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The Echoes Podcast dives into real-world questions about community, faith, and human connection. Guided by hosts Marcus Goodyear and Camille Hall-Ortega, each episode explores personal journeys and societal challenges with inspiring guests—from faith leaders and poets to social advocates—whose stories shape our shared experiences. Through conversations with figures like Rev. Ben McBride, who moved his family to East Oakland’s “Kill Zone” to serve his community, or poet Olga Samples Davis, who reflects on the transformative power of language, we bring to light themes of belonging, resilience, and the meaning of home.
From the creators of Echoes Magazine by the H. E. Butt Foundation, The Echoes Podcast continues the magazine's legacy of storytelling that fosters understanding, empathy, and action.
It is 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 Clip:Key political partnership is imploding in spectacular fashion tonight...
News Clip:Racing tonight after sweeping immigration raids sparked protests and plagues...
News Clip:...after Israel warned it is considering a strike on Iran.
Marcus Goodyear:And in moments like that, 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 bestselling 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 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 are in the middle of a moral and social crisis, and it's one that runs deeper than any campaign or policy.
Marcus Goodyear: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 is 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 5,000,000 times.
Marcus Goodyear: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 thirty five percent of Americans say they're persistently lonely. Forty five percent of high school kids say they're persistently hopeless and despondent.
David Brooks:The number of Americans who say no close personal friends is up by four times since February. 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 gonna reach out to some sort of power. Mhmm. And they wanna feel I need somebody on my side when I feel under siege, when I feel distrustful.
David Brooks:The core social statistic to me is the loss of interpersonal trust. A generation ago, if you asked people, do you trust your neighbors? 60% of Americans said, yeah. I trust my neighbors. That's down to 30% and 19% of millennials.
David Brooks: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, 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, the gas station, whatever.
David Brooks: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.
David Brooks:You're just hating the same side. Politics seems to give you the illusion of righteous action. You're doing something moral, but you're not sitting with a widow or serving the poor. You're just tweeting at somebody. And so it it gives you the illusion you're gonna fill the hole in your soul, but really it just puts you in a state of perpetual war.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah.
David Brooks:And so to me, when I look at the politicization of society of, like, late night comedy, of sports, of churches, that's that's people trying to fill a hole in their soul with politics, and I'm 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. Well, 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.
David Brooks:That trust collapsed in the era of Vietnam and Watergate. And 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. 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.
David Brooks:I went to a great elementary school. I went to a great college. I went to a great summer camp. And those were glorious institutions. I now work at The New York Times.
David Brooks:It's an institution. It's been around for hundreds of years. And it has its problems like every institution, but I'm proud to be part of it. You can tell when an institution is being successful, when it sets a series of standards that you try to live up to. For example, I work at a place called PBS on the NewsHour and it was founded by Jim Lehrer.
David Brooks:And when I first started, and I was a baby pundit, when I said something he liked, I could see his eyes crinkle with pleasure. When I said something he didn't like, I could see his mouth downturn 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 to me, he set a standard.
David Brooks:This is how we do things at the News Hour. And he said that standard not only to me, everybody on the team. And so Jim has been dead for several years now. But that moral ecology he created glass on. And so I trust the News Hour as an institution because it told me, here's how you should behave to be excellent.
David Brooks: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. 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 him down. And so that's the voice of somebody who's 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 churning 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 gonna do one thing and they don't do another. If I run for office and I say, I'm gonna take care of you. And I'm really, I'm there with the common person. I'm not there for the elites.
David Brooks:And then they are there for the elites and not for the common person, well that's a sense of betrayal. I grew up in New York City so you wouldn't think this of me, I love to ride horses.
Marcus Goodyear:Nice.
David Brooks:I was out in Montana and I was with a 21 year old and she said, where do you live? I said, Washington DC. And she's like, that's a cesspool. I despise that place. I was like, woah.
Marcus Goodyear:Strong feelings.
David Brooks:From like a sweet little 21 year old young woman. But I think that has 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 gonna say it. I'm gonna look after you. And then they don't mind if you lie.
David Brooks:Because lying has become just so expected. And that they take it for granted if you're a politician, of course you're gonna 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 a place where people have morally 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 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'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. That whole madness of our politics over the last few years is just going to seem like normal. And so I think I do think there's national.
David Brooks:The second thing, I teach college, I ask my students why you guys 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's gonna ghost me. So of course, I'm distrustful.
David Brooks: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 three or four generations, we have not taught succeeding generations how to be considerate toward each other in the complex circumstances of life. Like how do you sit with someone who's grieving? How do you sit with someone who's depressed? How do you break up with someone without crushing their heart?
David Brooks:How do you ask for an offer of forgiveness? These are just basic social skills. And I don't think anybody taught them to me. Maybe in the old days people got them in church or somewhere, I never got And so I've had to spend an adulthood trying to learn basic social skills. The woman who had her boyfriend's ghost her, partly it could be the guys are jerks, but it could be nobody ever taught them how to have that conversation.
David Brooks:Nobody even suggested to them that they needed to have that conversation. And so I think there's just been a loss 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 gonna 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. Let me 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, used to be all those those books of etiquette. And and, I mean, I get it. There were problems with those books. There were all kinds of expectations and stereotypes embedded in them.
Marcus Goodyear: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 a bit broader. Right? But it goes outside of etiquette or politeness, but into the realm of of really interpersonal communication and and how to relate to others in healthy ways. Right?
David Brooks:Yeah. I mean, 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 the explicit. That was very interesting.
David Brooks:It's been a pleasure spending time with you. Like, that's a nice way to end a conversation.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Sure.
David Brooks:But it took me till my forties or fifties to 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 20 since my high school reunion, I'm so drunk I had to leave because I'd gone to the bar like six times.
Marcus Goodyear:But you could've gotten to water.
David Brooks:I could've gotten to water.
News Clip:Bartender's like, do wanna swap the water here?
David Brooks:That that part is basic etiquette. Then some of it is like being more considerate. 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 raise a bad subject.
David Brooks: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. We the way you teach tennis or carpentry, we we could teach these 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 advancement in the world today has offered us has also sort of crippled us in this realm that we are 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 can I leave? Right?
David Brooks:Yeah. Yeah. And as Marcus said, you know, we used to have these rules of etiquette. And to me, I was raised in a generation. They seemed stuffy.
David Brooks: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 1950's when people were like, they would pin a girl out of this was like if you're 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 you have an official relationship, you know where you stand and then you break up.
David Brooks:And when I talk to my students, those courtship rituals are gone and they often don't know where they stand if it's a hookup is it 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 morals 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. The kind of people you can turn to when people chips are down.
David Brooks: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, some of them still talk a good game, it's about character formation, but really it's about SAT scores, standardized tests, and been getting kids into the college their parents can be proud of.
Marcus Goodyear:And it has to be, right? Because we have a kind of a stated meritocracy, and I know that it's complicated. You've written about 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 how well you do on standardized tests. And so my definition of moral formation comes from the gospel of Ted Lasso.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Perfect.
David Brooks:The first season of that show, he was asked, what's your goals for your football team, FC Richmond? And he said, my goal is not to win a championship. It's to help these fellows become better the best versions of themselves on and off the field.
David Brooks: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 and the mouth downturn, that's moral formation. He was the standard on how to what here's how we do things here, how to be an excellent. And so it doesn't have to be like Stern rules of those sometimes help. I wrote a column years ago on how hard it was to teach more formation in a 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 the smallest of their gestures.
David Brooks:So if you're in a 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're 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 wanna know, are you considerate toward me? And if you are, I'll become a little more considerate because I'll what it looks like.
Camille Hall-Ortega:That's really good. I would always say I 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 a 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 I was teaching up at Yale and I would teach Tuesday morning and Wednesday, Tuesday night, Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. That was my class schedule and then when I was in New Haven. And so I had office hours, what I called 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 seven or eight students and it was totally fun. And I was courting a woman who happened to work at the Howard Butt Foundation and lived in Houston.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Oh, wow.
David Brooks:And she was gonna fly to New Haven and tell me whether she was gonna marry me. And so I thought 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 know, I'm praying for you and we're going through but I'm thinking of you. And that changed the temperature of that classroom the whole time. Because suddenly I wasn't Professor Brooks.
David 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 all worked out at the end.
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.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Sure.
David Brooks:And then you don't wanna do it. And one of the, I had a moment. It was after October 7, I was in a hotel bar and I was you would have said drinking alone. But I would I call it reporting. So I 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're brutal, brutal images.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
David Brooks:But then I come across a little video, black and white video, of the novelist James Baldwin. And I 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 wanna be.
David Brooks: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 in that harshness, made the ultimate humanistic comment. You could be that person.
David Brooks:That person could be you. And when I was watching the video, the phrase that 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 gonna 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.
News Clip:So good.
News Clip:That makes me think of AI. You're talking about humanism and being human I'm very aware right now that we have this technology that is pretending to be human. For the first time in human history do we have a technology like this. And I'm curious 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.
Marcus Goodyear:Right.
David Brooks:It has no emotion. It has no agency. It has no sense of self. And so I'll give you my upbeat version. I can give you my downbeat version of the AI future. But my upbeat version is that it's gonna remind us who we are by revealing what it can't do.
Marcus Goodyear:Yes.
David Brooks:And so there's certain things that it can't that it it's really good at. It's really good at taking batches 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 coming up with unusual opinions. So, and it's really bad 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 a notion that has been too powerful for a hundred years, which is that the core human trait is intelligence. I don't think that's the core human trait. And so if AI takes on some of that certain kinds of intelligence, it doesn't bother me.
David Brooks:As long as we have our emotions, our will, our passions, our character, our soul, our spiritual yearnings, that strikes me as more at the core of being human than your SAT score.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Right.
Marcus Goodyear:That's a good answer. I like it. If you were to flip it, you said you could have flipped it.
David Brooks:How do you do the negative? Well, you know, I'm 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 they the 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'll only help do the help it do my first draft.
David Brooks:Well, your 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 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, really?
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 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 posture.
David Brooks:It's a posture that says we're all made in the image of God and each person 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 has somebody said to me, none of your damn business? And the answer is zero.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
David Brooks: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 the core thing.
David Brooks:Simone Weil, this mystic, French mystic in World War II, 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.
David Brooks:And so it's the act of casting attention is the prime the first moral act. I'm reminded, don't know if this is 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 asked her 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. People love to 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 about their kids. People will never tire of talking about their kids.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Right? Some of that can seem sort of superficial or script 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 friend with a guy, a social psychologist named Nick Epley at the University of Chicago. And we were on a stage in front of, I don't know, an audience. And we were talking on one of these conversations. And then he interrupted our conversation.
David Brooks: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.
David Brooks:They all found somebody they started doing this exercise and ten minutes later we couldn't get them to shut up. We're having such a good time And finally, twenty 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 we'll enjoy talking to strangers.
David Brooks:We underestimate how deep people want to go. And so we underestimate what 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. I when they know who I am, I don't do it because I don't need to play that rep, that game. If they don't know who I am, we can just have a normal conversation, 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 them about the New York Mets or their kids soccer team or anything. And then before long, I can get to the spot where it's just my next go to, which is asking, Where'd you grow up? And I travel a lot and there's a good chance I've been there.
David Brooks:But then if I even haven't, people love to talk 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 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 the chapter about?
David Brooks:And then people get to step back, and then, you know, what crossroads are you at? Are you in the middle of some sort of transition? This, this, you gotta know people. But I had a friend who was in a job interview and he turned to the interviewer. He was being interviewed.
David Brooks:And he said, 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 to build some trust before you ask that question, believe me.
David Brooks: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. 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 born to talk in stories.
Marcus Goodyear:Yeah. They're being relational, right? They're talking about the relationship that brought them to a certain understanding rather than naming the truth.
David Brooks:And I found it it doesn't take long before they're pulling out their phone and showing you pictures.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.
David Brooks:Yeah.
Camille Hall-Ortega:I wonder maybe then if if we can get a story out of you. We 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. I would 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 gonna make it here no matter what. We're gonna work our rears off and we're gonna make it here. And that really was pretty formative. I'm not an immigrant but I still think I have that immigrant mentality.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
David Brooks: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 it. Was just like my grandfather.
David Brooks:So that was very formative. And then frankly, went to the University of Chicago where our professors, they did a lousy job of preparing us for the workforce, believe me. But they did a great job of trying to convey what matters in life. My professors said, if you read these books, these great books, whether it's Aristotle or Socrates or Rousseau or 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: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, is our adult retreat center, but he was at an event that essentially the staff of Laity 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 I would love to just get your take on this.
Marcus Goodyear:Here's Ronald Reagan.
Ronald Reagan: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 has survived 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.
Ronald Reagan: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 I have a couple reactions. First of all, it makes sense that he he was an actor, 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 that that quotation.
Marcus Goodyear:We all take ourselves very seriously.
David Brooks:It's entertaining. And I guess the final distinction I've made is I don't think 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.
David Brooks: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 gonna 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 of 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 to sermonize us into how to do it. And when you do that, a, you're spreading empathy.
David Brooks: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 school's drama department.
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.
David Brooks:Like I got to interview Matthew McConaughey and he said, 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. They're hands in the front pocket kind of people. They put their hands in their front pockets. They're kinda curled in on themselves. And I know if that guy's curled in on himself, if he's gonna try to be assertive and big, he's gonna be a little fake. He's gonna overdo it.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Mhmm.
David Brooks: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 to 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.
David Brooks:If you don't understand other people, you're gonna be miserable and make other people miserable. And so all the things that we think are soft and squishy, like theater, art, 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 University of Chicago, which 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 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.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
David Brooks: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 isn't saying he should have chose column A rather than column B. He's just showing a guy caught between these two value systems.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Right. The tension is the story.
David Brooks:Right. 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.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Yeah.
David Brooks: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 and the right lane goes.
David Brooks:And if somebody butts in line, I'm gonna honk at them because I wanna enforce the norms. No, 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.
David Brooks: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. I think CS Lewis wrote that. So there are I think there are some universal moral truths.
David Brooks:If we tell people, you come up with your own morality, then we're privatizing morality. It's not gonna 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.
David Brooks:And I think the value, hyper individualist values we've sent over the last fifty years, come up with your own morality, come up with your own truth.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Your truth and my truth.
David Brooks:Yeah. 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. So you may be stoic. You might think that I I'm I shouldn't show emotion, I might be an anti stoic. I like showing vulnerability.
David Brooks: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 pluralists, and we live in a pluralistic diverse society, so we understand that some values are universal and pretty rock solid. But, know, whether I drive on the right side of the wrong road or the left side of the road, that's more about custom.
David Brooks:And even how I regard dating. We're gonna have different people have different values. Yeah. Negotiating those values is hard, those differences, but it's also fun because it's interesting to be around somebody who's a very different value system than you. I 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 bit off his fingertip and wrote a slogan in blood on the wall. And he said, well, I understand why they call this foreign correspondents because that's very foreign to me. 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 they're from a different culture. They've got different values.
David Brooks:And I found some of the best people on earth are Russian. Some of the worst people on earth are Russian.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Right.
David Brooks:And so you 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 we have places where we can agree. But then there's also this notion of in in faith, sometimes we call it open handed and closed handed issues.
Camille Hall-Ortega: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 I would just say that and nobody has a monopoly on being right. So it it could be that my moral value system has some blind spots, 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'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 than there are spaces. And so people who apply to college get rejected by most as people try to get a summer internship, I talked to kids who have to apply to a 150 to get one.
Camille Hall-Ortega:Woah.
David Brooks:And then they they swipe right on 900 people and nobody responds. And so I have tremendous sympathy. So I was talking to a young woman who's in Gen Z, and she said, I wish I'd been young in the 90's. It seemed so much easier. And I told her, I was real young in the 90's, and it was.
David Brooks: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 onto that. The second thing I'd say is over invest in your friendships.
David Brooks:I have a friend who, when he was in college, he got together with 10 of his closest college friends and they formed a giving circle. And they said, we're gonna put some money in a pot depending on what we can afford. Every year we're gonna get together we're going to have him 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.
David Brooks: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 help.
Marcus Goodyear:Hope in humanity.
News Clip:Thank you, David.
David Brooks:It's been great to be with you guys. Thank you.
Marcus Goodyear:The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stennett, and me, Marcus Goodyear. It's edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, David Brooks. In addition to The Echoes Podcast, we welcome you to subscribe to Echoes Magazine.
Marcus Goodyear: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.