 And I'm delighted now to introduce our next peace talk speaker, a Renaissance man who is a musician, a best-selling author, a scholar, the president of our partner in today's event, the American Enterprise Institute, and someone who reminds us frequently on the importance of compassion. And he also is here today to talk to us about the roots of populism. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Arthur Brooks. Thank you so very much for what an honor it is to be here. Congratulations to USIP for this wonderful event, this event that has taken its place in the constellation of important traditions as we pass the baton from one administration to the next. On behalf of all my colleagues at AEI, we're really honored to be a co-sponsor of this event. And I've been looking forward to give a peace talk. I'm not a foreign policy specialist. I want to talk about a different kind of piece, one that we can all invest in today. I want to talk to you today about political peace, maybe the most elusive kind of piece around the world of all it would seem today. But I'm going to make the case to you in the next 15 minutes that political peace is possible. I'm really honored to be in front of leaders like you, because I want to make the case that we can, in this room, we can be agents of greater political peace in our country by following a few rules that all of us, in point of fact, have learned along the way in our lives as leaders. Now, I want to start by telling you about an experience that I had some years ago before I came to the American Enterprise Institute. Before I got to AEI, I was a professor at Syracuse University where I was teaching economics and entrepreneurship. And I had a pretty ordinary professorial life. I was beavering away in relative obscurity, teaching my classes and writing my books. I had written a lot of books which were very boring and nobody had ever read them. And weirdly, along the way, I wrote a book that became popular. I didn't exactly know why. It hit the news cycle in just the right way. It was a book about charitable giving. And I asked the question in this piece of research. I mean, it was a very empirical book. It had a lot of numbers and figures and equations in it. But it asked the question, who gives more to charity, conservatives or liberals? That was just right for the news cycle. And strangely to me, the book started selling hundreds of copies a day and my life changed overnight. I had no idea. I mean, I was not ready for this as a professor. I was just working away in my office and suddenly I saw the Amazon numbers going up. I said, what does this mean? And I found out very quickly what that meant. It meant I was going to be on TV a lot and I was going to be on the radio a lot. A week after the book came out, I was on Rush Limbaugh's radio program to the great consternation of my friends in the faculty lounge. I assure you, it turns out they watched, they listened to Rush. You know, who knew? And I also started to get correspondence by email from people I'd never met before in my life. Lots and lots of emails, hundreds of thousands of emails. And in those days, I read all my email and my email was very easy to get because it was on the university website. And I remember, it was a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, I was working in my office. I was working on a data set and an email popped up from a guy in Texas. And here's what it said. It said, dear Professor Brooks, you are a right-wing fraud, which I thought was a pretty unpromising way to start an email. But I kept reading. And the first thing that I noticed was that the email was like 5,000 words long. It was going to take me 20 minutes to read this email. But gamely, I'm going through it. And the next thing I noticed is that this guy was refuting every single point in my book, chapter and verse. Things like the columns in table 3.1 are reversed, moron, stuff like that, right? And I was going through it. It was just heaping abuse on me, but every single detail in the book. And you know what thought kept going through my head as I was reading the email? Here was the thought. He read my book. So I decided to tell him that. Right? I mean, I was filled with distress and anger and humiliation. But I really wanted to tell him how thankful I was that he'd read my book. So I did. I rolled back to him. Dear so-and-so. I could refute every point and I could rebut your with rebuttals and I could, you know, I could tell you what I think about you. But I really want to tell you what's written on my heart, which is how grateful I am because you read every single word of that book. And it took me two years to write it. And I put my whole heart into it. Thank you. Send. Went back to work. 15 minutes later, his response pops back up. Dear Professor Brooks, next time you're in Dallas, if you want to get dinner, give me a call. And I said, power. I understood at that moment by accident how to turn that situation around. And that was a simulacrum for what leaders can do in the political space to achieve political peace. I want to talk more about that in a second. But first, I want to diagnose the problem we have that we've just experienced in the 2016 election in the United States, or the Brexit referendum, or what's going on all over the world. What are the roots of populism? People will tell you it's anger. People are angry. That's wrong. The reason we have so much political animus is not anger. There's always been anger. It's contempt. Contempt, according to social psychologists, is defined as the utter conviction of the worthlessness of another person. That is the perfect way for you to make a permanent enemy is contempt. Now, there's a big body of literature on this. There's a social psychologist at the University of Washington. His name is John Gottman. Some of you may have heard of him. He's the world's leading expert on marital reconciliation. He has a laboratory in which he brings couples together and saves their marriages. He's a hero, if you believe as I do, that marriage and family is the unit of analysis of a healthy society. This guy's great. He's brought together thousands of couples and saved their marriages. Okay, now, he has a trick that he can do. He'll bring a couple together. He says he can watch you and your spouse arguing over a contentious issue for five seconds with the sound turned off and tell you with 94% accuracy if you will be divorced within five years. Now, you want to know what he's looking at, don't you? You want to know the secret. Here it is. Physical expressions of contempt. Number one, eye-rolling. Now, I have three teenagers at home, so I've seen lots of eye-rolling. I mean, the problem is when equals show each other contempt, it's particularly harmful. It's almost like a physical assault. When people who work together show each other contempt, it destroys workplace harmony. When spouses do it, when world leaders do it, when people in politics do it, when people on a debate stage who want to be president of the United States do it, it creates harm for those people and to those people and to their followers. And that's what explains the roots of the political contempt, the contentious atmosphere, the toxic ecosystem that we find ourselves in is mutual expressions of constant contempt. Do we want to solve the problem? If we do, then we have to deal with contempt. Now, solving that problem doesn't mean solving it for somebody else. You know what it really starts with? It starts with me, because I feel lots of contempt. Not me, not right now. I feel lots of contempt. You know, look, I'm the president of the American Enterprise Institute and for years, I've been seeing policies at the federal level with which I disagree. You know, I mean, I'll dream about some really bad policy cooked up by the federal government and I'll wake up in the morning and open the Washington Post and what they really did is worse than my dream for me, right? I don't feel good about that. I feel contempt. The way to political reconciliation and peace is for me to cure myself of that contempt. How? How do we do it? How does each one of us as a political leader do it? Now, here's the typical answer that's wrong. Let's all come together and agree. Let's all come to the middle. We need more centrism. We need more people in the political middle. We have to take politics out of our decision making. Why is that wrong? That's wrong because that creates an undemocratic, unelected atmosphere in which unelected people, bureaucrats, run everything and that creates more contempt and more anger and more contention from the citizens. Don't believe it? Look at the torches and pitchforks all over Europe today. It has to do with the fact that people don't feel like they are being heard. Don't take disagreement out of it. Learn to disagree better. That's the right way to make this work. So I go back to my original question. How do we fight contempt? I asked that question to the wisest man I have ever met. My friend, my teacher, has holiness to Dalai Lama. See, when I was working on this, and for those of you who don't know about my institution, AEI has now a years-long relationship with Dalai Lama, where he's come to AEI several times. And we've gone to him at his monastery in Darumsala in the Himalayan foothills. And it's a wonderful relationship where we talk about the morality of free enterprise and big world issues and we dilate some of the big controversies of the day. And I value the relationship. He's become somebody where it's a friendship that I value so very much. And when I was going through this problem of contempt that I was seeing in politics, it happened to coincide with one of my visits with the Dalai Lama. And I asked him this, your holiness, what do I do when I feel contempt? And he said, show warmheartedness. I thought about it. And I thought, what else you got? Because just on its face, that sounds kind of like a fortune cookie or not really serious advice. It sounds kind of pat. But then I thought a little bit deeper. You know the Dalai Lama, the one who was kicked out of his homeland when he was a teenager at the face of brutal Chinese communist aggression. At the end of a gun sent into exile with his people, sent to live in a country in poverty, in anonymity, to be gone and forgotten. That one, that Dalai Lama. And the one over the course of his life who threw warmheartedness and kindness and love became the most respected religious leader in the world, that Dalai Lama. See, warmheartedness isn't for sissies. Warmheartedness is for strong people. That's why he told me that. That's what I remembered. Here's what he says. I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends. Warmheartedness makes your enemies your friends. You want to know what strong people do? The Dalai Lama starts every morning praying for the Chinese leaders. Not praying that they'll change the attitude toward Tibet. Praying that they will find what's right for them. That's warmheartedness. Okay, now that's what we want. That's what we can do. That's what lies in the future for us if we choose to grab it. But I need to be a little bit more practical in the time that remains for me just in front of you here today. So I want to go a little bit further in how we can do that as leaders. And there is a way, there is a way for us, there's something for us to remember such that we can turn the wheel of contempt toward gratitude. And that is, I mean, toward warmheartedness. And that is to show gratitude. I read a book years ago, you've read it too. It's the most important book that you've read with a terrible title and that you've forgotten. Okay, there's a lot in there. It's How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. It sounds like a, it sounds terrible, you know, self-improvement. It's really tacky. It's downscale. It's not suitable for people of our intellectual caliber, right? Wrong, read it again. It's a guide to ethical living. It's a guide to happiness. I recommend it very strongly to you. You read it in high school, go back and read it again. It'll change your life, actually. And there's one point in that book. It's a beautiful moment where Dale Carnegie, his research method, this is in the 1920s, he's going all over the United States to find the most successful people and find their secrets to success. And he's in New York and he goes to see the most famous magician of the age. See, in those days in Broadway, they had these lavish vaudeville variety acts. They didn't have, you know, big musicals. And there was this guy, his name was Howard Thurston. He had been performing on Broadway for the last 40 years. The most absolutely just world famous guy. We've forgotten him today by Google him. You know, that's how you find everything. And you'll find Howard, the amazing Howard Thurston. Super famous, very rich. He went to see Howard Thurston and he wanted to see what does he do that's so special. And he watched the act and it was just rabbits out of hats and card tricks and the whole thing. But here was the secret. Howard Thurston was laughing alongside his audience. Howard Thurston looked like it was his very first night. He was a bullion. He was magical in his outlook and not just in his tricks. So later, Dale Carnegie went to the dressing room and said, Mr. Thurston, I'm writing a book about the most successful people in the world and you're the greatest magician of your age. What's the secret to making it look like it's the first night even though you've been doing those tricks for 40 years? Oh, simple. Simple. Every night before I go out on stage, I say in my dressing room, I am truly grateful for the people sitting in those seats because they make it possible for me to do something for a living that I love. That, my friends, is the secret. Why do we bring that kind of gratitude up? Because who are the people in those seats for you? They're people you disagree with in a democratic capitalist society. None of us wants to live in a one-party state. None of us wants to vanquish people who disagree with us once and for all. We don't want that in the United States and in Europe and democracies around the world. We want a vital competition of ideas even though we disagree with others. You know what that means? We need people with whom we disagree and we should be grateful to them. We should be grateful to live in countries where there's no knock in the night and there's no jackbooted thug just because we have differing political views. When was the last time that you expressed gratitude, interior gratitude, for that? If you do, you simply cannot feel contempt toward those with whom you disagree. That's the beginning. The gratitude toward the system that makes this possible, to the people who gave their lives and gave their careers to make that possible, and the people on the other side of the aisle who are going to tell you that they think you're wrong, but they're not going to shoot you. That's a wonderful thing and it's a beautiful thing for which we should be grateful, for which we should be warm-hearted, and that should wipe out the contempt and be the beginning of the peace. Now, I know this is an unusual talk from the president of a think tank that does pure public policy. It's an even weirder talk from an economist like me, right? But I took the opportunity to do it today because if we think differently as leaders and we act differently and we show these values, then a better political future is possible in our countries and it starts with us. Thank you.