Hello. Welcome. Thank you for joining us and thank you for being here and cspan thank you for letting me interview about this great book. Its great to be with you the last time we did the show it was a bestseller that changed a lot of peoples lives including mine. You asked a lot of hard questions and i plan to repay the favor. [laughter] youre only in the mid fifties people have already heard your introduction i will not read you that you are freakishly productive for already having 34 work lives you are accomplished globally renowned musician and then became an academic and behavioral social scientist and lots of people cite your work in the academic context like me site your happiness studies all the time to of your books are National Bestsellers and he went on to a third career running a think tank aei that is very important in washington dc and beyond and took it tonight new heights raised resources and hired for interesting people that you are about to transition to a fourth career and as you make that transition you write a new book love your enemies how decent people can save america. Thank you for sharing with us today. I will start by having you unpack what is contempt and how does that differ from anger . People often say in american Politics Today ideological differences in general whether any dimension but particularly politics that americans are too angry with each other. Anger is a hot demotion that says i care about what you think the problem in America Today what the great 19th century philosopher says is contempt conviction of the utter worthlessness of another human being it is a cold the motion i dont care about you it takes anger and mixes discussed like ammonia and bleach making a compound that is toxic social Science Research shows if you treat somebody with contempt that person will never forgive you. The world leading expert in ma for o is uncanny and also bringing thousands of couples back derisive huber and i rolling and sarcasm is also the way for americans to hate each other for ordinary citizens to not listen to each other 11 out of six have stopped talking to a Family Member or friend based this on the 2016 election that is not anger but contempt. Stick with broken marriages if he is 94 percent successful but yet able to save some of these marriages than what is the magic for him and the analog to your quest . Thats a great question. He has saved thousands of marriages by inducing people to stop dealing with contempt because thats not what you feel. Most couples do love each other with an unproductive form of communication that they rolled their eyes and criticized constantly. But they get into a cycle you criticize me i criticize you so he makes them stop he will say they need to say five loving things for every criticism and its weird because when they are getting ready to divorce they cannot think of anything but criticism when you love you cannot think anything to criticize if you make them go back to when they are first in love manually some have to carry around notebooks and things that they will say that is nice this radically changes the whole form of discourse what the analog of Politics Today . We need to break the habit of talking to each other with contempt a lot of people watching us we joke with each other sometimes except we have an audience of hundreds of thousands of people watching us the problem is if we dont know each other if they are anonymous they are trashing each other talking with contempt you are an idiot thats the stupidest thing i ever heard that is the discourse we have gotten into i saw myself on tv last year somebody said something i disagreed with that i rolled my eyes. Im guilty i want to be that way but that breaks down the bond of fellow citizenship the ability to listen to each other we dont need to agree that is bad we need a competition of ideas but we dont need to disagree less but better that means breaking the habit of content just like couples do when they figure out how to get back together. Talk about social media we will talk about that flag the first you use the word addiction in the book mean tweets and me are addicted to them i dont want to talk to that as a way to get to social media but the addiction habits around contempt so i will ask you to distinguish that as well but what does that mean to be addicted to contempt . It is a manner of communicating, speaking, expresg yourself to efficiently say what you think that have it can be an addiction that it passes by it doesnt go to the prefrontal cortex to one cortex but the very deep part of the brain it the size of a walnut your brain has evolved more than a million years ago to process rewards to stay alive so what happens if you do something that makes you feel good you start to build up a habit whether its chemical like cigarettes or communication if i do something i get the reaction it will start programming that into your brain and that is how addiction works if you are communicating in a particular way to Say Something over and over thats not being processed by your conscious brain but your unconscious brain that is how habits form and also the secret to how to break a have it when you are stimulated to do something you can wait before you respond count to ten when you get angry she is saying spend one extend the time for stimulus response see you can get past the lizard brain to say i feel this this is how i will react because its my habit but i will react this way instead. When you do that you get a different rewarding can break a bad habit of contempt that is a john is telling the couples to do weight before they criticize to say loving things thats reprogramming the nucleus and we do the same thing by not responding on twitter a message that we dont like for hear somebody Say Something we disagree with the weight before we reacting consciously put something in as positive instead of negative to see the reaction we get to that thats a large part of what im talking about. Before we get to the cultural and Public Square implications the marriage basis is it possible to retrain yourself to do that no matter how long that habit is built up as a success strategy to count to ten its one thing if there is a romantic infatuated phase early on in a real life marriage is a different thing with this overwhelming part you can re train those habit six months in but six years still pack 60 . I do believe it but nobody will claim that its easy. If youve done something for six days or 60 days in aristotle talks about habits are virtues in your more sophisticated than im so we know the longer you ingrain something the harder it is to break but the key thing to understand is if you want to be a better leader and more unified because you want to be more persuasive if anybodys paying politician today were not getting any place because were in a lockdown of a standoff some side wants to when they will have to be more persuasive treating people with contempt wont do it because nobody has ever been insulted into agreement that you have to do Something Different you cant break on you can break the habits but not doing that and behaving differently will make you a better leader and happier and ultimately more successful you can do it it will be harder but you can do it. You mention in the book things that you pray about and you think god for the brain that will confuse your children at the dinner table why do you do that . Oxytocin is a hormone it is a neurotransmitter called the love molecule its interesting in 1969 Richard Nixon commissioned a study for the Rand Corporation because there was a huge problem in vietnam 20 percent of soldiers in vietnam were addicted to heroin. This is catastrophic for the war effort and a ticking time bomb what do we do these policy ideas so they come home and they brace themselves and 90 percent of the heroin addicts stopped using overnight when i got home. Just stopped. No intervention, no policy or detox 5 percent were we addicted the following year. What happened . When you talk to anybody whos been addicted they will tell you what it feels like you are enveloped by pure love thats how it feels. When you come home you do get enveloped by pure love we only found out decades later chemically what was happening they were getting a hormone stimulated when you feel love which is oxytocin and those receptors are filled by opiates and heroin so that gives you the assimilation almost always addiction is doing something or repairing something thats broken inside the person they are selfmedicating so with oxytocin you see your kids and your wife remember the first time did you help deliver your children . I did they make you feel like you are helping your really not they keep you out of the way and give you some scissors but the first time you look in their eyes if you like something popped in your brain that was oxytocin when you see your friends, your parents after a long time , when you see your wife if you havent seen her for two or three weeks because youre on the road that little pop is oxytocin that is gods way of helping us to bond to each other in this miraculous way and this is something i talk about in the book when we bond we get more pleasure it stimulates us to work for unity thats why i think god for oxytocin. Earlier i didnt want to get swallowed by a social media but stay there but that requires social media to be used as a supplement to human relationships to complement what you just said as opposed to a substitute for human relationships. We know each other so if we mock each other in social media we know it is playful but its not really disdain or contempt. I believe in you and i care about the project you are working on. If someone doesnt know someone else comments there is that quick lever is as positive or negative or supportive. How could this possibly work . The oxytocin theory popping is a form of bonding how did that work in a world thats more ruthless and mediated by distance and technology . Its a good problem to what youve talked about in your last two books Everybody Needs to read if they want to understand how politics and human relationships interact. This is a key thing. For my money the senator writing books youre in the middle of politics you do work in history and social science how do they relate that politics can be life enhancing . Thats what they do. Thats what i got from your boo book. The way i see it is behavioral social scientist those interested in the neuroscience is to understand the extent we cannot substitute for human relationships for actual inperson relationships they cannot be done because the human relationships involve the oxytocin and the neurochemistry and looking into each others eyes and how humans were developed. We dont have the 500,000 years of twitter to make it possible to develop a neurological link to the other. When we talk to each other on twitter we joke around thats a compliment to her in person friendship then sass is great am happy to see you because i know you as a flesh and blood person. The person on the problem among strangers they cannot get that done and as a result its not a complement to a real human relationship but a substitute. That does not gave you the biochemical to meet your needs but it is a contempt machine it reduces you to a guy with a twitter handle and something that is literally less than human and as anonymous i can dehumanize you and me thats the reason why we go down this terrible rabbit hole largely driven by the relationship on social media. Host how do you fix that . Because i checked your twitter account one hour ago and you have been tweeting out practical things mostly from this book but ways to tackle the culture of contempt but using a medium of twitter in the political space politically the main ingredient seems to be contempt how do we solve this problem . I dont thank you are recommending that. No im not and even if i did it wouldnt be practical that i wouldnt do that. But i do recommend that people think of the social media behavior to say is this complementing my life or substituting for Real Relationships . My kids are 16, 19, 21. They are pretty good on social media they use it to set up or they will meet me in my son use it to figure out college or a meeting for something but he doesnt use it as a substitute for human relationships so i think its Getting Better. One of the things i recommend is mi substituting for real human relationships i will get the oxytocin deficit, less pleasure, more contemptuous and that is bad. Youve got to make sure for your Real Relationships are remand on talking social media and not others also use it and this is my experiment on social media we follow each other. I just will not say mean things on twitter i will do the rule this five one rule with couples five you things for one criticism i will say five nice positive loving things for every one thing that i say is a joke or a critical after i do the five i never get to the one. I am committing myself to use it as a positive medium i want to get 50 million followers because its a lot more interesting and fun to get that dopamine hit which is another hormone and transmitter that gives you that reward when you are stimulated positive or negative that you see when somebody insults somebody else. Twitter doesnt bum me out because im only participating in a way that i feel im listing other people up. Host you mentioned leaders to succeed with the two different tactics you unpack over said of leadership and authoritative leadership that could be called aspirational leadership. You also said you are optimistic about where youre headed. Why . Dont we see more of that quick. And this is language taken from harvard doing work on thousands of ceos and political leaders he has categorize them as a Factor Analysis he breaks them up into different kinds of leaders and on one and he calls them courses leader it is selfexplanatory those with contempt they treat other people with contempt and demand immediate compliance certainly we see that an entertainment on the other hand the visionary to say not come with me now but do you see a Better Future do you want to come with me . They make people want to follow them. Thats how authoritative leaders work what we know from American History course of leaders have succeeded significantly and that had a lot of followers and they have one elections, but they dont last for long and when they go down they go down ugly intent to on fragment. France is a much more populist place and so courses populist leaders tend to hang on a lot longer but not in the United States we see those populist leadership is successful ten or 15 years after a financial crisis. Because that doesnt create low Economic Growth but it is uneven but after financial crisis is about 20 percent of the economic distribution is resentment it makes sense there is research that shows the surgeon support for populist politicians and parties thats what were seeing now but then it ends badly for these leaders authoritative leaders have an opportunity i believe a Market Opportunity and here is the key statistic. Weve talked about this before but im happy about this. There is a group called more in common working in the United States and Great Britain what do we have in common they do high quality polling and a 93 percent of americans hate how divided we are as a country. The darkside is 7 percent dont hate that because they profit from that they get famous and powerful and rich and internet clicks with a social pathic personality but 93 percent most people watching us right now we want Something Better thats Market Opportunity it takes more skill but i like 93 percent more than 7 percent. As a devils advocate one reason we see so much contempt played out even with a bad habit and continue indulging , surely that seems to be the market signals we sent back that these are the stories we want. Are the 93 percent putting on rosecolored glasses when they are asked a direct question of daytoday behavior that we like that quick. That is possible of course. But the data says that we dont like it and it makes us unhappy in the Research Shows that people are participating in the climate of contempt or treating others with contempt has stress hormones a make people feel lonelier we see higher levels of stress in our society lower levels of social capital people feel lonely and this is nontrivial he related to the climate in America Today so what this means is we that we have leaders and media on campuses and politics and entertainment making a big profit and if thats all you got your take one side or the other you will take your own side but we dont like it are looking for Something Better this is what i have been so bullish on your political life. [laughter] me in the whole state of nebraska. This is what is so good when i hear you talk you are the man for the 93 percent and we need more people like this. This is a pregnant moment waiting to happen in american politics. We are sick of that its time to stand up to the 7 percent and say i am addicted. I am an addict but there are a lot of products with the point youre making there are a lot of products we consume regularly and patronize to the great market effect that we hate one of the reasons the Cigarette Companies are trying to make them less dangerous and addictive because people started to figure out tobacco is a people are addicted to and spend money on it and they dont like it because its hurting them thats the problem with contemptuous Politics Today as a vehicle with social media we do it all the time we are stuck on it we dont like our lives and what Something Better we are waiting for that better. This is build a fascinating social Science Research present you brought up the 2008 financial crisis and the division of unequal growth leads to envy and contempt as a product as these are reinforced do a little more history. Thirty years ago there wasnt as much contempt as there is today. Why it is that historical reason that we got here or into this vicious cycle . 30 years ago there was less but thats not to say we are at an alltime high the historical statistics is tricky to use and easy to manipulate. We are as politically polarized at any time since the civil war however waxing and waning highly contemptuous politics generally use the following a financial crisis a ten or 15 year cycle of populism the political rhetoric is almost always contemptuous its almost impossible to be a positive populist im encouraging people in this book and in this interview with our time together to be positive authoritative populist to grab that 93 percent but typically thats not how we see populism take form there are historical trends happening along the way the late 19th century 1892 and 1886 we had a financial crisis one on the back of the other because of the silver bust in the railroad last so we had the surge of William Jennings bryan day democratic candidate for president in 1896 and 1900 and was absorbed finally into the Wilson Administration to get him out of circulation but he was a contemporary looking political figure talking on the time about foreigners taking your stuff and the rich bankers antiestablishment super populist and pretty hateful and his policies were pretty bad. Theres nothing new under the sun. Given that he is a nebraskan he is one of nebraska sons and has a bunch of angry rhetoric. [laughter] i admire your appreciation for your fellow nebraskan no politician that is more different than been sass and him spirit there is a bunch of stuff we can say. [laughter] from back in his day but now your optimism about what comes next is partly driven by a charitable anthropology that americans will learn these habits can go to the concluding chapter of the five rules there is a bunch of stuff we should go there but one of the criticisms of your book that you will hear people say is weight. Contempt as a habit for people who have ideas that are policy is pretty stupid but what if the ideas you are critiquing they are contemptible isnt there that more a toll relativism . Are you saying we should regard anybody elses terrible ideas as terrible . It is a criticism i will hear a lot and i have heard it and i have wrestled with this. I have treated people with contempt. A lot. I have prayed about that with an epiphany at least talking about fellow americans public dt is the essence of avoiding stagnation so lets keep disagreeing and disagreed vigorously but that is different than saying i disagree with your idiocy you are beneath contempt and you are a worthless person and i didnt make that distinction early enough in my career and im going to do it for the rest of my life. This conservative rally im talking to a bunch of conservative activists and in the middle of my speech i said lets not forget the people that are not here because they are political progressives and i want you to remember they are not stupid or evil and this lady says i think that there is good and evil. I didnt think that it is making ii was makingin line with that t moment i thought about i didnt grow up in fremont nebraska, talking about my family and friends and i took it personally so there was a reason not to treat people with contempt. There were some practical things and so that is the key thing to keep in mind, to treat other peopldont treat otherpeople wie their ideas from them. They want the best for themselves, they want to separate the best for the families in the safety and security. They want to help the poor. The its really basic and its stated so clearly in this book i recommend everybody agreed that this you believe in the healthy and aggressive rigorous marketplace of ideas about the person that you are arguing with you want us to talk and learn the habits of Getting Better at how we do it any time you were in a political argument and the funniest thing is that liberals and conservatives do this in equal measure. I know what they want they just wanted lower taxes. I hear from politicians when they talk to the crowds firing them up their own rallies. That is insane. It isnt even close to the truth and the truth of the matter is either we are vilifying the full knowledge of the it is 2. 5 if we dont know everything about each other how well th they know anything about each others motives assuming that its a big mistake and its the best way to start to persuade so that is one of the things i need again and again is dont assume the motives at all take peoples arguments on their face and ask people what the moral is. Its amazing when you do that. Let me give an example when i did this wrong and i fixed it as a policy analyst when i first came to aei i was engaged in one of these battles because thats been going around again and again and that data is showing why you shave off the bottom rungs of the ladder and i would make the argument they want to make the work pay a once i recognize that i can say i understand the motive. I think i have a better way of getting the balance that will not have these consequences. That is how you argue on the floor. Thats an important way to do that and they stop assuming motives and i started listening more and start disagreeing more on policy and i think that there is a potential for progress. Host to play devils advocatadvocate it in as the cay of the few talk about with the leaders of the cynics about the 7 , what are some of the problems although there are more than two sides on the policy side of the right end of the continuum to the legen left ende ideological continuum august the second dimension that we are missing which is the people on tv everyday, people running for elected office and the people that live in neighborhoods raising kids trying to build a better app to raise money for the club, what if most people are what youre saying but what if the leaders on both sides are not necessarily as coercive as some of the grassroots americans believe they are . Guest i recognized him doing wrong when you said the cynics, the people firing people and manipulating other people it makes me sound and actually treating the 7 with contempt. And i shouldnt do that either. I have to reassess the. But if the leaders are doing that and we dont know how to change a there are the contracts that come they are market followers. The edition that consumed with hatred and anger mixed with the discussed the people who sell mass debate could they are a market fall over and will continue buying it. The people that are persuasive that changed the world and get the storytelling so first of all worth of lessons and how they should tell stories doe those tt were College Professors found they were in a strange way to a fair hearing a bunch of evidence and that is and how the humans learn. But thats how people talk us but it turns out we had to retrain ourselves to talk about examples and then say what did we learn from these lessons if jesus gave them stories that is the whole idea of teaching through parables. The what he finds he called it brain to brain couplings when you call somebody a story they will walk onto your brainwave pattern. A people will be locked onto you and get ahead so they start to anticipate and that is how they learn. You need to use stories. There simply is no other way. Host what if america doesnt share enough ideas to make this . You are not writing about the politics you are learning about the square much more broadly. When we get to the upstream of the policy of we have to believe things in common. Now i increasingly recognized as a whole bunch of identity politics as well. You seem to want to distinguish among different politics therefore youve are not as worried about it. Guest i see what is happening in the University Campuses and deposited with one aspect of your story saying here iis to im and who i am in here u understand me. Or reducing other people to onedimensional characters it is a classic set 7 trick to say they are not this and that is why they are the enemy, they are not us. It is based on a rich story the first thing i will ask is tell each other about your kid. Sometimes people use politics as a way to say im worried about my kids. Everybody watching us is a leader and they can use these identities. What do we have in common, we love our communities and our children from the culture of contempt that the decent people are somehow you are about to take the professorship jointly and will be teaching a bunch of leaders at the big institutions. What lessons do you have about the storytelling and how do they translate. A guest i will be teaching leadership as you mentioned a. As the purpose they have in the first place why do you want to be a leader. The most important thing to bring to their highest level of dignity that is what i want to fight for the radical equality in for the limitlessness of human potential. I learned a lot of things from you to it is what they wanted for this country. This is a country that was founded not by gentry and their rich. It was founded as an experiment in the pursuit of happiness for ambitious riffraff. They were just like moving west one step ahead of the law. Stopped in nebraska and mine in seattle but the system was set up such that we could define as we saw fit to guarantee it if we are going to pursue it and say you have the right to pursue his or happiness requires a kind of leadership to protect your dignity that respects that is what they should be all about, not setting america against americans or say that the other side happened to be as stupid and evil but rather to say that we are all in this together, two basic goals. Host you have been humble enough to be transparent like all of them dont give practicing the culture of contempt when we aspire to do Something Better and youve done something in this book which is talk about the need to seek forgiveness. Talk about that a little bit, the sort of moral obligation to do it and also the instrumental benefits in the way that you have gone to apologize. Guest there is a lot of literature about the psychological power of forgiveness which is to say how important it is to forgive other people and how important it is to forgive. When youve done something, i hope people dont say thank god im one of the decent people trying to fight against. And i hope that we all see ourselves as sinners as we are. Its hard not to swim in the river flowing and i have seen it and one of the things i recommend is to ask for forgiveness. Its one in siif one in six amee broken a relationship with a close friend or Family Member that means that there are thousands of people watching us right now that have done this. How do you think that . By saying i am her sorry that ive heard this relationship and it doesnt mean you are right, im sorry, too. More importantly ive done it myself and it is making amends. The ninth step is to make amends wherever possible. Ive done it publicly owned on social media and tens of thousands of people and i think it is going to affect me for the rest of my life and im grateful for it. Host name a few people who do this well as i am hopeful you were getting their talking about cornell west transforming an institution with very few political questions the same way so many would be played out and get they are actually friends and believe in each others dignity and argue a different way and public. Guest they are both professors at the university both of them are the most distinguished political philosophers on opposite sides of the spectrum. Hes a social conservative and open about his beliefs about abortion which are conservative and cornell west is the chairman of the democratic socialists of america and is open about his progressive views. They couldnt be more different. They talk about their common principles and deep disagreement about the way. They have zero contempt for each other. The model what we really want. And i know both of them are friends of mine and its incredibly inspirational i have a partner i work with named john powell. He is the general counsel of the naacp california ethnic studies hes a man of the Progressive Left and a civil rights warrior. I am the other hand him a conservative leader. We met at a National Commission i sat next to him and it was like a house on fire because poverty is the thing we care about the most is reaching the people that are at the periphery of the society to find a way to relieve pain so now we do a talk to gather where we talk about the alternative ways. I see this and i cant imagine this coming back to politics. Heres the leader because you have expressed the Democratic Party including members of the senate. You didnt have to do that. There were people you talked to and told me about that you say we disagree and talk about it and we can debate this again but we respect each other. I respect the integrity and he respects mine. That is what is so attractive and magnetic about you as a leader for this country and why i am so bullish on it and there are more people like this at the state and local level. Host we are three minutes from the end. I am going to skip over because youve already spoken to adhere. Folks are going to find a book filled with the hatred will social sciences and changed their view of the problem of contempt and how you can join the cause they will als but theo find a practical guide to the rule was because we are going to move on to world number two it is to attack or insult or try to win. Guest when you win you dont win and when you lose, you lose it when you vanquish another persons argument, that is completely wrong. But isnt the way to giv do thaf the business is persuasion, try to find a common cause and debate the way to get the common cause. Rule number three we will pass over because it is deemed to other person and ustheother pers as a gift, not a weapon. People often have strong views on social issues, Economic Issues and they are used to say since you dont believe these things youre a socialist and new, whatever happens to be this issue is using what is beautiful and good taste on your morality if you think it is an important you better use that as a gift and offer it up as such that the only way somebody is going to understand it and maybe be persuaded by it. Refuse to be used by the powerful, nobody wants to be used by their enemies you say in this book the person you need to stand up to somebody on the wrong side. Guest if i save somebody hating each other they will have a visual somebody they disagree with. Who on your side do you always patronize that person is trying to use you if that isnt a leader is somebody following your market signals to get more rich and famous. Host youve treated them with dignity, thank you for sharing your book with us