she doped dropped out of college when she got pregnant. since she's raise 12 children, it's her time. >> i am very, very grateful that god has enabled me to do this. >> she finisher her first semester with a 3.5g pa. when she crosses that stage in may, she will be 102 years old. her granddaughter will be getting a degree of her own. sa hthank you for joining me today. smerconish is up next. finally liveing the dream. i'm michael smerconish in new york city.

my saturday morning weekly program is approaching its tenth year here on cnn. thank you for that. i can this a great privilege. i'm grate ful for all the regulr viewers. a quick story. back in 2006 after i was appearing regularly on cnn as a legal guest, the network told me they liked my work but didn't know what to do with me. do you have any ideas, i was asked. i do. i think the network brass were surprise d when i pitched my idea. hosting a weekly book club. i envisioned an entertainment show featuring author interviews and discussion of the best in journalism. the network was intrigued and decided to go ahead and order a pilot. we filmed it beginning with me back at home on market street in philadelphia. i remember being so nervous and having to do many, many takes. >> headlines plucked from today's newspaper. when you add in drama, when you add in a wisecracking whip, when

you add in a sexy, smart love interest, then you can gentlien transition from the hard news to the hard cover. i'm michael smerconish. welcome to book club. >> the greats best-selling novelist fwrashsly agreed to be my test guest. that show never made it to air, but 17 years later, a holiday gift, at least for me, welcome to my book club at least for one day. despite having a daily raid yea program on sirius xm and weekly television program on cnn, i like to say i read for a living. i have to know what to say. books are my passion. the interviews i enjoy the most are those with authors whose books have enriched me. i have accumulated many over the years dating back to my a.m. radio days. they are archived on my podcast. go there. you'll hear my interviews with everybody from hillary clinton to jeffrey archer, from arnold

schwarzenegger to jimmy carter. 2023 was a banner year for hi read ing. today i decided i would speak with five authors of books that made an impact on me this year. david brooks has been an opinion columnist for the "new york times" for 20 years. his latest book explores the most important skill for people to possess and lead happy, healthy lives. free speech advocate cowrote the coddling of the american mind. he's now back as a well-time follow-up. it's the canceling of the american mind. sheila johnson was the first female black billionaire. in her memoir, she recounts hardships she faced including racism, losing a child, emotional abuse and depression. robert rubin was the former secretary of the treasury. his latest is about what he's learned on how to make the best decisions in an a uncertain

world. and perhaps in complete contrast, robert is a ted talk phenom. he's professor of biology and neurology at stanford university. he argues in his latest book we really don't have any power to decide anything. but there's no such thing as free will. so welcome to the smerconish book club. let's dive in. one of the biggest challenges in today's world is the loneliness epidemic and lack of deep friendships. david brooks may have an answer. how to know a person, the art of seeing others deeply and being deeply seen, he writes these words. some days it seems like we have intentionally built a society that gives people little guidance on how to perform the most important activities of life and as a result a lot of us are lonely and lack deep friendships. it's not because we don't want these things about almost any other need human beings want to have a person to look into their face with loving respect and

acceptance. david brooks joins me now. is a regular commentator on pbs news hour and frequent analyst on npr. so great you are here. i like to think that i'm an illuminator. sometimes i'm a diminisher. >> i know you're persistent because you pursued a 17-year-old dream. i'm happy to be part of it. so they are people who don't know how to see. they don't ask you a question. the whole time, nobody asked me a question. 30% of humans are question asks. others make you feel respected and they can see the world from your point of view. the story i like to tell the is about a woman named jenny. she became the mother of winston churchill. but she's seated at dinner next to the prime minister.

she left that dinner thinking that he was the cleverest person in england. later, she's seated next to his great political rival. she leaves that dinner thinking she's the cleverest person in england. if you can make other feel cler, you have something going on. >> is it the hand you're dealt? or can people change? can i go from being an diminisher to an illuminator? >> i do it every morning. i'm a diminisher late at night when i'm tired. it's like athletic ability. we're born with certain levels of social skills, but nobody is good without practice. everybody can get better with training. i try to walk people through the process. how should we hang out casually, and then the biggest thing is how good are you at conversation. most of us are not as good as we think we are. so i just collect some tips on how to be good conversation theist. it's like talking in church.

yes, i agree, i agree. and i love talking to that guy. another one is don't be a topper. if you tell me that you had had this terrible flight on the tarmac for two hours. >> oh yeah, well my flight was four hours. >> it seems like i'm trying to relate, but let's talk about me. >> i was drawn to this book, your book, this year because i put it on as list and i'm going to put it on the screen. other books i associate and i hope you'll agree. robert's bowl alone. charles murry coming apart you and i both like the grant study with the good life. the whole thread of these books is about diminished relationships and the impact on not only mental health, but our national fabric. can we change all this. >> i'm very proud nbc n that company. those are really good books. so there's just something crazy happening in our social fabric.

so the rising depression, rising suicide, the stuff that gets me is the number of people who say they have no close personal friends is up four times since 2000. the amount of time we spend with friends is down 60%. the number of americans who rate themselves in the lowest happiness category is up 50%. it's a social disaster. it's hard to have a strong democracy. so i think we can change what's happened. we have to get good at these skills and knowing how to ask questions of each other. knowing how to disagree. knowing how to sit with someone who is depressed. these are just basic. >> here's the problem. there's a whole page in how to know a person with absolutely alarming statistics on mental health. some of it is probably known to the audience and some of it probably is not. i want people to buy and read the book. but how can we get to know one another if we're behind closed

doors on social media? that's not a substitute. >> there's judgment everywhere and ubsing nowhere. on social media, you're just performing. social media is a big cause for why we have seen the rise in depression among young people, but it's not the only cause. you mentioned another cause is less active in civic life. i have no data behind this and nobody has written about this, but we used to live more in extended families. if you had uncles and cousins, now we live in smaller families. so there's less social skill required. finally, the thing i focus on, we used to teach this stuff like how to ask somebody on a date. >> a date, what is that? >> how to ask for forgiveness. you look back at schools like 70 years ago. it seems corny like courtesy club, but it's useful. how to break up with someone without destroying their heart.

i teach college level. a lot of my students have had few romantic relationships. one said every time i have been broken up with the guy just ghost ed me. he didn't have the courtesy to say this isn't working out. i'm sorry. they just vanish. so she goes through life distrustful thinking the next fwie is going to vanish on her too. >> yes or no, is this book in part an argument for national service? >> absolutely. >> i thought so. the book is great. thank you for being here. up ahead, a am choosing to say these words and to host this program or is it all pred predestined. my next guest believes people don't have any free will. how did he reach that conclusion? what would be the implications?

do humans lack free will? if so, what are the the implications? is all of you are behavior beyond our control? that's the provascular ty theory of my next guest. robert who has studying humans and baa boons in kenya. his ted talk, the biology of our best and worst zefls, determined, a science of life without free will, it's a follow-up to his 2017 best seller and winner of los angeles times book prize behave, the biology of humans at our best and worst. if there's no free will, this has broad implications for society from career ss to our

families to the criminal justice system to what we're beginning to eat for lunch today. i chose or at least i think i chose to invite him on today's book club to discuss. robert joins me now. he's a professor of biology, neurology and neurosurgery at stanford university. he's a mccar thur genius grant winner. thank you for being here. what is free will, as you use those words? >> well, probably the best way to get at that is to first define what is not free will, because that's what most people operate on, which is this sbu intuition. i'm going to order a type of ice cream. you pick chocolate over vanilla. you consciously know you intended to do that. you know the consequences like lu to be they are going to hand you some chocolate ice cream. you know you had alternatives. for most people the moment of how palpable that moment of choice is, it's a pretty good stand for free will. it constitutes free will because

you had intent. and what nobody addresses in the realm like that is where did that intent come from? how did you become the sort of person who at that juncture would choose chocolate over vanilla, who would want ice cream at all, who would have the means to buy it, the whole issue is we can intend and pursue it baa bust as much as we try, can cannot intend to intend things different than what we do. that's because of biology that's made us who we are. >> maybe it makes sense for ice cream, but one person fires into a crowd. another person is in the crowd and is a victim. do you see them both similarly? >> absolutely. because all we are victim

perpetrator chocolate ice cream eater, whatever. all we are is the outcome of what came before and what came before that and what came before that. when we understand what makes for human behavior, we are nothing more or less than the sum of biology of which we had no control and the actions with environment over which we had no control. we arrive at a moment where we feel like we are making a conscious choice and indeed we are. but we are choosing based on the person that circumstances has turned us into being. >> wherein lies personal responsibility? >> well, the thing that really puts me out in the lunatic fringe is when you really look at this closely, personal responsibility doesn't make any sense anymore than feeling responsible for your eye color or responsible for like how many cells you have in your left kidney or some such thing. we are simply the outcome of our

good or bad luck, biological and environmental. when you look closely, blame, punishment, praise, reward, none of it makes any sense because none of us really earned the temperament that we have and the personality that we have and the vulnerabilities and the proclivities. >> let me look at it from a different angle. how about someone born into a life of distress who was a able to free themselves of that environment? disn't that at odds with your argument that we don't have free will? something about that person allowed them to escape the life for which they were apparently destined. >> exactly. in your wording, something allowed them. they did not choose to. they did not change their circumstances. their circumstances were euniqu enough they were changed in a way they could escape from what was the statistical probability

of their outcome. what we see here is the second realm of free will, yeah, there's stuff we have no control over. there's attributes that we were given that we were gifted, that we were cursed with. we are tall enough to play in the northbound, too tone deaf to sit in the opera, whatever. but what do you do with your i attributes? do you show tenacity, are you self-indulgent? that's where we make this grand canyon-sized leapfrog in deciding the traits that you have are biological or what do you do with it is made out of something warning gumption. >> one other angle. if you're right, there's no such thing as free will, then by rights, we ought to open the jails. >> we should open the jails.

we should open the corporate men's clubs also. i'm fishing for an equivalent here because nobody deserves to be in jail. nobody deserves to have a corner office. nonetheless, we have to have people running corporations and we need to have people taken off the street who were dangerous. and we need -- >> in the academic realm, i assume you're a mcarthur genius. you're the guy with the corner office. do you deserve tov the corner office? s was that not because of your work and intelligence? >> absolutely. uh-uh got the right genes. my parents traumatized me in the perfect right way. so that this was the outcome. i got sufficient protein at this point. i'm wearing the right color sock this is morning in terms of changing what i have to say. no, i didn't earn anything. you didn't earn anything. all we are is the outcome.

but still, yeah, we have to have dangerous people off the street, even if we don't hold them responsible. we have to have competent people taking out your brain tumor, even if we're not making them think they are a better human than others. but we can do this. we do this all the time. we subtract a notion of responsibility out of realms where we have to constrain some people, where we have to facilitate others. we can do it. for example, there's this type of human who is dangerous to people around them. and we have to protect people from them. we can do it. your kid is sneezing a lot, so you don't send them to kindergarten tomorrow because they are going to get everybody else sick. you keep your kid home. you can strain them. you protect society from their sneezing, but you don't preach to their kid about how they have

a rotten soul because they are sneezing. >> i can't think of a more provocative subject. to be continued, okay? maybe but maybe over a couple of beers or something else. who knows. thank you. >> good. thanks for having me on. happy holidays. >> you too. up next, the frougt confrontations on campus about the israel-hamas war are the latest battleground regarding free speech. a university president lost her job over her inability to address the topic. has cancel culture made it impossible to please anybody? my next guest has a solution.

i'm a little anxious, i'm a little excited. i'm gonna be emotional, she's gonna be emotional, but it's gonna be so worth it. i love that i can give back to one of our customers. i hope you enjoy these amazing gifts. oh my goodness. oh, you guys. i know you like wrestling, so we got you some vip tickets. you have made an impact.

so have you. for you guys to be out here doing something like this, it restores a lot of faith in humanity. the war between israel and hamas the latest lightning rod in the debates across college campuses about where to draw the line when it comes to free speech and cancel subtleture. after the recent disaster with college presidents, business leaders, and others led to the resignation of the president of the university of pennsylvania, the timing couldn't be better for my next guest's book "the canceling of the american mind." since kcancellations exploded o campus in 2014, heavy they have ebbed and flowed. many very too ieger to declare it through, but every time cancel cull which are has come back stronger than ever.

we have to establish the free speech culture that will short sur kit. joining me is the coauthor, the president of the foundation for individual rights and expression for fire. it's been a banner year for the kind of issues that you get psych ed to discuss. >> absolutely not. i think that a lot of people do to the testimony and do to a lot of things coming out of the h hamas war, people are more aware of the dysfunction, but a lot of people, a lot of institutions are taking the message of the testimony as being we have to clamp down even more on free speech. and the book, one of the reasons i am glad that canceling of the american mind came out right around now is because what we're saying is that's what they have been doing for years, and it's been a disaster. >> now to me it seems like the ideological lines have totally blurred. >> absolutely. there are people who are against cancel culture and seem to be

more pro censorship. but it is normal. we talk about threats from the right and the left. but right now, people seem to think that maybe more censorship is the answer, which is insane. >> you recently were on bill march's program. he ran through some of the current buzz words. a reminer for everybody at home. >> when i break down the phrases that i hear, first, there's the lot of people who say you shouldn't say that. i disagree. free speech. that's one of those vague terms like undejihad that probably me violence. then there's from the river to the sea. okay, that's a little more genocidy, but let's give the benefit of the doubt. we just want the jews to move, not die. pz. >> and the next was by any means necessary, where's the line? >> generally, the three things to look out for are incitement,

you have threats and you have discriminatory harassment. we are seeing an uptick in all three on college campuses, particularly threats. we saw death threats at cornell. a at harvard shs you saw incidents they are outright assault. so campuses have been really bizarre in the sense they have been weirdly tolerant of violence or shouting down sp speakers. throwing rocks at people. it's been a bad year for shoutdowns. those need to be fought. when your students are assaulting each other, you have to punish them for it. >> pen is my alma mater. i'm not a defender of the whole tenure of liz mcgill, but i don't think she should have been drummed out. what do you think? >> i think that liz is not great for free speech. one of the last things she did after her testimony not going very well was say, you know what, we're going to consider abandoning tying our contractual

promises to constitutional standards, which is one of the scariest things i have heard a university president say. the vision statement that some of the donors who wanted to oust her kale out with is one of the best things i have read on restoring free speech. >> but weren't they a little hypocritical in not giving her the right to honor free speech, as she saw it? >> penn finished second tos last in our campus free speech. harvard was dead last. mcgill has been around for longer. so i think there was no way for free speech or academic freedom. >> should schools even take positions? >> i think when it comes to global positions of the things that don't directly affect their campus, they shouldn't. because it establishes an orthodoxy and leads to weird situations on opining on things that really it's for the professors and the students to come up with those opinions, not the president of the university. >> that's an idea, correct me if

i'm wrong, that came out of the university of chicago. explain what that was. >> the calvin report was this wonderful statement that university of chicago came out in 1967 at the time when the pressure was every university has to follow the politics of the movement and declare their support for the causes of their students wanted. university of chicago said no. we are not the critic ourselves. we are the host to the critics. we are not actually supposed to establish orthodoxies of these the schools. and so many of these schools have established orthodoxes every time they come up with a statement on of the issue of global or local concern, they are saying this is the official position of the university. that's inappropriate. >> the university presidents were horrible the in their presentation at congress. they were tone deaf, they should have slammed the table and coop demed hamas and condemned anti-semitism. then they should have explained that they are somewhat tethered to the first amendment, even though they are private institutions, and that explains what they are and are not able

to do. final word from you? >> check out the fire.org. don't send your kids to schools that do badly on the rank ing. up i ahead, before op epps ra, sheila johnson started a cable network. she has stakes in three sports teams who launched her own film festival. it wasn't always on easy road. she's here to tell her story.

before oprah, there was sheila johnson. the first female black billionaire. in 79 she cofounded the cable channel black beinentertainment television. they sold for $3 billion. they divorced ending a 33-year marriage. since then she founded a collection of hotels and resorts. became a stakeholder in the nba, nhl and having served as executive producer for lee daniels "the butler", founded an annual film festival in her small virginia town of middleburg. along the way, she's encountered racism, lost a child, suffered emotional abuse in her first marriage. it's all here in her recent auto biography. wit"walk through fire." sheila johnson join mess now. was oprah bummed you beat her to

that list? >> i have no idea. and you know i admire her in everything she has done. i hope she's okay with everything. >> today you are like a pillar of virginia horse country. hasn't always been that way. when you arrive in town, i love this in the book. what's the powder horn and antique shop? >> it was a gun shop that was on the right-hand side every time you come into middleburg and had a confederate flg in the window. i had just recently moved out there. every time i drove into town, it just grated my last nerve. i decided to buy the building. and because i could. >> i take it the confederate flag is now there. >> no, it's now a wonderful food market where people can eat lunch and din there. >> you envision this resort, which you brought to fruition, but some signs get put up on the

yards. don't b.e.t. our area. you took that as racism? >> the town was totally bankrupt. didn't even have a functioning water sewage treatment plant. i knew if i built this resort on 340 acres that belonged to the late la, i could build an economic engine to support the town. but the other people didn't see it that way. so i remember after i had a conversation with the town up on the land and was going to dulles airport, there were signs don't b.e.t. middleburg. that was the sign. >> the book is called "walk through fire." the fire you have walked through includes that first marriage. a lot of ups and downs, but a lot of downs. here's what i was taken with. your parents were very accomplished, especially for african-americans of that era. dad was a doctor for the va hospital. mom was an accountant. he walked out on her.

did that decision impact when you finally decided to walk out on your marriage? >> well, i think what happens in life is things start to come back around. i was actually shocked when my father did leave. we were at the top of the pinnacle of black soviet. by him leaving there, it plummeted my mother down. what i realized then is women had absolutely no standing in life. they didn't have bank accounts. they didn't have any kind of financial foundation. that really hit me hard. from that moment on, by him walking out, it really established a seat in my thought process of how i never, evered to be there. >> before there were the obamas, there were the johnsons. you were the first family of this country, the first black couple. was there pressure that you

can't leave bob because we can't have that reflection on the community. >> exactly. they kept saying you're the king and queen of media. you can't leave. i had no support. as much as i worked behind the scenes of keeping b.e. tesmt on the air and really trying to push it forward, many of the employees said you were the conscious of the company. erased out of the history of b.e.t. this was something that really got under my last nerve. i mean, i sold my violin. i was a concert violinist to help fund b.e.t. and to pay for rent. there was so much that i was doing behind the scenes and sacrificing that i never got credit for. and i even started a show called team summit that really would answer the issues of black media video, the video market and the way women were portrayed. this was just something that is the time went on and more of the

brand expanded and got very popular within the african-american community, my name was never mentioned. not that i wanted it mentioned, i really wanted to push my husband forward. pit wanted him to be the face, which he was. but the problem was is i was not respected. i did not get the credit for anything that i did behind the sceneses of b.e.t. that's what hurt the most. >> but you do now. 50 years almost to the day after the i have a droem speech, you opened the salamander resort. you overcame those battles. even by one vote in the zoning meeting. who was standing there when you opened it but your ex-husband. you were cool with that. >> i'm not going to ever stoop to his level. i wanted him to see what i could do. i was never given credit for anything i had done. i felt like a failure. but the struggles that i went through, he said, let's bring

four seasons in there. they can buy this. i said, no, i can do this. >> and you did. >> and we have seven hotels now. >> thank you. congratulations. great book. appreciate it. >> thank you. still to come, every day we're confronted with decisions large and small. how can we make sure whether the choice we're making is the right one? the former cochair of goldman sachs uses my favorite method, he's here to explain.

there is a lot of information out there. hamas is a terrorist group oppressing the palestinian people. hamas refused a continued ceasefire, a continued pause in fighting and more aid from israelis in exchange for just freeing more hostages. instead, hamas resumed attacks. not to protect the palestinian people or obtain peace, only to destroy israel. we must stand against hamas and stand with palestinians and israelis for basic human rights.

how do you know when you're making the right decision? my next guest had a revelation about that question while he was a sophomore at harvard. it shaped his thinking ever since. the professor of rubin's introto philosophy engrained the concept all the great thinking, nothing can be proven in an absolute sense. that was 1958, the world has only gotten more uncertain since. but robert did pretty well for himself in the intervening years. he rose to be co-chair of goldman sachs and was the first director of the economic council for president clinton andrough found himself relying on one essential tool, one that i myself employ and what is a yellow legal pad and write out the list of possible outcomes and the odds of each occurring and choose the course of action that seemed to be the most promising outcome. thus, title of the new book "the yellow pad," making better

decisions in an uncertain world. in it, rubin writes this. i worry that faced with such unsettling uncertainty, too many people and too many of our institutions have responded by rushing toward absolutes and simplistic answers. robert rubin joins me now. okay, mr. secretary. one day you're at the white house and a letter arrives, old school, wanting to know, are you the same robbie rubin from the fourth grade at the north beach elementary. what am i talking about? >> well, we moved to miami beach, michael when i was entering fourth grade and i was a rather poor student when i went to the school in new york and i went to this elementary school and wonderful teacher mrs. collins and under her in fourth and fifth grade i blossomed and i became a rather good student. and she was asking in that letter was i the same robbie rubin that she remembered and i think the answer is two-fold. one, i am the same robbie rubin,

somewhat older, at that time, i was in fourth grade, and much older when i was in the treasury department, and the other meaning of that, i think, is what had happened to me in the interim. how do i become whatever it is that i became and that got me to thinking about not only what contributed to my life, and what i had done in my life and a lot of good luck and what about other people and who have been measured by external metrics, and not internal metrics, how you feel about yourself and what they have pleasure accomplished in the world and that's what it is about. >> the harvard course to which i made reference, that was an epiphany moment for you. how so? >> well, we all got there, and the professor talked about the great picture of the ages and truthfully, i didn't understand a whole lot of it. and that was before -- >> well, it is true. >> it was poor grade inflation. >> and it occurred to me as this

was going on, it seemed to be something else that was that he had in mind, and even with the great thinkers, with all they put forward, were not able to prove in certainty that they moved toward in their thinking. and in time, michael, the conclusion i reached was there are no proof of certain ties and extrapolated from that, the view to the way to approach uncertainty is with a probabilistic mind set and so what one needed to do when facing an issue or decision is to try to identify a number of possibilities and try to make judgments about the probabilities of each of those materializing and make the best choice you can. >> you had me with book title. my legal pad. every saturday with the show, it is in front of me. what surface nation with yellow legal tablet s? >> well, this is a problem approach to decision making, trained or if you will, guided every decision i made, whether

it is running the financial department at goldman sachs or the white house, the treasury and everything i do now, and i am pretty active with the investment banking firm and the yellow pad, you can say it is tool a-tool and the issue is this and make this decision and whatever it may be and here are the possibilities and what are the probabilities of those materializing and on that basis you can make the best possible decision you can. and i would scribble on that yellow page how to work on the decisions and what the best decision might be. and those were all judgments. the answers don't fly off the page. and so one thing that the problemistic decision making does is it causes you to think much more carefully and look much more carefully and probe much more carefully about every issue you're dealing with because you will make judgments about probabilities. >> i never heard the words energetic curiosity before. is that an ainnate quality or i

can be acquired. >> i don't know the answer of that. i have an innate curiosity. probably part of my psyche, i suppose and i am now 85 years old and about five months ago i thought to myself, this things called artificial intelligence, wherever it may be, it might have a great big effect on the world and i started with a tutorial and now take a tutorial twice a week, an hour each time and remarkably interesting and the fact it is an obviously an important part of the world that i'm living in and my curiosity took me there. i have an innate curiosity. whether it is psychologically grounded and almost genetic, nature/nurture or something where this comes from or something to acquire, but i guess it is kind of inherent in you, whether, as i say, for nature or nur fure, i don't know. >> mr. secretary, happy holidays. thanks you for being here. >> i very much enjoyed being with you, michael. thank you. >> me too. i enjoyed having you. well, thanks for joining me on the smerconish book club. i am so happy. i finally got to share my love

of books and authors. if you want more, check the out the more than 300 episodes of the book club podcast at smerconish.com and listen to interviews i've done with everybody from liz cheney to the grateful dead. happy holidays. see you next week.

the power goes out and we still have wifi to do our homework. and that's a good thing? great in my book! who are you? no power? no problem. introducing storm-ready wifi. now you can stay reliably connected through power outages with unlimited cellular data and up to 4 hours of battery back-up to keep you online. only from xfinity. home of the xfinity 10g network. hello again. and welcome. it's time to get together with some smart people, to break down the biggest stories. today, we're looking ahead to the new year. and asking, in the republican presidential race, who will be donald t's