Sasse of nebraska. After words is a weekly Interview Program with relevant guest host interviewing top nonfiction offers authors about their latest work. Reporter hello and welcome. Thank you for joining us. Cspan thank you for letting me interview you about this really good book and congratulations. Guest thank you for having me. Last time we did the show we talked by your fantastic book that was a bestseller. Host you asked a lot of hard questions and id plan to repay you. You are only in your mid50s and people have heard your introductions. I wont review all of it that you are freakishly productive but you have already had an accomplished globally renowned musician and you lay down your horn became a behavioral social scientist and lots of people cite your work in an academic context and lots of lay people like me cite your happiness studies all the time. He wrote to many books that are National Bestsellers and now youre in your third career at the think tank American Enterprise institute and you took it to new heights and raised a lot more resources and hired a lot or interesting people and now you are about to transition to a fourth career lifelong output level career. As you are making the transition you wrote this new book love your enemies how decent people can save america from the culture of contempt so thank you she was for sharing it with us. I want to start a having you unpack for us what is contempt and how does it differ from anger . Guest people often say in american Politics Today or ideological differences in journal whether its religious or social americans are too angry with each other and thats not right. Anger is a hot motion this as i care about what you think. The problem with America Today as we have too much contempt. Thats the conviction of other worthlessness of another human being peer contempt is a cold emotionless as i dont care about you. You are beneath caring about. It mixes disgusted to anger like pneumonia and bleach making this compound is really toxic and theres a lot of research that shows when you treat somebody with contempt that person will never forgive you. Theres a guy who teaches at the university of washington in seattle a leading expert in marriage reconciliation and he can counsel a couple for one hour and just interview them and no with 94 act accuracy. What he is looking for signs of contempt, eye rolling sarcasm. Thats the way divorce courts and the way for americans to hate each other. Its a way for ordinary citizens do not listen to each other anymore. Americans have stopped talking to a Family Member or close friend on the basis of the 2016th president ial election. Thats not anger thats because of contempt. Host stay with the analog of rogan marriages. If he is 94 success would diagnose him as unable to save some of these marriages what is the magic for him and whats the analog to what you think your quest is . Guest is a great question. The way he does that is by inducing people to stop their contempt because contempt is what not what they really feel. Most couples have gotten into an unproductive location where they roll their eyes or they criticize constantly adapts not the problem. The problem is they get into the cycle. I roll my eyes at you when you roll your eyes at me and one of the things youll say is say five loving things for every criticism. Couples are getting ready to divorce and they cant think of anything but criticism. When youre first in love you cant think of anything to criticize so he makes them go back to when they were first in love for some couples need to carry around notebooks and right down things they are going to say. This radically changes the whole form of discourse. What is the answer to Politics Today . The answers we need to break the habit of talking to each other with contempt. A lot of peach people are watching us with social media. You and i joke with the thailand social media except we have an audience of hundreds of thousands of people watching us and we are friends. The problem is people who dont know each other are trashing each other in talking to each other with contempt. You are not worth caring about them you were an idiot and thats the stupidest thing ive ever heard is the discourse we have gotten into. I looked at myself on tv and somebody said that i disagreed with and i rolled my eyes but im guilty and thats what breaks the bonds of stability. We dont need to agree. Agreeing is a monopoly. We need a competition of ideas but we need to disagree better and break the habit of contempt jeff couples do when they figure out how to get back together again. Guest the. Host you mentioned a few things about social media a really important flagship let you use the word addiction a little bit ago repeatedly in the book you used the word addiction to talk about mean tweets in how we have a common addicted to them. I dont want to talk about that as a way to get to social media but it happens and i will ask to distinguish them well. What does it mean to be addicted to contempt . Guest contempt as a matter of speaking and expressing yourself. Its a way to efficiently say what you think and that habit that can be an addiction insofar as it passes by. Doesnt go to the cortex the part of your brain that processes emotions. The part of the brain is called the nucleus the size of a walnut. The brain had evolved more than a million years ago and its part of the lizard apparatus. Processing rewards and staying alive. What happens is when you do something that feels kind of good it becomes a habit whether its chemical like cigarettes or committed to committed to communicative. You will start programming that into your brain and thats how it works. When you find yourself saying something over and over again thats not being processed by your conscious brain despite your unconscious brain. Thats how habits form and thats also the secret to how to break habits. When you are stimulated to do something you can wait before you respond. When your mom said count to 10 before you give your response. You are spending time in your sponsor you can retrain your lizard brain by saying i feel this and this is my habit but im going to react in this way instead. When he do that to get a different kind of reward and you can actually break a bad habit of contempt. Thats what john dawson is telling couples to do. Before they criticize a loving things. We can do the same thing by not responding on twitter or if we get an email we dont like her message on facebook facebook. Dont like or we hear somebody Say Something that we disagree with strongly wait before we react and put something in its positive instead of negative and see the reaction we get to that. Thats a large part of the look on how to do that. Host before we get to the cultural and Public Square locations that stay on the marriage feast for a minute. Is it possible to retrain yourself to do that no matter how long that happens quite how optimistic are you about this as a success strategy . As c. S. Lewis says theres the four loves and theres the romantic infatuated phase and marriage is a different thing. That early overwhelming love early in marriage. You can retrain those habits six months in. Guest six years, 60 years. You believe that . If youve done something for six days its easier to break the habit then if its 60 days. Aristotle talks about how habits are virtues. We know the longer you ingrain something, the key thing to understand is the want to be a better leader if you want to be a more unifying leader because you want to be a more persuasive leader we are not getting anyplace because we are locked down at a standoff. Obviously if someone wants to when they will have to be more persuasive. Contempt wont do it because nobody in history has never been insulted into agreements with the wrong strategy if you want to win. Its very practical. You can be the master of yourself and break these habits. In so doing theres evidence of the book that not doing that behaving a different way will make you a better leader and happier and ultimately more successful. You can do it. After 60 years is going to be harder but you can do it. Posted he mentioned in the books are things you pray more things you do as you thank god for oxytocin. Its going to confuse the children. Why do you do then was that main . Guest oxytocin is a narrow transmitter often called the love molecule. In 1969 Richard Nixon commissioned a study by the Rand Corporation because theres a huge problem going on in vietnam to 20 of soldiers in vietnam were addicted to hera one, 20 which is catastrophic for the war effort when they come home. They said what do we do . What are we ask a going to do . The guys go home and brace themselves and 90 of the heroin heroin addicts stop using heroin overnight when they got home, stopped. No intervention, no policies no detox zero and only 5 of them were addicted the following year. We get the answer when you talk to anyone whos addicted to heroin they will tell you what deals like youre in love. Thats how heroin feels. When you come home you do get indulged by pure love. Decades later were chemically was happening in the brain of these people coming back from vietnam was they were getting a hormone that stimulated when you feel love called oxytocin and those receptors are built by opiates or they are built i hear went so gives you the simulation and the reason people get addicted to drugs knock a hole. Almost always its doing something or repairing something is broken inside of a person. They are selfmedicating in a way. Thats the feeling of oxytocin did when you see your kids and you see your wife and remember the first time they make you feel like youre helping but they are keeping you out of the way and tend to be the scissors but the first time you look into those allies something pops in your brain. Thats oxytocin. You see your friends and you see your parents after a long time and when you see your wife when you havent seen your wife for her while because youve been on a campaign. Its oxytocin. The miracle in my view and its a way of helping us to bond to each other in this miraculous way. This is something i talk about a little bit in the book. When we bond to each other more we get more pleasure and it stimulates us to work for unity and thats why i thank god for oxytocin. Host this is earlier than i want to get swallowed by social media but stay there for a second. That requires social media to be used as a supplement to human relationships if its going to complement what you just said as opposed to a substitute for human relationships. You and i know each other so if we mock each other and social media we know that its playful. Its not really disdain. I believe in you and i care about the projects you are working on but when someone who doesnt know someone else comments on social media theres a quick level that youre going through. This is critical of me are supportive of me and how can this possibly were . Your oxytocin. The popping is a form of bonding how can that work in a world thats more and more ruthless and more and more mediated by technology . Guest its a really big album and in fact what we need is something you talked about in her last two books which Everyone Needs to read if they want to understand how politics and human relationships interact. This is the key thing. For my money the dubreau of ben sasse writing books is you work in history and social science and how to do to relate such that policies can be met with life enhancing and thats what these two books ago do. Thats what i got from your book. And the way i see it is a haverhill signed to someone whos interested in neuroscience of the stuff is understand speculation. We cannot substitute for human relationships for actual and person human relationships. The human relationship that we get involves the oxytocin and above the neurochemistry and it involves looking into each others others eyes and thats how humans were developed. We dont have evolution and the 500,000 years of twitter to make it possible for us to develop and are allowed to go wync one to the other. When we talk to each other on Twitter Twitter and we are joking around as joking around thats a compliment to her in person friendship and when i see you i say ben sasse am really happy to see you because i know you as a flesh and blood person per the problem is social media, strangers can get that done and as a result its not a compliment to a human relationship as a substitute for real human relationship and it does not give you the biochemical desire to meet your needs. Its if the contempt machine because it reduces you to some guy with the twitter handle reduces you to something thats literally less than human and god forbid its anonymous and i can dehumanize you in dehumanize me and thats a reason we are going down this terrible rabbit hole of contempt largely driven by the relationships we have on social media. Host how can you fix that was completely unplugging . Ive checked your twitter account an hour ago before we got into the studio and youve been tweeting out practical things mostly from this book wasted tackle the culture of contempt that using a medium twitter that is largely a political space. Its main ingredient is contempt and how can we solve this problem . The dont think you are recommending that. Guest no, not an theres no reason for me to recommend that. One thing that i do recommend his people think about social media behavior and say his is complementing my life for so substituting for Real Relationships in my life and you can say both. My kids are 16, 19 and 21. They are pretty good on social media. They use it because they want to set up where they are going to meet for example. Mail the sun uses facebook to figure out where its going to meet his buddies in college or they are going to have a meeting for something but he doesnt use it as a substitute for a relationship. People notwithstanding they think its actually Getting Better. One of the things i recommend in my substituting for Real Relationships because if i am i will get an oxytocin deficit but ill have less pleasure not be more contemptuous about the less successful and thats bad. We have got to make sure its a compliment for real human relationships. I recommend talking with your your real friends you see regularly and not others. The other thing i recommend and this is my experiment on social media. You and i call each other new notice im just not going to say the things on twitter. Im now on social media and im going to do the five to one rule with couples by beautiful things for every criticism that im going to say five nice positive constructive aspirational loving things for every one thing that i say that is maybe a joke or something critical and i find i dont even get to the one that im committing myself to using it as a positive medium. Will i get 50 million followers . Nope. But its a dopamine hit which is another narrow transmitter which is a reward when you get stimulated that you see when somebody is insulting someone else. I have to say twitter doesnt own me out that some only participating in a way where i feel like im lifting other people up. Host you mentioned leaders who succeed with the two different tactics and you unpack course of leadership and authoritative leadership which could also be called aspirational. You have also said you are optimistic about where we are headed. Why . Why do course of leaders succeed in dont we see more of that now . Guest this is language taken from Daniel Baldwin from harvard has done work on thousands of videos. What he has done is categorized a technique called factor analysis. He breaks them up into bins of different types of leaders and on one polar and as is the divisive leader called the course of leader and thats selfexplanatory. They are the yellers in the contempt they treat other people with contempt and they demand to be in compliance. Its certainly what we see a lot of in media and entertainment. They basically dont say come with me now they say do you see a Better Future and do you want to come with me . They make people want to follow them. Thats how it tore two clears work. One of the things we know is course of leaders uses significantly and they have had a lot of followers and they have won elections but they dont last for long. When they go down to go down ugly and they tend to fragment. This is not the case in the nationally populous country. France is much more populous place and as a result course of populist leaders tend to hang on for a lot longer but not in the united states. We see generally is the course of leadership tends to be successful after financial crisis. A financial crisis doesnt create low Economic Growth it creates uneconomic uneven Economic Growth. 20 of the economic distribution are theres a lot of research that shows theres a surge in support for populist politicians and parties. Just exactly what we are seeing now but wanted and it ends badly. If dorothea pfleiderer have an opportunity. I believe we have a Market Opportunity and heres a Key Statistics that i want to share. You and ive talked about this before but im really happy about this. Theres a group called morant, and in Great Britain and its what it sounds like. What do we have in common and they do highquality polling in 93 of americans hate what we are becoming as a country. The dark side of that is 7 of americans dont hate how we have become as a country. Because they are profiting from it and they are getting famous and rich or maybe they are sociopathic pursehouse the 93 of us which is most people watching us right now and you in the eye know for sure we want Something Better and thats a Market Opportunity for leadership. Its takes longer takes more skill but i like 93 more than i like 7 . Host let me play devils advocate by one of the reasons we see so much can template out even when out even what out even when we know its a bad habit for us to continue indulging again and again surely seems to be because of the market signals we send back to the media is that these are the stories we want. Are the 93 putting on rosecolored glasses and whats borne out in their daytoday behaviors that we all like the put down . Guest that is possible of course that i look at the data that says when we say we dont like it and it makes us unhappy and furthermore Research Shows