which was to interview three politicians every day.

And from that much contact with politicians,

I can tell you they're all emotional freaks of one sort or another.

They have what I called "logorrhea dementia,"

which is they talk so much they drive themselves insane.

(Laughter)

But what they do have is incredible social skills.

When you meet them, they lock into you,

they look you in the eye,

they invade your personal space,

they massage the back of your head.

I had dinner with a Republican senator several months ago

who kept his hand on my inner thigh

throughout the whole meal -- squeezing it.

I once -- this was years ago --

I saw Ted Kennedy and Dan Quayle meet in the well of the Senate.

And they were friends, and they hugged each other

and they were laughing, and their faces were like this far apart.

And they were moving and grinding

and moving their arms up and down each other.

And I was like, "Get a room. I don't want to see this."

But they have those social skills.

Another case:

Last election cycle,

I was following Mitt Romney around New Hampshire,

and he was campaigning with his five perfect sons:

Bip, Chip, Rip, Zip, Lip and Dip.

(Laughter)

And he's going into a diner.

And he goes into the diner, introduces himself to a family

and says, "What village are you from in New Hampshire?"

And then he describes the home he owned in their village.

And so he goes around the room,

and then as he's leaving the diner,

he first-names almost everybody he's just met.

I was like, "Okay, that's social skill."

But the paradox is,

when a lot of these people slip into the policy-making mode,

that social awareness vanishes

and they start talking like accountants.

So in the course of my career,

I have covered a series of failures.

We sent economists in the Soviet Union

with privatization plans when it broke up,

and what they really lacked was social trust.

We invaded Iraq with a military

oblivious to the cultural and psychological realities.

We had a financial regulatory regime

based on the assumptions

that traders were rational creatures

who wouldn't do anything stupid.

For 30 years, I've been covering school reform

and we've basically reorganized the bureaucratic boxes --

charters, private schools, vouchers --

but we've had disappointing results year after year.

And the fact is, people learn from people they love.

And if you're not talking about the individual relationship

between a teacher and a student,

you're not talking about that reality.

But that reality is expunged

from our policy-making process.

And so that's led to a question for me:

Why are the most socially-attuned people on earth

completely dehumanized

when they think about policy?

And I came to the conclusion,

this is a symptom of a larger problem.

That, for centuries, we've inherited a view of human nature

based on the notion

that we're divided selves,

that reason is separated from the emotions

and that society progresses

to the extent that reason can suppress the passions.

And it's led to a view of human nature

that we're rational individuals

who respond in straightforward ways to incentives,

and it's led to ways of seeing the world

where people try to use the assumptions of physics

to measure how human behavior is.

And it's produced a great amputation,

a shallow view of human nature.

We're really good at talking about material things,

but we're really bad at talking about emotions.

We're really good at talking about skills

and safety and health;

we're really bad at talking about character.

Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher,

said that, "We have the concepts of the ancient morality

of virtue, honor, goodness,

but we no longer have a system

by which to connect them."

And so this has led to a shallow path in politics,

but also in a whole range of human endeavors.

You can see it in the way we raise our young kids.

You go to an elementary school at three in the afternoon

and you watch the kids come out,

and they're wearing these 80-pound backpacks.

If the wind blows them over, they're like beetles stuck there on the ground.

You see these cars that drive up --

usually it's Saabs and Audis and Volvos,

because in certain neighborhoods it's socially acceptable to have a luxury car,

so long as it comes from a country hostile to U.S. foreign policy --

that's fine.

They get picked up by these creatures I've called uber-moms,

who are highly successful career women

who have taken time off to make sure all their kids get into Harvard.

And you can usually tell the uber-moms

because they actually weigh less than their own children.

(Laughter)

So at the moment of conception,

they're doing little butt exercises.

Babies flop out,

they're flashing Mandarin flashcards at the things.

Driving them home, and they want them to be enlightened,

so they take them to Ben & Jerry's ice cream company

with its own foreign policy.

In one of my books,

I joke that Ben & Jerry's should make a pacifist toothpaste --

doesn't kill germs, just asks them to leave.

It would be a big seller.

(Laughter)

And they go to Whole Foods to get their baby formula,

and Whole Foods is one of those progressive grocery stores

where all the cashiers look like they're on loan from Amnesty International.

(Laughter)

They buy these seaweed-based snacks there

called Veggie Booty with Kale,

which is for kids who come home and say,

"Mom, mom, I want a snack that'll help prevent colon-rectal cancer."

(Laughter)

And so the kids are raised in a certain way,

jumping through achievement hoops of the things we can measure --

SAT prep, oboe, soccer practice.

They get into competitive colleges, they get good jobs,

and sometimes they make a success of themselves

in a superficial manner, and they make a ton of money.

And sometimes you can see them at vacation places

like Jackson Hole or Aspen.

And they've become elegant and slender --

they don't really have thighs;

they just have one elegant calve on top of another.

(Laughter)

They have kids of their own,

and they've achieved a genetic miracle by marrying beautiful people,

so their grandmoms look like Gertrude Stein,

their daughters looks like Halle Berry -- I don't know how they've done that.

They get there and they realize

it's fashionable now to have dogs a third as tall as your ceiling heights.

So they've got these furry 160-pound dogs --

all look like velociraptors,

all named after Jane Austen characters.

And then when they get old, they haven't really developed a philosophy of life,

but they've decided, "I've been successful at everything;

I'm just not going to die."

And so they hire personal trainers;

they're popping Cialis like breath mints.

You see them on the mountains up there.

They're cross-country skiing up the mountain

with these grim expressions

that make Dick Cheney look like Jerry Lewis.

(Laughter)

And as they whiz by you,

it's like being passed by a little iron Raisinet

going up the hill.

(Laughter)

And so this is part of what life is,

but it's not all of what life is.

And over the past few years,

I think we've been given a deeper view of human nature

and a deeper view of who we are.

And it's not based on theology or philosophy,

it's in the study of the mind,

across all these spheres of research,

from neuroscience to the cognitive scientists,

behavioral economists, psychologists,