YouSaid · the spoken record

David Brooks

lines on the record: 108
first: 2019-05-20
most recent: 2019-05-20
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So that's a case of somebody that's just what they want to do. They want to reach into the valleys and pull people up, and that's the joy they get.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what they do is they she takes kids, moms and kids, and puts them in eighth grade classrooms. And the kids, the students sit around the infant and they try to guess what's in the infant's mind because that's how they learn empathy. And one of the kids was bigger than the rest because he'd been held back, run through the foster care system, and he wanted to hold the kid. And the mom was nervous because he was so big, a little scary looking. She let this kid named Darren hold the baby, and he was great with the baby, nussled it. And then gave it back. He gave it back to the mom, and he asked questions about parenthood. And one of the questions was, if nobody's ever loved you, can you be a good father?”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think it's a life where you really have your ultimate allegiance is not yourself, it's something else. And the two mountains are really just metaphors for two different value systems. One is the value system that we a lot of us live in, which is about self. And the second value system, these people, these weavers I met, they're not driven by money, they're not driven by celebrity, they're not driven by power. And they want to live in right relationship with others, and they want to feel they're doing something good. And so another story, and one of my favorite stories in the book is about a woman named Mary Gordon who's founded something called Roots of Empathy.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decide what do I commit to? What vows do I make? And to me, a commitment is a promise made from love. And then the other thing I say about a commitment is it's falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters because love is always going to falter. And so Jews love their God, but they keep kosher just in case. They build a lifestyle around it. So I'm hoping just in myself and I'm hoping for others, just switch the lifestyle a little to really take time and work on the stuff you've been talking about these years.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And dinners. So that way life is better. So I don't want to go back to deference to authority. I want to go into a culture where we really commit to each other, where we say, what are the big promises in my life? What have I made promises to? And an ethos built on, I'm going to really”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want to go back. We're not going to go back to the 1950s, nor should we. It was unfair society. It was a really boring society. The food was terrible.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm an important part of a healthy organization. Everybody in the organization knows how they're connected to the mission. Yes. And that is not always happening.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Chukley's room, but then later the dad comes up to him and says, You didn't clean my son's room. And the first mountain response is to think, my job here is cleaning rooms. And if that's your mentality, then you say to the dead, I did clean your room, but you were out getting a smoke. The second mountain mentality is to say, my job is not cleaning rooms. My job is providing comfort to patients and their families. And if that's your mentality, then you go back and clean it again the second time so he can have the comfort of seeing you clean it. And that's what Luke does. And so we're all in a lot of daily.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So Luke was just cleaning rooms, and one of the rooms he was cleaning was a kid was in a coma that he wasn't coming out of, and his dad would sit there every day. And one day Luke cleaned the room and his dad was out getting the smoke.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Committing ourselves first to relationships. And that sounds easy, but we sometimes think life is quantitative how much But it's qualitative how thick. And so some organizations, the people have come in there and they're leaders of organizations and they make sure we have a moral mission for our organization. Everybody in this organization is going to know what it is. I'm going to really serve as a mentor serving you as the famous servant leadership. And it's how you do things every day. The one story I tell in the book I got from a book called Practical Wisdom. It's about a hospital janitor named Luke.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I walk in there the first day, introduce myself to a kid, and I say, I'm David. And he says, we don't really shake hands here. We hug here. And Bass Presley back then, I was not the huggiest guy on the face of the earth, but I've been hugging with them. And the problem, we all need second families. And we have our family, and that's great. And we need more families. And the problem was providing a home for all of us. And so we just have dinner Thursday nights. We throw our problems on the table and we share. And I took my daughter there and she said, that's the warmest place ever.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then you're looking for a problem. What problem grabs me? And I was lifted in my life by a couple named Kathy and David who had a home in D.C. and they had a kid in D.C. public schools and that kid had a friend who know place to stay. So they invited that kid over. And then another kid came. And by the time I went to dinner there, six years ago, for the first time on a Thursday night, there were 30 kids around the dinner table, dozens. Yeah, I love that story.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, first, I believe in books. I'm a bookish person, so I always have a spiritual book going. And that just keeps reminding me. And then you look for a social problem that captures you. And sometimes you are just.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I had a psychologist tell me the other day that I was asking about why suicide rates so up and depression in the young. And she said, a lot of my patients have a lot of different performative cells they send out into the social media world, but none of them are their real selves. And so there's like a crisis there. They have these personas they've created, one for Instagram, one for Snapchat, one for Twitter or whatever. But it's not the real self. And I really want to understand the core of this teenage depression and suicide mental health facilities and colleges overwhelmed. Something's going on. I confess I really don't.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think eventually it burns itself out like Instagram life is where you judge your life by aesthetic criteria. I'm having fun right now. Am I having fun right now? Can I put this on Instagram? Does this look good right now And after a while, it doesn't really add up to much, and so it's good. I'm not almost for getting together for brunch and taking selfies with your bloody Marys. But most people suffer a concept that was very prominent. Acidia, and that's the loss of desire. Like, your heart is not really engaged in your own life. Your heart is over here, but your life is sort of over there. And a lot of people are doing the run of brunch and getting drinks and going here and doing Pilates there and Bikram yoga there, but they haven't found a thing to devote to pictures.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I find people like loving stories, the stories of heroism, stories of people just reached out and did something ordinary. And so one of the things that we're lacking is to fight segregation, we had a civil rights movement, to fight environmental degradation, we had an environmental movement, we didn't have a connection problem, but we don't really have a national community movement. And so the people out there are a movement that doesn't know it's a movement yet. They haven't built the institutions, the common sense of ethos, the idea that we can all do this better if we do it together. And that's really what we're trying to do.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those of us Yeah, I think it's crazy we don't cover them. We in the media don't cover them because they are the main force in society.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I hope people are noticing. I've been around these amazing people for these weave things and I think I really feel The solution is out there. The people are out there and they're”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Always battle, and like if we enjoy in community by mutual love, we don't mind that somebody else has another mutual love that they have their community. There's plenty to go around, but tribalism is scarcity attack. And I think that's where we're in.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We've left ourselves naked and alone. And in those circumstances, we do what our evolutionary roots tell us to do. We revert to tribe. And tribe seems like community. It's a bonding. But communities based on mutual love, you and I love the same thing. I thought that was a good thing.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I live in politics a lot of my life, and it's just unpleasant a lot of the time. Readers are angry, politicians are angry, journalists are angry. We're just not very nice to each other.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some meaning at the person's life as infinite meaning. And so when you think we have a soul, and I know you've talked about this, then it's a short leap to think we all have a shared soul. And that there's a creator, we live in a created universe. And then that doesn't answer a lot of the questions you have, but it's a beginning.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's sort of been a lifelong, very gradual. Like some people have mystic like. A lot road to Damascus lightning. God says, Here I am, obey me and you have that. But I had a gradual, as a friend of mine put it, reality was more enchanted than the categories I had for it. And so, for example, we talked about souls. I was in Penn Station, which is in New York City, which is just about the ugliest place on the face of the earth, and the least likely year to have a spiritual experience. But suddenly I'm in these tunnels. We're all walking out of the subway. And I think all these people have souls. And they all have souls that are breathing in them and enchanted in them. And some souls are suffering in them. And so we don't even think about the depths of the reality. We inhabit every day, but life is more enchanted and magical than we assume it is. And when I'm doing my journalism and writing about others, or you're talking to others, it wouldn't be right to think, oh, I'm just talking to a bag of genetic material.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And when I first started working on this book, one of my publishers said, Oh, you're in a woo-woo phase, and maybe I am in woo-woo is real. This is the thing I've learned that the things that seem squafted and squishy, like spirit, those are actually hard and practical. That's the way we are.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And if they mention her, maybe I'll want to talk about it. Maybe I won't. But you've given me permission to do that. So that's like the little skills of how you communicate at the deepest levels, which frankly you've been doing your whole career.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right, but we've now had 60 years of that, and we've sort of run out the string, so we've got a lot of individualism. I'm free to be myself, but we don't have an ethos that encourages connection. And you've been a one-woman show on this, maybe. Like entering into deep communication is a skill somebody has to teach you how to do it. I was with a woman who lost a daughter and I never knew what to say in those circumstances. And she said, people often wonder, should they mention Anna in front of me? Because they don't want to remind me of something bad. And she said, they should know that Anna is always on my mind.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you lived in Chicago, you didn't say I'm from Chicago, you said I'm from 59th in Pulask. It was that little neighborhood that those were your people. But that culture had real problems. It was too stifling Tolerated a lot of racism, sexism, anti-Semitism. We had to chop that up and move to something else. And we chopped it up in the 60s. And we became more individualistic. I'm free to be myself. I just want to be free to be myself. And we needed to be.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I tell a cultural story. I think culture and our value is really shape us. So in the 1950s, we had a very communal culture. It was like we're all in this together. We got to get through the war, depression, we're all in this together. And that had some really good features.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even more incredible is that this teenage suicide rate is up 70%, 70%. And so all of this opiate addiction, this is all these deaths of despair are products of a world that's become detached from each other and there are people alone, people not being helped, people who distrust each other. If you ask people a generation ago, do you trust your neighbors? A generation ago, 60% said yes. Now it's 33% and 19% of millennials. The younger you get, the more distrust there is. So imagine going through life thinking, I can only really rely on myself.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what happened to me has happened to millions of people around the country. I'm not unusual. I got disconnected, and around the country, millions of people are disconnected. If you ask people how many times do you have meaningful conversation with your neighbors, only 8% say they have meaningful conversations with their neighbors. 35% of people over 45 say they're chronically lonely. Majority of people say no one really knows them well. The suicide rate is up 30% since 1999.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the most important relationship in their lives is at peril and they're scared and they try not to avoid risk. And it's just a punishing experience to be the subject of conditional love where you have to earn your parents' love. And frankly, there's too much conditional love in our society, the idea that we have to earn love. We humans love each other because of who we are.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To serving your kid and not making your kid the reflection of your own parenting skills. And I find, you know, I teach college and I find there's a significant number of my kids who are the victim of conditional love, that their parents love them, but they are anxious about them. And when the kid does something that the parent thinks will lead to success, the beam of love is strong. When the kid does something the parent thinks won't lead to success, the beam of love is withdrawn.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of people described them what kind of a very high standard. But, for example, I have a friend named Trabian Shorters who lives in Miami, and he ran into a lady who was helping school children leave the elementary school in the afternoon. And he said to her, do you have time to volunteer? And she said, no, I have no time. And she said, are you getting paid for this? And she said, no. What are you doing after this? I'm taking food to the hospital. I take it to the ill. He says, you don't think that's volunteering? She said, no, that's just being a neighbor. And so any of us, we don't have time to lead these really self-sacrificial lives, but we could invite our neighbors over for dinner when somebody comes out, moves in the neighborhood, we could have a barbecue for them. They're just little things that we could do. And if we all did a few little things.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As she's moving out, she looks across out of her window and sees some little girls playing with broken bottles at an empty lot, and she turns to her husband and she says, we're not leaving. We're not going to be just another family who left that. And so she Googled got volunteer in Englewood, and now she runs Rage, which is a big community organization there. And so she planned herself down in Englewood, and she serves her neighbors and her community. And so that's, to me, what a second mountain life looks like.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Second mountain is the service to one of those four things. It's the ultimate allegiance not to self. And so, for example, I'm wearing this pin, which stands for the weavers and people who are weaving our society together. And these are people who are on their second mountain. So for example, there's a woman in Chicago named Aisha Butler. She was living in Englewood, which is a tough neighborhood there. And she was going to move out because it was dangerous.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Four different categories of commitments, and most of us make to more than one, but sometimes only one, to a family and spouse, to a vocation, to a philosophy and faith, and to a community. And so some people just plant themselves down in their community and they say, I love my town. And I'm going to serve my town. I met a guy in Young San Ohio not long ago. He just stood in the town square and he had a sign that said defend youngstown. His town is facing some challenges. And so he just said, I'm living for Youngstown. And that's what he gives himself away to.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so, but so you get to the top of it, and maybe you get a cancer scare, maybe you lose a child, something happens that just carves you open. And then you go through this valley experience we've talked about, and then you realize Maoto Allegiance is not going to be to myself. I'm going to fall in love with things, and I'm going to serve those things. And I say it's about making commitments, the kind of commitment that Ruth made to Naomi in the Bible where you go. Your people will be my people where you die there, I will die, and there I'll be bitter.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Success doesn't matter. It's okay. You should fail, embrace failure from which you learn that if failure is okay, if you're JK Rowling, that seems a lot of people, failure.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first mountain is what a lot of us do. We get out of school. We think I'm going to climb this mountain. I'm going to be a cop, a teacher, a journalist, an actor, and that's going to mountain to climb. And you get to the top of it, and it's unsatisfying or you fail, you fall off, or something happens that wasn't part of the original plan.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a nice writing there. I work on these things. But pride is self-sufficiency, the thing I can be self-sufficient. And that's the way to make yourself invulnerable. But eventually you get to the top of your first mountain, your career's gone okay.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I always loved that. Yes. Because it suggests that we have the things we do for our genes and all that, but there's an extra layer to being human. And that is when you touch that layer, then you really have the, you go into yourself and then it's a highway right out and you begin to care. And then eventually people lift you out of the valley.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're at the beginning of that process. Yes. And I have a friend named Catherine Cox, who she said when my first order was born, I realized I loved her more than evolution required.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tell me about it. That's where the scary dark monsters are down there. But I think what you find, and this is why life is good. You find if you go down, there's a phrase I borrow from Andy Dillard. You find you're complex and illimitable ability to care for others. You found at the heart and soul level that you really have this capacity to be caring toward others if you would only give yourself permission to be open.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you don't know your why, then when the setbacks come, they're tough. And so I threw myself on my friends. But then, and this is about the wilderness and performance, I had to go alone into the wilderness, a sort of a social wilderness where there was nobody to perform for. And when there's nobody to perform for, your ego sort of crumbles because there's nothing for it to do that really matters. There's a saying the rabbis have, it's a story about Moses is out being a shepherd, and there's a little lamb that runs away and runs like a gazelle, and lambs don't usually run like cells, but this one did, and Moses had to chase it deep, deep into the wilderness, and the rabbis say that the lamb was Moses himself. You just had to go into the wilderness to do the inner work before you could come back.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they have no resources when the setbacks come. Nietzsche has this great phrase he was a why to live for can endure anyhow. And if you know why you're here, the setbacks come, you still have your vision on the far horizon He who has a why to live for can endure anyhow”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I would say any period where you've lost the thread of your life and any period where you, I feel that happiness often is when you have just a nest, a warm relationships, you have this family here, this thing you do here, you've got all this warmth in your life, and you can travel between them. But I didn't have that. And I had my kids, so that was a source of great warmth and support and love. But, you know, they were off going to college and doing their thing. And so I just felt what am I here for?”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and that's a vicious cycle. A bit of a performance. And that's not only people who have some celebrity, everybody sort of lives as performance. And so when you're in the seasons of suffering, first, I threw myself on my friends.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And this was not something I wanted to hear in 2013. And I just wanted to cure the problem and distract myself the best I could. But it turns out I couldn't. And the problem was avoiding my social life, but also reflecting a void in myself. And so I just hadn't done the inner work.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And that it carves into what he said was what you thought was the floor, the basement of your soul, and it carves through that, and then it carves through that floor, and it leaves these cavities below. And you see deeper into yourself than you ever thought you knew existed, and you realize that only emotional and spiritual food will fill those dark cavities. So you realize I got to find a bigger, larger life.”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm in the foothills of my second mountain, I would say. I'd say the thing that happened to me in the valley is that I find what suffering does is it carves into you and it reminds you you're not the person you think you are. And I came across a passage from this guy. That's”
2019-05-20 · Oprah's Super Soul · David Brooks: The Quest for a Moral Life · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source