Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor-intern, and this week I'm very pleased to be joined by David Brooks,

who is very well known as the New York Times columnist and whose new book is called The Second Mountain,

The Quest for a Moral Life.

We need more of that these days.

David, you're welcome.

Can you start by telling me what are these two mountains that you describe?

I mean, what's the sort of governing metaphor of your book? It's a bit of a narrative device.

It's really two moral systems.

But if you want to stick with the narrative, you get out of

school and you think there's a mountain, you're going to climb, you're going to be a teacher,

lawyer, doctor. You're thinking a lot about your career, whether you're going to be a success.

You're thinking a lot about reputation management. Are people like me? Do people think well of me?

Am I popular? And you're driven by the normal desires of the ego to make a difference in the

world and to see for people to see who you are and think well of you and so you climb that

mountain and you some people achieve success and then they find inevitably it's less satisfying

than they thought it would be and that was the case in my life or they fail and they're not on

the mountain or something happens that wasn't part of the original plan so they get a cancer scare, the loss of a child or something, which make the first mountain

desires seem trivial. And so they're down in the valley, and all of us spend some season in the

valley. And in the valley, they sink into themselves and discover deeper parts of themselves

than they ever knew when they were living out of their ego. And they realized they're ready for a bigger and more larger life.

And so they launch off on a second mountain, which is more about contribution, less about acquisition.

...