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

22:27But I regard that as one of the great acts of mentorship as in the great act of parenting, letting the person go and have their life. Was Milton Friedman a good mentor? He also was a great mentor. What made him great? So the reason I wasn't at the Buckley speech was I'd been hired. I was a democratic socialist and I was hired to go out to Stanford and debate him on national TV. So if you go back and Tyler has seen this, I think, if you go on YouTube and write Milton Friedman, David Broke. It's there. You'll see me with this. He's younger. Big afro. These 1980s glasses that look like they were on loan from the Mount Polymer Lunar Observatory.

23:05They were like gigantic. And then I read something I'd read in a Robert Cutner book. And then he destroys it in six seconds. And then the camera lingers on my face for about 19 seconds. Well, I try to think of something to say. And so that was the show, but afterwards, he would have us out to dinner, and then we would pepper him with questions about, well, how does the economy work here? How does it work there? And I would say my education from him came from those dinners, and then subsequent dinners over the years. And I grew up here in Stives and Town. And I had never met a conservative. And to meet somebody so bright, and somebody so lies and rational who was outside the left.

23:49That was my opening to me. And at one final thing about both these guys, I had a chance at the end of their lives separately to say, okay, Bill, okay, Milton, you've changed the world. Bill Buckley created the modern conservative movement. Milton Friedman widened the aperture of economics and I asked them both, so now you've done a less year older, do you have a feeling that you can just relax? Like, I did what I was put on the surface to do. I'm happy, I'm good, and I'm just going to play golf. And neither of those guys understood the question. Neither of them had the ability to slow down and to stop trying to change the world.

24:26And they both kept trying to change the world until their very last days. If you think about Buckley, where you disagree with him, and I don't mean on particular issues, I feel I know that. But his method of thought, what is there in his method of thought, But where you would say, I David Brooks diverged from Buckley in a fundamental way. His gift and his curse was that he couldn't slow down his thinking. And so I would see him write a column in 20 minutes. And if he wrote it for an hour, we'll get no better. He just moved at that speed. And me, it takes me two days, three contexts, you know, 14, 20 hours.

25:02And so that's one thing. Second, you know, he really did have, he grew out of such a different background. and his dad, as we know from this book, was an old -right America firster. And my parents were like, low -reside, New York intellectual progressives. And so I always felt at home in a diverse America, in a regular working class America, that was light years away from the world he inhabited. And your difference with Milton Friedman, again, not on specific issues, such as the New Deal, but conceptually, how is it that you think differently from how Milton did? Yeah. So Friedman is great gift, and I think this is a libertarian gift, is that once you get inside their logical system within their assumptive models, there's no arguing with them.

25:51They have, it all sets together. And I don't believe in assumptive models, and I'm much less rational. I think human beings are much less rational than he did. I think they obviously respond to incentives in some ways, but often respond to incentives in no rational way. And so again being more neoconservative and conservative or more whatever you want to call it, a yumean, I really do believe that David used famous sentence that reason should and ought to follow the passions, I believe that's true, that our passions are wiser than our regional mind and that our emotions, when well -trained, are much more supple and much more responsible for the way we think.

26:33That we don't... There was the rational... Again, I may be charactering, but the rational school of economics thought, well, you see the world, that simple process of looking, you weigh costs and benefits about the world, and then you make a decision about the world. I don't believe that's the way thinking works. I think the active perception is 90 % of what you think. That whether we're seeing a moral act or seeing a good on a supermarket ourselves, we're seeing another human being, we're making quick aesthetic judgments, and that will determine all the downstream thought processes. And that perception is really the most, and that's why so many neuroscientists are phenomenologists now, because perception is most of what the mind does.

27:13You had on your last podcast, you had a conductor. Yes, David Robertson. And one of the things he did, he mentioned on that podcast, was he took a mixtape and he put all sorts of music together, ACDC, Springsteen, Barely O's, I don't know it. And in 2 .5 second increments and people could decide right away, that's for me, that's not for me. And I felt like screaming at my car radio. Why 2 .5 seconds? Why not 0 .5 seconds? Because that's how we make our minds. So that aesthetic sense of perception to me is how people make up their minds in all sorts of circumstances, including economic streams.

27:48So you were a reporter covering a crime beat on Chicago's south side, right? What was that like phenomenologically? Were you thinking this is the Milton Frieden rational model, or how did it shape you? No, because mostly what I covered was incredible idiots. And so I covered criminals. I was a police. No, the police. Well, actually, one of the humbling things was I'd come out of the Chicago. I'm sitting there in the detectives in all these different police stations on the south -west side of Chicago. And I realized the detectives are as smart as my professors. I was very impressed by them. But a lot of the criminals I covered, They were criminals because they had something through.

28:24So for example, I covered a guy who worked at McDonald's and he conducted an arm robbery at the McDonald's where I worked. And they said, like, John, man, we know you. And another guy, a couple of guys who broke out of some jail must have been. And they decided they were hungry, so they ate at the restaurant nearby and they ate in the window booth. And we're caught. So I covered a lot of that. But I wasn't not planning on being a journalist. I'm still not really a journalist, but to come home every day as a police reporter with a story An amazing story about something happening in a great city That was and how did that influence your column?

29:02So you had to write up crime reports, right? Which I didn't even write I called them in called them in and that they was for something called the city news bureau The slogan was if your mother says she loves you check it out And so I remember I would call in and this was back in an earlier era where I would call on and I'd see a body that had been killed in some way. And they'd enter back at the desk and say, what color were the socks? And I would say, I don't know, I didn't see that. And they would say, you are the worst reporters ever worked and they would just scream at you. And that was part of the - That was good for you.

29:34Was mentorship or bad for you? I'm a little sensitive. So that was bad, that fire was bad. But it got you used to the online world, right? I'll say one thing, especially for those academics who are listening, listen, I totally respect randomized controlled experiments. and this sorts of things academics do, but journalism has a mode of knowing that's equally valid, and that is the interview. And I sometimes get frustrated with social scientists who give us data about populations of people, but don't take the time to interview any particular individual. I've had some interviews that were life changing and that I remember to this day, on my best interview, or at least my funniest was with a comedian named Jackie Gleason, which was just two hours of his jokes.

30:16But one, I was in Russia at the end in 1991, and there's a coup staged by the Soviets, the dying Soviet Union against Yeltsin. And a lot of people, I hope, remember this moment. Yeltsin stood on a tank in front of the Russian parliament building and said, I dare you to shoot me, and all the Democrats ran to surround him to be sort of bodyguards. And I go there, I'm in Moscow, and I run into a woman I'm hesitant take because I know we have some Russian friends in the room. I hope I don't miss pronounced the name. As I remember, it was a 93 -year -old lady named Valentina Koseva. And I asked her, she was handing out sandwiches to the democratic protesters.

30:54And I asked her, tell me your life story. And she said, well, I'd grown up in the general household of the Tsar. There was a Russian civil war right after the revolution. I was on the side of the whites, the anti -communists, and I was lined up to be executed. My mother begged and the soldiers decide not She was not shooting me. Her first husband was taking the gulag in the 30s. She never saw him again. Her two sons were killed in the bottle of stolen bread. They were being edited by the Nazis. Her second husband, one day they raided her apartment. They said, you have 15 minutes to leave, but he's coming with us.

31:26And she never saw him again. She was a member of I think the Kalmak people, which is a Muslim community there. And they were said to internal exile under Khrushchev. And so every bad thing that happened in Soviet history happened to her. And my brilliant interviewing technique in that interview was just, and then what happened? And then what happened? And so the power of that interview is living history. And you see how these great sweeps of history influence one woman. And she insured days that what we then thought was the birth of democratic Russia and she's passed out sandwiches. And so as a journalist, I so defend the epistemology of the interview.

32:08And so our problem is we don't use data enough. Academics problems they don't use interviews enough. Now, the 1990s, you're working for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, I believe. Who is your mentor there and what did you learn from them? By then, the adult world had cast me off. I think I stopped having meant. I considered Buckley and Friedman my mentors because I was young and impressionable. I had bosses and of course that matters all through life. But then at the Wall Street Journal my two bosses were a guy named Robert Barley and a guy named George Malone. And they were farm boys from Iowa and Indiana.

32:41And because they were Midwestern guys of a certain generation, they were very comfortable with long silences. And so they were editorial meetings would be them sitting basically parallel to the ground, staring off into the wall. And as a New York Jew, I'm sitting like this. I'm saying to myself, I will not break this silence, I will not break this silence. And so that was an experience of learning to work with people who were of a different part of American culture than I was from. But I don't, do people have mentors when they're in the 30s or 40s? I still have many mentors and they're mostly younger and they teach me things like AI.

33:19So I think you need more mentors as you get older, actually, not fewer. Yeah, I'll say that this may pertain to the subject. I read this book Snowball about Warren Bussett. And what's remarkable about him was his ability to grab onto whoever could teach him. And so early when he was a socially awkward kid, he grow up onto Dale Carnegie. And this guy provides him a system to socialize. And then he glums onto Ben Graham and his investing model. And then he glums onto Charlie Munger. And you think, oh, he's still glomming on his 40s. But then in his 50s, he glams onto Catherine Graham, the owner of the Washington Post.

33:54And she's taking him to parties in New York and Washington, which are totally alien to him. And he's loving it because he's getting to sit next to Dolly Parton and Lady Die. And he thinks, this is great. I get to enter a new world. In his 70s, he gloms onto Bill Gates. He teaches him about philanthropy and the tech. And so there's a guy, one of the things I admire most is people who are different in their 70s than they are in the 60s, different in their 50s than they were in their 30s. And Warren Buffett is a guy who just gloms onto whoever can teach him. So that would be an example of being mentored through life.

34:26I have a few questions about politics. Are we allowed? Sure. So you mentioned. You have to pay me double. You mentioned before that you used to be a neo -conservative. Now, we're in 2025, and we see Russia has proven quite weak in some ways. Iran, extremely weak, has Bala, mostly devastated. Hamas, you know, is it the case that other than occupying countries, that the Neocons were right about most things, and you should actually just be a Neocon again. True or false? So the Neocons are anti -Trump, your anti -Trump. Are you in some sense headed toward being a revised Neocon where occupation is the belief you've jettisoned?

35:11Afghanistan didn't work, Iraq was very messy, right? Does that make sense to you? I'm still consistent with that belief. To me, Neocon was, it was a specific group of people. And they tend to have grown up in the 1920s and 30s, usually Jewish from Brooklyn. Usually they went to city collards of New York. And in those days in city collards, they were all Marxists, but there were Stalinists who were the Dumber Marxists and there were trotscates who were the smarter Marxists. And they ate in different alcoves in the cafeteria. And because the trotscates were smarter, the Stalinists did something intelligent, which they said, you're not allowed to talk to the trotscates.

35:45And all the trotscates turned into neocons, or not all, but many. Irving Crystal, there was a guy in Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and that was the cohort that I followed. And they were, like me, totally fine with the New Deal. They thought that American culture began to go off the rails in the 1960s with a rebellion against bourgeois culture, which their immigrant parents were really part of, with the spoiled rich kids who formed the new left. And they became suspicious of some of the great society social programs, which they thought that were counterproductive. And so I think they were pretty much right to all that.

36:22The second thing they were right is they emphasized that society, you can't analyze society unless you're willing to analyze and do this dangerously, the moral fabric of the society. You're sending more and more Neocod, the more you go on, I'm getting into it. I'm getting into it. And so there was a guy named James Cue Wilson, who wrote a great book called The Moral Sensor, which I highly recommend, Irving Crystal's wife, Gertrude Himmelfar, a historian, and really of how morality changes across civilizations. And that strikes me as absolutely essentially true. One, I don't think it's impossible to understand America today.

36:53Without understanding the fact that most people used to feel held within a moral order. George Margin is a historian who said that what gave Martin Luther King's rhetoric such power was his sense that morality, right and wrong, are built into the natural law of the universe. That segregation is not wrong in some places. Its segregation is always wrong. Slavery is always wrong. And that sense of a held moral order was essential to the existential security of all people in our society and our ability to settle disputes because we had an understanding right and wrong. That begins to go away relatively early.

37:28And back in 1955 Walter Lippman, a great colonist, wrote a book called The Public Fossil. And in that book, he says, if what is right or wrong is determined by what each individual feels, then we have left the grounds of civilization. And I think that was profoundly true. And Gertrude Himalpharab and James Kuhlson would say that there is a moral order and we have shredded it and we're living off the fumes of that order. And once that goes away, then you're in trouble. And I think they were right about that. So we're all going to sign up for being Neocons, but what's the fundamental dimension where maybe you're not a Neocon?

38:07If there is one. Well, now I root for Barack Obama and Joe Biden. I don't know if that would have flown, but it were right about something about foreign policy. They were right about the Soviet Union. That was worth trying to push back and. And just stand up to evil, even naively, right? And in my view, they were right about the idea that the internal nature of regimes determines the foreign policy of those regimes, that a dictatorship is bound to be more dangerous than democracy. And what they and I were wrong about was the belief that we could export democracy from that size. So occupation. You're like a Neocon minus the occupation, fellas.

38:42And I'm a pacifist Neocon. But I do think they were right about not totally trusting capitalism. Roryn Kirstal wrote a book, Two Cheers for Capitalism. And so I think if you go back and read some of the writings from that generation, it's worth remembering they were not Republicans. They were break off from liberalism. And I think they were skeptical and realistic and sophisticated break off from what was conventional 1960s liberalists. I promised you only one question about Trump. So Trump has made a mess of our relations with our European allies, but in fact it's led them to spend more money on defense.

39:19In my view, that's a good thing. I've spoken to a lot of European elites who say they think it's a great thing. These are mostly people who hate Trump, but they say we are secretly thankful to Trump that he's now letting us do this. Now in my opinion, it's still not worth it. But my question for you is this. I mean, let's say the Israel -Aran thing also goes well. I'm not sure I will, but let's say it does. What's the minimum number of different things you would have to add up on your ledger before you, David Brooks, the reformed Neocon, would say like the Trump thing worked out okay or even better?

39:55What does that mean you have to look like? I'm not saying you're asking me to. I've off the moral degradation of America. Yes. But to me it's kind of a big deal. Of course it means, you know, that, but what is the list? Have to look like where you take the trade off. Well first let me get the headline before we get to your caveats. You know Charles the Gaulle wrote a memoir and that first sentence to the memoir, his memoir was, all my life I've had a certain idea about France. And I would say all my life I've had a certain idea about America that were sometimes a foolish nation, we're often a naive nation, But we're rarely a cruel and ill intention nation.

40:33And we may disagree about this, but I thought the decision, at least temporarily to get rid of PEPFAR, was deliberate and cruel. No, we agree. And it's led to already tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of that. The treatment of Zelensky, cruel and in malevolent. And so I wake up with a lot of malevolence. But I do have to concede that Trump is never totally wrong. And when he said USID was a poorly managed program, well, that was true. It was a poorly managed program that happened to save a lot of lives. When he says that Harvard is too left -wing, too dogmatic, too unicultural, that's true.

41:10And I was at a conference of academics that I'm not in Utah, not real -ongo. And I said, you know, I'm appalled by what he's doing at the universities. But I have to say, I think it's 20 % your fault. And some of the professors raised their hands and said, no, it's 40 % our fault. So he's never totally wrong. And so I think there was truth to things he said about Europe under spending. He wasn't totally wrong. My problem with him, he's like a doctor, and you go into him and you say, Doc, I've got acne. And the doctor says, oh, good, decapitation. We're going to decapitate you. And so that's what he does.

41:46He takes something that needs to be reformed like our alliances with our European ally. and he trashes them. Something that needs to be reformed, the university system, attack. Something that needs to be reformed, USID, Department of Education, you name it. And it's just random destruction. And so there are things I think he's done well. I think the Iran thing was the right call. There are other things. I think he's done well. And frankly, the tariffs so far have not had the deletorious effects that I expected. that I think they will. But I have to give them credit. There's always some basis of truth to the critique he made.

42:28He's got a lot of things going against him. Americans are swinging to left on immigration right now. Americans are for pluralism and multicultural diversity. Even white Christians are for that. He's not. So he is away from the American mainstream. My American is Alexander Hamilton American. I like dynamism. I like social mobility. He is a securitarian. Let's just keep us safe. And so I think he's way out of the American ideas I've understood it over the last 300 years. But the good thing he gets right is he tells a story the elites betrayed you. And Americans it turns out will pardon him for a lot of things if he gets that story right.

43:11And I think that story is basically right that I believe me I'm a member of the establishment. But the American American establishment has betrayed large numbers of Americans, that's just as the French establishment has betrayed a lot of French people. And he gets that story right. And that's why he's president. What do you think is the point estimate of the probability that at the end of the term, you basically say he got enough things right that it was worth it? That I will say it. You can bury me now. I will not be saying that.

43:45We agree there's something right now quite screwed up in the American psyche, and maybe sometimes it's hard to diagnose, but it seems to me often fairly fundamental. Should we consider the uncomfortable idea that only major involvement in a war, a war with true danger, not an excursion, that only that would reinvigorate the American spirit? Like is that a serious idea or is that just an awful thought? Is there any truth to it? Yeah, I used to think we would... If we had a world like Canada, somebody I thought we could take, yeah, we'd unify us. But now we might have a world with Canada, so I don't think that.

44:20Now I don't think... If you look at the history of the world, there are two things that don't bring countries together, or at least that make countries uglier. And I would say pandemics and wars are among them. I'm not a believer that you go to war to save the culture of your country. But with that intent, but could that be the end result? World War II, Korean War? I would like to see Americans who opposed Donald Trump create a mass movement in the way Israelis created a mass movement against Nia, whose judicial reform in the way Filipinos created a mass movement against Marcus. I think that would have an enormously positive effect on the body politics to, for those of us who oppose Donald Trump to have to articulate our principles, to organize, to create a civic structure, a cross -class civic structure, to come up with an alternative vision that's better than the elites betrayed you.

45:12I think that would be a lead to American renewal, but that does not seem to be happening because the leaders of our major institutions, whether it's corporations, universities, and so on, are basically laying low. So what is the kind of shock that will work? Yeah, my analysis, I gave you all the statistics of how sad we are. My analysis is, there's an attachment theorist named John Bulby who said that all of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base. And that secure base for most of us is a secure attachment to Mom and Dad, a secure devotion to a specific place, the place that sacred to us, a sure devotion to our nation and confidence that our nation stands for something good, secure implantation in, as I said, a moral order.

45:58And I think that secure base for a lot of people has been destroyed. Families are less healthy than they were. Communities are less healthy where the moral order has been taken away. So if we privatize morality, it's every man and woman for herself. But two parent families seem to be doing quite well. It's a problem that there's fewer of them, right? That's a problem. But within the two parent families, it seems above average to me by historic. Yeah, but then the lack of a secure base, just like social suffering everywhere, is not evenly distributors, you know, that people with high school degrees die 15 years sooner than people with college degrees, people with high school degrees are five times less likely to get married, they're much more likely to get divorced, they're five times more likely to die of opiate addiction, they're 2 .4 times more likely to say they have no friends.

46:44And so among the upper middle class, within tax families, well, guess what, that's easier. But among working with us folks or folks with high school who agree with no marriage, no job, shorter life spans, it looks pretty grim and I understand why they vote the way they do. And the shock that will get us out of that is most likely to be what? Well, when I look at places that, in my view, individuals like nations come back through a process of rupture and repair. You go through a hard time, when I ask people, tell me about a time that made you who you are. Nobody ever says to me, you know, I took this vacation Hawaii.

47:19That was awesome. That made me who I am. No, they went through a hard time. I went through a hard time 12 years ago. You knew me then. And I'd gone through divorce. My kids were leaving home. And I realized I had not lived my life in the way was consistent with my values. And such as to say, I think I value friendship and relationships over anything else. And yet I had become such a workaholic that I had slanted, just neglected so many friendships. And it was a theory of intense loneliness. And I read a book by a guy named Henry Nau on a Catholic theologian who said, when you're in pain, you have to stay in the pain to see what it has to teach you.

48:00And I was like, screw that, I want to get out of the pain. But then I read another book by a guy named Frederick Beaconer who was novelist and a pastor who said, in those moments of pain, you can either be broken or broken open. And to be broken, you get calloused over. To be broken open, you make yourself even more vulnerable, even though it's a hard time. And that process of rupture and repair going through that phase in the valley, I think that's how people grow. And nations go through periods of rupture and repair. We went through period of rupture and repair in the 1870s. We come back. The 1830s, the Antisex and Populism.

48:371890s when we really screwed up how to handle industrialization. 1960s with bombings, assassinations, riots. By 1974, their kids were into crystal and est and disco. Like, you go through this rupture and then you repair. And I think we're in a period of rupture where people get disgusted with established power. And the whole social fabric is marred by intense social distrust. But we've been through this process before, or I have every conference, we'll go through a process of repair. And I think that process is already happening. I think some of the outrages of left and right that occurred during the pandemic, I think those have calmed down.

49:15I think the Democratic Party is lost, but they're humble, which is in the beginning of repair. And what will happen to the Republican Party? I don't know, but I think we're already in a process of restoring that trust. And you know, I run this little nonprofit called Weave, the Social Fabric Project. We take people who are trusted in their local neighborhood and we try to support them. We go into any town in America and we say, who's trusted here? And people give us names, local trust merchants, and they're everywhere. There's one in you know Columbia Heights, which is a neighborhood in DC. And we ask who's trusted in this neighborhood.

49:52And there's apparently some guy who takes the money at the parking lot in the blue booth, and he is in obsession with city zoning regulations. And so if you have a problem with the city, you go to the guy in the parking lot, and he takes care of your problem. And so those people are in every neighborhood in America, and I think that bottom -up rebuilding of trust is the precondition for a national restoration of trust. Two last questions. The first one is very easy. How are we actually going to get out of the fertility crisis? Well, you're the second communicator. Yeah, I think that's... I mean, I've not seen anything that particularly works beside we make everybody turn ultra -orthodox or Amish.

50:33Or Amish, Amish would be great. Some religious revival, that would do it. But in my view, that's not about money, though money is part of the, it's about like, wow, look at all these great restaurants. I don't want to miss this. And that's what I saw when I lived in Europe and saw the fertility crash. So that's a genuinely serious problem barring some sort of religious revival. Last question, what will you do next? Play for the New York mess. Yes. Now, my next book is that motivation. My belief is that we vastly overvalue the power of intelligence. We know a lot about emotions, but we don't know a lot about what they call co -nation, which is where our desires come from.

51:12And to me, what you desire is the most important thing about you. Augustine said, we're not primarily thinking creatures, primarily desiring creatures. What you desire determines what you believe. And so I'd like to know how to ramp up the virus, how to be motivational. You have the wrote the book on talent. And one of the points you make in there that I truly believe in is that intelligence matters. We both agree on that. But stamina. Stamina really matters. Determination really matters. I once asked AI CEO who was off the record so I can't mention his name, but you can guess. And I said, when you're hiring somebody, what do you ask?

51:52And he said, I asked at the interview, I walk out and I say, was that person a force of nature. They want to know who's going to run through walls. You have a great question in that book. Are you ambitious? People are not going to lie about that. I ran into an interviewer and his question was, he wanted to test people's moral character. And so his question was, tell me about a time you told the truth and it hurt you. So I should tell my Yale students, if you can fake that one, you can get a job. I think we've amputated the importance of what we stupidly could call the non -cognitive skills, which is social skills, which is dry, which is motivation.

52:30I'd like to understand though. David Brooks, thank you very much.

52:44They will bring me some of your questions, yes? Thank you for these. Okay, David. Have we reached or passed peak broad -based human intellect? Well, no, I mean, I'm with you on AI, that it's an introduction of a new form of intelligence to the world, and it's gonna, on balance, make us smarter. And so if I have a tool that can help me answer questions, I think we'll still store it in our brain. I'm trying to figure out what the question is getting at. Do you think it's getting at, will we rely on AI so much we won't know stuff? I don't know. There's the sense that once there was a Gertr, a John Milton, maybe today that's harder.

53:23There was a peak for that kind of intellect and now everyone's so specialized. So I tend to agree we passed that peak. Have you read your blog? I mean, you have things I'm reading. We just Dutch make our basket making Austria and economics astrophysics. So you're the omnivore. I think on the contrary. that in an age of specialization, it's got to be an advanced to be a generalist. And the problem with being a generalist and as a generalist is sort of what I am, is you have to understand the whole field. And you've got to know who's over here on this side of the field who's over there, and when you try to capture the field, you don't want to take too many risks.

54:05You want to go right down the middle of what's conventional within the field rather than picking some loony tune. And that turns out to be a rather hearting to do. And in some fields, there's no middle. I would say the study of intelligence. what's the correlation between IQ and success? I think they're randomly divergent explanations, and if you wander into that field, and you pick one, all the other people will say you're an idiot. But in general, I think the ability to do what journalists do, which is to go into a field and understand what's the consensus here and then to compare the field of economics to the field of physics, I think there's great fertility there.

54:42Here's a question for both of us. I'll answer it first. quote, what do the two of you admire about each other? I would say when any question or topic comes up that you put, what is humane about the issue first and that this is truly internalized, it's not just a habit you force on yourself, it may have somewhat even been that at first which is pretty common, but it is you now and it's the most defining feature of you. That would be my answer. Oh, that is the person I'd like to be actually. So I find that very honoring. Thank you. Somebody said, actually, in that book, that he didn't know anybody with more conceptual models in your head that you can apply to any situation.

55:22I would just say the one feature I admire more than any others is to be a lifelong learner. There's a book I read by a woman in Susan Engel. There's a woman in Susan Engel who works here in the Y. But she did some research into how many questions does a three -year -old ask. And the median three -year -old is like 140 questions an hour. And if any of you have kids, you've been there. But then they go to elementary school. And the teachers know that if the kid asks the questions, it'll take them off course and they won't be able to cover content. And so this woman, she's observing classrooms. And literally, she writes down a teacher says this.

56:00Some kids that found an old -fashioned scale in the classroom. And they were playing around with it, figuring out how it worked. And the teacher said to them, we don't have time to experiment now, we're doing science. And so that's the way they repress curiosity. But your curiosity has not been repressed. Here's one, I hope it if ends no one in the audience. This is from Ted quote, to David, would you agree with Tyler, that New York City is no longer a cultural center of America? The cultural center I would say. My family's been here for five generations, so that's a tough one. I would say, I think New York City, to the extent that America has a cultural center, which I'm not sure it does anymore.

56:38I would still say New York City is A, the cultural center would be the most dynamic city in America. But and it pains me to say this, I do think if you asked me the most dynamic city in the world, given my experience, I would have to say London is more dynamic than New York. I think London has gotten considerably worse in the last five to ten years, actually. and China aside, which is just a different comparison. I would say the Bay Area. It's interesting. What truly influences our life and a lot of your early answers were about social media and phones and however good or bad you think it is, we talked about AI, those are ideas from there, not here.

57:19Right, but they're technical ideas. Sure, but that's what it is. It's incredibly insular in a political and other way. But maybe those are right now the less important ideas at least temporarily. Right. We've turned political idea making over to goodness knows what or whom, but we've done it. It's not. And you know who is from Queens, right? Right. So. But I, well, you can't shake me off my life. I'm the only person I live in DC. I come up here. I get off the Penn station. I'm on eighth Avenue in 33rd Street, which is God awful ugly. And I think, oh, my heart rate can go down now. I'm with my people.

57:58So I still think New York were operates at a pace that no other city operates. How does a greater adoption of AI influence political party realignment? Hmm. I'm not so much of the belief that technology influences that stuff as other people are. I don't think social media is, it's had a negative effect on society in all sorts of ways. I don't think it's, I can say, it may have weakened the power of the mainstream media and created more fringe. But I think what influences people is their direct lived experience, not so much media. Now I don't even mean social media, I mean all media. I was at a conference many years ago, decades ago, sexologist.

58:39See? See? You would have felt right at home. I knew. I'm more boring people than ever want to meet. But one of the things I What I learned from them is that if you had looked at the media in the 60s, you would have thought sexual behavior changed radically because suddenly there was porn everywhere, there was nudity everywhere, but actually sexual behavior changed in World War I and World War II. It was the actual act of going to France. Not Germany. Not Germany. Except for the King. But it was, it's not something that you consume in the media. it's things that happen actually in your actual life that change behavior in such ways.

59:20So if there's gonna be a political realignment, it'll be because what happened that caused MAGA, which is, I used to be, I drive around the country, I visit like 35 states a year, and it used to be you would drive from a, what we now consider a college educated area to a red area, a working class area, and they were different, but they didn't seem like different nations. Starting about 10 years ago, I would drive from whatever, Samino Idaho to Sun Valley Idaho, and you're like in different universes. And so that the physical change in the way the two different kinds of towns works is dramatic.

59:56And the fact that the rich, I ran to a guy who used to have a handle travel for the Boston Celtics back in the Larry Bird Air, not that long ago. And they used to fly commercial. And they used to have to carry their bags and stuff like that. And now people like that have no contact with regular old commercial flight. And so the rich people used to be a little normal. Now the rich people are just rich people. And so that kind of actual social distancing changes people's viewpoints then and a media technology. Here's my follow up. Won't AI make us more objective? At least the current models. They seem to me more objective than the New York Times.

1:00:37If you ask them a question, they're really crazy. They give you pretty good answers to a lot of controversial questions. I don't always agree, but they seem to me the most objective source out there. Yeah, I haven't really thought about that as a person who gets paid by the New York Times that has to point out that a lot of their data is stolen from all of us. I think I is taken. They read you because they love you. I find they're blander though. I mean, there's all this hedging, they don't offend anybody. I don't like AI because they want to please you. I tried Claude in that Chinese deep -seek one.

1:01:08That was too nice to me. Maybe that is objective. Maybe that is. Here's a longer question. You've convinced me that many of America's ails are social in nature, not economic. My question, what does this imply for those of us pursuing large scale change? What's the political agenda that I could spend a career promoting to help all this dot, dot, dot? Simple question. Let's ask Jack, you can get an objective answer. You know, I do think our core problems are sociological and cultural and psychological and moral. And if you want to work on a core problem, rebuilding social trust, if you can figure out how to do that, be an awesome contribution.

1:01:50But when I look at how countries recover, and Bob Putnam of Harvard has done this for one period when America recovered, and it's from 1880 to 1910, and the recovery there from a pretty took place in three phases. First, there was a civil cultural Renaissance, which was social Darwinism, which was hyper individualistic in Charcoal Road, was replaced by the social gospel movement, which was more communal. That was followed by a civic Renaissance. Use had in the 1890s, the creation of the Boys and Girls Clubs, the Sierra Club, the NAACP, the Union Movement, the Temperance Movement, the Settle and House Movement.

1:02:28People basically decided we have to form civic organizations because all our organizations are designed for a country where people are living on the Kansas Prairie, and now we've got a million kids in Baltimore on Cleveland and Chicago. And so they had a civic renaissance, and that was followed by the progressive movement, where they cleaned up government and FDA, eventually the Federal Reserve system. So to me, if you want to work on the rebirth of the country, that basic model strikes me as a very persuasive. You can work on the cultural piece to reinvision who we are, and what we believe in what our values are.

1:02:59You can work on the civic piece, which is to create the civic social capital so people can coordinate, or you can work on the political reform piece. And the one thing I'd say about the political reform piece, I'd just reread a book I had in Regions College called The Age of Reform by Richard Hofsteader, a very great historian. And one of the things that struck me is that now we think populism, Donald Trump's over here, progressivism, AOC's over here. But from 1870 to 1917, the progressive populist were one movement. And it strikes me that the progressives need the populist to stay in touch with the real America.

1:03:36And the populists need the progressives to be a little sophisticated on the educational front. And it was a very useful movement to have a movement that was half JD Vance or Josh Hawley and half AOC. And that would be interesting. Here's one I'll paraphrase. The New York City government has a lot of influence and resources. is why are not more ambitious people determined to become mayor? There's at least one, right? Yeah. It seems like someone... I'm not sure they're skilled. I think it's becoming, well, a, it's super hard job. I used to, when Rudy Giuliani was mayor, I would travel around in the van with him and just watch him.

1:04:13And to do New York, all the boroughs, you're handling on a day -to -day basis such a level of economic, social, cultural, demographic diversity, it's mind -boggling. And then you're in conflict all the time. And Giuliani loved the conflict. I was with him once, he'd wear it the much -falton operative, and he kicked the PLO representative out in the middle of its performance. He just loved that kind of stuff. And this was before he went and became the Giuliani we know today. He was still a very rational person. But it's so demanding. And then you think of the hurdles you have to clear. I happen to think Mike Bloomberg was pretty good mayor.

1:04:49But for a businessman, billionaire Republican, there are a lot of hurdles. And I would say in general, when I look at a lot of the mayors who are not successful, Chicago's mayors not to integrate DC's mayors, I'd say we're, even though there are some mayors, I think LA San Francisco, I think that Atlanta, I'd say we're in a period where the quality of our mayors is surprisingly low in a way that it didn't used to be. It used to be, I would think, the happiest people I know where people left Congress and became mayors. And the most unhappy were people who left mayors and became congressmen. Because you can actually get something done.

1:05:23But I would say right now cities are becoming less governable, especially in blue states. Whereas the cities I know that are doing well are blue cities in red states, the Nashville, the Austin, Texas, the Houston, the Dallas, Phoenix. And they combine red state tax policy with blue city education and welfare policy. And I think that turns out that's where all the people are flocking to so it's got to be working reasonably well. Where is it you want to travel to next and why? Well, I should ask you that question because my wife and I are trying to plan something and we're thinking scissorly, I've never been to scissorly, but you've told me and I am persuaded because I've asked many other people that where should I go?

1:06:06I've never been to Japan. And I would like to go somewhere, it's always a drag when you fly a long way and when you get out of the airport It kind of feels like back home. I want something that feels foreign. And I gather Japan is beautiful and different. I don't know. Sicily in Japan are two of my favorite places. Oh, really? And they're each quite manageable in terms of expense, safety, just general. You're not going to have any problems in either one. Sicily is this amazing mix of Norman, Arabic, Italian, North African cultures. still vitally diverse in that manner. Arguably the best food in Italy, incredible Greek ruins.

1:06:47Make sure you go to St. Acusa, avoid Teremina, and I even love Palermo. I think it's fantastic as of semi -modern in the 20th, 19th century sense Italian city. I would recommend that. Japan will blow your mind and change how you think about community and social cooperation. They're not in a funny way that cooperative, but they completely cooperate. And that's the paradox. And I'm still trying to think that through, and I'll never figure it out. But if you leave a bottle of water on the table and leave the restaurant, they'll come running after you down the street. Here's your bottle of water back.

1:07:21At the same time, they're not that civic -minded. The next trip my wife and I are taking is to Northern Ghana, which is a kind of Sahali and culture of the Sahara. Those cultures are usually too dangerous to visit civil war, Russian intervention, whatever, but in Ghana it's fine and there's some elephants you can see there, but some very famous old mosques, a some towns with a lot of arts in them, and no one really goes to northern Ghana. So that to me will somehow change how I think about things. So I can't answer anything other than where we're going, and that's where we're going. Okay, I will see you for seasons of northern Ghana.

1:08:02If only they were. I should say I should thank you publicly. I publicly thank you. Tyler has something called the ethnic, the Tyler Cowan ethnic dining guide, which especially in the DC area, I guess you're in New York too. Sure a lot. And so there are all these shopping malls, strip mall restaurants with the best Guadamol on this, the Gris Honduran that, Tibet and that. And in our courting phase, my wife and I, we just went down the Tyler Cowan ethnic food dining yard. And so you're invited? You are the Aphrodisiac from my marriage. I wish I had not said that.

1:08:37We had a very nice lunch today at a Korean place on 35th Street. I think it was West 55th. It won a Michelin Star in 2023 and it's a tofu restaurant. So that would be one of my recommendations. But travel to me always keeps me fresh. And I think also Tokyo is probably the best food in the world and also the best French food in the world, which is remarkable. So there's an attention to quality and detail that is just difficult to believe until you're there and to live with that for say two weeks. I think you'll very much enjoy. I'm sold. Yeah. And the flight's not that bad. You just bring a big pile of books.

1:09:16Right? And you're fine. You don't need the smartphone or anything. Just the books. And you're AI. What question do you wish I had asked you? What's it like to be so wonderful? No, I don't know how to answer that question. You are the master question -asker. Anyway, David, thank you very much. It's been a great pleasure. Thank you, audience.

1:09:48Thanks for listening to Conversations with Tyler. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. If you like this podcast, please consider giving us a rating and leaving a review. This helps other listeners find the show. On Twitter, I'm At Tyler Cowan, and the show is At Cowan Convos. Until next time, please keep listening and learning.