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March 10, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show

01:03:46

Arthur Brooks | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 41

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	I asked none other than the Dalai Lama, and I said, what do I do when I feel contempt for another person?
	He said, show warmheartedness.
	And I thought, you got anything else?
	Welcome to the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special.
	We are eager to welcome to the program Arthur Brooks.
	He's the author of a new book, Love Your Enemies.
	He's also the head of the American Enterprise Institute.
	We'll get to his new book and all sorts of life-changing topics in just a second.
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	Arthur, thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate it.
	Thank you, Ben.
	I'm just so happy to be here.
	I gotta tell you, I have teenage kids.
	I have two sons.
	One's a junior at Princeton, and one is a farmer in Idaho, and they both think you're cooler than I am.
	Wow, that's very flattering, and I really appreciate it.
	Well, you know, your book is called Love Your Enemies, and it says how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt.
	And I have to get the elephant In the room out of the way immediately, which is that people are going to be asking how is it that Ben Shapiro of Ben Shapiro destroys blank fame could possibly be interviewing you and taking seriously the question of loving your enemies, people who disagree with you.
	And so I want to go through sort of what you mean by loving your enemies and also what is the best way to do that in a really fraught culture.
	So let's start with the basics.
	How did you come up with this idea that the biggest problem we have in the culture is us not loving our enemies?
	Well, as I'm looking around, and look, we've been going through the same trials and the same tribulations.
	Those of us who are on the political right, we've seen a lot of bad things happen.
	We've seen just the way that the whole discourse has been spoiled, and not just by people on the other side, by people on our own side as well.
	I thought to myself, you know, what's the big problem?
	And people say, well, we need more civility.
	or we need more tolerance, that's garbage.
	We don't need more civility.
	I mean, if I said, "Hey Ben, my wife Esther and I, "we're civil to each other." You'd be like, "Oh man, dude, you need some counseling." Or my employees at the American Enterprise Institute, they tolerate me and say, "Bad scene, man." These are not high enough standards, basically.
	I started thinking to myself, what do we need?
	Well, when you go back to the sacred texts, but the pillars of philosophy in the West, what you find is that there's this subversive teaching, which is basically to love your enemies.
	This comes from the Gospel of St.
	Matthew, the fifth chapter, the 44th verse, where Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies.
	Why?
	Well, Martin Luther King actually sorted it out for the modern era.
	When you love your enemies, you find out they weren't Your enemies after all.
	You know, people will say that, you know, when they look at the internet, they say, you know, Ben Shapiro destroys.
	One of the things I happen to know is you're not using that language.
	And when I watch you up on stage, you're tough.
	You're going hammer and tongs after the people who disagree with you.
	But by and large, I think that you're engaging with ideas and not treating the people with contempt.
	And I admire that.
	Could you be better?
	Could I be better?
	For sure.
	But in point of fact, I think we're going in the same direction.
	I think we're trying to make progress in the same way.
	So let's talk about what it means for someone to be your enemy.
	So, you make the point in the book that there are people who obviously are enemies, right?
	I mean, they're obviously Islamofascists, they're members of the Taliban.
	Are those people that we should love?
	I mean, how do we deal with, are there gradations, in other words, to the enemies that we ought to love?
	Are there the domestic political enemies, meaning, you know, President Trump's enemy of the people press, and Democrats versus Republicans?
	Or are there like a legitimate group of people that it's okay not to love?
	There are gradations, of course.
	And the main point that I'm making here, when I'm talking about how decent people can save America from the culture of contempt, I'm largely talking for an American audience where we have started to suffer from something that political scientists call motive attribution asymmetry.
	Big fancy term so that academics like me can get tenure.
	But basically what it means is that when you feel that you're motivated in your ideology by love, but the other side is motivated by hatred.
	Now this is something you typically see in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, but what political scientists are finding for the very first time is that Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals are displaying the same level of motive attribution asymmetry As Israelis and the Palestinians.
	In other words, we're treating each other internally in American politics as the other, as the enemy.
	And this is not anger.
	Anger is fine.
	Anger is literally not correlated with separation and divorce among married couples.
	The problem is contempt, the conviction of the utter worthlessness of the other person.
	That's what we see.
	And so I'm talking to a largely American audience.
	This obviously has gradations.
	We're talking about warfare and people overseas that want to kill us.
	But I'm telling you, when I'm looking at somebody on the political left in the United States, I can disagree.
	But that person should not be treated with contempt.
	Not by me, not by you, not by anybody watching us.
	And if we can get past that, that is the source of our strength.
	And I'll admit, when I read the book, I mostly see my own shortcomings in it, things that I can do better.
	And you tell the story in the book of the first time that you sort of experienced the use of love in order to overcome what you felt was somebody who was attacking you, somebody who wrote you a long email going after one of your previous books, and how you responded to that.
	I wonder if you might want to tell that story.
	Yeah, so, I mean, this happened a long time ago, and it was, I was actually, I recalled this because I asked none other than the Dalai Lama, while I was making this documentary film, and I said, what do I do when I feel contempt for another person?
	He said, Show warm-heartedness.
	And I thought, you got anything else?
	Because it seemed sort of weak to me.
	But then I remembered, I mean, Dalai Lama is a tough person.
	He was exiled as a teenager from his homeland in Tibet.
	He was just rolled over by the communist Chinese.
	And he spent every day for the last six decades starting each morning praying for the communist Chinese leaders that they'll live good and happy lives.
	That's toughness.
	And I said, well, how do I do that?
	And he said, remember a time when you accidentally did it.
	So I thought back to 2006.
	I was a professor at Syracuse University in those days, and I had just written a book.
	I'd written a lot of books, but nobody'd ever read them because they were very boring.
	And I was living a happy professorial existence, and I wrote this one book that hit the news cycle in just the right way.
	I think President Bush read it, and it got into the news, and I was on the news every day.
	It was weird.
	It happens to academics sometimes.
	I started selling hundreds of copies a day.
	My life changed kind of permanently, as a matter of fact.
	And the weirdest part is I started to get emails from people I'd never met.
	So I get an email from a guy, I mean, hundreds.
	When you have a book, you know how this feels.
	When you have a book that's selling, people feel like they know you, and if they don't like your book, they don't like you.
	So I started getting emails from people.
	I loved your book, I want to tell you about my grandma, you know, all that kind of stuff.
	My email was very easy to get, and I heard from people who didn't like it as well.
	Okay, two weeks after the book comes out, I get an email from a guy in Texas.
	Dear Professor Brooks, you are a right-wing fraud.
	Bad way to start an email.
	But I keep reading, and I notice this email is like, 2,000 words long.
	No, more.
	5,000 words.
	It's going to take me 20 minutes to read this email.
	But as I'm reading it, you know, and I'm, you know, I'm game, and he's insulting everything.
	Like, did you know that the, I think that the columns are in three, table 3.1 are reversed, you idiot, and stuff like this.
	And as I'm reading through the email, this thing is going through my head.
	He read my book!
	I was filled with gratitude.
	Why?
	Because it had taken me two years to write it, and he'd read every word.
	So I decided, you know, I'm just going to tell him what's written on my heart.
	I got nothing to lose.
	I'm never going to see him.
	So I write him back, you're so-and-so.
	Took me two years to write that book.
	I put my whole heart into it.
	You read every word.
	I'm so grateful to you.
	Thank you.
	Send.
	And then I go back to work.
	Fifteen minutes later, his response pops back up.
	Ding.
	Open up the email.
	Dear Professor Brooks, next time you're in Texas, if you want to get some dinner, give me a call.
	Huh, that's power.
	What it turns out was that, and look, it took me a long time to remember that because I was stimulated in that memory by His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
	But once I did, I never forgot.
	I remember the feeling of not just a power, but of warmth.
	You know, and his point is when somebody treats you with contempt, and Ben, man, you're going to be treated with contempt like, Next time you go out in public, because I've seen it, and you're super good at responding to ideas.
	But you're going to be treated with contempt.
	You're going to get a choice.
	I can answer with contempt, or I can answer with love.
	No, no, no.
	To answer with love does not mean to agree with the person.
	We have a responsibility to say what we think.
	Why?
	Because ideas have consequences.
	And misguided ideas have deleterious consequences for society.
	But when you answer somebody with whom you disagree with enough respect to show them the disagreement and to do it with love, you'll change at least one heart, and that's Ben's heart, and that's Arthur's heart, and maybe, maybe the other person's heart as well. - So what do you do when somebody comes at you, and it's not just a contemptuous argument about your ideas, what if somebody comes at you, and the way that people have tended to do this lately is to call you legitimately morally deficient.
	So you give the example of, you're somebody who is pro-gun rights.
	And the implication is put forward after Sandy Hook that the reason that you are pro-gun rights is because you don't care enough about dead children.
	Or the reason that you believe what you believe on welfare policy is because you're a vicious racist.
	How should you respond to that?
	How is it possible to be warm hearted?
	Now, I'll admit, my typical strategy when someone calls me a racist is to say, "Well, you're acting like a jackass.
	"You have no evidence that I'm a racist." Obviously, you are now acting like a jackass because attacking people without evidence makes you such.
	Right.
	That's a pretty hostile way to do it, but it feels like the only way sometimes to shake people out of the stupor of slandering people with those sorts of names.
	And I also am worried that if I say, listen, let me explain to you all the reasons why I'm not a racist.
	I've already lost the argument.
	I can't grant credibility to even the statement because the statement is so off base.
	What's the best way to handle something like this?
	So, yeah, when somebody says, you're a racist, or, you know, prove to me you're not a racist, it's like, it's when did you stop beating your wife?
	I mean, it's just, it's an unanswerable question because the premise is entirely wrong.
	Okay, now, the first thing to remember is that in point of fact, the person is behaving like a jackass.
	And you're utterly within your rights to say so, but that misses a core opportunity.
	You take the person on very, very vigorously, but in terms that basically says, I understand the position that you're coming from, which is that you have a huge concern about racism in our society, and I share that concern with you.
	Don't even take on the charge that Ben Shapiro's a racist.
	That's idiotic and everybody knows it.
	But the opportunity is this.
	Look, when you're on a college campus or you're in the mainstream media and people are watching, there are a ton of people out there.
	They're not hostile.
	They're also not true believers of Ben Shapiro.
	You've got a ton of true believers, but a lot of people are not.
	They're persuadable.
	They're open.
	They're skeptical, but they're open.
	How are those people going to be persuaded?
	They're going to be persuaded by the force, not just of the force of your arguments, but the way that you make those arguments, the mercy that emanates from your heart, the love that you actually show, the respect that you show for other Americans.
	Look, those people who are attacking you, They're not all bad people.
	They're really concerned about legitimate things.
	They just don't know how to express it in the right way.
	And they've never gotten proper direction to treat another human being with respect.
	So you can turn it around and say, look, I don't like the way you just talked to me, but I do share the concerns that are written on your heart.
	So I'm going to talk about those concerns because I think I've got a better way to address them that maybe even you do.
	But at very least, I want you to consider those things.
	Who's going to be watching that?
	The persuadable people in the audience.
	They're going to go, huh.
	Ben Shapiro, no horns, man.
	I want to know more.
	So one of the things that you talk about in Love Your Enemies is the fact that the amount of contempt in our politics has been rising very, very rapidly of recent vintage.
	Do you think that that's a result of the polarization of politics, or do you think that polarization in politics is a result of the contempt?
	I feel like it's a bit of a chicken or the egg question.
	Yeah, I think it's what economists would call an endogenous situation, where one is actually causing the other, and we're in a vicious cycle.
	And that again, once again, is a big opportunity, because once you cut the cycle, it's no longer downwardly spiraling, and it requires that people who are in the public eye.
	I mean, I'm very blessed to be in a position where I get to talk in public, you even more, and you have millions of people who are watching this show.
	And you can actually cut that cycle of contempt and show other people, more importantly, how to do it.
	Because, you know, what you say, people are going to, they're going to follow you because you're a leader under those circumstances.
	So sure, polarization leads to contempt.
	Contempt leads to more polarization.
	This is actually how all relationships deteriorate.
	I have a friend, his name is John Gottman.
	He teaches at the University of Washington.
	He's the world's leading expert on marital reconciliation.
	The guy's a hero.
	He's brought thousands of people back together who would have otherwise gotten divorced.
	And one of the many things you and I agree on is that a good society must be based on stable, happy families that have love for each other.
	So this guy, I mean, he really is a modern-day hero.
	And he notes that what predicts divorce is not anger at all.
	I mean, thank God I'm married to a Spaniard.
	Arguments don't lead to divorce.
	We've had thousands and thousands of them over the past 28 years.
	What leads to divorce is treating other people like you have contempt for that person.
	Eye-rolling, sarcasm, contemptuous humor, derisive jokes.
	These are the things that really predict divorce.
	I mean, John Gottman can counsel somebody for an hour, counsel a couple for an hour, and know with more than 90% accuracy if they'll be divorced within three years by looking for those signs of contempt.
	And those are the same things that destroy relationships at all different levels.
	Friendships, collegial relationships, and in point of fact, that's what's happening in America today.
	That's the reason that people can't talk to each other, that one in six Americans have literally stopped talking to a close friend or family member because of the election of 2016.
	That's way worse than politics.
	That's a crisis of love.
	When it comes to this problem of contempt, one of the questions I guess I have is that it's very tied, I think, to humor.
	So, if you wanted to look at, you know, the chief progenitors of contempt in American politics, I really wouldn't look to our politicians first.
	I'd look to somebody like Jon Stewart, because Jon Stewart spent years basically showing a clip of somebody making a face at that person, and then that was the cue for the audience to laugh.
	Now, we all enjoy that.
	Is there a way to separate out humor from contempt, or is it just we need to stop treating politics as entertainment more generally?
	Well, there's nothing wrong with humor.
	The problem is mockery.
	And mocking another person is trying to hurt that person.
	It's trying to belittle that other person.
	And it's really tempting.
	Yes, I give incident temptation regularly.
	I do, too.
	I do, too.
	You know, guilty.
	And one of the things that stimulated this book, Love Your Enemies, is I saw myself on TV behaving with contempt and treating somebody with mockery, using humor.
	I mean, I've been telling jokes my whole life.
	I was the wisecracking kid in the back of the class.
	When I was growing up, I mean, that's the reason it took me until I was 30 to graduate from college, but that's another story.
	And okay, and I saw myself doing it and I thought, that's not right.
	That is, that actually, I'm not living up to my own values.
	I mean, these people are, they disagree with me, but they're, they're not evil and they're certainly not stupid.
	And, and, you know, The key moment came for me, Ben, and I'm sure you've had this experience too.
	I was at this political activist rally in 2014, a couple of years before the 2016 election.
	And, you know, I do like 175 speeches a year.
	I'm on the road all the time.
	Being the president of a think tank is like not much thinking in tanks.
	It's mostly, you know, on the road, sitting on planes.
	And I was talking to this group of activists, and I said in my talk, you know, I want you to remember, look, we agree.
	I said to this group, you know, they were very conservative.
	I said, we agree on economic policy and foreign policy, but I want you to remember the people who are not here because they don't agree.
	They're political progressives.
	And I want you to remember they're not stupid.
	They're not evil.
	They're just Americans who disagree with us on politics.
	And this lady afterwards, she said, actually, they're stupid and evil.
	It was actually kind of funny, but I thought to myself, that's not where I want to be because I can't make progress.
	I'm in the business of persuading people so that we can get more dignity, so that people can be lifted up in their dignity and so we can explore the limitlessness of human potential that we can do.
	That's what America is supposed to be all about.
	That's what our culture is really.
	That's why the Shapiros, who I suppose three generations ago were probably like bailing out of some godforsaken shtetl someplace and, you know, coming someplace where they could build their lives.
	They wanted someplace where they had radically equal human dignity.
	And the Brookses too, by the way, who are moving west one step ahead of the law.
	And now look at you and me.
	I mean, we actually get to sit here talking about ideas in front of hundreds of thousands or millions of people.
	What a privilege.
	We can't waste it.
	We got to bring people in and show them the blessing that really is this country.
	That's the point of your new book, which is such an important book.
	- Thank you. - The blessing of what the West really can bring and how we can celebrate these ideas to lift other people up. - Well, in a second, I wanna ask you about the efficacy of contempt because I wanna ask if there's a market advantage to contempt.
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	All right.
	So when it comes to contempt-- Finally, he's going to talk faster than me.
	Exactly.
	When it comes to contempt, the fact is that there is a feeling in modern American politics that contempt is effective business.
	An ounce of contempt can destroy a bevy of arguments.
	And contempt for ideas particularly can help destroy a bevy of arguments.
	It's shorthand.
	You can just skip the argument entirely.
	Or you can just completely destroy an actual idea through use of contempt.
	And then by leaving that out of your arsenal, you're basically surrendering to the other side.
	And I think that that's where you're seeing a lot of the passion come from on the right, particularly when you have folks who are being hit with the intersectional identity politics or group politics, being called racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes.
	And they just want to say, listen, socialism is dumb.
	Socialism is evil.
	Are there some ideas that are so bad, in other words, that they have earned contempt even in the current contemporary debate, do you think?
	There are lots of ideas that have earned contempt, to be sure, but there are no people in America who've earned contempt.
	So how do we distinguish that?
	Because I really want to dig in on this, because I think that we live in a time where ideas are so tied into our own identity.
	And we've convinced ourselves really since the 60s that the personal is the political, and that my politics are me.
	So if you and I disagree on tax rates, and then I attack your tax policy, and I say, you know, I think it's a foolish tax policy, I think it's fallen apart everywhere it's tried, then you take that as a personal affront, and now my contempt for your idea has been interpreted as contempt for you.
	Is there a way around that?
	There is, and there is absolutely, because the personal isn't the political.
	Ideas are not people.
	People have ideas and ideas can change society and they really affect people a lot.
	But the most important thing is that we are autonomous individuals, that we are people, that we can generate ideas.
	And until we can separate out people from ideas, we're going to continue in this really terrible cycle.
	So how do we do that?
	By modeling that.
	This is an incredible source of power.
	Now, it's much easier to go contemptuous on a particular person and to destroy a particular person.
	But let's remember, it's ultimately a self-defeating proposition if we're trying to bring more people into our way of thinking.
	What it does is it locks down our particular base.
	And we have a president of the United States who's good at base locking.
	We have his entire opposition in the Democratic Party, 57,000 people who are running for president in the Democratic ticket at this point.
	All but a couple are basically using the same rhetorical techniques as President Trump.
	But that's an ultimately self-defeating proposition because what you've got is warring tribes.
	You're never going to actually bring people into a meaty coalition of those who share certain values such that we can make progress until you can persuade other people.
	What does that take?
	That takes leadership by guys like you and me.
	People who actually have an audience of people out there who are listening to the way that we communicate with other people, who see us pass on the opportunity to treat other people with contempt, to vigorously assert the correctness or incorrectness of particular ideas.
	I'm not saying we have to agree.
	On the contrary, agreement leads to mediocrity and stagnation.
	It's a kind of a monopoly.
	You know, countries where everybody agrees, they go no place.
	We believe in competition in markets and in politics.
	It's called democracy in sports and especially the competition of ideas.
	When something's wrong, you got to say it.
	When something's dangerous, you have to articulate that.
	But separating that out from the individual and always showing love toward the individual, that's a true source of strength.
	It's hard to do.
	It's hard to do.
	I'm trying to do it.
	That's why I wrote the book.
	But when you can do that, and when I can do that, people will follow, and that's the beginning of a movement.
	It seems like a lot of that is really tied down to interpersonal contact, meaning that it's much easier to have conversations with people in person, via phone, than it is over social media.
	Social media seems like a machine for spinning up contempt, especially Twitter, where you've got 280 characters now to say what you've got to say, get it off your chest.
	I remember there was a situation recently where I got into a little bit of an online debate with Pete Buttigieg, who's one of the guys running for president on the Democratic side, one of the 57,000.
	And it started to go sideways, and at a certain point I said, why don't you just come on the Sunday special?
	I'm glad we engaged.
	And suddenly it was diffused because it was an actual invite.
	Did he do it?
	Is he going to?
	He's not reached out.
	I've asked him.
	We'll see if he does.
	I'd love to have him on.
	I mean, really, we're always looking for Democrats to come on.
	But they are afraid, specifically, of the kind of antipathy that they think they're going to receive.
	Or maybe they just don't want to be challenged.
	But I'm happy to have folks on the Democratic left on the show, for sure.
	But it was that feeling of diffusing that came from, I had a name, he had a name.
	You talk in the book about the culture of anonymous social media and how Counterproductive it is to the kind of anti-contempt you're looking for.
	I was hoping maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
	Yeah, for sure.
	So I'm on social media, you're on social media, you have tons of people who are following you on social media.
	And there's a real temptation when we're on social media, and you know, we're dealing with one-on-one people, we have lots of friends, we have lots of people who disagree with us.
	You know, if I were to ask everybody watching us today, how many of you love somebody with whom you disagree politically?
	All the hands would go up.
	And that's, I mean, I hope.
	I mean, practically all the hands, except for the people who are not listening or not getting out of the house enough.
	And yet on social media, we de- what political scientists or what social scientists call de-individuation.
	It's dehumanization.
	We dehumanize ourselves by becoming anonymous.
	And as such, we lower our moral standards.
	I mean, we're here in the Los Angeles area.
	I live in Washington, D.C., and one of the big problems that we have is people are terrible to each other in traffic.
	I've got a way where I could solve that, where everybody has to put their name on a bumper sticker on the back of their car and their house of worship.
	Right?
	It's like, wow, I just got flipped off by, you know, Mike Smith from Our Lady of Sorrows.
	I mean, it's unlikely, right?
	So, you know, so the problem that we have on social media is the ultimate traffic problem, where people de-individuate themselves, they dehumanize themselves, they lower their moral standards, and they engage in behavior they don't like.
	Well, then they're gearing it toward people who really are publicly putting forth their actual identity.
	Ben Shapiro, Arthur Brooks.
	And so the tendency is for us to say, well, that jerk.
	Not only is he wrong, he's rude.
	And so I'm going to come back at him.
	I'm going to come back at him hard.
	But in so doing, what you've done is you've taken on a phantom.
	You've taken on somebody who doesn't actually exist.
	So one of the things that I recommend, I mean, for the self-preservation of these social media companies, they're going to have to stop giving platforms to anonymous users.
	Because little by little, people are figuring out that social media is no fun and is decrementing their happiness.
	Good studies show that more hours on social media, less happiness.
	And by the way, that's also true for Ben and Arthur.
	Oh, yeah.
	Thank God for Sabbath for me.
	Yeah, for sure.
	For sure.
	Between Friday night and Saturday night, all of it goes off.
	I know.
	Maybe four days of Sabbath.
	Yeah, really?
	The social media is appropriate.
	Really?
	Yeah, so that's important.
	I've had these exact conversations with my wife.
	How do I minimize the number of hours that I'm actually on Twitter?
	Because there is definitely an inverse proportion between the amount of time on Twitter and human happiness.
	Oh, for sure.
	Absolutely.
	And you feel your chest tightening and, you know, people, what they don't understand is, you know, they're just some guy sitting on his sofa and he's called Bernie Bro 2020 or something.
	And he goes after Ben Shapiro.
	Well, you know, Ben Shapiro is a flesh and blood guy, you know, and Arthur Brooks has got actual feelings and we get used to it.
	So it's kind of okay.
	But in point of fact, it's a mistake for us to engage at all with people who are anonymous because you're going after people that in a very real way, in a very human way, They don't exist.
	You gotta love your enemies, by which I mean people who, it turns out, weren't your enemies, but those are people.
	And people who will not divulge their identities or give part of anything, anything of their humanity, anything of their story, they're saying I'm actually not a human being.
	For all you know, it's a Russian Twitter bot, and so not worth engaging.
	So, in your book you talk about, and we've talked a little bit here, about the gradations in terms of, you know, who's worthy of contempt.
	So the Taliban, worthy of contempt.
	But, you know, in the United States, the idea is that we are, while we think that we may be enemies, we're actually not enemies, we're brothers in the sort of Lincolnian formulation.
	I want to ask if that's really true.
	And the reason I want to ask that is because as certain people on both sides become more radical, I think right now the left is moving in a radical direction faster than the right is.
	Donald Trump is actually in policy somewhat of a moderate Republican.
	The left seems to be moving pretty dramatically in a far left direction, including embrace of democratic socialism.
	You talk about these sort of moral values that you still think unite Americans.
	What do you think those moral values are?
	And are you overstating the case?
	Do you think that we have more in common than we may actually have in common?
	I may be overstating the case, but I want to err on that side.
	Why?
	Because one of the things that I've noticed is that leaders throughout history who are truly aspirational, they're not populist.
	Because, you know, populism is fundamentally not leadership, it's followership.
	It's basically, and you've made this point a hundred times, I stole this from Ben Shapiro, but there's a parade going down the street, a populist is a guy who says, there's a parade, I better get out in front of it, they need a leader.
	Leadership is something that says there's a better future.
	Can you see it?
	There's a guy who teaches at Harvard Business School named Daniel Goleman.
	And he talks about authoritative leadership, which is not, you must come with me.
	It's not coercive.
	It says, do you see a better future?
	Maybe people don't want it.
	But in point of fact, you have to look at the horizon.
	You have to look at the moral horizon.
	You have to say, this is something better.
	And to hold Americans to their highest and best values.
	That's a good thing to do.
	Are we there?
	No.
	Am I there?
	Not every day.
	But I want to be there, and I want America to be there, and so I'm looking for what I think is kind of the moral DNA of this country.
	And the moral DNA of this country unambiguously believes in the radical equality of human dignity.
	Why?
	Because you make this point in your new book.
	Everybody's got to get this book.
	Because it talks about how these Judeo-Christian values, these Western values, are a gift to the world.
	People, even if they're not religious, we have a lot of people watching us who are atheists, who are secular completely, but they believe in the equality of human dignity.
	Why?
	Because we have a culture that's based on the idea that each one of us is made in God's image.
	God is worthy of respect.
	That's the essence of dignity.
	And so each one of us is worthy of dignity.
	That's what Americans actually believe.
	Furthermore, the reason that the people came here in the first place is because we believe in the limitlessness of human potential.
	So let's call Americans the dignity and potential.
	Are they living up to it?
	No.
	Will they ever live up to it completely?
	Not in my lifetime.
	But I'm going to work in a social movement, in an intellectual movement, in a media movement.
	I'm going to work with you.
	We're going to work together to try to help Americans live up to those standards, even though we haven't hit them yet.
	I mean, I certainly agree with all of that.
	I wonder if there are active opponents to some of that.
	And the reason I say that is because you point out Jonathan Haidt's moral matrix.
	Jonathan's been on the program, Professor Haidt, and we talked about the five factors, maybe six if you include liberty, which he added later.
	And you talk about how conservatives and liberals still believe in a couple of them.
	Compassion and fairness.
	Compassion and fairness.
	But even those ones, As Professor Haidt has recognized, are seen in almost diametrically opposed ways.
	So fairness for conservatives is fairness in the meritocratic sense, the idea that we all have equal rights but that the outcome is not going to be equal.
	And fairness for many on the democratic side is fairness of outcome, which is directly opposed to fairness of meritocracy.
	When it comes to compassion, on the right side of the aisle, the value system tends to be, well, compassion is me helping you find a job, develop a skill set, care for yourself.
	And compassion on the left side of the aisle is, how do I create a system whereby you don't have to care for yourself, whereby we are caring for you?
	That's real compassion.
	So if that's the case, then even the most basic values, the ones that are necessary for us to be playing the same game, so to speak, Have those been radically undermined, or do you think that there are bridges that can still be built?
	I think there are bridges.
	And the reason is because, let's take something like fairness, where the right really does focus on meritocratic fairness.
	It's, don't take something that somebody else earned.
	And the left really does focus much more on redistributive fairness.
	The idea of redistributing, somebody has more, somebody has less, the person who has less needs more, you take it from the person who has more.
	Okay, I got it.
	But that doesn't mean that you and I, who are guys on the center right or on the right, Don't believe in any redistribution.
	That's wrong.
	You believe that there should be a welfare state and so do I. I mean, I believe that the free enterprise system, one of the greatest accomplishments ever of the free enterprise system was our ability to support people we've never even met.
	It's an incredible thing that no system in history has been able to accomplish and it's because of capitalism.
	Because of the largesse that came from capitalism, and it's such a blessing.
	I'm so proud of it.
	And that means I believe in some amount of redistribution.
	I'm just more meritocratic in that balance.
	You know, I know a ton of people on the left.
	I have tons of friends and family.
	I mean, I used to be a musician and a college professor, and I come from Seattle, Washington, for Pete's sake.
	I know a lot of people on the left.
	And they don't think that merit's garbage.
	They think that America's great because they want their kids to achieve, and they're kind of proud to live in a country where people can start companies and do great things.
	They just, they want a little bit more redistribution.
	Now, you find radicals, and when I say this, I mean that approximately, depending on how you count it, the 7% of people who are true polarizing radicals in this country who don't see any common ground.
	But if 93% of us, give or take, I actually do believe that there can be some common ground, that we can work together in some way, shape, or form, that I'm going to be bridging that meritocratic redistributive divide, and I'm going to be really forgiving.
	I'm going to be as generous as I possibly can to the people who don't agree quite as much with my meritocratic values, so that I can try to get some fairness that bridges that gap.
	And I think it can be done.
	Okay, so in a second I want to ask you where you came from because your story is really fascinating and I want people to hear how you got from French horn to what you do now.
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	So, I want to ask you about your personal story, because as a person who also grew up as a classical musician, your story is pretty amazing.
	I mean, you started off as a musician in Spain playing the French horn, and here you are doing public policy and data analysis.
	How did you get from one place to the other?
	It's not the typical path, and it's certainly not linear.
	I mean, when you say, how do you become the president of a big national think tank, the answer is not, you know, play the French horn.
	I started classical music when I was four years old.
	This is a typical story.
	I mean, you're from the arts, too.
	I started violin when I was four, piano when I was five, French horn, which I was really good at, it turns out, when I was nine.
	And from that moment, I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player.
	That was my real ambition.
	I just grew up wanting to do this.
	When I was 19, I was in college.
	I spent a little less than one year in college.
	It was the California Institute of the Arts, right here outside of Los Angeles, in Valencia, up in the Santa Clarita Valley.
	It was a pretty unrewarding experience, I think, not just for me, but also pretty unrewarding for the institution.
	And they offered me an opportunity to earn my success elsewhere.
	And so I went out on the road as a professional.
	I started playing chamber music all around the United States.
	I did that for about seven months a year, from 19 until I was 25.
	I played a couple of years with a jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird.
	We had a group called Bird and Brass, which was fantastic.
	And when I was 25, I got a job in the Barcelona Orchestra.
	And the reason, actually, I did that, by the way, was a total startup endeavor.
	I met a girl.
	And I met her when I was on a tour in Europe, and she lived in Barcelona, and the only way I was going to have a bid at trying to, you know, I had to go all in.
	I had to quit my job, move to a place where I never learned the language.
	I'd known her for a week at this point, but, you know, I called up my dad's dad.
	This gives you a little bit of insight into the warped world here.
	I said, Dad, I met the girl I think I'm going to marry.
	She says, great.
	I said, not so great.
	She doesn't live in the United States.
	She doesn't speak a word of English.
	And she doesn't know this.
	And I don't want a restraining order.
	Anyway, so I quit my job.
	I moved to Spain, joined the Barcelona Orchestra.
	And we're about to celebrate our 28th wedding anniversary.
	OK, so it worked out.
	Yeah, so it totally did.
	We have three kids, two of whom are teenagers.
	But I'm not here to tell you my problems.
	Anyway.
	As I said, they're big fans of Ben Shapiro, so that's great stuff.
	But when I got to Barcelona, I thought to myself, you know, I want to do something more.
	I dropped out of college.
	That kind of bugged me.
	I got nothing against not going to college.
	All kinds of good lives can happen without going to college.
	But for me, I kind of felt like I'd screwed it up and I'd failed.
	So I went back and started studying by correspondence.
	And I got my bachelor's degree in economics, and I had this weird epiphany.
	This is why I love your new book so much because it really spoke to me.
	It reminded me of this epiphany I had in my late 20s when I was studying for my bachelor's degree.
	I took economics for the first time and I learned this crazy thing that 80% of the world's poverty had been eradicated since I was a kid.
	I thought that hunger was worse.
	I thought that the world was worse.
	And furthermore, I thought capitalism was great for rich people and bad for poor people.
	And I grew up in a left-wing environment, and I knew nobody who cared about economics or business, but I was learning that two billion of my brothers and sisters had been pulled out of poverty since I was a child.
	And I learned That it came from five things.
	Five things.
	And all economists, left, right, and center, this is not controversial stuff.
	This is not propaganda.
	Five things pulled two billion of Ben and Arthur's brothers and sisters out of poverty since 1970.
	It was globalization, free trade, property rights, the rule of law, and the culture of free enterprise spreading from America all around the world.
	And I thought, huh.
	You know, my favorite composer in those days was Johann Sebastian Bach.
	You know, the greatest composer who ever lived.
	And he was asked, near the end of his life, why do you write music?
	His answer was, the aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul.
	And I thought to myself, how can I answer like Bach?
	I wasn't answering like Bach as a French horn player in the orchestra.
	I thought, I want to do something that glorifies God and that refreshes the lives of other people.
	And I became an economist.
	From the sublime to the dismal, man.
	Bach made me into an economist.
	And then I got my PhD.
	I taught for 10 years.
	And then I became president of the greatest think tank in the world, the American Enterprise Institute, where people fight every day for dignity, for potential, and who believe that the free enterprise system is America's gift to the world.
	But in an artistic way, because the fact is that, unlike most economists, you're a story-driven person.
	You talk about this in Love Your Enemies.
	The idea that story is really what connects us, and while you can know all the stats that you want to know, in the end, what's really going to allow you to connect to other people is the ability to identify with them on a one-to-one level.
	Absolutely.
	The truth is, it's funny.
	When you're trained as an economist, you start believing that the force of your arguments is going to win people over.
	And I wish it did, but I lost arguments for 15 years.
	People would talk to me about the minimum wage.
	And I would say, "Don't you understand supply and demand "and you're raising the cost of labor?" And people would say, "You're just a hard-hearted something, something.
	"And you just wanna put more dollars "in the CEO of Walmart's pocket or something." And I thought, "No," until I realized I needed to tell a human story.
	Look, I mean, the people who really want to fight for a higher minimum wage, God bless them, they have a really good intention.
	You know, there was a long time when people on the political left weren't fighting to make work pay.
	And people who want a higher minimum wage, they're fighting to make work pay.
	That's a really good objective, until I finally had enough generosity to say, that's an excellent objective.
	I completely agree with that, because work brings purpose.
	Work brings meaning.
	You've had Mike Rowe on your show.
	Work brings dignity in every single job.
	Every single job is a blessing and it's good.
	There's no debt in jobs, right?
	So, okay, so I really respect that particular objective of the people who want to increase the minimum wage.
	They're just worried about the ability of people at the minimum wage to be able to support themselves and their families.
	I'm worried about that, too.
	So let's talk about a better way to get it done that doesn't imperil the people at the very bottom of the wage ladder to keep their jobs.
	Let's find better policies, and let's find more open economic systems.
	Let's share the objective, and let's differ.
	Let's have a competition of ideas about the way to actually meet that objective.
	That story's about real people, and that's rocked my world, man.
	That's completely changed my work.
	Well, you talk a lot in the book, at least in the beginning, about the 2016 election, what you think happened there, what drove the president, because Trump breaks a lot of these rules, right?
	President Trump is a master of the use of contempt.
	It drips from everything that he says.
	He can be vicious and brutal and very effective in his political warfare.
	And you talk specifically about sort of a group of folks who you believe felt dispossessed by current politics and were looking for a leader to kind of restore a feeling for them.
	And you specifically are talking about Yeah, that's a great question.
	Something that I've contemplated a lot.
	What did I get wrong?
	is with non-college educated white males.
	And it seems like if you're anti-contempt, what do people across the spectrum, including this group of people, need to think about?
	Yeah, that's a great question.
	Something that I've contemplated a lot.
	What did I get wrong?
	And I know that you're not this huge fan of President Trump, yet we're both trying to understand the dynamics of what's going on in the United States so that we can help our country.
	You know, the people on the left have always said there's this income gap.
	And people on the right have always said there's an opportunity gap.
	And both things factually exist.
	But the real thing that we missed was the dignity gap in this country.
	You know, ever since the beginning of the war on poverty, which did amazing things in raising the standard of living.
	I mean, if you go into the poorest places in the United States, you don't have a calorie deficit.
	Everybody's got running water.
	You know, they have enough space to live in.
	But the truth of the matter is that it's basically that that system in our culture has said to poor people, We don't need you.
	The basis of dignity is to be needed, to be needed by your family, to be needed by your community, and indirectly to be needed by the economy.
	We forgot that.
	We've been moving away from that for a long time.
	That was exploded, that was exacerbated massively by the financial crisis of 2008.
	And people who were in positions of authority and power, they didn't seem to understand that there was a dignity gap.
	And when people feel that they are not needed, man, they're going to fight back.
	They want somebody who's going to fight for them.
	You know, Donald Trump, his ideas may have been good, they might have been bad.
	His ideas about, you know, I'm standing in front of a coal mine or a steel plant saying I'm going to open this thing back up, you might have said, that's a bunch of claptrap, that's not right.
	But finally, somebody was fighting for people who felt that their dignity had been attenuated.
	So what are we gonna do about that?
	I mean, if Donald Trump as a coercive leader is ultimately not successful in his bid, I mean, look, he's got the best economy in decades and his popularity isn't very high.
	I'm not gonna say, I'm not a political prognosticator.
	I'm not a meteorologist in the weather of politics.
	And I don't know what's gonna happen, but whether he's successful or not successful, we have to take a lesson about dignity from this.
	And that comes from making every single person needed.
	You want a good policy?
	It makes people more needed.
	You want a terrible policy?
	It makes people less needed.
	Less needed to their families, which is to say that it splits families apart, it creates incentives for that.
	Less needed in their communities by fragmenting our communities.
	And most importantly, in the case that we've seen over the past 10 years, unnecessary to the economy by creating incentives for idleness, by making it harder to find jobs.
	This is the oracle on how to bring dignity back and how to fix this situation for the United States.
	This is such a fascinating debate to me, because what I've seen is that there's sort of this continuum when it comes to the dignity gap and the power of work, ranging from Tucker Carlson on sort of the populist, I would almost say, left, to Orrin Cass, who's somewhere in the middle.
	Did you just say that Tucker Carlson's on the populist left?
	I mean, he sat in the chair that you're currently sitting in, and he legitimately said that he would outlaw self-driving cars in order to preserve Yeah.
	for people who are driving trucks, for example.
	And he's been—he's spoken in his book, his new book, he talks a lot about regulation of the economy, specifically in order to prevent technological progress, because he believes that they're a group of people who are going to be put out of work by that technological progress.
	That policy is almost indistinguishable in certain ways from Bernie Sanders' policy.
	And so when it comes to Tucker on cultural issues, he's of the populist right— When it comes to issues of economics and regulation, he's in many ways closer to the populist left.
	It's kind of fascinating.
	Then you have folks like Orncaste, who are kind of in the populist middle right, who have suggested regulatory reform, but he's also suggested the idea of a certain amount of redistributionism.
	Where do you fall along these lines?
	I mean, how do we cure this problem?
	Because it seems to me that If we feel we're in a transformative moment, if we feel that we're in a moment where technology is obviating an enormous number of jobs for people who don't graduate from college, then is the solution to that redistributionism?
	Is the solution to that regulation?
	Or is the solution to that maybe something else, which is, for the first time in a long time, returning to finding meaning in something other than simply going to a factory and doing a job?
	Okay, so this is – I'm not a populist.
	I'm not trying to rhyme here.
	I'm an optimist.
	I'm an optimist about what can actually happen in this country.
	Look, we've had wave after wave of technological change.
	We've had wave after wave of the way that jobs are sorted, the way that they break up, the way that they're reformulated.
	And one thing I'm just not willing to accept is that people actually can't see labor markets and skills in new ways.
	This is America.
	I mean, the whole idea that somehow it's either no skills and desperation and trying to, you know, hit the brakes on technology so that self-driving cars are somehow illegal or you have to go to college.
	Those are, that's an insane dichotomy as far as I'm concerned.
	The truth is we've lacked imagination in this country because we have a completely screwed up educational system.
	We have an educational system that is great at serving guys like Ben and Arthur, and it's really, really bad at serving people who have all kinds of visuospatial skills.
	You know, it's crazy that our standardized testing in this country looks at verbal and quantitative, but doesn't look at visuospatial skills.
	Look, I got a kid.
	I have a teenage kid.
	He's turning 19 this year.
	His name is Carlos.
	He loves you.
	He's watching this right now.
	Carlos graduated from high school.
	He didn't want to go to college.
	He wanted to go to work.
	So he went to work on a farm in Idaho, and he is thriving.
	He's getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning during harvest.
	He's driving a $500,000 Combine.
	He's doing stuff that I can't even imagine.
	It amazes me.
	I'm so proud of him.
	I'm his dad.
	I could kind of help him make his way so that he could earn his own success.
	But not everybody is in a family where those opportunities exist.
	Why don't we have a country that has the imagination to say that not everybody is cut from the same mold?
	That if you don't go to college you're somehow a loser.
	That's nuts.
	What we need to actually do is to beef up the vocational and technical education system in this country so it's just as important as going to college.
	We need an apprenticeship system that we could experiment with at state and local level.
	There's all kinds of policy solutions to this, but the cultural question is the biggest one of all, which is actual respect and dignity that goes to people who don't have college educations because they have so much to bring.
	Look, here's the key stat.
	Three million people are going to be thrown out of jobs when we have self-driving cars, but we have seven million unfilled jobs in this country today.
	Look, I go to places in eastern Kentucky.
	We just shot this documentary film, partly in a place called Inez, Kentucky, where President Johnson kicked off the war on poverty, and you see unemployed people next to unfilled jobs.
	I talk to people in manufacturing all the time who they can't find workers.
	What's up with that?
	That's not because we have too much technology.
	It's not because we have to make it illegal to innovate.
	It doesn't matter how much you make it illegal.
	It's going to happen one way or the other.
	We have to embrace it and we have to skill up and we need an educational system that treats people with equal dignity whether they go to Harvard or not.
	And this is one of the areas where I really think that it gets into uncomfortable tension because a lot of folks in conservative and leftist circle, liberal circles, they focus a lot on what the government can do to make these things happen.
	And it seems to me the vast majority of this stuff has to be done through social fabric.
	When I say social fabric half the time, I think I'm using a euphemism for religious community, because the truth is that there are a couple of factors that I think were here three generations ago that are no longer here.
	One of them is the belief that there's a community that is larger than you, that is going to help take care of you if, God forbid, something happens to you, and government has been used as a substitute for that.
	And the other is that you know that that community exists not just in your city, meaning that When I was talking to Tucker, and I thought it was a fascinating conversation, because Tucker took the position that you should never have to move from your hometown.
	He said, should you really have to move from the place where your grandparents are buried?
	And I said, well, you know, there is this biblical call to Abraham, and just in the Joseph Campbell hero's journey, every journey starts with somebody calling you to adventure.
	So America was always about that call to adventure.
	But the call to adventure exists largely because I, as a Jew, I can pick up and I can move to anywhere I know that there's a Jewish community and I can walk into somebody's house and I know that they're going to be able to take care of me and they're going to help me out because we share a certain fundamental fabric together.
	And I think that it's broader than my social community, my Jewish community.
	I think that it extends also to many religious Christians.
	I think that it extends to conservatives.
	But in the absence of that social fabric, I think it's going to be very difficult to build the sense of comfort that you can move somewhere and start anew.
	How do we rebuild some of these key components?
	Because we live in a time when people have the greatest ease of travel we've ever had in human history, when, as you say, there are lots of jobs available to people who want them, and people are not moving, when there's this almost feeling of malaise, to use a Carter phrase, that is set over the country, where we feel like we're in a dying community, and if we tell people to pick up and move from those communities, that's a political loser.
	Right.
	Telling people to pick up and move from those communities, if you tell people, the best decision you can make is to Graduate high school and then get any job that you can possibly get and don't have a baby out of wedlock.
	This is considered by a lot of folks in American politics to be discriminatory and terrible.
	Right.
	And, you know, for those of us who are kind of freedom-based folks, like, the personal decisions come first.
	I wonder if there's a fundamental disconnect about the picture of the country itself that is going to be difficult to bridge.
	Yeah, it's really tricky.
	One of the things that we've forgotten, both on the political right and the political left, I mean, the political right has become pretty libertarian over the past few—and I've got nothing against my friends who are libertarians, but you've got to remember that that stuff does not work unless the fundamental moral code is existing underneath it.
	I mean, morals come before markets.
	Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations 17 years after the theory of moral sentiments.
	I mean, he believed that we're not dignified, we can't handle a market system unless we actually have our morals together, that we understand and serve each other, that we have a concept of a greater purpose.
	That's the reason he thought that The Theory of Moral Sentiments was a better book, a more important book than The Wealth of Nations.
	He went back to it at the end of his life and worked on it.
	You know, what we've forgotten in this country, on the political right and left, but especially on the political right, is we're all wealthy nations, no theory of moral sentiments.
	We have to remember that none of this stuff works.
	I mean, you know, capitalism is a machine.
	It's a good machine.
	It's a great machine.
	It's the best machine for pulling people out of poverty in the history of mankind.
	But like any other machine, it can be used for, you know, malpurposes.
	It's like a car.
	You can drive it to work and support your family, or you can get drunk and drive it into your neighbor's living room and run over them while they're watching television and hurt them.
	Capitalism actually requires morals, and this is the thing that we have to remember.
	So therefore, what I would like to encourage people who are watching us to remember is that in America, in an entrepreneurship-based society, we're not just looking for the next innovation that's going to make us richer.
	We have to be looking for the resurgence of our ideas through social entrepreneurship that will bring our culture back.
	What really great entrepreneurs should be doing, spiritual entrepreneurs, cultural entrepreneurs, people that are thinking about what the gears should be for a really great America.
	And by that, I don't mean a richer America, just a more prosperous America.
	I mean a healthier country where we're happier and where people want to live and people want to raise their kids, where people have a greater sense of adventure, where they have a greater sense of community.
	That requires the best minds watching us right now to think about themselves as the entrepreneurs that are going to truly bring the country back.
	That does not necessarily mean developing an app.
	What that means is developing a congregation, maybe, and that's the kind of entrepreneurship.
	Man, if we got back to that idea, that, by the way, is the entrepreneurship that made America what it is today, between the Civil War and the First World War.
	That's the self-improvement and the tent revival and the temperance and the abolitionist spirits that went into the social entrepreneurship.
	That made it into a congenial environment that drew your great grandparents here.
	That's why they're not in some town in Ukraine.
	That's why they are in the United States.
	And if we want to give people the courage, we have to create the ecosystem that will inspire their courage.
	If we want them to get a U-Haul, instead of just being depressed about what's going on, we have to create an environment where they have that kind of confidence.
	Just the kind of confidence that you're talking about.
	And that requires the innovative spirit, the frontier spirit, that we've kind of lost in this country and we've got to get back.
	So I want to ask you a base political question because we haven't done any base politics at this point.
	So I want to ask you, you talk about the distinction between conservative and libertarian and how much of a social welfare state there should be.
	What is your ideal?
	What do you think should the social welfare state look like?
	And full disclosure, I tend toward the more libertarian on this.
	My view is that You know, the vast majority of social welfare should be done at the non-governmental level by religious communities, ideally.
	And then if there are people who fall through the cracks, that's where local government comes in, then state government, then federal government.
	But you talk about sort of the certain levers that you think that we can tweak in social welfare.
	Where do you see the ideal social welfare state being?
	What do you think that that level looks like?
	I mean, I could probably put dollar figures on it.
	We could kind of go through the spreadsheets on it.
	That's what we do.
	That's why God created the American Enterprise Institute, is actually to come up with dollar figures on this.
	But as a philosophical principle, I have pretty solid libertarian roots like you do, but they're more morally based than practically based.
	I'm not really that concerned about how much it costs.
	What I'm concerned about is the deleterious spillovers that happen to people at the margins of our society.
	And so the key thing for me is using our policy ideas, using our intellect, using the blessings that we've got on behalf of people with less power than Ben and Arthur.
	That's my view.
	I mean, I'm very Catholic, you know, in this way.
	But by the way, where did I get these ideas?
	We got these ideas from the Jews.
	You know, this idea that we exist such that we can help people with less power than we have, that can mean a lot of different things.
	I don't care that much about the money.
	I mean, I realize that you run out of other people's money sooner or later.
	What I worry about is the extent to which we've designed programs that demobilize people, that hurt people, that marginalize people and leave them desperate.
	One of my colleagues, Charles Murray, who wrote Losing Ground in 1984, he pointed this out.
	The problem with the welfare system is not how much it costs.
	It's that it harms the people it's supposed to help, and that's the fundamental problem.
	So my libertarianism, to the extent that we can call it that, is based on that.
	For the principles, how much it costs, then we're actually getting into accounting.
	What actually works?
	Well, what works, the criterion for what works, is does it make people more needed or does it make people less needed?
	And welfare programs from April 23, 1964 when Lyndon Johnson went to Inez, Kentucky until today have been making people less needed, more comfortable and less needed.
	And that's the big scandal of that.
	I'm willing to spend tons of money.
	I'm absolutely willing to spend actually what it takes if we have a welfare system that will enhance the necessity of people and as such to build up their dignity.
	And we're not there yet.
	Okay, so at the very end of your book, Love Your Enemies, you give a bunch of tips for people how to actually get beyond your own feelings about this.
	As I say, there's a concept in Judaism called Musar, and Musar is the idea basically of people trying to convince you to be better at being a human being.
	And I took this as a work of Musar.
	I'm reading it and I'm thinking to myself, okay, how can I do better?
	So what are some of your tips for folks to help love their enemies, to help get beyond ego?
	Because a lot of it is about ego submission, about saying like, you know what?
	Contempt would be the easy response here.
	I'll take the hit and I'm going to try and love you anyway.
	Yeah.
	To begin with, the most important thing to keep in mind is that when somebody treats you with contempt, you have to see it as an opportunity.
	And this is a real mindset shift.
	I learned this from our friends, the Latter-day Saints, previously known as the Mormons.
	I mean, and you know, they would, they all go on missions and it's amazing.
	It's like, man, how do you deal with the rejection?
	I mean, because, you know, people are not like, oh boy, Mormon's on the porch.
	Pretend we're not home!
	I mean, it's very tough psychologically to say, no, no, you understand.
	Every time that there is some rejection, that's an opportunity for us to react to the rejection in such a way that people are inherently morally attracted to it.
	So the first thing to keep in mind is that we have mastery over ourselves.
	This is the blessing.
	You know, when we're creating God's image, we're actually able to extend the time between stimulus and response.
	You know, you're stimulated.
	If you're treated with contempt and you answer just like that with contempt, then the time between stimulus and response has been minimized because you're not the master of yourself.
	You can make the decision to answer with contempt, but typically we don't.
	So what we need to do is to take that time and say, huh, I was just treated with contempt.
	It's a big opportunity.
	That's a big opportunity to answer somebody with kindness.
	And in so doing, somebody is going to see it.
	It's going to change my heart.
	And I'm never going to go away saying, you know what?
	I wish I would have been more of a jerk.
	That's not what, so that's principle number one.
	Now principle number two is rebellion.
	And you know, it's funny, it's one of the things that I, I take a lot of my writing and a lot of my thinking from Saul Alinsky actually.
	He was a very clever guy.
	His politics were all messed up as far as I'm concerned.
	He was wrong on most things, but he was really good on communication.
	And he's very clever in a lot of ways.
	And one of the things that he did, and a lot of things that people on the political left have done from time immemorial, is to stand up to the man, is to have a sense of the man.
	Well, we need to do that right now too.
	I mean, again, not to treat anybody with contempt, even the man, but to remember that 7% of Americans are profiting from the current environment.
	Now, I say this with appropriate humility because sometimes it's been me.
	And I don't want it to be me, and that's why I've written the book, and that's why we're having this conversation, and that's why I'm so grateful that we get to talk about it, because we haven't been perfect, but we want to be better.
	93% of Americans want to be better.
	They don't want the current climate of contempt.
	All the people who are unrepentant about this, who are getting rich and powerful and famous and getting clicks and making money and getting elected to office, that 7%, we need to Leave them behind.
	I mean, it's time for us to turn that off and to think about what we can actually do to lift other people up.
	And here's the third one.
	Here's the third one.
	Here's the one that's really capturing my imagination.
	We have to go where we're not invited and say things that people don't expect.
	That's the sort of the missionary spirit.
	That's why I admire you.
	You're unafraid.
	And you go places where, I mean, technically you're invited by the College Republicans, but you're not invited.
	I mean, let's be honest, when you're going on to a lot of these college campuses, there's a hostile environment.
	And the truth is they don't understand you.
	I mean, I've heard your message for years.
	You're not coming in a spirit of hostility and contempt.
	On the contrary, you're talking about big issues and you're trying to explain things in coherent terms.
	And you represent something.
	We're all kind of, these days in modern American polarized politics, we're just avatars for something else, right?
	But you're not invited, but you're going anyway, and you're going in a spirit of adventure, and you're always happy.
	I can tell.
	I enjoy it.
	It's fun, yeah.
	Of course you do.
	And look, I write about happiness.
	I know the tells.
	I can tell that you're happy to be there.
	That's a really, really good thing.
	What we need more is people who have this Spirit of the missionary.
	They want to be there, even though they haven't been invited.
	And they're going to say things that people don't expect.
	Not more hostile, not more outrageous than people expected, but more loving.
	And not agreeing, but more loving than people expected.
	And I'll leave you with this one image that's really stuck with me lately.
	And I closed the book with this, because it had such a big impact on me.
	My wife and I, we do marriage prep.
	We teach marriage prep for 25 or 30 couples every couple of months in a Catholic retreat center near our home.
	And it's really super inspirational, because these guys are in it.
	They're going to get married for the rest of their lives, till death do us part.
	And we're just given a little bit of our wisdom, because we've been doing it for a long time.
	And we were in this chapel at this marriage retreat center.
	And I noticed a sign over the door, but not a sign when you're going in.
	It's a sign for people who are in the chapel going out into the parking lot.
	It's the last thing you see when you leave this chapel.
	And it said, you are now entering mission territory.
	I thought to myself, that's not a religious message necessarily.
	That's Ben and Arthur and our public ministry.
	Look, we have one life.
	We have one career.
	We have one set of opportunities to get out there and spread what's right and true.
	Your book does this.
	Your book actually says, this is a gift, share the gift.
	If I were to summarize, because I got to read the book before anybody watching got to read the book, right?
	That this is our gift and we get to share it, embrace it with love and happiness and with affection and with positivity.
	That's, as far as I'm concerned, that's the point of your book.
	That's what we can do with our public ministry and all the things that we talk about as well.
	Get out there.
	Remember that when you go out of the house and you're talking to friends and you're talking to people who disagree with you, you're in mission territory.
	Don't mess it up.
	Nobody kicks down the door and threatens somebody unless they join the church.
	They try to make it beautiful, and they try to make it good.
	And that's what we can, that's what I can certainly be better at, and that's what I'm dedicating the rest of my life to doing.
	So, I have to ask you, because you famously, you've been a famous vegan for a long time.
	How did the vegan, I have to ask you this because I've been getting this question more and more on college campuses, and I really do think that in a hundred years when there are actual appropriate meat alternatives for children, this is going to be one of those areas where in a hundred years people are going to look back and say, you used to kill animals for food.
	To raise them?
	To kill them?
	That's insane!
	How did you become vegan?
	How did that happen?
	My wife.
	So my wife is always, I mean, all good things in my life come from my wife.
	I mean, it's, you know, everything I've learned about love, everything I've learned about my Catholic faith, all that stuff comes from my wife.
	And my wife experiments with different diets from time to time.
	And I have to say, it always kind of bothered me.
	I mean, eating, and again, I'm not, you know, I'm gonna get a ton of email from this.
	Oh no, I get it too.
	I've expressed some warmth toward veganism, yeah.
	There's going to be some at me.
	And I'm not saying that nobody should eat meat and that people shouldn't raise animals and people shouldn't.
	I mean, fine.
	But for me, I felt more comfortable getting my sources of protein and getting my nutrition from plant sources for a bunch of different reasons, both health and ethical reasons.
	And so I tried it.
	And I got to tell you, man, I feel great.
	I feel great all the time.
	I mean, it's weird.
	I'm 54 years old.
	I feel better than I did when I was 24 years old.
	And part of the reason is because I'm living.
	I was a musician then.
	Suffice it to say, I'm living a healthier lifestyle.
	You know, the pack of cigarettes not there, that's good too, you know, among other things.
	But I find that I feel like I'm in my 20s.
	I feel great all the time.
	It has something to do with my diet and my exercise.
	And I recommend it to anybody who wants to try it.
	I think it's really good.
	I would recommend it to you.
	At least try it for a month.
	You'll be the two guys on the right who are vegans.
	I know, and then we'll immediately lose our jobs and be...
	So I have one more question for you.
	I want to ask you, where are you going next?
	Because you were at AEI and now you're moving on.
	I want to ask about that first.
	If you want to hear Arthur Brooks' answer, you have to be a subscriber at DailyWire.
	To go subscribe at DailyWire, go to dailywire.com, click on that subscribe button, you can hear the end of our conversation over there.
	The book itself is amazing.
	You should go buy it.
	Love Your Enemies by Arthur Brooks.
	Thanks so much for stopping by.
	I really appreciate your time.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Thank you, Ben.
	Executive producer Jeremy Boring.
	Associate producer Mathis Glover.
	Edited by Donovan Fowler.
	Audio is mixed by Dylan Case.
	Hair and makeup is by Jeswa Olvera.
	Title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
	The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire production.

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