Why Everyone's Social Skills Are Getting Worse (ft. David Brooks)

People are becoming increasingly lonely and are unable to relate to one another. Yet we have more access to more people than ever before. What's going on? Is it technology? Is social media replacing our sense of community with the 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 and complete loss of work/life balance? These are questions that I, and renowned journalist and author David Brooks, unpack together as we nose dive into the social and emotional disconnect of millions of people. Need lessons on how to talk to the barista making your coffee? Looking to build a better relationship with Gary from across the fence? This episode won’t make you a master of communication overnight, but it’s a fascinating conversation packed with useful insight from beginning to end. Listen to it. David Brooks on Twitter @nytdavidbrooks: https://twitter.com/nytdavidbrooksDavid Brooks’ column: https://www.nytimes.com/column/david-brooksDavid's new book “How to Know a Person:” https://www.amazon.com/How-Know-Person-Seeing-Others/dp/059323006X CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction 00:02:46 Why we’re in a social crisis 00:05:55 The harsh judgment of social media 00:08:06 The growth of distrust 00:10:57 The decline of the traditional family 00:15:14 On communitarian cultures 00:16:24 Making America more “relationalist” 00:18:19 The Scandinavian and Israeli success 00:20:33 Is this success replicable in a diverse society? 00:23:32 The vice of today’s generation 00:29:19 David’s take on politics 00:32:11 Mark on the evolution of self-help 00:33:57 The recession of religion 00:38:33 Friction is the point 00:39:46 The “second mountain” 00:46:42 What we’re really motivated by 00:49:55 Can we go straight to the “second mountain”? ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://markmanson.net/breakthrough⁩⁠⁠⁠ ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at ⁠⁠⁠⁨https://bit.ly/4w46FMH⁠⁠⁠ FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠ YouTube: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@IAmMarkManson

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  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 three. Over 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 zero. 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?

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  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 bestselling 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.

• 1:28Mark Manson?

  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 are potentially destroying dating, why people aren't getting married or having kids anymore, how conflict entrepreneurs have ruined politics

• 2:10Mark Manson?

  and media, why everyone in life pursues two 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.

• 2:46Mark Manson?

  So David, you said recently, we are amidst a social, emotional and relational crisis. I'm curious, what makes you believe that?

• 2:56Speaker 01

  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 life are 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.

• 3:38Mark Manson?

  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 modern systems of society are presenting barriers to empathizing?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  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 judgment 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 judgment 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.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  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 and offer 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 tried 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.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  And, you know, that you'd produce a lot 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 the, were considerate 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.

• 5:55Mark Manson?

  You mentioned the constant judgment of social media. And I think with it, that there comes a constant potentiality for that judgment, 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.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  Or just the very fact that 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.

• 6:36Mark Manson?

  That too.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I never saw images from all the parties I didn't get invited to. And now 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, 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 neighbors. And now it's down to 30% and 19% are millennial and Gen Z. So I asked one of my students, why is there such low trust in your generation? And she said to me, have you seen our social lives? It's just, it's kind of harsh and judgmental and not only harsh and judgmental, but occasionally cruel.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  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, unfortunately, I've got an established identity. I know I'm mostly an 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.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  But if I was 16 and I had to endure that kind of stuff, that would be horrible.

• 8:06Mark Manson?

  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 distrust.

• 8:38Speaker 01

  Vaccines, for example?

• 8:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah, everything. I think other than the military, there's not really anything. In our culture, American culture, that's not called into extreme question and scrutiny these days.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think, well, yeah, there are two forms of distrust. The one is institutional distrust. Do we trust our institutions? And their trust in 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 institutional distrust. But the second, 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 vulnerable before them, I'm going to assume they're going to protect me, they're going to hold me.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  And I found that's the right thing to do, because you will be betrayed, and there will be people who 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 Heminger, 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

• 10:18Speaker 01

  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 kid's 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 break through that wall of distrust, but you've just got to keep showing up for others.

• 10:57Mark Manson?

  This gets into, I think, an under-discussed component.

• 11:02Mark Manson?

  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 marriages happening in the first place. It kind of creates this atomization of, like, an unintentional atomization of the individual within the society, right?

• 11:47Mark Manson?

  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 it 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.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, and of course, we should say that we all know people who grew up in single-family homes, who the mom or the dad did a great job and 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 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 have 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, you know, women shouldn't be chained down to a family, they should have, be able to have an independent life.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  But, you know, 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 last two months, just reporting on some social science research, suggesting that if you look at what leads to happiness in life, career success is important, but having a successful marriage is four 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, how to be a good marriage partner? But we don't teach any of that stuff. We prepare you for career. And so I wrote that, just reporting the social science research. And I had a lot of people come up to me really angry because they wanted to teach their

• 13:36Speaker 01

  their sons and daughters that they should, A, they should worry about career success, and they shouldn't worry so much about marriage. That should be a secondary, a third concern. And I just think the social science evidence is pretty clear on this, that family life is just super important. And I have one theory, which I have no evidence for. But when I talk about the social crisis, 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. There were people all around you.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And one of the things I've puzzled over is, I think social media's 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 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, a doctor, whatever. And she said, it's really not solely up to me. It was my whole community who sent me here.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 15:14Mark Manson?

  So I lived in South America for about five years and my wife is Brazilian and looking at the cultures down there, it's very similar. It's extremely, as you put it, 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 economics 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 WASP-y, you know, don't share your feelings family, which I believe you did as well.

• 15:54Speaker 01

  Except for the WASP-y part, yeah.

• 15:55Mark Manson?

  It was completely foreign. I was like, wow, 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 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, you know, I've heard of people like this. I have family members of friends who are like this. And I know you have described yourself as a relationalist. Is there a way to imbue those sorts of values back into our culture? And if so, what does that take?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, a lot of my work has been trying to do that. And this book is about trying to do that exactly, how to be better at relationship. When Americans got the chance, starting after World War II, to move out and live on their own, they grabbed it. When 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.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  So when home builders ask consumers, would you like us to make you a home which has a suite for your grandparent, for the kid's grandparents? Now forty percent of homebuyers say, yeah, I want grandparents to eat in there. Because if I'm gonna raise my kids, I want grandparents around. And so there's been, we now have, there's been a rebound in 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

• 18:00Speaker 01

  table in the front yard, and like every Thursday night, she has a dinner with the picnic table, and any neighbor can show up. And that's people's self-consciousness saying, I'm not gonna live an isolated life, and I'm not gonna 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 for a good start.

• 18:20Mark Manson?

  Is there a country or a 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?

• 18:29Speaker 01

  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 assume, we're all family here. And so like years ago, I had a friend who, who called directory assistance, back in

• 19:13Speaker 01

  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 wanna 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 had 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.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  She goes, checks out the pool to make sure he's not at the bottom of the pool. Then she's running around the neighborhood screaming out his name. And she sees some lights come on, but nobody comes out of their houses. And finally, she goes back home and found 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 p.m. at night?" She was like, "In Israel, if I was screaming my kid's name, everybody would be out of their house in their pajamas searching for my kid." And so that's a culture that is more like we take care of each other versus a culture where it's like, we're suspicious, we're staying in our, in our home.

• 20:34Mark Manson?

  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 homogenous 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?

• 21:04Speaker 01

  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 gonna 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 imagine every difference under the sun. Can I get to know that person? And there are some people that say, no, you can't.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  That 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'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 them 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.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I'm not shy about asking people about what they're really proud of. And so, you know, there, there are 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, 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've found in the course of my life, when I've asked people to tell me a bit about their themselves,

• 23:10Speaker 01

  the number of people who say, none of your damn business is zero. People love to tell their story. 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.

• 23:24Mark Manson?

  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 quote from you from, I think, 2007, where you said you are 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 I believe you wrote, came out in 2011. The reason you wrote this at the time was that statistics were just beginning to show

• 24:05Mark Manson?

  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 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,

• 24:49Mark Manson?

  they're getting in less trouble, doing fewer drugs, having less sex. And when I was growing up in the 90s, you know, this was what my parents and the older generation was always screaming about was, you know, there's too much sex, drugs and rock and roll going on. Well, now there's no sex, drugs and rock and 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 there's just, young people are always just an easy target. But it's interesting to see that they've kind of traded the vices of my generation and then replaced it with almost

• 25:32Mark Manson?

  like these moral crusades that mostly happen online and are very, very disruptive and I would argue are very counterproductive most of the time, not all the time. So I'm curious, if you, first of all, if you have a take on this, or a guess of why this has happened? And then, 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. Does this happen to be Gen Z's thing? Yeah, they've succeeded.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's funny. I'd forgotten about all that earlier work, but of course, back in those days, we thought, what's the chief problem facing us? It was 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 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 on their kids, who then went to the same universities, same married each other, moved to the same few high-tech cities.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  And you basically built up in a society after society, this caste of highly educated, powerful elites, who controlled the media, who controlled government, who controlled corporations. And a lot of the people in 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.

• 27:32Speaker 01

  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 cellphone 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, it doesn't run between groups. As Solzhenitsyn said, it runs down every human heart. And it doesn't

• 28:15Speaker 01

  really give you moral action. You don't have to sit with a poor, or help a widow. You just got to 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. Our comedy is now political, our movies are political, our sports are political.

• 28:32Mark Manson?

  Science is political.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  Science is political, and so it's just, they end up making people even less happy. And the therapists have a phrase, "The hardest thing to cure is the patient's attempt to self-cure." It's a 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 think especially for the younger generation, you know, 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 careerists than previous versions that I taught, but they're also

• 29:14Speaker 01

  sadder and lonelier, and they try to cure it through politics, which is not a good cure.

• 29:19Mark Manson?

  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. What is your sense of the political party's relationship with this toxic culture of identity politics?

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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 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 agreed with them. I thought they were there introducing more energy into society.

• 30:24Speaker 01

  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 need a 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 to different problems. In Washington, I think, and I think that'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.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  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 entrepreneurs are really thriving by driving wedges between us every which way.

• 31:43Mark Manson?

  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.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  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, The Times categorizes your books and they put mine, usually I'm in nonfiction, now I'm in advice and 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 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, you should help people out with your book.

• 32:39Mark Manson?

  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. The industry has changed a lot since I got into it in the late aughts and early 2010s. You know, when I came into it, I, the industry was predominantly...

• 33:02Mark Manson?

  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, here are like three 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.

• 33:48Mark Manson?

  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 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 longtime 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

• 34:30Mark Manson?

  and 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, but are still very, very hungry for these kind of practical life lessons and how to's. 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,

• 34:58Mark Manson?

  Is you lose the community that comes with those, the religious organizations. And so I'm curious what, first of all, what you think about the recession of religion and modern culture, the effects of that. And then also, what is the solution? What is the, how do we compensate for that? I think it's unreasonable to ask hundreds of millions of people to go back to church. So what do we do instead?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  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, 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. You're busy every day because you've got to find all the food to serve them. And then there are certain prayers and then there are certain practices. Like when you're sitting shiva with someone, you can talk about the death, the dead person or not, but just let them sit there amongst you, just have your company.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And so there's a lot of wisdom in all these traditions in that when you lose a 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.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  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 without community. And so it's it's nice to have friendships, but having the structures of people who are not going to leave no matter what, whom 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 these yawning needs. You know, my my last book was called The Second Mountain, and it was more about being sort of middle aged and going through hard times

• 37:34Speaker 01

  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 a CEO 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 60, 40, female, male. And most of my books are about that. But on The Second Mountain, I'd look down the signature lines when you're signing books, and it would be eight guys, then a woman, then nine guys, then a woman. And I think, and especially be 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

• 38:18Speaker 01

  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 journalist, and all these successful guys felt, okay, I can talk to this guy.

• 38:27Mark Manson?

  It's an interesting point about The 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 guests that I've talked to on this podcast, is Especially when it relates 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.

• 39:05Mark Manson?

  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 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 second mountain, I found the second mountain incredibly impactful.

• 39:50Mark Manson?

  You set up this analogy of there are two mountains in life. The first is kind of the, well, I'll let you, it's your book. I'll let you describe it.

• 40:00Mark Manson?

  And then we'll talk about it.

• 40:01Speaker 01

  I was curious where you're going to go because.

• 40:04Mark Manson?

  Like, why, why am I telling David about his own, his own book?

• 40:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the basic idea is when 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 or we're 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.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  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 he says, "They carved through what we thought was the floor of the basement of our soul, and they reveal a cavity in ourselves, and they carved 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 gonna 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 mountain out there for me." And it might be starting a new company, it might be starting a new family, but it might also be,

• 41:36Speaker 01

  you know, going off to Tibet and becoming a monk. It's less about accumulation, 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 two-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 mountain, but I've made a few strides.

• 42:15Mark Manson?

  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 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 six months. And there was kind of this euphoria immediately, like a celebration for a few months. And then this very strange, unexpected,

• 42:56Mark Manson?

  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, nobody wants to hear, like, "Your book is literally number one everywhere."

• 43:16Mark Manson?

  And you're just getting, you know, money dumped on your head and nobody wants to hear you say, well, I peaked at 32. I don't know what else to do with my life. And it was funny because the first person I came across who understood, I was friends with a guy in New York who was a co-founder of a unicorn startup and he had cashed out for a very large nine-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 asked me how I was doing with the book and everything. I was like, oh, it's great. You know, he's like, what have you been working on? I'm like, well, you know,

• 43:58Mark Manson?

  I don't really know what I'm going to do next. And he kind of kept digging and digging. And then I just came out and told him, I was like, honestly, man, I'm not doing so hot. 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. 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 year later. Some of the best book experiences are nonfiction 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 Second Mountain really did that for me in the sense that it was like, oh, yeah, I accomplished all my material

• 44:39Mark Manson?

  goals. Or as you describe and wrote the character, I've notched all of the resume virtues, but there's the second 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 spoken very publicly about this experience. I've been on a lot of podcasts and been interviewed many times. 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.

• 45:22Mark Manson?

  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 the liberty to talk about it. And second of all, never felt understood, like people

• 46:04Mark Manson?

  understand where they are with it. I think the reason it's like nine out of 10 men, uh, well, one, it's, you know, nine 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 first mountain stuff. Men tend to base a lot of their self-worth on 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.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  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 us. One 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, of what the Greeks would call a telos crisis. What's my telos? What's my, my role here? And to have it 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, um, we underestimate, and that's really what my new book is about, is recognition. A baby comes out of the womb

• 47:26Speaker 01

  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 me in the airport back in 2013, when I was going through my hard time, especially, people would come up to me in the airport and they'd say, oh,

• 48:08Speaker 01

  David, I love you. And it used to make me 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

• 48:50Speaker 01

  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. But the recognition and the purpose and meaning, those motivations are there and still need to be met. And if you're seeing, have a life that is not oriented towards something, you're, you're going to be kind of miserable.

• 49:10Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I had Morgan Housel, 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

• 49:39Mark Manson?

  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 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, uh, to understand?

• 50:08Speaker 01

  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.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  And so she's just a spiritual, uh, naturally incandescent person. And so I joke that she attended her second, had her second round first, and now she's going on the first mountain, building a career. And so I do think something, you know, every formula doesn't fit everybody. So there's no, gonna 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 in Hawaii. Uh, that's never the answer. It's always like, I had some, 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.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  And I once told this to a college student and she said to me, um, you know, well, I haven't really had that much suffering in my life. Where should I go to find suffering? And I was like,

• 51:17Mark Manson?

  It will find you, don't worry.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  That is exactly what I told her.

• 51:24Mark Manson?

  David, thank you so much.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been a great pleasure. I've been a big admirer of your work and, um, 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.