 If you want to pump your body and expand your mind, there's only one place to go. Mind Pump with your hosts, Sal DeStefano, Adam Schaefer, and Justin Andrews. So in this episode of Mind Pump, we got to meet somebody that we have a lot of admiration for. A very, very smart individual, Dr. Arthur Brooks. He's a professor at the Harvard Business School. He's an economist, a social scientist, a very popular columnist at the Washington Post. He's written some best-selling books. Before joining the Harvard faculty in 2019, he also served for 10 years as the president of the American Enterprise Institute. This is a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C. Now, again, he's an economist by training, but he's also spent decades studying culture and public policy. His work in topics from technical economics to the sources of human happiness has established his reputation as a best-selling author. He's got two New York Times bestsellers. This guy is awesome. He's got a phenomenal documentary on Netflix called The Pursuit. He gave a talk that we got to witness live that was one of the most moving inspirational talks ever. His current book, Love Your Enemies, takes an incredible approach at a problem that seems to be growing today. People on both sides of the political spectrum hate each other. They genuinely have discussed and disdain for each other, and it seems to be getting worse. His approach is to love your enemies. You're going to love this episode. Now, you can find Arthur Brooks on Instagram at ArthurC Brooks. His website is arthurbrooks.com. He has a podcast called The Arthur Brooks Show. I already told you about his documentary. You got to watch it. You guys will absolutely love it. Oh, and he's also on Facebook and Twitter under the name Arthur Brooks. Go check this guy out. You will not be disappointed. Now, before we start the episode, it's Cyber Monday. It's another massive, massive sale day for us. This is it for the rest of the year. After this, there will be no more massive sales like this one. Here's what's going on, okay? Ready for this? Half, half off of all MAPS programs except for one, MAPS Power Lift. But other than that, everything is 50% off. Everything that we offer, all of our programs, half off, including our guides and our mods. But that's not all. We took our bundles. This is where we take multiple programs. We put them together and we already discount them off retail. So bundles already discount the retail price by 30 to 35%. Well, we're going to take an additional 25% off those as well. So in other words, everything is severely discounted. This is a great time to get your fitness programs stocked up. It's a great time to set yourself up for all of 2020. Here's what you do to get the discount. Go to mapsfitnessproducts.com. And if you want the 50% off individual programs, I say you just want to buy one at a time, use this code Cyber Monday 50. That's C-Y-B-E-R Monday 5-0, no space. And if you want the 25% off the already discounted bundles, you want to just buy a lot of programs altogether. Use the code C-M as in Mary bundles. Make sure you do it because this promotion is going on Monday and then that's it. I want to start because I know that once I give Sal the reins, I'll probably never get a chance to get back. I know we're going to be competing for this one. But you three big personalities running the show. That's amazing. It's amazing that it works, right? That's what I think everybody... We haven't killed each other yet. Always, always fascinated. And I'll probably, totally, brutally destroy the quote, but it was such a beautiful thing that you said and we heard it the other day listening to you. I'll have a rune down. Because I wanted to start you there because it was such a powerful statement that you made and I want to, Sal, read it and then I want to ask why this is so important in today's climate and kind of start you there. You had said in a talk that this was something that your father had told you and it was the mark of moral courage is not standing up to the people with whom you disagree. The moral courage entails standing up to the people with whom you agree on behalf of those with whom you disagree. Such a powerful quote. We live in this incredible time in the greatest country. I mean, the fact that we can... You guys could post on Instagram that you think that President of the United States is a clown and there's going to be no knock in the night, no jack-booted thug. That's totally a historic. I mean, it's unprecedented in the history of the world that you could just trash the chief executive of the country and there's like no problem. We have to appreciate that and we also have to use that. I mean, the whole idea that you should, in a free society, disagree and you should disagree in a way that's respectful and you should stand up for the people with whom you disagree. I mean, that's how social solidarity should work. That's how we use the full blessing of a free society and yet we're not exactly not doing that. We're so spoiled. We stand with the people with whom we disagree, trashing them and then the people with whom we agree more or less. We're just like in total group think. I mean, that's exactly what's wrong. So the question then becomes, look, what can I do on behalf of the people who disagree with me because I think the competition per se is important. I believe there's a moral case for competition, including in the competition of ideas. And that's where life really gets interesting. That's where people who are courageous really start to stand out. Yeah, currently at the moment, it seems like there are, because I agree with you 100%. I love disagreement. I love arguing and debating. I feel like that's the best way to get the best ideas. It's just like any, like you said, like a market. You want multiple products and allow the best product to succeed. And today what I see is rather than people trying to compete ideas, I see people trying to silence other people as if they're trying to say, forget the fact that your idea is different. You can't even say anything different. We won't even let you speak. How do we approach that? Well, to begin with, that's like the Yankees blowing up the Red Sox bus on the way to the game. That's not competition. That's shutting down competition. And that leads to mediocrity. That leads to, I mean, the barriers that we go ahead to head in a way that's fair and that respects the rules. Competition actually requires cooperation and that's not cooperation. That's basically saying, you know, I'm just going to, that's cronyism. That's monopoly. That's trying to establish monopoly through sheer coercive power. It's happening all the time on the right and on the left. It's happening on campuses, which is really shocking. I mean, college campuses, that should be the epicenter of the combination of ideas, right? Where the idea industries are really supposed to be most free. But, you know, look, humans are humans. And if you can, through coercive power, not have competition to your product line, you're going to get a bigger margin. That's just the way it is. And that's all that is a sheer power. So I don't have to deal with somebody whose ideas might or might not be better. What's interesting to me, and you mentioned it on college campuses, that they used to be bastions of competing ideas and free speech. And it seems like now it's changed dramatically. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the left used to be some of the strongest supporters of free speech. And by the way, free speech exists because, you know, it's in the Constitution not to protect popular speech, which needs no protection. It specifically exists to protect unpopular speech. But it feels like the left these days are the ones that are trying to shut that down. And they use words like, that's harmful, that's hate speech, oppressive, and ensure it may be, but to shut it down. Are people not realizing the slippery slope that we could be going down by allowing stuff like that? It's a good question, whether they realize it or not, whether they think it's worth it. But the whole language of safety is basically trying to blur the line between, I mean, in the annals of free speech, there's the whole idea that you're allowed to say what you want until you shout fire in a crowded theater. Why? Because you don't want speech to actually cause physical harm to others. So what you do is you blur the line. The strategy to play is I'm going to blur the line between physical harm and psychological harm. And I'm going to say that if you do something that makes me feel unsafe, that makes me feel harmed, it's equivalent to shouting fire in a crowded theater. As such, I got to shut it down. Well, that's just insane. I mean, it's just any little kid could say, that's not right, that can't be right. And yet that's kind of straight out of the playbook. You know, it's not just the left, it's on the right, too. People are trying to shut each other down constantly. And it's mostly happening when you have a little bit of disloyalty on your own side politically. The problem that we have is there's about 5% on each side of the political spectrum that are the kind of the outrage industrial complex that are gathering power by making sure they're not dissenting views and whipping up a whole lot of bad blood. And look, the four of us, we're not in that 90% that constitutes both sides together. We want, I want to hear everybody's point of view. I don't want, you know, like I'm a free enterprise guy, I'm a Catholic, you know, I've had my whole life. People who aren't, I want to hear from them. Why? Because if I'm wrong, I want to know first, not last. You know, it was a little while ago, I saw a tweet that was shared by a, you know, I make no qualms. I let everybody know that I'm very much a supporter of free markets and free enterprise. In some cases, I'm left. In some cases, I'm right in terms of social issues and stuff like that, but I saw a page share a tweet that was from the left and it seemed extreme and crazy. And I thought, oh my gosh, I can't believe people would actually say this. And then I realized, I wonder if this right-leaning page picked out the craziest tweet from the left to make the left seem crazy. Do you think that they're using strategies like that to make each other seem, by picking out the extremes of each other? Yeah, that's a strategy. That's called nut picking. And you go for the nuts and you pick out the nuts. Say, this is the normal fruit from this thing. It's like, no, it's not. That's an insane person. You know, why? And so that's actually how these extremes they work, how the outrage industrial complex works. It's like slinging arrows back and forth to the extremes and all of us are in the middle go, what, what, what? That doesn't, none of that represents what I think. None of it. That's the reason that people talk about these surveys and show that, that confidence in the United States and our institutions, the only institution in American life that's consistently increasing in prestige is the military. All the rest of them are tanking. I mean, the judiciary, the Congress, the, I mean, the press, like just in the toilet. Well, why is that? That's because everybody's playing this game, saying, if you don't agree with me, you're Hitler. If you don't agree with me, you're Stalin. Well, that's nuts. That leads to mediocrity. That leads to failure. As a matter of fact, it's exactly the play. You picked it out. Are we, are we heading kind of towards a, you're talking about society just not basically losing trust in all these institutions? Are we heading down a path of nihilism and what's that going to look like? I think that it's actually pretty predictable. So there's a lot of research that shows that in the wake of a financial crisis, which is different than an ordinary recession, I mean, everybody listening to us knows that a, you know, ordinary sessions that happen every 10, 20 years, they're no fun, but you come back from them relatively quickly. Financial crisis happened two times a century. It's like the Great Flood. And what, it takes 10 to 20 years to recover from a financial crisis. You know, the 1929 stock market crash, there's one at the end of the 19th century based on this huge bust in silver and railroads. And of course the financial crisis that came from the real estate bust in 2008 takes a super long to get over, take super long to get over those crises. And the net result is not that you have low economic growth. It's that you have uneven economic growth where 80% of the rewards from the recovery go to the top 20% of the income distribution. So we have, I have data on 800 elections over 120 years and 20 advanced economies. And what it shows clearly is that that effect, that asymmetry, that uneven economic growth leads to populism. You know, that effect causally is related to a 30% bump in the voter share for populist parties and candidates. My friends, this is the problem that we see in political parties on both right and left today. That populism, that polarization, that outrage is being fueled by this macro economic phenomenon. But the good news is that it wears off because that energy can't be sustained. Americans are not envious people. I mean, if you look at these data on, you know, what do you think of Bill Gates? You know, the French in their survey data like let's steal his stuff and burn his house down. Right? And Americans are like, I hope my kids next Bill Gates. And that's how we're wired, man. I mean, it's like that the Stephanos weren't like getting out of some God-forsaken village in Sicily just because they thought, oh, you know, maybe America's got a better system of income redistribution. No, they came to the United States because they wanted to build their lives. They had this funny entrepreneurial gene that made you, I mean, look at you. You're building this thing from nothing. The ambassador of health. I know, it's really great. But you know, this is, you're the archetypal American as somebody in, you know, in the people in your culture of your family. I mean, it's just, that's the optimism. That's who we are as Americans. You know, we want to like each other and admire each other. We're not envious. You know, envy is like this bad, deadly sin. The heavenly virtue is admiration. So, and that's where we naturally lie. That's what we got to get back to. I mean, I'm dedicating my career to take us from a country of envy to a country of admiration. Now, Dr. Brooks, the America was founded on that principle. It was to come here was relatively easy. You could walk in, you got nothing for free. You worked hard and you succeeded based off of your work. You had all kinds of different cultures coming over here. People from all over the world, but they agreed on one fundamental principle, which was liberty. They all agreed that they valued liberty and freedom. Do you think that we need to at least all agree on that foundational principle for all this, all these different people to work together? It doesn't fall apart if we don't. You know, we have to have a creed for sure. We have to have a kind of a civic creed, a set of beliefs that it's funny. You know, I just relatively recently finished as president of the American Enterprise Institute, which is a think tank in D.C. I was the president of the place for almost 11 years. I had 300 employees. We're super mission-driven place. You know, $50 million budget. We were a machine. And it was in the middle of those, these political and policy controversies in Washington. It was super hot and sometimes terrible. So what held us together? And the answer was we all believed in certain things. We basically had a creed. We believed in the radical quality of human dignity and the limitlessness of human potential. Freedom, opportunity and enterprise for people, especially people at the margins of society. That's what we believed. You know, I would hire a CFO, an accountant, a controller, somebody for the, you know, to do hospitality, somebody who's going to keep the books, whatever. I would say, do you believe these things are not? You know, I don't care where you were raised. I don't care what you look like. I don't care what your education is if you have enough education and skills to do this job. But do you believe or not that everybody has equal human dignity and we have limitless potential? Do you believe in freedom for all people all the time? Do you believe in opportunity and just, do you believe in the free enterprise system? Are you going to be a warrior for it or not? And people like, I don't really care. There's an American Enterprise Institute. I could be an American Airlines for all I care. I'd say, well, next, next, because I need warriors. Every creed requires people that are willing to fight for that creed or we won't understand who we are. And the United States is a, this is the thing. You know, we've got this nationalist thing going on in the United States where we say, no, it's a country. It's got borders. It's identifiable who the people are, which means who the people aren't. While I'm telling you, I travel all the time. I'm in India a lot. I'm, you know, you find people who are Americans in their heart all the time and they would, they would run, they would like sleep on a bed and nails to get to this country because they say, that idea, it's like, that's me. That's me. And that's the Stephanos, man. I mean, they came here. They're like, yeah, I want that. I want that. I'm willing to make huge sacrifices for it. All my capital at risk. I'm going to, I don't know the language. I don't know the people. You know, I'm going to give it all up. I don't care. I'm not going to, I'm going to, I'm going to go back to the story. And finally, United States is an idea. And the idea is based on a set of ideals. And when we can articulate them and remember them and be proud of them and fight for them, then we're getting strong. Now what's happened with that message because you don't have to sell me on it. I lived it. I lived it with my family. Um, objectively when you look at how, uh, you know, freedom works for people, happening now where kids are getting pulled and socialism, for example, is getting more support than it's had in decades. And words like capitalism and free markets are getting less and less popular. Well, and they also think that they're pursuing equality, like you're saying right now, through those ways, though, right? Yeah, so what is that? Are we doing a bad job of explaining it and selling it? What's happened? Well, part of it is this is a knock-on effect, the financial crisis. A lot of people who are, they think that they like socialism a whole lot, they came out of college in 2010, or they came out of high school in 2012, or something in the job market was garbage. And they're like, yeah, look at these rich guys getting rich, and I'm barely able to make minimum wage. That's not right. And they came out in a really, really unfortunate time. Here's the good news. Young people saying that they're socialists and saying that capitalism is terrible, that number is actually, that percentage is not higher than it has been in previous generations. Young people just tend to talk that way. What happens is you see a massive difference between, you guys are in your 30s, I'm in my 50s, you look at people in their teens and 20s, and you see generational cohorts. It's not a, but it's not a set generational effect, people get older. I used to do, I was in the classical music business for a long time, and people were always saying, oh, the audience is dying, right? Why? Because I go to the New York Philharmonic and everybody's like a thousand years old. It's like, oh man, they're all gonna be dead and there's no gonna be here. It turns out there's gonna be a new generation who are a thousand years old and people are a thousand years old like classical music better. People kind of graduate into things. One of the things you graduate into is the observation of the truth that freedom is better than servitude, that free markets are better than collectivism, that people telling you what to do with your money when you get to a point in your life where you actually are earning a little bit of it is not that fun. Now, some people are gonna be kind of collectivist in their sentiment forever, but I'm really confident that we're gonna see people, particularly as we truly move beyond the shadow of the Great Recession. And we get into times that are more optimistic with leaders, by the way, who are more optimistic. Leaders are sort of followers in democracy and they're gonna be like, eh, right now, it's like everybody's mad, I'm gonna be mad. But pretty soon they're gonna say, Reagan was a good politician. He said, there's optimism on the wind. And he was an optimist. Bill Clinton, same deal. These were optimistic leaders in reaction to the circumstances of the time. I think it's coming back. I find it interesting that we're seeing things, maybe larger support or it sounds like larger support for things like socialism or people against markets when we live in the age of information, the decentralizing powers of the internet is making, are making markets, the barriers to enter markets are lower than they've ever been before with things like Uber and Airbnb and podcasts, for example. There's no way ever we would have ever been able to start this business in any other way. So it's almost like, I think the numbers show they're more entrepreneurs than ever, but at the same time you have, for the first time at least in my life, politicians openly running as socialists. I've never seen this before in my life. I've never heard of, I remember there used to be a dirty word, if you said, if people said you were a socialist even though you might support socialist policies, you're like, no I'm not. And now you have people like Bernie Sanders who are saying, oh no, I'm openly a democratic socialist. Yeah, totally. I mean, that's a very unusual thing in American life. It's also, it's equally unusual, more unusual that Donald Trump calls himself a nationalist. That's even weirder. I mean, that's like the- That's a great point. Yeah, Americans never called themselves nationalists. We're patriots. Patriotism and nationalism are two different things. Now like scholars are killing themselves but we all know what we're talking about here. I mean, nationalism is who we are and who they're not. And that's just, to me, that's just like so un-American. I just hate it. And so socialism is a way of trying to organize the economy. Nationalism is the way to try to organize people into in-groups and out-groups. And I think it's actually more dangerous. The socialist impulse is basically, I don't know. It's like, maybe we should spend more money on government or maybe the taxes should be higher. Okay, fine. For me, that's like this discussion of how many angels fit on the head of a pin. I don't like it, but I can deal with it. When people are talking, like I'm my wife's an immigrant, one of my kids is adopted from a foreign country. My life is organized around the idea of the ambitious riff-raff that wanna be this country. And so that's what I really care about. To me, that's the biggest threat that we've got against the American way of life right now. I, you know what, as you're saying that, I have to 100% agree with you. There's a very dangerous, nationalism can get very dangerous very quickly and very tyrannical very quickly. Historically, we've seen that. Yeah, oh yeah, for sure. I mean, it just, it gets whipped up into this frenzy. Now, I don't think it's gonna, I think it's a huge opportunity for us to talk about what this is. I mean, you make this great point about the way that we have this new entrepreneurial economy that's fragmented into little tiny molecules all over the place, that's a big opportunity to help people understand the way the new economy is gonna go. It's this classical American economy organized in a new way. Our principles, they work. They just work in different ways at different times. And so what I like, and you know, I don't think listeners quite realize, I'm not just some random guest on the show. I'm a listener. I mean, I'm a consumer of this product. And I came to it organically. I didn't have somebody say, like, yeah, I hear these guys. Now Justin and Sal are these big free enterprise guys, huh, I was like, I was asking people, what's the best fitness podcast for me to listen to? And they said, oh, well, you for a guy like you, you know, you want the, you want the science, you want the fun talk and you want people who are ideologically aligned and positive trying to bring the best. And every day, start your day with that. I mean, I kept getting this recommendation sure enough. That's why I'm a big listener, but that's what we can do. I mean, you guys are representing what's good about the American economy and your positive feel good about it. And I start my day feeling good when I listen to this podcast because of the philosophy, as well as the, you know, the fitness tips you help my lifts. I wanted to say the same about how you present capitalism and how me and my wife actually watched your documentary and just how uplifting, you know, and how emotional that actually made us in terms of like coming back to those core values of, you know, people having that dignity and that ability to be able to create a life just by, you know, having the opportunity for it. So. Where did you grow up? I can't remember. So I grew up in Santa Cruz area. Yeah. So you're, you're in Northern California. How long has your family been in the United States? So we've been here. I don't know how long we've come from Scotland. So that was like our main like it's going to be 1860. Probably Scotch Irish or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Scotch Irish. Yeah. I mean, it's really important for all of us to get in touch with how our families got here and what they were thinking. Because when we lose track of that, it's like, I know we've always been in the United States. No way. Just a bunch of riffraff or just a bunch of immigrants just trying to make our way in a, do it a podcast or whatever weird thing. I mean, it's just, it's incredible to me. How, how, how, you know, easy it is for us to forget this. So along those lines, when you were doing all your research for your documentary, what were some of the most alarming statistics that you came across? Well, a lot of it is the stuff that we're talking about, the attitude, how attitudes are hostile toward these great American ideals. When I was, I actually thought that I was going to find a lot more depressing stuff than I found. When I was making the movie, I had this kind of epiphany, which is that, because I was dealing with Western cultures and societies and, you know, towns and places that are, that should have everything going for them, but people are very desperate. You know, in Inez, Kentucky, where 29% of the adults are in the workforce. Think about that. And then I go to a place like Dharavi in a slum in India. They're supposed to be the most, you know, unfortunate place in the world where people are optimistic and everybody's working. And it's not perfect, but, you know, it's not, it's not the slum like we think about it. They're, the kids have education and people have healthcare. And yeah, yeah, a family of four is living in one room, but they're on their way up. And what you notice is that people who are optimistic and on the make, making their life, they feel needed. And people who are going down and feel terrible about themselves, they feel helped, you know. And it's like, this is this misguided policy environment that we have in the United States. And it's a problem with our culture, where we've gone from needing poor people. It's like, let's go get, go someplace and from God for a second village and get the shapers. And it's like, I want them here. I want them here. Why? Because we need them to actually float this experiment called the United States to sometime in the mid-60s. You know, I, the shapers, I don't know, they're, will help them. But, you know, the dignity difference in that, that was a, that really I have to say, that was maybe the most illuminating point, but also the most depressing point was to see people who, you know, they live in America and they feel just helped. They feel like a liability to society. And you go to other places around the world with like the most unfortunate circumstances and they feel needed and they feel like assets to society. And they like, yeah, yeah, of course, I'm making clay pottery and a slum in Mumbai, but you know, my kid is an electrical engineer. That's like America, man. There was an article you wrote and you talked a little bit about this and how, you know, and we see this all the time, right, you're a high level athlete and then you stop, you're competing in your sport. And even though you had all these great achievements, you feel like, okay, now what? Because you're not, you know, contributing or producing or you retire or, and there's all those transitions. Really, it's about feeling like people need you. That's what gives you that drive. It's what it's about. Yeah, I've been writing about that a lot. As a matter of fact, I have a book that I'm working on right now that my publisher needs me to start working on more and faster about actually these transitions in life such that we can actually live up to our whole sense of dignity. What happens is that people in their, particularly in their fifties, they recognize that their skills are in decline. And it's not just people like the fitness industry where, look, I mean, there's limits. I mean, it's gonna be easier to build muscle mass when you're in your twenties than it is when you're in your fifties. Trust me, you know, when you're in your fifties. But it's also true in the idea industry. Ideas don't come as fluently as they were. And there's a whole lot of science behind this. This is not just, you know, dude, there's the theories of crystallized and fluid intelligence and just the way that the brain is structured and all that. But if we actually can understand that people need us to do different things at different times in our lives, we can structure our lives in a way that we can serve others the best and understand the contribution that we're making. We can be necessary over the course of our lives. And so this is basically a handbook for people my age. I mean, it's extraordinary how life changes work. By the way, here's how I think this actually interacts with the world of fitness. I just quit my job. I was a chief executive for 11 years. And, you know, I was kind of felt like Mr. Big. And I've like, I've been studying the data and when you make a big transition, especially away from one where you have a big leadership position, I have, my life is sweet. I'm a professor at Harvard and I mean, don't cry for me. But, and I'm, you know, traveling around, life is great. But I don't have a big workforce. I don't have the same leadership position. What that will do in these transitions it'll mess up your hormone levels. As sure as we're sitting here, you'll get it. You'll tank your serotonin levels. It will affect your testosterone levels. It just will. How do you fix that? Well, you can, you know, you can go into counseling. You know, you can get a therapist. Maybe that's a good thing to do. Get into the gym and do leg day. Why? Because it's funny, you know, when you're, what's the natural free testosterone level at 8 a.m. What would it be that would be considered normal? It's like 300 to 700 or so. It's a big range. And if you have a job where you feel really important and maybe your free testosterone levels are 550 or 600 and then they go down to 350, the doctor is going to say you're normal and you're like, yeah, but I feel like hell. I'm hot garbage, man. I want to die. And so you have to, you have to recognize that. I actually, what I'm going to start doing is I'm going to start doing naps anabolic. Oh yeah, perfect. Because that's the right program. For a 55 year old guy who just left his CEO job. Absolutely. Right, so my world interacts with your world in this way and a very important way and it's important for our listeners to recognize that there's a lot of science behind happiness and dignity. It's not just, you know, platitudes and quotes from Winston Churchill. The social science behind this is very solid, but it also interacts with the world of fitness and the way that you take care of yourself. Your physiology starts to match your, just your mental state and your emotions and vice versa and it can become a feedback loop. You know, you could, if you, let's say you have low testosterone because of some physiological issue, now you feel bad, now because you feel bad and everything feels bad, testosterone levels start to plummet even more. And it can start to, and in the reverse, you know, you can have something like you said, you can move from a position of leadership and feeling like people depend on you and you have all this responsibility to moving to a position where nobody needs me anymore. That can cause lower testosterone, that makes you feel bad, which then causes that. Exactly right, exactly right. And you have to break out of that loop and there are a bunch of different ways to do it that don't require hormone replacement therapy or sitting 10 months on a psychiatrist's couch. I mean, there are a bunch of ways that we can deal with these problems ourselves in very, very natural ways. Nothing against hormone replacement therapy or psychotherapy. But look, I mean, what you guys are doing, it's very important to point out that this is a positive lifestyle where we are contributing, where we have dignity, where we know who we are as men and women. I mean, this is not, there's a seamlessness between, you know, the social psych and the social science stuff that I'm doing and the fitness stuff that you guys are doing. We have to have an integrated lifestyle to understand that self-care and care of others has to involve all of these parts of our lives. Yeah, the thing I love most about fitness, and I witnessed this when I would train kids, was it was a very easy way of learning. If I put something in, I get something out, and then you can start to apply that to, you know. It's a metaphor. It definitely is. And it's a very easy, clear metaphor. I can communicate it to anybody, you know, whether you're on the right, the left, it doesn't matter what religion you believe in. It's real simple. Everybody understands that when I communicate fitness and they can take that information in and then it contributes to that amazing attitude of, wow, I can, and so along these lines, would you say then that one of the best things you could do to help someone is rather than give them something, ask them if they could do something for you? Yeah, for sure. I mean, this is something that we often forget that when somebody, you know, how am I gonna, you know, live my best life and, you know, be a charitable person and good person, I'm gonna go help people. People I don't need anything from, I'm just gonna go help them unilaterally. But that's not how humans are wired. We're wired for reciprocity. You know, I don't want something for nothing. Nobody wants something for nothing. We think we do. You know, it's a party game. It's like, if you hit the lottery, yeah, Adam, what would you do if you hit the lottery? And so I was like, I don't know and travel more and, you know, get my master's degree, whatever, right? And the truth is, I got the data. If you hit the lottery, which is just a windfall for doing nothing except buying a ticket, you, I mean, not you, but generally people would, I think I'd start off by, I don't know, getting taken advantage of by my friends and then I think I'd get like a big substance abuse problem. And I think I'd probably marry somebody way younger than me who doesn't actually love me. And then I'd lose all the money and she'd leave me. I mean, that's actually the story of when people hit the lottery. Why? Because we're not wired for hitting the lottery. We're wired to earn it. You know, so this is the key. I mean, that's how, you know, fitness is a metaphor. You put in, you get out. I mean, life is like that. And when we're treating people who are unfortunate, the key thing is you got to figure out a way that the best way that you can serve people in the margins of society is figuring out how they can contribute. We shouldn't have any programs that disincentivize work. That's insane. That's dehumanizing people. And that's the place a lot of public policy. That reminds me of a place I want to take you that is controversial. And I would be mad at myself if I didn't have a go here with a mind like yours. Because when we talk about that, what do you think of things like minimum wage and how debilitating is that to us economically? So the minimum wage is very controversial policy. Here's the reason. First, I'll tell you why I like it and then I'll tell you why I hate it. The reason I like it is because it recognizes that it's important to earn your money. It recognizes that, I mean, it's not welfare. I mean, to say, no, forget the jobs. Let's just give people a universal basic income. But let's let people just apply for whatever welfare program we've got that's coming down the pike. And that says that people don't have equal human dignity. I love my work. I want to help. I want to be contributing to society, but poor people, their jobs suck. That's what that says. It's completely discriminatory. It's not right. I mean, the data are very clear that above and below average income, college, no college, that people love or like or love their job at about 89% of the population. You know, just to say that the guy at McDonald's does a garbage job is discriminatory. It's not right. It's morally, it's not correct. And it's a disordered way to think because our brothers and sisters all find different ways to find their dignity and work at the center of that sanctified work. So that's why I like the minimum wage. It recognizes that and it's like, let's make work pay fantastic. The problem is that there's a better ways to make work pay. Why? Because when you put in a minimum wage, what you do is you create incentives to chop the bottom jobs off the ladder. I mean, work is a ladder. Life is a ladder. You know, work more, climb more. And if you chop off the bottom rungs to create a disincentive for companies to create low wage, low-skilled jobs, you're discriminating. Now, 82% of minimum wage workers are not low wage people. They're usually second and third earners from above average income households. My teenage kids are minimum wage earners. And it's like, I'm gonna work in a sandwich place until I go to Princeton. And that's, I mean, that's not everybody for sure, but 82% of minimum wage workers are not poor. That's an important thing to keep in mind. The 18% who really are, they're disproportionately the ones who don't get jobs in the first place or lose their jobs. When you make those jobs more expensive. So it's great for my teenage kids to get raised, but for people who are very marginalized, who don't come from a background with a lot of work, who don't have very much education, who are not acculturated in the ways of work adequately. Those are the people we wanna help the most and we hurt them disproportionately. It's what we're pricing them out. It's like- Exactly right, it's basic economics. It's basic economics. And so the problem with that is pretty obvious. Now a little minimum wage increase has a little effect on the market. A big minimum wage increase going to $15 an hour will be totally catastrophic for people at the very margins. So question is, what are we gonna do to make work better? I mean, if we're gonna have a holy policy that does that, what do we do? And there are tons of ways to do it better. Their earned income tax credit is a, I know it's a mouthful and it's super wonky and nerdy, but hey man, I'm a policy professor at Harvard. I get to be a nerd. That's why we have you here. That's right. But that's a policy that basically says, if you work, we're gonna top up your wage. That's the government tops up the wage. It doesn't create any incentive to lay you off. And it's been incredibly effective. Mostly because it goes to women, single women with kids in the home, we need to expand it to men. Explain how that works? The earned income tax credit is basically on your tax form, you file your taxes and you pay negative taxes. So you get once or twice a year or quarterly or depending on how it's set up. You know, the government actually, when you file your taxes says you deserve to earn more money than you got and you get a refund even though you didn't pay taxes. And so it's paying, it's topping you up. Isn't this now Milton Friedman had a policy? That was his policy. That was his policy. Milton Friedman, I mean, the great, the great St. Milton. I mean, he came up with this idea that you should have a negative income tax. And that's a great way to do it. That's the best way of all to do it is to get more economic growth, to get more opportunity, to get more entrepreneurship, to get more optimism, to make it easier to form businesses, to cut regulation, to cut housing restrictions. That's the best way to do it. I always argue for lowering the barriers to enter the market. Start getting rid of those barriers, minimum wage being one of them or if you come in with no skills or maybe you've been to prison or whatever, someone's not gonna hire you for the $12, but maybe they'll hire you for $8. That's what you have to bargain with and then you can build up your skills and your resume. And there's other barriers like permits and you gotta go buy this license and that license just to start a business. Yeah, it's insane. It's insanity actually, because the whole idea of barriers to entry, licensing requirements has exploded over the past 20 and 30 years. The extent that we say something like a third of the economy requires professional licensing to function and that's sort of easy for us. I mean, you guys have this incredibly successful business. You need a lawyer, you hire a lawyer. You need an accountant, you hire an accountant. I mean, those of us who are lucky in this economy, we can find, we have a guy. No matter what it is, I got a guy, right? But well, it turns out that if you wanna do hair braiding in your home, then you don't have a guy and you just have to figure it out. It's in Washington, D.C. where I live for a long time. If you wanna be a lawyer, I mean, a realtor, you need something like 150 hours of schooling. Okay, a lot of little, I'm not sure. If you wanna braid, literally do African hair braiding, you need 1600 hours to get your cosmetology license. You gotta go to school full-time and it's expensive. And people don't realize that that was put forth by people in the hair business who are trying to reduce their own competition. Barrage entry. They're the ones that are put in forth like, oh no, you need to have all these requirements. You need to have four sinks in your office. You need to, I've read some of these for hair braiding. It's insane. There was one woman I read about who was making a living supporting her kids. She was a single mom and she had to stop because she didn't have sinks and she didn't need sinks. She wasn't washing hair, she was just braiding hair. But because the license has said, no, you have to have three sinks in your play. It's insane. It's straight up discrimination. It's straight up discrimination against people in the margins. We don't want people coming in. We don't, that barrier to entry, the really scary thing to entrench businesses that are not that great is Riff Ref, is hustlers. It's hard workers. I mean, that's, I mean, so you guys in the podcasting world, super successful, you've disrupted the way that we do communications, right? And the reason that they couldn't get in your way, you know, big radio couldn't get in your way is because they weren't there fast enough to shut down the Riff Ref, right? And so entrepreneurship will out, it has a ton of casualties in the meantime, unless we who are the lucky ones, we who are the chosen ones with respect to all the advantages of life, we got to fight for them. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that. Now that podcast is sort of taken off and long form conversations are sort of making a comeback. Have you seen that effect politics at all in terms of, you know, them trying to, you know, explain themselves further and actually having a platform to do that? Yeah, not yet. I mean, in politics, generally speaking, they shy away from long form ideas. Because they have to actually get caught. Well, the problem is that somebody on the other side is gonna just chop it up into, you know, if you don't do sound bites, if you do full conversations, look, if somebody really wants to kill me, they can find stuff that we're talking about here and chop it up into a seven second clip and say, Brooks, he says minimum wage is bad. Minimum wage is bad. No, no, no, you didn't get the whole context context and all that. So you have to be in a circumstance where people aren't or have the courage to not worry about people trying to wipe you out. So it's a great medium for people who want to listen. And again, it's super portable. It's very flexible. It's mostly, I mean, I bet most people who are listening to us are working out. And so you've got a ton of time and you're like, that's the whole idea. I mean, the genius of this thing is you're getting in shape and you're getting smarter at the same time. Hence, mind pump. Yeah, I'll tell you what though, people like Joe Rogan, you know, his podcast go two, three hours. He's getting more views and listens than all the other news networks, the mainstream news networks combined. And I think that we might have misunderstood people. I think we thought for a long time that people only wanted short sound bites, but the reality is the bandwidth was so small that that's all we got. And what we're finding is people actually like long form. They like explanations. They like intelligence. They like smart people. Explaining themselves and the numbers are showing it. People are leaving the mainstream methods of communicating in flocks and they're moving over the new way, which is a lot of its long form. This would have, there's no way you would have done a two hour show when there wasn't a limited internet bandwidth. Nobody would, no channel would have ever put that on. Well, in the market, wouldn't have supported it either. I mean, so you guys are getting a one and a half million downloads a month, something like that, right? And with maybe 20, between 20 and 25 shows, between 20 and 25 shows, that works out to not enough listeners per show. It's one of the most successful podcasts making good money, lots of people listening, but they have to be able to select into the environment with almost zero marginal cost. That's the only way the economics are gonna work out on this. If you're trying to do something on a network with, you got offices all over the country and you have staff and you have bricks and mortar and all this stuff, you can't make the numbers. And so what we've been able to do is to turn this into micro businesses and some of the micro, and so a micro business can be extremely profitable and really edifying. That's the, you know what the, you know what did that? Capitalism did that. Yeah. Free enterprise did that. It wasn't some central planners like, ah, you know what we need? We need to, you know, get rid of the bricks and mortar so that we can have this thing called podcasts. It's just, it's totally organic. That's the beauty of it. Dr. Brooks, I want to get into your book, Love Your Enemies, but before we do, I want to make one more comment on this. And I don't want to go too deep in the weeds because I can totally do this with this topic, but you know, the, because of the decentralizing power of the internet, the unlimited bandwidth, the fact that barriers to enter the market are disappearing mainly because there's emerging markets that are, they're happening faster than regulators can regulate. For example, Uber is a great example. Uber would not have existed had they had to bring it forth and get it approved. It just happened. Now we love it. Now they're trying to figure out ways to regulate it, but people like it already. I feel like the future, whether we like it or not, things with 3D printers where you'll be able to print your own products, you know, was just a great example. The difficulty of licensing and patenting, like I can go online and get music and get things and it's very, very easy. So the only way to beat it is to out compete it rather than make laws that get me in trouble. I feel like the future is so decentralized and capital and free market no matter what. I feel like we can't, the cat's out of the bag, the toothpaste is out of the tube, that they're going to try to control it, but it just innovates too fast. It's always been the case too. It's always been the case in the American economy and that's really the magic. And it's funny because countries kind of get old and cranky and sometimes the real, the thing I really worry about is that, that we find ways to slow it down and it's other countries around the world that start getting ahead of their regulators. I bet the American magic was always like, you know, I want to go to the United States where nobody's going to bother me. It's not like nobody wanted to bother you. It's just that you can't. I mean, it's like you're in some little town in Texas and the cops are half an hour away. And so you set up a gas station and you have a license for a gas station and I don't know, I'm still a gas. I don't know. And then pretty soon we'll figure out somebody to regulate the market. And so staying ahead of it is really critically important but it's also remembering the ethos of that, remembering how important it is. And what I like are our politicians on both sides, whether they're more Democrat or more liberal or more conservative or whatever, who respect this frontier atmosphere, who want the people who are just running into the future saying, I don't know what's there and stop me if you can but who respect that, who actually admire that. And you know, that's what worries me is that all of us are trying to find a way to slow that down. And I just saw these data. They're very interesting to me that are related to this that Americans are less than half as likely to move for work than they were in 1970. So, you know, when I was a kid, little kid, I mean, one in five families in your neighborhood would move in any given year for work. And today it's less than one in 10. And this is the lowest year that we've been actually moving for work. And that's it. Why do I bring that up? Because that's actually kind of emblematic of the problem that we're seeing where people are stuck, where people are just not willing to, you know, head west, young man. And I realized that where we are right now, you can't, you can't move west anymore. I appreciate it. I appreciate it. I appreciate the idea. Yeah. But it's really important for us to remember that the frontier spirit has got to stay alive. You got to find ways. And what that requires is the idea of entrepreneurship is not starting a company. Entrepreneurship is your startup life. And if we each one of us, and this is what I, if I can do one thing to change American culture, it's going to be for people to say, what's my enterprise? Me, Arthur Brooks, Inc. You know, and when there's an opportunity, I'm going to run toward it. I'm just going to say, I don't know. I don't know. Run into the void all the time. Have confidence. Surround yourself with positive people. Remember that the startup is the startup life. And when we get away from that, it makes me feel kind of like we're getting old. Like we don't have the energy for it. And so they're going to want, we're going to want to regulate it. We're going to want to put rules around it. And that's what actually kind of alarms me. So now your book, Love Your Enemies, I think the premise is absolutely brilliant. And I think it's at the perfect, perfect time. It seems like today people are more polarized than ever. They, if you're on one side, you hate the other side, or at least you think that they hate you. At least it's being portrayed that way. And you're presenting a different way of communicating with each other. And I'd love you to just kind of give us an idea what the premise of your book is and why it's so important. Yeah, so way back in 2014, I was starting to see trends in American life that were super alarming in the way that we were just simply talking about politics. It's been going on for a while, but I was working on something called, in my research, called motive attribution asymmetry. That's the phenomenon where two sides in a conflict, they have this mutual belief that they are motivated by love, but the other side is motivated by hatred. That's an error. Both sides to a conflict can't simultaneously be motivated by love and hatred, which means that one side is wrong or the other side is wrong about the other side. Usually we find social psychologists, political scientists find that both sides are wrong, that we're just too siloed. So of course I love my country and you hate me. And therefore I can't work with you at all. Now the reason that really, I was working on this is not because I was trying to find some new, something new about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or something which is characterized by this motive attribution asymmetry, but because we were seeing in the data that Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives in America were exhibiting the same level of motive attribution asymmetry, this mistaken belief that was making intractable conflict, the same level as the Palestinians and Israelis. Wow, so just as bad. Yeah, just as bad, just as bad. And that didn't mean that we were going to have settlements and people shooting at each other and occupied territory, none of that stuff. What it meant was we were simply not going to be able to have dialogue anymore. I said, that's coming down the pike. This is where this is going. And sure enough, that's where we were heading in the 2016 election and that's kind of where we are today. So how do you get out of that? And the answer is that we got to be entrepreneurs and we got to subvert it. Each one of us is responsible subverting it. How do you subvert motive attribution asymmetry? You look for the people that are profiting from it. And again, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I got the data that showed that 93% of Americans hate it or participate in it but hate it. And that means that 7% don't hate it. 7% of Americans are the outraged industrial complex. They're getting rich and powerful and famous by making us hate each other. And that's insane. These are drug dealers, man. This is sort of the ideological meth in our society and in politics and in media. I mean, turn on cable television at eight o'clock at night, you'll just want to, I mean, it's very depressing. It makes you want to cry your eyes out. This is our country. It doesn't matter what channel you've got it on, practically. And so how do you fight against it? How do you fight against the outraged industrial complex? We stand up to it. And the way that you stand up to it is not by being pugilistic, you're not being militant and marching, although maybe you should. It's by doing exactly the opposite. When they're saying, hate your enemies. That's your enemy, hate your enemies. That's what you see in major media about politics today. That's what you hear from these populist politicians all the time. Do the opposite. It's rage against the machine. Love your enemies. It's like, I don't feel it. Who cares? I mean, are we the masters of ourselves or are we the slaves of our feelings? I mean, that's what it comes down to. I don't have to tell three professional guys of fitness that you better not be a slave to your feelings because you're gonna stay in bed until nine o'clock in the morning and you're gonna eat a lot of carbohydrates and you're gonna feel like garbage. You must be the master of yourself. And that is just as true. That's not just true in fitness. This is also true in our lives and the way that we treat each other and the society that we're trying to build. If you are an entrepreneur of you, Inc. then it's incumbent upon you to be an agent for positive change. And that starts in our current climate by saying, they say, hate your enemies. I say, sorry, not gonna do it. I'm gonna love my enemies. Forget civility, that's garbage too. You know, civility, it's a totally low standard. I'm gonna love, I'm gonna bring unity where there's war, I'm bringing peace. Just sorry, that's the way it's gonna be. And then it's infectious because a couple of benefits from it. Number one, nobody has ever been insulted into agreement in human history. Can't happen, right? So you have a chance of being persuasive if you love your enemies. You will be happier. I got the data on this and actually how it changes the structure of the human brain is when you answer hatred with love, contempt with warm heartedness, you will be happier. I mean, nobody's ever said, yeah, man, I wish I were more of a jerk. You know, that's not how, but to say, I could have been a jerk and I wasn't. My mother would be really proud of that. That's, and you have a chance of making other people happier and changing interactions. And if you don't, if you're part of the 93%, which almost everybody listening to us today is part of the 93% that hates how divided we become as a country and as a society, you have a chance of being a tiny micro part of the solution instead of adding to the problem. So loving your enemies is just an easy way of remembering that this is your subversion. This is a way for, this is your single entrepreneurial act for today. So what does that look like? I'm talking to somebody, we totally disagree. You know, hey, I think, you know, I think we should have, you know, healthcare for everybody. I think the government should pay for it. No, I think it should be free market. We're arguing with each other. How do I love this person or how do I exhibit that? How do I show that? The first thing is to start with why you're interlocking her. And by the way, you know, it's almost Thanksgiving. And there's a lot of people who are like- Awkward conversations are coming. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know what day we're airing, right? But you know, it's like, maybe it's like chess day and you're in there going, I'm thinking about Uncle Joe. He's going to be a jerk at Thanksgiving. You know, you're just dreading what's going on Thursday, right? I was like, oh, my Uncle Joe. This is going to be a tough one. Aunt Marge, he's a socialist. I can't handle it. You know, it's, I know, I know, right? So, how do you start that conversation? You could actually have a rule around the Thanksgiving table. No politics, no religion. Okay, okay, if that works for you. But that's just weak. It's unnecessary. When you're talking to Aunt Marge, understand Aunt Marge. Aunt Marge, she believes these things not because she wants to hurt America. She wants these things because she wants to help people because she loves poor people because she wants to bring us together and she thinks there's injustice. Listen to Aunt Marge and say it. So, is this what motivates you is love? Is what motivates you something better for everybody? And tell Aunt Marge, or ask Aunt Marge if this is what's really written on her heart. And it's like magic. Aunt Marge can be like, yeah, exactly. Exactly. And say, yeah, I want those things too. I want those things too. And I see things a little bit differently, but I tell you, I just really appreciate that. I mean, it's just, we got it. We got it going on in common. That's totally subversive. And it's not just a technique to get your point in. Who knows? Maybe we're wrong, you know? And if we're wrong, we should know first, not last. And so that's a beautiful way of actually finding common purpose around solidarity and brotherhood and love toward all of the people. Now, sometimes it'll be somebody whose values are in the 7% and it's like, okay, fine. But it's good to know that too. It's good to articulate that. It's good to say, yeah, I really disagree with that. I really, but with good humor and with happiness and at very least somebody's gonna say, yeah, sell the stuff or no. I mean, he's a big free enterprise guy. I totally disagree with him. But he's a really nice person. He's somebody, he's a kind person. He listens to me. At least he listens to me. That's what we have to a little of it. That's, if you want any shot of persuasion, that's where it's gotta start. If you want any shot at interchange, at brotherhood, at a little bit more love in our lives and in our families and our societies, that's where it has to start. When's the last time you've had one of those interactions with somebody and what was the conversation about? There's a lot of it because I teach at a major university and my views about collectivism, about free enterprise are not the prevailing views. They just aren't. And for a long time I was a little bit reluctant to go back to the University of an academic. I taught at another university for a long time before I went and ran this center-right, this conservative think tank, this free enterprise-oriented think tank. And when the time came, I resigned as president and I was like, what do I want to do? And I prayed about it for a long time. It's this prayer of discernment, Lord, not what do you want me to do? What do you want me to want? Right? Because, you know, it's like a backup. What do you want me to want? And it was kind of in my heart. I wanted to go back. And the reason I wanted to go back is because I wanted to hear from people. I wanted to talk about big things. And I wanted to put my ideas in action. I just published this book called Love Your Enemies. I'm lashed in the mass as a bestseller. Love your enemies. And like when you write a bestseller called Love Your Enemies, you better love your enemies because you're going to hear. So I thought, not my enemies, but people who disagree with me. Where can I go where there's a lot of people to talk to and who might hear these ideas for the very first time, couched in the language of love and affection, of mutual brotherhood, of trying to lift each other up. And, you know, that's back in the academy, I thought. And sure enough, I'm having a lot of these conversations. I'm hearing all the time. It softens me, you know, when we're only talking to each other. I mean, the four of us, we really agree. We see the world much the same way. And I love it. It's great. It's like, sustenance. It's relaxing, right? But if it's only that, then we can start talking about them who disagree with us. It's not them, it's us, you know? And so surrounding yourself with it, I think it makes you tender. It gives you a different kind of spirit. And so I have those conversations literally every day. Yeah, I feel like if you feel so strongly about your ideas, you should be driven by wanting to communicate them effectively to other people. And there's no way you're gonna convince anybody just by, I mean, what you push against only gets stronger. If somebody comes up to me and calls me an idiot, I'm gonna stand much stronger in my position and not wanna hear what the other person has to say. Yeah, you're not gonna say, you know, he's making a good point. I kind of am an idiot. I should rethink everything. No way, it never happens. Yeah, well, I had a client years ago who she was so good at discussing different topics. And I asked her, I said, how did you get so good at being able to debate and discuss things? And she said, I learned the opposing view as well as my view. And she said, and what happened from that was either, A, I became more confident in my view or sometimes something exciting would happen, which was, B, I changed my opinion because I found a better answer. And I thought that was the most brilliant thing ever. And that's something that I've always tried to do, but I'll tell you what, what you say makes a lot of sense, it's hard. Yeah. It's really, really hard to discuss and debate with someone that you disagree with and also remind yourself that they're good, they're coming from a good place. It's a very difficult thing to do. Yeah, and you know, we also have to remember that we don't have to talk all the time about the things we disagree with. And the internet culture can be very corrosive insofar as the people are on social media all the time. Always talking about controversial stuff, it gets you more clicks and so therefore it gives you more hits at dopamine. I mean, that neurotransmitter in the brain of immediate reward, it's like a cigarette. You know, I got, oh, man, yeah, I said something really outrageous. And I got 30 likes or 3000 likes or whatever. That's an addiction and it's a very unhealthy addiction. We shouldn't be talking only about things that we disagree with on all the time. It's funny when I bring people together, Democrats and Republicans who disagree and we're gonna have a hard conversation, I've facilitated those conversations many times. The first thing I'll ask them to tell each other about is their kids, right? Cause that's this weird point of commonality. And you know, it's very disarming. Yeah, totally. And when you have teenagers, it's like common enemy. Yeah, I know you're pain. Yeah, and everybody's got the same problem. Everybody's got the same problem. And you know, it's a conversation based on mutual love and mutual challenge and it's fun and it's funny and they just can't hate each other or trivialities like tax policy. I mean, I care about tax policy. I wanna get it right, but it's not as important to me as being a father, it just isn't. I mean, it's not one of my loves. And so you talk about the important things first and create commonality based on that. And then you can get into other things as well. And I got, it's so, it's interesting. You know, when you create a culture around that, then people are just looking for ways to be more generous in their disagreements. That's the healthiest culture of all. That's one of the things I like about the faculty at Harvard. I'm at the Kennedy School, which is the policy school. And there's this culture where you wanna show all the ways that you've changed your mind. Literally this culture is like, yeah, let me tell you tonight, well, I can now do that. I can tell you 10 ways that I've changed my mind. And that's a cool, it's great. It's a culture of intellectual humility. It really creates a lot of happiness because that's that vulnerability that you can get from actually learning. And that's what we're trying to pass on to our students. That's actually where I was gonna go. I was gonna ask you, because we talk on the show all the time about paradigm shattering moments for us in the fitness space, things that we believe to be true and then later found out were not true. What was the last paradigm shattering moment for you and your field? It's a paradigm shattering moment for me. I have become a lot less sort of stark in my views about the role of government, I have to say. I mean, I always believe that the private sphere of human activity and initiative really has to conquer all. And in point of fact, love is more important than policy. You know, I have a PhD in public policy, so I should have thought of that before I suffered through many years of schooling, but love is the 95% life in life and policy is only over the 5% margin. But you know, but that said, there is a role for policy in fixing things. And I think that the idea that there's something so morally inherently disordered about a policy that does something I don't like, I imbued too much of the morality to government intervention in our lives than I should have. And I'm just a lot softer on that than I was. It's like, there are things I don't like, but it's okay, so I don't like it. It's not the end of the world. I just more, it's funny because you know, I have public finance as an economist, I did a lot of work in public finance and tax systems. And so as if that 5% were actually the 100%, that's wrong. I've relegated it more into that 5% space. And if I disagree with somebody about the incentives that are created about tax policy, I don't worry about it nearly as much as I did before. It's like, okay, yeah, there's, yeah, it might have problems. You know, who knows, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I wouldn't. So for example, you asked me about the minimum wage. You know, if you asked me 10 years ago, I'd be like, always bad, all the time must stop now. And I'm like, well, it's actually motivated from a really good place. And small increases in the minimum wage actually have really small impacts on the labor market. And who knows, maybe the good things outweigh the bad things. That would never would have come out of my mouth. It just wouldn't have. And part of the reason is now I'm older, I'm 55 years old. And so I'm less sort of mannequian, sort of black and white in my thinking. Most stuff isn't black and white, you know, it just isn't. And I'm also more interested in what matters, which is love. And so the more research that you've done, the deeper that you've gotten, the more positive you've gotten, the more hopeful you've gotten. Yeah, I have to say that I get more positive and hopeful as I get older. It's, and part of it is just because scholars who are talking about bad public policy for a living, it's a kind of a shtick to be permanently pissed. You know, it's like a pissed off guy, PhD, right? Let me tell you all the things that are wrong. And so early on in my career, I was always talking about policy, bad policy, how to do policy design. And then when you get older, I mean, I first got tenure at a university so that, you know, you can, tenure means you can kill a dude and not get fired practically. I mean, it's just like, it's permanent employment. And I thought to myself, what is the purpose of tenure? And the answer is to do things that matter more. So I went through this process of trying to discern what's the, what are the most important issues in life? And that's when I actually, my beat turned from tax systems to love and happiness. I literally turned my focus of attention as a social scientist to love and happiness on the basis that I'm still really interested in public policy. You guys have seen the documentary. That's a lot about public policy, but fundamentally it's about the equations of human existence, which are all about the way that we treat each other. That's softened me a lot. It's softened me the way that I talk to each other, talk to other people and appreciate their, I mean, I do debate sometimes, so I'm not very interested in just besting somebody. You know, I kind of more want to hear what they have to say and then see if I believe it and see whether I can work it into my own personal philosophy of trying to lift people up and bring them together. I'll still do debates occasionally. I got a big one in Toronto. Who are you debating? Varro Fockes, who's the old finance minister of the Socialists of Greece and Katrina van der Hoovel, who is the editor of The Nation magazine. And it's a two-on-two debate. David Brooks and I, not my brother, but same last name. And David Brooks, the New York Times columnist and I are, we have our position that capitalism should be preserved and there is that capitalism should be abolished. And you know, I'll go into the, but the way that I'll argue it is not that socialism has subjugated millions and led people to death camps. Which is true. Yeah, I mean, it's true as far as it goes, but it was actually people who subjugated others and used socialism. See, this is the key. I mean, morals matter more than systems. And so the key thing I would have said 10 years ago, again to your question is I would have said socialism kills people. No, no, people kill people. They use socialism or nationalism or anyism or monarchism or, you know, and the truth of the matter is that we can use capitalism in a way that subjects people to conditions that we don't think are appropriate to. We can twist any system and it's something that we don't like. And so the way that I talk about capitalism now is if you've got your morals in order, if we're all brothers and sisters and we want to lift each other up, capitalism properly understood with cooperation and without predation with proper rules, that's the best way to get people by the billions, brother. I mean, that's the best way to do it. I mean, two billion people have been pulled out of poverty because of free enterprise since I was a kid that are not starving today or have not starved to death because of the free enterprise system. So it's a humanitarian venture. And then the only reason I care about it is because of people and that's how I'm, that's my argument. How will they argue that? Yeah. I don't know. Very curious. Tune in at 10. So spicy. Something you said that was really powerful yesterday when we watched you talk is you talked about how anger isn't the problem or nothing to really be worried about. And you talked about how in marriages it's not about anger that causes divorces and anger isn't gonna cause problems in society. It's contempt. Explain that. Yeah, contempt. So anger is a hot cognition. It's an emotion that says, I care what you think and I want to change it. It can be very destructive because if you're out of control, you can say things that you don't believe and you can hurt another person. So anger puts you in a very vulnerable position to do things that you don't want to do. That's the reason that in leadership positions you have to be very judicious about anger. Never use anger because you have been threatened. Only ever use anger on purpose on behalf of people who have less power than you. That's a core characteristic of how people see leaders. You're seen as weak if you use anger because you're on ego and strong if you use it judiciously and sparsely on behalf of other people. Okay, so that's, but anger per se says, I care about something. The problem is when you move that to, I don't care about you because I think you're worthless. That takes this element of disgust, the social pathogen, which it freezes it. And that turns to so anger plus disgust equals contempt. And we do it all the time. We act as if we have contempt for people. You are worthless. There's the definition of contempt is to the conviction of the worthlessness of another person. We do that. We have a habit of rolling our eyes, of talking with sarcasm about the thing I just heard is literally the stupidest thing I've ever heard. That's a contemptuous thing to do. That literally is the most important characteristic that breaks up marriages. So anger and divorce are uncorrelated as you just correctly pointed out. Contempt is what leads to divorce. And that's from the best research on this. Yeah, what did Gottman say? The statistics on that was like 90 or 87% It's insane. He could predict it with 97% accuracy within five minutes of counseling a couple. That's crazy. And he looks for eye rolling. Eye rolling. And so you're talking about something with your wife that is contentious and whatever it is. You know, the kids or money or you're out of town all the time or something. And if when she says something that you think is wrong or at least, or maybe you think it's right but you don't want to deal with it, you shut it down but you always say that. And it's always the same with you. That is to say, what you're about to say is not right. It's not worth hearing. And when you say that to the person that to whom you owe love and respect, that's like saying you are worthless. It's almost like it lights up and illuminates the same part of the brain as physical abuse. And they know this from fMRI machines when there are a bunch of cognitions that are non-physical that illuminate the brain in the same way as physical pain. And you're doing that. You treat somebody with contempt. It's like they experience the equivalent of physical pain. Well, no wonder it's gonna repel them. That's what drives people apart. The problem is, no, the opportunity, there aren't any problems, the opportunity is that that's not how you feel. It's basically you feel threatened and so therefore you're nuking it with contempt. And so that's what actually breaks marriages apart as mutual contempt, but it's basically a smoke screen for I love you and I don't want this pain. And so I'm acting in this particular way. So John Gottman, the greatest expert in the literature on marital reconciliation, he brings couples back together again by just simply helping them to remember and express what's really written on their hearts. And so when you're angry, angry, angry, angry, don't let it turn into an expression of contempt. So I just, I love you. I just love you. And it doesn't come out naturally, but it gets easier and easier. It's easier and you know, it's funny. You know, my wife is Spanish and that's an agriculture. It's a love culture too. And she just, she's willing when we're just really, really going hammer and tongs. She's just willing to say, I love you so much. It's magic. It's magic. And it's really, and if all of us can, if we master that, if we're willing to master ourselves to go against these feelings of contempt, which are stimulated by a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens. That's the reward center that governs all habits. And if we say, no, no, no, I will not be your slave. I'm gonna stop when I feel that contempt and I'm gonna do the opposite no matter how I feel. You will ingrain new habits. It's a huge source of power. Well, to that point, and since we went the direction of love like that, I think it's so important that you touch on, I think the misconception of love, so many people mistake it as a feeling when it's really an act of will, right? Absolutely. It's a discipline. You know, and a lot of people who, it's funny because I know a lot of people who are very, very disciplined about their physical routines. I mean, it's like four or 45, ding, ding, ding, I'm up out of bed, right? I'm making a shake. I'm going to the gym. I know what day it is. I've got routines, I get it done. I don't rest more than one day a week, whatever, right? And yet they have no discipline over themselves in other areas of their lives that are gonna be the difference between the success and their failure, between their happiness and their unhappiness, between the success of relationships or the disaster that's happening all around them and they can't figure out that you need to have the same discipline when it comes to your psychological and your emotional hygiene that you do with your workout routines. You know, if something is, there's all kinds of things that we want to do. I mean, my bed is warm at four or 45 in the morning, right? I mean, pizza's tasty. I mean, it's like, but you say yes to the first and no to the second. Well, the same thing is true when you have impulses. Your psychological impulses that tell you if it feels good, do it. That is insanity. That's a, you know, you're a useful idiot. I mean, that if it feels good, do it might be some good way to pass on your genes in the very near term, but is absolutely not the secret to happiness and good relationships and bringing harmony to life and being a successful person. Just not the way. You could even argue that the getting up part is, and going to the gym when you don't want to, that's an act of love for yourself by doing that. And how important that is. And so like it is with other people, like I think, you know, Adam said, in terms of not being a feeling, I think a lot of us think, you know, I can't love this person. I don't feel the love for it. No, no, no, it's an act of will. What, you know. To will the good of the other. St. Thomas Aquinas defined love as to will the good of the other. Nothing about to feel the good of anything. I mean, that sentimentality is a disaster. It's the road to perdition. You're just not going to be successful in the business of love. And, you know, another way to think of it is to will the good of the other as other. Like, what's best for Adam? I want to fight for that. That's love, that's friendship, that's real brotherhood, right? And that means you got, I mean, that's gritty, man. That takes strength and that takes discipline. And it also gets easier with reps, like anything else. And so remembering that's really quite critical. I mean, if you can think about it, how do we, I mean, how long, saw how long you've been married? Oh, I was married for 15 years. No, I'm not anymore. It's been about two years. It's been about two years since you got divorced. And, you know, the long and happy marriages are based on this, on acts of will and acts of discipline, right? Oh, yeah, hindsight's 20-20. I mean, understanding and learning this, looking back, I can clearly see all the mistakes that I made during that period of time. Well, I love the Gottman's five to one rule. I mean, I think how many relationships and not just like married, I think even friendships and just encounters, if you were to practice that every time you feel that way to sit down and write five positive things or things that you really appreciate about that person before you get to the criticism. For sure. So, Adam, you're talking about Gottman's five to one rule is that every time, to repair a relationship, you have to not say the critical thing first. And so the way that he does it, he makes these couple of walk-around with notebooks that are in counseling. And they want to say something nasty to each other. Fine, write it down. You can't say it until you say five beautiful things first. Now, there's a lot of literature that suggests that for Americans, it takes five compliments to actually to balance one criticism. In Korean Japan, it's two to one because different cultures, right? They can take more, more cultures of constructive criticism. Interesting. But in the United States, we're all complimenting each other. I said, dude, you're jacked, you look great. You're awesome. The show is awesome. Everything's awesome, right? Sweet anymore. But it's like any criticism is just not enough. I'm so injured. I'm so injured. So anyway, and with couples is particularly the case. And so if you do five, you got to say five beautiful, loving things, which by the way, there are five things. It is more than five to one. I think about my relationship with my wife. It's like a hundred to one. Yeah, you wouldn't have married her if that wasn't the case, right? It's 28 years. I'm completely in love. I'm complete. It's like the first day. It's just that I don't act that way. I act, I'm a jerk. I'm undisciplined. I'm being subjugated by my own feelings or like, I'm insecure. I'm tired or whatever. And I came home from work the other day and I had a really rough day. I mean, it was like, I had lectured for six hours and I had a bunch of meetings and there's problems and the whole thing I got home my wife is late and she's like, here's your dinner. And I'm like, I don't want it. And she looked at me like, what's wrong with you? What is, were you raised by wolves? I made you dinner and you turned it down. And I thought it was pure petulance on my part. I was like a two-year-old kid. No, no, man, it's like my wife, the love of my life made me dinner. I should be like, thank you sweetheart. This is like you're making my day. And it's because I was forgetting that. I was forgetting that. And so once you get to the, Gottman says, write down the five beautiful things before you're going to get to the nasty gram. And you're not going to get to the nasty gram because you've built up this reserve of love and you don't feel the nasty part anymore. It's just a question of discipline. Yeah, no, wait, you know, this conversation about how anger is okay, love as well. I mean, it's funny we were on the way home after listening to you speak and on the way back to the hotel, I should say. And in our business, you know, our mind pump, behind the scenes, we have big argument blowout conversations. Heated. Heated debates all the time over the business. I mean, you know, we've gotten into it and it's the loudest. But at the end of it, there is no contempt. We respect and value each other and we know we want to go in the same place. And it works, it works every time. And people say, how can you guys all be partners? And you're all such strong personalities. It's like because we all, it's exactly that. It comes from love. It comes from love. It's exactly that. That's how good partnerships work. That's how friendships work, ultimately. It's a funny thing for guys, however. And this is one of the things that, and so you guys are all 30s. I just term it 40. Close to 40 in January. You guys are all turning 40. Yeah, 38, 39, 40. Yeah, man. Yeah, that's great. Welcome. The water's not bad. The water's not bad. The water's not bad. It feels a little cold. I know, it feels a little weird, but you know, I'm 55 and it is harder to keep mass on. It is harder and harder. I was actually walking the Camino de Santiago this last summer. This is long spiritual walk across Northern Spain. That's in there. You know that Martin Sheen movie, The Way? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was doing that this last summer. Yeah, it's unbelievable. Everybody's got to do it. It's unbelievable. It'll change your life forever, right? But here's the problem with no gym. And so, and what I'm doing is I'm walking 30K a day. No lifting. And no lifting and practically not eating. It's like, holy cow. And this last week I lost 10 pounds, all mass. I'm already, you know, it's thin. I'm like, stick man to begin with. And so anyway, so anyway, that's my point is that, what was my point? I don't know. We were talking about... It's hard. Oh, the problem with the friendship. Yeah. So, you know, I look at, you know, there are really four accounts you got to put your energies into every day to be the happiest person you can be. Don't worry about your baseline mood because 50% of your happiness is genetic. And your baseline mood is based on your genes. Fundamentally. So if you're kind of a gloomy person, don't worry about it. It doesn't matter. If you're a happy person, lucky you, but don't take credit for it, right? And then a quarter of your happiness is largely circumstantial. It's like, ugh. Or, you know, I'm super happy right now. We got, you know, 1.9 million downloads on MimePomp. Awesome. You know, the Arthur Brooks episode broke all records, you know. Right? And it'd be fantastic. And we'll all be super happy. That's circumstantial, right? But the 25% that you can affect has four elements you got to put a deposit in four accounts per day. Your faith, and that does not necessarily mean my faith. I mean, if it were, I would tell you. I mean, I'm a Catholic. I'm a practicing Catholic. I take it seriously. I love it. But the data show that a transcendental philosophy, something bigger than you, that's not just the here and now. Something is more important than you that's really other focus that has, you know, love for something bigger than you. That's hugely important, the transcendental. So I just call it faith for short. Family, friendship, and work. And work, it has to have two elements. It has to be sanctified. It has to have, I feel like I'm earning my success and I feel like I'm serving others. That's why you guys are so happy about your work, by the way. Because this thing is getting, you're earning your success. Yeah, I built this thing and it succeeded. Achievement, you know, accomplishment, reward. And you're serving other people. I mean, I know you can guarantee it. I'm a guy sitting around the table with you guys. You have served me and made my life better. This is, so that's so rewarding. The problem that guys your age and especially my age, I'm 15 years older than you guys, is friendship. We have this undiversified portfolio. And when you're in college or in high school, your friends come real easy because you know, we're good at friendships, you know? Bros, it's great, right? But we get worse and worse and worse and worse at it. We get married, we have children. You don't hang out with your buddies because that's stealing from your family. Friendship requires practice. It's a skill. And your wife gets better and better at friendship. And so by the time your wife is 55 or 60, she's got tons of friends and you're, you don't have any. And so 60% of 60-year-old men say their best friend is her wife. 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Contemplate those statistics. Wow, interesting. It's the story of unrequited love in a big way. It's very important that we recognize that what you guys are doing, this is not a business partnership. That's ancillary to what's really going on. You guys are brothers and you have a friendship and you're cultivating a relationship of love, understanding that if you don't have disagreements, it just means that the partnership isn't right. I mean, you have to have disagreements. You have a competition of ideas, but fundamentally the friendship, the bones, the scaffolding around this thing is one of love. The advantage that you guys have because of this business is by the time you get to 55 or 60, no matter what you're doing for a living, you will have stayed in practice for friendship. And the people listening to us, the guys who are lifting a loan in the gym right now and they're gonna go to work and they're gonna bust their pick all day. And then be a good citizen and a good worker and highly sociable and then come home and there's kids and hi honey and they don't have real friendships, that's gotta stop. That is a big mistake because you're not gonna be putting anything in that account and that's like I say in baseball, an unforced error. You're simply not gonna be as happy as you should be if you don't actually start fixing that. Dr. Brooks, this has been phenomenal. Yeah, amazing. Absolutely phenomenal. And to find out that you're a big fan of our show was like, I gotta have you in our place. I would love to see your place in San Jose with the big comfy couches. I've seen the pictures of you guys and I love the show. It's a huge service and it's really fun and it's really interesting and I'm really glad that you're successful. Thank you. Because it shows that capitalism works, it shows that our values matter and it shows that quality is rewarded. So I'm gonna keep listening and again, I'm in this transition point of 55, I need maps and a ball of stuff. I'm gonna start right after. So if you ask you a tap off, don't worry. I'll give you a discount code. Super cool discount. You're doing great work, man. Keep doing what you're doing. I think you're changing lives and minds and just keep doing it. God bless you guys. Thank you. I obviously appreciate it. Thank you for listening to Mind Pump. If your goal is to build and shape your body, dramatically improve your health and energy and maximize your overall performance, check out our discounted RGB Superbundle at mindpumpmedia.com. The RGB Superbundle includes Maps Anabolic, Maps Performance and Maps Aesthetic, nine months of phased expert exercise programming designed by Sal Adam and Justin to systematically transform the way your body looks, feels and performs. With detailed workout blueprints and over 200 videos, the RGB Superbundle is like having Sal Adam and Justin as your own personal trainers but at a fraction of the price. The RGB Superbundle has a full 30-day money back guarantee and you can get it now plus other valuable free resources at mindpumpmedia.com. If you enjoy this show, please share the love by leaving us a five-star rating and review on iTunes and by introducing Mind Pump to your friends and family. We thank you for your support and until next time, this is Mind Pump.