#770 - David Brooks - Why Is Everyone So Emotionally Detached?

25:28Now I think it's the ability to receive the stories that people are telling you in a way that holds space for them. Ida, a student, named Jillian Sawyer, I had her as a grad student when she was in college. Her dad got pancreatic cancer and so he died after college and she was then invited to become a bride's maid of a friend of hers and so she's a bride's maid at the wedding and she watches the father of the bride give her this beautiful toast to his daughter. And then it comes time for the father daughter to dance. And Jillian thinks, I just can't take this. I'm just going to go to the ladies room and have a cry.

26:05And so she goes to the ladies room, has a cry, comes out in a few minutes. And every single person at her table and joining the Jason table was standing in the hallway. And she said they didn't try to validate my grief. they didn't say a word. Just all of them in succession gave me a quick hug, even the new boyfriends who I knew less well, and it was exactly what I needed. And that's just the art of presence. I have another friend, an old friend who lost a daughter in Afghanistan. And I said, like, how do I talk to you about that? Like, what do I say? And she said, But some people don't want to raise Anna with me because they think they're bringing up a bad subject.

26:50But they should know that Anna is always on my mind. And so you should raise her. And if I feel like talking about her, I will if I don't, I won't. But you're not introducing a bad subject to me. So that's just being present. And then she had another daughter who had a horrible bike accident and she was nursing her to health. And she said, you know, was the best thing that happened to me from that a friend did for us. They came and they brought a cast for all of whatever. And then they went to the bathroom. And while they were in the bathroom, they noticed there was no shower mat. And so they went out to target.

27:22They bought a shower mat and they put it in and they didn't even tell me. And it was just like a practical thing that I needed done. And so sometimes you can be a profound friend, not by having the deep heart -tart conversation just by the the mere act of presence. If this is so important, why are we not all doing it already? Why are we not seeing other people deeply if the rewards are as great as you say? Yeah. If some of it is culturally, you mentioned British culture. I mean, I think we built up defenses because it is vulnerable and it is a little scary. And I know British culture reasonably well.

28:01I remember I used to watch the show. I don't know if it's still on cult. Have I gotten news for you? And the people on that show were so quick and so funny, a spontaneous wit. And I think we're just culture doesn't get enough credit for being a very comically gifted culture. People are just genuinely funny, but it does become a defense mechanism. And I've seen it again and again and again. It becomes a way. So there's that cultural thing. And then we evolved to live in bands of 150 people when you really got to know people I'm assuming in, you know, 100 -gatherer bands. Now we live with lots of, like hundreds and hundreds of people.

28:41It's much easier to slide by and do the surface a luth thing and just sort of like cheery bonamie. Second, getting to know someone takes time and I'm trying to be a very efficient person and I've got a little clock in my head so that when somebody, when I pull over the I guess I should pump gas in my tank. I'm thinking, oh, I got 90 seconds here, I can get two emails done. And if you have that clock in your head, then the patience of building a relationship just doesn't seem worth it. Like when I leave a party, I leave in like 30 seconds. When my wife, who's very relational leaves a party, it takes her like an hour.

29:21Did you see there was an article that came out recently that said, people who do Irish advice at parties save themselves up to two days per year. I say that would be me, that would be me. But on the other hand, people really elect my wife. And me, I'm okay with me, but so I think that's the thing. And then there's always a sensation that this person will think I'm crying, that I'm getting two persons who are vulnerable too fast. And of course that is a danger. Like if somebody's really vulnerable right off the get -go, then you'll creeped out. On the other hand, I interview people for a living like you.

29:57and how many times in my life have I seriously asked somebody to tell me some piece of their life story how many times have they said none of your damn business the answer is zero zero people love to tell their story there's an academic at Northwest University named Dan McAdams and he studies how people tell their life story so pull some news lab for four hours tell me your high points your low points your turning points the end of the four hours he gives some amount of luck with some money to compensate them for their time. And a lot of the people say, I'm not taking money for this. This has been one of the best of the afternoons of my life.

30:31No one has ever asked me these questions. And so people have a need to tell their story. And you're giving them a great gift by asking. I think we assume that other people have got their life together more than we do. Or at least I certainly did for a very long time. You know, I always presumed that anybody else's judgment of me was because of some perfect insight into my malignant broken programming and they were perfectly rational and I was deficient in some sort of relative way and what that means is that you assume that they they talk about their life all the time They've got friends that or you know, somewhere.

31:15I don't know what it is Maybe there being on a Netflix documentary. Whatever the whatever the fuck it is that they've done They have conversations like the ones that I'm yearning to have all the time. And if I bring it up to them, that highlights to them the fact that I have a scarcity of that and them being someone who has a surplus of that will see me in a deficient light somehow. Yeah, well, of course, it's a truism, but it's a true truism, like a lot of truisms, that even when we know someone, we only see 10 % of them, and that everybody has demons, everybody has something deep down that you don't know anything about.

31:53And everyone's going through some struggle or you don't know anything about. But I have found that I've never met somebody who said, yeah, I have too many people to talk about important things with. I've never met that person. And so there used to be a journalist named Studs Terkel who did these oral histories. And he said, if you listen, if you listen, they will talk. They will always listen because no one has ever asked in their life story. And so I think there's a way more people who never have the chance because there's a bit of a social stigma. And again, I don't want people spilling their guts.

32:26I was at a party and there was a journalist and she was grilling me about my spiritual life and she was giving me nothing. Like nothing about her. It was just like, I felt like I was on trial. In tarigation. Yeah, and so that was awful. But, you know, a conversation that moves halfway, halfway, halfway is a beautiful conversation. In the book, I draw this distinction between diminishes and illuminators. And diminishes are people who are not curious about you. They stereotype you. They do a thing called stacking, which is I learn one fact about you, and then I make a whole series of assumptions about you.

33:01And so illuminators, on the other hand, are people who just make you feel seen. they really care about you and they make you feel lit up. And one of the stories I tell is of Jenny Jerome who would go on to become Winston Churchill's mom. But when she was a young lady, she was at a dinner party in London, in Victorian England, and she's seen next to William Gladstone, the Prime Minister. And she leaves that dinner thinking that Gladstone is the clearest person in England. And then sometime later, she's at a different dinner party and she happens to be seen next to Gladstone's great political rival Benjamin Disraeli.

33:35And she leaves that dinner thinking that she's the cleverest person in England. And so if you can make other people feel entertaining and funny and clever, you've done a little noble service for the world. I want to talk about the felt sense of you as an individual, not the art of seeing others deeply, but the art of being deeply seen. Talk to me about going from this protective autism, hyper -rationality world, the step by step, there will be people listening, there will be a lot of people listening who think, this sounds like me. The control, the order, I like to be competent and to get things done, I don't like to be out of control.

34:18What What is the felt sense that you went through of beginning to open up and how do you cope with the discomfort of that rising and how can people also do that? How can people become more comfortable with feeling feelings? Yeah, well, I went through, you know, a reasonably ambitious person, so I went through a phase that a lot of us go through called the career consolidation phase of life. You're trying to build your career, build your identity, achieve things, make a difference in the world. And in my experience a couple things happen. One, you achieve success, and it's not as crazy thought I was going to be.

34:57And you know, I remember the first time I got a call from my agent saying one of my books was on the best cell list, like I had sort of dreamed about writing a best cellar. And I felt nothing. I just felt nothing. And I've had way more career success than I thought I would. But and I've found that it spares from me from the anxiety I might feel if I thought I was a failure, but as far as positive good, it doesn't lead to that much. So it's created this dissatisfaction of a deeper life. Or you don't achieve success, you fail, in which case you're in the valley, or something happens in life that wasn't part of the original plan.

35:30You get cancer, you lose a child, and so there's a theologian in the 1950s named Paul Tillic, who says, moments of suffering interrupt your life, and they remind you you're not the person you thought you were. And he says, they carve through the floor of the basement of your soul. And they reveal a cavity below. And then they carve through another floor and they reveal a deeper cavity below. So in those bad moments, you see deeper in yourself than you do in normal life when you're happy. And you realize only spiritual and relational food will fill those cavities. And so in my case, I went through a bad period.

36:05I had a divorce. My kids were leaving home. I had under invested in intimate friendship and good friendships. So I had work friends, but I had no weekend friends. Like the people I really wanted to hang around with if I could call it two in the morning. And so I just realized this gap in my life. And I'm a little eccentric. I'm sort of a super university of Chicago intellectual. So I wanted to learn about emotion. So I wrote a book about emotions called The Social Animal Years ago. So I did it the Chicago way. I wrote a book. But more it was a... And then I found when you're in one of life's valleys, you can't pull yourself out.

36:44You have to rely on somebody else to reach the valley and pull you out. And so around about 20, 14 or so, I'm in DC recently lonely. And I get invited over to this couple's house, their name is Kathy and David, and they have a kid in the DC public schools who's got a friend, who's got his mom has some issues, and he has some often has nothing to eat in no place to sleep. So they said, James can come over to our house and then James had a friend and that could have a friend, that could have a friend. And by the time I go over to their house in 2014 or so, there were 14 mattresses in the basement and there were 40 kids around the dinner table.

37:24And so I visit and I hold out my hand, I meet a kid at the front door the first time and he says, we're not really allowed to shake hands here, we just hug here. And I'm not the hugiest guy, but I joined this little extended family, this sort of chosen family. And those young people who were 17, 18, they like beamed emotional openness at you and they demanded it back. And I think that getting into that kind of culture was part of my education of knowing how to, you really be open. And so you joined a different culture where being emotionally available is the norm. and by process of his Moses, I think you do, you don't even notice, I wouldn't say I noticed the change, I wouldn't say like, oh, I've gotten 60 % more emotionally available, like that's, the spirit is opened.

38:15And I wrote in the book, I can prove it to you, but I have to name job. So I've been interviewed by Oprah twice in my life. And the first time in 2014, and the second time in 2019, And after the taping in 2019, she pulls me aside and said, David, I've rarely seen somebody change so much in middle age. You were so blocked before. And she should know, she's Oprah. And so there's just a flowering of the spirit that happens to people. And I think it often happens as people get older, that career consolidation phase ends. And another phase called generativity, the desire to really be of service to the world, that sort of kicks in.

38:58I think when people hit, especially if they hit like 50 or 60, I say, you remember when you were 13 or 14 and horniness entered your life? Well, around 50 or 60, generativity enters your life. This intense desire to give, and I'm oversimplifying it, you don't have to be 50 to experience as you can experience it when you're a parent at 25. But I do think that desire to be of service to the world and just be more to cry more easily. Yeah, that's something that I'm quite ashamed about. I'm ashamed about how emotional I am. I think I've cried on this show maybe twice, maybe two or three times. Usually when I'm telling something like quite a happy story, it doesn't tend to be something that's sad, but if it's me on my own watching a Christmas movie, good example, I watched two quite sad Christmas movies.

39:47One of them is Klaus, which is phenomenal animated children's thing, but it's really deep and meaningful. That's outstanding. And then there was another one, which was an animated version of Night Before Christmas. And at both of these, I'm like weeping, fully weeping at the end of it. And I find that happens when I tell, like when I think about stuff, when I reminisce, and so forth, but the discomfort that I feel and that desire to clamp down on emotions, I totally understand what you mean. And there's something... There's another part you were talking before about how we're in different size tribes and now we're in...

40:26There's more people, so we kind of flip through the conversations a little bit more. I think another element of it is that has decreased our level of security, especially since social media because if you only have 150 people to be open and vulnerable with, you fucking ten of them are your kin, twenty of them are your extended kin, half of them are older than you're going to die within the next decade, so who cares? Another half of them are babies, so they don't know. There's just not that many people that would use, and also it's not cemented on the internet for the rest of time. So I think that given that so much of our communication into personally, and even people use video journals, diaries, vlogs, et cetera, writing that is a very personal approach, that I think there is a fear that that will be used as some sort of cudgel to batter us with at some point later in life by a person who isn't a zernest, by a person who is going to be more cutting or sadonic or doesn't feel things so very deeply.

41:22There are people out there that I think just don't feel them, don't necessarily have the capacity to feel them and don't have the desire to have the capacity to feel them. I'm not one of those people. And yeah, I genuinely feel like I'm on the same train, similar train tracks to yourself, just a little bit further behind. And one of the other things, again, an Oprah bit, I haven't learned like everything from Oprah, but two things that I did learn. First being, develop a nice repertoire of nods. And the second one, something that I know that you're a big fan of, is the use of silence. Yeah. Now, for researching this book, I would watch Oprah.

42:02I turned the sound off. I just watched her. And I noticed like if she did this Harry and Kate famous interview, and when they're saying something happy, she's verbalizing. Yes, but when they're saying something said, she goes quiet. And it's like creating an emptiness for them to continue their talk. And so I think that's part of the process. But the other thing I'd mention is that doing this, It's being good at social skills, social life. It is an absolute skill. It's like it's a skill like learning carpentry or learning platenis. And you can get better by learning the skills. I mentioned some conversation skills before.

42:42And so you just have to know what to say. Like I tell the story in the book, one of my friends got very terrible depression. And I just literally did not know what to say to a depressed person. I thought I was reasonably well -educated, but I didn't know what depression was, not really. And I learned you can't understand depression by extrapolating from your own moments of sadness if you're lucky enough not to have experienced it. That a friend of mine, another friend said, a depression is a malfunction in the instrument you use to perceive reality. And so depression, like my friend, the one who got depressed, he had these lying voices in his head.

43:22like your worthless, nobody would miss you if you were gone. And he was literally seeing the world through lying voices. And I just made mistakes, which were just skill mistakes, not nothing to do with my heart or anything. I wanted to do the right thing, but I didn't know how. And so the two classic mistakes that I made, which I'm told other people make, is I tried to give them ideas on how to get out of depression. Like you used to go into these service trips to Vietnam, you found that so rewarding when you do that again. And I learned if you're giving people who are depressed ideas about how to get out of depression, you're just showing you don't get it because it's not ideas they're lacking.

43:57It's a lot of other things they're lacking, but not ideas. And the second mistake I made was called cognitive reframing, which is trying to remind people how good, how many good things they have in their life. Great marriage, great career, great kids. And if you, if you try to convince a person who's depressed that their life has all these positives, You're making them feel worse. Because you're just the things I'm taking for granted. Oh, how much shame that I don't have these problems. And yet I still feel like shit. Right. And I'm not enjoying the things that are enjoyable. Why am I not enjoying these things?

44:30Oh, this is really broken with me. Yeah, right. And so these are just like knowing what to say, what not to say. And you could just learn how to show up for people in these circumstances in ways that are a little more graceful than not. If that's what not to do with someone, I think this is probably quite specific to depression, but maybe we can broaden it out into people who are sad or have had to, you know, going through a tough period, how can people be better seeing others that are down? Yeah, first, and I learned this the hard way over three years. First, acknowledge the reality of the situation.

45:05This sucks. This really sucks. And so, just show that you're there with them. Second, just a burst of goodwill. I want more for you. I want more for you. That doesn't mean that you'll make any difference because frankly, I've learned the words of very limited utility in these circumstances. You can at least say I want more for you. And then constant touches. A lot of people who are depressed or terrified their friends will leave them because they're not fun to be around. And it's just like I'm thinking of you and I wish I'd sent my friend like more texts here and there. I read about a guy whose brother was depressed and he was a world traveler.

45:43He sent postcards from everywhere he went in the world. No response necessary, thinking about it. And that's just a constant set of light touches. And then there's a, I read about this later from the classic book, which I hope everybody's read called Man Search Remaining by Victor Franco. And he's in the death camps, Nazi death camps. And he's confronted with a lot of people kind of and so his advice, what he said to them was, life has not stopped expecting things of you. You still have responsibilities to the world. There are still things you can contribute. And one of them is credibility with suffering.

46:22And I often think when someone tells me they're kind of blaming suicide, first thing I think is you're so brave, because you're going through some horrible stuff and you're still here. And so I just admire the courage with which you embrace life. And so these are things I'm not sure it'll make any difference, but it's a way of being a graceful friend to the person. And never asking why, just I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. What are some of the ways that we make ourselves less easy to see? Well, A by invulnerability, B by Egotism. Because we want to, the reason a lot of people don't question is that they want to perform.

47:08And the performance is a performance. I mentioned earlier Fred Beegner, the novelist, and he says it's important from time to time to tell some secrets about yourself, because it'll remind you you're not the person you tend to be for the world. And he says it'll make it a little easier for others from time to time to tell secrets to you. And so we do that. We all put on a show and you mentioned social media. In social media, it's judgment everywhere, understanding nowhere. And so of course you put up walls. And you know, there's books out now, the Settle -Art of Not Giving A Fuck, and Girl Wash Your Face.

47:44And these are all books that say, don't mind what other people are saying, like, do not mind. Because so many people have that so consciously on their mind, I'm being judged all the time. And of course the truth is that people aren't thinking about you that much, so be who you are. But I do think we put on that show. And then finally, just, you know, I'm a practiced escape artist. And so if you came up to me with a problem 20 years ago, I would look at my shoes and then pretend to have an important appointment with my dry cleaners. I'm like, you know, I was an escape artist. And it's just a way to glide because I was uncomfortable.

48:27If somebody was getting too personal, I just was uncomfortable. And I guess a little fearful. And so that's one of the ways. And, you know, it's just a question of trust. And you'd mentioned trust earlier. And I have found that if you're open in the world with your friends and acquaintances, you will absolutely get betrayed. Because people will sometimes take advantage of your vulnerability and they'll use it against you and look, I'm in political journalism. It's kind of a rough business. And yet I found it's better to lead with trust and be betrayed occasionally, then to not trust people and to wall yourself off.

49:05I think that is one of the huge trade -offs that people feel uncomfortable about. And I see this a lot in comments sections. I talk a lot about the problems of men and there is a lot of advice for men, especially around vulnerability. How much should you show? How much should you not? If you do this to your partner, it's immediately going to make her unattractive to you. the full gamut and then people saying that you can do this, you just need to find a partner that's in the right place to be able to hold space and so on and so forth. But there is this perennial concern around if I show my vulnerabilities, especially to a female partner as a man, but also to the world generally that's associated with the kind of weakness.

49:47it is a vector of attack that can be used in future. It is inadvisable for a whole host of reasons and it makes you it makes you diminished in status both to yourself and to other people. And I grappled with that for a long time because that is me. My background is in running nightclubs, not exactly the most emotionally mature environment to grow up in. And I'm still playing with this idea, but you're still going to feel feelings, ultimately. You're still going to have these thoughts. And I really struggled to see how pretending that you don't feel them or not showing them is braver than actually doing it.

50:45Like, to me, the braver thing that you can do is to, you don't need to tell everyone about everything about your fucking athletes, photo, your chronic flatulence or like, you know, whatever, like the door hinge that squeaks and annoys you. But it's that seems to me like the the the real hero's journey. It's that that seems to be the thing where you think wow that that person is not only sufficiently brave that they're able to verbalize this but they're doing it because they think that they can overcome it. And again, you know, do you want to be ruled by your mental afflictions? Are you do you want to become aware of them?

51:21Yeah, I've known a lot of women who dumped guys and I've never had one tell me you know I dumped them because he was just too vulnerable like That won't the name and reason women dumped guys is because they don't communicate And they don't feeling it's a mutual open -loving relationship and so I do think You know that vulnerability is just like not only good Strategy for life, but it's a good strategy for building a relationship But of course you got to do it the right pace. I remember when I was dating the woman who's now my wife If we were like emailing and we were like emailing in ways where we would slightly cross a trust threshold and it would like minute and like and I remember I sent her an email which is a little more intimate than the emails we'd said before.

52:04It was just like 5 % more and then so I get on a flight across country flight and I think okay I can't wait to see how she reacts as she pushed me away or she like welcoming and of course the flight had no Wi -Fi and so I'm like for five or six hours I'm sitting with I'm like, wow, what a terrible open looped out. But it turned out well, we're married. How can people end a conversation more effectively? Yeah, I think I sucked at this. So I remember I went to my fifth high school reunion and my only trick for ending a conversation was I've got to go to the bar. And so I was so hammered after 20 minutes of that reunion that I had to leave the reunion.

52:44But I think the way I've learned is like you have a conversation and I say I say I've really enjoyed talking to you. I particularly enjoyed your analysis how British culture made it might have made you more inhibited. And that was great. So in other words, a positive burst, I really enjoy talking to you and then mention a couple of things the other person said that particularly struck their interest and then say, It's been great. And then you can leave. But it's that positive burst with specificity. And then people leave thinking, wow, that was good. It really listened. Yeah, that's lovely. You also talk about improving the energy that you walk into a room with.

53:29And since moving to America, for all of the flaws that it has, I find myself flourishing here because you're an enthusiastic bunch. Everyone is good. I can't count of it, maybe not everyone. But many people are like excitable. And they want to stick. You hear what you've got that's going on. Maybe it doesn't go particularly deep, but especially, you know, you've got something good. Here's some good news. I've got, that's amazing. It's in the UK that we'll be like, oh, all right. You must think you're a little bit special. Again, like banter. They're talking to me about how people can improve the energy that they come into a room with.

54:02Yeah, well, we are, I noticed like I used to live in continental Europe. And when you pass somebody in a hiking trail in a forest, nobody says hi in Europe, but here in America We always say hey, and that was it. You wait. This is just a small thing. I had a friend who moved here from Africa and she said My first few years here my cheeks hurt because I just smile so much you people smile ridiculously resting smiling face Yeah, yeah, yeah, and so when we first meet somebody Each of us is unconsciously asking a question, which is is this person gonna be nice to me? Am I a person or this person? Am I a priority to this person?" And the answer to those questions will be answered by your eyes before any words come out of your mouth.

54:43And so the power of that first gaze, then the Simon Vey was a French intellectual in the World War II era, said, attention is a moral act. It calls forth people things into being. And so the way you treat each person as just this reverent creature, tell a quick story that I put in the book. I mean, Waco Texas, which must be close to Austin, how big a text box. Yeah, it's an, Waco's, Waco's an hour from where I am. Yeah. So I'm having breakfast at a diner with a woman named Leroux Dorsey's like 93 and she's like a drill sergeant type. She had been a teacher and she said, you know, I just, I loved my students enough to discipline them.

55:28And I'm a little intimidated by this, This lady is like tough. And in the diner walks a mutual friend of ours, this pastor named Jimmy Dorell, and Jimmy pastures to the homeless in Waco, among others. And he comes up to our table, he sees us there, knows us both, and he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders. And he shakes her way harder than you should ever shake a 93 year old. And he says to her, Mrs. Dorsey, Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best, you're the best. I love you, I love you. And in an instant, that formidable drill sergeant lady I've been talking to turns into a bright eye -shining nine -year -old girl.

56:05And Jimmy with the power of his attention, called forth a different version of her. And so if you see the world objectively, people will be objective. If you see the world critically, people will feel judged. And you'll see judgment. You'll see flaw. But if you see the world, you mainly, you'll see people doing the best they can in difficult circumstances. So the way you cast a attention determines what you see. Yeah, I think I find myself very much being a mirror to the energy of other people, but not so much the first mover. And I'm trying to be more of a first mover. Like really stepping in, my friend George actually, the guy that first told me about your book, that then resulted in this episode happening.

56:56He often, when I sit down with him, I hope for him too, I think for him too. We're just at our best. It's exactly what I want to be. It's open, it's about ideas, it's hopeful, it's funny, it's all of those things. I'm like, well, why am I not like that with everyone? Because it's still me, I'm the common denominator between these things. And why do I need to wait for somebody else to determine, you know, are we doing Fock Strat or Salis of this evening? It's like, no, like you get to choose. You get to choose. And maybe they're waiting for you to do that. Not just being, it's different to holding space.

57:31It's not like being a vessel for them. It's like folding around the weird conventions and it's not breaking step with stuff. So just to recap, let's say again, someone listening, big on the cerebral side of things, loves the rationality and thinks, I like the idea of stepping into this more emotional realm. What's your starter kit for good questions to break people out? It's maybe the first time with an existing friend that they've done this or maybe it's the first time with someone that they don't know quite. So, well, they want to pivot the conversation towards something they think is a bit more deep or meaningful.

58:08What's your favorite run through? Yeah, I would say the thing that comes immediately in mind is storytelling questions. people are just better when they're in story. And so as a political journalist, I no longer ask people, what do you believe about this? Instead I ask them, how did you come to believe that? And that way they're telling me a story about their, the person or the experience that influenced how they think. And so you want to get them to the story mode. There's a classic example of this I read about in a book called, You're Not Listening by Woman in Kigmerfy. And she's describing this focus group leader who's leading a focus group, she's been hired by supermarkets to figure out why people go to the grocery store late at night.

58:51And so she could have just said to the focus group, why do you go to the grocery store late at night? Instead, she said, tell me about the last time you went to a grocery store after 11 p .m. And there was some lady in the store who, in the focus group, who hadn't said anything. and she said, well, I smoke some weed and I need to have been an ajiatwa with me Ben and Jerry. And so you get a little glimpse into her life and she gets them in a story mode. I have a friend named David Bradley who started three successful businesses and owned for time the Atlantic magazine where I work part time. And his genius is hiring people.

59:30And he hires on two basic criteria. The first one is spirit of generosity. And the second one is extreme talent. And so he defines talent very narrowly. He doesn't know, are you a good writer? What kind of writer are you? A synthesis writer? Are you a narrative writer? So he defines talent very narrowly. But how does he find spirit of generosity? Is a method he calls the take me back method? He says when people are presenting themselves, especially in professional circumstances, in a job interview, they start in the middle. They start at the beginning of their career. He says, no, take me back to your childhood.

1:00:06Tell me what your home life was like. And he has a theory which I'm not sure I agree with it, but he says Everybody is who they were in high school somewhere deep down. So if you were unpopular in high school You still are carrying around those insecurities. And so he said he wants to know who were you in high school? And how has that changed? And so he that method take me back suddenly is getting people into narrative mode and And the final thing I'd say is one of the tips I got from the conversation experts is make people authors not witnesses. People don't go into enough detail when they're telling you about some event in their life.

1:00:40So if you ask them, where was your boss sitting when she said that to you? Suddenly they're deep in the scene and they're telling you a much richer narrative. So I've learned to try to make as many conversations possible storytelling conversations and not argument -making conversations. David Brooks, ladies and gentlemen, David, honestly, I adore the book. I adore this transformation that you've been on. I think it's very aspirational in a very non -typical aspirational way. And I love it. I really, really love it. Why should people go? They're going to want to keep up to date with everything you do.

1:01:14Where should they head? They can head to the New York Times webpads and I'm there once a week and I'm at the Atlantic and they can go to Amazon and buy my book. Hell yeah. David, I really, really appreciate you. Thank you so much for today.