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Conversations with Tyler

David Brooks on Audacity, AI, and the American Psyche (Live at 92NY)

Conversations with Tyler

Conversations with Tyler

Society & Culture, Education

4.8 • 2.4K Ratings

🗓️ 20 August 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

David Brooks returns to the show with a stark diagnosis of American culture. Having evolved from a Democratic socialist to a neoconservative to what he now calls "the rightward edge of the leftward tendency," Brooks argues that America's core problems aren't economic but sociological—rooted in the destruction of our "secure base" of family, community, and moral order that once gave people existential security.

Tyler and David cover why young people are simultaneously the most rejected and most productive generation, smartphones and sex, the persuasiveness of AI vs novels, the loss of audacity, what made William F. Buckley and Milton Friedman great mentors, why academics should embrace the epistemology of the interview, the evolving status of neoconservatism, what Trump gets right, whether only war or mass movements can revive the American psyche, what will end the fertility crisis, the subject of his book, listener questions, and much more.

Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video on the new dedicated Conversations with Tyler channel.

Recorded July 22nd, 2025.

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Photo Credit: Vladimir Kolesnikov/Michael Priest Photography

Transcript

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0:00.0

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University,

0:09.4

bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.

0:13.5

Learn more at Mercadis.org.

0:15.7

For a full transcript of every conversation enhanced with helpful links,

0:20.4

visit Conversationswithtyler.com.

0:26.6

Hello, David. Thank you for doing this. Thank you all for coming. I'd like to get your

0:31.3

sense of where the world is today, conceptually speaking. So let's start with young people

0:36.5

today. So there's plenty of evidence that

0:39.1

younger people today, maybe they have shorter attention spans, feel alienated, higher rates of

0:44.0

depression. At the same time, it's almost impossible to get into a top school. You can be

0:49.0

valedictorian from your school in Maryland, straight A's perfect SAT scores, and maybe it's hard to even get into a

0:54.9

good state school. How can both of these things be true at the same time? Like, what's the model

0:59.1

going on here? So first, one of the things I've learned about young people is they love it when people

1:03.2

of our generation generalize about them. They just think that's fantastic. So I guess I would say

1:09.1

a couple things. First, the bad news and then

1:11.5

the good news. The bad news is young people are tremendously sad. The number of high school

1:16.0

students who say they are persistently hopeless and despondent is 45%. The number of young people

1:21.4

who say they have no friends is up by fourfold since 2000. The number of people who say they

1:25.7

are lonely is 36%. And so I've been teaching in colleges

1:30.2

off and on for 25 years. And the good and the bad is that young people are very open about

1:36.3

their men health, which is good. But the bad is really in every room. And so for some reason,

1:41.1

I don't understand America, but especially young Americans, have gotten sadder.

...

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