What’s Actually Breaking America — with David Brooks

26:21And I think there is some sort of social risk aversion that has settled as we've come to be more distrustful. And then the second thing that's happened is professionalization has become an urgent carve-out. And so my students would always tell me, I don't have time to date, I'm just too busy. And I would tell them, you're doing it wrong. one you know their data is pretty clear that the quality of your marriage is more important than the quality of career in determining your happiness and so you should focus on that and i once had a student tell me you know marriage is a box that'll come in the mail when i'm 35 and i was like wrong it's very important to learn how to do relations i don't advise getting married in college the statistics show you should wait till 25 um but uh it's really helpful to have had a whole repertoire of relationships.

27:14So you're able to be a good partner to somebody. And it takes practice just like anything else. And it takes skill building. The same woman who told me that marriage will come in the mail, she said, you know, I've had four boyfriends in my life. And they all ghosted me at the end. Not a single one of them had the decency to call her up and have that conversation. And I think it's because in part, Nobody had taught them they had to do that. A decent person has a breakup conversation. And as important, no one had taught them that it's possible to break up with someone without crushing their heart, at least more than is necessary.

27:52And I think these are basic social skills that we have not passed on. And they're skills like how to ask for an offer of forgiveness, how to listen really well to somebody, how to be a great conversationalist. And somehow social skills are neglected. I've seen some recent studies trying to understand why young people are so anxious and depressed. And a lot of it is they claim they have no purpose. And I sort of, for the first time, kind of made that connection to what you were just saying, that the ability to love others or love something. And as I think about it, I think I think of my purpose is I want to raise patriotic, loving men.

28:30And what that means is my purpose is I just don't get as much back from my boys as they get from me. And I know that sounds terrible, but that's my purpose. And your purpose might be civil rights, but showing up to protests, raising money, getting all sorts of feedback or negative feedback or getting attacked online, it's because it's your purpose. You're going to give more than you're going to get. And do you make that connection between purpose, the young people? And I don't know how we inculcate this or teach them that. But the whole point of parenting, in my view, or of purpose is you decide to just give more than you're going to get from this thing or this person.

29:08I encounter this all the time. I had a student who was a great student. I gave him his only A minus at Yale. And he was such a good investor that while he was in college, he had a Bloomberg terminal on his dorm room desk. He worked for a firm and they gave him a terminal, which is an expensive thing. And he got out and he was an arrogant bro kind of kid. And wonderful guy, I really liked him. And he got out and he got fired. And he called me and his voice was utterly different because he had done what he thought. And when he was fired from that job, he didn't really know what his telos was. And I think he never knew.

29:44I think he just was going along with the system, what the system told him to want. And Nietzsche has a saying, who you have as a why to live, work and endure anyhow. And if you know why you're put on this earth, you can endure the setbacks. But if you don't know your whys, then the setbacks are really devastating. And I found that many young people are what they call insecure overachievers. They have no foundation. They haven't discovered their sense of purpose. So they build very impressive towers up on top, but their foundation is rotten. And eventually the towers are going to crumble. And so I began teaching courses really on how to find a sense of purpose.

30:23And the core theory of one of those courses was that every young person, not everyone, but most, are going to make four fundamental commitments in the course of their 20s or maybe up to 35 or 40. A commitment to a vocation, a career, a commitment to a philosophy or faith, a worldview they can believe in and guide their life by, some kind of family, and to a community. And the quality of your life will be determined by the quality of the commitments you make and how you live up to those commitments. And a commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for when love falters.

31:04So Jews love their God, but they keep kosher just in case. Keep them on the straight and narrow. I love my wife, but we have a legal and religious marital bond between us. So that's a structure of behavior for those moments when love falters. And that act of commitment-making is a bit countercultural today because we live in a culture that values autonomy a lot. We're a freedom of choice. Keep my options open. Keep my options open. And commitment is about closing options. But in my view, there are two kinds of freedom. The freedom of no restraint, which is the way a lot of people define freedom now.

31:40But another kind of freedom is the freedom to do hard things. So if I want the freedom to play the piano, I have to chain myself down to the piano bench and practice. And in that sense, sometimes it's your chains to stay free. But these are countercultural concepts these days. We'll be right back after a quick break.

32:07Support for the show comes from Vanta. Startups move fast, and with AI, they're shipping even faster and attracting enterprise buyers sooner. But big deals bring even bigger security and compliance requirements. A SOC 2 isn't always enough. The right kind of security can make a deal or break it. But most founders and engineers can't afford to take time away from building their company to focus on that. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta's AI and automation make it easy for your company to get big deal ready in days. And Vanta says they continuously monitor your compliance so future deals are never blocked.

32:38Plus, Vanta scales with you, backed by support that's there when you need it every step of the way. With AI changing regulations and buyer's expectations, Vanta knows what's needed and when. And they've built the fastest, easiest path to get you there. That's why serious startups get secure early with Vanta. Get started at Vanta.com slash ProfG. That's V-A-N-T-A dot com slash Prop G. Vanta dot com slash Prop G.

33:28hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor. That's a big deal when every hire counts. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip confusing steps in recruiting jargon. It filters through applicants based on criteria you've set for your role and surfaces only the best matches so you're not stuck sorting through a mountain of resumes. LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant can even suggest 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash prof, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates.

34:05That's linkedin.com slash prof to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

34:15Support for the show comes from Vanguard. To all the financial advisors listening, let's talk about bonds for a minute. Capturing value and fixed income is not easy. Bond markets are massive, murky, and let's be real, lots of firms throw a couple flashy funds your way and call it a day, but not Vanguard. Vanguard bonds are institutional quality. Institutional quality isn't a tagline. It's a commitment to your clients. It means top grade products across the board. The lineup includes over 80 bond funds. They're actively managed by a 200-person global squad of sector specialists, analysts, and traders.

34:46Lots of firms love to highlight their start portfolio managers, like it's all about that one brilliant mind making the magic happen. Vanguard's philosophy is a little different. They believe the best active strategy shouldn't be locked away with one person. They should be shared across the team. That way, every client benefits from the collective brainpower, not just one individual's take. So, if you're looking to give your clients consistent results year in and year out, go see the record for yourself at Vanguard.com slash audio. That's Vanguard.com slash audio. All investing is subject to risk.

35:16Vanguard Marketing Corporation Distributor.

35:27so there's no way to make this altitude change elegantly but let's talk about trump um so consumer sentiment is worse now than its lowest point in the biden administration uh how do you view economic anxiety is as part of this political crisis do you think that um you write about authoritarian figures that they create their own realities akin to performance artists. How do you think people will look back on this moment in terms of what it means for broader society? Well, I think we're just in a moment of extreme anxiety, and that feeds negative economic sentiment. If you look at the University of Michigan consumer data information, consumer sentiment is through the floor.

36:17And what's interesting to me is that 20 % of Republicans think Donald Trump is responsible. And that's bad news for Donald Trump. My colleague at the New York Times, E.J. Dionne, had a piece where he estimated that somewhere between 15 % and 25 % of Trump voters have changed their mind about him. And that's good news for me because I've maintained that all voters are reasonable. And that suggests a lot of Republicans are walking away from Trump. It's a little too early. Some of the people are out over their skis in thinking the Trump presidency is in permanent decline. I think he's holding around 40 % approval, 42%, which is his historic norm.

36:59But we are in a moment where people are prepared for the worst, quick to see the worst, I would say, high threat perception, and then quick to blame the elites. And Donald Trump is now being seen a little more as one of the elites. You said you could measure authoritarianism by how high the price is to oppose it. But does the fact that institutions and voters are, I assume, reticent or actually less reticent, it seems like they're more willing to push back. Does this reflect it feels like I don't know if it's confirmation or, you know, I don't know which bias it is that I'm imposing here. But it does feel like this is a moment that there's been a bit of a pivot or that the dam is beginning to burst in terms of Trump's ability to hold this coalition together.

37:45Your thoughts? It's clearly fraying. I mean, there's just been a lot of negative news for Trump in the last time. The drop in his polls, especially the drop in his polls on economics, dropping his polls on immigration, the setback in all the different political races that have been held over the last year, the Indiana legislature beginning to rebel. I do think, and then even within the Senate, some of the attacks on or in the House on Speaker Johnson for basically disarming. The Senate and the House both unilaterally disarmed. One of the things I was taught in political science class is that people go into politics because they want power.

38:25But I've learned as a journalist, people don't want power. Even politicians don't want power. They're happy to give away power if they can keep their jobs. And so they give power to the agencies. They give power to the president. And they give power to the party leaders. So Congress is run by four people. The Speaker, the Majority Leader, the Minority Leader, and the Senate and House Minority Leaders. And so they run the place and most other people are basically powerless, which is why so many people leave. But when we begin to see mainstream House members bucking the president on important issues, then I'll believe his coalition is fracturing.

39:03Now I think it's fraying around the edges, but not really fracturing. I'm curious what you think about. So trust in media and government, all-time lows. Talk about the concepts more generally of, you know, as it relates to media or government or however else you want to explain these constructs or these themes. Talk about the notion of trust in experts. Yeah, well, trust is faith that you will do what you ought to do. And so it's a faith. It's a form of faith because I'm anticipating the future and I have faith in you. And faith, it's a moral kind of faith that you will do what you ought to do.

39:38And the ought relies on the fact that we have a shared moral sense, that we agree what you ought to do. It also requires that we have shared norms of how to be considerate to each other, that if two lanes are merging on the highway, the right lane is going to go, then the left lane, the right lane, and then the left lane. And if you bump in line and I'm going to honk because you violated the norm. And so over the last decades, that sense of shared faith and shared moral order and shared moral norms has deteriorated. the most important statistic to me in all of politics is, do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time?

40:24And through much of the 20th century, 70 % of Americans said, yeah, I trust government to do the right thing most of the time. Now we're down to what, like 15 %? And the most socially important statistic is, do you trust your neighbors? Do you trust the people around you? And it used to be 60 % said yes, and now that's down to 30 % and 19 % are millennial and Gen Z. So people have lost faith in each other. And I've been persuaded by Robert Putnam at Harvard that when you lose faith, it's usually well-founded. When you are distrustful, it's usually because people have been untrustworthy to you.

40:59And I just think there's, so it's in a weird way, trust is the moral barometer of society. And when people betray you, then you get distrustful. And one of the dumbest things Donald Trump is doing right now is going to people at rallies and saying, you don't need$32. You can get by with two dolls. That just makes people feel like he's flippant and he doesn't sympathize. And if there's one thing Americans want right now, it's to be seen by their leaders. And when they would go to the supermarket and they buy like a medium amount and they walk out of there with a$179 bill and he says, buy two dolls, people are going to feel unseen.

41:45And that's part of what's happened here. And once you feel unseen, then you get more distrustful. Because we evolved to be surrounded by 150 other people who saw us all the time. And when you get more distrustful, you're less likely to trust others. And people will less likely be trustworthy to you. And so trust is about spirals. You have a death spiral of distrust feeding into distrust, feeding into distrust. Or positively, you can have a death upward spiral of people who behave trustingly, find that people are trustworthy, so they trust them more, so their relationships improve and they have more trust and more trust.

42:22And I have found in my life, I don't know about you, that I always lead with trust. I exaggeratedly trust people. And often that burns me. Not often, but sometimes it burns me. I get socially betrayed. I get financially betrayed. Well, whatever. But I think on balance, if you lead with trust, most of the time people will behave in trustworthy ways. But you have to lead with trust in the first instance. And a lot of people are just too burned by life to do that. I would argue that the culprit around the erosion of trust and faith in our institutions is that we have attached a profit motive to algorithms who figured out a way to get us to mistrust each other.

43:00That we're actually not that divided, but we have the S &P, 40 % of the S &P has a vested interest in dividing us. I'll go online. I'll read the comments. And, you know, everyone has addictions. I'm convinced everyone has a certain amount of addiction. I have two addictions. One is to money and one is to the affirmation of strangers, which is just stupid at my age. But I'll go on YouTube and people will say really aggressive, mean things about both of us. And the reason why, and then I'll find that half of them, especially the really vile ones, are dog mom 312 with three followers. It's a bot meant to create engagement or from someone who sees a vested international interest in dividing America, whatever it might be.

43:42But essentially, we've created porous platforms and an algorithm and attached a profit incentive that's gotten so big it may be the dominant force in our economy that sees an inverse correlation between trust and profitability. Your thoughts? I think that's part of it. But the trust numbers really began to go south about 30 years ago. The federal trust numbers began to go south in the 70s. That do you trust government? But the social trust began to go 30 years ago. So I think that's a big part of it. But I think it's mostly it's social disconnection. It's shrinking family size. It's shrinking friendship circles, et cetera, et cetera.

44:21But I'm sort of interested by the fact that you go on and look at the reaction to you because I am – I don't know. I must be psychologically weaker than you. I avoid that because it's too – I can't take it. And you're stronger. I'm the heroin addict. It's like just my last day. No, I go on and I look at them. And I try to stop at a certain point, but I think yours is a much healthier approach, a much more confident approach. Yeah, I go on and look at these things and it takes me out of my head and I lack presence around my family, the people who I should care about. But your data is hard to argue with.

44:58Do you think it's, I mean, it's a variety of things. You talk a lot about this when I see on television, lack of church attendance, lack of—let's move to solutions. One idea I love, and I'm curious, I would love to see mandatory national service. Your thoughts? A hundred percent. I mean, it's astounding to me that it doesn't—you know, it's not there. Because all you have to do is mention, if you're talking to a group of people and you mention the phrase national service, you get applause, spontaneous applause. And I think we all have a sense we would be better off, A, people have a sense of purpose if they got experience, the sensation of giving.

45:34B, it would be great if somebody from Berkeley, California had to room with somebody from Birmingham, Alabama. It would just be fantastic. I actually, in 2017, I launched a nonprofit exactly on this subject. The idea that social distrust was underlying a lot of the problems in our society. And so the project is called Weave, the Social Fabric Project. And we just go to towns and we say, who's trusted here? And people list names. People in the neighborhood, it could be some of the people have, are just the sort of people in the neighborhood who spontaneously organize things. We met somebody who said, I practice aggressive friendship.

46:16And she's the lady on the black who has the July 4th party. She's the lady on the black who has New Year's Eve parties. So everyone looks to her and they know that she's a community hub. Some people are just nonprofit leaders. So they run the community organization. They run the homeless organization. I was in Watts, and I ran into an organization called Sisters of Watts. It was just like a bunch of moms. And they did whatever the neighborhood needed. So if the kids were going home hungry, they had backpacks filled with food to send them home with. They cleaned up the empty lots. They gave showers to the homeless.

46:49They just did what the community needed. And I found that whatever town you go into or whatever neighborhood you go into, and if you say, who's trusted here, you will get a list of names. And everybody, they're everywhere. And we call them weavers because they're weaving communities together. They are the people who build trust. And trust travels at the speed of relationship. And that's slow. But if you can shift norms, you can really produce big change all at once. So in the 70s, we shifted norms around littering. and it used to be perfectly fine to litter and then it was not. Then we shifted norms about smoking.

47:25The Me Too movement shifted norms about sexual abuse and harassment. And you can shift norms. And so what Weave does is we give financial support to Weavers so they'll be more effective and we give them access to each other. We give them chances to tell their stories on media. And then we bring them together. And the goal is to create more people's identity. It's really powerful. If people say, you know, I'm going to be a little more like those people. A culture changes when a small group of people find a better way to live and the rest of us copy. And so I've spent the last seven or eight years around the most beautiful people in America.

48:01And it's kept my mood up when politics is trying to destroy it. And if we could shift norms around that kind of behavior. Just one final story. We were into a lady in Florida. And she was helping kids cross the street after elementary school in the afternoon. And we asked her, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she said, nope, I have no time. We said, well, are you getting paid to do this? And she said, no, but I help the kids cross the street after school because it'll be safer for them. And then we said, what are you doing the rest of the day? And she said, well, on Thursdays, I take food to the hospital so the patients will have some nicer food to eat.

48:36And we said, do you have time to volunteer in your neighborhood? And she said, no, I have no time. And she didn't see this as volunteering. She just saw it as what neighbors do. and if we could shift the norm so people redefine what a neighbor is then suddenly you'll see a lot more trust in society and it has to start at the ground up but it also has to happen to the top down it's really hard to build trust to the ground up when somebody in the white house is trying to destroy it every day from the top down one of the i learn a lot from you and i like that you challenge my thinking because you have argued against a purely material explanation for our political crisis, that throwing money at people isn't to solve, and that there are moral, relational, and spiritual issues at hand here.

49:20What do you think that progressives, including myself, misunderstand about economic redistribution, that it's not a good substitute for cultural repair? Yeah. One of the differences between liberals and conservatives is liberalism grew up in power. I think modern liberalism grew up in the New Deal, when there was levers of power that Democrats controlled that they could advance their agenda. Conservatism more or less grew up out of power. And so when I was a young conservative, we had neckties. And some conservatives wore Adam Smith neckties, some more St. Augustine, some more Edmund Burke. But the lodestars of being conservative was philosophical.

50:06And it was more, it was out of power. It was a group through the 60s until Ronald Reagan was in exile. And so I found it in those days that things have all changed now, of course, as a more conservatism was more philosophically oriented and progressivism was more programmatical and more reliant on planning and economics. And if you were in government, then it's natural to think, well, what do I have in government that I can use to make society better? I've got money. and that under that fed into what really was descending from marxism and i think a lot of people are influenced by marx including me who are not marxists but marx was really about economic and material determinism that material conditions determine consciousness and as a conservator i think consciousness has a large influence on material conditions or at least the air the causal arrow goes both ways.

51:02And so it was very easy, both in the great society and in the years since, to believe if we just throw money at a problem, then that'll go a long way to solving it. And that has failed, in my view, in the school system. We've thrown a lot increasingly more money at schools, and scores are dropping rapidly. And it's especially in efforts to create social mobility. If you give a poor family money, they're better off. So I'm for it. They can buy more groceries or whatever else they need. But what you were hoping when you gave a poor family basic income or whatever was that their long-term outcomes would be different, that they'd have higher high school graduation rates, they'd have higher incomes later on.

51:47And that's not true. That doesn't happen. And that's been, I just saw another study with the same finding today. Because if you come from a poor family and have parents with an extremely strong work ethic, you're probably going to be okay. And it's that work ethic that is necessary along with some resources. And I think a lot of people don't want to mention that work ethic because it seems like you're blaming the poor, you're blaming the victim. But the people who are poor are completely aware of how important a work ethic is. And everyone has complexities in their life to explain their circumstances.

52:26But I do think it's possible to talk about things like work ethic, self-control, without saying, oh, you poor people are bad, which is certainly not true. We'll be right back.

52:45Support for the show comes from Rippling. finance teams can waste weeks chasing receipts reconciling spreadsheets and fixing errors across a slew of disconnected spend tools and it's what rippling is here to fix helping you keep your under control without the busy work of clunky finance software rippling is the unified platform for global hr payroll it and finance they've helped millions replace their mess of cobbled together tools with one system designed to give leaders clarity speed and control by uniting employees teams and departments in one system rippling removes the bottlenecks busywork and silos your software can create.

53:18Automated perfectly in sync and seriously simple to use, with Rippling, you can run your entire HR, IT, and finance operations as one, or pick and choose the products that best fill in the gaps in your software stack. And right now, you can get six months free when you go to rippling.com slash propg. Learn more at rippling.com slash propg. That's rippling.com slash propg for six months free. Terms and conditions apply.

53:49When it comes to managing your company's spend, finance leaders face a brutal truth. You often have to choose to move fast and lose control or carefully control money and slow everything down. But not anymore. Brex breaks that tradeoff. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that helps you spend smarter and move faster. With Brex, you get high-limit corporate cards with built-in expense management, plus a team of AI agents that handle manual finance tasks for you. Brex's AI agents do all the stuff you don't want to do, like collect receipts and memos, enforce your policy, and monitor transactions for abuse and fraud, all according to your rules.

54:31So you're free to focus on the business. Over 30 ,000 companies run on Brex, from Anthropic to Zoom. Join them at grex.com.

54:46300 sensors. Over a million data points per second. How does F1 update their fans with every stat in real time? AWS is how. From fastest laps to strategy calls, AWS puts fans in the pit. It's not just racing. It's data-driven innovation at 200 miles per hour. AWS is how leading businesses power next-level innovation.

55:20We're back with more from David Brooks. The term I keep hearing, and it's become almost a badge of honor, people are consistently saying I'm politically homeless. And there's different levels of homelessness, right? There's people who don't have a static address. They're qualified as homeless. There's people who live in their car. And there's people living under a bridge. I think of David Brooks as a guy living under a bridge. I can't imagine a more politically homeless person right now. The way you meld conservative ideology. Money doesn't fix the problem. It's values. And at the same time, you talk about the importance of touch among young men.

55:57I mean, you really are sort of an island of one. Let me ask you this. who in the Republican or the Democratic Party, or where do you find a home in terms of our leadership? Who do you think, who does David Brooks want to be president? Who are you impressed by? Yeah, well, first, just my home. You know, I think I'm pretty consistent. Now I'm in personal faith, but until my 50s, I had no faith. But I did read the Bible and the idea that the strong should serve the weak and the rich should serve the poor, was pretty squarely in the center of both Old and New Testament. And so that seemed like a good value to embrace.

56:38Then one of my heroes is Edmund Burke. And the key phrase for Burke is epistemological modesty, that the world is really complicated and you should be very humble about what you think you can know. And so you should do change, but you should do it cautiously and incremental. You should perform on society, Burke wrote, the way you would perform surgery on your father, very carefully. And I think a lot of the planning that progressives did and the big projects that the progressives did over the course of the 20th century, a lot of them just backfired because no one is smart enough to navigate complex change.

57:13And then my third hero is Alexander Hamilton, who's a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from New York City. Now, Hamilton, there are three traditions in American life, even though we only have two parties. One of them is a progressive tradition, but believes in using government to enhance equality, very legitimate tradition. The other is a more libertarian tradition that believes in reducing government to enhance freedom. And then historically, we've had a third tradition, which starts with Alexander Hamilton. It goes up through Henry Clay and Daniel Webster and the Whig Party with the American system.

57:49and then it goes up through Abraham Lincoln, who was a Whig, who gave more speeches on banking than he did about slavery in the course of his career. And then it goes up to Theodore Roosevelt and then it goes up and probably dies with John McCain, at least the first McCain race of 2000 and would include the Rudy Giuliani version, the 2000 version of Rudy Giuliani, not the contemporary version. And that tradition believes in limited but energetic government to enhance social mobility. As Hamilton or Lincoln would have said, it's about creating a world in which poor boys and girls can rise and succeed.

58:27If we don't have social mobility, if we divide into a class structure, then that's curtains. And so the way you do that is you use government in limited but energetic ways to help people become good capitalists or good whatever they want to be. And that's good human capital policies. That's good education policies. That's job training. That's earned income tax credit. that's baby bonds, whatever, to help people rise and succeed. To me, my tradition, the Whig tradition, is a legitimate tradition in American life. It just happens to have no political partisan home. But I think I see bits of it on the moderate side of the Democratic Party, which is where I now consider myself.

59:08I'm just watching, for example, Rahm Emanuel begin his presidential campaign. And some people think Rahm is, you know, he's the old guard, he doesn't have a chance. Maybe that's true. I hate that he's very realistic about what his chances are. But he is talking about the American dream. And he is talking about education. And the way Democrats have walked away from that issue is astounding to me. Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama wanted education reform. And now the Democrats, Kamala Harris basically did not have an education plank in her platform. Because she didn't, I don't know, she didn't care.

59:40She thought it would be divisive for the party. And the problem with that is, right now, Republicans are kicking Democrats' asses on education. The best education states, as has been written about a lot, are Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Florida, Georgia. Those are the states where the gains are being made. And one statistic should upset every Californian, that in California, 28 % of black kids are reading at grade level. 28%. In Mississippi, a much broader state, 58 % of black kids are reading at grade level. So what the hell is going on in California? and somehow so my party would if it existed would care a lot about that so i used to think the best way to predict the future was to make it which is sort of this ego-driven action orientation like tarzan uh trope but i now think it's the best way to predict the future is to look at incentives and do you believe that so i think as a percentage of of gdp generally speaking across the uh uh across the West, especially in Europe, we've seen social service spending go up.

1:00:48And at some point, the incentives are, quite frankly, not to take risks, not to work. Do you think that part of the failure of progressives is that we've, in an attempt to grab social virtue and show empathy for our brothers and our sisters, that we've created an incentive system that creates a smaller tax base and slowly but surely inspires this downward spiral? Yeah, I guess I would, I do believe, obviously, in the power of incentives. But again, we look at issues somewhat differently. It's interesting because I think you and I agree on a lot, but we think differently. And so I think what matters is your intrinsic desires.

1:01:24And incentives to me feel like extrinsic desires, like a performance pay plan sounds like an extrinsic desire. And I think one of the things the research shows, if you pay kids to read, they'll begin to regard reading as work and do less of it. And I think this is even true among bankers, that some of the performance pay programs that they thought would boost productivity didn't really boost productivity. And I would say what really makes people work hard is, to get back to our original subject, is doing the thing they love to do, doing the thing they are wired to do. I read this biography of Walt Disney recently, and when he was making Snow White, the first full-length feature animated movie, he hired artists and art historians to come to Disney Studios and teach his cartoonists to draw like Michelangelo and Rembrandt and people like that.

1:02:16And he worked on this movie three years before even drawing this first cell and was hour upon hour, seven days a week, of doing the voices. What should the look of the movie be? What do we do with Grumpy? And that three years of prep work, bringing in, he brought in, I think, Frank Lloyd Wright to come to the studio to talk to the artists about lines. And it made no economic sense to do all this stuff. But he did it because he just wanted to do the thing he wanted to do. He loved drawing and he wanted to do the great project and it made no economic sense, but he was totally driven and frankly, it economically eventually paid off.

1:02:56But so I think people will become entrepreneurs when it seems challenging and cool to be entrepreneurs. I think, again, I gravitate a little more to the incentive, to the cultural piece than to the incentive piece. I don't know if you think I'm wrong about that. I just grew up in an environment where, you know, not having money, then being very focused on economic security, teaching at a business school, being an entrepreneur, raising capital, being on board. I one of my real weak points is I tend to think of things through an economic lens And also I and by the way, I think the idolatry of the dollar in America I think America is basically becoming a trading platform It's it's like losing almost any sense of self around what it means to be a society We're just a trading platform to try and get rich is and it's you know Character seems to take in a distant second and character and grit are conflated with The size your bank account full stop is how I see it And so the incentives among young people is just disproportionately towards doing whatever's required to find money and skipping over the purpose, the relationships, the things you were talking about, touch that are so important.

1:04:05And you end up maybe with some economic security, but you end up anxious, obese, and depressed at the age of 35 with an inability to attach to anything. So, yeah, I do. I think about incentives a lot. And that is whenever I look at a situation where the behavior is just I can't figure it out. I go right to the economic incentives. But part of that, again, is proximity bias. Those are the people I teach at a business school. I don't teach at the sociology department. What do you what do you make of. And I hate even using his name because I worry I'm adding to the problem by platforming him. And I think that I'm hoping like Andrew Tate is just going to fade into the distance when people realize just how.

1:04:45how stupid and nihilistic he is. But what do you think of Nick Fuentes? And does it say anything about the Republican Party? Or is it going to be like an Andrew Tate or Yanni Monopoly, what I forget his name was, just kind of the algorithms love him for the short term, and then he goes away. Do you think this is something bigger? Yeah, I do. I mean, I do think we're in a moment of sort of nihilism, which produces a right-wing reaction, which comes close to fascism. And so I think we entered a stage in the 1980s or 1990s of what we would call moral relativism, the prevailing ethos, as Alan Bloom wrote in The Closing of the American Mind, is you do you, I'll do me.

1:05:27We each come up with our own values. And I think that led to a lot of people with no shared values. If you tell everybody to come up with your own values, unless your name is Aristotle, you can't do it. You come up with nothing. And so I think we entered a phase where people were just morally inarticulate and unclear on values and everything was kind of wishy-washy. And they were weak. And then when you get a counter-reaction to that, there's a book by a guy named Rusty Reno called The Return of the Strong Gods. And his argument was that after World War II, people wanted weak belief because they thought strong belief produces the Nazis.

1:06:02And so they went for weak belief. Karl Popper, open society, everything should be open. And so there's a reaction against that to have strong gods, strong nations, strong man, strong Orthodox faith. With that goes true fanaticism. Because if you're trying to shock the bourgeoisie, the weaklings, the elites, one of the things you wanted to do is have a strong position. And you want it to be somewhat dangerous and romantic and manly. And so then you had that love for Roman Empire that's spread throughout the alt-right. But it's inevitably going to lead you to conspiracy theories. It's inevitably going to lead you to racism.

1:06:40It's inevitably going to lead you to anti-Semitism. Because once you adopt that logic that I'm going to have the strong belief that the establishment doesn't like, then you've got to keep upping the dosage. And that's what Nick Fuentes is. He ups the dosage. And the audience demands the higher grade of heroin. They want the pure stuff. And he offers a little more pure. Andrew Tate offers a little more pure. But you can't return to the earlier dosage because it seems boring. And so you have this cycle of self-radicalization with these young guys rising, spewing the most hateful stuff. And it still somehow seems cool to people, I guess.

1:07:20Because I think the alt-right, and my friends and family members who are really in that world, they say it's just getting crazier and crazier. And you brought up a word just as we wrap up here, manly, and we think about this a lot. And again, this is a genuine question, not a question posing as a comment, but I tend to reverse it almost everything, including the instability in our society to a lack of economic and romantic opportunities for young men. And that's not to say that it's not terrible for young women, but young women don't pick up AR-15s or start revolutions typically. I mean, They're part of the movement, but I would argue the most unstable violent societies in the world all have the same thing in common.

1:07:59And that is a disproportionate number of young men who are economically or relationally challenged, if you will. Can a lot of our problems be reverse engineered to young men feeling no sense of purpose? And again, I'll use the term economic precarity. Absolutely. I agree with that a thousand percent. And this is not a new problem. And Dostoevsky wrote a book, Notes from the Underground, about a nihilistic young man who feels invisible to society and draws the right conclusion that if society— Started World War I. Yeah, right. A 19-year-old. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. And so, if society hates me, I'm going to hate right back.

1:08:37And I think that's part of it. Just supplement that. So, I would say some of the lonely young men do the—they basically want to commit suicide and take others with them when they go. That's basically what a mass killing is. And so there's that segment. But there's another segment that's reacting. I was really struck by this in a survey I saw sometime in the last couple weeks, where they asked young people, if you want to have a successful life, what are the most important pieces of that for you? And for Trump voting young men, the number one answer was having children. and uh the number three answer was was getting married so the and it was 11 for progressive women right and so it was didn't even make the top 10 it was it was second and third from the bottom and so to me that this is like i think it's frankly healthier i think the people who think marriage is not important unless a lot of people don't get married a lot of people marriage is not for them a lot of things life happens but as i said earlier dating and marrying uh are vastly more likely to make you happy.

1:09:45I saw a study, I think the Institute for Families Studies, that among liberal women who get married, 96 % say they're happy. And among unmarried, 66%. So it doesn't mean you're going to be unhappy if you're unmarried. It's certainly not. We all have single friends who have built great lives for themselves. But the odds are a little better if you have a life partner. The odds are a little better if you have a life partner. David Brooks is one of the nation's leading writers and commentators. He's an op-ed columnist for the New York Times and writer for the Atlantic. He's a best-selling author of The Second Mountain, The Road to Character, The Social Animal, and How to Know a Person.

1:10:25David, you are, I don't know if you feel this heat or if you can sense it. You are such a role model for me because I love how you are just unafraid and you bring this peanut butter and chocolate that I don't see anywhere else and that is conservative values or what are thought of as conservative values, wrapped in emotion, wrapped in love, wrapped in character. I don't see anyone, I don't know if it was the last person to do this was W. I just don't see anyone doing this. I think you're just such an important voice and such a great role model for young people, specifically young men. Very much appreciate your time today and your voice.

1:11:03I've never been compared to a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, but I take it as a great honor. And so I thank you. And one of the nice things about doing this show is for the next several weeks, lots of people are going to come up to me saying, hey, I saw you on Professor G's show.

1:11:37Algebra of happiness. I've had such a blessed year. My oldest is applying to college, which has been both stressful and really rewarding. You got into school. It's kind of like when your kid gets into college, it's similar to when my partner, her water broke with our first kid. I didn't ever believe that was going to happen. I couldn't imagine, or my dog Zoe, for some reason, I couldn't imagine that my dog Zoe would ever pass away. I just didn't believe it. There's just certain things you believe are never going to happen. I never believed that my kid was actually going to get into college. I just couldn't imagine him actually getting in, and he did, and that was just such an enormous highlight and a culmination of so many things, not least of which was his hard work and discipline, but it was just so kind of meaningful.

1:12:23But the year has had a bit of an overhang, or I don't know, what is on my mind today is that, distinct of all my blessings, there's definitely a cloud and that cloud is the following my friends are dying and it's very strange my closest friend in New York a guy named Scott Sabah died about 18 24 months ago went out to dinner with him he had a bump on his head he said yeah I'm getting it checked out ended up it was leukemia they thought they could treat it with pills pills aren't working went to chemotherapy That didn't work. He went through a stem cell transplant from his son. That didn't work.

1:13:05And, you know, diagnosis to death in about six months. And this was a guy that was in his, he was 54, healthy, handsome. And then my roommate from my freshman year, Craig Marcus, again, great shape, diagnosed with Ghislaine Barr syndrome, I think it's called, a nerve disorder that you can recover from. everything was going fine his limb started swelling back in the hospital on his way to get a x-ray and his heart stopped and then this past week another fraternity brother brad luff there's a picture of eight of us kind of core friends this really optimistic really nice super handsome kid uh like no one ever said a bad thing about brad uh passed away from uh he got a stroke and then they found out he had cancer and then he ultimately decided to refuse treatment and went on hospice care.

1:13:56And it's very, um, obviously it's really rattling and you're kind of at that age or now there's two of the eight of us are gone, uh, from this picture and we're not that old. At least we don't feel there, think of ourselves as being that old. And a couple of things struck me. One, if you lined up all eight of us and had a, an insurance agent say, who's most likely to go first. These guys would have been towards the bottom of the list. They were both really good shape, good genetics. It just didn't make any sense. And it's just so fucking random. But other than me feeling sorry for myself because I'm losing my friends, that's not, I don't have a hallmark moment around this.

1:14:34But the thing that strikes me about all of this is that one of the guys in the group, this guy named David Kingsdale, who was actually president of our fraternity and was also, you know, one of these incredibly impressive guys He's super handsome quarterback of our fraternity football team, a real leader. And David stayed very close, friends with Brad. And over the course of the last 12 to 24 months, I would get a call from David. And this could not have been easy for David. David and I are friends, and we have this shared history, but we're not close. And he'd say, do you know anyone at Cedars?

1:15:11We're trying to get Brad in, and they're trying to ship him to another hospital in Ventura. He'd call me and say, do you know anybody at this physical therapy? I mean, the key to living long or longer across all these studies say, even hospitals and doctors will say this, is does the person have an advocate looking out for them, helping them navigate the circuitous, sometimes blunt instrument that is the American healthcare system? And this is a guy with his own family, his own career, his own parents to take care of. And he was essentially Brad's advocate and his family and raising money for Brad's care.

1:15:51And it's not fun to call your friends and say, do you have contacts here? We're raising money. And he did it. I think it was just such an incredible lesson around character that we all miss Brad and we all cared about him. But there was one of us who said, okay, that's nice, but I'm going to step up and tangibly make his life. I'm going to offer him comfort. I'm going to offer him hope. I'm going to spend time and energy finding the right access, the right care, and the resources. And it is not fun to do this. It is hard and time-consuming and probably even a little bit embarrassing. But he did it.

1:16:35And it's more than just friendship. It's character. And I wrote a book on happiness. And one of the things that really struck me, so the net-net of happiness is the number of deep and meaningful relationships. That's not surprising. But the unlock that I found most insightful and probably the biggest takeaway for me from writing the book is the happiest people aren't the ones who are loved the most, but the ones that have the opportunity to develop relationships such that they can find places to put their love. And that is rock stars are happy. It's great to be adored. You're happier to be loved than not to be loved, but the happiest people are the ones that develop relationships such that people trust them enough that they're able to help them and love them.

1:17:25The happiest people on earth are caregivers, the people who have such good relationships with people and are such good people that that person will let them demonstrate that kind of concern, that kind of love. There's a great movie, Magnolia, and the bartender in the movie is breaking down and says, I have love to give. I just don't know where to put it. Anyways, David Kingsdale found a place to put love. He was the guy amongst all of us in our fraternity who really stepped up and demonstrated a great deal of concern and love for Brett and has demonstrated and been a real role model around what it means to have real character.

1:18:06My holiday wish for you is that you form enough relationships that you have the ultimate blessing, and that is you find places to provide and give comfort and love.

1:18:33this episode was produced by jennifer sanchez our assistant producer is laura jennere drew burrows is our technical director thank you for listening to the prop g pod and prop g media

1:18:562025 was a wild year for the tech industry. AI seemed like it took over everyone's brains. It was the only thing anyone wanted to talk about. NVIDIA became the most valuable company in the world. We had some huge new video games. The Switch 2 launched. A lot of people got it. There was just a lot going on. And on The Verge Cast, we are talking about the best, the worst, the most important, the biggest heel turns, all the stuff that happened in 2025, and making maybe a few predictions about what's going to happen next year. All that and more on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. This series is presented by Jira by Atlassian.

1:19:40Right now is the AI gold rush. And that means everybody who builds an app, a platform, a piece of software, a gizmo that somebody, anything. Everybody is trying to put AI everywhere. And for two weeks in a series on the Vergecast, we are talking through what that looks like. We're talking to developers about what they're building and how they're building it and whether AI actually does make sense everywhere or is just going to ruin everything in the process. That's the AI miniseries on the Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. This series is presented by MongoDB. Does it ever feel like you're a marketing professional just speaking into the void?

1:20:21But with LinkedIn ads, you can know you're reaching the right decision makers, a network of 130 million of them, in fact. You can even target buyers by job title, industry, company, seniority, skills, and did I say job title? See how you can avoid the void and reach the right buyers with LinkedIn ads. Spend$250 on your first campaign and get a free$250 credit for the next one. Get started at linkedin.com slash campaign. Terms and conditions apply.