Politics Edition: Handling The Other Side | Ep 772

Hey, what's going on everyone? This is Alex Hormozi. Welcome you back to The Game. Today I have a political edition podcast and no, before everyone gets excited, this is not me talking about my political beliefs, but I actually wanted to talk about it within the context of the workplace and maybe even you can use this in everyday life. And so I wanted to bring this up because I thought it was, I had a fascinating conversation this morning with a coworker, a leader in our company. This was somebody with whom I had a difference of voting record, meaning we voted for different candidates. But I respect them a lot and I think they respect me a lot. And we have actually a really wonderful relationship. I thought it would be a great thought experiment to try something out, which I did, and I want to share those results with you. And I think going through this process is actually something that can kind of heal the divide. Between the parties that I think is very worthwhile, especially considering, and I want to make this very clear, half the nation disagrees with you if you voted. And so the blanket statement that half the nation is moronic, I wholeheartedly disagree with. I say this from both sides, to be very clear. I see people who voted for Trump and say everyone who didn't vote for Trump is an idiot. And I see people who voted for Kamala and said anybody who voted for Trump is an idiot. I think anybody who thinks that is an idiot. I say this because I know very intelligent people, um, who have good reasoned arguments on both sides. I want to walk through not my political ideologies, but the thought process that created something that I think would be very helpful for anyone going forward. And also for those of you who are parents who have kids that are kind of becoming of political age, maybe share this with your kids because I think this might be helpful. So first things first, It feels fitting to start with my single favorite quote of all time, which is a permutation of an Orson Scott Card quote, and he's the author of my favorite book, Ender's Game, science fiction about a boy genius, military stuff. Anyways, it's a really great book. "We question all of our beliefs except for those that we truly believe and those we never think to question." That's my paraphrasing of the quote. That's Hermosi version. But basically, if you truly believe something, You never think to question it because it's so ingrained in your pattern of reality. It's woven into your perspective on the world. And so many of us are willing to question things that we believe are, you know, things are pseudo beliefs, but not the true beliefs. The follow-up to that is a different quote, which is, "If you do not know why you believe what you believe, it's not your belief, it's someone else's." Meaning if you're like, I believe this stance, then if you cannot make a reasoned argument for why you believe that stance, then it means that you've taken what I consider an off-the-shelf belief set. So it's like at the store of beliefs, you've got a big blue book and a big red book and you pull it off the shelf. They say you are blue, therefore you believe these things, or you are red, therefore you believe these things. And what's interesting is that all people say, oh, I'm not that way. But then all of a sudden, what's very fascinating about this is that the decision-making process for when we want to decry or hate or make basically even just make an appraisal or judgment of an action that someone does. I'm going to play this forward for you because I think this will be really fascinating. So let's say you hear someone did something. Who here on their newsfeed, who here has seen something, you don't know the political affiliation, and then before making a judgment, you do the research to figure out if they're, quote, "on your team," and then you say, "Then it's fine," or you say, "They're not on my team, therefore I hate them and this is all wrong." Real talk, that's how a lot of people do it. And that's because that's how your brain works. It's not because you're an idiot. That's just how brains think, right? And I think it takes a lot of active effort to acknowledge how incredibly skewed and biased our thinking is. So I wrote down every one of my beliefs and I have very extreme beliefs on both sides, which is like, so then what color am I? I don't know, right? That's what's crazy is because only a Sith thinks in absolutes, black and white, right? Typically, by the way, I think it's a sign of intelligence to have nuance, which is an understanding of the gray, an encouragement of walking the line between two extremes. And most people like to do binaries because it's easier to think in binaries, but it's not more truth-seeking. And so for me personally, it's like if I have a life that I want to dedicate to the pursuit of truth, pursuit of knowledge, then it would follow that I have to be comfortable waiting in the gray and going through it and actually trying to figure out, okay, well, under what circumstances is this better or worse? And what are more long-term implications? Blah, blah, blah, blah. So I went through, I have a doc that I sent to this teammate and I said, hey, this is all that I believe. I had one or two lines of reasoning underneath each one of them just as a quick back of napkin. It wasn't sending Magnus open here or Magnus, whatever it is. The teammate sent theirs back to me and we only disagreed on one of like 20-something beliefs. And I have very specific kind of belief sets that are not yay or nay. They're like this under this circumstance, this under this circumstance. And what was interesting here, and this is why I think I wanted to make this podcast, because it's very easy to say this person's blue, this person's red simply based on who they voted for. But what I would encourage you to do, and I think this is very helpful for anybody in the workplace, especially if you have a a team that has people who voted differently than you or anything like that, is to just look under the hood. Just simply ask, "What do you believe?" And what's interesting about this is this allows you to actually have a discussion about individual things under circumstances rather than blanketed statements of like, "He is red, I am blue." Which by the way, we've got the Crips and we've got the Bloods, and somehow we think we're somehow better or different than these gangs that fight based on these binary ideologies or identities that are associated with them. And I think it's a load of hogwash. In reality, I think it's actually just an undisciplined mind. And that goes for both sides. In walking through this particular one that we disagreed on, we then chatted further about. The teammate in question was like, "Well, under this thing, zero circumstances." And I said, "Oh, I thought that was assumed." And so I added that note to my reasoning and to my contingencies of the belief that I had. And then after that conversation, we basically agreed, oh, we actually agree on literally everything. It makes sense that I have a good relationship with this particular employee. And to be very clear, my relationship with that employee has in no way changed based on the fact that they voted for someone else. It's more important to me, and this is really, really important, I want to really fucking drive this in, and I'm cursing on purpose here, I have significantly more interest in ideological alignment than I do in voter card alignment. I will say that again. I care significantly more about someone's ideologies, their idea of a perfect future. I want as much alignment on that, and I care almost zero about their political alignment in terms of who they voted for. Now, it would then follow, if you both believed the exact same thing, then why would you have voted for two different candidates? Aha. And this is where I wanted to get to for this podcast. Fundamentally, it would follow that we have different sources of truth or different sources of information. And then based on those different sources of information, we cast an approximated vote of confidence under which candidate, based on the information that we collected, we believe will approximate that ideal future most closely. So I'll say this again. You have this information that you consume. You then make an approximate bet on the candidate that you believe will bring about that ideological future most closely. This then means that we simply made a different bet for the same outcome. And again, I think this is so important because I think this will help bring a lot of this, this animosity down. Imagine you knew somebody else literally wants the same thing as you. Now, to be clear, that's not always the case. Sometimes people literally want different things than you, in which case, great, but that's a different bucket. But I think that so many more of us share 80%, 90% of our actual ideological beliefs. And so if we pull up the hoods and we find out that we share significant amounts of ideological beliefs, then it just comes down to who we believe. Because fundamentally, like, almost none of us are going to meet candidates in general, either because we have a lack of interest or we just don't have that kind of access or whatever. Right. It's very, you know, it's difficult to, to, to, to buy the $100,000 dinner so that you can meet the candidate. Right. Especially at a presidential level, but the same thing applies at a regional level and so forth. And so we have to rely on third-party media to get what we want and looking at original speeches and public appearances to try and piece together what someone believes. But the thing is, is that most of the times, a lot of the— and because it makes sense for a political candidate to be relatively vague, mostly because they can't actually recite legal documents and no one would read them anyways. And it would go over the head of the vast majority of voters. And as a marketer myself, I completely understand why they are vague. And it's because it doesn't matter. I mean, it very much matters, but from a marketing perspective to get the vote, it doesn't matter very much at all because the very small percentage of the electorate that is literate and— key point— and would take the time to actually understand a nuanced position for some person It also creates more things for people to disagree with because the more concrete your plans, the more someone can try and poke holes in it. It very much becomes a popularity contest, for lack of a better term, on key soundbites, unfortunately. But hating that is just hating how marketing and humans work, which I tend to not spend a lot of time there because I don't hate reality. I just accept reality and then try and change my behaviors. To win. I just wanted to make this one, one podcast about this because I think that there are probably people in your family, there are probably people in your team, probably people above you or below you. You take your kids to soccer practice, there's other parents there. You may not need to hate them. You might actually find out that if you actually just peel up the layer, you might have 90% agreement. And so the actual then disagreement comes to what sources of information are we going to listen to? And based on those, Where are we going to make our bet? If you consume from the identical information sources, you're still going to have some level of beliefs based on your history of which one of these will I believe more? And then also based on your history of dealing with other people, looking at the candidates, which one do I believe them more? But I think that if we just focused on what kind of world do we want to build, I think we have a lot more similarities than we have differences. I thought it was worth making this because on one side, the quote Viktor's, shit on the other side and be like, "Haha, nani nani boo boo." And I think that if we want to win as a country, then not hating one another is probably a decent start. I know that this podcast will probably change nothing, but I wanted to at least give a couple of people maybe a better life or a better working life or a better life in your neighborhood. That as soon as someone wants to hate, if you just said, "Hey, real quick, I'll bet you if I took all of my beliefs and all of your beliefs, we probably have a lot in common. I think that a lot of our differences come down to who we wanted to make a bet on. But I think by and large, we want probably very similar things. If you zero in on the ideology, then the discussion becomes way more about the ideology and way less about, oh, you voted for this person, therefore you love them. Also therefore, you are that person. And I hate you. It just gets around the ingroup-outgroup bias. And you'll also find that if you actually define out your ideological beliefs, you may find to your surprise that some of them belong on the, quote, other side of the aisle. And so if you have two kind of books off the shelf, these boxes of pre-made beliefs, they have to encapsulate, let's say there's 10 fundamental things that we need to make decisions off of, whatever. And half are on one side and half are on the other side. Well, if you've got 5 on one and 5 on another, which I think a lot of people do, A lot of people are. Well, I wouldn't even— A lot of people, for example, are fiscally a little bit more conservative. Like, hey, government sucks at spending money. Very inefficient. In general, the larger the government is compared to GDP, the worse the country does long-term. More growth with smaller governments. Private sector is more efficient. I don't think these are things that people argue about to the same degree. A lot of people don't care about social issues. All right, like, marry who you want to marry, screw who you want to screw, right? There's a lot of people who are on that side as well. Just don't mess with me. Now, there are some people who want to, who will be in a vocal minority, who say everyone should do what I want, and I want to have a few people who make the rules for everyone. And if you disagree with me, tough cookies. Tough way to live, honestly, because you will always have people hate you. And so I have always personally preferred the perspective of I would like as little interference with my life as humanly possible from everyone else. And I also would like to interfere as little as possible with everyone else's life, provided that the commons that we have do not get destroyed. The environment, for example, is a commons. It's something that we all participate in. And so we try not to destroy those things. The community that you're in, you probably try not to destroy those things. The roads that you drive on, you probably try not to destroy those things. And so we have rules around that so that everyone can benefit. I don't have the biggest platform in the world and I don't intend to do anything political. And I've been very, very deliberate about avoiding, I would say, largely one, the manosphere, and secondarily kind of the plittosphere. And the big reason for that is because I am a businessman. I'm not a political pundit, but politics are a fact of life and business is affected by politics and certainly employees and relationships are. And I think the more polar the country gets, the worse it is. For the small microphone that I have, and to be clear, I have voted on a different side than I am registered to vote. And I say that because I don't believe in binary thinking in general as a fact of life. And the system that we have currently, at least in the US, is a duopoly, right? There are only two parties. And so you were forced to literally pick a side at registration. And then also, you know, later when you actually make your final votes for different candidates. My hope is just that if we just realize that there is nuance in reality, if many variables exist, many variables must be studied. And that's really what it comes down to. And as much as you probably want to hate some other person across the street and you find out they voted someone different than you, and it just gives you, quote, more reason to hate them. I think that is the wrong way to live. And equally, if you find out that you didn't like somebody, but then you find out they voted for the same person as you, they could still be a shithead. And so I would say don't necessarily like them for that same reason as well. I mean, half the country disagreed and half the country agreed. 50/50 is not a very good razor for character testing or character judgment. On both sides. This is probably one of the, one of the only, you know, political, which I would say isn't political. It's really just about how to deal with other people and deal with differences just under the guise of talking about politics because it's trending. And of course I'm going to make content that's trending, you know, that's me. So anyways, lots of love, everyone. If I can help one person get a, you know, avoid a calamitous exchange with somebody else and maybe make a closer friend as a result, then, you know, this podcast will have served its purpose. And the TL;DR, by the way, for the particular teammate that we shared our beliefs, which weirdly almost feels like it's like cognitively showing someone your cards, right? I think that we now have a better relationship than we did prior, and I think that that is cool. Have an amazing day. Maybe make a friend from someone across the aisle. It might serve you. All right, thanks, guys. Have a good one. Bye.