Speaker 1: As a new year approaches, many people start reflecting on
Speaker 1: the year that has passed and start thinking about how
Speaker 1: they want the next year to be. Imagine if in
Speaker 1: two you were able to have clarity on what matters
Speaker 1: to you and then have the tools to live that out.
Speaker 1: Imagine if you are able to be the person you
Speaker 1: really want to be. That's where I come in. I've
Speaker 1: helped hundreds of people from around the world become who
Speaker 1: they deeply want to be. If you're feeling frustrated or
Speaker 1: disappointed in your ability to make changes in your life,
Speaker 1: then having someone in your corner to support and advise
Speaker 1: you is critical. Look, there's a lot of general advice
Speaker 1: out there, but figuring out which of it applies to
Speaker 1: you is difficult. You are different than other people and
Speaker 1: your life looks different than other people, so you need
Speaker 1: solutions that make sense for you. Knowing how to apply
Speaker 1: certain tactics and tools to your specific life is my specialty.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to make two a better year for you,
Speaker 1: then book a thirty minute discovery call with me. It's
Speaker 1: a no pressure, no sales call where we determine if
Speaker 1: working together might make sense, and if it doesn't, I'll
Speaker 1: give you some ideas to take with you so you
Speaker 1: win either way. Go to when you feed dot net
Speaker 1: slash coaching to book your free discovery session. That's one
Speaker 1: you feed dot net slash coaching to book a free
Speaker 1: discovery session, and I look forward to meeting you. You
Speaker 1: take all of your energies and you try to put
Speaker 1: walls up around yourself such that nothing bad can get
Speaker 1: to you. Ironically, the one thing that truly won't get
Speaker 1: to you is happiness. Welcome to the one you feed
Speaker 1: throughout time. Great tinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true. And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this
Speaker 1: episode is Arthur Brooks, a bestselling author, social scientist, and
Speaker 1: the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He teaches leadership
Speaker 1: and happiness at the Harvard School of Business, and today
Speaker 1: Arthur and Eric discuss one of his many books, Love
Speaker 1: Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America From the
Speaker 1: Culture of Contempt. Hi, Arthur, Welcome to the show. Thanks,
Speaker 1: it's great to be with you. I'm happy to have
Speaker 1: you on. We're gonna be discussing your latest book, Love
Speaker 1: Your Enemies, How Decent People Can Save America from the
Speaker 1: Culture of Contempt, And we're also going to be talking
Speaker 1: about happiness, which is a topic you have written a
Speaker 1: lot about. But before we get into either of those
Speaker 1: things will start like we always do with the parable.
Speaker 1: In the Parable, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.
Speaker 1: He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of
Speaker 1: us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
Speaker 1: the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 1: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandsonth stops and
Speaker 1: he thinks about it for a second, and he looks
Speaker 1: up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which
Speaker 1: one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. Well, appreciate that. And I've
Speaker 1: heard you talk about this in the past and talk
Speaker 1: about it with your guests, and so I've given it
Speaker 1: a little bit of thought because this is actually I
Speaker 1: teach at the Harvard Business School. I have a class
Speaker 1: called Leadership and Happiness, and this is almost exactly what
Speaker 1: I ask my students to do. You know, what are
Speaker 1: they feeding? Which wolf? For the feeding and for me,
Speaker 1: it comes down to literally one of the choices that
Speaker 1: you gave. It's love or fear. This is what we've got,
Speaker 1: love or fear. And on my worst days, I realized
Speaker 1: that I am feeding fear. I am afraid of what
Speaker 1: people will think about me. I'm afraid of what's going
Speaker 1: to happen to me. And fear is sort of the
Speaker 1: shadow of the dark one over what we're doing in
Speaker 1: our lives. And there's an antidote to it, which of
Speaker 1: course is, as you'd say, feeding the other wolf. But
Speaker 1: there's a way to do it too. In the Bible, St.
Speaker 1: John the Apostle says that perfect love drives out fear.
Speaker 1: But this is an ancient idea. Five years before that,
Speaker 1: Loud Sue said in the Dowd to Ching exactly the
Speaker 1: same thing, that the psychological opposites, not just philosophical and
Speaker 1: theological psychological opposites are fear and love. When you stimulate
Speaker 1: the limbic system of the brain to experience love, it
Speaker 1: will literally crowd out because you can't be experiencing these
Speaker 1: two cognition simultaneously, the fear that is in you. So
Speaker 1: what I try to do each day is I say,
Speaker 1: look what's animating me today? What's animating me? And if
Speaker 1: it's fear, I know the answer to it. I gotta
Speaker 1: get out the sack of wolf chow and start throwing
Speaker 1: it on the love side. That's what I have to do,
Speaker 1: and that's what I'm trying to do every single day.
Speaker 1: That's a more robust answering. You probably watered are sorry
Speaker 1: about that. I like robust. So what are some of
Speaker 1: your ways of getting out the love wolf chow in
Speaker 1: your own life? So probably the most really profound psychological
Speaker 1: teaching from medieval times, from the Middle Ages, comes from St.
Speaker 1: Thomas Aquinas when he wrote Assume a Theologia that that
Speaker 1: had this really interesting and insightful observation that we have
Speaker 1: these substitutes for divinity in our lives, these idols that
Speaker 1: have these kind of divine characteristics, but they never give
Speaker 1: us what we really see their money, power, pleasure and
Speaker 1: honor or fame. Money, power, pleasure and fame. And the
Speaker 1: problem is that when you're pursuing those things, you're always
Speaker 1: going to be living in fear. Now you're living in
Speaker 1: fear why because these are zero sum things. These are
Speaker 1: extrinsic things, which is to say that they come from
Speaker 1: outside you and you can't depend on them, and so
Speaker 1: you're always going to be afraid that you're not going
Speaker 1: to get this thing. If you say, basically, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: be nourished by the scraps the world is promising it
Speaker 1: will throw it to me, then I'm gonna be living
Speaker 1: in a fear based world. And the answer then is
Speaker 1: if those are the bad for money, power, pleasure, and fame,
Speaker 1: there's a good for there's a divine for which are
Speaker 1: not extrinsick from outside you, but from inside you, and
Speaker 1: they're based not on fear, but on love and their
Speaker 1: faith and family and friendship and work that serves other people.
Speaker 1: Those are the divine for. And there's a ten thousand
Speaker 1: articles on the social science of happiness and the science
Speaker 1: and neuroscience and social science of happiness. And if you
Speaker 1: boil the ocean of this literature, you will find that
Speaker 1: there are really only four things that reliably do bring happiness.
Speaker 1: They are faith, family, friendship, and work where you serve
Speaker 1: other people and you earn your success. And these are
Speaker 1: the antidotes to the bad fear for I mean, if
Speaker 1: the you know, the bad wolf, the fear wolf is
Speaker 1: just chowing down on money and power and pleasure and
Speaker 1: fame and all the stuff that's scarce in your worries
Speaker 1: going to go away. And if you want to feed
Speaker 1: the other wolf, you need to put a deposit in
Speaker 1: each one of the four divine accounts every day. What
Speaker 1: are you doing to cultivate your faith? What are you
Speaker 1: doing to develop your family, maintain and protect your family relationships?
Speaker 1: Thanks Givn's coming man, what are you doing with your friendships?
Speaker 1: And what are you doing says that your work truly
Speaker 1: is lifting other people up those are the questions to ask,
Speaker 1: and I try to ask myself every day. So faith, family, friendships,
Speaker 1: and work that matters. Yeah, that's a meaningful work. And
Speaker 1: meaningful work only has two characteristics. They're not prestige and
Speaker 1: position and noney, none of stuff in the less The
Speaker 1: two things that matter to make your work meaningful are
Speaker 1: the answers to the questions and my earning my success
Speaker 1: and am I serving others? Am I earning my success?
Speaker 1: And am I serving others? There's a lot of things
Speaker 1: that people would say are parts of the good life
Speaker 1: that maybe aren't clearly delineated in these Where does pleasure
Speaker 1: fit in this? Some degree of enjoyment? Because I think
Speaker 1: you also mentioned that if we talk about happiness, you
Speaker 1: talk about it having three sort of macro nutrients, which
Speaker 1: are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. There's there's some cross over
Speaker 1: here and then there's a little, perhaps some slight differences.
Speaker 1: I'm curious how those tied together for you. Sure, So
Speaker 1: happiness is like a meal, and there's lots of ways.
Speaker 1: If I said, what's dinner, well, it's what kind of
Speaker 1: question is that? There's a bunch of ways that I
Speaker 1: can answer the question. What's dinner. I can answer in
Speaker 1: terms of dinner's macronutrients, which are protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Speaker 1: I could answer dinner is the dishes that I had.
Speaker 1: I had a salad, and I had an entree, and
Speaker 1: I had some dessert, I had my vegetables. Or you
Speaker 1: could answer it in terms of the micronutrients that was
Speaker 1: in it. You know, all the different parts, the vitamins
Speaker 1: and minerals that actually go into it. There's lots and
Speaker 1: lots of ways to answer the question. Or the ingredients,
Speaker 1: you know, the spices and the you know, the actual
Speaker 1: foods that you cooked. So the way to think about
Speaker 1: it is this way when I said faith, family, friends,
Speaker 1: and meaningful work, those are the dishes in your happiness.
Speaker 1: Those are the things you actually need to consume every day. Well,
Speaker 1: let's dig a little further into the purpose or meaning
Speaker 1: side of things. You recently talked about different ways or
Speaker 1: the different parts of meaning. Should we go into that
Speaker 1: for a second. Yeah, sure so. Meaning and purpose or
Speaker 1: purpose is another way of talking about it. Although purpose
Speaker 1: is actually an aspect of meaning. Meaning is definitely one
Speaker 1: of the macronutrients of happiness, and it's actually one of
Speaker 1: the most paradoxical and so far as that there's nobody
Speaker 1: listening to us. Or when I said, when did you
Speaker 1: figure out the meaning of your life? What was a
Speaker 1: significant event helping you figure out the meaning of your life,
Speaker 1: There's nobody that would talk about that week in Disneyland.
Speaker 1: They would always talk about something hard that had happened,
Speaker 1: something trying, taxing, maybe even traumatic, the death of a
Speaker 1: loved one. When I got really sick, when I lost
Speaker 1: my job and I was able to persevere, I actually
Speaker 1: found that I was strong and I was resilient, and
Speaker 1: that's when I figured out what I really cared about
Speaker 1: is when things were threatened for me. And so that's
Speaker 1: an important point, is that meaning requires challenge and difficulty, problems,
Speaker 1: even trauma, which actually brings out sadness and makes you unhappy.
Speaker 1: And so the great irony of happiness is that happiness
Speaker 1: requires meaning, and meaning is associated with unhappiness. And so literally,
Speaker 1: happiness requires unhappiness. And one of the biggest mistakes that
Speaker 1: we make in our lives today is that we spend
Speaker 1: a huge amount of our energy trying to avoid unhappiness.
Speaker 1: We got a huge length I mean, I talked to
Speaker 1: my students about this all the time I graduate students
Speaker 1: here at Harvard, and they spent a ton of their
Speaker 1: time trying not to feel sad, not to be rejected,
Speaker 1: not to take risk, not to get in trouble. And
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, don't go looking for trouble, but
Speaker 1: trust me, trouble is going to find you, man. I mean,
Speaker 1: this is just life. And if you take all of
Speaker 1: your energies and you try to put walls up around
Speaker 1: yourself such that nothing bad can get to you, ironically,
Speaker 1: the one thing that truly won't get to you is
Speaker 1: happiness because you won't actually find meaning, you won't find
Speaker 1: out who you are, and you'll be afraid, and that
Speaker 1: fear will be coming in instead of the love. You'll
Speaker 1: be feeding the fear wolf. By doing this is exactly
Speaker 1: what we're doing to a lot of young people. So
Speaker 1: we talk about, you know, safety is um and cancel
Speaker 1: culture and all these things that we complain about in
Speaker 1: our society today. That has everything to do with fear,
Speaker 1: and it has to do with the fact that we
Speaker 1: have a society that says, like, whereas in the sixties
Speaker 1: and stead, if it feels good, do it, man, today
Speaker 1: they're like, if it feels bad, Stop it if it
Speaker 1: feels bad, treated if it feels bad, and neesthetize it,
Speaker 1: make it go away. And that's a huge, huge mistake.
Speaker 1: That's a preamble to the entire meaning lesson the meaning
Speaker 1: macronutrients in our happiness. If you want to be happy,
Speaker 1: you need meaning. If you if you're gonna have meaning,
Speaker 1: you have to be open to all types of experiences
Speaker 1: in life. Don't be afraid of aine. I mean, it's
Speaker 1: not gonna be fun, but you need it and it
Speaker 1: will ultimately and the vast overwhelming majority of cases you
Speaker 1: will get growth as a result of it. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: is paradoxical in that way, and yet we're so wired up.
Speaker 1: The natural tendency within this is to avoid pain seek pleasure. Yeah, yeah, totally,
Speaker 1: to seek pleasure or just to seek peace, to seek
Speaker 1: a lack of problems. And it's it's an error. It's
Speaker 1: just an error. There is no other way to put it. Now.
Speaker 1: When you get into meaning itself, meaning actually has three
Speaker 1: parts to it. So when people say to me, I
Speaker 1: don't know my meaning in life, but that really means
Speaker 1: is they have one of or more of three problems
Speaker 1: that we call these the meanings of meaning as it were,
Speaker 1: you know, the aspects of meaning, coherence, purpose, and significance.
Speaker 1: Coherence is the belief that things kind of fit together,
Speaker 1: that things sort of happen for a reason. And you know,
Speaker 1: there's some philosophies like absurdism and nihilism and existentialism that
Speaker 1: say that actually, there is no purpose. I should say
Speaker 1: there is no coherence. Things don't have and for a reason.
Speaker 1: But most of us we don't think that's true. We
Speaker 1: do think that things happen for a reason because you
Speaker 1: look back in your life and you say, oh, that's
Speaker 1: why I had to deal with that thing. That's why
Speaker 1: that that particular thing happened. That it kind of makes
Speaker 1: sense now, and so understanding that is key. The second
Speaker 1: is the purpose part itself, and where it's not just
Speaker 1: a synonym for meaning. Purpose is the idea that you
Speaker 1: have a direction you're going in, that you have goals.
Speaker 1: Purpose means you know, I'm going toward that thing that
Speaker 1: really will bring me meaning. So you don't have the
Speaker 1: goal of being able to support myself in my family.
Speaker 1: I have the goal of doing something meaningful and helping
Speaker 1: other people. I have a goal of knowing God better
Speaker 1: than I currently do I have a goal again into heaven.
Speaker 1: You know, that's a that's a tremendous kind of purpose
Speaker 1: that brings a sense of meaning and ultimately happiness to
Speaker 1: people's lives. And the last of significance, which is simple,
Speaker 1: my life matters. You know. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who struggle with this. They say, I don't see
Speaker 1: how my life matters, and trauma of having a really
Speaker 1: bad childhood where your parents didn't make it clear that
Speaker 1: your life matters. The number one predictor of thinking your
Speaker 1: life matters is having mom and dad who said your
Speaker 1: life matters, and who acted as if your life matters,
Speaker 1: and who are like, I don't want you to drive
Speaker 1: above the speed limit or try drugs. Then the reason
Speaker 1: is because you might hurt yourself, and your life matters.
Speaker 1: That is hugely, hugely significant for actually predicting that. But
Speaker 1: when I talk to people and they say I don't
Speaker 1: feel like I have meaning in life and it's hurting
Speaker 1: my happiness, I'll dig down to find which one of
Speaker 1: these three aspects of meaning is actually driving them crazy.
Speaker 1: Do they not they think that, you know, things don't
Speaker 1: have any rhyme or reason? Do they have no goals,
Speaker 1: or they not actually believe in their life matters. These
Speaker 1: are the three challenges. And so what are ways of
Speaker 1: creating coherence? You mean how things hang together? Yeah, how
Speaker 1: things hang together. So, for example, I'm one of those people,
Speaker 1: I would say, I'm not one of those people that
Speaker 1: believes like everything happens for the best or for a reason.
Speaker 1: Now I have my own way of getting to coherence,
Speaker 1: but I'm kind of curious what are ways of getting
Speaker 1: there if you don't sort of believe in that like
Speaker 1: everything happens for a reason kind of mentality. So when
Speaker 1: I say coherence, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's a
Speaker 1: deterministic formula that's predestined to happen. There can be a
Speaker 1: lot of randomness in life. And my father was a statistician,
Speaker 1: this PhD in biostatistics, and he was a professor, and
Speaker 1: he used to say that God's greatest miracle is creating
Speaker 1: randomness in the universe. He said, isn't it a wonderful thing?
Speaker 1: The distribution of events in the way that they can occur,
Speaker 1: And God chose to make things actually happen randomly. He says,
Speaker 1: what a wonderful miracle. He was a dedicated Christian all
Speaker 1: throughout his life. But he was like a you know,
Speaker 1: nerd Christian. Right, So you have this funny view of
Speaker 1: how this works, but there's nothing that's opposed to between
Speaker 1: the ideas of randomness and and and things happening following
Speaker 1: a distribution of events and happenstance and believing that there
Speaker 1: actually is coherence. And the way to actually understand this
Speaker 1: is to say, Okay, I don't know what's gonna happen.
Speaker 1: Nobody knows what's going to happen except God. But it
Speaker 1: might be random. Okay, fine, going forward in your life. Now,
Speaker 1: let me look backward in my life. And so who
Speaker 1: are people who lack coherence? And they feel like they're
Speaker 1: just kind of like jet some being tossed about on
Speaker 1: the surf of life, and it's making them intensely unhappy
Speaker 1: and uncomfortable. Right, the narrative of your life. I mean
Speaker 1: a lot of people end up trying to put meaning
Speaker 1: into their life by writing their own memoir, even if
Speaker 1: it's just a personal thing that that you don't share
Speaker 1: with anybody. Try that, you know, try to write five
Speaker 1: pages of your memoir. I did this, and I did this,
Speaker 1: and I did this and this, and guess what, You're
Speaker 1: gonna find coherence. You're going to find a through line.
Speaker 1: It may have happened relatively randomly, but you're gonna find
Speaker 1: the meaning that is the thread that actually goes through it.
Speaker 1: So you look at your life. You don't necessarily believe
Speaker 1: that the events are predestined, but you look at your
Speaker 1: childhood and your early adult life, and one thing led
Speaker 1: to another, lead to another, and you built one thing
Speaker 1: on top of the last thing, even including on the
Speaker 1: ashes of the stupid mistakes that you've made in your life.
Speaker 1: And on the basis of that, there is coherence. And
Speaker 1: that's a very important exercise for people to undertake. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think my approach to that is not everything happens
Speaker 1: for the best, but I can make the best out
Speaker 1: of everything that happens. You know, literally that as you said,
Speaker 1: that there is a meaning that can be created out
Speaker 1: of the events that occur. Yeah, the key thing to
Speaker 1: keep in mind is that, again, trouble finds us. And
Speaker 1: when trouble finds you, what I recommend that people do.
Speaker 1: Somebody rejects you, Somebody says something that's me, Somebody hurts
Speaker 1: your feelings. You didn't get that promotion, you didn't get
Speaker 1: the raise, you didn't get a job, you didn't get
Speaker 1: that person that you're in love with, etcetera. To actually
Speaker 1: look at the event and instead of saying that was
Speaker 1: a net loss, what a wash out. My life would
Speaker 1: be way better if that happened a different way. So, okay,
Speaker 1: it happened that way. I'm going to list the things
Speaker 1: that I learned from this, list the things you learned,
Speaker 1: and doing that, you'll have a much firmer foundation upon
Speaker 1: which you can build on good and especially on bad things.
Speaker 1: And that's really important because when you do that, when
Speaker 1: one thing is built on another thing, including on bad things,
Speaker 1: where you learned, that actually creates the coherence that you seek.
Speaker 1: You can actually write your own memoir as you're living
Speaker 1: your life, and that's really really exciting. Furthermore, I'm telling you,
Speaker 1: when you take the bad feelings that are existing in
Speaker 1: the limit system of your blizzard brain and you write
Speaker 1: things down that you're learning, you're making them what we
Speaker 1: call in my business meta cognitive, which is to say
Speaker 1: that you're bringing them to the prefrontal cortex of your
Speaker 1: brain and exposing your executive brain to these negative cognitions
Speaker 1: and finding the good that actually is in them and
Speaker 1: finding the ways you can profit and experiences. Let's talk
Speaker 1: about significance, because significance is one of those things that
Speaker 1: more and more I feel like our baseline of what
Speaker 1: we have to do in order for it to be
Speaker 1: significant seems to just be getting ratcheted up higher and higher.
Speaker 1: Some of this, I think is social media comparison, although
Speaker 1: I want to circle around to you sort of saying like, hey,
Speaker 1: comparison is nothing new, it's it's bedevilled us for ages.
Speaker 1: But I sometimes make the observation if I look at
Speaker 1: my parents life and what would have been considered a
Speaker 1: successful life for my parents versus a lot of younger
Speaker 1: people seems to be very different. Younger people seem to
Speaker 1: have more of a like, well, I need to raise
Speaker 1: great kids, I need to have a great career. I
Speaker 1: need to start an amazing charity. I need to do
Speaker 1: like nine different things to be significant. Right. There's a
Speaker 1: really important new book out by the physician and neuroscientists
Speaker 1: at Stanford, Dame Anna m Key, and it's about dopamine.
Speaker 1: And what she shows in that book is that you
Speaker 1: can get addicted to pretty much anything, because anything that
Speaker 1: actually stimulates you in any way, or you look forward
Speaker 1: to it to enjoy it will give you a hit
Speaker 1: of dopamine. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of pleasure and desire,
Speaker 1: and you produce it in the human brains so that
Speaker 1: you will encode experiences that you want to repeat. So
Speaker 1: when you do something that's kind of exciting or good,
Speaker 1: or you know, I have great kids, I got a
Speaker 1: promotion at work, I had a really hardcore experience, or
Speaker 1: drugs and alcohol for that matter, you give yourself some
Speaker 1: dopamine that puts you at a higher baseline for having
Speaker 1: to do it again, then again, and higher and higher
Speaker 1: and higher and higher. And this is the problem that
Speaker 1: we face in society today. The key to that is
Speaker 1: finding significance in the small and this is a very
Speaker 1: deep philosophical and theological roots. And I'll give you an
Speaker 1: example of this. You know Mick Jaggers saying I can't
Speaker 1: get no satisfaction, right, And the truth of the matter
Speaker 1: is that he could. The problem is he couldn't keep
Speaker 1: no satisfaction. You can get satisfaction, but only for a minute.
Speaker 1: The way to actually solve that and define the significance
Speaker 1: of every moment without trying to have higher and higher
Speaker 1: and better and better and more and more followers and
Speaker 1: more and more money and more and more success. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's just a rat race. Man is actually start being
Speaker 1: alive now and paying attention to the smaller things that
Speaker 1: should be providing the ultimate source of significance. And I
Speaker 1: give you an example of this. You know, I had
Speaker 1: his friend Man. He was a rat race kind of guy.
Speaker 1: This is a guy I worked with when I was
Speaker 1: in my twenties. So in my twenties, I didn't have
Speaker 1: a traditional career at all. I dropped out of college
Speaker 1: when I was nineteen and I went on the road
Speaker 1: as a professional musician, and I was touring with these
Speaker 1: other four guys for a lot of my twenties, So
Speaker 1: I didn't go to college, and all was in my
Speaker 1: late twenties. My parents called it by a gap decade
Speaker 1: kind of And so I was working with this one guy.
Speaker 1: He was two decades older than I was, and he
Speaker 1: was just always about the next thing, always about the
Speaker 1: next gig, and just a very worried, anxious guy. As
Speaker 1: a result of that, trying to find significance and and
Speaker 1: always finding that it was elusive. I was in you
Speaker 1: know my late twenties. At this time, he was in
Speaker 1: his late forties. He gets this really bad cancer diagnosis.
Speaker 1: I mean it was it was grim man. The doctors like,
Speaker 1: you need to make out your will. You've got six
Speaker 1: months to live, and you know, he went on some
Speaker 1: experimental drugs at the time and had a couple of miracles,
Speaker 1: and then six months turned into a year, and a
Speaker 1: year turned into two years, and then it turned into
Speaker 1: thirty years. The doctor said, however, interestingly, this is a
Speaker 1: wolf at the door. So this is you know, the
Speaker 1: one you feed is one thing. The wolf of the
Speaker 1: door is something else. Entirely that we're staying with the
Speaker 1: wolf themed. And he said, sooner or later, that wolf's
Speaker 1: gonna slip in and it's gonna kill you. I don't
Speaker 1: know if it's now. I don't know how many decades
Speaker 1: you're gonna get or how many months you're gonna get,
Speaker 1: but the wolf's gonna get into it. Really, so he
Speaker 1: lived like that. It was this incredible blessing to him.
Speaker 1: What did he do? He ratcheted everything down because he
Speaker 1: didn't know if he had a month, and so we
Speaker 1: ratched and so I was visiting him. His life completely
Speaker 1: changed it was like a different guy. And I was
Speaker 1: hanging out at his house. He was living in Annapolis, Maryland,
Speaker 1: and we were hanging out at dusk one summer night
Speaker 1: with a bunch of friends and we were hanging it
Speaker 1: was great, and he says, hey, everybody, camericamere. It was
Speaker 1: just getting dusk. And he says, qat he was this flower.
Speaker 1: This bush had flowers on it and they were all closed,
Speaker 1: tight as drum. And he said, wash the flower. Washed
Speaker 1: the flower. And I said what he said, just watched
Speaker 1: the flower. And we're wearing at these little closed flowers
Speaker 1: and suddenly suddenly they all opened. They all opened, just
Speaker 1: popped open at the same time. And we're like just
Speaker 1: gasped with this intense satisfaction and thinking about it. Now,
Speaker 1: I get satisfaction from it, much much more so than
Speaker 1: so many more exciting things. On my hedonic treadmill on
Speaker 1: my building, the tower of Babel, all the way up
Speaker 1: into the sky was actually go down, be alive. Now
Speaker 1: go for a walk without your device. You know, it's interesting.
Speaker 1: It's really helped me. It's really changed my life. I
Speaker 1: spend a lot of time getting smaller to actually find
Speaker 1: significance in my life. I'm a Catholic kind of go
Speaker 1: to Mass every morning with my wife. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing every day, the same thing every day. And that's
Speaker 1: the point, you know, that's actually the significance that actually
Speaker 1: comes from the seemingly mundane and so doing the significance
Speaker 1: of my life is actually more apparent to me than
Speaker 1: it's ever been totally. It's what has drawn me to
Speaker 1: Zen as a path for me, because and is pretty
Speaker 1: obsessed on that very idea of like just the ordinary
Speaker 1: right now. I mean it's basically when Buddhism met Taoism,
Speaker 1: right that they sort of combined in made Zen and
Speaker 1: so so you get both those themes. But there is
Speaker 1: that almost near obsession with the small things of life. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know the tick not Han, the great Vietnamese Theravada
Speaker 1: Buddhist monk. He has his famous book everybody should recalled
Speaker 1: the Miracle of Mindfulness. It was very helpful to me
Speaker 1: in my life. And the miracle mindfulness is basically, you know,
Speaker 1: we spend our lives thinking about the future so that
Speaker 1: we can ensure a good past, and in so doing
Speaker 1: we missed the present. We're not actually in a meaningful sense,
Speaker 1: we're not alive right now. So he said, when you're
Speaker 1: washing the dishes, be washing the dishes, wash each dish,
Speaker 1: and he walks through the process of washing dish. You
Speaker 1: think it's really boring, it's actually riveting. And that's the
Speaker 1: critical thing for us to keep in mind. So many
Speaker 1: people are missing their lives, you know. And and I
Speaker 1: hesitate to say, turn off this great podcast. But if
Speaker 1: you want to turn off this podcast for minutes, what
Speaker 1: Arthur saying is when you're done with this, then be
Speaker 1: fully alive. Yeah. Well, I love that tick not han
Speaker 1: part where he talks about washing the dishes. I teach
Speaker 1: this in my Spiritual Habits program because what he says is,
Speaker 1: you know, you're washing the dishes to get done so
Speaker 1: you can have a cup of tea. And then when
Speaker 1: you get to the cup of tea, but the problem
Speaker 1: is that if you don't know how to wash the dishes,
Speaker 1: to wash the dishes, you don't how to drink the
Speaker 1: cup of tea, to have the cup of tea, and
Speaker 1: thus we are sucked moment by moment out of the
Speaker 1: present moment into the future, which has been my experience.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's one thing to miss, like some of
Speaker 1: the more mundane things in life. But what I found
Speaker 1: is that by missing the mundane you you've lost the
Speaker 1: ability to even appreciate the more beautiful things. Yeah, for sure,
Speaker 1: it's an inability to ever be here. It becomes actually
Speaker 1: an unwillingness to be fully alive in the presence. It's
Speaker 1: a really interesting thing. So, you know, I talked to
Speaker 1: my class about the best way to have a vacation,
Speaker 1: how many pictures should you take? What should you do
Speaker 1: with the pictures? And inevitably people do too of one
Speaker 1: of two things when they're taking pictures for a vacation.
Speaker 1: Either they're taking pictures so that they can enjoy their
Speaker 1: current vacation in the future, when it is then the past.
Speaker 1: In other words, forget the current moment, don't enjoy it now,
Speaker 1: enjoy it later when you're thinking that it's the past.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's just it's complete insanity, which, by the way,
Speaker 1: according to the data, decreases your pleasure of your vacation.
Speaker 1: Or number two, where you're actually living it so that
Speaker 1: somebody who's not you can be envious and be enjoying
Speaker 1: your vacation, which is what you do when you're posting
Speaker 1: your pictures on social media. Which according to the data,
Speaker 1: lowers your pleasure and your vacation by six It's a
Speaker 1: total loss to do this, and we're sleep walking through life.
Speaker 1: This is what psychologists called prospection and retrospection. Prospection is
Speaker 1: living in the future retrospection in the past, and this
Speaker 1: is an incredible human trait. It's a miracle that we're
Speaker 1: able to do this. One of the reasons that we
Speaker 1: make so much progress is that we can practice future
Speaker 1: scenarios that we've never lived by imagining them and living
Speaker 1: through them. The trouble is that we become so obsessed
Speaker 1: with living in the future and so comfortable doing it
Speaker 1: that are our lives. They don't have significance and happening.
Speaker 1: That doesn't meaning you know, what does it mean to
Speaker 1: be living in the future and then and then missing
Speaker 1: our current lives? You know, I know a lot of
Speaker 1: people who say, I feel like because I was planning
Speaker 1: for the future, planning for the future, working working, working
Speaker 1: for the future, I missed my kids growing up is
Speaker 1: a very very common lament, and it's just a general
Speaker 1: a specific case of this general problem that we're talking
Speaker 1: about now. So the average person is thirty to fifty
Speaker 1: percent of their time literally thirty of their time living
Speaker 1: in the future. The average go getter that's listening to us,
Speaker 1: like real entrepreneur, is seventy living in the future. We
Speaker 1: all need to die all that back so that we
Speaker 1: can be alive. Now. Yeah, I certainly relate with that.
Speaker 1: I would probably put myself more in that seventy eight
Speaker 1: percent category. I've dialed it back and gotten better. But
Speaker 1: if I don't watch it, that's where I always think,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, totally. And you have a tendency. People will
Speaker 1: listen to us. They know who they are. You know
Speaker 1: you are. That's right, that's right. Let's change directions a
Speaker 1: little bit and talk about our fears about what other
Speaker 1: people think about us. You've got a column recently titled
Speaker 1: no One Cares Well. There's a huge problem that most
Speaker 1: people in our society have. Some people have a little
Speaker 1: bit less, so you will have a little bit more.
Speaker 1: Some people have us kind of a superpower of not caring,
Speaker 1: but most of us don't have that superpower. And we
Speaker 1: find that we think an awful lot about obsessing on
Speaker 1: what other people think of us. And it's interesting. Marcus Aurelius,
Speaker 1: the great Storic philosopher, one time said that we love
Speaker 1: ourselves more than we love others, but we care more
Speaker 1: about other people's opinions of us than our own opinion
Speaker 1: about ourselves. What an a gret A great irony that is,
Speaker 1: and it's so true, and so you know, I wrote
Speaker 1: about that. I wrote about the dilaterious phenomenon that worrying
Speaker 1: all the time about other people's opinions. And again, there's
Speaker 1: an evolutionary basis for this that's very very clear. If
Speaker 1: you did not care what other people thought of you,
Speaker 1: and you crossed the wrong kind of lines in ancient society,
Speaker 1: you'd be thrown out into the frozen tundra, without a tribe,
Speaker 1: without a community, and you would literally die. That's when
Speaker 1: the wolf would say, there's a tasty lunch. I want
Speaker 1: that one because it's alone. We have a hardwired tendency
Speaker 1: to care about what other people think of us, and
Speaker 1: I want to curry favor with powerful people and indeed
Speaker 1: with the group. So if you want people on social
Speaker 1: media to like you, and you want people who have
Speaker 1: a lot of social power to think favorably of you,
Speaker 1: that's why it's your hardwiring that's making you do that.
Speaker 1: But it's extre really suboptimal and maladapted to our current circumstances.
Speaker 1: You know, we spend a ton of time, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to post fake versions of our lives on social media,
Speaker 1: which are depressing, disheartening, and by the way, they're depressing
Speaker 1: other people too, because we have an an incredible incapacity
Speaker 1: to realize that everybody's posting a fake thing, and we're
Speaker 1: the only ones who know that we're falsifying all. It's
Speaker 1: just quite isolating as a matter of fact. So there
Speaker 1: are ways to get around this. So if anybody's listening
Speaker 1: to us says, yeah, I'm spending too much time thinking
Speaker 1: about it, I just wish I could not care. There
Speaker 1: are ways to deal with this, and the first way
Speaker 1: to deal with this is number one is to realize
Speaker 1: that actually nobody cares. I mean, they might think less
Speaker 1: of you if they cared about you, but they're not
Speaker 1: thinking about you. And there's a ton of research that
Speaker 1: shows that people are thinking about you way, way, way
Speaker 1: less than you think they do. Even when they act
Speaker 1: like they're thinking about you, they're not thinking about you.
Speaker 1: They're only thinking about themselves. Me me, me, me, me,
Speaker 1: me me. That's what people are actually doing. It's so
Speaker 1: freeing to realize that nobody cares. It's so incredibly free
Speaker 1: because like, oh, that's great, nobody's looking at me. The
Speaker 1: second interesting way to do this is to think about
Speaker 1: how much we're judging other people. And we're judging other
Speaker 1: people constantly. You know, this is good, this is bad,
Speaker 1: that person's fat, that person is then, that person is boring,
Speaker 1: that person is smart, that person is interesting, that person stupid, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: And when we're judging everything all the time, is supposed
Speaker 1: to observing things, and this again, this is your practice.
Speaker 1: Ends you know that the idea of observation is such
Speaker 1: a powerful tool as opposed to judgment, But we're judging
Speaker 1: things all the time instead of observing them. The result
Speaker 1: of that is that we're saying that it's legitimate for
Speaker 1: people to judge each other. You can judge each other,
Speaker 1: go for it, judge each other. That's saying you can
Speaker 1: judge me. And so the more you judge, the more
Speaker 1: you are open to the judgment of other people, and
Speaker 1: you will fall prey to the problem of caring about
Speaker 1: the people's opinions. So that's really important to keep it.
Speaker 1: Just don't judge just judge less. Take an hour and
Speaker 1: don't judge anything, and you'll feel unbelievably relieved. You won't
Speaker 1: know why, and the reason is just because it takes
Speaker 1: a lot of your energy and you've opened the door
Speaker 1: to every else's judgment. So these are the two best tools.
Speaker 1: And then there are other things you can do about,
Speaker 1: you know, thinking about what actually embarrasses me about myself.
Speaker 1: And I'm worried about being judged on do it, go,
Speaker 1: do it, go, do it? I mean, I think about it.
Speaker 1: They think about the times that we crossed the rubicon.
Speaker 1: I tell the story in my column about giving a
Speaker 1: three hour lecture to my graduate seminar on the first
Speaker 1: day of class and turned out my fly was down
Speaker 1: the whole time, right, and there's zero present chance like
Speaker 1: my shirt was coming out of it or so. It
Speaker 1: was just the worst. I mean, it was just really
Speaker 1: really embarrassing. And I realized after that, it's like, man,
Speaker 1: that happened, and I didn't die, and it didn't matter,
Speaker 1: and nobody cares. And they laughed about it, for sure.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there are students from that seminar they're still
Speaker 1: cracking up about that, and it's fine. And I felt
Speaker 1: kind of free. Not not free to do it again,
Speaker 1: but I felt free a little bit under the circumstances. So,
Speaker 1: you know, make a list of the things that you're
Speaker 1: kind of embarrassed about yourself, and you think people might
Speaker 1: be laughing about you about make a list of them
Speaker 1: and then actually start laughing about them, and enter reduced
Speaker 1: them into conversations in the self deprecating way. You will
Speaker 1: be basically opening up your jail door. Yeah, I love
Speaker 1: that idea. You have three different quotes around this, not
Speaker 1: judging others judge not that ye not be judged by Jesus.
Speaker 1: Whoever judges others digs a pit for themselves the Buddha
Speaker 1: and from the doubt a ching care about people's approval,
Speaker 1: and you will be their prisoners. Three quotes. I love.
Speaker 1: That is one of my favorite doubt a ching quotes
Speaker 1: of all time. But it's so true. I've noticed that
Speaker 1: the less I have judged other people, the less I
Speaker 1: judge myself, and then the less I judge myself, the
Speaker 1: less I judge other people. It's a kind of a
Speaker 1: virtuous circle when I'm doing it in the right direction,
Speaker 1: and a you know, vicious spiral when I'm doing it
Speaker 1: in the wrong way. Oh yeah, for sure, and we
Speaker 1: all fall pright to it. So basically, the key to
Speaker 1: keep in mind is that when you're feeling really insecure
Speaker 1: about yourself, really bad about yourself, the reason is probably
Speaker 1: because you're judging other people too much. That's almost always
Speaker 1: the case, and so doing that, you're exposing yourself to
Speaker 1: the judge mint of others, or you're saying to yourself,
Speaker 1: come on, man, bring on judge me, Just judge me.
Speaker 1: It's all good. That's the key thing to do. So
Speaker 1: anytime you feel insecure, the proper therapy is to stop
Speaker 1: judging and start observing, and to do that therapeutically for
Speaker 1: an hour and your whole mind settle change. Just a
Speaker 1: minute ago, you mentioned the humor aspect, right, the humor
Speaker 1: of teaching a class with your fly down, you know,
Speaker 1: the self deprecating humor. Let's talk about the link between
Speaker 1: happiness and humor. It's something we talk about on this
Speaker 1: show a lot. I've often said that I think levity
Speaker 1: is an underappreciated spiritual virtue, but talk about some of
Speaker 1: the things that may not be immediately intuitive to those
Speaker 1: of us who go, yeah, I think humor is a
Speaker 1: good way of increasing happiness. But you made some really
Speaker 1: interesting points in the column that we're not immediately intuitive. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So to begin with, when you say you have a
Speaker 1: sense of humor, or when somebody has a sense of humor,
Speaker 1: that means one of two things. Number one is that
Speaker 1: they appreciate funny things, and the second thing is that
Speaker 1: they make funny things. They both say, he's got a
Speaker 1: great the humor. Either he cracks up when you tell
Speaker 1: a joke, or he cracks great jokes. Those are the
Speaker 1: two ways we talked about it, and they're very, very
Speaker 1: different phenomena. Happiness is associated with the first, it's not
Speaker 1: associated necessarily with a second. Funny people tend to be
Speaker 1: less happy than not funny people that they tend to
Speaker 1: be more intelligent, but there's kind of a tortured spirit
Speaker 1: behind the naturally funny joke. Cracker. I'm sure that there
Speaker 1: are some comedians that are unbelievably happy people, but you
Speaker 1: find the clinical depression and even sociopathic tendencies tend to
Speaker 1: run heavier among professional comedians than other groups of people.
Speaker 1: And you notice the people who are funniest in your community,
Speaker 1: they don't laugh very much. The people who make the
Speaker 1: funniest jokes. They don't usually laugh at other people's jokes,
Speaker 1: and they don't laugh their own jokes either. Notice this
Speaker 1: and you'll start to see this pattern as a matter
Speaker 1: of fact. On the other hand, people who laugh a
Speaker 1: lot at jokes, I mean, they just appreciate jokes, they
Speaker 1: tend to be much happier. And the great news is
Speaker 1: that you can cultivate that. There's some people who they
Speaker 1: have kind of a persona of being bummed a lot,
Speaker 1: and so they don't let themselves laugh. But if you
Speaker 1: basically give yourself permission, and this is actually something that
Speaker 1: you can do, you can when you go to a
Speaker 1: new place, you can say, you know, I'm gonna laugh
Speaker 1: at everybody's jokes more, just literally saying that. What it
Speaker 1: does is it makes it once again metacognitive. It brings
Speaker 1: it to your consciousness, your pre for the cortex of
Speaker 1: your brain, and you literally will start laughing at the
Speaker 1: people's jokes more and you will get happier. This is
Speaker 1: just it's free, man, and it's something that we all
Speaker 1: should be able to do. And also is an incredible
Speaker 1: social lubricant. People will be like I like him and
Speaker 1: I don't know why, and the reason is because he's
Speaker 1: cracking up all the time, and I want to be
Speaker 1: around having people. I want to be around people who laugh.
Speaker 1: It a nesthetizes unpleasantness in a very real way. Not
Speaker 1: your jokes, but you're laughter. Yeah, you also make the
Speaker 1: point to avoid being grim, reject grimness, you say, is
Speaker 1: that sort of what you're saying there is to decide
Speaker 1: sort of as a position to be less grim. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this gets political too, because you know our culture today,
Speaker 1: which is so unbelievably politically polarized, grimness is a weapon.
Speaker 1: Anytime you say that it's not funny, you basically tried
Speaker 1: to take some power. You're trying to grab some power.
Speaker 1: And that's one of the main ways our inability to
Speaker 1: take other people's jokes or to take offense when none
Speaker 1: was intended is a power move in our in our
Speaker 1: society today, and it transcends right left distinctions. You actually
Speaker 1: find it across the political spectrum. This is key. And
Speaker 1: I'm sitting on a college campus and I see this
Speaker 1: all the time, where you know, you make a joke
Speaker 1: at your peril and understand, you know, stupid jokes or
Speaker 1: offensive jokes, And there are certain kinds of jokes that
Speaker 1: we should have moved beyond at this point in our society,
Speaker 1: and yet we haven't. But still the key thing is,
Speaker 1: if you want to be happier, don't actually try to
Speaker 1: hurt people with jokes, but also don't take offense when
Speaker 1: none was intended by these jokes. And so doing you
Speaker 1: can be kind of in the anti grimness more levity
Speaker 1: part of the culture. Will you give up some political power? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Will you be happier? Yeah? Will you be making a
Speaker 1: happier culture? A hundred percent? I want to swing around
Speaker 1: briefly to the culture of contempt, but before we do,
Speaker 1: this is the time of the year that brings up
Speaker 1: a lot of unhappiness in people. Some people love this
Speaker 1: time of year, but a lot of people don't. I've
Speaker 1: been reflecting on the fact that there's a lot of
Speaker 1: expectation around the holidays, expectation that other people have on us,
Speaker 1: expectation we have on how the holidays should be. What
Speaker 1: would be a way to be happier through the holidays,
Speaker 1: will be a way to deal with those expectations more
Speaker 1: wisely well? To begin with, one of the main reasons
Speaker 1: that people are unhappy this time of year is because
Speaker 1: they're disappointed, and the reason they're disappointed is that we
Speaker 1: have a tendency to believe or to remember past holidays
Speaker 1: is better than they were. It's called fading affect bias.
Speaker 1: It's a cognitive bias that we have where we remember
Speaker 1: the good parts of things and not the bad parts.
Speaker 1: Very very common. It's a self defense mechanism. But it's
Speaker 1: also because we learn from things, and we keep getting
Speaker 1: benefit from the things we learned, and we we jettis
Speaker 1: in the parts of our memories that are not useful
Speaker 1: to us, like you know, Uncle Mike got you know,
Speaker 1: loaded and you know, passed out in the front yard
Speaker 1: after screaming obscenities of the neighbors on Christmas Day, you know,
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. We leave that behind. So we
Speaker 1: tend to be disappointed when our holidays don't live up
Speaker 1: to either our expectations about the future, which tend to
Speaker 1: be very rosy, or our memories are nostalgic memories from
Speaker 1: the past. That's the key thing. The second big problem
Speaker 1: that we have is that we feel that a lot
Speaker 1: of pressure. You know, we feel a lot of pressure
Speaker 1: to sing the Christmas carols and to enjoy the holidays
Speaker 1: and for some people it's really really hard. I remember
Speaker 1: this was very hard for my mom. My mom, you know,
Speaker 1: she suffered a lot, very ill for almost all of
Speaker 1: my childhood, and she would suffer on the holidays, you know,
Speaker 1: Thanksgiving and Christmas. They were really really, really hard for her.
Speaker 1: And the main reason is because she felt it was
Speaker 1: an expectation for her to be the perfect mother and
Speaker 1: the perfect cook and have the perfect home, and she
Speaker 1: didn't feel she was up to it. That was a problem.
Speaker 1: So what do we do, you know, for those of
Speaker 1: our listeners who they suffer a little bit on the holidays,
Speaker 1: Number one is reject the expectations and do your own thing.
Speaker 1: You know, if you find the consumerism really off putting,
Speaker 1: then put together Christmas with people who are like you,
Speaker 1: and you decide you're not gonna spend money. As a
Speaker 1: matter of fact, don't spend any money from any consumer
Speaker 1: money from Thanksgiving through January. One. To be a rebel,
Speaker 1: the countercultural man and and be amazed that actually how
Speaker 1: happy it takes you by being countercultural per se and
Speaker 1: and being around people who do that. Or you know,
Speaker 1: when my kids were little, my wife who's from Spain,
Speaker 1: she often because the kids would be home. She would
Speaker 1: take one kid and go see her mother in Barcelona
Speaker 1: over Thanksgiving, and I would have the other, our two kids,
Speaker 1: and and she's like, oh, it's gonna be so sad.
Speaker 1: And the first year I took him to a restaurant
Speaker 1: and then to the movies. And it became this tradition
Speaker 1: where I had two kids and they were competing to
Speaker 1: be the ones who were home to go to the
Speaker 1: restaurant in the movies with dad. And it was like,
Speaker 1: and you see me with my kids and look like
Speaker 1: a divorce dad. Who got who got, you know, custody
Speaker 1: of his kids? On Thanksgiving? It too pathetic to make
Speaker 1: a turkey or something. We were having this great old time.
Speaker 1: Make your own traditions was the key thing. And then
Speaker 1: the third thing is leave the memories behind, leave her
Speaker 1: expectations behind. Just today's Christmas, today's Thanksgiving. Let it be
Speaker 1: what it is. Let it be what it is. And finally,
Speaker 1: actually one more, don't talk politics. Don't talk politics on
Speaker 1: the holidays, because you're gonna get politics in the way
Speaker 1: of your love. And your love is more important than politics.
Speaker 1: And that leads to your last question, doesn't it? It does?
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna actually bring that back on you a
Speaker 1: little bit because you summarize your whole book on the
Speaker 1: culture contempt to a few lessons, and you then said
Speaker 1: it even similer. Go find someone with whom you disagree,
Speaker 1: listen thoughtfully, and treat them with respect or love. A
Speaker 1: lot of times for many of us, unfortunately, sometimes maybe
Speaker 1: the only time we encounter somebody who believes something different
Speaker 1: than us is when we're forced into our families of origin.
Speaker 1: But you're saying, if you want the holidays to be good,
Speaker 1: then is not the time to try and take on
Speaker 1: the culture of contempt. Leave that for another time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, that's a good idea. That doesn't mean you
Speaker 1: have to avoid it. It just means that don't be
Speaker 1: going and looking for it, don't say. You know, there's
Speaker 1: the Democratic Party and the Repulican Party both have in
Speaker 1: different parts of these parties have put out a guide
Speaker 1: to how to beat your family and arguments, which is
Speaker 1: actually evil. You know, this is evil to to giving
Speaker 1: people a guide on how they can vanquish their family members.
Speaker 1: And you know, Dale Carnegie, the great self improvement writer,
Speaker 1: one time said that a man convinced against his will
Speaker 1: is of the same opinion. Still, even if you win
Speaker 1: the argument, you lose the argument because nobody in history
Speaker 1: has ever been insulted into agreement. This is really really
Speaker 1: important thing to keep in mind. So go rushing towards
Speaker 1: the people with whom you agree, listen to them with
Speaker 1: civility and love, and not just tolerance, with actual love.
Speaker 1: But on Thanksgiving and Christmas, you know, talk about the
Speaker 1: things that matter first, which is, you know, the people
Speaker 1: that you have in common, the love that you have
Speaker 1: for each other, the fun things that you've done over
Speaker 1: the course of the year. And you probably won't even
Speaker 1: get to the politics by the end of the day,
Speaker 1: but you'll say, you know, my crazy Republican aunt Marge,
Speaker 1: you know, we love the same things and that's what
Speaker 1: really matters. Well, that is a beautiful place to wrap up.
Speaker 1: I would love to get more into Contempt and talk
Speaker 1: about what it is and and all the problems. Your
Speaker 1: greatest book is wonderful. Maybe that will be another time.
Speaker 1: That'd be great. Thank you, yeah, thank you so much
Speaker 1: for coming on the show. It has been a real
Speaker 1: pleasure to talk with you, and thanks for sharing so
Speaker 1: much your wisdom with us. You have a great show
Speaker 1: and you're doing a lot of good and I appreciate
Speaker 1: a lot being able to be some small part of it.
Speaker 1: Thank you right on. If what you just heard was
Speaker 1: helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to
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