The Art of Seeing Others (and Being Deeply Seen) | David Brooks

In this episode, David Brooks explores the art of seeing others and being deeply seen, and why our ability to make another person feel truly seen, heard, and understood may be one of the most important skills we can develop. He discusses the power of curiosity, the questions that lead to genuine connection, and how wise friends help us rewrite the stories we tell ourselves. Along the way, David explores loneliness, depression, difficult conversations, and why learning to truly know another person can transform not only our relationships, but our own lives.

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Key Takeaways:

• Exploration of empathy and its importance in human connection.
• Discussion of depression and its impact on individuals and society.
• Insights on wisdom and the distinction between wisdom and knowledge.
• The significance of meaningful conversation and deep engagement with others.
• The concept of “stacking” and the tendency to judge others quickly.
• Strategies for deepening conversations and fostering connection.
• The role of humility and curiosity in understanding others’ perspectives.
• Navigating difficult conversations, especially across divides.
• The nature of support for those struggling with mental health issues.
• Reflections on the joy and meaning found in truly seeing and being seen by others.

David Brooks is one of the nation’s leading writers and commentators. He is an op-ed columnist, for the New York Times, a writer for The Atlantic and appears regularly on the PBS Newshour. He is the bestselling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, Bobos in Paradise, and On Paradise Drive and his newest book is How to Know a Person:  The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.

Connect with David Brooks: Website | Twitter

If you enjoyed this conversation with David Brooks, check out these other episodes:

Peter Block on Freeing Yourself from Consumer Culture

How Relationships Shape Our Happiness and Well-Being with Robert Waldinger

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Episode Transcript:

David Brooks 00:00:00  You can be an atheist, a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist, monk, Muslim, whatever. But looking at people with that level of respect and reverence for who they are deep inside is the first prerequisite for knowing them well.

Chris Forbes 00:00:20  Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts. We have quotes like garbage in, garbage out or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don’t strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don’t have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it’s not just about thinking our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:05  David Brooks used to think wise people were like Yoda or Solomon, full of maxims that would solve your problems, but not anymore.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:13  The wise person, he says, is someone able to edit their story. When someone is struggling, it’s usually because their story has stopped working. They blame themselves for things that aren’t their fault and others for things that are a good friend helps them retell it. And that’s the center of a lot of my own work. To the question of what we make things mean and what else it could mean, we also talk about what David learned when his oldest friend fell into a severe depression. His new book is How to Know a Person. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi, David, welcome to the show.

David Brooks 00:01:50  Oh, it’s great to be with you.

Eric Zimmer 00:01:51  I am so happy to have you on. I was describing several of your more recent books about, you know, character and asking the deeper questions about our lives. And even your latest book, which is called How to Know a Person The Art of Seeing Others and Being Deeply seen have been deeply resonant with me, so I’m really happy to have you on, and we’ll discuss that latest book in others in a moment.

Eric Zimmer 00:02:11  But we’ll start, like we always do, with the parable. And in the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with their grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparents, says which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.

David Brooks 00:02:44  Yeah, I guess the first thing I think of is we’re living through hard times where the bad wolf has been given preeminence. People just aren’t as kind to each other as they should be. And so we have this epidemic of sadness in American society the rise of depression, the rise of suicide. 54% of Americans say that no one knows them well.

David Brooks 00:03:05  The number of people who say they have no close personal friends has quadrupled in 20 years. The number of people who ranked themselves at the bottom level of happiness is gone up by 50%. So there’s just something sad and broken in our society. And in my view, it means we have to double down on the good wolf. And the good wolf is the humanity in us that humanity consists of trying to see the world from another point of view. And in my view, there’s one skill that’s at the center of every healthy family, society, country and organizations the ability to see others deeply and make them feel deeply seen, to make people feel seen, heard and understood. And that’s hard when you feel there’s war going on around you. It’s hard when you have leaders say, we can’t afford morality because it’s a dog eat dog world. But in these hard times, I’m really struck by the defiant humanists, the people who say even in hard times, I’m going to stand up. And my humanity, my ability to see other people is not going to be a weakness.

David Brooks 00:04:01  It’s going to be a strength for me. I saw a video online at Twitter the other night of James Baldwin in the 1960s, and the great novelist in the midst of racism was saying, no, I’m doubling down on my humanity. Go to my year in the midst of Middle East war. Gandhi in the midst of colonialism. And so I wrote the book trying to understand in hard times, how can you be a more gentle, a kinder, more respectful person who illuminates others with a gaze that says, I just want to understand you?

Eric Zimmer 00:04:32  Yeah, that seen and being seen is so deeply important. I mean, I mentioned to you briefly before we started about my addiction history and, you know, I think that’s one of the things that makes 12 step programs work when they do work for people. Right? I’m not saying they work for everybody, but when they do, one of those things is you feel deeply seen for the first time. You suddenly feel like you’ve not understood yourself and no one has understood you for a long time.

Eric Zimmer 00:04:56  As you wrestle with this addiction and suddenly you feel seen and you feel understood, and that is a lot of the healing process. I mean, that’s a big engine in what makes that overall thing work.

David Brooks 00:05:07  Yeah, that’s why it’s so important that we see each other accurately. Because if I see you, if I see potential in you, you’ll see potential in yourself. If you beam your attention on me, you’ll bring forth growth in me. And so the act of casting attention is a generous, creative act. The problem is, we’re not naturally good at it. And so there’s researchers at the University of Texas who test how well are we reading each other the first time we meet somebody, and the average person is only reading the other person? Well, 22% of the time. And some people, it’s 0% of the time, they just don’t know what’s going on in the other person’s head. So it’s important to get really good at that skill of knowing how to probe deeply into people, how to be curious about people.

David Brooks 00:05:49  The number one reason we don’t see each other is we’re just not curious and we don’t ask. I sometimes come back from a party and I think, you know, that whole time nobody asked me a question. And I’ve come to feel that only 30% of the people are questions and answers. The rest are perfectly pleasant. They’re just on broadcast mode. They’re not curious about others. And so the book is an attempt to walk people through the skill from the first second you meet somebody through the conversations, through hard times, through politically hard times, how you get to know another human being and make them feel known.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:20  Yeah. I mean, my partner and I often will remark on that. We’ll go out to dinner or we’ll be with a group of people. And, you know, sometimes it’s just this amazing, wonderful, deep conversation. And other times we leave and it just doesn’t quite feel right. And what we’ve often found is that we’re the ones who asked all the questions all night. No one ever reflected a question back.

Eric Zimmer 00:06:40  No one ever asked, how are you? No one, you know, and it’s just it’s an odd thing. And I think that piece about curiosity is really important. And you talk about, you know, the gaze at a person. And it seems to me that the way we are as creatures, the way we have evolved, that we cannot not judge people at first sight. Like it doesn’t seem to be a mechanism I can turn off, right? Like it just happens automatically. I see somebody and immediately a judgment forms of them. And then based on that judgment is sort of I think your next level is is a really good one. There’s some cases where it’s an immediate like or an immediate dislike, but most of the time it’s sort of a lack of curiosity. Oh, I know what that person’s about. I know what somebody who rides a Harley-Davidson and wears leather is about, or I know what. Somebody who drives an Audi and is it a coffee shop and orders a, you know, a latte that has 18 customizations? I know what they’re about based on those judgments.

David Brooks 00:07:39  Yeah. So that’s called stacking. And that’s when, you know, one thing about a person, then you make a whole series of assumptions about them. And so that I know that you’re a Trump voter. Say, or a person who’s a Trump voter. And I think, oh, then I must believe this X, Y, and Z. And that’s never true. If you’re actually curious about people, you find their lives are completely amazing and unpredictable. And so I remember years ago I met a woman at a Trump rally who was a big Trump supporter, who was also a lesbian biker who converted to Sufi Islam after surviving a plane crash. I’m like, what stereotype do you fit into? Exactly.

Eric Zimmer 00:08:12  It’s great.

David Brooks 00:08:12  And so it’s that humility that the person you meet is not a problem to be solved. They’re a mystery that you’ll never completely unravel, and the fun of it is getting to know them really well. And so I do think the the quality of the attention you bring to a person determines what you find a little to some degree that if I see you with judgmental eyes, I’ll find flaws.

David Brooks 00:08:33  If I see you with fear in my eyes, I’ll find threat. But if I see you with generosity, then I’ll see someone who’s smarter than me in many things, who’s more interesting than me and many things. Who has a soul of infinite value that I want to get to know and understand?

Eric Zimmer 00:08:49  Yeah. I mean, I think what you’re describing there is that getting to know process deeper and deeper because, I mean, stereotypes. They exist for a reason. They’re not completely made up. Right? And oftentimes even early on with someone, you just sort of keep encountering what you expect to encounter with them, you know. And so one of the things that you talk about is and we’re kind of jumping around in the book here, but I think we just kind of been led here, naturally, is that it’s the quality of the questions that you ask people. Because if we stay at the basic questions, we may stay at the level of the stereotype that we just talked about. Right now, the woman you just described very quickly, you’d be like, whoa, what’s going on here? Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:09:31  But someone else, you might go, oh, you know, they they do indeed drive a pickup truck. They do indeed love NASCAR. They do indeed love hunting. They like, you know what? You would just sort of keep skimming along the surface and keep getting kind of what you expected. So what are some ways that we start to go deeper with people? And I’d love to sort of start off that question in people that we are sort of meeting for the first time and not at like a, say, a dinner party where our friends have brought together people they think are interesting. And there’s almost a permission and an expectation often to go deeper in that context, whereas it’s a parent of someone on your kid’s soccer team and you’re sitting there watching the soccer game. Right. And I was just talking with my son about this last night because he’s 25 now. But when he was in high school, we lived in an upper middle class or upper class white enclave in Ohio, and I really struggled connecting more deeply with a lot of the parents that we were just actually just talking about this last night.

Eric Zimmer 00:10:31  So I’d love to go back if I could go back there and say, okay, how do I break through to a deeper level with these people that I spend time with, but I keep seeing stuck on the surface. And our surfaces are very different.

David Brooks 00:10:42  Yeah. Well, first, as I say, is the quality of the gaze. When you first meet a stranger there asking certain questions as the same time you’re unconsciously asking questions, am I a person to you? Am I a priority to you? Do I matter to you and the answers to those questions get communicated with your eyes before they get communicated with your mouth. And so it’s the way you look at them that that has tremendous power. I was in Waco, Texas, a couple of years ago, and I was having breakfast with a woman named LaRue Dorsey, and she was like 93. And she presented herself to me as this strict disciplinarian, like, real tough lady. She was a teacher. She said, I loved my children enough to discipline them.

David Brooks 00:11:20  And so I was a little intimidated by her. And then into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours named Jimmy Darrell. And Jimmy’s a pastor who ministers to the homeless. And he comes up to our table, grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders, and shakes her way harder than you should shake a 93 year old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, are the best. You’re the best, I love you, I love you. And that stern disciplinarian turned to this bright, eye shining nine year old girl. And it was just the power of Jimmy’s gaze. And he’s just a warm, garrulous guy. But something more important is going on, which is that he’s a pastor. So he believes when he’s looking at anybody in the face, he’s looking into the face of God. He’s looking at somebody made in the image of God. He’s looking at somebody or anybody with a soul of infinite value and dignity. And you can be an atheist, a Jew, a Christian, a Buddhist monk, Muslim, whatever.

David Brooks 00:12:12  But looking at people with that level of respect and reverence for who they are deep inside is the first prerequisite for knowing them well. And then there’s the tendency which we resist a lot is to go just an inch deeper. You got to do this slowly. And so when I meet people, sometimes I ask them about where they grew up. I travel a lot, so I probably know something about their town. People love to talk about their childhood. Sometimes I’ll ask you, where’d you get your name? That gets people talking about their parents and their ethnic heritage and things like that. Sometimes as I get to know people a little better, it’ll just be like, tell me the most enjoyable, unimportant thing about you. And I had asked that. And I learned some scholar loves reality trash TV shows, and he learned from me that I have a ridiculous fondness for the early songs of Taylor Swift. And so, you know, it’s just a fun thing to learn about each other. We get to know each other a little more deeply, and you can always ask people what they’re proud of.

David Brooks 00:13:08  So if you’re at the sidelines of a soccer game, they’re probably proud of their kid. And so ask them what they’re proud about, and then you’ll be surprised how quick people want to get deep. I was at a dinner and this was a dinner conversation, so not so casual. It was an 80 year old political scientist said, what should I do with the rest of my life? And that was such a big question. We had a great conversation about his interests, about how you should approach old age these days. How do you confront death? It was just a great conversation because he had the guts to ask a big question.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:40  Yeah, yeah. Those are all really great. And so do you believe that? Let’s take the scenario I’ve been describing. You go to a soccer game and there’s the parent, and you meet them with that gaze because they’re most likely not meeting you with that gaze. I mean, again, some people are in those situations seem to unfold pretty easy and naturally.

Eric Zimmer 00:13:58  Right? But let’s assume they’re not meeting you with that gaze. They’ve kind of got you in the same, you know, sort of stacked idea of your character, and they’re just not that interested. And so you meet them with the warm gaze and you engage them and you try and go a little deeper. I would assume there are many cases where that works far better than you thought. And there are other cases where people just don’t want to go there. But you seem to indicate that far more often than we think people do.

David Brooks 00:14:22  Yeah, I do absolutely think that sometimes they don’t want to go there. Sometimes they’re jerks or they’re liars. So you can’t you know, I have a line in the book that in every group of people there are two sorts of people. There’s diminishing the people who make you feel small and stereotyped and ignored, and illuminators, the people who make you feel lit up and respected. And if you confront a diminished who just doesn’t want to go there, then there’s nothing you can do to force them.

David Brooks 00:14:45  But I have founded my career as a journalist, and I’ve talked to people who are in sort of the conversation business. And I asked them, how many times does somebody say, none of your damn business? And the answer is zero or almost zero. People love to tell their life story. I ran into a guy named Dan McAdams, who’s at northwestern, who studies how people tell their life story, and he calls his research subject in. He asked him about their high points, their low points, their turning points, their life. He says about half the people cry during the session because something sad they’re recounting, and then at the end, he gives them a check to compensate them for their time. And he says a lot of the people just push the check back across the table and said, I’m not taking money for this. This is one of the best afternoons I’ve had in my life. No one has ever asked me about my life story, and it’s just so much fun to try to tell you who I am.

David Brooks 00:15:35  And so I find we’re way too shy about wanting to go deep. And if people don’t pick it up, they don’t pick it up. But if you ask them big questions, they will enjoy it. And so some of my favorite big questions is after you’ve gotten to know somebody, you have to establish trust before you have these conversations. But it’s like what crossroads are you at? Most of us are at some sort of transition point in life. So what crossroads are you at right now? Or if the next five years is a chapter in your life, what’s the chapter about? What commitments have you made you no longer really believe in? What’s the forgiveness you’re hoping you’ll get from somebody? And those are big questions. And they get people to see their lives from 30,000ft. And they’re not the questions you ask when on first meeting. But if you know somebody, you can really deepen a friendship by having a conversation about those sorts of things.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:21  Yeah, I heard you in a conversation with Peter Block, who’s also been a guest on this show here from Ohio, where I’m at, and you guys discussed a question I believe that he likes is what question, if you had the answer to would set you free.

Eric Zimmer 00:16:34  And I’ve been pondering that one all morning. I still don’t have an answer, but I’m like, wow. Like really gets you thinking, like, what is in the way of me being free? And that freedom will mean different things for different people. But what a powerful question.

David Brooks 00:16:47  Yeah, and it’s not one we would normally ask. And that’s the great gift of really being interested in somebody else. You give them a chance because to tell their own life story and to understand themselves in a different way, because most of us just don’t sit down and compose our life story. We only get to tell when somebody asks. And when we do, we’ve suddenly got a different image of ourselves. I love Peter Bloch’s stories. One of his question is, can you be yourself where you are and still fit in? And so, you know, can you be natural at your workplace or do you only bring part of yourself to work? And that’s just interesting to know. Yeah. Those conversations, you’d think, well, it’s just a passing hour or two maybe.

David Brooks 00:17:24  But I really do think those kinds of encounters alter the way people see the world, alter the way they feel in the world. And if we’re surrounded, whether it’s at an AA meeting or even with a soccer team, it becomes a little closer to family. And, you know, my kids were athletes and my boys played baseball, my daughter played ice hockey. And our little families on those teams became community. Because often we’re traveling around together. Yeah. Having breakfast at Comfort Inn. And plus, my kids were pitchers. I can’t tell you how many times there’d be a three two count. And I’d send up a little prayer to God. God, take five years off my life, but just have the kid throw a strike.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:01  Right?

David Brooks 00:18:01  So those are vulnerable moments when your kid is either doing well or not 100%.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:06  I can understand and relate with that. So I want to just spend a minute on some, I guess, tips, right? You refer to this as sort of a self-help book, right? Like where you’re really trying to teach people how to do this.

Eric Zimmer 00:18:18  And obviously you’ve said that the self-help is you mostly. Right. You want to learn how to get better at this. But let’s talk about a couple of ways to be good conversationalists. And I’m just going to bring up a couple that you listed and just ask you to kind of say a little bit more about. But you said one of the ways is to favor familiarity. What do you mean by that?

David Brooks 00:18:38  Yeah. You would think people would like to talk about what they don’t know, but they like to talk about what they know. So if you meet somebody who’s a football fan, he or she wants to talk about the game that happened Sunday afternoon. And that’s why I always ask about their hometown. People love to talk about their childhood. I have a friend named David Bradley. His great skill is to hire people. He’s built successful businesses not because he’s a great manager, but he’s really good at spotting people. And he has two techniques. One is he wants to know about their skill set, but he wants to know it in the narrowest way possible.

David Brooks 00:19:07  Like, don’t tell me you teach. Tell me. Oh, I like drawing up lessons, plans, or I like tutoring special needs kids. Like, I want to know the specific skill you have. But the other thing he’s looking for is what he calls a spirit of generosity. And so it’s always, take me back. He says people in job interviews, they start their life talking about their career. He says, take me back to your childhood and he wants to know. I don’t know if this is right or not, but this is his theory. We all carry around the person we were in high school, and so he wants to know, who were you in high school and how has that changed? And if you were an outsider in high school or insecure, you probably still carry some of those insecurities around with you. He wants to get at that deeper level, and that’s favor familiarity.

Eric Zimmer 00:19:47  I’m contemplating. If someone asked me that question in an interview and I answered honestly, I’m like, would that help me get the job? Would that, you know, would that help me not get the job? I, you know, would help that person realize that I was sort of two wildly different people in high school, one year to the next.

Eric Zimmer 00:20:04  It’s an interesting question. The other is you talk about don’t be a topper.

David Brooks 00:20:09  Yeah. So that’s so if you tell me you’re having problems with your teenager, and then I turn around and start talking about the problems I’m having with my teenager, it sounds like I’m just trying to establish some commonality so we can relate to one another. But what I’m really doing is shifting the topic of conversation onto me and away from you. Yeah. And showing I care more about me than you. And so if you tell me you’re having a problem with your teenager or whatever, I might say, yeah, I’m having a problem with mine. But tell me about what you’re experiencing. And then on any subject, whether it’s across political difference or relational difference, it’s always a good idea to ask three times to ask the question one way, then ask another, and then ask it another way. And it’s like, what am I missing here? Tell me more about that, because we think we’re more clear than we are, and we think we listen better than we really do.

David Brooks 00:20:57  So if I can ask you three times and then do a thing called the looping, which is paraphrasing back to you what you just said, then we’ll be sure that we, we really do understand each other and that looping can be awkward. Like I’m summarizing what you just said, but you’ll be astounded how often you get it wrong and how often you misheard what the other person just said.

Eric Zimmer 00:21:18  I have a couple questions in there about that very specific thing. I mean, I think the topping thing, I know I do it. I mean, the minute I read that, I’m like, oh yeah, I kind of do it all the time, right? And I do think that there is a genuine desire to sort of connect over a shared thing. And I also understand completely how it’s sort of shifting back to me. And so it’s one to kind of watch for. And I think there’s probably an art to when you sort of say, yeah, me too. And when you step back and let them tell their story and again, kind of, you know, I’ll go back to my 12 step things, right? If I had just said, I’m a heroin addict, and I just explained all about being a heroin addict, and that other person had sat over there and just asked me questions about it, it would have been a far different experience than when they go, yeah, me too.

David Brooks 00:22:03  Right?

Eric Zimmer 00:22:03  That’s true. Right? Like, you know, I know what that’s like. So I think there’s probably an art to like, how do you do that? Well, where you can sort of say, I understand you because I’ve been there and I’m not making this about me, you know? It’s right.

David Brooks 00:22:16  Yeah. That’s very well put. I hadn’t thought about that complexity, but I totally agree with somebody walked through the experience you have. It’s a very different conversation. Yeah. And so then you can say, well, did you feel like this in the morning? Did you like.

Eric Zimmer 00:22:29  Yes.

David Brooks 00:22:29  Here’s like I’m talking from some awareness here. Yeah. And empathy is three different skills. And the first skill is mirroring the ability to catch the emotion. But then the second skill is mental. It’s taking the experiences I had and then trying to imagine what you had. And that’s what I’m talking about here mentally. It’s the ability to use my experience to illuminate yours. And then the final skill is caring.

David Brooks 00:22:55  It’s the ability to accurately do what you need to do to feel cared for. And so that’s like you may be having an anxiety attack. And if I had an anxiety attack, I might want a glass of wine.

Eric Zimmer 00:23:07  You just referenced asking a question three times, and you also referenced sort of this looping process. So I’m going to start with the looping process and then go back to the three questions. My partner Jenny and I often debate this looping thing, a version of it. Right. It’s called Different Things. And she believes that it’s very important that you often use the exact words somebody used going back, because those words carry a resonance and an importance to them. And I’m always much more like, well, if I just summarize it in my own words, it kind of shows I’ve got it and I understand what they’re saying. What do you think about that? I’m just kind of curious, your thought on that or what you’ve learned from people who know a lot about this?

David Brooks 00:23:51  Yeah, it’s funny you say that.

David Brooks 00:23:52  So I think about this a lot, and I think I’m my instinct is more on your side that if you repeat the exact words back then it sounds like you’re a therapist and not a friend. But so my instinct is to paraphrase, but as you’re saying, that I was very lucky early in my career to be on a TV show with Jim Lehrer called the NewsHour on PBS, and Jim’s method was you would give an answer, and then he would pick out the three essential words and repeat it back to you. Those three words and him repeating those three words was an invitation for you to go deeper. Yeah. Or else he would take those three words. And my partner was Mark shields. He would throw those three words to Mark. So I think there’s a very good point that there is if you can pick out the three crucial words, that becomes an invitation to go deeper. And so just as I’m thinking of this off the top of my head, I had a conversation with a young person who was leaving her current employment and then going off to, as she said, find herself and travel the world.

David Brooks 00:24:48  And I didn’t have the presence of mind at that moment to stop the conversation at that moment and say, find yourself. What do you mean by that? And so I let the moment pass, and I’ve now appreciated something I didn’t point out in the book because I really didn’t think about it. Those moments when something important has just been said. And if you can pause at that moment and go deeper at that moment, and it strikes me that using the exact words as the person used is an effective way to suck. Let’s pause here. Let’s let’s go a little deeper on this point.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:16  Yeah, yeah, that’s actually a great idea. Those three words. Because you’re right. If you just say back exactly what they said, you start to look like a therapist or a Saturday Night Live skit or just something that’s not real. You become robotic, right? It becomes a method, not a feeling or a deep connection. And yet, as you pointed out, you know, the words can be important.

Eric Zimmer 00:25:37  And you said that we want to ask the question three times. Can you give me an example of a question I might ask, and then how I might follow it on three times without asking the exact same question three times? Or again, it looking like I’m using a method like, because what you’re talking about is moving around their answer and looking at it from there and looking at it from there. What are some of the ways we might do that? Very practically, because I can’t quite think of how to do that in all cases.

David Brooks 00:26:04  So the hardest conversations I have these days are conversations across difference or inequality. And so I walk into a room. You know, I work at the New York Times. I work at the Atlantic. I’ve been teaching at Yale University. I come with a lot of elite baggage. When I walk into a room. Yeah. And so a lot of people naturally see me as whether they’re on the right or the left. They see me as part of a system that is holding them down.

David Brooks 00:26:28  And so those are hard conversations, because sometimes in the way they approach me, there’s criticism, there’s blame. You’re enmeshed in systems that are awful. And so my first instinct in those conversations is to get all defensive and say, oh, I’m not part of the problem. I’m part of the solution, or here’s what I’m dealing with. And I’ve learned it’s best at those moments to resist that temptation to get defensive. Yeah. And that my first job is to stand in your standpoint, the Scottish have this word, Ken, which is a naval term for the whole world that you can see from your ship. We have the phrase that’s beyond my Ken. And so my job is to get inside your Ken. And so if they say, well, you’re part of the establishment guy, the guy come up to me in the airport the other day and said, you’re part of the establishment. And here’s what I should have said. I didn’t have the presence of mind, but I probably should have said, what do you mean by establishment? And how do you feel pinned down or ignored or judged by the establishment? What kind of establishment would you like to see? Or do we not need one? And suddenly there’s the little train of thought, and suddenly we’re not critiquing each other.

David Brooks 00:27:31  We’re exploring a point of view. Yep. And two things I like to when there’s disagreement. One fun thing to do is find the disagreement under the disagreement. Like we may superficially disagree about whether Donald Trump’s a good guy or not, but there’s probably a philosophical reason, deep down, that we’re disagreeing. So let’s go off and search together for that fundamental disagreement under the disagreement. And then the other thing I’ve learned in hard conversations is to pay attention to the under conversation that when we’re talking, there’s the nominal subject that we’re talking about, whether it’s politics or whatever, the culture war. But there’s also the other conversation, which is the flow of emotion between us as we’re talking with every comment, you or I are making each other feel a little more threatened or a little more safe. And so if I ask you to go into detail about your point of view, I may not ever agree with you, but at least I’m showing you the respect of curiosity about your point of view. And there’s a great book called Crucial Conversations by a whole bunch of authors.

Eric Zimmer 00:28:30  And it’s funny, I was just about to reference that book, get something from it, because I love that book.

David Brooks 00:28:35  Yeah, it’s a great book, but one of the things they say in that book is in any conversation, respect is like air. When it’s present, nobody notices. When it’s absent, it’s all anybody can think about. So I’m going to be showing you the respect of asking you three times, what did you have from that book?

Eric Zimmer 00:28:50  Well, a similar idea, which is about this idea of safety. And that once safety leaves a difficult conversation, you can’t go anywhere. And my experience is once safety leaves a difficult Conversation. Everything that happens after that is injurious. It injures each other. Right. And you know, what’s sort of amazing is sometimes in certain relationships or in certain fraught political conversations, that safety leaves the room immediately. Like my ex-wife, I remember I was reading that book. I was like, okay, we got to figure out how to communicate better, right? I’m going to get safety.

Eric Zimmer 00:29:24  You know, we’re going to establish safety, and I’d establish safety. And then, I mean, I swear it was like a minute and a half later it’s all gone again. And I’m like, how is this possible? But it’s because we had so, so many conversations that we did not say, oh, safety’s gone, let’s stop. Right? We just plowed onwards and those conversations damage the relationship again and again and again and again. But it’s really hard in the moment of emotion to stop and go, oh, wait. Safety’s gone. Nothing good can happen here. Nothing good can happen. It’s really hard to pause and step back from that. So that was one of the things from that book that really has always been illuminating to me. And that’s sort of what you were just talking about, which is that monitoring the under conversation, whether it’s for respect, whether it’s for safety, you know, and when that starts, either respect or safety is gone. That has to be fixed before the conversation can carry on in any way that will be less than destructive.

David Brooks 00:30:22  Yeah. They have a phrase.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:23  Better than destruction.

David Brooks 00:30:24  When safety goes away, our motivations deteriorate. And so at first.

Eric Zimmer 00:30:28  That’s a great yes.

David Brooks 00:30:29  We were motivated to like, share our point of view on something. Suddenly, I’m motivated to show I’m smarter than you or more powerful than you. And so the motivations are deteriorated. The only thing you can do, as you suggest is, is like, stop the conversation. And they have a murmur from one of the experts. I spoke to a term called splitting, and that’s where I clarify what my motivations are here. No, I wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to understand what your point of view a little better. So you say what you’re not good trying to do, and then you say what you are trying to do. And that may not, as you say, save the relationship or save the conversation. Once contempt enters the room, it’s really hard to get out of the room. And yeah, but at least it gives you your best shot at recovering something.

Eric Zimmer 00:31:31  Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What’s one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it’s there. You’ve tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You’re not alone in this. And I’ve identified six major saboteurs of self-control. Things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here’s the good news you can outsmart them. And I’ve put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now. At one, you feed and take the first step towards getting back on track. There’s another thing that you talked about in difficult conversations, and one of them is keep the gem statement at the center. Say a little bit more about that. I think it applies to what we’re talking about with safety and respect, but say more about it.

David Brooks 00:32:31  Yeah, I learned that one from a mediator.

David Brooks 00:32:32  It’s if we’re having a disagreement, we may just like, say, my brother and I are having a disagreement about her dad’s health care. There’s usually something deep down that we agree upon. So we both want what’s best for our dad. And if we can keep that thing, we agree upon the gem statement at the center. Then we preserve a relationship. Amid disagreement, it becomes clear we’re just arguing over means, not ends. I think that’s just a valuable way to soften a disagreement.

Eric Zimmer 00:32:56  Yeah, I agree also. And I think in certain situations in my life where there’s been problems in a relationship, you know, the gem statement that we can go back to is, or at least in my case, has been we love each other and we care about each other, and we’re trying to resolve a problem. And going back to that often is very helpful. I love that phrase. When safety goes away, our motivations deteriorate, right? And the gem statement is really a way, at least in my mind, of recovering that safety.

Eric Zimmer 00:33:21  Yeah, I love you. I care about you. That’s the core. That’s what we’re after here, you know? And now we’re we’re talking about an issue that is in there. But it’s not about that core idea.

David Brooks 00:33:33  Yeah. I once ran into a blog post about how to save a relationship that’s troubled, and it was filled with good advice. I can’t even remember who did it, but one of them was like, you know, they tell you, never go to bed mad. You should always resolve your fights before you go to bed. And her advice was, no, just go to bed. You’ll you’ll wake up. You’ll be rested, you’ll make pancakes. It’ll be a lot better. Yeah, I remember another. Her piece of advice was never complained to her mom or complained to his mom because his mom will forgive you, but your mom never will. So pitch to somebody else’s mom, not your own mom. And another one was, boast about your partner, a friend, and have them over here.

David Brooks 00:34:09  You boasting? Yes. People like to be boasted about.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:12  Yeah, yeah, that. Don’t go to bed. Mad is one of the worst pieces of advice I’ve ever heard. I mean, I heard that advice and I would try that at points, and I was like, I can’t tell you how many disastrous conversations came from trying to follow that advice, because it’s 3:00 in the morning, you’re both exhausted, your motivations have deteriorated, and it never has turned out well for me.

David Brooks 00:34:32  Right? No. Same.

Eric Zimmer 00:34:34  You have a chapter in the book called How to Save a Friend Who’s in Despair. I thought it was a great chapter. I would wonder if you could just share some of the key points for, you know, how to save a friend in despair, and maybe what you even mean by that. Save. You know what? What do you mean by save a friend? And but let’s just talk a little bit about how do we work with, you know, people in our lives that we care about who are in the midst of really rough times?

David Brooks 00:34:59  Yeah.

David Brooks 00:34:59  Now that I think about it, I poorly named that chapter I hadn’t thought about till this second, but it should have been how to sit with a friend who’s in despair because saving is beyond your ability, I guarantee you.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:08  But people want to read about how to save. That’s going to bring them in the door. You know. So.

David Brooks 00:35:12  Okay.

Eric Zimmer 00:35:13  It’s okay. Yeah, I think I think it’s still good.

David Brooks 00:35:16  Yeah. So my oldest friend in the world was a guy named Peter, and he had was a wonderful guy. Cheerful, playful, sporting, good looking. He had, like, a wonderful life. He had great career, wonderful wife, great kids. And at age 57, he gets hit by just a severe, severe depression. And so I thought I knew what depression was, but I didn’t really know what depression was. I learned that a person who’s fortunate enough not to have suffered from depression cannot understand what depression is by extrapolating from their own moments of sadness. It’s not like that.

David Brooks 00:35:47  And the best description of depression I read was from another friend of mine who suffered from it, who said, a depression is a malfunction in the instrument we use to perceive reality, and so reality just appears very different. And my friend said I had these voices in my head that were lying to me. They were telling me, you’re not worth anything. Nobody would miss it if you’re gone. And so depression is just different than sadness. And I made a couple of mistakes early on with Pete. The first one, I tried to give him ideas about how to get out of his depression, you know, used to go on these service trips to Vietnam. You should do that again. And I learned later that if you’re offering ideas to someone who’s depressed, all you’re doing is showing you don’t get it because it’s not ideas they are lacking. And so that was the first mistake I made trying to get them out of depression. The second mistake I made was what psychologists call positive reframing, which is to try to get them to see all the things about their life that are great.

David Brooks 00:36:44  Oh, you have a great family. You have great kids, great career. When you do that to someone who’s depressed, all you do is remind them they’re not enjoying the things that are palpably enjoyable so they feel worse. And so I think I eventually learned that your job as a friend of a depressed person is one to acknowledge the reality and to just say, this sucks. I’m here with you. For you. I’m not going away. There’s nothing I’m doing. I’m just sticking around. And I wish, in retrospect, I’d sent them just little touch points, like a little text random blue that said, I’m here. I’m thinking about, you know, no response necessary. Yeah, just those little touch points. I wish I told them I’m proud of your strength, that you’re still here because you’re in a lot of pain. You are fighting this with bravery and courage. And then Viktor Frankl, who wrote the great book Man’s Search for meaning, he would say to people who were in this situation that life is not stopped expecting things from you.

David Brooks 00:37:42  And that sounds kind of harsh, But he found it very useful that when somebody was really thinking of ending their life to be told, no, you still have some jobs here on this earth, so stick around. Yeah, and that sounds counterintuitive, but I think it actually works. And so we lost Pete. He’s come to the depression, but it was a hard education in how to talk to and not talk to someone. And ultimately the words had limited use. Yeah. Yeah. And nothing I said made a big difference. Pro or con particularly. Yeah. But learning had to be present through those moments is one of the most generous things you can do. And and in most cases, I think really a beautiful act, whatever the outcomes.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:25  Yeah. Well, I’m deeply sorry to hear that he didn’t make it. And, you know, there’s no way that we don’t carry some sort of like, what could I have done differently? And it sounds like you’ve gotten to the point where you sort of realize not a whole lot.

Eric Zimmer 00:38:39  Right. Having been in the recovery community for at least the last 25 years. You know, we’ve lost a lot of people to addiction. You know, a lot of people who never find their way back. And yeah, it’s a humbling process. It’s it’s an extraordinarily humbling process. And to realize that I believe there are things you can do that make things worse, particularly with an addict like you can make things worse for an addict, which is generally to continually shame and scold them. That will actually make it worse.

David Brooks 00:39:06  Because they’ve come to feel hopeless about their situation or their own efficacy to deal with the situation.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:11  Yeah, and addict has plenty of shame, right? What an addict needs is the ability to actually come out for help. And it’s an incredibly difficult thing. And so if you are constantly shaming or criticizing or yelling at the addict, it almost forces them into a defensive position like we talked about earlier. Like, right. It’s natural somebody comes at you, you go into defense.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:32  And a big part of getting somebody to the point of being willing to begin recovery is they have to lose their denial and their defenses enough to do it. But if you’re constantly helping them, erect them. Right.

David Brooks 00:39:45  Yeah. Right.

Eric Zimmer 00:39:45  Right. You know, it doesn’t work. And people think, you know, they addicts feel no shame about what they’re doing, but they feel tremendous, overwhelming shame. It is one of the engines of addiction. And so the more shame you put in, it’s like putting gasoline in a high powered engine. Right. And so, you know, those are some of the reasons. Now, again, even if that’s what we’re doing, it’s not our fault that the addict ends up where they are. Right. It’s not ours. But but there are things we can do that are more or less potentially helpful. But at the end of the day, it’s beyond us. You know. Yeah.

David Brooks 00:40:17  That’s how I came to think of it. Like especially talking to his wife and kids.

David Brooks 00:40:21  Like the thing was bigger than Pete. The monster was bigger than Pete, and it was certainly going to be bigger than us. And he had the great carry at a loving family. But the mountain monster was just big.

Eric Zimmer 00:40:31  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I’ve dealt with clinical depression in my adult life. And I mean, I think in, in my addiction sort of were a response to each other. And so I am familiar with depression. I have friends who can get very, very depressed. You know that thing you said about don’t offer ideas because it’s not a lack of ideas, right? It’s a lack of energy. It’s a lack of ability to do. I’ll share this because he’s listening, because he’s editing this show right now. But, you know, my best friend Chris, who’s also the audio engineer who’s been on this show with me for ten years, I mean, there have been multiple times over the last 15 years where we nearly lost him to cocaine addiction. I mean, I really literally thought multiple times, like, he’s not going to live through this.

Eric Zimmer 00:41:12  And it’s just it’s heartbreaking. It is so hard to have someone you love and care about that much. I’m saying this to you, but I’m also saying it to all the family members out there of children who are depressed, or children who are addicted, or your your spouse or I mean, it’s it’s really, really hard to to to go through that. And it’s also really, really important to find a way to take care of yourself through that, because you you can’t be of any benefit to anybody else. If you were self-destructing and being around somebody who’s deeply depressed or who’s an addict, being really, really close to them, if you don’t have the proper frameworks and support will make you crazy. I mean, it’s it’s why Al-Anon exists, right? Because the the spouses of addicts tend to go crazy, right? It makes you insane because you’re dealing with somebody who’s acting insane, you know, like, yeah, those are difficult things. So I’m sorry to hear about your friend. Are there other things that, you know out of that chapter that you feel like would be valuable to add to this?

David Brooks 00:42:12  Yeah, I mean, I resonate when you said it had an effect on me because a lot of our calls were over, Covid said they were phone calls, and that was already a deeply disorienting time.

David Brooks 00:42:21  Yeah. So that was the time I felt most close to depression. I began to think, is, yeah, is it catching?

Eric Zimmer 00:42:27  But, well, you know, maybe.

David Brooks 00:42:31  Yeah. I guess I it helped me, frankly, the only thing I’d add and I know less about this than you do, and probably a lot of people in the audience. There’s some books that really helped me. There’s a William Styron book called Darkness Visible, and it just to get inside the mind of a depressed person was an education for me. And so I read a bunch of books because I am who I am. And I learned, I learned that depression is far weirder than I thought it was.

Eric Zimmer 00:42:56  Yeah. Have you read The Noonday Demon by Andrew Solomon?

David Brooks 00:42:59  I read that, too. Yeah. That was a beautiful book.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:01  Oh, he’s been a guest at several times in this show, and it’s such a beautiful man. And that book is is so, so good.

David Brooks 00:43:08  Yeah. He talks about the weirdness of depression.

David Brooks 00:43:10  He says, I, I was terrified of taking a shower. At the same time, I knew showers are not scary.

Eric Zimmer 00:43:17  Yeah. Yeah, he’s really good. I want to go back to something that we were talking about a little bit before, and I don’t remember the exact context, but it was about, you know, listening to somebody versus giving advice. Sort of. That was the general thing you referenced in your book. Ethan Kross and Ethan was a guest on the show, and he wrote a great book called chatter. And there was one thing from it that really, really stood out to me because it’s a question I’ve often thought about a lot. And, you know, it seems that there’s two models that we hear about dealing with somebody who’s struggling. Model one is the one that we’re all sort of naturally given to, which is you give them advice, you do positive reframing you. How did you think about it this way? Did you like we get in and we try and fix it.

Eric Zimmer 00:44:01  And we’ve heard an awful lot about how that’s not good. You know, the women in our lives, if we’re listening, will tell us, like, stop trying to fix it, you know? And again, I’m making a gender thing there, but I’m just speaking for my own life and men and women that I have known, you know. So the other model is you just sit with the person and you sympathize and you go, oh, yeah, your boss. What an asshole. Like, I mean, such a, you know, and you do that and what Ethan said, and I can’t speak to the data or the studies that he referenced, but what he said was that Actually, the people who get the most out of supportive friendships are getting both those things. Their very first, getting that deep understanding, being heard, sympathized, empathized with, supported. I’m on your side 100% right. And then at some juncture, perhaps they’re getting offered alternate perspectives, you know, and this is what I valued so much about my early friendships in AA was that when done right, they had both those things.

Eric Zimmer 00:45:00  When done wrong, it was just somebody telling you that’s one of your character defects coming up. And you, you know, and you’re like, well, okay. But yeah, I mean but that other perspective is so valuable. But I also think we can’t take that other perspective. And until we feel deeply seen, heard and understood. And so I always think of that study that Ethan referenced, because it speaks to me to a sort of a middle ground here of how we work with people who are struggling or, you know.

David Brooks 00:45:26  Yeah, yeah, that resonates with me. I think the way I’d phrase it is, as first, people need to be understood before they’ll change. Yeah, they’re not going to. They’re not going to change if they feel misunderstood or threatened or unsafe. And so you do have to show that unconditional positive regard. I guess the way I would say it is, I used to think wise people were like Yoda or Dumbledore or Solomon like, filled with maxims and mottoes that would solve all your problems.

David Brooks 00:45:49  Tell you what to do. We all want the smart person come in, tell us what to do. But I no longer think that’s what wisdom is. I think a great quality of wisdom is the ability to be tenderly receptive. So it’s to receive what you’re sending. It’s almost like being a coach and not a professor. You’re there to see somebody in a noble struggle. You’re there to see somebody negotiating the contradictions in life that we all have to negotiate the between intimacy and freedom. And so there’s just trade offs we have to make. And then you’re there. And this is most important, I think, to try to be a story editor. And so you want to know. Tell me the story. If someone’s in trouble, it’s probably because their story isn’t working for them anymore. And often it’s because they get causation wrong. And so they blame themselves for things that are not their fault, and they blame others for things that are their fault. And so what therapists are, and I think what good friends can be is story editors.

David Brooks 00:46:49  Let’s get you to retell the story of your life in a way that you’re the hero here, and in a way that explains to you what you should be doing. You can’t know what you’re going to do until you know what story you’re a part of. And Isaac Denison, the writer, said, any pains can be born if they can put into the form of a story. So if you know what your long the whole path of your life is going to be, what the narrative of your life is going to be, then the current moment is just a point in time. Yeah. And you’ll be able to get on track with that longer narrative and you’ll come back better. And so I do think it’s that the wise person is not giving advice to the wise person, is helping the other person retell their own story through prompts, sometimes by, you know, you can’t have a friendship. That’s all compassion without confrontation. Sometimes there has to be a little confrontation in there, too, to say, didn’t you leave this out of the story you just told me?

Eric Zimmer 00:47:44  Yes.

David Brooks 00:47:45  And don’t you need to confront this? And then they have to tell a larger story in a more accurate story about themselves.

Eric Zimmer 00:48:12  You said several things in there that are so good, but I love that idea of being a story editor that’s actually, you know, kind of what it is. And element of a story is what perspective you’re taking. Right. And so in that case, if you’re a story editor, you’re also a prospective editor, which is kind of what we need. And one of my favorite big questions, deepest, most valuable and important questions. And it’s not like a dinner party conversation. It’s a question that you use in response to what’s happening in your life is, what am I making this mean? Right? Right. I mean, because Crucial Conversations lays out very clearly that part of the problem in every disagreement is there’s an objective fact, like if you were rolling a camera, you know, the classic example, it’s easy to use and we all laugh about it, but we all understand it is like, you know, the husband who doesn’t take out the trash, or your wife who doesn’t take out the trash, whatever.

Eric Zimmer 00:49:03  If a camera was rolling, what it would see is that a person did not take out the trash. That’s the objective fact. Beyond that, though, it’s all about what we make it mean. Right. You know, and being able to ask ourselves, what am I making this mean? And what else might it mean to me is one of the most powerful and deep questions you can have. And it’s very helpful often to be able to do that. What else could it mean thing in partnership or in community, you know, with someone else a discussion?

David Brooks 00:49:32  Yeah. Aldous Huxley, the writer, has a phrase experience is not what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you. Yeah. And that’s pointing to that subjective layer. What does that mean to you? And so, you know, if husband doesn’t take out the trash, the question is why is that a trigger for you. Why is that an issue for you. And so there are all these things that are happening inside of us.

David Brooks 00:49:52  And we need somebody to ask us why. Yeah. Like, you seem to have it all and yet you feel inferior. What’s that about? Why is celebrating holiday so important for you? What was in your family that made that so important for you? You look like an insider, but you feel like an outsider. Yeah. Where did that come from? Yeah. And so those are all questions designed to ask, like, why is this triggering you? Like, let’s see what’s in the background here and see where you actually came from and where you are now. I would say that in researching this book, one of the things I learned and was amazed by is how subjective all our points of view are, how we really are constructing our own reality. And just give one example. A guy named Dennis Proffitt teaches at UVA, and he asks college students to look at the hills on the UVA campus and say, how steep do you think those hills? And people tend to overestimate the steepness? Like it’s a 5% grade hill.

David Brooks 00:50:42  They’ll say that’s 20%. And then one day all their data came back from the research and the students got the hills steepness exactly right. And they were like, wow, why did that happen? And it turns out that day, the researchers happened to ask a bunch of students who were members of the women’s soccer team. So these were very fit D1 athletes. And so when they looked at a hill, it didn’t seem very steep to them because there was no problem for them to run up that hill. And so the lesson here is, the way you see a situation depends on what you can do in the situation. So a fit person sees less steep hills than an unfit person. A happy person sees less steep hills than a sad person. Someone with a backpack sees steeper hills than somebody without a backpack. And this may all seem trivial, but it comes to seem very important to me. So a poor person when I was teaching at Yale, a poor person who lives in town, does not see the same campus as a student at Yale who has badge as an access to all the buildings.

David Brooks 00:51:39  A poor person walks into Neiman Marcus. She’s a very different store than a rich person. And so these are what’s called affordances. And the way we perceive the world depends on what we can do in the world. And so our economic status, our social status just has tremendous power over the way we see reality. And we have to be appreciative of how subjective everybody’s viewpoints really are.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:00  So that was the way you see a situation depends on what you can do in that situation.

David Brooks 00:52:04  Yeah. It was originally formed by a psychologist actually 40 or 50 years ago. And it’s called affordances. You do what the situation affords. So if if you’re a hunter and you have a bow and arrow, you see a different field than if you have a rifle. You see a much smaller field.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:18  Well, it’s interesting to think of that in a psychological sense, right? You know, the way you see a situation depends on what you can do in that situation or what you believe you can do in that situation.

Eric Zimmer 00:52:30  Now, again, obviously, the Neiman Marcus example or the Yale campus example between a rich and a poor person, that’s not a psychological thing. Right now we may layer things on top of it. That’s a reality, right? But I’m thinking back to depression, right. And I’m thinking back to one of the main things that we referenced, which is it’s not about having ideas, it’s about having efficacy to do them. It’s about believing you can do them at all. And so my experience of depression is the way I see a situation depends on what I can do in this situation. And what I’m capable of doing feels very, very small. So I feel very, very small, right? You know.

David Brooks 00:53:07  I imagine if you’re an alcoholic, when you see a city block, you see liquor stores.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:12  Yes you do. Yep, lots of them.

David Brooks 00:53:15  The opportunity. Where am I going to get the next drink? And yeah, that’s partly but I think what you’re saying is actually a little deeper than that, that your vantage point can be filled with a sense of in efficacy or efficacy.

David Brooks 00:53:26  Yes, yes. And if you’ve led a blessed life, you probably think you can walk into a room and you can handle whatever you find there.

Eric Zimmer 00:53:32  Yeah, well, there’s that phrase, I can’t take it, right. That’s an internal phrase that many people use with a difficult situation. I can’t take it. I can’t do it, you know, and I’ve gone through some difficult things emotionally recently, and I’ve had moments where the thought pattern is, I can’t take this, it’s too much, or I’m just utterly heartbroken, you know? And there’s a balance in there of allowing the emotion to be what it is, but not limiting what my future and potential responses to that emotion might be. You know, I won’t always react the way I react today, right? There’s this balance of it’s that old saying, like, if you believe you can’t do something, you’re right. You know, in that you bring it about to a certain degree. And so even in an emotional sense, I do think that’s one of the as we mentioned, the primary engine of despair and depression is a form of despair.

Eric Zimmer 00:54:23  Is that belief that I can’t make this different?

David Brooks 00:54:26  Right? Yeah. And I guess the times I’ve felt those levels of suffering. I remember once this was about ten years ago, and I was in a dark period, and somebody gave me a book by a guy named Henry Now and a theologian, and he says, you need to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you. And I’m like, screw that. Yeah, I’m just getting out of the pain. Like. And so I think we should never romanticize pain and suffering. Yes. And I myself have felt it with an earlier when my the first love of my life dumped me. I was, like, filled with narcissistic pride that. Oh, look how much pain I can feel. Yeah. You know. Yes. Oh, I’m really feeling this. I’m deep guy. but on the other hand, you know, I do think those moments of suffering. And one of my favorite phrases is from a theologian named Paul Tillich who was writing in, like the 1950s.

David Brooks 00:55:15  He says those moments of suffering interrupt our life, and they remind us, were not the people we thought we were. They carved through what you thought was the floor of the basement of your soul, and reveal a cavity below, and you carve through that and reveal another cavity below. And so you see into depths of yourself you don’t see when you’re happy, and you realize that only spiritual and relational food will fill those depths. Yeah. There’s a phrase you can either be broken by suffering or broken open. Yeah, yeah. And it’s hard. But our goal here is to be broken open, to approach the world with even more sympathy and wisdom and credibility, frankly. And there’s a great saying I have. I’m going to butcher it. It’s not Thornton Wilder. I put it in the book. He says, where would your power be without the wound you carry because of what you’ve gone through? He’s saying you have credibility. Your low voice, I think he says, trembles in the hearts of men in love service.

David Brooks 00:56:09  Only the wounded soldiers can serve. And so that sentiment, I think, is, is what you get out of the suffering. And if you just shut it off and deny the suffering, then you’re not going to get that power to bring with you for the rest of your life.

Eric Zimmer 00:56:21  Yeah. I mean, and you may have sense from the way I’ve had several of these conversations, I’m a big believer sort of in the middle way, you know, and it is that don’t shut down the pain and ignore it, but you can drown in it if you’re not careful. Right. And you can over romanticize it. And knowing that pain can lead to healing and redemption and openness up in new ways is a beautiful thing. And it’s the worst thing to say to somebody who’s in deep pain. Well, this is an opportunity for growth. You’re like, I’m going to I’m going to throttle you. And yet, even in the midst of it, I do find that if I can put even 2%, 5% of my mind on that, if I can know that my story is being edited right now, right, in a powerful way, it does give me a little bit of hope while feeling the difficult emotions in the pain.

David Brooks 00:57:05  Right? Yeah. And sometimes your mind just needs to create new models of the world. And those transitions are hard. They’re filled with grief, but your mind is just doing its thing.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:15  Do you just have an exceptional memory for quotes that you’ve read, or do you actually spend time like that? Paul Tillich quote was a fairly long quote that you just trotted out. Do you spend time like trying to, like, really memorize the things that are really meaningful to you, or do you just happen to have that gift?

David Brooks 00:57:31  I don’t know. I definitely don’t think I have a memory gift, but for things that are important to me that I’ve thought about a lot of, I can at least paraphrase them pretty well.

Eric Zimmer 00:57:38  Yeah. My ability to return a quote that I know I’ve heard and that was meaningful feels semi non-existent. I usually can find the idea, you know, like I can remember like Ethan Cross said something about that and it really meant something to me. But I’ve just been impressed too, several times in this conversation where I’m like, wow, that’s pretty good at that.

David Brooks 00:57:55  Well, maybe, yeah, I had a friend who could do, like, recite long hundreds of lines of poetry and stuff like that, and that’s out of my league.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:02  Yeah, I was memorizing poetry for a while every morning. I’ve kind of gotten away from it, but it was a great little thing to do because I loved to be able to just be out walking and bring a poem to mind and walk with it and sit with it and not have to pull out a piece of paper. I want to go back to wisdom for a second, because you’ve talked about wisdom a variety of different ways in your past and your previous books, and I just want to read something you wrote and then ask you to kind of maybe elaborate on it. And you say, wisdom is in a body of information. It’s the moral quality of knowing what you don’t know and figuring out a way to handle your ignorance, uncertainty, and limitation. That’s a beautiful phrase and very counterintuitive to the way we would think of wisdom.

Eric Zimmer 00:58:44  Say more about that.

David Brooks 00:58:45  Yeah, well, our major intellectual flaw is overestimating what we know, and we all think we’re smarter than we are, and we know more about a situation than it is. But situations like people are infinitely complex. The trade I admire most is humility. Humility is not thinking lowly of yourself. My favorite definition of humility. It’s seeing yourself accurately from a position of other centeredness. And so it’s the ability to know what you know and know what you don’t know. Know what you’re good at. Know what you’re bad at. And so Abraham Lincoln, I think, was a genuinely humble man. But he knew he was pretty special in some ways. Like he knew he was great with words. He knew he was wise. He knew he could take toughness, but he never thought he was master of events. He was willing to tolerate other people’s foibles. One of my favorite stories about him is there was a general who was a total jerk in my eyes, named McClellan, and Lincoln wanted to get into a fight more, to be more aggressive on the battlefield.

David Brooks 00:59:40  And so McClellan wouldn’t come visit him in the white House even though he was present in the States. So Lincoln and his aide, John Hay, went to McClellan’s house, and McClellan keeps them waiting in a waiting room for 45 minutes. And you can imagine keeping the president waiting. And then after about 45 minutes, the butler comes down and says, general McClellan has decided to retire for the night, so he just flat out refused to see his commander in chief. And John Hey is indignant like, you can’t treat the president this way. And Lincoln’s like. Listen, we’re here to fight the war. My personal ego is not at stake here. I don’t matter that much. We just somehow need to get him to fight more aggressively. And so he was not bothered at all. And to be not at stake. And to know what’s really important and what’s really not important. That’s part of wisdom. And that really is a quality of humility.

Eric Zimmer 01:00:31  Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.

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Eric Zimmer 01:01:15  You’ve also said that we can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but we can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom. Wisdom isn’t a body of information, you know. And sort of back to that same phrase you used about ignorance, uncertainty and limitation. You know, I’m just fascinated by wisdom because I think it’s the thing that people often attribute to me, which then makes me go, well, hang on, let’s go before I’m even willing to take that mantle at all.

Eric Zimmer 01:01:40  What are we actually talking about? But it’s also one of the things that I most deeply feel like I want in life, right? I mean, actually, what I really want is the ability to respond wisely. I don’t want to be wise. So what I want the ability to respond wisely in all the situations in my life, and I think that’s what you’re speaking to when you say, what do I do? How do I handle my ignorance, uncertainty and limitation? Because the times that we don’t respond wisely is because we’re lost in one of those things. Or as the Buddhists would say, not only that, we’re also lost in greed and hatred or grasping an aversion. Pick your terms there. Right? But those are the ways that we don’t respond wisely.

David Brooks 01:02:18  Yeah. And I would say wisdom is knowing about other people. Knowledge is knowing about things, but wisdom is knowing about people in their situations. And so if you have sat doing the show or gone through the experiences you’ve gone through, you probably have not come out with that with empty hands, you probably have come out with some wisdom.

David Brooks 01:02:34  What you were just saying. I resonate so much with that. I think I’ve discovered I may not be the greatest intellectual in the world, but I like to teach. If I can find something that I found useful in my own life and I can share it with somebody, and then they write it down. That’s about as good as it gets for me. If I can offer some words that other people find useful. And there’s a saying about writers that were beggars who teach other beggars where we found bread. And so if I find something that worked for me, maybe it’ll work for you. And so I share it and that that’s like the core of what gets me up in the morning.

Eric Zimmer 01:03:07  Yep. Certainly. I feel like that’s what I am about to, you know, how can I share what I found elsewhere? That is helpful. Any final words on seeing other people or being seen any like big thing that you felt like was really important? That Eric just completely missed the boat on that you feel like you’d like to leave as we wrap up here.

David Brooks 01:03:27  The only thing I’d mention is it’s not only fun to be seen when people tell me stories of times they were seen. Their eyes light up their everyday stories. It’s like a lady. She was working a homeless shelter. Early Covid. She comes home, she’s overwhelmed. She gets home and starts hugging her dog and crying. And her husband just sits down next to her and he says, here are the six chores I’m going to do while you’re slammed at work. And that’s not profound. But he understood what she needed at that moment. And one day I was sitting in my dining room and my wife walks in and she doesn’t notice me. She’s just looking at a flower, an orchid we keep by the front door and I have this sensation sweep across my mind. I really know her. I know her through and through. It wasn’t like the personality types I would know about her at that moment. It was just the ebb and flow of her being, the harmonies of her music. And it was that moment of connection with a family member or somebody.

David Brooks 01:04:19  It was just very profound moment to really know somebody else. It’s so it’s fun to be the scene. It’s also really fun to be the singer and to have that knowledge of another human being. It’s just one of the most profound experiences you can have.

Eric Zimmer  01:04:31  That’s beautiful. Well, David, thank you so much. This has been such a wonderful conversation. I would love to go much longer, but we are out of time. But you and I will continue a little bit longer in the post-show conversation. And we’re going to talk about a woman named Edie Hilversum and a piece you wrote for a magazine recently, and really about a female way of relating to great difficulty that involves attention. And there’s a lot of great stuff in there. And so we’ll explore that in the post-show conversation. Or as listeners, if you’d like, access to that ad free episodes, the joy of supporting something that means something to you. You can go to one you feed, and we’d love to have you as part of our community. David, thanks so much.

David Brooks 01:05:11  Great pleasure. I truly enjoyed the conversation. I learned a lot.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:13  Thank you.

Eric Zimmer 01:05:14  Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking. I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity. But we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community.