Notes — David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche

Notes on David Brooks in conversation with Tyler Cowen — Conversations with Tyler (https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/david-brooks-2/), recorded live at 92NY, 20 August 2025.

Four questions [Adler frame]

Q1 — What is it about as a whole? A cultural diagnosis of contemporary America delivered through Brooks’s recurring instruments: sadness among the young, the addictive pull of the smartphone and now AI, a lost ‘audacity’ in the humanities, and a shredded moral order. The through-line is that America’s core troubles are sociological, cultural, psychological, and moral — not economic — and that individuals and nations alike recover through a cycle of ‘rupture and repair’. Along the way Brooks reconstructs his own political migration (Democratic socialist → neoconservative → ‘conservative Democrat’) and pays extended tribute to his two mentors, William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman.

Q2 — How is it argued? By anecdote, portraiture, and statistic rather than system. Brooks reasons the way he says he thinks — through perception and example (a Rembrandt painting, a 93-year-old Russian woman handing out sandwiches, a McDonald’s employee who robbed his own McDonald’s) — and is explicit that he distrusts ‘assumptive models’, siding with Hume that reason follows the passions. He offers hard numbers on youth despair and class-divided mortality, then interprets them morally. He repeatedly resists Cowen’s attempts to push him toward a tidy position (be a neocon again; endorse a war to unify the nation; score Trump on a ledger).

Q3 — Is it true, in whole or part? The statistics (45% of high-school students persistently hopeless; the fourfold rise in young people reporting no friends; the ~15-year mortality gap between high-school- and college-educated Americans) are cited as established and are broadly consistent with the public-health literature, though presented without pinpoint sourcing here. [?] His central interpretive claims — that phones and AI are ‘semi-kryptonite’, that audacity has drained from the humanities, that a lost moral order underlies the malaise — are argued, not proven, and he flags their contestability himself (he concedes Cowen may be right that audacity has merely migrated to building AI and to Trump). His self-report on AI’s uselessness for humanistic work is first-hand and honestly hedged (‘I use it every day’).

Q4 — What of it? A transferable stance on how to read a culture: refuse the economic-first reductio, take the moral fabric of a society as a real object of analysis, and treat recovery as a staged civic-and-cultural renaissance (his 1880–1910 template) rather than a policy fix. It also extends this speaker’s existing wiki material — the two-mountain theory and telos crisis of Ep. 42 recur here as ‘rupture and repair’ and ‘conation’ — and sharpens his distinctive claim that perception, not calculation, is most of what the mind does.

Glossary

Kryptonite — Brooks’s metaphor for a single technology that can so cripple human faculties (attention, agency) that it threatens the broader liberal order; he rates both the smartphone and AI as semi-kryptonite — genuinely harmful, but not agency-destroying if used as a tool to think with rather than for you. [§ On AI and audacity]

Audacity — self-confident creative ambition, the willingness to define how others see reality (Picasso’s Guernica, George Eliot, the social-realist novel); Brooks argues it has drained out of the humanities and been replaced by ‘professionalism and commercialism’. [§ On AI and audacity]

Neoconservatism — for Brooks, a specific mid-century cohort (often Jewish, City-College-educated, ex-Trotskyist) that accepted the New Deal but turned against 1960s counterculture and Great Society excess, and insisted a society cannot be analysed without analysing its moral fabric; he now calls himself a ‘pacifist neocon’ — the creed minus the belief in exporting democracy by occupation. [§ On the evolving status of neoconservatism]

Moral order — the pre-1960s sense that right and wrong are built into the structure of the universe (Brooks’s example: Martin Luther King’s claim that segregation is always wrong), giving people existential security and a shared basis for settling disputes; Brooks holds it has been ‘shredded’ and privatised, and that we are ‘living off the fumes’. [§ On the evolving status of neoconservatism]

Secure base — from attachment theorist John Bowlby: the stable foundation (parents, place, nation, moral order) from which people make ‘daring explorations’; Brooks’s diagnosis is that this base has been destroyed unevenly, worst among working-class Americans without marriage, job, or community. [§ On what will revive the American psyche]

Rupture and repair — Brooks’s model of growth: individuals and nations are remade by passing through a hard time rather than around it (Buechner’s ‘broken’ vs ‘broken open’); he reads American history as recurring cycles (1830s, 1890s, 1960s) of disintegration followed by cultural, civic, and political renaissance. [§ On what will revive the American psyche]

Conation — the faculty of desire and will, as distinct from cognition (thinking) and emotion (feeling); the subject of Brooks’s next book, on the premise (after Augustine) that we are ‘primarily desiring creatures’ and that what you desire, not how intelligent you are, is the most important thing about you. [§ On what will revive the American psyche]

Epistemology of the interview — Brooks’s defence of journalism’s distinctive mode of knowing: sitting with one particular individual and asking ‘and then what happened?’, which he holds is as valid as the social scientist’s population data and, in cases like his Moscow interview with a 93-year-old survivor, reveals ‘living history’ that statistics cannot. [§ On journalism]

Key claims by section

On young people, sadness, and rejection [§ On young people, sadness, and rejection]

Young Americans have become markedly sadder: 45% of high-school students report persistent hopelessness; the share reporting no friends is up fourfold since 2000; 36% report loneliness. [?]
They are also the ‘most rejected generation’ — a slim opportunity structure (Harvard rejects 96% of applicants; students apply to 20 schools or 250 internships to land one) manufactures massive rejection rates before social media is even counted.
The misery is concentrated at the top and bottom of the demographic curve; the happy middle is the ‘middle-ring’ state schools (Penn State, Arizona State, Southern Methodist) — good, not hyper-exclusive, and less competitive to enter.
Brooks urges students to put relationships first and get ‘practice’ being romantic: choosing a spouse is among life’s most important decisions and needs rehearsal (‘a marriage is a 50-year conversation’; ‘love comes and goes, but admiration stays’).

On smartphones and sex [§ On smartphones and sex]

Following Jean Twenge, Brooks attributes delayed risk-taking (sex, driving, fighting) among the young to ‘age compression’ and chiefly to the phone, which removes the need to ask anyone out and licenses ‘ghosting’ instead of the learned skill of an honest breakup.
He is persuaded by Jonathan Haidt that phones are genuinely harmful — schools that ban them report happier students and teachers — but insists on preserving human agency: a phone, like AI, can be used to think with rather than to think for you.

On AI and audacity [§ On AI and audacity]

AI is powerful in formal domains (it reportedly solved in hours an astrophysics problem eight senior scientists had worked for months; it can crack problems only elite economists can) but, in Brooks’s first-hand experience, ‘pathetic’ for humanistic inquiry — it ‘hoovers up all the crap on the internet’ about love or growth. Assigning it named voices (Piaget vs Erikson) screens out some of the pabulum.
He is ‘unthreatened’ by AI because he judges it to lack understanding, judgment, emotion, and motivation; an OpenAI claim to be building a machine that thinks like the human brain founders, per his neuroscientist friends, on our not knowing how the brain thinks.
Audacity — the defining quality of Western art’s high points (Renaissance, Russian novels) and of 1970s film, rock, and New Journalism — has, he argues, drained from the humanities, replaced by professionalism and commercialism. Art’s gift is a way of seeing (Ruskin: for each thousand who can think, one who can see; Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son gives ‘a new emotional experience’, not new facts).
Cowen presses the counter-case: audacity has merely migrated (building AI is audacious; Trump is audacious; long-form podcasting is audacious), so its absence from the novel is a puzzle, not proof of cultural decline. Brooks concedes the humanities have been ‘backfooted’ but holds the loss is real.

On William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, and mentorship [§ On William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, and mentorship]

Buckley considered making Brooks editor of National Review; Brooks says a New York Jewish urban outlook was ill-matched to the Catholic, pre-New-Deal magazine (Tanenhaus’s biography reports his Jewishness as a reason he did not get the job).
Buckley’s mentorship: red-inked drafts (‘Come on, David, you can do better than this’), immersion in a glamorous world, and — the crucial gift — teaching the news cycle and then letting Brooks go. Brooks rates the letting go as the great act of mentorship, analogous to parenting, even though others he mentored felt betrayed by it.
Friedman’s mentorship came through dinners after a televised debate in which Friedman demolished a young afro’d Brooks; 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 Buckley nor Friedman could ‘slow down’ or stop trying to change the world; both kept at it until their last days. Brooks’s own divergence: from Friedman’s rationalist ‘assumptive models’ he is a Humean — reason follows the passions, perception is ~90% of thought, and quick aesthetic judgments determine downstream reasoning (his gloss on why so many neuroscientists are now phenomenologists).

On journalism [§ On journalism]

Covering the crime beat for Chicago’s City News Bureau (‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out’) taught Brooks that detectives were as smart as his professors and many criminals were simply people who ‘hadn’t thought something through’ (the man who robbed the McDonald’s where he worked).
He defends the interview as a mode of knowing equal in validity to the randomised controlled trial: his 1991 Moscow interview with a 93-year-old survivor of nearly every Soviet catastrophe, encountered handing out sandwiches to pro-democracy protesters, is his exemplar of ‘living history’. His frustration with social scientists: they give population data but never interview an individual; journalism’s failing is the reverse.

On the evolving status of neoconservatism [§ On the evolving status of neoconservatism]

Neoconservatism was a specific ex-Trotskyist, City-College cohort (Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer) that accepted the New Deal, distrusted 1960s counterculture and some Great Society programmes, and insisted society cannot be understood without analysing its moral fabric — a claim Brooks endorses.
He locates the loss of a shared moral order early: Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy (1955) warned that if right and wrong are set by individual feeling, ‘we have left the grounds of civilization’. Himmelfarb and James Q. Wilson (The Moral Sense) are his touchstones for a real, now-shredded moral order.
His remaining break from neocon orthodoxy: he roots for Obama and Biden, and — while agreeing regimes’ internal nature drives their foreign policy — rejects the belief that democracy can be exported by occupation. He styles himself a ‘pacifist neocon’ and a ‘conservative Democrat’ (‘the rightward edge of the leftward tendency’, after Isaiah Berlin).

On what Trump gets right [§ On what Trump gets right]

Brooks holds a ‘certain idea about America’ (after de Gaulle on France): foolish and naive but rarely cruel — a standard by which he judges the PEPFAR cut, USAID handling, and the treatment of Zelensky deliberately cruel.
Trump is ‘never totally wrong’: USAID was poorly managed (while saving lives), Harvard is too dogmatic, Europe did underspend on defence. But his method is a doctor who answers ‘I’ve got acne’ with ‘we’re going to decapitate you’ — taking things that needed reform (alliances, universities) and trashing them.
The one thing Trump gets right that explains his presidency: the story that ‘the elites betrayed you’. Brooks, a self-described establishment member, concedes the American establishment has betrayed large numbers of Americans. He nonetheless places Trump ‘way out of the American idea’ (securitarian, against pluralism as the country moves the other way) and states flatly he will never say Trump’s term was worth it.

On what will revive the American psyche [§ On what will revive the American psyche]

War and pandemics do not unify countries — they make them uglier; Brooks rejects the idea of going to war to save a culture. He would rather see an anti-Trump mass movement (on the Israeli anti-judicial-reform or Filipino anti-Marcos model) forcing its side to articulate principles and build cross-class civic structure.
Diagnosis via Bowlby’s ‘secure base’: the stable foundation of family, place, nation, and moral order has been destroyed unevenly. The suffering is class-distributed — Americans with only a high-school degree die ~15 years sooner, are five times less likely to marry, and 2.4 times more likely to report no friends.
Recovery comes through ‘rupture and repair’ (Nouwen: stay in the pain; Buechner: be broken open, not merely broken). Brooks reads his own divorce-and-loneliness decade this way, and American history as recurring cycles. His Weave project rebuilds trust bottom-up by finding the locally trusted ‘trust merchants’ in each neighbourhood.
His template for national renewal is Putnam’s 1880–1910 recovery in three phases: cultural renaissance (social gospel displacing Social Darwinism), civic renaissance (Boys and Girls Clubs, NAACP, unions, settlement houses), then political reform (FDA, Federal Reserve). He notes progressives and populists were once one movement (Hofstadter, The Age of Reform) and would benefit from being so again.
On the fertility crisis he sees nothing that works short of religious revival (‘make everybody turn Ultraorthodox Jewish’ — or Amish); it is driven less by money than by an abundance-of-options unwillingness to ‘miss’ anything.
His next book is on motivation and conation: we overvalue intelligence and undervalue desire, stamina, and drive (‘was that person a force of nature?’); after Augustine, we are ‘primarily desiring creatures’, and what you desire is the most important thing about you.

On the audience Q&A [§ On the audience Q&A]

On peak human intellect: in an age of specialisation the generalist has the advantage — the journalist’s craft of entering a field, finding its consensus, and comparing fields (economics to physics) is fertile, though it discourages taking idiosyncratic risks.
Brooks resists technological determinism: direct lived experience, not media (social or otherwise), changes behaviour — sexual mores shifted with the world wars, not 1960s media; the visible physical divergence between college-educated and working-class towns over the last decade is what produced MAGA.
On AI’s ‘objectivity’: he finds the models bland, hedging, and eager to please (‘too nice to me’) — a flaw, not a virtue. New York remains, for him, America’s cultural centre, though he concedes London may be the world’s most dynamic city.