Peter. Michael. What do you know about a book called Bobo's In Paradise? I know that this is the

the book that made David Brooks famous. Yes. Or whatever he is.

Should we start out by talking about like the phenomenon of David Brooks? I think you have to. As

soon as this name comes up, it's like, okay, who's going to mention this first? We have to get

some stuff out of the way. Yeah. David Brooks is a Times columnist. Their house conservative.

Yeah. I sort of mentally and emotionally prepared for this episode by reading a couple of his

columns randomly selected. And then I drilled an imperceptible hole in my skull and poured

lukewarm water all over my brain. I mean, thinking about him as I have last month, unfortunately,

if you were putting together a list of the most influential thinkers and writers of the 2000s,

I think he would be probably in the top five. He apparently had phone calls with Ram Emmanuel,

who was at the time the chief of staff of Obama's White House once or twice a week, like a huge swath

of the American establishment, like looked to him for guidance of what they should be saying in doing.

Right. And I always wonder whether that is influence or whether he's just being sort of used as a

barometer. Right. He's just sort of there and people are checking in on him because he symbolizes

something. I mean, my sort of whole David Brooks thing clicked into place when I was reading his

bio. He's one of these boomers who like kind of brags about getting bad grades in high school. He's

like, oh, school really wasn't for me. But then I attended the University of Chicago, like immediately

upon graduation. He graduates in 1983. And then this is the thing that like made everything click

for me. He for the next year is a police reporter in Chicago. This is the only feet on the ground

journalism that he does. Yeah. Everything after this is just punditry. Right. He's like he's like a

political opinion have her. Right. So he just sort of like flits from thing to thing without any real

object permanence and without really gathering any like deep expertise on anything. Yeah. And

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