In 1983, researchers conducted a survey and asked how many
friends or family people would trust with a personal secret.
The most common answer at the time was 3 / 25 years later,
researchers ran the same survey and asked the same question.
But this time the most common answer was shocking.
When asked how many people someone would trust with a
personal secret, the most common answer was 0.
This is merely one of the many horrifying statistics about
loneliness and social isolation that you probably hear all the
time Now. How is it that when the world is
more connected than ever before, people are more lonely and
isolated than they've ever been? Is it the technology?
Is social media replacing our sense of community with empty
calories of the sweet sweet for you feed?
Or maybe it's the deterioration of the nuclear family.
Fewer kids are being born and being raised by fewer parents.
Or is it the lack of religion in public life?
Or the geographic exodus from small towns and communities
towards big anonymous cities? Or the economic inequality?
Or the complete loss of work, life balance?
Or do people's social skills just kind of suck Now?
Have we forgotten how to empathize with each other?
Are we all just becoming self absorbed and socially anxious?
Today I'm joined by renowned journalist and author David
Brooks. He is the best selling author of
seven books, including the newest How to Know a Person.
Despite being a conservative, David has had a popular column
at the New York Times for over 20 years and continues to teach
courses on philosophy at Yale. In 2011, a survey of elected
officials in Washington, DC found that David was the only
journalist in the United States that was trusted by both a
majority of Republicans and Democrats.
Roughly 10 years ago, David pivoted and began writing books
about morality, connection, community, and purpose because
he felt strongly that at the core of the country's political
issues was actually a much larger social crisis of a lack
of purpose and meaning. Today, David and I are going to
talk about the various theories for why people have become so
distrustful and socially isolated across the world.
We talk about how TikTok and Instagram program or potentially
destroying dating, Why people aren't getting married or having
kids anymore, how conflict entrepreneurs have ruined
politics and media, why everyone in life pursues 2 forms of
success, the importance of a community that's hard to leave,
and of course, how to actually get to know someone.
Pretty sure no one had David Brooks coming on to the world's
most famous fuck podcast on their bingo card, but this is
where the world has gotten us. It's a fascinating conversation
from beginning to end. I hope you enjoy it.
Let's get into it. The podcast that's saving the
world one fewer fuck at a time. It's the subtle art of not
giving a fuck podcast with your host Mark Manson.
So David, you said recently we are amidst a social, emotional
and relational crisis. I'm curious, what makes you
believe that? Well, if you look around most of
the world, there's rising mental health issues, rising depression
rates, rising suicide rates. There's rising a number of
people who say they feel lonely. You have governments both in
around the world, including the UK, who now have ministers for
loneliness. The number in the US, 54% of
Americans say that no one knows them.
Well, the number of Americans with no close personal friends
has gone up by four times since the year 2000.
And so these are trends pretty much not everywhere in the
world, but most places in the world where we're just, you
know, the things we need most in in life here, relationships.
And the things we suck at most are relationships.
And so that's the crisis, and I'm very much including myself
in that category. Do you think this crisis is
driven by Is it that our ability to empathize with each other is
receding? Or is it that the complexity of
society and the the modern systems of society are are
presenting barriers to empathizing?
There's. A lot of causes to all big
social problems. But you know, I could tell a
bunch of stories. Like the first story would be
the social media story, that social media is driving us all
crazy. And on social media there's
understanding nowhere and judgement everywhere.
And so a lot of people, and I think a lot of people who have
responded to your work, it's like I what do I do with all
this judgement on me? And you say don't give a fuck.
And so I think that's the social media story.
There's a sociology story, which is we're less, we're less active
in civic life than we used to be.
There's an economic story. A lot of our societies are
becoming more unequal. The story I tell is the what you
might call the moral formation story.
And moral formation is a pompous word for treating each other
with consideration in the complex circumstances of life.
And so in my view, one of the main reasons we don't treat each
other well is we haven't learned a series of skills.
And these are skills just like learning carpentry, just like
learning tennis or whatever. And there are things like how do
you listen well, how do you disagree?
Well, how do you ask for an offer of forgiveness?
How do you sit with someone who's feeling depressed?
How do you host a dinner party so everybody feels involved?
How do you break up with somebody without crushing their
heart? I saw a study recently of the
number of young men who have never asked a woman or a man out
on a date. And that number is very high and
they try to figure out why aren't people asking people out
on dates? And the short answer is they
suck at flirting. And so no one's ever taught them
how to flirt. And so I wanted to call a school
principal and say you should have classes on how to flirt.
And you know that you'd produce a lot of happier students.
Or one of my students, a young woman, I teach at the university
level, she said, I've had a few boyfriends in my life and they
all ghosted me at the end. They none of them had to
consider were considered enough to like, sit me down and say,
sorry, I don't think this relationship is working.
And so she went through this, the world with a lot of
distrust, assuming that every guy she dates in the future will
ghost her. And so we just need to learn the
skills. Here's how you break up with
somebody, and here's how you do it so you don't destroy them.
And these are basic social skills we're not teaching.
You mentioned the constant judgement of social media and I
think with it that there comes a constant potentiality for that
judgement no matter what you do, right?
So when you and I were young, if we asked out a a young woman on
a date, the worst thing that could happen is she says no.
But now everybody's got a camera in their pocket.
Everybody's got a TikTok account, an Instagram account.
So now actually, the worst thing that can happen is, is a degree
of public humiliation that you and I couldn't conceive of when
we were young. You know or just the very fact
that you if I asked somebody on a date and she said no to me, I
didn't then have to go on Instagram and watch her go on a
date with somebody else too. And I I I never saw images from
all the parties I didn't get invited to.
And and now that that's a that's a different world.
And then I just think I think there's just a lot more cruelty
than there was around to each other.
And you know I one of the statistics that really troubles
me is about social trust. Do you trust the people around
you? In two generations ago, 60% of
Americans say, yeah, I trust my neighbours and now it's down to
30% and 19% of Millennial and Gen.
Z. So I asked my one of my
students, why is there such low trust in your in your
generation? And she said to me, have you
seen our social lives? It's just it's kind of harsh and
and and judgmental. And not only harsh and
judgmental, but occasionally cruel.
I mean, I don't think at any point in my adolescence I had to
face anything like a mob of disapproval.
And now young people do. And I did something extremely
stupid. Like four months ago I sent a
tweet which was completely moronic and it went viral and
not in a good way. And so, like, I write all these
careful articles and books and this tweet, which was incredibly
stupid and embarrassing for me. It got 39 million views.
It's like, what the hell? And now I'm I was like,
unfortunately, I've I've got an established identity.
I know I'm mostly intelligent person, but every eight years or
so I completely might get an ass out of myself.
And so I did it, but I can survive it.
But if I was 16 and I had to endure that kind of stuff, it'll
be it'll be horrible. Yeah, I want to stay on the
trust piece for a second because I've written about that
previously in some of my articles.
And it's not only I think, is it the growth of distrust, is it so
harmful for interpersonal relationships, communities,
feeling a sense of belonging? But it's also, at its core,
underlies a lot of the institutional problems that
we're experiencing, and not just with government, but
corporations, media. I mean, you can just go right on
down the list. It seems like distract.
Scenes for example. Yeah, everything.
I think other than the military, there's there's not really
anything in our culture, American culture, that's not
called into extreme question and scrutiny these days.
Yeah. And I think, well, yeah, there
are two forms of distrust. The one is institutional
distrust. Do we trust our institutions and
their trusted institutions has collapsed.
That's been collapsing since really the 1960s and 70s, and
it's very low, but it's even lower and lower now.
And if you look at the global rise of populism, that's a
movement built on distrust that whatever the elites are telling
me, they're full of it. And so that's that's
institutional distrust. But the 2nd and even more, I
think the more troubling kind is interpersonal trust.
It's do you trust your neighbors?
Do you trust the people right around you?
My practice is always to lead with trust.
And it means when I meet a stranger, I'm going to lead with
trust. I'm just going to assume they're
a good person, they're going to treat me well, and I may be a
vulnerable before them. I'm going to assume they're
going to protect me, They're going to hold me.
And I found that's the right thing to do because you will be
betrayed and there will be people screw you over.
But most of the time you bring out a better version of the
people if you lead with trust. But if you're a person who has
found betrayal, betrayal, betrayal, then it's very hard to
lead with trust. And then you sort of cut
yourself off from other people. So for example, I have a friend
named Sarah Hemminger who runs this great organization in
Baltimore. And basically they surround
underperforming kids in Baltimore with a series of
volunteers who basically serve as extended family.
And the kids in this inner city, Baltimore, have been betrayed
over and over again. And so when some random neighbor
stranger comes up and says, I'm going to help you out, I'm going
to drive you to school, I'm going to pack your lunch, I'm
going to support you, they assume, well, here comes another
person to betray me. And so they slam the door.
And so the rule of threat is there's no escape, there's no
exit here. We're going to stay with you.
So absent a court order, the volunteers knock on the kids
door day after day after day. And Sarah says when somebody
shows up for you after you've rejected them, it's life
altering. It's evidence that somebody can
trust me, I can trust somebody. Somebody is going to show up for
me day after day after day after day.
And she says for the person who's been rejected and who has
to keep knocking on the door, it's life altering too.
And so it is possible to breakthrough that wall of
distrust, but you just got to keep showing up for.
This gets into I think an under discussed component of this
broader social issue, which is the lack of traditional family.
I'm actually reading a book right now called The Two Parent
Privilege which is all the research behind all the
psychological benefits and lifelong benefits of growing up
in a stable two parent home. And you don't see this get
talked about a whole lot in the press or on cable news or
anything. But again, if you look at the
amount of children being raised by single parents, again not
just in the US, throughout the western world and of course the
ever present divorce rate, but then also the just the lack of
marriage is happening in the 1st place.
It it kind of creates this atomization of like an
unintentional atomization of the individual within the society,
right? Like it's you can be
individualistic, but you can also still have a two parent
home and a bunch of siblings and an extended family that you're
in regular contact with. But seems more and more it's
just people growing up with a single parent, no siblings, no
access to extended family. And so the opportunities for
trustful experiences, especially as a young person, it
diminishes. Yeah, and of course we should
say that we all know people who grew up in single family homes
who the the mom or dad did a great job and the the kids
turned out great. But it is still on average.
It's just as this book and many other books have made clear for
for decades. The average is that kids who
grew up in two parent homes are just do better in school.
They do better in life. They have, they themselves have
happier marriages. They're much less drug problems,
much less likely to be incarcerated.
And so I think we didn't talk about this for the main reason
is we didn't want to seem judgmental.
We didn't want kids who grew up in single family homes to, you
know, feel bad. And then I think there was a bit
of the feminist ethos is we, you know, women shouldn't be chained
down to a family. They should have be able to have
an independent life. But you know the the evidence is
just overwhelmingly that it's better to it's more advantageous
to grow up in a two parent home. And I wrote a column like in the
last two months just reporting in some social science research
suggesting that if you look at what what leads to happiness in
life, career success is, is important.
But having a successful marriage is 4 times as important as
career success. And so you would think that our
entire educational system would be geared around how do you have
a good marriage and how to be a good marriage partner.
But we don't teach any of that stuff.
We we we prepare you for career. And so I wrote that just report
Pete reporting the social science research and I had a lot
of people come up to me really angry because they wanted to
teach their their sons and daughters that they should a
they should worry about career success and they would shouldn't
worry so much about marriage. That should be a secondary
thirdary third concern and I just think the social science
evidence is is pretty clear on this that family life is is just
super important. And I have one theory which I
haven't, I have no evidence for. But when I talk about the the
social crisis the the smaller number of friends everybody has
the number of people who are involved in a romantic
relationship is down by a third. I think some of that has to do
with the decline of extended families.
And so, you know, if you grew up with a bunch of aunts and uncles
and grandparents, you had to learn to deal with your crazy
Uncle Ted or your crazy Aunt Sarah, and you just had social
skills. You know, there were people all
around you. And one of the things I've
puzzled over is I think social media has had this negative
effect which we talked about earlier, but it hasn't had a
negative effect everywhere. It's had a particular negative
effect on basically the Western world.
But as far as I know, you know, Instagram and TikTok are in
Kenya, but I don't think Kenya or Ghana, Ghana are having the
same level of problems because I think there in those countries
that people still do have extended families.
I had a Ghanaian woman in one of my classes and I would go around
and I asked people, what do you want to do with your life?
And all the American kids would say, well, I want to do this, I
want to be a lawyer or doctor, whatever.
And she said it's really not solely up to me.
It was my whole community who sent me here.
And so we'll make a decision together about what, you know,
my life should entail. And I was really struck by how
much more communitarian her culture was than the US culture
in particular. So I lived in South America for
about 5 years and my wife is Brazilian.
And looking at the cultures down there, it's very similar.
It's extremely, as you put a communitarian, big tons of
contact with family all the time.
Everybody's very tight knit. I think part of that first of
all grew out of economic necessity in previous
generations, just they were there was a lot of poverty going
on and so you had to rely on an extended network of family.
It was interesting living in those cultures because they
they're as an American, they to me, they put an outsized, a
disproportionate amount of value on those things, which I came
from a very classic Waspy, you know, don't share your feelings
family, which I believe you did as well.
Except for the Waspy part. Yeah, it.
Was completely foreign. I was like, wow, well, there's a
lot of hugging going on in this room right now.
But it was actually, you know, after I lived down there for a
few years. It was very refreshing.
And it's something that I, I lament, isn't more present in
our culture. Down there I don't hear about
people that sit in their house alone for an entire week at a
time. Whereas here in the States I
know of people like this. And you know, I I've heard of
people like this, I have family members or friends who are like
this. And I know you have described
yourself as a a relationalist. Is there a way to to imbue those
sorts of values back into our culture?
And if So, what does that take? Yeah, well, a lot of my work has
been trying to do that, and this book is about trying to do that. 00:16:44,360 Exactly how to be better at
relationship. When Americans got the chance,
starting after World War 2, to move out and live on their own,
they grabbed it when the America became more prosperous because
they got sick of like Aunt Sadie getting into their business.
And so they they moved in their own apartment.
And so we went from extended families down to like two parent
nuclear families and now often no family.
And I think we've overshot the mark and it's led to a lot of
loneliness. One of the optimistic causing
things that's happening right now is the creation of way more
three generation families. So when home builders ask
consumers, would you like us to make you a home which has a
suite for your grandparents, for the kids, Grandparents now 40%
of home buyers say, yeah, I want a grandparents to eat in there
because if I'm going to raise my kids, I want grandparents
around. And so there's been we, we now
have, there's been a rebound and the number of three generation
families in the US at least is now at modern levels.
And so people are, we're recovering from a period which
was hyper individualistic. And so that takes in part just
an ethos of community that I will get involved in my
community. And I have a friend who says she
practices aggressive friendship. And so she's the one in her
neighborhood who invites people for dinner.
She has a picnic table in the front yard and like every
Thursday night she has a dinner with a picnic table and any
neighbor can show up. And that's people self-conscious
to saying I'm not going to live an isolated life and I'm not
going to allow my neighborhood live an isolated life.
I think the key is to change the norms of how you show up in your
neighborhood. And being an aggressive friend
is is for a good start. Is there a country or culture
that you know of that seems to be getting this right?
That seems to be immune to this, this modern effect that we're
seeing everywhere. Yeah, well, if you look at
social science statistics, they always point you to Scandinavia
and Denmark and some of those countries when you talk to the
Scandinavians themselves, I think they're, they've got more
mixed emotions about how well their society is handling this.
But I do think they they have solved a lot of these problems.
They have some advantages. They've got affluence, they've
got strong welfare states, they've got relative homogeneity
compared to some other countries.
So I think they're doing well. One country that I think is
interesting, especially in the current climate, is Israel,
because Israel is a country where people do not respect your
private life. They they assume every, we're
all family here. And so like years ago, I had a
friend who who called directory assistance back in the old days,
you called an operator to find out a restaurant's phone number
and he said, will you give me the phone number for a
restaurant called Ocean in Tel Aviv?
And the operator said, Nah, you don't want to eat there.
And so she was like she was up in in his business.
And so Israelis will fight with each other and they will scream
at each other. But yet when things come
together, when there's a crisis, when they will lock together as
one. And so that's a country with a
lot of solidarity. And I, I know an Israeli couple
tell me the following story. They were living.
They were doing tech and they were living in San Diego.
And one day the father was off on a business trip and the mom,
10 at night, realizes she can't find their four year old boy and
so she's running around the house.
She can't find him. She goes checks out the pool to
make sure he's not at the bottom of the pool.
Then she's running around the neighbourhood screaming at his
name and she sees some lights come on but nobody comes out of
their houses. And finally she goes back home
and founds that the kid has built a little Fort in their
living room out of the cushions of the sofa.
And he's perfectly fine. But the next day she's walking.
Down the street in her neighborhood and a bunch of
people come up to her and say why were you screaming your
son's name at 10:00 PM at night? She was like in Israel if I was
screaming with my kids name, everybody would be out of their
house in their pajamas searching for my kid.
And so that that's a a culture that is more like we we take
care of each other versus a culture was like we're
suspicious we're staying in our in our home.
Is developing a culture like that possible?
Because you mentioned the advantage of homogeneity within
countries and obviously with Israel you have not only the
homogeneous ethnicity and religion, but also, I mean when
you feel as though you're being persecuted all the time, that
also drives you together. And is there anything replicable
in that without like say a secular diversity friendly
replication of that? So my view is that it's harder
with diversity. Like, I love diversity.
I'm glad to live in a very diverse country and I just think
it makes life more interesting and creative and innovative and
everything, but it's just harder.
I mean, if somebody comes from the same background I come from,
then obviously I'm going to get who they are really fast.
And so my rule is that our social skills are inadequate to
the society we now live in. And so that's why, you know,
basically I wrote this book. So if I meet somebody and I'm a
New York Jewish kid and I'm 62 and I meet a 21 year old
Nigerian kid and I'm straight and they're gay and you know,
whatever, You can imagine every difference under the sun, can I
get to know that person. And there's some people that say
no you can't, that you you can never really understand another
person's experience. And I can tell you with personal
experience that that's not true. You're never going to get all
the way into another. If I, if I'm, I'm never going to
fully understand what it's like to be like a Nigerian, gay, 21
year old. But if I ask some questions
respectfully, and if I say, tell me about your childhood, tell me
what it was like to come out, anything like that.
If I ask them a series of deep questions about their life, what
are the high points of your life so far?
What are the low points? What are the turning points
then? And if I can get them talking
about their life story, I will get a pretty good picture of who
they are. And I I found that one of the
things in life that we don't do enough is ask people about their
life stories. And I'm, I'm not shy about
asking people about their childhood.
I'm not shy about asking people about what they're really proud
of. And so, you know, there there's
certain deep questions you can ask that you'll really get to
know another person despite difference.
So some of the questions are things like, if this five years
is a chapter in your life, what's the chapter about?
Or if we met a year from now, what would we be celebrating?
Or what would you do if you weren't afraid?
I had a friend who asked a woman who he was being interviewed for
a job and he asked her what would you do if you weren't
afraid. And she started crying because
she wouldn't be doing HR at that company, but she's too afraid to
quit. And so these are just deep
questions that and if people love to tell their life story.
I found in the course of my life when I've asked people to tell
me a bit about their themselves, the number of people who say
none of your damn business is 0. People love to tell their story. 00:23:16,320 And so I do.
I fervently believe that you can name any, any human difference,
and we can overcome that difference by asking each other
to tell each other's life stories.
It's like the remedy. It's the remedy of the small
talk, folks. Boring never talk about the
weather again. So maybe the last time you
really stepped in it, I found a a quote from you from I think
2007, where you said you were optimistic about the social
stability and cohesion of the American public.
Sorry to bring it up, I thought it was hilarious.
But your argument at the time was really interesting, which I
think opens the door to a really interesting conversation that
not only ties together your current work but also your
previous work, which is the road to character, which you I
believe you wrote came out in 2011.
The reason you wrote this at the time was that statistics were
just beginning to show a a decline among things like drug
usage, teen pregnancy, recreational sex, smoking,
alcoholism, things like that. I believe the idea was like
people are overcoming their vices and so we should see a
little bit more stability, reasonableness in the culture,
which I think was a reasonable assumption at the time.
What has happened with that has been completely
counterintuitive. And this is what I want to talk
about because I don't understand it, is that when you look at our
society today, a lot of those statistics continue to be true.
Things like smoking, drinking, teen pregnancy, especially if
you look at young kids, they're getting in less trouble, doing
fewer drugs, having less sex. And when I was growing up in the
90s, you know that this was what my parents and the older
generation was always screaming about was.
You know, how were there's too much sex, drugs and rock'n'roll
going on? Well, now there's no sex, drugs
and rock'n'roll. Yet incivility seems to be at an
all time high. And particularly with the young
generation, I don't want to pick on Gen.
Z too much. I think they're just young
people are always just an easy target.
But it's interesting to see that they've kind of traded devices
of my generation and then replaced it with almost like
these moral crusades that mostly happen online and are very, very
disruptive and and I would argue are very counterproductive most
of the time, not all the time. So I'm I'm curious if you first
of all if you have a take on this or a guess of of why this
has happened. And then the second of all, is
this just another generation? I feel like every generation
just finds the thing that's going to annoy the old people
the most and does this happen to be Gen.
ZS thing? They've succeeded.
Yeah, yeah. It's funny.
I'd forgotten about all that earlier work.
But of course, back in those days we thought what's the the
chief problem facing us? It was like teenage pregnancy,
it was crime rates, it was like in the 80s, it was crack and all
that stuff was going down. And if you look at, you know,
like when Barack Obama was elected president of the United
States, it seemed to be a period of of increasing social peace.
But I think what happened that undermined that was one thing
that happened across, especially across Western countries, which
was a new highly educated elite was formed.
And so you had highly educated people, university graduates
going to school with other university graduates marrying
other university graduates, pouring a ton of money in their
kids, who then went to the same university, the same married
each other, moved to the same few high tech cities.
And you basically built up in a society after society this cast
of highly educated, powerful elites who controlled the media,
who controlled government, who controlled corporations.
And a lot of the people in the all these societies said, screw
them, they have too much power. And so you had this populist
uprising. I think the other thing, and
that was Donald Trump, that was Le Pen in France and so on and
so on. But it was the other thing that
happened was that a lot of people got lonely, lonely and
isolated. And they found that there's a
therapy for loneliness, which doesn't work, but they didn't
know that at the time. And that therapy is called
politics. And politics gives you the
illusion of community. I'm on Team Red or Team Blue or
whatever it is. Politics gives you the illusion
of morality, that there's the forces of good who are the
people on my side, and then there's the forces of evil, who
are those other people over there.
And then it gives you the illusion of moral action.
I can do something to make the world better.
I can tweet. I can TikTok.
I can expose my indignation. I can stare into a cell phone
and deliver an angry tirade that I put on Instagram.
And all this is a form of social therapy that fails.
Politics doesn't really give you community.
You're just hating the same people.
Politics doesn't really give you an accurate moral landscape.
The line between good and evil doesn't run between groups.
As Solzhenitsyn said it, it runs down every human heart and it
doesn't really give you moral action.
You don't have to sit with the poor or help a widow.
You just got a TikTok and that's not really moral action.
And so in my view, one of the things that's happened in
societies, we've become way over politicized and our our comedy
is now political, our movies for political, our sports are
political and science is political.
And so it's just they end up making people even less happy.
And the the therapists have a phrase the hardest thing to cure
is the patient's attempt to self cure.
It's the thing they do for themselves to try to make them
feel better. And that's often things like
alcohol or drugs. But now politics has become the
opiate of the masses and it's tearing us apart.
And I I think especially for the younger generation, you know,
they want them, they're passionate and I salute them.
You know, I've been teaching college all this time, so I have
a lot of contact with people who are 20 years old and I would say
they're more morally passionate. They're much less likely to be
careerist than previous versions that I taught, but they're also
sadder and lonelier, and they try to cure it through politics,
which is not a good cure. As a journalist, you are very
well known as being connected and or liked or respected on
both sides of the aisle. You're one of the few, I think,
who has survived the polarization to some extent do.
What is your sense of the political party's relationship
with this toxic culture of identity politics?
My basic attitude is that politics is usually a
competition between partial truths, that most public issues
are really complicated, and so you try to find a balance
between and the left. They want equality, which is a
good virtue. On the right, they might
emphasize freedom more, which is also a good virtue.
And so you're trying to find a balance between achievement,
between equality and freedom, or you're trying to find a balance
between achievement, individual achievement and community
cohesion. And so life is a series of
balances, and it can change from decade to decade. 20 years ago,
I was more on the right than I am now because I thought the key
problems in society is we were stagnating and we needed more
energy. And So what Margaret Thatcher
and Ronald Reagan did, I I agreed with them.
I thought they were there introducing your energy into
society. Now, I think the key problem is
that we're leaving people behind, that a certain group of
highly educated people are doing just fine, but a lot of less
educated people are being left behind.
And so we needed politics that'll help the people who've
been left behind. So now I appear more left, but I
just think the problems have changed.
And I've adjusted different problems in Washington.
I think. And I think that it's true in
every country I go to, there are most people you meet in
government who've been elected to office.
They sort of think the way I do, but they have to please the
members of their party who are conflict entrepreneurs.
And there are some people who are who like they thrive off the
conflict. They thrive off polarized
thinking that they're they're evil, we're good, they thrive
off catastrophizing. The whole country's about to
fall apart. And the problem is they have a
very well mobilized, angry base. And they're helped frankly, by
those of us in the media. We've learned the way to get
attention in the age of the Internet is to generate anger
and hatred. And so the number of headlines
in the American media that are meant to arouse fear and anger
has risen by 150%. And so my view is most
politicians are good people caught in a terrible system, and
the people who are the conflict of entrepreneurs are really
thriving by driving wedges between us every which way.
I love that term conflict entrepreneur because as someone
who is in the entrepreneurial online media space, I see that
all the time across industries too.
It's not just politics. I mean you see it in the fitness
world, you see it in the nutrition world, you see it in
the self help world which I'm in.
There are short term easy wins. If you can, find ways to upset
people, and especially if you can upset them in a very
righteous way that drives them briefly together behind A cause. 00:32:13,000 You mentioned you're in the
field of self help, which I've now entered, which I'm very
happy to enter because my new book is They.
The Times categorizes your books and they put mine usually.
I mean nonfiction. Now I'm an advice on how to
which I'm fine with because the first two my book is literally
called How to Know a Person. So it's a it's a good it's an
accurate category but I'm I'm like very like people think do
you mind being a how to book And I'm like no every book should be
a how to book it's it's you should help people out with your
book. First of all, welcome welcome to
the genre David. We're very happy to have you.
Just like we need more reasonable people in in
political journalism, we need more reasonable people in the
self help world. I.
The industry has changed a lot since I got into it in the late
aughts and early 20 tens. You know, when I came into it, I
the industry was predominantly touchy feely, a little bit woo,
woo. You know, the secret was top of
the charts everywhere and it just made me feel really gross.
There seemed to be a much more practical way to go about
things. There were a bunch of kind of
positive psychology books that were coming out, but it's become
a lot more practical as well. So there's a lot more focus on,
you know, just having a better life.
Like, what? Here are like 3 simple things
you can do to have a better relationship.
Or, you know, here's a situation where you want to have
boundaries. There's less of a call to, like
some grand authority or some great mystical law or anything
like that. So I'm very pleased with the
trajectory of the industry. It's really blown up the last 10
years. I don't think that's a
coincidence either. I think it's as it's become more
practical and relatable to more people, self help books are
selling more and more. So I think All in all it's a
it's a good trajectory. I actually think this ties into
a little bit of one thing I wanted to talk to you about as
well, which is the recession of religion and culture.
Because, and I've said this, you know, my long time readers and
listeners will have heard this spiel before, but you know,
nothing in self help is new. It's it's all just principles
and lessons that have been around for thousands of years.
It's just that for most of human history, these lessons and
principles were taught at church or at the synagogue or at the
mosque. And I think the recession of
religiosity in coinciding with the ascendance of the self help
industry, I don't think that's a coincidence.
I think there are a lot of secularly minded people who
never went to church that are still very, very hungry for
these kind of practical life lessons and how TOS and instead
of getting it from a pastor, you know, they get it from a book or
a podcast like ours. The downside of that is you lose
the community that comes with those, the the religious
organizations. And so I'm curious what first of
all, what you think about the recession of religion and and
modern culture, the effects of that?
And then also what is the solution, what is the, how do we
compensate for that? I I think it's unreasonable to
ask hundreds of millions of people to go back to church.
So what do we do instead? I completely agree with you
about the recession of religion, and religion contains practices
that are just very useful. Like if you lose a spouse or
suffer a death of a spouse. It's not obvious that the thing
you should do for the next week is go to a party every night or
host a party every night. But in the Jewish tradition,
sitting Shiva you are hosting or going to a party every night
where all your community gathers around you.
There you're busy every day because you got to find all the
food to serve them. And then there are certain
prayers. And then there are certain
practices like you when you're sitting Shiva with someone, you
can talk about the the death, the dead person or not, but just
let them sit there amongst you, just have your company.
And so there's a lot of wisdom in all these traditions, and
that when you lose religious congregation, you're losing
these traditions. You're also losing a group of
people who know exactly what to do when somebody dies, like in a
synagogue, everybody knows what to do in a church, Everybody
knows what to do. And so you're losing that.
And so I do think a lot of, you know, what we do is we we just
take some of the wisdom that was enshrined in those traditions.
And so, like, I've got a chapter on how to sit with someone who's
suffering from depression, a chapter on how to sit with
someone who's who's in grief. And so as you say, I didn't
invent anything, Nietzsche or George Eliot or Aristotle or
somebody. They all thought of this stuff.
And we're just like saying, oh, here's what the wisdom of that
survived the ages. So I do think there's a gap.
But I do think your final point is also correct that it's very
hard to do this with that community.
And so it's it's nice to have friendships, but having the
structures of of people who are not going to leave no matter
what who you do daily life with and that I think that's that's
kinship, that's family, that's place.
I think the loss of a sense of I'm rooted in this place.
When you lose that you lose a lot.
And so if you're losing a religious community, if you're
losing a sense of place and you're in smaller families, it's
just a recipe for this yawning needs.
You know, my my last book was called The 2nd Mountain, and it
was more about being sort of middle-aged and going through
hard times and then coming back with a new set of values.
And as I was touring for that book, I realized I could have a
second career as Aceo Whisperer because all these guys would
come up to me and say, hey, can we have a relationship?
I got nobody to talk to. And most of my books, the
audience is very much like the normal book audience, which is
like 6040 female, male and most of my books are about that.
But on the 2nd mountain, I'd look down the signature lines
when you're signing books and it would be 8 guys and a woman,
then nine guys and a woman. And I think in especially be
curious, curious to know what you think about this.
I think in particular there are a lot of guys who are hungry for
a kind of counsel and advice. They don't have anybody to go
to, but they're very suspicious of a certain sort of person who
won't have credibility with them.
In my case, because I've had a nice career as a journalists and
all these successful guys felt like, OK, I can talk to this
guy. It's an interesting point about
Second Mountain. I'll get to that in a second.
What you were saying about community.
I think you used the phrase people who can't leave,
basically, whether it's kin, religious affiliation or place.
One theme that comes up repeatedly in my own work and
has come up with a number of of guests that I've talked to on
this podcast is, especially when it relates to to relationships,
is that friction is often the point.
You know, we live in a world that is constantly optimizing to
remove friction from everything, to make everything as convenient
as possible and to generate as much optionality as possible.
Yet it's friction in situations like that, like the friction of
leaving a religion that keeps people together in a very
profound and important way. And I think as long as you're
trying to kind of synthetically create a community that people
are opting into and can opt out of at any time, you're you're
going to lose the deeper value of that community, which is the
friction that keeps them in. And so that I that that point, I
just thought that was a really fascinating point and I think it
really gets at why this problem is so intractable to modern
solutions. To your point about the 2nd
mountain, I found the 2nd mountain incredibly impactful.
You set up this analogy of there are two mountains in life.
The 1st is kind of the well, I'll let you It's your book,
I'll let you describe it and then we'll talk about it.
I was curious where you're going to go because.
Like, why? Why am I telling David about his
own his own book? Yeah.
So the basic idea is when we we get out of school, whatever we
think there's this mountain we're going to climb and we want
to make a difference in the world.
We want to establish our identity.
We hopefully want to make some money and have some success.
And so we're climbing the mountain.
And then one of three things happens.
One is we achieve success and it turns out to be not as
satisfying as we thought it was, or we fail.
We get laid off, are we fired or our company fails or whatever.
And so we're stuck with failure. Or third, something that happens
that wasn't part of the original plan.
You get cancer, you lose a child, something happens.
And so suddenly in all three cases, you're sort of down in
the valley and in the valley of life, there's some suffering and
pain you realize to make a change.
My favorite quotes, I can't remember which book I put it in,
is by a theologian from the 1950s named Paul Tillich.
And he said the moments of suffering in our lives interrupt
our lives. And they remind us we're not the
person we thought we were. And that he says, they carved
through the what we thought was the floor of the basement of our
soul. And they reveal a cavity in
ourselves, and they carve through the floor and they
reveal another cavity. And so when you see, you see
deeper into yourself than you would have in good times.
And so you realize that only spiritual and emotional food is
going to really fill those cavities.
And so you have to set off on your second mountain.
You realize, well, that first mountain really wasn't my
mountain. There's another bigger amount
out there for me. And it might be starting a new
company, it might be starting a new family, but it might also
be, you know, going off to Tibet and becoming a monk.
It become it's less about accumulation and it's more about
service. So it's really a shift in
mindset from a utilitarian, instrumental mindset.
How can I climb to a much more moral mindset?
How can I serve? How can I be a servant?
How can I give back? And so I think a lot of people
go through this 2 Mountain Shape in their life.
But the question is, it's a painful transition in the
middle. And that book was written at the
moment when I was in the middle of that transition.
And you have to shed a lot. And there's a period of
wandering in the wilderness and I'm not sure I'm totally on my
second round, but I've made a few strides.
Yeah. When I started my career, I had
this laundry list of career goals.
And I was My plan was that slowly, over the course of two
or three decades, I would gradually check each one off.
And maybe by the time I was 50 or 55, I would feel like I
would. I had accomplished everything.
And when subtle art came out, its success was so drastic and
so accelerated that it kind of knocked out that entire laundry
list in about 6 months. And there was kind of this
euphoria immediately, like a celebration for a few months,
and then this very strange, unexpected, mild depression set
in for probably eight or nine months after that and completely
caught me off guard. And what was worse about it is
that I didn't feel at liberty to really talk to anybody about it
because like, no, nobody wants to hear.
Like your your book is literally number one everywhere and and
and you're just getting you know money dumped on your head and
nobody wants to hear you say. Well I I peaked at 32.
I don't know what else to do with my life.
And it was funny because of the first person I came across who
understood I was friends with a guy in New York who was a a Co
founder of a Unicorn start up and he had cashed out for a very
large 9 figure deal. And since he cashed out he kind
of just sat around playing video games for a few years not really
doing anything. And I was talking to him one day
and he he asked me how I was doing with the book and and
everything I was like oh it's great you know he's like what
what have you been working on? I'm like well you know I I don't
really know what I'm going to do next and he kind of kept digging
and digging And then I I just came out and told him I was like
honestly man I'm not doing so hot I I feel completely lost.
I'm like a little bit depressed. I have no idea what to do next.
And he just kind of nodded and he's like, yeah, he's like I've
been there the last three years, I'm still there.
And I think your book came around about a a year later.
Some of the best book experiences are or non fiction
book experiences is when you read a book that like puts in
the words the things you've been feeling, but you've never like
managed to put the words around yourself.
And 2nd Mountain really did that for me in the sense that it was
like, Oh yeah, I I accomplished all my material goals or as you
described and wrote the character.
I've I've notched all the resume virtues, but there's the 2nd
Mountain and there's there's this kind of like what is my
life going to mean when I'm dead?
How am I going to give back to others?
And so it really oriented me in a very useful way.
I've public spoken very publicly about this experience.
I've been on a lot of podcasts and been interviewed many times. 00:45:03,720 And it's interesting because
when I talk about it, there are also a lot of very high
achieving people, as you said, CEOs executives, founders who
reach out to me and they say, Oh my God, I thought I was crazy.
Inevitably I end up recommending them your book, I'm like, this
will explain everything you're feeling.
Just go read it. So I think it's one of those
things that it is, I get it because it's it's not the sort
of thing, it's not really socially acceptable.
You know if you're at a dinner party with a bunch of family and
friends and your company's just blown up and you're making all
this money, yet you're feeling the worst you've felt in
decades, it's not really socially acceptable to talk
about that. Especially if the cause of what
what's making you feel so bad is how much you know how successful
you've become. Again, coming back to that idea
of like pent up demand that's not being served, I think there
are a lot of very high achieving people out there who first of
all never felt that liberty to talk about it, and second of
all, never felt understood like people understand where they are
with it. I think the reason it's like 9
out of 10 men, well one it's you know 9 out of 10 CEOs tend to be
men. But I also just think that men
tend to base a lot more of their self worth on 1st mountain
stuff. Men tend to base a lot of their
self worth on resume, resume virtues.
So how much money they made, what their title is, what
company they work for. I think it's just more typical.
So it makes sense to me that that that's the audience you
reach and and that resonates with it so much.
I think also we have a very bad set of social theories on what
motivates us. And there's a general assumption
from economists that we're motivated by money and status.
And of course we are. That does motivate us, but there
are other things that motivate. US1 is a sense of purpose and
meaning and you know, you achieve all your goals, all of a
sudden you're bound to have a crisis of of purpose, what the
Greeks would call a telos crisis.
What's my telos? What's my my role here?
And to have to serve when you're if you're serving some purpose,
there has to be struggle going on.
And if suddenly the struggle's not there and you've served one
purpose, then you're bound to have a telos crisis.
And then the other motivation that I think we we
underestimate, and that's really what my new book is about, is
recognition that a baby comes out of the womb looking for a
face to see that will see them. And if you ever go on YouTube,
there's these things called still face experiments where
they tell moms not to react to their babies.
So the babies make a bid for recognition and the moms just
sit there still face. And within 10 seconds, the
babies are in utter agony because their mom is not
recognizing them, not seeing them, not showing.
They understand what the baby wants and needs.
And I don't think we change very much in life.
We we need that recognition. And I think as anybody who's had
any fame will tell you, fame is seems like recognition, but it's
not really recognition. It's not like people would come
up to the airport. Back in 2013 when I was going
through my hard time especially, people would come up to the
airport and they'd say, oh David, I love you.
And I used to make it so sad because I would think, I would
think if if only you did like if only we actually had a loving
relationship. They they like my public
persona, but it's not me. And so I think we need this
recognition. And, you know, one of the
inspirations for this book was Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible
Man. And in the beginning of the
novel, he says, when people look at me, they see everything but
me. They see their stereotypes of
me. They see their surroundings,
they see their projections. They don't see me.
And I just want to show the world I exist.
So I get the urge to lash out with my fists.
And that never works. But I think he he's talking to
this need for recognition and so you could have the money thing
all satisfied. The status thing, I think we
never really get satisfied, no matter how much status you have. 00:49:00,080 But the recognition and the
purpose and meaning, those motivations are there and still
need to be met. And if you have a life that is
not oriented towards something you you're going to be kind of
miserable. Yeah, I had Morgan Haussell, the
author of Psychology's Money on maybe a month ago, and we talked
about this. And one of the things that we
talked about was how there's like a legibility or a
measurability of wealth, status, prestige, position that you
don't get with a lot of the the like softer stuff, you know,
relationships, community, recognition, purpose.
You can't put a number on a spreadsheet and measure your
purpose, whereas you can easily put a number on a spreadsheet
and measure all these other things.
So it's there's like this almost a gravitational pull I think for
a lot of people to just use it as a proxy.
Last question for you, is it possible to just go straight to
the second mountain or is it one of those things where you have
to kind of make a bunch of money, achieve a bunch of goals
and be completely let down by it to to understand?
I sometimes think I joke, my wife went to the second round
first. So she she's a very rich
spiritual life. She's a real moral life.
She's a people. When they meet us, they think
they they keep telling me how lucky I am and I I like to think
I bring something to the table, but they keep saying, no, you're
really lucky, you're really lucky.
And so she's just a spiritual naturally incandescent person.
And so I choked that she attended her second, had her
second mount 1st. And now she's going on the 1st
mountain building a career. And so I do think something, you
know, every formula doesn't fit everybody.
So there's no going to be no formula fits everybody.
But the one thing I will say is I do think it's hard to really
grow to your full depth without enduring something hard.
And I never met somebody. Whenever I asked them, like,
what made you who you are, nobody ever says, well, I had a
great vacation, Hawaii. That's never the answer.
It's always like I had some really.
I went through some really hard period of struggle, and I had to
reorient myself. So life sort of has to kick you
in the ass. And I once told this to a
college student and she said to me, you know, well, I haven't
really had that much suffering in my life.
Where should I go to find suffering?
I was. That's exactly don't.
Worry. That is exactly what I told.
Her. David, thank you so much.
Oh, it's been a great pleasure. I've been a big admirer of your
work and and then we've had it a bit over the phone in the past,
but it's great to have an extended conversation with you.