Mentioned in this episode: 

• The Road to Character and How to Know a Person by David Brooks 

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck 

• The Gift by Lewis Hyde (referenced contextually) 

• Ronald Reagan’s address at the Laymen’s Leadership Institute in 1974 (excerpted clip begins at 6:50). 

• “Remembering Jim Lehrer” on PBS 

• Subscribe to Echoes Magazine at hebfdn.org/echoes/subscribe/ to receive a beautiful, free print magazine each quarter. 

Note: This transcript was made with AI (using Adobe Premiere). We have made minimal edits.

Marcus Goodyear
It’s a strange time to read the news in our country. Everything feels like a crisis. As if the world is crashing down around us.

News Clips: “Political partnership is imploding in spectacular fashion tonight.” “Sweeping immigration raids sparked protests and riots.” “Israel warned it is considering a strike on…”

And in moments like this, it’s tempting to look to politics for answers—left, right, center, whatever. But what if we’ve been asking politics to do something it was never meant to do?

New York Times best-selling author David Brooks, our guest today, says it like this:

David Brooks: “What people are doing is they feel a pain… And they should be coming to faith, but they’re not by and large. They’re going to politics.”

Marcus Goodyear: Maybe you’ve felt let down by leaders from both sides. Maybe you’ve been waiting for the next person in power to fix what feels broken. But deep down, we know: this repair work isn’t really political. It’s spiritual. It’s relational.

We’re in the middle of a moral and social crisis—one that runs deeper than any campaign or policy.

I’m Marcus Goodyear from the H. E. Butt Foundation. And this is The Echoes Podcast. On today’s episode, we welcome our guest, David Brooks. He’s the author of six books, including The Road to Character. He’s a columnist at the New York Times and The Atlantic. And he’s a regular contributor to NPR, PBS, and The Wall Street Journal. His TED talk has been viewed more than 5 million times.

This week, David Brooks joins us to discuss—not parties or platforms—but the courage to lead a life of meaning.

I’m here with my co-host, Camille Hall-Ortega.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Hey, Marcus, how are you?

Marcus Goodyear
Great. David, welcome to The Echoes Podcast.

David Brooks
Good to be here.

Marcus Goodyear
Let’s just jump right in. It feels like we are living through some kind of crisis of meaning in our culture right now, and that has people looking to power rather than purpose. What do you think makes power feel so seductive? Maybe always, but especially right now.

David Brooks
Well, in particular, you know, I trace our political problems to what you described as a spiritual and relational crisis. And it shows up in the mental health statistics. It shows up in rising suicide rates. It shows up in the fact that 35% of Americans say they’re persistently lonely. 45% of high school kids say they’re persistently hopeless and despondent.

The number of Americans who say no close personal friends is up by four times since 2000. And so that’s a crisis in the fabric of our society. And if you leave people alone, and especially in a time of polarization when people feel under siege, then they’re going to reach out to some sort of power, and they want to feel I need somebody on my side when I feel under siege, when I feel distrustful.

The core social statistic to me is the loss of interpersonal trust. A generation ago, if you ask people, do you trust your neighbors? 60% of Americans said, yeah, I trust my neighbors. Now that’s down to 30%. And 19% of millennials. And so if you ask Millennial and Gen Z, do you agree with the following statements? Most people are selfish and out to get you.

In one recent survey, 72% of Gen Z said, yeah, I agree with that. And that’s true of my students when I teach in college. So imagine going through life when you think most people are selfish enough to get you, everybody in the grocery store or the gas station or whatever. And so if that’s your mentality, then of course you want power.

You want defense. And politics is a surprisingly effective or seductive form of social therapy, because politics seems to give you a sense of belonging. I’m a member of Team Blue or Team Red, but of course it’s not really belonging. You’re just hating on the same side. Politics seems to give the illusion of righteous action. You’re doing something moral, but you’re not sitting with the widow or serving the poor.

You’re just tweeting at somebody. And so it gives you the illusion you’re going to fill the hole in your soul. But really, it just puts you in a state of perpetual war. And so and so to me, when I look at the politicization of society of like, late night comedy, of sports, of churches.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Sure.

David Brooks
That’s that’s people trying to fill the hole in their soul with politics, and that’s asking more of politics than it can deliver.

Marcus Goodyear
I hear you talking about distrust in society, and that makes me think of distrust in institutions. Do you think we can believe in institutions again? What would that even look like to to go down that route?

David Brooks
Yeah. Though there are two kinds of distrust that social scientists measure. The one is institutional distrust. And for most of American history, the question they ask is, do you trust institutions or government or schools to do the right thing?

Most of the time. And up until about 1967, 75% of Americans or so would say, yeah, I do. I trust my government to do the right thing most of the time. That trust collapsed in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. And it’s it’s gone up a little sometimes during the Reagan years, during the Clinton years, during the Obama years.

But it’s never really recovered. And so distrust in institutions is caused by a sense that institutions are letting us down. I have a friend who’s an electrician in Ohio, and he heard me say somewhere that I really trust institutions, I do. I went to a great elementary school. I went to a great, college. I went to a great summer camp.

And I those were glorious institutions. I now work at the New York Times. It’s an institution. It’s been around for hundreds of years, and it has its problems, like every institution. But I’m. I’m proud to be part of it. And you can tell when an institution is being successful, when it sets a series of standards that you try to live up to.

So, for example, I work at a place called PBS on the NewsHour with and it was founded by Jim Lehrer. And when I first started and I was a baby pundit, when I said something he liked, I could see his eyes crinkled with pleasure. And when I said something he didn’t like, I could see his mouth downturned with displeasure.

He thought it was crass or stupid. So for ten years that I worked with him, I just tried to chase the eye crinkle and avoid the mouth downturn and without ever saying anything to him. To me, he set a standard. This is how we do things at the NewsHour. And he said that standard not only to me, but everybody on the team.

And so Jim has been dead for several years now. But that moral ecology created, lesson. And so I trust the NewsHour institution because it told me here’s how you should behave to be excellent. And a lot of people and my friend from Ohio heard me talking about this, and he said, I’ve never been part of an institution that I really trusted, that the institutions I’ve been part of are just like a boot in my face.

And that’s a school that didn’t see him. Other institutions that have let him down, government that he feels has let them down. And so that’s the voice of somebody who has had a different experience than I have. But his experience is probably a little more common than mine.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Right. Well, now and you’re discussing there, you’re talking about learning about standards via implicit rules, right?

Implicit guidelines. And we have this knowledge of implicit versus explicit guidelines. And what a lot of us see, perhaps when we are sort of turning up this mistrust. Distrust is that sometimes the explicit standards or what we say we expect or want or want to live up to does not match what we’re seeing. So it seems to me like some of the experiences of, of institutions sort of saying the right things, but that becoming lip service where they’re not walking the walk, they’re just talking the talk becomes sort of the root of some of that distrust.

Is that what you’ve seen as well?

David Brooks
Yeah. I mean, there’s a sure way to lose trust if somebody tells you they’re going to do one thing and they don’t do another. And I run for office and I say, I’m going to take care of you. And I’m really I’m there with the common person. I’m not there for the elites.

And then they are there for the elites and not for the common people. And, well, that’s a sense of betrayal. I was, of course, I grew up in New York City. So you wouldn’t think this of me, but I love to ride horses. And I was out in Montana and I was with the 21 year old and she, she said, where do you live?

And I said, Washington DC. And she was like, that’s a cesspool. I despise that place. And I was like, whoa, strong feelings. I’m like this sweet little 21 year old young woman. But I think that is built up. But now we’ve gotten to a point where the distrust is so profound that they don’t even believe you. The first time, you’re going to say, I’m going to look after you.

And then they don’t mind if you lie because lying is become just so expected and that they take it for granted. If you’re a politician, of course you’re going to lie. People aren’t bothered by it because of course they all lie. And so once you get into a place where they all lie, then you’re in a place where people have more or less checked out.

And you’re sort of in a place of nihilism.

Camille Hall-Ortega
So we’re, we’re pretty jaded at this point. Right. And now I heard you talk a bit about millennials, and I’m a millennial and when you were talking about some of the roots of or the history of these issues, you mentioned Watergate and Vietnam. But of course, my generation that’s not salient for us.

Right? I wasn’t alive then. Are we seeing some of it come from family? Are we seeing some of that be rooted in how we’re raised, that that distrust is sort of trickling down to us? Or are you seeing other roots for for generations like millennials and Gen Z?

David Brooks
Well, I think some of it is national. And so if you’re a millennial, and you you’re not familiar with or personally familiar with Vietnam, Watergate, but the financial crisis may have affected you.

The war in Iraq may have affected you in that whole the manner. So our politics over the last few years, it’s just going to seem like normal. And so I do think there’s national. The second thing I teach college, I ask my students why you got so distrustful. And one young woman said to me, have you looked at our social life?

And she said to me, I’ve had four boyfriends. And all of them ghosted me at the end. And so I expect the next guy is going to ghost me. So of course, I’m distrustful. And then the final thing I’d say is, and this is not a millennial, this is true of Gen-X Boomer whatever. I think for the last 3 or 4 generations, we have not not taught succeeding generations had to be considerate toward each other in a complex circumstance of life.

Like, how do you sit with someone who is grieving? How do you sit with someone who’s depressed? How do you break up with someone without crushing their heart? How do you ask for an offer of forgiveness? These are just basic social skills. And I don’t think anybody talked to me. Maybe in the old days, people got them in church or somewhere, but I never got them.

And so I’ve tried to spend an adulthood trying to learn basic social skills. And the woman who had her boyfriend’s ghost her, partly it could be the guys or jerks, but it could be. Nobody ever taught them how to have that conversation. And nobody even suggested to them that they needed to have that conversation. And so I think there’s just been a loss and in how we treat each other, consideration or not consideration.

And if people aren’t being considerate toward you, it doesn’t matter what national politics are. You’re you’re going to be a little suspicious.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Right.

Marcus Goodyear
It almost sounds like what part of I feel bad about what I’m about to say. And let’s just preface it that way. It almost feels like we’re missing etiquette. Like we don’t know the rules of polite engagement anymore.

I mean, there’s to me all those those books of etiquette. And I mean, I get it. There were problems with those books are all kinds of expectations and stereotypes, embedded in them. But the rules of engagement, probably because of technology and the many different ways in which we can communicate and message each other, have just changed.

And we don’t have clear etiquette for how to behave.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Oh, sure, it’s broader right than it goes outside of etiquette or politeness, but into the realm of really interpersonal communication and how to relate to others in healthy ways. Right?

David Brooks
Yeah, I mean, I nobody ever taught me how to end a conversation gracefully. And so what I should say is, Camille, I really enjoyed talking with you.

I really like what you said about the implicit versus explicit. That was very interesting. It’s been a pleasure spending time with you. Like, that’s a nice way to end the conversation. Sure. But it took me till my 40s or 50s. Didn’t know how to do that. And I remember I went to my fifth high school reunion and my only move in a cocktail setting to get out of conversation was to say, I’ve got to go to the bar.

And so, so 20 minutes into my high school reunion, I’m so drunk I had to leave because I’d gone to the open six times.

Marcus Goodyear
Well, you could have gotten to water. I said, I don’t know why bartenders like you want to come up to water here. So.

David Brooks
Right. That part is basic etiquette. But then some of it is like being more considerate.

I like, Someone has lost a child, and you’re in conversation with them. Do you talk about it or don’t? And so I had a friend who lost a child, and she said, people are afraid to mention my daughter Anna to me because they don’t want to raise a bad subject, but they should know Anna is always on my mind.

And if you raise it, then I can talk about her if I want to. If I don’t feel like I won’t. But you’ve given me the option. And so these are just basic rules. Social skills, the way you teach tennis or carpentry, we could teach you skills better. And I think it would do a lot of good.

Camille Hall-Ortega
It seems like we’re out of practice. I think so much of what our world advancements in the world today has offered us has also sort of crippled us in this room, that we’re able to escape really easily from having to practice how to be in relation with one another. And that escape is really welcome for a lot of folks. But then yet you get to your high school reunion, and you go when you leave.

David Brooks
Yeah. And as Marcus said, you know, we used to have these rules of etiquette. And that to me, I was raised in a generation. They seemed stuffy. They seemed old fashioned, they seemed artificial and pretentious. But it turns out if you don’t have those rules, life can get pretty ragged. And so, for example, I’m old enough.

To have been at a time I wasn’t there, like in the 1950s when people were like, they would pin a girl and know this was like, if you were in high school, you want to go out with somebody who put a pin on her. That was a thing. I wasn’t around for that, but I was around for you.

Ask a girl out, then you’re going steady. And you have an official relationship. You know, where you stand, and then you break up. And when I talk to my students, those courtship rituals are gone. And they often don’t know where they stand. If there’s a hookup, is are we having a relationship or we’re not having a relationship?

And so some of those artificial rules have been taken away. And in some ways it’s liberating. But in some ways it’s anarchy.

Marcus Goodyear
Wow. I feel like morality in general is kind of on the edge of this conversation, too. And, I’m wondering like, what moral do we need to be teaching in our society right now? How can we how can we shift the morals that we’re teaching?

David Brooks
Yeah. Well, it used to be that moral formation was at the center of every institution. And so there’s a school in England called the Stowe School, and the headmaster there said, our job as a school is to turn out young men and women who will be acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck. So the kind of people you can turn to when people are chips are down.

And that was their job. That was the primary job and that was the primary job. If you look at the National Education Association in this country, they said character formation is the primary job of schools as late as the 1960s. But now if you look at how schools behave and some of them still talk a good game, it’s about character formation.

But really it’s about SAT scores, standardized tests and getting, getting kids into college. Their parents. What can be proud of.

Marcus Goodyear
Well and it has to be right because we have we have a kind of a stated meritocracy. And I know that it’s complicated. You’ve written about this in ways that are really interesting to me, but if kids don’t show their merit, they will not get a good job, potentially. The stakes are really high.

Camille Hall-Ortega
We’ve created this madness.

David Brooks
Yeah. I mean, your characters, your ability to persevere. It’s more important than how smart you are. How do you. Well, yes. Yes. And so my definition of moral formation comes from the gospel of Ted Lasso. And, okay, the first season and that show, he was asked, what’s your goals for your football team, AFC Richmond.

And he said, my goal is not to win a championship. It’s to help these fellows become better of the best versions of themselves on and off the field. And that’s it. Becoming the best version of yourself on and off the field. And what Jim Lehrer did to me, with those eye crinkle in the mouth down term. That’s the moral formation.

He was giving the standard. Had what? Here’s how we do things here, how to be an excellent and so it doesn’t have to be like stern rules, though sometimes. Hell, I wrote a column years ago on how hard it was to teach moral formation in the classroom, and I got an email from, a veterinarian in Oregon, and he says, never forget what a wise person says is the least of that which they give.

What gets communicated is a smaller set of their gestures. So if you’re in the classroom, is the teacher generous toward you? Is the teacher really interested in seeing you and understanding you? And those kind of small gestures get communicated. We are all spreading moral ecologies every second of every day, and people are watching us more closely than we think.

And really, that’s how moral formation happens in everyday life. I just I want to know, are you considerate toward me? And if you are, I’ll become a little more considerate because I’ll see what it looks like.

Camille Hall-Ortega
That’s really good. I would always say I taught at the college level previously, and I would always say the best reviews that I would get from students came from the ones who would come to office hours, because they got to see more. You had a better opportunity, more time to show yourself as being considerate toward them. Right? They see you lecture and they see the grades they get and they go, this class is too hard, or she’s a tough grader. The ones that would come and spend time and really desire to learn would see how relational you are, right?

David Brooks
Yeah. I’ll tell you one of my best moments as a teacher. And so I was teaching up at Yale, and I would teach Tuesday morning on Wednesday and Tuesday night, Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, that was my class schedule. And then when I was in New Haven. And so I had the office hours, what I call the office hours at a restaurant or a bar, on Tuesday nights.

And sometimes we’d go to like one in the morning. It was just me and like 7 or 8 students. And it was so fun. And I was courting a woman who happened to work at the Howard Butt Foundation and lived in Houston, and. Oh, and, she was going to fly to New Haven and tell me whether she was going to marry me.

And so I, I didn’t I didn’t tell my students that, but I told them that, I was going to cancel office hours. And that evening, of the 24 students in the seminar, 18 of them sent me an email saying, Professor Brooks, I just want you to know I’m praying for you. I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’m thinking of you.

Oh, and that changed the, temperature of that classroom the whole time because suddenly I wasn’t Professor Brooks. I was just another schmo going through the normal stuff normal people go through. And so it was a revelation to me as a teacher to be not super vulnerable, but slightly more human and vulnerable than maybe I’m comfortable with being.

Then it’ll it’ll really change the temperature and get people really relating to you in a way.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Sure.

David Brooks
And she told me she would never marry me. And now we’ve been married for eight years, so it almost.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Oh, I love that story. That’s beautiful. That’s beautiful. And I think it touches on another point here, right? That this sort of power of vulnerability, that there’s this element that we want to relate to one another and that vulnerability humanizes in a way that people can appreciate, people can relate to. They see themselves in you.

David Brooks
Yeah. And you can feel how hard that vulnerability is. When you feel the world is distrustful, and then you don’t want to do it. And one of the. I had a moment, it was after October 7th. I was in a hotel bar, and I was, you would have said drinking alone.

Said that sitting alone, but I would. I call it reporting. And so I was perfect. I was on my phone at this bar late at night. And I’m scrolling through all this, these images from the Middle East. And you can imagine they were brutal. Brutal. But then I come across a little video, black and white video of the novelist James Baldwin.

And I stop on that video and I listen to what he says, and it’s just a few seconds and he says, “There’s not as much humanity as one would like in the world, but there’s enough. There’s more than you would think.” And then he says, “You have to remember when you walk down the street, every person you see, you could be that person.

That person could be you. And you have to decide who you want to be.” And so James Baldwin had the right to be very distrustful of American society because of the terrible way American society treated him. But he still, even though that harshness made the ultimate humanistic comment, you could be that person. That person could be you.

And when I was watching the video, the phrase I left my mind was, defiant humanism that even in harsh and brutal times, even when the world is really being unfair to you, that he still was going to insist on being a human and treating other people as humans. And it seems to me it’s scary, but in harsh and brutal and polarizing times, that kind of defiant humanism is what we’re called to do.

Even while we understand how vulnerability it will lead people to betray you. But I found in life, if you lead with trust, then most of the times people will show up for you and respond with trust in trustworthy ways.

Camille Hall-Ortega
So good.

Marcus Goodyear
That makes me think of AI. I mean, you’re talking about humanism and being human, and, I, I’m very aware right now that we have this technology that is pretending to be human.

I for the first time in human history, do we have a technology like this? And I’m curious what what do you think that does to our moral intuition when we’re surrounded by technologies that are acting like they care?

David Brooks
Yeah, well, it’s AI simulates humanity, but it’s not right. It has no emotion, that has no agency. It has no sense of self.

And so I’ll give you the my feed for I can give you my downbeat version of the AI future, but my upbeat version is that it’s going to remind us who we are by revealing what it can’t do. Yeah. And so there are certain things that it can that it’s really good at. It’s really good at taking patches of information and synthesizing it into a paragraph.

It’s really bad at desiring things. It doesn’t have desire. It’s really bad at having a distinct voice. It’s really bad at have coming up with unusual opinions. And so and it’s really buried at actual empathy. And so I do think it’s going to help us see what is at the core of ourselves and maybe disabuse of, of a notion that it’s been too powerful for 100 years, which is that the core human traits is intelligence.

I don’t think that’s the you mean trade and so if I takes on some of that certain kinds of intelligence, it doesn’t bother me. As long as we have our emotions are will our passions, our character or soul or spiritual yearnings. That strikes me is more at the core of being human then your S.A.T. score, right?

Marcus Goodyear
That’s a good answer. I like it if you were to flip it, you said you could have flipped it. What? How do you use the negative?

David Brooks
Well, you know, I just look at my students, and some of them are using AI to write their papers. And at the current technology, I can always tell that voice is abstract. And it’s like that. This structure is all too formulaic, and if you’re doing that, all you’re doing is robbing yourself of an education.

If you’re using AI to write your papers like. And even if you think, oh, I only have to do to help it do my first draft, well, the first draft is how you think and and writing badly is part of the process of actually learning something. And if we use AI as a crutch, then we will simply not develop as full human beings.

And that’s not even to talk about the, you know, the job displacement and all the rest.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Really good. We were talking a bit about morals and and how it seems like in some ways we’ve lost our way. How do we find our way? Where where are we supposed to sort of begin to get better at all of that?

David Brooks
Yeah. Well, I think the first step is just seeing each other better. And so I do think the, you know, the, the primary source of, of a good society is people feel seen, heard, respected, understood. And so that’s a set of skills, like I said, but it’s also a, a posture. It’s a posture that says we’re all made in the image of God, and each person is is deserving of respect, reverence and respect.

And if you start with that posture, then you’re probably gonna do okay. But then the second thing is just become really good at asking each other questions. And, you know, my job as a journalist and your job as podcast host is to ask people questions. And in my lifetime, how many times if somebody said to me, none of your damn business, the answer is zero.

Because if you ask people to tell you their life story in a respectful way, no one has ever asked them that, and they are delighted to do it. And so to me, that’s that’s the core thing. The, Simon Vai, this mystic French mystic in World War Two, she said, attention is the ultimate form of generosity. And one of her disciples said that most of the time we see each other with self-centered eyes, and our real job is to cast a just and loving attention on each other.

And so that’s the right kind of attention. The novelist I was thinking of is Iris Murdoch. And so it’s the act of casting attention. Is the prime the first moral act? I’m reminded I, I don’t know if this apropos, but I once heard about an interview that Dan Rather, the CBS newsman, did with Mother Teresa. And he asked her, when you pray to God, what do you say to him?

And she says, I don’t say anything. I just listen and he asks her, well, what is your what is God saying to you? And she says, oh, he’s not saying anything, he’s just listening. And she says, if you can’t understand what I’m talking about, I can’t explain it to you.

Camille Hall-Ortega
I love this idea of asking each other questions. We used to say, and it doesn’t seem true for everyone, but we used to say, if you’re looking for something to talk about with someone, their favorite subject is themself. It people loved it. And so we would encourage our students, you know, if you’re if you are trying to get to know someone or impress someone, make sure to use their name a few times in the conversation and ask them questions about themselves.

You know, even if you don’t care about these people’s kids, ask you about their kids. People will never tire of talking about their kids, right? And some of that can seem sort of superficial or scripted script like. But in the end, it oftentimes helps us get where we need to be, which is just learning more about one another.

David Brooks
Yeah. I’m a friends with a guy social psychologist named Nick Epperly at the University Chicago, and we were on a stage in front of, I don’t know, an audience. And we were typing on one of these conversations, and then he interrupted our conversation, and he said to the audience, okay, we’re going to David and I are going to stop talking now, but I want you, every one of you, to find somebody in the room you don’t know, and spend the next ten minutes telling them about the high point of your life, the low point of your life, and the turning point of your life.

And this big groan went up from the audience, and he said, how many of you don’t want to do this? And 80% of the hands went up and he said, go. And so they all found somebody, they all found somebody. They started doing this exercise, and ten minutes later we couldn’t get them to shut up.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Right.

David Brooks
We’re having such a good time and finally, 20 minutes later, we got them to quiet down and pay back attention to us. And Nick said, how many of you enjoyed that? And, 80% of the hands went up again. And so the lesson and this is, comes from his research that we underestimate how much will enjoy talking to strangers. Well, we underestimate how deep people want to go. And so we underestimate what a pleasure it is to talk to another human being.

And so now when I’m on a plane, not all the time, but sometimes when I’ve got an hour left in the flight, I won’t do the whole flight. But maybe when there’s an hour left, I’ll take off my headphones and see if we can have a conversation. And that is a surefire way to improve your life. By the way.

Because the people you talk to, they’re always more interesting than whatever it is you happen to be reading.

Marcus Goodyear
I’m imagining when you do that on an airplane. Do people know who you are? Does that help introduce the conversation, or is that a barrier to conversation?

David Brooks
It’s a barrier. When I when they know who I am, I actually don’t do it because I don’t need to play the that game.

But if they don’t know who I am, we can just have a normal conversation. Then. Then it’s a natural conversation and it’s more fun.

Marcus Goodyear
And, forgive me if this is silly, but we were talking about, you know, things that people you wish people had taught you that you didn’t know. How do you initiate the conversation in the plane without seeming weird?

David Brooks
Well, it’s like, it’s like what Camille said. You find something they’re proud of, and if they’re wearing a New York Mets jersey, then I’ll ask about the New York Mets or their kids soccer team or anything. And then, the before long, I can get to the well, which is my next go to, which is asking, where’d you grow up?

I travel a lot, and there’s a good chance I’ve been there, but then if I haven’t, I haven’t. People have talked about their childhood. And then as the conversation develops, you can push it pretty fast. People love to talk to strangers, and sometimes they’re more uninhibited with strangers than with adults. And so some of the good questions are the good questions I like.

Are they lift you out of your your normal view of yourself and, they allow you to see your life from a higher vantage point. So like, if this five years is a chapter in your life, what’s a chapter about? And then people get to step back, and, and then, you know, what crossroads are you at?

Are you in the middle of some sort of transition this, this you got to know people. But I had a friend who was in a job interview, and he turned to the interviewer. He was being interviewed, and he said, what would you what would you do if you weren’t afraid? And she started crying because she wouldn’t be doing HR at that company if she wasn’t afraid.

She’s too afraid to leave. And so fear plays a role in our lives. And so you have you have to build some trust before you ask that question, believe me. But, but you can get there, with some speed, and people just love telling the stories of their lives. And the one thing I’ve learned is always get them to storytelling mode.

And so I never asked people, what do you believe? I said, how did you come to believe that? And then suddenly they’re telling me about some mentor or some experience they had. And when they’re in narrative mode, then they’re really talking in a more natural way. We were we we were born to talk and stories.

Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, they’re they’re being relational, right? They’re talking about the relationship that brought them to a certain understanding rather than naming the the truth.

David Brooks
And I sound it doesn’t take long before they’re pulling up their phone and showing you pictures. Yeah. They, they I see exactly.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Yeah. I wonder maybe then if we can get a story out of you. We talked again. Yeah. We talked about morals as sort of a through a through line of our conversation here.

And I wonder who shaped your morals in your life.

David Brooks
Yeah, let’s say a bit. It’s my family. My grandfather was a, he was actually born here, but his grandfather was an immigrant. And so he had the immigrant mentality that we’re sort of marginal to this society. But we’re going to make it here no matter what. We’re going to work their rears off and we’re going to make it here.

And that that really was pretty formative. I still I’m not an immigrant, but I still think I have that immigrant mentality. Yeah. And my, I grew up in lower Manhattan on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and my wife used to be a trustee at a university called Nyack College, which was a Christian college in New York City.

And I would go visit the students there, and they were really immigrants from all over the country, all over the world. And some of them didn’t look like me. But that hustle, that immigrant hustle, I recognized that it was just like my grandfather. And so that’s that was very formative. And then, frankly, I went to the University of Chicago where our professors, we didn’t they did a lousy job of preparing us for the work force, believe me.

But, but but they did a great job of trying to convey what matters in life. And my professors, then if you read these books, these great books, whether it’s Aristotle or Socrates or Rousseau, whoever and you think about them carefully, you will have the keys to the magic kingdom of how to live. And once you’ve tasted the fine wine, the grape juice is not satisfying.

And so they instilled in me a love of great deep reading. And I think that’s that’s been a great gift to my life that they they gave me.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Really good. Thank you for sharing that.

Marcus Goodyear
So speaking of deep reading, that makes me think of just engaging with art of all kinds. Recently, we discovered that there is in our audio archives some clips from Ronald Reagan, who spoke at a foundation event back when he was governor.

So this is he wasn’t actually at Laity Lodge, which is our adult retreat center, but he was at an event that essentially the staff of Lady Lodge was putting on, I believe it was in California. And he talks, in this clip about the importance of art and deep attention to art in shaping us. I would love to just get your take on this. Here’s Ronald Reagan:

Ronald Reagan Clip
“One of our truly great playwrights, Maxwell Anderson, evidently believed that each of us can practice faith in his daily work. He said the purpose of the theater is to find and hold up to our regard what is admirable in the human race. The theater is a religious institution devoted to the exaltation of the spirit of man.

It is an attempt to prove that man has a dignity and a destiny, that life is worth living, and that he is not purely animal, without purpose. He went on to say, analyze any play which is survive the test of continued favor, and you will find a moral or a rule of social conduct which is considered valuable enough to learn and pass along.

The theater is the central artistic symbol of the struggle of good and evil within man. Its teaching is that the struggle is eternal and unremitting, that the forces which would drag men down are always present, always ready to attack, that the forces which make for good cannot sleep through the night without danger.”

David Brooks
I have a couple of reactions.
First. Well, it makes sense that he was an actor, so the theater would be important. Second, I can’t help but reminding myself that one of his big hit movies was called Bedtime for Bonzo about him and his relationship with a monkey, which I’m not sure really lived up to the high calling that he just described in quotation.

Marcus Goodyear
We all take ourselves very seriously.

David Brooks
I guess the final distinction I made is I don’t think a play is like a sermon. I don’t think it’s there to, like, hammer a moral message over us. Yeah, but I do think what a play or any artwork is there is to help us understand humanity and to understand the essential dignity of humanity.

And in that is its morals. As you see people struggling with right and wrong. As I was listening to that, I was reminded that I’m not going to get the quote right. But the great novelist John Steinbeck in his book East of Eden says, he says, “There’s only one struggle. And at the end of life, the only essential question, what did I do well?

Or did I do ill? And he said, this struggle between good and evil is operating on all levels of our consciousness.” And I think the job of theater, literature or art is to show us in that struggle. Not necessarily. The sermon is us into how to do it. And when you do that, you’re spreading empathy. And if you want to have your kids learn empathy, literally, this is research.

The number one thing you should have them do is get involved in their schools drama department. The actual preacher.

Marcus Goodyear
Yes! Preach it!

David Brooks
The act of inhabiting another role is that’s empathy. And I wrote a book on how to know people. And my best interviews were often with actors like, I got to interview Matthew McConaughey. And he said, well, one of the things I do when I’m trying to get into a role is I look at the one gesture that guy does that reveals his character, and he said, some people are front in the hands pocket.

Their hands in the front pocket kind of people. They put their hands on the front pockets. They’re kind of curled in on themselves. And I know if that guy is curled in on himself, if he’s going to try to be assertive and big, he’s going to be a little fake, he’s going to overdo it. And so those one little gestures from McConaughey were a way for him to understand, sort of at the core of that being, and there’s a quote from Viola Davis I saw where she says, we’re thieves.

We’re looking at gesture, and we’re trying to see why did this person nod their head that way? Why do they swallow this way? Like we I’m just looking around, observing people. And, so I do think the theater plays a great role in humanizing society because it shows us what’s going on in another person’s mind and heart. And every bit of time you can do that is, to me, the most practical thing you can do is if you don’t understand other people, you’re going to be miserable and make other people miserable.

And so all the things that we think are soft and squishy, like theater, are music. Those are hard and practical in my book. And as we eliminate them from school, that feeds into a lot of the dehumanization we’ve been talking about.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Sure. I love that this idea, because I think some of what Ronald Reagan was discussing there really is what you were hitting on about your professors from from, University of Chicago, which is that is that they were conveying what matters in life.

And so perhaps these plays or these works of art aren’t showing in this very explicit way. We should behave like this. This is what morals look like, but get to know people because that’s that’s what matters in life.

David Brooks
Yeah. Like that. Like take Hamlet like somebody kills his father. And one value system that he’s inherited from the classical world says revenge.

Kill the guy who killed your father. That’s your job. Yeah, but then another moral tradition he’s inherited from Christianity says, love your enemy. Revenge is not what you’re supposed to do. And so we see a guy, Hamlet, who’s caught between these two value systems, and Shakespeare is in saying he should have chosen column A rather than column B.

He’s just showing a guy caught between these two value systems.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Right.

David Brooks
And so the tension is the story, right?

Camille Hall-Ortega
Exactly.

Marcus Goodyear
How do we learn to trust each other when we feel that divide within us? You know, we feel the conflict in our own value systems. So when we already experience our own conflict, how are we learning to trust others who we know implicitly are also in conflict?

David Brooks
Yeah, it’s hard to trust people who don’t share your value system. And because because trust is faith that you’ll do what you ought to do. And your trust in me is faith that I will do what I ought to do. But for that to happen, we both have to have the same understanding of what we ought to do.

Yeah. And so that requires shared values. And then beyond shared values, we have to have faith that we each understand the norms that guide us in these circumstances. So if I’m on the highway and two lanes are merging into one, I know the left lane goes and then the right lane goes, the left lane goes on the right and goes.

And if somebody butts in line, I’m going to honk at them because I want to enforce the norms. Now this is how we do things and that’s how trust is built. And I think one of the things that I think is at the core of a lot of our problems is that we’ve privatized morality instead of believing that morality is a shared thing, that that is an order in which we all live, that betrayal is always wrong.

Adultery is always wrong. Segregation is always wrong. Whatever. It’s always wrong. And it’s not just a matter of circumstances. Betrayal is always wrong. There’s never been a society on earth where people were praised for running away in battle. And C.S. Lewis wrote that. And so there are I think there are some universal moral truths. And if we tell people you come up with your own morality, then we’re privatizing morality.

It’s not going to be a shared possession anymore. And there was a great book by a guy named Walter Lippmann in 1955. He was a newspaper columnist, and he wrote, if what is good and bad is a matter of personal opinion based on our own individual feelings, then we are outside the realm of civilization. And I think the value of the hyper individualist values we’ve since sent over the last 50 years come up with your own morality, come up with your own truth.

Camille Hall-Ortega
Your truth and my truth.

David Brooks
Yeah, it’s had the effect of making it harder for each to connect with each other,

Camille Hall-Ortega
But people having different value systems is a reality, right? We can work on that, perhaps, but the reality is that people have differing value systems. How do we trust them? How do we live life and in society with folks that we know differ from us, perhaps in very deep and real ways? What what do we do?

David Brooks
Yeah. Well, first, I think there are some human, universals. And so you may be, stoic. You might think that I’m. I shouldn’t show emotion and I might be an anti stoic. I like showing vulnerability. And but and so we’re going to be different. But we probably have some same beliefs that lying to each other is wrong.

That being callous and cruel to each other and as pluralist and we live in a pluralistic, diverse society. So we understand that some values are universal and pretty rock solid. But, you know, whether I drive on the right side of the wrong road or the left side of the road, that’s more about custom and even how I regard, dating, we’re gonna have different people have different values.

Yeah. And negotiating those values is hard, those differences. But it’s also fun because, yeah, it’s interesting to be around somebody who’s a very different value system than you. I remember I had a friend who was a foreign correspondent, and he was in Korea, and the young people were protesting, and one of the kids spit off his fingertip and wrote a slogan in blood on the wall.

And he said, well, I understand why they call us foreign correspondents, because that’s very foreign to me. But, you know, you you see, you know, I’ve been a foreign correspondent myself, and you, you go to Russia and people there have, you know, they’re from a different culture. They’ve got different values. And I found some of the best people on Earth are Russians, some of the worst people on Earth, are Russian.

So. Right. And so you deal with that, that pluralism, that that’s just part of being modern,

Camille Hall-Ortega
But sounds like what you’re saying is find the commonalities and lean in. Right? Because they’re there. We have places where we can agree. But then there’s also this notion of a in faith. Sometimes we call it open handed and closed handed issues.

If you believe that it’s right to harm children, we’re never going to be on the same page. That’s not that’s not, an open handed issue.

David Brooks
Yeah. I would just say that, and nobody has a monopoly on being. Right. So, it could be that my moral value system has some blind spots in it. Almost certainly does.

Marcus Goodyear
David. If somebody is young and listening to this, we’ve been talking about morality. We’ve been talking about the lack of trust. We’ve been talking about some pretty dark statistics. What, what encouragement do you have for Gen Z? For Gen Alpha?

David Brooks
One of the hard parts about being in Gen Z is, how often rejection comes. Because it because it’s important to apply.

It’s so easy online to apply for a job, or to apply for an internship, or to apply for a college or to apply to be somebody’s boyfriend and girlfriend, that there’s just a lot of applications. Then there are spaces. And so people who apply to college get rejected by most colleges, people who try to get a summer internship.

I talk to kids who have to apply 150 to get one and then they they swipe right on 900 people and nobody responds. And so I, I have tremendous sympathy. So I was talking to a young woman who was in Gen Z, and she said, I wish I’d been young in the 90s. It was just seemed so much easier.

And I told her I was very young in the 90s. And it was, I guarantee you, it was a lot easier. And so I just would say to Gen Z a be not afraid that you will be betrayed. But if you lean in on to that, the second thing I’d say is, over invest in your friendships then, and that I have a friend who, when he was in college, he got together with ten of his closest college friends, and they formed a giving circle.

And they said, we’re going to put some money in a pot depending on what we can afford. And every year we’re going to get together and we’re going to, have a get together for three days and decide where to give the money. And the purpose of this exercise is not to give away money, though. That’s a nice side effect.

The purpose of this is to keep his college friendships through the rest of your life. And those friendships, the friendships you make when you’re young are just so powerful and so over. Investing in friendships, is a good way to give yourself a secure base. So when the challenges of life come, you’ve got a secure base and you can handle them.

Camille Hall-Ortega
So good. David, I feel like that’s a great place to end. On a note of hope, we’re so grateful for your open humanity.

Marcus Goodyear
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Thank you. David, it’s been great to be with you guys.

David Brooks
Thank you.

Marcus Goodyear
The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stinnett and me, Marcus Goodyear. It’s edited by Rob Stinnett and Kim Stone.

Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. And special thanks to our guest today, David Brooks. In addition to The Echoes Podcast, we welcome you to subscribe to Echoes magazine. You’ll receive a beautiful print magazine each quarter. You can find a link in our show notes. The Echoes Podcast and Echoes magazine are both productions brought to you by the H. E. Butt Foundation.

You can learn more about our vision and mission at hebfdn.org.