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The last 10 years have been one of unique ideological crisis. Crisis of what? Crisis of disagreement. No, people have always disagreed. In my view, it's a crisis of contempt. Schopenhauer defined contempt as the conviction of the worthlessness of another individual. When you take hot anger and mix it with cold disgust, it becomes truly noxious, truly poisonous. And when you deploy it toward another person, you're going to have a permanent enemy. The Dalai Lama says, when you feel hatred, show warm heartedness. Now, when you hear that, you might be like you got anything else. But let's think about His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He was exiled as the teenager, as the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist people. He was kicked out of his native Tibet, but he wasn't disappeared. His Holiness as the Dalai Lama is the most revered and most respected religious figure in the world. How over the last 60 years he's done that by loving his enemies, by taking his own advice. Hi friends. Welcome to office hours. I'm Arthur Brooks. I'm a behavioral scientist dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. This show is about that how you can lift people up as well using the ideas that we discuss in this show. That's a big topic today because the truth of the matter is that we have a world that could use a lot more love and happiness. Isn't that right? You know, a lot of people that are suffering for all kinds of normal reasons. Ordinary life is hard, but a lot of extraordinary reasons as well. There's a lot of fear, there's a lot of hatred in our World today, I think more than I've seen in decades, maybe my whole lifetime. And that's what I want to talk about today. How we all can bring more love and happiness to a world that's in crisis, that in many ways has hatred. Where love could exist, how can we put it there? That's today's show. I'll be diving into how the political division around the world is actually working today, how polarization works and how we can actually love our enemies. And when we do so, how it will lift each one of us up to more bonds of happiness and love in our own own lives. We're being encouraged to hate our enemies, but when we resist that urge, when we transgress that trend, our lives get a whole lot better. I'm going to show you the. The research on that and encourage you to do that. But most importantly, I'm going to tell you how you actually can. A lot of this is based on a book that I wrote in 2019 that's actually behind me here called, well, love your enemies. I didn't know the world we were walking into. I knew it was tough in 2019, and it's much tougher now. So I'll be talking about some of that. But updated to the most modern research on what it means to actually cross ideological lines, to love people with whom we disagree, how to actually do that. As always, please do keep in touch. If you like this show, you'd like to see something different. You want to weigh in on the format, you want to ask questions? Because I answer questions at the end of each show, please do so at the email that's appearing below me right now. Office hours@arthurbrooks.com don't forget to leave a review on Spotify or Apple and subscribe on your platform of choice. Also, subscribe to my newsletter. For those of you who don't know, I have a newsletter that comes out the same day as this podcast every Monday. And the newsletter is usually linked up, but gives you information I don't even talk about here in the podcast. And you know, clickable links and all sorts of interesting ideas and ways that you can use information. That's at www.arthurbrooks.com newsletter and that's free, so go get that. I hope you'll enjoy it. Okay, now the subject at hand, the last 10 years have been one of unique ideological crisis. Crisis of what? Crisis of disagreement. No, people have always disagreed. Crisis of. In my view, it's a crisis of contempt. That's what I'm going to talk about contempt is a complex emotional phenomenon. And it's really overtaking the way that we discuss our disagreements in the United States and indeed around the world. Many of are living in countries that are suffering from the same sort of crises that we're seeing in the United States. What can leaders do about this? No, what can you do about this? I'm going to make the case that you can make the world better in your own way and get happier while you do it. I'm going to make the case that there's no good reason not to love your enemies. But I'm going to be, as I said before, practical in how you can actually get that done. Now, I want to wind back the clock a little bit. Before I was doing what I do now, which is I teach happiness at Harvard University, I write for the Atlantic, I, I travel and speak all over the world. What a privilege it is to talk about that. I do this podcast. Oh, it's just great writing books. But before I did that, before I started in, in earnest doing this full time, which is about seven years ago, I was the, the CEO. I was the president of a think tank in Washington D.C. that's a research organization dedicated to better public policy. And as a behavioral scientist by background, as an academic by background, I had left academia and then did that CEO job for about 10 and a half years before I came back to academia. And during that time I tried to stay abreast of the behavioral science research. I wanted to keep my skills up, made perfect sense. But I was especially interested in the behavioral science around public policy and politics because that's the world I was living in, not the world I live in now. But I was all in on that. So I was reading every article I could find in the professional academic journals, the esoteric stuff that academics write for each other, a lot of which I talk about on the show, but not in an academic way. I try to talk about it in a popular way in the show and in my books. And I was reading a lot of that literature and I came across an article in 2014 that really, really caught my eye. It was by three psychologists and it was, and I'll link to this in the show notes, of course, it was an article on motive attribution asymmetry. Yeah, and that sounds really esoteric, right? I mean, motive, attribution, asymmetry, like some really technical phenomenon. It's not. What it really refers to is when there's implacable hostility and conflict between two people or two groups of people that you can't resolve. I mean, it's just. It goes on and on and on and on. Maybe it's a couple that can't get along and they. They wind up getting divorced. More seriously, maybe it's an armed conflict between two groups inside a country or two, two countries that. That are just always at war. And we know so many examples around the world, so many examples of all of those things. We know couples that are just. They just can't understand each other. We know groups that hate each other. In the United States today, boy, oh boy, do we ever see that. That's, you know, we have more political violence than at any time in my adult lifetime. As a matter of fact, we're in the wake right now of political assassination. It's horrible. And of course, around the world, we see constant war and constant conflict between groups of people that have traditionally been hostile toward one another. This theory, mode of attribution asymmetry, explains it in the following way. When you see that, it's inevitably because there's a mistake. And the mistake is that both sides believe that they love, but the other side hates. So, for example, take the United States. Between the political left and political. Right now, I'm not talking about people who are just sort of lean Democrat or lean Republican. I'm talking about people in the real margins, the 10% of people who are just truly convicted and completely convinced that the biggest threat to this country is people who vote for the other party. And there's a lot of people like that out there. I could cite the data. I'll drop something into the show notes that that proves that this is not a phantasm, that this is a real deal that is actually going on. When you ask people under those circumstances, which I have in my research, you will find inevitably that both sides say the same thing. I love this country, but they hate it. They hate it. They hate what America stands for. That's what they say. Now, why is that a mistake? Because both sides to a conflict cannot simultaneously love and hate. That's not possible for everybody to love and hate simultaneously. That means that one side of the conflict, or usually both sides, is mistaken and they don't really understand what's going on with the other. Now, that was a pretty interesting article that I read because it talked about the Palestinian Israeli conflict, which in 2014 was hot as can be hotter. Now, obviously it talked about the Balkans, you know, the Balkan wars of the 1990s. It talked about the Rwandan genocide of 1994 as well. But then this is what really caught My eye. The authors. This is 2014. It's 11 years ago. The authors noted that the level of motive, attribution, asymmetry, I love they hate mutually was the same in the United States between Democrats and Republicans as it was between the Palestinians and Israelis. This is 11 years ago. And I thought, what? Really, I don't believe it, but maybe it's true. Now, that's really alarming because when you see something like that, it goes nowhere good. Unless you solve this problem, and we didn't solve that problem. I don't have to convince any of you that we haven't solved that problem. No matter what your political views are, that problem isn't solved. I started thinking to myself, because, you know, I'm. I'm. As a behavioral scientist, I want proof, or at least I want better evidence than just what I'm seeing in an article. So I started thinking to myself, how can I find evidence of this? And now, at the time, just like now, I traveled a lot for speaking. Now I travel 48 weeks a year. I'm on tour constantly. I'm going to be somewhere near you. I'd love to meet you in person, look on the website for where I'm going to be next. And I talk about happiness, which is not a big polarizing topic, to be sure. But during those times, I was talking awful lot about public policy. And I thought, I'm going to ask a couple of audiences a few questions and see whether or not I can find evidence of this mode of attribution asymmetry. Well, it didn't take very long for me to find this evidence. I was giving a talk in the Northeast at a conservative political activism conference. Don't get the wrong idea. I will talk to any audience. I go to super progressive college audiences. I talk to apolitical business audiences. I talk to activists on both sides. I'll talk to anybody who wants to talk seriously about ideas, because I'm into it, you know, I mean, I want to talk, I want to listen, I want to discuss ideas, because that's my bag. So on this particular day, I was at a political activist rally for 600 or so conservative political activists. And they were super fired up. I mean, this was not like a mixed crowd at all. They were there with their friends and they were listening to politicians mostly. I got there a little early, and There was about 15 speakers, which is one of these things where they just kind of roll through the speakers one after the other. And I looked at the program and I realized really quickly that this was maybe 14 presidential candidates and me. Nobody would mistake me for a presidential candidate. America is not ready for a bald president. Let's be honest here. But the other 14, man, they wanted the nomination for the Republican presidential candidacy in 2016. That's why they were there. And I listened in because I get there a little early and listen to other people before me. It's interesting. It's the right thing to do. I wanted to get in the lay of the land. And they were doing what politicians always do, left and right again. This is not a partisan statement at all. They were telling a highly partisan audience that was going to be supportive of one of them. You're right in your opinions, these things that you believe you're right. Why? Because you love America. And. And the people who aren't here. Who's that? That's political progressives. They don't love America. They're basically stupid and evil for all of their views. And I thought, yeah, that's mode of attribution, asymmetry in action. It's true. It's true. It's bad. So. And it was interesting because then I thought to myself, well, what can I do that will make this better? But what can I do that will actually really firm up this hypothesis? So I got up to give my speech and I thought I said a little prayer, actually. I said, you know, what can I do that these other people, speakers. These speakers can't do? And then I thought, I know I can say anything I want because I don't need votes, right? So I got up and I gave my talk. It was about economic policy. It was not memorable. But here's the thing that I remember. In the middle of the speech, I stopped and I had prepared this, and I said, you've been hearing from a lot of politicians today, and they've been telling you that, you know, you're right and the other side is pathological, stupid and evil, effectively. But I want you to remember something. They're not stupid and evil. The people who aren't here who disagree with you politically, they're just Americans who have different politics than you, have different views on policy than you. And if you want to convince them, which should be your goal, by the way, because that's the only thing that's going to change the country is getting a majority viewpoint on something and get people to back it up with their votes, you got to convince them. You can't do that with insults. Nobody in history has ever been insulted into agreement. You don't need to be a behavioral scientist to know that there's only one way to convince people, and that's with love. Love for your ideas and love for them. And it wasn't an applause line. I'll admit that. It was not an applause line, but there was an applause line because this lady then said, actually, they are stupid and evil. And it was. I'll admit it was sort of amusing in its way. Right? Because, you know, it was kind of a festival environment. She wasn't trying to repudiate me or hurt my feelings. But here's the point I'm trying to make. At that moment, my mind went to Seattle. Why? Because Seattle was my hometown, where I was raised. And for anybody who's even remotely sophisticated about the demographics of American politics, you know that Seattle is not a hotbed of American conservatism. It's probably the most progressive city in America politically. And I came from a. Well, I mean, my dad was a college professor. My mom was an artist in Seattle. What do you think their politics were? But let me tell you something that they weren't. They weren't stupid and evil. My parents were great. They gave me incredible values. They taught me the value of education. They taught me the value of the radically equal dignity of all people with no exceptions. They brought me up right. They loved me. They took care of me. The politics was the least of it. The truth is, I didn't agree with their politics. I was kind of the. Remember that old. You probably don't. There was a sitcom in the 90s called Family Ties and there was this super left wing family and. And they had a right wing kid played by Michael J. Fox. He was fantastic in that show. Hilarious. His name was Alex P. Keaton, you know, because he knows War up. You know, he was a Reaganite and he had a poster of Reagan in his room and all that. So I wasn't exactly that. But by my 20s, I was kind of, kind of an enthusiast for the free enterprise system. And. And. And I remember one time I was alone with my mom in the kitchen. I was back. I was living on my own. I was actually living in Barcelona at the time. And. And I was back for the holidays and. And we were making dinner, me and my mom, and we had a great relationship, but she was being real weird and silent while we were making dinner. This one night. I said, mom, is there something on your mind? And she said, yeah, actually there is. Your dad and I are worried about you. I said, what? I mean, what could it be? I mean, I'm making a living, you know, things are going well. And she said, look, I want you to know that we'll love you either way, but I want you to be completely honest with me. Have you been voting for Republicans? And, you know, that gives you an idea. It was fine. The point is, I had a great relationship with my parents. Rest in peace, they died young. I missed them so much. And when that lady at that speech said that liberals are stupid and evil, even though I'm not especially politically progressive, she was talking about my mom, and I took it personally. Herein lies the solution to the problems that we have is taking it personally when somebody talks about somebody you disagree with but that you love. My father taught me when I was a little boy that the mark of moral courage is not standing up to those with whom you disagree. Good. It's a free country, free speech, fine. But the mark of moral courage is to stand up to the people with whom you agree on behalf of those with whom you disagree. That's real moral courage. And people are afraid to do that. We know why they're afraid to do that. They're afraid to do that because they don't want to be socially rejected. There's a ton of good neuroscience research that shows that your brain was evolved to avoid being rejected by your tribe. It's true. That's why people will put up with all sorts of terrible, hateful nonsense from people with whom they agree politically because they don't want that to turn on them. You know, your. Your friends are saying terrible things, bullying somebody on social media, and you think you zipping it. You're staying silent because you don't want them to turn on you. You're on a college campus and there's somebody who's, you know, saying terrible things. You disagree, but you stay silent. Why? Well, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex in the limbic system of your brain is warning you not to get thrust out, because if you get thrust out by your tribe, you're going to walk the frozen tundra and die alone. That's what your brain is telling you. Of course it's a lie, but that's why people are afraid. That's why they won't stand up to their own side, even when their own side is insulting their friends, insulting their family, insulting their aunt, insulting good people who just happen to disagree politically. So that's why that happens. And it happens all the time. And I've seen lots of evidence of that. So the next night or a couple of nights later after that experience at that speech at that activist conference, I was giving a talk someplace Else, Kentucky or West Virginia, I don't remember. And I started to think, I wonder how much of this is actually going around. So I asked the audience to vote on something, and I'm going to ask you to vote on it. I can't see you. You can see me or you're listening to me, but I want you to think inside your head. How many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically? I'm imagining 100% of hands going up or almost. Of course you do. Of course you do. How are you defending them? How are you defending them against your own side? You see the strategy I'm putting together here, right? You want to love your enemies. This actually starts not by liking your enemies or agreeing with your enemies. It starts with an effort to defend your enemies against hateful rhetoric on your own side. Now, okay, I know you're like, yeah, sure, fine. How, How, How, Brooks, how? And that's really what I need to talk about, isn't it? Because it's not good enough just to exhort you to some sort of incredible moral courage. I have to tell you how to do it. And that's what this show is all about, practical wisdom. So that's where we're going next. Now, let's pull this apart a little bit. What's the problem? What's the problem that we find in America today in the political discourse? And again, I'm not adjudicating who's right and who's wrong on every issue here. You can do that perfectly. You don't need me to give you political advice. I'm about the social science behind the phenomenon so that we can solve the problem culturally. The problem is not too much anger. Now, if you turn on cable television, it's like an anger fest. And, you know, you got the. You got the debatatronic robots kind of going after each other and. Yeah, I got it. I know, I know. And they act really angry. And it's easy to dismiss that as a problem of anger in the United States, but that's not right. Anger actually is a hot emotion. It's mediated by the amygdala in the brain, and it basically. In the limbic system of the brain. And it says, I care what you think, and I want it to change. If you're in love with somebody, you're going to feel more anger than if you're not in love with somebody, because you care more what they think, and you have more of an investment in how they think. And when they think wrong, you get more mad. People often mistakenly think there's something wrong with their relationship because they're fighting. On the contrary, there's a complete lack of correlation between divorce and anger. I'll say it again. Anger and divorce are not correlated, to which I say, thank God I've been married for 34 years to a Spaniard, and in Spain, where I've lived off and on for 35 years, anger is just. And fighting in a relationship, that's just basic communication. I mean, it's yelling at the dinner table. If you're not yelling, you're not having dinner. And for the first few years, it was a little bit hard because I'm an American and we're a little bit more reserved and all that, but. But now, man, I'm in it. I'm in it. And we're love. And there's anger, and it's okay. That's not the emotion I'm worried about for America and for the world and for ideological polarization and motive, attribution, asymmetry. No, no, no, no, no. I'm actually worried about a composite emotion which takes anger and it adds in another negative emotion, negative basic emotion, which is disgust. Now, disgust is mediated by a part of the limbic system called the insular cortex, or the insula. And it has one job. It's been evolved to do one thing, which is to alert you to pathogens. Before the advent of vaccines and antibiotics, the only thing that you had to keep you from being poisoned or to get germs in places where you shouldn't have germs that are dangerous is your sense of disgust. And that's the reason that things that look dead, things that look rotten, that they disgust you, because they're more likely to contain harmful bacteria. That's why you've been evolved using your insular cortex to. To say, no, I don't want to go anywhere near that. And it's such an incredibly useful little organ that you can go from having chicken in your refrigerator, that's going to be a delicious dinner tonight, to forgetting about it and finding it two weeks later and being disgusted by it and taking it to the trash like this. That's because it stimulates. There's a smell. There's a look that has stimulated your insula. Okay, good, good, good. I mean, there's a reason for everything, all your negative emotions, you know, because you. You're a viewer of the show, you know that everything's got a reason. Evolution is smart. But here's the problem. When you use it on another person, it becomes deadly because People aren't pathogens. When you treat somebody as if they were a pathogen, a deadly germ, you make an enemy. And this basic negative emotion discusses what we mix with anger to create a composite emotion that philosophers and psychologists call contempt. Contempt was defined by Arthur schopenhauer, the great 19th century existentialist philosopher. Some say, no, I know, I know, the philosophers are banging the table right now. No, he was a nihilist. Anyway, whatever. He was a downer. Arthur Schopenhauer had a good first name. Whatever. Schopenhauer defined contempt as the conviction of the worthlessness of another individual. When you take hot anger and mix it with cold disgust, it becomes truly noxious, truly poisonous. And when you deploy it toward another person, you're going to have a permanent enemy. That's the truth. And that's a lot of what we see today right now that's characteristic of motive, attribution, asymmetry, and any relationship that's breaking down. We know this from tons of research. You know, I have an old podcast I had that I discontinued a long time ago. I had as a guest on it, the great John Gottman. Many of you know who he is. He's the world's leading expert on marital reconciliation. Reconciliation. He and Julie Gottman, she's also a psychologist there at the University of Washington in Seattle. They have the Gottman Marriage Lab. And they bring couples in that are on the rocks and they, they help them to get over their motive, attribution, asymmetry by helping them understand that you love and think that she hates and she loves and thinks that you hate. And you help each other understand that you both love and you need to communicate in a new way. And the way that he does that is by breaking down the contempt. See, the contempt that you express, you do so inadvertently. And that's why your partner thinks that you hate while she loves, or vice versa. That's the problem. It's a communication problem, according to John Gottman. And so he'll bring him in. And by the way, I had read before I met John Gottman. I think I read it in one of Malcolm Gladwell's books. As a matter of fact, I think that's where John Gottman really got a big audience, was. Cause Malcolm Gladwell wrote about him in, I think in Blink, as a matter of fact, that he can tell in just a few minutes if a couple's not going to make it after meeting them for the first time and watching them have a conversation about something contentious. And I said, john, I've heard that I've heard that you can, you can see really quickly if somebody's not going to make it just based on their. On their actions, on how they express themselves to each other. He said, yep. I said, tell me what you're looking for so I cannot do that with Esther inadvertently. And he said, it's eye rolling. Eye rolling. So they're talking about money, they're talking about the kids, they're talking about the in laws. They're about talking. And one partner's like, right, you're always saying stuff like that. Now what that shows, it's an inadvertent expression of contempt that's registers with the other partner of a mixture of anger and disgust that's almost like physical abuse because it says what you said is worthless. What you are right now is worthless. You wouldn't say, that's your soulmate. No way, man. No, you would not. But you did when you rolled your eyes. And he says when he sees that sarcasm, dismissal, derision, eye rolling, there's big problems ahead. Now, why do I bring that up? Because that's how we talk about politics in America and in many places around the world. If you're not living in a place that sees this, lucky you write in on the show so I can move there. That's all I can say. But that's how we talk about it. Think about the last time that your least favorite politician was on television and you were with your kids or with your friends. You're like, moron. That was like one of John and Julie Gottman's couples in the lab is what it came down to. And that registers with everybody else's contempt. That becomes a habit. That becomes a habit. Now, one side note, I want to go back to an earlier episode of this show because you probably express contempt and you're a normal person. There's a whole class of people that aren't normal. People who profit from. From the culture of contempt. Those are dark triads. Remember when we talked about dark triads? If you haven't seen that, go back, rewind a little bit and go back to the dark triad episode. That was a pretty popular episode because what it talked about was the personality constellation that's shared by 1 in 14 people in America, according to samples, is probably true. Around the world, 7% of the population has three characteristics. They're above average in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy, psychopathic traits. Now, it sounds terrible, like axe murderers. But just to be above the average on that doesn't make you, you know, necessarily somebody who's going to commit heinous crimes and go to jail. What it's going to make you is somebody who really, really is all about you. That's narcissism. Willing to hurt others or be dishonest with others to get what you want. That's Machiavellianism. And who feels very little or no empathy or remorse. That's psychopathy. You've met people like that. That was like your worst romantic partner ever. That was the worst person you ever worked with. Who stole your ideas. It was dishonest. That's the boss who is a. A complete psycho. Those are a lot of people in your life, and you learn to avoid them, right? Well, those people exist, and they. They have thrived in the political Internet space. You know, people who are writing Twitter about politics. Disproportionately dark triads, narcissistic, Machiavellian psychopaths. And no joke, go back to that episode and look at the show notes. And I've got data that show that Internet trolls are disproportionately psychopathic. Okay. I mean, clinically psychopathic. It's not even an exaggeration. Okay, so what are we talking about when, with respect to political polarization, these are the people who are profiting from this terrible situation that we have. You hate it. I know. If you're still watching this episode, it means you hate it. If you turn it off in the first two minutes because this is so boring. Well, you're not watching now, so you don't even know. I'm. I'm suggesting you might be a dark triad. So that's important to keep in mind that there's certain people who are. Who are productizing you dark triads by keeping you in a state of political contempt toward people with whom you disagree and telling you they're wicked and they're evil and they're broken and they're. They're pathological. Those people are monetizing you for maybe literally for money or maybe for votes or maybe for views or maybe for attention or maybe just for their trollish jollies. But you have to be aware of that. Now let's talk about the rest of us, the other 93% of the population, who are not dark triads. We do contempt, too, because it's become a national habit. It's become a habit of discourse. Let's talk about communication habits. Now, habits are a very interesting area of research. There's a lot of neuroscience about how habits work. Habits largely involve a little place in the. In the ventral striatum, which is part of the limbic system, this sub. Part of the ventral striatum is called the nucleus accumbens. And the nucleus accumbens allows us to form habits and do things automatically so that we don't have to think about them consciously. And that makes perfect evolutionary sense. If you want to do something that's good for you, you want to do it automatically so you can free up your prefrontal cortex, that meaty CEO suite, and behind your forehead to learn new stuff and to do more new things. Consciously, you want to do all the old stuff. Consciously, you want that to be a habit. Unfortunately, it also is behind all your bad habits. And that's the. That's where your habits tend to be programmed. This is the really nice treatment of. This popular treatment of this is Charles Duhigg's book, the Power of Habit. This came actually out before Atomic Habits of James Clear. So Duhigg has got a. His book is really great on. On the science behind habits are formed. He explains the nucleus accumbens really nicely in that book, if you're interested. So what do we do with this? Well, we. We. We reinforce by being in. In culture, doing certain things. And some of it's really good. I mean, we. Your nucleus accumbens makes it so that when you cough, you cover your mouth automatically without thinking. That's your nucleus accumbens, and that's a good thing to do. But there's also things that you do, like checking your phone 205 times a day, which side note is the average number of times that somebody between the ages of 15 and 30 checks their phone each day. Yeah, that's your nucleus accumbens. Like up waiting at a light. Phone's out, right? I mean, look, if I had my phone on me right now and I weren't recording a podcast, I would have looked at my phone several times in the time that I've been talking to you. That's how habits actually work. And it's also true with the way that we communicate. If we get into a pattern of rolling our eyes when our partner says something with which we disagree, that's your nucleus accumbens reinforcing a cycle of psychological abuse. You're not an abuser. But that's abusive. That's a problem. And that's what we're doing in politics today. Now, I'm making a very optimistic case here. You'll notice that I'm complaining about polarization, but I'm actually very hopeful here because what I'm Chalking up most of our polarization to is not that we got to break up and, you know, have a, you know, two countries and. Or fight each other. No, what I'm saying is that for the vast majority of us, we're making a mistake that's being reinforced by bad communication habits. And I'm going to give you solutions later on how to break these habits, which will start the cycle of healing in our country and will help you get happier. Okay, this is a good news story. This is not a bad news story. But we got to do the science first, because that's what we do. That's what we do on. On office hours. So that's a habit that most people have, as I've observed, in which the re. The research suggests, by the way, I'm gonna. I'll throw into the show notes more about the nucleus accumbens, if you like that stuff. I had just read a very interesting article from the Journal of Neuropsychiatry and clinical neurosciences from 2025 called neuroanatomic structures and Neural Circuits of Habits. And you'll learn a lot from that. If that's. If that's your bag. In the show notes, we. When I say we have this communication habit, I do, too. I've seen film of myself debating and rolling my eyes when somebody said something I thought was inadvisable. And my debating partner, or debating partners, I guarantee you, didn't go home and say to their spouse. I debated Arthur Brooks on television tonight, and he was making good points. They noticed that I was just subtly disrespectful, subtly contemptuous and dismissing and a little bit sarcastic and, man, I mean, I made me look like a jerk. I earned that. And I'm sorry. Every time I did that, it was a habit. It was my nucleus accumbens. It wasn't me. And that's what you need to reprogram if you want your marriage to last and if you want your country to heal. Each one of us needs to reprogram our nucleus accumbens so that we can communicate in a new way. So, okay, so question. How do you break a habit? How do you break a habit? For years, as a younger man in my 20s, I had this terrible habit. I was a smoker, smoked cigarettes. Now I know I'm old enough that I can kind of get away with saying I used to smoke in my 20s because, you know, that was back in the, you know, the 1830s, and nobody knew that that was, you know, bad for you. Wrong. You know, I Grew up in the late 70s and 80s. And in the 80s, I was a smoker. And trust me, in the 80s, everybody knew that smoking was horrible. Horrible for you, and you shouldn't do it. I did it because I was a complete knucklehead. I was a musician, and everybody smoked, but I knew I needed to quit. So at the time, I was playing in Barcelona, which was like all cigarettes all the time, but I knew I had to quit. And I was playing in the orchestra, the Barcelona City Orchestra. The guy next to me who sat in the orchestra next to me, it was the principal trombone player, and he didn't smoke, and he knew how stupid it was. And he was American, like me. And he said, you should quit. And I said, tell me about it. I've tried to quit a thousand times. I quit and I start and I quit and I start and I quit and I start. He said, that's because you're trying to use your willpower. He said, here's how you quit. Every time you want a cigarette, do something else. I said, like what? He said, like, have a beer. That led to other problems. What I started doing, actually, was every time I wanted a cigarette and I was at home, I would get up and I would go walk around the block. Take big breaths as I walked around the block. And when I came back, I didn't want the cigarette as much. What was I doing? I was reprogramming my nucleus accumbens through a different kind of impulses. When you feel the craving, you do a different thing. And by about three weeks in, I wasn't a smoker anymore. Did I still crave it? Occasionally? Yeah. I mean, it's been 35 years, and I still crave it. I do. But that's just me, right? And part. Probably part of the reason for that is because nicotine is so effective at drawing dopamine into your prefrontal cortex, giving you a momentary kind of psychostimulant effect that's similar to using ADHD drugs. It's great for concentration. And maybe that's what I want. I don't know. That's one hypothesis. But I don't smoke. And the reason I don't automatically smoke and reach for cigarette anymore is because I learned how to break the habit. Okay, back to the subject at hand. How do you reprogram your nucleus accumbens? You do it by doing something different. Every time you feel political disgust, every time you feel political contempt, what should you do? What should you practice? What should you do actively? Some people say civility. Be civil. Some people say tolerance, and I say that's nonsense, that's garbage. Because those are standards that are the lowest standards possible. You know, if I told you that Esther, my wife, and I, that were civil to each other, you'd be like, hey, Arthur, you need counseling. Because civility, really, in America, civility, tolerance. My employees tolerate me. Well, that's a human resource crisis, right? No, here's the answer to that. Many of you will recognize this passage. You've heard that you should love your friends and hate your enemies. But today I give you a new teaching. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. That's Matthew 5:44 of the Christian Bible. Want something non Christian? Many of you watched the episode I did with my dear friend Rainn Wilson, the actor who practices the Baha' I faith. That's what we talked about, the 19th century Persian religion. Beautiful, beautiful religion based on love. Their prophet Ba' Ullah has said, if you have an enemy, consider him not as an enemy. Do not simply be long suffering, nay, rather, love him. The same teaching. Or let's take the Dalai Lama. Many of you respect the Dalai Lama. I've been working closely with the dalai Lama for 12 years. We're going to do a series of episodes coming up of conversations that I'm having, that I've had and that are on camera with His Holiness, the Dalai Lama at his monastery in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills. Stay tuned because that's going to be a great series. We're working on that right now. Here's what he says. The Dalai Lama says, when you feel hatred, show warm heartedness. Now, when you hear that, you might be like, you got anything else? But let's think about His Holiness, the Dalai Lama. He was exiled as the teenager, as the leader of the Tibetan Buddhist people. He was kicked out of his native Tibet, which was overrun by the Communist Chinese military, the world's most numerous military in the world. Might makes right, man. I mean, that's what's always happened, you know, poor people and pacifistic people, unarmed people, they're just disappeared. But he wasn't disappeared. His Holiness, the Dalai Lama, is the most revered and most respected religious figure in the world. How over the last 60 years, he's done that by loving his enemies, by taking his own advice. My friends, this is power. Hating your enemies, that's weak. Loving your enemies, that's strong. As the Dalai Lama has shown, as did Bahaullah and Jesus Christ and the Buddha, and fill in the blanks again and again. And again, that's the secret. That's my father's testimony to true moral courage. That's what we need to do today. I asked the Dalai Lama. He said that to me. When you're feeling hate, show warm heartedness. He said, remember a time when you did that by accident and how it made you feel. He's an excellent psychologist. You understand that when you. When you recreate an emotion, frequently, what that will do is that will bring back the action that led to the emotion in the first place. In other words, if you recreate the feeling of how you felt when you were kind to somebody, you will be kinder. It runs the causality in reverse. That's very, very good. That's called the as if principle. In psychology. It really, really works. Act like the person that you want to be and you'll become that person. That's what the theory says. And it's, you know, Richard Wiseman, the British psychologist, has wrote a whole book called the as if Principle. It's terrific and. Right. So that's what His Holiness was saying. Remember a time when somebody treated you with hatred and you reacted with love, how it made you feel, and then think that way and you'll do it again. And I remembered when he said that to me, a time when that actually happened to me. I had written a book. It was the first book I ever wrote that humans read. I'd written books before, but they were, you know, academic. They were just so boring. So the year was 2006. And the book was about charitable giving. I know. And. And it was. It had a, you know, a mathematical appendix. And the whole. Nobody's going to read this book. Well, it turns out the book had kind of some. It was interpreted as having certain political overtones which I didn't really intend. And the President, United States, who at the time was George W. Bush, called me to the White House to discuss it. And, you know, when the President wants to discuss a book, it suddenly becomes kind of a big deal. And I was on every. I was on every. I almost said podcast. No podcast in those days. I was on every drive time talk show and I was on tv. And it really, really changed my career. I also started to get emails from people I didn't know. They would, you know, W. Is reading the book. And they got the book either to hate read it or to, you know, to enjoy it. And they would write to me. And when you read somebody's book, you feel like you know them, whether you like them or not. And so people would write to Me and say, you know, I love the book and my grandma taught me how to give charitably, et cetera. Or they would write and say, you're an idiot. And it was in the latter category that I got an email from a guy about a month after the book came out. Dear Professor Brooks, you are a fraud, which is a bad way to start email. My recommendation is don't write email that way. But I'm a good sport. I start reading the email and I realize it's 5,000 words long. It's going to take me 20 minutes to read this email. But I'm pounding through, I'm charging through it. It's just full of insults and is vitriolic, and I'm feeling very defensive. But I realized that this guy is refuting, in his mind at least, everything I said in that book. Every chapter, like, you know, the columns in Table 3.1 are reversed, stuff like that. And, and, and I realized about two thirds to the email that I was actually, I was feeling gratitude. I mean, he read my book. Nobody read my books. My family didn't read my books. So I thought, you know, I'm just gonna tell him, gonna tell him. So I write back to the guy, said, dear so and so. I know you hated the book, and I. You think it's terrible and I'm terrible and everything's terrible, but it took me two years to write that book, and you read every word. I'm really grateful to you for that. Thank you. Send. And okay, then I go back to work. I'll never hear from him again. No, no, no. Fifteen minutes later, ding, his email's back up. And now I'm apprehensive. Maybe he wants to kill me now. I don't know. So, but no, I open up the email. Dear Professor Brooks, next time you're in Dallas, give me a call. Let's get dinner. What? What? I think he probably hate wrote the email, assuming I'd never see it. But when I wrote back, in kind of a spirit of gratitude, which is an expression of love, by the way, it changed his heart. And even if it hadn't changed his heart, because if he's super hardcore and still hates me even more, it changed my heart. In that 15 minutes, I felt like a different person. Remember the as if principle? That was really important. And there's a version of that for you, too. So how do we get that back? I'm going to give you four assignments on how to do this, because we got to be practical about this. If you're going to get this done for America or whatever country you're in. No, if you're going to do it for you, which you can and should, you need some practical advice. Number one is actually not my advice. It's agreeing. I'm not saying you need to disagree less politically. No, no, no. I don't believe in that. Disagreement is the competition of ideas. Agreement is mediocre. And maybe it's just because I've been living with a Spaniard all this time, but let me tell you, I mean, it's like I. When. When I. When I go to the voting booth, I don't want one candidate on the ballot. I want competition. When I go to the supermarket, I don't want one brand of, like, you know, you already know if you watch this show, what I eat, Greek yogurt, cottage cheese, chicken breast, and broccoli, which is pretty much my whole diet, I don't want one brand. I want competition. And when it comes to ideas in this country and around the world, I want competition because I don't know who's right, and I want to evaluate it fairly. So I'm not saying to disagree less. I'm saying to disagree better. How? Starts with my dad's advice of standing up to your own side. You're getting fired up. You're getting dopamine, you're getting a little bit of satisfaction. We all are. Not you. All of us. From hearing somebody who says forbidden things about wicked people that you wouldn't say because you're too decent to say it, but somebody on the Internet says it, somebody in your favorite newspaper, one of your columnist says it, somebody on a podcast says it, and you're like, yeah, right. That's your brain rewarding you by saying, you're right. But that's unhelpful, and it's very important that we stand up to it. Now, you don't have to write into that podcaster and say jerk. No, you just turn it off. Vote with your attention. See, this is the attention economy, my friends. You turn off something with your attention. You voted. And when you vote for the people with whom you disagree, not because you agree with them, but because they don't deserve to be treated with hatred, that matters. It matters to you. Number three. Go looking for contempt and go running toward it with love. You're a missionary. This is gonna change. This one's gonna change your life. Now, I know I'm being missionary. Work as hard. I've had missionaries on both sides of my family, and words that no human has ever uttered. Good News. There's missionaries on the porch. No, pretend we're not home. That's more like it. It's. Missionary work is hard, but missionary work brings joy. I've known so many missionaries. Like I worked for a guy who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, AKA in the old days called the Mormons. And he was a Mormon missionary in France. And he's had doors slammed on him so many times. Joyful guy. Joyful guy. Because he felt that he was propagating truths that people needed to hear. And it was a joy to be able to bring that to other people, even though there's a lot of rejection involved in it. And the same thing is true here. You know that what we're talking about is right. You know that we should love our enemies. And doing so is joyful work. And that means you need to go into the neighborhoods where people don't have the truth, which is the whole Internet, which is probably your workplace, maybe it's your Thanksgiving dinner and, and, and meeting the contempt that you see with love. Like, and making a commitment never to answer with contempt, only to answer with love. You know John Gottman, I talked about him before. He has a. He has an exercise with his couples who are quarreling. It's called this five to one list. When you want to criticize, which usually has contempt involved, you have to say five loving, beautiful things first. You got to write it down. Have notebooks. So you know, it's like she picked you up late again. I'm going to lay into her from picking me up late again. Really? So. It's just so inconsiderate. Okay, but first I got to come up with five things. So, honey, it was really nice of you to leave dinner out for me last night when I came home late from work. That was really considerate. You look beautiful today. I love your mother in law. That's too much. But anyway, you get my point. By the time you get through five, you're not going to get the six because you've changed. You make that commitment. I've made it publicly in my social media presence. I'm not going back on that. I'll hear from you. I'm accountable to you and I'm accountable to me. Go looking for contempt. Answer it with love. Your life will change. It will make you so happy. And last but not least, because the topic I'm going to talk about a lot more later, this is gratitude. Gratitude neutralizes contempt. It's like pouring water on flames. Gratitude stands up to our Our natural evolutionary proclivity to be ungrateful wretches. Actually, I'm going to have a whole episode on expressing gratitude. I think it'll be our Thanksgiving episode, appropriately. How to be a more thankful person. When you think consciously about the reasons that you're grateful to live in your country, to be in your family, to be in your marriage. I know it's not perfect. I know, I know, I know, I know. But when you focus on the things that actually are good and are grateful for them, your contempt will evaporate. It just will. It's incredible. You know, there's this in. In Dale Carnegie's famous book, how to Win Friends and Influence People, he talks about Howard Thurston, the most famous magician in the 1920s. And he said, you wanted to go see this guy. What's the secret of why he's such a great magician? It turns out all his tricks were pret conventional, but he loved his audience. It's like he was in love with his audience and his audience responded. They wanted to go because Howard Thurston, they could tell, and that's what made him magnetic. And he asked him later, how do you do that? And he says, well, he started by with a little mantra in his dressing room where he said, I am grateful because these people come to see me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I'm going to give them the very best I possibly can. And before he stepped out of the footlights on Broadway, because that's where he had his theater was in Broadway, he would say to himself over and over and over, I love my audience. I love my audience. I'm grateful for my audience. That's why I start my podcast in my mind for you. And the truth is, I hope it comes across that I care about what I'm doing here and I care about you. And you can do that every day, about your country, about your family, about your marriage, about this world, notwithstanding the disagreements that we have. And if you do that, my friends, you truly are stepping into mission territory, because the whole world's a mission, and it needs you to love your enemies and show the joy in your life that comes as a result, so that people will want to be more like you and love their enemies, too.