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- [00:02]
A
From the Free Press this is honestly and I'm Bari Weiss. It's no secret that young men in this country are sort of unwell. They are four times more likely to kill themselves, three times more likely to struggle with addiction, and 12 times more likely to be incarcerated than women. If that wasn't enough, record numbers of men are not getting married, not even dating, not enrolling in school or working, and struggling as they never have before with serious mental health issues. In response, a cottage industry has emerged full of influencers and paid courses and podcasters claiming to teach young men how to become high value. What those people cannot address is the deeper challenge, which is that young people right now lack meaning. 58% of young adults say they've experienced little or no sense of purpose in their lives over the past month. Shiloh Brooks has an antidote for all of it. He's telling young men, but really all young people, to read. Yes, to read. The idea is simple. Reading great books can make you stronger and better and wiser. He knows he's facing an uphill battle. Reading for pleasure among American adults has dropped 40% in the last 20 years. In 2022, only 28% of men read a novel, compared to 47% of women. A 19 point gap Shiloh doesn't have the stereotypical profile for a lit boy, as Gen Z might describe him. He's from a very small town in Texas. He has a thick Southern accent. When he was a baby, his stepfather, an alcoholic, stole his mother's savings, leaving them with nothing. And he almost didn't go to college because he couldn't afford it until a generous neighbor stepped in. You'll hear about that in our conversation today. Shiloh Brooks is president and CEO of the George W. Bush Presidential center and a professor of practice in the Department of Political Science at Southern Methodist University. He has also taught at Princeton, the University of Virginia, the University of Colorado, and Bowdoin College. Shiloh's prescription is simple. He says great works of literature are entertaining, but they're not mere entertainment. A great book induces self examination and spiritual expansion when a man is starved for love, work, purpose, money or vitality. A novel wrestling with these themes can be metabolized as energy for the heart. When a man suffers from addiction, divorce, self loathing or vanity, his local bookstore can become his pharmacy. This is the driving vision of the new podcast he just launched with the Free Press called Old School, where he talks to guests about the books that have shaped their lives. Fareed Zakaria on the Great Gatsby Nick Cave on the Adventures of Pinocchio, Richard Dawkins on PG Wodehouse. Then there's Coleman Hughes, Ryan Holiday, Rob Henderson, and so many more. Because a book club doesn't have to be Chardonnay and Danielle Steele. This is one that I think will really, really elevate you. So here's what you'll hear today. It's a conversation between me and Shiloh about this project and how it addresses a generation of lost boys and men, followed by an excerpt from an episode that shiloh recorded with Dr. Cornel West. Stay With Us. Honestly is proudly supported by the Jack Miller Center. At a time when our democracy faces real challenges, one question matters more than ever. Are we preparing the next generation to understand and uphold the principles that define America? At the Jack Miller center, they believe the answer begins in the classroom. Their mission is bold, to revive the teaching of America's founding ideals, documents and history on college campuses, in K12 schools and beyond. Since 2004, the Jack Miller center has built a national network of over 1300 scholars who are bringing the American political tradition to life for students across the country. And through their Teach for Freedom campaign, they're working to reach millions more by 2026, our nation's 250th anniversary. Why? Because a strong democracy depends on informed citizens. The Free Press is really proud to partner with the Jack Miller center on Old School, a new podcast about how great books can change your life, hosted by the brilliant Shiloh Brooks. To learn more about their work or to get involved, visit jackmiller center.org Again, that's jackmillercenter.org Shiloh Brooks, welcome to Honestly.
- [05:00]
B
Thank you so much for having me.
- [05:01]
A
We decorated it specially for you. Yeah, I hope you notice. So for people that are not yet aware of you and I don't know where they've been living must be under a rock. You have just launched this new show with the Free Press that I absolutely love, and it's called Old School with Shiloh Brooks. Of course. But you came onto my orbit a little while ago when a reporter here called Franny Block pitched a story to me about a Princeton professor. And I have to tell you, when she first pitched it, I rolled my eyes. I'm like, why do I need to read a profile about a guy that teaches at an Ivy League school? But the more she explained it and sold it to me, the more excited I was. And I just want to read the first line of that profile back to you. Shiloh Brooks is on a mission to teach Ivy League students how to read something. That's kind of an amazing first line because you would assume that Ivy League students can read. But what you noticed and what you found among your students at Princeton of all places is that they didn't really know how to read. They kind of knew how to skim or maybe ask ChatGPT. Tell us what you encountered as a professor at Princeton and why that led you to teach your extraordinarily popular course there.
- [06:12]
B
Yeah, you know, one of the things I found at Princeton when I started teaching there was that the students knew how to read massive amounts very quickly and retain nothing. I equate this to. Have you ever seen those July 4th hot dog eating contests when the guys are like cramming hot dogs in their mouth?
- [06:30]
A
That is like the one appointment viewing in my family. Yes.
- [06:33]
B
Yeah. So that's what they read like. In other words, they take the books and they cram them in and they mean nothing. Or they've been taught to read books, to check boxes off on an SAT to like answer ABC questions and take this passage apart like it's a car and you know, strip it for parts and use it for the answers and move on. But I didn't find that those students knew how to let books sit with them. And so I wanted to teach them to slow down to read. Not for the sake of some end exterior to the reading, like getting a better grade or something like this, but because it's good in itself, because it makes you wise, because they can shape the arc of your life. And I think that is what resonated with them. It's odd to me, they had never been told that before.
- [07:19]
A
I went to Columbia, which has this Great Books core curriculum program. And the thing that strikes me now as an adult when I look back on what we were taught to do, is we were taught to dissect a sentence. Like all of the papers we wrote were about what was called at the time. I'm sure it has another name now. Close reading, like showing how smart you could be in picking apart literally, like a phrase you could write in a whole five paragraph essay based on that. It was very, very rare that the conversation even in a Great Books program would be about the meaning of the book and the wisdom you could bring to your own life.
- [07:57]
B
Yeah, I find that one thing people don't do today in higher ed circles a lot of the time is read with the heart. And by that I mean read a book or a passage and say, does this strike you as wrong or right, good or bad? Just or unjust, these sorts of things, rather than, as you say, how can I now immediately construct some kind of sophisticated argument like a sophist about this thing? And so I tried to teach the students, the first thing you ought to do is quiet your mind and read with your heart and let it settle on the heart and let it weigh on your emotions and see whether you're offended by this, whether you embrace it, whether it makes you want to cry, whether it makes you want to laugh, whether it makes you.
- [08:35]
A
But you would think that that would be the basis of higher education. When did that become like day class A? When did that become unsophisticated to read a book and think, how does this make me feel? Why did that kind of like close reading, Let me show you how smart I am tendency. Do you have any sense of when that became the norm and why?
- [08:57]
B
Yeah, My sense is that this has its roots in what I'll call the scientific of the humanities, namely that the humanities ought to look and proceed in their study like the natural sciences. So you're going to take this thing, you're going to kind of dissect it, use a book like Shakespeare as mere data or something of this kind. Whereas the humanities, as they're understood, in their kind of original instantiation, raise the deepest possible questions about human beings and what moves the soul. And so my sense is that the. Over. How would you put this? Scholarization or academization of beautiful literature castrates, neuters, sterilizes the power of that literature to affect the soul and makes it into something that's useful for producing scholarly papers in obscure journals, but not. That's useful for shaping a heart or a mind.
- [09:48]
A
So you noticed kind of this broad tendency when you arrived at Princeton. What year did you arrive there?
- [09:54]
B
I arrived there in 2022.
- [09:56]
A
Okay. And so you start this class called the Art of Statesmanship and Political Life.
- [10:01]
B
Yeah.
- [10:01]
A
First semester, 40 kids signed up, and in the second semester there were 250. And soon this class became one of the most popular in the whole university. In this class, you taught the writings of people like Xenophon, Machiavelli, Theodore Roosevelt, Sandra Day o', Connor, Frederick Douglass. Not five people you would necessarily put together?
- [10:22]
B
That's right.
- [10:23]
A
Why those five?
- [10:24]
B
Well, five is an interesting number. So one of the things I used to always tell my students is, I would rather you learn to read a few books well than many books poorly. There are many courses at this university where you will read many books, and by the time you're a senior, say, you Took that course as a freshman, you'll not remember anything you read. But if we study these five books with great care, such that they're inscribed on your heart, such that you can almost call to mind the page on which various passages we study comes up, that will be something that sustains you through life. So I wanted them to read a few books. Well, I chose those five books for a lot of reasons. I don't want to go on and on about it, but I'll say this. I chose Xenophon, who's an ancient Greek author. He's a student of Socrates because he's one of the most profound thinkers about the biggest political questions ever to have lived. He's also not someone people have heard of. And I wanted them to realize that there were wise people, sources of wisdom out there you don't even know about. This man was a great leader in addition to being a great philosopher. Imagine being just one of those things, much less both. I chose Machiavelli because he wrote the greatest book on leadership ever written, the Prince, which advises you to lie, cheat, steal and murder to get ahead. And I wanted them to feel what that meant. To say nothing of the fact that Machiavelli himself had read Xenophon and learned a great deal from him.
- [11:39]
A
Someone recently recommended that I read that book.
- [11:41]
B
In my new book, you Might be the ideal, you and me could maybe do a reading group together.
- [11:45]
A
Let's do it.
- [11:45]
B
On that Theodore Roosevelt I chose because he's a man in full. And by that I mean in addition to having been the President of the United States, a Vice President of the United States, Governor of New York, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, his collected works take up 23 volumes. He was a naturalist, he was a conservationist, he was a writer, a historian. I wanted the students to see what it meant to live a full life, not just a specialized I do this thing, but to love and wonder at the world the way Roosevelt does. O' Connor comes from a 200,000 acre ranch on the border of Arizona and New Mexico. She's the first woman on the Supreme Court. When she gets out of Stanford Law School, she can't get a job, so she works for the San Mateo Attorney's office for free.
- [12:27]
A
Free.
- [12:27]
B
When they ask her, how is your secretary skills? She said, look, that's not what I'm here for. I'll work for free next year. Secretary until such such times, you can pay me. She goes on to the court and she makes the biggest decisions. Swing vote on Bush v. Gore, on abortion cases, civil Rights cases, and then Frederick Douglass, because Frederick Douglass is the quintessential self made man. He has an essay called Self Made Men in which he talks about what it means to be self made, how to be great in this country. If you want to talk about greatness, he starts at the lowest possible rung. He was a slave. And over the course of his life, he rises to the greatest order in the country, rivaled only by Abraham Lincoln, who knew him and thought he was an extraordinary man. So I wanted the students to see the kind of distance that can be traveled.
- [13:11]
A
What was it like when they were only having to read These five people? What did you notice when their reading life slowed down?
- [13:19]
B
It was almost like. The way to. To describe it I describe to people is almost like a religious revival. Like, first of all, they started to show up in droves. Second of all, they started to laugh. A Princeton classroom, a lot of times it's pretty stiff. And the reason is you look around and you don't want anyone to hear you laugh or really anyone to know what you think because they might pass judgment on you and that might cost you something in the future. So everyone's like, real. And I used to tell them, God, you are stiff. Let's shake it up. So I would get in the class, I started to notice they were reacting to the books. They would laugh, they would cry, they would be offended. They would make jokes and everything just loosened up. And they would come to me on the last day of class, look me in the eyes, shake my hand like I had been. Like we had gone through war together and say thank you. I had never read a book until I got to your class. And what they meant was not that they had never read a book. They meant that they had never felt the fullness of what a book can do and be in the world. And that was what was so powerful for me.
- [14:24]
A
You said the following. I'm teaching more than just these books. I'm teaching a way of making sure your spirit survives the pressures that are put on it and that you remain a unique individual. I want you to connect the act of reading deeply with how that can be an antidote to the stiffness you're describing. In other words, kids at Princeton, from the outside, you would think you've made it, you made it to the top. But no, that's really the beginning of the playing of status games. How does reading puncture that or the way that you are teaching people how to read?
- [15:01]
B
You know, one thing about Princeton, I could have never gotten in there and Gone there myself. Those kids are prepared from kindergarten to get in there and they check all the boxes and they do all the extracurriculars and they get all the right grades. And so when they get there, they're all tremendously intelligent, but they're kind of, in my view, we're sort of carbon copies of each other. Everybody looks the same. There's a lot of conformity. Like I said minute ago, nobody wants to talk. And so, you know, I had not been from that world. And what I told them was I would stand up on the first day of class. And I've never seen eyes get bigger than when I say this. I would say, y' all are boring. Everybody in here is boring. Y' all are boring as hell. And it's not going to get any better unless you become interesting. And the only way you become interesting is to have ideas that are not your own. Boring, ignorant ideas. What that means is that you need to read people whose ideas have endured because they stand for something. You may agree with them, you may disagree with them, take them into yourself, fight with them, argue with them. There are so many thoughts that in your. And this is not your fault. You're 18 years old. Don't worry about being boring. That's fine. But over time, if you expose yourself to the best that's been thought and said, you can become a person who has novel ideas based in arguments that other people who aren't readers have never heard. Right. You need to have some rough edges when you walk into a room. Don't be an empty suit. There are too many empty suits in corporate America. Be a person of substance who, when you walk in, everybody there knows, first of all, you're formidable. Second of all, that you stand for something. And third, that you can defend it. And if you haven't exposed yourself to wisdom, to arguments, to ideas that you can articulate with precision, that make you different, that make people stand up and listen when you talk, then you're going to be a failure. And so getting into Princeton, as you said, is the beginning. It is not the end. On your tombstone, it should not say that you went to Princeton. Nobody remembers great people who went to the Ivy League, that they went to the Ivy League. What they remember is what they did. So go do something. Become interesting.
- [16:52]
A
Read these books you just said, and people will be able to hear it in your accent that you are not from the world of most Northeast kids that go to Princeton and are trained from kindergarten to get into school like that. And you say you couldn't have Gotten into a school like that?
- [17:08]
B
No.
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A
Tell us why.
- [17:09]
B
You know, I grew up. I was born in a town called Brownfield, Texas, which is in West Texas, kind of rural Texas. A lot of cotton farming and oil going on. My dad was a big drinker. He was an alcoholic. You know, he divorced my mom when he was 2. My mom was married four times in my lifetime. And I didn't grow up in circumstances where there was going to be a lot of promise for me, not a lot of money, not a lot of education and the kind of refined sense going on. It never occurred to me to even think about being a person who could read books for a living or share them with other people.
- [17:42]
A
And.
- [17:42]
B
And you know what changed my life was people started to notice that I, you know, I didn't like school. I'm not going to sit there and take your standardized test because that's boring. And I'm not a. I'm not a pleaser, I'm not a conformist. But what I will do is if you put a piece of literature before me, a piece of philosophy that's been written by somebody who stands for something, who writes beautifully, who argues persuasively for something. I'll sit there all day and read that, and people notice that. And I had a very kind and generous man from my hometown say, look, you've had a hard life. You know, it hadn't been great for you, but I want to do something for you. Because if I do this for you, I think you can change the world. I think you'll be great. So I'm going to pay for you to go to college. But you got to promise me that you will use the gift that I'm giving you to help other people. So that's what I did.
- [18:32]
A
The other thing I know about you, in addition to some of these critical men that guided you in your life, this amazingly generous doctor that paid your way to St. John's you also had a role model, an unusual one, maybe in your second stepfather. Here's how you describe him. A blue collar, red blooded rockabilly son of the 60s. He threw a football like a bullet while wearing steel toe work boots, faded Levi's and a trucker hat. He grilled meat over a fire built from wood he split with an ax and he could hunt and fish with a bow and arrow. He also loved books. Tell me a little bit about him and how he changed your life.
- [19:09]
B
Yeah, I met him when I was seven years old. He was the third father that I'd had. I'd had a biological father who was, again, an alcoholic. I'd had another stepfather who didn't last long. And then my mother married him, and they stayed married for 10 years. And when he came into my life, you know, I had. I had no direction, but I was young enough to be influenced. And he would go into work every day driving a forklift. He was a Vietnam veteran. He was an ensign on a battleship in Vietnam. And he came back home, and he bought an acoustic guitar. And he told me this story about going to see Joan Baez, and he was wearing his sailor whites, and he walked in with a bunch of other sailors, and they all got booed, even though they were there to see Joan Baez, because they were wearing their sailor whites, and it was Vietnam. But he goes with the money he gets when he gets out of Vietnam, and he buys himself an acoustic guitar, and he starts playing guitar, and he takes up a job as a forklift operator, moving cargo at an airport onto cargo planes. And that's when I found him. And he'd come home every night, and he'd go out in the backyard with me, and we'd do something awesome for a little boy. We'd fish, we'd throw the football, like, whatever. But then when the sun set, he'd go in, he'd take a shower, and he would either sit down with a novel, or he subscribed to National Geographic because he just wondered at the natural world, and his shelves were lined with these magazines. Or he would write music as though it were a poem. And he would sit down with me and he would read the song that he wrote, not play it with the music, just read it like a poem to me and say, you know, what do you think? And then he would talk to me about authors like Thomas Wolf, who he loved. He would talk to me about the history of aviation and Charles Lindbergh and what a man can do, that a man could fly, could make a solo flight across the Atlantic. Atlantic. He would talk to me about Hemingway and the history of the American West. And so to see a man who drove a forklift by day, who changed his own oil, who hunted deer, who cooked steak, and then who talked literature, that really sat on my heart, because where, you know, my previous fathers were not readers. And I thought, reading is not a manly thing. That's something women do. They sit and they read Danielle Steele, and they just, like, you know, that kind of deal. And I had never seen a man with a beard and a Miller Light take out a novel. And so that really gave Me, this kind of ideal, which I've tried to respect.
- [21:41]
A
Well, there is this caricature that reading is sort of a feminine thing. And one of the things that's pretty alarming when you look at some of the stats right now is that boys and young men really are reading less. In 2022, only 28% of men in America said they read a fiction book, read a novel, as opposed to 47% of women. It's 19 point gap. Now, you could argue maybe those men are reading other things, but I think we would both agree that there's something deeper going on there. Why are young men and boys not reading in America in 2025?
- [22:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right that they're reading something, but they're not reading good things. In other words, I suspect they do plenty of reading on the Internet, suspect there's plenty of trash that they're willing to ingest. But what they're reading are ephemeral things rather than enduring things. And one of the reasons they're not reading is of course, as everyone knows, there are techno addictive substances all around us in social media and on these sorts of things, video games and that sort of thing. But I think the other thing is that there's, there's, and this is a problem I'm trying to address. They don't see, as I didn't see for some time, men who read, they're not acquainted with, for instance, the fact that there is a great strain of male American literature that runs from Herman Melville through Ernest Hemingway, through Escott Fitzgerald, Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, that some of the greatest writers ever to walk this earth are men of substance and toughness who were also men of literary merit. And so I think they don't see their fathers read in school. They're not exposed to these sorts of things. You know, school oftentimes is today, especially K12, kind of bureaucratic, technological, learn things this way, take this test and do these sorts of things.
- [23:38]
A
Would you argue that it's more built for girls than it is for boys?
- [23:40]
B
I think that's, you know, in large part true. I think that that's true. And I think it's just, it's not fashionable to say what I'm going to say, which is that I'll take university life, which I'm most familiar with. If you go to the College of Engineering and I taught in the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado for six years, you will find, you know, a high percentage of men in those classes, you know, 70, 30, 90, 10, 60, 40. And that's something we lament and we say we need to get more women into stem. There needs to be programs and summer camps for girls to code, etc. Now, if you go over to the English department and you take Victorian literature, you're going to find 90% women in those classes and 10% men. Nobody says we need to have summer camps. We need to have, you know, classes, and we need to have male teachers who are they? Don't say that. But that's what I notice when. When you walk in my classroom, there are athletes. There are plenty of women, maybe over half, but there are plenty of athletes, ROTC guys, guys coming up to me who are just saying, man, I've never seen a man get up on stage and talk about literature in the way that you do. So I think those sorts of things are taboo, and that's part of our problem.
- [24:54]
A
One of the reasons to put my cards on the table that I was so taken by you the first time we sat down and why I was so excited when you agreed to do this show with us is because, quite simply, I thought to myself, a decade from now, if Shiloh Brooks is a more famous, widely lauded, and, you know, red person, than a lot of the male role models that are out there for young men today, we will be in a much healthier country. I look out at the group that you've called and others have called America's Lost Boys, and I see what they're gravitating to. It's people like Nick Fuentes, people like Andrew Tate. I mean, we don't need to go into these people and what they think. People, broadly, I think, understand how deeply troubling their views are. And I'll give you one example. Okay, I spoke at a few years ago at a small Jewish high school, an Orthodox school, definitely not the kind of place where you would imagine young men are watching a guy like Andrew Tate who brags about sexually assaulting women. And that's sort of the least of it. And the person that they wanted to talk to me about after I spoke was, have you met Andrew Tate?
- [26:11]
B
Yeah.
- [26:11]
A
What do you think about Andrew Tate? And I was like, holy. It was just such a aha moment for me in terms of, first of all, the idea that their parents would have no idea at all that that's what they're ingesting on the Internet, but that also they didn't seem to understand that he would even be taboo. They saw it as a kind of punk rock, countercultural thing. But not really more than that. So there wasn't really a sense of shame or taboo at all associated with being a fan or being interested in Andrew Tate. What do we do about that? What do we do about the fact that those kind of extremes are where young men are gravitating to right now?
- [26:50]
B
Yeah, I mean, I have a similar story to you. This will. This will be shocking, but I was at Oxford University. Think about this. Oxford University, the. The. The gestation point of Western civilization, with a bunch of Princeton students doing a summer seminar on ambition on great books. And they asked me, have you ever heard of Andrew Tate? And I said, no, I've never heard of him. And they played me some of his videos. I'm like, all right, I get this. It doesn't take long, you know, and that. And so, I mean, get that. That's a sickness, right? When it's coming at you from Oxford and Princeton and, you know that kind of. And you're like, what? What. Why are you guys talking to me about this guy?
- [27:24]
A
But what is it? What do you think? Like, let's steal, man. What is drawing people to that?
- [27:30]
B
Here's what I think is at least part of it. I've learned from a long study of the ancient Greeks that men in particular, all human beings, but men in particular are attracted to some vision of the noble. They want to do what's noble and be noble, and they want to be great and noble in the conventional sense. And the healthiest sense means that you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of something good. Right? That you're held up as a hero, as a person who gives of themselves in a strong way, whether you're a hero going into battle or whatever the case may be for a good cause, such that you're held up as a person of nobility and beauty. My sense is this, that those men hold up some false God of the noble, meaning they encourage a certain kind of indulgence of the appetites, which is a false sort of nobility and which shows itself to be a false kind of greatness. All the women, all the money, all of these things will make you happy. Whereas my view is that it's precisely sacrificing those things for something that's much deeper and more profound that will make you happy. And so I think that young men are searching for some vision of greatness in the noble, finding a false version of it in people who are peddling these things. When you know, the great books and great writers, Plato and whatnot, can point you in the direction of A genuinely satisfying nobility that will lead you to a kind of happiness that can't be fathomed by money and indulgence.
- [29:00]
A
Was the rise of people like Tate an inevitable reaction to a woke ideology, for lack of a better term, that told men, normal men, that they were toxic just for being men?
- [29:14]
B
Yeah, I think that that's. That's plausible to me. I can't say for certain, but that seems plausible to me. I think the other thing is, of course, that they were just. They're enabled by modern technology as such, that it. I mean, everyone knows this, right? That it incentivizes the most outrageous thing to, you know, that you can say. And so you get, you know, there's this famous video of. Of the guy we're talking about saying he doesn't read books. He thinks books are boring. Like, why would you read books when you can go out and conquer people and have sex with a bun. Women or something like that? I don't know that in his heart he lays in. And maybe he does, but that he lays in bed at night and thinks, yeah, that's good. Like, I did. Like, that's how I feel in my soul. And that. I don't know if that's what he tells his grandma, for instance. I don't know if that's what he. You know what I mean? And so I think that in a certain way, these folks are incentivized to say things which are totally outrageous. And unfortunately, young people, in their impressionability, believe they're sincere.
- [30:09]
A
You've also said that your class is. And the curriculum, the kind of things you teach, is also, in a way, an antidote to the anti Americanism that has run rampant on college campuses, especially elite college campuses over the past two years. We've seen displays that I think a decade ago would have seemed totally insane to us. The idea of college students saying glory to our martyrs, talking about terrorists. The idea of young students shouting death to America, ripping down American flags. Only 42% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 say they're proud to be an American, which is down from 85% a decade ago. What is going on here? Diagnose that for me and explain, if you can, how telling people to read Xenophon and Machiavelli is the antidote.
- [31:02]
B
So what's going on there, I think is probably a failure of education at all levels. I mean, there's a lot going on there. And so I don't. Again, I'm a good social scientist, and I don't want to Say there's one cause for all of our ills. There's a multivariable cause. But one of the causes that I want to. Want to isolate is a kind of failure of civic education and wholesale. So I'll tell you this. I'll give you a story. On October 7th, that fateful day, I was teaching a freshman seminar at Princeton. And our reading for that week was two books. One was Karl Marx's the Jewish Question. And I had coupled that with Elie Wiesel's Night. And we were going to read them together that week.
- [31:36]
A
And it was just happened to be that week.
- [31:38]
B
It just happened to be that week. It was on the syllabus in August when I designed it. So what I found in that classroom after those events happened and those books were on the syllabus was very different than what was going out on the quad. And that really opened my eyes. In other words, students were, first of all, immediately very interested in these books. And second, that these books were assigned meant that they were. And that they were apparently relevant at the moment meant that they read them with great care. And we went into that classroom and we had the richest, most edifying, elevating, civilized, deep discussions about this problem. And then we walked out, literally out of our door onto the quad, and people were doing all. So my sense is that there's a way to do this, even at the elite universities where the students, when approached with the proper gravity, can be assigned texts which will at least make them more thoughtful. The fact that this is not going on is a problem. I'm heartened by the following thing. At the University of Texas, University of North Carolina, University of Florida, Ohio State, there are some programs that are cropping up, the purpose of which is to introduce students to America's founding documents and principles, the great ideas of the west, and all of their richness and all of their disagreement. To try to expose students to ideas that might make them think more deeply and broadly about what they see. That this hasn't been going on, that special programs need to be created because the university was failing to do that is a symptom of an illness. I would prefer that those programs didn't need to be created because those scholars were in ordinary departments, et cetera, but they're not. So I think that people are starting to take notice. This is not going to solve all of our problems. You can't fix the world by reading a book. But nonetheless, the beginning of genuine liberal education, education that liberates the mind, that frees it from its convictions, that Makes you less boring. That's a good start.
- [33:41]
A
I hesitate to ask you this because it's probably hard for you to pick only three or four, but. But when you think about books that liberate the mind, books that every person that wants to not be boring should read, what are they?
- [33:56]
B
Yeah, So I think, you know, you can't not read Plato's Republic. Plato's Republic is probably the greatest book on justice ever written. It's, you know, what is justice? What do we expect from it, and is it realizable in the world? So I think any proper liberal education has to contain Plato's Republic. I think a book that really shook me and made me a more liberally educated human being is a book by an author who has been controversial for generations, and that is Frederick Nietzsche. I've written a book on him, but he wrote a book called Beyond Good and Evil, which in my view is the most scathing critique of the west from top to bottom, ever written. Nietzsche is the most profound critic of everything we hold dear, whether it's the Judeo Christian tradition, whether it's liberal democracy. Nietzsche has a critique of it. And I think if you're a person of substance, you need to meet your critics. All the things that I grew up loving, I was a patriot. We loved America. I grew up in a Christian house. Nietzsche said, guess what? That's trash. And I thought, look, if I can't come to terms with him, then who the hell am I? What kind of education do I have? So I think a book like that, I think you need to read some great literature. I think you need to meditate, especially as a young person, on love. Whether you do that through Jane Austen and a book like Emma or Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Plato's Symposium, books on love that give you. That make you begin to think more than just about kind of the super. I love Taylor Swift, but it gives an inaccurate picture.
- [35:27]
A
What's your favorite Taylor Swift song of
- [35:28]
B
what love can do and be? Probably Bad Blood. I think that's an awesome song, but it gives an inaccurate. Just like Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare is guilty of the same thing, although he wrote a book called Taming of the Shrew, which sobers one up about what love should be. But at any rate, I think you need to think about love. And then I'll say this. I think you should read.
- [35:46]
A
Wait, just pause for a second. What do those books. Middlemarch, Emma, et cetera, Pride and Prejudice, teach us about love that Taylor Swift doesn't?
- [35:54]
B
So there's a view of love that is in pop music and even in film, which is, it's going to feel like this. And it's very formulaic. Like, you see the guy and you, he's six foot two and he.
- [36:06]
A
And an arrow goes through your head
- [36:08]
B
and then it's like. And all your problems are solved and there's like, you can hear the angels singing and he's the one, and you're a soulmate and all this kind of thing. But anyone who's been married, anyone who's seen the kind of trials and tribulations of love, knows that that's a kind of false picture of it. And if you. And I find many young women in my classes who suffer from this. If you wait for that, that, and you wait for that, and you wait for that, you're going to be waiting a long time. And so what these books do is they acquaint you with your intoxicated hopes for love. First of all, like, first of all, you're drunk and you need to sober up. And second, here's what a healthier, more realizable and sober love looks like. And so I think that is very, very healthy for a young person. And I'll just say one more. I think you should acquaint yourself with American literature. The beauty of what's possible through good writing. And I talked previously. The books I recommended here have been about ideas, but it's important to see what writing can do and be F. Scott Fitzgerald is among the most beautiful writers ever to emerge in the world. And I think when students have a sentence that takes their breath away, when there's a phrase. We were reading the Great Gatsby yesterday and I, I pointed out to my producer that Fitzgerald uses this phrase to describe the night sky, the silver pepper of the stars. Imagine if you came up with the silver pepper of the stars. I mean, that's perfect. It's perfect. And so I think to have your breath taken away by an arrangement of words, all of which you know, but none of which you could have put together in that order is moving. And so you should do that too.
- [37:48]
A
Our colleague here, Neil Ferguson, wrote a really important essay. He usually writes about foreign policy and geopolitics, but this essay was about the thing you care the most about, which is literacy.
- [38:02]
B
Yeah.
- [38:03]
A
And it talks about how we're moving into a post literate society, how we're becoming like serfs of another time. He talks about how, you know, in the beginning there was the word and in the end there will be the emoji talk to me as we close out here about the connection between literacy. Not just the ability to like read a phrase, but to understand its meaning. The connection between the decline of that and the sort of unraveling politically and socially, I feel like all of us are seeing right now.
- [38:37]
B
Yeah. So I'll say this. The regime in which we live, liberal democracy, Democratic Republicans, premises itself on the possibility and the functionality of self government, meaning we govern ourselves. What that means is that we're required to examine a wide variety of arguments in the public square, weigh them on their merits, and then elect representatives who will carry out those arguments which to us are most persuasive for promoting the common good. That's why literacy is necessary. That's why you have to be able to think for yourself. And I know that's a motto here, it was a motto of ours at the James Madison program at Princeton. Think for yourself. And so literacy is the pathway to thinking for yourself. Thinking for yourself is the primary ingredient or necessity for self government. If we don't think for ourselves and we outsource the thinking either to talking heads or to AI, we're not governing ourselves anymore. They are. And so I think that's really important. I'll say one more thing. Principled leadership, good leadership requires, by necessity, curiosity. I'm now a CEO of a presidential library. I know you're a CEO and now even a more major leader than you were just a couple weeks ago. I work for a former president. That president, when he left office, had a. A reading contest with one of his closest staffers and he read 95 books. The staffer read 115. So President Bush lost. But one of the things that strikes me so much about him, and that strikes me about the leaders I teach in my classes, Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, is that they were widely curious people who, when the things came across their desk in positions of leadership, whether it was war today, tax tomorrow, healthcare the next day, needing to award a medal of the arts this day, whatever the case may be, they were able to ask questions and read up on it because they were well read, curious, intellectually agile individuals. That's necessary for good leadership. You look at a man like Abraham Lincoln, whose favorite books were Shakespeare, the Bible and the Greek geometer Euclid. That those three things would make the best president in the history of the country is odd. Those things aren't being taught at our schools. So I think that one has to be literate and curious in order to be a good leader, to deal with the wide variety of subject matter that come across your desk any given day. And if we fail there, then of course, this country will fail. So self government, principled and curious leadership, those are the kinds of things that literacy can cultivate in young people.
- [41:17]
A
Shiloh Brooks, thank you so much.
- [41:20]
B
Thank you for having me.
- [41:22]
A
A quick break and then you'll hear Shiloh Brooks in conversation with Dr. Cornel West. Needless to say, Cornel west disagrees with a lot of what we publish here at the Free Press, but that is what we're about. We are about thinking for yourself, listening to other points of view and making up your own mind. So I'm really excited to share his conversation on the Republic with honestly listeners. Stay with us.
- [42:04]
B
Plato shows us what would be required for the kind of justice that we hope for. Namely, it might be radical politics. The problem with those radical politics is that they themselves seem to produce injustices with which we are dissatisfied. What that leads to is not a perfect definition or solution of what justice is, but rather a moderation of our hopes for the justice we can realize in this world, given the political limitations of what we can do. I see young people chanting the words justice, writing it on the walls, screaming for it. It always and everywhere in all sorts of circumstances. I think that's good. But at the same time, our hopes for justice, that justice can be good for everyone when it's done, you know, Socrates brings this out. It has to be good for the doer and good for the person to whom it's done. It has to. You know, you want to help friends, but you may harm enemies. But then how can justice be harmful to people if it's good and you get into all these contradictions. So my question for you is, at the end of the day, when you see this imaginary city with all of its richness, but also all of its tragedy, what are we to take home about the question, what is justice from this bizarre utopia that's been constructed?
- [43:19]
C
Now, you're right. When the triple waves that he generates, the elimination of family and abolition of private property, and then philosophers being rulers, you know, he reaches the point where he says, look, I am so desperate when I look at the human condition that the only sense of being able to defend justice is to create a situation in which those who have access to the idea of the agathon, the idea of the good, those who have access to truth, or at least are interested in the pursuit of truth, they also should wield power. Plato's desperation leads toward him being a control freak. Surveillance, eugenics, infanticide, all the things that so many of us, if not all of us, view as unjust and immoral. He's wrong about that. But he's not caving into the Callicles and the Gorgias or Thrasymachus and the Republicans who are outright defenders of nihilism. And I think the message for young people these days is that you live in a culture which is so many ways a joyless quest for insatiable pleasures. You can gain access to any kind of titillation and stimulation, any kind of addiction and distraction, but your soul can still be empty, your heart can still be cold, your conscience can still be coarsened. See, that's what Plato's speaking to, even in 2025. Now, Plato also is going to argue that any society is going to have its mechanisms of censorship of control forms of education that will shape the souls of the young folk. And by souls we mean their fundamental orientations toward the world. But those of us who are committed to more libertarian and democratic social experiments, highly critical of Plato's authoritarianism, recognize that Plato is always that major skeleton in the closet with which we must wrestle with and come to terms, even if we disagree with his conclusions, because we agree with his starting point. Young people look into Socrates. We must look to traditions that provide us with resources to come to terms with meaninglessness, hopelessness, lovelessness, touchlessness, grinlessness. That's what nihilism lived is all about.
- [46:05]
B
I mean, you're talking about having to come to terms with Plato, especially for young people. I think that's true. One aspect of this book that always strikes me, though, is the, of course, famous Socratic irony. It's not obvious to me that Plato is an authoritarian, that he does recommend these things, or that that's not in some ways ironic, meant to show us something deeper about what justice is in the world and how it's deployed and what it looks like when we, you see, when we get it out there. So I hesitate myself to say this is what Plato teaches, primarily because Socrates claims not to teach anything and he only ever asks questions. And this is a feature that our listeners should be acquainted with. Socrates only asks questions. He claims that not to have knowledge. It's, in a way, his antagonists, the sophists who do.
- [46:52]
C
Plato is a catastrophic thinker. He's born during the plague. He's wrestling with authoritarian rule of the 30s. He's wrestling with elites out of control, but doing what, Engaging in the highest philosophic achievement, which is in many ways the Republic. And his 25 dialogue as a Critique of the highest political achievement, which was Pericles and Democracy. He's got a deep suspicion of the demos. Yeah, he really does.
- [47:21]
B
He does.
- [47:21]
C
Now Socrates is very different, his master is very different, because Socrates really doesn't have any positive alternative, he doesn't have any constructive. He says, I go about infecting others with the perplexity I have. That's what he says in Meno, right? That's my calling. I'm a midwife. All I'm doing is allowing things to be birthed. Whereas Plato, his student, comes along and says, I follow that Socratic spirit and energy, a sense of inquiry, but I've got a positive vision that my master doesn't have. And yet I do agree with you. He's so slippery and it's just hard to know where he lands in that sense. He's like Shakespeare. What does Shakespeare believe? Nobody knows what was Shakespeare's religion? Nobody knows what was his philosophy, where he carried Montanus, his back pocket, the floral translation of Montaigne, and the Bible on the other pocket. But what did he believe? We have no idea really. Hamlet doesn't speak for him, Lear doesn't speak for him. In the end, Socrates doesn't really speak for Plato. I agree with you there. There's an ironic distance again. Great artists, great literary artists. Yet we know he's much more constructive than Socrates, Socrates himself. You would agree with me on that?
- [48:42]
B
I do. I would agree with that. You've done a good job so far saying why this book is the cornerstone of Western philosophy. The Republic is that book with which every philosopher, worth any weight at all, reckons at some point, somehow, it is that book. It's the one book. It's the urtext of Western philosophy. Right. And so I'm curious why this thing continues to endure. Why should somebody pick it up? Because I think a lot of students would say, you know, this thing's 2,000 plus years old. The world has changed. Who cares about what some ancient Greek thought? And yet you and I are sitting here saying, the greatest minds to have proceeded after Plato for 2000 years all had to confront the Republic. Why is that? And why in 2025 should a young person sitting at home wondering what to do next, say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to stage a confrontation with the greatest book that intelligent people say has ever been written. How does it held that sway over us?
- [49:40]
C
We tell our young precious brothers and sisters of all colors, of all countries, of all sexual orientation, the religious and non religious identities Plato sets The scene of instruction for any philosophic inquiry, especially in the west, but I think in the world, what is the scene? The distinction between reality and appearance, the distinction between knowledge and opinion, the distinction between nature and convention, the distinction between philosophers and sophists, the distinction between a world that is recurrent, that is constant, what he'd call a realm of being versus a world of becoming as changing, drifting, flowing all the time. And you can take a position against Plato, he certainly takes a position in favor of reality and knowledge and philosopher and so on. And Nietzsche said, no, Platonism is one of the worst things that come along. But you want to flip the script, okay, Nietzsche, you're still on the same terrain that he laid out. No young person can come to terms with their lives, with what it means to be human, what it means to live a life from their mama's womb to tomb without wrestling with reality versus appearance. Things seem to be this way, but they're not. You don't say, I thought she loved me. She doesn't. I thought he. No, I thought that what the scientists said in 1900 was a nature reality. They changed their minds. They got better theories. Things are forever changing. But that doesn't mean, in fact, that there's not some reality behind the veil of appearance. Same would be true in terms of the struggle against Homer. I mean, there's a sense in which the Republic is the first effort for the Greeks to replace Homer as the source of paideia, the source of education. And what's going to replace it? Dialectics. What's dialectics? A sense of the whole. What is the sense of the whole? Philosophy. That love of wisdom, philosophia, emerges in Plato over against the inferior wisdom that he thinks is at work in Homer. So you get this wonderful clash of philosophy versus poetry. Well, that's going to persist up until this very day. You could tell the young folk, oh, I see. You listen to a little Kendrick Lamar, huh? Did you listen to Mortal man and his wrestling with Tupac? How come Tupac was silent? Tupac, how do you pass on the wisdom to the younger generation? Stops. Tupac. Kendrick, what are you saying? Everybody has to have traditions of education that allow people to draw a distinction between reality and appearance and knowledge and opinion, and be able to cultivate the capacity to love, not just wisdom. Because, of course, Socrates never cries, never sheds a tear, which means he never loved anybody.
- [52:34]
B
Right? Right.
- [52:35]
C
You had to get to the prophetic legacy of Jerusalem for that.
- [52:37]
B
Right.
- [52:37]
C
Love neighbor. Yeah. Jesus loved neighbor and enemy. That's different than love and Wisdom.
- [52:47]
B
The word of the day is dialectic. What does dialectic mean? It's something that we don't do enough of today. Maybe it's easier to define by saying what it doesn't mean. What it doesn't mean is you're sitting with a friend and you're holding forth and you're saying all the things that you think are true, and then they wait for a pause in the conversation so that they can say all the things that they think are true, and then you walk away. That's not dialectic. Dialectic requires listening. It requires asking precise questions, listening to your interlocutor's response, and then furthering the discourse on the basis of that response. So what you get with the dialectic is a deepening, a gradual deepening over time of a conversation by way of the reasoned exchange of ideas which respond to the specifics as they are exchanged. That's very different from what we do on social media, which is just shouting your view and then the other person shouts their viewers. But you engage in correspondence and exchange of ideas in pursuit together of the truth. Dialectic doesn't simply imply or require a clash. It's not a clash. It's not an argument. It's an attempt to come to some mutual understanding, to pursue the truth in steps. It's a collaborative effort, not a combative one. And I think we've sort of lost sight of that. Let me ask you this. You. You just mentioned the. The, you know, the. The way the Republic seems to venerate and show the superiority of the philosophic life.
- [54:26]
C
Yes.
- [54:26]
B
This is a. This is a. A canonical question. You know, Aristotle talks about the priority of the philosophic life and the political life or the life of the poets. We should talk. You mentioned, and I want to ask you about that because you strike me as somebody who lives the philosophic life in a certain way through their deeds, acknowledges its superiority. And yet you're a poetic man. You love music. And you mentioned earlier that of course, there's much music outlawed in the Republic, and I wanted to get your reaction to that. But more than that, I wanted to get you to evaluate this claim and tell people why Plato would say the philosophic life over and above the political and the poetic is the best way, because today, as young people say, you don't want to be too judgy. You don't want to say what's best. Is it better to be on Wall street, or is it better to go to a nonprofit? I hear Princeton students arguing about this stuff all the time. But. But Plato comes out and says, pursue the life of philosophy. It's the best way of life. Why is the philosophic way of life the best way of life? And how do you make sense of that in your own soul, given your well known and powerful attractions to poetry and music?
- [55:31]
C
Well, I can tell you this, my brother. I think one of the reasons why your courses at Princeton were the biggest courses and you won the teaching awards was that you recognized that the young people had to have some alternative, especially the young brothers of all colors. They had to have some alternative to the careerism and the opportunism and the hedonism and the narcissism that is so pervasive in contemporary culture. They want something deeper than that. They want something that's more real. They want it to be nourished by something more than just commodities and possession and spectacle and image and position and status. That's a human thing. Plato was making the same point thousands of years ago. 20, 25, same point. We human beings are constituted in such a way that we have a need to love and be loved. We have a need to have some sense of meaning. We have a need to get outside of ourselves and feel as if life can present to us ways of nourishing and flourishing. That goes far beyond money, which is to say richness measured in terms of what money cannot buy. Love, trust, faith, quality, relationship, friendship, sense of community. You can't buy those things. Yeah, all the money in the world, all the billionaires running around praying for, I pray for them because it look like their lives are so empty. They're not really rich in the way Plato's talking about.
- [57:01]
B
You know, one of the things that comes up, up these days, as you know, is that something like these classical authors and classics as a discipline is in utter disarray in my point of view, because people will say these. These authors have nothing to teach diverse peoples. Now, you obviously don't think that. And I was reading Martin Luther King's Letter from a Birmingham Jail in which he quotes. He mentions Socrates three times in that letter. So my question for you is, how do you see these classic books, classic Greek books in particular, animating the black intellectual tradition? And what would, since I think you and I are on the same page on this, your critique, be of those who say these books by old white pagans can't teach us our people anything. You seem to disagree with that. So how do you see the classic authors who I can tell are near and dear to your heart, fitting into that intellectual tradition.
- [57:53]
C
Oh, I mean, I wouldn't say they just fit in. I think that they are integral and constitutive in the same way that black life, black thinkers, black music is integral and constitutive of wrestling with what it means to be human. Anybody who engages in the fallible quest for truth and beauty and goodness and holy. Whatever tradition you come from, you're going to be grounded in your r o o t s, your roots. But the routes that you take to R o u t e s is going to be headed towards the most fundamental efforts to make sense of meaning in the world. That's variety. Different religions, right. Different philosophers. Within the west, that means you're starting with Plato. There's no way around it. I mean, what's distinctive about my own tradition of black folk is that, see, the best of what we have been able to do is to deal with 400 years of being chronically hated and yet still teach the world so much about love. Martin Luther King's love ethics and John Coltrane Love supreme, Stevie Wonders, love and need of love. We can go on and on and on. Same is true in terms of being traumatized. To teach the world about healing, terrorize. Teach the world about freedom for everybody, wrestling with the depths of sorrow. Teach the world about joy. Look at all the joy in Louis Armstrong. Look at all the joy in Richard Pryor. It's like the Bel Shem Tov in the Jewish tradition, overflowing with joy because Jews themselves hate hat, terrorized, traumatized. Teaching the world so much about justice, teaching the world so much about joy. Right? And there's a whole host of historic peoples who have made these kinds of. I'm just using these two examples of black folk and Jewish folk here. My God, we can go on and on with a variety of different cultures. Persians, Irish and so forth. Just in the West, I mean in the east and in the African indigenous people, peoples and so forth have their own very rich and deep traditions. But I'm thinking of myself as a black man born in Jim Crow America in the 50s. How am I going to make sense of the world?
- [60:03]
B
Yeah.
- [60:04]
C
And I have access to first, this black church and the west family, Ireal and Cliff. And I have access to the music, the Curtis Mayfields, the Aretha Franklin, John Coltrane's and Sarah Vaughans. I have access to American tradition of Faulkner and Twain and Henry James and Baldwin and so forth. And I have access to the best of the west, where we started before Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe and Beethoven and Schiller. Plato sitting at the bottom, but then Proclus and Plotinus playing fundamental roles. And of course, I don't want to downplay aristotle here and St. Thomas, but all of these folk mean so much. Why? Because they invested so much of their genius and heart and soul trying to make sense of the world.
- [60:52]
B
That's right.
- [60:53]
C
That's a beautiful thing. If I want to play the violin and can't say a word about heifers, I need to put the violin down. If I want to play the piano and can't say a word about Chopin or Art Tatum or Mary Lou Williams or Litz. Franz Lich, I got to put this piano, move away from the piano and picks up, maybe pick up the flute. Banned in the Republic. So you got to deal with the best, you know what I mean? If you go play basketball, you got to come turn Michael Jordan and back to Jay and LeBron and so forth.
- [61:26]
B
Yeah, that's a really nice way to put it. And I would only add to that that Plato or Homer, they're equally alien to you and to me now, based on our skin colors. That's not what I'm talking. I'm saying neither of us lived 2,000 years ago. That's true. Neither of us wears togas and walks around. Neither of us, as Achilles did, rages with our sword and shield.
- [61:49]
C
That's right.
- [61:50]
B
So you and I listen to the same music. We use the same phone, we read the same newspaper. We travel in the same cars. You and me, we got some life experience, commonality together. Despite our background differences, neither of us knows what the heck was going on with a sword and a shield in our hand on the battlefield, cutting men's throats and cutting off arms.
- [62:07]
C
That's true.
- [62:07]
B
So, I mean, no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, these books are disorienting. They are alien to you because they have a more profound axis of difference than almost any difference we could come up with today, just on account of the chronological distance that's passed. You know, they're pre Christian, for crying out loud, so.
- [62:26]
C
Exactly right.
- [62:27]
B
You know, I think in that way, they're great equalizers.
- [62:33]
A
Thank you so much for listening. New episodes of Old School with Shiloh Brooks drop every Thursday. Head over to his feed to subscribe and catch the latest conversations. Like bodybuilder and scientist Dr. Mike Isratel on Steven Pinker's book the Blank Slate, or meat eater Steve Rinella on Jim Harrison's Wolf. You can find this by searching for old school wherever you get your podcasts. Last but not least, if you want to support honestly, there's just one way to do it. It's by going to the fp.com and becoming a subscriber today. I'll see you next time.