Transcription 00:00:00 And I asked Ronald Reagan, I said, so what's the most important thing that you have to do in political office? And I'm thinking he's gonna talk about strength or whatever it was to his message at the time. He said, oh, Paul. He said overwhelmingly, he said, you gotta leave people with hope. You have to leave them with hope that things are gonna be okay. 00:00:18 Do you feel like you're stuck in a rut in life or in a dead end job with no progression? I'm Jerry Dugan, and welcome to beyond the Rut, the podcast that offers you the motivation, inspiration and practical tools to help you build a life worth living. My show is here to help you break free from your limitations and find a path to success. Join me as I share encouraging stories and actionable advice on how to get out of your rut in life and create a vision for your future. Life is just too short to live stuck in a rut. 00:00:47 Here we go. 00:00:50 Hey, rudder nation. This is your host, Jerry Dugan, and our special guest in this episode is Paul Johnson. He's an author as well as podcast host and retired mayor of Phoenix, Arizona. So his book, The Addictive Ideologies goes into the negative impact of when we are addicted to our ideology more than our values, more than our family relationships, our friends work and so on. And we've probably seen a lot of that in the last three to four years, both in the political climate of things, the economic climate, social media and so on, where people are just so tightly wound around their ideology that they lose sense of all other rational thinking, sense of their grounding and values and so on. 00:01:36 So what does that rut look like? How do you know that you're trapped in that rut? What is the impact that it's having on your life or a career or both? And on top of that, we're going to talk about the reasons for optimism, because, after all, Paul is also the host of a podcast called The Optimistic American. He has hope we could get past this season, but we got to do some work. 00:01:56 So this is really about you as an individual, but all of us as a country, as a world and so on. So sit back, relax, grab a notebook and a pen. Here we go. All right. I am here with the Honorable Paul Johnson out of Phoenix, Arizona. 00:02:12 How are you doing? I'm doing very well. Thank you so much for having me on. Awesome. And I definitely had to say honorable in there because you were a mayor of Phoenix and in fact, I think you went down in history as the youngest mayor of Phoenix back when you were 29 years old and you were just about to turn 30. 00:02:31 Did I get that right? You did. It's kind of interesting. I used to when I was 30, I had to meet with all the other big city mayors because Phoenix was the fifth largest city in the United States. But Mayor Bradley from La, dinkins from New York, daley from Chicago. 00:02:44 And then we would all go through this. I would just listen to them almost and all. Finally, one year during a winter, they were all talking about their problems, about the snowstorms. And daily had somebody run into a dike that flooded all the bottoms of the buildings. And Bradley had the Rodney King issue that year. 00:03:00 And finally they turned to me and they said, what's the big issue in Phoenix, Mayor, in February when winter is here? And I thought about for a second, I said, those Gulf creeks, you don't get them just perfect. People go nuts out there. 00:03:13 You're not the real mayor, but Phoenix is a little bit of paradise, to. Be fair, right now, is there an influx of the older generation who comes down to Arizona during the wintertime? Like in Texas, we have the winter Texan. They come from the north. They just stay from October to February, March, and then they go back. 00:03:32 People from all over the United States are moving here. One of the surprises is that people from California are starting to move here. But if you look at our winter months, our roads are all packed and your trailers jack knife in the middle of the road and all the things that the wonderful snowbirds who contribute a ton to our economy and we love having them do. How long did you stay as mayor of Phoenix? I was on mayor and council for about a decade, from the age of 24 to 35. 00:04:03 Okay, nice. So you did the right. It was a blast, I can tell you. It was an incredible honor. I learned an awful lot about the community, our nation. 00:04:13 I was selected to go to Poland. I worked in helping them establish their first local government. I spent time in the Middle East doing deal with the State Department. I just learned so much from it. I will always feel like I owe the taxpayers a huge debt of gratitude. 00:04:29 That life of service also enriches you. It's kind of like when you're mentoring somebody. You also grow from that relationship in a way. If you allow leadership, it'll grow you. It's not just the privileges. 00:04:42 Right? Yeah. Now if we fast forward quite a few years, you buddied up with somebody named Dr. Emily Bashaw, and the two of you wrote a book called Addictive ideologies finding Meaning and Agency when Politics Fail You. And I love the title. 00:05:01 It's on my reading list for the year. And I like it because you take a dive into those ideologies that kind of remove our individuality from us, that we almost buy into this so wholeheartedly that we wind up losing ourselves, losing our better judgment or our common sense. If I got the gist of the book, give us a little bit more background of what the book goes into. And what were those big AHAs that you and Dr. Bashar pulled out of it? 00:05:30 Sure. Well, my background, as you said, was mayor. I've also spent a lot of time in trying to help change the way elections work, focusing more on what we call post artisan elections. But Dr. Bashar has worked on terrorism. 00:05:45 She has done forensic analysis on lots of terrorists, as well as her family was persecuted in Iraq directly by Saddam Hussein, and they had to flee. Both of us had an interest in the divisions that were beginning to happen in the United States. What we wanted to understand was whether there was a connection to past genocides, past Holocaust connections to terrorism. And so what we did is we did a historical look at that with a team focus on the case study of what took place in Iraq and what caused it. We came away with three basic hypothesis statements. 00:06:23 The first one is that almost all acts of terrorism, as well as almost all genocides, are tied to ideologies. They're almost always tied to an ideology. In fact, we couldn't find an example of one that hadn't happened. The second thing that we found is that ideologies, the ones that tend to turn into being violent, usually separate people by identity politics. They separate people by the group that they're in. 00:06:53 And it usually is based upon who's the oppressed and who's the oppressor. Now, of course, in the United States, we have a very different view of that. From our very beginning, we said, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all people, all men are created equal. That concept was a concept around individualism, which, by the way, came from Mark Luther in the beginning. But point I guess I would give to you is that those that separate by groups, almost all violent ideologies and terrorist acts come from people who ideologies separate people by that type of group. 00:07:25 And then the third thing that we found that was the most interesting is that when someone becomes ideological, even in an ideology that may not be as extreme, the first thing they begin to do is they create this construct in their mind. And that construct makes it more difficult for them to speak with people who don't have the same ideology because they don't connect to them. They see life differently. They've created this construct that gives them kind of this perfect vision of what's wrong with the world and what it is that you need to do to fix it. And when someone else disagrees with that, they don't like it. 00:08:00 And it creates a rift between them. And oftentimes that rift is between them and a family member. It's between them and someone they love. In fact, one of the things that I say all the time to people is don't give up on the people you love for the people you don't even know. But in ideology, that begins to happen and you start to move towards people who are more ideological. 00:08:20 And the more ideological people become, the more likely they are to becoming violent, right? And so it begins to perpetuate that, it perpetuates the division. So in looking at what causes that, we found a couple of things to be true and we created seven ideals of things that people need to do to be able to break out of it. But the last thing that I told you, the third item, what that really says, is this is much like an addiction. In an addiction, the definition of it is you keep doing something that you know is harmful to you and it's people you care about, but you can't stop, right? 00:08:55 So if you're going to break an addiction, you have to think about how you do that. Here's the answer. It's really hard. People who have to break addictions, it's really difficult to do. So you're much better to focus on the front end, on preventing that from happening, which when you're at the early stages of the addiction, so these seven ideals connect to that. 00:09:17 What I would tell you is that if you want to get to the starting point, this is what I would tell you is happening. The negative bias has a keen impact on ideologies and on people who begin to become more violent. So the negative bias is used by the news media, it's used in social media, it's used by political parties, it's used by candidates. But it basically is focused on what we call the amygdala hijack. The amygdala hijack is there's this more reptilian part of your brain that only has the fight or flight instinct, but through our creator or evolution or whatever you want to believe, this part of our brain evolved. 00:09:58 That's called the neocortex. And in that neocortex, we do amazing things that no other species can do. We're able to create and to innovate. We find love there, we find opportunities. Optimism comes from that part of the brain. 00:10:12 But if I can terrify you, that amygdala hijack goes into play and it basically overcomes the entire neocortec, where you can't think, where you can't rationalize, where you can't be optimistic. When I ran for office, I've run several presidential campaigns, or at least been involved in running them, and we're on a number of them on a state base. I remember Ulster telling me, look, here's the number one thing that we need to do. Terrify our base. We need to terrify them so they won't even listen to the other side. 00:10:43 And it's easy to terrify your base because they have a base set of thinking that you can appeal your message to. Now, the upside to that is it actually kind of works, but the downside to it, to the individual, is that it starts to leave people with a feeling of hopelessness. So when politics fails, you when you recognize that that's happening with our news media on a nightly basis, when you recognize that's happening with social media, when you realize that that's happening by the political party. Now it's 24/7. We used to like to listen to our candidates every two or four years when they ran for reelection, and then we'd go into this messy stuff. 00:11:24 We're messy all year long. Now, when that starts to fail you, you have to find agency. And the first step of finding agency today, I'd like to cover three of the seven. But the first one is knowing the truth, right? And the truth is, if you live in the United States of America, this is the best place in the world at the best time in history. 00:11:44 In fact, we've done more to reduce poverty. We've done more to reduce illiteracy, to improve child mortality. We educate more people. It's unbelievable what we've been able to accomplish. And again, we can go farther into that. 00:11:59 But this is the greatest superpower ever. There's never been a country like this one. The second thing is you have to be accountable. You have to be accountable for the things that you do that each one of us have good and evil inside of us. And what ideology does is it allows us to export that evil that's on the inside of us to another group. 00:12:20 Recognizing that and being accountable for what it was key. And the third thing is strength. It's important that you recognize that you only gain strength for resilience. I spoke to a group of college kids yesterday. I was very encouraged by a very bright group of young people. 00:12:36 And of course, some conversation revolved around woke culture. My answer to them is that, first, free speech works. It makes you stronger. It helps make the country better. We listen to one another. 00:12:49 If we are willing to listen to one another, our ideas improve. But the second thing I told them is when you decide you need to be safe, you don't get stronger. You get weaker. That's what happens. And your anxiety levels go up. 00:13:04 Actually, my partner, the psychologist, was telling them your anxiety levels go up, your stress levels go up. It starts to have an effect on how you see things. Psychologically. Being safe and cutting other people out doesn't actually make you deal with problems better. Usually you deal with problems worse because you internalize them. 00:13:24 Yes, I love all this stuff. I mean, we're talking about that addiction to ideologies, really putting ourselves in those echo chambers and reinforcing that confirmation bias, in a sense. So other phrases that we may hear in the business world, really applying outside of that in the political arena, want to bring it back a little bit more to that personal level of and you mentioned that there is this phrase that had been coined about, like, know your truth. And it's almost like we took the word perspective and made it an absolute truth. And I could see where, as we start, whether or not you subscribe to that phrase specifically, I've seen people who are all for it and know your truth. 00:14:07 This is my truth. And what they're really saying is, this is my perspective. Oftentimes not really accepting that there are other viewpoints, other pieces of information that may not be considered. And I've also seen folks who are completely adamantly against that phrase also hold on to their perspective as an absolute truth. How do we you've kind of touched on it a bit. 00:14:28 Look at the data. Don't look at somebody's Twitter meme and take that as an absolute truth or the data even. Look at the data. Look at the source information, look at interpretations, and maybe more than one interpretation of that data. How can we challenge ourselves to separate what is truth versus this is just simply my perspective. 00:14:50 I don't have all the answers. Yeah, I think what you're bringing up is really a great way, because oftentimes we argue about semantics, meaning I see the word one way when I say my truth, and somebody else sees it another way. So I'll just try to parse it apart and say, you can choose your choosing. I believe that there are universal truths. Right. 00:15:11 So if you're using the idea of my truth, there are no universal truths. There's only how I see it. We disagree. We just disagree. But if you're using it to say, well, I need to figure out whether I should be an artist or an entrepreneur or a mom okay, but that's the truth that you're looking for. 00:15:27 You're right. You need to figure out your truth. That that's how you're interpreting it. Right. But again, to me, it's being used, I think, by some group to try to remove us from believing there are universal truths. 00:15:39 And when that happens, I think it's problematic. So one of the universal truths, I think, is accountability. Alexander Soljanitson he wrote the book The Gulag Argipelio, and in it, he talks about his story. And his story was that he was in the Communist Party. He went and fought on their Western Front. 00:16:00 He was captured by the Germans, spent a few years in a German prisoner war camp. When he was finally let out, he started to come back. Stalin was worried about all these people who had been Westernized. So he put him in the Gulag. He spent time there. 00:16:11 He could have gone to the Gulag and said, oh, my gosh, look at all the great things I've done for the Communist Party and how they're treating right. And Stalin, what a bad guy. He instead said that he decided to look at himself to start with himself and to view who he was. He talks about one of the stories that he had to deal with as a member of the Communist Party, someone who was in the military, in the Communist party going out and removing what they called kulaks from their farms. Now, kulaks were it's almost a definitional issue again, like, what is truth? 00:16:44 Because the Russians said that the kulaks were the rich farm. The rich farmer was defined almost by having one cow. You have one cow, you're rich. If you have no cows, you're poor. But what they were really trying to do was the process of collectivization. 00:16:57 They wanted to take those koolax off their farm, take over that land, and then take the other farmers and basically turn them into state workers, make them work those other farms at low prices, and then take that money at those crops, sell some of it around the world. So they had cash to build out their industry, because Marxist theory was about how do you change a society that's industrialized? Well, they worked industrialized. They didn't have any industry, so their goal was to build it. Now, by the way, the answer to that or the result of that, I guess I should say somewhere near about 20 million people ended up serving to death in Russia because of that collectivization. 00:17:34 But when he went out to move these kulaks, he had to move 10,000 people. 10,000 families, 60,000 people. He moved them to Siberia. He said every one of them died. The first winter they all died. 00:17:50 And he said, I have to be accountable for that because I chose to follow orders, because I chose to engage in that, because I chose to do that, because now how I was able to justify it was I said, we're Communists, and they're property owners, and property owners shouldn't have the right to do this. And, oh, by the way, now that I'm taking their property, they're all screaming about it because they're upset. So I got to shut them up because otherwise they can hurt the interest of the collective. He said what ideology allowed them to do was to export the evil inside of him onto another face and to say, they're the evil ones. So what I'm doing is, okay, almost all genocides come from that. 00:18:30 Almost all acts of terrorism come from that. The beginning place is, be accountable for yourself, the things that you say, and I have to be accountable for my act. My brother and I had a rip. My brother is not some guy who's a gunny in the Marine Corps. He and I had an ideological fight during one of our very long runs, and I made it an insulting comment to him. 00:18:52 He didn't talk to me for a couple of months, and here's the answer to that. I have to own what I say, and I have to think about, what am I trying to do? Do I want to build out the relationships with the people I love? Or is my goal to get in a fight with him about a group of people that neither one of us really even know? Right? 00:19:10 So that takes me to the second issue. I think you also have to find meaning. Victor Frankel, who was also an amazing person, he went to oSwitch, and in oSwitch, he said that when they were pulling people through the line, they took nine people to the left, one to the right. When they took him to the right, he just assumed they were going to kill him and that the women and children were going to be put into some type of camp. Well, the opposite was true. 00:19:33 They murdered all nine of them in a very short period of time, and he was sent out to work. And he had been a psychologist that had taught logo therapy, which was a way to deal with suicide through teaching people meaning. But he decided to work on the prison. He created his sense of meaning to go help these other prisoners find theirs. They said, okay, here's what we're going to do. 00:19:53 We're going to watch the sunset every single night when it goes down. Now, he knew these men were down to 80, 90 pounds. They were on the edge of life. One, one person who had this dream that they were going to be that they were going to be saved on some certain date, I think it was like march 23 was all pumped up, excited, doing everything he could. And on march 23, he got ready to go, because this dream he just thought was so real. 00:20:17 And at midnight, when he realized what's going to happen, he died five minutes later. They're on the edge of life, right? And he said that what those sunsets did is that it made everybody want to go to work. And they couldn't let the guards know they were doing, but they'd watch that sun go down, and then they'd come back in and they'd talk about it. He said, we find meaning in three ways. 00:20:37 First, we find meaning in what we create. Now, that can be our art, our music, your podcast. That can be a business sometimes. It can be the things that we create inside of with our employers. The second place that we find it is through love. 00:20:53 And he said, that can be who you love. But he said when they're gone, you can find things that you love. He learned to love that sunset because he said it gave them the sense that he was part of something bigger, that there were other people out there in the world that were watching that sunset, that weren't living the life that he was living, and that maybe some of those people were his family members. And he would imagine what that might be like. And that who was it that put this son there. 00:21:15 He gave him the ability to love something, and he said the third thing, the place that you find it is through struggle. And he said, there you can find it definitely when you start to reframe in your mind what this struggle means and what you're going to do to deal with it. But it was about free will. Each of us has the free will to decide how we're going to see things. Now, I add a fourth to meaning service it's. 00:21:40 We, not me, if you figure out how to service other people and to help other people, which maybe that would fit into love and maybe that would fit into what you create. But to me, it's unique enough that I separated out how we service other people and help other people along the way, which can be just helping our children, helping our employees, helping a customer or helping a friend, dealing with the issues that they have, or being involved in a larger organization that's designed to do it. That gives you that sense of purpose and that sense of meaning. So if you want to break out, there's the first three things right? First, know the truth. 00:22:15 And the truth isn't nearly as bad as these people who have the dark, triad personality traits that are trying to convince you of they're trying to convince you that it's bad so they can steal your agency from you. Set that aside if you have to. Listen to it, minimize it. Put your thoughts on other things. Second thing is look for accountability. 00:22:35 What's my role in this? I want to talk about what you're doing wrong, what the liberals are doing wrong or the conservatives are doing wrong, or the president's doing wrong, or the past president did wrong. Start with you and what role do you play with you and the people that you care about? And the third is finding meaning. What is your meaning? 00:22:55 What is your purpose for being here? That's the beginning of finding agency. What agency means is that I have the ability to take action that will determine my future. Perfect. I'm glad you also brought that back for me. 00:23:12 I was sitting here thinking, how do I bring us back onto agency? Because I've taken us down this cool rabbit hole, and you did it perfectly. And I know one of the things we also wanted to talk about, and I think we've touched on it already with, oh, shoot, Frankel what's his first name? Victor. Victor. 00:23:31 And finding meaning. But there was something we wanted to talk about before we hit record, and that was around optimism, because I think they go hand in hand. They're not exactly the same thing, optimism and meaning. But why is optimism such an important thing as we go forward to create that success for our lives, our community, our families and so on? Yeah, so there's a lot of studies on this, and we've listed a couple of them in the book. 00:23:55 But there is absolutely no doubt that being optimistic has an effect on your lifespan, it has an effect on your health, has an effect on your prosperity. Again, that goes back to the negative bias. When the amygdala is engaged, you have a very hard time being able to think creatively. But I do want to make a separation between being optimistic and an optimist. Right? 00:24:19 An optimist. I think a lot of people would say, well, they're always happy. They always say things are okay. Being optimistic means, hey, I believe it's going to come out okay. It doesn't mean that you don't identify the problems. 00:24:30 In fact, pessimists play a big role in our society. I mean, I feel bad about it, the fact that I use them knowing that it's going to shorten our lifespan by being a pessimist. But the pessimists will tell us, what about this problem? Well, what about that problem? And in the United States that's been happening for a long time, back to the 1970s, when I was growing up. 00:24:49 The big thought was that we were at I think it was at 5 billion people, maybe 6 billion people, and that we couldn't grow to eight, that there was going to be this huge, widespread famine that was going to take place, and it was going to destroy most of the planet. So they were coming up with these heretical ideas, like how we limit population, which, by the way, Mao thought was a good idea. So he created a one child policy, right? They implemented it. He implemented it for environmental reasons. 00:25:15 Here's what happened. They had no idea what was going to happen with food engineering, that we were going to be able to grow more crops, better crops, safer crops, crops and less land and with less water. They had no idea that we'd be able to do that, which is why they thought that we couldn't get to 7 billion people. We got to eat. The mayor of New York once said, you could never have more than a million people in New York, because where would you put all the horses? 00:25:42 So the world changes, and we've been given an incredible intellect, an incredible ability to think through problems. And I believe we were given that by design, that we're supposed to use that. It doesn't mean that we don't listen to people who have the problems. But if you even look at the sources of pessimism and optimism, the pessimist thinks that the world, if you get down to the core of the philosophy, they believe that the universe is chaos and that there is no order. And because there's no order, there is no hope. 00:26:19 It's going to go bad because it started there and it's going to end there. Optimists believe. I think there is an order to the society, to the universe. I think that there is. 00:26:35 Plato called it logos. Right? The idea that all of these forms fit up into this larger idea that there's an intellectual thought to everything and how it works, I believe that that exists. Right? So, of course, I'm an optimist, because in the end, I think it's. 00:26:51 Going to work out for us. But that doesn't mean that we can just sit there on that roof and say, wait a minute, god's going to come save me, right? We got to do our part. And doing our part means that we utilize science and technology and health care and medicine and all the other things that we've been able to create because of those gifts that we were given. And that we believe that when we look at those problems and work at them that we have the ability to resolve them. 00:27:19 By the way, all the problems that are going to be solved are going to be solved by people who believe that you can't solve them. They're not going to be solved by the pesma who believe that you can't. And the last thing that I would tell you is I'm going to go back to individual ism just for a second. I had seen government do some great things. I've seen them do amazing things. 00:27:37 I've seen them build bridges. We were able to get to the moon through them. I've been involved with police departments and trying to make certain that neighbors were safe. I've seen education. But the greatest thing our government ever did was at the very beginning it empowered the individual over itself. 00:27:55 It said that the individual is at the top, the citizen is at the top. There's a downside to that. Look, it's easier for some citizens to say, hey, here's the goal. I'm going to tell you all the characteristics that a citizen has and I'm going to define that for you so you know what it is. And then I'm going to take care of your prosperity and I'm going to make certain that you don't have to worry about anything. 00:28:17 And the way we're going to do that is that group. But there's the problem and I'm going to take care of that group and then we're going to become more prosperous. Well that's an easy thought. I don't have to do anything other than march, right? If I just march, it's going to work in our society. 00:28:30 We don't have any of those guarantees. Our society says no. Once we give you that you got to go out and figure out part of this on your own. You have to play your own role. And it's harder for some people than it is for others. 00:28:43 There's no doubt. I grew up in a poor neighborhood myself. My father hitchhike from Pennsylvania when he was seven. His brother was eleven. Their mother had died. 00:28:51 They shined shoes. I grew up with nine kids in a 700 square foot house. But we had opportunities. We had the ability by living in this country to be able to take advantage of the educational system, to watch other people work, to work hard and to create something. But that only happens if you're willing to become more resilient. 00:29:11 And to me, that's an important issue here. The safetyism has become an issue. And some of this may be caused by the parents of young people today, which were I watched my son when he was raising my grandkids. He hated his kids go out in the front yard because he was terrified something was going to happen to you. Well, if you're constantly keeping them safe, by the way, I don't know about you, but I'm a lot older than mine was. 00:29:35 Hey, when those street lights go out, you got to come in off of the front street. That was the rule. So the summer we could stay longer and in the winter we had it was shorter. But we know now from there's a great book called The Coddling of the American Mind I recommend people to listen to that talks about this whole issue. But the point was that as you do that with your children, they begin to become actually they have higher anxiety. 00:30:00 Their stress levels actually go up because they're worried about what's happening, what's happening outside. And as you constantly drive society to keep them safe and people start demanding safe places, and then they move to the point of saying, hey, we're not going to allow people to speak at our university because we don't like their idea. We think they represent something that makes me feel unsafe. The problem is this doesn't make you better, makes you worse, a lot worse, because your anxiety levels will go up and you don't learn. And it's also taking that value of safety and saying, hey, I'm going to put that value of safety above free speech. 00:30:39 I'm going to put it above the values in our Constitution. I'm going to put safety above the values of fairness and due process and making certain that people are treated fair, because it doesn't matter what you thought you said. It matters how I interpreted what it was that you said. You can't know what they really said unless you actually listen and you try to understand. And then it's okay to disagree. 00:31:03 There's no problem with disagreeing. That's part of how free speech works. But define your agency. You have to build up resilience, and we build up resilience by being an individual and by allowing other people that same right, the right to be able to say what they think even if we completely disagree with them. Yeah, I know we're running out of time, but the thing that I think a lot of folks get misconstrued about safe space, and you're probably thinking of the same thing is like, we think safe space means anything that goes against what I say, believe and hold as a core value. 00:31:40 That's all that's allowed in this safe space. And if you bring anything outside of that, get out. That's totally different than creating a setting of psychological safety where that we can share differing ideas. And I'm not going to attack you or insult you or try to take your sense of free will or agency away from you that I wanted to convey is that the thing we really want to create, whether it's in our own marriages, our family setting, a community setting, a work setting. You want to create that space where you can have that dialogue. 00:32:17 You put those ideas out there. You abide by some rules that we say, this is how we're going to interact. That's totally different than if you don't get in line with what I say, then get out of this room, because that takes away that diversity. Now it weakens, just like you said earlier, it weakens us as a whole because now there was a show over a decade ago, I think ABC had. It was like the town halls. 00:32:44 I don't know if you remember those. And it would take an idea like pornography, and it would put up there on the stage a pastor, a pimp, a porn star, and just some random middle of the road person all up on the stage and talk about pornography. And they would all share their points of view and challenge each other. And I remember watching those, and it would make me think, and it would challenge things I held as a core value. It would challenge things that I believed in. 00:33:15 And in the end, whether I held onto those beliefs still or not, the thing that I valued was that I was challenged. It made me think through the things I was spouting, and it let me realize the things that really aligned with my core values, that everybody's an individual, everybody has free will. We all have the right to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. So why am I spouting off this belief that takes that away from other people? I had moments like that, and I think that's a key thing for us is to know, just like you said, know who you are, what are your values, and what's that common ground we have with other people. 00:33:51 We don't get there if we don't even allow ourselves to hear other points of view. I love that. Yeah. If you think about the question, if one parent puts a focus on building a career and making money and the importance of fiscal stability, and the other parent puts a focus on love and nurture and taking care of you, which one are you better off about? Right. 00:34:15 The answer is, I'm probably better with both of them. Imagine this country with either not having both Thomas Jefferson or Alexander Hamilton. Both of them played an incredibly important role in the foundations of who we are, but they did not get along. They were on opposite sides. I saw the musical. 00:34:34 But today I look at Republicans and Democrats. I'm a registered independent. But gosh, they both bring to the table some important things, right? Democrats focus oftentimes on education and programs that are important to people, and Republicans focus on the human spirit and how it is that we can create and innovate. And my answer to that is I think they both play a role in this, in our safety, our protection, as well as our ability to think outwardly. 00:34:58 But it's through the communication of those things that we start to get better. Now, here's, what if I had any one message that I gave to people? I mean, again, our goal at the American Optimist is to try to help people restore their sense of agency. But what I've seen as I've gone around the country and I started talking I talked to people on this topic, we're confronted with a lot of blowback. Some people who get really mad even about the word optimism, they don't even like the word. 00:35:25 They think that it's deceptive to use it. But what I see is that there are people all around the country who are losing hope. They're watching these negative messages. They're captured by the Amygdala Hijacked, by the news media, by social media, by political parties, and by candidates. And they're losing out. 00:35:44 They're losing the belief that we can make things better. To me, the most important thing is believe. I'm here because I still believe. I believe we can make things better. I love that. 00:35:57 Folks, check out the website Optamerican.com. Paul has a podcast called The Optimistic American. It's on YouTube. It's also on Apple podcast spotify pretty much anywhere you can listen to podcasts and read the book Addictive Ideologies finding Meaning in Agency When Politics Fail You. It's on my reading list for 2023. 00:36:22 I'm glad Podmatch put us together, by the way. Paul, is there anything else you want to share with folks? If they're looking for more information, they want to have you come talk to them. Be a guest on their show. Oh, yeah, I can definitely talk to other people on their shows. 00:36:36 I've given speeches around the country. We have kind of a great slideshow presentation. But let me kind of reverse this just a little bit. This whole idea of trying to get people out of the rut, I love that concept. I love the concept that you're trying to help people think about, hey, what is it that got me into this rut where I have all these types of feelings? 00:36:57 Keep up your good work. Keep giving people hope. Last story I'll give you, I can't help myself. I'm a story guy. I had dinner with Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill when I was 29 years old, and it was a formal dinner. 00:37:10 But then we had a private chance to meet on our own with the two of them at a guy named Pierre Fallinger, who was the speechwriter for John F. Kennedy. And I asked Ronald Reagan, I said, So what's the most important thing that you have to do in political office? And I'm thinking he's going to talk about strength, or whatever it was that his message was at the time. He said, oh, Paul, he said overwhelmingly, he said you got to leave people with hope. 00:37:32 You have to leave them with hope that things are going to be okay. I think that message that you have that you're carrying forward, you keep doing that. And I know these podcasts don't make money, right? Maybe they do. Don't tell my mom that, but yeah, they don't. 00:37:50 They're transformational. It's helping people think and talk and listen to ideas and to understand the challenges that they're I just want to compliment you for doing that and say thank you. Thank you, Paul. I appreciate that. And I was going to ask for any final words of wisdom, but I want to end there. 00:38:05 No kidding. Any final words of wisdom, though, or was that it? That was it. And I would tell that to everybody. I will take it. 00:38:12 Leave people. I love that. Paul, it was great to have you on this show. I'm glad we were able to get this going past the barrier of time zones and all that good stuff and I look forward to keeping in touch with you. Yeah, thank you. 00:38:28 Wow, that was a lot of information, right? I mean, I let this one go the full length because there was so much meat in the conversation we were having. So I hope that you saw the light around what addictive ideology looks like, how to describe it to others, what to do if you run into somebody who is close to you and has attached themselves to their ideology so much that is taking a toll on everybody else around them. Sometimes you got to let loose cut sling, as they would say, an aerosol, when it has to do with like letting go of cargo that's going to take the helicopter down. That's not important. 00:39:03 But show notes, that's the important thing. Where do you go from here? Well, if you want more information, check out the show notes@beyondtherut.com. Three, seven, five. There you'll find links to other episodes that have been done on this show about having an open mind, exploring and getting more information, as well as Paul Johnson book Addictive Ideologies, the link to his podcast, The Optimistic American and so much more. 00:39:28 Now, I'm glad you joined me for this episode and I look forward to joining you again on the next one. But until next time, go live life beyond the rut. Take care.