He read a review that had some criticism of the book, but she understood what I was trying to do, and it was such an honor that she got inside my mind.

Here's what he's trying to do.

And she explained it and I just felt, wow, that that feels good.

Even though she was critical in many ways of the book.

But just like she understood my own motivation, my my aspiration for the book.

David Brooks, welcome.

To be here in Detroit.

Yeah, it is just a delight to get to sit down to talk with you after reading the book.

Thank you.

So as I was reading the book, How to Know a Person, The Art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen.

I was thinking a lot about who the book was for.

Write books are for a reader, for an individual.

Right.

But I was thinking at the same point, this book feels so much more like it's for society, for community right now.

How are you thinking about who this book was written for?

Yeah, I was sitting on a plane recently.

There was a guy next to me and he was reading a book on how to become a writer.

And one of the chapters was Pay close attention to your audience.

And I was like, I feel like drawing an extra that, like, don't pay attention to that chapter.

So we writers are working out our stuff in public.

And so I'm not naturally good at seeing others.

I'm not the most socially adept human being on the face of the earth.

So I wrote this book to try to get better at one of my favorite sayings about writing is from Frederick Buechner, the novelist We're beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread.

So if I found something that's useful to make me become more socially adept, more good at seeing people, more good at making them feel understood, then I just take that and I try to pass it along.

And so I wrote it for myself.

But I would say I'm not the only person with this problem.

And so I wrote it in part because we have this loneliness epidemic in society.

We live in a society where 54% of Americans say that nobody knows me well, where the number of people who say they have no close personal friends has gone up by four fold since 2000, where 45% of high school students say they're persistently hopeless and despondent.

So we're in the middle of some sort of relational crisis in society.

And to me, one of the reasons for that, not the only one, but the one of them, is we just haven't learned how to be considerate toward each other in the concrete circumstances of life.

Like, have you listen well?

How did you become a really good conversationalist?

How do you sit with someone who is suffering?

Just the basic social skills.

Like I remember how to end conversations gracefully.

Nobody ever taught me that.

I remember my fifth high school reunion.

My only way to get out of a conversation in a cocktail party was say, I'm going to the bar to get another drink.

So I'm at my fifth high school reunion.

And by 20 minutes in, I'm so drunk I have to leave because that was my only way to get out of conversation.

And so I had like six quick drinks and like, I got to get out of here.

And so these are skills.

And the book tries to teach these skills.

They are.

And you lay these skills out.

But I'm curious what it means to you if we're thinking about you sort of writing this book for yourself, what does it mean to see others deeply?

it's the most joyous thing in the world.

In the book, I tell the story about one day I was sitting at my dining room table at home in D.C. and my wife walks in the door, front door, and you can see from the table and she pauses there on the threshold.

And it's summertime.

So the sun is coming in behind her and her eye rests on an orchid we keep on the table by the front door, and she doesn't even notice I'm there because that's the kind of charisma I have.

And but I look at her and I think, you know, I really know her.

Yeah, I know her through and through.

And it wasn't just like her personality traits.

It was like the whole symphony of her being like the incandescence and awe.

And so it was almost like I was not only seeing her, I was seeing out from her.

And when you really get to know somebody really well, you can see a little how they see the world.

And it was just like a beautiful moment.

And I just like it was a moment of connection.

And if you would ask me how I was looking at her at that moment, it was not observing or inspecting.

The only word I can think of is holding.

I was holding her, which is like gratitude, a little admiration, maybe mixed in.

And it was just a beautiful moment.

So it's great to have that kind of human connection.

It's one of the most fun things in the world.

And that's an intimate case.

But there are plenty of other cases where you're just at an airplane or bar.

You start talking to a stranger.

And it's way more interesting than anything you would have read in a book if you happen to be sat there reading a book.

So it's just fun is what we like to do as humans.

You write a lot about just sort of picking up conversations with strangers at airports.

You also talk beautifully and just lovingly about your wife.

It's it's just obvious how much you care and adore her.

I'm curious who sees you deeply?

Well, she does, that's for sure.

My kids do.

But, you know, sometimes you get frankly.

Sometimes a book reviewer.

And it doesn't happen often, to be honest.

But I remember I wrote a book in 2000, so a long time ago.

And a woman I vaguely haven't seen in 25 years named Diana Hsiao, who teaches at Johns Hopkins.

She read review that had some criticism of the book, but she understood what I was trying to do.

And it was such an honor that she got inside my mind.

Here's what he's trying to do.

And she explained it.

And I just felt, wow, that that feels good.

Even though she was critical in many ways of the book.

But just like she understood my own motivation, my aspiration for the book.

And so it's that I remember that from 25 years ago.

Just have good that felt.

You write in the book about the impetus for the book being a panel discussion.

And when I think of David Brooks, right, I'm thinking panel discussion, you know, some big heady topic or the future of politics.

But instead, the panel is you.

It's the actress Anne Hathaway.

It's the performer Bill Irwin, an absolute favorite of my mom.

So it was fun to hear him in the book.

And you say that, you know, this panel is what sort of set you on this path to to see people and to be deeply seen.

But I got to the end of the book.

And I mean, you jokingly say it was this panel that did it, I think, in just a little bit.

But was it really that panel or was there something much deeper?

The panel is what started it for you?

Yeah, I mean, there was a felt that that I was not the most emotionally open human being on the face of the earth.

I spent my early part of my life in my head.

Yeah.

And so the bad way of life that I lived, it symbolized for me a moment I can't even remember if I put this in the book.

I love baseball.

Been the thousands of games and even been here the Detroit Tigers.

But I've never caught a foul ball.

And so I'm at Baltimore with my younger son, and a batter loses control of the bat.

It lands in my lap.

And getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball.

I should have been up there just dancing, celebrating high five, hugging, being a Jumbotron hero.

Yeah.

Instead, I put the bat on the ground and I just sat there.

That is in the book.

It is the emotional reaction of a turtle.

And so and so I was aware this is not the way to live.

If you're like not emotionally in touch with yourself.

Yeah.

And so but I did this panel, and usually when I do panels, it's at some think tank.

We're talking about fiscal policy.

But at this this Anne Hathaway panel, it was at the Public Theater in New York, which is the theater company that brought us Hamilton and many other production.

And we're backstage and we're all giving each other group hugs because it's theatrical.

It's theater, not think tank.

Right.

And so everyone's like, Yeah, rah, rah.

And then we go out there and there's tissues on the on the panel in case we start crying.

And and sings a song.

And then we're having a good time and we're all emoting things.

And then afterwards, we give each other another group of great job.

Everybody that's like, Wow, I got to be around theater people more because I want to be like, in this kind of environment.

And so it wasn't like a total.

But I did decide I got to spend more time in New York.

Yeah, because Washington, D.C. is the most emotionally avoidant spot on the face of the earth.

And a lot of people go into public policy because they're uncomfortable talking about private policy.

They don't want to talk about the intimate things of life.

But so it's easy to talk about the world.

And so I found going up to New York, I thought I need to move to New York.

And that sadly never happened because my wife is not a fan of New York.

She's, of course, in New York, a bad boyfriend who's good with you some days, some days really terrible, which is true.

That's how New York is.

But just to be in that environment of we're going to share.

And so that I and one thing I didn't put in the book, which was a big moment for me, was moving from that guy, the baseball game.

About two years ago, I was at a conference in Nantucket in Massachusetts, and the speaker had there are about 700 of us in the crowd, and he hands us all a piece of paper with lyrics to a love song on them.

And he said, Okay, everybody, take this love song.

Find a stranger in the crowd, gaze into their eyes and sing them the love song.

So I found some guy, I guess, in his eyes, and I sang the love song and there were no sparks between us.

But but it was like.

It was like a moment where if I can do that, I must have grown a little in the last couple of years.

So that I think, yeah.

So the book begins with the how.

Right.

Just sort of how to pay attention to a person, how to really engage.

It's really sort of a how to all of these really wonderful practical tips.

And then you get to chapter eight.

And David Brooks, you just laid out all of these things and then you wrote and I want to I want to read it for you.

So far, I've been describing a process of getting to know someone as if we live in normal times.

I've been writing this as if we live in a healthy cultural environment and a society in which people are enmeshed in communities and webs of friendship, trust and belonging.

We don't live in such a society.

End quote.

It was a gut punch.

I'm bringing you down.

Sorry, but it sets up what I think is so the early stuff like how to be a good listener.

The tips for how to be a good conversationalist.

Those are happy tips and easy.

But there are so many times we have painful conversations these days.

And the two main sources of painful conversation, which I tried to describe in the book.

The first is the political conversation.

When, you know, we work in public broadcasting and sometimes people come at us with critique, either from the left or the right.

And if you're at all a public minded public figure, they're going to come at you or if you're anybody.

We were just talking about Thanksgiving is about to happen.

And I always tell people, if you're a little nervous about going home to your family on Thanksgiving because the political stuff will get too hot.

Start your Thanksgiving dinner this way.

Let's talk about the subject.

Things I've always resented about you.

And if you start with that subject, by the time you get to politics and I see music much easier, but so the political conversations are hard and then the conversations across suffering.

Yeah.

So sitting with someone who's just lost a child or and it's one of my chapters in the book is about how to sit with someone who's depressed.

And so it just seems that graduate level of knowing somebody well is how to know some well in hard circumstances, which we're in the middle of an age with a lot of bitterness and polarization and depression.

And so it's it's tough choices.

And I want to talk a little bit about that.

You wrote this book over a four year period of time.

Yeah.

So I can't help but think about how society and our politics right, that we have seen impact are sort of mimicked some of the book and these ideas about society and how we treat each other.

What did you see in society as sort of paralleling while you were writing this book, particularly over the past four really intense years?

Yeah, well, I saw obviously a lot more bitterness and hatred and a lot, lot more depression.

And the, you know, my friend took his life, who I describe in the book.

And every time I go out and talk about the book, somebody I mean, depression is in almost every family.

It's and even suicide touches almost every family in some way, in some extended way.

It's just so omnipresent.

And some of the suicides are opioid related and things like that.

So it's just become more necessary for that.

But then I think the also the divisions in society and because we just went through an election season, I, I always do a lot of what I did, especially a lot of travel this fall.

And I was in blue places, you know, like Boston or Philadelphia and red places and rural Nebraska, rural Kansas, West West Texas, rural Ohio.

And the chasm between the two seems to me just bigger than ever, just in terms of how the shopping malls suck in these places, how the people look.

I was at a town in West Texas, where the there was one with a crappy little grocery store.

It was a really hard to get healthy food, but there were a bunch of liquor stores.

So you're in a town where a lot of people have left and there's a lot of drinking going on.

And and, you know, that's borne out by the statistics.

So I learned recently that people with high school degrees are 2.4 times more likely than people with college degrees to say they have no friends.

And so the chasms in our society and the economic, but they're social, they're longitudinal.

So the high school grad dies eight years earlier than a college grad.

Obesity rates are different.

It's just one thing after another that the division in our society seems to be grown and more and more immense.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I grew up in a city in New York and I've lived all my life in cities in Chicago and D.C. And so there's a certain sort of set of subgroups that I'm used to talking to.

But I have to say the hardest group for me to try to relate to and connect with is rural white people.

Just because I don't have experience in a lot of these places.

And so I have to, you know, work harder to like to understand how they see things, how they see me, how they perceive me when I walk in a room.

And I found it actually, one of the rewarding things of researching this book is that I've had to do a lot of that.

And I once was in central Pennsylvania, and people probably know the famous political joke about Pennsylvania.

It's got Philadelphia at one end and Pittsburgh at the other and Alabama in the middle.

And this was a 7030 Trump country county.

And I ran into a woman somewhere and she was a New York Jewish progressive lady.

And I said, Why did you move out here?

And she said, The people are just so wonderful.

And I found that to be true.

People are nicer in red America.

I hate to say it's a blue America sort of denizen, but that that's the kind of social hurdle we all have to clear to deal with in unfamiliarity.

What are the things in society right now that you see that are helping to bridge?

Yeah, that's not hard either.

There are so many.

So in 2017, I created something called Weave the Social Fabric Project, and it was based on the idea that social trust is really social distrust is a real problem.

And if you two generations ago, if you ask people, do you trust your neighbors?

60% said yes.

Now 30% say yes and 19% of the millennials.

So we have a lot of distrust in this society.

But there are people in every neighborhood who are building trust at the local level.

Yeah.

And so I I'm thinking if there's a guy in Houston named Poncho Aguilera and he used to run something called the Living Hope Wheelchair Society, he would take guys who've been injured in construction accidents and were paralyzed and give them wheelchairs and diapers and catheters so they could be dignified lives.

He'd offer them training in how to be social workers.

So you're in Houston in 25.

Guys in wheelchairs are really in your neighborhood, help solve your neighborhood's problems.

And the guy who did this, his name is Poncho Aguilas, and he just is spreading trust by being selflessly serving a community.

And I want said the poncho.

You know, you just radiate holiness.

And he said, no, I just reflect holiness, which is the right answer.

And so those people everywhere we go into any town in Detroit or McCook, Nebraska, or Wilkes, North Carolina, and we just say, who's trusted here?

And people give us names.

And sometimes like Poncho, they run the organization, sometimes they're just neighbors.

We were in Florida and there was a lady there who was helping the elementary school kids cross the street.

And we said, Do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood?

She said, No, no time.

And we said, Are you getting paid to do this?

And she said, No, but it's afternoon.

So I help the kids across the street.

And we said, Well, what are you doing after?

And she said, On Thursdays it takes you to the hospitals.

And we said, Do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood?

She said, No, I have no time, because she didn't regard any of that as volunteering.

It's just what neighbors do.

And so in every neighborhood, there's someone I have a friend of my neighborhood who says, I practice aggressive friendship.

I'm the person who invites people over.

I'm the one who hosts the Christmas get together.

And so those people are everywhere.

So there's a lot of cause for despair.

But since I get to hang around these weavers, and if people want to go to weavers dot org, they can see these people.

It's just so uplifting.

Tell me about moral formation.

Yeah.

My favorite definition of moral formation is from the gospel of Ted Lasso, which was he was asked in his first season, what do you what are your goals for your football club, AFC Richmond.

And he said it's not to win championships.

I just want to make these fellows on the team better versions of themselves on or off the field.

And that's what moral formation is, trying to make each of us better versions of ourselves.

And that used to be absolutely at the center of every school that their job.

Our job is not to teach math.

Our job is to character building more information.

There's a school in England called the Stowe School, and the headmaster said, Our goal is to create alumni who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck.

And so that's the people who can we count on them.

And one of the people who formed me to stay within the PBS universe when I started working on the NewsHour, though these many decades ago, my boss was Jim Lehrer.

Yeah.

And I was on the show.

And Jim went when he was on the show, when the camera was on him, his face was not expressive.

He was just he didn't want to be the center of attention.

But when he was off the air, his face was really expressive.

He was like a marine like me.

Lots of reactions.

And so when I would say something in ten years on that show that he thought was intelligent or classy, I could see his eyes crinkle with pleasure.

And when I said something crass or kind of stupid, I could see his mouth turn down with displeasure.

And so for ten years, I tried to chase the eye crinkle and avoid the mouth down there.

And in that way, Jim never said anything, But he was communicating to me.

This is how we do things at the NewsHour.

These are our standards.

And so I had to try to rise up to the level, the standards that Jim set.

And he didn't do that with me.

He did it with everybody.

And Jim has been dead for several years now.

But the Jim Lehrer way of doing things is still the moral ecology of the NewsHour.

And so we're not like cable, frankly.

There's a different way of doing things.

And that's if you can leave behind a moral ecology that lifts people up to be a better version of themselves, You've really achieved something.

It's a task.

It's work, as you write in the book, to do it.

It is, but it's it's it's done by who you are.

Yeah, I was.

I once wrote a column about how hard it is to teach character in a classroom, and I got an email from a guy out in Oregon, and he said, What a wise person says is the least of that which they give Look gets remembered is the minutia of their behavior.

And he said, Never forget the message is the person.

And so when I think back to my own teachers, I don't remember a lot of what they taught me, but I remember their love of learning or I remember who they were.

And so we were good at copying people.

And so the message is the person.

And so you don't how often, if you're just a generous person and a and considerate in the concrete circumstances of life, you're lifting everyone else around you because you're showing them how to behave.

I was I had a friend who's had lost a daughter in a horseback riding accident in Afghanistan, two places and almost lost another to a bike accident.

And she was nursing the younger daughter back to health after this horrible bike accident.

And her older daughter was named Anna.

And she just mentioned to me is where I came to visit.

And she said, you know, people don't know whether they should mention Anna, because they don't want to remind me of a bad subject.

And she said they should know that Anna is always on my mind.

Yeah.

So you should mention or if I feel like talking about her, I will.

If I don't, I won't.

And so she wasn't working hard to give me valuable piece of information, but I regarded that as a tremendously valuable piece of information, how to sit with someone who's had a grievous loss.

And then she said one more thing, which was with her own daughter, when people would come to bring them casseroles as they were nursing.

One guest went to the bathroom and noticed there was no bath mat.

There.

So she took her bike and went out to Target, got a bath mat and put it in and didn't even mention it.

And my friend said that was the best thing because someone practical need taken care of it.

I'm taking this off your shoulders.

And so these are just her talking to me and some life lessons.

But that's a way you give people information that really helps them behave better.

You talk and you've talked in this conversation and in the book a lot about loneliness and sort of the impact that we're seeing in society.

I'm curious about if we write the royal, we don't choose this path of kindness and caring for each other.

What happens?

Like, where do we go from here?

I think a lot of folks are wondering in society today, well, societies fall apart when distrust is high and people can't work together because they don't trust each other.

You know, societies fall apart when there's no moral order that's cohesive, holding them together.

They fall apart when they're we don't have a common story.

So diverse, pluralistic society like ours needs to be united by a common story.

We're all moving together toward some end.

But then the very act of being considerate to one another, it sounds like my new to not that important, but societies break apart when that doesn't happen because people feel existentially lonely, because when we are isolated, we not only feel sad, but we feel mean.

Because if when you feel unseen, you feel under threat.

That's how we evolved and you feel your dignity is being insulted, which it is.

People are not recognizing me for the human being that I am.

And so you want to lash out.

And there's a guy named Ryan Streeter, the University of Texas, who did a study finding that people who self-identify as lonely are seven times more likely to be active in politics and other people.

So what happens is people go to politics as an attempt to cure their social loneliness, because politics seems to offer belonging on Team Red or on Team Blue.

There's not belonging like being a part of community.

It's just hating the other people.

And it seems to offer a path of righteousness.

I can doing something with the country.

But you're not sitting with a widow or serving the poor.

You're just hating people on Twitter.

And so it's a failed form of therapy, But it creates a politics that I think is super destructive.

And in a healthy society where people feel secure, we have the politics of distribution and we have arguments, but it's an argument.

It's like, how high should tax rates be?

Where should budget spending be?

That's like normal politics.

We don't really have that politics anymore.

We have the politics of recognition.

I want you to see me.

I want to be affirmed.

People are looking for politics, for membership and admiration, and they're basically using politics to try to fill a hole in their soul.

And if you're asking that of politics, you're asking too much.

And this is true of Republicans and Democrats.

I just watch the post-election emotions.

Yeah.

And some some of the emotions are about either I feel very optimistic about where the country is going or feel pessimistic.

And so there's those legitimate emotions we're all going to have after the election.

But a lot of it is so like my kind of people have been insulted.

We've been rejected or my kind of people have been accepted because we won.

And that's not not the right emotions to attach to politics.

So I think it's just destructive when you try to use politics to fill holes in your relational life and your emotional life, your psychological life.

Politics is there for important reasons, but it should be more mundane.

Can we keep the streets clean?

Can we direct money to people who need it?

Like that?

Should be mundane questions of politics, not it shouldn't be a spiritual as it's turned into here.

And I think this idea that I'm thinking a lot about is coming back into local.

Yeah, right.

I mean, you talk about this community, but also local government, which, you know, with news deserts and sort of the lack of newspapers that we have so much less regional fabric weaving when it comes to common sets of facts in our states or towns.

I often say as a political journalist, they're happiest people I know.

Yeah.

Are people used to be in Congress and have now become mayors?

And the unhappiest people I know are people used to be mayors and go to Congress because they come to Congress and think, I'm not achieving anything.

Whereas when I was mayor, it was local.

I could see what I was doing.

There was a concrete thing I was doing.

And most people do you have trust?

Yeah.

And so in my travels, I often ask people to which level of society are you most attached Is your block.

So your neighborhood, your town, your state, your region, your country, the world.

And every time I say that, I 5% will say I'm attached to all of humanity of the world.

A lot of people will say, and this I would say I'm most attached to the nation, but 80% of the people say I'm attached to my town.

Yeah, I love my town.

Yeah, I was in Youngstown, Ohio, and I met a guy and he had started his career of community service just by town, standing in the town square with a sign he'd made, and it said, Defend Youngstown.

I didn't know what he was going to do, but he was going to defend Youngstown, whatever it was going to be.

And so it was that attachment to town that people really feel viscerally.

Well, as we start to wrap for folks who have read the book or haven't and are listening and curious about the book or just curious about what they can do to move sort of the country forward, What what's a quick sort of prescription that you can write right now?

Well, some of it is just about asking good questions.

Yeah.

And some of the questions when you first meet someone, you've got to start off gradually.

So I'm first meeting someone.

I'll ask like Reg, grow up because people love to talk about their childhood and you learn a lot from them.

Where does your name come from?

People start talking about their ethnic heritage or something they're proud of.

If they're wearing a Detroit Red Wings jersey, I'll ask about the Red Wings.

And not that that's a pride source of pride these days, but they'll be better.

Again, it's the Lions right now.

Yeah.

I've been listening to the Detroit Sports Radio.

A lot of pride in the Lions and But then I'll try to graduate and ask, Well, I asked a theologian, What's your favorite unimportant thing about you?

And if you'd ask me, it's like I like early Taylor Swift more than I like later Taylor Swift.

But he said I learned that he is watch is way too much trashy reality TV dating TV like love is blind if you've ever seen this show.

So I wish I didn't know that about him.

But but it was a way of getting to know the full person.

But then if you really get to know people, you can ask bigger questions, like if this five years is a chapter in your life, what's it about?

Or what transition are you in the middle of or the deeper questions you really have to know people for?

These are like, What refusal are you postponing?

Yeah.

Or what commitment have you made you no longer believe in?

Yeah, and people are shy to ask these questions legitimately.

You have to tear.

It's up.

You earn trust.

Yeah, but we do this for a living.

We ask questions.

Yeah, and I. I'll ask it of you, but I'll say for me, how many times in my life has someone said none of your damn business?

Yeah.

And the answer is zero.

Because if you ask respectfully about their lives, no one has ever asked them.

Yeah.

And so I don't know if that's been your experience, but people love the chance to express themselves and tell their story.

Yeah, well, in the final moment or two, we have left, I loved the questions that you write in the book to ask.

They're just lovely and I actually wanted to end it with one of the questions that you just talked about.

I know we're turning the tables, David Brooks, but if the next five years is a chapter in your life, what's the chapter about?

Yeah, I'm always if you look at my life and I only understood this later in life.

Yeah, my life is a series of attempts to get a by a shallow person to try to be a slightly deeper person.

So my first book was about consumerism.

Yeah, my second book was about real estate.

My third book was about the unconscious.

My fourth book was about character formation.

My fifth book was about how to recover from hard times.

And this book is about relationships.

Yeah.

So I think my next book is going to be about desire, Like, how do we like people say, discover your passion, but what does that mean?

Where do desires come from?

We can't really choose our desires, it seems like.

Or can we?

And I think a lot of and that's in reaction to a lot of our world that thinks intelligence is the most important trait in a person, which I do not think.

I think the ruling passion of your soul is the most important part of each person.

Like what they want is what they want worth wanting.

And so I'm hoping to learn more about like, where am I?

Where do our desires come from?

And what happens when we lose desire and how can we want the things that are worth wanting?

Well, I look forward to that chapter and to that book.

My books come out every four years so I can tell you when it's going to come out, but I don't know what it's going to say.

Well, the book that we've been talking about is How to Know a Person, the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen.

David Brooks, it's been a pleasure.

Thank you.

It's really been fun.