211: Arthur Brooks | How Loving Your Enemies Can Save America

Transcripts for Arthur Brooks | How Loving Your Enemies Can Save America (Episodes 211)

Jordan Harbinger: [00:00:03] Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer Jason DeFillippo. 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 complement. 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 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.

[00:00:53] Naturally, since this is The Jordan Harbinger Show, we also learned 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 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 jordanharbinger.com/course. In the meantime, here's Arthur Brooks.

Arthur Brooks: [00:01:25] Anytime you catch yourself comparing yourself to others, you have to stop. and say, “That's what I'm doing. Don't do that.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:31] Oh God. Easier said than done.

Arthur Brooks: [00:01:33] Yeah, I know, but once you know that the knowledge is power because you'll actually be able to do that once you start catching yourself. You say, “Oh, I'm comparing myself. That's why I'm feeling unhappy right now.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:01:43] Oh man, I need that every single day. I need to catch that--

Arthur Brooks: [00:01:47] Think about the fact that you're really successful, which means all those people comparing themselves to Jordan. “I can be like Jordan, but 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:01] It is.

Arthur Brooks: [00:02:02] That's called the hedonic treadmill.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:03] Yes, that's right, that's right.

Arthur Brooks: [00:02:06] It's 40 percent more than you currently have.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:08] Is that what it is?

Arthur Brooks: [00:02:10] That's kind of the iron law in the social psychology of not having enough. 40 percent more, 40 percent more advertisers, 40 percent more money, 40 percent better looks, 40 percent, 40 percent.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:20] Maybe I'm greedy. I want a thousand percent more.

Arthur Brooks: [00:02:23] You’d be basically like, “If I had 40 percent more money, I'd feel better,” but you won't know. It's always moving. So you have to stop comparing yourself and say, “Is this intrinsically satisfying? Am I doing good? Am I earning my success? Am I serving others?” If the answer is yes. That's awesome.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:43] 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:02:55] You go nuts. And particularly for your certain kind of person, if you're a pretty ambitious entrepreneurial person --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:02:58] I am that type of person.

Arthur Brooks: [00:03:00] So that's basically what happens is that the happy entrepreneur is one that has a high level of wellbeing and low level of satisfaction. Because if you're an entrepreneur, you can't be satisfied. But you have to have this enough self-awareness to recognize that and not let that dissatisfaction metastasize into a source of your own unhappiness.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:17] Because this is really useful, especially for me because I go through life in many ways going, “You know, I'm so lucky to have this job. I've got Arthur Brooks coming in and 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 does. They’re riding a giraffe or whatever.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:03:44] It's classic. And if you’re riding a 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 the giraffe. It's interesting, you know, there's sort of three kinds of people. Do you know this whole mindfulness moment?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:03:58] Yes.

Arthur Brooks: [00:03:58] 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. The three kinds of people are prospective, mindful, and retrospective. There are people who live in the past, people live in the present, people live in the future. All entrepreneurs are prospective.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:15] That makes sense.

Arthur Brooks: [00:04:15] 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 fully and enjoy your life. So that's the reason that you're always like, “Okay if I could be more mindful now--“ If everybody were mindful, we'd be living in caves. This is an interesting thing. It's a conundrum basically. The success and happiness of the world depend on people who don't discern their own success and can't enjoy their own happiness.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:04:48] I know. It's funny, it's like a soldier, right? Like your life is a sort of like you're living in a trench outside of castle wall wearing heavy armor and being malnourished half the time. But the people inside are like, “Good thing, there are people like that out there,” because they like to have dinner with their friends and family.

Arthur Brooks: [00:05:02] I know. And you know, most people -- the interesting thing to keep in mind is 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. Okay so then the key thing is how you defend yourself, how are you going to take care of yourself. The self-defense actually has to come at some point because otherwise, you're just going to sit on the hamster wheel for the rest of your life. And so it was 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 have really, really high achievement. And 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:05:48] I should read that.

Arthur Brooks: [00:05:49] 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 it’s going to be me. I'm turning 55 this month and I feel great.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:02] Happy birthday.

Arthur Brooks: [00:06:03] Thank you. I feel like I'm 30 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 -- and I was on a plane thinking about this and 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, a bestseller most of the time. My columns are getting published in the New York Times and life was sweet, but it could've been better.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:35] It could've been on TV.

Arthur Brooks: [00:06:37] Yeah, exactly right. 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 elderly couple with the tone of their voices. It’s dark. The wife is like, “Oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. It's not true.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:06:51] Oh no.

Arthur Brooks: [00:06:52] Oh my God, man. This guy is like – I mean fortunately it's not me because you know, when I'm old I'm going to be saying, “I did everything. I was super successful.” But this guy, I mean frustrated dreams and live up to his potential. Lights go on, he stands up. It's one of those famous men in America.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:10] Really?

Arthur Brooks: [00:07:11] Yeah. And the guy who had done everything a real hero, not controversial. And I thought I got to make some changes because I don't want to be 89 years old going, “Nobody loves me anymore.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:25] It must be hard to come down from it. Because at some point he must have felt good, but maybe not.

Arthur Brooks: [00:07:29] Maybe not. I mean, I bet he was on the wheel, on the wheel just going, “There’s could be more. I could have more.” The equivalent of more podcasts listeners, better advertisers --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:07:38] I only got nominated for an Academy Award.

Arthur Brooks: [00:07:40] Can you believe that? It’s like that sucks, man. I got shafted. And look at old Joe down the street there. He’s won two Oscars. “If I only had that, then I'd finally be happy.” No, you wouldn’t. 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 is the happiness that you create for yourself right now. And that's especially true for a guy like you, and I'm talking to myself too.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:12] Yeah. Well, I appreciate that. It makes sense. It's one of the topics that I try not to shoehorn into every show but comes out anyway.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:18] Yeah, because you're thinking about it. You're building your life. How old are you?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:21] 39.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:21] 39. You look good, man. If I had that hair I could be the president of the United States.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:25] Yeah, 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 --

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:34] It looks good. You look good.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:35] I appreciate it.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:36] You got a lot going on.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:37] Thank you. First kid on the way.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:37] Do you like your life? Notwithstanding your dissatisfaction.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:40] Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because--

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:42] Is this your baby?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:43] Yeah. In there. Right in there. First kid.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:46] Congratulations in advance.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:47] Thanks.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:48] That’s so beautiful first child.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:49] Yeah. It's going to be exciting.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:50] Boy or girl.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:51] It's a boy.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:52] When?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:53] August.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:53] August.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:08:54] Yeah. Coming up in three months.

Arthur Brooks: [00:08:56] Let’s celebrate. It’s totally the best. The life-changing thing, it will make you super miserable but that’s great.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:00] That’s what everybody says. Like sleep now and I’m like ahh.

Arthur Brooks: [00:09:03] Well yeah, that's actually not right. But there are lots of crazies and lots of -- you'll understand why you're alive much better.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:14] 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 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:09:30] We don't know if that's true. That's a hypothesis with no basis and empirical regularity. I mean it'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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:43] That's good.

Arthur Brooks: [00:09:44] What happens is the funny thing, there's a, there's a chemical in your brain, it's called the love molecule, neurotransmitter oxytocin. Very well done, very well played.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:09:52] I read a couple of books about it.

Arthur Brooks: [00:09:53] The neurotransmitter oxytocin and it stimulated in its maximum dose, the moment you make eye contact with your newborn baby. And you can almost feel it pop inside your brain and you're like, “It's just a baby. I have never met this baby before.” You would die for that baby the minute that you cut the cord because they are 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:12] Staring there and shaking.

Arthur Brooks: [00:10:14] You know, it's great. And then the really hard thing is when they – I mean two of my kids have moved out. My kids had grown up, moved away. But it's still all meaning and you’ll understand life. That's how it works.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:10:27] Yeah that's, I'm looking forward to that because this show gives me a 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 ends. 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 or should I be doing more with something else?”

Arthur Brooks: [00:11:13] And what is the future going to bring when this thing is no longer viable? Because at some point, every party's got to stop.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:19] Everything slows down.

Arthur Brooks: [00:11:20] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:27] Yeah. Yeah. I do a lot of thinking about that and other cheerful topics like that.

Arthur Brooks: [00:11:31] That's good. It's good though. I mean, you're trying to find -- you're in the middle of it. You're hacking through the jungle with your machete.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:11:39] Yeah. I try to be patient with myself, especially in this period of time because the son 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 might need 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 underlined.

Arthur Brooks: [00:12:09] You got it. You got it, you got it. And then you'll be worried about all kinds of other gum.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:12:13] Yeah. Where should I send my kid? Which $30,000 preschool do I send my kids to in California?

Arthur Brooks: [00:12:17] No, you know, the most amazing thing is all none of that stuff matters at all. None of this stuff matters at all. I mean, I finally figured that out with one of my kids. He’s like under-performing in school and I was hustling and hustling, not my first kid. It's like, “Oh, come on man, come on and do your homework.” And then I thought, “You know, I think I'm talking 90 percent of the time about something that matters 10 percent to me.” Because I don't care if he flunked out at high school. I don't actually care. Here's what I care about. I want him 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. Everything else is gravy, man. Everything else is gravy. And so I finally sat down with him and I was like, “Let me tell you what really matters to me. Living in my basement, I don't care. You are unemployed at some point -- The only 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 reason I want you to be successful and so that you can spread the love around the world as the only reason I want it.” And so, therefore, I'm going to try to spend 90 percent of my time thinking about those three things. It made me a better dad and maybe less stressed out too.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:21] So was this while in the past or is this current?

Arthur Brooks: [00:13:24] When he was in high school, probably as a sophomore in high school and now he's 19 and he's a farmer in Idaho.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:31] He probably enjoys that.

Arthur Brooks: [00:13:30] Oh, he’s happy. St. Irenaeus in the year like 190 said, “The glory of God is a man fully alive.” And he's a man fully alive. He drives Ram 3500. He has a Glock 19. He drives a combine.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:13:51] That sounds fun.

Arthur Brooks: [00:13:52] Yeah. He harvests 60,000 pounds of white soft wheat an hour. He builds custom cabinetry in the wintertime. He has a firewood hauling business. He has a dog named Corona. I'm like, “Corona, did you name that after the crown of the Blessed Virgin Mary in heaven? He's like, “No, dad, it’s the beer.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:13] Well, you had to see that one coming.

Arthur Brooks: [00:14:16] I kind of did. I was 19 too at one point, a long time ago.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:14:23] Speaking of family, good segue here. You mentioned that one in your book, which I will link in the show notes. One in six Americans has 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:14:48] It's almost one in five now. Yeah. I mean people who've stopped talking to a family member or close friend because of politics. Politics has become super 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 percent of people say they care whether their adult child married somebody from the other party.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:10] When was this?

Arthur Brooks: [00:15:11] As recently as 20 years ago, and now it's 40 percent. This is the most important consideration.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:16] Tribalism.

Arthur Brooks: [00:15:17] Super tribalism and not just this is my tribe, but this is what's going to define my love. This is the key.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:24] Oh, yeah, good point. Stakes are much higher.

Arthur Brooks: [00:15:28] For sure. I mean, it's one thing to say like I'm Catholic. Okay, that's a tribe. I'm from Seattle originally. That's my tribe.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:15:38] You’re a Catholic from Seattle. Did that come later?

Arthur Brooks: [00:15:39] Well, then the last one I left but those are tribes. The key thing is to actually have the tribe to find your love. If you disagree with me on issue X, I just can't talk to you. That is insane. Basically, it says it's missing the first trap, you're supposed to run in humanity, which is separating people from their opinions. It's like just Jordan is not his opinion 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. Saying that 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:16:34] I want to get into that a little bit. It's definitely something that I think is -- that took me by surprise. I probably shouldn't have, I felt naive after hearing you explain it, but I think it's important that the whole show is about highlighting things people see every day and going, “See that that's not an accident. It shows up everywhere.” And people go, “What?” So I definitely want to get into that. I know that you'd said America is more divided than it has been since the civil war. And I think that was actually in one of your podcasts as well, The Arthur Brooks 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 it. And like is that just rosy retrospection where people say, “Well, I lived through the depression and it wasn't this bad.” It's like, “Really though.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:17:18] 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 who’s phenomenal, the greatest documentary filmmaker of our generation. And we have this new movie that is coming out called The Pursuit. Just actually out an iTunes is coming out on Netflix later this summer. It's about capitalism and how we lift people out of poverty and he watched it --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:17:41] We can rent that on iTunes.

Arthur Brooks: [00:17:43] Yeah, for sure. You can rent or buy it on iTunes and it'll be on Netflix in August. It’s called The Pursuit or go to thepursuitmovie.com and it has the trailer on it. But he watched it because he's a friend and he was giving me a bunch of suggestions where we're making it. We got to talking and he had just made the Vietnam War, an epic saga of the Vietnam war, the best thing that's out there on Vietnam. And I was saying, “It's so terrible, the polarization today, how much everybody hates each other, how people are being driven apart. It's never been this bad.” Hey look, I'm a behavioral social scientist. I should not fall into that trap.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:15] Well, yeah, that's a cognitive bias.

Arthur Brooks: [00:18:18] A total cognitive bias. I know to everybody, you know, none of us would say it, and I said that and 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?” And I'm like, “Oh, I don't know. Was that in New Jersey or I think it went off maybe Times Square?” He says, “Do you know how many politically motivated domestic bombings there were in 1968 and 69?” I said, “No.” He said, “700.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:46] Wow. Really?

Arthur Brooks: [00:18:47] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:48] Geez.

Arthur Brooks: [00:18:49] Yeah, yeah, for sure. That's insane. It's like --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:51] It’s crazy.

Arthur Brooks: [00:18:52] Yeah, for sure.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:18:52] It’s like Israel in the height of the First Intifada.

Arthur Brooks: [00:18:55] That's exactly right. That's like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And the reason that I bring that up is because 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 and 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 areas. 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:19:42] Yeah, that's, 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 thinks you're a terrible conservative that she can't even listen to any more is better than getting blown up on your way to the drugstore.

Arthur Brooks: [00:20:00] Yeah. By the Weather Underground or the Symbionese Liberation Army with Patty Hearst. I mean that was really going on.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:09] It's just nuts.

Arthur Brooks: [00:20:10] It's nuts. And I don't remember that. I was little. I was born in 1964 and I look back and I just remember my dad. We were driving through some really hippie freaked out part of Seattle and be like, “Lock the doors kids.” And I'm like, “How come?” He’ll be like, “There are yippies out there. And they might try to get in the car and kill us.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:29] Oh my God.

Arthur Brooks: [00:20:30] And thinking back and of course that's insane. My dad is just taking care of us and maybe who knows? Maybe he was just like punking us, for all I know.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:20:37] Yeah. Reefer Madness. It sounds like Reefer Madness.

Arthur Brooks: [00:20:41] But God I 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 jackbooted thugs. There's no possibility that we're going to be actually hurt or exiled are arrested because of our views. Thank God. I mean God bless America. And so as bad as it is -- it is bad because we should love each other more we'd be happier, at least as most people in most countries are facing. I mean try disagreeing with the government or with your neighbors in China.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:11] Well, it's funny, I'm looking at a potential interview with the incoming president of Venezuela and it's like --

Arthur Brooks: [00:21:18] With Guaido?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:19] Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [00:21:19] You got Guaido.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:20] Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [00:21:20] You’re the man.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:21] Yeah, well, we'll see. I mean, until it's uploaded in the cloud.

Arthur Brooks: [00:21:27] Are you going to be torturing yourself because somebody else got Guaido – until you get Guaido, right?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:29] That's right. That's exactly what's going to happen. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing some work with their security forces. So it was more of like -- instead of a journalist connection, it was more of, “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.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:21:43] Yeah, I mean, that's interesting, but that's winds up how things get done. He's a hero.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:21:46] 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:21:56] The interesting thing about that -- do you know the 26 percent of people don't feel fear? Don't feel fear in the face of danger.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:03] Isn't that good?

Arthur Brooks: [00:22:05] It's not. They’re the worst leaders. So the best leaders are the other 74 percent 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:20] I do think there are people that don't feel fear. I see them on 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.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:22:29] Bring them to run your company.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:31] Yeah, it's all right. You send them to go over raise capital and then you go, “Okay, thanks. Bye.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:22:35] And to the women listening to us, make sure that they're not the father of children.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:39] 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 luck.

Arthur Brooks: [00:22:48] 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, you want to find courageous people and you want to avoid fearless people.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:22:58] How do you distinguish between those two types of people?

Arthur Brooks: [00:23:02] Fearless people don't feel the fear. Courageous people feel fear and act anyway and they've learned how to dominate the fear and not be controlled by the fear, but they actually feel fear.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:11] Sure. But I mean, look, if you’re --

Arthur Brooks: [00:23:12] If I'm looking at him, how do I tell the difference between them? 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, “No, 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 that, and then you realize that they're really weird. At the extreme, they're sociopathic. And that's the reason they don't feel fear in the first place, that it was just like, “Yeah, I know this could go really wrong. I'm really, really worried about this.” And you notice that they're into battle. That's courage. That's the ones you're looking for.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:23:51] You're listening to the Jordan harbinger show with our guest Arthur Brooks. We'll be right back.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:23:56] This episode is sponsored in part by BiOptimizers. All right. Here's a shocking fact about probiotics, which are all the rage right now. According to Naveen Jain, who is the founder of Viome and listener and guest of The Jordan Harbinger Show, he tests at home gut bacteria over at Viome, and he's said that almost no probiotics show up in people's gut analysis, which means that this thing that's all supposed to colonize your gut 99 percent of it never makes it to your gut in the first place. Still, research shows that we need good bacteria to fight the bad guys. So what's the solution here? Well, there's a single strain, proteolytic probiotic called P3-OM. P3-OM uses a patented natural process to upgrade a well-researched probiotic strain. So the result is a super strain that some called the Navy seal of probiotics. I think that's a little hyperbolic, but you know I'm not writing the copy here for this, right? The Navy seal probiotics --

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[00:26:00] This episode is also sponsored by Just Crack An Egg.

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[00:26:53] 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 jordanharbinger.com/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 Jordanharbinger.com/deals. If you'd like some tips on how to subscribe to the show, just go to jordanharbinger.com/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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:27] That's, 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:27:35] Yeah, free solo, right. They can't feel fear.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:27:38] That's what people were saying. But then I 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 shake uncontrollably knowing I'm halfway up this mountain and there's no way down. I think he doesn't seem to have that.

Arthur Brooks: [00:28:05] It's right. And the guys that I meet that do this the best are the guys who've been in the military. I mean, a lot of us, there's a lot of people who 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, “Why am I alive?” And we talked about this before, when your first child is born, it's like, “Ah, that's it.” But it'd be great if we could articulate, “Why am I alive?” What do I want to live for? And being able to say -- one of the things that are recommended on the college campuses to young people, “You want to be happier. I think a 12-word mission statement for you that says what am I going to live for? What's the purpose of my life?” 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, but I'm 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 when they act as if the guys come back from a battle from Afghanistan or Iraq or something, that they're somehow injured. None of these are reasons that those guys go on to do incredible things. The reason is because they’ve proved to themselves to their own standard of satisfaction that they're as courageous as such. Everything's easier. “I feel the fear, I can do it anyway.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:29:43] Especially if the fear is not going to result in death or dismemberment -- less of a big deal.

Arthur Brooks: [00:29:48] It seems like the standard of the stakes are lower, but also we have a tendency to -- what I hate -- is the extent to which we treat veterans as victims. These guys have -- there's a major crucible -- they've passed the test and the data are overwhelmingly clear. All this stuff that we hear now, that all these suicides from men who've 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:23] I didn’t know that. That’s a relief actually.

Arthur Brooks: [00:30:26] Totally. And it's because these guys are not injured. They're not screwed up. They're hugely meritorious and they deserve all of our respect and our admiration, our love. And we got to look to those guys as the leaders for our society, for our culture. And they're the people that we need. They're not like hurt birds, man. These are the future presidents.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:30:45] 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 to how his discourse then changed to make this divide that's greater now happen. I mean, I know that being nice now 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 the sea -- look at guys like Nelson Mandela, who you wrote about and he was good to everybody even while he was in prison. So the kind of hypothesis then is being nice is actually an advantage. And I would agree with that hypothesis in my own life.

Arthur Brooks: [00:31:27] Yeah, that's right. So there's a guy, a psychologist at Harvard and he's named Daniel Goleman. 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 Goleman 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 them into six leadership types. And there are two polar ones. I talk about this in the book. There are coercive leaders and authoritative leaders. Coercive leaders are bullies. They get immediate compliance and they do it right, they get huge results, but they don't last. And the reason is because we hate bullies. We don't like bad people. 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 economists call it as suboptimal equilibrium. The basic way of saying things aren't the way that they should be. But they're kind of stuck that way. When we have a suboptimal equilibrium, a bad situation where we've got bullies on both sides. And so basically you got to choose your bully and we will. I mean, everybody listening to us is kind of choosing their bully, but we don't like our bullies. And forget whether we're talking about the 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.

[00:32:56] 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 into this better future?” It takes more skill, it takes more time. But it's ultimately what our hearts 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, you're a cuckservative or whatever they call it these days, and 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 is just more or less just like smoking a cigarette anyway.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:33:42] Yeah, or worse.

Arthur Brooks: [00:33:43] It's like it's as bad for you as a cigarette and then they more or less have the same brain chemistry implications, which is to stimulate your dopamine which is found on cigarettes. So, okay, so don't do that. You know, if you don't want to say something and find out that you're a weakling, then don't go to the place where a bunch of anonymous Russian Twitter bots that are saying that you're weak.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:34:03] I was just thinking the exact same thing. I interviewed Clint Watts who talks about -- Do you know who he is? He sort of tracks ISIS and bad actors online and it takes a lot of Twitter data and does it. The title of his book was something like tracking Russians and extremists and ISIS, and it was just like these hundreds or even thousands of people in air quotes were tweeting at me like, “Oh, well, look at Jordan now. He must hate Russians. We know who hates Russians. Nazis. Jordan is a Nazi.” And then it was like retweet, retweet and I thought, “Wow, this is pretty extreme.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:34:35] 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 get the privilege. I mean it's like – I think about how great my life is for the past 45 minutes I've gotten to give Jordan advice. A super successful young guy who's going to like master the media universe and you know, Arthur Brooks gets to give him some advice because it might be his loving happiness. One of the things that I recommend is, okay, you have to have a social media presence because your business depends on it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:08] It does yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [00:35:08] But what you have in this one -- 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. The example that you're going to want to create as a good dad. So one of the things that I recommend is fighting against anonymity. And there are people listening to us are you going to be like, “No, no. The Federalist Papers were written anonymously.” Twitter is not the Federalist Papers.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:35:36] That's a good point. Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [00:35:37] So what I recommend is never, never, never, never do anything anonymously. So let's have a pack. 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, but a lot of our people listening to us do because they're afraid or they want to have fun. 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. 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:08] That is hard.

Arthur Brooks: [00:36:09] It's really hard because then you're going to take your body blows from people who are saying that you're weak and whatever. But I've really committed myself to this and I got to tell you I'm so much more relaxed because you know, somebody says I'm a moron and it's Berniebro2020 or something like that. That guy doesn't exist.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:26] It's not a real person.

Arthur Brooks: [00:36:30] Somebody who has proposedly 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 after my column in the Washington Post or anything. I'm telling you, Jordan, life's better.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:36:56] That makes sense especially given your niche. I would say 99.9 percent of what's in my inbox, maybe just 99 percent is overwhelmingly positive. Of course, negativity bias makes me look at the one and then go, “Argh.” But then Jen will go and delete it and I also sort of just realized 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 Sheryl Sanders and it's her Instagram, she's like, “Look, love the show. I 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 kook idiot, moron libtard, F you,” and it's a guy with a truck and an Elmo puppet. It's like this is --

Arthur Brooks: [00:37:41] Or a frog and you’re like -- 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. It's not to change your mind. 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, t's like, “You know, it's a good point. I am a libtard.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:05] Yeah. Guilty.

Arthur Brooks: [00:38:06] It’s like, “Guilty. God, I got to really rethink everything because you know, that guy said I'm a cuckservative 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 when 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:28] The most common reply to a negative comment is, “Oh man, well what I meant was and I didn't know were going to reply is that I love your show and I really disagree with this.” I often will get somebody who says who'd backtracks and goes, “Look, I was probably a little harsh with this,“ 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:38:51] That's right. So if he didn't think you’re going to read it, why did he just say dear Jordan?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:55] Because they're venting.

Arthur Brooks: [00:38:56] Yeah, completely.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:38:57] It took me years to realize that.

Arthur Brooks: [00:38:58] Oh totally. And as the key, you have to have 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. It's sort of the intestinal, the emotional fortitude because you can improve people a lot. Like they're willing to go out on their own and there they say something that's emotionally attenuated. If they say something that's, that goes beyond what proprietary would suggest and you reach out to them, you can change them, you can change them as people. And it's funny, this is the thing I talked 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 who I've been working with for the past seven years in my personal work and I write with him and I see him a lot and, and I asked him how I can answer hatred with love better because he always says the answer hatred will love, answer contempt with warm-heartedness -- always, always, always choose warm hearted like, “How, your Holiness, how?” And he says, “Think of a time when you accidentally answered hatred with love and the effect that it had and how it made you feel and remember how your heart was on fire. Remember your heart being on fire and then you'll do the right thing.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:05]  How do you remember? I'm trying to think of any time where I've accidentally been too nice. It’s like it never happened in my life.

Arthur Brooks: [00:40:12] I bet you can remember times when somebody treated you like trash and you reached out and the person said -- I mean, they give 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. That's the key. 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. You create a memory. And so for me, I wrote this book. The first time it ever happened to me is for the first time I wrote a book to anybody ever read and I was still called professor. I was in Syracuse and I would write books and nobody ever read because I'm academic.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:40:48] You’re an academic, 27 copies later.

Arthur Brooks: [00:40:50] Exactly. Right. It's like man, 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, then my career, my life changed. My career change. 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 and I was, you know, your age and, and I was kind of getting my legs under me. It was a professor, and this guy raised me from Texas – “Dear Professor Brooks, you are a right-wing fraud.” And then he goes through a chapter of the book. It's 5,000 words.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:26] Hey at least he did that.

Arthur Brooks: [00:41:28] Well, totally. And so that's my point because I realized that what I was feeling this, “He read my book.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:41:34] Like somebody read this.

Arthur Brooks: [00:41:35] I was super grateful. And so I decided to tell them, and it was serendipity. I'm not a saint. I could have written back and said, “You know blockhead. You think you're an economist. Let me tell you, I'm going to PhD, let me tell me school you, chump.” You know, but no, I said, “You know, I 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 yeah, it's amazing, I mean you read the whole book, every word. Thank you.” Send. And then like 15 minutes later you get an email back from the guy. He’s like, “Dear Professor Brooks, next time you're in Dallas if you want to get some dinner and give me a call.” Like what the --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:12] What happened?

Arthur Brooks: [00:42:12] Yeah. And it was gratitude, which is like an anesthetic for contempt. When somebody treats you with hatred then you respond with, “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, it's paying enough attention to get to, to get offended. I mean that's something amazing. Hostiles are our friends much more than apathetics.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:42:41] There is something to this. The people that write to me every week and are rude are often the ones that 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 peculiar quirks. And sometimes they go away.

Arthur Brooks: [00:43:02] And they quit.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:43:03] And they quit, yeah. But 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 Yiannopoulos 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.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:43:20] Well, you're doing something good. I mean, you're doing something you care about. You're saying things. It's actually not cost-effective for you to get Juan Guaido. It's hugely time-consuming and totally in a lot of people are going to be listening to like, “Juan who? Where is Venezuela? Is that in Canada?” I mean I get it. I mean this is foreign policy is extremely exotic, but the reason you're doing it is because it's the right thing to do and it gives you inherent satisfaction. If basically, your whole product is Jordan, you got a problem. And that's what a lot of what's going on in the entertainment industrial complex in America today is people whose whole program is their self-aggrandizement. On the other hand, if you say, “Look, you know, God has blessed me. 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. The sense of achievement that I'm getting, a satisfaction that I'm getting it's entirely instrumental. It is not intrinsic. And this is the key thing, every single person listening to this 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 you know that we really would be like, you know, not even flints. The animal skins are 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, “Ah, I'm going to have six million downloads.” But they want to do something and want to get a promotion at work. They want to get a sense of accomplishment where somebody tells them they did well. Why do you want that? Not for its sake such as that you can do more good and remembering that,  that's really key.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:04] 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. You just entertained us with stupid crap.

Arthur Brooks: [00:45:28] You wasted it.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:29] You wasted it, yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [00:45:31] Absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:32] That makes me like get all -- I don't know -- excited in a negative way.

Arthur Brooks: [00:45:36] A few basic, If you get more what, always ask why. You know, if you get something more that you wanted, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:47] Yeah. Trust me, I thought about that strategy.

Arthur Brooks: [00:45:50] You said you can't, you don't have any of these.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:52] No, I think I look at people -- I grew up in Michigan --

Arthur Brooks: [00:45:55] Where?

Jordan Harbinger: [00:45:56] Troy, Michigan. It's like a suburban Detroit area. 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 who are 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, 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 on many levels.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:46:35] Yeah, 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. The key thing is what we call discernment. Discernment is the process not in 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 -- I'm talking to people under 30, most of the people listening to us are under 25. I bet you.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:09] This?

Arthur Brooks: [00:47:09] Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:10] No, it's 25 to 35 and 35 to 45, it's a second-tier.

Arthur Brooks: [00:47:14] So one of the key things when I'm talking to people, young people, but it includes 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. 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 the 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 the goal.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:47:53] You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest Arthur Brooks. We'll be right back after this.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:47:59] This episode is sponsored in part by Cloud Control litter by Arm & Hammer. I know cat litter, so bizarre. But you know what? I love my cats. You know this. I love the snuggle edge. I love the fact that they knock off my AirPods from every freaking table that they're on and I have to secure everything. Well, okay, maybe I don't love that part, but I love other things surrounding that. I love that they jump on my head at 4:00 a.m. I do wake up laughing a lot because of that. But you know, there are cats. They're our best friends. Even when they act like cat holes. Do you know what I mean there? They're cleaning up Momo’s litter box. Not my favorite part of having a cat, but that's why Arm & Hammer created new Cloud Control litter because clouds are trending apparently, Jason. But there's, there's no cloud of nasties when I scoop it's 100 percent dust-free, which to me was important because I don't want that crap literally or figuratively floating around in the air of my house. I don't want heavy perfumes floating around my house. I don't want airborne dander and all of that, you know what, when I'm scooping. So what happens in the litter box stays in the litter box, new Cloud Control cat litter by Arm & Hammer. More power to you.

[00:49:02] This episode is also sponsored by MedMen. So MedMen is essentially the apple store of dispensaries, marijuana dispensaries. And they're in a bunch of different states and it is impressive. Look, I'm not a huge cannabis user here, but everything's in a glass case and wood and there are iPads everywhere that show you all the strains and all the products and everyone who works there as is nice, unlike the Apple store, honestly and very helpful and I can see why this is a massively popular business. It's killing it and I can see -- also Father's Day coming up -- why my friends really love being a dad. I'm about to do that myself, but sometimes I also think it may be slowly killing them this year. Let's give these amazing dads a little bit of relief. You can find a MedMen location on your way home. No one's screaming inside. I promise you that, and they'll send you on your way with a nice red bag filled with the key to your sanity for some of you. Dads deserve a break too. Give them a hall pass to go ease the aches and pains of fatherhood -- if you catch my euphemistic drift --plus gift cards are available, so you can visit medmen.com to find the store near you. Or if you're like me and you're not sure what to get your dear old dad given the best gift of all and escape to MedMen premium dispensaries. There's plenty of people working there to help them find everything he needs. I brought my own dad and my mom there for that matter and they were like, they were super impressed by this. I thought that was kind of a funny field trip. It means a dad won't be texting you with a million questions. It's a win-win. Plus, make sure he uses code JORDAN for 10 percent off his purchase at medmen.com.

Jason DeFillippo: [00:50:26] Keep out of reach of children. For use only by adults 21 years of age or older.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:50:30] This episode is also sponsored by HostGator.

 

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[00:52:16] 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 hear, visit jordanharbinger.com/deals. And don't forget that worksheet for today's episode. That links in the show notes over at jordanharbinger.com/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.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:52:42] 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 we sort of link it to moral turpitude instead. 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 that our mind sort of fills in the blank and goes like, “Oh, this is the person who just really entitled, selfish prick,” not, “Oh, they got their kid in the back and they're on the way to the hospital,” whatever. 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. I'll post something on Instagram funny and someone will go, “Oh, I see 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. 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.

Arthur Brooks: [00:53:51] 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. Most people are kind of motivated by love, but we see the actions of others as you just suggested. And the motive attribution asymmetry means that we attribute different motives to the people with whom are 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 attributional 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 according to the research both sides are motivated by the idea that I'm motivated by love and you are motivated by hatred towards me.

[00:54:38] Now, here's where it gets interesting. There's a guy named Adam Waytz who teaches at Northwestern University and he writes an article with some colleagues in The Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences in 2014. I read this article and it just blew my mind. He found that motive attribution asymmetry is as intense today between Democrats and Republicans as it is between Israelis and Palestinians.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:54:55] That’s not good.

Arthur Brooks: [00:54:56] 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 and our country. That's untenable. 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. I know what motivates me or 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. 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, liberals, they know each other so little because they're so siloed today and they make these huge errors, just factual errors.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:43] You put it in the book, what was it? It was like a huge percentage of Democrats think Republicans are --

Arthur Brooks: [00:55:50] $250,000 and above.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:55:51] Right, many liberals think Republicans make tons of money and many Republicans assume liberals are mostly homosexuals.

Arthur Brooks: [00:56:00] It's so amazing. So the average Republican guesses that 40 percent of Democrats are gay or lesbian and the average Democrats --

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:10] Literally impossible.

Arthur Brooks: [00:56:11] No, no, no. It's completely insane. I mean, it's just, it's not, it doesn't pass the giggle test. And that 40 percent of Democrats, the same percentage just to show that nobody is immune to this, that we're all like enthralled of our cognitive biases. The average Democrats think that 40 percent of Republicans make $250,000 a year or more.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:33] There aren't enough people in either of those brackets.

Arthur Brooks: [00:56:36] If only they were true. If so, our country would be simply more prosperous.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:56:40] That’s true, yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [00:56:41] It’s like 2.1 percent, 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 in the heck am I going to know what your motives are and to assume ad hominem is. This what you’re saying -- it's like Jordan made this joke on Instagram and so therefore I know it's residing in the depths of his heart. I bet you he bears animus towards some racial groups, some 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. Who's doing that? If you're disagreeing with somebody, you just leave them. You don't know what motivates them. Maybe he has hatred for humanity and wants everybody to die. Probably not.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:29] Generally not.

Arthur Brooks: [00:57:30] I would actually if you're going to make an assumption about people's motives, I recommend assuming the best of the person because life will be easier.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:36] It's tricky to do that, but it's a good sort of cognitive drill maybe.

Arthur Brooks: [00:57:40] It will make you happier. You'll be way, way, way happier. It's amazing to me. 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 can't ever do the thing that you're railing against ever again.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:57:57]  Oh yeah, good point.

Arthur Brooks: [00:57:58] And so basically I'm thinking to myself, I did all of the work. It was a two-year research project on the advice I wanted to give people and the standards to which I wanted to live up. I want to live up to the standards of loving my enemies and 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 were 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 to be hearing about it.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:27] 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 way.”

Arthur Brooks: [00:58:37] I write like liberals are deviant and then it'll be a quote Arthur Brooks circa 2019 and then this was the author of Love Your Enemies.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:58:44] Ironically, he tweeted yesterday.

Arthur Brooks: [00:58:47] And I have been inconsistent in my life. 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 because I always haven't lived up to that in the past. What I'm committing myself as trying to live up to it in the future.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:04] Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, you're allowed to sort of --

Arthur Brooks: [00:59:08] You can't say to somebody who's in alcohol recovery, somebody who's in AA and says, “You're a hypocrite because 10 years ago you used to be a drunk.”

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:16] Right, yeah, good point. 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 how the 40 percent I wouldn't want my kid to marry a 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 really.

Arthur Brooks: [00:59:50] So 93 percent of Americans hate how divided we become as a country. It's incredible.

Jordan Harbinger: [00:59:55] That's a huge number.

Arthur Brooks: [00:59:56] it’s a huge number and 100 percent of the people listening to us and watching us love somebody with whom they disagree politically.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:02] That makes sense.

Arthur Brooks: [01:00:02] 100 percent. Unless you'd live in a cave or you're really, really screwed up. You love somebody who you disagree with politically. Okay, so that's really, really good news. Now, here's the bad news. We act in contempt. Most of us act contemptuously towards the people with whom we disagree. Why? And it really comes down to bad leadership from not the 93 percent. We have bad habits. It's the seven percent of 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 who are getting rich and powerful and famous or simply getting satisfaction and followers by setting people against each other. But for fuel, they rely on you and me playing along.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:00:45] 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 we’re the voice of reason.”

Arthur Brooks: [01:00:65] Right and they'll set up the other side, in terms of actual quotes from the craziest person in the side, and the left and right both do it. 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 liberal think I'm going to put up their 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 two percent cross-section and attributed 50 percent of people's views. That's irresponsible, it's actually a brainless thing to do. And in 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.” But being a nonconformist and the way to do it is by standing up to people on your own side who are telling you to hate.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:01:46] That's interesting because we might actually have a chance of persuading somebody on our own side, “Hey look, don't argue like that.”

Arthur Brooks: [01:01:54] Totally and totally and you know, again, you'll lose followers when you do that because you're a lot less interesting, but that's okay to wait to lose followers.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:02:04] I agree. I think that that makes sense. I'm not very political in the show ever. We're more like, hey, teach people critical thinking and then they'll make, well, the best in air quotes decisions, but I love the idea that this is something that we should all be doing 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 the 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've been really helpful to people like personal growth and self-help or not just cheesy crap that like 98 percent of it you should just light on fire.

Arthur Brooks: [01:03:06] Just candy. And you know, it could have been something that's really nutritious for sure. I agree and we should be able to do more. So the first part of what you just said is really provocative because you'd basically talk about what we call in our business, the prisoner's dilemma, where, you know, it'd be better if people collaborated, but if one person's collaborating and you're the guy who's defecting, then you're going to do better. Here's the argument that I want to make to everybody watching us. Yeah, it feels more satisfying to be the one who owns the libs or owns the conservative or whatever. It feels more satisfying to do that and to just vanquish the other side with a, with a well-placed zinger, and by the way, they're virtually always super like an original and lame. The moment they feel like when they're tripping off your iPhone.

[01:03:56] But here's the key thing. When I talk to people who are very fired up about politics and doing that a lot, and I'll say, “So why are you doing that?” He says, “Because 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 the conservatives are liberals. I'm going to these campuses a lot, right? So I'm having this conversation over and over again and say, “Okay, what's the ideal state of affairs? If you're a big liberal, for example, a big progressive, and you see people who like Donald Trump 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 to hold Trump. And you tell them that they're stupid and then you tell them they're worthless. You tell them idiots and they're hurting the country. What's your goal? Your goal is actually what would you ideally, would you like to exile that person kicked 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 when they sleep?” Like, “What kind of person do you think I am?” “Okay, what's your goal?” “Well, I want them to act and think differently.” “So how's your hate working out for that?” If you want to be more persuasive, you got to love. There is no other way. Martin Luther King said 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 like one of the great communicators of our time, of our nation's history because he would illuminate these fundamental truths.

[01:05:24] 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 unhappier. I've got the science, it's irrefutable, it's unambiguous. Read the book. If you don't want to read the book, you know I'm right. 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 percent 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:11] It makes sense from sort of a tactical rhetorical level as well because we know about the boomerang effect. It's arguing with people in the wrong way, solidifies their beliefs. Is it the same as the backfire effect? It's very similar.

Arthur Brooks: [01:06:22] Yeah, It is the same thing.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:23] Same thing.

Arthur Brooks: [01:06:24] You’re exactly right. You know a lot. Did you get your degree in psychology?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:27] No. I went to law school. 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 learned a bunch of this stuff from behavioral economist –

Arthur Brooks: [01:06:41] And you’re into it.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:06:41] Yeah, I like it. Yeah. I like it because I think these are powerful tools because otherwise, you hear people say stuff and you go, “Well 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 one, 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.”

Arthur Brooks: [01:07:08] Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:07:09] Have you ever heard of that?

Arthur Brooks: [01:07:10] Yeah, I've heard that used before, but yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah. Yeah.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:07:14] I think then in research and 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.

Arthur Brooks: [01:07:27] That's actually a huge problem in academic research. Believe it or not. I mean, it just sounds like something that 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 the dataset or a bunch of datasets and you can't publish a paper in an academic journalists, you come up with statistically significant results. You know, you basically said, “I ran all these regressions and I got all these data and, and they, they were very inconclusive.” It's like not published. So you'd run the data, run the data, run the data, change the model, change the specification, change until you find like, “Aha, significant.” And then you write the paper.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:02] That you're writing the paper enough, it got all kinds of stuff and it sort of goes in that direction. So here's what --

Arthur Brooks: [01:08:07]And so everybody is prone to this. And it's not just because you're trying to be dishonest, it's because you're trying to have some for what you believe because otherwise, it's too scary and ambiguous.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:20] Yeah. It is scary. And of course, you know, I get it. You go to school for 10 years, you want to freaking write something and get your PhD already.

Arthur Brooks: [01:08:26] Yeah. You want to get actually tenured at the university as opposed to getting fired.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:29] Yeah, yeah, yeah. “You never came up with anything.” “What are you talking about I debunked all this other stuff.”

Arthur Brooks: [01:08:33] Go do bunk elsewhere.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:08:35] 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 this contempt and division, do we have these 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. 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.

Arthur Brooks: [01:09:13] Yeah, that's right. You know, for the longest time and in the war on drugs in the United States, 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 when with the cocaine problems coming from Columbia. The original idea was that the government was going to beat supply and we're going to poison the fields that coca fields and we were going to interdict everything with the coast guard -- it's like it was failing because they're 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 to the United States is because people like cocaine. And the reason that we've got all this hatred is because people get some satisfaction from it. So it's like 93 percent say, “Oh, I hate how divided the country is.” And like, “I love my mom even though she disagrees with me in the whole thing.” And, and yet you're listening to that guy on the radio who's spewing pure hate and you're listening to his ads and they know you're listening to his ads, and so the given him money and his ad prices are going up and he's going like, “Hate sells baby.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:19] Yeah, he’s got a 50K or 15K speaking fee.

Arthur Brooks: [01:10:23] Yeah, because people are actually -- 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 the things that you say.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:10:37] Revealed preference. That's good. That's really good. I used to teach guys how to 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. 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.

Arthur Brooks: [01:11:13] Everything. You know what’s funny, I mean we wish we want -- again, this is to get to the right desire. 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. 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 kind of behavior and the other one is like -- it's like the devil on one shoulder and angel on the other. You got to be the master 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. I mean one of the key things is -- part of as you're going to teach your son and I've taught my kids -- is are you doing in private the things that you wouldn't be ashamed to have people know you're doing. 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:12:18] Yeah. The cognitive dissonance that --

Arthur Brooks: [01:12:20] 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 be in sync. It is living up to your own moral standards. This 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 we become as a country, then do something about it. Don't be militating against your own preferences revealed the man or woman you want to be.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:13:03] We see the contempt is bad for you, sort of psychologically, physically. In the book, you go into some of Gottman's research where it's like, “Look, you're 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 riled up.”

Arthur Brooks: [01:13:20] Like cigarettes. 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.” Everybody who's addicted to meth is like, “I hate being addicted to meth but I keep taking it.” Because of 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 like they finance guys call -- talking about the inversion of the yield curve. What you really want is an economy where the short and long-term interest rates where 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.

 [01:14:07] Make your actions right now consistent with what you want to be. I mean, that's really where virtue comes in but it's also where happiness comes in. That's the key thing. There's a big literature out there about what explains addiction. And in psychology and in neuroscience, it's always all about brain hormones. It's about neurotransmitters like dopamine. 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 heavily -- in other words if it happens a long time from now, it's nothing. And if you're the kind of person that does that and young people tend to do that. 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 difference, 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? You know, 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:15:22] Yeah. It seems like almost like a lofty goal, but it obviously has to be possible to get there.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:15:30] I think it is.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:15:31] I know that you'd 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 are certain things when I was growing up, like yeah, drunk driving bad.” Right?

Arthur Brooks: [01:15:42] Yeah. And you're a millennial.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:15:44] Yeah, technically. I'm at the edge.

Arthur Brooks: [01:15:46] You’re sort of gen-X, millennial kind of a guy.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:15:49] But why is that important? What does this indicate for society at large that people won't say drunk driving bad, infidelity bad?

Arthur Brooks: [01:15:56] Well, it's because there's been a tendency for a pretty long time to encourage young people to not make moral proclamations. It's like my morals, your morals. It's kind of the relativism that comes, that creeps into our society as if there's no natural law and that's just not a kind of a decline. It's just the tendency that we have. It’s like to say, “You know, this is what I believe in. 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 that you're a heretic and gonna burn. That's very different than saying this hurts people. This hurts people who should not be hurt. So, therefore, it's bad. We should be able to make these distinctions.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:16:41] 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 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 dark windows.”

Arthur Brooks: [01:17:15] In a way you're saying 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. 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 that 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 based on the idea that people are made in God's image with dignity is to be worthy of respect. God is inherently worthy of respect because he’s 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 as equal.

[01:18:08] Okay. That's just the philosophical, the philosophy behind that is the algorithm behind that and a lot of people listening to us, watching us don't have traditional religious views. And yet they picked up on the implication of this philosophical algorithm, which is that 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 poor. You have as much dignity as I do even though you got a different color, even though you got a different religion.” The reason that the United States is the most successful progressive nation in the history of the world, bar none is because we are a nation based on the idea that there are certain truths to which we claim to be self-evident.  We say life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. That means all men are created equal. Do we live up to it? No. Do we still have 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 education to women with my culture, your culture -- this is to abdicate the idea that that human dignity is actually radically equal. 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. We have to go to first principles in a lot of this stuff and celebrate some of these truths. There's nobody listening to us no matter how they think politically was going to say, “You know what? Human dignity not radically equal.”

Jordan Harbinger: [01:19:39] Yeah, to me, it's a whole -- I don't want to go down that road. 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 will 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 --

Arthur Brooks: [01:20:09] It's actually the most non-fascist thing.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:11] That's kind of where I am going.

Arthur Brooks: [01:20:13] You know what? Basically, it's an argument for equal human dignity.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:16] Maybe we should Google fascism but the definition is obvious.

Arthur Brooks: [01:20:19] Basically fascism means everything I don't like. That's what fascism means in modern Western culture.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:25] Yeah, I think you're probably right. You had given us the advice in the book to be where that 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 with 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?

Arthur Brooks: [01:20:50] So this is based on moral foundations theory, which comes from a friend of mine named Jonathan Haidt. You probably had him on the show.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:20:56] Yeah, he was on the show.

Arthur Brooks: [01:20:56] He’s terrific, fantastic. He's a psychologist who teaches at the business school at NYU at the Stern School of Business. And he's actually a visionary. His scholarship is fearless and he is totally courageous, amazing guy. And his work in moral foundation is basically -- and this is based on hundreds of thousands of observations. He's done big survey data and huge numbers of interviews. And so this is not him popping off is not theory.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:21:25] He is not a podcaster for God’s sake.

Arthur Brooks: [01:21:28] Look, man, you're the value chain leading the people listening, actually using this in their lives. You are 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 the conservatives and liberals, for example, because they're all talking about, you know, the conservatives say the liberals are immoral. And the liberals say that conservatives are just a bunch of puritans with their weird morals. As much as we're not willing to say that drunk driving and adultery are 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, it means different things to 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 live for fairness.

[01:22:35] 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 it you hold people to super high standards? I mean, again, compassion is different to different people.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:22:50] That’s Interesting. Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: [01:22:52] But the core point is that it's not reasonable for liberals to say that conservatives don't believe in compassion, don't believe in fairness, and it's not reasonable for conservatives to say the 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 the conservatives and liberals don't share. Conservatives tend to believe in the morality of authority, the morality of loyalty to group, and 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, as I'm concerned, that's fine. 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.” I was in San Francisco, I see this bumper sticker, your body might be a temple, but mine's an amusement park.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:23:58] Oh, yeah, I’ve seen those.

Arthur Brooks: [01:25:59] It's like, is that a person a conservative or liberal? That's a question that answers itself. And John would say, “Well, there's a moral foundation basis,” for the fact that that person is probably really, really – first of all, it’s a joke. 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. So, okay. If we actually want to make progress as a society, it's not okay. 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, loyalty. You're just like the Taliban.” Well, you know, it's like get off it guys. Let's talk about compassion and fairness and we're going to build a better society and base it with compassion and fairness. Let's adjudicate the fact that people on 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. 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. At the same time, it's uncompassionate not to hold people to high standards.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:25:15] Yeah, I agree.

Arthur Brooks: [01:25:16] That's the kind of conversation we need to be having -- moral conversation we need to be having.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:25:20] There's so much in here and I'm now even 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, they're really good at research.” Shoot, I 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 prepare most people now. I'm looking for that edge all the time.

Arthur Brooks: [01:26:24] Are you happier?

Jordan Harbinger: [01:26:25] Oh, I like it. Yeah. Good point.

Arthur Brooks: [01:26:27] You know, by being good, if excellence is its own reward. Yes. If simply beating the competition is the reward, then it's problematic.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:26:36] It's both.

Arthur Brooks: [01:26:37] Of course it's both. Of course. It's both.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:26:39] It's both. Yeah. I want to be candid.

Arthur Brooks: [01:26:40] 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.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:26:47] I try not to just be competitive because then if you just trying to beat somebody, you just dismantle them. You don't work on yourself.

Arthur Brooks: [01:26:53] 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 inside. But anyway, that's not your point.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:27:00] Right, no.

Arthur Brooks: [01:27:00] The point is competition's good. Competition being good is the basis of the greatness of the country. And by the way, that is not a political statement or ideological statement at all. 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 at the supermarket, they want more than one. You know, that's not even about choice. It's about the fact that -- actually, that's probably a bad example because a lot of food that we get is just the race to the bottom and garbage. It makes you fat and makes you miserable. It doesn't give you good nutrition, et cetera. But the point is that people want more than one option when they do things because the iron sharpens iron. The same thing is especially true in politics. Democracy is an example of competition. We don't want uncontested elections. It bums us out when there's only one person or God forbid the voter fraud or there's voter suppression. We hate that and the reason is because we want real competition. I liked the Seattle Seahawks, my favorite football team. I love the Seattle Seahawks.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:28:05] My friend just moved to Seattle.

Arthur Brooks: [01:28:08] I'll always love the Seattle Seahawks. I have lived in Seattle since I was 18 years old when I graduated from high school. And I am still crazy with Seattle Seahawks. I don't want the Seattle Seahawks to win because the opposing team's quarterback got hurt on a dirty hit. I don't want that. I want the Seahawks to win fair and square. 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 had made a bad play and try to throw a touchdown pass when they should've run into the line with Marshawn Lynch. Do you remember that? The moment in the Super Bowl --

Jordan Harbinger: [01:28:43] I remember the whole uproar.

Arthur Brooks: [01:28:45] 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 true competition. And if they had won because it turned out that they'd bribed in official and won on that last play at the Super Bowl, it wouldn't have just not the same. I wouldn't have watched anymore. You know, this is how people are and we need true competition of ideas that we need to make each other better and stronger.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:29:10] But it's not just tolerating competition. It's actually being grateful for competition. And that was your point. That I really like.

Arthur Brooks: [01:29:16] It's hard. It's hard to do, man. But you know, when I was at one of the congressional retreats, I was keynoting for members of Congress a couple of years ago, and one of my questions to the audience was, “How many of you wish we live in a one-party state?” And it's like zero hands, zero hearts, frankly. They don't secretly wish for it. As much as you know, Democrats say the Republic is wishing that we live in a fascist one-party state and the Republicans say the same thing with the Democrat. It's not true. And then I said, “Okay, so how many of you are grateful that we live in a multiparty democracy?” Every hand. You just told me you're grateful for the Democrats. And these are a bunch of Republicans.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:29:52] I think they’re laughing around.

Arthur Brooks: [01:29:54] Kind of except that it’s like scales fall from their eyes. 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 just said, I'm grateful that there's more than one opinion because if there's not more than one opinion than it is being meaningless that there's no jackbooted thugs right there to cut me off to jail. It’s like there's no group think. You 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 opinions. It doesn't mean you agree. It doesn't mean you don't want vigorous competition, but you got to be grateful for the fact that they’re people who disagree with you living peacefully with you.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:27] Even when it annoys you a little bit.

Arthur Brooks: [01:30:29] Or a lot.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:30:30] Or a lot. Should we wrap with -- 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 to identify manipulators and their influence.

Arthur Brooks: [01:30:44] Up to the man, you know, this is the key thing. Everybody knows. If I say, “Okay, get in your head a picture of a person who's telling us they hate each other.” The person you're thinking of is somebody with whom you disagree and so that's wrong because you're not being manipulated by somebody who you disagree with you. You think that person's a stooge. 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. So get into the head on somebody you'd agree with, who is saying the other side is stupid and deviant evil and turn them off. You got to do it because otherwise, you're rewarding the outrage industrial complex. You got to start on your own side.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:31:33] It's true. Okay, good. Stand up to people on your own side who trash people on the other side. We just kind of cover that. Escape the filter bubble. This one we've talked about in previous shows.

Arthur Brooks: [01:31:42] 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 in 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 and news from Facebook will be on to 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 automatic atomic hater. That's the problem with these social media algorithms. It is not a person who was trying to screw you up, but the algorithm will screw you up because there'll be monetizing you. There'll be figuring out how your dopamine is going to make you click them on more of their lengths and it's going to drive up bad prices.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:32:24] 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 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, your time on site, et cetera.” And so they are those algorithms optimized for that. And then it's everyone that you know because that everyone you see agrees with you and everyone who doesn't, you're just thinking, “Who's this moronic one percent that wants to ruin everything?”

Arthur Brooks: [01:32:55] And who is the moronic 50 percent that doesn't agree with me? Their 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 and 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 is dumb. 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 with social media where you, where you get into the filter bubble is you start getting into a social bubble too. If you're good at filtering at all posing 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 in the survey. It doesn't mean you're wrong, but even if I do think you're wrong, and only says what I think. 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. Got to get out of here and also, your life won't be as satisfying and interesting as it should be. It's not interesting to be around people and say you're right all the time.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:34:06] Right. It's a challenge. If you're a young high school activist, go to Brigham Young or something and see why you come out from inside.

Arthur Brooks: [01:34:12] You know if you're a big conservative activist and a real evangelical Christian conservative activist, go to a left-wing church.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:34:20] Oh yeah. Interesting.

Arthur Brooks: [01:34:22] Try it, you know? Yeah, absolutely.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:34:25] Last but not least, how can I avoid contempt if I view the other side is just immoral. I get all, “That's good,” “Fine and good,” ”Thanks,” or, “Thanks Jordan,” but you know, look the other side, they're just real pieces of crap. What am I supposed to do?

Arthur Brooks: [01:34:39] The answer is you are wrong. 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 has 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 partially formed ideologies and stuff that you've read and things that you might've accidentally said. I mean, come on man, 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 what 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 more sons of the same father in my view. And that's my religious view, but you know, it's a clear philosophically consistent view with the way that we should see each other.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:35:47] 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 --

Arthur Brooks: [01:35:53] Just because you say -- 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'd 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 -- you win.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:36:10] You fulfilled your promise today. Thank you very much.

Arthur Brooks: [01:36:12] Thank you, Jordan. I appreciate it a lot.

Jordan Harbinger: [01:36:16] 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 --" The book is very much in the middle of the road. It's 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 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 and politics.” Then again, I'm naive as hell and that might never work.

[01:36:59] But anyway, this was 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 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/course. Speaking of building relationships, tell me your number one takeaway here from Arthur Brooks. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. And there's a video of this interview on our YouTube channel at jordanharbinger.com/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. You could tell he's just born for this and I love that about this episode.

[01:37:57] This show is produced in association with PodcastOne and this episode was co-produced by Jason “The Enemy” DeFillippo 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 the 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.

[01:38:26] A lot of you out there like to build your network. There's actually a show called Build Your Network with my friend Travis Chappell. It's dedicated to helping people level up their inner circle, build meaningful connections the right way, and ultimately become a better version of themselves. And Travis who hosts the show, he walks the walk, man. I mean he's a great guy, kind of a new-ish friend of mine last couple of years and he's always thinking about how to help other people, get in touch with people. I mean he's really putting some brain power towards this stuff and he's gunning for the guests. He's got highly valuable and practical advice from some of the best leaders in the world, including shark tank panelists and FBI hostage negotiator -- I'll give you a hint who that might be -- several New York Times bestselling authors, billionaires, investors, and more. Like I said, he's, he's going for it, man. He started less than two years ago, and now he's got over 275 episodes featuring some of the world's top leaders. And remember, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. I've said that on the show a bunch. You've heard it elsewhere. So search for Build Your Network on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts and start leveling up your inner circle today. The show and its guests have a lot of value and I think you'll enjoy it. You can also find him at travischappell.com/show. We'll link to that in the show notes.