The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - What Happened to American Conservatism? — with David Brooks

Episode Date: May 1, 2025

David Brooks, New York Times columnist and writer for The Atlantic, joins Scott to discuss the decline of true conservatism, the failures of elite institutions, the moral decay fueling American politics, and the crisis facing men and boys. Follow David Brooks, @nytdavidbrooks. Algebra of Happiness: reflections on religion.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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In 1946, the first Cannes Film Festival was held in France. My friend claims he can speak German, French, and Scottish. When I said I didn't believe him, he said, you're wee bastard. That's good. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 346th episode of The Prop G Pod. What's happening?

I am home in London. Is this my home? I guess home is where the heart is. My heart is mostly with my kids. Had a very British weekend. On Saturday night I went to something called Bum Bum Train, which is this experiential experience where you sign an NDA. So I can't talk about it.

I can't talk about it. It's like when you go into these douchey members clubs and they ask you to put a sticker over your camera on your phone such that you'll believe that there's so many important people there that you'll wanna take pictures. It's just such bullshit marketing anyways, like, and by the way, I went to school in Boston,

I went to school in Cambridge. That's kind of the ultimate douche and doucheier move. Anyways, I've been here Saturday night, went to this fantastic experiential thing. You should do it. Signed an NDA respecting it, but if it ever comes to your town, you should absolutely do it.

I really generally found it inspiring. And then on Sunday, went into the park, worked out with my son, which was beautiful. It is really strange here. I'm experiencing something entirely different in London, or I should say for the first time since I moved here two and a half years ago. And that is when I go outside,

something happens to me I'm not used to, I start sweating. It is a sweltering 72 degrees here, and it is spectacular. Everybody is out, it's like Chicago in the summer, or this is what I imagine Chicago to be like in the summer. But it's absolutely just breathtakingly beautiful to be here and then last night I went and had about 11 pork bow buns with my son. I ordered a beer, he ordered a boba

and then every third sip we'd switch, felt kind of naughty for both of us. Came back, watched one and a half episodes of Game of Thrones, boom! That's what you call the ultimate dad weekend in London. And we watched part of the Chelsea game. Anyways, this is an exciting day. And that is, I believe the worm has turned.

I wrote an immersive novelist on this about how I think that the president, or as I like to think of him, the American fascist is hit rock bottom, and that is people are starting to rebel. And what's so weird about this politically is that the things he is advocating for, America largely agrees with, deporting immigrants, cutting government waste, a different approach to tariffs and international trade. The problem is it's not what he does, it's how he does it. And he's gone way too far and revealed himself

as being not only cruel, but kind of stupid. And that is the way they've gone about this. It's like, let's put village idiots in charge that, I don't know, disseminate attack plans on an unsecure phone, or type into chat GPT what the tariffs should be, or constantly threaten and then blink. My favorite is the tariffs are 145% on China and then three days later the tariffs are too high they must come down.

Well boss you're the one that put him that high. Everyone claims he's playing 40 chess. My joke is that I think the whole world thinks there's a decent chance he's gonna start eating the pieces. He's such a man child. What is going on? Let's talk about real news. We have bottomed. I think we have hit a bottom. I wrote on Friday, the worm has turned. We're gonna see some leadership from Fortune 500 CEOs,

even Republicans who have said, this makes no fucking sense. And they also sense weakness in a guy, in a crocodile who's decided to start biting and snapping at every other crocodile in the pond. And finally, the other crocodiles like, we've had it with this guy, we're no longer scared of him. And what's happened? He's gotten someone elected prime minister of a country that has an economy that is bigger

than Russia's. He's gotten someone elected who is our biggest trading partner, or someone elected prime minister. Going into 2025, the Conservative Party in Canada had a get this 25 point lead on the Liberal Party because Justin Trudeau was so unpopular and like a lot of nations in the world, they are looking for a change.

25 points down. And then what happened on the way to the voting booth? Trump. Essentially the Liberal Party and Mark Carney were able to cling or if you will associate Trump and his policies with the Conservative Party and their candidate and Mark Carney was forceful yet dignified in his pushback.

Also, by the way, it helps to have probably what is the best resume in geopolitics. Was the first non-Brit to run the Bank of England, worked at Goldman Sachs, was the chairman of Brookfield, understands the economy, understand government, understands finance, monetary, fiscal policy, and also it helps that he's tall and handsome and comes across, he just kind of reeks the credibility.

And what do you know? Boom, they won. Mark Carney's election to Prime Minister of Canada shows that the worm has turned. That Trump is now electing people who are associated with anti-Trump movement. This will be the election strategy, the political operative strategy for the next 18 months

going into the congressional elections in 26. And that is the following, forceful yet dignified pushback on the fascism, the cruelty and the stupidity demonstrated by this administration. And by the way, for those of you who show up in the comments and say, I struggle with Trump derangement syndrome, no, I've just gotten really fucking fond

of capitalism and democracy. I struggle with democracy addiction syndrome. All right, in today's episode, we speak with David Brooks, an off bed columnist for the New York Times and writer for the Atlantic. I think the world of David, I've been trying to get him on the show for about a year. I think he is this peanut butter and chocolate

of compassion and empathy, which is crazy high IQ. I just think the world of this guy. We discussed with David the decline of true conservatism, the failures of elite institutions, the moral decay driving our politics, and the crisis of men and boys. Love this conversation. So with that, here's our discussion with David Brooks. David, where does this podcast find you?

I am actually at home in Washington, D.C. In D.C. Well, as I said off mic, I'm a big fan, and it took us a while to get you on the pod, but I really appreciate you being here. We're happy to be here. So let's bust right into it. You've been a lifelong conservative. Is there a version of conservatism left that you still recognize or believe in? It feels Democrats at least have a common enemy. Where do true conservatives go right now for leadership

or some sort of touchstone? Yeah, I became a conservative in my 20s after being a police reporter in Chicago. And the two heroes for me were Edmund Burke, who was an Irish conservative statesman and philosopher, who believed that in epistemological modesty, the idea is the world is really complicated and when we do change, we should do it constantly but incrementally. And my other hero was Alexander Hamilton, who was a Puerto Rican hip-hop artist from

Upper Manhattan. And so Alexander Hamilton believed that progressives believe in government to enhance equality and libertarians believe in limited government to enhance freedom. Hamiltonianism believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. Those are the two North stars for me. Over the course of the Trump administration, I've come to believe that whatever

conservativism is, it's not what Trump is producing. He's producing reactionary politics, something completely different. And so I went back to those books that I used to read from Edmund Burke and people like Isaiah Berlin and a guy named Michael Oakeshott, and I loved them all over again. I think the essential conservative truths are still very profound, but they are nothing like what is called conservatism today. There is nothing like Fox News.

And I go back to one moment in my formation where now in retrospect it looks like there's a crucial fork in the road. I came out of the University of Chicago and I read Burke and Adam Smith and these books. And I worked in National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, the Weekly Standard, and we believed in promulgating conservative ideas.

At the same time I graduated from Chicago, there were a couple people graduating from Dartmouth who had worked at the Dartmouth Review. And people may recognize Laura Ingraham, Dinesh D'Souza, they were in this group. And I've come to see they were not pro-conservative. They were anti-left. They were in elite institutions, but they hated the progressive lean of those

institutions. And so they were sort of the rebel bad boys. The defining feature of the Dartmouth Review was in 1986, some progressive students on Dartmouth's campus erected a shantytown to protest apartheid. And in the middle of the night, the editors of the Dartmouth Review, about a dozen of them, descended on the shantytown to protest apartheid. In the middle of the night, the editors of the Dartmouth Review, about a dozen of them, descended on the shantytown and took sled shamers to them. It was attempt to dismantle the left, really.

To me, it was like Gestapo tactics. I was shocked and appalled because apartheid really is worth protesting. But I've come to see that difference between being pro-conservative, which I would say John McCain was, Mitt Romney was, George W. Bush was, and anti-left, which is what Lauren Grimas, which is what Pete Heckseth is, what is what Vivek Ramaswamy is.

That to me is a crucial difference. You had a recent essay in The Atlantic titled, I Should Have Seen This Coming, and you write about how people were once drawn to conservatism by a set of values, but now it's about dominance and rage. It feels as if the right has conflated some perverted form or sense of masculinity with coarseness and cruelty.

How did that come about from a group of people that has typically been more aligned with, I don't wanna say Christian values, but religious values that are meant to be more charitable than quite frankly these heathen hippies from the left. Like how did it get so mean? Yeah, resentment, a sense of siege mentality. And then there's something animistic,

deep in human nature. And so when humans first evolved, we were in a war of struggle of all against all. Life was nasty, brutish, and short. And then over the course of the centuries, we built civilization. And that civilization consisted of constitutions to restrain power. It consisted of international systems to try to promote peace. But it also consisted of humanistic values, literature, and art and poetry to soften human nature.

It consisted of moral philosophies, either theological or secular, to answer the question, what is life for? And when I look at the Trump administration, I see a massive attempt to return us to the life of dog eat dog, the life of nasty British and short, the life where gangsters have maximum freedom to do what they want to do. And that is the evisceration of all the values of civilization that conservatism is supposed to transmit and preserve. And I think the raw lust for power that Donald Trump embodies has not only eviscerated conservatism,

it's inviscerated Christianity. Christianity is a system designed around the meek, service to the poor. Jesus never embraced worldly power. Donald Trump is completely about worldly power. It's about domination. And so it's been interesting to me to watch a political leader eviscerate the two philosophies

that he claims to stand for, both conservatism and Christianity, and such as the acidic power of nihilism. You summarized, I remember after January 20th, I think a lot of us on the left just felt sort of flummoxed and flat-footed. We did not even know how to describe or even process what we were feeling. You summarized it perfectly. You said that you you felt moral shame, that to watch the loss of your nation's honor is embarrassing and painful.

What do you think we lost that day? Yeah, you know I quoted in that Atlantic essay, the first sentence of one of Charles de Gaulle's memoirs, and he says, I've always had a certain idea about France, and I've always had a certain idea about America, that we're a flawed nation that's fundamentally a force for good. Lincoln tried to uphold the dignity of man. FDR tried to defeat fascism. Ronald Reagan tried to defeat communism. George W.B. Bush, for all his flaws, created PEPFAR to save 25 million lives in Africa

who might have otherwise died of HIV. So we made our mistakes like Vietnam and Iraq, but they were mistakes of stupidity, of arrogance, of naivete. But they were not out of evil intention. When I look at Donald Trump, evil intention is part of the plan. So when I saw him attack Zelensky with JD Vance in the global office,

I had experienced a blow to my patriotism, an emotion that I hadn't really felt about America before. Then on Liberation Day when the tariffs were announced, I felt it again mixed with a horror of incompetence. These are new experiences, new and shocking experiences. Yeah. I think a lot of moderates try and find their political home base.

I think I would have been a Rockefeller Republican if I'd been a little bit older. There's a lot of things about conservatism I'm really drawn to. And I wonder as someone who's, I think a lot of progressives are like, we think, okay, we Democrats get it wrong a lot. We take things too far. Identity politics, I think, is out of control. But the way you describe Americans, I would describe Democrats right now. Their hearts in the right place. But we just often take things too far. We let 250,000 people across the border on December

of 23, inspiring an overreaction where we start basically rounding up people with the wrong tattoos. We let DEI apparatus on campus go so far that it probably becomes unconsciously accidentally racist itself and we inspire an overreaction. Do you think there's any truth to the notion that we on the left, quite frankly, have a tendency to stick out our chin and just take things too far, and quite frankly, create space for an overreaction is some of this our fault. Oh, absolutely. You know, I would say one flaw,

and now where I position myself, I read one of my heroes is Isaiah Berlin, the British philosopher, and he said, I'm happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. And that's where I find myself these days, on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. I associate where I find myself these days, on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency. I associate more with moderate or to the Democrats, I guess,

but I am the conservative version of that. When I look at the progressive world, I think it was just a horrible mistake to buy into an ideology that defines all human relationships into oppressor oppressed groups. It was a horrible mistake to think that a person's ideas, values, and worldviews are determined by their racial or gender identities. But the ultimate sin for me that progressives committed over the last 70 years is they created worlds in the

universities and in the media and the cultural institutions and the nonprofits where there was no room for voices that were working class voices and there was no room for voices that were working-class voices, and there was no room for conservative voices. When I joined journalism as a police reporter, I worked around a lot of high school grads. Journalism had a strong working-class component in those days. When I went to college, there was mostly progressives,

but there were a lot of conservatives around. Over the ensuing 40 years, that's been purged. And as far as I know, if you look at the editorial staff of the major mainstream media organizations, there's not a single Trump supporter in an editorial position, as far as I know. And so if you tell half the country that your voices are not worth hearing,

they're gonna flip the table. And worse, if you create a meritocratic system where the children of the rich have advantages in getting to Ivy League schools over the children of the poor, and that goes on generation after generation, they're going to flip the table. And one of the things that disturbs me most about American life is how we develop the caste system. So college-educated people

live 15 years longer than high school-educated people. American life is how we've developed a caste system. So college educated people live 15 years longer than high school educated people. High school educated people are five times more likely to die of opioid addiction, five times more likely to have kids at a wedlock, 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends. So we've created this class divide on the basis of education. It was mostly progressives who were in charge of our educational institutions.

So that fixing that problem is one of the things I think progressives have to work on. Yeah, I think a lot about this. And the way I describe it, what you just described is this magic drug that does all the wonderful things you're talking about if you take it. And yet we as progressives who run these institutions have decided to hoard this drug through artificial scarcity. Did America's become a rejectionist, kind of LVMH exclusionary culture, that once I have a house, I get very concerned with traffic

and show up and make sure no one else can build a house because the incentive is to see the value of my house go up. Once I have a college degree, I kind of enjoy hearing that the admissions rate has gone from 76 percent to 9 percent, which is my alma mater, UCLA. Do you think that there's this virus that infects Democrats and Republicans where we've decided once you get there, pull up the bridge behind you? That we're more Elvia Mage than what was originally a vision for America?

Yeah. I mean, I would say the one little activity that personifies what you just said is my daughter did okay in her SAT scores and she started getting brochures from colleges. And she got big expensive glossy brochures from schools like Harvard. There is literally no student in my zip code who can get into Harvard who doesn't know about Harvard. And so why did they send these fancy brochures in order to induce students to apply so they can reject them?

That way they can say, we're rejecting 96% of the kids who are applying to our school. And so that's a bit of the cynicism of creating not only creating scarcity, but bragging that you've become a rejection academy, rejecting 96% of the kids who apply. And so that to me is a bit of the segmentation. And then recruiters from the banks and the consulting groups, they recruit at very few schools. Somebody did a study of looking at who works in media, entertainment, corporations, law, science.

And 54% in these various diverse fields went to the same 32 elite colleges. And so we have created a segregation system based on SAT scores and grades that divide society at a very early age. A lot of kids know by age eight or nine, because they're tested so often, whether the system thinks they're dumb or smart.

The dumb ones are alienated, and they think the system is rigged against it, which is accurate. I had an interesting call with a friend of mine who lives in Ohio who's an electrician. And he said, you know, David, I saw you saying nice things about institutions, that you really were through some really wonderful institutions that made you a better person. And I would include my summer camp, my high school, my college. He said, I've never felt that way about institutions. That was such a novel thought for me,

because every institution I've been a part of is like a jackboot in my face. And that's just a very different attitude than those of us who are fortunate enough to do reasonably well in these elite institutions. We'll be right back after a quick break. We'll be right back after a quick break. Dire Wolves! Not just a thing from Game of Thrones, not just Jon Snow's best friend. Dire Wolves walked the Americas for millennia, up until about 14,000 years ago when

maybe their primary food source dried up or humans hunted them to extinction no one was taking notes but we know they were a bit bigger than gray wolves they ate a lot of meat and their bite could crush bones and now we know that apparently dire wolves are back a startup called colossal says they've brought these pups back from extinction. They say they've got three of them, but are these dire wolves they brought back actually dire wolves? And whether they are or aren't, should we be trying to bring dire wolves back?

Like why? Join us for answers over at Today Explained. Support for PropG comes from Vanta. Starting a company is incredibly gratifying, but can also be one of the hardest things you'll ever do. And one of the most challenging parts of it is making sure that you're meeting all the security compliance standards you need to meet. Vanta makes the whole process easier.

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Find out why more than 2.5 million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash prof. That's LinkedIn.com slash prof to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. You're a thoughtful guy. I want to move to solutions. Do you think it's, one idea, I just spoke with David Axelrod, the University of Chicago. You went to, you're a Chicago grad. Yeah, I'm a Chicago guy. Okay, in the middle of the tour, I just did that college week, college tour with my son,

and they keep talking in this very warm tones if we look at the full applicant, and then along the way, a parent, and of course it's only the parents asking questions, but I think there should pass a law that no parent is ever allowed to ask a question in these tours. Anyways, someone makes the mistake

of asking the admissions rate, and the guy, this lovely high EQ guy goes, it's 4%. So there's 75 people on this tour, 25 kids, 50 parents. So one of them is getting in and we're all marching around the campus. And I say to my son, I said, let's leave the tour. I just don't wanna get your hopes up here. You're not getting into the University of Chicago

with a 4% admissions rate. You're just not. And I wonder if some of these schools should lose their tax-free status, that if you have an endowment over a billion dollars, you're not growing your freshman class faster than population. You're no longer a public servant. You're a hedge fund with classes. You're a thoughtful guy.

You've written on the topic. What do you think we do to try and break the caste system that has become higher education? First, on those college tours, I've never felt more invisible in my life than when I'm a parent on one of those college tours because you realize you don't matter at all. But I would say these schools, and I piss on them all the time,

they're still fantastic places. If you can get in, it's amazing. If you can get in, they're amazing places of deep learning. What I'm hoping is the universities will do a couple of things. First, expand as you suggest to allow more access. Second, do genuine intellectual diversity on campus. Since I'm more conservative than the campus norm, I now talk politics, something I would never have done in the classroom.

I'd say, I'm a conservative, I just want to the classroom. I said, look, I'm a conservative. I just want to explain to you what it feels like why I became a conservative. So you have some access. You know what a conservative looks like. And so that's strange to a lot of students. The third and most important thing is we need to redefine our definition of ability. Our whole system is based on the definition of ability, which is the ability to suck up

to teachers between the ages of 15 and 18 and do well on standardized tests. That is not what genuine ability is. It doesn't allow for curiosity, it doesn't allow for determination, for drive, for social skills. And if we had a wider definition of ability that rich parents couldn't game as well, to include those more humanistic traits, then it's more widely dispersed across populations. And we would have a more democratic student body

because we'd measure the things that really matter that don't require you to go to a private school to get all the training. And so to me, the history of the meritocracy is the history of different definitions of ability. And it used to be, if you were in a military society, it was military courage. Then in the 19th century, it was social breeding.

Did you come over from the Mayflower? But in the 1930s to 1950s, the whole system switched over to IQ. That's just an incredibly narrow definition of ability. The only way to really diversify and democratize the system is to redefine what ability is, what we're going to measure, what criteria we're going to use to accept or reject kids. And we'll understand that the distinctions these days we draw between Princeton and,

I don't know, Penn State, these are ridiculous distinctions. Williams and Amherst, you know, these are ridiculous. But we've built this hierarchy of status which perverts and distorts all of society. Do you think, though, I wonder if the argument over the criteria for who gets in, whether it's going from more analytical to more qualitative, that it's the wrong argument, that it shouldn't be who gets in, that's a misdirect from the key argument, and that

is how many. And that is DEI is an initiative, DEI has caused a lot of problems on campus. I actually am, I don't want to call it conservative here, but I think that DEI apparatus on campus should be disassembled. You know, 60% of Harvard's freshman class identifies as non-white.

So what is the 140 person DEI apparatus actually doing? But at the same time, I think all of that is a misdirect from what we should be talking about and that is how many get in. So junior colleges don't have a DEI problem because you just show up, you pay the fee, you get in. And there's not all this manufactured stress over who gets in and then an argument

over who deserves advantage. And my premise has always been at the age of 18, I don't know about you, I was remarkably unremarkable. And I don't believe any organization, test, or individual can be the arbiter of who's going to be a success at 18. You know, I think a lot about men. Our prefrontal cortex just doesn't fully develop until 25. And I didn't get my act together until I was in graduate school.

And fortunately, Berkeley let me into graduate school, the 2.27 undergraduate GPA. And so these institutions are amazing, but why would they sequester this drug? Anyways, I'm sorry, a bit of a speech there. I'm curious what you think about the idea of mandatory national service. Couldn't be more enthusiastic about it, in part because it would get kids from Berkeley

to meet kids from Birmingham, Alabama. And then it would give students a sense of what this country is like, what different kinds of people there are in it. But it would also give them a sense that life is really about offering. What are you offering? And you know, one of my favorite sayings about vocation is the famous one from the novelist, Frederick Buechner, you find your calling where

your deep gladness meets the world's deep need. How do you find the world's deep need? You're probably not going to find it at the office in McKinsey or on the campus of some fancy university. You have to go out to where the problems are. I'm also a fan of Viktor Frankl, whose book, Man's Search for Meaning Everybody Should Read. He was an Austrian psychiatrist who was put in

a Nazi concentration camp and he realized the wrong question to ask about your life is, what do I want from life? The right question to ask is, what is life asking of me? What problems are in front of me that I'm uniquely qualified to take part in addressing. And so National Service would give kids a chance to go

out where the problems are. And they'll be moved by the injustice of homelessness. They'll be moved by struggles in rural America. They'll be moved by urban poverty. And it's tapping into that calling will arouse tremendous energy levels. I just think it's become tremendously hard to be in your 20s these days, in part because we don't give students enough avenues to find their purpose in life.

You can only do that by trying out a bunch of stuff in your 20s and figure out which touches your soul. I'm like you, I graduated maybe halfway in my public high school class. I went to Chicago because in those days, Chicago was accepting 74%. And just to underline something you said, I fervently agree with you that you can't predict how a person's going to do by anything they do at age 18. They have not been formed. And the key to success in life is not how smart you were at 18, but whether you're capable of keep growing and learning all the days of your life.

I taught off and on at Yale for 20 years, and it's a wonderful place. I think it's a fantastic place. But I noticed this phenomenon with some of my students. They were electric at 21. But by the time I would have coffee with them 10 years after graduation, some light had gone out. They'd fallen into some career rut.

They were not asking the big questions anymore. So to me, I don't want to know whether you're shiny at 18. I want to know, are you capable of perpetual growth until you're 100? That is a skill that you can't measure at 18. Talk about, one, do you believe, do you bind to this thesis that the idolatry of money has kind of overwhelmed and crowded out character, service, patriotism? Where do you stand on the thesis that it's

the idolatry of money that has really, really hurt America? Yeah, I would say that's a rhythm in American life where money becomes the dominant ethos. You would say the 1880s, the 1890s, we were incredibly materialistic society. But what you need is a moral system that stands against capitalism. So you live in the contest and the tension between capitalism, say, and Catholicism, or capitalism and Judaism,

or frankly, capitalism and progressivism. These are all systems or capitalism and environmentalism, or capitalism and Judaism, or frankly capitalism and progressivism. These are all systems or capitalism and environmentalism. These are all systems that push against some of the worst flaws of capitalism and give you a moral basis to make your decision, a sense of right and wrong, not just richer or poorer. I think creative people live in

the tension between those two things. And I think what we've seen is the collapse of all rival systems. One of my favorite things from psychology is from a guy named John Bowlby who does attachment research. Says all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. We need that secure base.

And that secure base fundamentally is about your relationship with your parents having secure attachments. But it's also about having a secure home, hometown, a safe neighborhood. But it's also about a moral order, the sense that you live within a coherent moral order and you can make the decisions of your life based on this. There was a historian named George Marsden who wrote once that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such power was his sense that there was a moral order woven into the fabric of the universe. That segregation was not just wrong sometimes, segregation was always wrong.

Slavery is always wrong under all circumstances. And so that gives you a sense of security if you have a sense that yes, that right and wrong are permanent. And we took that away, we privatized morality. We told people, it's up to you to come up with your own values. And if your name is Aristotle or Nietzsche, maybe you can do this. Most of us can't come up with our own values and we're left in sort of a formless world that gives no security. Way back in 1955, a great columnist named Walter Lippmann wrote a book in which he

wrote that if what is right and wrong is just what each individual invents based on his or her feelings, we have left the bounds of civilization. And I think we have left those bounds. So it's a loss of social security, friends, family are weakening, community base is weakening, and moral base is weakening. And that to me explains what I think is the deep root cause of a lot of our political problems, which is a spiritual and relational crisis,

the rise of disconnection, the rise of loneliness, the rise of suicide. 45% of teenagers say they're persistently hopeless and despondent. The number of Americans who say they have no close friends has gone up fourfold since 2000. And so we've just seen a decay at the foundations of society, and that has perverted our politics.

Let's try and move to solutions, a spiritual and personal disconnection. How do you think we repair this? If you, I imagine, get called a lot by probably not this White House, but you probably have a lot of influencing it, asked a lot, what are the two or three programs you believe warrant real investment and attention to try and heal this decay? Well, first on the political front, you know, I think Joe Biden had one job, and his job was to redirect resources to the places that have been left behind. And I thought he

basically succeeded at that. If you look at the people who received the money from the Build Back Better and the big infrastructure bills and all that stuff, they were mostly Republican rural places. And if you look at where the big, Rahm Emanuel, who was then our ambassador to Japan, produced a map where he showed where the big massive investments are in chip plants and other kind of manufacturing facilities. The good news for me was out of the top 100, only two were in California, but five or six or seven were in Illinois, and five or six or seven were in Iowa,

upstate New York. As I travel around the country, I find a lot of those places, you go to Eastern Ohio, they're happy because they got an Intel plant coming in there. You go around Syracuse, they're happy because they got

a micron plant coming in. There really is some bit of economic renaissance. It did not bloom enough to reward Joe Biden. And the second mistake Biden made was you can't fundamentally solve a problem of respect with economic resources. That it's not only that these places have been left behind materially, but they've been left behind in terms of status and respect. And the Democrats still have not managed to find a way to show solidarity and respect to a lot of working class voters. And crossing that cultural divide is a chief challenge, I think, for the party. But then if you're talking about the social and relational crisis, you know, I do two

things. I'll just tell you what I do. I started a nonprofit called Weave, I do two things. I'll just tell you what I do. I started a nonprofit called Weave, the social fabric project. And we celebrate and reward and support people who are working in the neighborhoods where they live. And they're rebuilding trust in those communities. And we give them money, we give them support, we give them platforms to tell their stories. And culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy.

So you pick the community leaders in your neighborhood and you hold them up and say, let's be more like them. Let's build connection. And then the final thing I did, I had a book come out a year ago called How to Know a Person. And that's based on the idea that a lot of the disconnection is that people just don't have skills. How do you sit with someone who's suffering from depression?

How do you sit with someone who's grieving? How do you ask for an offer of forgiveness? How do you break up with somebody without crushing their heart? These are basic social skills, and for a couple of generations, we simply have not taught them. And so to me, one of the reasons we have such high levels

of distrust and disconnection is we haven't taught people the practical skills of how to be considerate to each other in the concrete circumstances of life. And so, these are at least the things I've chosen to try to work on as my piece of the larger challenge. Something that struck me in your work is that you advocate for putting moral formation at the center of society. What does that mean and how tactically does that become operationalized?

Yeah. When our founders created this country, they took a look around human nature and said, if we're going to build a democracy out of these people, we have to work hard on moral formation. Moral formation is a pompous word, but my favorite definition comes from the Gospel of Ted Lasso. He says his job at coach of this football team he was coaching, pompous word, but my favorite definition comes from the gospel of Ted Lasso. And he says his job at coach of this football team he was coaching is to make these fellows

better versions of themselves on and off the field. And schools, unions, civic organizations, they used to think that moral formation was part of their job. It was to perform the character of their kids. And there was a school called the Stow School, and the headmaster said, our job is to turn out students who are acceptable at a dance, invaluable at a shipwreck.

They wanted to turn out students who were reliable when the chips were down. And sometime after the war, the whole ethos changed. And we went from an understanding of human nature is that we're beautiful creatures, but we're also deeply flawed. We went to a version of human nature is that we're beautiful creatures but we're also deeply flawed. We went to a version of human nature is that we're beautiful. People are good inside.

There's an angel inside. All you have to do is self-actualize yourself. And if you think you're perfect inside, you don't need to do more of automation. And so all sorts of institutions got out of the moral formation business and into the self-actualization business, including the Girl Scouts, including the schools. Then gradually, the schools became just more careerist.

They're not about moral formation, they're about getting you into Harvard, they're about getting you a job. So to me, that whole side of human nature, the whole side of human activity, which to me is the most important side, how can we become slightly better versions of ourselves? We abandoned it and we're left with the consequences.

And we left frankly with the country that can only like Donald Trump because they look at him and they don't see anything wrong. And that's the consequences. The thing I struggle with, I think that makes a lot of sense, right? I think of boy scouts, which doesn't exist anymore. They're scouts for America and the Girl Scouts get their own gender, but Boy Scouts no longer exists. I used to go to church, temple.

My dad was married four times, so he was exposed to a lot of different institutions, and I recognize the importance there. Having said that, I worry that universities, like the one I teach at, offer a lot of courses in sustainability, leadership, ethics. And quite frankly, I find for the most part, they're just student debt and an opportunity

to bring in what I call FIPS, formerly important people, to basically over and over say one thing, do the right thing even when it's hard, such that we can charge kids more and more money. I just, I wonder if, again, Democrats have decided it at, we have decided in higher education that we're no longer centers of excellence, we're social engineers and evangelists of a certain orthodoxy. That again, it's the right idea, but it's gotten out of control at universities.

Any thoughts? Yeah, well, just to stick with universities, in the course of American history, universities have gone through different regimes. The first regime was the piety regime. They were Christian institutions and they were there to instill Christian virtues. Then in the 19th century,

there was the humanistic ideal, which is we're going to still create moral formation, but we're not going to use the Gospels. We're going to use basically the great conversation, the European writers from Aristotle to Shakespeare, France to Bacon and all the way. Then in the middle of the 20th century, the ideal shifted to the research ideal.

We're a bunch of specialists here to advance knowledge. Then it shifted to the career ideal. Our job as universities is to get kids high paying jobs. And then because those last two ideals were so morally vacuous, the social justice ideal filled the moral vacuum and said our job is to be activists and to help people who've been part of marginalized groups. And that of course is a noble activity, but it's not the right activity for the universities, in part because it turned teaching into a form of indoctrination.

It turned students into a form of diplomats from their identity groups. But most of what we're seeing now is that if you fix your university to a political party and say, we're the activist wing of the Democratic Party, well, guess what? The Republicans are going to take it out on you. And that's what's happening. And I'm hoping the universities will realize they're a new ideal, which is to return to the humanistic ideal, which is character formation more than political activism. But then to return to a civic ideal.

Our universities spend, and like a lot of institutions, spend a lot more time helping people prosper in their private lives without thinking carefully what's our role in our civic life and why do we have so many universities that are blue bubbles in red neighborhoods or in red states? Because they're not interacting with the civic life as a whole. They withdraw into the campus walls. And so So to me, universities are great institutions. They are great, great institutions that are really one of the keys to America's greatness.

But they've lost their mission, and I'm hoping under challenge from Trump and the rest of them, that they'll rediscover their mission and find out our job is really to form people and to create citizens and to be civic institutions that bind society across difference and across class difference. And that would be a noble mission and a real recovery for American universities. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from NerdWallet.

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the NBA postseason. Join me, Kenny Beecham, for new episodes of Small Ball throughout the playoffs. Don't miss Small Ball with Kenny Beecham, new episodes dropping through the playoffs, available on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. So we want to introduce you to another show from our network and your next favorite money podcast for ours, of course. Net Worth and Chill hosts Vivian too as a former Wall Street trader turned finance expert and entrepreneur. She shares common financial struggles and gives actionable tips and advice on how to make the most of your money. Past guests include Nicole Yoder, a leading fertility doctor who breaks down the complex world of reproductive medicine and the financial cost of those treatments, and

divorce attorney Jackie Combs, who talks about love and divorce and why everyone should have a prenup. Episodes of Net Worth and Chill are released every Wednesday. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch full episodes on YouTube. By the way, I absolutely love Vivintu. I think she does a great job. We're back with more from David Brooks. You actually introduced me to someone who's had a profound impact on my life because you basically wrote what was sort of an adjacent review of his book. Back in 2022, you wrote a piece for the New York Times called The Crisis of Men and Boys, and it introduced me to Richard Reeves. Richard's become a good friend. And

just the data was so overwhelming to me, and in a weird way, I felt like late in life, I'd found, you know, a sort of a purpose, and I was to talk about this issue. We think about it a lot here. Most of our 80 percent of our listenership is men. What are your thoughts on struggling young men and specifically masculinity? Yeah. Well, I just took a hike with Richard two days ago, so he's a very close friend of mine. I do think one of the beautiful things Richard has accomplished

is to make sure this is not a zero-sum game. He emphasizes this over and over again, that what's good for males is not bad for females. That should be obvious, but Richard struggled to get the book published years ago because a lot of people had this zero-sum thinking in their head. I think the crisis of masculinity is in part a system, as Richard says, where the

schools are not designed for boys. But I think it's primarily that loss of purpose, that loss of sense that how do I express? There's a British philosopher named Shirley Robin Letwin who wrote a book about the vigorous virtues that we want people who are loyal to friends, tough on foes, dynamic, risk-taking, courageous, brave. And these virtues, some of these virtues have been shoved aside in the effort to create a more compassionate society, and that's a beautiful effort.

But people want to be courageous. They want to do things on behalf of some moral ideal that requires courage, force, strength, and frankly self-mastery. And I look at all the podcasters who are now like gigantic buff ripped guys and they look like they swallowed a weight machine. But that's discipline. It's something you can relate to and I'm not a buff guy by any means. But you see why young men want that, because it gives them something that's hard, and it fills the urge to self-improvement.

We went a few decades by saying the things a lot of guys want, not all guys obviously, those things are toxic or those things are bad, or those things are aggressive and destructive. But they're aggressive and destructive only when used to serve evil ends. But to serve noble ends, the idea of self-improvement, the idea of being aggressive, the idea of being strong is something we should celebrate and give people avenues toward. And just, you know, I hope I'm not violating any privacy, but Richard has a tradition

of taking a camping trip on New Year's Eve. And it can get cold in that 10, 9 degrees. And that's what, that's the kind of love of adventure that not only boys want, girls want that too. And we've we've reduced the ways young people can experience adventure, in part because of all the helicopter parenting. You talk about things around community and comity of man and care for your neighbors. I don't hear you talk about your own family a lot. And to the extent you're comfortable, I'd just be very interested to know, we have a lot of young men who listen,

a lot of new dads, a lot of new husbands. Curious, you know, we're, look, we're on the back nine, right? And hopefully we've learned some stuff that we can impart on other people or share our mistakes so other people don't make the same ones. What advice would you have for new dads and what have you learned about being a dad? Yeah, well, I was like a lot of guys. I had trouble expressing my emotions. I think I felt emotions, but there was no highway between my heart and my mouth, so I didn't know how to talk about them.

I had a natural fear of them, I guess. There's a moment that represents the way I used to be to myself. I love baseball, I go to a lot of baseball games. I've never caught a foul ball. And I'm in Baltimore with my youngest son and the batter loses control of the bat, and it flies into the stands and lands in my lap. And a normal human being, like getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball.

A normal human being is waving his trophy in the air, my bat and I'm high-fiving everybody and getting on the jumbotron, I'm hugging people. I took the bat and just put it on the ground and just sat there. I look back on that guy and I see, show a little moral joy, show a little joy, like that's a great event. You should be celebrating in public.

But I was so inhibited that I didn't know how to be emotionally open in public. And I went through a hard time after that. I went through divorce. My kids left for school, and I was living in a little apartment. I was lonely and fiercely lonely. And there's a saying that when you're in those hard times in your life, you can be either be broken or broken open. And if you're broken, you turn hard, you turn into a lobster shell and nothing can touch

you. But if you're broken open, you get even more vulnerable and you stay in the pain to learn what it has to teach you. And what my pain had to teach me was that I was misleading my life by not living from the depths of myself, but living from the shallows. It was very easy for me to use glibness and reason to do fine in life without confronting the spiritual and in some way relational shortages and vacuums I'd created. And so I did it the way I do it. I read books about spirituality and I came to faith in this time. But mostly I just became a lot more able to express my emotions,

express vulnerability and that can be an easy drug to express vulnerability too easy. But I think I'm different and my friends tell me that I'm different. One of my wife, we've been married eight years. She looks at earlier versions of me on video. She says, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. So I guess the lesson is

to become familiar with your emotional and spiritual life, and it will bring you greater pains and greater joys. But you have to do that either through spiritual practices. For me, it's in the case of spiritual reading, that's how I process. But it's also through the process of deeper conversations. I'll tell you one quick story. When I was in between marriages, I was dating,

and I was talking to my daughter on the phone, and I asked her what she was doing that weekend. And she said, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my boyfriend's parents for the first time. And I said to her, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my boyfriend's parents for the first time. And I said to her, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm going to meet my girlfriend's parents for the first time. And in that moment, our relationship went from being adult to child to adult to adult. And we could talk about things that we, that as a parent sometimes you don't want to talk, open up too much to your kids.

But when it's adult to adult, you can open up a little more, not totally, but open up a little more. That was a beautiful shift in our relationship, that to be able to just be adults together working through crap. I found that's a beautiful moment. The overall lesson I would say is no matter what your age, it's never too late to change. People change, not just in adolescence, they change through adulthood.

The transformation I needed in my life was an emotional one. Thoughts on being a good partner, good husband? Yeah. There's a guy named Tim Keller who wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. And he said, you get married and you married this wonderful person. And about six months in, you realize that she's actually kind of selfish in some ways. And as you're making this discovery about her,

she's making it about you. And marriage work, when you realize, well, my kind of selfishness is the only selfishness I can work on. And he says, if you have two partners in a marriage who are working on their selfishness, then you're probably gonna have good marriage and not blaming the other.

The other thing I'd say is who you marry is just tremendously important. And Nietzsche, who you don't think of as a particular romantic guy, said marriage is a 50-year conversation. Pick the person you can talk with for the rest of your life. And so if you find somebody who you can talk on the phone with for four hours,

that's a pretty good indicator. The second thing I'd add is that love comes and goes but admiration stays. So stay with someone you admire, pick someone you admire, and they will not let you down. And then the final bit of advice I give to college students in picking a marriage partner,

which is to me one of the most important decisions in life, is there are three kinds of love according to the Greeks. There's eros, which is passion. There's friendship. And then there's agape love, which is selfless love. And if you're going to marry someone, you should have all three kinds of love. If you just have eros, you have a hookup, but you don't have a relationship.

If you just have philly, a friendship, you have a friendship, but you don't have romantic love. You should have all three. So the bar should be pretty high. So that's some of the advice I give on making a marriage decision. I'm not sure anybody listens, but that's my advice. So you've been very generous with your time. I'm going to do just a quick lightning round because you're a busy dude.

So real quick, best piece of advice you've ever received? I guess know something about something. When you get out of school, find some field of expertise that you can really study, and then you bring that to the table. A second bit of advice I would give to young people is build identity capital. Meg Jay wrote a book called The Defining Decade about being in your 20s. And she had a patient who wanted to work at Starbucks

but had a job offer at Outward Bound. And she said, go to Outward Bound, because at every job interview, at every dinner party, people want to know what it was like to work on Outward Bound. That will give you identity capital. And so I find that's pretty good advice. Last piece of media that really moved you. Well, I'm now listening on audiobook to Andre Agassi's memoir,

which is one of the best modern memoirs I've ever read. He's a guy who hated tennis. His dad was an absolute monster who forced him to do tennis, and Agassi hated tennis all the way through. To me, I found it tremendously moving, a guy who's really good at an activity that he absolutely hates. The way he struggles with this hatred and this really imprisonment, I find his courage and audacity really moving.

He's just a beautiful writer for a guy who dropped out of high school in ninth grade. He didn't have the benefits of an education, but he's obviously a brilliant guy. And it's just a tremendously moving look at mastery and finding the things that you really want to do. And I just can't recommend that book enough. If you could go back in time and visit someone who's gone, who would it be and what would you say to them? Well, I have a lot of questions for Jesus.

That's a pretty big ask. Yeah. All right, we'll stop. And then you talked about finding a purpose. Last question. What is David Brooks' purpose? Well, my purpose now is to, you know, there's a concept I figured who came up with it called the lake. We all pour into the lake.

The lake is our conversations. And we all are little tributaries pouring into the lake and we learn, we listen to your podcasts and we learn and we improve our lives just because we're all learning from each other. And so part of my job is just to pour into the lake like everybody's job. But I think my two core missions, if I have to ask, first is to try to defend a political ideology, a belief system, this conservatism of Alexander Hamilton.

I try to embody that. Second, I try to embody just a civil way of being in the world. And third, I think American society, as you can tell from my conversation in the last 45 minutes, is over politicized and under moralized. I think we think too much about politics and too little about our moral and relational

growth. And so I try to write books that are sort of about that, giving people tips and pointers of how to be better friends, how to be better listeners, how to be better conversationalists. And I think it's in those minute interactions of life that really the health of society is determined. David Brooks is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and a writer for the Atlantic. He is the best-selling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobo's in Paradise, and on Paradise Drive, he joins us from Washington, D.C.

David, I've admired you for so long from afar. I feel as if I know you and I realize we've never met in person. And you bring this peanut butter and chocolate combination of your commentary is puncturing, unafraid, analytical, very strong, but you always feel like at the end of the day, you're a gentle soul.

I think you're a wonderful role model for young men and really appreciate your contribution not only to your domain, but just to larger society. It was a real pleasure to meet you and appreciate your time. Thank you. I've always I've been a fan of yours and a huge honor to be on this on this podcast. So I really appreciate the invitation. I was a root of happiness. When I was younger, I took pride. I've been exposed to a lot of religion. My father was married and divorced four times. I went to temple, church, Presbyterian, then Methodist.

And at a very young age, I decided that I was a, quote unquote, pseudo-intellect slash scientist, and basically mocked religion and religious people, and felt that it was just sort of I was very judgmental, and got a lot of sort of intellectual reward from thinking that, okay, religion is stupid and I don't have an invisible friend. It was very judgmental and disparaging, not only religion, but people who were religious. And as I've gotten older, I've discovered

that while the extremist part of any religion I find dangerous to society and a very negative force, that that represents an extreme niche and minority of religion and religious people. And that religion, for the most part, gives a great number of people a great deal of comfort. And while I'm a raging atheist, I find myself thinking that part of the solution to what ails us in terms of loneliness and a lack of comity of man and empathy is religious institutions. To go to church or go to temple or to mosque and to be in the company and presence of other people in the agency of something bigger than yourselves. And that the majority of these institutions promote empathy and kindness and community. I have someone in my life who's worked with me for, I guess, the better part of 10 or 15 years, and she showed up with a new kid, and I thought, I didn't even know she was pregnant. And someone

told me, no, she adopted her sister's kid, her sister's struggles with drug addiction. And then she showed up with a second kid, and the same thing happened. Her sister had another kid. addiction. And then she showed up with a second kid and same thing happened. Her sister had another kid. And our firm went through an acquisition and I suggested that she move to the corporate headquarters where they hosted the people who did or the professionals who were in her department. And she said, I don't want to move. And I said, it'd be crazy not to move. You have two kids, you're a single mother, you need economic security. And she said, yeah, but I don't wanna give up my church. And she gets a great deal of comfort

and community from her church. And I think there's a lot of people that get a great deal of comfort and community. And I've tried to become less judgmental and quite frankly, just less of an asshole and recognize that whatever gives people a sense of grace, makes them feel closer, gives them contemplative moments, gives them mindfulness is a good thing. And

I know so many people that find so much comfort in this notion I fell into that intellect was inversely correlated to how strongly you felt or how spiritual you were. I have found that is not the case. I have a lot of, I know a lot of people in my life who are exceptionally bright and are exceptionally spiritual. I am not a fan of the Catholic Church. I think in some, the Catholic Church for, you know, a couple decades figured out a way to institutionalize pedophilia and that no organization would have survived that type of crime against or crimes against humanity had it not had the sort of religious cult-like following of the Catholic Church. Now having said that, I think there are a lot of good people in the Church,

and one of them passed away, and that is Pope Francis. I think he was an exceptional man, and there is a statement circulating, and people aren't sure if he said it or if it's just being attributed to him, but I read it and it really moved me, and it's the following. And reportedly, he wrote this while he was in the hospital. The walls of hospitals have heard

more honest prayers than churches. They have witnessed far more sincere kisses than those in airports. It is in hospitals that you see a homophobe being saved by a gay doctor, a privileged doctor saving the life of a beggar. In intensive care, you see a Jew taking care of a racist, a police officer and a prisoner in the same room receiving the same care, a wealthy patient waiting for a liver transplant ready to receive the organ from a poor donor.

It is in these moments when the hospital touches the wounds of people, the different worlds intersect according to divine design. And in this communion of destinies, we realize that alone we are nothing. The absolute truth of people most most of the time, only reveals itself in moments of pain or in the real threat of an irreversible loss. A hospital is a place where human beings remove their masks and show themselves as they truly are, in their

purest essence. This life will pass quickly, so do not waste it fighting with people. Do not criticize your body too much. Do not complain excessively. Do not lose sleep over bills. Make sure to hug your loved ones. Do not worry too much about keeping the house spotless. Material goods must be earned by each person. Do not dedicate yourself to accumulating an inheritance. You are waiting

far too much. Christmas, Friday, next year, when you have money, when love arrives, when everything is perfect. Listen, perfection does not exist. A human being cannot attain it because we are simply not made to be fulfilled here. Here we are given an opportunity to learn. So make the most of this trial of life and do it now. Respect yourself. Respect others. Walk your own path and let go of the path others have chosen for you. Respect. Do not comment. Do not judge. Do not interfere, love more, forgive more, embrace more, live more intensely, and leave the rest in the hands of the Creator. I just think that is so lovely and so meaningful and so instructive and actionable. In some, Pope Francis was a wonderful man that had a

really positive impact on a lot of people. And as I have gotten older, I've come to appreciate and respect any institution or any person who is providing comfort for people, distinct of my own biases and my own need to feel smarter than other people. In some, I am trying to figure out a way not to judge. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez. Our intern is Dan Shalon. Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the PropG pod from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

We will catch you on Saturday for No Mercy, No Malice, as read by George Hahn. And please follow our PropG Markets pod wherever you get your pods for new episodes every Monday and Thursday.