The Art of Manliness - The Quest for a Moral Life

00:00:00.000 Hey, it's Brett. We're taking a break for the Thanksgiving holiday. Going to eat some turkey,

00:00:03.280 some sweet potato casserole with the marshmallows on top. Can't wait to dig into that. In the

00:00:07.060 meantime, we're going to rebroadcast episode number 518, The Quest for Your Moral Life.

00:00:11.280 This is an interview I did with David Brooks back in 2019 about his book, The Second Mountain,

00:00:15.520 one of my favorite episodes. Hope you enjoy it. I hope you have a happy Thanksgiving. I know while

00:00:19.480 I'm eating my sweet potato casserole with marshmallows on top, I'll be thinking of you

00:00:22.760 all. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. We'll see you on Monday with a brand

00:00:26.360 new episode.

00:00:30.000 Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. Do you ever feel

00:00:38.500 like you're spinning your existential wheels in life? That outwardly you seem to be doing okay,

00:00:42.560 but inwardly you feel kind of empty? I guess they would say that you've got to move on from trekking

00:00:46.500 up life's first mountain to begin a journey up its second. His name is David Brooks and he's the

00:00:50.600 author of The Second Mountain, The Quest for Immoral Life. In that book, David makes the case that there

00:00:54.900 are two mountains that we climb in life. The first is about the self, getting a college degree, starting

00:00:59.160 your career, buying a home, and making a mark on the world. But at some point, that mountain starts

00:01:03.800 to feel unfulfilling. That's when we discover there's a second mountain to ascend, a path of

00:01:07.640 selflessness, relationships, and greater meaning. Today on the show, David tells us what he got

00:01:11.580 wrong in his previous book, The Road to Character, and how the second mountain expands his vision of

00:01:15.840 the good life. We then discuss why the first mountain of life gets more attention in the West,

00:01:19.600 and how the hyper-individualism it encourages has led to an increase in loneliness, anxiety,

00:01:23.860 and existential angst. David then walks us through how we shift courses from the first mountain of

00:01:27.620 achievement to the second mountain of meaning by making commitments to things outside of ourselves.

00:01:31.960 We then discuss the four commitments he thinks bring us real meaning and significance, and how

00:01:35.820 we can seek and find them. After the show's over, check out our show notes at aom.is slash

00:01:40.400 second mountain. David joins me now by phone.

00:01:43.260 All right, David Brooks, welcome back to the show.

00:01:53.120 It's good to be back with you.

00:01:54.640 So last time we had you on was a few years ago to discuss your book, The Road to Character.

00:01:58.980 You got a new book out, The Second Mountain, The Quest for a Moral Life. Is this book a

00:02:04.280 continuation of your thoughts that you fleshed out in The Road to Character, or is it something

00:02:07.460 different? It's a bit of a correcting what went wrong with that one, or what are the limitations

00:02:12.460 of that one? And so both books are sort of about how do we become better people. And when I wrote

00:02:17.500 that, I wrote it about some amazing people. We still have a lot to learn from people like

00:02:21.520 Dwight Eisenhower and George Marshall and Samuel Johnson and Dorothy Day. And so I don't renounce

00:02:26.560 that other book. But when I was thinking about how people built their character, I think I was still

00:02:30.860 stuck in an individualistic mindset. And so to me, the way you build characters, you identify your

00:02:37.500 core sin, like you might have anger if you're Dwight Eisenhower, and then you work on it every

00:02:42.300 day. And so character building is about inner conflict. And I think there's some bit of

00:02:47.420 character building is about that. It's like you go to the gym, you work up your honesty muscle,

00:02:51.440 your courage muscle, you get stronger at those things. The problem is, I don't think most of us

00:02:56.400 have the willpower to do that. And so the question is, how do we really develop the willpower to become

00:03:01.180 better people? And I think we do that by falling in love with something. So for example, when my first

00:03:06.480 kid was born, we didn't know he had really low APGAR score. We didn't know whether he'd live or die

00:03:11.540 that first night. And I remember thinking, would it be worth it for his mom and I to have a lifetime

00:03:17.300 of grief for him to live just 30 minutes? And if you'd asked me that before he was born, I would

00:03:22.360 have said, no way, what, you know, why should two people suffer a lifetime of suffering for 30 minutes

00:03:26.940 if a creature doesn't even know he exists. But after the kid was born, I became aware of a level

00:03:31.880 of commitment and love that I didn't even imagine existed beforehand. And when you become aware of that

00:03:37.660 level of commitment and love, you want to make promises to the kid, I'll always be there for

00:03:41.640 him. And you start behaving a little less selfishly than you would have before. Like, you might want

00:03:46.900 to go out and play golf, but instead you care for the kid, push him around in the baby carriage,

00:03:50.960 and you start doing things for other people. And over time, I think you get a little less selfish.

00:03:57.280 And so now I think character formation is really about keeping up with our commitments. We fall in love

00:04:02.160 with something. We make a promise to it. And then we try to live up to the promises we make. So it's

00:04:07.180 much more relationship-centered and less individualistic. And did you have any experiences

00:04:11.320 or was this, you know, just talking with people after you wrote The Road to Character, where you

00:04:15.100 kind of realized that character formation is about relationships and about commitments and not just

00:04:20.200 sort of this sort of Nietzschean, you know, will-to-power, ubermensch mission?

00:04:25.800 Yeah. I mean, you get some stuff in books, but you only get a little. Like, books name

00:04:30.160 things that you experienced. Somebody once said, you can be knowledge, knowledgeable with other

00:04:35.220 men's knowledge, but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom. And you sort of have to go through

00:04:39.640 stuff. And I went through a period just at the time I was finishing Road to Character,

00:04:44.600 but I didn't really put it in the book because I couldn't understand what was happening to me.

00:04:47.700 I just went through a bad period of life. And we all go through periods in the valley and some are

00:04:51.760 not our fault. Like a couple of years ago, my mother died and that was a bad period in the valley,

00:04:55.840 but some kind of are my fault. And in 2013, I went through one that was at least partially my fault.

00:05:02.160 And my marriage had ended and my kids were going away to college. And I had lost a lot of the

00:05:07.820 friends that I used to have in the, more in the conservative movement. And I realized I had

00:05:12.380 weekday friends, like the kinds I could talk to about work, but I didn't have that many weekend

00:05:16.780 friends. And I'd sort of gotten to a place where week for work and all the amount of work I did

00:05:22.160 had sort of numbed over both the heart, the desire for connection with another and the soul,

00:05:29.120 the desire of connection to be good. And so there'd been sort of a moral numbing and a relational

00:05:34.260 numbing. And so I was down in the valley for a year or two and learned a few things down there.

00:05:40.500 So this idea of valley, this goes back to this metaphor that structures the book. You make the

00:05:44.920 case that their life consists of two mountains. What's the first mountain like? And then let's talk

00:05:49.580 about the second mountain after that. Yeah. The first mountain is the mountain society wants us

00:05:53.980 to climb. You get out of school and you want to have a good career. You want people to think well

00:05:58.900 of you and you want to carve out an identity and make a mark in the world. And this, this is what

00:06:04.040 our meritocracy tells us to want to, you know, if I make enough money, if I have a good career,

00:06:09.240 people will think well of me and I'll be happy. And I think that's a lie. I think there are certain

00:06:14.060 lies embedded in our meritocracy. One is that career success leads to fulfillment. I can guarantee

00:06:19.800 you that's not true for most people. The second is I can make myself happy. That happiness is an

00:06:25.420 individual achievement. If I just lose a few more pounds, I get better at golf or something.

00:06:29.820 But if you talk to people on their deathbed, they say, you know, I was happiest when I was least

00:06:34.480 self-sufficient, when I was most dependent on others. And that's a living in relationship.

00:06:39.440 And then there are a bunch of other lies that you're not a soul to be saved. You're a set of

00:06:43.680 skills to be maximized. And the most pernicious lie of our culture is that people who have achieved

00:06:49.420 a lot more and are a little smarter are somehow worth more than other people. And so you fall for

00:06:54.820 all these lies and they sort of lead you in the wrong direction. And they lead you thinking too much

00:07:00.220 about the desires of the ego, which are pretty simple desires, but bad and not enough about the

00:07:06.640 desires of the heart and the desires of the soul. So down in the valley, you sort of discover your

00:07:10.660 better desires and try to align yourself with them. So this basically, it's created, we have

00:07:14.980 a culture of individualism. I mean, how did we, how did we get these assumptions in the West that

00:07:19.860 individualism will bring happiness? What's the history of that, the social history of that?

00:07:25.400 Yeah. Well, we've always been individualistic, like Tocqueville talked about in the 1830s,

00:07:29.660 but we've always had another ethos, which balanced that. And sometimes that ethos was religion,

00:07:34.680 which was more about community and more about service to some good. Sometimes it was just like

00:07:39.560 bohemianism that you served art. There were a lot of different things that balanced it.

00:07:45.380 And in the 1950s, say we had a real belief in hanging together. We had to get through the war,

00:07:51.080 we had to get through before that, the great depression. And so there was a culture of,

00:07:55.200 we're all in this together. And if you grew up, say in Chicago, you didn't say I'm from Chicago.

00:07:59.360 You said I'm from 59th and Pulaski because it was your little neighborhood that really defined your

00:08:05.420 life. And that had some wonderful elements of really strong communities, but it became stifling

00:08:10.960 to people. And people thought I'm just a soulless cog in this conformist society. And so they rebelled

00:08:16.960 in the 60s and they said, I want to be free to be myself. And some of that started in the early 60s

00:08:23.280 and some of the late 60s, the Woodstock, but it was symbolized by a moment very early in my

00:08:28.760 childhood. The first football game I really paid attention to was Super Bowl III. And on one side

00:08:33.940 of the field was a guy named Johnny Unitas from the Baltimore Colts. And he was like a 1950s guy,

00:08:38.980 very conformist, crew cuts, very unflashy. And on the other side of the field, there was a guy named

00:08:44.580 Joe Namath for the New York Jets. And he was very flashy, long hair, $5,000 for coats. He wrote a

00:08:51.020 memoir called, I Can't Wait Until Tomorrow Because I Get Better Looking Every Day. And that was the

00:08:56.200 culture of let's rebel. Let's be expressive, not reticent. It's cooler to be young, not old.

00:09:01.900 And so we created a much more individualistic culture. I'm free to be myself. And that had a

00:09:07.060 right-wing version, which was the economic individualism of the 1980s. It had a left-wing

00:09:11.640 version, which was the lifestyle individualism of the 60s and 70s and so. But it was all individualism.

00:09:17.800 And when you have a culture really built on the self, self-satisfaction, self-sufficiency,

00:09:23.520 self-happiness, you end up weakening the bonds between people. And that's more or less what we've

00:09:28.080 done. And how is that manifesting itself in our culture today? What are you seeing? The downsides

00:09:34.180 of it, yeah? Yeah, we don't just have as good connections as we do. And so if you ask people,

00:09:40.180 a generation ago, people entertained in their homes an average about 16 times a year. Now it's down to

00:09:45.700 eight. Only 8% of Americans say they have important conversations with their neighbors.

00:09:51.700 And if you ask people over 45, 35% of people over 45 say they're chronically lonely.

00:09:57.860 If you look at the suicide rate, which is really a proxy for loneliness, it's up 30% in the last 20

00:10:03.520 years. If you look at the teenage suicide rate, it's up 70% in the last eight years. And if you ask

00:10:10.000 people, do you trust your neighbors? A generation ago, 60% of Americans said that my neighbors are

00:10:15.100 basically trustworthy. Now only 32% say that, and 19% are millennials. So we've become a much

00:10:21.100 lonelier culture, much more distrustful culture, and a culture that's much nastier or nastier to 0.88

00:10:27.380 each other. Right. You talk about, also in the book, the rise of tribalism we're seeing in our

00:10:31.180 political discourse. Yeah. Tribalism seems like community because it is a way of bonding with

00:10:36.540 others. But to me, it's the dark side of community. It's not based on mutual affection for

00:10:41.620 a town or something. It's based on mutual hatred of some other. And so it's a scarcity mentality.

00:10:47.120 It's a zero-sum mentality. It's always about fighting distrust and war. And that pretty much

00:10:52.120 defines our politics and a lot of else. And do you think social media and the internet has

00:10:56.020 amplified all these downsides? I do. I mean, I think when we're on social media, we're not really

00:11:01.460 communicating out of our depths. We're either on Twitter, which is a lot of people saying,

00:11:06.220 I'm smarter than you are. Or sometimes on Instagram, which is a lot of people saying,

00:11:10.320 I'm more fabulous than you are. And it's just a shallow form of communication. It's not a deep

00:11:15.160 form of communication. And I think if you look at that teenage suicide rate increase, a lot of that

00:11:20.820 has to be tied to the smartphone. It just correlates so perfectly with that. And not only just the actual

00:11:26.580 technology, but the fact that it creates this mentality of, I'm manipulating you to get a response.

00:11:33.100 I'm competing to get a better response. And so it's just a shallow form of communication.

00:11:40.280 I think the good news is we're trying to, I think we are figuring it out. We all know the upside of

00:11:44.640 the social media and the technology. And I think people are now experimenting and trying to find

00:11:49.720 ways where they can get rid of the downside by limiting the time they spend on their phones or

00:11:54.500 limiting what they do on their phones or trying to turn the thing off one day a month. I have a friend

00:12:00.400 who, he gets up and before he looks at any screen, he goes outside and just looks at the sky for a few

00:12:05.480 minutes and has a few thoughts. It's just a way of getting things in the right order.

00:12:09.940 But what's interesting, when I talk to people or whenever newspapers interview young people,

00:12:15.860 you can tell there's this desire for meaning and significance. But then you see how people

00:12:21.800 look for that. It seems like they go about it at trying to find meaning and significance using that

00:12:26.500 first mountain response, right? They don't actually go to the second mountain. They think,

00:12:30.320 well, I can just work really hard to find meaning. And that doesn't work.

00:12:34.020 Right. Like it's a homework assignment. Yeah. No, because that's the language. If we're raised,

00:12:38.700 you know, you start at 15 or 16 and you get put in the college admissions process.

00:12:43.540 And so you're raised in an ethos of, well, I have to earn it. It's all about, you know,

00:12:47.620 work, doing my homework, working out. And then the thing that's, I think, most treacherous,

00:12:52.940 or at least most treacherous for me is you get this productivity mindset. And so much of our day

00:12:58.580 is taken up by email and stuff like that. So your little clock in your head says onto the next

00:13:04.940 project, onto the next project. And so you never actually sit down and have time for real relationships,

00:13:10.220 which do take incredible patience and time. And I found in my worst, I value productivity over

00:13:18.400 people, which is an illusion. But I would say among my students, I teach college,

00:13:24.380 you know, they, they say we're so hungry, like they're very open that we're so hungry for some

00:13:29.020 sort of spiritual nourishment, but we're not sure we have the vocabulary. We're not sure we've been

00:13:34.220 given the path. And I do think that's the fault of my generation. Frankly, we haven't passed along

00:13:40.040 how to do the hard things like have a good character, have good relationships.

00:13:43.800 relationships. And often on the most important subjects of life, we really don't know what to

00:13:48.300 say. Well, you mentioned the valley that you went through to get on to the second mountain.

00:13:52.920 Does everyone have to go through that valley, like a dark time in their life when they realize

00:13:56.800 that they're, they were, they weren't on the necessarily on the wrong mountain, but it's like,

00:14:00.540 it's not, it's not all the mountains of life. Yeah. I don't think they have to. I know a lot of

00:14:05.200 people, my wife included, who she started on her second mountain, like the second mountain,

00:14:09.360 the first mountain is, is, is about building up your ego and acquiring things. The second

00:14:14.700 mountain is about contributing things and giving things back. First mountain, you're just trying

00:14:19.220 to earn a good reputation. The second mountain, you're just trying to pour forth and you get

00:14:23.460 joy from the happiness you bring to others. And a lot of people are just good somehow, just

00:14:29.480 all the way through there. They were born in an environment and a family that emphasized the

00:14:34.100 right values that put relationship before self. And they are lucky ones to grow up in a, in a

00:14:41.340 nurturing family, nurturing culture. But I will say, I don't know anybody in life who hasn't gone

00:14:46.340 through hard times of one sort or another. And I was with a 94 year old guy not too long ago who said,

00:14:52.360 you know, when I look back on my life, I realize, um, my whole life is defined by how I reacted to my

00:14:57.160 moments of adversity. And I do think that's true. And you ask people, you know, what made you,

00:15:02.300 if I asked you what, what was the event that really made you who you are? Most people point

00:15:06.400 to a moment of struggle and how they reacted to it. So I would point to my vow. I would point to

00:15:10.540 two things and one is good and one is bad. And I went to a great summer camp from age five to age

00:15:16.860 23 with the same group of people every summer for two months. And that was a great relationship

00:15:23.120 because it, it surrounded me in, in friendships, uh, friendships I still have today. And so that was,

00:15:28.540 that was one thing that made me who I am and gave me a viewpoint. And then the second was this

00:15:33.460 valley I went through in 2013. And that was a hard thing I had to get through.

00:15:38.320 Yeah. And you would give examples of different valleys people can go through. It could be a

00:15:41.780 divorce. It could be a sickness, could be a job loss, but could also be, you know, your first mountain

00:15:45.900 life is great. Everything's on lockdown, but you just feel that existential angst or that soul

00:15:51.100 sickness that you think there's something more and then it knocks you off. And then you,

00:15:55.700 you find that second mountain. Yeah. There's a great concept that was popular in the middle ages,

00:15:59.980 but we sort of don't talk about it today, even though it's very common called acedia. And that's

00:16:04.780 the loss of desire. And some people like they were just climbing and they were hungry to get to the

00:16:09.280 top. And then somehow they just can't care anymore. They just, the passion is gone. And then they're

00:16:16.180 sleepwalking. I had a friend who was, um, being interviewed for a job and he turned around at the end and

00:16:22.000 asked the interviewer a question. And the question was, what would you do if you weren't afraid?

00:16:26.920 And the woman burst out crying because if she wasn't afraid, she wouldn't be doing HR at that

00:16:32.060 company, but she doesn't know what to do with her life. And so she's just trudging through a life.

00:16:36.280 She doesn't actually enjoy that doesn't arouse her high desires. And I think there are people like

00:16:41.260 that. And there are people who, who, you know, feel, I don't quite know what to do. I'm kind of stuck

00:16:46.320 here. And that's a version of a valley and other valleys, you know, everything's going well, but

00:16:50.560 you get hit by something that wasn't part of the original plan. You know, you get a cancer scare,

00:16:55.320 you lose a loved one. And when you're in suffering over grief or something like that,

00:17:00.980 the desires of the first mountain, the desires of the ego, they just don't seem that important anymore.

00:17:05.800 And you have trouble mobilizing your whole life around.

00:17:09.060 So you argue the second mountain is all about commitment. It's the committed life. And this goes

00:17:13.700 contrary to what our individual culture tells us will bring us happiness. So how does,

00:17:18.800 how does binding ourself through commitments give life meaning and bring us joy?

00:17:24.960 It's really, uh, the two mountain metaphors really, uh, as really about two different value systems

00:17:30.920 and one value system is the individualistic one. And the second one is the one where you,

00:17:36.160 we make promises to each other. And so in my view, we're not going to go back to the 1950s.

00:17:41.140 You know, I defer to their organization. I defer to authority. We're not going back to that culture,

00:17:46.280 but we could build a culture around commitment making that our life is really defined by the

00:17:51.840 commitments we make. And so most of us make commitments to a several of four things or maybe

00:17:57.740 all four things to a spouse and family, to a community, to a vocation and to a philosophy or faith.

00:18:04.820 And my argument is that the fulfillment of our lives depends on how well we make and choose those

00:18:12.680 commitments. So a lot of the book is just asking basic questions like, how do you choose a marriage

00:18:17.700 partner? How do you figure out who to marry? And then once you've married them, how do you figure

00:18:21.240 out how to behave? So you make the marriage a full marriage or how do you choose your vocation? How do you

00:18:26.760 know what job is the right life fulfilling career for you? And not things like that. How do you,

00:18:32.080 how do you come to faith? How do you find a philosophy? How do you serve your town?

00:18:35.740 And so these are all very just practical questions of how you lead life. That's about

00:18:40.240 really a committed, a really buried life where you've chained yourself down to something you

00:18:45.840 really care about and you dedicate yourself to that thing year after year.

00:18:50.000 And what's interesting is you highlight in the book, as you commit yourself to something bigger

00:18:53.860 than yourself, you can actually, that's how you find yourself. I think oftentimes in America,

00:18:58.640 we think, well, I'm going to go off into, I'm going to drive in a van, sleep in a van. I'm

00:19:03.080 going to find myself that way. But really, no, it's, it's submitting yourself to something larger

00:19:07.860 is how you can develop an identity. Yeah. And everybody says you should serve a cause larger

00:19:13.080 than yourself, but cliche is always around, but nobody tells you exactly how, and you got to realize

00:19:19.160 you have to chain yourself down. And so there are two, um, two definitions of freedom that are out in

00:19:24.660 the world. One is freedom as absence of restraint. I can do whatever I want. And then freedom as

00:19:30.000 freedom of capacity. I have the freedom to play piano. You have to chain yourself down and practice

00:19:34.780 so you can really play. And a lot of your life is determined by what sort of definition of freedom

00:19:40.720 you have unconsciously in your head. And so, you know, I, I'm a writer, so I pay attention to how

00:19:46.420 other writers work. And one of the things they do is they tend to have very rigid routines. They get

00:19:51.400 up at nine. It was Tony Morrison used to go to a hotel room. She kept in the hotel room. There

00:19:56.980 were only four things. There was a typewriter, a Bible, a desk, and a bottle of brandy. And she

00:20:03.480 just locked herself in the room and wrote all morning. And that commitment to writing seemed

00:20:08.680 like a restraint and it was a restraint, but it really set her free to, to do what she was meant

00:20:13.660 to do. We're going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show.

00:20:19.180 Well, let's talk about some of the commitments you talk about in the book. The first one's

00:20:22.760 vocation. I think we've all heard that word before, but I think we often confuse our careers

00:20:28.500 for vocation. Or in other words, we call our career our vocation, but that's not, our career

00:20:32.980 is not necessarily a vocation. Yeah. A career is something you, you look at the skills you have

00:20:38.120 and you look in the marketplace and you say, well, how can I get the most return on my skills?

00:20:43.200 And so I'm good at math. Somebody needs to do accounting. So I'm going to become an accountant.

00:20:47.940 And so that's a career and it doesn't really involve your heart and soul necessarily. It's

00:20:53.480 how you trade your skills for money. But some people are called and in a vocation, you're

00:20:59.080 not, it's not like a choice. You're called and you find something incredibly beautiful.

00:21:03.920 I read about this guy, EO Wilson. When he was seven, he was out in the beach for the first

00:21:09.560 time in his life. He got to see the ocean and he saw jellyfish and animals he'd never imagined.

00:21:14.340 He saw stingrays and he was called by the beauty, like was entranced by the, what he

00:21:20.020 found. And his whole life has been about becoming a naturalist. Read an interview with a painter

00:21:26.200 and she was asked, why'd you become a painter? And she said, I just love the smell of paint.

00:21:30.880 My daughter, when she was five, she went into an ice hockey rink. She just felt at home at

00:21:35.340 a rink and now she teaches hockey in California. It's more a sense that there's some beauty out

00:21:40.620 there that calls you to do what you were meant to do in your life. And it could be accounting.

00:21:45.220 I mean, it could be, I know a guy, he just, he finds beauty in spreadsheets, just in the

00:21:51.280 mathematical elegance of the numbers being in the right place. But it's, it's not really

00:21:56.120 a choice. It's more submitting to something outside you that just seems entrancingly beautiful.

00:22:01.260 And your calling might not necessarily be the way you make your living. You might have a day

00:22:05.740 job, but then in the afternoon or the evening you, you work on your calling.

00:22:09.700 Yeah. There's a great quote in the book that says, sometimes I've been paid for my work

00:22:13.980 and sometimes I haven't been paid for my work, but I'm always doing my work. And I think that's

00:22:19.080 a nice distinction. You know, I know some people who are, they're just great at hospitality and

00:22:25.040 sometimes they might do that as a job and say the hotel business, but oftentimes they do it by

00:22:29.500 organizing barbecues. And I have a friend who says that she's aggressive. She's an aggressive 1.00

00:22:34.580 friend. She's aggressively friendly. And that means she's in the friend group. She's the one

00:22:39.180 organizing everything. She's the one putting together the giving circle or putting together

00:22:43.300 the regular dinners that people have. And she just gets great pleasure from cooking and hosting 0.71

00:22:48.900 people. And you can do that as a career or you can do that just for fun, but it's still your

00:22:53.640 vocation. And if you ask somebody like, who are you right down? Who are you at, you know,

00:22:59.320 what's your identity? You know, I, part of my identity is being a writer and sometimes I get

00:23:04.860 paid for it. Sometimes I don't, but it's what I am. Right. And I guess the way you figure this out

00:23:09.400 is, you know, it, like you feel it, like, you know, like EO Wilson, like you just feel entranced

00:23:13.380 by the animals, like look for that thing. And that's going to lead you to what your vocation possibly

00:23:18.600 is. Yeah. And Nietzsche said, write down the four most beautiful moments of your life and then see if

00:23:25.140 you can draw a thematic line through them. And that's how you discover what he called the

00:23:29.120 law of your very nature. And so sometimes you get to the point of the double negative.

00:23:34.400 It's like, I can't not do this. This is why I'm a teacher. Like if you get called, you know,

00:23:39.300 often we stumble into the things we do because something happens to us. And sometimes it's a

00:23:44.200 very bad thing. Like, you know, that we're in a town and I know a woman, she was a healthcare

00:23:48.840 executive in New Orleans and she got shot in the face by two boys, 10 and 11 years old,

00:23:55.840 who had to shoot somebody to be as part of their gang initiation ritual. And she remembers she

00:24:01.600 recovered and she remembers look at the look on their face just before they shot her. And it was

00:24:06.980 a look of pure terror. And she realized they were really terrified too. They were, they were put in

00:24:12.660 a situation where to be in a gang and have friends, they had to go shoot some random person. And she

00:24:18.100 said, well, I was collateral damage, but they're the real victims. And so she realized at that moment,

00:24:22.560 her calling was to deal with boys and girls who were in gangs. And so she quit her job as healthcare

00:24:27.660 executive and now works with gang members and works for the city of New Orleans. And sometimes

00:24:32.700 you're just called by bad circumstances, but you get to the point where you say, I can't not do this.

00:24:37.100 So I'm going to do it.

00:24:38.440 I think you talk about Viktor Frankl asking that question, like, what's my responsibility here?

00:24:42.480 Like, what is life asking you to do right now?

00:24:45.140 Yeah. And in commonsense, we give a lot of garbage advice. And one of the pieces of garbage advice 0.98

00:24:49.820 we give is you should ask, what do I want from life? That's too vague a question. You never come 0.97

00:24:55.660 up with an answer. The better question, Frankl says, is what is life asking you to meet? So what's

00:25:00.920 the big problem that my generation or I am called to deal with? And what problem am I uniquely suited

00:25:08.960 to deal with? And I gave a commencement this year and I said, listen, if you're graduating from college

00:25:13.720 now, the big problem your generation faces is the social fragmentation, the political division,

00:25:20.720 the lack of connection. So some generations are called to fight wars or battle depressions,

00:25:28.740 but your generation is called to build really strong relationships with one another. That's

00:25:33.680 pretty good calling. That's pretty good responsibility to have. It's hard to do, but it's better than some

00:25:40.120 of the alternatives that earlier generations are called that. So the next commitment is marriage.

00:25:44.400 And it's not just marriage. You say we need to commit ourselves to maximum marriage. What do you

00:25:49.820 mean by maximum marriage? Yeah, there's a style of marriage that's out, that's prevalent today that

00:25:54.960 sociologist Eli Frankl calls, it's sort of a minimal marriage, the self-expressive marriage.

00:26:00.560 That's two people. We, we care for each other and we both have our individual projects in life that

00:26:07.380 we're going to do and we're going to get married and we're going to help each other on our individual

00:26:11.840 projects from time to time. But our life is still mostly about the individual projects. And I'm not

00:26:16.840 sure marriage can survive that. I think marriage is tough and you have to be all in. Tim Keller is a

00:26:22.980 pastor in New York says, when you're in marriage, you get into marriage about two years in, you realize

00:26:28.560 that the person you married who you thought was completely perfect and completely wonderful

00:26:32.160 is actually kind of selfish. And as you're making this realization about her, she's making it about

00:26:37.920 you. And so you have a decision to make. You can either have a truth marriage, in which case you

00:26:43.080 won't talk about each other's flaws and you'll just have a kind of superficial marriage, or you can

00:26:49.340 decide you're going to deal with the flaws, but you're going to realize that, you know, she seems kind

00:26:53.480 of selfish, but actually my own selfishness is the core problem here. I'm going to be alert to my own

00:26:58.700 selfishness. It's my own selfishness is the only selfishness I can control. And Keller says, when

00:27:04.180 you have two people who see their own selfishness as the core problem in the marriage and who are

00:27:09.120 working on it, then you have the makings of a great marriage. But that requires you like to totally

00:27:14.080 throw yourself into it to defeat the ego to serve the marriage. And that's a tough thing to do, but

00:27:19.300 that is the essential moral challenge of marriage. And do you have any, based on your research and

00:27:24.140 your writing and talking to people, any advice for people who aren't married, but want to get

00:27:28.480 married to find that kind of marriage partner who also wants a maximum marriage? 1.00

00:27:32.980 Yeah. The first thing I always tell my students is marriage is a 50 year conversation. So you have

00:27:37.980 to be able to talk to the person forever. And so you better have very pure communication. It should

00:27:43.400 be the sort of person that you just love talking to on the phone for hour upon hour. But then there's

00:27:49.480 obviously been a ton of research on how to make this decision and it falls into three buckets.

00:27:54.480 The first is the psychological bucket. What traits does the other person have? And the shorthand

00:28:01.680 answer is go for kindness and avoid neuroticism. And kindness doesn't seem particularly exciting.

00:28:08.300 Sometimes we're attracted to the bad boys or the bad girls, but it's really useful in a marriage.

00:28:13.580 And neurotics, people are making drama out of everything. The research suggests those people

00:28:18.220 never change. They never stop making drama. So kindness is really valuable.

00:28:22.280 Then there's the passion lens, which is what kind of love do you have for this person?

00:28:29.740 And the Greeks used to say there are three different kinds of loves. There's philia,

00:28:33.480 which is friendship. There's eros, which is real passion, lust, and that kind of thing.

00:28:39.480 And then there's agape, the desire to give your selfless love away to the person.

00:28:43.540 If you just have philia and maybe some lust, then you have a relationship, but you don't have a

00:28:48.480 marriage. If you just have agape, you really want to give yourself to this person, but you don't have

00:28:53.420 lust, then you just have sort of admiration. It's best to have all three kinds of loves.

00:28:59.740 And then the final lens is the moral lens, which is, you know, love is going to come and go,

00:29:04.940 but admiration is pretty stable. And do you admire the person? Do they do things that you find morally

00:29:11.060 admirable? A marriage can survive a lot of things, but one thing it cannot survive is disrespect and

00:29:16.780 contempt. So pick someone you really admire. And then the one other good piece of advice I was

00:29:21.580 given was, you know, when we think about getting, marrying someone, we ask a lot of questions about

00:29:27.420 the other person. Are they the right person? We don't ask enough questions about ourselves,

00:29:32.080 which is really, am I ready for this? Am I ready to lead a very different kind of life? Because

00:29:37.880 until you get married, you can live with the illusion that you're easy to live with.

00:29:41.760 But when you get married, somebody is watching you and you become aware of exactly all the ways 0.99

00:29:46.980 you're crazy and selfish. And that, so you got to be willing to be changed. 0.91

00:29:51.800 And I imagine as if you've been married for a while, being, keeping that idea or being willing

00:29:57.980 to change, keeping that up will help strengthen your marriage as the years go on.

00:30:02.580 Yeah. Some of it is just like practical stuff. Like I pass a lot in the book. I take a lot of the

00:30:07.500 best bits of advice I've read from others and I just pass them along. And one of the things I read

00:30:12.180 was like, sometimes when you're in a relationship, they say, never go to bed mad, but sometimes you're

00:30:17.680 just tired. So you just go to bed and that's, you know, go to bed tomorrow. You'll wake, make waffles

00:30:23.140 together. Things will seem better. Another bit of advice I got for women in marriage was just, if you

00:30:28.780 feel encouraged to bitch about him to somebody, bitch to his mom and not to yours because his mom will 0.99

00:30:35.460 forgive him, but yours never will. And so these are just like little practical things and 0.98

00:30:39.640 commitments are lived out every day. And so there, there's just got to be practically committed to

00:30:44.640 not just, it's not just theory. So the third commitment is to philosophy and faith. And you

00:30:50.960 make the case that reading the great books of Western civilization or just studying Western

00:30:55.780 civilization can be a way to commit yourself to the intellectual life. How so, and how can that,

00:31:00.520 how can that transform you? Yeah. So I happened to go to college where they taught the great books.

00:31:05.080 It was the University of Chicago. And so we read like Tolstoy and Aristotle and Plato.

00:31:11.620 And the thing about the geniuses of those times is in some ways they are very different,

00:31:16.260 but in some ways they know us better than we know ourselves. And so they really broke things down.

00:31:21.860 How do you become a virtuous person? How do you do forgiveness? How do you experience grace?

00:31:26.640 Or even like George Eliot or Jane Austen, like, how do you think through the marriage decision?

00:31:30.660 And George Eliot wrote a lot about that. And so they are very practical advice. And then they also,

00:31:37.120 they, they touch you on a level that's deeper than, you know, I read for the newspaper book.

00:31:42.060 Newspapers don't really touch you on the level of your soul, your heart. But if you hear,

00:31:46.620 you know, Mozart's, you know, if you hear Ode to Joy, if you see Chartres Cathedral,

00:31:51.020 if you've read, you know, Tolstoy, you've been touched on a much deeper level. And I think one

00:31:57.560 of the things they do is they educate the emotions. And so we all have some crude emotions. But when

00:32:04.240 you've touched, been touched by art, your emotions get much more refined. Now, here's one trivial

00:32:09.700 example. I once saw Taylor Swift interviewed on 60 Minutes. And the interviewer said, you know,

00:32:16.020 you write a lot of sad songs. And she said, well, actually, there are about 17 different kinds of

00:32:21.420 sadness. And she said, there's your boyfriend rakes up with you sadness. And she played a little

00:32:25.400 tune. Your mom is mad at you sadness. She played another tune. You've lost your dog sadness. She

00:32:30.420 played another. And she is an expert on sadness. And if you go through life, you want to go through

00:32:35.520 life with a lot of different repertoire of emotions. So you can feel the right kind of sadness and a

00:32:40.040 different kind of sadness. And you can understand your own feelings a little better. And that's what I

00:32:44.460 think happens with the great books. And you can do this together with other people. I mean,

00:32:48.660 one of the most significant things, you know, meaningful things I've done in my life in the

00:32:52.700 past few years is we have a men's group here in town in Tulsa, where we've been reading the great

00:32:57.100 books. And, you know, started at the Iliad. We're at Shakespeare now. And it's been great meeting with

00:33:01.340 these guys once a month to discuss these ideas. Yeah. One of the phrases I passed along is,

00:33:07.500 there's no such thing as thinking for yourself. Like even the language we think in is a creation of the

00:33:12.960 group. And when you get together and just debate these issues, that to me is one of the great

00:33:17.920 pleasures of life. And just having, just you're in the moment and you each are building on each

00:33:23.320 other's thoughts. That's one of the great gifts of friendship. And I'm in a group like that. And

00:33:27.600 we're sort of sensitive that nobody should talk too much. And a lot of the book is,

00:33:33.140 a lot of my book is just things we discuss together as a group of guys reading a bunch of

00:33:38.620 books that have made us a little less shallow than we otherwise would be.

00:33:41.980 Let's talk about the commitment to faith and religion, because that's a hard sell

00:33:45.200 in a culture that's becoming increasingly secular. I think the number of people who describe

00:33:49.540 themselves as nun when it comes to religious affiliations, the highest it's ever been.

00:33:55.080 How are you defining spirituality in this book? Are you advocating for something like,

00:33:59.400 you know, that spiritual but not religious? Or are you talking about religion as well?

00:34:04.400 I lean toward religion. I get being a nun since I spent most of my life as a nun,

00:34:08.340 not believing in God, even though I was around a lot of organized religions. But I guess,

00:34:14.640 at least for me, over time, my categories, which were pretty atheistic, became inadequate to reality

00:34:21.140 as I experienced it. And so there were just moments of time that seemed mystical, that seemed like there

00:34:28.460 was a presence that couldn't be explained by just material causes. And often that presence was in

00:34:35.020 other people. Like, I'm a journalist. I cover other people's lives. And I just couldn't care

00:34:39.920 about the stories I write about if people were just sacks of genetic material or being blown around

00:34:46.280 by evolutionary forces. I see them as creatures with souls that have something in them that is of

00:34:53.440 infinite value and dignity, something in them that gives them moral responsibility to either behave

00:34:58.320 well or behave badly. And so I said, you know, the people I write about have souls. And we all have

00:35:05.260 souls. And you don't even have to believe in God to believe that there's some invisible piece of

00:35:10.380 yourself that has no size, weight, color, or weight, but that gives you infinite value and dignity,

00:35:15.420 that slavery is wrong because it cuts over another person's soul, and that the soul yearns to lead a good

00:35:22.740 life, which I think we all want to lead a good life. We all want to lead a meaningful, purposeful life.

00:35:28.320 And so once you get that sense that other people have souls, and at every second of every day,

00:35:33.900 their souls are either getting a little more holy or a little more degraded, their souls are getting

00:35:38.220 sick, their souls are yearning, then it's a short step, or at least it was for me, to believe, well,

00:35:44.380 maybe the material world is not the only world, but there's something else as well. And so in the

00:35:49.920 book, I just try to describe a very boring, gradual process toward faith.

00:35:54.100 And what does that commitment to faith look like, for you at least?

00:35:58.820 Well, partly it's, faith is change, as one of the writers I quote says. It's not like,

00:36:04.520 you know, some people, when they talk about God, they say, you know, I prayed and God told me to

00:36:08.720 move to Arizona instead of Nevada. And I respect people who feel they have that contact with God. I

00:36:15.440 can't tell you I've ever felt it that specifically. To me, it's seeking the beauty of certain things.

00:36:21.800 Like, there are certain stories in the Bible that are just morally very beautiful. And I'd like to

00:36:28.520 have opinion my life more on the beauty that are in some of these stories, rather than the

00:36:33.540 ugliness that's in the world. And so I have a sense of what grace is, just this joyous love that

00:36:40.300 you can't earn. And I'd rather pin my life toward that than pin it toward, you know, going to the

00:36:46.140 casino and hitting the jackpot. And I don't know, it's an aesthetic sense of what is truly morally

00:36:51.420 beautiful. And I make a distinction in the book between happiness and joy. And happiness happens

00:36:57.160 when you get a promotion, your team wins the Super Bowl, it's the expansion of self. Joy happens when

00:37:03.200 the barrier between you and something you really care about disappears. And so there's joy when you're

00:37:08.920 with your kids, and you're just playing. Sometimes there's joy in work, where you totally lose

00:37:13.840 yourself in your work, and you experience flow. Sometimes there's joy with someone you love.

00:37:19.200 And you're just so delirious to be together. Sometimes there's joy in nature, you feel part

00:37:25.040 of the natural surroundings, you become one with the forest as you're hiking through it. And one of

00:37:30.840 the messages in the book is happiness is good, but joy is better. And the ultimate joy is transcendent

00:37:36.420 joy. When you've surrendered yourself to some pure good, and you're not even thinking about

00:37:41.600 yourself anymore, you're doing something just because you think it is morally beautiful.

00:37:45.900 Yeah, and I imagine the faith you're talking about too, the examples you gave, it was all

00:37:51.440 about leading back to other people, right? It's not, even the faith you're talking about is not sort

00:37:56.240 of this, you know, personal salvation. It's like, it's a faith that leads me towards action

00:38:02.180 that transcends myself and wants me to love others and, you know, love my group, love my

00:38:07.760 family, whatever that is.

00:38:09.140 Yeah, I had a camp counselor who then became a friend who was an Episcopal priest, and he

00:38:14.280 was just like a holy child almost. He lived till about 60, and he saw some really hard things.

00:38:21.000 He worked in Honduras among the poor, he worked with women who suffered domestic violence, but

00:38:25.660 he spoke in this enthusiastic, he would always interrupt his sentences with whistles and pops

00:38:31.420 and laughs, and he just didn't think about himself. He was just grateful for every person

00:38:36.500 he met, and he treated every person he met as sort of a miracle. And so he really did live a life of

00:38:43.340 selfless love. And I run to such people who are just glow with joy, maybe once a month or so.

00:38:49.840 I get to work, I've got this project at the Aspen Institute, and I get to work with Yo-Yo Ma,

00:38:55.340 the cellist. And that guy is just happy all the time, and he just delights in his work,

00:38:59.900 he delights in the people he meets, he's filled with gratitude, and, you know, he's got as much

00:39:05.040 fame and money as he could ever handle. And so he's going around the world playing in order to bring

00:39:10.220 angry people together and out of anger. And it's, I'm sure it's hard to be traveling around the world

00:39:15.740 all that time. But he's serving a cause he really believes in. And he's just happy, he's just laughs

00:39:21.080 a lot.

00:39:21.840 It's amazing, all these individuals, you can tell they're outside of their head, like they're not

00:39:25.520 neurotic, they're not constantly thinking about themselves. And whenever you see that, you're

00:39:29.900 like, I want that too. I don't want, I'm tired of like journaling about my terrible thoughts,

00:39:34.880 I just don't want to even have to think about it anymore.

00:39:36.960 Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things I learned as I described this in the moments in the

00:39:40.880 valley, is people go out into the wilderness. And if you're the sort of person who's spent a lot of

00:39:47.340 life, you know, trying to be popular, wanting to be liked and performing for others, out in the

00:39:51.640 wilderness, the rocks don't care. So there's nobody left to perform for. And then you, if you get called

00:39:57.560 to do a task, maybe you call to be a community worker in something, maybe you're called, you love

00:40:03.920 a certain company you're starting up, and you think it'll really do some good in the world.

00:40:07.020 And you're so busy caring about the commitment you've made, you yourself seem much less important.

00:40:12.800 And I've always thought that you can't replace a bad with a, or you can't replace one thing with

00:40:18.040 nothing, you have to replace it with a better thing. And so finding a better love, like something

00:40:22.600 you love more than you love yourself is just the way to do that.

00:40:26.320 Let's talk about the last commitment, which is to community. You mentioned earlier that you think

00:40:31.100 that the rebuilding community is probably the great challenge of my generation. What for you,

00:40:37.680 what does an ideal community look like to you?

00:40:40.500 There was a book by a woman named Jane Jacobs, which was written somewhere around 1962, called

00:40:45.180 The Death and Life of Great American Cities. And she lived in Greenwich Village in New York,

00:40:49.800 in a little community, a little neighborhood there, which was then a middle-class neighborhood.

00:40:53.520 Now it's really rich, but back then it was middle-class.

00:40:55.560 And she was looking out her street, at her street from her second story window.

00:41:00.740 And she realized that her street was like a ballet, that early in the day that people picking up the

00:41:06.440 trash would come by, then the people would taking their kids off to school would come by, then the

00:41:11.260 shopkeepers would open their shops. And it was like all this movement on the block. And there was

00:41:16.660 always something happening, teenagers hanging out, people heading off to the bars. And she said,

00:41:22.480 all this movement is just like a ballet. We're all sort of moving around each other and keeping an eye

00:41:26.880 on each other. And at one point, she's looking out her window and she sees a guy tugging on a nine-year-old

00:41:34.320 girl, pulling her to where the girl clearly does not want to go. And Jane Jacobs wonders, am I watching 0.68

00:41:41.080 a kidnapping? And she's about to go down and intervene. And then she says, oh, wait. And she sees that the

00:41:48.420 fruit vendor has stepped out of his store. The locksmith has come out of his store. Two other

00:41:52.620 people have come out. And she says, the guy didn't realize, but he was surrounded. And there were just

00:41:58.000 eyes on the street. We're all watching each other. We're all taking care of each other. And it turned

00:42:02.320 out to be only a dad pulling on his nine-year-old daughter to do something. But that's to me what a

00:42:07.440 community is. It's like a ballet, a collection of people who are moving together organically and

00:42:12.780 dynamically, but keeping an eye on each other and helping each other out when that has to happen.

00:42:18.780 And I'm afraid what's happened in our society is we don't have a lot of those dense places where

00:42:22.580 people live on a street and really can look at each other. We're locked in the privacy of our

00:42:27.180 own homes. And I don't know about your neighborhood, but in my neighborhood, if you went on to somebody's

00:42:32.600 home unannounced at 830 at night and knocked on the door just to hang out, that would be considered

00:42:37.880 an amazing violation of privacy. And so we've put privacy above community and sometimes work above

00:42:43.720 community. And so as a result, the social capital is much lower. And what I admire are people who

00:42:50.740 go out of their way to build community. And sometimes they do it by organizing annual dinners

00:42:56.620 or your book club or there are a zillion ways that, you know, you can have a whiskey club and that's a

00:43:02.480 fun way to have community. Community should be fun and not just like a chore.

00:43:05.940 Yeah. And definitely think it's going to be, it's a skill that has to be relearned because I think a

00:43:09.440 lot of particularly young people, they don't know how to do this stuff. Here's a pretty great example.

00:43:13.540 My mom, my parents still live in the neighborhood that I grew up in when I was a kid. And when I was

00:43:18.460 a kid, there was a very active mother's association. So there was Christmas parties,

00:43:22.340 Easter parties, 4th of July parades, Halloween parties. And then after all the kids my age

00:43:28.220 graduated and left home, that stuff stopped and it wasn't there for 25 years. And so my mom,

00:43:36.380 so they're all grandmas now, my mom and all her friends in the neighborhood decided we got to get

00:43:40.460 this going again. So they started the mom's organization again. There's these grandmas and

00:43:45.760 they're teaching these young millennial moms how to organize an Easter party or an Easter parade. 1.00

00:43:51.240 And like, they're loving it. And these, these young moms are like, we don't know how to do this. 0.99

00:43:54.640 We're so grateful that you're showing us how to do this.

00:43:56.880 That is great. I've never heard of anything quite like that, but that is fantastic.

00:44:00.820 They're just tricks people can do to build community. I have a friend who was in college. He's

00:44:04.680 probably 34 now. And he said, I've got a really good group of friends here in college. I'm

00:44:09.800 terrified. I'm going to lose them as we, you know, we drift apart in life. And one of his

00:44:13.320 professors said, well, start a giving circle. All of you put money into a pot every year and

00:44:18.540 every year get together for four days and decide where, where you're going to donate that money.

00:44:23.940 And the charity is sort of the pretext together to get together. But the reality is they are now

00:44:29.340 13 years out of college and every year they get together and they're walking through life

00:44:33.640 together. And so you got to invent something. There's got to be some technology of convening

00:44:38.040 that will pull you into community. But it's just a question of finding what your best technology is.

00:44:44.280 Does a person need to like have all four commitments in their life to have a meaningful

00:44:47.700 life? Or is it, it can just have one or two, or there's going to be, you know, one in one part

00:44:52.680 of your life and another part in your other life? Yeah. I mean, a lot of people never get married and

00:44:56.940 they're very fulfilled lives. So I would not say you have to have all four. And then sometimes

00:45:01.440 sometimes are in different phases. Some people really serve their communities. You know, they

00:45:07.800 work at the Y or do something later in life. And sometimes, especially if you have small kids,

00:45:13.440 that swallows up your life. So that's a commitment that swallows up a lot of time. But I do think

00:45:18.740 being committed to something all the way through. And a commitment is to me, the best definition of a

00:45:24.060 commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for

00:45:28.440 those moments when love falters. Because we all, you know, we all have moments where we're feeling

00:45:32.640 dry. We don't want to go to church or we don't really care about the, the mentoring program we're

00:45:38.260 in. But if you build habits around that thing and you just go by the habits, it'll carry you through

00:45:43.540 those moments. So I always say Jews love their God, but they keep kosher just in case, just because 1.00

00:45:49.360 the structure of kosher sort of pulls them through the moments when, you know, they don't feel the

00:45:54.860 presence of God and they're just going about their way. It's about instilling habits.

00:45:59.540 And you also talk about this in the book, create an environment where it makes those habits are

00:46:02.880 easier to follow through on. So have a community where you can, where you have that social pressure,

00:46:08.980 where it's just the normal thing to do. And you're going to do it because you're with those group of

00:46:12.780 friends that are doing the same thing.

00:46:14.500 Yeah. I mean, this is sort of the model of Al-Anon or anything else. Probably even your book club,

00:46:19.900 like, would you really read the book? But if you got to go talk about it with your friends,

00:46:23.560 well, I'll show up and read the book. And so with, and that's, I think people who are dealing

00:46:30.060 with addiction find the same thing, that they're really doing it because they, they care about

00:46:34.920 those people. They don't want to let them down and they want to set a good model for the people

00:46:38.800 they're in group with. And we're just such contagious creatures that if six people around

00:46:44.700 you gain weight, the odds that you're going to gain weight are extremely high. If they start

00:46:48.860 smoking, you'll probably start smoking. If they stop drinking, you'll probably stop drinking.

00:46:52.460 We're very, we think we're not connected creatures, but we're extremely connected to each

00:46:56.960 other.

00:46:57.280 Right. Plato says we're mimetic animals, mimesis. We copy others. Right. Well, David, where can

00:47:02.580 people go to learn more about the book and your work?

00:47:04.820 Well, they can go to the Amazon webpage to get the book. And then the community stuff, I've

00:47:09.480 got an organization at the Aspen Project called Weave, the social fabric project, and they can

00:47:14.060 go to weareweavers.org. And that's there they can learn about some of the most amazing

00:47:18.860 people I've met over the last few years who really are building community on the ground

00:47:23.700 level and leading really lives that I would love to copy.

00:47:27.460 Well, David Brooks, thanks so much for your time. It's been a pleasure.

00:47:29.780 Oh, thank you.

00:47:30.660 My guest name is David Brooks. He's the author of the book, The Second Mountain, The Quest for

00:47:34.460 Immoral Life. It's available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show

00:47:38.460 notes at aom.is slash second mountain, where you find links to resources where you can delve deeper

00:47:42.720 into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Check out our

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The Art of Manliness - November 24, 2021

The Quest for a Moral Life

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