[Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] conversations with Tyler is produced by the mercada center at George Mason University Bridging the Gap between academic ideas and real world problems learn more at arcades.in conversations withth tyler.com [Music] [Applause] hello everyone thank you for coming David David is actually part of the
Genesis of this series though he doesn't know it so periodically David and I get together for lunch and just talk about different things and it occurred to me that there ought to be some product version of this that would be free and open for everyone and so here we are and finally it's David himself in the flesh
for me to talk to him so I'd like to start with what I call the elanar Rigby question all the lonely people where do they all come from what's the root cause behind the loneliness epidemic why can't we just bring these people together use the internet if need be and make them all unlonely what's the actual underlying
problem okay first let me say I would come back from the our lunches and my assistant would say you're glowing you have such a man crush so here we are glad we can do this in public so this is the most uh intimidating interview I've ever sat down for because a you know me and B you actually read my stuff uh two things
that are rare um so I'm a cultural determinist and so I tend to think the loneliness is primarily a cultural problem that uh we went through a culture in the 50s where we were the opposite of lonely we were in a culture where people had to solve big problems so they had a very group oriented culture uh which you might call the
We're All in This Together Big unions very tight neighborhoods conformist organizations refence to Authority and then people decided around about 1962 that wasn't working and so they created a culture that was very individualistic and if you go back to the port euron statement if you go to Betty Fan's
Feminine Mystique people begin to Value autonomy that we need some lack this to Soul crushing this Conformity and so in my view we've had 40 or 50 years or more of individualism and there's been individualism of the left which has been about social individualism and aut aut omy there's been a right-wing version
which is more economic autonomy but it's been autonomy all the way down and my view if you leave people naked and alone they do what their revolutionary Roots tell them to do which is revert to tribe and so they pick a bad form of community which is tribalism but my my explanation would be primarily cultural because there's no reason people should do
what's bad for them which is to be alone and but that's what's happened say we consider this from the point of view of women so in the 1950s women had much less autonomy could it be that an ideology of individualism was what we needed to partially liberate women some men are left lonelier because women are
in fact independent and the other side of the coin is independence of women if you think of women as often a kind of Glu holding communities together so we've traded off Community for liberation of many women and maybe a there's no going back and B it's actually a good thing or no well I wouldn't put it I put it halfway like
that I forget who said this but there's a social theorist who a theory that we culture moves forward by what she calls the ratchet Hatchet pivot ratchet phrase and so you the culture is our Collective response to solve a problem and so you solve a problem and c and mo Society ratchets upward it works for a little
while and then it stops working so you have a hatchet phase where everybody chops up the culture and I would say 1960s were a period of chopping up the old culture then you shift over because humans are very ingenious uh and you ratchet upwards but then it stops and so so I'd say my explanation was we had to get rid of that 1950s culture because it
really was it tolerated a lot of racism a lot of sexism a lot of anti-Semitism people were emotionally cold with one another the food was really boring uh and so we had to chop that up and then we had to move over to an individualistic culture we couldn't have had feminism civil rights women I doubt
we could have had Silicon Valley without that Rebel individualistic autonomy ethos but every truth becomes false when you take it to its an extreme and so I've said we've sort of run out the string on that one and I would say just especially one of the things that's noticeable about affluent people and this has happened to me is as soon as
people make money they seem to purchase loneliness I grew up in the city super crowded when I had a book of my books sitting over there I had a bestseller which allowed me to buy a house and I bought it out in Bethesda uh with a big yard cuz I thought that was cool and I remember the moment I put the garage
door thing on the visor of my car that was like one of the biggest moments of my life I'd like made it to Suburbia but then you realize oh I got a a big acre yard and I'm lonely and I think that's a common phenomenon that people take money and translate into loneliness there's one study of the yamish it only has 52
data points but it seems to show they're not especially happy they're a little bit above the neutral level and they have strong community and if you ask them are you happy with their Community ties you get very high numbers if you ask them are you happy with your own life you get pretty low numbers and there's no great demand to migrate to
the Amish a few people try but why isn't it that demonstrated preference is what we should take seriously when it comes to assessing how much individualism we have because you can join groups relatively easily still right yeah well I would say if you ask people are you lonely it used to be 20% who said yes
and now it's 40% if you look at suicide rates suicide rates are now at a 30-year high in suicide a proxy for loneliness 50,000 people die every year of opiate addiction there's a massive upshift in Social distrust and so to me the the idea you know Stephen picker wrote this book on how we're all doing better his
data was primarily about individuals if you have try to collect data on the quality relationships it's really hard to find data that's anything but bad and so people we societies fall into patterns that are pretty self-destructive and I'd say we' fallen into the pattern I think we're going to fix it one thing about the Amish I do
think you have to control for their Germanic temperament but but aside I think the beauty America and which separates us from other countries frankly which have much more inherited Community we're really good at we form community and then we're living it for a little while and then somebody offers us five bucks an hour to move
somewhere else so we go somewhere else so to me it's the act of not inheriting Community but forming it and then leaving it and then forming it again that creates the the creativity of this culture my favorite westerns are almost all John Ford Western the greatest movie of all time was the Searchers by the way
starting John Wayne but there's another movie made with Henry Fonda called My Darling Clementine which was the most accurate Western because it's about people forming a community in the west it wasn't a single guy having a gun shootout they the teacher comes to town The Shakespearean actor Comes to Town
the they put up a Schoolhouse it's a movie about community building and that's actually How the West Was founded so you just spent two weeks in Italy you told me and if we think about Italy family size is quite small so total fertility is at about 1.3 people are marrying at much later ages that's making them much more alone you could
say they're becoming individualistic whether they like it or not and does that strike you as a problem Japan would be another example some parts of Northern Europe people are marrying late low birth rates so almost by definition they're cut off from community of family compared to how things were 30 40 years
ago but they seem to systematically make these choices be happy happy with them would Italian women be better off with three kids in an apartment in Rome you want me to tell Italian women how to live I will say I just got back that see this is where you separate your own lived experience from the data cuz my ideology my prior is that oh low
fertility they should definitely fix that problem but I was just out in Tuscany on a restaurant over a Hillside and we were surrounded by Italian families and we were probably 3 and hours into the meal before they served the entree like it was just expected you would sit there five or six hours CU it's Sunday afternoon what are you going
to do I don't know I can't speak for Italian families and I I I wouldn't want to translate anything into happiness I'm sort of I'm in arguments with people who do happiness research well I find the whole field it doesn't live up to if you look at sort of novelistic or musical expressions of Happiness whether tll
story wrote a book a story called family happiness owed to Joy the literary and musical capturing of what Joy feels like is so much richer and more nuanced than anything in the happiness data that I find the happiness data very unsatisfying and all the happiness researchers say no no it's really thick it's but it to me this is a a failure
just a failure of social science anything you can reduce to data that's as humanistic as joy and happiness it seems to me there are so many different kinds of joy and happiness that are uncaptured in the data I now have taken to clipping out when I see a description of Joy I clip it out and they're almost
they often involved rhythmic movement with groups of people marching or dancing but they're often a sense of what was formerly inside yourself merging with something outside yourself and a sense of people get caught up in this sense of spiritual Transcendence whether you're marching across a bridge
in Selma or Emerson being the universal eye when he was out in the forest it's always the loss of sense of where the self ends that that seems to produce Joy now you sometimes describe yourself as a conservative as I would do for myself but I think we would all recognize there's some level of stagnation in a society where at that
point you have to take chances or you have to make radical changes and conservatism in the literal sense becomes virtually impossible do you think we're at that State right now or if we're not how will we know when we get there yeah well I'm an American conservative though my two heroes are Edmund Burke and Edmund Burke's core
conservative ethos is epistemological Modesty the belief the world is really complicated and therefore the change should be constant but incremental but America's not built on that right right so B that's one half but then my other hero is Alexander Hamilton who's a Latino Hip-Hop star from the heights uh
and his conservatism was very different it's about dynamism energy transformational change and so so a European style conservatism doesn't work here you have to have that Dynamic recreated self- transformational element and I would say we're definitely at a moment of certainly need how it's impossible to argue we're not at a need
for some sort of political transformation because we're completely dysfunctional so so there's some big bet we ought to be making doubling down on something do you have a sense I mean for you what that would be yeah I mean my short answer is that you know I'm a wig I believe in the wig party you know the
wig party was started by Hamilton Henry Clay Daniel Webster and the basic argument of the wig party is that there were there always conservatives who believe in limit or Libertarians who believe in limiting government to enhance freedom and progressives who believe in expanding government to increase equality and social economic
security but wigs believe in limited but energetic government to enhance social Mobility they you know they had National Banks they had infrastructure plans they believed in credit markets and was an all an effort to create Dynamic economy that where poor boys and girls could rise and succeed and so I would like to
see a rediscovery of the wig party now there are six wigs in America right now but I'm one of them so I'm sticking with it do you think conservatives ever really can win on social issues anymore or is that train simply left the station social liberalism has has triumphed forever one can you know stand up and
yell stop but basically there's no returning or do you think it's fluctuation back and forth well I'd say on some things that train has probably left the station on gay marriage I I don't think in my lifetime In Our Lifetime we'll see any reversal on gay marriage on abortion the data is pretty there's if anything there's a bit of a
movement especially among the young toward a more pro-life position and on the basic stability of Bourgeois virtues I think the conservatives are actually winning that argument and my friend Charles Murray put it that the people a lot of people on the left think left but they definitely live right and so the
acceptance of Bourgeois virtues of stable families and pretty narrow self-disciplined Lifestyles that seems to me almost without argument these days and do you accept the secularization thesis that the West will become less and less religious and will never go back or is that also cyclical with mean reversion well I think there that's
completely that's always wrong the secularization I mean Peter Burger who died I think at age 197 the last year I think he disproved that in the 197 S I mean the the idea that America is going more secular or as you get richer you get more secular I think it's demonstrably false and I would say even though we're seeing we're seeing
religious polarization now a lot of people getting much more religious if you walk through Northern Central Park on a Saturday afternoon you just see hundreds of modern Orthodox kids who are trying to meet each other in the park there that's sort of their meat market on the Great Lawn and so in Judaism the
Orthodox are surging and then among Christians they're losing a lot of members cuz evangelicalism has disgraced itself with Trump but on the other hand if you go to New York to the hip areas of New York and you hang around 20s somethings they're growing to churches there's a a church called Redeemer which
has a bunch of plants around New York there's one called Trinity Grace there's one called C3 you go into these churches and it feels like you're going into the hippest nightclub on Earth and they're surging with enthusiasm and so I don't know what the data show but just my observation of both these different
communities Orthodoxy and Christian and Jewish circles is that especially among the Vanguard the cultural Vanguard there's a spiritual Resurgence and I would say I I teach at Yale and 15 years ago if you were religious it was like having acne it was sort of uncool then it went neutral and now it's sort of a
plus that it's seen of a sign of your some spiritual depth even among those who are pretty secular themselves but if you think of Sweden the United Kingdom Ireland Italy Japan many nations they seem to be rather drastically secular even if people in some fairly neutral sense still believe in God so do you think we're the last hold out in a sense
amongst wealthy Nations or do you think we're eventually going to follow them or you don't think they have secularized well no I do think they have secular I think Western Europe and Japan have secularized I think much of the rest of world has not and that much of the Western World Is Still Africa the Middle
East but wealthy countries we seem to be the only religious one maybe we're the nation with the soul of a church I would I well I I guess my basic belief is that you either have religion or some sort of religious substitute that people are innately soul-driven spiritual creatures and then imagine that people really
suffer when they have a sense their life has no transcendental purpose and meaning and I've my observation is that people over the centuries we get secular we were super secular in 1913 but the human being is such that there's a spiritual hunger there that seeks outlets and when the church does a really bad of answering that Outlets
which most churches have done over the last 50 years people drift away but then somebody invents something new and the drive for Transcendent experience leads people back what do you think of the view common among Muslim theologians that Western liberalism is in some sense a footnote to Christianity that we have
a relatively individualistic religion it's individual as victim rather than might makes right Western liberalism is an offshoot of that and relies on Christianity for its sustenance intellectually spiritually and otherwise I would say judeo-christianity I mean the the idea that we live in a covenantal society that we co-create
with God as a Jewish idea I'm just we were just talking about Rabbi Jonathan saak who's a beautiful book called um the house we build together and it's about covenants and a lot of it is what's difference between the purely liberal view of human Arrangements which is contract and a religious view of Human Relationships which is Covenant
and his argument is that contracts are what we do for our individual benefit a contract is about interest but a covenant is what when we make a promise to each other that transforms our identity uh and when we make a covenant one with another whether it's a marriage covenant or to our nation we serve the
relationship more than we serve ourselves and that's why people are willing to die in a battlefield that's why people are willing to risk their lives for their children and it seems to me the more covenantal relationships we're involved in the more our life feels f F we often hear the term religious extremism used as a criticism
but doesn't in a sense any serious religion have to be extreme in some way so if one believes that Christ is however you want to phrase the belief about the Trinity but the Son of God or or whatever the claim is that's almost by definition a radical extreme claim or that the Quran literally has come down
to us from God that has to be an extreme claim to be interesting right so is there such a thing as religious extremism as a negative yes and what is that so you know the religious people I know and admire like you go to some places and it's like yeah God told me to buy french fries he didn't want the potato chips that day I'm like who are
you people like I don't know anybody who I respect who God talks to in that way and most people I know God Appears and these are people who devoted their lives to religion God Appears occasionally and then you sort of wonder about it uh and so there's a guy named Frederick Benner who's a novelist and a theologian he
said if you wake up every morning and says I feel God right next to me I really don't recognize you but if you wake up one out of 10 and you feel some presence and that presence comes with infinite laughter that's sort of how I feel it a friend of mine is a great poet named Christian Wyman who's up at Yale and I he says he occasionally has
moments of transcendence which the way he describes it it feels like Poetic inspiration and then he says the rest of time I don't feel much but I try to stay faithful to those moments and there's a great scene I'm going to hopefully not buter tily he was in Prague with a girlfriend and he was sitting there
working on his poetry on the dining room table and I think it was a falcon lands on the window sill on the other side of the window and he looked at the Falcon the Falcon didn't notice him so he called to his girlfriend who was in the shower and she comes out and she's naked dripping wet and they stare at the
Falcon and the falcon turns and locks eyes with them and they're just sort of awed by the experience of this contact with nature and she just Whispers to him make a wish make a wish and he said that I just was in wishing for a moment that moment would last forever and it went away and he just describes that as just
this moment when sort of reality spills outside its boundaries and most religious people I know have those moments and they get a sense of Grace or of God's presence but then it goes away and so if if you don't if you're filled with doubt and filled with doubt about your own interpretation which is pluralism then you're not an extremist
and to me that's the only civilized way to be religious but the religions that motivate people they seem to be based on Extreme claims and on the other hand we're both technocrats of A Sort and pragmatists and we'll look at the evidence and change our mind about policies and if you have religion and
then you have your technocracy how is it that you circumscribe the two and keep them apart because the people who are motivated by religion think the supposedly extreme religious belief has a say about the areas where we want to be technocrats well they make extreme claims I'd call them they make Supernatural claims which is a hard
barrier to get over I grant you but I would say and this is why I read a lot of religious writing it's just it helps me do my job better and so the central claim of religion is that as a friend of mine Jerry root puts it is the reality it is iconoclastic there's something weird extra there and so the way I would
say it is that we all have souls so we all there's all a piece of each of us which has no weight and has no color and has no size and shape but is in us and it gives us infinite dignity and it causes us to want to lead good lives and that slavery is wrong because each person has a soul and slavery is an obliteration of a soul and that rape is
wrong because rape is not just an assault on a bunch of physical molecules but it's an obliteration of another human being soul and if I don't have that concept of Soul it's very hard for me to do reporting it's very hard for me to understand how human beings are and why atrocity is wrong I I would find it
very hard if if I'm out covering a story something that outrages me or something that Delights me if I didn't see the people I was covering as essentially spiritually driven Natures I think the whole story would fall to pieces and so I find it hard to um I find it not empirically in a statistical way but empirically helpful as a way to see
reality you've described yourself at times as religiously bisexual what do you mean when you say that I need my own bathrooms no I mean I grew up in a Jewish household and you know when you grow up in a Jewish household and Jewish Family kep kosher all those years you read the Passover seder uh and you feel
deep you know how stories enter you and the story of Judaism and I feel so Jewish all my a lot of my friends are Jewish my jokes are Jewish my style is Jewish and so you feel that you're just deeply and irrevocably embedded in that story and at the same time I went to uh the the school that probably had the
biggest influence on me was called Grace Church School which if anybody goes to the Strand Bookstore in New York it's just NE it's just really next door a beautiful Church on Broadway and I even like I was in the choir and so I sat in Chapel every day and that story and then I went to an Episcopal camp for 15 years
and then I read ryal neber and then I fell in love with St Augustine and somehow that story is also you find that story settling into you I feel more Jewish and more attached to the Christian story than ever both and so that's why I'm bisexual and do you think Jewish or Christian readings of the book of Exodus are deeper and more
insightful which friends do I want to offend um I think the the Old Testament Torah is um amazingly complex and I I I guess I I would say it's um it's amazingly interesting and there are just so many characters frankly the New Testament is about one guy essentially so it can't compete if we're judging these on novelistic rounds maybe that's
not the right criteria I think know the Holy Spirit might have introduced a few more characters living up the plot you know no I I I would say the I get a little tired of Jewish theology when it gets pedantic you know how many grains of rice can be in your bowl of whatever in Passover but some of the Jewish writing
and from Martin Boer and Abraham Joshua hesel and others on the book of Exodus are amazing the Christians do better on love I've read Christian books about Ruth Naomi and Boaz which strike me as just a greater appreciation maybe Jews got a little too cognitive I don't know these are my off the top of had
extremely dangerous self-destructive generalizations I'm making if anybody takes the last three and a half minutes too seriously I I ask for forgiveness let's say Elon Musk is right and we will be able to settle distant planets should we choose people all just from one religion or one country or how pluralistic should we make the
settlement keep in mind you're an American and the early settlements here were were fairly narrow right we had a number of waves but each one was pretty well defined in some way so you have Puritans or you have the Spanish yeah the Puritans I I actually have a lot of respect for the Puritans they don't strike me as the most fun group to
settle Mars with they were actually way more sexualized than we think we we we sort of narrow them down unfairly I blame Henry Miller Arthur Miller my you know my bias especially these days is for infinite diversity and integration in a weird way and I really don't understand this all the fun in life comes from
integration it's from integrating one group of people with a radically different group of people and somehow it's become uncool to be for integration we're all for our separate little communities and our the purity of our cultures but the most enjoyable times I've had are are with people completely unlike myself where I can learn about
what I mean your whole omnivorous brain is one vast testimony to the power of cultures clashing and joining why have so many young young men stopped even looking for work what has happened to aspiration in our culture you know these are I'm asking you right it's I'm a ped so I have to come up with answers I'm
not sure I feel qualified we're all driven I'm again speculating because these are unusual questions uh by complexes we don't understand and if you have six adverse childhood experiences in your life some sort of abuse some sort of loneliness some sense of betrayal it's hard to get a sense of self- agency and that's uh everything's
recoverable but attachment patterns early trauma a sense of if you've been betrayed enough then long-term thinking doesn't make sense and so I would say the the desire to not Aspire and you can rationalize that away it probably comes from some sort of wound and injury in people's lives and when I after I missed
the Trump thing so badly I traveled around the country for 18 months and I still doing it and always talking to Trump voters and other voters and the the amount of wounding and amount of sense of betrayal high levels of distrust high levels of feeling everyone else is getting ahead and I'm falling behind I found especially for young
people in their 20s even people with Sterling educations the 20s have become for many a brutal time they don't quite know what their purpose is in life they don't quite have the skills to get out of the the empty the just the wide open options they're afraid of closing off options cuz they're not really quite
sure who they are we've produced a society that's made being 25 phenomenally difficult and part because you're in the most supervised childhood in human history until 21 and then after that you're released into the complete void and you're not going to get married for another 12 years you're
not going to settle into your career and so I've come to notice it in my students I've come to call it the TS crisis the loss of sense of purpose and when you get the setback in your mid-20s you don't quite know where your life is you haven't discovered it you haven't found some calling that just seizes you and you it can be pretty
rough um n has a phrase he as a WI a live for can endure anyhow that if you know what your longterm is that you can endure the setbacks but if that hasn't become clear to you then the setbacks are super hard and I just noticed it in the rising depression rates the rising mental health problems the rising suicide problems we've sort of left
people in a very unstructured experience after age 21 I just gave this commencement a talk at Butler University a couple days ago and you know commencements are happy and I was like your life is going to suck in three years like I'm not sure that was the right spirit for that occasion our mutual friend Jonathan Ral
he has a book where he argues quite persuasively I think that people tend to become considerably happier after age 50 uh first what do you infer from this second since often children are leaving the house then does this not mean that a bit more loneliness would be a good thing and maybe aren't the main
determinants of of your state of mind just heritability the basic level of wealth in your society and how old you are no no well I mean Jonathan Rous is there he's absolutely right there's a U-shaped curve people are happy in their 20s and they sort of bottom out at 47 which to me is having teenage children but he he has more complex
things but then they rise up and some of it is straight biological if you give people experiments where you ask them to look at a crowd of faces young people look at angry faces they go toward threat old people their eyes just fixate on the happy faces they just perceive reality as a more friendly thing and so
that's one of the reasons and he's even got data on apparently baboons also have a a U-shaped curve that they're happy in young baboon hood and then they get middle-aged baboon Hood stinks and then upper old age baboon Hood I don't know how they measure this but uh but but to me I guess my answer would be
it's again it's quality relationships quality relationships correlates extremely well with happiness levels if if you join a club that meets once a month that produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income and so just if you know relationships are the thing and I would say that people get better at Living that in their 50s and 60s they
get out of their own way there a lot the the sort of the monster of self-regard diminishes how am I doing how am I doing what do people think of me after a certain age people stop caring and that's a recipe for happiness and then I notice uh and I'm going to write about this I hope that I notice a lot of my
the people I talk to especially over 70 their life has this shape which I've come to think of as the two- Mountain shape they got out of their education they figured oh that's the mountain I'm going to climb and there's a career they imagine there's a family they imagine and then they achieve that success and
find it unsatisfying or else something really bad happens and they suffer and they're at the valley and they realize oh that actually wasn't my mountain and there's a second mountain and it happens often in their 50s and 60s and the second Mountain tends to be more about community service it's more internal
less external the first mountain is more building up the identity and the ego the second mountain is sort of shedding it all and it's more about pouring back and you meet people at person after person who built a career and then they're SEC then they went off and became a teacher or they went to to bed and meditated or
they dedicated their life to some cause and that second mountain is a more spiritual Mountain but it's just a happier mountain and so I think people just learn lessons as they get older and they get better at living in an age of supposed Revelations about Silicon Valley and so-called Facebook scandals why don't Americans seem to care more
about their privacy and in your view is this actually a good thing that we're not not so worried about it not many people have quit Facebook right there can be a big zip file of information about you out there uh there's not actually any great protest in The Parks of Arlington that I know about some media people some intellectuals but
otherwise no yeah that's my observation Mark Zuckerberg came through town and all the hearings were about privacy and yet I don't really you know I hear a little about that to me the problem with Facebook is the fact that for especially for 16-year-olds the more social media you use the more depressed you're likely
to be uh that's the big problem with with social media not the Privacy invasions I think people assume that that's their business model and the stuff they find out about us is Trivial in the most I mean I my wife and I we were going to decorate our house with like one of those little barrels like a
decorative barrel and for the next 6 months whenever I logged onto any website I had to look at a damn Barrel cuz I thought I was going to buy a barrel and I we decided we didn't want a barrel so but but is that really okay so that's an invasion of my privacy but I don't I'm sure there are other privacy experts who
are more alarmed but I haven't seen a massive pain caused by this Invasion might you be game for a a quick round of overrated versus underrated as I said this is the most intimidating interview of my life this the most intimidating part of the intimidating interview but I think these all will be easy okay the
Bruce Springsteen album Born to Run is it overproduced or is it his best work it's overproduced and some of it is his best work it's a little it's a it's a wall of sound style and he he it's like a lot of artists he got spare more spare and more simple as he went along so but for a guy who was at the peak of his
creativity it was an explosion of creativity the Bruce Springsteen double album uh the river which is under produced has a very nice flow but maybe not so many truly great wonderful amazing songs underrated or overrated the river uh everything by Springstein is rated extremely highly and everything by Springsteen is underrated and what is
it that you would Point our attention to in Springsteen that is underappreciated by most others so the crucial moment for me in Springsteen so he has two album he gets his big record he gets a three record deal his two records are bombs the first two greetings from Asbury Park who for those who can see is at our feet
here and then the Wild and this innocent the East Street Shuffle so they failed commercially and the album the company's going to cut him loose so then he comes out with Born to Run which is massive success he's on the cover of time in Newsweek and so he has just made it and the next logical step for any artist in
the commercial sphere would be to go big I've just made it out of New Jersey I'm going big I'm going to go for the big album that's going to really make me a superstar instead partly for legal reasons he takes four years off and he goes down back into his roots of these New Jersey small towns and he writes an album called Darkness on the edge of
town about which is dark small simple and really local going back into his landscape and that was an amazing creative and courageous decision now I saw Springsteen in Madrid about four years ago and so I'm surrounded by 65,000 Spanish kids and they've got t-shirts with all the pieces of landscape from that album Highway 9 The
Stone Pony all these little items from the New Jersey landscape that Springsteen came about and it's a lesson for an artist and it's like the Faulkner lesson it's like a lot of artists if you go to the power of your particular and build a landscape there the audience will sense the authenticity of what
you're doing you're exploring your own stuff and they will come to your landscape and live in your landscape with you and there was a moment in that concert in Madrid where he's singing I was born in the USA I was born in the USA and 65,000 Spanish kids are singing I was born in the USA I was born in the USA I'm like no you weren't no you
weren't but one of the great ironies of Springsteen is that he Embraces in theory the ethos of rock and roll I'm on the road I'm rebelling I'm getting out the guy now lives 10 miles from where he grew up that the ethos was get out but his genius was to go deep and plant roots and stay within his roots and that that
was a great courageous artistic decision which I notice a lot of artists making that decision Lyn manell Miranda has one of those moments where you reject the easy success and you go back to who you are let me tell you some of my reservations about Bruce Springsteen and let's see if you can talk me out of no I was willing to
trample over the new New and Old Testaments but now we're getting into Holy Ground [Laughter] here if I think of his sources like Roy Orbison Gary in the US bonds Eddie Cochran they're almost completely American and you've stressed Virtues Of integration they're strongly White there's a kind of I hesitate to say
monotony but there's a a sameness of Rhythm in a lot of Bruce Springsteen and if I say instead well for me kind of foundational American musicians singer songwriters I would look to Paul Simon who's more Global Bob Dylan who's more religiously bisexual as a stronger link to Black Culture and I would put
Springstein as less important than them I mean what would you say to talk me out of that he's a kind of nationalist isn't he and you're a cosmopol through spring scen as Donald Trump Steve Bannon rolled into one you know I do think I mean as I say he's uh he's not a Cosmopolitan actually I think you're right about that I mean I
would point to some influences that you know Sam Cook and some others Africa BB King probably some of the Blues guitarists some a lot of the 1950s R&B singers were big influences he he really grew up at the 5565 era and I would say he drew from white and black in that era you know I don't know how to compare him
to Dylan I mean Dylan is not my cup of tea a lot of the time especially later Dylan but you know I would say that as an artist who's exploring his own issues and is relentlessly not performing but is being relentlessly honest with the issues that really trouble him and send him to analysis for 45 years he's a pretty honest guy and he he's got a good
he's got a lot of good passages in his Memoir which is a really good Memoir It's A Memoir of somebody who's been in analysis all his life he's talked it all through um but one of them is how is his evaluation of his own voice which is a medium quality voice but he says I I do sing truly to what I'm feeling and he is
very I mean he's very transparent I had a chance to meet him a couple times once for an extended period and he's amazingly shy and when you see him on stage you can't believe you're seeing the same human being and he's he's like one of a lot of writers are like this they're only fully themselves when they're the pro process of
writing and so he's someone who is who is honest about what he's processing and then throws it out and the key to good performance when I go to a concert or the key the key to public speaking is are they willing to throw themselves out onto the audience and hope the audience will pick them up and if you want to see
a good speaker or a good musician they always have that quality that I'm helpless here I'm just going to you got to help me here and he he does that every time Walt Whitman not only as a poet but as a foundation thinker for America overrated or underrated I'd have to say slightly overrated tell us why I
I think his spirit and his energy sort of Define America his essay Democratic Vistas is one of my favorite essays it captures both the vulgarity of America but the energy and especially the business energy of America but we do have to if we think the rise of narcissism is a problem in our society Walt women is sort of the Holy spring
there SOC es overrated or underrated this is so absurd I mean with everybody else it's like Breaking Bad overrated underrated I got Socrates I I I will say Socrates is overrated for this reason we call him dialogues but really if you read them they're like Socrates making a long speech and some other Schmo saying oh
yes it must surely be so Socrates so it's not really a dialogue it's just him speaking with somebody else affirming and it's Plato reporting Socrates so it's pl's monologue about a supposed dialogue which may itself be a monologue yeah it was it was all probably the writers a few questions about politics
but of course feel free to pass if you wish should Donald Trump win a Nobel Peace Prize no the Nobel Prize for literature maybe but [Laughter] no is a wilsonian foreign policy still feasible given that our GDP relative to Global GDP will just keep on falling so I'm an idealist in foreign policy but Wilson is too idealistic for me so I a
more realistic I think a a reaganite foreign policy is still possible which urges democracy promotion human rights abroad but is not quite thinking that we're going to solve human Evil Within 3 years you argued in a recent column that the anti-trump movement basically has failed what could it or should it have
done better or different it should have understood where Trump supporters were coming from and you know I'm as guilty about this as everyone uh you know what when I get push back from Trump supporters which is frequent it's because they don't feel respected and heard so saying you know a realistic understanding of why people voted for
Trump and then a realistic argument of why he failed on those grounds rather than the grounds that I happen to find be offended by with Charlottesville and all the rest if you think about what is coming next in American politics one view I sometimes hear is we tend to elect presidents who are a reaction
against the previous president so Jimmy Carter was in a way a reaction against the era of Watergate Reagan was a reaction to Jimmy Carter you know this story of course there's a kind of reversion to a mean another view is that every now and then just things change and they don't go back to how they were so the post-war era those presidents do
seem fundamentally different from a lot of the Knuckleheads we had in the mid to late 19th century so here we are in 2018 which of those two models or some other model do you think does best yeah well I I think the reaction but you can react in two ways the reaction I would hope for is to some bore manager uh like I wrote a book in in
2015 on humility and then 2016 happened and Donald Trump's get elected so my reaction was well that worked uh and so then the reaction would be okay we've got a narcissistic blow hard in the white house we go back to I I could use like a boring manager like Mitch Daniels who was governor of Indiana now
president of perue when he got into office as Governor the line at the DMV was an hour and 20 minutes when he got done it was was 8 minutes and I'm like for president I'll take that that's what I'd like just somebody to manage things there's a DMV in this building by the way you need to take care of any of your
business wrong I don't live in Virginia sadly um but so it you know he he was 5'6 slow to the ground in touch with the people so that was be one reaction but to the more likely one I think is Trump was a swing to a certain sort of Halo Pap Buchanan right and I think it's a little more likely that we get to swing
to a a Paleo left uh and that will get a trumpism on the left um which will be pretty socialistic and pretty Progressive left but in terms of the boring manager why should we want that or why should we think it's possible so if the antitrump movement Went Wrong by not hearing the people who feel AG
grieved is it possibly the case those people can never feel that a boring manager has heard them because all he's going to do is go off and manage something in a boring way well what I observe and this is a book I I've just finished reading by James and Deborah Fallows called our towns and one observes this as you travel around the
country our national politics stinks to high heaven a lot of local cities are doing well and they point to Greenville South Carolina Fresno California oakair Wisconsin uh Nashville uh Detroit it's doing reasonably well and those cities are all run by people who say there's all those culture War cable TV issues
we're putting that nonsense aside and we're just going to talk about I was with this guy mayor of Detroit Mike dou and he talked about like where to put the lamp post where to cut the grass like to the basic management issues and the cities that are doing well are run by people who do business private Public Partnerships they focus on community
colleges and they produce measurable results for workingclass Americans and so to me all you have to do is take the success of all these Mayors at the local level and try to nationalize it and that's completely plausible uh to me when you look at times of American History when we have recovered turned around a social decline without the
benefit of War it's like periods from 1890 to 1910 and generally we take some local series of local movements and we merge it into a national movement in the 1890s we had all these Civic organizations that grew up all at once you the Boy Scouts the Girl Scouts the boys clubs the Girls Clubs the temperance movement
the settlement house movements the n ACP the unions they all grew up in five years of each other and then they joined together eventually and formed the Progressive Movement and they cleaned up government and so to me you look around to if you want to look how America changes look around what's happening locally and figure H it'll probably
nationalize at some point the earliest appearance of David Brooks on video I believe is still on YouTube you're a young man and you're challenging Milton Friedman on the Chrysler Bal out do you remember this encounter sadly I do it's like one of those early traumas that will live with me forever what was it
like having Milton Friedman lecture you about the Chrysler Ballout so I was a student at University of Chicago and they did an audition and I was a socialist back then they he it was a TV show PBS put on called Tyne the status quo which was Milton talks to the young and so I studied up on my leftwing economics and I went out there to
Stanford and then I would make my argument and then he would destroy it in 6 seconds or so and then the camera would Linger on my face for 19 or 20 seconds as I tried to think of what to say uh and it was like he was the best arguer in human history and I was 22y old and so it it was my TV debut you can
go on YouTube I have a lot of hair and big glasses but I will say I never met a Libertarian before and every night we taped for like 5 days every night he took me and my colleagues out to dinner in San Francisco and really taught us about economics and I wouldn't I later and he stayed close to me I called him a mentor
and I didn't become a Libertarian ever quite like him but a truly great teacher uh and a truly important influence on my life and so many others I mean a model of what an academic Economist should be like what do you think of the Chrysler Ballout now I not only support the Chrysler B out I support the Obama bail
out of GM or so I which I was against at the time I will say one other thing about Freedman early in my life when I was 23 I got this little fellowship at the the Hoover institution and at 3:30 you would have cookies uh and you could go to Milton freedman's table with all the economists at Stanford or Sydney Hook's table with all
the philosophers and so some days I would go here hook and I remember he was a great philosopher and he did an hour and a half discussion of the problem of evil which is thrilling and once I once I was sitting at the fredman table and I was making some dumb argument I'm sure and some other Economist of the table
ripped me the shreds but I didn't understand what he was saying because it was all jargon and I finally just said I really don't know what you just said I I don't understand I'm sorry and fredman laughed and he was totally on my side and I I felt the great I felt great gratitude of him to leaping to my defense and he was an economist who
could speak without jargon and sort of a model of that but that was an act of great charity which I remain grateful to him for and I didn't feel you lost that early exchange with fredman I mean it seemed to me to be a draw that you had good arguments and he had good arguments and then time was up oh good well I beat
Milton Friedman or at least or at least Drew e where's my Nobel Prize now I have a few questions for what I sometimes call the David Brooks production function about you so obviously you've written numerous bestselling books been journalist for the Wall Street Journal long-standing columnist for the New York Times so how
you work is what I'd like to ask about how would you say you keep yourself just motivated because I've written for many years and getting up every morning and having to do things how do you keep that live and active for yourself so I I read a book when I was seven called Paddington the bear uh and I've written
pretty much every day since then and I people know get out of my way before I write for two hours in the morning that's just how I live I just do not stop writing uh the thing that's distinctive about my style is that my brain has very bad memory so I have to write everything down and then the I I think geographically and so for each column
I'll have like 200 pages of notes and then a bunch of things I've written on myself and I lay them out on the floor of my living room in piles and every pile is a paragraph in my column so the column is 850 words and but I'll have 14 or 15 piles I'll pick up a pile write it throw the pile out pick up another pile
of papers and so writing for me is not typing into the keyboards it's crawling around on the floor organizing my piles and the lesson for my students which they ignore is that your paper should be 80% done by the time you sit down and type it CU writing is about structure and traffic management it's and if you
don't get that right everything else will flow badly and if something's not working judges have it saying that opinion won't right they thought they knew what they believed but then they started writing and it just wasn't flowing don't try to fix it start over with a new structure uh and so to me it's it's a it's I crawl I I write by
crawling around on the carpet and writing aside just learning keeping on learning through life there are plenty of obvious pieces of advice like read books talk to smart people what do you feel you can tell us that maybe we haven't already thought about already how to keep on learning through life uh
I just read the marginal Revolution blog and steal as much as possible unscripted I the one virtue of this job is um is that you have to come up with a new idea every three days so it it may not be a good idea and I find I've written more than a thousand columns but if I write a bad one then I feel really bad I feel
really humiliated and if I write a bad one and WR out that and Brett Stevens right good ones I feel really bad I'm trying to think of other than the obvious um you know I don't I go to conferences I don't learn that way particularly I I learn by reading and I just I'm always reading not as much as you but 50% of you maybe what would it
take for you to pack up and move to rural China for a year to live there and write about what that's like or a month even huh that's actually kind of attractive uh the food is good the food is good and uh it would be life altering I know it would be good because what's another year in in DC I guess I do I
think I would say the action is here I mean I wrote a column called I mentioned James follows before but called the Fallows test which is Jim Fallows in the 80s he went to Japan then he moved to China he wrote about Iraq Each decade he's more or less picked the spot where the action is and so the question is if
you could live anywhere in the world where the action where where history is being made where's the action and I Fallows now thinks it's like Fresno California but but I would make the argument that Washington is where the action is right now uh and that that is so living here actually has has some good utility even if it seems a little
boring the second thing is part of my career rightly or wrongly is based on The View that politics is are our conversation is overp politicized and under moralized we we write too much about politics and not enough about relationship and truth and yearning for goodness and meaning and so what I try
to do with my little column is sort of shift the direction a little in more that sort of meaning purpose culture direction do you have a work habit dysfunction that you're willing to confess to I mean I have the same one everyone else has which is checking my phone every 90 seconds I'm a big pen chewer I don't know if that counts as a
real dysfunction I feel I should come up with something more dramatic U I chew pens and shoot heroin at the same time I'm kidding so a young person comes to you and says I would like to be some version of the next generation of David Brooks which won't be exactly what you did by any means and they say again other than
the trivial advice work hard talk to smart people whatever what would you give that person in the way of advice to guide them well it used to be you would you would the career path was kind of ordinary you became assistant editor of the National Review or New Republic and then you moved up the opinion food chain
then the EZ recline model seems probable you go online you do work nobody else wants to do so somebody pays attention to you and then you get well known for being a smart person who's willing to work hard uh and that that model has uh I think that's probably still the way to go you know the the obvious lessons are
um say yes to everything you don't know what's going to lead to what so when you're 24 say yes to every opportunity I was a movie critic as was a foreign correspondent uh that was a very useful thing to I wrote about El Salvador I've still never been to El Salvador uh just somebody ask you to do something say yes
I'm happy to bring you by the way I'm happy to go I won't ask because you'd have to say yes but there is a direct flight the other thing is this was Richard holbrook's advice to young people which was know something about something you've got to have a body of information to bring to the table uh the final I have writing a book on this so
I'm filled with random bits of advice right now but there was a there's a guy a friend of mine named Fred swaner who grew up in Africa and was his mother was a teacher and he was educated here and he founded a school in South Africa called the African Leadership Academy and was trying to figure out what to do
with the rest of his life and he said which is true advice you don't when you're thinking about what to do with your life don't say what do I want to do from Life ask what is life expecting of me this is a Victor Frankle question what problems are around me that are really calling me and then so one is it
a big problem you got to fall in love with a big problem cuz if you have some human capital you might as well go for the big problem two is it a problem your life history has made you uniquely qualified to serve so swaner decided education Africa is the big problem and there need to be more universities and for all of Africa and
so but he said actually I'm uniquely qualified to do that because I did grow up across all of Africa my I was an educator my mom was an educator I did have the advantage of an American Education I did go back and form of pan-african high school so I'm going to start universities and he's already started one in maius and I think he's on
scheduled to start another 10 or 15 universities across Africa which is an audacious goal but it's one that he was uniquely qualified to serve and the Fred rner the novelist who I mentioned before he is the most famous phrase about vocation which is find the spot where your deep gladness meets the world's
deep need so something you intrinsically love doing and match it with some deep problem that's out there last question before I turn to the audience on the iPad for questions what is indeed your current and next project so it was about um commitment making the theory of the book when it started was um that each of
us make four big commitments in the course of Our Lives to a spouse and family most of us make these commitments to a spouse and family to a vocation to a community and to a philosophy and faith and the Fulfillment of Our Lives depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments so how do you
do that and what examples of people who are great at making commitments and what is a commitment and my favorite definition of commitment by the way is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters so Jews love their God but they keep kosher just in case you got to
build the structure and now I think that I'm probably going to call it when you give yourself away and the argument is we all everyone says serve something larger than yourself and like that's the cliche of the moment but what does that actually mean how do you actually do that and so the book is an attempt to
look at people who've actually done that not me but other people have done it and what are the lessons we can learn from their lives David thank you very much for all of your wisdom audience questions we will take at the two mics and from the iPad these are not opportunities to make statements or speeches uh the goal here is to hear
from David So if you start making a speech I will simply stop you and cut you off question hi uh I I kind of observed since you've moved to the times um and also I might say the same thing for Brett Stevens that I never feel like I'm reading a conservative anymore do you feel like that you've Chang the time
has changed you or are they not letting you be conservative or you know and am I correct that you're moving a little bit to the left yeah well if I write a conservative sentence krog hits me over a ladder it's like no um they we first thing to say is we have no that nobody supervised us we're given total academic
freedom we have copy editors in New York but we really don't have we don't consult with editors we basically write the column and send it in so for good or ill it's all us uh the second thing I would say is if you read my stuff in in the Weekly Standard I was writing this hamiltonian Teddy Roosevelt style of republicanism back then which I still
think I'm writing the third thing to say is I think events have pushed me away from a more pure free market view especially uh because I think the structures of the economy have become more evident uh the structural flaws of the economy and that I've become a little more tolerant of government intervention as inequality is
widened as working class has been left behind as society's Fallen apart so I probably have drifted a little to the to the left as the party has drifted in a more populist uh nativist Direction uh but I don't think I've moved all that much I I still basically are Teddy Roosevelt Alexander Hamilton wig next
question so much has been written about uh failure and why it's good but not a lot of it is practical or useful so what advice would you give to say a young recent college graduate about how to fail and even how to Suffer Well so Steve Jobs gave an a famous commencement address at Stanford on the importance of
failure and JK Rowling gave a famous commencement on the importance of failure and Densel Washington gave a famous commencement on the importance of failure so if you're Steve Jobs JK rling or denel Washington failure is awesome but for most people failure just sucks and I wouldn't do it now as for suffering suffering comes whether you
want it you know I wrote a little section in my last book about the value of suffering and one of my students came up to me and said well how can I find some suffering um like don't worry it'll find you uh and I think I think the the lessons the classic lessons are the people who suffer and grow from
suffering are able to turn their moments of suffering into a story of redemption so nobody ever says if you ask somebody what made you who you are nobody ever says oh I went to Hawaii and I had an amazing time that was really the transformative event of my life but a moment of suffering is usually what they point to or struggle uh and what
they do is they um there's a paulic phrase um that what suffering does is it introduces you to yourself and reminds you you're not the person you thought you were and then he says what it does is it carves through the floor of what you thought was the basement of your soul and it reveals a cavity and then
carves through that floor and it reveals a cavity below so so moments of suffering reveals the deepness of a person the way nothing else does and then I think you realize the only thing that can feel that depth is a spiritual food and not a material food and people want to fill that depth with something and so I have uh two friends for example
who lost a child uh and nobody says well we grieve for two years let's go out and party and let's be happy they want to turn that moment of suffering into a a cause and a precondition for service and so they created a charity called hope for Henry about their child's in honor of their child so other children wouldn't have to
suffer from what Henry suffered from and so they turn a moment of suffering into a Redemption and meaning and those who don't turn their moments of suffering into that kind of Redemptive narrative they can really shrivel but I find most people um those moments of suffering deepen them spiritualize them and they
all that what I talked about that monster of self-regard it sort of crashes through the ego the people who've been through deep suffering it sort of breaks the ego and they are less self-obsessed there's a guy named Henry Nan who I read and I'm not sure I agree with this he says when you're in a moment moment of suffering
your instinct is to get out but sometimes you need to stay in that moment of suffering to see what it has to teach you I'm not sure about that I I would get out but it's an idea next question you mentioned that you're a cultural determinist and so right looking at for example North and South Korea or 20 30 years ago Hong Kong
China it seems to me that there is a difference combined with the fact that there is this what's called The Deep Roots literature and economics which basically looks at right like how long has there been a state in this country and so from a cultural conservative perspective that would be fairly pessimistic looking at economic
development in places that do not have a long history of statehood so I was wondering if you could discuss that a little bit and then to what extent it might be possible to sort of right create sustainable formal institutions in these places that do not have a long history of them Allah a Paul romer's
Charter cities well I've tried to be a cultural determinist but not a total nut about it uh and so I wouldn't want to deny the importance of Institutions and um and economic laws and conditions obviously those are you know the difference between North and South Korea is probably not primarily culture it's probably institutional I will say it's
very hard to I think we've learned this at Great National cost it's very hard to impose institutions that require High trust onto Society that have low trust and so I covered the Soviet Union and the decline of the Soviet Union the emergence of Russia and we sent teams of economists with privatization plans and
we emphasized the Economic Institutions they would need to thrive but we didn't appreciate the depth of lack of social trust uh and so I think we sort of got that wrong and did a great disservice uh and so I think it's it's hard to uh if you don't take that especially levels of social trust into account it's very hard
to impose one society's institutions onto another which is why I've always been a little impatient with should we be more like Denmark I'm not sure we have that choice a question from the iPad quote the more we learn about our Behavior the larger a role culture peer group and genes play in determining it how does
this impact or what does this leave for free will and moral agency well I I mean I do think our our genes and our our cultures are basers but we still make choices and in part one of the things we do is we have the power you know I'm like everybody you're going to talk to Danny conoman soon uh and I'm a Believer like everybody that
most you know 99% of our con our processing is unconscious but that doesn't mean you can't control your life you you can decide to join the Marine Corps and then the Marine Corps will influence you in a zillion ways that are most of which are unconscious you can decide to get married and then that will
affect you in unconscious ways you can decide what environment to put yourself into and then the environmental influences will be very determinative but uh making that decision of how to plant yourself uh that that to me strikes me as a free will decision and finally I just fall back on the um the
old saw I forget who said this first that everything in the philosophical literature makes free will seem impossible and everything about lived experience makes it seem inevitable next question um in your first question you alluded to a kind of a communal mentality in the 1950s and an argument could be made I think that maybe that
was born out of the sense of mission from World War II and I'm wondering if there is hope and if we are optimistic um if something short of War what kind of Crisis or do you foresee something or is it an anti-trump movement um that could bring that kind of sense of communal ambition or collectivism and
Goodwill and love together if we got invaded by Canada like not even all of Canada just part of Canada uh the weaker part uh you know I I do think there are times where K uh cultures have turned around uh and uh without War the two examples that I know most about are Britain between 1830 and 1848 and America as I mentioned between 1890 and
19 10 say and in both those cases there was a religious revival first which made everybody much more communal then there was a Civic Revival which I described and then there was a political Revival it seems to me we're not going in that order we're going we I think we are genuinely having a Civic Revival I don't see despite what I said earlier not
really a lot of evidence of a religious revival a lot of upsurge of Institutions and responses uh and I'm hoping that'll lead to a political Revival down the road one of the things that that that 1950s culture and I'm again I've got Jonathan saxs on my mind but I think he has a good metaphor the problem that 1950s
culture was that he calls it a guest house culture the Protestant establishment owned the country and everybody else was just guests in it and if you behaved according to the cult of the laws of the Protestant establishment they would let you in but there wasn't really ownership uh and that became and the
reason there were so many tight communities in in Chicago say in African-American neighborhoods Italian neighborhoods polish neighborhoods is because those people did not have access to Michigan Avenue and the community was in part caused by lack of opportunity and Sach says we smash that up for good reason because we don't want
to live in somebody else's house but then we went to what he calls a hotel culture where we've all got a private room we don't really invest in the building we don't really know our neighbors and we're seeing the after effects of that too I have just tremendous faith in human's ability to solve their problem problems so I assume
we'll find a way to to create a much more communal organization but we're not going to go back to the 1950s in Airbnb culture then like taking that metaphor like we're on the way it bothers me that giv me hope it bothers me that a lot of I mean it doesn't bother me but a lot of the really big
social Technologies are designed to make human relationships friction free and temporary Airbnb Tinder even Facebook to some degree um and so we there has to be some other way to solve the problem for long attention span and the one thing I'd love to do is uh demote how we think about high tech and especially social
media I think our smartphones do a lot of great stuff for me I can find my way anywhere in the world now because of my smartphone and so that's a great tool but I don't expect it to lead to a new Consciousness or solve my emotional problems I mean my car is a great tool the wheel is a great tool tool electricity a great tool I don't expect
it to spiritually deliver the society but somehow we got in the business of expecting Tech to deliver a new Consciousness and a new social order that's just asking too much of a tool uh and so I doubt it's going to come through some technology next question uh yeah hi I have a I have a question about
foreign policy which is a subject you write quite a lot about in your in your columns uh earlier in this conversation you mentioned that you you're an epistemological you you have you share with Edmund Burke epistemological modesty and I'm wondering how you square that with um being a reaganite uh it seems to me that in order to run a
successful foreign policy of the sort that America wants to run that you have to know quite a lot about the world and how how can you know enough yeah well I I think I would say reaganite and then I'll get to Iraq in a second uh I think The Secret of reaganism was understanding the planned economies were
probably going to be doomed and he understood that better than most other people for probably for the right epistemological reasons I mean he wouldn't use the word probably uh but having that confidence that planning was going to fail was a right intuition uh and also having a an ability to um think in moral terms to me
communism and he said evil empire to me communism really was an evil system at to Untold human misery uh and so basing one's intuitions on those things seemed to me the right thing to do now the question then becomes how much can you remake the rest of humanity and Reagan was pretty careful about how he
committed troops uh and tried to remake other nations George W Bush was less careful and I remember I wrote a a column in the runup to the Iraq War which I supported how would Michael oakshott think about this problem and oot is sort of berky and though he denied it but the same sort of cultural style and would oot would be like you're
going to screw this up you do not understand that culture and so I wrote 700 words on why Michael Oak shot would really oppose the Iraq War and that any conservative should and then unfortunately I WR another 150 on why Oak shot was wrong and if I could take back that 150 I probably would there's a balance between you know you can't be
paralyzed by your modesty in in world affairs you have to act and to me to not try to plan too much but just sort of be a gentle Force for democracy and human rights that's strikes me as the right posture just constantly pushing for these things and then hoping something good happens you can't tell what effects
you're going to have but if you push for the right things that are your values and you have faith in them um then that strikes me as the right posture and we've had two presidencies in a row who didn't do that Obama it was interesting Obama would never saw a problem he didn't want want to transcend except around foreign policy he always thought
you messed up by doing too much not by doing too little that was his bias never do too much and as a result I think he did too little and then Donald Trump doesn't seem to believe in Dem democracy promotion at all he is a more law of the Jungle mentality about foreign policy so I I still strike to stick to reaganism
that basic leaning toward democracy and dignity and progress next question thanks so much for sharing Thoughts with us I want to go back to your understandings and learnings from the Trump voter it's fascinating the age Spectrum uh that it crosses and my 26-year-old son oftentimes looks at a younger Trump voter and says where did
they get harmed by some of the past and I'm just curious what is your sense about how do we move forward so that this Trump voter is better understood is indeed heard if that's indeed what's being sought after and that the tangible results can be seen and felt and ultimately changed the dynamic here with
that's created such dysfunction yeah well I happen to know a lot of trump voters 18 to 24 age group um and some of some of it is sort of rebellion against liberal professors but a lot of it is a pretty in thought through view of what constitutes Community uh and I've had it argue to me many times that my view of community
which is about pluralism and cosmopolitanism is a 10 ated and unrealistic uh and that they generally do argue and I've had it said many times to me that you just can't think there's such thing as diversity and community at the same time that these two sit in much greater tension than you're willing to
acknowledge and I'm willing to face the reality that diverse societies tend to be attenuated societies with low social trust and I'm willing to adopt the policies that uh are consistent with that and you're not you know I disagree with that argument but it's not an argument without Merit uh and so the young voters I I've
interviewed or have known just personally they've got some philosophical background to what they're thinking from the iPad what idea or cultural inspiration will be the motivating force for the Next Generation in China so I've been to China like twice or three times so I don't know I will say I spoke to Stuart brand
I uh about a column for a column I wrote recently and he's like one of these zeligs of world history uh where whatever trend is hot at the moment he's there whether it's hippies or you know Steve Jobs or The Homebrew Computer Club uh and he was he just said if he urged me at my amazingly young age compared to
him to focus on biotech he said If I Were Young that's where I'd be I'd just stick with biotech uh and if that's true for any Young American maybe it's true for any young Chinese I don't really know China that was a great answer next question hi I was curious to know what you would cite as your most underrated book or article and what critical
Insight um it it uh provides us you can't get away from underrated versus overated here the book I'm I regret the most but I um it was a failure as a book but I it's the one I go back to the most uh is called on Paradise Drive I assume you're talking about my books is not and it was an attempt to write a book about
the spirit of America as exemplified by sprawling Suburbia uh but what I go back to is that I went through the literature of what makes America culture so spiritually electric and in the 19th century there were magazines called the Democratic review and W Whitman was writing and and um Melville and tracing the history of
sort of the American why are why do we move so often why do we switch jobs so often why do we marry and divorce so much why do we kill each other so much the all these there was a guy named Seymour Martin lipit who wrote a book on American exceptionalism and a lot of all these ways America is just an outlier
for example if you ask um people are you in control of your own life or is it mostly luck we're a super outlier in believing we control our own lives and so where did that come from and there was a great history of American literature going back to the historians of the 19th century but especially in the 1950s that addressed this question
you know I guess my short answer to it is that people came Europeans at least came to these Shores 1600s saw flocks of geese that were 45 minutes it took them that long to take off Forest stretching on forever they just saw material abundance and they had two thoughts one was that God's PL for Humanity would be
completed here and the second is they get really rich in the process and so that moral materialism that drives the country uh and there's a great writer who I really became came beholden to in those writing that book named sackin burkovich who died probably about 5 years ago who wrote about the Puritan influence on American society
and it was that two ORS rowing for heaven one very materialistic one super spiritual and I do think that long cultural consistency in America continues to shape Us in odd ways and I screwed up that book in the middle of writing that book I came across a jack barsen quote that every book is possible to write except one trying to define the
spirit of America America and I was in the middle of I was like 3 years into the project and I was like oh damn he's right and so the book in some ways was a failure and a sort of disorganized hodge podge mess but I go back to it more than any other book just because there's valuable quotes in there and valuable
stuff in there next question uh I have a question about your relationship with Tyler um how has he changed the way you look at going out to eat and when you go to lunch does he ever let you you pick the restaurant well the answer to the second is no and I have become uh Tyler's ethnic dining guide which for listeners is a guide to um ethnic
restaurants in most all around the DC area and basically you want to you want some um mosam Bean restaurant and so there's some strip mall out in Seven Corners or Bailey's Crossroads where the greatest mosam Beque restaurant in the western hemisphere is located and you go in there and you sit down and there all
these mosm beans sitting around and they come up to you and they say I didn't even know you were from mosm Beek what are you doing here uh it it's actually it's not only been an education in Cuisine but an education in um in new America what what the future of America is going to be like and is like uh and I
I have I've I've spent many weekends with that ethnic dining guide finding one restaurant after another that you would never have known CU they look like all the other El Salvadoran restaurants in the strip malls but a couple of them happen to be really Sensational next question so I wanted to ask you what you
think about President Trump's job performance do you approve or disapprove overall and do you think the Democrats will take the house in the midterms I know a lot about the future uh um I mean I I would have to say they would simply because I mean if you run the raw numbers need to pick up what 23 24 seats and that happens 50% of the time and
when the president's approval is under 50 it happens 86% of the time so just by that raw number you'd think they have a pretty good shot at at Tak in the house I think it's less like much less likely they'll take a senate just the way the geography works and because of the candidates Republicans have chosen as
for Trump approval um I have to I have to say number of things one I think it's appalling uh you know as a cultural determinist I pay a lot of attention to Norms and social fabric uh and I think he's pretty good at making friend enemy distinctions uh and poking a red hot wound into every every divide we have in
this country and making it worse and so I place a high value on social norms and cultures I have to say for my friends who are Trump supporters they say yeah I don't really pay attention to that stuff I just look at the economy uh I look at some of the things I like that he's done and there are some a lot of things I
like that he's done uh and um the economy is not tanked and I expected support to wne as the scandals mounted has not waned at all you know I happen to support the move of the say we're speaking on the day they moved the embassy in our Embassy in Israel to the Jerusalem I happen to think that was the right move I mean Jerusalem is clearly
the capital of Israel so we should recognize reality um the tax cut Tyler linked to something I I was against it because it seemed to me not the tax reform I always dreamed of and it seemed to me a way way to um basically take money out of blue pockets and put into red pockets and I didn't want to see our
tax reform our tax system turned into a tribal weapon uh and I didn't think corporate tax cuts were the way to increase growth but you linked to a study I don't know if you're allowed to talk on these things but I'd like to know if that or at least a story in Bloomberg that suggested that since the corporate tax
cuts that Capital expenditures have risen 37% and stock BuyBacks have only written 16% which is that the corporate rate cuts are producing more economic activities than a lot of a lot of economists suggest that they would and so I'm open to the fact that a lot of trump policies may be have surprisingly
beneficial effects but it'll be very hard to persuade me they're good enough to justify the harm he's doing to our democracy with that David thank you very much announcements if you like this conversation subscribe to our podcast up upcoming events at Mason Nobel Lauri at Daniel conman November 12th April 8th
Margaret Atwood who will be a Nobel Lau we just don't know when thank you [Applause] again thanks for listening to conversations with Tyler you can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes Stitcher or your favorite podcast app and if you like this podcast please consider rating it on iTunes and leaving a review this helps other people find the show