David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche

David Brooks returns to Conversations with Tyler — live at 92NY — for a cultural diagnosis of America: why the young are at once the most rejected and the most productive generation, why smartphones and AI are ‘semi-kryptonite’, where audacity went, what made Buckley and Friedman great mentors, and why he thinks the country’s ills are moral and social rather than economic, and will heal through a cycle of ‘rupture and repair’.

Key ideas

1. America’s core problems are sociological and moral, not economic. Brooks reads youth despair, class-divided mortality, and political disintegration back to a lost ‘secure base’ — family, place, nation, and a shared moral order — that once gave people existential security. Fix the economy and you have not touched the wound.
2. The young are the ‘most rejected generation’. A slim opportunity structure (Harvard rejecting 96% of applicants; 250 internship applications to land one) manufactures mass rejection before social media is counted. The misery concentrates at the top and bottom of the demographic curve; the happy middle is the good-but-not-exclusive state school.
3. AI is a great tool but no threat to humanistic work. In Brooks’s daily first-hand use it is ‘pathetic’ for writing on culture, psychology, or morality, because it lacks understanding, judgment, emotion, and motivation — even as it solves formal problems that stump elite scientists. Like the smartphone, it is ‘semi-kryptonite’: harmful if it thinks for you, useful if it thinks with you.
4. Audacity has drained from the humanities. The self-confident ambition that defined Western art’s high points and 1970s film, rock, and New Journalism has been replaced by professionalism and commercialism; art’s real gift is a way of seeing the world, not new facts.
5. Nations, like individuals, recover through rupture and repair. Growth comes from passing through hard times, not around them; Brooks reads American history as recurring cycles of disintegration and renaissance and offers Putnam’s 1880–1910 recovery — cultural, then civic, then political — as the template.

Content

The most rejected generation

Brooks opens on the paradox Cowen sets him: young people are sadder than ever, yet more productive than any prior cohort. The bad news first — 45% of high-school students report persistent hopelessness, the share of young people with no friends is up fourfold since 2000, 36% report loneliness. His frame, borrowed from a student, is that this is ‘the most rejected generation’: the opportunity structure is so narrow that everyone applies to the same few schools and internships, so the rejection rates are enormous (Harvard rejects 96%; some students send 250 internship applications to land one) — all before counting the unreturned dating apps and unliked posts. The misery, he argues, concentrates at the top and bottom of the demographic curve. The untold happy story is the middle: the good, less-exclusive state schools — Penn State, Arizona State, Southern Methodist — where students have great friends, expect a job, and are simply in a better mood. His advice to the elite students he teaches is to stop deferring romance for activities and classes: choosing a spouse is one of life’s most important decisions and needs practice (‘a marriage is a 50-year conversation’; ‘love comes and goes, but admiration stays’).

Smartphones, sex, and semi-kryptonite

Why are the young having less sex? Brooks (to Cowen’s ‘you are such a boomer’) points to Jean Twenge’s ‘age compression’ — risky behaviours once done in ninth grade now delayed to twelfth — and chiefly to the phone, which removes the need to ask anyone out and normalises ‘ghosting’ over the learned skill of an honest breakup. Pressed on whether the phone is a ‘kryptonite’ so powerful it should shake his faith in human agency and liberal institutions, Brooks calls it semi-kryptonite: addictive by irregularly-timed reward (the next text, the next email), and genuinely harmful — he is persuaded by Jonathan Haidt that phone-free schools are happier — but not agency-destroying. His discipline: use the phone, and AI, to think with rather than to think for you.

AI and the limits of the machine

AI is the second kryptonite. Brooks ‘follows Cowen 15 yards behind’ on AI and thinks it generally great, but singles out one serious threat: a student who has GPT write every paper is robbed of an education, a ‘totalistic’ cheating worse than the creative old kind. On persuasion and craft he is sharper. AI is formidable in formal domains — he cites an astrophysics problem eight senior scientists worked for months that AI cracked in hours, and economists’ reports that it solves problems only elite economists can. But for his own work on culture, psychology, and politics it is ‘pathetic’, hoovering up ‘all the crap on the internet’ about love and growth; assigning it named voices (Piaget versus Erikson) screens out some of the pabulum, but he finds it basically useless for humanistic research — ‘great as a travel agent’, not a thinker. He is ‘unthreatened’ because he judges AI to lack understanding, judgment, emotion, and motivation; an OpenAI claim to be building a machine that thinks like the brain founders, his neuroscientist friends tell him, on our not knowing how the brain thinks. He declines even to test whether an o3-plus-Claude column could imitate him — partly afraid he would be impressed, mostly certain it cannot predict an idea he has not yet had.

The loss of audacity

From AI, Brooks turns to a column arguing the novel has lost its centrality. Dickens changed how Britain saw poverty; George Eliot supplied a moral structure as religion faded; a Tom Wolfe novel was a civic event. In an era whose public tumult directly invades private life — a great age for a Balzac — he sees no novel capturing it. The scarce factor, he says, is audacity: the 1970s films (Apocalypse Now, The Godfather), rock songs, and New Journalists (Wolfe, Didion, Thompson) were more freewheeling than a more uptight, professionalised, commercialised culture now permits. Cowen presses the counter-case — building AI is audacious, Trump is audacious, long-form podcasting is audacious — so audacity has merely migrated. Brooks concedes the point about the culture at large but holds the humanities have been ‘backfooted’. His deeper claim is about seeing: Ruskin’s line that for each thousand who can think, one can see; Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son, painted old and bereaved, gives ‘a new emotional experience’, not new facts; Picasso’s Guernica is an audacious act of defining how you will see war. That ambition to ‘shape your mind’, he thinks, is less encouraged now.

Buckley, Friedman, and the art of mentorship

Brooks appears as a character in Sam Tanenhaus’s Buckley biography: Buckley once considered making him editor of National Review. He was the wrong fit — a New York Jewish urban progressive’s son against a Catholic, pre-New-Deal magazine (Tanenhaus reports his Jewishness as a reason) — and in any case a neoconservative, not an orthodox National Review man. But Buckley was a ‘fantastic’ mentor: he discovered Brooks after a mean campus parody, hired him on the single test of whether he could write, red-inked his drafts (‘Come on, David, you can do better than this’), taught him the discipline of the news cycle, and then — the crucial gift — let him go. Brooks rates the letting go as the great act of mentorship, analogous to parenting, even though others felt betrayed by it. Milton Friedman, who demolished a young afro’d Brooks on televised debate, mentored him over dinners; meeting someone ‘so bright and so wise and rational who was outside the left’ was mind-opening to a Stuyvesant Town kid who had never met a conservative. Neither man could ever slow down or stop trying to change the world. Brooks’s own divergence from Friedman is methodological: he distrusts ‘assumptive models’ and is a Humean — reason follows the passions, and the act of perception is ~90% of thought, quick aesthetic judgments determining everything downstream.

The epistemology of the interview

Brooks covered the crime beat for Chicago’s City News Bureau (‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out’), where he learned the detectives were as smart as his professors and many criminals had simply ‘not thought something through’ — the man who robbed the McDonald’s where he worked; the jailbreakers caught eating in a restaurant window booth. Out of this he mounts a defence of journalism’s mode of knowing: the interview is as valid as the randomised controlled trial. His exemplar is a 1991 Moscow interview with a 93-year-old woman handing out sandwiches to pro-democracy protesters during the anti-Yeltsin coup, who had survived nearly every Soviet catastrophe — an execution line, a husband to the Gulag, sons bayoneted at Stalingrad, internal exile. His ‘brilliant technique’ was ‘and then what happened?’ The power is ‘living history’: social scientists give population data but never interview an individual; journalism’s failing is the reverse.

Neoconservatism, moral order, and what Trump gets right

Neoconservatism, for Brooks, is a specific ex-Trotskyist, City-College cohort (Kristol, Bell, Glazer) that accepted the New Deal, distrusted 1960s counterculture, and insisted a society cannot be analysed without analysing its moral fabric. He locates the loss of a shared moral order early — Lippmann’s warning (1955) that if right and wrong are set by individual feeling ‘we have left the grounds of civilization’ — and treats Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson’s The Moral Sense as touchstones for an order now ‘shredded’, its fumes all that remain. He is a ‘pacifist neocon’ and ‘conservative Democrat’ — the creed minus the belief that democracy can be exported by occupation. On Trump he holds ‘a certain idea about America’ (after de Gaulle on France): foolish and naive but rarely cruel — a standard by which the PEPFAR cut, USAID handling, and treatment of Zelensky are deliberately cruel. Yet Trump is ‘never totally wrong’ (USAID was badly managed; Harvard is too dogmatic; Europe underspent on defence); his fault is the doctor who answers ‘I’ve got acne’ with decapitation. The one thing he gets right, and why he is president: the story that the elites betrayed you — which Brooks, a self-described establishment member, concedes is basically true. He states flatly he will never say the term was worth it.

Rupture, repair, and the American renaissance

Asked what shock could revive the American spirit, Brooks rejects war and pandemic — they make countries uglier, not more united — and would rather see a cross-class anti-Trump mass movement forced to articulate its principles. His diagnosis runs through Bowlby’s ‘secure base’: the stable foundation of family, place, nation, and moral order has been destroyed unevenly, worst among working-class Americans (a ~15-year mortality gap by education; five times less likely to marry; 2.4 times more likely to have no friends). Recovery comes through ‘rupture and repair’ — Nouwen’s counsel to stay in the pain, Buechner’s distinction between being broken and being broken open — which he reads into his own divorce-and-loneliness decade and into American history’s recurring cycles. His Weave project rebuilds trust bottom-up through locally trusted ‘trust merchants’; his template for renewal is Putnam’s 1880–1910 recovery in three phases — cultural (the social gospel displacing Social Darwinism), civic (Boys and Girls Clubs, NAACP, unions, settlement houses), then political reform (FDA, Federal Reserve). On the fertility crisis he sees nothing short of religious revival that works. His next book is on motivation and conation: we overvalue intelligence and undervalue desire, stamina, and drive — ‘was that person a force of nature?’ — because, after Augustine, we are ‘primarily desiring creatures’, and what you desire is the most important thing about you.

See also

• David Brooks — guest; columnist and author
• Tyler Cowen — host
• David Brooks on Youth, Morality, and Loneliness — Brooks’s first CWT appearance (Ep. 42); the two-mountain theory and telos crisis recur here as ‘rupture and repair’ and ‘conation’
• Conversations with Tyler — the show