AI transcript
0:00:04 Hey there, it’s Stephen Dubner.
0:00:10 Given the heated nature of our national conversation these days, I have been thinking about an interview
0:00:11 I did in 2021.
0:00:16 So I went back and listened, and I thought you might like to hear it too, whether again
0:00:17 or for the first time.
0:00:21 Facts and figures have been updated, but do keep in mind this conversation was recorded
0:00:22 in 2021.
0:00:26 As always, thanks for listening, and let us know what you think.
0:00:28 Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com.
0:00:37 I have a question that I’m afraid is going to sound rude, no matter how I put it.
0:00:37 It’s okay.
0:00:38 It’s okay.
0:00:43 So my reading of your second-to-last book, The Conservative Heart, was that it was written
0:00:49 to help pave the way for the right kind of Republican presidential candidate in 2016, maybe a Jeb
0:00:50 Bush type or whatnot.
0:00:52 Is that roughly right?
0:00:57 Yeah, it was my entrant into the ideological sweepstakes of 2016.
0:01:01 It’s debate night for the Republicans, and we’re just-
0:01:01 And I lost.
0:01:04 This is a tough business to run for president.
0:01:04 Oh, I know.
0:01:05 You’re a tough guy, Jeb.
0:01:08 And we need to have a leader that is principal.
0:01:11 You’re never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency.
0:01:11 Let’s see.
0:01:13 I’m at 42, and you’re at three.
0:01:14 So so far, I’m doing better.
0:01:15 Doesn’t matter.
0:01:16 So far, I’m doing better.
0:01:17 Right.
0:01:22 So you did lose because Trump was not the kind of Republican or conservative candidate
0:01:23 that you wanted.
0:01:30 And then in 2019, you publish a book called Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save
0:01:33 America from the Culture of Contempt.
0:01:38 And this book argues that we have reached a contempt crisis in the U.S. and we need to fight it with
0:01:40 kindness, essentially.
0:01:46 Now, from the evidence I’ve seen since 2019, that argument of yours is not working so well
0:01:47 either.
0:01:49 So let me ask you this.
0:01:50 Those were just statements.
0:01:52 Now, finally, is the rude question.
0:01:56 How do you rate yourself as a public persuader?
0:01:59 And if not very well, why not?
0:02:07 Because you are a smart, experienced, well-meaning person with good communication skills, experience,
0:02:08 connections, et cetera.
0:02:12 So what does this failure say about either the message or the messenger?
0:02:15 I have a latent demand strategy.
0:02:18 And latent demand strategies, they lose a lot.
0:02:22 You know, entrepreneurship means rolling out something new.
0:02:24 And by the way, I might never succeed.
0:02:29 But remember that the average successful entrepreneur has 3.8 bankruptcies.
0:02:31 I had a couple of bankruptcies.
0:02:33 I mean, it wasn’t bankruptcies.
0:02:34 They were bestsellers.
0:02:35 I mean, that’s not nothing.
0:02:39 And by the way, I talk to mayors and governors all the time.
0:02:41 Many of them are successful using these ideas.
0:02:47 Both Democrats and Republicans who say, I love this book and I’m using it and it helped me
0:02:50 get elected and it’s helping me govern and I’m governing across the aisle.
0:02:56 I mean, you’re right to say that this ideology that I’m trying to inject, it looks a little
0:02:56 quixotic.
0:02:59 And I’m like tilting the windows or something.
0:02:59 I get it.
0:03:01 But I think it’s right.
0:03:02 I think it’s morally right.
0:03:04 I think it can be popular.
0:03:07 And I think that it just might work.
0:03:08 But you got to keep trying.
0:03:14 You can’t stop just because, you know, look, because virtue didn’t fit at the current moment.
0:03:15 Well, I guess I’m going to turn to vice.
0:03:18 I know that’s the wrong strategy.
0:03:23 The person I’m speaking with today is named Arthur Brooks.
0:03:27 I’m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School.
0:03:32 The latent demand strategy that Brooks mentioned, that’s the kind of thinking employed by entrepreneurs
0:03:34 like Steve Jobs.
0:03:37 These are people who basically said, I have a product.
0:03:39 You don’t even know what it is.
0:03:41 You’re going to need it.
0:03:42 You’re going to need it.
0:03:45 And latent demand is more powerful than extant demand.
0:03:50 And it can have much bigger markets than extant demand, but it requires visionary entrepreneurship.
0:03:56 So what’s going on right now is that we have an untapped latent demand for the kind of country
0:04:01 that we want, which is an aspirational country, which is not characterized by bitterness and
0:04:05 polarization, which is one in which we actually can learn from each other.
0:04:09 And one in which the competition between the ideological sides, which is good and healthy
0:04:14 because iron sharpens iron, as far as I’m concerned, is to see who can empower people
0:04:15 the most.
0:04:21 Instead, what we have is the actual demand curve firing up dopamine in people’s brains
0:04:23 again and again and again and again and creating addiction.
0:04:26 And what are we addicted to?
0:04:27 Contempt.
0:04:29 That’s his argument, at least.
0:04:33 Now, who is Arthur Brooks and why should we be listening to him?
0:04:36 We’ll get into his full bio later.
0:04:42 But briefly, before teaching leadership at Harvard, he ran the American Enterprise Institute, one of
0:04:45 the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country.
0:04:52 Before that, he was an economics professor and before that, a professional French horn player.
0:04:59 So he’s already had several careers and an unusual trajectory, which has led him to an unusual
0:05:00 belief.
0:05:08 Arthur Brooks believes that the best way to detoxify American politics, maybe the only way, is with
0:05:09 love.
0:05:17 I will not let the press, the media, politicians tell me I’ve got to hate my brother-in-law.
0:05:19 I’m just not going to put up with it anymore.
0:05:22 In the end, people want to love.
0:05:23 They don’t want to hate.
0:05:26 And then we can accelerate that with good leadership.
0:05:32 And I’m telling you, Stephen, I’m spending all of my time doing what I can to make love
0:05:33 cool right now in politics.
0:05:37 And how is this love offensive working so far?
0:05:38 Everybody hates me.
0:05:39 Yeah, totally.
0:05:41 I’m despised by one and all.
0:05:47 Today on Freakonomics Radio, can love really conquer all?
0:05:51 Is Arthur Brooks a fool for believing it can?
0:05:54 And are you maybe his kind of fool?
0:06:12 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with
0:06:13 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:06:29 Let’s say you are a bright, ambitious, civic-minded kid, in middle school maybe, and you are
0:06:32 considering a career in government, perhaps in Congress.
0:06:36 So you tune in one day to see what’s happening on the House floor.
0:06:37 Thank you.
0:06:40 Chair recognizes Ms. Tlaib from Michigan.
0:06:43 You find two representatives, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
0:06:46 I think it’s really important we need to stand up against this.
0:06:48 Fascist takeover.
0:06:49 That’s not a bad word.
0:06:50 It’s a fact.
0:06:53 And Byron Donalds of Florida…
0:06:54 Will the gentlelady yield to a question?
0:06:59 …having the sort of high-minded debate that our founding fathers must have envisioned.
0:06:59 Will the gentlelady yield?
0:07:00 No, I don’t yield.
0:07:01 I don’t even have time.
0:07:05 Chairman, I think it’s insane that the gentlelady doesn’t have an argument, but she’s going
0:07:07 to refer to me and some of my colleagues.
0:07:07 Mr. Donalds.
0:07:08 We were from the Third Reich.
0:07:09 This is insane.
0:07:09 You’re about the criminals?
0:07:10 It’s insane.
0:07:13 Do I look like a member of the Third Reich to you, Ms. Tlaib?
0:07:14 Please, no, please.
0:07:15 Is that what I look like to you?
0:07:20 Trying to insult somebody into agreement is the stupidest thing you can possibly do.
0:07:21 Arthur Brooks again.
0:07:25 I mean, it’s completely ineffective, but it feels good.
0:07:27 It feels satisfying in the very short run.
0:07:30 But surveys suggest that most of us hate this noise.
0:07:37 93 percent, if you believe Tim Dixon’s data on this, 93 percent of us hate how divided we
0:07:38 become as a country.
0:07:44 Brooks is referring to a 2018 survey run by an international group called More in Common, which
0:07:47 tries to build stronger communities and fight polarization.
0:07:50 Now, we shouldn’t pretend that polarization is new.
0:07:54 In many political systems, it is more of a feature than a bug.
0:08:00 You can find incredible nastiness if you go back a century or two in American politics or
0:08:03 if you go back a couple millennia in Roman politics.
0:08:06 But the current American polarization has been building for a while now.
0:08:08 Here’s an example.
0:08:12 In the 1960s, only 42 percent of votes in the U.S.
0:08:16 Senate were what are called party unity votes, where the majority of Republicans opposed the
0:08:18 majority of Democrats or vice versa.
0:08:22 By 2022, that number had risen to 83 percent.
0:08:24 Here’s some more data to consider.
0:08:31 In 1935, the Social Security Act was passed with 90 percent Democratic support and 75 percent
0:08:32 Republican support.
0:08:35 So not unanimous, but united.
0:08:41 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed with just 60 percent Democratic support, but again,
0:08:43 75 percent Republican.
0:08:48 But if you look at the major legislation passed in recent years, it’s another story.
0:08:53 President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act made it through Congress with zero Republican
0:08:54 votes.
0:09:00 President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act made it through with zero Democratic votes.
0:09:06 And I think we can all feel this partisanship reflected in our daily lives and in the media
0:09:06 we consume.
0:09:09 So how did we get here?
0:09:13 What’s been driving this intense spike in division and partisanship?
0:09:16 It’s a perfect for economics question, actually.
0:09:20 So there’s an interesting paper from the European Economic Review that was published in 2017 by three
0:09:26 German economists that looked at 800 elections over 120 years in 20 advanced economies, including
0:09:27 the United States.
0:09:34 And what they found was that a financial crisis, which is a two times a century deal, not a regular
0:09:38 V-shaped recession, but a financial crisis like what we endured in the 30s and what we endured
0:09:44 in 2008, 2009, has a very, very strong impact in the following decade on political polarization.
0:09:51 Specifically, on average, it causes the 30 percent bump in voter share for populist parties
0:09:52 and candidates.
0:09:54 This is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump by the numbers.
0:10:02 So we don’t know how to distribute the returns after economy is coming back without 80 percent
0:10:06 of the returns going to the top 20 percent of the income distribution, which opens the door
0:10:09 for political populists to say somebody’s got your stuff and I’m going to get it back, whether
0:10:15 it’s foreigners or whether it’s trade or whether it’s bankers or whether it’s wealthy people.
0:10:20 You’re saying that the populist sentiment comes from frustration over how the recovery
0:10:26 gains are distributed, because I was assuming it was about blaming the experts and elites
0:10:27 for the underlying crisis.
0:10:29 Well, there’s that, too.
0:10:30 But that generally comes later.
0:10:34 It’s the fact that I’m seeing people doing just fine after the crisis, but I’m still not.
0:10:39 And my brother-in-law, Cletus, is still on my foldout watching TV all day because he can’t
0:10:40 get his job back.
0:10:42 And it’s like, what the hell?
0:10:48 But then the real action happens because in democracy, which is the political version of
0:10:49 capitalism, a.k.a.
0:10:52 markets, people decide the leaders are not leaders.
0:10:53 They’re followers.
0:10:54 They’re following market signals.
0:10:57 And so Donald Trump, all he did was follow market signals.
0:10:59 Bernie Sanders follows market signals.
0:11:02 These news networks, they follow market signals.
0:11:05 And those market signals are coming from a whole lot of frustration.
0:11:08 And then, of course, the tail starts to wag the dog.
0:11:14 So the contempt that actually is serving the markets as an outlet of frustration for the
0:11:19 lack of progress that’s going to the margins of society then actually fires up more contempt
0:11:20 and it self-fuels.
0:11:25 Let me be sure I understand because you’re saying all this frustration comes from us, from the
0:11:32 citizenry who feel duly wronged by the big macro events that have ruined our livelihoods.
0:11:39 And that feeds into something that politicians then respond to, and it creates this even bigger storm.
0:11:46 But you also just told us that most of us don’t want to be involved in that contemptuous
0:11:47 partisan cycle.
0:11:52 So you’re saying that we are both victim and villain, we being the citizenry, no?
0:11:53 For sure.
0:11:58 And the same thing is true with any addictive cycle, where you want some relief, and so you
0:12:04 drink, and then the homeostasis sets in, and so you drink some more, and you want the relief,
0:12:05 but you hate the process.
0:12:10 And so what we’re in is this weird downward spiral of contempt.
0:12:17 Tell us what you can about the science of contempt.
0:12:22 I’d like to know, first of all, just how empirically it’s been identified as a separate
0:12:23 thing from, let’s say, anger.
0:12:26 So anger is a basic negative emotion.
0:12:30 The negative emotions are produced vis-a-vis stimuli of your limbic system.
0:12:32 It’s kind of your lizard brain.
0:12:37 Anger is a hot emotion that says, I care what you think, and I want it to change.
0:12:41 The problem is when you mix these emotions into complex emotions.
0:12:44 So shame and guilt are complex emotions, for example.
0:12:51 And contempt is this nasty cocktail of anger plus disgust, which is not a hot emotion anymore.
0:12:52 It’s a cold emotion.
0:12:55 It says, you are worthless, and what you said is worthless.
0:12:58 You aren’t beneath my regard.
0:13:02 And that’s something that should be reserved for something that’s not human.
0:13:09 Reading your book, Love Your Enemies, it was so moving to me, especially the portions where
0:13:12 you’re describing the difference between contempt and anger.
0:13:16 You write, people often characterize the current moment as being angry.
0:13:20 I wish this were true, because anger tends to be self-limiting.
0:13:25 But then, when you mix it, as you’ve described, with disgust, and it becomes contempt, it’s a
0:13:26 totally different thing.
0:13:31 What I found so moving about it was one very positive thing and one very negative thing.
0:13:36 The very negative thing was, you realize how easy it is for anyone to tip into contempt.
0:13:43 In fact, I don’t know if most of us have even noticed that we added that layer of disgust
0:13:43 to our anger.
0:13:51 The upside, what makes me happy about it, is once you can identify the forces that are being
0:13:53 destructive, you can address those forces.
0:14:00 So, do most of us who exhibit contempt or experience contempt even know it?
0:14:04 Do we identify the fact that it’s something different than anger?
0:14:07 The answer is no, because it’s a habit.
0:14:11 Our habits of communication are as ingrained as smoking.
0:14:17 I mean, I’ve seen myself in debates about the free market system, and somebody made an
0:14:21 ill-considered remark about capitalism, and I rolled my eyes, Stephen.
0:14:25 And I guarantee you that my interlocutor didn’t go home that night and say, I was debating the
0:14:28 president of the American Enterprise Institute on CNN, and he was making some very good points.
0:14:30 He’s like, that guy’s a jerk.
0:14:34 And the reason is because I made somebody feel horrible with just one little action.
0:14:35 And I didn’t hate the person.
0:14:37 It was just a habit.
0:14:44 What do we know about the characteristics of people who are most likely to exhibit contempt
0:14:46 or to be the target of contempt?
0:14:51 In other words, break down if you can, whatever you can tell me, gender-wise, Republican, Democrat,
0:14:55 old, young, anything racially, ethnically, and so on.
0:14:58 So, we don’t see racial differences, and we don’t see gender differences.
0:15:01 You know, I actually don’t see differences between right and left.
0:15:03 What we do see is differences in consumption of media.
0:15:08 So, the more time you consume political information on social media, the more you’re going to be
0:15:09 both a victim and a perpetrator of contempt.
0:15:13 The more that you watch cable television, you’re going to be a victim and perpetrator of contempt.
0:15:18 For example, answering questions like, what do you think is the biggest threat in the United
0:15:18 States?
0:15:23 The likelihood of you saying it’s a person of the other party is directly related to how much
0:15:25 political news that you consume.
0:15:28 And I don’t even have to know what political news you consume.
0:15:30 It’s funny, but it’s not, right?
0:15:34 Straight hits off the bottle for people who just can’t handle it.
0:15:43 Make your best argument that while feeling contempt seems to make us happy or satisfied, in fact,
0:15:46 makes us psychologically and physiologically worse off.
0:15:53 There’s a really great psychiatry professor at Stanford Medical School named Anna Lemke, who
0:15:55 has a big new book out about dopamine.
0:16:01 She talks about addictions to video games and gambling and substances and pornography.
0:16:04 What they all have in common is that they stimulate dopamine.
0:16:10 So, if you’re a media addict and you’re watching six hours a day of Fox News or MSNBC, the reason
0:16:13 is because your brain is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
0:16:16 The problem is that you’re neutralizing the pleasure you get from that almost immediately,
0:16:20 leading you to have to take the drug again and again and again and again.
0:16:24 These are the sort of the neurochemical predictors of falling happiness.
0:16:29 And then at the more meta level, what you find is that contempt is going to drive love out of
0:16:29 your life.
0:16:33 There’s a very famous study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an 80-year
0:16:36 longitudinal study of people when they get old.
0:16:39 What do they all have in common if they’re happy and well?
0:16:40 And the answer is love.
0:16:41 It’s just all you need to know.
0:16:42 Happiness is love.
0:16:42 Full stop.
0:16:46 Okay.
0:16:49 So, is love a verb or a noun?
0:16:53 Discuss and feel free to show your homework.
0:16:59 What I’m talking about is the love that we manage, that we make metacognitive.
0:17:01 So, love is a verb.
0:17:03 It is to will the good of the other as other.
0:17:05 What is love not?
0:17:07 It’s not a feeling.
0:17:12 And this is incredibly important to remember because in our modern culture, we tend to,
0:17:18 in my view, overvalorize feelings, which tends to throw us like bits of jetsam on the surf.
0:17:23 And we’re getting thrown around a lot, and it makes our lives have less quality, quite frankly.
0:17:27 And it makes us bitter and angry, and it makes us suffer a lot more than we need to.
0:17:34 If you were writing this as some sort of equation in an econ paper, where you are treating contempt
0:17:40 and love as these commodities, talk about how the two relate, where the supplies come from,
0:17:42 where the demand comes from.
0:17:46 In other words, how can this lovely theory of yours actually work?
0:17:50 Your vice, the opposite of your virtue, is your contempt divided by your love.
0:17:58 If you want that force in your life to decline, absolutely, you should work on your contempt.
0:18:03 But the real way to do that, where you’ve got a lever, is that you should have a denominator
0:18:04 management strategy.
0:18:11 And the more that you increase the denominator, the more that vicious impulse will just magically
0:18:12 decrease.
0:18:17 Are you saying that love is proactive, essentially, and contempt tends to be reactive?
0:18:22 It generally tends to be, because it’s being processed by the nucleus accumbens of your brain,
0:18:26 which is the part of your brain that governs your habit-forming behavior.
0:18:29 And so you can basically say, I won’t be that way.
0:18:30 I won’t be that way.
0:18:32 That’s what I used to say when I was trying to quit smoking.
0:18:36 And I always wound up, like, you know, seven cigarettes burning at once, because it would
0:18:38 be like this binge behavior at the end of the day.
0:18:43 And people will say, I won’t be contemptuous, and then they wind up watching MSNBC all night.
0:18:51 We should say, the number of people who actually binge on MSNBC or the other cable news networks
0:18:53 is relatively small.
0:18:58 MSNBC averages well under one million viewers during primetime, not so many in a country of
0:19:00 around 340 million.
0:19:02 CNN is also under a million.
0:19:06 Fox News, the biggest cable news network, averages just over two million.
0:19:13 But the noise from the cable news networks, the nearly constant volley of contempt, that
0:19:17 noise reverberates like someone shouting into a canyon.
0:19:21 It disrupts any chance of peace you might have hoped for.
0:19:27 So coming up after the break, how does Arthur Brooks propose to restore the peace?
0:19:34 Pretend that you’re feeling this love, notwithstanding your feelings, because it’s an act.
0:19:38 And what does all this mean, if anything, for the future of politics?
0:19:44 We need people from both parties that people are going to vote for, as opposed to somebody
0:19:46 who will defend me from the person I’m voting against.
0:19:48 That’s coming up right after this.
0:20:04 If I told you there was a public intellectual, a conservative, who wanted to fight political
0:20:11 polarization and contempt with love, and that this person was trained in economics, you might
0:20:11 not believe me.
0:20:18 Economists are about supply and demand, costs and benefits, not love.
0:20:21 But Arthur Brooks is not a typical economist.
0:20:26 I thought everybody who is a professional economist actually starts out as a French horn player.
0:20:29 Brooks grew up just outside Seattle.
0:20:32 His mother was an artist, his father a math professor.
0:20:37 Arthur started playing violin when he was four and piano at five.
0:20:40 And I played the French horn starting when I was eight years old.
0:20:42 And that one really stuck because I was good at it.
0:20:44 And it’s fun to be good at something when you’re a kid.
0:20:47 And then when I went away to college, all I wanted to do was play.
0:20:53 So I went to the California Institute of the Arts, where I dropped my required classes and
0:20:57 took Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming and was invited to pursue my excellence
0:20:58 outside of the institution.
0:21:03 He spent the next 10 years playing French horn professionally, the last several with the
0:21:04 Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.
0:21:09 I moved to Spain to get a woman who didn’t speak English in a bid to convince her to marry
0:21:10 me.
0:21:11 It worked.
0:21:16 That woman, Esther Munt, now Esther Munt Brooks, is still his wife.
0:21:19 But his musical career didn’t last as long.
0:21:21 There was really something missing.
0:21:25 My ambition was to be the world’s greatest French horn player and not to make beautiful
0:21:26 music.
0:21:31 And that’s a problem because I was all about extrinsic satisfaction, not intrinsic satisfaction.
0:21:33 So I started doing correspondence school.
0:21:34 I was playing in the orchestra.
0:21:38 I didn’t tell anybody because I was embarrassed that they might think that I wasn’t all in on
0:21:38 music.
0:21:39 This is how musicians think.
0:21:44 And I wound up secretly getting my bachelor’s degree by correspondence.
0:21:46 And then I just couldn’t stop.
0:21:50 And so I got my master’s degree secretly at night at a local university.
0:21:53 I decided I was just, you know, it’s so great.
0:21:58 These ideas are just so interesting that I quit music and started my PhD.
0:22:04 I wonder for you, someone who’s coming to academia relatively late, what would you say were the
0:22:05 benefits?
0:22:09 What did you bring to that academic pursuit as a full-grown adult?
0:22:10 Here’s the deal.
0:22:13 People don’t know what they want.
0:22:17 The most obscure thing to most people is the nature of their own desire.
0:22:19 People always ask the wrong question.
0:22:20 They say, I know what to do with my life.
0:22:21 No, no, no.
0:22:22 You don’t know what you want.
0:22:27 And they look for exogenous sources of information and they don’t actually go through the process
0:22:28 of discernment.
0:22:31 Every major philosophical and religious tradition has discernment.
0:22:33 I mean, discernment is part of Judaism.
0:22:35 Discernment is part of Buddhism.
0:22:37 It’s certainly part of the Ignatian tradition and Catholicism.
0:22:43 Discernment is all about understanding the nature of your own desire so that you can actually
0:22:44 be happy.
0:22:48 And what people will do is they’ll say, everybody goes to college after high school.
0:22:50 Okay, I’m going to go to college after high school.
0:22:52 And in college, I’m going to figure out what I want to do.
0:22:53 And then they get out of college, like, I don’t know what I want to do.
0:22:58 So I’m going to go work for a consulting firm or write software, and then I’ll figure out
0:22:59 what I want to do.
0:23:00 And then they don’t.
0:23:05 They’re hoping that some outside experience comes over the transom and shows them what they
0:23:06 want to do.
0:23:08 And that’s not how it works.
0:23:14 And so what happened was having to make decisions for my own life and treating my life like an entrepreneurial
0:23:17 endeavor, I figured out the nature of my desire.
0:23:20 I actually really, really, really want to be an idea guy.
0:23:21 I want to.
0:23:24 It’s not because some college professor said, you’re smart enough to be like me.
0:23:28 It was because I realized that I’m obsessed with ideas.
0:23:37 After his PhD, Brooks became a college professor, first at Georgia State and then Syracuse.
0:23:39 He would spend 10 years in academia.
0:23:46 He focused his research on philanthropy, primarily the motives that lead people to donate money.
0:23:50 Out of this research came his first book in 2006.
0:23:52 It was called Who Really Cares?
0:23:56 The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.
0:24:01 There was one thing in that book that people either liked or didn’t like, which was that
0:24:03 as a general matter, this wasn’t very political.
0:24:07 It was more religious in nature that people who have strong religious commitments give more
0:24:11 to all causes and charities, including secular causes and charities than people who don’t have
0:24:12 strong religious commitments.
0:24:14 And people who are more religious tend to be more conservative.
0:24:18 And so, therefore, this is the reason that we see a pattern in which, at that time in particular,
0:24:20 conservatives gave more to charity than liberals.
0:24:23 And for me as an academic, it’s like, big deal, man.
0:24:26 I’m just looking at a bunch of data and I’m noticing these patterns.
0:24:30 And also, there’s one other characteristic of conservatives, which is that they tend to think
0:24:33 that the government is not effective.
0:24:40 How much did you overlay that association onto this argument that conservatives give more
0:24:46 to charity because they don’t believe so much in redistribution while liberals do and therefore
0:24:50 think the government should distribute and therefore might give less to charity?
0:24:54 That was an interpretation on the basis of the associations that I showed.
0:24:59 But I tried to be careful about my language because I’m a guy, you know, who does this research.
0:25:01 And so, I know what the research is saying and not.
0:25:04 But, of course, the political thing was what was salient.
0:25:07 And it hit the news cycle in just the right way.
0:25:09 President Bush read my book.
0:25:14 And when the president of the United States is walking out to the helicopter holding a book,
0:25:15 people are like, what’s that book?
0:25:17 And it’s like some obscure college professor.
0:25:18 Suddenly, my phone started ringing.
0:25:23 So, you write that you were happily working as a professor at Syracuse when you get a call
0:25:27 from AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, asking if you’d think about becoming their
0:25:28 president.
0:25:31 Describe that call and how much of a surprise this development was.
0:25:34 They were going through a presidential search that was going very poorly.
0:25:38 And so, they threw a dart down the hall and basically hit me.
0:25:41 I’d never raised a dollar and I’d never had one employee.
0:25:44 It was just insanity.
0:25:52 Usually, when an institution has a hard time finding a leader, it’s for good reason that
0:25:53 the place is in bad trouble.
0:25:53 Were they?
0:25:54 No.
0:25:59 The truth of the matter is, however, that most institutions have a really hard time finding
0:25:59 a chief executive.
0:26:03 I mean, these jobs are, they’re a grind.
0:26:04 You’re on the road all the time.
0:26:06 They’re 80-hour-a-week jobs.
0:26:10 And if you’re going to go in to be a university president, but even more a think tank president,
0:26:11 you’ve got to be a scholar.
0:26:17 Did it feel like the intellectual, academic, ideas-based operation that you envisioned?
0:26:24 Or did you feel like, oh, it’s an ideas shop, but it’s an ideas shop geared toward producing
0:26:30 policy that is meant to promote a certain spectrum of the political industry?
0:26:31 It was the former.
0:26:32 It really was.
0:26:39 And part of the reason was because our scholars are notorious for irritating our friends.
0:26:42 Give me an example, if you could.
0:26:47 You talk about the carried interest provision, which is basically it’s a loophole where you
0:26:50 take income and say it’s not income for founders of certain kinds of businesses.
0:26:52 And our scholars are like, no, it’s income.
0:26:56 Sure, lower the income tax, but don’t say that something that is income isn’t income.
0:26:58 And so we were saying things like that all the time.
0:27:02 I was getting these outraged phone calls from donors all the time.
0:27:04 How can your scholars say something?
0:27:07 I was just like, dude, this is what the data is telling them.
0:27:08 And I’m sorry.
0:27:09 What do you want me to tell you?
0:27:17 So let’s say that I am a billionaire plutocrat and I wish to affect U.S. policymaking.
0:27:20 OK, where do I get the best ROI?
0:27:26 A, funding a think tank to support research that promotes my agenda and works its way into
0:27:27 the bloodstream.
0:27:35 B, lobbying members of Congress directly or perhaps see some other route like a public relations
0:27:36 campaign or a media blitz.
0:27:42 I’d buy a bunch of TV stations and newspapers and I would probably start a cable network.
0:27:45 That’s where you’re going to be coalescing a movement of people who are highly ideological.
0:27:48 And that’s where you don’t have to worry about anybody telling you you’re wrong.
0:27:54 The whole idea that you’re actually going to be informed by cable media, that is just insane
0:27:54 if you think that.
0:27:58 If you’re actually going, it’s like, oh, I’m going to watch these cable news networks,
0:27:59 especially during primetime.
0:28:03 I’m really going to find out what’s going on with Biden, what’s going on with Trump.
0:28:04 No, you’re not.
0:28:06 You’re basically going to have your biases scratched.
0:28:10 And if you go to the other side to see what the other side is saying, you’re going to
0:28:16 recognize the accelerants on these half-truths and rumors, and that won’t change how you think
0:28:16 either.
0:28:20 So we have a big problem with the means of communication in this country and the way that we actually
0:28:21 do so-called news.
0:28:27 There are things that can happen that can radically change this environment, or we can have a slow
0:28:32 kind of oozing moving forward, where the leadership in one or both parties basically says, I’ve
0:28:33 had enough.
0:28:33 I’ve had enough.
0:28:38 What I really, really hope is that you have this, remember good old days, Stephen, remember
0:28:39 2012?
0:28:46 Obama and Romney were just duking it out about who was going to be a better opportunity politician
0:28:47 for the American public.
0:28:49 And I knew tons of people like, I don’t know who to vote for.
0:28:51 I don’t know which one of them I like more.
0:28:57 And instead, you know, and you get into 2016 and people are like, yeah, I don’t know who
0:28:58 I like less.
0:29:02 Things can change really fast in American politics.
0:29:07 And so we need people from both parties that people are going to vote for, as opposed to
0:29:10 somebody who will defend me from the person I’m voting against.
0:29:12 That’s what we actually want.
0:29:22 So you’ve collaborated with the Dalai Lama, and you asked him once what to do when you
0:29:22 feel contempt.
0:29:26 And his answer was, practice warmheartedness.
0:29:32 And then you did exactly what I lived on, which is said, can you say a little bit more about
0:29:33 that, please?
0:29:34 Are there any specifics?
0:29:35 You got anything else, Your Holiness?
0:29:42 And then, as you’re right, he suggests that you think back to a time when you answered
0:29:48 contempt with warmheartedness, remember how that made you feel, and then do it again.
0:29:50 Is it really that simple?
0:29:52 Because that sounds like even I could do that.
0:29:54 It’s amazingly good psychology.
0:29:57 It’s reversing an automatic process.
0:30:01 There’s a famous exercise that I teach to my Harvard students now.
0:30:02 I had to teach a class on happiness.
0:30:06 And when you’re feeling unhappy, if you want to feel happier, if you put a pencil in your
0:30:10 mouth and bite down, so it’s sideways in your mouth, and you’re biting down in your molars,
0:30:16 that will actually strain the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corner of your eyes, giving you
0:30:17 little crow’s feet.
0:30:22 And that signals to your brain that you’re doing a Duchenne smile, which is the only smile
0:30:23 associated with true happiness.
0:30:28 And it runs the causality in the other direction, and you will literally feel happier.
0:30:30 So that’s what I’m suggesting.
0:30:36 Pretend that you’re feeling this love, notwithstanding your feelings, because it’s,
0:30:38 an act, it’s a commitment, it’s not a feeling.
0:30:44 And in so doing, you will run the cognitive process in the opposite direction, and you’ll
0:30:45 get results.
0:30:46 And that’s what the Dalai Lama was telling me.
0:30:50 He was just not telling me in those wonky, nerdy terms.
0:30:57 So you’re making the argument that people, individuals, can and should opt out of the contempt industry
0:31:00 and practice more warmheartedness.
0:31:07 But I wonder if you’re being somewhat Pollyannish here, because the leverage and the reach of the
0:31:13 industries that promote contempt, especially the political and media industries, they’re
0:31:13 very powerful.
0:31:20 So what makes you think that those Goliaths could ever be taken down by even a very large
0:31:21 army of Davids?
0:31:25 Well, the answer is that every movement actually starts with a few people.
0:31:30 What political leaders do, what institutions do, is they get in front of parades that are
0:31:32 going down the street saying, this parade needs a leader.
0:31:35 And the parade’s got to start someplace.
0:31:40 And none of the things that are right are at odds with the idea that we need institutional
0:31:40 change.
0:31:41 That’s true, too.
0:31:46 But only thinking institutionally, only thinking in terms of systems doesn’t actually get out
0:31:50 the intrinsic truth, which is that everything actually starts with a few individuals.
0:31:53 That was Gandhi’s big point.
0:31:54 That was Martin Luther King’s big point.
0:32:00 Martin Luther King didn’t start by going to the Department of Justice to try to break up
0:32:01 racist institutions in the South.
0:32:07 Martin Luther King got people together who said, I think that we can start making things better.
0:32:09 We can act in a particular way.
0:32:12 We can show steely courage with boundless love.
0:32:20 Coming up after the break, the COVID-19 pandemic might have been a good moment to break our
0:32:22 addiction to contempt, but that didn’t happen.
0:32:24 Arthur Brooks will explain why.
0:32:25 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:32:27 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:32:27 We’ll be right back.
0:32:47 A lot of social scientists argue that when different groups are presented with a common
0:32:48 enemy, they tend to unite.
0:32:55 I heard a lot of smart people posit that COVID-19 would be that common enemy that would bring
0:32:57 everyone together, that it would lessen contempt.
0:32:59 I see no evidence that it’s done that.
0:33:00 Why do you think not?
0:33:01 Bad leadership.
0:33:05 You know, we had an opportunity and under appropriate leadership, the country could have
0:33:08 come together and it did in other parts of the world, not perfectly.
0:33:12 There’s still dissidents and there’s still problems and there’s uneven recovery.
0:33:12 I get it.
0:33:17 The fact of the matter is that the president of the United States used COVID to divide as
0:33:18 opposed to using COVID to unite.
0:33:20 Every leader’s got a choice.
0:33:23 And when the president of the United States, I mean, it would have been great if the whole
0:33:25 country said, no, we refuse.
0:33:26 We will come together.
0:33:27 We will.
0:33:30 But the president of the United States has a lot of power.
0:33:36 It was a classic case of dividing contemptuous leadership in our moment of need.
0:33:40 Here’s a sentence from your book that one doesn’t often read.
0:33:44 My admiration for politicians has grown enormously.
0:33:48 You go on to write, they are some of the most patriotic, hardworking people I’ve ever met.
0:33:53 They love America and hate our culture of contempt as much as you and I.
0:34:00 So, Arthur, if that’s the case, why are they, the players in that industry, not able to tamp
0:34:01 down the contempt?
0:34:08 You have a problem of scale where it’s one of them versus the entire infrastructure of
0:34:12 media, the rest of politicians, the most powerful politicians.
0:34:14 It’s a massive collective action problem.
0:34:18 Now, when I say my respect for politicians has risen, it’s true.
0:34:19 Not all politicians.
0:34:24 I mean, some are opportunists and some of them are really creating the problem wholesale.
0:34:28 But the truth of the matter is that most of that I’ve met, they’re smart.
0:34:30 They’re interested in what’s going on.
0:34:32 They want to make things better and they don’t know how.
0:34:36 And just like the rest of us, they feel a lot of fear and people act in some optimal ways
0:34:37 when they’re fearful.
0:34:44 How much time do you spend talking still with Republican candidates, congresspeople, strategists
0:34:45 and so on?
0:34:46 A lot.
0:34:46 Not everybody.
0:34:49 It’s not like President Trump is calling me.
0:34:53 But I do have the pleasure of talking to a lot of people on Capitol Hill.
0:34:57 And what I’m talking about, the playbook that I’m trying to bring to everybody who will
0:35:01 possibly listen, not just Republicans, but anybody who will listen, is we need a competition
0:35:02 of opportunity.
0:35:07 Look, we are still the same nation of ambitious riffraff that we always were.
0:35:10 We believe in the radical equality of human dignity.
0:35:11 I’ve got the data.
0:35:13 Most people believe in this.
0:35:13 Absolutely.
0:35:17 And we have different ways to make this agenda true and pure and good.
0:35:21 And once we start fighting each other over that, no, I want more opportunity.
0:35:23 We can get out of this crisis.
0:35:25 I’ve got the ear of a few.
0:35:26 And Stephen, I want more.
0:35:27 I want more.
0:35:34 When you talk to Republicans, either elected politicians or their strategists, who are on
0:35:39 the fence about whether to continue to support Donald Trump or to accept support from Donald
0:35:43 Trump in the upcoming midterms, how do you advise them?
0:35:46 So it depends on where they are.
0:35:51 But fundamentally, you got to ask yourself, what are you willing to fail for, Stephen?
0:35:55 One of the things that we find about the happiest people is they can answer the question, why
0:35:55 are you alive?
0:35:57 And for what are you willing to die?
0:36:00 Okay, so let’s take it to the level of our career.
0:36:03 What are we willing to fail for?
0:36:06 What are we willing to have the microphone taken away from us for?
0:36:10 And so I ask my political friends, you have a concept of what you think is right.
0:36:12 It doesn’t mean it’s what I think is right.
0:36:15 What are you willing to lose an election for?
0:36:18 And when my friends examine that, you start showing some courage.
0:36:20 You start saying the things that you think.
0:36:25 And then once you cross that Rubicon, it’s unbelievably liberating.
0:36:26 You can be free.
0:36:27 You can be free.
0:36:34 What are your very best ideas for fighting contempt?
0:36:37 Let’s say we’re sitting next to each other on an airplane.
0:36:43 You catch my attention totally by saying, yeah, we live in this contempt cycle, but I can fix
0:36:43 it.
0:36:44 Fix me quickly.
0:36:46 We’re going to land in 10 minutes.
0:36:48 Number one, stand up to the man.
0:36:50 Like they used to say in the 60s, stand up to the man.
0:36:54 The man that’s manipulating you is the media that are telling you that you have to hate.
0:36:59 Number two is start running toward contempt because this is your opportunity to show a love.
0:37:01 And you don’t get that many opportunities to show love.
0:37:04 I mean, this is mission territory, man.
0:37:07 Why is it that all these religious missionaries, why do you think that they’re so happy all the
0:37:07 time?
0:37:10 You know what nobody has ever said in human life?
0:37:11 Oh, good.
0:37:14 There’s missionaries on the porch and yet they’re happy.
0:37:18 They’re happy because they’re actually bringing light where there’s darkness in their view.
0:37:20 Be a missionary.
0:37:25 And one of the ways to do this, if you’re in a habit, this is number three, John Gottman says
0:37:29 that if you’re fighting with your spouse, start carrying around a five to one list.
0:37:34 When you want to say something hateful or sarcastic or critical, you write it down on your list,
0:37:39 but then you have to say five loving, nice, caring things first.
0:37:40 And guess what?
0:37:41 You won’t get to the sixth thing.
0:37:46 And so if you want to say something sarcastic on Twitter about President Biden or Trump or
0:37:50 something, you got to say five positive things.
0:37:53 You’re going to lose followers on Twitter, by the way, because it’s a contempt machine.
0:37:55 But you’re going to be a different person.
0:37:59 And what that’s going to do is you’re going to start finding yourself confronting the sources
0:38:03 of contempt with love, with happiness, with light.
0:38:07 And then finally, last but not least, you need to be more grateful.
0:38:11 If you’re a Republican and you actually think that the biggest threat to America is Democrats,
0:38:13 man, you’re out of your tree.
0:38:15 You’re just not looking at the facts.
0:38:18 You don’t have enough grasp on foreign policy, among other things.
0:38:23 You’re drinking this Kool-Aid from cable TV and your Facebook friends or something.
0:38:24 And it’s crazy.
0:38:29 And you need to be more grateful for the fact that you live in a country where you can say
0:38:33 the president of the United States is an idiot and there’s no knock in the night and no jackbooted
0:38:36 thug and God bless America for that.
0:38:40 That’s Arthur Brooks.
0:38:41 What do you think?
0:38:48 Does the love and warm heartedness he prescribes stand a chance against the contempt machine that
0:38:49 seems to be running our country?
0:38:51 I’d love to know what you think.
0:38:55 Our email is radio at freakonomics.com.
0:38:58 You will be hearing from us again very soon.
0:38:59 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:39:01 And if you can, someone else too.
0:39:08 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:12 This episode was produced by Ryan Kelly and updated by Dalvin Abawaji.
0:39:15 It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger and Greg Rippon.
0:39:20 The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman,
0:39:26 Alan Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Jeremy Johnston, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly,
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0:39:31 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers.
0:39:33 Our composer is Louise Guerra.
0:39:38 You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app.
0:39:43 If you’d like to read a transcript or the show notes, that’s at freakonomics.com.
0:39:45 As always, thank you for listening.
0:39:54 I haven’t played a concert in 25 years.
0:39:56 Do you keep up your embouchure?
0:39:57 Can I hear?
0:40:00 Can I just hear you try to blow a little?
0:40:04 I mean, I could play, but it would be bad.
0:00:10 Given the heated nature of our national conversation these days, I have been thinking about an interview
0:00:11 I did in 2021.
0:00:16 So I went back and listened, and I thought you might like to hear it too, whether again
0:00:17 or for the first time.
0:00:21 Facts and figures have been updated, but do keep in mind this conversation was recorded
0:00:22 in 2021.
0:00:26 As always, thanks for listening, and let us know what you think.
0:00:28 Our email is radio at Freakonomics.com.
0:00:37 I have a question that I’m afraid is going to sound rude, no matter how I put it.
0:00:37 It’s okay.
0:00:38 It’s okay.
0:00:43 So my reading of your second-to-last book, The Conservative Heart, was that it was written
0:00:49 to help pave the way for the right kind of Republican presidential candidate in 2016, maybe a Jeb
0:00:50 Bush type or whatnot.
0:00:52 Is that roughly right?
0:00:57 Yeah, it was my entrant into the ideological sweepstakes of 2016.
0:01:01 It’s debate night for the Republicans, and we’re just-
0:01:01 And I lost.
0:01:04 This is a tough business to run for president.
0:01:04 Oh, I know.
0:01:05 You’re a tough guy, Jeb.
0:01:08 And we need to have a leader that is principal.
0:01:11 You’re never going to be president of the United States by insulting your way to the presidency.
0:01:11 Let’s see.
0:01:13 I’m at 42, and you’re at three.
0:01:14 So so far, I’m doing better.
0:01:15 Doesn’t matter.
0:01:16 So far, I’m doing better.
0:01:17 Right.
0:01:22 So you did lose because Trump was not the kind of Republican or conservative candidate
0:01:23 that you wanted.
0:01:30 And then in 2019, you publish a book called Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save
0:01:33 America from the Culture of Contempt.
0:01:38 And this book argues that we have reached a contempt crisis in the U.S. and we need to fight it with
0:01:40 kindness, essentially.
0:01:46 Now, from the evidence I’ve seen since 2019, that argument of yours is not working so well
0:01:47 either.
0:01:49 So let me ask you this.
0:01:50 Those were just statements.
0:01:52 Now, finally, is the rude question.
0:01:56 How do you rate yourself as a public persuader?
0:01:59 And if not very well, why not?
0:02:07 Because you are a smart, experienced, well-meaning person with good communication skills, experience,
0:02:08 connections, et cetera.
0:02:12 So what does this failure say about either the message or the messenger?
0:02:15 I have a latent demand strategy.
0:02:18 And latent demand strategies, they lose a lot.
0:02:22 You know, entrepreneurship means rolling out something new.
0:02:24 And by the way, I might never succeed.
0:02:29 But remember that the average successful entrepreneur has 3.8 bankruptcies.
0:02:31 I had a couple of bankruptcies.
0:02:33 I mean, it wasn’t bankruptcies.
0:02:34 They were bestsellers.
0:02:35 I mean, that’s not nothing.
0:02:39 And by the way, I talk to mayors and governors all the time.
0:02:41 Many of them are successful using these ideas.
0:02:47 Both Democrats and Republicans who say, I love this book and I’m using it and it helped me
0:02:50 get elected and it’s helping me govern and I’m governing across the aisle.
0:02:56 I mean, you’re right to say that this ideology that I’m trying to inject, it looks a little
0:02:56 quixotic.
0:02:59 And I’m like tilting the windows or something.
0:02:59 I get it.
0:03:01 But I think it’s right.
0:03:02 I think it’s morally right.
0:03:04 I think it can be popular.
0:03:07 And I think that it just might work.
0:03:08 But you got to keep trying.
0:03:14 You can’t stop just because, you know, look, because virtue didn’t fit at the current moment.
0:03:15 Well, I guess I’m going to turn to vice.
0:03:18 I know that’s the wrong strategy.
0:03:23 The person I’m speaking with today is named Arthur Brooks.
0:03:27 I’m a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School.
0:03:32 The latent demand strategy that Brooks mentioned, that’s the kind of thinking employed by entrepreneurs
0:03:34 like Steve Jobs.
0:03:37 These are people who basically said, I have a product.
0:03:39 You don’t even know what it is.
0:03:41 You’re going to need it.
0:03:42 You’re going to need it.
0:03:45 And latent demand is more powerful than extant demand.
0:03:50 And it can have much bigger markets than extant demand, but it requires visionary entrepreneurship.
0:03:56 So what’s going on right now is that we have an untapped latent demand for the kind of country
0:04:01 that we want, which is an aspirational country, which is not characterized by bitterness and
0:04:05 polarization, which is one in which we actually can learn from each other.
0:04:09 And one in which the competition between the ideological sides, which is good and healthy
0:04:14 because iron sharpens iron, as far as I’m concerned, is to see who can empower people
0:04:15 the most.
0:04:21 Instead, what we have is the actual demand curve firing up dopamine in people’s brains
0:04:23 again and again and again and again and creating addiction.
0:04:26 And what are we addicted to?
0:04:27 Contempt.
0:04:29 That’s his argument, at least.
0:04:33 Now, who is Arthur Brooks and why should we be listening to him?
0:04:36 We’ll get into his full bio later.
0:04:42 But briefly, before teaching leadership at Harvard, he ran the American Enterprise Institute, one of
0:04:45 the most prominent conservative think tanks in the country.
0:04:52 Before that, he was an economics professor and before that, a professional French horn player.
0:04:59 So he’s already had several careers and an unusual trajectory, which has led him to an unusual
0:05:00 belief.
0:05:08 Arthur Brooks believes that the best way to detoxify American politics, maybe the only way, is with
0:05:09 love.
0:05:17 I will not let the press, the media, politicians tell me I’ve got to hate my brother-in-law.
0:05:19 I’m just not going to put up with it anymore.
0:05:22 In the end, people want to love.
0:05:23 They don’t want to hate.
0:05:26 And then we can accelerate that with good leadership.
0:05:32 And I’m telling you, Stephen, I’m spending all of my time doing what I can to make love
0:05:33 cool right now in politics.
0:05:37 And how is this love offensive working so far?
0:05:38 Everybody hates me.
0:05:39 Yeah, totally.
0:05:41 I’m despised by one and all.
0:05:47 Today on Freakonomics Radio, can love really conquer all?
0:05:51 Is Arthur Brooks a fool for believing it can?
0:05:54 And are you maybe his kind of fool?
0:06:12 This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with
0:06:13 your host, Stephen Dubner.
0:06:29 Let’s say you are a bright, ambitious, civic-minded kid, in middle school maybe, and you are
0:06:32 considering a career in government, perhaps in Congress.
0:06:36 So you tune in one day to see what’s happening on the House floor.
0:06:37 Thank you.
0:06:40 Chair recognizes Ms. Tlaib from Michigan.
0:06:43 You find two representatives, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.
0:06:46 I think it’s really important we need to stand up against this.
0:06:48 Fascist takeover.
0:06:49 That’s not a bad word.
0:06:50 It’s a fact.
0:06:53 And Byron Donalds of Florida…
0:06:54 Will the gentlelady yield to a question?
0:06:59 …having the sort of high-minded debate that our founding fathers must have envisioned.
0:06:59 Will the gentlelady yield?
0:07:00 No, I don’t yield.
0:07:01 I don’t even have time.
0:07:05 Chairman, I think it’s insane that the gentlelady doesn’t have an argument, but she’s going
0:07:07 to refer to me and some of my colleagues.
0:07:07 Mr. Donalds.
0:07:08 We were from the Third Reich.
0:07:09 This is insane.
0:07:09 You’re about the criminals?
0:07:10 It’s insane.
0:07:13 Do I look like a member of the Third Reich to you, Ms. Tlaib?
0:07:14 Please, no, please.
0:07:15 Is that what I look like to you?
0:07:20 Trying to insult somebody into agreement is the stupidest thing you can possibly do.
0:07:21 Arthur Brooks again.
0:07:25 I mean, it’s completely ineffective, but it feels good.
0:07:27 It feels satisfying in the very short run.
0:07:30 But surveys suggest that most of us hate this noise.
0:07:37 93 percent, if you believe Tim Dixon’s data on this, 93 percent of us hate how divided we
0:07:38 become as a country.
0:07:44 Brooks is referring to a 2018 survey run by an international group called More in Common, which
0:07:47 tries to build stronger communities and fight polarization.
0:07:50 Now, we shouldn’t pretend that polarization is new.
0:07:54 In many political systems, it is more of a feature than a bug.
0:08:00 You can find incredible nastiness if you go back a century or two in American politics or
0:08:03 if you go back a couple millennia in Roman politics.
0:08:06 But the current American polarization has been building for a while now.
0:08:08 Here’s an example.
0:08:12 In the 1960s, only 42 percent of votes in the U.S.
0:08:16 Senate were what are called party unity votes, where the majority of Republicans opposed the
0:08:18 majority of Democrats or vice versa.
0:08:22 By 2022, that number had risen to 83 percent.
0:08:24 Here’s some more data to consider.
0:08:31 In 1935, the Social Security Act was passed with 90 percent Democratic support and 75 percent
0:08:32 Republican support.
0:08:35 So not unanimous, but united.
0:08:41 The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed with just 60 percent Democratic support, but again,
0:08:43 75 percent Republican.
0:08:48 But if you look at the major legislation passed in recent years, it’s another story.
0:08:53 President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act made it through Congress with zero Republican
0:08:54 votes.
0:09:00 President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act made it through with zero Democratic votes.
0:09:06 And I think we can all feel this partisanship reflected in our daily lives and in the media
0:09:06 we consume.
0:09:09 So how did we get here?
0:09:13 What’s been driving this intense spike in division and partisanship?
0:09:16 It’s a perfect for economics question, actually.
0:09:20 So there’s an interesting paper from the European Economic Review that was published in 2017 by three
0:09:26 German economists that looked at 800 elections over 120 years in 20 advanced economies, including
0:09:27 the United States.
0:09:34 And what they found was that a financial crisis, which is a two times a century deal, not a regular
0:09:38 V-shaped recession, but a financial crisis like what we endured in the 30s and what we endured
0:09:44 in 2008, 2009, has a very, very strong impact in the following decade on political polarization.
0:09:51 Specifically, on average, it causes the 30 percent bump in voter share for populist parties
0:09:52 and candidates.
0:09:54 This is Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump by the numbers.
0:10:02 So we don’t know how to distribute the returns after economy is coming back without 80 percent
0:10:06 of the returns going to the top 20 percent of the income distribution, which opens the door
0:10:09 for political populists to say somebody’s got your stuff and I’m going to get it back, whether
0:10:15 it’s foreigners or whether it’s trade or whether it’s bankers or whether it’s wealthy people.
0:10:20 You’re saying that the populist sentiment comes from frustration over how the recovery
0:10:26 gains are distributed, because I was assuming it was about blaming the experts and elites
0:10:27 for the underlying crisis.
0:10:29 Well, there’s that, too.
0:10:30 But that generally comes later.
0:10:34 It’s the fact that I’m seeing people doing just fine after the crisis, but I’m still not.
0:10:39 And my brother-in-law, Cletus, is still on my foldout watching TV all day because he can’t
0:10:40 get his job back.
0:10:42 And it’s like, what the hell?
0:10:48 But then the real action happens because in democracy, which is the political version of
0:10:49 capitalism, a.k.a.
0:10:52 markets, people decide the leaders are not leaders.
0:10:53 They’re followers.
0:10:54 They’re following market signals.
0:10:57 And so Donald Trump, all he did was follow market signals.
0:10:59 Bernie Sanders follows market signals.
0:11:02 These news networks, they follow market signals.
0:11:05 And those market signals are coming from a whole lot of frustration.
0:11:08 And then, of course, the tail starts to wag the dog.
0:11:14 So the contempt that actually is serving the markets as an outlet of frustration for the
0:11:19 lack of progress that’s going to the margins of society then actually fires up more contempt
0:11:20 and it self-fuels.
0:11:25 Let me be sure I understand because you’re saying all this frustration comes from us, from the
0:11:32 citizenry who feel duly wronged by the big macro events that have ruined our livelihoods.
0:11:39 And that feeds into something that politicians then respond to, and it creates this even bigger storm.
0:11:46 But you also just told us that most of us don’t want to be involved in that contemptuous
0:11:47 partisan cycle.
0:11:52 So you’re saying that we are both victim and villain, we being the citizenry, no?
0:11:53 For sure.
0:11:58 And the same thing is true with any addictive cycle, where you want some relief, and so you
0:12:04 drink, and then the homeostasis sets in, and so you drink some more, and you want the relief,
0:12:05 but you hate the process.
0:12:10 And so what we’re in is this weird downward spiral of contempt.
0:12:17 Tell us what you can about the science of contempt.
0:12:22 I’d like to know, first of all, just how empirically it’s been identified as a separate
0:12:23 thing from, let’s say, anger.
0:12:26 So anger is a basic negative emotion.
0:12:30 The negative emotions are produced vis-a-vis stimuli of your limbic system.
0:12:32 It’s kind of your lizard brain.
0:12:37 Anger is a hot emotion that says, I care what you think, and I want it to change.
0:12:41 The problem is when you mix these emotions into complex emotions.
0:12:44 So shame and guilt are complex emotions, for example.
0:12:51 And contempt is this nasty cocktail of anger plus disgust, which is not a hot emotion anymore.
0:12:52 It’s a cold emotion.
0:12:55 It says, you are worthless, and what you said is worthless.
0:12:58 You aren’t beneath my regard.
0:13:02 And that’s something that should be reserved for something that’s not human.
0:13:09 Reading your book, Love Your Enemies, it was so moving to me, especially the portions where
0:13:12 you’re describing the difference between contempt and anger.
0:13:16 You write, people often characterize the current moment as being angry.
0:13:20 I wish this were true, because anger tends to be self-limiting.
0:13:25 But then, when you mix it, as you’ve described, with disgust, and it becomes contempt, it’s a
0:13:26 totally different thing.
0:13:31 What I found so moving about it was one very positive thing and one very negative thing.
0:13:36 The very negative thing was, you realize how easy it is for anyone to tip into contempt.
0:13:43 In fact, I don’t know if most of us have even noticed that we added that layer of disgust
0:13:43 to our anger.
0:13:51 The upside, what makes me happy about it, is once you can identify the forces that are being
0:13:53 destructive, you can address those forces.
0:14:00 So, do most of us who exhibit contempt or experience contempt even know it?
0:14:04 Do we identify the fact that it’s something different than anger?
0:14:07 The answer is no, because it’s a habit.
0:14:11 Our habits of communication are as ingrained as smoking.
0:14:17 I mean, I’ve seen myself in debates about the free market system, and somebody made an
0:14:21 ill-considered remark about capitalism, and I rolled my eyes, Stephen.
0:14:25 And I guarantee you that my interlocutor didn’t go home that night and say, I was debating the
0:14:28 president of the American Enterprise Institute on CNN, and he was making some very good points.
0:14:30 He’s like, that guy’s a jerk.
0:14:34 And the reason is because I made somebody feel horrible with just one little action.
0:14:35 And I didn’t hate the person.
0:14:37 It was just a habit.
0:14:44 What do we know about the characteristics of people who are most likely to exhibit contempt
0:14:46 or to be the target of contempt?
0:14:51 In other words, break down if you can, whatever you can tell me, gender-wise, Republican, Democrat,
0:14:55 old, young, anything racially, ethnically, and so on.
0:14:58 So, we don’t see racial differences, and we don’t see gender differences.
0:15:01 You know, I actually don’t see differences between right and left.
0:15:03 What we do see is differences in consumption of media.
0:15:08 So, the more time you consume political information on social media, the more you’re going to be
0:15:09 both a victim and a perpetrator of contempt.
0:15:13 The more that you watch cable television, you’re going to be a victim and perpetrator of contempt.
0:15:18 For example, answering questions like, what do you think is the biggest threat in the United
0:15:18 States?
0:15:23 The likelihood of you saying it’s a person of the other party is directly related to how much
0:15:25 political news that you consume.
0:15:28 And I don’t even have to know what political news you consume.
0:15:30 It’s funny, but it’s not, right?
0:15:34 Straight hits off the bottle for people who just can’t handle it.
0:15:43 Make your best argument that while feeling contempt seems to make us happy or satisfied, in fact,
0:15:46 makes us psychologically and physiologically worse off.
0:15:53 There’s a really great psychiatry professor at Stanford Medical School named Anna Lemke, who
0:15:55 has a big new book out about dopamine.
0:16:01 She talks about addictions to video games and gambling and substances and pornography.
0:16:04 What they all have in common is that they stimulate dopamine.
0:16:10 So, if you’re a media addict and you’re watching six hours a day of Fox News or MSNBC, the reason
0:16:13 is because your brain is lighting up like a Christmas tree.
0:16:16 The problem is that you’re neutralizing the pleasure you get from that almost immediately,
0:16:20 leading you to have to take the drug again and again and again and again.
0:16:24 These are the sort of the neurochemical predictors of falling happiness.
0:16:29 And then at the more meta level, what you find is that contempt is going to drive love out of
0:16:29 your life.
0:16:33 There’s a very famous study called the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which is an 80-year
0:16:36 longitudinal study of people when they get old.
0:16:39 What do they all have in common if they’re happy and well?
0:16:40 And the answer is love.
0:16:41 It’s just all you need to know.
0:16:42 Happiness is love.
0:16:42 Full stop.
0:16:46 Okay.
0:16:49 So, is love a verb or a noun?
0:16:53 Discuss and feel free to show your homework.
0:16:59 What I’m talking about is the love that we manage, that we make metacognitive.
0:17:01 So, love is a verb.
0:17:03 It is to will the good of the other as other.
0:17:05 What is love not?
0:17:07 It’s not a feeling.
0:17:12 And this is incredibly important to remember because in our modern culture, we tend to,
0:17:18 in my view, overvalorize feelings, which tends to throw us like bits of jetsam on the surf.
0:17:23 And we’re getting thrown around a lot, and it makes our lives have less quality, quite frankly.
0:17:27 And it makes us bitter and angry, and it makes us suffer a lot more than we need to.
0:17:34 If you were writing this as some sort of equation in an econ paper, where you are treating contempt
0:17:40 and love as these commodities, talk about how the two relate, where the supplies come from,
0:17:42 where the demand comes from.
0:17:46 In other words, how can this lovely theory of yours actually work?
0:17:50 Your vice, the opposite of your virtue, is your contempt divided by your love.
0:17:58 If you want that force in your life to decline, absolutely, you should work on your contempt.
0:18:03 But the real way to do that, where you’ve got a lever, is that you should have a denominator
0:18:04 management strategy.
0:18:11 And the more that you increase the denominator, the more that vicious impulse will just magically
0:18:12 decrease.
0:18:17 Are you saying that love is proactive, essentially, and contempt tends to be reactive?
0:18:22 It generally tends to be, because it’s being processed by the nucleus accumbens of your brain,
0:18:26 which is the part of your brain that governs your habit-forming behavior.
0:18:29 And so you can basically say, I won’t be that way.
0:18:30 I won’t be that way.
0:18:32 That’s what I used to say when I was trying to quit smoking.
0:18:36 And I always wound up, like, you know, seven cigarettes burning at once, because it would
0:18:38 be like this binge behavior at the end of the day.
0:18:43 And people will say, I won’t be contemptuous, and then they wind up watching MSNBC all night.
0:18:51 We should say, the number of people who actually binge on MSNBC or the other cable news networks
0:18:53 is relatively small.
0:18:58 MSNBC averages well under one million viewers during primetime, not so many in a country of
0:19:00 around 340 million.
0:19:02 CNN is also under a million.
0:19:06 Fox News, the biggest cable news network, averages just over two million.
0:19:13 But the noise from the cable news networks, the nearly constant volley of contempt, that
0:19:17 noise reverberates like someone shouting into a canyon.
0:19:21 It disrupts any chance of peace you might have hoped for.
0:19:27 So coming up after the break, how does Arthur Brooks propose to restore the peace?
0:19:34 Pretend that you’re feeling this love, notwithstanding your feelings, because it’s an act.
0:19:38 And what does all this mean, if anything, for the future of politics?
0:19:44 We need people from both parties that people are going to vote for, as opposed to somebody
0:19:46 who will defend me from the person I’m voting against.
0:19:48 That’s coming up right after this.
0:20:04 If I told you there was a public intellectual, a conservative, who wanted to fight political
0:20:11 polarization and contempt with love, and that this person was trained in economics, you might
0:20:11 not believe me.
0:20:18 Economists are about supply and demand, costs and benefits, not love.
0:20:21 But Arthur Brooks is not a typical economist.
0:20:26 I thought everybody who is a professional economist actually starts out as a French horn player.
0:20:29 Brooks grew up just outside Seattle.
0:20:32 His mother was an artist, his father a math professor.
0:20:37 Arthur started playing violin when he was four and piano at five.
0:20:40 And I played the French horn starting when I was eight years old.
0:20:42 And that one really stuck because I was good at it.
0:20:44 And it’s fun to be good at something when you’re a kid.
0:20:47 And then when I went away to college, all I wanted to do was play.
0:20:53 So I went to the California Institute of the Arts, where I dropped my required classes and
0:20:57 took Indonesian dance and North Indian classical drumming and was invited to pursue my excellence
0:20:58 outside of the institution.
0:21:03 He spent the next 10 years playing French horn professionally, the last several with the
0:21:04 Barcelona Symphony Orchestra.
0:21:09 I moved to Spain to get a woman who didn’t speak English in a bid to convince her to marry
0:21:10 me.
0:21:11 It worked.
0:21:16 That woman, Esther Munt, now Esther Munt Brooks, is still his wife.
0:21:19 But his musical career didn’t last as long.
0:21:21 There was really something missing.
0:21:25 My ambition was to be the world’s greatest French horn player and not to make beautiful
0:21:26 music.
0:21:31 And that’s a problem because I was all about extrinsic satisfaction, not intrinsic satisfaction.
0:21:33 So I started doing correspondence school.
0:21:34 I was playing in the orchestra.
0:21:38 I didn’t tell anybody because I was embarrassed that they might think that I wasn’t all in on
0:21:38 music.
0:21:39 This is how musicians think.
0:21:44 And I wound up secretly getting my bachelor’s degree by correspondence.
0:21:46 And then I just couldn’t stop.
0:21:50 And so I got my master’s degree secretly at night at a local university.
0:21:53 I decided I was just, you know, it’s so great.
0:21:58 These ideas are just so interesting that I quit music and started my PhD.
0:22:04 I wonder for you, someone who’s coming to academia relatively late, what would you say were the
0:22:05 benefits?
0:22:09 What did you bring to that academic pursuit as a full-grown adult?
0:22:10 Here’s the deal.
0:22:13 People don’t know what they want.
0:22:17 The most obscure thing to most people is the nature of their own desire.
0:22:19 People always ask the wrong question.
0:22:20 They say, I know what to do with my life.
0:22:21 No, no, no.
0:22:22 You don’t know what you want.
0:22:27 And they look for exogenous sources of information and they don’t actually go through the process
0:22:28 of discernment.
0:22:31 Every major philosophical and religious tradition has discernment.
0:22:33 I mean, discernment is part of Judaism.
0:22:35 Discernment is part of Buddhism.
0:22:37 It’s certainly part of the Ignatian tradition and Catholicism.
0:22:43 Discernment is all about understanding the nature of your own desire so that you can actually
0:22:44 be happy.
0:22:48 And what people will do is they’ll say, everybody goes to college after high school.
0:22:50 Okay, I’m going to go to college after high school.
0:22:52 And in college, I’m going to figure out what I want to do.
0:22:53 And then they get out of college, like, I don’t know what I want to do.
0:22:58 So I’m going to go work for a consulting firm or write software, and then I’ll figure out
0:22:59 what I want to do.
0:23:00 And then they don’t.
0:23:05 They’re hoping that some outside experience comes over the transom and shows them what they
0:23:06 want to do.
0:23:08 And that’s not how it works.
0:23:14 And so what happened was having to make decisions for my own life and treating my life like an entrepreneurial
0:23:17 endeavor, I figured out the nature of my desire.
0:23:20 I actually really, really, really want to be an idea guy.
0:23:21 I want to.
0:23:24 It’s not because some college professor said, you’re smart enough to be like me.
0:23:28 It was because I realized that I’m obsessed with ideas.
0:23:37 After his PhD, Brooks became a college professor, first at Georgia State and then Syracuse.
0:23:39 He would spend 10 years in academia.
0:23:46 He focused his research on philanthropy, primarily the motives that lead people to donate money.
0:23:50 Out of this research came his first book in 2006.
0:23:52 It was called Who Really Cares?
0:23:56 The Surprising Truth About Compassionate Conservatism.
0:24:01 There was one thing in that book that people either liked or didn’t like, which was that
0:24:03 as a general matter, this wasn’t very political.
0:24:07 It was more religious in nature that people who have strong religious commitments give more
0:24:11 to all causes and charities, including secular causes and charities than people who don’t have
0:24:12 strong religious commitments.
0:24:14 And people who are more religious tend to be more conservative.
0:24:18 And so, therefore, this is the reason that we see a pattern in which, at that time in particular,
0:24:20 conservatives gave more to charity than liberals.
0:24:23 And for me as an academic, it’s like, big deal, man.
0:24:26 I’m just looking at a bunch of data and I’m noticing these patterns.
0:24:30 And also, there’s one other characteristic of conservatives, which is that they tend to think
0:24:33 that the government is not effective.
0:24:40 How much did you overlay that association onto this argument that conservatives give more
0:24:46 to charity because they don’t believe so much in redistribution while liberals do and therefore
0:24:50 think the government should distribute and therefore might give less to charity?
0:24:54 That was an interpretation on the basis of the associations that I showed.
0:24:59 But I tried to be careful about my language because I’m a guy, you know, who does this research.
0:25:01 And so, I know what the research is saying and not.
0:25:04 But, of course, the political thing was what was salient.
0:25:07 And it hit the news cycle in just the right way.
0:25:09 President Bush read my book.
0:25:14 And when the president of the United States is walking out to the helicopter holding a book,
0:25:15 people are like, what’s that book?
0:25:17 And it’s like some obscure college professor.
0:25:18 Suddenly, my phone started ringing.
0:25:23 So, you write that you were happily working as a professor at Syracuse when you get a call
0:25:27 from AEI, the American Enterprise Institute, asking if you’d think about becoming their
0:25:28 president.
0:25:31 Describe that call and how much of a surprise this development was.
0:25:34 They were going through a presidential search that was going very poorly.
0:25:38 And so, they threw a dart down the hall and basically hit me.
0:25:41 I’d never raised a dollar and I’d never had one employee.
0:25:44 It was just insanity.
0:25:52 Usually, when an institution has a hard time finding a leader, it’s for good reason that
0:25:53 the place is in bad trouble.
0:25:53 Were they?
0:25:54 No.
0:25:59 The truth of the matter is, however, that most institutions have a really hard time finding
0:25:59 a chief executive.
0:26:03 I mean, these jobs are, they’re a grind.
0:26:04 You’re on the road all the time.
0:26:06 They’re 80-hour-a-week jobs.
0:26:10 And if you’re going to go in to be a university president, but even more a think tank president,
0:26:11 you’ve got to be a scholar.
0:26:17 Did it feel like the intellectual, academic, ideas-based operation that you envisioned?
0:26:24 Or did you feel like, oh, it’s an ideas shop, but it’s an ideas shop geared toward producing
0:26:30 policy that is meant to promote a certain spectrum of the political industry?
0:26:31 It was the former.
0:26:32 It really was.
0:26:39 And part of the reason was because our scholars are notorious for irritating our friends.
0:26:42 Give me an example, if you could.
0:26:47 You talk about the carried interest provision, which is basically it’s a loophole where you
0:26:50 take income and say it’s not income for founders of certain kinds of businesses.
0:26:52 And our scholars are like, no, it’s income.
0:26:56 Sure, lower the income tax, but don’t say that something that is income isn’t income.
0:26:58 And so we were saying things like that all the time.
0:27:02 I was getting these outraged phone calls from donors all the time.
0:27:04 How can your scholars say something?
0:27:07 I was just like, dude, this is what the data is telling them.
0:27:08 And I’m sorry.
0:27:09 What do you want me to tell you?
0:27:17 So let’s say that I am a billionaire plutocrat and I wish to affect U.S. policymaking.
0:27:20 OK, where do I get the best ROI?
0:27:26 A, funding a think tank to support research that promotes my agenda and works its way into
0:27:27 the bloodstream.
0:27:35 B, lobbying members of Congress directly or perhaps see some other route like a public relations
0:27:36 campaign or a media blitz.
0:27:42 I’d buy a bunch of TV stations and newspapers and I would probably start a cable network.
0:27:45 That’s where you’re going to be coalescing a movement of people who are highly ideological.
0:27:48 And that’s where you don’t have to worry about anybody telling you you’re wrong.
0:27:54 The whole idea that you’re actually going to be informed by cable media, that is just insane
0:27:54 if you think that.
0:27:58 If you’re actually going, it’s like, oh, I’m going to watch these cable news networks,
0:27:59 especially during primetime.
0:28:03 I’m really going to find out what’s going on with Biden, what’s going on with Trump.
0:28:04 No, you’re not.
0:28:06 You’re basically going to have your biases scratched.
0:28:10 And if you go to the other side to see what the other side is saying, you’re going to
0:28:16 recognize the accelerants on these half-truths and rumors, and that won’t change how you think
0:28:16 either.
0:28:20 So we have a big problem with the means of communication in this country and the way that we actually
0:28:21 do so-called news.
0:28:27 There are things that can happen that can radically change this environment, or we can have a slow
0:28:32 kind of oozing moving forward, where the leadership in one or both parties basically says, I’ve
0:28:33 had enough.
0:28:33 I’ve had enough.
0:28:38 What I really, really hope is that you have this, remember good old days, Stephen, remember
0:28:39 2012?
0:28:46 Obama and Romney were just duking it out about who was going to be a better opportunity politician
0:28:47 for the American public.
0:28:49 And I knew tons of people like, I don’t know who to vote for.
0:28:51 I don’t know which one of them I like more.
0:28:57 And instead, you know, and you get into 2016 and people are like, yeah, I don’t know who
0:28:58 I like less.
0:29:02 Things can change really fast in American politics.
0:29:07 And so we need people from both parties that people are going to vote for, as opposed to
0:29:10 somebody who will defend me from the person I’m voting against.
0:29:12 That’s what we actually want.
0:29:22 So you’ve collaborated with the Dalai Lama, and you asked him once what to do when you
0:29:22 feel contempt.
0:29:26 And his answer was, practice warmheartedness.
0:29:32 And then you did exactly what I lived on, which is said, can you say a little bit more about
0:29:33 that, please?
0:29:34 Are there any specifics?
0:29:35 You got anything else, Your Holiness?
0:29:42 And then, as you’re right, he suggests that you think back to a time when you answered
0:29:48 contempt with warmheartedness, remember how that made you feel, and then do it again.
0:29:50 Is it really that simple?
0:29:52 Because that sounds like even I could do that.
0:29:54 It’s amazingly good psychology.
0:29:57 It’s reversing an automatic process.
0:30:01 There’s a famous exercise that I teach to my Harvard students now.
0:30:02 I had to teach a class on happiness.
0:30:06 And when you’re feeling unhappy, if you want to feel happier, if you put a pencil in your
0:30:10 mouth and bite down, so it’s sideways in your mouth, and you’re biting down in your molars,
0:30:16 that will actually strain the orbicularis oculi muscles in the corner of your eyes, giving you
0:30:17 little crow’s feet.
0:30:22 And that signals to your brain that you’re doing a Duchenne smile, which is the only smile
0:30:23 associated with true happiness.
0:30:28 And it runs the causality in the other direction, and you will literally feel happier.
0:30:30 So that’s what I’m suggesting.
0:30:36 Pretend that you’re feeling this love, notwithstanding your feelings, because it’s,
0:30:38 an act, it’s a commitment, it’s not a feeling.
0:30:44 And in so doing, you will run the cognitive process in the opposite direction, and you’ll
0:30:45 get results.
0:30:46 And that’s what the Dalai Lama was telling me.
0:30:50 He was just not telling me in those wonky, nerdy terms.
0:30:57 So you’re making the argument that people, individuals, can and should opt out of the contempt industry
0:31:00 and practice more warmheartedness.
0:31:07 But I wonder if you’re being somewhat Pollyannish here, because the leverage and the reach of the
0:31:13 industries that promote contempt, especially the political and media industries, they’re
0:31:13 very powerful.
0:31:20 So what makes you think that those Goliaths could ever be taken down by even a very large
0:31:21 army of Davids?
0:31:25 Well, the answer is that every movement actually starts with a few people.
0:31:30 What political leaders do, what institutions do, is they get in front of parades that are
0:31:32 going down the street saying, this parade needs a leader.
0:31:35 And the parade’s got to start someplace.
0:31:40 And none of the things that are right are at odds with the idea that we need institutional
0:31:40 change.
0:31:41 That’s true, too.
0:31:46 But only thinking institutionally, only thinking in terms of systems doesn’t actually get out
0:31:50 the intrinsic truth, which is that everything actually starts with a few individuals.
0:31:53 That was Gandhi’s big point.
0:31:54 That was Martin Luther King’s big point.
0:32:00 Martin Luther King didn’t start by going to the Department of Justice to try to break up
0:32:01 racist institutions in the South.
0:32:07 Martin Luther King got people together who said, I think that we can start making things better.
0:32:09 We can act in a particular way.
0:32:12 We can show steely courage with boundless love.
0:32:20 Coming up after the break, the COVID-19 pandemic might have been a good moment to break our
0:32:22 addiction to contempt, but that didn’t happen.
0:32:24 Arthur Brooks will explain why.
0:32:25 I’m Stephen Dubner.
0:32:27 This is Freakonomics Radio.
0:32:27 We’ll be right back.
0:32:47 A lot of social scientists argue that when different groups are presented with a common
0:32:48 enemy, they tend to unite.
0:32:55 I heard a lot of smart people posit that COVID-19 would be that common enemy that would bring
0:32:57 everyone together, that it would lessen contempt.
0:32:59 I see no evidence that it’s done that.
0:33:00 Why do you think not?
0:33:01 Bad leadership.
0:33:05 You know, we had an opportunity and under appropriate leadership, the country could have
0:33:08 come together and it did in other parts of the world, not perfectly.
0:33:12 There’s still dissidents and there’s still problems and there’s uneven recovery.
0:33:12 I get it.
0:33:17 The fact of the matter is that the president of the United States used COVID to divide as
0:33:18 opposed to using COVID to unite.
0:33:20 Every leader’s got a choice.
0:33:23 And when the president of the United States, I mean, it would have been great if the whole
0:33:25 country said, no, we refuse.
0:33:26 We will come together.
0:33:27 We will.
0:33:30 But the president of the United States has a lot of power.
0:33:36 It was a classic case of dividing contemptuous leadership in our moment of need.
0:33:40 Here’s a sentence from your book that one doesn’t often read.
0:33:44 My admiration for politicians has grown enormously.
0:33:48 You go on to write, they are some of the most patriotic, hardworking people I’ve ever met.
0:33:53 They love America and hate our culture of contempt as much as you and I.
0:34:00 So, Arthur, if that’s the case, why are they, the players in that industry, not able to tamp
0:34:01 down the contempt?
0:34:08 You have a problem of scale where it’s one of them versus the entire infrastructure of
0:34:12 media, the rest of politicians, the most powerful politicians.
0:34:14 It’s a massive collective action problem.
0:34:18 Now, when I say my respect for politicians has risen, it’s true.
0:34:19 Not all politicians.
0:34:24 I mean, some are opportunists and some of them are really creating the problem wholesale.
0:34:28 But the truth of the matter is that most of that I’ve met, they’re smart.
0:34:30 They’re interested in what’s going on.
0:34:32 They want to make things better and they don’t know how.
0:34:36 And just like the rest of us, they feel a lot of fear and people act in some optimal ways
0:34:37 when they’re fearful.
0:34:44 How much time do you spend talking still with Republican candidates, congresspeople, strategists
0:34:45 and so on?
0:34:46 A lot.
0:34:46 Not everybody.
0:34:49 It’s not like President Trump is calling me.
0:34:53 But I do have the pleasure of talking to a lot of people on Capitol Hill.
0:34:57 And what I’m talking about, the playbook that I’m trying to bring to everybody who will
0:35:01 possibly listen, not just Republicans, but anybody who will listen, is we need a competition
0:35:02 of opportunity.
0:35:07 Look, we are still the same nation of ambitious riffraff that we always were.
0:35:10 We believe in the radical equality of human dignity.
0:35:11 I’ve got the data.
0:35:13 Most people believe in this.
0:35:13 Absolutely.
0:35:17 And we have different ways to make this agenda true and pure and good.
0:35:21 And once we start fighting each other over that, no, I want more opportunity.
0:35:23 We can get out of this crisis.
0:35:25 I’ve got the ear of a few.
0:35:26 And Stephen, I want more.
0:35:27 I want more.
0:35:34 When you talk to Republicans, either elected politicians or their strategists, who are on
0:35:39 the fence about whether to continue to support Donald Trump or to accept support from Donald
0:35:43 Trump in the upcoming midterms, how do you advise them?
0:35:46 So it depends on where they are.
0:35:51 But fundamentally, you got to ask yourself, what are you willing to fail for, Stephen?
0:35:55 One of the things that we find about the happiest people is they can answer the question, why
0:35:55 are you alive?
0:35:57 And for what are you willing to die?
0:36:00 Okay, so let’s take it to the level of our career.
0:36:03 What are we willing to fail for?
0:36:06 What are we willing to have the microphone taken away from us for?
0:36:10 And so I ask my political friends, you have a concept of what you think is right.
0:36:12 It doesn’t mean it’s what I think is right.
0:36:15 What are you willing to lose an election for?
0:36:18 And when my friends examine that, you start showing some courage.
0:36:20 You start saying the things that you think.
0:36:25 And then once you cross that Rubicon, it’s unbelievably liberating.
0:36:26 You can be free.
0:36:27 You can be free.
0:36:34 What are your very best ideas for fighting contempt?
0:36:37 Let’s say we’re sitting next to each other on an airplane.
0:36:43 You catch my attention totally by saying, yeah, we live in this contempt cycle, but I can fix
0:36:43 it.
0:36:44 Fix me quickly.
0:36:46 We’re going to land in 10 minutes.
0:36:48 Number one, stand up to the man.
0:36:50 Like they used to say in the 60s, stand up to the man.
0:36:54 The man that’s manipulating you is the media that are telling you that you have to hate.
0:36:59 Number two is start running toward contempt because this is your opportunity to show a love.
0:37:01 And you don’t get that many opportunities to show love.
0:37:04 I mean, this is mission territory, man.
0:37:07 Why is it that all these religious missionaries, why do you think that they’re so happy all the
0:37:07 time?
0:37:10 You know what nobody has ever said in human life?
0:37:11 Oh, good.
0:37:14 There’s missionaries on the porch and yet they’re happy.
0:37:18 They’re happy because they’re actually bringing light where there’s darkness in their view.
0:37:20 Be a missionary.
0:37:25 And one of the ways to do this, if you’re in a habit, this is number three, John Gottman says
0:37:29 that if you’re fighting with your spouse, start carrying around a five to one list.
0:37:34 When you want to say something hateful or sarcastic or critical, you write it down on your list,
0:37:39 but then you have to say five loving, nice, caring things first.
0:37:40 And guess what?
0:37:41 You won’t get to the sixth thing.
0:37:46 And so if you want to say something sarcastic on Twitter about President Biden or Trump or
0:37:50 something, you got to say five positive things.
0:37:53 You’re going to lose followers on Twitter, by the way, because it’s a contempt machine.
0:37:55 But you’re going to be a different person.
0:37:59 And what that’s going to do is you’re going to start finding yourself confronting the sources
0:38:03 of contempt with love, with happiness, with light.
0:38:07 And then finally, last but not least, you need to be more grateful.
0:38:11 If you’re a Republican and you actually think that the biggest threat to America is Democrats,
0:38:13 man, you’re out of your tree.
0:38:15 You’re just not looking at the facts.
0:38:18 You don’t have enough grasp on foreign policy, among other things.
0:38:23 You’re drinking this Kool-Aid from cable TV and your Facebook friends or something.
0:38:24 And it’s crazy.
0:38:29 And you need to be more grateful for the fact that you live in a country where you can say
0:38:33 the president of the United States is an idiot and there’s no knock in the night and no jackbooted
0:38:36 thug and God bless America for that.
0:38:40 That’s Arthur Brooks.
0:38:41 What do you think?
0:38:48 Does the love and warm heartedness he prescribes stand a chance against the contempt machine that
0:38:49 seems to be running our country?
0:38:51 I’d love to know what you think.
0:38:55 Our email is radio at freakonomics.com.
0:38:58 You will be hearing from us again very soon.
0:38:59 Until then, take care of yourself.
0:39:01 And if you can, someone else too.
0:39:08 Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio.
0:39:12 This episode was produced by Ryan Kelly and updated by Dalvin Abawaji.
0:39:15 It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger and Greg Rippon.
0:39:20 The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Alina Coleman, Augusta Chapman,
0:39:26 Alan Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Gabriel Roth, Jeremy Johnston, Morgan Levy, Sarah Lilly,
0:39:28 Teo Jacobs, and Zach Lipinski.
0:39:31 Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers.
0:39:33 Our composer is Louise Guerra.
0:39:38 You can get the entire archive of Freakonomics Radio on any podcast app.
0:39:43 If you’d like to read a transcript or the show notes, that’s at freakonomics.com.
0:39:45 As always, thank you for listening.
0:39:54 I haven’t played a concert in 25 years.
0:39:56 Do you keep up your embouchure?
0:39:57 Can I hear?
0:40:00 Can I just hear you try to blow a little?
0:40:04 I mean, I could play, but it would be bad.
Arthur Brooks, an economist and former head of the American Enterprise Institute, believes that there is only one remedy for our political polarization: love. In this 2021 episode, we ask if Brooks is a fool for thinking this — and if perhaps you are his kind of fool?
- SOURCES:
- Arthur Brooks, professor of public and nonprofit leadership at Harvard University.
- RESOURCES:
- “Vital Statistics on Congress,” by Molly Reynolds and Naomi Maehr (Brookings Institute, 2024).
- Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence, by Anna Lembke (2021).
- “Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being,” by Arthur Brooks (The Atlantic, 2020).
- Love Your Enemies: How Decent People Can Save America from the Culture of Contempt, by Arthur Brooks (2019).
- “This 75-Year Harvard Study Found the 1 Secret to Leading a Fulfilling Life,” by Melanie Curtin (Inc., 2017).
- The Conservative Heart: How to Build a Fairer, Happier, and More Prosperous America, by Arthur Brooks (2015).
- “Grin and Bear It: The Influence of Manipulated Facial Expression on the Stress Response,” by Tara Kraft and Sarah Pressman (Psychological Science, 2012).
- EXTRAS:
- “Why Is U.S. Media So Negative?” by Freakonomics Radio (2021).
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