david: museums to see. charlie: isn't it great to have a huge appetite? that is what i say. i don't want anybody with a small appetite. david: you should have a bunch of opera stars. charlie: i was speaking to someone the other day about a memoir, who felt they had been stolen from having a big life. i thought, that's sad. a big life is not being a celebrity or having a lot of money. a big life is being connected to all that is possible. david: i had a journalist friend who asked a woman, what would you do if you were not afraid, this was a job interview. and the woman started crying. there are people held back by fear. including me. charlie: well, you get into things like marriage, responsibility, mortgages, career. david: i always tell my students, two thirds of you will be more boring at age 30 then you are now. people get happier. people's happiness is high in their 20's and then bottoms out at 47 -- which is called having teenage children -- and then it rises after they have gone away. [laughter] david: when people are older, they look at the world in a happier way. they look at happier phases. they don't look at the bad phases. i hope this is where i am, and you get to a certain age and you sort of know who you are. you can take a big risk toward the middle of life, or even toward the end of life, because you can see how it is all adding up. you have the resources and you are ready to take the risks. you basically have a ground of stability. charlie: so, you are taking risks? david: i hope so. partly, this election, i messed up big time by not knowing trump was coming. when something like that happens, you take a look and think, what did i miss about america? i am too much in the corridor. i have to get out. charlie: you mean the corridor between boston, new york and washington. david: i travel every week, but i am at a college here, so i am always in the bubble. i have to get out. the other thing is, i achieved way more career success than i ever thought i would, so it's time to take some chances on the spiritual realm, on the personal and emotional realm. charlie: let me come back to that. there is so much about trump to talk about, but you are willing to take chances on the spiritual realm. what does that mean? david: i went to a summer camp in connecticut for 15 years and i had a friend who was exuberance personified. he could not get through a sentence without clicking and whistling because he just had an inner life he just radiated. he died two weeks ago. i went to see him on what happened to be the day he died. he greeted death with such confidence and almost joy. he was a man of deep faith, and he said i am going to the kingdom. to have such deep faith and greet death that way. it not only animated his death, but animated his life. and he was a man who had gone to honduras a lot and been a counselor. a life of such selfless giving. into of us who don'talk microphones don't have that. i certainly don't have that. how do you get that? you see examples like that, and you think, what do i have to cut loose to get that, because that would be wonderful. charlie: you have spoken to that idea in other places. david: of course. it has been a lifelong passion, but frankly, reading a bunch of books about it or writing a book about it doesn't get you there. charlie: talking to someone who lived it. david: my joke is buying books about it -- like my book. but you have to get there with the direct contact with the people. you have to have an emotional connection. and a lot of us in middle-age hopefully become more open and, frankly, more feminine. the radical leap has to be within the realm of emotional vulnerability. that is lived out. charlie: part of this comes from the fact that you know that you have the skills of life, in a sense. you have skills that you can, as you say, you have a certain level of achievement and comfort. david: carl jung said the first half of life is building the outside world. the second half should be finding the cause, finding something.. i was an emotional idiot for most of my life. you try to widen your repertoire of emotions with relationships, music, literature. and suddenly, you are more emotionally sensitive to people, and you are hopefully braver and willing to be more vulnerable, willing to slow down. that is something that is challenging for me, but out of that comes a risk. there is a guy named joseph who said leisure is not having time to play golf, it is having your mind to slow down enough that people can access you. getting your brain slowed down at the right place is a challenge. charlie: a friend as he was approaching death, within days, said if i had only time, i would -- longer time, i would do nothing. and doing nothing is to expose yourself to all that is there, doing nothing is not having a schedule and ambition. david: inner formation does not always look like outer formation. my last book was based on the distinction between the resume and the eulogy virtues. we all want to be good at the eulogy virtues, be honest, honorable, capable of great love, but how you get there is sometimes a matter of passivity. another piece of great writing is on the sabbath, taking a day off. he said the sabbath is a palace in time. youdon't take a day off so can get better at work. you work because you want to climax your week at the sabbath. and that's done through abstention, by saying no to things. charlie: is this part of a conversation with students at yale? david: a bit. my class is about commitment making. my last book was too individualistic. i got something's wrong about in life. and characters in my book who i admired, eisenhower, dorothy day, were able to make awesome commitments to thinkgs outside themselves. that strikes me as the key to a good life. the argument in my class is you make four big commitments in life. to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. and how well you make and live out those commitments will determine the quality of your life. it is about how you make these long-term commitments. charlie: it's an ongoing learning process. david: to me, a commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters. you cannot think yourself into who to marry. you cannot think yourself into a vocation. i love being a journalist, or a sculptor, it is a process of love. you have to love your way into it because it is such a big stretch of time. you have to be in love to be a deeply loving creature. but then there are moments that sack. you have to have the discipline of community and craft. my craft, a surgeon has to has tools. in my case, i have a very bad memory. what i do is write everything down, and when i write a column, i sometimes have 200 pages of research material and notes, and my craft is i lay them out in piles on the floor of my living room, and each pile is a paragraph. i could have 14 paragraphs later crossed the floor. the process of writing is not typing on the keyboard, it is crawling around on the carpet and laying out my piles. sometimes when the ideas are flowing, i am writing notes to myself and that's the best part of my job. that craft of whatever you do disciplines our commitment. charlie: when you do that, do you know where it starts and ends, or do you think of it almost as containers, as in shipping, and how it ends up will depend on how it comes together. david: i need to see a geographically or it is just a jumble in my head. -- else it is just a jumble in my head. when you get the order right, the words will flow. if you get the order wrong, it's all choppy. and if you get it wrong, you cannot fix it. you have to start over. it's completely new. sometimes judges have a saying -- that opinion won't write. charlie: you could have a thought or opinion and when you sit down to confirm it, nothing comes out. david: they knew something was wrong. and you know you're wrong. it's about structure. it's not about fancy words. getting the structure right is the foundation. i do it on my floor. some do it on a wall. charlie: but it is about words in the end. yes, you get the piles right and you have the ideas in there, that in the end, you have a command of words. david: yes, but i'm not proust, i work for newspaper. another key -- i saw something online, and this is the lesson of my two favorite writers, orwell and cs lewis, never use a big word when a small one will do. both are some of the greatest stylists of the age. they wrote for radio, so they had to be heard. so they wrote great narratives. they wrote with great clarity. it has to be heard. but there is still artistry involved. orwell was a genius at the first sentence. there is an essay he wrote during the blitz when he was being bombed in world war ii, he wrote an essay and the first sentence was "high above my head, highly civilized human beings are trying to kill me." it's a good first sentence. it drags you write in. charlie: did cs lewis have a religious influence? david: he wrote the four love's which is a book i highly recommend. there are words in there -- you could be christian or not christian -- the definition of pride, of sin, of soul. the idea that there is a core piece of yourself that with every decision you make you change that core piece of yourself into something more wholly or more degraded. -- more holy or more degraded. you don't have to believe in god. he uses a secular language to describe parts of our moral architecture in a way that is so clear and commonsensical. charlie: but he had a real one-to-one relationship with jesus. david: he definitely became a christian, but it took him a long time to get there. for him, he wrote that it was a high longing and a lens through which he saw the world. he had a very writer's approach to faith, less ecstatic and more common sense. charlie: indeed. tell me back to what you referenced, how is your evolution taken place on the question of donald trump? because you have been very strong. david: right, i didn't take them seriously for the longest time. i knew there was dislocation and a coalition of the dispossessed in the country, but i didn't think they would turn their dispossession to him, just because i do think he answers any of their problems. charlie: do you know why they think he does? yeah, so, i think there are a couple of things going on here. one, people are into manners. they are attracted by revolutions in manners more than revolutions of policy. and he has revolutionized the manners of how you run for president. charlie: what do you mean? david: for the first debate, he had already insulted carly fiorina's face. rand paul says i'm not going to insult his looks, but i have a lot to work with over there. that is a way to run that nobody had ever run. charlie: it went to george bush. david: he took the style of professional wrestling and brought it to politics. and what he did, and i think the most egregious thing we have seen in the last week or two, is he has offered us a different and uglier form of masculinity, which a lot of people are drawn by and a lot of women are repulsed by. basically, we have a form of masculinity in our culture that i think we should be there he proud of. over the last generation, our ideal man combines traditionally feminine and traditionally masculine traits. to be successful at work but gentle at home. to honor the woman in your life at whatever she wants to do, but to be romantic at the same time. we are called on to be both male and female, and i think that is a wonderful way of idealizing what is a great goal for all of us. but trump eliminates that. he is pure masculinity, and his treatment of the world is as an arena where males compete and and women are objects, there as a body to complement the status of the man. to me it is a degraded form of masculinity. charlie: but the question ought to be raised does he mean what he says and does he say what he means? because, he has built in his own mind, i am the best, i am the best, i am the best. do you believe that? you have written for eight years about the supreme confidence of barack obama, a man with much less bravado and much less comfortable emoting. david: obama is as confident as trump, but he backs it up with actual knowledge and substance, and integrity, and humanity. charlie: he doesn't see the world as win-lose. david: he sees it as a conversation. sometimes to a fault. [laughter] column thatte a says he has a grace and elegance that is sorely lacking this year. trump epitomizes that. but obama's confidence is a not narcissistic. it is a believe in a set of ideas, whereas trumps is a belief in himself. charlie: and winning and losing. david: yes. and he has a heartless view and i am completely repulsed by him, to be honest. i have rarely been this motivated by a political figure in a negative way. partly, he is taking people who have taken economic lumps and telling them -- charlie: he is telling them i am your hero. david: it's authoritarian. they are all stupid and i can solve it, simply. and, you may not be thriving, but at least you are better than women or mexicans, or muslims. he is turning it into a form of bigotry. charlie: do you think he can win the nomination? david: it's hard for me to imagine, but i have been wrong before. for a number of reasons. his favorable-un-favorability rating is like 25-55 or 60. unfavorable, if you're unfavorable rating among women is 75, unless you turn minds, you are doomed. those unfavorable ratings among the total population have been there he stable for eight months. among women, they are rising. charlie: so, how did it happen? if he has all of these qualities or lack of qualities, and he is on the precipice of getting the nomination for president. david: there are two big things. one, there is a much discussed piece that the republican party was basically the party of the white working class. they spent 25 years harvesting their votes and offering them nothing. second, there is a slow building anti-political wave that has been building for 30 years. we live in a diverse country. there are two ways to do that. one is through politics, negotiation, compromise, which is unsatisfying. you do a deal, and have to listen to people you disagree with. that is politics. the other way is through force. you get a strong man to bully his way through. we have gotten sick of politics, and compromise. in the republican party, the willingness to compromise has become a sign of weakness, so the only alternative is force. there is a tolerance of an authoritarian personality type. charlie: it is almost as if he has become an action hero. david: yeah, every interview he does, he did an interview with us and the washington post, the transcript from the washington post, they ask him if he thinks african-americans are unfairly targeted by police, concept about which he knows nothing, so he starts talking about immigration. when we go into a talk show, or if you are a student taking a test, you're nervous if you have no level of preparation. but he is not nervous even if he is unprepared. most people buy a sofa with more preparation. charlie: my point is, does he know that? or is it that he would see the world in a different way. all those people who profess to be, his dislike, as jeffrey goldberg suggested -- and i realize we are talking about different levels of intellectual preparation, but this donald trump somehow think, look, all those people are supposed to be smart. and he says i learned a lot on foreign policy. i was in china. and sitting next to me was a man who was a very, very successful businessman. and he said i just know he's going to be different. i said do you know anybody supporting donald trump, and he said me. me. why? because he will get on the phone and say to vladimir putin, i am coming to see you. you say that will never get anything accomplished. he believes it does. that is a different way, and is neceessary. david: maybe, but the idea that you could get on the phone and somehow vladimir putin would see the light. i mean, do we think the state department is filled with idiots? problems are complicated. and the big problems of the world are not a question of one person coming to the table and being tough. they are structural. they are dealing with technology, globalization. charlie: the president has said i am more concerned about climate change than isis. david: they are both important. it's weird to rank them. charlie: but he said that. david: but climate change is a complex, structural problem. charlie: that's my point. that's why he said that. ♪ ♪ wereie: so, you think you wrong. as i say, i am out in the country every week, somewhere. somehow, somehow, i didn't see it coming, and i am not alone. a lot of us didn't see it coming. charlie: i don't know anyone who saw it coming. david: i am sure there are people now claiming they did, but in part because we had seen this kind of candidate run before. the party that nominated mitt romney, john mccain, bob dole, george w. bush, nominates a certain kind of person. suddenly, we get a black swan. nonetheless, there are a lot of trump voters out there. i would run into them, but i didn't take them seriously enough. maybe i was blinded by my own prejudices. i have trouble with the people who do vote for him. how does one regard them? i have some level of sympathy, because obviously, they have been dislocated by the economy. on the other hand, i think they are supporting a guy who is polluting the cultural atmosphere in which our kids are raised, with the attacks on ted cruz's wife and all that stuff. i think voters have to have some culpability for that. charlie: so, what happens if donald trump crashes and burns? do they believe, and what happens to their grievances? david: the grievance stays, and i have constructed a very optimistic narrative for the republican party, which is that the republican party party had grown obsolete. it had been imprisoned by reaganite categories, which were great for the 1980's. but it is 26 years later. donald trump was the agent of death for that old structure, and that old structure is never coming back. so, after what i hope will be a what thomas kuhn called a revolutionary period. after a scientific theorum collapses, you get all sorts of theories floating all over the place. eventually, one of them rises. intensebe a time of creativity. it will focus one two things: one, the segmenting of america and the disunity of the social fabric. the problem with the reaganite orthodoxy is you have all of these big problems, wage stagnation, inequality, and the republicans had no response because they didn't believe in government for anything. the future of the republican party will have to believe in government action because the structures require it. charlie: it is also happening around the world. as you said, in country after country, anxiety is challenging the liberal order. they support the national in france. this is a global phenomenon. david: if you like, democracies have been in retreat for years. i think it is the stress of globalization, the stress of technological change, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the rise of ethnic nationalism. all of this is making the world an uglier place. than it looked like in the 1990's. charlie: who is articulating the kind of idea or narrative, or structure that you believe ought to and may emerge from all we are going through? david: well, i am awake. if anybody has seen it, there was this guy named alexander hamilton -- a latino hip-hop artist -- he created -- my [laughter] david: my shorthand view is that there are two parties but three structures in movements in this country. there is a conservative movement that believes in limiting government to enhance freedom. a liberal movement believes in using government to enhance equality. and a third movement believes in -- started by hamilton and the which believes in using government to enhance social mobility, giving people the tools to rise. i still think the human capital agenda, not only giving people access to colleges, the giving them the emotional and psychological capacity to compete, is the big agenda. charlie: do you think that might emerge out of all of this? david: that is what i write about, i hope. i am not confident because the country has turned ethnic-nationalist. this is not my view. there are so many things we can do to surround people with loving relationships that would give them the emotional security to thrive and succeed, and we are, fortunately, graduating from a very economical view of human nature, which is that we all respond to incentives and tax cuts, to a more relational view, that we are primarily loving creatures and not thinking creatures. we are all emeshed. charlie: you sound like john kasich. there is no one articulating -- it is almost a third way, in a sense. it is what at hird -- a third party might have represented. it's a traditional definition between some sense of social responsibility and conservative fiscal policy that enables you to create the skills that enable you to prosper in a modern economy. david: if you don't have those relationships, it's very hard to exercise self-control, to sit in a school room and build a relationship with a teacher, to succeed in a modern workplace where computers are doing all of the non-personal stuff. therelational skills are key. i came across a study in a book called life reimagined by barbara bradley haggard. they did a study of all of the guys from world war ii. some rose to high ranks and some didn't. what explains that? you might think intelligence. it wasn't it. social class? physical courage? it wasn't that. it was relationship with the mother. people who had been given deep love by their mothers were capable of giving deep love to the men in their units, and therefore they rose. putting love at the center of who we are is a shift in the way we are thinking about social policy, which homo-economicus. i think both the right and left are making that shift. pope francis is making that shift. and that opens a wider array. charlie: relating family and social connections across the diversity of the globalized world, conservatism needs a worldview that is accurate about human nature. was there a key in your experience that unlocked this for you, or was it simply the progress of a curious mind? david: i hope it is the progress of a curious mind. i rarely have epiphanies, but i realize things in retrospect. charlie: as we often do. david: the story begins to make sense to me as i go through it. charlie: what story makes sense? david: the emotional opening i have been talking about. i wrote a book called the social animal about six years ago. charlie: and talked about it on this program. david: you are good for my books. the role of cognitive science shows it is wrong to think that reason and emotion are opposite. emotion is the foundation for reason. emotion is a value device, a motivational device. love is what motivates us in things. love is what motivates you to do well in your job. it motivates you to get through med school, through the marine corps. you have to think of humans in those terms. we will not always be motivated by incentives. charlie: coaches teach that. love your colleagues. love your teammates. love the game. david: and knowing yourself well enough to have the right desires. some of us think we want one thing but we actually want another because we don't know ourselves well enough. and surrounding yourself -- this is the commitment -- the willingness to fuse yourself with another person, with an identity. there is a quote i love from the author of "captain corelli's mandolin." in the book, there is a man talking to his daughter about his wife who is now dead. he says love is an art form. your mother and i had it. while we were loving each other -- i am sort of mangling the quote -- roots were growing into the ground. as the years went by, and as all the pretty blossoms fell from our branches, we discovered we were one tree, not two. and that is what you want when you are becoming a writer, a journalist, or in a relationship, or serving your city. you want to be so joined with that thing you love that the commitment is rock solid. cha ♪ ♪ charlie: the democrats. bernie sanders. no one would've predicted that as well. i am not sure where they would have gone other than some sense of -- or, how do you see it? how is it different from what trump is about? david: well, sanders is a more substantive figure than trump, for sure. that interesting to me this is also a product of the segmentation of society. we have to figure out what to do about it. sanders has a coherent explanation. charlie: which he has had for 60 years. david: it's like the hedgehog and the fox. the hedgehog knows one thing. that's sanders. the fox knows many things. that's clinton. there is consistency. it is interesting to watch these two styles. integrity.a man of and consistency. we have to think for all of our candidates, execution strategy. how is any of this going to happen? i am not sure any candidate solves it. i am not sure the primary solves it. how do you get 60 votes? charlie: you with think somebody running for president would have thought about it. that's what you would hope. it's like an empty vessel and people poor things into it, so what comes out as a campaign speech or talking points. some sense of understanding where the country is, what is in contrast and opposition, and how do you fix that. how do you go from poetry to prose? from campaigning to governing? david: i think what barack obama taught us is it's not enough to be good at politics. his policies were orthodox democrat policies. you have to have a set of policies that cuts across lines, a little from column a and column b. charlie: he thought he could prevail. he thought his own pursuit of bipartisanship would overwhelm the opposition. david: i think he had a genuine trans-partisan aspiration, but his policies were not trans-partisan. they were very predictable. there is a natural alliance between progressive democrats and evangelical christians. you could put together policies that would give each of them what they want in addressing poverty, and get 60 votes, but you have to be willing to step outside the orthodoxy of your party and say i am going to take a little from them -- charlie: but why wouldn't he? david: because it is very damaging. the people in your own party go crazy if you step outside. charlie: how do we change the politics? is it the nature of the people we are electing today because of redistricting? david: partly. the people who rise in congress have good donors and fundraisers. and they tend to be partisan. partly it is just leadership. but you have to have five people at the top of society, four congressional leaders and the president, and they have to say ok, this is over. we are going to cling together by the hip and walk through this. we are going to govern in a bipartisan way. charlie: it has to come from the president and the congress. do you believe that is possible with paul ryan? david: i do. he is a little trapped in the reagan era, but i think his aspirations are real. i think it's possible with hillary clinton. they have to do a lot more in private. we all believe in transparency and open government, but my friend says that government should do some things in private for the same reason village people should wear clothing. -- middle-aged people should wear clothing. you don't want to see everything. i think it's the only way to begin the term. the leadership can make the terms. charlie: here is one thing talking about sanders and trump. there is a deep passion embedded in the trump and sanders phenomenon for energy, magical thinking. is that a suspension of disbelief? david: trump has no agenda, trumsanders had no agenda that could be passed. we have been a society that, as deep to our bones, do you think your personal destiny is shaped haveck, or effort, we been more on the individual effort. we may be becoming more like the europeans, like sanders. charlie: i believe it's not just about the marketplace. david: then you are more on the side of the market place. charlie: where are you? overestimatek we that, but i think it is a great trait. charlie: i believe it's not just about the marketplace. it has to do with your ability and your initiative to change lives, and start with the people that are closest to you. changing lives meaning being open to the things you talked about. all the stuff you believe in terms of love and that there is a capacity to make a difference. david: we all know people who had every disadvantage but one person in their life with total rock solid faith and a set of standards. out of that, that develops confidence. extremely successful people often have one parent who is very problematic with conditional love and one who is filled with unconditional love. it is that weird tension between the two. i read a study years ago that if you look at people who are phenomenally successful in good and bad ways, or phenomenally ambitious would be another way to put it, and amazing percentage of them lost a parent between ages 9-12. security was taken away and they became hustlers. i tell my kids i have already faild them, because i am still here. charlie: let me talk about isis. we had this remarkable piece by jeffrey goldberg, which you and every other writer i know has praised. talk about that piece, what you saw in it, and what it tells you. it's the difference between a dog and a cat, and barack obama is a cat. david: dogs bound into situations, and cats hang back. charlie: so george w. bush? david: dog to the extreme and barack obama is a cat to the extreme. we have hit both extremes. charlie: you talk about their sense of self, what kind of community they reach out to, and how much of it is their own decision-making. david: i have a strange reaction to goldberg's piece. the first reaction was positive. i like the president more. he is thoughtful. there is a consistency. he looks for every reason not to take action abroad. but there is a reckoning with reality. but the disdain for the establishment and for all foreign-policy adviser thinkers except himself does smack of an unearned confidence sometimes. so, i do doubt that. that's like the worst thing to say in 2016, but i have come to be a believer that we need to fix the establishment. i believe in establishments. we have big problems. we need big institutions to run them. we need a good state department. charlie: so on the agenda should be reforming establishment. david: reforming institutions. our institutions are fraying. congress is the prime example of an institution that has frayed because the norms of behavior, the invisible codes have been ripped away. when i talk about trump as a revolution in manners, the reason we have manners, the reason we don't talk about each other's wives or talk about each other's looks, or call people losers and liars is it enables us to have a conversation. it enables us to be a community and be citizens together. if you rip those away, it's dog eat dog. to me, when he rips away the shrouds of those manners, it has reduced us to scorpions. restoring manners, codes of civility, decency, is the prerequisite for restoring institutions and standards of behavior. i sound like an old fuddy-duddy, but i go back to eisenhower a lot more than i used to, just a sense that politics is a competition in partial truths and you are trying to balance it. charlie: what has contributed to that? has social media, there is anonymity on one hand and an instant place to privately express your grievance, your anger, your protest, your differences, your criticisms, and there are no bounds. david: it may be deeper than that. media can be used, but egotism. if you have a basic humility or have been taught to value humility, you think there's a good chance you are wrong about some stuff. if you are told you have the truth by the short hairs, what do you need other people for? that is what we have. charlie: that's obama? david: well. charlie: you just said that. david: ok, fine. [laughter] charlie: i'm just trying to get you to articulate. david: it's not only obama. it's rush limbaugh. charlie: there is a vast difference between them. david: i agree. but i do think you -- the thing about democracy, and this is why politics is noble. it forces you to recognize the other people in the room. you may wish them away. you may think they are jerks. but they are in the room. charlie: but it hasn't worked, but that is the biggest problem we have had in this country for a while, the absence of people willing to compromise. ronald reagan said it's better to have a piece of the pie than no pie. right? we've lost that. everybody knows that. david: if we were attacked by canada we would get it all back. we need a hostile force to unify us. but it's a matter of technological skill. i knew a guy name richard darman, who worked for the first president bush. we would go to lunch and he would regale me with stories of craftsmen-like skill. there was a guy melvin laird who would go to the white house and there was a barbershop in the white house in those days. he did not have much hair, but he would go to the white house at 3:00 p.m. each wednesday. he didn't really need a haircut, but he would go. so it would say on the pentagon schedule, which everyone could see, that laird had an appointment at the white house. [laughter] david: he understood, those are the kind of tricky games. charlie: he tried to control the flow of information. he viewed that as power. his remarkable understanding on how power works. david: they were passing social security reform in 1982 or 1983, and it was going to hurt seniors. and the dean of seniors was claude pepper. and everyone had signed off on the deal except him, and they beat the hell out of him. he finally agreed. they march him to give a press conference. how you do that is a skill. execution is a skill. jim baker had it. charlie: we need more of this? david: jim baker had it. he had that skill of execution. and it's a skill -- charlie: lyndon johnson had it. david: it withers with disuse. passing a complicated piece of legislation with a bipartisan majority is a skill of execution. if you want an example, see spielberg's movie about lincoln. how do you reach that guy, reach that guy, it's that political deftness. and that's the nobility of politics. we disdain politicians for being dealmakers, but there is a craft, and nobility to it. i would say everyone is dumping all over the elites, but the people i know in government, the civil servants, they are in for the right reasons. the job is not that glamorous. charlie: i meet people today who come one television programs who are scared to death of being misinterpreted, that social media will be on top of them. it's one click or another. david: and we have seen people whose lives have been ruined by one mistake, a small mistake or a gesture. on the other hand, if you are in the world, and this is true for everybody, not just in the media, there is a lot of criticism out there. and if you don't let it affect you, it goes away. charlie: you have to realize that if you are in the public eye. if you can't do that, you will be terminally unhappy. you have also said that middle-age has been redefined. whatever that is. david: look at the three candidates we are talking the most about. hillary clinton is 68. donald trump is 69. bernie sanders is 74. they are running for their first term. longer.ife wais charlie: and we thought ronald reagan was very old when he ran in his late 60's. david: it used to be that in your 20's you got married, bought a house, had kids. now that happens in many parts of the country in your early 30's. we have a very unstructured world in our 20's. that is harsh now. there's unemployment. you're finding your identity. that period is underserved by instiutions. there is a company called rework that gives all of the people doing startups in starbucks a place to come work. that is coming into being to serve others. charlie: they believe they understand millennial's more than anyone alive. summer-campy.that's one big david: it is sort of summer-campy.that's one big shift. but if you are 54 -- i am hoping a have 30 years of active life ahead of me. charlie: and actually tables would suggest that's true. david: i hope so. i am trying to stay healthy. so, i can think i have a moment now where i can do 20 or 25 years of something substantive, satisfying, and maybe significantly new. so, maybe you think of another chapter. charlie: you chronicle these people who would write you. tell me jog my memory. you write about people who are in their 70's, and they were writing to you about the perspective they had at the time. david: i asked 5000 readers to send in essays and grade themselves on their lives looking back. they would give themselves b- for personal life. very few regret risks. but they divided their lives into artificial chapters. some people said ok, this was the beginning of a seven-year chapter. what do i want to accomplish in seven years? and then after another seven years, another chapter. most unhappy people let time dribble by day by day. making false bifurcations is a useful tool. i had a student who was a 40 year-old colonel, and every time he went to a new army base, he and his wife would say ok, let's have a personal retreat. what do we think of our parenting style? what do we think of our marriage? and they would write it all down and it was very useful. when you get older, there is you can cause yourself fewer problems. there is clear evidence that people get better at living. charlie: brooke astor said to me for a long time i cared about what people thought about me. now i only care about what i think about them. [laughter] david: there's useful advice on marriage. from a minister in new york. should regard your own selfishness as a core problem in a marriage. not your partners. your selfishness is the only one you can control. that's good advice in any relationship. charlie: great having here. david: always a pleasure. ♪ >> let's start with a check if your bloomberg first word news. in italian appeals court has upheld the conviction and prison sentence of the italian captain of the costa concordia crews ship. that capsized in 2012 killing 32 people. the captain has one final appeal to italy's highest court. alberta's prime minister says the return of 80,000 residents to fort mcmurray will continue tomorrow as planned. about 2400 structures were planned. schools will not reopen until september. democrats investigating the benghazi terror attack want to review the report before its release.