The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
00:43:01 · David Brooks
[00:43:01] S2: Yeah. Well, I just took a hike with Richard two days ago, so he's a very close friend of mine. I do think one of the beautiful things Richard has accomplished is to make sure this is not a zero sum game. And he emphasized this over and over again that what's good for males is not bad for females. Females. And that should be obvious, but Richard struggled to get the pub... Book published years ago because a lot of people had this zero sum thinking in their head. And I think the the crisis of masculinity is in part a system, as Richard says, where the schools are not designed for boys. But I think it's it's primarily that loss of purpose, that loss of sense that how do I express... There's a British philosopher named Shirley Robin Letwin who wrote a book about the vigorous virtues that we wanna be... We want people who are loyal to friends, tough on foes, dynamic, risk taking, courageous, brave. And these virtues, some of these virtues have been shoved aside in the effort to create a more compassionate society, and that's a beautiful effort. But people wanna be courageous. They wanna do things on behalf of some moral ideal that requires courage, force, strength, and frankly, self mastery. And I look at all the podcasters who are now like gigantic buff ripped guys, and they look like they swallowed a weight machine. And... But and... But that's discipline. It's something you can relate to, and I'm not a buff guy by any means, but you see why young men want that because it gives them something that's hard. And it fills the urge to self improvement. And we went a few decades by saying the things a lot of guys want, not all guys, obviously, those things are toxic or those things are bad or those things are aggressive and destructive. But they're they're aggressive and destructive only when used to serve evil ends. But to serve noble ends, the idea of self improvement, the idea of being aggressive, the idea of being strong, is something, we should celebrate and give people avenues toward. And just, you know, I hope I'm not violating privacy, but Richard has a a tradition of taking a camping trip on New Year's Eve, and it can get cold in that 10, nine degrees. And that's what... That's the kind of love of adventure that not only boys want. Girls want that too. And we...
00:45:28 · David Brooks, Scott Galloway
We've we've reduced the ways, young people can experience adventure, in part because of all the helicopter parenting. [00:45:36] S0: You talk about things around community and comity of man and care for your neighbors. I don't hear you talk about your own family a lot. And to the extent you're comfortable, I'd just be very interested to know we have a lot of young men who listen, a lot of new dads, a lot of new husbands. Curious, know, we're... Look, we're on the back nine, right? And hopefully we've learned some stuff that we can impart on other people, or share our mistakes so other people don't make the same ones. What advice would you have for new dads? And what have you learned about being a dad?
00:46:10 · David Brooks
[00:46:10] S2: Yeah. Well, I was like a lot of guys. I had trouble expressing my emotions. I think I felt emotions, but there was no highway between my heart and my mouth, so I didn't know how to talk about them. And I had a natural fear of them, I guess. And there's a moment that represents the way I used to be to myself. I I love baseball. I go to a of baseball games. I've never caught caught a foul ball. And I'm in Baltimore with my youngest son, and the batter loses control of the bat, and it flies into the stands and lands in my lap. And a normal human being, like, getting a bat is a thousand times better than getting a ball. A normal human being is waving his trophy in the air, my bat, and I'm high fiving everybody and getting on the jumbo time. I'm hugging people. I took the bat and just put it on the ground and just sat there. And I look back on that guy, and I see show a little moral joy. Show a little joy. Like, that's a great event. You should be celebrating in public, but I was so inhibited that I didn't know how to be emotionally open in public. And I went through a hard time after that. I went through divorce. My kids left for school, and I was living in a little apartment. I was lonely and fiercely lonely. And there's a saying that when you're in those hard times in your life, you can be either be broken or broken open. And if you're broken, you turn hard, you turn into a lobster shell, and nothing can touch you. But if you're broken open, you get even more vulnerable, and you stay in the pain to learn what it has to teach you. And what my pain had to teach me was that I was misleading my life by not living from the depths of myself, but living from the shallows. It was very easy for me to use glibness and reason to do fine in life without confronting the spiritual and in some
00:47:59 · Scott Galloway, David Brooks
[00:47:59] S0: way [00:47:59] S2: relational shortages and vacuums I created. And so I I did it the way I do it. I I read books about spirituality, and and I came to faith in this time. But mostly, I just became a lot more able to express my emotions, express vulnerability, and that can be an easy drug to express vulnerability, too easy. But I think I'm different, and my friends tell me that I'm different. I want my wife. We've been married eight years. She looks at earlier versions of me on video. She says, well, I wouldn't have married that guy. And so I guess my... The lesson is to, to become familiar with your emotional and spiritual life. And it will bring you greater pains and greater joys. But you have to do that either through spiritual practices. For me, it's in the case of spiritual reading. That's how I process. But it's also, through the process of deeper conversations. I'll tell you one quick story. When I was in between marriages, was dating, and I was talking to my daughter on the phone. And I asked her what she was doing that weekend. And she said, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm gonna meet my boyfriend's parents for the first time. And I said to her, you know, I'm a little nervous because I'm gonna meet my girlfriend's parents for the [00:49:15] S0: first
00:49:15 · Scott Galloway, David Brooks
[00:49:15] S0: first [00:49:15] S2: time. And in that moment, our relationship went from being adult to child to adult to adult. And we could talk about things that we... That as a parent, sometimes you don't wanna talk... Open up too much to your kids. But when it's adult to adult, you can open up a little more, not totally, but open up a little more. And that was a beautiful shift in our relationship that to be able to just be adults and adults together working through crap. And I found that was... That's a beautiful moment. And the overall lesson I would say is no matter what your age, it's never too late to change. People change, not just in adolescence, they change through adulthood. And and the emotional... The the transformation I needed in my life was an emotional one. [00:49:54] S0: Thoughts on being a good partner, good husband?
00:49:58 · David Brooks
[00:49:58] S2: You know, there's a guy named Tim Keller who wrote a book called The Meaning of Marriage. And he said, you get married, you marry this wonderful person. And about six months in, you realize that she's actually kind of selfish in some ways. And as you're making this discovery about her, she's making it about you. And marriage work when you realize, well, my kind of selfishness is the only selfishness I can work on. And he says, if you have two partners in a marriage who are working on their selfishness, then you're probably gonna have good marriage and not blaming the other. The other thing I'd say is who you marry is just tremendously important. And Nietzsche, who you don't think of as a particularly romantic guy, said marriage is a fifty year conversation. Pick the person you can talk with for the rest of your life. And so if you find somebody who you can talk on the phone with for four hours, that's a pretty good indicator. The second thing I'd add is that love comes and goes, but admiration stays. So stay with someone you admire. Pick someone you admire, and they will not let you down. And then the final bit of advice I give to college students in picking a marriage partner, which is to me the most... One of the most important decisions in life is there are three kinds of love according to the Greeks. There's eros, which is passion. There's friendship. And then there's agape love, which is selfish love. And if you're gonna marry someone, you should have all three kinds of love. If you just have eros, you have a hookup, but you don't have a relationship. If you just have Philly, a friendship, you have a friendship, but you don't have a romantic love. You should have all three. And so the bar should be pretty high. And and so that's some of the advice I give on making a marriage decision. I'm not sure anybody listens, but that's my advice.