Kurt Gray: Understanding Outrage to Heal America

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Of a second for your flight or fight response to be activated and 20 minutes for it to calm down. And so part of, I think managing outrage is just taking some time and space away. It's okay. It's okay to walk away from the situation and say you need a little bit of time to calm down and you think about it. And it's okay to schedule it for a different time when you're not feeling angry. Like, don't send emails in anger. Try not to talk about politics when you're filled with rage. But I think what I try to do and to get to the, you know, your point about thinking about the minds of others is to think about, like, how these folks that I disagree with might feel victimized and the harms that they see. Because once you see that, the harms that someone else is worried about or how they feel, like they've been victimized, even if I don't agree with their position, I can at least see them as a little more human. And that goes a long way.

I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. We're on a mission to make you remarkable. So we bring in remarkable guests so that they can pass on their knowledge and wisdom and tactics and strategies. Today's remarkable guest is Kurt Gray. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology at Harvard. He's currently a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Is that where Michael Jordan went to school?

You bet. You bet.

He's the second most famous graduate of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. And he's the director of. I have never heard of academic labs named like this, but he's the director. I gotta read this to make sure I got it right. He's the director of the Deepest Beliefs Lab and the center for the Science of Moral Understanding. That's quite a mouthful.

Yeah, we rebranded. I thought we study everyone's deepest beliefs. Politics, religion, morality. And why not name the lab what we do?

Yeah, I mean, it Couldn't just be the U. University of North Carolina Neurosciences lab. Okay, so let's just ease into this interview. All right? And I'm inspired by something at the very end of your book where you discuss the work of John Saroof. I hope I pronounced that right. And so you asked him a very easy question, which I'm going to now ask you, which is, what are the three easy steps to heal America? Could you just get to that in like 60 seconds or so?

First, he laughed and he said no. He's like, it's too hard. But then he tried to kind of lay it out. And so I figured the best three steps from what I could, and they are how to have better conversations with each other. And so those three steps are connect in conversations, invite in conversations, and then validate. So those are the three steps. It's a way of having conversations about politics that we frequently. Well, we don't have. I'm happy to go through those steps. Yeah.

Because there were lots of things in those steps which I found counterintuitive for. For example, you talk about it's better to ask too many questions than too few. So can you just tell us, like, connect. What's the power? Tips for connect.

Totally. And all this is against the backdrop of, like, you're trying to have conversations across differences. It's hard. You want to do it. You want to talk to your uncle that you haven't talked to in a while, your co worker who disagrees with you sometimes. And so the civ is the civ, the beginning of more civil conversations. So that's where the kind of term comes from. So connect. The first thing you want to do before you talk about anything contentious is connect with someone as a person. There's so many things that you could talk about that aren't like politics or what you disagree about. Right. Food, music, family, jobs, whatever. You know, weather. I mean, weather's boring, Right. And let's get away from the weather and let's ask deep questions. So it turns out that people really like when you ask them questions, especially surprisingly deep questions. Right. When we think of someone who's a good conversationalist, we think of someone who talks a lot. But what we really like is someone who asks us deep questions. So think about conversations as more like a date. Like if you went on a date with someone and they just talked at you forever, you'd think, oh, my goodness, like, what a win bag. But when someone asks you questions, follow up questions, and you know about you. Where'd you grow up? Oh, what was it like growing up? How did that shape you? How did that make you who you are today? What hopes and dreams do you have about the future? When's the last time you cried? These questions might seem crazy to ask someone that people really appreciate connecting deeply in conversations.

And what about the quantity of questions?

Yeah, more than you think. It's more than you think is better, especially follow up questions. Right. So you can imagine having a conversation with someone and lots of research to back this up. Someone says, here's this heartfelt story of me and once my kid's fish just died. Very tragic. We had to bury my daughter's fish out back. And imagine I told you the story of my. The fish dying. And then instead of you saying, wow, that must have been really hard. I'm sorry for your fish loss. You know, you're just like, oh, yeah, yeah. Anyways, I went fishing the other day and that this is what reminded me of fish, you know, like, that'd be terrible. And so you want to ask follow up questions, right? How are your daughters dealing with it? Did you have a special ceremony for the fish? And it's a funny example, but follow up questions show that you're listening. And so I think that is an important thing for connecting.

We had a guest about a week ago who, she cited many studies about speed dating, and she gave us all these speed dating tips, and she basically said exactly what you said. Maybe you guys are both talking about the same studies, but she said in speed dating, you got to ask a lot of questions and you got to go deep really fast to stand out from other speed daters.

Yeah, just human nature, right? What humans want.

Yeah.

Because if you're just like, hey, pretty hot out, isn't it? Super. You know, okay, sure. You're not connecting with that.

All right. Okay, so that's connect. Now invite, invite.

So invite. If you want to talk about some, like, deep issues, the invitation is something that people appreciate. And an invitation means that something where someone can say no, right? So if I'm inviting you to a party, you can say no. But if I'm demanding you to go to a party, that'd be kind of a jerk move, right? I'm having this party and you better come or else. And I think when we talk about politics and we talk about moral questions, we often do demand, how could you vote for this person? How do you believe this? Explain to me, right? Like, justify yourself. No one needs to feel like they're justifying who they are, what they believe. And so an invitation is really focused on understanding, and the intention there is learning. So, please, I'd love to learn what you think about immigration. And I know maybe we disagree, but I'm just like, I'm trying to understand, and I want to understand where you're coming from and what experiences might be of led there. So I just really appreciate hearing kind of your views, even if they're different from what I think. That's.

How about if you say to the person, can I ask you a question about immigration?

That's good. Yeah, that's a great place to start. And a question before the question. That's perfect. Yeah.

All right.

Okay. Now can I ask you about validation?

Thanks for the invitation. I'm happy to share. See, like, it worked. It just worked for us right now. So, you know, you invite someone to share something that is going to be hard for them to share. Invitation, you're, like, putting in kind of a little, like, grace. I like to say, you know, I talk to a lot of churches, so you're, like, putting in some grace. Like, I'm inviting you. And I know it's going to be hard for you to share this thing, and you're probably going to say something offensive. You don't need to say that to someone. But, like, come up with a mindset that someone might say something offensive to you, and then they'll say something. And then maybe your first reaction is to say, I don't think that. Or what about this? Here's this other thing you are considering. You want to say no right away. You want to, like, fire back something, but you should resist that impulse and instead validate doesn't mean agree. It does mean, thanks so much for sharing that. I understand it's hard to share. If I'm listening correctly, I think you mean this, and I'm going to rephrase it in a way that's very charitable. And then that's going to make you feel heard, it's going to make you feel seen, and it's going to allow us to have a better conversation after that.

And it's not part of civ. But you also make a very big deal about showing that you're vulnerable. So how does vulnerability play into this?

Yeah, I guess taking a step back. The goal for all these conversations is to see the humanity in each other, right? To recognize that we're all good people. We're all trying to figure out our lives and our world. And oftentimes when we're disagreeing with someone, we. And this is John Saroof's turn. We Flatten them. We see them as two dimensional. And so all this is a way of seeing someone in their rich three dimensionality. You want to connect, you want to invite, you want to validate and you want to let them see you as well as someone who is human. And a big part of that is vulnerability. So I'm going to share the stories after you shared with me. I feel comfortable with you now because we've had a connection. And so I'm going to share the stories of suffering, of harm, my concerns. And so you can see that I'm really basing my moral judgments, my concerns and questions about harm, because that's where our minds are rooted when it comes to morality and politics and concerns about protection.

So the name of your book is Outrage. And I have to ask a very simple question which is what causes people to get outraged?

It's a great question. It's a pretty simple answer. And the answer is we get outraged. We when someone rejects or challenges or defies our understanding of what is harmful and who is vulnerable to harm. So we get morally outraged when we see someone causing harm or rejecting our understanding of who or what is harmful.

And would you say that being outraged is highly correlated with justifiable reasons to be outraged? Or is it like if you stepped aside, would it be irrational to be outraged?

Here's the thing. So outrage evolves as a way of protecting ourselves. So if in our community someone did something that, that we thought was harmful, we would all band together in anger, we'd grab our pitchforks, our torches, and we would kick that person out of the community or we would punish them or censor them somehow. Except today we're no longer faced as much with kind of things that we all agree are harmful. Instead, we disagree. Immigration, abortion, taxes. Different people on the left and right disagree about what's harmful and what's worthy of outrage. And so going back to your question, it's really hard to know what's the rationale, right thing to be upset about because there are so many people on each side of an issue who have a legitimate point often. And so I think it's hard to say what's rational and what's not. We can all agree on some things, but other things we're very far apart on.

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As I was reading your book, this section about outrage or moral outrage, I just thought, would you say that the United states reaction to 911 was the mother of all examples of moral outrage?

I mean, it's certainly there's a case to be made. So we were harmed. We were harmed by someone we thought as a true villain, in this case, bin Laden. And like foreign folks doing harm on our soil, attacking our institutions. And certainly we were collectively outraged enough, we came together and then try to punish the folks who caused that harm. I think that's a good example.

But isn't the point of your book that we should look at it from the other perspective and see what drove them to do 9 11, or is that a stretch?

I think the point of the book is to understand how everyone has the same moral mind and we're all driven by outrage. And so I think it's justifiable that many Americans were outraged at that act. But I do think that failing to appreciate the kind of mindset of, let's say, folks in Afghanistan, folks in Iraq, other folks in the Middle east is like, you know, America goes in there and causes a lot of harm. I think we maybe needed to think about how they might feel outraged at America in return. Right. There's always two sides of any issue, and there's always people who take the other side. So at least we should have had a better understanding of what they're thinking and what they're feeling.

So do you have a practical tip that when you're feeling moral outrage, you know, before you react, you should take these steps, or do you just start launching B52s?

Well, you know, John Saroof has this other quote that I really like when he's working with divided communities, and he says it takes a fifth of a second for your flight or fight response to be activated and 20 minutes for it to calm down. And so part of, I think managing outrage is just taking some time and space away. It's okay. It's okay to walk away from the situation and say you need a little bit of time to calm down. You need to think about it. And it's okay to schedule it for a different time when you're not feeling angry. Like, don't send emails in anger. Try not to talk about politics when you're filled with rage. But I think what I try to do, and to get to your point about thinking about the minds of others is to think about, like, how these folks that I disagree with might feel victimized and the harms that they see. Because once you see that, the harms that someone else is worried about or how they feel like they've been victimized, even if I don't agree with their position, I can at least see them as a little more human. And that goes a long way.

Author to author, I'd like to ask you this question, or maybe I should pose it as author to author. May I ask you a question?

Yes, you bet.

So did you consider titles for your book that were not quite violent or negative? Instead of outraged, it would be like harmless or something like that.

The flip side of outraged, I did consider harm less. I thought that would be nice. The original title, the kind of secret working title, was the Victim within, which is a negative and maybe less violent. It turns out no publisher wanted that book. You're a victim and you're. No one wants to walk through the bookstore and be like, you know what? I am a victim. Even if we might all feel like it at some times. But I think we thought that the one word title with a bright orange cover and the aggressive question or exclamation mark rather, maybe a question mark would have been better. Right. Outraged. But I think we wanted people to resonate and many people are feeling outraged today and we wanted to help them make sense of that.

Okay, fair enough. And now I'm going to ask you one more author to author question that I noticed. And you may find this really bizarre, but on page 190 of your book, I have a question. And let me read a quote. So on page 190 it says, Most conservatives generally want to protect black men and most liberals generally want to protect the police. Is that an error? Is that a typo? Was it transposed?

No, no. Because it is the case that when we think of progressive folks and conservative folks, we generally think of conservative folks being more concerned about the police, progressive folks being more concerned about protecting black men, black lives. But it is the case that most progressives do think that police officers are good and want to protect them.

Okay, I get it now. Okay. So you were like busting two myths there.

Exactly, exactly. And where the disagreement Comes is like the relative concern when those two groups, those two interests are kind of pit against each other, but most people want to protect most other people.

I read that sentence about four times and I said, is this an error? What is he trying to say? So I stand corrected. I stand corrected. Thank you very much for clarifying.

But, but you're right. Like, we have these myths that the other side is so, you know, stuck in their political positions that they don't care about the other side or other interests. But most people do generally care for others and want a world where people are protected. Just these disagreements come down to these trade offs.

The foundation of your book is something that I never considered, which is I've had many social psychologists on this podcast and there are many explanations for this divide in the United States, but none of them have ever said something like harm is the key variable and the master key to explain human morality. So can you explain why harm is such a big deal? Because I never considered it. I never thought of it like that.

I think the reason that harm is the master key of morality is because we as a species and as individuals, we're really concerned with protecting ourselves. And we evolve through time as being threatened. If you go out, I make the argument that we're a lot more prey than predator. If you go out into the forest and you strip down to your underwear and you wait for nighttime and you hear a twig snap behind you, you're not going to think, oh, good, I hope it's an animal that I can eat. You're going to think, oh, my goodness, right? Something's coming to eat me. Something comes to kill me. And if you walk through a dark alley and you hear some shuffling in the darkness, you're going to think, oh, no, there's something there. There's something trying to get me. So we are so attuned to threats because through evolution, the people who were not attuned to threats, they died. If you were like, oh, look, there's something lurking in the darkness. I'm going to go try to hug it. You got eaten. And so we're attuned to threats. And in the past, those threats were clear. The predators or people who might kill us. But today, those threats are a little more ambiguous, right? Are immigrants a source of income for America or are they threats? Are taxes going up? Is that bad? Is that good? So today, we're divided by what's the most threatening. But at the heart of all our moral judgments is this concern about protecting ourselves from harm. And that's why? It's the master key.

And if someone from 100 years ago took a time machine and came to America today and saw what we considered harmful threats, would that person just be scratching their head and saying, listen, you guys, you gotta have more serious things to worry about than, I don't know, not being able to get into Harvard. That's not the biggest threat in the world?

I think you're exactly right. I often think going back in time, if you went to a parent in the Industrial revolution and their kids were working in a factory, it's dark, it's hot, there's spinning machinery that could catch your hand and cut it off. And they're thinking, every day, I hope my child's going to come home. And then, as you say, you tell them, you're like, maybe your kid's not going to get into this elite school, or maybe your kid is going to look at the screen too much. They didn't have a screen. Maybe I don't understand. Right? But they'll look at the screen too much and not feel fulfilled. The parent will be like, I just hope they come home with their hands. You know? And so I'm not, you know, it's not saying that these harms we're worried about today aren't real to us and don't cause concern, but it's certainly. It's a stretch from days of yore.

So let me ask you something so that if you are dealing with someone who you disagree with, should you be so transparent and ask them what harm they are seeing or what harm they're trying to avoid? Can you just be that blunt and ask what's threatening you?

I think you can. I think I probably wouldn't start with that going back to the civ. I would probably get into the conversation a little more obliquely talking to them as a person. But I think it's totally reasonable once you're actually talking about politics, about morality, to say, what are you most worried about? What do you think the harm is of this policy? People will tell you people have a gut to feeling that the things they're against are harmful. And so I think they're very happy to tell you as long as you don't throw back in the face, as long as you don't deny the kind of victims that they see.

Okay, so I'm a hardcore liberal, and probably most of my audience is liberal too. Maybe I have two or three conservatives listening to this podcast. So I got to tell you, a lot of the book was just eye opening to me that There is another argument to be said about abortion or vaccination or guns. So can you just quickly explain to us what's the other side of you, guy? What harm do they see with too much abortion or vaccination or gun control?

Yeah, good question. And I want to preface this with this idea of, look, there are, like, statistical truths of who or what is more likely to be harmed in some situations. And so I think vaccination, you know, as a scientist, I think vaccination, it's a good. It's a clear good. I'm a scientist. There's lots of evidence to support that. But I think that statistics don't always resonate in our minds, and in fact, they seldom do. And what does resonate are kind of stories about harm. And so even if we are all concerned about protecting the vulnerable from harm, especially kids, that you can have powerful stories, visions of what's harmful that contradict any kind of statistics. So if, let's say your kid gets a vaccine and falls terribly ill, that's going to be a personal experience that overwhelms however many scientists tell you that vaccines are okay. Or if you hear a story of a friend, I think guns are the same way. Right. If you have experience and you've used a gun to defend yourself, that's really powerful. And guns is also an interesting case because we could argue about what's most relevant to the gun debate. If you're like, look, the real problem is his mental illness, or it's not like taking care of your gun or putting them in safes, then we shouldn't be worried about how many guns are there. We should be worried about, like, responsible gun ownership. And if someone comes for a family, if the zombie apocalypse comes, right, you want to have a handgun, and so you see those threats and you see guns as a way of protecting yourself against those threats. So it just always comes down to this kind of. This worldview about what best protects us and our family.

Would you say that it's accurate that conservatives and liberals would almost completely agree on the desirability of protecting kids?

Yes, I think we. We agree on the desirability of protecting most people. We just make different assumptions about what protects them.

So a liberal would make the argument that vaccination protects kids, and a conservative might make the argument that vaccination is going to cause autism. So they're both trying to protect kids.

That's exactly right.

Wow. But let me ask you, Kurt, is there a point too far? I understand seeing the other side, but are you telling me I'M supposed to see the other side for Hitler and Putin and Musk and Trump. I mean, RFK says don't get vaccinated. Is there a point where you just say, I don't think so?

I think there is a point. There is a point where you say, this is a step too far. But I do want to separate the kind of the morality and humanity of everyday people for maybe political elites. So this book is not written as, like, being an apologist for Putin. In fact, in one chapter, I say, like, Putin thinks he's a victim, and obviously he's not. That idea is crazy. But I do think that many people in America have so many kind of different assumptions about who's vulnerable to harm from social media, from cable news. And I think most people, left or right, just want to protect their family and want to have a better world to live in. And maybe some folks make assumptions or misunderstand the science. Questions of vaccination are probably more complex than most people realize, even if they're uniformly, I think, a good thing for society. And so I think we should just see the humanity in the other side, even if we want to argue against them. But that understanding of humanity doesn't have to extend to Elon Musk if you don't want it. This is about reconnecting with your friends and family, coworkers. And if people don't want to have a reason conversation with Kanye or Elon or, you know, or Donald Trump, I think that's okay. This is about healing. Are kind of everyday fractures. Although I do want to say there are people who think that you can extend the bridge even further. So Daryl Davis is a black blues musician. Talk about him in the book. He devotes his life to befriending KKK members and getting them to hang up their robes. So should we require a black man to talk to a KKK member? No. But the fact that he did it, I think makes society better because he de. Radicalizes them and brings them towards the middle. So those conversations are good, but I.

Think a very subtle and important point is that where do you draw the line between communication and understanding and empathy and vulnerability and crossover into persuasion? Because once you cross into persuasion, it changes the C. I. V. Right, Right.

And so in general, when you have these conversations, for them to go well, you should be trying to understand and not win. Because if you try to win, say you've already lost, but you can persuade someone through understanding, which I think is actually the only way to do it. Because if I come at you and I say, look, your positions are wrong. I heard some statistics on Fox News and here's how, like you're following the wrong party and you're a sheep and let me tell you, the right statistics, that's not going to persuade, that's going to send you in the other direction. Right? You're going to get angry. You're an idiot. Like you don't know the right facts. And this is why facts don't work, to persuade, because people have different facts. But if instead I say, look, here's why I believe what I believe. It's because of how I was raised. This really formative thing happened to me as a child. I felt very vulnerable and I got assaulted by a migrant or like I used a gun to defend my, these positions on the right, I think you'll think, oh, okay, like I see where you're coming from. And, and now you can generalize my own stories and feelings of harm maybe to other folks on the side. And, and that could be persuasion, but not because I'm trying to persuade, because I'm trying to just show you who I am.

But isn't there an inherent flaw in using stories this way? Because stories are not necessarily statistically or scientifically valid. Right? You could say, yeah, my uncle smoked cigarettes every day for 70 years. He never got lung cancer. So cigarettes, according to my story, are safe.

Yeah, no, that's a good point. And we, I teach my students in psychology and science that stories, just anecdotes, are not data. And the point is very apt, but our minds do not work well around statistics and they should work better. And I teach my students to think about statistics. Right? But in a political conversation, it doesn't work. I wish that it worked. Then we could agree on like a common set of statistics or facts. But we don't because each side has statistics and they disagree about which statistics are most relevant. So there's a statistic that somewhere between a hundred thousand and 1.2 million times every year guns are used in self defense. And there's a broader set of statistics even more times in America each year guns harm people not in self defense. But I could say, look, as a conservative, like those other statistics, they're not relevant because they're not using guns correctly, they're not well trained, it's not the right kind of guns. And there's always a way to, I think of like Neo in the Matrix. You dodge around which facts are real. And so at the end of the day, if you want to understand someone, you need to put statistics Aside, at least at first. At first connect with someone as a person and then you can talk about statistics.

So do you basically tell your students that story is a very powerful way to communicate and persuade, but you should also be understanding that when you on the side of the recipient of the story, you have to ask, is this valid in general?

I think people already do that. I think if I tell you a story as I have. So here's how a gun rights advocate, why they would be pro gun because of they used a handgun to defend themselves, or your kid got sick and you thought it was because of the vaccine. That's a story. You would spontaneously say, that's not valid, that's not a right story, that's not generalizable. People already do that. And so I think the step we're missing is to say we. Wow, that must have been hard. Thanks for sharing that. I can understand where you're coming from and then you can talk about some broader statistics. I think once you've shared your own story so the person knows where you're coming from. And there's lots of programs actually to bring lawmakers together across the country. And those programs, they allow storytelling initially and then afterwards they have lawmakers think about statistics and policies and affecting the most good on kind of narrow range of issues typically, but statistics are still part of it. But they don't happen first, if that makes sense.

In Silicon Valley, one of the most common stories is that you don't need a college education because Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg don't have undergraduate college degrees. So they don't need it. You don't need it drop out of college. And that is statistically a very, very misleading story.

Right, Right. I think about in terms of the stock market too, Right?

Yeah.

Sometimes there's big crashes, but statistically speaking, it just makes sense to invest your money in the stock market because it goes up. But morality is not. It's not like other facts. It's not like other statistics. If you have a deep moral conviction and I say, hey, there's a statistic out there and it suggests that your moral conviction's wrong. It's not that you're not going to be like, oh, you know what, you're right. I guess I'll just give up my view. Because that's not how we're built. Right. Our moral convictions, they tie communities together. They make us feel like we're good people. And so maybe you can have moral change over time. And people. Do people shift left to right or right to Left, but, like, it's not the same kind of thing of what's the most reliable car you can buy? It's not the same kind of thing as what should you believe about abortion?

Okay, so now kind of reversing my direction on stories, can you tell us how to optimize the use of stories? So let's say I'm sold. I've seen the light. I love stories versus facts. So how do I use stories most effectively?

Before we get there, I think one thing that's useful to note is that, like, political operatives, the people that I'm saying you don't need to have quite as much empathy for as everyday people. They understand the power of storytelling and fears and harms. These are the things that motivate the base that get out donations, that get out the vote. These people are out there. They're coming for you. They're coming for America. So I think stories do work, and the other side uses them. Whether you're on the left or the right, the other side is always using them to almost for evil, to drive division, especially during elections. And. And so I think it's useful for us to know that they work. And I think even drawing from those kind of like the success of fear and threat, the stories that work best for bridging divides are, as we mentioned a little bit earlier, stories that kind of reveal your vulnerability and reveal that, you know, you're a good person. If I tell you the story and I talk about my family, and so here's a story of, like, why I, you know, wants to bridge divides and see the humanity in the other side. And even though I, like, hang out mostly with progressives, I have family in Nebraska, and they very clearly love me. And they love me. As a kid, I was a stepchild. I was a foreigner. I came down when I was, like, 7 and 10, and they opened their arms to me and accepted me as part of the family, despite these facts. And even as I got older and I realized I disagreed on issues, I couldn't write them off and say that they're just, you know, stupid or evil, because I know that's not true. And so it's my personal experience of, like, feeling loved and having them kind of sacrifice for me, drive across the country to see me get married. These are the things that make me feel connected. And so my own story for why I'm a pluralist and why I think we should bridge divides is, like, grounded in my personal experience and my feelings of love and openness. So I think those are the Stories that are optimized in a sense, like bearing yourself and showing who you are personally. Up next on Remarkable People. And so I think we're exhausted about fighting about what the best way to do it is. And we're exhausted about the kind of loudest voices on social media and on cable news. Even though I think we're kind of like there's this like terrible addiction to kind of social media and cable news. Like, we would be happier if we put it aside for a little bit, took some time, rested, slept and connected with people on a human basis. And that might make us feel less exhausted.

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Thank you to all our regular podcast listeners. It's our pleasure and honor to make the show for you. If you find our show valuable, please do us a favor and subscribe, rate and review it. Even better, forward it to a friend. A big mahalo to you for doing this. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. You brought it up. So I gotta ask, did you ever get baptized?

I never got baptized, despite. As the story in the book goes, I'm in a Sunday school in Nebraska and the lessons on baptism and I was like a 7 year old or 10 year old or something sitting in the basement. And the teacher says, can anyone tell me what happens to people who aren't baptized? I'm the only kid, obviously, who's not baptized. And some kids put up his hand and teacher says, yes. And the kid says, they go to hell. And that's what everyone believes. But I felt like it was a bit of a setup. Like you're just like telling me I'm going to hell. And I was a little offended initially, but then I took some time. I was like, hot on it for a little bit. But I took some time to think about it. I went away a little bit, and I realized kind of what harms do they see? Well, they see me going to hell and they love me and they don't want me burning in a pit of fire for eternity. That's bad. That's a harm. And now that I see this concern, which is a little offensive actually, as a. As a way of trying to protect me and reach out to me, and so I see it in a new light and I'm still not baptized, I don't think I'm going to hell. But I do appreciate their concern for me, even if I disagree with their assumptions about the world.

I gotta tell you, I love that story. I was baptized. I was probably 40 years old or something, so it's never too late. I got baptized at 40. I took up hockey at 44, took up surfing at 60. Kurt, take your time. You got a lot of times.

There you go. I've already had a couple concussions, so I don't know about hockey, but definitely surfing.

You put together two words that I have never seen put together in my life. And I want you to explain the concept of moral humility. What do those two words have to do with each other?

So there has been a big trend, a movement towards intellectual humility, which is this idea of maybe I don't know how the world works. And so you can make people feel intellectually humble very easily. If I say, imagine a helicopter. You know how it works? And you're like, yeah, I got it. There's like two rotors. It's cool. And then I say, could you please draw out a helicopter in sufficient detail that you could, like, explain how it works? And then you, like, get your pen and paper and you start drawing the helicopter. Like, I don't know, I. I have no idea. That creates some humility or even, like, how does a toilet work? Whatever that creates humility, because you realize intellectually you don't know everything that you thought you knew. Moral humility is that understanding about a moral issue. And it's harder one, I think, but I think you can still have it. And I think it's still important if you acknowledge that, like, well, maybe there's someone on the other side of an issue about guns or abortion or taxes that maybe has a bit of knowledge or a bit of opinions that I might learn from that really changes the conversation. Right? Because now they're not evil, they just, they think differently. And even if I don't agree with it, like, I could still learn a little bit from them. And every time I've had conversations, like, I had an Uber ride with a Christian nationalist, I don't agree with Christian nationalism, but at the end of this 20 minute conversation I had where I asked him a lot of questions, I connected, I invited, I validated, I learned a lot about his position, and I still don't agree with it, but I still learned about what he's thinking about and I appreciated that learning. So I think humility can help.

Okay, Kurt, you opened another door here. Tell me, what did you learn from a Christian nationalist? I want to hear this. I. I want to be morally humble and learn this.

So Christian nationalist was an uber driver. He had his own business, he has his family. And he was describing to me, like, what he thought about the state, what he thought about the church. And I was surprised at, in a sense, how tolerant he actually was of other faiths. He thought that, like, Christianity should be the kind of national religion its definitional in the idea of a Christian nationalist. He's like, you can be Muslim, maybe it's not as prominent as being Christian. And I didn't realize that he would be supportive of that idea. And he also had, like, more nuanced beliefs on the economy than I thought. He's like, oh, I'm kind of libertarian, but not in the following ways. And so I, I think I learned about the kind of economic and social complexity in this view that I didn't appreciate. And, and that made me kind of reflect on, like, well, what do I think of the connection between the state and the church? And there's lots of tax breaks for churches. And do I think that's reasonable? I'm not sure, but he's advancing arguments for, like, why that's meaningful to him and like, the connection between the church and supporting his family. So it just made me think of there's nuance around these issues. And it didn't change my core convictions, but it did make me realize that there's Unanswered questions you could have about these topics.

And did you give them five stars and a tip?

I did give them five stars. And here's why. Here's why. Okay, so we had a 20 minute conversation about Christian nationals. I asked questions, I invited, I validated. And then as we're driving up the ramp to the airport, we start talking about abortion. And abortion really comes down to your, like, assumptions about when life begins. And this may be a whole other conversation, but interestingly, evangelical Christians used to think that life started at birth, not at conception, which is like a whole turnaround in the seventies. But I digress. So we're having a conversation about abortion. He's very pro life, and he starts saying that anyone who's pro choice is kind of aligned with the Nazis. Right? Yeah, and you mentioned it as well. It doesn't take long for someone to connect a moral position they disagree with to the Nazis. Right. It's so easy in discourse today. It's like natural even, because they're like the paradigm of evil. And I teach a class on this. I teach undergrads to have reasonable conversations about contentious issues. And I say, listen, we can't have this conversation if you're going to compare half of America to the Nazis. It's just not acceptable. Right. It's not fair. We can't have a good faith conversation about, about morality if, if this is going to happen. And he pauses and he says, you know what? You're right. I'm sorry, I'm going to take that back. All I was trying to say, I'm giving him some grace here to explain his views, like the invitation, some validation, is that I'm worried that people who don't respect the sanctity of fetal life will slide down a slippery slope. Kind of my words, but like, you know, and other areas will neglect life. And that's going to be bad for everyone in society, especially kids are the vulnerable. And the idea of a slippery slope is a reasonable philosophical argument that people on both sides have. And I could understand where that was coming from. And five stars, he, he took it back. He had some moral humility himself because he's like, that's wrong. I'm sorry. But that only happened because I tried to understand and ask questions. And so I think it's a good example of how these things can, if not change people, at least allow them to have respect for the other side in a way that probably didn't happen for him. I'm a college professor. He probably thinks I'm like the indoctrinating enemy. But now I think there's some respect that hopefully persists over time.

And why didn't this story make the book?

It happened after the book was written.

Oh, bummer.

But I have a sub stack on it if folks want to see the sub stack. But it's one of my favorite stories because I took all the book and I put it into practice.

Yeah, it encapsulates the whole book, right?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

You never know what happens in an Uber. That's another important lesson here. My last section of questions is I want to explore the concept of being mentally exhausted. So what causes mental exhaustion? Well, am I asking questions that are too easy?

So in the book, I talk about this idea of the exhausted majority when it comes to politics and that most people are, like you say, mentally exhausted. We're tired of the shouting. We're tired of all the anger. We're tired of the division. And even if it's a gut reflex, we just want to live our lives and we just want to feel like the country is working for us, by us. And we disagree about that, obviously, about who's the most effective leader. But most people want cheaper gas prices, want cheaper milk prices, want schools that flourish, want healthcare that helps them. And so I think we're exhausted about fighting about what the best way to do it is. And we're exhausted about the kind of loudest voices on social media and on cable news. Even though I think we're kind of like there's this, like, terrible addiction to kind of social media and cable news. Like, we would be happier if we put it aside for a little bit, took some time, rested, slept, and connected with people on a human basis. And that might make us feel less exhausted.

So your recommendation is put social media aside, don't doom scroll, and try to interact on a personal basis using civ.

Exactly. Exactly. And even if you use social media, we have some research on this, that if you unfollow the most divisive accounts, like, that's going to make you feel better. Just those, like, 10 people that are conflict entrepreneurs is a nice word from Amanda Ripley that people are making money by making you angry. Put it aside and actually have conversations with your Uber driver, someone who bowls with you. The guy who, like, runs the whole landscaping operation around here. He's certainly more conservative than I am. We talk about kids and we talk about how he's doing. Talk about, like, his house and he's planting trees. There's so many things that we have in common. That's not about Politics. And if we get to politics, we can, like tiptoe around a little. Respectfully. But those in person conversations are much better than screaming into platforms.

You made the argument that you should unfollow the 10 most disruptive people. I could make the case you should unfollow the 10 people that you most agree with. Right. Because that would put you outside the echo chamber.

Yeah, I think that's not a bad idea either. I think, again, you should be striving. Maybe this is a mindset for life. Right. You should be striving to learn in general. And if you're just hearing anything that you already believe parroted back, it's not a way to learn. But with social media, I mean, the algorithm's so fine tuned to induce outrage. Like, I don't even know if social media is the right place to learn. You can read reports by think tanks. I think that's probably boring for most people. But I think if you're going to use social media, follow like the US Parks cat memes. I don't know. Anything's better than politics on social media. In fact, I've got a study that shows that people who follow politics on social media and pay attention to virality metrics, like how many retweets, how many shares they have symptoms of PTSD that are above clinical threshold. Often it's crazy. Like, that's how bad it is to like politics and care about virality on social media. Don't do it.

The guy who just time traveled 100 years, he's going to be saying, yeah, 100 years ago we were worried about being killed and now you're worried about PTSD from reading posts on social media.

True. Although, you know, 100, I don't know how many. 150 years ago. Right. Salem witch trials, like all sorts of panic about witches. And they didn't have social media. Right. But they had the Bible and they had like preachers saying that like Satan's coming for them and things are terrible. So they still had a kind of panic. It didn't happen as fast as social media, but I think it's still a kind of like deeply human thing to be terrified of threats and to band together and get outraged.

Okay, this is my last question, and this last question may not go over well with your relatives in Nebraska, but let's just pretend that you become the chairman of the Democratic National Committee. What would you do?

I would tell stories of harm because I know that's effective, I suppose. I mean, I think deep in my heart, I think that the best way to run America is how it was founded, which is as a pluralistic democracy. And it's totally fair to have convictions. But I think some of the best bills that were passed are bipartisan bills, like overhauling the criminal justice system to be kinder, to be less punitive, to be less racially biased, but also just give individuals a second chance, no matter what their race is. And so I would try, I think, to build broad scale support. This is why I would never be elected, by the way, or chosen as the DNC chairman, because I'm not, like, motivating the base enough. But I think big social movements pass civil rights, women's suffrage. Right, because there is bipartisan support, there's understanding on both sides, there's allies that see same with gay rights. It's like John McCain's daughter is gay, and he could see the humanity in those folks. And then there's this widespread support. I think for moral progress to happen, I think it needs to be a more united effort than what we're seeing today.

And as you said, and I misunderstood, quote, most conservatives generally want to protect black men, and most liberals generally want to protect the police. And. Right. So we're probably more similar than we are different if we could just stop being outraged.

Exactly. We are so similar. If you take a law book and you flip to a random page, we probably agree on 99.99% of those pages of law. And even when it comes to contentious issues, we generally do agree. What pushes us apart is our partisan filters and what the media tells us. So if we just go within ourselves and think about our own minds and our own concerns about harm and other people's concerns about harm, it brings us a lot closer together.

All right, Kirk, thank you so much. This has been such an interesting episode, and I learned a lot reading your book. I would love to see all your theories and concepts get into practice so that we do have a more civil civ in cap society. So thank you very much, Kurt. I appreciate this very much. And. And you are a remarkable person. So we will be in touch. Okay, sounds good.

And appreciate it.

All right, so I'm Guy Kawasaki. This has been the Remarkable People podcast with the remarkable Kurt Gray. And I hope you learned some very tactical and practical ways to bring society together. I certainly did. And remember, his book is called Outraged, even though. Though I think he should be called harmless. But don't worry about that, because he had to get the book published. And if publishers want to call it outrage, so be it. And focus on the big issues, right, Kurt?

That's right. Outrage sells.

Outrage sells. All right, thank you very much. Have a great week, everybody. Mahalo and aloha. Thank you for my crew members, Addison Nismer, Shannon Hernandez, and Jeff C. That's the Remarkable People team behind me, Kurt. And we're all trying to help people be remarkable. This is remarkable people.