Lee
[00:00:00] I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
David
We live in a time that's weirdly dehumanizing.
Lee
That's New York Times op-ed writer, David Brooks.
David
We're in the middle of some sort of social crisis.
Lee
And yet, his depiction of the socio-political crisis might surprise you.
David
The number of people committing suicide is up by a third. The number of Americans who say they have no close personal friends has gone up four times since 2000. High school students, 45 percent say they're persistently hopeless.
Lee
David
Try to be more intimate, try to be a better friend to people.
And the answer to our social problem, which is low trust and high hostility and brutal politics, is the same. Just being better at, and more considerate at treating each other with kindness, respect, and understanding.
Lee
We discuss how we might get better at all of that, as we discuss David's most recent New York Times bestselling book, How to Know a Person.
Coming right up.[00:01:00]
I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
David
We live in a time that's weirdly dehumanizing.
Lee
That's today's guest, New York Times columnist, David Brooks.
David
We're in the middle of some sort of social crisis.
Lee
And for David, at the heart of that crisis is our inability to know one another, to rightfully see one another. We lack, he says, the skills needed to understand one another.
This is striking to me, that in a time of such sharp social and political hostility, and with the platform that a New York Times opinion writer has at his disposal, that David is writing about learning to see one another, learning how to know one another.
His new book, a New York Times bestseller, is entitled How to Know a Person.
It's simultaneously moving and compelling at points, [00:02:00] while also being immensely practical. He spends a great deal of time discussing specific, learnable skills... but not mere skills. Instead, he's arguing that the way I see another person will tell me a great deal about the kind of person I am.
David
And it's possible to cast a cold and aloof attention, in which case you're a cold and aloof person. If you cast the kind of attention which is looking for danger and threat, then you're gonna find menace.
Lee
But if, instead, we choose to cast a just and loving attention on others, if we choose to see with the eyes of compassion, that not only tells us something about our own character, it also, he claims, has the capacity...
David
...to call forth a different version of the person, a version that's more loving, more warm, more personal.
Lee
In brief, that the way we seek to know the people around us is of the utmost moral, social, and [00:03:00] political import.
Here's David Brooks. Enjoy.
David Brooks is a Canadian-born American journalist. He's been op-ed columnist for the New York Times since 2003, has been a regular guest on PBS NewsHour since 2004.
David grew up in New York City, completing his undergrad at the University of Chicago in history. He's also the author of numerous books, including number one New York Times bestsellers, The Road to Character and The Second Mountain. Today we're discussing his latest New York Times bestseller, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
David Brooks, it's great to see you again.
David
Oh, it's good to be with you, Lee. It's a pleasure, always, to be in your company.
Lee
Yeah, thanks for coming to be with us.
So here you are, a successful New York Times op-ed writer, and here this book on knowing people. Why do you care about this? In the midst of a world of so much political turmoil that you could pontificate about, you're talking about personal relationships. What's driven you to this?
David
There's a personal reason for this [00:04:00] and a social reason. The personal reason is we're all trying to grow and become slightly better human beings. And my personal journey is that I was a guy who was probably pretty good at writing, but probably not too emotionally available for the people around me.
And so I've been on a journey over the last 15 years to try to become a better human. And part of that is become more emotionally available. Part of that is become more spiritually mature. And part of that is just treat people with more consideration and kindness and justice. And so that's the personal journey.
The, the social journey is that we live in a time that's weirdly dehumanizing. And you know the statistics as well as I do - that the number of people committing suicide is up by a third, mental health problems are skyrocketing, the number of Americans who say they have no close personal friends has gone up four times since 2000. High school students, 45 percent say they're persistently hopeless and despondent.
And so we're in the middle of some [00:05:00] sort of social crisis. And the answer to my personal problem of trying to be more relatable, trying to be more intimate, trying to be a better friend to people, and the answer to our social problem, which is low trust and high hostility and brutal politics, is the same.
Just being better at, and more considerate at treating each other with kindness, respect, and understanding. And so I just thought the one skill that's at the center of any family, church, organization, company, or society is the ability to see others deeply and be deeply seen. I wanted to get better at that.
So I wrote a book trying to teach myself to get better, and hopefully other people around the country will want to get better and will read the book and will treat other people with more kindness.
Lee
Yeah. You're fairly personal, and you say things about yourself like, "When it came to spontaneous displays of emotion, I had the emotional capacity of a head of cabbage."
Uh, [laughs] unpack some of that for us and tell us kind of what some of the growth has looked like for you, perhaps [00:06:00] in some more specifics.
David
Yeah. I mean, I grew up in a home that was... we had love in the home, we didn't express it. So we, we were not like one of these huggy homes. We were not a home where people said, I love you.
And so I grew up in an intellectual world, and we, like, around the Thanksgiving Day dinner table, we talked about the evolutionary history of lactose intolerance, the history of Victorian funerary monuments. So we were super cerebral, intellectual, and I grew up in that home. But I, I wasn't great at relating to people.
And so that episode you described sort of summarizes a way of life I had, which was, like, I'm 50 years old. I love baseball. I go to a lot of baseball games. And so I'm at a ball game with my son in Baltimore. And on all those games, I never caught a foul ball. And I'm with my son in Baltimore, my youngest son, and a batter loses control of a bat. It flies through the air, lands in the stands, and lands on my lap. So I get a bat.
[00:07:00] Now, getting a bat at a baseball game is a thousand times better than getting a ball. And so any normal human being is waving the bat in the air, is celebrating, high fiving everybody around, hugging people, getting onto the jumbotron.
I just put the bat on the ground and sat staring straight ahead. So I had like, the emotional reaction of a head of cabbage or a turtle. Like I had no reaction. I look back on that guy and I say, show a little joy, man. And so I thought I would better embark on a personal journey to be a little more emotionally open, a little more emotionally available.
And so, being a good University of Chicago graduate, I wrote a book about emotion called The Social Animal. And then I wrote a book about character, called The Road to Character. And then I wrote a book called The Second Mountain, which is a little about my spiritual journey from a very secular world to a more religious set of beliefs.
And then this book is about how to connect, uh, how to connect with people on the most fundamental level. And it's meant to be very practical. It's like, [00:08:00] when you meet somebody, as you try to befriend them, as you sit with them as they're suffering from depression, as you sit with them as they're disagreeing with you politically, what are the exact skills you need to, to get to know someone and to establish intimate connection?
Lee
David
And through all these books, I'm basically trying to teach myself. We writers-- my favorite thing about writing is we, we writers are beggars who tell other beggars where we found bread. And so if I learn something valuable, I throw it into a book in the hopes that other people will find it valuable.
And that's, that's my big reward - when other people find something valuable that I found valuable.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah, that's helpful.
Yeah, I want, I want to dig into quite a bit about some of the specifics, because I do find it very practical and deeply helpful.
But before we go there, when you think back about that person who was more reserved, if you think about that, the person catching that baseball bat, do you think that the lack of emotion or the lack of joy that was shown... [00:09:00] was it, was it related to fear, or was it related to a lack of basic skill, or how would you frame that?
David
Yeah, all of the above.
So, like, those of us who are not good at making connection, understanding others, I think, A) there's a fundamental level of egotism. We're thinking about ourselves, we're not thinking about others.
Second, we don't think we possess the skills. So if somebody comes to me with a-- in my old life, say 15 years ago, if you came to me with a personal problem and you were trying to deal with something in your personal life, I would panic. Uh, I just didn't know what to say.
And so I was not a good friend to people who were going through something hard, because I would flee from that kind of emotional encounter. And so that, that was just lack of skills. And so there's, like, the normal fear of emotion. Uh, there's a fear of intimacy. And so to be emotionally available was not a priority.
And then, I think, at a certain point you think, you know, [00:10:00] I want to be better at connecting with people. I want to be, I want to be the kind of person people would come to if they're working through a problem and they want somebody to talk to. And so I hope in the last 10 years I've grown a little, uh, to become more of that kind of person.
I had a bit of a spiritual awakening about 10 years ago. And that, I think, opened myself up to the deeper chasms within my own soul that I wanted to fill with spiritual and relational food. And so I've been on this little journey. And it's been a challenge and it's been-- you know, I'm still very imperfect.
But I think progress can be made even in middle age. Some people tell you you can't change after age 30. I think that's ridiculous.
Lee
David
That I know a lot of people have changed a lot after age 30, and I've changed a lot after age 50.
And so, uh, I'm about to name drop here, but I've been interviewed twice in my life by Oprah. And after the second interview, I was interviewed, it was 2019. Oprah [00:11:00] pulls me aside and says, "David, I've rarely seen anybody change so much in middle age. You were so emotionally blocked before."
And so that was a good day for me. Like, she's Oprah, she should know. She's the expert. Uh, and she said, you're, you've become more emotionally open.
And that's the goal of somebody in middle age, to become open to the-- your friends, to your colleagues, to your kids. And to be, like, just show up for them.
Lee
David
And, and that was weirdly-- and this is what this book is about. It's like, being open-hearted, that's part of it. But part of it is just skills. It's knowing how to sit with someone who's depressed. Knowing how to disagree with somebody well. Knowing how to host somebody at a dinner party and make everybody feel included.
Those are just basic skills, and they can be learned just as much as carpentry or sailing or anything else.
Lee
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I'll definitely reiterate-- I mean, I'll definitely echo agreement on... I think I changed fundamentally, in very important ways, in my mid to late [00:12:00] 30s, and then again in my mid to late 40s.
And so, yeah, if you can't make significant change after 30, I'd be toast. And so I'm thankful that... I think we can.
David
Do you have incidents that caused the changes or was it a decision?
Lee
I did. Yeah.
I had, I had several. Early to mid 30s, I had a sort of, fundamental things about my life that just were not going to work long term, that forced me to do a lot of therapy and other, other kind of work.
And then, later, kind of midlife, classic midlife stuff, and depression in my mid to late 40s that was very difficult to process and required me to learn another set of skills and required me to learn what I had to let go of, and, you know, the classic Serenity Prayer kind of stuff. Learning what we can control and what we can't control. And again, another large set of skills that went with that.
So let's move then to talking about some of the skills.
So your part one... you develop this in, in three parts, and part one is, ‘I see you.’ And then you, you turn to this, this fundamental practice of [00:13:00] giving attention to the other.
And you, you say at one point, talking about the power of questioning and giving attention to others, you say, quote, "I've come to think of questioning as a moral practice." So unpack that for us.
David
Yeah. Well, first, I found that sometimes I go to a party, and I leave the party and I think, that whole time nobody asked me a question. Like, they were, like, selling themselves, they were portraying themselves, but they were just not curious about me.
And I've come to believe that only about 30 or 40 percent of human beings are question askers, that they're genuinely curious about the other people around them. They're, the other people are perfectly nice, but they're just not question askers. They're just, like, performing themselves. Like, here's what I want you to think of me.
And so I thought, well, I want to be a good questioner. And so how do you become that? And again, it's a skill.
And so in the book, I talk about a woman named Niobe Way, who was teaching young students, 7th grade boys in New [00:14:00] York City, how to be question askers, how to be really good at it.
And, I think she learned, you don't have to be good at teaching kids how to ask questions. Kids are great at asking questions.
And so in Niobe's case, she said, "Okay, you're 7th graders, I'm going to sit in the front of the class, and ask me anything and I'll answer it honestly."
And so the first boy said, "Are you married?" And she said, "No."
And the second boy said, "Are you divorced?" And she said, "Yes."
And the third boy said, "Do you still love him?"
Lee
David
And she was like, whoa, what's going on here? And she said, "Yes," with tears in her eyes.
And the fourth boy said, "Does he know you still love him?"
Lee
David
And the fifth boy said, "Do your kids know you still love him?"
And so, like, they're kids. They know how to ask questions. They go right for it.
Lee
David
And, and, but I think as we get older, we-- a lot of us get a little more timid and shy about asking questions. In my view, we get overly [00:15:00] timid and shy.
You don't want to rush into these things. Like, when I'm first meeting someone, there are certain questions I'll ask just to get us going.
That's, like, questions like, "Where'd you grow up?" I travel a lot, so I've probably been where they've grown up.
Or, uh, "How'd you get your name?" People talk about their family, their ethnicity. How'd you get your name?
And then as I get to know people a little better, I'll ask a little more personal, but not too personal.
And so I asked a theologian friend of mine, "What's your favorite unimportant thing about you?"
Lee
David
And he told me that he-- he's a big theologian, I thought very intimidating. But he loves a lot of reality, trashy TV.
[Lee laughs]
Uh, and so I learned that about him, and I said, "Well, my favorite unimportant thing about me is I like early Taylor Swift more than I like later Taylor Swift."
So there's some, something about those high school breakup songs that she used to sing that I really liked. Uh, and so that's unimportant, but it's something about me.
And if you ask those kinds of questions, then later on you can ask the more [00:16:00] serious questions.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah, that, that's a great question. I, I wanna make sure I remember that one.
What's the most important unimportant--
David
Favorite unimportant thing about you. Yeah.
Lee
Favorite unimportant thing about you. Yes. That's quite helpful.
You're listening to No Small Endeavor, and our conversation with David Brooks on his new book, How to Know a Person.
I love hearing from you. Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode. You can reach me at lee@nosmallendeavor.com or you can join me on social media @leeccamp.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen. These notes include links to resources mentioned in the episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes, and a full transcript.
We would be so pleased if you'd tell your friends about No Small Endeavor and invite them to join us on the podcast, because that will help us extend the reach of the beauty, truth, and goodness we [00:17:00] are seeking to sow in the world.
Coming up, David discusses why simply paying attention to someone might be a moral act of the highest order, how we might go about understanding each other in an age of isolation, and how we might love in the midst of depression and division.
In the vein of this, you, you talk about how you're kind of arguing for a different model of ethics. And later in the book, you talk about John Stuart Mill, and of course, there are plenty of the Enlightenment thinkers that kind of focus on moral rules or principles when they're talking about ethics. And, you instead are making the case, working out of Iris Murdoch, that seeing - how we see people, and an attempt to see people well, ought to be seen as a fundamental part of our moral endeavors, which I think is super helpful.
But talk about that a bit.
David
[00:18:00] Yeah, so all these male philosophers, like John Stuart Miller, Immanuel Kant, they built these vast moral systems, and they're based on abstractions. Like, don't use someone to get something else. Like, that's a pretty good rule... but it's pretty abstract, and it's pretty, like, philosophical academic.
But along comes somebody like Iris Murdoch, who's a woman, and who's learning from another woman named Simone Weil... that the essential moral act is the act of attention. It's not, like, some fancy moral rule.
It's like, you're sitting in a coffee shop, you're sitting in a restaurant, you got your kid right in front of you. What kind of attention are you casting upon that person? And it's possible to cast a cold and aloof attention, in which case you're a cold and aloof person. If you cast the kind of attention which is looking for danger and threat, then you're going to find menace. But Iris Murdoch said our goal should be to cast a just and loving attention on others.
So [00:19:00] we see someone, we're going to see with the eyes of love. We're going to see with the eyes of compassion. And if we see with those eyes, we're going to call forth a different version of the person. A version that's more loving, more warm, more personal.
And so the story I tell in the book is, I'm in Waco, Texas, like, I don't know, it was probably like three or four years ago. And I'm having breakfast with a 93-year-old lady named LaRue Dorsey. And LaRue Dorsey presents herself to me as a strict disciplinarian. She'd been a teacher much of her life, and she said, "I love my students enough to discipline them."
And into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours, a guy named Jimmy Durrell. And he comes up to our table, he knows us both, and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders, and he shakes her way harder than you should shake a 93-year-old.
And he says to her, "Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best, you're the best, I love you, I love you." And suddenly, that stern disciplinarian that I've been talking to turns into a bright, eye-shining, [00:20:00] 9-year-old girl.
And that's the power of attention. If you shine a certain kind of warm attention on somebody, you will bring forth a different version of that person.
And it's not only his own warmth, it's, it's something philosophical, really. Jimmy's a pastor, he pastors to the homeless in Waco. And when Jimmy sees someone, any human being he meets, he sees someone made in the image of God.
He's, he's looking into the soul of someone of infinite value and dignity. He's looking at somebody so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person. And you could be Christian or Jewish or Muslim or atheist or agnostic. Don't really care. But looking at every person you meet with that level of reverence and respect is a precondition for seeing them well.
If you see each person as a mystery that you'll never get to the bottom of, as someone of infinite value, then you're going to be curious about the person. You're going to ask questions. You're going to want to see who they, who [00:21:00] they are in their fullness. That's the beginning of seeing them well.
So that's-- to me, that's the moral quality of attention. It's just a super powerful moral act. Who you-- the way you pay attention to people becomes who you are in the world.
Lee
You have a beautiful passage from David Whyte, who says, friendship, quote, "is not improvement, neither of the other, nor of the self. But the ultimate touchstone is witness - the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another. To have walked with them, and to have believed in them."
That's such a beautiful portrait of friendship.
David
Yeah. The thing I love about that quotation is that we're not trying to prove each other. We're just trying to witness each other. We're just trying to be along for the ride.
Lee
David
And friendship is that, the privilege, I like the phrase, "the privilege of having been seen."
It really is a privilege [00:22:00] to-- when somebody really knows you well, and it's a privilege to give them that. And so even for this book, the last four years, I've been calling around asking people, tell me about a time you felt seen. And people would tell me stories with glowing eyes that seemed kind of mundane.
Like one woman told me she was, like, in her-- she was about 40. And she told me, "When I was 13, I had my first taste of alcohol. And I got so drunk, when my friends dropped me off at my house on the front porch, I laid down on the porch. I couldn't get up. And my father, who was a tough guy, came out, and I thought he was going to scream at me all the things that were going on in my head. 'I'm bad, I'm bad, I'm bad.'
Instead, he just picked me up in his arms, carried me inside, laid me down on the sofa, and said, 'There'll be no punishment here. You've had an experience.' That's it. 'You've had an experience.'"
And so she remembers that moment, like 30 years later. That her dad understood he didn't need to scream at her at that moment. [00:23:00] And so she felt seen.
And it's not super remarkable. It's like an everyday thing a parent might do. But it's an example of somebody saying, okay, I know you don't need to be screamed at right now. I'm just gonna be on your team. And I'm just gonna support you. I'm just gonna be here with you. And it's, like, it has an effect on people.
Lee
Yeah.
You have one, I think it's a full chapter, where you define a person. It's kind of, perhaps to some, a provocative definition of a person, as a point of view.
And you're, you're making the case that if we really want to see another person, then we need to at least make an attempt to try to see that person's point of view.
Talk to us a bit more about that and how you, how you came to see that yourself.
David
To me, the greatest thing all of us do, is we take the experience of our lives and the hardships of our lives and the good things in our lives and the wise people in our lives, and we construct our own unique way of seeing the world.
And we see the world [00:24:00] very differently. And you and I could be sitting in an auditorium in Nashville or in New York or wherever, looking at a concert. And in some sense, we're, we're looking at the same thing, but we're all having very different experiences of that thing, based on our pains, our hurts, our traumas, our joys, our tastes.
And so if I'm going to know you, I want to know how you construct your reality. Experience is not what happens to you. It's what you do with what happens to you. So I want to know, like, you and I are looking at the same situation. How do you see it? And it's likely to be very, very, very different.
And so, for example, I quote in the book a study done in the 1950s of a football game between Dartmouth and Princeton.
And it was a particularly bloody and brutal game. And each team's fans thought the other team committed the most penalties. And then a couple weeks later, they showed a video of the game to each team's fans. And both groups of fans looked at the same video [00:25:00] and said, "Look, this objectively proves that the other team was worse than our team." And it was the same video.
And so it just shows how subjective we all are. And so if I want to understand you, I don't want to know what happened to you. I want to know what meaning you made out of what happened to you. What's your subjective viewpoint on the world?
And just to get a little into brain science, not too much.... When we look at-- say, say we look at a rainbow. You and I speak English, and so we have, we see a seven-banded rainbow. Now a rainbow has no bands. It's a continuous stream of light. A rainbow has no color. There's no color in the world. There's just sound waves and visual waves and particles.
But a Russian, in Russia, they have two words for our word blue. They have one word for light blue and another word for dark blue. And so Russians see eight-banded rainbows. They don't see the same rainbow we see.
And so if I'm going to understand the Russians' [00:26:00] experience of a rainbow, I can't just say, "Oh, you saw a rainbow." I have to ask them, "How did you see it?" I have to understand that each of us has a very subjective view of the world depending on our own culture, our own language, our own experiences.
And so I have to be really curious and ask you, "How does this look to you? How does this look to you?"
We don't see the world with our eyes. We see it with our entire life.
Lee
So what are some practical ways, then, to try to understand the way another person understands the world or their experience?
David
So the subtitle of the book is The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen. But if it's accurate, it should be The Art of Hearing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Heard.
The essential skill is being a conversationalist. How good are you at conversation? And let me first ask people who are listening to this, how good are you at knowing the people you meet? And I can tell you with great accuracy and confidence, you're not as good as you think you are.
There's a guy at the University of Texas who [00:27:00] studies how accurate are we at understanding what's going on in somebody's mind when we're talking to them. And the answer is, we're accurate about 20% of the time.
Lee
David
So we don't know what's going on in the other person's mind. And some people are pretty good, they're 55%. Some people are terrible, they're 0%, they never understand what's going on in somebody else's mind. They're social idiots. But they think they're accurate 100% of the time.
So if I'm gonna understand what's going on in your mind as I'm talking to you, it's not good enough for me to guess. I have to ask you.
Lee
David
I have to ask you questions. I have to be really good at asking you questions and really good at having conversations.
And so in the book I have a bunch of conversational tips. How do you become a great conversationalist?
And there are things like, treat attention as a on/off switch, not a dimmer. If I'm going to be in conversation with you, my attention will be 100% or zero. It's not going to be 60%. I'm not going to multitask and be looking at my phone.
Another one, there's a friend who you [00:28:00] may know, a friend of mine named Andy Crouch.
Lee
David
Uh, when you talk to Andy, it's like you're talking to a Pentecostal charismatic church. He's like, "Yes, yes, I agree. That's good. Amen. Amen. Preach that."
And so what I learned from Andy is, be a loud listener. When somebody's talking to you, react. And you can either react verbally, like Andy does, or if you go on TV and look at an Oprah interview and turn the sound off, you see her facial expressions are changing depending on what the person is saying. She's a loud listener because she's reflecting back to them all the different emotions they're going. And so that's another tip.
Another tip is, don't be a topper. If you say to me, "Oh, I had this terrible flight, I was on the tarmac for two hours," I might say, "Well, I know what went through. I've been on a flight where we were, sat on the tarmac for four hours."
And it sounds like I'm trying to relate, like we went through the same thing, but really what I'm saying is, A) let's stop [00:29:00] talking about you, let's talk about me. And B) my experience is way better than your experience. So I'm being a topper, and that's a good way to kill a conversation.
So those are some of the practical tips of, just, how to be a conversationalist.
Lee
You've got another, a real helpful, simple acronym, SLANT. Sit up, lean forward, ask questions, nod your head, and track the speaker.
And I thought, you know, I think, I think I might start putting that in my course syllabi. That would be a simple, great skill for students in a class. For all of us.
David
Students really need it.
I mean, I saw a study a couple weeks ago, after the book came out, on the number of young men who've never asked anybody out on a date. And the number is super high. They wanted to know why, why have these young men gone all through their adolescence and they never asked somebody on a date? And the answer is, they stink at flirting.
They, they don't know how to flirt. And they don't know how to ask somebody out. And they certainly don't know how to break up with someone if they ever got into a [00:30:00] relationship. And so they're living these lives of isolation, and the answer is they just don't have the skills.
And so, somehow we've stopped teaching the skills of how to, like, ask somebody on a date. How do you go steady? How do you build a relationship? And if the relationship doesn't work, how do you end it gracefully? How do you end a relationship without breaking somebody's heart? That's a skill. We don't teach these things anymore.
Lee
We're going to take a short break, but coming right up, the loneliness epidemic, depression, political division, and how to see and love people well in the midst of these.
Just a warning that this episode contains mention of suicide.
So part two, you move to, 'I see you in your struggles.'
You've already [00:31:00] alluded to this earlier in the conversation, the fact that we're in this particularly difficult time with a loneliness epidemic. And you then go on to say things like, "Loneliness leads to meanness," and, "Distrust sows distrust," or, "Political movements these days are fueled largely by resentment."
So, in this kind of apparent breakdown of the social fabric, you're wanting us to lean into seeing one another in our struggles, in our difficulties. So, kind of point to some of the key ideas that you develop there.
David
I'll first talk about, I mean, one of the chapters in that section is about depression.
And so, my oldest friend in the world, who's a guy named Pete, we met when we were 11. We played through life, we were, like, friends for life. But when he was 57, he got hit by a period of depression, a very severe depression.
And I thought I was reasonably well educated and I should know how to deal, you know, accompany someone who's depressed. [00:32:00] But I realized in the course of those years, I didn't even know what depression was.
And I learned, if you're lucky enough not to have suffered from depression, you can't understand it by extrapolating from your own moments of sadness. That depression, as another friend of mine, Mike Gerson, said, "is a malfunction in the instrument we use to perceive reality."
So, both Pete, my friend, and Mike, another friend, said they had these lying voices in their head, which were screaming at them, 'you're worthless, you're worthless, nobody would mind if you disappeared.' And those were lies, but the voices were in their heads.
And so I learned over the course of three years of Pete's illness, a little about how you deal with someone who's suffering from depression.
First, I learned the mistakes you make and the mistakes I made. And the first mistake was, I tried to give them ideas about how to make the depression lift. So I'd say, "You know, you used to take these service trips to Vietnam, you found [00:33:00] them so rewarding. You should do that! Take some trips, and give back, and you'll feel good."
And I later learned that if you're giving a depressed person ideas on how to make the depression lift, all you're doing is showing you just don't get it. Because it's not ideas they're lacking, it's lack of energy, it's lack of curiosity. It's lack of a lot of things, but it's not lack of ideas. So I was just showing I was clueless.
The second mistake I made, was I tried to do what the psychologists call positive reframing, which say, "Look, look at all the wonderful things in your life. You have a great career, you have a great wife, great marriage, great kids." And I was just making him feel worse, because I was reminding him he was not enjoying the things that are palpably enjoyable.
And so I was just not, not helpful. And I think over the three years that we traveled this course together, I learned a few things you should say.
The first, is just to acknowledge the reality of the situation. "This stinks. Tell me [00:34:00] about what it's like to be depressed." Just so he doesn't feel so alone in his circumstances. Like, I feel-- okay, I know what you're going through. I may not share it, but I know, I have some idea of what you're going through.
The second thing I could have done is a burst of goodwill. And a pastor friend of mine up in D. C. tell me, when he has congregants who are going through hard times, he just says to them, "I want more for you. I want more for you."
And that expression of goodwill may not solve the problem. It will not solve the problem. But at least you're saying, "I'm on your side. I'm on your side. I'm rooting for you."
The third thing you can do, is constant touches. Like a text every day, a phone call, a postcard. It's like, no response necessary, but I'm thinking of you. I'm not going away. You may feel isolated, but I'm not going away. I'm going to be here.
And then the fourth thing I learned, I learned this from Viktor Frankl, who wrote this great book, Man's Search for Meaning, about life in a [00:35:00] Nazi death camp. And when he was confronting people who were contemplating suicide, he would say to them, "Life has not stopped expecting things of you." That there are still responsibilities that you have, that you can do good in the world.
And all these different things, these four different things you can do for somebody who's contemplating suicide or depressed, it may not help in the end. There, there's a limited power of words. But at least you'll have showed up in the most gracious way possible to show up, and you've sat with somebody who's going through depression, going through thoughts of suicide, and you've been a good friend.
I, I just say, that might not help, but it's at least the best you can do.
Lee
Yeah.
Yeah, I'll certainly, I would say from my own experience that all of those things you described about what does not help and what does help seems quite true to my experience. So I appreciate that a lot.
David
It was a hard education for three years, and my friend Pete lost his battle with suicide, but-- [00:36:00] or with depression, but... he left a legacy for his friends and family of knowing, let's be honest about this.
Lee
What was that experience like for you, in losing, losing your friend that way?
David
It was hard. Um, it was hard in first, because you felt so powerless. Like the beast that took Pete was, like, bigger than him, bigger than me, bigger than his wife, bigger than his kids. He was just a big beast.
Secondly, I lost three close friends within a few months of each other, and some of your listeners may know some of them. One was Pete... they probably wouldn't know. But another was Mike Gerson, who I quoted, who was a Washington Post columnist and a Bush speechwriter. And another was Tim Keller, who was a pastor, a Presbyterian pastor in New York.
And so I lost three close friends within rapid succession. And there are a lot of books about how to endure grief from a family member. And people have written books about grief when a spouse dies, when a child dies. [00:37:00] But I wasn't prepared for the kind of grief when a friend dies. And so losing a friend, it was sort of uncharted territory to me.
And after Pete died, since I knew him since we were 11, the only thing I could compare it to was like, going to Montana, and suddenly the mountains are gone.
It's like, he had been a permanent presence in my life, and suddenly that presence was absent. I was very disoriented.
And the one thing I'd say to anybody who's willing to hear, if you're ever in a state of depression, if you're ever in a state of despair, and you think, "Oh, if I were not here, it would be so much easier on my friends and family. If I took my own life, I would do them a favor."
I can tell you, having lived through the aftermath of Pete's death, that's completely wrong. You're not doing anybody any favors by taking your life. You're causing a lot of pain. And so, [00:38:00] if you're ever in a moment of despair, thinking it would be easier for everybody if I were not here, that's wrong. You need to stick around.
Lee
Yeah. Yeah, thank you for that.
If you or someone you know is in crisis, you can contact the Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1 (800) 273-8255.
So part three moves to, 'I see you in your strengths.' And one of the, one of the recurring constructs that you use throughout the book is this notion of illuminators versus diminishers, and-- which just seems to be especially pertinent in part three, 'I see you in your strength.'
So talk to us a bit about that.
David
Yeah. So, uh, diminishers are people who are not curious about you. They don't make you feel seen. They make you feel invisible. They're just not-- they're just like, they stereotype, they ignore. We all know people like that.
And then, illuminators are people who are curious about you. They ask you about you. They make you feel respected and lit up.
And so, an example of an illuminator is, there's a [00:39:00] novelist named Ian Foster, who wrote in England in-- 115, 120 years ago. And his biographer wrote of him, "To be with him is to be," quote, "seduced by an inverse charisma. A sense of being listened to with such intensity, you had to be your sharpest, most honest, best self."
We'd all love to listen with that kind of intensity.
Lee
So, I can't remember if you quote Alasdair MacIntyre or not, I think you do, but MacIntyre has that famous line about, we can't kind of know what we're supposed to do with our lives until we know of what story or stories we find ourselves a part.
And you, you at least point to this notion that one of the things that we can do for other people is ask questions in such a way so that it gives them an opportunity to experiment with telling their own story.
How did you come to see that?
David
Yeah, during the research for the book, I interviewed a few times a guy named Dan McAdams, who teaches at Northwestern. And he studies how do people tell their life story? [00:40:00] And so he pulls people in his research lab and he says, "Tell me your high points. Tell me your low points. Tell me your turning points."
And he says the interviews take four hours or so. He says about half the people cry, because something sad has happened to him. And then after the four hours, he hands them a little check to pay them for their, their time. And a lot of the people push back the check across the desk and say, "I'm not taking money for this. No one has ever asked me my life story before. This has been one of the best afternoons of my life."
And people, uh, often nobody's ever asked them. And so if you can ask people about their life story, you're giving them immense pleasure. You're giving them a chance to tell their story, which is a way to create their story. And you're learning a lot about them.
So for example, when I'm listening to a life story, first thing I want to know is what's the narrative tone here? Every writer has an implied author, the person the writer wants you to think he is. [00:41:00] And so some people have a sarcastic tone. Some have a pompous tone. Some have a knowing tone. So you learn a lot about a person - what's the, what's the tone here?
The second thing I'm looking for when somebody's telling me their life story, is who's the hero here? Some people, their, their persona is, I'm the healer. I'm the person who comes into a family and I heal things. In some people, it's, I'm the fighter.
Now, the third thing I'm looking for is, what's the plot here? And so all of us tell our story according to a certain plot. And some people, the plot is rags to riches. I was a poor boy, I made it. That's my plot. Some people, it's overcoming the monster. I had an abusive parent, but I overcame it. Or, I struggled with alcohol, I overcame it. I'm overcoming the monster.
My story, and I think for a lot of Americans in particular, it's a redemption story. I was going along fine, I suffered a big setback, I [00:42:00] came back stronger. That's redemption.
But if you don't have a story to tell, you can't know what to do. This is what Alasdair McIntyre said. He said, "You can't know what to do unless you know what story you're a part of." And if you know what your overall story is, then you can make the big decisions of life.
And the novelist Isak Dinesen said, "All sorrows can be endured if they can put into a story." So if you're a Marine, and you're at boot camp, and you're struggling, it's almost unbearable. But if you can say, this is a moment in my life, I'm gonna come out of boot camp, I'm gonna be a Marine, that's the story of my life, then the pains of being in boot camp at Parris Island or whatever... they're endurable, because they're part of a larger story.
Lee
When you lean into wanting to hear somebody's story, do you just ask them, or what's kind of practical ways you make space for that?
David
Yeah, it's not hard. Like, who were you as a kid?[00:43:00]
You know, you can do what Dan McAdams says, give me your high points, your low points, your turning points. There are other ways to do it. Give me your strengths. Give me your sparks, the things you're interested in. Give me your struggles. But the simplest way is like, who were you as a kid? When did you change? What have been the hard, the hard points of your life? What have been the great points of your life?
I was a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. And it's 1991. I'm in Russia. And Boris Yeltsin is elected the first democratic president of Russia. And the old communists, who are still sort of in power, stage a coup.
And so, the tanks are rolling through Russia, and they're going to try to destroy the first democratically elected president. And they're going to kill Yeltsin. And he stands on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building, which is called their White House. And I run into a woman who's like, in her 90s, and her name was Valentina Kosieva.
And she's handing out sandwiches to the [00:44:00] democratic protesters who've gathered to preserve democracy in Russia. And so I ask her, "How'd you get into this? What's your interest here?"
And she said, "Well, let me tell you. When I was a girl, my family was in the royal family in the household of the Tsar. And then when the revolution happened, the royal family was killed, and I fled, and I was part of the Russian Revolution. There was a civil war right after the revolution, and I was almost executed because I harbored some of the people who were anti-communist in those days."
And then I said, "So, then what happened?"
And she said, "Well, I had a husband in the thirties, and Stalin sent him away to the Gulag and had him killed."
And so then I said, "Well, then what happened?"
And she said, "Well, we had two boys, and they were fighting against the Nazis in World War II, and my youngest son was beaten to death in the battle of Stalingrad. And my other son was shot."
And so I said, "Well, then what happened?"
And she said, "Well, I married another [00:45:00] guy, and in the 1950s, he was also sent to the Gulag in Siberia, and he vanished. I never saw him again."
And so I said, "Well, then what happened?"
And she said, "Well, I'm part of the Kalmyk people, which is a Muslim population in the Soviet Union. And Khrushchev decided we were all going to be sent to internal exile. So we were all ripped from our apartments and we were sent to internal exile in, somewhere in Russia."
And so like, I'm just, all I did was say, over and over again, "And then what happened?" And basically, every terrible thing that had happened in Soviet history happened to her. And when she's 90, she's handing out sandwiches for the democratic protesters, to try to end the Soviet Union and create a better Russia.
And so it was one of the most remarkable interviews I ever had. And to get her life story, all I had to do was say, "And then what happened? And then what happened? And then what happened?" And it was a remarkable few hours that she described to me her whole life.
Lee
Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing.
So, last [00:46:00] question. How do you posture yourself, or how do you steel yourself for the upcoming season of politics? It clearly looks like it's going to be a lot of contention.
David
Yeah, I'm not ready for it. So, I've lived through the last seven years, as we all have. And even the last few months after October 7th in Israel, it's just been a brutal period.
And so, my only resolution to myself, and I don't know if I'll be succeed in this, is I'm not going to get calloused over. Like, it's going to-- we're gonna have a tough political fight. We're going to have a lot of insults, a lot of canceling. And I'm just not going to be turned into a warrior. I'm going to lead with curiosity.
I've found in life, if you lead with trust, and trust other people, sometimes you'll get betrayed, but sometimes the people you trust will trust you back. And so, I think it's not unrealistic, it's not naive to lead with trust, to lead with curiosity, to lead [00:47:00] with respect. And you may get bullied and beaten up occasionally, but it's better to be a defiant humanist than not.
Lee
I've been talking to David Brooks, op-ed columnist for the New York Times, on his latest book, How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
Thank you, David. It's been great to be with you today.
David
Oh, it's great to be with you again, Lee. It's always a pleasure to be with you.
Lee
Thank you.
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with New York Times contributor and author David Brooks, discussing his new book, How to Know a Person.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated, a private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education, and religion.
And the support [00:48:00] of the John Templeton Foundation, whose vision is to become a global catalyst for discoveries that contribute to human flourishing.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible. Christie Bragg, Jakob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hays, Mary Eveleen Brown, Cariad Harmon, Jason Sheesley, Ellis Osburn, and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening, and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life, together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media, LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.