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

Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello David, thank you for doing this. Thank you all for coming.

I'd like to get your sense of where the world is today, conceptually speaking. So let's start with young people today. So there's plenty of evidence that younger people today maybe they have shorter attention spans, feel alienated, higher rates of depression. At the same time, it's almost impossible to get into a top school. You can be valedictorian from your school in Maryland, straight A's, perfect SAT scores, and maybe it's hard to even get into a good state school.

How can both of these things be true at the same time? Like what's the model going on here? So first, one of the things I've learned about young people is they love it when people of our generation generalize about them. They just think that's fantastic. So I guess I would say a couple things.

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (70 minutes, 13,751 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

No account needed, we create one from your checkout email. With credits it is 1 credit; packs start at 5 episodes for $3.49, and monthly plans are cheaper still.