David Brooks | How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

So it is my pleasure to introduce our esteemed guest to the stage. David Brooks is considered one of the country's leading writers and commentators, a New York Times opinion columnist and a regular guest commentator on PBS's All Things Considered and Meet the Press. from NBC. His new book, How to Get to Know a Person, The Art of Seeing Others and Being Seen Deeply, is the latest in a collection of five best-selling books, including Bobos in Paradise on Paradise Drive, The Social Animal, The Road to character and the second mountain, how to

know

. a

person

is an honest and

person

al guide to fostering meaningful connections in all aspects of our lives and for our Philadelphia audience, I must inform you if you don't already

know

that Mr.

Brooks grew up on the main line that Radner attended. high school, he's a local boy, local talent and we're very happy to have him back in town tonight, so join me in welcoming David Brook. Thank you. I'm not tall enough for this podium. Kobe Bryant used to speak here. that what's going on here is a pleasure to be back here and to be back in Philadelphia, my hometown, which you're going to shorten if you could give me higher heels on my boots that might work, so I'm. I'm going to try to offer you, um, we'll talk a little bit about politics at the end, but mostly I'm going to try to offer you a variety of encouragement in the dark and in confusing and difficult times, so first I'm going to start.

Start talking about the subject I know best, which is me, and some of you will remember that movie Fiddler on the Roof, and you know from that movie how warm and huggable Jewish families can be, they're always singing and dancing and frolicking. . around uh I come from a different kind of Jewish family and so the phrase in our house was think yish act British uh and so we were kind of stiff-lipped, emotionless types and then, uh, in kindergarten when I was four, the teacher apparently told me my parents David doesn't play with the other kids, he just watches this, which I guess is good for a career in journalism.

I always say that if I tell journalism students if you're at a football game and everyone else is doing the wave and you just sit there and don't do the salute you have the right kind of aloof personality to become a journalist because we just watch things and then when I was 17 at Radner, I wanted to go on a date, uh oh, when I was seven. I read a book called Padding in the Bear and I decided then and there that I wanted to become a writer and I've been writing almost every day since my Fitbit used to tell me when I write between 7 and noon and my Fitbit used to tell me.

I was breaking up but I was doing what God put me on this Earth to do so apparently my heart rate went down and then when I was 17 in Radner I wanted to date this woman named Bice and she didn't want to date me. she wanted to date another guy and I remember thinking what was she thinking I write a lot better than that guy and those were my values ​​um and then when I was 18 the admission missions officers at Columbia Wesley and Brown decided that I should go to the University of Chicago uh and that was an extremely cerebral place the famous saying about Chicago is where fun goes to die uh my favorite saying about Chicago is a Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students Saint Thomas Aquinas um so we were very woke up in our heads and I fit perfectly.

I was a double major in Chicago in history and cibus um and actually freshman year we took my roommate who had never boxed a day in his life and we entered him into the Golden Gloves competition and we gave him They gave him a nickname, the kosher killer, and then we practiced Chicago style, that is, we didn't practice boxing, we read a lot of books about boxing and his illustrious career lasted 29 seconds, so I was quite intellectual, and then. I work in journalism, which is a somewhat independent profession in which you are observing people and judging them.

I was hired as a conservative columnist at the New York Times, a job I compared to

being

the chief rabbi in Mecca, uh, no. a lot of company there, and then I got a job at TV H, but I got a job at the most cerebral form of television, which is PBS NewsHour, where we have for television extremely long 14-minute conversations about things, uh, and I love our audience uh, it's a somewhat seasoned audience, so if a 93 year old woman comes up to me at the airport, I know what she's going to say. I don't watch your show, but my mom loves it, so um, and all of this is to say that it was on my mind a lot and there's a moment from about 10 years ago that symbolizes that way of life for me, so I love the baseball.

I have attended hundreds, perhaps thousands, of baseball games. I never caught a ball, etc. I'm at Camden Yards in Baltimore with my youngest son and a batter loses control of the bat, it goes into the air and lands in my lap, so getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball, so a

being

normal human standing holding his trophy in the air jumps up and down high fives everyone hugs gets on the Jumbotron I take the bat I put it on the ground and I sit looking forward without any emotion on my face and then I look back and I remember that uh, and I think it shows a little bit of Joy, man, it shows a little bit of Joy, but that wasn't who I was, but I do if I'm not an exceptional person, but I'm a grower, I try to grow, Uh, and you know, being a father was kind of an emotional revolution.

I had some public failures and humiliations and I learned about emotion. I wrote a book called The Social Animal uh to learn about emotion, which is a book about emotion. A classic University of Chicago trick to try to learn about emotion by writing a book about emotions and I think I opened my heart and the sad thing was that when I opened my heart I became more open to music and dance uh and the arts and I discovered that unfortunately my heart is perpetually 14 years old. I like all the songs 14- year olds are listening at any given moment and then caty Perry I kissed a girl avra LaVine complicated every song in the Taylor Swift songbook I don't even remember high school I've heard so many songs at breakups high school is like If I was reincarnated and came back as Britney Spears, um, and then I had a little more excitement, I can prove it to you, although I have to mention the name, so Oprah interviewed me twice in my life in 2014 and in 2019 .and after the second interview she tells me, uh, I've rarely

seen

someone change so much, you were so emotionally blocked before and that was like a good moment for me and she should know it's Oprah, right? um, and how strange it is and how sad.

The important thing for our country is that I was making a journey toward being more fully human, the country was making a journey toward being less human and more dehumanized, and there are all kinds of statistics. I won't recite them all, but we all know it. suicide has increased by 30% depression rates are skyrocketing 36% of Americans report feeling lonely often 45% of teens say they feel depressed and hopeless most of the time the number of people who say they have no close personal friends has disappeared increased fourfold, 36% more Americans are not in a romantic relationship. The number of Americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category has increased by 50%, so what I see in my career is an epidemic of blindness of people who do not feel valued and heard, and when you feel like they don't see you, you consider it an insult and an injustice, and that's why you attack and a society that becomes sadder eventually becomes meaner and so I was in a restaurant in New York and the owner told me that he has to throw out at the restaurant people every week for being rude.

The behavior never used to happen. My sister in law is a nurse, head nurse at a hospital in Camden and apparently hers The main challenge is keeping the nurses because the patients have become so abusive that the nurses want to leave their profession and that is just sadness and meanness. So why is all this happening? Well, I could tell a lot of stories, one of them would be the history of technology. social media is driving us crazy, one would be a sociology story, we are not as involved in civic life as we used to be, it would not be an economic story, there is more income inequality than before and that is why we leave desperate lives, but The story which I emphasize is the most direct: we become sadder and meaner because we do not treat each other with the consideration we deserve, and treating each other with the consideration and reserve we deserve is partly a matter of simply being open to each other. the other.

But it is fundamentally a question of skills. Being a good friend, being a good parent, being a good teacher, being a good colleague requires certain social skills. How can you be a good listener? How is vulnerability revealed? an appropriate place, how is it offered? criticize in a way that cares, how do you disagree, how do you feel with someone who is suffering? That's why, in my opinion, we don't teach these skills anymore, if we ever did, and why people sink into social ignorance, hence my book. It is simply an attempt to guide us through the skills it takes to get to know another human being and make them feel known,

seen

and heard, so I would ask them how good they are at these skills.

Well, I don't know most of you. but I can tell you with great confidence that you are not as good as you think there is a guy at the University of Texas who studies this and the average person, when they meet a stranger and start a conversation with them, understand precisely what is going on. in that person's head 20% of the time with friends and family, it goes up to 35% of the time, some people are pretty good, they are 55% of the time and some people are zero% of the time, but they think that they are. 100% of the time we are strangers to each other, in any group of people there are people who are reducers and they are enlighteners, reducers are not curious about other people, they stereotype, they ignore, they don't ask questions.

Sometimes I leave. a party and I don't think so, during all that time no one asked me a question and I have come to recognize my assumption, my conclusion is that only about 30% of the people you meet ask questions, are persistently curious about you, the other 70 % perfectly nice people, they're just not questioners and they're belittling, enlighteners, on the other hand, they're people who are curious about you and make you feel special and enlightened, and that's why there was a novelist who wrote about 100 years ago called I Foster and His biographer said of him that to talk to him was to be seduced by an inverse charisma, a feeling of being listened to with such intensity that you had to be your most honest, sharpest and best self, which you wouldn't want to be able to bring out, that is all.

In other people there is a probably apocryphal story about Jenny Jerome, who later became the mother of Winston Churchill and, in the late 19th century, as a young woman, was sitting at a dinner party in London one night with William Gladstone, the Prime Minister of England and left that dinner thinking that Gladstone was the smartest person in England; Then, a couple of weeks later, she sat at a dinner next to Gladstone's great political rival, Benjamin Disraeli, and she left the dinner with Disraeli thinking that she was the smartest person in England. England, that's why it's good to be Gladstone, it's better to be Israeli.

Many of you probably know about the Vaed research facility, Bell Labs, they had a group of researchers and some of them were just more creative and innovative than

others

and they wanted to know why and why. They checked their IQs They checked their educational background They couldn't understand it It turned out that the most creative researchers had the habit of having breakfast or lunch every day with a guy named Harry Nywest who is an electrical engineer and he got into his problems that got into his head , he asked them the good questions and walked with them as they solved their problems, so Harry nist is an Enlightener and so how can you improve as an Enlightener?

The first thing you should do if you are young. or more experienced you read you study humanities you study literature you play arts the humanities are the most I tell young people the humanities are the most practical thing you can specialize in because they teach you about other people and if you can't understand

others

If you feel miserable and You will make the people around you miserable, so there is a series of steps that one must follow to really get to know someone well and make them feel respected, and that series of steps begins with the first glance you meet. simply meeting someone and you are looking at them when we meet someone there are a series of unconscious questions that go through our minds I am I am a priority for you I am a person for you you will respect me and the answers to those questions are communicated in the eyes before any word comes out of your mouth I was in Waco Texas several years ago and was having lunch witha woman named Laru Dorsy and Mrs.

Dorsy was a teacher for most of her career and presented herself to me as a harsh disciplinarian. Some kind of drill sergeant and she told me that she loved my students enough to discipline them so we are sitting there and I feel a little intimidated by her, she was a tough tough woman and in the restaurant walks a mutual friend named Jimmy Derell, who is a pastor, pastors the homeless, uh, and he walks up to her and grabs her by the shoulders and shakes her harder than you should shake a 93-year-old person and says, Mrs. Dorsy , Mrs.

Dorsy, you are the best. the best, I love you, I love you and that stern disciplinarian I had been talking to turns into a 9 year old girl with bright, shiny eyes, so the moral of the story is to greet people more like Jimmy and less Like me, and that's part of it. because he has a great warm personality, but part of the deeper part is that Jimmy is a pastor, as I mentioned, and when Jimmy greets someone, he is greeting someone. Made in the image of God, he is looking at the face of God, he is looking at someone with a soul of infinite value and dignity, is looking at someone so important that Jesus was willing to die for that person, now you could be a Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Muslim.

Agnostic Atheist Buddhist I don't care, but greeting every person you meet with that level of reverence and respect is a precondition to

seeing

them well, it says knowing that every person you meet is not a problem to be solved, it is a mystery we will never get to the bottom of. bottom line, so the first look is so powerful, attention is a moral act, the type of attention we put in the world determines the type of person we are in the world, so that is the Look, the second phase to arrive to know someone is what I call accompaniment most of life it's not having deep conversations with other people it's just hanging out it's picking up your kids from school or attending a meeting accompaniment is another focused way of being a normal course of life what we think about The Pianist who accompanies a singer The pianist is there paying attention to the singer, he is there to make her shine and that is why we want to have that other way of being focused and, sometimes, it can be so informal how to pass the time.

I have friends who say that we like our friends to stay when they come to dinner, we just want to stay with them, they are fun, it is a great quality of accompaniment, the second is to play, when you play with someone, you don't have to have deep conversations, whether pickle ball. o Uno or basketball, whatever you are, but when you are playing you are yourself, you are more natural. I have friends that I played basketball with and you can imagine how good I am, uh, and we've never done that. We really had deep conversations, but we had trash talk and high-fives and passed the ball and really got to know each other, and you can see how powerful that was when my son, my oldest son, was about 14 or 12 months old.

I don't remember, he woke up, he woke up at 4 a.m. every day and I played with him until 10:00 a.m. m., when I left, and I remember thinking that one day, you know, I know him better than I've ever known anyone. He knew me better than anyone because I was very emotionally open and playful and we had not exchanged any words because he could not speak yet and yet there was a deep bond between us, sometimes accompaniment is simply being present, simply appearing in At the right time, I had a student a couple of years ago, two years ago, named Jillian Sawyer and Jillian's father died of pancreatic cancer while she was in college and as he was dying they talked about the fact that he would probably be lost some of the big events in her life like her wedding and after college she was a bridesmaid at a friend's wedding and she passed by the wedding she saw the father toast his daughter a beautiful toast to the father of the bride and then he arrived the moment of the father daughter dance and she just didn't want to sit during it so she left the table and went to the bathroom quietly just to cry and when she came out of the bathroom all the people at her table at the adjacent table had already I got up and was standing by the bathroom door and she wrote this on a piece of paper, uh, which she gave me permission to quote, what I will always remember is that no one said a word about every person, including the newest boyfriends who I knew less.

Well, they gave me a firming hug and headed back to her table. No one lingered or awkwardly tried to validate my pain. They were there for me just for a moment and it was exactly what I needed. It is a beautiful example of the art of presence. Prepare yourself for someone, so that's the second phase, the third phase is conversation, you have to be a very good conversationalist to meet other people and have the kind of encounters that you want to have, so how good are you at conversation? ? Well, again, I don't know. I don't know you that well, but you're probably not as good as you think.

It's easy to have bad conversations. They are two people making statements to each other. That's a bad conversation. A good conversation goes somewhere. People say something and the other person says yes. that's good, let me build on that and then build on that and we start at a place where we end up here. I asked a group of conversation experts what are some tips for becoming a better conversationalist and they gave me some of which I will repeat here one treat attention like an on and off switch, not a dimmer, it should be 100% attention or 0% but not 60% two, be a noisy listener.

I have a friend named Andy Crouch who lives in Swathmore and when Talking to him it's like talking to a Pentecostal Church, he's like Amen, uhhuh brother, brother, preach that and I love talking to that guy, make them authors, not witnesses, When people tell you a story, they don't go into enough detail, so if I said well, where was your boss sitting when she told you that, suddenly they're telling you a story, you want to put people in story mode, even in journalism they don't care anymore. I ask people what you think about this I ask them how did you do it I came to believe that this is what they start telling me a story about some experience they had or some person who shaped their values ​​a much better conversation Don't be afraid to pause if we're in a conversation and I make a comment that starts at my shoulder and moves to my fingertips, at what point did you stop listening so you could start thinking about what you're going to say in response?

Probably here, so let me speak with my fingertips and then pause and then you can have a thoughtful response, don't do it. being a Topper is when you say something about how you're having trouble with your teenager and I'm like I know exactly what you're going through. I'm having trouble with my Tommy, it sounds like he's trying to identify me, but what? What I'm really doing is saying I don't really care about your problems, let me talk about mine, so don't be a Topper. The last two keep the gem statement in the center. When we have an argument, there is usually something going on in the background.

We agree that if my brother and I are arguing about our dad's medical care, we both want the best for our dad and therefore, if we could maintain that point of agreement, the gem statement in the center saves a relationship in the middle of an argument and then the last one is to find the disagreement underneath the disagreement, when we disagree about something like tax policy, there's probably some philosophical reason why we see it differently, so let's explore what It is, it is a more fun way to have a conversation, ultimately the quality of the conversation depends. about the quality of the questions you ask, so we should be very good at asking good questions now that kids are phenomenal at asking questions.

I have a friend named naobi wayi who teaches seventh graders in New York how to be an interviewer and how to ask him questions. The first day in class she said, "Okay, you guys can ask me anything and I'll answer you honestly." question: does he know? Do your children know now that she is crying? So kids are great questioners and as adults we get a little shy about it. Too shy in my opinion, so we want to be good at asking questions and sometimes you're just getting started. You know someone who you are not going to ask a very deep question.

Sometimes I ask people like I always ask people where you're from or where you got your name or tell me something about yourself that's your favorite and unimportant. I learned from that question. an academic who loves to watch a lot of trash tv but that's his favorite unimportant thing about him but you want the questions to be open ended questions for storytelling so i read a book called "you're not listening" by ke murphy about a moderator of a focus group. who was hired by grocery stores to find out why people come to grocery stores late at night and she could have just said tell me why you go to grocery stores late at night to the focus group, instead of That, he said, tell me about the last time you went to a grocery store after 11: p.m. and a lady who had been quiet throughout the entire focus group said, well, I had smoked a joint and wanted a Minaj ATA with me, Ben and Jerry, so you got a little glimpse into their life, once you meet someone, my questions favorites. are those that take you out of your daily experience and take you to 30,000 feet looking at your life and then it's like what a crossroads are you at, most of us are in life, some life transition, what a crossroads we are in if these 5 years of your life is a chapter.

What is the chapter about? What would you do if you werent afraid? I had a friend who was being interviewed for a job and at the end of the interview he told the interviewer what you would do if you weren't afraid and the lady started crying because she wouldn't be doing HR at that company I asked my Yale students what they would do If they weren't afraid and every year two or three they say well I wouldn't be at Yale, it's not the right school for me, but I need prestige, so fear rules all of our lives to some extent.

Peter BL, writing on Community, has some interesting questions, but you really have to know people to ask them what the no or no is. You keep postponing what is the commitment you have made do you no longer really believe in what is the gift you have in exile what talent do you have that you are not using these are deep questions I once had a dinner and my wife thought it was very pretentious but it worked I asked how your ancestors show up in your life because we have all been shaped by our ancestors and there was a Dutch family and they talked about their Dutch heritage there was a black family they talked about the African American experience that I have had I talked about Jewish heritage and it was A great conversation because we all knew that we were affected by our heritages, but we hadn't really pinned it down, so we had a great conversation talking about it and these are the easy parts of meeting someone in the normal circumstances of life.

Now we live in a time that is not normal and so to have a graduate level of social connection with other people you have to be able to make that connection in under favorable unfavorable circumstances and so I had a friend um I mentioned all the problems of mental health. I had a friend named Peter Marx who we were friends with since we were 11 and Peter uh had this seemingly charmed life, he had a great wife, wonderful children. He was an eye surgeon, but at age 57 he suffered a very severe recession. I thought he was well educated, but I didn't know what depression really was.

I learned that you can't understand depression by extrapolating your moments. of sadness, depression is not like that, as Michael Gerson said, depression is a malfunction in the instrument that people use to perceive reality and, in the case of my friend, he had these vicious, lying voices in his head that They said you're worthless, no one would miss you. if you're gone and then I didn't really understand how severe the despair and the pain really was and then I made mistakes in my social skills and a lot of that was because we were talking on the phone and at first I tried. to give him ideas about how we could live, make the depression go away, so I said, well, you know you used to do these service trips to Vietnam, why don't you do it again?

And when you do it, I found out that all you are doing is showing the depressed person that you don't understand because what the depressed person is missing is not ideas, but energy and many other things, and then the second mistake that What I did was to say that your life is so wonderful that you know, appreciate what you have. around you and I was basically just telling him that you should enjoy things that you palpably aren't enjoying and what better way to make someone feel even worse, so I think I gradually learned over time that a friend's job in that circumstance is just acknowledging how suck the situation is and to remind him that you will be there, I will be there forever, I'm not going to walk away from this, uh, there's no abandonment here,uh, and I wish I had texted you more with little touches. the day uh no answer is necessary Victor Frankle searches for meaning in man when he counseled people who were contemplating suicide he said that life has not stopped expecting things from you and I find it hard but he says that he calls people to understand the effect they have on the world and the effect they can have on the world because in moments like these people who have gone through some suffering have the credibility to talk to other people through this Pro their own suffering process there is a great quote from Thoron Wilder, without your wound, where your power would be, it is your own remorse that makes your low voice tremble in the hearts of men.

The Angels themselves cannot persuade Les Misérables and clumsy children of the Earth as a broken human being can on the wheel. of living in love service only wounded soldiers can serve That is the power that a depressed person can have in the world or someone who has been through this now unfortunately Peter succumbed to suicide about a year and a half ago and nothing he I said, there are things I said wrong. but nothing I could have said would have made any difference, the monster was just bigger than Peter and he was going to be bigger than the rest of us, so it was a tough lesson, so that's a kind of social skill which has unfortunately become necessary for so many people how to sit down with people who are going through depression mental health issues grief the second type of difficult conversation that has unfortunately become necessary are conversations about ideological differences, about differences of classes, about racial differences, about any kind of difference and these can sometimes be difficult conversations uh often when you are in these conversations there is criticism and blame, especially me.

I enter a room. I come associated with the New York Times with Yale University. I come as a nice establishment. Elite credentials and lots of it. Many people on both the left and the right see me as part of the systems of oppression that keep them down and so there is often criticism and my instinct is to be defensive oh I'm not the r, I'm one of the good ones who don't I don't understand the things I'm dealing with, but I've come to appreciate that in this world my job and I think our whole job when we're talking across differences is to be in the other person's point of view. ask the other person in three separate ways in three different types what am I missing here tell me more about your point of view tell me more tell me more tell me more and if you ask him three or four times in different ways be surprised how the third and fourth answer they're richer and more complicated than the first one, so you learn a lot, but secondly, you show respect, you show respect from their point of view and there's a great book called Crucial Conversations and in that book, um.

They say that in every conversation respect is like air when it is present no one notices it and when it is absent it is the only thing anyone can think about and in any conversation your conversation occurs on two different levels of what we are talking about nominally and the conversation underlying which is the Flow of emotion that passes between us with every comment I make. Either I make you feel more confident or less confident. Am I showing you respect or not? I'm showing you my motivations for telling you this or not, and so on. It's paying attention to that underlying emotional conversation and these skills from the first look at the conversation to difficult conversations in the midst of conflict.

These for me are the essence of the moral life. The safe moral life is big things like reporting embezzlement in a workplace and telling the truth in a trial, but to me the essence of morality is being a genius at your fingertips. The Irish novelist and philosopher Murdoch said that morality is something that happens in the details of everyday encounters and in our work we normally see the world through selfish eyes, our job is to get the self out of the way and into reality. and she says: pay fair and loving attention to the people around us and that is how we show who we are and how we present ourselves in the world. world uh and so I ask people to tell me about the moments when you feel seen uh and some of my favorites are just little everyday things, like there are some big epic moments, but bright-eyed people tell me about the moments when they really felt seen and like that A boy told me Well, my second, my daughter in second grade, she was having a hard time during the year in class and the teacher one day told her, you know you're very good at thinking. before speaking and that took that.

The comment made the girl's ear turn because it took that moment that she thought was social awkwardness, her weakness turned into a strength and when she told me that he told me that story, I thought of my own 11th grade teacher, the Mrs. dnap in Radner. I'm doing intelligent communication in a class which is what I did and she said David, you're getting by with glibness, stop it and on one hand I felt humiliated, she called me out in front of the whole class on the other. On the other hand, I thought: wow, she really knows me, wow, I'm so interested in her.

A woman in her 30s told me a story about her when she was 13 and she tried alcohol for the first time and she got so drunk that she was just lying. She couldn't move on the porch of her house and her father, who was a strict disciplinarian, appeared at the door and thought she was going to yell at me all the things that are already in my head. I'm bad, I'm bad. I'm bad, on the other hand, he simply picked her up, inside her he put her on the couch and told her that there will be no punishment here.

You just had an experience and 25 years later, she remembered that moment as the moment her father really got her and she knew she didn't need to be yelled at at that moment and these are long memories of her. There's a guy named Rabbi Elliot KLA who tells a story about a woman who has a brain injury and sometimes she just falls to the ground and she told him I think people rush to help me up because they feel so uncomfortable

seeing

an adult. lying on the ground, but what I really need is for someone to get down with me and that's empathy, it's not knowing what makes me feel comfortable. what you need at that moment and when people do it are also good moments of great vision.

I will give you some examples and these are a little deeper than what a great vision can do because it is a creative act that changes relationships and in my point of view it changes societies, one of them is being able to see people well Franklin Roosevelt in 1933 34 something like that. I met a guy who came to his office named Lyndon Johnson, who was then a 28-year-old congressman and after the meeting, FDR. says to his assistant Harold, you know, Harold, that's the kind of uninhibited young professional I could have been when I was young if I hadn't gone to Harvard, and then FDR continued in the next two generations the balance of power in this.

The country is going to move south and west and that boy, Lyndon Johnson, could very well be our first president from the Southwest. Alright, some of you probably know the movie Goodwill Hunting, and in that movie Matt Damon plays this math genius, Robin Williams plays the therapist, and Matt Damon goes around the movie gutting people with his wit, including the character of Robin Williams. Williams takes him to a pond and gives him a longer version of the following speech. You're a tough guy. I ask you about the war. You'll probably throw Shakespeare at me. Just once again in the gap dear friends, but you have never been so close to one.

You have never held your best friend's head in your lap and seen him gasp at his last breath. I ask them about love. They'll probably quote me a sonnet, but. I have never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. I knew someone who could level you with her eyes. I look at you. I don't see an intelligent and confident man. I see a cocky and scared child. You are a genious. No one will deny it personally. I don't care about all that, I can't learn anything from you that I can't read in some book unless you want to talk about your sport, who you are, then I'm fascinated, but you don't want to do that. you're terrified of what you might say and that little speech comes from a lot of listening, first of all, he's heard exactly what Matt Damon's character is most desperately hiding, which is how terrified he is of life and, in Secondly, it is a great critique carefully, it is saying that there are two types of knowledge in the world, book knowledge and then there is the personal wisdom that is acquired by risking things emotionally and having experiences, book knowledge , not the knowledge that really matters, so he does it with unconditional love and tells Damon's character the direction he should take.

It is simply a beautiful example of wisdom. I read a story in a book called Lost and Found by Katherine Schultz and in that book she describes her father as This happy, talkative, gregarious guy, a guy who had opinions on everything from the infield fly rule to whether the cobbler apple was better than apple crisp he just sounds like a wonderful guy uh and he got older and as he got older and he got sicker he suddenly stopped talking and no one. I was able to find out why and that's why the family visited him in the hospital in those last weeks and she writes that she had always considered my family to be close, so it was surprising to realize how close we became, how close we were.

We approached its waning flame and then one night. In the end he sat down in the room and the whole family went around the room and everyone said the things they didn't want to leave unspoken and Schultz writes my father, mute but apparently alert, looked from face to face as we talked, his brown eyes shining with tears. I always hated seeing him cry and I rarely did, but for once I was grateful because he gave me hope for what could have been the last time in his life and perhaps the most important. He understood at least he knew it everywhere.

He looked that night and found himself where he had always been with his family, the center of the circle, the source and subject of our Abiding Love, and that was a guy who died well-regarded and it's just profound that people are involved in that. . He's an experience guy and if it's great to be seen, I can tell you that it's also great to be the one who sees, so one time, about two years ago, I was sitting at home in DC and I was reading a boring book in the dining room. table, which is what they pay me for, uh, and my wife opens the front door, which you can see from the dining room table, uh, and she stops at the door and the summer sun is streaming behind her and she He really doesn't realize it.

I'm there because that's the kind of charisma I have and but her eyes land on an orchid that we have on a table by the door and she's just thinking about something and I have this feeling in my mind, which is I know her, I really know her. I know her, I know her from beginning to end and if you had asked me at that moment what I knew about her, it wouldn't be the personality traits that I would describe to a stranger or even what she was thinking, but rather the is and flow of her music the harmony of her way of being the incandescence of her personality the moments of fierceness the moments of insecurity it was as if I was not seeing her for a brief moment I was seeing outside of her and when you really know someone, you see the world a little from their point of view and if you had asked me what a word was to describe how I was looking at her, the only English word that comes to mind is the word contemplating. looking at it, which is just gratitude and it was just a beautiful moment.

I told this story to an older couple recently and they said yes, that's what we do with our grandchildren, we just contemplate and they say you can never get to know a stranger I think. That's wrong, I think in examples from my life and many of the lives of people I've talked to, there have been times when that profound act of seeing another person actually happens and from that, if we live in a dehumanizing time, so seeing another human being is the most practical and aggressively effective way to fight dehumanization and we live in a time where people don't see each other in this country and in the Middle East and everywhere and It's a brutal time to be here and the natural impulse is to cower into being protective and I understand that impulse, but the people I admire right now are the defiant humanists who say I will not be insensitive I will not put up barriers I will not declare war on others I will be challenging enough to perform the essential humanistic act of trying to understand your point of view.

Try to recognize yourself as a person worthy of respect, investigation and curiosity. It is not naive to lead with respect. It is not naive to lead with confidence. It is not naive to guide myself with curiosity, they are the most practical and effective things we can do in a moment of brutal dehumanization. Thank you so much. No, the experience of depression is an isolating experience, so simply showing up for people is tremendously powerful. Thank you Mr. Brooks, thank you for the wonderful presentation of it. I'm a relatively young guy who looks at itevery Friday night. Thank you for helping our demographic.

Thank you. Can I introduce you to our donors? I would like to ask you a quick question. So I actually saw your interview about a book on PBS last week and about eye contact, about gays. I grew up, I was born in West Africa and I grew up in West Africa and culturally. I came to the United States, I immigrated to the United States about 31 years ago and we were raised in a different culture where eye contact was not part of the interesting culture, so when I came to this country I was a naturally shy person.

It actually took me a while to understand the importance of that. I look and therefore America is a country with so many different people from all over. I mean, when you meet someone who has their G at an angle. I mean, how do we explain that? I mean, it's taken me a long time to understand it and I do, uh, I make an effort to make eye contact nowadays, but I recognize that there are people who culturally are uncomfortable with that. that, then, well, first we should relax a little with each other because of our cultural differences, and for, at some point, people with personality differences who are on the spectrum, if you look, if for them, look into the eyes of another person is like touching a hot stove, there's just so much that they just don't like, it's too much for them and that's how they're wired, but secondly, these cultural differences, you know, I have friends who immigrated here and they told me when I arrived for the first time.

I moved here, my cheeks hurt because I had to smile a lot, so I, you know, these sects, we probably have a more individualistic society than a West African society or an Asian society, we're a pretty individualistic group of people, um , and so these cultural differences need to be taken into account, but one of the things I admire most in people is this phrase: Social capital, which is how connection is built in society and there are two versions of it: one is binding and another is a bridge, so the link is with people. Everyone around you probably likes you, but bridging is the most exciting thing, which is meeting people who are completely different from you and getting inside their heads and seeing how their culture is different and knowing that we evolved to be in bands of 150 people. like us and now we live in these wonderfully diverse societies and our social skills are not suitable for the societies that we live in now, but one of the joys is having social rank, you know, I, for example, I don't know.

What country are you from, Ghana, so I had a woman in my class. For some reason, yes, we have a lot of Ganan students. I'll tell you two quick stories about Zara, which is from Gano. The first is that she was asking. the students um, what are you, what are you, GNA, what are your goals after graduation? and my American student said, I want to be a lawyer, I want to be a banker, whatever and Zara said, well, it's not totally up to me, my Village was here and they helped me come here, so we're all going to talk about it together. and it was a more communal way of reaching out and then the second Z Zara story that I'll tell you is that I had a son from a very fancy prep school called Harvard Westlake, which is in Los Angeles, it's like an Exitor Andover type school and he was a complete brother and he treated me like a complete brother and I liked him a little, he was an idiot, he said that Brooks stop being an idiot.

The name came up again and the kid kicked me and I, about two-thirds of the way through class, Zara raised her hand and said Book Professor, we don't appreciate the way Alex talks to you, so I said, oh, come on. Stop class, how many of you think Zara is right and how many of you think Alex is right? The vote was 24 to 1 on Zara's side, so there was a certain sense of dignity that she thought we should do and I was very happy about that. day to have her in my class, yeah, yeah, so I would say this is a case where it's good to be aggressive, uh, and I have a friend and a source in this book named Nicholas Epley, who is a social psychologist at the University from Chicago and he commutes to school every day and he was on a commuter train and he knows that, because he's a social psychologist, what makes us happiest is having conversations with other human beings, but he looks around the commuter train and everyone is on their screens with With headphones on, he's a social psychologist.

Pay people on subsequent trips $100 each to talk to a stranger and they all later report to researchers that this trip talking to a stranger was a thousand times better than their normal trip just on their screens and their conclusion is that we underestimated seriously how many people will enjoy these conversations. We seriously underestimate how deep people want to go. So if you can get through it, it's actually worth it and like I said, I'm not the biggest joker. sociable guy on Earth and I used to go on the plane with headphones even if there was no music so my seatmate wouldn't talk to me but now I talk to people and you know, I talked to a guy a couple of weeks ago or months.

Who was this big Trump supporter from where he immigrated to this country from Russia when he was seven years old created a company that sold t-shirts to other parts of the world and made a fortune lost a fortune made a fortune lost a fortune had more marriages than he I could count and at the end of the boat he shows me his vacation. He's an 80 year old guy. He is surrounded by 20 year olds. He is on the back of a yacht. I don't know where these people came from, but he wasn't my. he cup of tea, but I remember that conversation, so I found that if you can break down those barriers, people will enjoy it.

The last story I'll tell is about a guy named Dan McAdams, who is a researcher at Northwestern who studies how people tell their life stories. and then what he does is he brings people in, he asks them to tell me about their high points, their low points, their turning points and the interviews last four hours and he said that half the people cry at some point, but then at the end Finally, you hand them a little check to compensate them for their time and they, um, send the check back, say I don't want to take money for this.

This has been the best afternoon I've had in years because no one has ever asked me a story and as a journalist I can tell you if you go up to someone and say, tell me your story in a respectful way, no one ever says None, it's your business, they're happy to do it now, having said that, when my wife tells me to put my phone away, I get mad at her, but it's probably good practice. Hello, thank you again for everything you have shared today and for your optimism and joy, and you have made it clear that you have done a lot. of changes and you're very happy with those changes and when I told my friends in my book group that I was coming, you know they were interested and they said it's surely been moving to the left lately now that that's where they live, they're happy about that, but my question for you is: has that change in all the changes you've made also been difficult?

Good question, so the first in politics. My heroes are a guy named Edmund Burke, who is an old-school conservative. and his key concept is the epistemological modesty that the world is really complicated, we must be careful with what we can know and therefore change must be gradual and incremental and he was my hero at 25 years old, he is my hero today and my other hero is Alexander Hamilton and Hamilton. He's a Puerto Rican hip-hop star from New York, um, uh, but no, his thesis is that we should build a society in which poor boys and girls like him can rise and succeed, we should have social mobility, so those They are my anchors and those are me.

I remain my anchors, but in my opinion the Republican Party has so far moved in a different direction that to me is not conservative and on some issues I have probably moved to the left. Capitalism does not distribute what it produces as fairly as it should. race in America is a national crime and as you know, I've written columns on reparations recently, things like that for at least the last five years, so that would be a left turn and I would say once you get out of the team mentality it's wonderfully liberating to be able to think for yourself and it used to be that I was on a team and now I'm at a party in the 19th century called the wig party that had Daniel Webster and Henry Clay and in the beginning Abraham Lincoln. and they represent what I think is the best political party, the best political tradition in America and now there are six of us, so I'm not on any team anymore, but it's liberating and emotionally, first of all, I don't.

I've done. I've lost friends because the Republicans I was very close with have become Never Trumpers and it's strange that the people who have become Trumpers were people I didn't like anyway and I'm not saying that because I have a lot of friends who are. Trump supports and my family members who I love, so I don't want to be critical, but it's just that my team became never successful and then the final change I would say is that I have a lot more emotions going on. Right now, like when I was in rner, I used to think, well, all these people are suffering, but I'm superficial, I'm happy with it, I'm, I'm fine and now I feel happy, like joyfully happy sometimes. and other times really sad and hurt and I think man's emotions are very much a mixed blessing, um, but it's better to live that way than not, there's a novelist I admire called Fred Frederick Bner, his father died when he He was nine years old and never grieved and then in middle age he said that if you separate yourself from the pain of life, you separate yourself from the sacred springs of life itself, and so he himself opened them throughout his adulthood and at the end he was crying for his dad every day and said that what we want most is for someone to look at our face with complete understanding and respect and what we fear most is for someone to look at our face with complete understanding and respect and then he says that what you have to do is you.

You should tell your secrets from time to time because if you tell them you will not fall into the false version of yourself that you are trying to sell to the world and you will make it easier for the other person to tell some secrets. for themselves and that's the kind of trajectory and path of openness and deeper connection that I'm looking for, oh, thank you so much David for everything and, uh, I'm an older guy who likes to see you on Friday nights, um, uh, The basic question is, when did you first realize that you wanted to write this book and how long did it take you to do it?

Yeah, so I'm on a four-year cycle. I return to the Free Library of Philadelphia every four years. I've been in that cycle since 2000 or so, so it takes me a long time to acquire all the information and you have to give yourself permission to write badly, so if you look at the first 200 drafts of this book they are pretty bad and that takes me a while and I think when I first wanted to write this book it was how many people told me that they felt unseen and unseen and it just came up over and over again in interviews and they were black, they were telling me that white people didn't understand the systemic injustices that everyone faces.

The days, they were rural people who told me that they did not feel seen by the coastal elites, they were Republicans and Democrats looking at each other with blind incomprehension, uh, they were lonely children who had no one to see them well, they were people with married couples. broken, uh, who realized that the person who should know them best had no idea and it seemed like there was a lot of pain and at that moment I just wanted to be a deeper version of myself and part of it is to hope that it will be for society, but personal transformation and social transformation happen at the same time and this is how each of us appears in the world.

That's how we make a world and that's how I wanted to be. improve myself and a lot of us writers are just working in public uh and and uh my favorite saying about writing is a writer. I am a beggar who tells another beggar where he found bread, so if I read something or hear something that is useful to me I love to share it uh and that is what gives me the greatest joy is when I learn something I write it I put it in a book I talk about it and I see other people writing it and that's how it is.

I'm not so much a writer, I'm a teacher. I'm just passing on the knowledge that I've heard, uh, and I have to say it's been a horrible four years in many ways, but it's been very encouraging to be surrounded by people who are just phenomenal good illuminators, thank you very much.