David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche (Live at 92NY)

David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls "the rightward edge of the leftward tendency," Brooks argues that America's core problems aren't economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our "secure base" of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security. Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most productive generation, smartphones and sex, the persuasiveness of AI vs novels, the loss of audacity, what made William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman great mentors, why academics should embrace the epistemology of the interview, the evolving status of neoconservatism, what Trump gets right, whether only war or mass movements can revive the American psyche, what will end the fertility crisis, the subject of his book, listener questions, and much more. Read a full transcript https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/ enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video https://youtu.be/I8Z50JuysNg on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel. Recorded July 22nd, 2025. This episode was made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation. Help keep the show ad free by donating https://mercatus.donorsupport.co/page/podcastgift?utm_source=cwt+podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=shownotes today! Other ways to connect Follow us on X https://twitter.com/cowenconvos and Instagram https://www.instagram.com/cowenconvos/?hl=en Follow Tyler https://twitter.com/tylercowen on X Follow David https://x.com/nytdavidbrooks on X Sign up for our newsletter https://mercatus.tfaforms.net/5060931 Join our Discord https://discord.gg/JAVWP7vTxt Email us: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] Learn more about Conversations with Tyler and other Mercatus Center podcasts here https://www.mercatus.org/podcasts. Photo Credit: Vladimir Kolesnikov/Michael Priest Photography

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

• 0:04Tyler Cowen?

  Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com.

• 0:27Tyler Cowen?

  Hello, David. Thank you for doing this. Thank you all for coming. I'd like to get your sense of where the world is today, conceptually speaking. So let's start with young people today. So there's plenty of evidence that younger people today, maybe they have shorter attention spans, feel alienated, higher rates of depression. At the same time, it's almost impossible to get into a top school. You can be valedictorian from your school in Maryland, straight A's, perfect SAT scores, and maybe it's hard to even get into a good state school. How can both of these things be true at the same time? Like, what's the model going on here?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  So first, one of the things I've learned about young people is they love it when people of our generation generalize about them. They just think that's fantastic. So I guess I would say a couple of things. First, the bad news, and then the good news. The bad news is, young people are tremendously sad. The number of high school students who say they are persistently hopeless and despondent is 45%. The number of young people who say they have no friends is up by fourfold since 2000. The number of people who say they are lonely is 36%. And so I've been teaching in colleges off and on for 25 years. And the good and the bad is that young people are very open about their mental health, which is good, but the bad is really in every room. And so for some reason, I don't understand, America, but especially young Americans, have gotten sadder.

• 1:45Tyler Cowen?

  But they're more productive, right?

• 1:46Speaker 01

  They are more productive than we ever were. But there's a young man in the audience named David Wignall, who I met at Williams College a couple years ago, or a couple months ago, and who made an interesting observation to me over dinner, which he said, "We're the most rejected generation." And so if you're applying to Harvard, 96% of you are going to be rejected. Harvard is a rejection factory. And so you have to apply to 20 schools to get into one. And then you want to get into a summer internship. And sometimes I've met some young students from Georgetown who have applied to 250 internships to get into one Goldman Sachs internships. I forget the exact numbers, but 350,000 people apply and 3,000 get the summer internship. So these are massive rejection rates. And then I'm not even talking about the people who are not swiping right to you.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  I'm not even talking about the people who don't like your Instagram posts. Part of the problem is the opportunity structure is so slim that everybody's applying to the same few schools and the same few internships. And so the rejections are massive. And then the young people who get out of college and not only at elite schools, who are applying for their first job are in indeed hell. They're sending out hundreds of resumes and nobody is ever coming back. So I think at the top and at the bottom of the demographic curve, you've got a lot of misery. The good news is go to the middle. Go to Penn State, go to Southern Methodist, where you don't have quite the competitive to get into these places, but they're still great schools, they're plenty smart, and they're happy. And so what I notice is if you go to Arizona State, you go to a lot of the sort of the middle ring schools, good schools, but not super exclusive, the mood is just happier

• 3:14Speaker 01

  than at the top or the bottom of the demographic.

• 3:16Tyler Cowen?

  But that's 80% of the distribution, right? So you're pretty blown off on the whole thing?

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Half of young people go to college.

• 3:21Tyler Cowen?

  But of the college going?

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Of the college, yes.

• 3:23Tyler Cowen?

  80%.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  So what is it, 4% go to super elite schools? So I think the untold story is the Southern Methodist students. This is great. I go to a great school, I have great friends, and I'm going to get a job.

• 3:34Tyler Cowen?

  You write for Atlantic. Atlantic told us recently, younger people are having less sex. Is it that they're being rejected? Why can't they solve that coordination problem?

• 3:46Tyler Cowen?

  There's gains from trade. It seems a lot more fun than a smartphone. What's your model here?

• 3:52Speaker 01

  You are such a boomer.

• 3:55Tyler Cowen?

  Do you think the smartphone is more fun?

• 3:56Speaker 01

  Hell, yeah. You didn't go to the college where I went. No, I do think, well, this is Gene Twenge's work, that there's been an age compression. And so things people were doing in ninth grade, they're now doing in 12th grade. And this is all sorts of risky behavior, whether it includes sex, whether it includes fighting, whether it includes driving. And so a lot of people are delaying. And I do think that's primarily the phone, that it's hard to ask somebody out. Believe me, if you looked like me in high school, it was a challenge. And so it's super anxiety inducing to ask somebody out.

• 4:27Tyler Cowen?

  But I asked in high school. I was rejected every time, but it wasn't a challenge to ask, right?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  But now you have a phone, you don't have to ask. And one of my students said to me, you know, I've had four boyfriends in my life, and all of them ghosted me at the end, that none of the young men had been taught, you need to have a breakup conversation, and you need to have the skill to break up with somebody without crushing their heart. And so this young woman told me, of course, I'm distrustful, and of course, I'm hesitant to be in a relationship, because I've been burned every time. And so I think there's just a lot more anxiety about that. And second, there's a values problem, and here I will criticize the younger generation. The thing I learned most from in high school and college was my romantic relationships. They were more meaningful to me than my classes and even the breakup. I would sit around smoking French cigarettes and moping about getting dumped.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  But, you know, I said to young people, one of the most important decisions of your life is who you're going to marry. So get really good at making that marriage decision. You need practice. You need to have relationships. And a marriage is like a 50-year conversation ideally. Find someone you can talk to for the rest of your life. A marriage is, love comes and goes, but admiration stays. So find someone you admire. And so many of my students were like, I don't have time for relationships. I'm busy with this student activity, that student activity, this class, that class. And I would say, you're doing this wrong. Put relationships first and get practice being romantic. So I'm a little cupid on Ivy League campus.

• 5:53Tyler Cowen?

  Why don't married couples have more sex? I mean, they're there together. It seems better than anything else they could do. Is it the same reason younger people are not having more sex? Like if a married couple, after a while, is doing it twice a week, that's thought of as, but you know, there's seven nights in a week.

• 6:12Tyler Cowen?

  There's some shortfall. Is it like a price control?

• 6:15Speaker 01

  I love it that I'm your sex guru.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  I suppose they're not doing, well, this is such speculation. I assume they're doing it, not doing, because they're the same reason everybody else is doing it. They're exhausted, they're tired, and gee, I really can't say anything. My wife's voice is in my head like, David, why do you speculate about that?

• 6:35Tyler Cowen?

  Should I think of smartphones as a kind of kryptonite? That literally they cripple our faculties? And if that's the case, why should I believe in freedom of speech? Freedom of religion, rule of law, democratic constitutional government? As you and I both believe in, if there's this one kryptonite that can so take us down, does that make you doubt those other broader commitments? Or do you think it's, see, in my view, it's not a kryptonite, but what's your take?

• 7:03Speaker 01

  I think it's a semi kryptonite. I mean, if you want to get people addicted, give them irregularly timed rewards. And so they do this with mice, where they give you irregularly timed rewards, and the mice absolutely go crazy.

• 7:12Tyler Cowen?

  But we're not mice, like, we don't favor liberalism for the mice. We favor them for the humans.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  But when I look at my phone, I think the next text is going to be interesting. So I always am addicted to that next text, to that next email. And so my attention span is shot, just like everybody else's. Nonetheless, listen, I've been totally persuaded by Jonathan Haidt that these really are bad. And when I've been to 100 high schools in the last couple of years, and where they banned the phones, the students are happy, the teachers are happy, everybody's happy. But I don't want to take human agency out of this. I think I use my iPhone, as I use AI, to help me think better. I try not to use it to think for me. And so it's a tool like any tool, and I think there's ways to use it so it enhances your cognitive abilities and not distracts from it. When I look at my iPhone usage, a weekly report, I'm on Kindle a bunch of the time. And so that's just reading.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  And then I'm reading The Marginal Revolution, which is crack for, um, but, uh, but, so, no, I don't, I don't think it's had a terrible effect on my brain, but I'm in my 60s, so.

• 8:13Tyler Cowen?

  Is it the only kryptonite humans face?

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I think AI is also kryptonite in the exact same way. That if you're a college kid and you're not doing any of your papers, you're just using your GPT to write your papers. That's kryptonite.

• 8:25Tyler Cowen?

  But does it ruin you any more than old style cheating, which was very common? It was bad for people, but it didn't ruin generations, right?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, though that cheating took a lot of creativity. And this cheating is total. It's a totalistic cheating. The model is literally doing most of your work. I follow you on AI. I'm like 15 yards behind you the whole time. So I think it's generally great. But I think this one thing of robbing people of their own education is truly a serious threat.

• 8:49Tyler Cowen?

  I've heard people in the AI sector from the major companies say they're very worried that AI can be so persuasive. Do you find it so persuasive? Because I don't. It will teach me lots of facts and I will defer to it. But it's never persuaded me much with arguments, whereas humans have. What's your view? Is it kryptonite in that way?

• 9:07Speaker 01

  It depends what you're writing about. So I was with an astrophysicist recently who worked on a problem with eight of his senior colleagues for months. And they put it to AI and with a little extra prompting, it solved their problems in a couple of hours. And I gather from economist friends that it can solve problems that only a few elite economists can solve. I write about culture, psychology, sociology, politics. It's pathetic. I can not use AI and I use it every day. I make the attempts. And because in my, the things I care about, which are more humanistic, it's hoovering up all the crap on the internet about what love is or do you grow from post-traumatic experiments? And it's just the pablum that's out there on random websites.

• 9:50Tyler Cowen?

  But what if you ask it? What would David Brooks say? Surely that arises to the occasion.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  Then it's brilliant in that case. It's a frickin' war on peace. No, what I do is I assign it voices. What does Jean Piaget say about, does he disagree with Eric Erickson about this? And if you assign it to a voice, then you can scream out a lot. But I still have found it basically useless for my own research and my own. It's great as a travel agent. It's great at a lot of things. But in humanistic inquiry, I find it pretty pathetic. And you know, my view of intelligence is that I do a lot of interviewing, as you do with AI folks. And I was at OpenAI several months ago. And somebody said, we're going to create a machine that can think like a human brain. And so I call my neuroscientist friends and they say, well, that'll be a neat trick because we don't know how human brains think.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  And so I think AI is a great tool, but I'm unthreatened by it because I don't think it has understanding. I don't think it has judgment. I don't think it has emotion. I don't think it has motivation. I don't think it has most of the stuff that the human mind has. And so it'll teach us what we're good at by reminding it what it can't do.

• 10:52Tyler Cowen?

  If you asked it to write a 900-word column on a topic you would write on and asked it to be like you, let's say this is the O3 model from OpenAI, and then you ran it through Claude to improve the writing style, how good is that result in your view?

• 11:06Speaker 01

  Well, I know you did this because I read your stuff and you were impressed. But I was A, too afraid to do it because I might be impressed, but B, it can't possibly predict an idea I haven't thought of yet. And I hope I'm coming up with new stuff. And so I'm hoping it would be behind me, but I'm not going to try.

• 11:24Tyler Cowen?

  How persuasive are novels to you now? Not in your whole life, not when you were younger, but right now. Do novels change how you think about things?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  They can. I confess, I wrote a column recently on how the novel is not as central to American life as it used to be. And when I was in college, when a Toni Morrison novel came out, when a Philip Roth novel came out, when a Saul Bellow novel came out, when a Tom Wolfe novel came out, those were big deals. They were big cultural events. We all talked about it. People reviewed the reviewers and then there were a million book reviews. One of the sad things about the American literary life now is there are many fewer book review outlets, so it's really hard for an unknown novelist to get known. And then I think the second thing that's happened is that novel Satan will go to the 19th century, the glory days. Charles Dickens literally changed the imagination of Britain by altering

• 12:14Speaker 01

  how people saw poverty. George Eliot literally changed the moral life of Britain because as religion was fading, she presented another moral structure that people could sign on to. So these novelists had these huge effects. Now, obviously, we have movies now and whatever, YouTube and stuff like that. Nonetheless, it wasn't that long ago that a Tom Wolfe novel set in this city of New York, in, I don't know what year, Bonfire of the Vanities was published, but I think sometime in the 80s, all of New York got that because all of New York was represented. We now live in a moment of great public tumult, a moment when our interior lives are directly affected by the trauma of our public lives. And if there's a novel that's capturing what it's like to live in this era, I'm not aware

• 12:59Speaker 01

  of it. And I think this would have been a great era for a Balzac, for a Tom Wolfe, for that kind of social realist novel. And in my view, the audacity is not there. And in this column-

• 13:10Tyler Cowen?

  And audacity is the scarce factor in your account?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  I think it's a scarce factor. And I don't know what you would think of this, but I think back to when I was a teenager in the 70s. And I look at the movies like Apocalypse Now, The Godfather, they seem big audacious. I listen to the rock songs I was listening to, Free Bird, Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody, they seem just more audacious.

• 13:31Tyler Cowen?

  Sure, big think.

• 13:32Speaker 01

  You look at journalists, Tom Wolfe, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, those people couldn't publish today because we're too, we're less freewheeling, we're more uptight. And so it seems to me there has been a loss of audacity in the culture, and it's been replaced by professionalism and commercialism. And one of my heroes is an art critic named Kenneth Clark, and he goes through the great high points of Western art, and those high points are defined by audacity. You look at the Renaissance, that was audacious. You look at the Russian novels, that was audacious. I think we're just, we're not at a moment where that kind of self-confidence, which is very hard to manufacture for one person, it takes a whole group, I just think we're not at that moment.

• 14:11Tyler Cowen?

  But building AI is audacious, right? Trump, whatever you think of him, is clearly audacious. You wouldn't say the quality has left our culture. So why has it left the novel?

• 14:19Speaker 01

  I think it's left the humanities. I think the humanities have been back footed, I think in part because, again, internet, all that stuff, the obvious stuff. But the reason you would go to become an English major was because you want to understand how human beings operate. You want to be able to see the world. One of my heroes is a guy named John Ruskin, a 19th century art critic. He says, "For each thousand who can talk, there's one who can think. But for each thousand who can think, there's one who can see." And it's that ability to see reality. And so you go to Tolstoy, that guy could see reality. You go to a Rembrandt painting, the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which is in St. Petersburg, that's a picture that Rembrandt painted when he was old, financially troubled, his wife was dead, four of his five kids were dead.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And I've seen that parable painted many times, but I've never seen a parable where the prodigal son, this kid who's been wandering about, is coming back in shame. Is so naked and hairless and vulnerable. And I've never seen a dad who's coming out to greet him and welcoming him back, who's so loving. And you can imagine the Rembrandt with his dead kids thinking this is fatherhood. And so there's just a power. When you see that painting, you haven't had new facts, but you've had a new emotional experience. And so to me, that's what we get out of a novel or a piece of music or a painting. The ability to see the world where somebody said, we don't see paintings, we see according to them. So if you've seen Picasso's Guernica, you've seen war according to Picasso.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And that was an audacious act of saying, I am going to define how you're going to see the reality around you. And that took, in some case, like Picasso, a male narcissist, but George Eliot did it too. And so I think that I'm going to shape your mind. I think that big ambitiousness is is less encouraged now for whatever reason.

• 16:07Tyler Cowen?

  We're here talking to people, right? We could each be at home writing for them, but we've chosen to be talking. How much are we just evolving toward an oral culture? And there's audacity in oral culture, very long podcasts, very ambitious. And it just doesn't quite fit with the written word. And so a lot of the written word is boring or more mediocre. And that that's the fundamental thing.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  I listen to your podcast every week. I've talked to you about it. And there are several podcasts I listen to every week, so I'm not anti podcast.

• 16:36Tyler Cowen?

  No, you don't have to be anti it, but it may mean the great works will be oral moving forward and not written.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I don't believe that. I mostly do audiobooks because what do I want to hear? Two guys riffing or somebody, a book that somebody who spent four or five years ago, I'm in the middle of the, Sam, ranking out his name, he's a friend of mine, the Buckley biography.

• 16:53Tyler Cowen?

  Tannenhaus, yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Him, Tannenhaus. And so he spent 20 years on that. And so there's a density of knowledge and information that's better than three hours of Joe Rogan riffing.

• 17:02Tyler Cowen?

  But what you're saying now, you've spent X number of years, whatever your age is currently, developing that, right? It's more than four years on a book. You've spent 60 plus years developing your ideas and people want to hear them.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I spent 60 years repairing and you asked me about sex.

• 17:19Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe one needs 60 years to have answers to this question.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, to forget the answers to those questions.

• 17:25Tyler Cowen?

  Now, you mentioned the Tannenhouse book. It's striking because you appear as a character in the book. I know you haven't gotten to that part yet, but surely you remember the reality that William F. Buckley was considering making you editor of National Review. What would your life have been like if you had received that offer? Would you have even taken it? What does that alternate universe look like?

• 17:47Speaker 01

  The American conservative movement is going from strength to strength.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  Donald Trump is a failed real estate developer somewhere. I was never an orthodox National Review person, that kind of conservative. I was a neoconservative, which was different. And so basically, you can tell what kind of conservative a person is by what year they want to go back to. And I've learned, especially from this Tannenhouse biography, that a lot of the old right National Review people wanted to go back to like the 19th century. They were pre-New Deal. I never had a problem with the New Deal. I had some problems with some of the policies of the 1960s. And I was an urban kid. I was a New Yorker. And I was a Jew. And the magazine was Catholic. And I've been told that one of the reasons I didn't get the job was that reason.

• 18:31Tyler Cowen?

  Tannenhouse says this.

• 18:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, does he? I also, I grew up, Buckley was my mentor. We can tell that story, how that happened. And I worked at National Review. And then I worked at the Wall Street Journal editorial page. And I went from being an old right to being a free market Wall Street Journal sort of person. And I never had the opportunity to think for myself until I left those places and went to a place called The Weekly Standard. And suddenly I could think for myself. It was funny how long, because I was in my 30s, before I really thought, what do I believe? Not, how do I argue for the Wall Street Journal position on this or the National Review position? And when I did that, I found I had two heroes. One was Edmund Burke, whose main idea was epistemological modesty, that change is really complicated and we should be really cautious about what we can think, we can know about reality.

• 19:17Speaker 01

  And the second was Alexander Hamilton, who's a Puerto Rican hip hop star from Washington Heights.

• 19:24Speaker 01

  But Hamilton's belief was using government in limited but energetic ways to create a dynamic country where poor boys and girls like him could rise and succeed. And so that involves a lot more state intervention than National Review would be comfortable with. And so I became sort of a John McCain Republican. And now, one of my heroes is a guy named Isaiah Berlin. And toward the end of his life, Berlin said, "I'm very happy to be on the rightward edge of the leftward tendency." And that's where I find myself today, sort of a conservative Democrat. So I would not have fit in at National Review because I didn't really hew to the gospel.

• 19:57Tyler Cowen?

  If you self-report, you weren't thinking so much for yourself back then. Was Buckley, in fact, a good mentor?

• 20:04Speaker 01

  Fantastic.

• 20:05Tyler Cowen?

  Well, but that seems to be the test failing.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  Well, let's put it this way. So let me quick tell the story of how I met him. So I'm at the University of Chicago. I'm a humor columnist back then. I was funnier. And Buckley comes to campus and he just published a book called Overdrive, which is one of his memoirs of name dropping the Pope and David Niven and all these people. And so I wrote a parody, a mean parody of him for being a name dropping blowhard. And some of the jokes, the only one I remember now from that parody of long ago was, while at Yale Buckley formed two magazines, one called The National Buckley and one called The Buckley Review, which he merged to form The Buckley Buckley. And so he came to campus and he said, "David Brooks, if you're in the audience, I want to give you a job." And that was my big break. Sadly, I was not in the audience.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  But I called him up three years later, as I'd become more conservative, and said, "Is the offer still open?" And so he said, "Yeah." He hired me without asking anything about his ideology, which is his mode, because he hired Joan Didion the same way. He hired Gary Wills the same way. This guy, John Leonard, was a very great book critic, the same way. Just can the person write? And so he gave me all these assignments. And I remember the pieces, the little, my drafts coming back, filled with his red ink. And it would say, "Come on, David, you can do better than this." So that was mentoring. And then he took me out to yachting with him and to Bach concerts in the back of his limo, back when limos were a thing. And I'd never... Imagine glamour of this level. And he took us out to dinner every Monday night at his house.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  And I remember his wife, Pat, would come by with her Bill blast and all these glamorous designer friends. And they'd look at us, they'd look at Bill like, what are you doing eating with the Star Wars bar every Monday night? And so he really educated me to the world and gave me a crucial thing that journalists have to know, which is a sense of the news cycle. What do people want to read about tomorrow? Not the thing they want to read about four days ago. You got to hit the cycle. And that was just so valuable to know. Helped me in my editing. And then he sent me off. And so he got me a job and then let me go. And that process of letting me go. I was fine with it. I went off and led my life.

• 22:13Tyler Cowen?

  And that was being the great mentor that he let you go.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Right, but a lot of people who had my job were deeply hurt when he let them go. He thought they would cut him off and they were betrayed. And there was a whole series of very nasty articles about Bill, written by people who felt that was a betrayal. But I regard that as one of the great acts of mentorship, as in the great act of parenting, letting the person go and have their life.

• 22:34Tyler Cowen?

  Was Milton Friedman a good mentor?

• 22:37Speaker 01

  He also was a great mentor.

• 22:38Tyler Cowen?

  What made him great?

• 22:39Speaker 01

  So the reason I wasn't at the Buckley speech was I'd been hired. I was a democratic socialist and I was hired to go out to Stanford and debate him on national TV. So if you go back and Tyler has seen this, I think, if you go on YouTube and write Milton Friedman, David Brooks.

• 22:54Tyler Cowen?

  It's there.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  You'll see me.

• 22:56Tyler Cowen?

  He's younger.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  Big, big Afro. These 1980s glasses that look like they were on loan from the Mount Polyma Lunar Observatory. They were like gigantic. And then I read something I'd read in a Robert Cutner book. And then he destroys it in six seconds. And then the camera lingers on my face for about 19 seconds while I try to think of something to say. And so that was the show, but afterwards, he would have us out to dinner and then he would really, then we would pepper him with questions about, well, how does the economy work here? How does it work there? And I would say my education from him came from those dinners and then subsequent dinners over the years. And I grew up here in Stuyvesant Town. And I had never met a conservative.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And to meet somebody so bright and somebody so wise and rational.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  Who was outside the left, that was mind opening to me. And one final thing about both these guys, I had a chance at the end of their lives separately to say, okay, Bill, okay, Milton, you've changed the world. Bill Buckley created the modern conservative movement. Milton Friedman widened the aperture of economics. And I asked them both, so now you've done all this, you're older. Do you have a feeling that you can just relax? Like I did what I was put on this earth to do. I'm happy, I'm good, and I'm just gonna play golf. And neither of those guys understood the question. Neither of them had the ability to slow down and to stop trying to change the world. And they both kept trying to change the world until their very last days.

• 24:30Tyler Cowen?

  If you think about Buckley, where you disagree with him, and I don't mean on particular issues. I feel I know that. But his method of thought, what is there in his method of thought where you would say, I, David Brooks, diverge from Buckley in a fundamental way?

• 24:46Speaker 01

  His gift and his curse was that he couldn't slow down his thinking. And so I would see him write a column in 20 minutes. And if he wrote it for an hour, it would get no better. He just moved at that speed. And me, it takes me two days to write a column, it takes me, you know, 14, 20 hours. And so that's one thing. Second, you know, he really did have, he grew out of such a different background. His dad, as we know from this book, was an old right America firster. And my parents were like Lower East Side New York intellectual progressives. And so I always felt at home in a diverse America, in a regular old working class America

• 25:29Speaker 01

  that was light years away from the world he inhabited.

• 25:32Tyler Cowen?

  And your difference with Milton Friedman, again, not on specific issues such as the New Deal, but conceptually, how is it that you think differently from how Milton did?

• 25:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Friedman, his great gift, and I think this is a libertarian gift, is that once you get inside their logical system, within their assumptive models, there's no arguing with them. They have, it all fits together. And I don't believe in assumptive models and I'm much less rational. I think human beings are much less rational than he did. I think they obviously respond to incentives in some ways, but often respond to incentives in no rational way. And so, again, being more neoconservative than conservative, or more whatever you want to call it, a Yumian, I really do believe that David used famous sentence that reason should and ought to follow the passions. I believe that's true, that our passions are wiser than our rational mind and that

• 26:25Speaker 01

  our emotions, when well-trained, are much more supple and much more responsible for the way we think. That we don't, there was the rational, again, I may be caricaturing, but the rational school of economics thought, well, you see the world, that's simple process of looking. You weigh costs and benefits about the world and then you make a decision about the world. I don't believe that's the way thinking works. I think the act of perception is 90% of what you think. That whether we're seeing a moral act, or seeing a good on a supermarket shelf, or seeing another human being, we're making quick aesthetic judgments and that it will determine all the downstream thought processes. And that perception is really the most, and that's why so many neuroscientists are phenomenologists

• 27:10Speaker 01

  now, because perception is most of what the mind does. You had on your last podcast, you had a conductor.

• 27:15Tyler Cowen?

  Yes, David Robertson.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  And one of the things he did, he mentioned on that podcast, was he took a mixtape and he put all sorts of music together, ACDC, Springsteen, Barley, etc. And in 2.5 second increments, and people could decide right away, that's for me, that's not for me. And I felt like screaming at my car radio, why 2.5 seconds? Why not 0.5 seconds? Because that's how we make our minds. So that aesthetic sense of perception, to me, is how people make up their minds in all sorts of circumstances, including economics.

• 27:48Tyler Cowen?

  So you were a reporter covering a crime beat on Chicago's South Side, right? What was that like phenomenologically? Were you thinking this is the Milton Friedman rational model? Or how did it shape you?

• 28:00Speaker 01

  No, because mostly what I covered was incredible idiots.

• 28:03Tyler Cowen?

  You mean the criminals?

• 28:04Speaker 01

  I was a police. No, the police, well, actually, one of the humbling things was I'd come out of New York, Chicago, I'm sitting there and the detectives in all these different police stations on the southwest side of Chicago, and I realized the detectives are as smart as my professors. I was very impressed by them. But a lot of the criminals I covered, they were criminals because they hadn't thought something through. So for example, I covered a guy who worked at McDonald's and he conducted an armed robbery at the McDonald's where he worked. And they said like, John, we know you. And another guy, a couple of guys who broke out of some jail, it must have been. And they decided they were hungry, so they ate at the restaurant nearby and they ate in the window booth.

• 28:46Speaker 01

  And were caught. So I covered a lot of that, but I was not planning on being a journalist. I'm still not really a journalist, but to come home every day as a police reporter with a story. An amazing story about something happening in a great city. That was-

• 29:00Tyler Cowen?

  And how did that influence your column? So you had to write up crime reports, right?

• 29:04Speaker 01

  I didn't even write, I called them in.

• 29:06Tyler Cowen?

  Called them in?

• 29:07Speaker 01

  And it was for something called the Sydney News Bureau. The slogan was, "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." And so I remember I would call in, and this was back in an earlier era where I would call in. I'd see a body that had been killed in some way. And the editor back at the desk would say, "What color were the socks?" And I would say, "I don't know, I didn't see that." And they would say, "You are the worst reporter who's ever worked here." And they would just scream at you. And that was part of the-

• 29:33Tyler Cowen?

  That was good for you as mentorship or bad for you?

• 29:36Speaker 01

  I'm a little sensitive, so that was bad, that part was bad.

• 29:39Tyler Cowen?

  But it got you used to the online world, right?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  I'll say one thing, especially for those academics who are listening. Listen, I totally respect randomized controlled experiments, the sorts of things academics do. But journalism has a mode of knowing that's equally valid. And that is the interview. And I sometimes get frustrated with social scientists who give us data about populations of people. But don't take the time to interview any particular individual. I've had some interviews that were life-changing and that I remember to this day. My best interview, or at least my funniest, was with a comedian named Jackie Gleason. Which was just two hours of his jokes. But one, I was in Russia at the end, in 1991. And there's a coup staged by the Soviets, the dying Soviet Union against Yeltsin.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  And a lot of people, I hope, remember this moment. Yeltsin stood on a tank in front of the Russian Parliament building and said, "I dare you to shoot me." And all the Democrats ran to surround him. To be sort of bodyguards. And I go there, I'm in Moscow, and I run into a woman. I'm hesitant because I know we have some Russian friends in the room. I hope I don't mispronounce the name. As I remember, it was a 93-year-old lady named Valentina Kosheva. And I asked her, she was handing out sandwiches to the Democratic protesters. And I asked her, "Tell me your life story." And she said, "Well, I'd grown up in the general household of the czar. There was a Russian civil war right after the revolution. I was on the side of the whites, the anti-communists. And I was lined up to be executed.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  And my mother begged, and the soldiers decided not to shoot me. Her first husband was taken to the Gulag in the 30s. She never saw him again. Her two sons were killed in the Battle of Stalingrad. They were bayoneted by the Nazis. Her second husband, one day they raided her apartment. They said, "You have 15 minutes to leave, but he's coming with us." And she never saw him again. She was a member of, I think, the Kalmyk people, which is a Muslim community there. And they were sent to internal exile under Khrushchev. And so every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her. And my brilliant interviewing technique in that interview was just, "And then what happened? And then what happened?" And so the power of that interview is living history.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  And you see how these great sweeps of history influence one woman. And she ends her days at what we then thought was the birth of Democratic Russia, and she's passing out sandwiches. And so as a journalist, I so defend the epistemology of the interview. And so our problem is we don't use data enough. Academic problem is they don't use interviews enough.

• 32:14Tyler Cowen?

  Now, the 1990s, you're working for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, I believe. Who was your mentor there, and what did you learn from them?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  By then, the adult world had cast me off. I think I stopped having mentors. I considered Buckley and Friedman my mentors because I was young and impressionable. I had bosses, and of course, that matters all through life. But then, at the Wall Street Journal, my two bosses were a guy named Robert Bartley and a guy named George Malone. And they were farm boys from Iowa and Indiana. And because they were Midwestern guys of a certain generation, they were very comfortable with long silences. And so they would, our editorial meetings would be them sitting basically parallel to the ground staring off into the wall. And as a New York Jew, I'm sitting like this. I'm saying to myself, I will not break this silence. I will not break this silence.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  And so that was an experience of learning to work with people who were of a different part of American culture than I was from. But I don't, do people have mentors when they're in their 30s or 40s?

• 33:14Tyler Cowen?

  I still have many mentors and they're mostly younger and they teach me things like AI. So I think you need more mentors as you get older, actually not fewer.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll say this may pertain to the subject. I read this book, Snowball, about Warren Buffett. And what's remarkable about him was his ability to grab onto whoever could teach him. And so early, when he was a socially awkward kid, he grabs onto Dale Carnegie. And this guy provides him a system to socialize. And then he gloms onto Ben Graham and his investing model. And then he gloms onto Charlie Munger. And you think, oh, he's still glomming on in his 40s. But then in his 50s, he glams onto Catherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post. And she's taking him to parties in New York and Washington, which are totally alien to him. And he's loving it because he's getting to sit next to Dolly Parton and Lady Di. And he thinks, this is great. I get to enter a new world.

• 34:07Speaker 01

  In his 70s, he gloms onto Bill Gates. He teaches him about philanthropy and the tech. And so there's a guy, one of the things I admire most is people who are different in their 70s than they are in their 60s, different in their 50s than they were in their 30s. And Warren Buffett is a guy who just gloms onto whoever can teach him. So that would be an example of being mentored through life.

• 34:26Tyler Cowen?

  I have a few questions about politics. Are we allowed?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 34:31Tyler Cowen?

  So you mentioned-

• 34:32Speaker 01

  You have to pay me double.

• 34:33Tyler Cowen?

  You mentioned before that you used to be a neoconservative. Now, we're in 2025 and we see Russia has proven quite weak in some ways, Iran extremely weak, Hezbollah mostly devastated, Hamas, you know. Is it the case that other than occupying countries, that the neocons were right about most things and you should actually just be a neocon again? True or false? So the neocons are anti-Trump, you're anti-Trump. Are you in some sense headed toward being a revised neocon where occupation is the belief you've jettisoned? Afghanistan didn't work, Iraq was very messy, right? Does that make sense to you?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  I'm still consistent with that belief. To me neocon was, it was a specific group of people. And they tend to have grown up in the 1920s and 30s, usually Jewish from Brooklyn. Usually they went to City College of New York. And in those days in City College, they were all Marxists, but there were Stalinists, who were the dumber Marxists, and there were Trotskyites, who were the smarter Marxists. And they ate in different alcoves in the cafeteria. And because the Trotskyites were smarter, the Stalinists did something intelligent, which they said, "You're not allowed to talk to the Trotskyites." And all the Trotskyites turned into neocons, or not all, but many. Irving Kristol, there was a guy named Daniel Bell, Nathan Glaser. And that was the cohort that was, that I followed.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  And they were, like me, totally fine with the New Deal. They thought that American culture began to go off the rails in the 1960s with the rebellion against bourgeois culture, which their immigrant parents were really part of, with the spoiled rich kids who formed the New Left. And they became suspicious of some of the Great Society social programs, which they thought were counterproductive. And so I think they were pretty much right about that. The second thing they were right is they emphasized that society, you can't analyze society unless you're willing to analyze and do this dangerously, the moral fabric of the society.

• 36:33Tyler Cowen?

  You're sending more and more neocon, the more you go on.

• 36:35Speaker 01

  I know, I'm getting into it, I'm getting into it. And so there was a guy named James Q. Wilson, who wrote a great book called The Moral Sense, which I highly recommend. Irving Kristol's wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, a historian, really of how morality changes across civilizations. And that strikes me as absolutely essentially true. I don't think it's impossible to understand America today without understanding the fact that most people used to feel held within a moral order. George Marsden is a historian who said that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such power was his sense that morality, right and wrong, are built into the natural law of the universe. That segregation is not wrong in some places. It's segregation is always wrong. Slavery is always wrong.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  And that sense of a held moral order was essential to the existential security of all people in our society and our ability to settle disputes because we had an understanding of right and wrong. That begins to go away relatively early. Back in 1955, Walter Lippman, a great columnist, wrote a book called The Public Phosphate. And in that book, he says, "If what is right or wrong is determined by what each individual feels, then we have left the grounds of civilization." And I think that was profoundly true. And Gertrude Himmelfarb and James K. Wilson would say that there is a moral order and we have shredded it and we're living off the fumes of that order. And once that goes away, then you're in trouble.

• 38:00Speaker 01

  And I think they were right about that.

• 38:02Tyler Cowen?

  So we're all going to sign up for being neocons, but what's the fundamental dimension where maybe you're not a neocon? If there is one?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  Well, now, I root for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I don't know if that would have flown, but they were right about some things about foreign policy. They were right about the Soviet Union, that it was worth trying to push back and...

• 38:19Tyler Cowen?

  And just stand up to evil, even naively, right?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  And they were, in my view, they were right about the idea that the internal nature of regimes determines the foreign policy of those regimes, that a dictatorship is bound to be more dangerous than a democracy. And what they and I were wrong about was the belief that we could export democracy from outside.

• 38:38Tyler Cowen?

  So occupation. You're like a neocon minus the occupation balance.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  And a soft, I'm a pacifist neocon. But I do think they were right about not totally trusting capitalism. R. R. I. C. Still wrote a book, Two Cheers for Capitalism. And so I think if you go back and read some of the writings from that generation, it's worth remembering, they were not Republicans. They were a break off from liberalism. And I think they were a skeptical and realist and sophisticated break off from what was conventional 1960s liberalism.

• 39:08Tyler Cowen?

  I promised you only one question about Trump. So Trump has made a mess of our relations with our European allies. But in fact, it's led them to spend more money on defense. In my view, that's a good thing. I've spoken to a lot of European elites who say they think it's a great thing. These are mostly people who hate Trump, but they say we are secretly thankful to Trump that he's now letting us do this. Now, in my opinion, it's still not worth it. But my question for you is this. I mean, let's say the Israel-Iran thing also goes well. I'm not sure it will, but let's say it does. What's the minimum number of different things you would have to add up on your ledger before you, David Brooks, the Reform neocon, would say,

• 39:51Tyler Cowen?

  like, the Trump thing worked out OK or even better? What does that menu have to look like?

• 39:57Speaker 01

  Well, first, you're asking me to hive off the moral degradation of America, which to me is kind of a big deal.

• 40:03Tyler Cowen?

  Of course it is.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  And, you know.

• 40:06Tyler Cowen?

  But what does the list have to look like where you make the trade off?

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Well, first, let me get the headline before we get to your caveats. You know, Charles de Gaulle wrote a memoir, and that first sentence of the memoir, his memoir, was, "All my life I've had a certain idea about France." And I would say, "All my life I've had a certain idea about America, that we're sometimes a foolish nation, we're often a naive nation, but we're rarely a cruel and ill-intentioned nation." And we may disagree about this, but I thought the decision, at least temporarily, to get rid of PEPFAR was deliberate and cruel.

• 40:38Tyler Cowen?

  No, we agree.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And has led to already tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of deaths. The treatment of Zelensky, cruel and malevolent. And so I wake up with a lot of malevolence. But I do have to concede that Trump is never totally wrong. That when he said USAID was a poorly managed program, well, that was true. It was a poorly managed program that happened to save a lot of lives. When he says that Harvard is too left-wing, too dogmatic, too unicultural, that's true. And I was at a conference of academics down in Utah not real long ago, and I said, you know, I'm appalled by what he's doing to the universities, but I have to say, I think it's 20% your fault. And some of the professors raised their hand and said, no, it's 40% our fault.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  So he's never totally wrong. And so I think there was truth to things he said about Europe underspending. He wasn't totally wrong. My problem with him, he's like a doctor, and you go into him and you say, Doc, I've got acne. And the doctor says, oh, good, decapitation. We're going to decapitate you. And so that's what he does. He takes something that's, needs to be reformed, like our alliances with our European ally, and he trashes them. Something that needs to be reformed, the university system, attack. Something that needs to be reformed, USAID, Department of Education, you name it. And it's just random destruction. And so there are things I think he's done well.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  I think the Iran thing was the right call. There are other things I think he's done well. And frankly, the tariffs so far have not had the deleterious effects that I expected, though I think they will. But I have to give him credit. There's always some basis of truth to the critique he made. That he's got a lot of things going against him. Americans are swinging to the left on immigration right now. Americans are for pluralism and multicultural diversity. Even white Christians are for that. He's not. So he is away from the American mainstream. My American is Alexander Hamilton American. I like dynamism. I like social mobility. He is a securitarian.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Let's just keep us safe. And so I think he's way out of the American ideas I've understood it over the last 300 years. But the one thing he gets right is he tells a story, the elites betrayed you. And Americans, it turns out, will pardon him for a lot of things if he gets that story right. And I think that story is basically right, that I'm, believe me, I'm a member of the establishment. But the American establishment has betrayed large numbers of Americans, and that's just as the French establishment has betrayed a lot of French people. And he gets that story right, and it's, that's why he's president.

• 43:26Tyler Cowen?

  What do you think is the point estimate of the probability that at the end of the term, you basically say, he got enough things right, that it was worth it?

• 43:36Speaker 01

  That I will say that?

• 43:37Tyler Cowen?

  That you will say it, yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  You can bury me now, I will not be saying that.

• 43:45Tyler Cowen?

  We agree there's something right now, quite screwed up in the American psyche. Maybe sometimes it's hard to diagnose, but it seems to me often fairly fundamental. Should we consider the uncomfortable idea that only major involvement in a war, a war with true danger, not an excursion, that only that would reinvigorate the American spirit? Like, is that a serious idea, or is that just an awful thought? Is there any truth to it?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I used to think we would, if we had a war with, like, Canada, somebody I thought we could take, yeah, it would unify us. But now we might have a war with Canada, so I'm not, I don't think, no, I don't think, if you look at the history of the world, there are two things that don't bring countries together, or at least that make countries uglier. And I would say pandemics and wars are among them. I'm not a believer that you go to war to save the culture of your country.

• 44:38Tyler Cowen?

  But without intent, but could that be the end result? World War II, Korean War?

• 44:43Speaker 01

  I would like to see Americans who oppose Donald Trump create a mass movement in the way Israelis created a mass movement against Netanyahu's judicial reform, in the way Filipinos created a mass movement against Marcus. I think that would have an enormously positive effect on the body politics to our, for those of us who oppose Donald Trump, to have to articulate our principles, to organize, to create a civic structure, a cross-class civic structure, to come up with an alternative vision that's better than the elites betrayed you. I think that would be, lead to American renewal, but that does not seem to be happening, because the leaders of our major institutions, whether it's corporations, universities, and so on, are basically laying low.

• 45:23Tyler Cowen?

  So what is the kind of shock that will work?

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, my analysis, I gave you all the statistics of how sad we are. My analysis, there's a attachment theorist named John Bowlby, who said that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  And that secure base for most of us is a secure attachment to mom and dad. A secure devotion to a specific place, the place that's sacred to us. A sure devotion to our nation and confidence that our nation stands for something good. A secure implantation in, as I said, a moral order. And I think that secure base, for a lot of people, has been destroyed. Families are less healthy than they were. Communities are less healthy where the moral order has been taken away. So we privatize morality. It's every man and woman for herself.

• 46:11Tyler Cowen?

  But two-parent families seem to be doing quite well. It's a problem that there's fewer of them, right? But

• 46:17Speaker 01

  That's his problem.

• 46:18Tyler Cowen?

  But within the two-parent families, it seems above average to me by historical

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then the lack of a secure base, just like social suffering everywhere, is not evenly distributed, you know? That people with high school degrees die 15 years sooner than people with college degrees. People with high school degrees are five times less likely to get married. They're much more likely to get divorced. They're five times more likely to die of opiate addiction. They're 2.4 times more likely to say they have no friends. And so among the upper-middle class with intact families, well, guess what? That's easier. But among working-class folks or folks with a high school degree with no marriage, no job, shorter lifespans, it looks pretty grim. And I understand why they vote the way they do.

• 46:59Tyler Cowen?

  And the shock that will get us out of that is most likely to be what?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Well, when I look at places that, in my view, individuals like nations come back through a process of rupture and repair. You go through a hard time. When I ask people, "Tell me about a time that made you who you are." Nobody ever says to me, "You know, I took this vacation in Hawaii. That was awesome. That made me who I am." No, they went through a hard time. I went through a hard time 12 years ago. You knew me then. And I'd gone through divorce. My kids were leaving home. And I realized I had not lived my life in the way was consistent with my values. That's what it's just to say, I think I value friendship and relationships over anything else. And yet I had become such a workaholic.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  That I had just neglected so many friendships. And it was a period of intense loneliness. And I read a book by a guy named Henry Nowen, a Catholic theologian, who said, "When you're in pain, you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you." And I was like, "Screw that, I want to get out of the pain." But then I read another book by a guy named Frederick Bickner, who was a novelist and a pastor, who said, "In those moments of pain, you can either be broken or broken open. And to be broken, you get calloused over. To be broken open, you make yourself even more vulnerable, even though it's a hard time." And that process of rupture and repair, going through that phase in the valley, I think that's how people grow. And nations go through periods of rupture and repair.

• 48:30Speaker 01

  We went through a period of rupture and repair in the 1870s. We'd come back, the 1830s, the Andrew Jackson populism. 1890s, when we really screwed up how to handle industrialization. 1960s, with bombings, assassinations, riots. By 1974, the kids were into crystal and est and disco. Like, you go through this rupture and then you repair. And I think we're in a period of rupture, where people get disgusted with established power, and the whole social fabric is marred by intense social distrust. But we've been through this process before, and I have every confidence we'll go through a process of repair. And I think that process is already happening. I think some of the outrages of left and right that occurred during the pandemic, I think those have calmed down.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  I think the Democratic Party is lost, but they're humble, which is the beginning of repair. And what'll happen to the Republican Party, I don't know. But I think we're already in a process of restoring that trust. And you know, I run this little nonprofit called Weave, a social fabric project. We take people who are trusted in their local neighborhood, and we try to support them. We go into any town in America, and we say, "Who's trusted here?"

• 49:42Speaker 01

  And people give us names, local trust merchants, and they're everywhere. There's one in, you know, Columbia Heights, which is a neighborhood in DC. And we asked, who's trusted in this neighborhood? And there's apparently some guy who takes the money at the parking lot, in the little booth. And he has an obsession with city zoning regulations. And so if you have a problem with the city, you go to the guy in the parking lot. And he takes care of your problem. And so those people are in every neighborhood in America. And I think that bottom-up rebuilding of trust is the precondition for a national restoration of trust.

• 50:14Tyler Cowen?

  Two last questions. The first one is very easy. How are we actually going to get out of the fertility crisis?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Well, you're the sex communicator. Yeah, I think that's, I mean, I have not seen anything that particularly works beside we make everybody turn ultra-orthodox Jewish.

• 50:32Tyler Cowen?

  Or Amish, right?

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Or Amish, Amish would be great, some religious revival, that would do it. But, you know, in my view, that's not about money, though money is part of the, it's about like, wow, look at all these great restaurants, I don't want to miss this. And that's what I saw when I lived in Europe and saw the fertility crash. So that's a genuinely serious problem, barring some sort of religious revival.

• 50:54Tyler Cowen?

  Last question, what will you do next?

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Play for the New York Mets. Now, my next book's on motivation. My belief is that we vastly overvalue the power of intelligence. We know a lot about emotions, but we don't know a lot about what they call conation, which is where our desires come from. And to me, what you desire is the most important thing about you. Augustine said, "We're not primarily thinking creatures, we're primarily desiring creatures." What you desire determines what you believe. And so I'd like to know how to ramp up the virus, how to be motivational. You have, wrote the book on talent. And one of the points you make in there that I truly believe in is that intelligence matters, we both agree on that, but stamina, stamina really matters, determination really matters.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I once asked AI CEO, who was off the record, so I can't mention his name, but you can guess.

• 51:49Speaker 01

  And I said, when you're hiring somebody, what do you ask them? And he said, after the interview, I walk out and I say, was that person a force of nature? They want to know who's going to run through walls. You have a great question in that book. Are you ambitious? People are not going to lie about that. I ran into an interviewer and his question was, he wanted to test people's moral character. And so his question was, tell me about a time you told the truth and it hurt you. So I should tell my Yale students, if you can fake that one, you can get a job. I think we've amputated the importance of what we stupidly could call the non-cognitive skills, which is social skills, which is drive, which is motivation. I'd like to understand them.

• 52:31Tyler Cowen?

  David Brooks, thank you very much.

• 52:44Tyler Cowen?

  They will bring me some of your questions, yes? Thank you for these. Okay, David. Have we reached or passed peak broad-based human intellect?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Wow. No, I mean, I'm with you on AI, that it's an introduction of a new form of intelligence in the world, and it's going to, on balance, make us smarter. And so if I have a tool that can help me answer questions, I think we'll still store it in our brain. I'm trying to figure out what the question is getting at. Do you think it's getting at, will we rely on AI so much we won't know stuff?

• 53:18Tyler Cowen?

  I don't know. There's the sense that once there was a Goethe, a John Milton, maybe today that's harder. There was a peak for that kind of intellect, and now everyone's so specialized. So I tend to agree we've passed that peak.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Have you read your blog?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  I mean, things I'm reading, Swedish, Dutch basket making, Austrian economics, astrophysics. So you're the omnivore? I think, on the contrary, that in an age of specialization, it's got to be an advantage to be a generalist. And the problem with being a generalist, and as a journalist is sort of what I am, is you have to understand the whole field. And you've got to know who's over here on this side of the field, who's over there. And when you try to capture the field, you don't want to take too many risks. You want to go right down the middle of what's conventional within the field, rather than picking some looney tune. And that turns out to be a rather hard thing to do. And in some fields, there's no middle. I would say the study of intelligence. What's the correlation between IQ and success?

• 54:20Speaker 01

  I think there are randomly divergent explanations. And if you wander into that field and you pick one, all the other people will say you're an idiot. But in general, I think the ability to do what journalists do, which is to go into a field and understand what's the consensus here, and then to compare the field of economics to the field of physics. I think there's great fertility there.

• 54:42Tyler Cowen?

  Here's a question for both of us. I'll answer it first. Quote, "What do the two of you admire about each other?" I would say when any question or topic comes up, that you put what is humane about the issue first, and that this is truly internalized. It's not just a habit you force on yourself. It may have somewhat even have been that at first, which is pretty common. But it is you now, and it's the most defining feature of you. That would be my answer.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Wow, that is the person I'd like to be, actually. So I find that very honoring. Thank you. Somebody said, actually, in that book, that he didn't know anybody with more conceptual models in your head that you can apply to any situation. I would just say the one feature I admire more than any others is to be a lifelong learner. There's a book I read by a woman named Susan Engel. There's a woman named Susan Engel who works here in the Y. But she did some research into how many questions does a three-year-old ask? And the median three-year-old is like 140 questions an hour. And if any of you have kids, you've been there. And but then they go to elementary school, and the teachers know that if the kid asks the questions, it'll take them off course and they won't be able to cover content.

• 55:55Speaker 01

  And so this woman, she's observing classrooms, and literally she writes down, the teacher says this. Some kids had found an old-fashioned scale in the classroom, and they were playing around with it, figuring out how it worked. And the teacher said to them, "We don't have time to experiment now. We're doing science." And so that's the way they repress curiosity. But your curiosity has not been repressed.

• 56:17Tyler Cowen?

  Here's one, I hope it offends no one in the audience. This is from Ted, quote, "To David, would you agree with Tyler that New York City is no longer a cultural center of America? The cultural center, I would say."

• 56:29Speaker 01

  My family's been here for five generations, so that's a tough one. I would say, I think New York City, to the extent that America has a cultural center, which I'm not sure it does anymore. I would still say New York City is, A, the cultural center, and B, the most dynamic city in America. But, and it pains me to say this, I do think if you asked me the most dynamic city in the world, given my experience, I would have to say London is more dynamic than New York.

• 56:55Tyler Cowen?

  I think London has gotten considerably worse in the last five to 10 years, actually. And China aside, which is just a different comparison, I would say the Bay Area.

• 57:06Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 57:07Tyler Cowen?

  What truly influences our life, and a lot of your early answers were about social media and phones, and however good or bad you think it is, we talked about AI, those are ideas from there, not here.

• 57:18Speaker 01

  Right, but they're technical ideas.

• 57:20Tyler Cowen?

  Sure, but that's what it is.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  The Bay Area is incredibly insular when it comes to political and other things.

• 57:25Tyler Cowen?

  But maybe those are, right now, the less important ideas, at least temporarily.

• 57:29Speaker 01

  Right, okay.

• 57:30Tyler Cowen?

  And we've turned political idea-making over to goodness knows what or whom, but we've done it. It's not, and you know who is from Queens, right?

• 57:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  But I, well, you can't shake me off my, I'm the only person, I live in DC, I come up here, I get off the Penn Station, I'm on 8th Avenue and 33rd Street, which is god-awful ugly, and I think, oh, my heart rate can go down now. I'm with my people. So I still think New York operates at a pace that no other city operates.

• 58:03Tyler Cowen?

  How does a greater adoption of AI influence political party realignment?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Hmm. I'm not so much of the belief that technology influences that stuff as other people are. I don't think social media has had a negative effect on society in all sorts of ways. I don't think it's, I can say, it may have weakened the power of the mainstream media and created more fringe, but I think what influences people is their direct lived experience, not so much media. And I don't even mean high, social media, I mean all media. I was at a conference many years ago, decades ago, of sexologists.

• 58:39Tyler Cowen?

  See, see.

• 58:40Speaker 01

  You would have felt right at home. You would have been right at home.

• 58:43Tyler Cowen?

  I knew.

• 58:44Speaker 01

  A more boring group of people you never want to meet.

• 58:47Tyler Cowen?

  You're holding back your wisdom from us.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  But what I, one of the things I learned from them is that if you had looked at the media in the 60s, you would have thought sexual behavior changed radically. Because suddenly there was porn everywhere, there was nudity everywhere. But actually, sexual behavior changed in World War I and World War II. It was the actual act of going to France.

• 59:08Tyler Cowen?

  Not Germany.

• 59:11Speaker 01

  Not Germany, except for the king. But it was, it's not something that you consume in the media. It's things that happen actually in your actual life that change behavior in such ways. So if there's going to be a political realignment, it'll be because what happened that caused MAGA, which is, it used to be, I drive around the country, I visit like 35 states a year. And it used to be you would drive from a, what we now consider a college-educated area to a red area, a working-class area. And they were different, but they didn't seem like different nations. Starting about 10 years ago, I would drive from whatever, Samano, Idaho, to Sun Valley, Idaho. And you're like in different universes. And so that, the physical change in the way the two different kinds of towns worked is dramatic.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  And the fact that the rich, I ran into a guy who used to have a handle, travel for the Boston Celtics back in the Larry Bird era, not that long ago. And they used to fly commercial. And they used to have to carry their bags and stuff like that. And now, people like that have no contact with regular old commercial flight.

• 1:00:17Speaker 01

  And so the rich people used to be a little normal. Now the rich people are just rich people. And so that kind of actual social distancing changes people's viewpoints than than media technology.

• 1:00:29Tyler Cowen?

  Here's my follow up. Won't AI make us more objective? At least the current models. They seem to me more objective than the New York Times. If you ask them a question, they're rarely crazy. They give you pretty good answers to a lot of controversial questions. I don't always agree, but they seem to me the most objective source out there.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, I haven't really thought about that. As a person who gets paid by the New York Times, I have to point out that a lot of their data is stolen from a while. I think I is taken.

• 1:00:57Tyler Cowen?

  They read you because they love you.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  I find they're blander, though. I mean, there's all this hedging. They don't offend anybody. I don't like AI because they want to please you. I tried Claude and that Chinese deep sea one. That was too nice to me.

• 1:01:11Tyler Cowen?

  Maybe that is objective.

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Maybe that is.

• 1:01:15Tyler Cowen?

  Here's a longer question. You've convinced me that many of America's ills are social in nature, not economic. My question, what does this imply for those of us pursuing large scale change? What's the political agenda that I could spend a career promoting to help all this dot, dot, dot? Simple question. Let's ask chat GPT, right? Get an objective answer.

• 1:01:36Speaker 01

  You know, I do think our core problems are sociological and cultural and psychological and moral. If you want to work on a core problem, rebuilding social trust, if you can figure out how to do that, be an awesome contribution. But when I look at how countries recover, and Bob Putnam of Harvard has done this for one period when America recovered, and it's from 1880 to 1910. And the recovery there from a pretty took place in three phases. First, there was a civic, a cultural Renaissance, which was social Darwinism, which was hyper individualistic and sharp elbowed, was replaced by the social gospel movement, which was more communal. That was followed by a civic renaissance.

• 1:02:19Speaker 01

  You've had in the 1890s, the creation of the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the Union Movement, the Temperance Movement, the Settlement House Movement. People basically decided, we have to form civic organizations because all our organizations are designed for a country where people are living on the Kansas Prairie. And now we've got a million kids in Baltimore, in Cleveland, in Chicago. And so they had a civic renaissance, and that was followed by the progressive movement, where they cleaned up government, FDA, eventually the Federal Reserve system. So to me, if you want to work on the rebirth of the country, that basic model strikes me as very persuasive. You can work on the cultural piece to re-envision who we are and what we believe and what our values are. You can work on the civic piece, which is to create the civic social capital so people

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  can coordinate. Or you can work on the political reform piece. And the one thing I'd say about the political reform piece, I just reread a book I hadn't read since college called The Age of Reform by Richard Hofstadter, a very great historian. And one of the things that struck me is that now we think populism, Donald Trump's over here, progressivism, AOC is over here. But from 1870 to 1917, the progressive populists were one movement. And it strikes me that the progressives need the populists to stay in touch with the real America. And the populists need the progressives to be a little sophisticated on the educational front. And it was a very useful movement to have a movement that was half J.D. Vance or Josh Hawley and half AOC.

• 1:03:48Speaker 01

  And that would be interesting.

• 1:03:49Tyler Cowen?

  Here's one, I'll paraphrase. The New York City government has a lot of influence and resources. Why are not more ambitious people determined to become mayor? There's at least one, right?

• 1:04:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:02Tyler Cowen?

  It seems like a somewhat...

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  They're ambitious, I'm not sure they're skilled. I think becoming, well, A, it's a super hard job. I used, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, I would travel around in the van with him and just watch him. And to do New York, all the boroughs, you're handling on a day-to-day basis such a level of economic, social, cultural, demographic diversity, it's mind-boggling. And then, you're in conflict all the time. And Giuliani loved the conflict. I was with him once. We were at the Metropolitan Opera and he kicked the PLO representative out in the middle of his performance. He just loved that kind of stuff. And this was before he went and became the Giuliani we know today. He was still a very rational person. But it's so demanding. And then you think of

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  the hurdles you have to clear. I happen to think Mike Bloomberg was a pretty good mayor. But for a businessman, billionaire Republican, there are a lot of hurdles. And I would say in general, when I look at a lot of the mayors who are not successful, Chicago's mayor is not doing so great, DC's mayor, I'd say we're, even though there are some mayors, I think, LA, San Francisco, I think that Atlanta, I'd say we're in a period where the quality of our mayors is surprisingly low, in a way that it didn't used to be. It used to be, I would think, the happiest people I know were people who left Congress and became mayors. And the most unhappy were people who left mayors and became congressmen. Because you can actually get something done. But I would say right now, cities are becoming

• 1:05:26Speaker 01

  less governable, especially in blue states. Whereas the cities I know that are doing well, are blue cities in red states. The Nashvilles, the Austin, Texas, the Houston, the Dallas, Phoenix. And they combine red state tax policy with blue city education and welfare policy. And I think that turns, that's where all the people are flocking to. So it's got to be working reasonably well.

• 1:05:51Tyler Cowen?

  Where is it you want to travel to next? And why?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  Well, I should ask you that question because my wife and I are trying to plan something. And we're thinking Sicily. I've never been to Sicily. But you've told me, and I am persuaded because I've asked many other people, that where should I go? I've never been to Japan. And I would like to go somewhere. It's always a drag when you fly a long way. And when you get out of the airport, it kind of feels like back home. I want something that feels foreign. And I gather Japan is beautiful and different. And I don't know.

• 1:06:22Tyler Cowen?

  Sicily and Japan are two of my favorite places.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 1:06:25Tyler Cowen?

  And they're each quite manageable in terms of expense, safety, just general. You're not going to have any problems in either one. Sicily is this amazing mix of Norman, Arabic, Italian, North African cultures. Still vitally diverse in that manner.

• 1:06:43Tyler Cowen?

  Arguably the best food in Italy. Incredible Greek ruins. Make sure you go to Sirte Kusa. Avoid Taramina. And I even love Palermo. Think of fantastic, semi-modern in the 20th, 19th century sense, Italian city. I would recommend that. Japan will blow your mind and change how you think about community and social cooperation. They're not, in a funny way, that cooperative, but they completely cooperate. And that's the paradox. And I'm still trying to think that through and I'll never figure it out. But if you leave a bottle of water on the table and leave the restaurant, they'll come running after you down the street. Here's your bottle of water back. At the same time, they're not that civic minded.

• 1:07:24Tyler Cowen?

  The next trip my wife and I are taking is to northern Ghana, which is a kind of Sahelian culture of the Sahara. Those cultures are usually too dangerous to visit. Civil war, Russian intervention, whatever. But in Ghana, it's fine. And there's some elephants you can see there, but some very famous old mosques, some towns with a lot of arts in them. And no one really goes to northern Ghana. So that, to me, will somehow change how I think about things. So I can't answer anything other than where we're going. And that's where we're going.

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Okay, I will see you at the Four Seasons of Northern Ghana. I should say, I should thank you publicly. I publicly thank you. Tyler has something called the Tyler Cowen Ethnic Dining Guide, which, especially in the DC area, I guess you're in New York too?

• 1:08:11Tyler Cowen?

  Sure, a lot.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  And so there are all these shopping malls, strip mall restaurants with the best Guatemalan this, the greatest Honduran that, Tibetan that. And in our courting phase, my wife and I, we just went down the Tyler Cowen Ethnic Food Dining Guide. And so you're

• 1:08:26Tyler Cowen?

  And you invited me.

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  You are the aphrodisiac for my marriage. I wish I had not said that.

• 1:08:37Tyler Cowen?

  We had a very nice lunch today at a Korean place on 35th Street. I think it was West 55th. It won a Michelin star in 2023, and it's a tofu restaurant. So that would be one of my recommendations. But travel to me always keeps me fresh. And I think also Tokyo is probably the best food in the world, and also the best French food in the world, which is remarkable. So there's an attention to quality and detail that is just difficult to believe until you're there. And to live with that for, say, two weeks, I think you'll very much enjoy.

• 1:09:10Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm sold.

• 1:09:12Tyler Cowen?

  Yeah. And the flight's not that bad. You just bring a big pile of books, right? And you're fine. You don't need the smartphone or anything, just the books. And your AI. What question do you wish I had asked you?

• 1:09:27Speaker 01

  What's it like to be so wonderful? No, I don't know how to answer that question. You are the master question asker, so.

• 1:09:35Tyler Cowen?

  Anyway, David, thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you, audience.

• 1:09:49Tyler Cowen?

  Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm at Tyler Cowen, and the show is at Cowen Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.