Super Soul Summer: David Brooks The Road To Character

0:00I'm Oprah Winfrey. Welcome to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. I believe that one of the most valuable gifts you can give yourself is time. Taking time to be more fully present. Your journey to become more inspired and connected to the deeper world around us starts right now. I'm talking with the author of the best-selling book, The Road to Character, New York Times columnist David Brooks. In his columns for the New York Times and as a political pundit on television, David Brooks is known for his conservative opinions. The Road to Character is a surprisingly candid look into David's personal journey, searching for his own set of values and the path to deepening his soul.

0:49As I read his book, I knew I wanted to have a super soul conversation with David about the essence and deeper meaning of character. I think this is so fascinating that you were considered one of the preeminent political pundits, literally, in the country and respected and admired. And yet you open the book in your intro right there on page eight. You write this. I wrote it, this book, to be honest, to save my own soul. I was born with a natural disposition toward shallowness. I now work as a pundit and columnist. I'm paid to be a narcissistic blowhard. I thought, that's so great that you know that's what you were paid to do.

1:33To volley my opinions, to appear more confident about them than I really am, to appear smarter than I really am, to appear better and more authoritative than I really am. I have to work harder than most people to avoid a life of smug superficiality. Bravo to you for at least having that level of self-awareness. So why did you write a book to save your own soul? I think all books you should try. You know, those are the sentences my friends think are the truest sentences in the book. And it wasn't like I was having a midlife crisis, but I would have experiences where I'd meet people. For example, I went up to a place called Frederick, Maryland, and I met some women.

2:12They were probably age 50 to 80, and they taught immigrants English and then how to read. And that process can take years. And so I walk in the room with like 30 of them. And immediately you're hit by a radiating wave of just goodness and patience and simplicity. And they didn't know me from Adam, but they treated me like I was valuable. And so immediately I just saw they radiated an inner light. They just had a light and a joyousness, a gratitude about life. And so I thought I've achieved way more in my career than I ever thought I would. But when I see that inner light, I haven't achieved that.

2:48Like, how do you get that? And so I thought, you might as well, you only go around once in life. You might as well try to get that. And so I wanted to know examples of people who, like at 20, they didn't have it. But by 70, they had it. They were marvelous. And so I just want to know, how is that done? And so that's what this is. That's what this is. The road to character. Interesting to me that you're in the car, you're listening to a radio broadcast, and you had a, quote, an aha moment. Tell me about that. So I'm driving home and I heard a show called Command Performance, which was a variety show.

3:20They went to the troops in World War II. All the big stars were on it, Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, but Bing Crosby was the host. And I happened to hear the one broadcast live on VJ Day just after they won the war against Japan, just hours after. And so Bing Crosby gets out there and he says, we've just learned this one. We've won this war. We're just so glad. We should just be humble and be glad we got through it. Yeah, and thank God for it. Yeah. And I was struck. That could have been a moment of big chest thumping, but it was a moment of beautiful humility and modesty. And I just thought it was beautiful.

3:50Then I go home and I turn on the TV and watch a football game, and the quarterback throws a pass to a wide receiver who catches it and is tackled after a two yard gain. And the defensive player does what all professional athletes do after moments of supreme personal achievement, does a big dance and honor himself. And it occurred to me I'd seen a bigger self-puffing victory dance after a two yard gain than I'd heard after winning World War II. And so that symbolized to me a shift in culture. Yeah. A shift from a culture of self-effacement that says, I'm no better than anybody else, but nobody's better than me, to a culture of achievement or distinction that says, look at me, look what I've done.

4:22Yes. And now we've just come to expect it. We've become a selfie generation, actually. Yeah. Now, you know, I was on a plane the other day and there was a young woman sitting next to me, and she was like 18, and she had vines, which are little short videos on her phone, and she was watching herself. and for two hours she watched different minds of herself doing different expressions and so I'm sort of fascinated by her sitting there you know just watching herself and I felt like saying hey I have a book I'd like you to read you know. Wow really? The statistic I quote in the book is in the in the 1950s a bunch of researchers asked high school sophomores.

5:00That's right. Are you a very important person and back then 12 percent said yes and they've asked that question in the 90s and 2000s. It's not 12 % who say I'm very important. It's 80%. Yes, and that same survey about people who want to be famous. Yeah, and so fame used to rank very on the bottom. Like 15 out of 16. Yeah, and now it's usually two or three. People really want to be famous. I don't know if it's reality TV or selfie culture, but people just want to be famous. So what has the shift to the fame culture done to our souls? What is the price we pay for our souls? and our character. You know, my thinking really begins with this distinction between two sets of virtues, what I call the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues.

5:42And the resume virtues are the things that make us good at our jobs. The eulogy virtues are the things they say about us after we're dead, whether we're honest, courageous, brave, capable of great love. And we all know the eulogy virtues are better and more important. We'd want to be remembered for those things. But a lot of us, including me, for many years, more clear about how to have a great career than how to have a great character. You just spend, you know, you're in a competitive world, so you're spending a lot of time there. You don't have enough time to think about the eulogy world. How then, David, do you define character?

6:13What is this thing that we are missing? Well, sadly, it's become an old-fashioned sort of word. But to me, there's a central piece of us that makes decisions. And every time you make a decision or have an experience, you turn that core piece of yourself into something slightly more elevated or something more degraded. And if you make discipline choices, you slowly engrave a certain set of habits and dispositions inside that core piece. And if you make fragmented decisions, you make that core piece a little degraded. And when I look at people with character, what they have is consistency over time.

6:48The things that make us, lead us astray are short-term, like lust or greed or hunger. But the things that are character are long-term, like honesty and courage. And so those people are just able to be consistent and can be counted on over time because they have something solid and grave The people I write about they were all great very accomplished people There was a woman named Frances Perkins who was secretary laborer the first woman in a US cabinet Dwight Eisenhower's president United States But they had self-awareness and they had a level of humility and to me humility is not thinking lowly of yourself It's accurate self-awareness from a distance.

7:24Yeah It's being able to step outside and say, hey, I'm really strong here, but also I'm kind of weak here. Yeah. You have a theory that over generations, you talk about this on the road to character, that we are kind of moving away from humility and a moral core. Why do you think this shift happened? Yeah, well, first of all, I would never want to go back to the past. Yeah. We were like a more racist culture, sexist. But I do think they had a little better sense of a small self as opposed to a big self. And I think we moved away part because we were a more competitive culture. So you just got to spend a lot of time branding yourself, marketing yourself to get jobs and stuff, get into colleges.

8:04Second, we have social technology where you're trying to get likes. You're trying to get attention. Everyone's in a war for attention. I know. And, you know, it's all looking for that feedback. How many friends on Facebook? How many Instagram followers? It's the competition for eyeballs that is infectious, and I like everything. You say, I've got the Kindle. The noise of fast and shallow communications makes it harder to hear the quieter sounds that emanate from the depths. You know, and you say that so with such articulation when that's really what we all are feeling. We all feel exactly that.

8:42We live in a culture that teaches us to promote and advertise ourselves and to master the skills required for success. But that gives little encouragement to humility, sympathy, and honest self-confrontation, which are necessary for building character. Yeah. I mean, I find – You should be proud of that sentence. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. How do you even focus your attention? I, I, my attention span, sometimes I feel it's shot. It's like every few seconds I'm drifting off to another thing on the phone. I'm checking my phone. And if you can't focus attention for a long time, you can't commit to anything.

9:20And you can't even really explore beneath the surface. And so all of this has created, uh, you know, which is basically what the book is about, a more shallow and self-centered society. Yeah. You call this the big me generation. Yeah. And I think it's just the mainstream culture and we have to create little countercultures to swim against it. Yeah. I love it. On page 258, actually, you quote a fascinating study that proves this theory of even our language has become more self-centered. Can we talk about that? Yes. I never thought about that when I read that. Yeah. So Google, you can take all these big searches and you look at all the words that are used in magazines, newspapers, and books in any given year, and you can chart what words we're using more of and what words we're using less of.

10:03And so we're talking a lot more about economics. So economic word usage is up. We're talking a lot less about community and morality. And so words like kindness, humbleness, gratitude, honor, those words are dropping over the past generation by like 50%, 50 % or 60 % each. We're just talking about this stuff. Yeah, and as we were discussing, kids in that Harvard survey when asked whether or not their parents would want them to be high achievers. There was a Harvard School of Education survey, and they asked 10 ,000 junior high school students, what do your parents care more about, that you get good grades, or that you're kind.

10:39And 80 % of them said, my parents care more about getting good grades. That's the message we end up sending. I think that's a really good hit the pause button for a lot of parents who are listening to us right now. And I recall meeting somebody recently and I was really struck by when I said, oh, gee, you have really, your children seem to be so well behaved, so lovely. And this mother said, yes, my daughters are very kind. I thought, ooh, that's a sign of somebody who's very self-aware or trying to raise children who are self-aware. And, of course, the way we teach that is not necessarily by talking about it, but by demonstrating it and just by living it out and they observe that.

11:20In his best-selling book, The Road to Character, David Brooks tells the life stories of ten historical figures, each of whom followed their own difficult and sometimes imperfect road to character. People like Dorothy Day, who's been called a saint for our time. Born in 1897, Dorothy Day co-created The Catholic Worker. It's a newspaper as well as a social movement. Today, the organization promotes religious teachings and service for those in need. You talk about the people in the book, the people who you admire and have cultivated their stories, who started out being one place and then ended up developing character over the years.

12:01Yeah. Some of them, the ones I fell in love with, there was a woman named Dorothy Day, who, in her 20s, she was really a mess. She was drinking, divorce, suicide, abortions. Her pivotal moment was giving birth to her daughter. And she had noticed that all the accounts of childbearing had been written by guys. And so she said, you know, I'm going to write one. And she sits down like 40 minutes after delivering her daughter and she writes an essay, What It Felt Like. And it's about some of the violence of it. But then in the end, she writes, if I had composed the greatest symphony, written the greatest novel, or sculpted the greatest sculpture, I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.

12:40I felt such floods of love and joy at that moment, and with that came a need to worship and to adore. In other words, she was given this great gift to her daughter. She said, who do I thank for this? And she wanted to worship somebody. Yeah, I love that story. And so she eventually became a Catholic and she started soup kitchens, she started a radical newspaper, homeless shelters, and she spent the next 50 years of her life living there, not just serving, but living in the homeless shelters, sacrificing her privacy, paying herself no income, and live a life of just service for the rest of her life.

13:13It's so incredible how having that child actually opened up the heart space for her in a way that she could see God, actually. Yeah, it was focused, and you open up hard ground. It's like a plow that opens up hard ground, love, and it happened to her. Interesting. And I know you write about A. Philip Randolph. Yeah. A. Philip Randolph was an early pioneer in the Civil Rights Movement. He was a union organizer who helped convince President Truman to issue an executive order banning racial segregation in the military. By 1963, A. Philip Randolph stood with Martin Luther King Jr. to help organize the March on Washington.

13:51He's a man of, you know, he was in circumstances that were designed to humiliate him because of racism. He would not be humiliated. He was dignified. And he found his character through his dignity. So he was early in life. He wanted to be a Shakespearean actor. He had a great voice. And actually at the end of his life, his wife was ill. And every day he would read an hour of Shakespeare to her, which is a nice thing to do. He would sit upright. His diction was very perfect. His word choices were perfect. And so you could try to do what you would to him, but he would not bend. He was going to be dignified and irreproachable.

14:26And he was a man of great firmness and character, even when others around him were trying to destroy him, but he just... Yeah, obviously I was touched by that story, being African American, and it's the thing that I so wish my generation had passed on to the upcoming generations, because I think when you understand where you've come from, when you understand your history, when you understand that there were, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of people like Ava LeBrandoff, who in the face of such brazen indignities every day stood inside themselves and stood up for themselves and stood up to that.

15:06I mean, just the definition of what building character is. His dad was an AME preacher in Florida. He taught A. Philip Randolph the great heroes of African-American history and then you're the son of a proud legacy. Live it out. Yeah. You say that we should all have a humility code. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought we talked about this culture, the big me, and I think that's a code that says deep down I'm really special inside. And if you go to all the commencement addresses, it's trust yourself, be true to yourself, you're special, you're special. But the people I think who have great character don't believe that.

15:43They believe we're divided, that we have parts we're splendidly endowed, but parts we're deeply broken. and we have sins. And a lot of the people would look at themselves and say, what's my core sin? Yeah, you write about our core sins. We all have core sins. We struggle with core sins. Whether it's vanity, ego, selfishness, self-centeredness, whatever it is. And then they ask, well, what does that behavior does that lead to that I'm not proud of? And you can work on it. They confront themselves. So is that why we're here, to work on our core sins? What do you think the reason for us being here is?

16:18What are we all doing, all of us humans? I think we all have a moral imagination. We want to not lead a life just of good experiences, but a life of meaning. And we're willing to give up some happiness for some holiness, whether you're religious or not. You know, people are willing to endure suffering for something they really believe in. And I've found that's true among the richest and among the poorest. Everybody wants to have a life where they say, my life has meant something, and it's been a good life, and I've gotten better at it. I've fulfilled myself a little more as I got older. And so, you know, we spend a lot of time in our culture talking about happiness.

16:54But if you're defining happiness, just having good experiences, I don't think that's enough. If you ask anybody, what's the activity that you had that made you who you are? No one says, you know, I had a really great vacation in Hawaii. No one says that. They say, I had a period of struggle. I lost a loved one. I was in the army, something. And that period of struggle or that period of toughness made me who I am. And quite often, though, it's also when you are extending yourself in kindness or grace to somebody else, too. Yeah. Living through somebody else through compassion or empathy. Yeah. And so often those things are connected that you see people suffering, and then they turn that suffering into a service.

17:38And so I have a great quote there I like by a guy named Tillich, who said that what suffering does is it takes us below the everydayness of life and reminds us we're not who we think we are. It carves beneath what we thought was the basement of our soul and carves through the floor and reveals the cavity below. So it really introduces us to ourselves. When you're in those moments of suffering, it gives you empathy because you sympathize with the others. But then you want to turn that moment into a story that will lead to service. You also, I like it in the book when you talk about how every one of us is in need of some kind of redemptive assistance.

18:16What does that mean? So I used to think that to get character, you worked on yourself. But then I came to the conclusion that no one has the power to defeat the power of selfishness and self-deception. We're sort of lying to each other all the time. So we all need assistance from outside. And for religious people, it's assistance from God. From everybody, it's assistance from friends. I had a friend who, she lost a daughter, And one of the things she told me was that the people who were close to her, some of them didn't show up in the moment of grief. But there were people who she barely knew who showed up.

18:53They came from far away and they showed up. And when you are getting that love from a person you barely know, that's unmerited love. That's grace. That's you're relying on something you don't deserve but it's being given to you. So much of the book focuses on love. You have a theory about what happens to our soul when we experience love. What is that? I do think it is the opening, but then it's also the fusion. You fuse with another. And so somebody, Montaigne, this French writer, said, when you're in love, it eliminates the distinction between giving and receiving. When you give to the person you love, you're giving to a piece of yourself.

19:32So it's actually more fun to give than to receive. And so that's about that fusion. That's why it feels so good. Yeah, it does feel like that's why you want to do it. That's why giving it, when you really give it from a pure place, it's just like you got it. Yeah. It's just as good as getting it. Yeah. And you can, I mean, it's actually a good measure of people, and I'm not good at this, of picking out the right gift. That's a really hard skill. Like, it takes empathy, the ability to make sure. It also takes paying attention, David. Yeah, that's true. They always, people always give you clues.

20:02Yeah. They do. I tell you, women always give you clues, they do. There was this wonderful line in the color purple, the book Alice Walker wrote, and also I think it stayed in the movie and the play, that what God loves most is appreciation. That's why God gets pissed if you don't notice the color purple. It's also true what people love most is appreciation. That's what I found. And so over the years, particularly for men in our audiences, I would always say if you can sit down and honestly come up with your top ten reasons you care for somebody, using specific things, not generalities, but specifics, there is no better gift than that.

20:41And you can do it regularly. And so it doesn't matter what you buy or what you find. If you can generally do your own top ten list for somebody, it's amazing. And I have all these girls from South Africa, and I tell them, they're saying, Mama, what can we give you? Your words matter. Your real appreciation matters. I love it in the book where you talk about we should rank our loves in highs and lows. Tell me what that does. That's a concept from this great theologian, Augustine. And he said, what is sin? And so when we use the word sin, now we only use the word in the context of fattening desserts.

21:15But in traditional morality, it's a sense that we have something broken. And I don't like the word sin when it's meant to suggest we're dark and depraved inside. But he had a beautiful formulation. He said, we sin when we have our loves out of order. And what he meant by that? This is good. Slow this down a little bit. That's good. That's a tweetable moment right there. I don't know if Augustine wants to be tweeted, but okay. Yes, yes. Okay. All right. We sin when we have our loves out of order. Yes. So we all love a lot of things. We love family. We love money. We love a little affection, status, truth.

21:51And we all know that some loves are higher. We know that our love of family is higher than our love of money, or our love of truth should be higher than our love of money. And if we're lying to get money, we're putting our loves out of order. And so sometimes we just, by some nature, we get them out of order. So for example, if a friend tells you a secret and you blab it at a dinner party, you're putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship. And we know that's wrong. That's the wrong order. And so it's useful just to sit down and say, what do I love? What are the things I really love?

22:22And in what order do I love them? Am I spending time, so I'm spending time on my highest love, or am I spending time on a lower love? Oh, that's good. That's really good, David. That's good. I didn't think of this. This is really good. Am I spending time on my highest love? Yeah. Or your attention or your energy, all that stuff. Yeah, that question's going to resonate really deeply with people. You know why? Because I got it. I felt it. Yeah. Yeah. So tell me, what is for you the difference between spirituality and religion? So spirituality to me is an awareness of the transcendent, an awareness that there's something beyond the material world.

23:09And you might call that nature, you might call it the oneness of meaning, or you might call it God. Or sometimes I feel it in history. I go back to a historic place and somehow I feel a connection, a mystical connection, with those who are dead. Lincoln called it the mystic cords of memory. And religion is more defined theology, and it's God with a specific message, which is embedded in the Bible or the Koran or some other book. And so I think spirituality is a piece of religion, but religion has more specific codes. And I observe, you know, people sometimes ask me, do you have to be religious to be good?

23:46and I just observe many faithful people who are wonderful. I observe many atheists who are wonderful. So just as a matter of observation, I don't think you do. It's not my job to tell people to have faith and I'm not in the pulpit business. I'm not persuading people or not. Right, but do you think that every person has the possibility to get on the road to character and to take themselves higher than they are right now? I think we're born to want that. We're born to want that. But that's a part of the human condition. I think it's in us. I've never met anybody who did not want it and did not want, you know, Augustine.

24:20I mentioned him. Saint Augustine was one of the founding fathers of Western Christianity and the Roman Catholic Church. Born in the fourth century, Augustine spent his life teaching the Holy Trinity and that human beings are the perfect union of body and soul. He had a mom named Monica, who was like the helicopter mom to beat all helicopter moms. She was like trying to control him. And they had a very conflicted relationship. At the end of her life, she says to him, you know, all my life I've wanted you to be a certain sort of man. And you now are that kind of man. And I'm ready to go. I'm ready to die.

24:59I'm fine. They were in Italy when this happened. She said, I thought I wanted to go back to Africa, but God's everywhere. He'll find me. You can bury me here. And she does die nine days later. But he describes their final conversation. and after all this conflict and fighting, mother and son have a sweet, harmonious conversation where he's describing, they talk about the life to come, the life they've led, and he said, we went above pure bodily things into the realm of pure spirit. And then he has a long sentence that's really hard to understand, but he's got one word in it that repeats, and that word is the word hushed.

25:37And he says, our voices were hushed, the sound of the birds was hushed, The sound of the trees was hushed, just hushed, hushed, hushed. And he describes this great tranquility. And so our worldly ambitions, there's always something else out there. But spiritually, I think we're all wired to seek that tranquility and peace. And he achieved it. And I do think all of us want to get there, want to have a life where we went through some struggles, went through some joys, but we cohered as a person. And we know who we are. We're grateful for what we have. We're delighted by life and peace. What do you think you were called here to do?

26:15Well, at age seven, I read a book called Paddington the Bear, and I said, I'm going to be a writer. So from age seven, I knew I was going to write. And there probably haven't been 200 days since then that I have not written something. But as to what to do with the writing, that's changed over time. I used to want to advance a certain political agenda. Then I wanted to be an example of a certain sort of political person, like not a screamer but civil. Now I think my calling, hopefully for the rest of my life, and this is just in career terms, is to try to shift the conversation a little toward these subjects.

26:52I frankly think we talk about politics too much. We have too many shows about politics and not enough shows about this. And so I'd like to shift the conversation a little over in that direction just because I think there's a hunger for it. I mean, you've been doing it your whole career, but there aren't so many. And you can turn on the cable news and there's political, political, political. Political, political. You're right. There's a certain kind of antagonistic voices that work for television. What do you think that's actually doing for us or to us? Well, I think it's making us cynical. And it's doing a couple of things.

27:28First, there's a certain sort of people who go to the channels so they can be reminded how right they are all the time. Yeah. But then I think it's like a formula. and it turns politics into like a team sport, just my team, my team. And the third thing it does, politics has come to displace morality. When we talk about things, we do it through the guise of politics. Ooh, that's really good. That's a really good statement. That's spontaneous. That's really good. And then it turns politics into a holy war. So, of course, we keep covering. Politics has come to replace morality. Yeah. And it's become a holy war.

28:04Yeah. It can't be good for us. No, I, you know, I live in Washington half the time. I see how bad it can be. Yeah. What has been the greatest outcome for you? Lots of people are talking about character and having a, and how it connects to our souls in a way that we haven't before. But what has been the greatest for you? Before I didn't know the words. Like, when I asked five years ago, how do you get character? I didn't know the words. I didn't know anything. And so now I have certain words that I can use. soul, grace, sin. And those words are like handholds. And so now at least I have a little language to describe the moral drama going on inside.

28:45Did this open you up in a way? Because did you, would you in a prior, more cynical life, have thought of those things, soul, grace, inner light, all that, as, quote, new age? Yeah, maybe. Yeah. Or I just wouldn't have, I might have approved, I just didn't know. A friend of mine said he read my first book and this book, and he said, you can't believe that's the same person. But now, where do you stand resume versus eulogy virtues? Well, I think I'm better in balance. That doesn't mean I've solidified the eulogy. I haven't become the person I'd like to be by a long shot. But I spend so much time thinking about that now.

29:27And what will be, and I think this is a good question for all of you who are listening to us right now, what will be the one great thing, important thing, that people say about what your life meant? Well, I hope they'll say he accelerated as he went on. That he... He got better. He got better. He got better at a faster pace. He got braver about this stuff as he went on. I hope they'll say that. And then I'll hope, and I'm not there, but I've got, hopefully got a lot of life left, that he was really able to make strong commitments. I do think that's what it's all about. It's about can you commit to a philosophy where you have a view of the world?

30:08Are you enmeshed in a web of unconditional loves? Can you serve causes that can't be completed in a single lifetime? Can you do those big commitments and stick with them? Yeah. You know, it's interesting. One of the things Maya Angelou, who was a personal friend of mine and a mother figure for me, used to say that people may not remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel. What will people say about the way you've made them feel? And I ask that in your professional life and in your personal life. Yeah. Well, I hope you stung me with that paying attention for the gifts.

30:47Like, I've got to work on that. I've got to work on paying attention. I hope they feel admired. I'm a big believer in admiration, admiring people that they feel valued and they feel admired. Has this helped you develop a more soulful way of being with yourself?

31:07A calming spiritual practice? Yeah, I think somewhat in prayer, somewhat just, you know, when you're learning about this stuff and you're reading books that are really deep. Sometimes I'm on the floor, I'm on the carpet in my living room researching, and I'm having fun. I've realized how meaningful it is to be learning about this sort of stuff. At this time in your life. Yeah. And the fact that it's always been there. I'm a late starter. I'm a late bloomer on this stuff. And for me, sometimes writing can be a spiritual practice. I used to be someone who did not believe in journaling because I thought, oh, it makes you a little self-indulgent, maybe.

31:45But now I sort of believe in it. Why? Because I think it makes you honest about yourself. And it's very hard. I mean, I write for a living, so I'm always writing for an audience. But then if I write separately for no audience, that's a very radically different mindset. I'm not trying to impress anybody. I'm not trying to communicate to anybody. I'm just trying to be honest. I'm just trying to see accurately. And so I became sort of impressed by it against my skepticism. So what are you most proud of right now? Are you proud of yourself for the journey that you've taken from the beginning of the book to the end of the book, where you said at the beginning of the book you were writing this book to save your soul.

32:24And you can see as the book progresses by the time you get to the end, talking about the humility code, that there has been a progression or a growing of yourself. That's what I sensed. Well, so there's a book about humility. Maybe I shouldn't be proud about a book about humility. You can be humbly proud. So maybe when we use the word pride, there are two different meanings. Yeah, I get that. One is like honest. You're not dancing in front of the television crowd. But it's like. Some pride is self-blinding. You're so arrogant. You don't even know yourself. And some pride is legitimate. Yeah. Yeah.

33:02And don't you sense though. The fact that I called the people in my magazine. I called my team. That you started a conversation. I've been having these conversations for years. I think the fact that you are now having this conversation. I think that's fantastic. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to join you in your world. It's a good world. Yeah, it is a good world. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Oprah Winfrey, and you've been listening to Super Soul Conversations, the podcast. You can follow Super Soul on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. If you haven't yet, go to Apple Podcasts and subscribe, rate, and review this podcast.

33:45Join me next week for another Super Soul Conversation. Thank you for listening.