Tell Me More with Kelly Corrigan

The world is obviously too complex to understand on our own, so too the nation and, for that matter, every neighborhood, so we look for and accept a mediated version from news outlets of all ilks, people who synthesize the day's events and give them meaning, people who tell us the story of what is.

As events and players multiply and compound, the storytellers become ever more imperative and influential.

For 20 years and 2,000 columns, David Brooks has been putting his spin on the world for the "New York Times," PBS, and through books like "Second Mountain" and now "How to Know a Person."

I'm Kelly Corrigan, this is "Tell Me More," and here is my conversation with introvert, convert, and Greek chorus David Brooks.

Hi.

Hello.

Thanks a lot for seeing us.

I'm wandering by.

Nice to see you.

Good to see you.

Come on up.

You go first.

I'll show you where we're gonna go.

You've been on PBS for almost 20 years?

Over 20 years.

Yeah, and Jim Lehrer was there when you started.

Jim Lehrer was there.

Good evening.

I'm Jim Lehrer.

Corrigan: I want to know how knowing Jim Lehrer, starting with Jim Lehrer, changed your ethos coming into your work.

Like, what do you do differently because you had that model?

He had a distaste for cheapness, and I was always trying to be the wise guest, and so he sort of beat that out of me just by the negative looks... Brooks: I'm not sure anybody's blaming Clinton for this recession.

Listen.

We had 8 years of fantastic growth started by Ronald Reagan and George Bush... Brooks: and so there was just a level of class, and, "We're not the story here.

The story's the story here."

Uh-huh.

The ability to critique with care is just a tremendous skill that not everybody has.

Lehrer: What about this death-panel thing?

How did that catch fire the way it did?

Brooks: He took his job seriously.

There is no death panel.

Brooks: You know, I was bidding for attention like a lot of ambitious young people... Yeah, yeah.

and so what can I do to get myself noticed, and Lehrer really didn't tolerate that, particularly.

How did he communicate it?

Oh, he never said a word to me about it.

Every time I would say something that he liked that had some substance to it, his eyes would crinkle with pleasure, and when I said something he disliked which was crass or stupid his mouth would downturn with displeasure, and so for 10 years, I tried to chase the eye crinkles and avoid the mouth downturn.

He never said anything, but he set a standard.

He set a moral ecology.

There wasn't a set of rules or anything.

It was just, "This is the way things are done here," and that's just tremendously powerful.

He's been dead for a number of years now, but the "NewsHour" still has the Lehrer ecology.

Corrigan: When we think about what it takes to make it in America today and then you kind of chase that back to, like, the original founders' values, like, how useful are they?

Have we outgrown them?

Are there's some that we should let go of?

Are there some that could be super grounding for us.

I used to think the essence of American culture is, we see the present from the vantage point of the future.

When people came here, they would cross west looking for good farmland, and they'd get to a perfectly nice place like Kentucky, and they kept going because they assumed something over the hill was just gonna be better, and so it was that future orientation that I think often still marks us and in good ways and bad.

I think, you know, one of the reasons Silicon Valley happened here-- and, you know, I'm obsessed with AI like everybody-- it's that risky leap to the future.

Even today, AI is a very risky leap to the future, but we're just gonna take that leap, apparently.

Americans are deeply spiritual.

We have this faith in the future, and they're driven relentlessly.

We started businesses.

We married and divorced more.

We killed each other more.

There was just a lot of energy, and a lot of that energy went into really good things, and a lot of that energy goes into really bad things.

We had Matthew Desmond on, and he talked about this one community where he lived where, you know, when it snowed, people would come and shovel each other's driveways, and then he moved to a better neighborhood where nobody would dream of coming over to your house and saying, "You need some help with your steps?"

Yeah.

We buy privacy to our own self-destruction.

I've done it, too.

We buy privacy thinking we want space, but it doesn't work out, and I used to go around the country talking to people about their communities, and I would say, you know, one of the problems is, we don't know the 8 people who live closest to us... Yeah.

and so we're in a weird social and emotional crisis in the country, and so everyone knows about the mental health problems and the rising suicide rates and the depths of despair, but it's even weirder than that that the number of people who say they have no close personal friends has quadrupled.

The number of people without a romantic partner is up by a third.

The number of people who say, "No one knows me well," is 54%.

The amount of time we spend with friends is way down.

We're having some relational crisis in this country, and there are a lot of reasons for it, and some of it would be social media, obviously.

Some of it would probably be economic inequality, but I think some of it is, we just don't have the skills.

How do I have a good conversation with you?

How do I ask for forgiveness if I need forgiveness?

How do I break up with you without crushing your heart?

These are just skills-- how do I sit with someone who's depressed?-- and they're skills that should be taught, and we're not teaching them in school, and apparently, we're not teaching them at home, and so a lot of my students that I've been teaching over the years, they just want these skills so when they break up with someone, they don't just ghost them.

They know what to say.

They know how to have a hard conversation.

I was writing all these columns about "community" and "relationship" and "connection," but those words are abstract.

The real thing is, I meet you on a train, and we're sitting next to each other, how do I make you feel seen and heard?

Right.

We sit together for 45 minutes on a train, you get up, and you think, "That guy was a good listener," like, that's a skill.

That's not, like, magic.

Yeah.

I am a grower.

I say in the book that I'm not a great person, but I am a grower.

I do change.

I've been on the journey to be a more fully human being.

I wrote a book about emotion.

In order to understand emotion, I write a book about it, and so I think I've become, hopefully, more vulnerable, more emotional, which--believe me--has its pluses and minuses, and, hopefully, a lot more social in interaction.

I was at some festival in Nantucket, and, like, one of the people asked us to pick a stranger.

"I'm gonna give you some song lyrics.

"Sing into the eyes of a stranger these lovely lyrics."

If you would ask me to do that 10 years ago, I would have spontaneously combusted, but I did it, so that's a little bit of the heart opening a little crack.

Yeah.

There's been research about these small interactions and weak ties that show that it's really enlarging and empowering for people to be a part-- to be kind of woven into something, which takes us to your big life project, which is Weavers, Yeah.

so can you tell us about somebody that you met through that that has really helped you frame your thinking?

So I started Weave about 5 years ago.

Brooks: We all have this yearning for good.

We all want to serve some transcendent ideal, and that's really what this is about.

We've gathered you people here to help think this problem through.

All my columns were really pointing to one underlying problem, which was lack of trust in society, social fragmentation, people just being suspicious of each other and, therefore, pulling inward or hating each other across partisan lines, so I figured, the problem is being solved by local community builders at the local level everywhere.

We would just go to a place and say, "Who's trusted here?"

They always came up with the same names.

One lady told me, "I practice "aggressive friendship," that, "I'm the one that's gonna be inviting you.

"I'm gonna be the one really organizing the activities," and so they're Weavers.

We call them Weavers.

How I get to be a Weaver is by listening and earning trust to build relationship.

I get to Weave the LGBTQ people.

I get to Weave people with food, music, and art.

There's a woman named Asiaha Butler who runs a thing called R.A.G.E.

in Chicago, and she was in this tough, still-tough neighborhood, Englewood, and she was going to move out because it was a little dangerous, and as they were moving out, she turns to her husband and says, "We're not leaving.

We're not gonna be another family left this."

I said, "I can't go.

I got to stay.

"I got to figure out what I could do to contribute to this community."

And so they Googled "volunteer in Englewood."

They find some organizations they can volunteer at.

One thing leads to another.

Now she runs the big community organization there, and they just made a commitment to be planted.

Butler: I wasn't a grant writer, so I used the passion of people to better this community.

If you are a graphic designer, you do our fliers.

If you like talking to people, you head up the street team.

That was such a easy way to organize.

Brooks: One of the ethos is, the neighborhood knows what it needs-- they don't always have the resources-- and also the neighborhood is the unit of change.

You don't want to just pick out the superstars and pull them out of the neighborhood.

Right.

You want to fix the whole neighborhood.

A friend of mine says, "You can't only clean the part of the swimming pool you're swimming in," and so these Weavers are really there every day, and they're phenomenal at this skill.

You show up with them, and they know how to connect.

You know, a lot of getting to know a person is not with the mouth.

It's with the eyes... Yeah.

because when you encounter anybody, especially where there's distrust or difference, everybody's asking the same question-- Am I a person to you?

Am I a priority for you?

Can I trust you?-- and those questions are answered with a gaze before they are answered with any words.

What worries you the most about the country right now?

I think it is the loss of social trust.

We lost trust in institutions a long time ago, in the seventies, but a generation or two ago, if you ask people, "Do you trust your neighbors?"

60% would say yes.

Now that's down to 30%, and so we're in danger of having a distrust doom loop where we don't trust each other.

Therefore, we don't act out for each other.

Therefore, we don't trust each other more.

When you have a trustful society, they have what they call spontaneous cooperation.

People just band together and fix local problems.

To me, we're objectively still in decent shape, but subjectively, we're not in good shape.

I wrote this book because in my travels, people kept telling me, "I feel invisible.

You know, no one knows me."

I would go to the Midwest, and years ago, I would hear this phrase "flyover country" once every couple days...

So dismissive.

and now I hear it, like, "You think we're just flyover country."

I would hear that 7 times a day... Mm-hmm.

and so it's this sense that-- Blacks feeling their daily experience is not understood by whites, Republicans and Democrats looking at each other with incomprehension.

Right, or a Black person feeling like, "They're just seeing me as "black person," and a woman thinking, "All you see is "woman," which is like, "Oh, my God, "there's so many parts about me "that are not defined by whatever the stereotype of a woman is."

When you see somebody, especially across difference, you have to see them as the unique, never to-be-repeated individual they are, but you also have to see their race and their gender-- you can't ignore those things-- and then you have to see their social location, where do they feel comfortable, where do they don't feel comfortable, so you have to see them at 3 levels all at once.

We have a thing at "Tell Me More."

It's called Plus One, where we give you a chance to shout-out somebody who's just been instrumental to your well-being or your thinking.

Who is your plus-one?

So my plus-one is my wife Anne Snyder Brooks.

All right.

So I'm sitting in our dining room table, and I'm reading some boring book, and my wife comes in our front door, and the door opens.

It's late afternoon in summertime, and the light is just streaming in behind her, and I just look up from my book, and this voice in my head says, "I know her.

I really know her," and I had this sense of just, like, "Oh, I know that person," and later, I thought, "Well, what word would I use to describe how I was seeing her?"

and the word would be "beholding."

I wasn't, like, inspecting.

I wasn't observing.

I was just beholding her.

I mentioned this story to somebody who's a grandparent, and she said, "Yeah.

That's what I do.

"I behold my grandkids.

I just behold them.

"I don't need to do anything.

I just, like, "Wow."

There are 3 things that we've asked everybody about-- AI, climate, and race.

Do you feel optimistic or pessimistic about where we could get to as a society?

Yeah.

I feel guardedly optimistic on race, where we could get to.

You know, I think we've gone through this period, really, since 2013, 2014, Ferguson, going back to there, where we've begun to have these sometimes painful and awkward conversations, for white people especially, but I think they've been informative.

I think there are more white people who understand the daily indignities that are imposed on Black people in this country, and I think it's been painful, and it's still painful to go through some of these conversations and to face bitter truths, but it's part of the process of recognition, forgiveness, and reparation.

What's a public policy that you hope we continue forever, what's public policy you wish we would eliminate, and what's a public policy you wish we could multiply?

A public policy we had expanded for a brief bit and worked phenomenally and then we got rid of was the child tax credit.

You know, if you ask me about social mobility, a lot of it really is about the first 5 years.

You want to invest massively in the environments in which kids grow up in.

We expanded the child tax credit under Biden when he first got in, and it lasted for a year, and it reduced the poverty rate, child poverty rate, by, like, 50%, and the other thing that I really would expand is intergenerational national service.

I was talking with some seniors who went back to school, and the best thing they found was hanging around 22-year-olds.

They're fast.

They're asking the big questions.

They force you to face the big issues of life that you "think you had settled"... Yeah.

and then the 22-year-olds need parents.

They may have parents, but everybody needs more parents, especially in times like these, so I would have a big national service program that's intergenerational.

I love that, Yeah.

and is there something we should multiply?

Tutoring.

Uh-huh.

We need teachers and classrooms and all the normal things of school, but tutoring is just tremendously effective, and you can shift the curve of what achievement looks like.

You used to have a rule when you sat down to write a column that every phone call you made to a Republican, you would make one to a Democrat.

Do you still do that?

Pretty much.

I'm a little less formal, but I learned that I would go from a Republican's office to a Democrat's office, and they would each tell me about what the other party was doing, and they were massively ignorant about what's going through the minds of the people in the other party.

They just did not know, and since writing this book, I pay attention to how many people are question askers... Mm, not many.

and sometimes I'll leave a party, I think, "Nobody asked me a question at all," but when somebody does ask you, like, you know, big questions like, "What crossroads are you at?"

"What are you afraid of?"

"What would you do if fear didn't influence your life?"

questions that sort of lift you up and get you to reflect on your life in new ways, as long as it's somebody who you trust, you can have great conversations, and I was talking with a friend of mine who lives in New York named Niobe Way, and she was teaching eighth-grade boys how to ask questions... Oh, how wonderful.

and then so she says, "OK.

The first interview subject is me.

You can ask me anything you want," and so the first boy says, "Are you married?"

She says, "No."

"Are you divorced?"

"Yes."

Third question-- "Do you still love him?"

and she's like... [Gasps] She says, "Yes."

"Does he know?"

She's like, "Tears are welling up in his eyes."

"Do your kids know?"

and so, like, they're eighth graders.

They are gonna ask the blunt questions.

Right.

It's gonna take them two questions to get right to the middle of your heart.

Yeah, and so but somehow we leave that behind as we become adults.

I know.

We think it's rude, I think.

There's something also about asking questions that's so intellectually humble.

It's taking this position that, like, there's something you know that I don't know, Right.

and I think we may have stirred ourselves up into this period of total intellectual arrogance where it's like, "I know everything I need to know about you.

I can tell just by looking at you," or, "Oh, you vote for so-and-so?

"I got everything.

I got all the stats and dats on you."

I learned that's called "stacking," where you take one thing you know about a person, then stack all these other things you assume about them.

Right, because they stop believing that there's something neat in there.

Yeah or how much fun it will be.

We vastly underestimate how much fun it is to get to know somebody.

Yeah.

This is sort of a loaded question, but do you find there's, like, a gendered element to this?

Because sometimes when I was reading "How to Know a Person," I was like, "Uh-huh.

Like, women do this."

Yeah.

I have a scene in there where I'm sitting at a bar and there's a date next to me at the bar, and the guy is just droning on and droning on, and I wanted to take my fork and just ram it into his neck.

There's a date like that at every bar in America right this second.

"Just ask her a question just once."

Right.

I did one of these group dinners, a big table at a conference, and I'm having my normal conversation.

I look up, my wife has just met a woman, and they're, like, locked in eye.

Their eyes are locked, and it's like, boom, instant intimacy.

They just, like, connect, and I'm thinking, "Would I do that with one of my guy friends?"

Probably not.

There's just, like, a social code.

We're, like looking off into the distance.

There's a lot of people in this series who make sure to tell me that they are optimists.

Oh, really?

Yeah, and you said, "The pessimists miss an underlying truth.

"A society can get a lot wrong as long as it gets the big things right," and that one big thing is...

Talent, maximizing talent, so I have a friend, Tyler Cowen, who's an economist, says, "List all the problems on a legal pad "that's wrong with America, and you could fill up the pad..." You could.

"but then on the other side, America has more talent than ever before," and his point is, Column B is more important than Column A.

We in my business, in journalism, are guilty, especially in the Internet age, of being excessively negative and pessimistic.

Especially in America.

Like, you pointed out that during the pandemic, you know, there was a lot of negative news around the world, but we did it at a whole 'nother level.

Right.

Yeah, so I forget the exact stats, but in Europe, they would have negative stories.

Of course, the pandemic was the pandemic, but when vaccines were coming in or something good was happening, they would have positive stories.

We would still have negative stories, and the number of negative headlines or headlines designed to evoke fear or anger has risen by, like, 150% as we try to chase clicks by getting anger-generating headlines, and so I bias now to the optimistic side because I do think we underplay, and so, for example, on AI, I saw a poll-- "Will AI cause more harm than good?"

and only 9% of Americans think it will cause more good than harm.

In my view, we've just stumbled upon a new form of intelligence that's gonna make us all smarter and better, and obviously, there are things to worry about and things like that, but to not see the positive side is, to me, just crazy.

But it's so our nature.

It's just negativity bias.

Like, it's just that fear of, you know, that we're not gonna survive it, I mean, every single new thing that's ever happened.

Everyone thought television will ruin everything.

Well, they were right on that one.

Video games will make everyone murder everyone.

You know, like, we do this.

Cars we thought were gonna ruin everything.

Right, the railroad.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah.

Absolutely, and so, you know, it's natural.

You're right.

It's somewhat human nature.

Like, it's a lot easier to imagine the destructive thing than the positive thing, the creative thing.

And a lot more important to imagine the destructive thing than the positive thing.

For evolutionary reasons, yeah, so that's true, and fear is stronger than hope.

Give me 3 things that every American needs and deserves.

Well, it's a very good question.

The first one is dignity.

I mean, that's really at the center of my politics.

They need to be treated like something of infinite value, and I don't care if you're religious or not.

It's super useful to have this phrase "made in the image of God," that if every person you meet, you think, "I'm looking into the face of God.

"I'm looking at somebody who was made in the image of God," and you might not believe in God at all-- I don't care-- but if you have that logic in your head some, "This person has an infinite soul," then you'll probably end up treating them well.

The second thing, everybody needs a container.

They need their 5 or 6 people who are their core, and I think one of the problems in our society is, a lot of people don't have their absolutely secure base.

One of my favorite sayings from attachment theory is, "All of life is a series of daring explorations from a secure base," and so you got to have that secure emotional base, that unconditional love from a small group of people, and then I think the third thing-- and these are broad-- but a sense of movement, a sense that my life is going somewhere, I'm a vector, I'm going somewhere, I'm going up, and I think when you feel the stagnation or going down, one's life tends to fall apart, but there's a phrase that's a favorite of mine from Nietzsche... that if you know why you're living, then when the setbacks come, you can endure them because you know, "That's where I'm going," and so you got to have that ascent toward a goal, and so those would be my 3.

Are you ready for the "Tell Me More" speed round?

OK. Ha ha ha!

What was your first concert?

KISS.

Nice, and what's the best live performance of any kind you've ever seen?

Every Bruce Springsteen show ever.

What was your first job?

A police reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago covering rapes and crime.

What is the last book that blew you away?

"Crossing to Safety" with Wallace Stegner.

Oh, so good.

You can't figure out why it's so good because not a lot happens...

I know.

but it's just gripping.

It's really about lifelong friendship.

And envy and ambition and-- Yeah.

There's a great line in there that resonates to what we do.

A writer is one of the characters and sort of a literature professor's the other, and the writer says to him, you know, "You read books to appreciate.

I read as a pickpocket.

I read to steal."

Yeah, yeah, totally.

Writers read that way.

If your high school did superlatives, what would you have been most likely to become?

I would have been most likely to become short.

I was really short in high school.

Do you have a favorite celebrity crush?

When I was a kid, it was Lauren Bacall.

What do you wish you had more time to do?

Hobby.

I don't have a hobby, so I need to find a hobby.

What's your go-to mantra for hard times?

That in moments of suffering, you can either be broken or broken open and that you should use those hard times to be even more vulnerable.

Yeah, put it to good use.

Don't let a crisis go to waste.

Yeah.

That's right.

Is there anyone you would like to apologize to?

When I was a younger writer, I attacked people in ways that were mean, and I feel guilty about them, and some I've met since, I haven't apologized, which I should.

I was in my 30s.

It was before I had kids.

Once I had kids, I was like, "I don't want my kids reading that kind of piece," so I don't write mean takedowns, but I did, and I feel ashamed of them.

What's something big you've been wrong about?

Well, the obvious go-to is the Iraq war.

I would say, having hope for the Republican Party, I was pretty wrong about that.

I probably had too much confidence in the free market to distribute goods fairly for the early half of my life, so those are 3 intellectual things that I got wrong.

If your mother wrote a book about you, what would it be called?

That's a tough one because my mother was my editor and my toughest editor... Oh, really?

and so I'd send her my manuscripts, and she would write at the top, "This is crap.

The reviews are gonna be terrible," but my mom was not wrong.

If she wrote a book about me, it would be "You Should Edit This."

If you could say 4 words to anyone, who would you address, and what would you say?

I'd have to go back to Jesus and say, "Is it really true?"

Like, I'd like to know.

That's probably the best one we've gotten.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Here are my takeaways from my conversation with David Brooks.

Number one, you cannot clean one part of the swimming pool.

Number two, being a good listener isn't genetic.

It isn't magic.

It's a skill set.

Number 3, don't be the guy at the bar.

Ask questions, and number 4, the reason for hope, the counterbalance to every item on the list of American problems is, we have the talent.