The Jordan Harbinger Show - 211: Arthur Brooks | How Loving Your Enemies Can Save America

Episode Date: June 13, 2019

Arthur Brooks (@arthurbrooks) is a social scientist, Washington Post columnist, president of the American Enterprise Institute, and author of Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt. What We Discuss with Arthur Brooks: Why happiness relies on being mindful of what you have right now instead of comparing yourself to others who have what you want. A disheartening statistic: One in six Americans has stopped talking to a family member or close friend entirely because of politics. How gratitude can be used as an anesthetic for contempt. Why a healthy society elevates authoritative leaders in search of cooperation for the greater good over coercive leaders who bully their way toward short-term results. Why we should commit not to be -- or interact with people who hide behind being -- anonymous on the Internet. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://jordanharbinger.com/211 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Build Your Network with Travis Chappell is a podcast for aspiring professionals who want to grow their inner circle and sharpen their relationships. Listen here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. Today's guest really brought his A-game. He's a social scientist, author of 11 books and a hell of a talker, which you'll hear in a minute. And I mean that is an absolute compliment. I've really had a great time here today. What I love about this conversation is that today we went completely off the rails and ended up with something better than I ever could have prepared. And that's because Arthur Brooks is a real thinker. And he cares about the ideas that he presents.

So obviously we geeked out over here. I think you'll dig this one, especially if you care of. about how and why discourse in politics and America have changed, and why and how media figures and political pundits are actually using some pretty morally bankrupt tricks to get us to divide further apart, something he calls the outrage industrial complex. Naturally, since this is the Jordan Harbinger show, we also learn what we can do about it to defend ourselves. If you heard the Shane Snow episode, you'll really love this one as well, and if you haven't heard that one, you can go back and listen to it afterwards. In the meantime, Arthur came to you.

through my network, of course. And the way that I build that network is something I'm teaching you for free because the more people that have these great networks, the better off we all are. That's the six-minute networking course over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. In the meantime, here's Arthur Brooks. Anytime you catch yourself comparing yourself to others, you have to stop and say, that's what I'm doing.

Don't do that. Oh, God. Easier said than done. Yeah, I know. But although once you know that, the knowledge is power. Because you'll actually be able to do that once you start catching yourself. I say, oh, I'm comparing myself. That's why I'm feeling unhappy right now.

Oh, man. I need that every single day. I need to tattoo that. And like everybody, think about the fact that you're really successful, which means all those people comparing themselves. You know, like Jordan. I could be like Jordan,

then it'd be really, really good. And you could be like Jordan, you're like, if I could be like fill in the blank. And there's always something more. I mean, it's a moving horizon. It is. That's called the hedonic treadmill. Yes, that's right.

That's right. I knew I had some sort of... Yeah, it's 40% more than you currently have. Is that what it is? Yeah, that's kind of the iron law, the social psychology of not having enough. 40% more, 40% more advertisers, 40% more money, 40% better looks, 40%, 40%. Maybe I'm greedy. I want like 10, I want a thousand percent more.

Yeah, no, but you'd be basically like, if I had 40% more money, I'd feel better, but you won't. No. You know, because it doesn't, it's always moving. So you have to stop comparing yourself and say, is this intrinsically satisfying? And am I doing good? Am I earning my success? Am I serving others? If the answer is yes, that's awesome.

Yeah, I mean, that is the answer. But then sometimes I go, oh, you're just saying that to make yourself feel better, you shouldn't let yourself off the hook like that. But you kind of have to let yourself off the hook because otherwise you'll go crazy. You'll go nuts. Particularly if you're a certain kind of person. If you're a pretty ambitious entrepreneurial person. Yeah.

So that's basically what happens is that the happy entrepreneur is one that has high level of well-being and low level of satisfaction. because if you're an entrepreneur, you can't be satisfied. Yeah. But you have to have enough self-awareness to recognize that not let that dissatisfaction metastasize into a source of your own unhappiness. Because this is really useful, especially for me, because I just, I go through life in many ways going, you know, I'm so lucky to have this job.

I got Arthur Brooks coming in. It's going to be so interesting. This guy's really great. We're lucky to get a bunch of his time. Some university probably paid him like a hundred grand to speak for an hour, and I get to actually have a conversation with him, and it's like, I don't have to cut a big-ass check. You know, and then I get all these people telling me nice things about it. And then I'll go on Instagram and I'll be like, my life sucks.

Look at what this person has. They're riding a giraffe or whatever. It's classic. And if you were writing the giraffe, you'd be like thinking about the next phase in your own success, instead of being fully aware and fully alive on top of that draft. It's interesting. You know, there's sort of three kinds of people. You know this whole mindfulness movement?

Yes. And you're like, yeah, that's got to be right. You know, your problem is that you're a highly prospective person. I can tell just by talking to you. There's the three kinds of people are prospective, mindful, and retrospective. Okay. Right? There are people who live in the past, people live in the present, people live in the future.

Oh, yeah. All entrepreneurs are prospective. That makes sense. Jordan is prospective. And so that's hard. I mean, the world is built by prospective people. Progress comes, prosperity comes to everybody because of you, because of people like you. But the point is, it's very difficult for you to be fully present and enjoy your life.

Yeah. So that's the reason that you're always like, okay, if I could be more mindful, you can be more mindful. Now, if everybody were mind. we'd be living in caves. Yeah, that's true. So this is an interesting thing. It's a conundrum, basically. The success and happiness of the world

depends on people who don't discern their own success and can't enjoy their own happiness. Yeah, I know. It's like being, it's funny, it's like a soldier, right? Like, your life is a sort of like, you're living in a trench outside a castle wall wearing heavy armor and being malnourished half the time.

But the people inside are like, good thing there's people like that out there is they like have dinner with their friends and family. I know. And, you know, there's so, most people, the interesting thing to keep on mind is that, you know, we have this tendency to think that everybody is super ambitious. It's actually not true. Most people aren't super ambitious. Most people prosper on the basis of living around a few super ambitious people. And that's you. You know, okay, so then the key thing is how you're going to take, how you're going to defend yourself?

How are you going to take care of yourself? You know, the self-defense actually has to come in at some point because otherwise you're just going to sit on the hamster wheel for the rest of your life. Yeah. And so it's one of the things that I do a lot. I work with very, very successful people, not necessarily rich, people who are just done a lot, people of really, really high achievement. And I have a piece, I have a feature piece coming out in the Atlantic in June about how to enjoy your life when you're a person of high achievement. I should read that.

Well, I'll send it to you. And actually, it'll be easy to get. And the reason I wrote it is because I realized that, I mean, this is going to be me. You know, I'm turning 55 this month. And I feel great. I feel, thank you. and I feel like I'm 30, right? But I'm not.

And I recognize that I'm, you know, I'm just kind of new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing, new thing. And I was, I was on a plane, you know, thinking about this, thinking about all the good things I was going to do and being really, really ambitious. And I was thinking about the future, being really prospective and comparing myself to others. And it was like, I had a book, it was selling really well as the best sell list at the time. And, you know, my columns are getting published in the New York Times and things was, like, for sweet. but it could have been better. Right, it could have been on TV. Yeah, and I heard this, exactly right.

See, I heard this guy behind me on the plane, and I couldn't quite make out his words, but I knew it was like a married couple, elderly couple of people, I could tell other voices. It was dark. The wife's like, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead.

It's not true. Oh, no. I'm like, oh, man. This guy's like, I mean, fortunately, it's not, that's not me, because, you know, when I'm old, I'm going to be saying, I did everything.

I lie, it was super successful, right? But this guy, I mean, frustrated dreams and live up to his potential. Lights gone and stands up. It's one of those famous men in America. Really? Yeah. And the guy who had done everything, a real hero, not controversial of it. And I thought, I got to make some changes because I don't want to be 89 years old going, nobody loves me anymore. Yeah. It must be hard to come down from it, because at some point he must have felt good, but maybe not. Maybe not. I mean, I bet he was on the wheel, on the wheel, just going, It could be more.

I could have more, the equivalent of more podcast listeners, more, you know, better advertising. I only got nominated for an Academy Award. Can you believe? It's like, that sucks, man, I got, I got shafted. Yeah. Right? And, you know, and look at old Joe down the street there. He's won two Oscars.

Yeah. If I only had that, then I'd finally be happy. No, you wouldn't. No. He's telling his wife, he wishes he were dead. So, you got to stop comparing yourself to others. You have to remember that the only happiness you're going to get. get is the happiness that you that you create for yourself right now. Yeah. And that's especially true

for a guy like you. And, and I'm talking to myself too. Yeah, well, I appreciate that. That makes sense. It's one of the topics that I try not to shoehorn into every show, but comes out anyway. Yeah, because you're thinking about it. You're building your life. How old are you? 39. 39. Yeah, you look good, man. If I had that hair, I could be present in the United States. Yeah, I do. I do have all my hair. And even people go, oh, those sides are going back a little. It's been that way since I was 12. Those sides aren't going anywhere. They're always, It's always got a little bit of that. It looks good. I appreciate you. You got a lot going on.

Thank you. You like your life? First kid on the way. Besides notwithstanding your dissatisfaction? Yeah, yeah. It's funny because it's just... This is your baby? This is, yeah, in there.

All right in there. First kid. Congratulations in advance. Thanks. It's so beautiful. First child. Yeah, it's going to be exciting. Boy, girl?

It's a boy. When? August. August. Yeah. Coming up two months, three months. So great. It's totally the best.

A life-changing thing. It'll make you super miserable. That's right. That's what everybody says. like sleep now and I'm like, ah, stuff. Well, yeah, that's actually not right. But there's lots of crises and lots of, you'll understand, you'll understand why you're alive.

Much better. That's a good, that's awesome to hear. Because people are always talking about purpose and things like that. And it's really easy to get sucked into this whole like, cosmos universe thing. But it's like, look, that's very abstract for me. It might be a comforting thought to be like, the universe thinks you're special.

I don't know if I believe that anyway. We don't know if that's true. That's a hypothesis with no basis in empirical regularity. I mean, there's like there's no data on that. But you'll understand intuitively in your heart why you're walking on the earth the moment you see your son. That's good. What happens is a funny thing. There's a chemical in your brain.

It's called a love molecule. It's a neurotoxetocin is very well done. Well, well-plied. I've read a couple books about it. Yeah, the neurotransmitter oxytocin. And it's stimulated in its maximum dose the moment you make eye contact with your newborn baby. Wow. and you can almost feel it pop inside your brain.

And you're like, it's just a baby, I never remember about this baby. You would die for that baby. The minute that you cut the cord, because they're going to let you do it to make you feel like you're actually being useful, even though you're just actually in the way. Standing there, shaking. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. And then the really hard thing is when they, I mean, two of my kids have moved out.

And my kids have grown up, moved away. Like, ah. But it's still all meaning. And it's, it's, you'll understand life. That's how it works. Yeah, that's, I'm looking forward to that because this show gives me a lot. lot of purpose. I don't have to really reach for it. But it's also like the audience is this abstract group of people on the other side of the mic. They write nice letters. I get nice comments on social

media and emails and things like that. But it's still kind of like they're still on the other end of this electronic internet spectrum, whatever the other side of the mic. And so during the show, it's great, doing the prep for the show. It's nice because I'm outside walking around reading. Like you can't really beat that. That's nice. Or I'm speaking to people. And then you feel connected. But other times you'll wake up and you'll be in your bed and go, is this really kind of what I'm supposed to be doing? Should I be trying harder?

Should I be doing more with something else? And what is the future you're going to bring when this thing is no longer viable? Yeah. Because at some point, every party's got to stop. Everything, yeah, slows down. And if you understand the purpose as opposed to product, if you understand the why as opposed to the what, then the what will take care of itself.

Yeah, yeah. So I do a lot of thinking about that. Other cheerful topics like that. It's good. It's good, though. I mean, that's, I mean, you're trying to find, you're in the middle of that you're hacking through a jungle with your machete. Yeah.

Yeah. And it's, I try to be patient with myself, especially in this period of time, because the, the sun is on the way. I'm like, okay, don't make any decisions right now. Don't do anything right now. Don't sweat it right now. Because like you said, the second that the kid is born, it's like, things will get clarified and other things I thought were important.

Probably I'm not even to think about again. Yeah. and all these other little piddly little petty things that I have going on, or maybe they're not petty, but the things that I judge as petty in my head, some of them are going to fly away, and others might get circled and underline. Yeah, you got it, you got it, you got it. And then you'll be worried about all kinds of other thumb. Yeah. Where should I send my kid? Which $30,000 preschool do I send my kids here in California? The most amazing thing is none of that stuff matters at all. Yeah. None of that stuff matters at all. I mean, I finally figured that out with one of my kids. It's like underperforming, underperforming in school.

And I was hassling and hassling and hassling. Not my first. kid, you know, it's like, come on, man, come on, do your homework. You know, I think I'm talking 90% of the time about something that matters 10% to me. Because, you know, I don't care if he flunks out of high school. I don't actually care. Here's what I care about. I want to be honest. I want him to be compassionate. And I want him to have his faith. I want him to have his faith. Those are the three things I want. And everything else is gravy, man. Everything else is gravy. And so I finally sat down and I was like, let me tell you it really matters to me. Living in my basement, I don't care. You're

being unemployed at some point, the only reason I don't, the reason I care about that is because you're going to be a miserable person, you're less likely to be compassionate and honest, and you're probably less likely to practice your faith. The only one reason I want you to be successful is so that you can spread love around the world as the only reason I want it. And so therefore, I'm going to try to spend 90% of my time thinking about those three things. Maybe a better dad. It made me less stressed out too. So was this a while in the past or is this current, when he was in high school, probably when he was a sophomore in high school and now he's 19 and he's farmer in Idaho. So he probably enjoys that. Oh, he's happy. He's saying St. Ironaus,

in the year like 190, he said, the glory of God is a man fully alive, right? And he's a man fully alive. He drives Ram 3,500. He has a Glock 19. He drives a combine. He drives a combine. Yeah, that sounds fun. Yeah, he harvest 60,000 pounds of white, soft wheat an hour. and he builds, you know, custom cabinetry in the wintertime. He has a firewood hauling business. He has a dog named Corona. I'm like Corona. It's like, did you name that after the crown of the Blessed Virgin Mary in heaven?

It's like, my favorite. No, dad, it's beer. Yeah. Well, you had to see that one coming. I kind of did. You walked right into that. Look, I was 19 too, man. I was 19 at one point, long time ago.

Speaking of family, good segue here. Yeah. You mentioned that one in your book, which I will link in the show notes, one in six Americans have actually stopped talking to a family member because of the election. That's pretty scary. I thought those people you hear about, well, I can't really talk to my dad because of Trump. I thought that was just like the one or two dysfunctional people that already had other stuff brewing in the family. And this is just the straw that broke the camel's back.

One in six is a lot. It's almost one in five now. Yeah. I mean, people who have stopped talking to a family member or a close friend because of politics. Politics has become super, you know, hyper attenuated in our culture where it's taken on this outsized role and importance. And it really wasn't that long ago. It was only something like 6% of people say they cared, whether their adult child married somebody from the other party. When was this?

As recently as 20 years ago, now it's 40%. Wow. This is the most important consideration. Tribalism. Yeah, super tribalism. But tribalism, not just this is my tribe, but this is how what's going to define my love. love. See, this is the key. Oh, yeah. Good point. That's a little, stakes are much higher.

For sure. It's one thing to say, like, I'm Catholic. Okay, that's a tribe. Yeah. You know, I'm, you know, I'm from Seattle, originally. That's my tribe. You don't, a Catholic from Seattle? Yeah, I know. Did that come later? Well, I'm the last one I left. So, anyway. And, um, but those are tribes. The key thing is to actually have the tribe to find your love. So, look, look, if you disagree with me on, on issue X, I just can't talk to you. you, that is insane. Yeah, it is. To say basically, that's missing the first, the first trap you're supposed to, you're supposed

to run in humanity, which is separating people from their opinions. You know, it's like, Jordan is not his opinions. And yet, when we're in a situation like this of polarization, we're being taught by some small amount of the population, what I call the outrage industrial complex in this book, yeah, saying that you have to, I mean, we should, you should hate somebody who disagrees. with you because that person is deviant, because that person is stupid, because that person is evil. Those people are profiting off our hate and helping us to not distinguish where we should. Okay, I want to get into that a little bit.

It's definitely something that I think is, that took me by surprise. I mean, it probably shouldn't have. I felt naive after hearing you explain it, but I think it's important. The whole show is about highlighting things people see every day and going, see that, that's not an accident. It shows up everywhere. It shows up everywhere. What? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So I definitely want to get into that. I know that you'd said, America's more divided than it has been since the Civil War. And I think that was actually in one of your

podcast as well, the Arthur Brooke Show, which will also link in the show notes. But my question is, okay, everybody says, well, when I was a kid, things were better. And there's a cognitive bias that's called rosy retrospection that I'm sure you've heard of. And I'm like, is that just rosy retrospection where people say, well, I live through the depression and it wasn't this bad. It's like, really, though? I know, I know. So, yeah, the answer is there's a lot of that. So, for example, I was having a conversation with a documentary filmmaker named Ken Burns. It was a phenomenal documentary filmmaker of our generation. And he was, we have this new movie that was that was coming out called The Pursuit, just actually out on iTunes. It's coming out of Netflix later this summer.

It's about capitalism and how it lifts people out of poverty. And he watched it. We can rent that in iTunes. Yeah, for sure. I can rent or buy an iTunes and it'll be on Netflix in August. The Pursuit or go to the Pursuit movie.com and it has the trailer on it. But he was, he watched it. because he's a friend. And he was giving me a bunch of suggestions when we were making it. We got to talking. And I said, he had just made Vietnam. His, you know, epic saga of the Vietnam War,

the best thing that's out there on Vietnam. And I was saying, it's so terrible to polarization today, how much everybody hates each other, how people being driven apart. It's never been this bad, right? Classic, look, I'm a behavioral social scientist. I should not fall into that trap.

Well, yeah. That's a cognitive bias is, right? It's a total cognitive bias. And, you know, I know, to everybody. You know, none of us is safe. And so, and I said that, there's like silence. And then finally, Ken's like, you don't think that, do you? And I said, what do you mean?

He says, when was the last time there was a domestic bombing for political reasons? Yeah. And I'm like, I don't know. I was like that in New Jersey or, I think it went off. Maybe time square. He says, do you know how many domestic bombings for political, politically motivated domestic bombings there were in 1968 and 1969? I said, no, he said, 700.

Wow, really? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. It's like. That's insane. Crazy. Yeah, for sure. It's like Israel in the height of the first Intifada or something. That's exactly right. That's like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

And the reason that I bring that up is because we, every era is actually different than others. And comparing them is perilous. The truth is not as bad as the late 60s in that way and much worse than others. So it is true that in the 1960s around the Thanksgiving table, the idea of Democrats not being able to talk to Republicans didn't exist the way it does today. And we didn't have populism in the same way that we do today. And we didn't have polarization that when we talk about the parties and people in the parties not understanding each other, not overlapping, is literally worse now than it was since the 1850s. But we don't have violence and that's better. These are distinct eras.

We have challenges that we should face them, but we shouldn't catastrophize the situation either. This is a really, really good time in America. Yeah, that's good to hear because I think people are quick to judge otherwise. But if you think about it, having your uncle Bob think you're a liberal idiot or your aunt think you're a terrible conservative that she can't even listen to anymore is better than getting blown up on your way to the drug store. Yeah, yeah, by the weather underground or, you know, the Symbionese Liberation Army with Patty Hurst and all this. I mean, that was really going on. It's just nuts. It's nuts.

And I don't remember that. I was little. I was more in 1964. And I look back and I just remember my dad, you know, we were driving through. through some really, you know, hippie freaked out part of Seattle and be like, lock the doors, kids. And they're like, how come? You know, it's really little and be like, there's yippies out there. They might try to get in the car and kill us. Oh my God. And thinking back on, of course, that's insane. Yeah. And, you know, my dad was just taking care of us. And maybe, who knows, maybe it was just like punking us for all I know.

Yeah, yeah, Reef or Madness. He's out Reefer Madness. But God love him. But there's nothing like that today. I mean, life is safer, life is better. There's no knock in the night. There's no. no jackbooted thug. There's no possibility that we're going to be actually hurt or exiled or arrested because of our views. Thank God. I mean, God bless America. Yeah. Right. And so as bad as it is as bad because we should love each other more. We'd be happier. At least it's not what most people in most countries are facing. I mean, try, trying disagreeing with the government or with your neighbors in China. Well, it's funny. I'm looking at a potential interview with the incoming president of Venezuela. and it's like, yeah,

you got Guido? Yeah. You got Guaido? Yeah. You're the man. Yeah. Well, we'll see. I mean, until I'm sitting, until it's uploaded into the cloud. And you're going to be torturing yourself because somebody else got Guido until you get Guido, right? That's right. That's exactly what's going to happen. Yeah. Yeah, we're doing some work with like their security forces. So it was more of like a, instead of a journalist connection, it was more of a, hey, can you ask this guy to ask this guy who's got a gun and stands next to him all day if we can do this? Yeah, no, I mean, that's interesting, but that winds up how things get done. He's a

He is brave, and I'm thinking borderline just must have a fear thing in his brain that popped 20 years ago and never came back. It's interesting about that. Yeah, about that. And do you know that 26% of people don't feel fear? Don't feel fear in the face of danger. Is that good? It's not. They're the worst leaders. So the best leaders are the other 74% of us who feel fear, but act anyway. Because that's called courage. Fearlessness and courage are not the same thing, and you have to be able to distinguish when you're looking for leaders. I do think there's people that don't feel fear. I see them in YouTube on those wingsuit videos

where they're flying around the trees. Those people, there's no way they ever thought, hey, this is scary, we shouldn't do this. Don't bring them to run your company. Yeah, exactly. That's right. You send them to go raise capital, and then you go, okay, thanks, bye.

And to the women listening to us, don't make sure that they're not the father of children. That's a good point. Yeah. The problem is, I think, those guys have a distinct advantage when meeting women because they'll walk up and go, and they'll walk up to a hundred different people and try their life. Yeah.

And the other thing is, once again, the cognitive error that we make is the lack of distinction between fearlessness and courage. So you want to find courageous people and you want to avoid fearless people. How do you distinguish between those two types of people? Well, fearless people don't feel the fear. Courageous people feel fear. Right. And act anyway.

And they've learned how to dominate the fear and not be controlled by the fear, but they actually feel fear. Sure, but I mean, look, if I'm a... If I'm looking at them, how do I tell the difference between us? Right. Part of it is you ask, you know, you ask about the situation at hand, and they will actually quite truthfully express fear. As opposed to the bravado. Now, it doesn't matter.

I don't care. No, I'm not afraid at all. And you don't find people in politics like this. And then you realize that they're really weird. They sort of, they sort of seem, at the extreme, they're sociopathic. Yeah. Right. And that's the reason they don't feel fear in the first place.

But it was like, yeah, no, this could go really wrong. I'm really, really worried about this, and you notice that they're walking into battle. Yeah. That's courage. That's the ones you're looking for. Yeah. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Arthur Brooks. We'll be right back.

Don't forget, we have a worksheet for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways from Arthur Brooks. That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. To learn more about our sponsors and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. you like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe.

Subscribing to the show is absolutely free, and it just means you get all the latest episodes in your podcast player when they're released, so you don't miss a single thing from the show. And now back to our show with Arthur Brooks. That's interesting. You see the movie with that guy who climbs up, is it El Capitan or whatever, and he climbs up with no ropes? It's called Free Solo. Yeah, free solo, right.

Like, I can't feel fear. That's what people were saying, but then I know people that know people that know him and they're like, yeah, he does feel fear. He just does it anyway. But I think it's got to be just turned down. It's so muted that it might be there. And he might have some sort of concept of this is scary. But I don't think he understands that if I looked at that and even if I was highly skilled, I would look at something like that and I would start, like, I would shake uncontrollably knowing I'm halfway up this mountain and there's no way down. You know, like I think he doesn't seem to have that. It's right. You know, and the guys that I meet that do this the best are the guys who've

been in the military. And so, for example, you know, most of us, I mean, a lot of us, a lot of people are listening to us, you have a big listenership of young people. And a lot of what they're wrestling with is trying to say, you know, why am I alive? And we talked about this before when your first child is born. It's like, ah, that's it. Right. But it would be great if we could articulate why am I alive. What am I, what do I want to live for? And being able to say, one of the things that I recommend on my college campuses to young people, you want to be happier. I need a 12-word mission statement for you that says, you know, what, what am I going to live for? What's the purpose of my life, right? The why of my life. But here's where it really gets good, because this gets into the discussion

we're having now about fearlessness and courage. What are you willing to die for? And are you convinced it's true? Like, I'm willing to die for my faith and willing to die for my family, and willing to die for my country, for sure, for sure. Am I willing to die for my friends? Of course. But then I often wonder, if push came to shove, what would I do? The great thing about the guys in the military is they have proved not just to others, but to themselves that they're willing to die for something. And then they don't die and they spend the rest of their lives, not fearless, but understanding that they have courage, which is hugely empowering. This is one of the reasons that people that, you know, when they act as if the guys come back from, you know,

battle from Afghanistan or Iraq or something that they're somehow injured. No, no, there's a reason that those guys go on to do incredible things. Yeah. The reason is because they prove to themselves to their own standard of satisfaction that they're courageous. As such, everything's easier. You know, I feel the fear I can do it anyway. Especially if the fear is not going to result in death or dismemberment. Totally. Starting a business, less of a big deal.

It seems like the standard of the stakes are lower. But also, you know, and you have a tendency to what I hate is the extent to which we treat, you know, veterans as victims. You know, these guys have, you know, there's a major crucible. They've passed the test. And, you know, the data are overwhelmingly clear, you know, all this stuff that we hear now about all these, you know, suicides for men who have been in the military. And that's true, except that when you actually correct for age and socioeconomic circumstances, they don't have a higher suicide rate than young men who haven't been, who have the same

demographic characteristics who haven't been in the military. Yeah. I didn't know. That's right. It's a relief, actually. Totally. And it's because these guys are not injured. They're not screwed up.

They're, they're hugely meritorious. and they deserve all of our respect and our admiration and our love. And we got to look to those guys as the leaders for our society, for our culture. They're the people that we need. They're not like hurt birds, man. Yeah. These are the president, the future presidents. Hopefully, yeah. I hope so. I love the idea that it's better to be kind than to be right when we're talking with people on the other side of the aisle or on the other side of the Thanksgiving dinner table, which is more common for most of us. But I am curious as how has discourse then changed to make this divide that's greater now happen. I mean, I know that being nice now is being is weak,

apparently. Apparently, you can't be civil because then you're just being a punk, which is part of the problem, I assume. But you look at guys on the other side of this, you look at guys like Nelson Mandela, who you read about, and he was good to everybody even while he was in prison. So the, kind of the hypothesis then is being nice is actually an advantage. And I would agree with that hypothesis in my own life. Yeah, that's right. So this is, there's a guy, a second psychologist at Harvard, and his name Daniel Goldman. Daniel Goldman has done, you've read his stuff, and a lot of people listening to us have read his stuff. He's really one of the greatest psychologists for applications

in business that we've had over the past 50 years in the United States. And Goldman has a, famous article in the Harvard Business Review called Leadership That Gets Results. And in that, he looks at 4,000 successful CEOs, and he breaks him into six leadership types. And here are the two polar ones. I talk about this in the book. There's coercive leaders and authoritative leaders. coercive leaders are bullies. They get immediate compliance and they get if they do it right, they get huge results, but they don't last. And the reason is because we hate bullies. Yeah. We don't like bad people. You know, in a way, we'll kind of like, yeah, yeah, that guy says what's on my mind. He's my walking

middle finger. But we don't like bullies. We don't like it. And we don't like it when our society is in a very, what we as economists call a suboptimal equilibrium, the basic way of saying things aren't the way that they should be, but they're kind of stuck that way. Okay. And, you know, when we have a suboptimal equilibrium, a bad situation where we've got bullies on both sides. And so basically, you've got to choose your bully.

You know, we will. I mean, everybody listening to us is kind of choosing their bully, but we don't like our bullies. You know, and forget whether we're talking about President of the United States or the CEO of the company or members of the media. The truth is we have a bullying culture. And that's making us choose something we don't really, really want. In the long term, we don't want coercive leaders.

We want authoritative leaders. who don't say, my way or the highway. If you're not coming my way, that means you're just completely on the other side and you're worthless. We want people who say, do you see a better future? Will you please join me in going to this better future? It takes more skill. It takes more time. But it's ultimately what our heart's desire.

These are the leaders that we want. And these are the people we actually want to be. And so the key thing is like, do what your heart tells you to do. Be that guy. And if somebody says that you're a cuck-servative or whatever they call us these days, right? It's like, do you really care? Do you really? It's like, don't go on Twitter.

Life goes on. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. I mean, it's like Twitter's just more or less just like smoking a cigarette anyway. Yeah, it's, or worse. Yeah. It's like it's as bad for you as a cigarette. And it more or less is the same brain chemistry implications, which is to stimulate your dopamine is because of a cigarette.

So, okay. So don't do that. You know, if you don't want to, you know, say something and find out that you're a weakling. Right. then don't go to the place where a bunch of anonymous, you know, Russian Twitter bots are saying that you're weak. I was just thinking the exact same thing I interviewed Clinton Watts, who talks about, do you know who he is? He sort of tracks ISIS and bad actors online and takes a lot of Twitter data and does it. And it was just the title of his book was something like tracking Russians and extremists and ICE.

And it was just like this hundreds or even thousands of people in air quotes were tweeting at me like, oh, well, look at Jordan. Look at Jordan. he must hate Russians. We know who hates Russians, Nazis. Jordan's a Nazi. And then it was like retreat, retreat. And I thought, wow, this is pretty extreme. It's pretty stupid is what it is. It's really dumb. And there's a platform these days. One of the things that I recommend to young people in particular, but especially people who are really entrepreneurial guys like you, I give the privilege. I mean, it's like, think about it, what a great my life is. For the past 45 minutes, I've gotten to give Jordan advice on his life. He's a super successful young guy who's going to, like,

a master of the media universe and, you know, Arthur Brooks gets to give them some advice because my beat is love and happiness. One of the things that I recommend is, okay, you have to have, you have to have a social media presence because your business depends on it. It does, yeah. But what you have, and I say the same thing to members of Congress. I say you have to set some rules so you don't go insane. And so you can actually behave in a way that lives up to your own moral standards. And the standards that you're going to want to behave when your son is born. Yes. You know, the example that you're going to want to create is a good dad. So one of the things that I recommend is

fighting against anonymity. And their people listening to us are going to be like, no, no, the federalist papers were written anonymous. Twitter is not the federalist papers. Right? That's a good point. Yeah. So what I recommend is never, never, never, never do anything anonymous.

So let's have a pact. You, me, and all of our listeners right now, take all your, I know you don't have an anonymous Twitter account because that actually doesn't help you professionally. It doesn't, yeah. But a lot of our people listening to us do because they're afraid or they want to have fun, right? So don't be anonymous because doing something anonymously,

particularly if you're trying to have fun and you're making somebody else suffer is immoral. That's a good point. It's a bad thing to do. And then the second thing is committing never, ever to interacting with anybody who's anonymous. That's harder. Ooh, that is hard. It's really hard because then you're going to take your body blows from, you know, people who are saying that you're weak and, you know, whatever.

But I've really committed myself to this. I've got to tell you, I'm so much relaxed. Because, you know, somebody says, I'm, you know, a moron. And it's, you know, Bernie, bro. 2020 or something like that. That guy doesn't exist. It's not a real person. It's a persona. Well, somebody who has proposively dehumanized her

or himself by taking away his or her actual human identity. And it's like, I can't deal with that. There's nothing I can do with that. It's asymmetric warfare. At that point is Arthur Brooks versus somebody who doesn't actually have an identity. So I've committed myself never to interacting with anonymous people on social

media or in the comment section of after my column in the Washington Post or anything. and God, I'm telling you, Jordan, life's better. That makes sense, especially given your niche. I would say 99.9% of what's in my inbox, maybe just 99% is overwhelmingly positive. Of course, negativity bias makes me look at the one and then go, but then Jen will go and delete it. And I also sort of just realize that that's the way it's going to be. But there are people that have negative things to say.

And I will tell you, when somebody wants to discuss something with me and they disagree, and it's like Cheryl Sanders, and it's her Instagram, she's like, look, love the show, really didn't like what you said about this other thing. I'm like, oh, okay, cool, maybe I'll change my mind. But when somebody writes, you're a cook idiot moron Libtard, F you, and it's a guy with a truck and an Elmo puppet, it's like, this isn't a, like a or a frog. Yeah, and you're like, you know, it's, again, here's the weirdest thing.

I mean, what's that guy's objective and is to poke you, is to make you feel bad as a person? Yeah. It's not to change your mind. Nobody, everybody knows nobody in history has ever been convinced with insults. You can't persuade somebody with hatred. It's impossible to do. So since nobody's ever been, you know, it's like, you know, it's a good point. I am a Libtar.

Yeah, yeah. Guilty. It's like, God, I got to really rethink everything. Because, you know, that guy said I'm a cuxervative moron, right? So, okay, so that means that the person had a different objective. And that's an objective with which you actually can't engage. But it's funny, you know, when people, you know, some people will assume when they reach out to you and they'll be harsher than they actually would be in person because they think that you're actually not reading things. Right. The most common reply to a negative comment is, oh, man, I, well, what I meant was, and I didn't know you were going to reply.

Yeah. Is that I love your show and I really disagreed with this. I often will get somebody who said, who backtracks and goes, look, I was probably a little harsh with this. Yeah. Because they think it's like my customer service representative in the Philippines who's just going to sort of distill it. and they just fired it off on their phone when they were heated. That's right. And if you didn't think I was going to read it, why did you just say, Dear Jordan?

Because they're venting. Yeah, completely. It took me years to realize it. Oh, totally. And it's the key. You have to have a pretty thick skin when you are in public life and when you have a public persona. But you can do so much good once you've got that,

not just it's sort of the intestinal, the emotional fortitude, because you can improve people a lot. Like if they're willing to go out on their own, and they say something that's emotionally attenuated, right? And they say something that goes to, beyond what they actually, what propriety would suggest and you reach out to them, you can change them.

You can change them as people. And it's funny, it's like this is the thing I talk about in the book that I learned this from the Dalai Lama, who has had a huge impact on my life and a mentor and somebody that I've been working with for the past seven years in my own, you know, my personal work and I write with him and I see him a lot. And I asked him how to how I can answer hatred with love better. Because he always says answer hatred with love. answer contempt with warm-heartedness always always always choose warm-hearted like how

your holiness how yeah and he says think of a time when you accidentally answered hatred with love and the effect that it had and had you made you feel and then remember how your heart was on fire and remember your heart being on fire and then you'll do the right thing how do you remember I'm trying to think of any time

where I've accidentally been too nice I never has happened to me in my life I bet you can remember times when somebody treated you like trash and you reached out and the person said, I mean, they gave their name or whatever, and you actually reached out and said, I don't think you understood me or whatever. You treated them like a real person. Oh, yeah. And so that's the key to remember one of those cases. Or, by the way, for those of us who want

to do this and they can't think of a time, go do it and then see how it makes you feel. Right. Create your memory, right? And so for me, I wrote this book. The first time I did ever happen to me is for the first time I wrote a book that anybody ever read when I was still a college professor. I was Syracuse. And, you know, I would write books that nobody ever read, because I'm academic. You're an academic. 27 copies later. Exactly right.

It's like, man, it's success. Tenure. And I wrote this book, and it was very boring and mathematical, but it hit the news cycle just the right way. And it started selling hundreds of copies a day. And President Bush brought me to the White House. And my life changed. My career changed.

My career changed. It has never been the same. And I started hearing from total strangers, which, you know, you do all the time. I do now, but I didn't then. Sure. And I was, I was, you know, your age. And I was, you know, kind of getting my legs under me. I was a professor and this guy raised to me from Texas.

You know, Dear Professor Brooks, you are a right-wing fraud. Oh, God. And then he goes through chapter of, there's 5,000 words. Hey, at least he did that. Well, totally. And so that's, and that's my point, because I realized that what I was feeling was, he read my book. Somebody read this.

I was super grateful. And so I decided to tell them. And, you know, just, it was, it was serendipity. I'm not saying, you know, I could have written back and say, you know, you think you're an economist. Let me tell you, I'm an economist. I've got a PhD. Let me school you, chump. But no, I said, you know, I've got to tell you, it took me two years to write that book, and you read the whole thing, and I put my whole heart into it, I'm really grateful. Seriously, I mean, I know you hate it, and you think I'm a stooge, and it's

terrible, and I'm terrible, and everything's terrible. But, man, it's amazing. I mean, you read the whole book, every word, thank you, sent. And like, 15 months later, I get an email back from the guy. It's like, dear Professor Brooks, next time you're in Dallas. You want to get some dinner and give me a call. Yeah, yeah. Like, what the... What happened? Yeah, and it was gratitude, which is like an anesthetic for contempt. Yeah. When somebody treats you with hatred and you respond with, you thank you for paying attention to my stuff.

Because when you think about it, I mean, we're so unduly negative. You know, somebody reaches out and punches you, Jordan. That guy knows who you are. That person is listening to your stuff. That person is like is paying enough attention to get offended. I mean, that's amazing. I mean, hostels are our friends much more than apathetics. There is something to this.

The people that write me every week, and are rude are often the ones that I have listened to every episode. They're nitpicking little things in each one. And then eventually, some way, midway through the year, I just go one step too far and never hear from them again. By one step too far, I mean not paying attention to their peculiarly or quirks. Yeah. And sometimes they go away.

And they quit you. And they quit, yeah. Yeah. But it is, there is something flattering about it. Now, on the other hand, you do have to make sure that you're staying sort of grounded because otherwise you become like a Milo Yanopoulos who's like, oh, I'm getting attention from doing this. I'm just going to go that way. Forget everything I was doing over here that made something real. I'm just going to trigger everyone.

Well, you're doing something good. I mean, you're doing something you care about. You're saying things. I mean, you know, it's actually not cost effective for you to get Juan Gua. It's hugely time consuming. It's going to be a lost leader. Well, totally. And a lot of people are going to be listening to be like, Juan Who? Where's Venezuela? Is that in Canada? You know, I mean, I get it. I mean, this is foreign policy is extremely exotic. But the reason you're doing it's because it's the right thing to do and it gives you inherent satisfaction. Yeah. If basically, your whole product is Jordan. You got a problem. And that's what a lot of, a lot of what's going on in the entertainment industrial complex in America today is people whose whole program is, is their, is their self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, if you say, look, you know, God has blessed me, you know, I got, I got listeners, I got viewers, I got an audience, why? There's got to be a reason. Listen to what's the reason for having this so I can enrich other people, so I can serve other people. this sense of achievement that I'm getting

and satisfaction that I'm getting, it's entirely instrumental. It is not intrinsic. And this is the key thing. Every single person listening to has got some version of this because every single person wants to be successful. That's a good thing. I mean, humans are built to be successful. Thank God, because we really would be like, you know, not even inventing flints.

Yeah. Yeah. Animal skins? Too complicated. Too complicated. But success is something that most people are driven to in some way. Maybe not as insanely as you. Maybe not as like, I'm going to have, you know, six million downloads. But they want to do something. They want to get a promotion at work. You know, they want to get, you know,

a sense of accomplishment where somebody tells them they did well. Why do you want that? Not for its sake, such that you can do more good. You know, you want to be, right? Yeah. And remembering that's really key. Yeah. I know that that's true because the things that make me mad about other people with big

platforms is when they, in my opinion, squander it. They'll do, like, somebody who has, let's say, a huge television show will then be like, oh, we have a real housewife on. I'm just thinking, like, okay, look, that's entertainment. You have a huge platform. I'm angry that you didn't spend any time trying to make your viewer better. Yeah. You just entertained us with stupid crap.

You wasted it. You wasted it. Yeah. So that's like my, that makes me like get all, I don't know, excited in a negative way. If you get more what, always ask why. You know, if you get something more that you want and there's a reason and it's your obligation to use it. I mean, if you want to relax, then don't try to succeed.

Yeah. Trust me. I've thought about that strategy. Oh, except you can't. You don't have any choice. No, I think I look at people, I grew up in Michigan and Troy, Michigan. It's like a suburban Detroit area, like Ann Arbor kind of situation. And I look at a lot of my friends and family.

and I was just at a bachelor party and some of my friends were like, oh man, some of our friends, they just became like high school teachers and I was like, well, let me stop you right there. You know how happy those people are? They figured out what they wanted to do when they were like 24.

They got married to somebody they'd been dating for a while. They had kids well before age 30. They're satisfied with what they're doing in a lot of ways. They have way more free time than you and I. We cannot sit back and judge. We're wired in a way that we're always dissatisfied.

They're wired in a way where that is fine. I'm jealous of that. that in on many levels. Yeah. Look, we're made differently. Everybody's made differently. We need people in different roles. And if everybody were like you, the world would melt down.

And if there weren't anybody like you, there wouldn't be any progress. I mean, and again, this sounds like super Darwinian in its way, but it's not. Everybody has his or her place in our society. And we need to, and the key thing is what we call discernment. Discernment is the process not of figuring out what you're supposed to do, but in meditation, figuring out what you want. Most of the people listening to us are under 30. And one of the key things, when I'm talking to people under 30,

most of people listening to us are under 25, I bet you. This? Yeah. No, it's 25 to 35 and 35 to 45 is the second tier. So one of the key things when I'm talking to people, young people, but including 25 to 35, that they don't know is what they want. They actually don't know what they want. And part of the reason is because they've been spending their life avoiding the question,

what do I actually want? And so the key thing is discerning, you know, who, they'll either be regretting that they can't enjoy their lives and relax or regretting that they don't have more ambition or regretting something. It's like figure out what you want and then figure out how to offer it up in service of other people. That's just, that's the key. Desire, this discernment of desire and making sure it's right desire, that's, that's,

that's the goal. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Arthur Brooks. We'll be right back after this. Thanks for listening and supporting the show. Your support of our advertisers keeps. us on the air. And to learn more and get links to all the great discounts you just heard, visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. That links in the show notes over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And if you're listening to

us in the Overcast Player, please click that little star next to the episode. We really appreciate it. And now for the conclusion of our episode with Arthur Brooks. Let's talk about the culture of contempt that you write about a lot in the book. We don't value the difference of opinion, but instead we sort of link it to moral turpity. and said, and I thought this point was really interesting. It cultivates this culture of contempt. And it reminded me of the fundamental attribution error where we judge ourselves by our intentions. We judge other people by their actions and then our mind sort of fills in the blank and goes like, oh, this is a person who's just really entitled, selfish prick, not, oh, they got their kid in the back

and they're on the way to the hospital, whatever. Yeah. Right. But the idea that we automatically look at other opinions and link those to moral turpitude is something that I'm seeing more and more of, not just online, but I mean, people, somebody wrote, I'll post something on Instagram that's funny and someone will go, oh, I see your, it's funny now to make fun of such and such. And I'm thinking, there's no way you're a member of that particular group that you're offended about. And then suddenly it's not just Jordan picked a weird meme that he didn't think about. It's Jordan's a bad person, therefore also kind of racist or whatever. And this seems to be getting more and more common, and I don't really understand why. But you mentioned the outrage industrial

complex and I can't help but think that fire is spreading. Yeah, so what you're talking about right now, I mean, there's a couple of different manifestations that I write about a lot. One is the motive attribution asymmetry where we believe that we are motivated by love and we know what motivates us, and most people are kind of motivated by love, but we see the actions of others, as you just suggested, and that motive attribution and symmetry means that we attribute different motives to the people with whom we're opposed, and we assume that they're motivated by hatred toward us. So it's amazing. And what you can have is two sides in a conflict, fundamentally, who have

motive attribution of symmetry. And it's what you'd expect in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The reason that's intractable and we can't fix it under current circumstances is because literally both, according to the research, both sides are motivated by the idea that I'm motivated by love and you are motivated by hatred toward me. Now here's where it gets interesting. There's a guy named Adam Waits, who teaches at Northwestern University. And he writes an article with some colleagues in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2014. I read this article, it just blew my mind.

He found that motive attribution in asymmetry is as intense today between Democrats and Republicans as it is between Israelis and Palestinians. That's not good. Which is really bad. That means that we can't make progress because we assume that if I'm a Republican and you're a Democrat,

that I'm motivated by love for my country and you're motivated by hatred toward me in our country. That's untenable. Yeah, that's not good. That's based on another cognitive error because you're into this stuff. which is the ad hominem error, which is that I assume I know what motivates you.

Look, I know what motivates me, or, you know, I should know what motivates me. It's astonishing how many people actually don't know what actually motivates them because they're so non-self-reflective, right? But I know for sure I don't know what motivates you. As a matter of fact, the new research shows that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, they know each other so little because they're so siloed today, and they make these huge error, just factual errors.

errors. You put in the book, what was it? It was like a huge percentage of Democrats think Republicans are, where is it? $250,000 and above. Right. Are a bunch of rich old, many liberals think Republicans make tons of money and many Republicans assume liberals are mostly homosexuals. I know. It's so amazing. So that it's, it's a, that the average Republican guesses that 40% of Democrats are gay or lesbian. And the average Democrat, no, no, no, it's completely. insane. I mean, it's just, it doesn't pass the giggle test, right? And the, the, that 40% of Democrats, the same percentage, just to show that nobody is immune to this, that we're all, like, enthralled of our cognitive biases, that 40% of Democrats think, no, the average Democrat thinks

that 40% of Republicans make $250,000 a year or more. There's aren't enough people in either of those brackets. If only it were true. It's like, then with our country would be so much more prosperous. It's like 2.1%. It's like it would be it's like it's crazy. And so we don't even know those basic facts about each other in this country because we're so siloed and our friend groups are so narrow. How on the heck am I going to know what your motives are? And to make the, to assume ad hominemis is this what you were saying. It's like Jordan made this joke on Instagram. And so therefore I know what's residing in the depths of his heart. I bet you he bears animus toward some racial group. So wild leap, but that's exactly what we're talking about. Motive attribution asymmetry

on the basis of ad hominem. Don't be that guy. You know, every, who's doing that. I mean, it's like if you're, you're disagreeing with somebody, you just disagree with them. You don't know what motivates him. Maybe he has hatred for humanity and wants everybody to die. Probably not. Generally not. I would actually, if you're going to make an assumption about people's motives, I recommend assuming the best. The person is life will be easier. It's tricky to do that, but it's a good sort of cognitive drill maybe. And you'll be way, way, way happier. It's amazing to me.

You know, that, you know, since I've been, the reason I wrote this book, Love Your Enemies, by the way, I wrote it because I want to lash myself to the mast. When you write a book and it's a bestseller, you know, it's, you can't ever do the thing that you're railing against ever again. Oh, yeah, good point.

And so basically, I'm thinking to myself, I did all of the work. I did, you know, it was a two-year research project on how, on the advice I wanted to give people and the standards to which I wanted to live up. Right? I want to live up to the standards of loving my enemies. I want to do it for the rest of my life. I want to dedicate myself to loving others, especially those with whom I disagree,

and standing up for the people with whom I disagree for the rest of my life. Those are my moral standards. I thought, okay, how am I going to guarantee I'm going to do it? I'm going to write a book, and if it's a bestseller, and then I don't do it, I'm going, a big poster with your face next to love your enemies, and then someone puts it next to some tweet, or you're putting it in your mind next to some tweet you're about to send, and you're going, that's not a good look. I write, like, liberals are deviant.

And then it'll be a quote, Arthur Brooks, circa 2019, and then this is the author of Love Your Enemies. Ironically tweeted yesterday. And I have been inconsistent in my life. I mean, you know, people, no matter what people will say, we'll find a quote from 2008 or something. And I don't care about that because we're allowed to change our thinking. And I have, by the way, the reason I wrote Love Your Enemies is because I always haven't, I always haven't lived up to that in the past. What I'm committing myself is trying to live up to it in the future.

Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah, you're allowed to sort of change things. You can't say somebody who's in alcohol recovery, somebody who's in AA, and say, you're a hypocrite because 10 years ago you used to be a drunk. Right. Yeah, good point. Yeah, you're supposed to upgrade your thing. It's like the whole point of what we're doing here. Ideology versus friends and family is a false choice. That really stuck out in the book. And to give people a little context here, the whole not getting along with certain people, family friends, because you're supposed to choose your ideology over that or the 40% I wouldn't want my kid to marry a right? Republican or a Democrat. That whole thing. This false choice is presented by pundits and politicians

and it divides us. Tell us what's going on here because we were kind of touching on that and then we made a right turn. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So 93% of Americans hate how divided we become as a country. Okay. It's incredible. That's a huge number. It's a huge number. And 100% of the people listening to us and watching us love somebody with whom they disagree politically. That makes sense. I mean, it's like, unless you live in a cave or or you're really, really screwed up, you love somebody with whom you disagree politically. Okay, so that's really, really good news. Now here's bad news. We act and contempt. Most of us act contemptuously toward the people with whom we disagree. Why?

And it really comes down to bad leadership from not the 93%. We have bad habits. It's the 7% the people who actually like how divided we become as a country. Now, inevitably, and I give the evidence for this in the book, this is what I call the outrage industrial complex. These are people getting rich and powerful and famous

are simply getting satisfaction of followers by setting people against each other. But for fuel, they rely on you and me playing along. Yeah, okay. So this is the whole, not just trolls, but people who say, look, these people are all insane

or dangerous in some way, and where the voice of reason... Right. And they'll set up the other side in terms of actual quotes from the craziest person on the other side. And the left and right both do it. And so if you watch a lot of cable TV, in the evening, whether you're on the left wing of the right wing, whatever, you'll see people saying,

you know what liberals think? I'm going to put up the craziest thing I have heard today and said, that's what liberals actually think. Number one, that's ad hominem. But number two, it's like you don't take a 2% cross-section and attribute 50% of people's views. That's an irresponsible. It's actually it's a brainless thing to do. And it's so doing, you know, when we put up with that, we're getting fired up and that person is getting rich. And so what I recommend that people do is stand up to the man. Back in the 60s, that's what they used to say. Stand up to the man, right? But be a nonconformist. And the way to do it is by standing to people on your own side who are telling you to hate. That's interesting because we might actually have a chance of persuading somebody on our own side.

Hey, look, don't argue like that. Totally and totally. And, you know, again, you'll lose, you'll lose followers when you do that because you're a lot less interesting. But that's, that's, That's okay to wait to lose followers. I agree. I think that makes sense. I'm not very political on the show ever. We're more like, hey, teach people critical thinking, and then they'll make, well, the best, in here quotes, decisions. But I love the idea that this is something that we should all be.

And it's tough, though, because it's kind of like saying, hey, you'd make more money if you were doing this dumb thing that was destructive. But don't do that because it's bad for the country. People will go, well, I hope everyone else listens to that advice, but I'm still going to do it because I want. the money. And I see this in sort of a self-help industry. Every industry has this. It's like, I can do really hard work and we can have a real conversation about things that will make people's lives better, but I could also have this yoga person on the show that has a million followers and then just say, hey, you know what, you should always just love everyone. And then people will go, oh, that sounds good. I'm going to put a bumper sticker like that on my car. It's empty. It doesn't

do anything, but it's kind of the easy way to go. But it's a race to the bottom. And so you see industries that could have been really helpful to people like personal growth and self- help are now just cheesy crap that like 98% of it you should just light on fire. Just candy. Yeah. And you know, it could have been something that's really nutritious for sure. Yeah. You know, I agree and we should be able to do more. But so the first part of, of what you just said is really provocative because you'd basically talk about what we call on our business, the prisoner's dilemma where, you know, it would be better if people collaborated. But if if one person's collaborating and you're the guy who's defecting, then you're going to do better. And so, but, but here's

the argument that I want to make to everybody's watching us. Yeah, it feels more satisfying to be the one who owns the Libs or owns the conservative or whatever, right? It feels more satisfying to do that and to just vanquish the other side with a well-placed zinger. And by the way, they're virtually always super like unoriginal and lame. You know, at the moment they feel like when they're tripping off your iPhone. Okay, but here's the key thing. When I talk to people who are very fired up about politics and doing that a lot. And they'll say, so why are you doing that? He says, because people, they deserve my contempt.

They feel really morally justified. They're screwing up my country. Those people are. They deserve these insults. They deserve my hate. I said, okay, okay, fine, okay, fine. And this is conservative or liberals. I'm on college campuses a lot, right?

So I'm having this conversation over and over again. I say, okay, what's the ideal state of affairs? If you're a big liberal, for example, you're a big progressive, and you see people who like Donald Trump, you know, running the country and having tons of power, and you see a person who has a lot of influence, or even who doesn't, but who really likes Donald Trump, what's your, and you tell them that they're stupid and you tell them they're worthless, you tell them that they're idiots and they're hurting the country. What's your goal? Is your goal to actually, what would you ideally,

would you like to exile that person, kick him out of the country? Like, no, of course not. Would you like to arrest that person and put them in jail? No. Would you like to sneak into their house and hurt them while they sleep? Like, what kind of person do you think I am? Okay, what's your goal? Well, I want him to act and think differently. So how's your hate working out for that? Right. If you want to be more persuasive, you got to love.

There is no other. Martin Luther King said this over and over and over again. He said, when you hate a man, you cannot redeem him. I mean, so that's why Martin Luther King was one of the great communicators of our time, of our nation's history. It's because he would illuminate these fundamental truths. If you can't hate somebody into being persuaded. Number one. Number two, if you act that way, you will be unhappier. You'll get a little bit of satisfaction in the moment, but you will be unhappy. I've got the science. It's irrefutable. It's

unambiguous. Read the book. If you want to be, and if you don't want to read the book, you know I'm right. And everybody listening to us knows I'm right. If you treat somebody with hatred, you will wind up being unhappier. And that person will be unhappier. And number three, 93% of us wish the country were more united. You're part of the problem when you do that. So I got a win, win, win proposition for our listeners and viewers today. Number one is I'm going to make you more persuasive. I'm going to make you happier. And I'm going to start a social movement in your heart in a tiny little way to bring our country together.

And that's answering hatred with love as much as you possibly can. It makes sense from sort of a tactical or rhetorical level as well because we know what the boomerang effect, right? It's arguing with people in the wrong way solidifies their beliefs. Is it the same as the backfire effect? It's very similar. Yeah, it is the same thing. Same thing. Different way of saying it.

Exactly right. Well, you know a lot. Did you get your degree in psychology? No. I went to law school. So, yeah. So I took all of the interesting stuff and then never used it.

And then here we are. But I read all the books for all the guests that come on the show. So I learn a bunch of this stuff, you know, from behavioral accountants. And you're into it. Yeah, I like it. Yeah. Yeah, I like it. Because I think these are powerful tools because otherwise you hear people say stuff and you go,

you know, that sounds clever and it sounds right, but it doesn't feel right. There's something wrong with it. And that's where maybe a lot of people stop. and I go, I want to find out why that's wrong. And then I'll look through my nerdy deck of cards that have cognitive biases on them. And I'll be like, oh, it's the Texas sharpshooter fallacy where you pick your data and then that illustrates your point, but you ignore all the ones that don't. Or whatever. Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

You ever heard of that? Yeah, I've heard that used before. But yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, yeah. I think then in research in academics, they call it shooting the barn too, where you just, you shoot randomly to get data. And then you draw the circle where you want it. And that's the target, supposedly. So you're just making the conclusion match.

That's actually a huge problem in academic research, believe it or not. I mean, it just sounds like something people would do who are undisciplined about their thinking. But academics do this, too. And the way that we tend to do it is that we get a data set or a bunch of datasets. And you can't publish a paper in an academic journalist. You come up with statistically significant results. You know, you basically said, I ran all these regressions and I got all these data. and they were very inconclusive.

It was like not published. So you run the data, run the data, run the data, change the model, change the specification, change until you find like, aha, significant. Right. Then you write the paper. Right. It's got all kinds of stuff and it sort of goes in that direction. So here's my conclusion.

So everybody is prone to this. Everybody, and it's not just because you're trying to be dishonest. It's because you're trying to be, you're trying to have some basis for what you believe. Otherwise it's too scary and ambiguous. Yeah. It is scary. And of course, you know, I get it. You go to school for 10 years.

You want to frickin' write something and get your PhD already. Yeah, and you want to get actually tenure at the university as opposed to getting fired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You never came up with anything. What are you talking about? I debunked all this other stuff. It's like, sorry.

Go debunk elsewhere. Yeah, yeah. We don't pay to debunk. We pay to publish. The idea that contempt and division are demand-driven, that was interesting. Because that to me was like, oh, wait a minute. And this goes along with what you were saying, not only are these contempt and division, do we have these sort of influencers or whatever,

these pundits and things like that coming out of the woodwork, they're demand driven. They don't exist unless people are reacting to it. So it's kind of like drugs, right? Where cocaine sells itself because people use it and they look for it and they want it. We're doing the same thing with these bad, I don't know if they're bad ideas, but they're bad ways of reacting to ideas we don't like. Yeah, that's right. You know, for the longest time in the war on drugs in the United States, you know,

People listening to us are all over different sides of that one for sure. And my point is not to say which side is right, but one of the things that we know is in the 1980s with the cocaine problems coming from Colombia, you know, the original idea was that the government was going to beat supply. You know, we're going to like poison the fields, the coca fields, and we were going to interdict everything with the Coast Guard. And it's like, it was failing because, you know, there's always going to find a better way to get around the mousetrap, always, always, always, always.

until people figured out you got to affect demand. The reason that all this cocaine is coming in the United States is because people like cocaine. Yeah. You know, and the reason that we've got all this hatred is because people like the people feel, get some satisfaction from it.

So it's like 93% say, oh, I hate how divided the country is. And like, I love my mom, even though she disagrees with me and the whole thing. And yet you're listening to that guy in the radio who's spewing pure hate.

Right. And you're listening to his ads. And they know you're listening to his ads. And so they're given him money and his ad prices. are going up and he's going like hate sells baby yeah he's got a 50k or 150k speaking fee yeah because people are actually and you know you you were this is what we call in economics revealed preference you can say all day long I hate how divided our country's become but you

reveal your preference with your dollar votes and your activities and the places you go and things that you say revealed preference that's good because it's yeah that's really good that there's I used to teach guys how to like meet girls back in my 20s that was like my thing 10 12 years ago. And revealed preference was a term we didn't know, but it was, there were all these misconceptions about what you should do. And you get all this advice even from the opposite sex. Like, oh, compliment my shoes and give her flowers. And it's like, wait a minute. That's not working. This is not what they're, oh, I get it. People are giving you advice or they're telling you what they prefer, but they're wrong. The thing they actually prefer is something they don't even

realize. And that was like a game changer as far as dating. But of course, it fits into like everything else. Everything, everything. People are funny. I mean, we wish we want is, again, and this gets to right desire. You know, we will express all kinds of preferences that we wish we had because we want to be virtuous. And at the same time, we exhibit behavior that reveals a different kind of preferences.

And, you know, the truth is we are both. Yeah. You know, the truth is that people, they do want to listen to a hateful radio show host. And at the same time, they do want their mom not to be insulted, and they do want the country to come together. It's just that one reveals a kind of a darker side, one that's a more dopamine-driven-driven kind of behavior.

And the other one is like the devil on one shoulder, an angel on the other. Well, you've got to be the master of yourself. You basically need to deny the revelation of a preference that doesn't express the person that you want to be. It's really not okay. I mean, one of the key things is that part of, you know, as you'll, you're going to teach your son. And I've taught my kids is, is, are you doing in private the things that you're, that you wouldn't be ashamed to have people know you're doing? Yeah. Because just in general, that's the essence of why you feel ashamed of something is because your stated preference is different than your revealed preference.

Yeah, the cognitive dissonance that's... You're not living up to your own moral standards. You know, Carl Jung, arguably the greatest or the most influential psychotherapist, with the exception of Sigmund Freud, said that the basis of happiness is having your private and public preferences being synch is to living up to your own moral standards. It's basically not having a secret life. even if it seems like an innocuous secret life. This is the reason that people become so unhappy when they are anonymously tweeting. They don't like it.

They don't like themselves. They don't like what they're doing, even though they're getting a little tiny bit of satisfaction. So it's like, be in private who you are in public. If you say that I hate how divided it we become as a country, then do something about it. Don't be militating against your own preferences. Reveal the man or woman you won't be.

We see the contempt is bad for you, sort of psychologically, physically. And in the book, you go into some of Gottman's research where it's like, look, you're at, adding stress to your life, you're adding stress to somebody else's life, and you're making the situation worse, and you know that, so you feel bad about it. But in the moment, you're like, ooh, I feel good. This person got it riled up. That's cigarettes. I mean, it's the same problem as anything that gives you a minor stimulus of dopamine. There's nobody who actually says,

you know what I really love. I love being addicted to meth. I love being addicted to meth. You know, everybody who's addicted to meth is like, I hate being addicted to meth, but I keep taking it because the short-term stimulation, the short-term satisfaction, basically you discount away what you really, really want. I mean, we are complicated people. And the secret to this sort of this transcendental bliss is in your life being able to have your, it's like, it's what the finance guy is called, talk about the inversion of the yield curve. What you really want is an economy where the short and long term interest rates, or the economy is so stable that people are not discounting future terrible things in the economy so that the, you know, the five-year interest rate

isn't so different than what we see today. Make your actions right now consistent with what you want to be. And that's really where virtue comes in, but it's also where happiness comes in. That's the key thing. You know, this is, people often, there's a big literature out there about what explains addiction. And in psychology and in neuroscience, it's always about neuro, about brain hormones. It's about, you know, neurotransmitters like dopamine, right? But economists think about it in a different way, and they talk about how we discount the future. And if you discount the future super, super, super, super heavily, in other words, if it happens a long time from now,

nothing. And if you're the kind of person that does that and young people tend to do that. Sure. People that don't think that the future is going to be any good, people who are really pessimistic, they tend to have huge, called discount rates. They tend to have a big dislocation between the preferences that they reveal with their actions and the preferences that they actually express. There's a different, they're two different people. So what you want to do is you say, like five years from now, what do I want to be? You know, if somebody actually saw my interior life, Would they say that it's consistent? Would they think I'm a virtuous person?

Would my kids be proud of me? Those are the questions that we really need to ask ourselves. And when you do that, it's so profoundly and intensely satisfying. It's really what we want. Yeah. It seems like almost like a lofty goal, but it obviously has to be possible to get there. I think it is. I know that you said millennials surveyed can't or won't say things like infidelity or drunk

driving are wrong in absolute terms. And I thought, oh, that's weird because there's something. certain things when I was growing up like, yeah, drunk driving, bad, right? Yeah, and you're, and you're a millennial. Yeah, technically. I'm not like the edge. Yeah, you're sort of gen X millennial kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah. But why is that important? What does this indicate for society at large that people won't say drunk driving bad, infidelity bad, or, you know. Well, it's because there's been a tendency for a pretty long time to, to encourage young people to not make moral proclamations. It's like, in my morals, your morals, it's kind of the relativism that comes that creeps into

our society, is that there's no natural law. And, you know, that's just a kind of societal, it's not a decline, it's just the tendency that we have, is to say, you know, this is what I believe, and this is what you believe, and let's all be cool about it. But that's not the natural state of affairs. We don't have to say that because I think this doctrinal thing in my Christian faith, and you don't think it, you're a heretic and going to burn. That's very different than saying, you know, this hurts people. This hurts people who have, should not be hurt. So therefore it's bad. We should be able to make these distinctions. I agree. I mean, this is what I think about when someone's like, well, look, we don't want to judge this particular subculture, but they just believe

that women shouldn't go to school. And I'm like, look, can we agree that education is good? Well, yeah. Well, okay, so then shouldn't everyone have access to it? Well, I guess, but we don't want to force our beliefs on other people. This is one where I'm kind of willing to go, you know, actually, education is good and everyone should have access to it. And it is backwards of you to think that because someone has a the set of organs or doesn't have a set of organs that they should be able to go to school or they should stay in a dark window. And in a way, you're saying something very, very profound, I think, which is deeper than the question of universal education, of course. You're talking about the universality of human dignity. Yeah. That's the argument that Jordan's making right now. And this is

the fundamental change in society. This is the reason that we should be proud of the society we've been able to build, because we have this all of us, everybody listening to us, Every single person listening to us has this one predilection, and we don't articulate it as such, because we're not taught to, although we should, which is that human dignity is radically equal. Now, that's actually based on a very deep Judeo-Christian assumption that people are, originally that's based on the idea that people are made in God's image. Dignity is to be worthy of respect. God is inherently worthy of respect because of the creator of the entire universe. If we're made in God's image, therefore we are worthy of respect, which is to say that we have, dignity and our dignity is equal. Okay, that's just a, the philosophy behind that, it's the

algorithm behind that. And a lot of people listening to us, watching us, don't have traditional religious views. Sure. And yet, they picked up on the, on the implication of this philosophical algorithm, which is that human dignity is radically equal. That had changed the world. The reason that we are as prosperous as we are is because we look around and we say, you have as much dignity as I do, even though you're a poor. You know as much dignity as I do, even though you're a different color, even though you've got a different religion. The reason the United States is the most successful progressive nation in the history of the world, bar none, is because we're a nation based on the idea that there are certain truths which we claim to be self-evident.

We say life, liberty, they preserve happiness. That means all men are created equal. Do we live up to it? No. Do we still live up to it? No. But is it our aspiration? Yes.

We have an aspiration for equal human dignity. And to say something like, you know, it's good enough for other cultures to deny, you know, education to women, it's my culture, your culture. This is to say, this is to abdicate the idea that human dignity is actually radically equal. Yeah. I mean, this is, this is our heritage. This is how we've been able to rock the world. It's also the big difference between our culture and what we've been able to do and many other places around the world that don't believe in radically equal human dignity. Yeah. So you got, I mean, we have to go to first principles on a lot of this stuff and celebrate some of these truths. There's nobody listening to us, no matter how they think,

politically. He was going to say, you know what, human dignity, not radically equal. Yeah, it's, to me, you're just, it's a whole, I don't want to go down that road. I think we get, I think you did it better than I would. I'm just going to get heated about it. I just look at things like that and I go, look, if this makes me, because people go, well, you're just being a cultural relativist or this is like almost fascist the way that you talk about this. And I'm thinking, if it's fascist to think that women should be able to go to school, even though you hold conservative religious beliefs that say otherwise, then yeah, okay, maybe I'm guilty there. Because that's weird to me.

And it's un-American, and if you live in America, then that's a little bit of age. It's actually the most non-fascist thing. That's kind of where I'm old. Because, you know, basically, it's an argument for equal human dignity. Yeah. I'm like, maybe we should Google fascism. The definition is obviously can. Basically, fascism means everything I don't like.

That's what fascism means in modern Western culture. Yeah, I think you're probably right. You had given us the advice in the book to beware of leaders that use moral dimensions to drive a wedge between us. Can we outline that a little bit? because that's sort of a practical takeaway that I think people can have what leaders are not. Thinkers, influencers, writers, whatever it is. How do we find somebody going, hey, we're just trying to separate this divide everyone? How do we notice that in real time?

So this is based on Moral Foundation's theory, which comes from a friend of mine named Jonathan Haidt. He probably had him on the show. He was on the show. It's terrific. Fantastic. He's a psychologist who teaches at the business school at NYU at the Stern School business. And he's written, you know, he's actually, a visionary. His scholarship is peerless, and he's totally courageous. The amazing guy. And his

work in moral foundations, basically, and this is based on hundreds of thousands of observations. And, you know, he's done big survey data and huge numbers of interviews. And so this is not him popping off. This is not theory. He's not a podcaster for God's saying. Look, man, you're the value chain leading to people listening and actually using this in their lives. You're way more important than me and John. You're the tip of the spear. But, you know, John has found empirically that there are certain moral foundations, things that we consider to be inherently moral, that are probably genetically wired across all people. So that conservatives and liberals, for example, because we're always talking about, you know, conservatives say liberals are immoral.

And that liberals say the conservatives are just a bunch of Puritans with their weird morals. And, you know, there's always these, as much as we're not willing to see. say the drunk driving in adultery or immoral, we use huge moral language all the time. So what John finds is that one thing that everybody agrees on is that the inherent morality of compassion and fairness. That we should treat people with fairness. And what that means means different things of different people.

Like if you believe in redistributive fairness, which is to say that people should have the same amount of stuff, or you have meritocratic fairness, which is to say you need a fair game. And if it comes out differently at the end, that's okay. Those are different versions of fairness, but we all believe is fairness, right? And then there's compassion, you know, how you should treat people with compassion.

We all believe that's an inherently moral thing to do. Once again, how does that manifest? Does it mean by, you know, when somebody is hurting you, you feel their pain to give them stuff? Or is that you hold people to super high standards? I mean, again, compassion is different to different people, right? That's interesting, yeah. Yeah, yeah. But the core point is that it's not reasonable for liberals to say that that conservatives don't believe in compassion, don't believe in fairness.

And it's not reasonable for conservatives to say that liberals don't either. Here's what gets interesting. John finds in his research, and I outlined in my book, that there are three dimensions of morality that conservatives and liberals don't share. Conservatives tend to believe in the morality of authority, the morality of loyalty to group, and the morality of purity, particularly in sexual matters. and liberals are much less inclined to believe those things. And he doesn't know he's agnostic on whether or not that's something genetic. A lot of our personalities do have a genetic basis to them. And, you know, that's, as far as I'm concerned, that's fine, right? Sure, yeah.

But his point is that we are wired a little bit differently on that. And one of the things that I talk about is we want a society in which we can understand each other better and make more progress, we should focus on the things that we have in common and not get all hung up because it becomes like a cudgel, where, you know, conservatives are like, you look at those liberals. You know, as in San Francisco, I see this bumper sticker. You know, your body might be a temple, but mine's an amusement part. Oh, yeah, I've seen those, yeah. It's like, is that a person a conservative or a liberal?

That's a question that answers itself, right? And John would say, well, you know, there's a moral foundation's basis for the fact that person's probably really, really super-pergot. The person's making a joke to begin with, right? But it's a joke that basically is sticking a finger in the eye of people who believe in sexual purity, mostly conservatives, mostly religious people, right? So, okay, if we actually want to make progress as a society, it's not okay. It's actually, it's not just imprudent, it's impractical for conservatives to keep harping on those dimensions. It's also unproductive for liberals to keep

harping on those dimensions and say, oh, you conservatives with your moral purity and your authority and loyalty, you're just like the Taliban. Well, you know, it's just, it's like, get off it, guys. let's talk about compassion and fairness. And we're going to build a better society in the basis of compassion and fairness. Let's adjudicate the fact that people in the left tend to be more redistributive in their fairness. People on the right tend to be more meritocratic

in their fairness. And let's find where we are in the middle of that and let's make some compromises. That's cool, man. That's good. That's what a great society is able to do. And the same thing is with compassion. I believe that it's compassionate

to have a safety net that bails people out that they can't fall too far even when they screw up. But at the same time, it's uncompassionate and not to hold people to high standards. Yeah, I agree. And, you know, that's, that's the kind of conversation we need to be having, moral conversation we need to be having. There's so much in here, and I'm trying, I'm now, like, frantically scrolling through the last of my notes here. But I love the idea that iron sharpens iron. And I think the idea that we need this in politics is good, too. And to give people

an analogy here, businesses get better when there's competition. That's a free market concept. But, I mean, in very real terms, this show got a lot better when podcasting became more popular. Yeah, my skills went up, whatever. But one of the real motivating reasons was really good talent that otherwise was writing is now podcasting. And then they're going, oh, well, there's no good show where somebody does this amount of prep. And I'm like, crap, now I've got to read the whole book instead of just getting a summary or winging the conversation like I used to do. And then that's made me better as an interviewer. And then other people go, oh, well, there's this journalist doing a show now.

they're really good at research. Shoot, I've got to be more entertaining. I better start taking comedy classes and speaking classes and get those skill sets because that's how I'm going to beat a journalist. So now I'm more entertaining and I'm able to out-prepared most people. Now I'm looking for that edge all the time. Are you happier? I like it.

Yeah, yeah, good point. No, but being good. That's true. If excellence is its own reward, yes. Yeah. If simply beating the competition is the reward, then it's problematic. It's both. Yeah.

Of course it's both. Of course it's both. It's both, yeah. If I'm candid, it's... And again, you know, it's like the entrepreneur, the progressive, the guy who creates prosperity, lives on a knife's edge all the time. I try not to just be competitive, because then if you're just trying to beat somebody, you just dismantle them. You don't work on yourself. And sooner or later, you're going to get beat. And you're probably going to get beat regularly

by different things, by different people, and you're going to be miserable all the time. But anyway, that's not your point. Right, no. Your point is competition's good. Right. And that's the... Competition being good is the basis of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, you know, the greatness of the country. And by the way, that is not a political statement or ideological statement

at all. Nobody, you know, there's nobody left, right or center. You'd have to be the most inveterate Soviet to say it would be better if we had one brand breakfast cereal, the supermarket. They want more than one. You know, and that's not even about choice. It's about the fact that, and again, actually, that's probably a bad example, because, you know, a lot of food that we get is just the race to the bottom in garbage. Oh, of course. Makes you fat, makes you miserable, doesn't give you good nutrition, et cetera. But, you know, the point is that people want, you know, more than one option when they do things because the iron sharpens iron. The same thing is especially true in politics. You know, democracy is an example of competition.

You know, we want, we don't want uncontested elections. It bums us out when there's only one person or when they're, God forbid, there's voter fraud or there's voter suppression. We hate that. And the reason is because we want real competition. Nobody wants to, like it, you know, I like the Seattle Seahawks, my favorite football team. I love the CELC Seahawks. My friend just moved to Seattle. It's just, you know, I'll always look, it's like, I haven't lived in Seattle since I was 18 years old when I graduated from high school. And I still crazy about the Seattle Seahawks. You know, I don't want the Seattle Seahawks to win because the opposing teams quarterback got, you know, got hurt on a dirty hit. Right. I don't want that. I want the Seahawks to win fair and square. I want them to, I loved it when they beat the Broncos in the Super Bowl. I mean, it was so awesome. And I got to say the next year when they lost to the New England Patriots on that last play, where they, they had a made a bad play and tried to throw a touchdown pass when they should have run it into the line with Marshawn Lynch. You remember that? I remember the Super Bowl and that happened. I remember the whole uproar. Oh, it was so depressing, but you know what? I love the game. I love the competition. I love the fact that my Seahawks lost because of a true competition. And if they had won,

because it turned out that they had bribed an official and won on that last play of the Super Bowl, it wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been, it wouldn't have been the same. I wouldn't have watched anymore. You know, this is how people are. And we need true competition of ideas that, that we need to make each other better and stronger. But it's not just tolerating competition. It's actually being grateful for competition. And that was your point, which I really liked. It's hard.

It's hard to do, man. But, you know, when I was talking to, I was at one of the congressional retreats, I was keynoting for the members of Congress a couple years ago. And one of my questions to the audience was, how many of you wish we lived in a one-party state? It's like zero hands. And zero hearts, frankly.

You know, they don't secretly wish. As much as, you know, Democrats will say the Republicans wish. that we live in a fascist, one-party state, and the Republican say the same thing about a Democrat. It's not true. And then I said, okay, so how many of you are grateful that we live in a multi-party democracy every hand? Sure.

You just told me you're grateful for the Democrats. And these are a bunch of Republicans, right? Does it get a laugh around around everyone? Well, kind of except that it's like scales fall from their eyes. You know, and when I say that I'm grateful to live in a country where there's no knock in the night because of my opinions, I'm just that I'm grateful that there's more than one opinion. because there's not more than one opinion

than it's meaningless that there's no jackbooted thug ready to cart me off to jail. It's not because there's no group think. You've got to have more than one opinion. And so if you're grateful for that, then you're grateful for the people who don't hold your opinion. It doesn't mean you agree. It doesn't mean you don't want to figure it's competition,

but you got to be grateful for the fact that there are people who disagree with you living peacefully with you. Yeah, even when it annoys you a little bit. Or a lot. Or a lot. Can we wrap with the, you have these five rules to subvert the culture of contempt. I can refresh your memory, although it appears I have four.

So you're on your own for the last one. The first one is identify manipulators and limit their influence. Stand up to the man. You know, this is the key thing. Everybody knows. You know, if I say, okay, get in your head a picture of a person who's, you know, telling us to hate each other, the person you're thinking of is somebody with whom you disagree. And so that's wrong.

Because, you know, you're not being manipulated by somebody who disagree with. You think that person's a stooge and bad. get into your head somebody who's telling us to hate the other side on our side. It's your favorite columnist. It's your favorite talk show host. It's your favorite politician. It's your favorite college professor. This is part of the outrage industrial complex. Sorry, Bill. It's, it's, you know, this is the kind of, so, so get into the head, somebody you'd agree with who's saying the other side is stupid and deviant evil and turn them off. You got to do it because otherwise you're, you're rewarding the outrage industrial complex. And you got to start on your own side. It's true. Okay. Good. Stand up to people on your own side who trash people on the other side. That kind of did. Yeah, we just kind of covered that.

Escape the filter bubble. This one we've talked about in previous shows. Yeah, filter bubble is dangerous because it's so easy to do that. And the filter bubble refers, of course, to the siloing of your information. And it's very easy to do on social media. Because the social media algorithms lend themselves to that. If you start looking at a certain kind of thing on Facebook and you get a lot of your information news from Facebook, will be unto you.

Facebook is going to get smart and is going to feed you more and more stuff. that you like and that you agree with and that outrages you about the deviancy of the other side. It will turn you into an automatonic hater. That's the problem with these social media algorithms. It's not a person who's trying to screw you up, but the algorithm will screw you up because they'll be monetizing you. They'll be figuring out how your dopamine is going to make you click on more of their lengths and it's going to drive up ad prices.

We did a whole show with this with Jaron Lanier and others who said, look, I've designed some of this and when you engage because you're angry, we show you more of this. that. And when you click like on this or share something, we show you more of that. Because that's how we get your impressions. That's right. I'm on site, et cetera. That's right. And so they, those algorithms optimized for that. And then it's everyone that you know, because of everyone you see agrees with you and everyone who doesn't, you're just thinking, who are these moron? Who's this moronic 1% that wants to ruin everything? And who is the moronic 50% that doesn't agree with me? They're deviance. And so the key thing to get out of that is not just, number one, don't get your

information from social media. It's a mistake to try to get your information and news from social media. And it's a mistake to try to get it from one news source, too, by the way, one news network or one newspaper at this point. It's dumb. You know, you're not going to be as smart as you could be. And the other thing that I recommend then is because one of the problems in social media where you get into a filter bubble is you start getting into a social bubble too. Yeah. If you're good at filtering out all, opposing information on the internet, you're going to be really good at filtering out other people that you disagree with. And you find that people are tending more and more and more. to only have friends who agree with them,

to only go places where they agree. You know, the kids who are really super social left-wing activists in high school, they'll go to these liberal arts colleges that are most fired up in social justice. Well, you're not going to be excellent when you come out of the circuit. It doesn't mean you're wrong.

But even if I do think you're wrong, it's that's only what I think, right? I mean, the point is not that I'm saying that you're wrong. It's just that you're not going to be excellent because, you know, iron sharpens iron. Exactly. You've got to get out of your...

Also, your life won't be as satisfying an interest. as it should be. It's not interesting to be around. People say you're right all the time. Right. So challenge if you're a young high school activist, go to Brigham Young or something and see what I see how you come out the other side. And, you know, if you're a big conservative activist and a real evangelical Christian conservative activist, go to a left-wing church. Oh, yeah. Oh, interesting. Try it. You know, yeah, absolutely. Last but not least, how can I avoid contempt if I view the other side as just immoral? Right? I mean, I get, all that's got, fine and good, thanks, Arthur, thanks Jordan, but, you know, look, the other side, they're just real pieces of crap.

What am I supposed to do? The answer is your own. I mean, people are not their views. It's perfectly fine for you to say, Brooks, your ideas are immoral. But you can't say, Brooks, because of your ideas, you are immoral. That's a huge, a cognitive leap, and it's been foisted upon us by the outrage industrial complex. It's made us into lesser people by basically saying, you. are the sum of your views. That's insane, if anything. If anything, you're the sum of your actions.

But the sum of, you know, of partially formed ideologies and stuff that you've read and things that you might have accidentally said. I mean, come on, man. You know, this is, I have to be able, and I can't put one foot in front of the other and live a happy, satisfying, and moral life by saying that, that you are, that Jordan is, is nothing more than what he thinks. You know, I have to be able to separate you from what you think because you, what you think, you think might be contemptible to me, but you should never be contemptible to me. You're my brother. You're my brother, man, and we're made, and we're sons of the same father, in my view. And that's, you know, that's my religious view. But, you know, it says, it's a kind of

philosophically consistent view with the way that we should see each other. Yeah, it doesn't really hurt you to look at people like that, even if you're a complete atheist. It's kind of nice to think. Yeah, so just because you say, you know, you should be able to look at every other person and say you're my brother or sister. And you'll be a happier person, you'll be a more effective person, you'll be a more persuasive person, you'll be a more persuadable person.

You'll bring people together. Win, win, win, win, win, when you win. You fulfilled your promise today. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jordan. Appreciate it a lot. Great big thank you to Arthur Brooks. The book title is Love Your Enemies.

He's got 10 other ones too. Love Your Enemies, how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt. And I know what you're thinking. Oh, he's conservative. Oh, no, I don't know. The book is very much.

middle of the road. If you're interested in intellectual honesty, you know, like talking about real ideas instead of being like, oh, you're the devil because, and then they mischaracterize your argument or they're drawing attention to their other pet cause, he's against that. He wants real discourse. And I am very much a fan of real discourse. And I had sort of my career flashing before my eyes, my future career, if you will, where I was like, oh, there might be room for intellectually honest discourse in politics. Then again, I'm naive as hell and that might never work. Anyway, this is a great show, and I really enjoyed it. If you want to know how I managed to book all these great guests

and manage my relationships using systems and tiny habits, check out six-minute networking. It's free. Don't kick the can down the road. You need relationships. You're too late to make them. You've got to dig that well before you get thirsty. This takes five to six minutes a day.

And, you know, it's like seven-minute abs, six-minute networking. This is the stuff I wish I knew a decade ago. It's not fluff. It's crucial. Jordanharbinger.com slash course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Arthur Brooks. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, and there's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at Jordan Harbinger.com slash YouTube, and you can find some YouTube-only content in there,

and you can see how awesome of a guest Arthur Brooks was. He's dynamic. He moves around. He's very engaging. I aspire to be that engaging someday. Like, really, you can tell he is just born for this. And I love that about this episode. This show is produced in association with Podcast One,

and this episode was co-produced by Jason DeAnemide de Philippo and Jen Harbinger. Show notes and worksheets by Robert Fogarty. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is you share it with friends when you find something useful. That definitely counts here in this episode.

So share the show with those you love. Share the show with those you don't. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by something you should podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way.

Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what makes people like you or not. The through line is always the same. Smart ideas you can actually use in real life. Something you should know has been featured in Apple's shows we love, and it's got thousands of five-star reviews because it's consistently interesting. So if you want another show that scratches that I want to understand how people in the world really work itch, search for something you

should know wherever you get your podcasts. Look for the bright yellow light bulb and start listening. You can thank me later.