Frank Bruni

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, the show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately how they got to where they are today. The dysfunction of our political and civic life right now, people don't have a sense of belonging anymore.

They're not part of something larger. And if you feel that isolated, if you are that isolated, you begin to forget about the virtue of the collective good. We need to spend more energy and pay more attention on giving people things to belong to and places to belong. On today's episode of the PUP, we have a special treat. We are joined by Frank Bruni, the best selling author and New York Times contributing opinion writer who has been writing for the New York Times since 1995.

He discusses his newest book, The Age of Grievance, sharing his insights on the concept of humility, the danger of social media for critical thinking, and what it means to be in an age of grievance. It's a fascinating and important discussion, so let's get to it. Frank Bruni, welcome to the book. So as we get started, can you take a moment and just tell us a bit about yourself? Yeah.

I'm a longtime journalist. I have worked in various capacities for The New York Times for something like three decades, which when I say fills me with terror about how many years I've been on this planet. I've written a number of books on a range of topics. Just as in my journalism career, I've I've written about a wide variety of things from politics to food to religion. And I now am in my third year as a professor at Duke University, and I live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

Terrific. So I went back, and I I read your bio on The New York Times website. And it seems as if you have covered just about everything under the sun. How have you avoided not getting boxed in? It's just my nature.

I've been lucky enough that I am nimble, and I have a wide ranging curiosity and the times, and I'm really grateful for this. They've valued me as a reporter and writer beyond any one area of expertise. So they've often encouraged me to turn in different directions, and they've trusted me to turn in different directions. And so that has enabled me not to get boxed in. And I hope contributed to a worldview that is a little bit broader and more elastic than too many people's worldviews these days.

I mean, as we'll talk about today, we'll talk about the age of grievance. A big part of the problem is so many people have one perspective. They get locked into it, and they can't hear or consider other sides. Totally makes sense. So are there things on your list that you'd like to cover that you haven't been able to cover yet?

There's a part of me, this will never happen, but my kind of journalistic bucket list would be to cover a season of pro football. I am a huge pro football fan, a conflicted one, given you know, the injuries in the sport and other unsavory aspects of the sport, but I'm a bit of a of a pro football savant. And I've never been given the chance to do any sorts of any sort of sports journalism. That would be fun if that's in the cards in my remaining time in this profession. I get it.

And that actually is a good segue into part of your Twitter bio reads, Duke professor, but UNC grad. Mhmm. It's complicated. How in the world did you manage that? Well, I I went to school at UNC, which is one of the reasons why I've always loved and longed to return to the Raleigh Durham Chapel Hill area.

Duke approached me a couple years ago and had a job that was perfect for me. And I never back when I was at UNC, when I was a Tar Heel myself, I never really bought into and participated in that rivalry. I don't understand rivalries that are that venomous, which again, factors into the age of grievance and what we'll talk about. I just and now that I'm there, I stay out of it when I get invited to the UNC Duke basketball game. I stay home.

I sit on my hands. I say nothing. I'm I'm Switzerland when it comes to Duke UNC athletic competitions. I love that. I love that.

So before getting to your current book, in the past, you have written about George w Bush, college admissions, and your own experience with vision loss. Mhmm. Now this can also refer to your work at the times, but how do these diverse ideas come to you? I mean, each of them reflect something that's going on in my life. I mean, I think like all of us, I look at the world around me.

There are things that grab my attention, that prompt reflection in me, and I've been lucky enough that those become the things I write about. I wrote, I guess, it's a decade ago now, I wrote my book, Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be, about the college admissions frenzy, because I had nephews, nieces, and children of friends who were going through a college application process that was even more frenzied and high stakes than when I'd done it decades earlier. And I thought, this just doesn't make sense. It's not healthy. I'd like to say something about it.

I wrote a book about George w Bush because in my career at the times, I spent several years as the main reporter covering George w Bush's presidential campaign. And I had so many thoughts and so much material that hadn't made it into my voluminous times coverage. And so it it all kind of reflects what I'm doing at a given moment and my desire to and my privilege to get to weigh in on those subjects. So speaking of subjects and important subjects, your new book is called The Age of Grievance. How and why and when did this theme of grievance emerge for you?

Well, I mean, I've been watching as you have, as any of us who read the news and kind of monitor public events. I've been watching this country get angrier and angrier and more polarized for decades now. And I've been getting increasingly concerned about it because I don't think we're in a good place. And at a certain point, I thought I'd like to try to make sense of it. I'd like to try to figure out how did we get here.

I'd like to really take a good inventory of what it's costing us. I think one of the most important things I do in the book or I hope I'm doing in the book is to show people, like, what this is costing us as a country, how much it's holding us back, how much it's turning us against one another, how corrosive that is. I just felt it was time to take stock of all of this and to see if maybe I had some ideas to point us in a better direction. And it's my hope that the book does that. Yeah.

Well, I think it does. And you deal with it, I think, in a very balanced way. So it is important. And the first piece I read from the book was the most important thing I teach my students isn't on the syllabus, which was published as an excerpt in the New York Times on April 20. Now I'm not going to spoil what its corresponding chapter is in your book, but I found your engagement with the concept of humility quite moving.

We obviously will link to the article, but for those listeners who haven't had a chance to read, can you walk them through how you developed what you refer to as your spiel? It was a big concern of mine when I began teaching at Duke, and it would have been my concern if I'd been teaching anywhere, that my classes be a space for diverse viewpoints, for healthy give and take between students who maybe saw the world differently, that they'd be heterodox and not homogeneous environments. And so regardless of the course I teach, and I've taught many different courses all in the media public policy space, I always, on the first day, tell students a number of things. I tell them I tell them to their consternation that I care a lot about proper grammar and usage. And I do that because I think tradition is important, and I think holding yourself to standards is a kind of humility that I wanna see in students.

I tell them that they're gonna hear me say one phrase more often than any other, and that phrase is it's complicated because I think people who have ready one size fits all solutions for problems are usually not being intellectually honest and are usually rushing to a conclusion rather than being deliberative and reflective. You know, and I tell them I wanna hear each and every one of their voices, but I don't wanna hear too much of each of their voices. Because, again, on the subject of humility, which I think is missing from American life right now and so important, I want each of us to make space for the people around us. None of us deserves to have a world exactly to our liking, and none of us deserves to monopolize the stage. And that's a message I try to I try to send to students.

Interesting. You mentioned this issue that life's complicated, and and I wanna just follow-up on that theme for just one second, which is you also talked about grammar and the importance of that and the words matter. When I use a particular word, I have a certain intention behind it, and I'm expressing that intention with that particular word. And when a person hears it, they're taking all their subjective bias and their life experiences, and they're translating that word like God with their own bias. Does that come up or in any way influence the way in which you have these conversations with your students where it is complicated?

Well, I actually try and sometimes not as well as you just said it, to be honest. But I try to make the very point you just made that so often when we get angry, when we decide somebody's not on our side, when we kind of go to war with them, it's because we've heard them in a particular way, and it's because whatever they've said is said imperfectly because we all communicate imperfectly. And because of what you just observed, I try to encourage students to build some forgiveness into their give and take with people because there's often this disconnect between what the person meant to say, what you heard. It's like that game of telephone. And I urge this is a really kind of old fashioned word that's gonna make me sound like, I don't know, like a codger or some Victorian.

But I I ask everybody to bring a measure of grace to these conversations, to interpret what people are saying generously and not sensoriously. Again, so much of the problem in our political discourse right now, in Congress, across all fronts of American life is rather than give people the benefit of the doubt, we hear them in the most judgmental, unforgiving way possible. There's no humility in it and there's no grace in it. And I ask my students to please, please keep that in mind and to try to create a different, better, more constructive environment in our classroom. Yeah.

I completely agree. And it's funny because as you're using words like grace and humility, or I bring up the word holiness, you know, there are words that mean something that we, as a society have really lost the ability to talk about. And I don't know what your experience is, but I don't see a lot of people struggling with the word grace nearly enough. I don't either, but I will say, and, you know, my kind of laboratory currently is not necessarily the most accurate one. It's the classroom.

It's the hundreds of students now that I've taught at Duke. When you ask young people, when I ask my students to pause and think about that, they do. I mean, I think a big part of the problem and a way in which we're failing the next generation is we don't pause and have the kinds of conversations with them that we could. We don't point them in the directions that we might. We had an amazing conversation in one of the last sessions of a class I taught at Duke this semester.

The class is called The Age of Grievance. It is synchronous with my book. And one of the students, one of the many thoughtful intelligent students in the class was talking about the range of political viewpoints in her family and how nobody gets too worked up about it, nobody cancels anybody else because they all see each other as more multidimensional, complicated human beings, who, yes, may not have the exact political perspective you want, but have other traits that bind you to them and that you appreciate. And we all sort of reflected on that and thought and and everyone kind of said, in our own families, we muster that kind of grace. Why can't we extrapolate that into the public realm?

Why do we not accord our fellow citizens, our fellow Americans, the kind of grace that we do our family members? It's clearly in us. We clearly have that ability in our psyches and our hearts, but we somehow can't make that leap into the public realm. It's funny, I have a friend who's a therapist, and he also has several kids, and he talks about why is it so hard to talk a certain way to my patients, but when I bring it into my everyday life, it's a lot harder to do. It's perfect example.

That's perfect. Yes. Yeah. So as a follow-up about humility in your own life, a lot of people come to that concept in different ways, and many find it through religion, but others through team sports, community activity. I'm wondering when you first were aware of the merits of humility as it relates to your own life.

Well, you're you're talking to somebody who doubts himself pretty much every hour and every second of the day and doubts himself even as he's talking to you. I have I struggle with a role that I've played in journalism for a decade now. I didn't start out as an opinion columnist. It's the latter stage of my career, not the bulk of my career. And I struggle with it to this day because I don't assume just as a matter, and this isn't a virtue.

I think for me, humility is a sort of Venn diagram overlap with insecurity. I don't assume I'm right about everything. I often doubt myself even as I'm advocating a viewpoint. It's just my natural nature not to believe I'm this I was gonna say not to believe I'm the smartest person in the room, to know I'm not the smartest person in the room. But I think for me, a lot of it's coming from a big family.

My immediate family, I mean, in terms of I'm one of four siblings. Our extended Italian American clan is boisterous and sometimes rancorous. And in the way that some people's church shows them that they're a part and just a small part of something larger, in the way that some people's community centers do that, I think for me, the Bruni family did that. It showed me that, yes, I have a valuable place in this world, but I'm not the star of every show. And I think that gave it to me.

But also, I'm just an insecure person to whom humility comes naturally because, like I said, I don't assume I have the most important words to say ever. I would have to say that humility has it came a little later in life to me in certain ways, and my three kids are my best source of humility. So in your chapter, Grievance Now versus Grievous Then, you highlight the phenomenon over the last thirty years that was at one point called political correctness and now may be called wokeness. You see, we can chicken and egg Trump's assent and this new funhouse mirror version of political correctness, but acknowledge that their concurrence wasn't coincidental. You speak of this modern form more or less starting with Sarah Palin, and president Obama makes a similar pitch in his book The Promised Land.

What was it about her rise that was so impactful? You know, Sarah Palin, I think again, these are all points on a continuum, but I think Sarah Palin, she communicated a very particular us versus them that has become a lot of the schematic or binary right now. She cast well educated eloquent liberals as this sort of insufferable elite that condescended to the rest of America in a way that proved very sticky. And I think it is it is very easy to draw a straight line from Sarah Palin to Donald Trump in that regard. What's so interesting about and where that straight line becomes very odd or warped is in Sarah Palin's case, she was an Alaskan, she was a small city mayor, she hadn't been to fancy universities, she did not come from money.

As a tribune of people look down at me and you if you're like me, she made logical sense. Donald Trump is a child of wealth who went to Wharton, who flies around in a private jet. What's so fascinating is the nice word. Crazy is the less nice word about Donald Trump is he is the megaphone and the mascot for this Us versus them, but in fact has so much more in common with the people he's identifying as his and his supporters enemies than he does with them. And it's it's just fascinating that he's been able to pull that off.

It's fascinating as a matter of political strategy, as a matter of communication strategy, as a matter of optics. I wonder, you know, when I think back to Sarah Palin and my friends and intellectual friends, I didn't in the news see as much about her saying that, you know, they look down upon us. But I do remember people looking down upon her and making fun of her that she wasn't sophisticated and so forth. I wonder with some of the Trump stuff that's going on is that he makes fun of the intellectuals. Like, he's one of the elites, but he also is able to make fun of it.

And I wonder if that creates a sense of identity and a feeling that they feel seen. Well, to go back to Sarah Palin, you are correct that she wasn't explicitly and expansively saying they look down on me and they look down on you if you're like me. So it wasn't explicit and expansive, but it was definitely implicit in that. And I will to take a very slight digression, I will tell you that during my age of grievance class at Duke, I show my students the in some ways hilarious, but also extremely illuminating Saturday Night Live clip, a famous one, where Tina Fey is playing Sarah Palin. Amy Poehler is playing Katie Couric questioning her.

And it's basically about how completely idiotic Sarah Palin sounds in that parody of an actual interview. Now it's funny, and in the realm of comedy, it's fair game. But as I say to my students, if you are a less educated American who did not think Sarah Palin sounded all of that idiotic and you're seeing this elite media representation of this interview. That's one of the reasons you feel so condescended to. That's one of the reasons you see this world as those snooty elites versus the rest of us.

Right? Donald Trump, what he has done is he had said he has noticed correctly that well, I don't I don't like to call them the elites. I think it's reductive. I don't think it's all that neat and clean. But that a certain kind of establishment didn't support him, opposes him.

I would say opposes him for good reasons because he says racist things. He says gratuitously and and recklessly divisive things, but he cast their opposition to him as they just see me as crude. They don't see me as refined. Those people are your enemies. I am gonna torment them.

I'm gonna torture them. I'm gonna torture them above all by seizing power from them. And in that sense, you should support me and you should revel in what I do because I'm getting back. I am hating the people you hate, and I'm getting back at them on your behalf. Most crucial line he has said in the last year or two, he said when he was kind of stepping out to run for president again, I am your justice.

I am your this. I am your retribution. That is the key to his appeal to many, many of his constituents. Yeah. And I think sometimes underappreciated because it requires you to really understand the anger and frustration that so many people feel.

And if you're not experiencing that in your own life and you feel stressed alone because you have your your own issues. Right? Right. That if you're not able to see that, it comes across as hubris and as the opposite of humility. And another reason I think it's important to read your book so that people can start to understand these various perspectives.

Listen. I think this isn't everyone, but I think it's enough people for for us to have a democracy in a civil society. I think most people, if they feel fully heard, if they feel fully considered, and if they feel respected, they can live for a given period of time with not always getting their way. Right? That's the nature of winner loser democratic politics.

You don't always get the president you want. You don't always get the congressional majority you want, but you live with it for the time being because the collective good and the collective peace matter. I think we have done that through our history, and I think we can continue to do that if a critical mass of people at least feel respected and heard. And the danger right now isn't just, okay, I'm not the danger isn't me or someone else not necessarily being on the winning side. The danger is being on the losing side and feeling like nobody even considered my viewpoint.

Yeah. Absolutely. And, you know, you talked about the value that you got from your family and that there were four of you. When I think about the book Bowling Alone and the the the lack of community and places for people to go to feel that sense of safety and connection and so forth, I think it is an added challenge that we face. Yes.

Yes. I agree. I mean, bowling alone was and it's kind of a surprise to remember that was written decades ago because it feels like it was written right now. It charted something that's a big reason we are where we are in terms of the dysfunction of our political and civic life right now. People don't have a sense of belonging anymore.

They're not part of something larger. We talked about that. And if you feel that isolated, if you are that isolated, you begin to forget about the virtue of the collective good. You begin to forget, again, about not getting everything that you want and about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. And isolation is a great recipe for desperation, for anger, for all of those things that prevent us from having coherent and civilized discourse.

We need to spend more energy and pay more attention on giving people things to belong to and places to belong. It has not helped in the last couple of years that more and more Americans have moved to remote work. That can make a daily life quite convenient. But as a kind of psychological reality, it can be quite dangerous. It's interesting.

I hadn't thought about that. It's an excellent point. So if I got this right, you note that in the last twenty years, we've gone from a satisfaction level of 50 to 60% to 11% as a country. And and that, to me, is a staggering statistic. Can you take a moment and talk about our stubborn fog?

Yeah. I have a chapter of the book that is called The Lost I think it's called The Lost Shimmer of the Shining City on the Hill or something like that. I think it might be a little more tightly worded than that. I think an enormous part of grievance culture right now is the turn toward pessimism in this country. To recall Ronald Reagan's campaigns and the idea of its morning America, you know, and the shining city on the hill, that almost seems like a world as distant as Jurassic Park at this point, right?

That's not the way anybody talks right now. The numbers that you just referred to, I don't have them right in front of me, but for decades now, Gallup, I think it's several times a year, I detail it accurately in the book, asks Americans, are you generally satisfied with the direction of the country? And if you go back more than two decades, that number would go up and down. It would very routinely crest 50%. I forget what the number of years is now, but it's something like twenty years running or maybe it's fifteen years running.

That number has never ever gone above 50%. So for for well over a decade, I think two decades, a majority of Americans tell Gallup they are dissatisfied with the direction the country is going in. That number often, the paucity of people who say they're satisfied, it's often as little as 25% of people who say they're general, not very satisfied, just generally satisfied with the way America's going. And the 11%, if my memory serves me, but again, it's in the book, I think that was right around the time of the January 6 storming of the capital. Only 11% of Americans said they were generally satisfied with the direction of the country.

That it it's hard to have a healthy democracy when a majority of the people in it are persistently, not just across years, but across decades, dissatisfied with the direction of the country. And what happens, if you don't believe in a robust future for your country, if you don't believe that the country is growing, that the pie is expanding, you are invariably gonna get much pettier, more competitive, more protective in regards to your piece of the pie. You are more likely to see your fellow citizens as being in competition with you than as being in collaboration with you. So this new American pessimism is a real problem because it fuels and accelerates grievance. Yeah.

Completely, completely agree. And that's a good segue into one of your chapters is called chaos, clicks, and catastrophe. So can I ask about your own relationship to social media? I I thought you're gonna ask about my own relationship to alliteration. Not too.

Which is something I will my own relationship to social media, I don't spend a lot of time on it because I'm a journalist and one of the ways you make people aware that you've published something and have something that you hope that is worth reading and that they'll read. I'm on social media. I do send out posts about my work, to people who may wanna know about it. You will not find me on social media getting in battles with other people. I don't think it is a platform that leads to substantive exchanges.

So I have a very I'm an infrequent visitor with a small footprint in that way. I also have a much different relationship to social media than many Americans in a way that I proselytize about, which is I follow an ideologically diverse group of people. And if you looked at the newsletters I get, if you looked at the things that are literally or metaphorically bookmarked on my computer, I want a diet of information that's really balanced and really diverse. An enormous problem right now in American life and it's a problem that because of technological advances, because of the nature of the Internet, because of the nature of social media, is we have so many people who spend a lot of time consuming information. They go up to the buffet table of possible information, and that buffet is infinite in the age of the Internet.

And they think that they're well fed because they've spent a lot of time there and they've consumed a lot of stuff from that buffet. But most people are consuming only broccoli or only roast beef or only hot fudge sundaes. They're consuming so much of it that they live with the illusion that they're deeply informed. And they may be deeply informed, but oh, so narrowly. And if we're all consuming different information and that information is really narrow, if we're all consuming different facts, we don't have a communal script to speak from.

We can't enter discussions about whether this policy or that policy, about what direction we should go in as a country. We can't enter those discussions and have them be productive because we are not speaking from the same set of facts. And social media is a big part of what makes that happen, what perpetuates that. And my so my relationship to social media is different because I'm hyper aware of that. And I think one of the things we really most need to do as a country, we need to do it in the classroom, we need to do it at the kitchen table, is we need to make the next generation conscious of what their social media lives end up being like if they don't pause, ask themselves what's best, what they mean them to be, and just kind of let these various sorting forces happen to them.

That reminds me of starting a class talking about critical thinking. Critical thinking. Whatever happened to critical thinking as opposed to group think? Yeah. So you also see the social media problem as solvable.

And we've had other people on the show, and we've discussed various strategies for improving the situation. But I'd be lying to you if I didn't say these were daunting challenges. So seeing social media as a solvable problem, was that a conclusion you came to or something you've always believed? It's a conclusion I partly came to and I'm partly willing myself to. And what I mean by that is I think it's pointless to say it's not solvable.

And solvable may be too high a bar, I think it's improvable. There's nothing in this life that's not improvable. And any improvement we can make is meaningful and is better than the alternative. So let's say it's prove improvable, and I think it's improvable in part by something I mentioned before, and I'll go back to the classroom. When I asked my students about their social media lives, their behavior online, whom they follow, what they follow, etcetera, Most of them, when they're prompted to reflect on it, realize that they have, like, clicked on this, clicked on that, set up this architecture that isn't necessarily what they intended.

It's not consistent with whom they really mean or want to be. And if you get them to realize that and to pause and to think about it, they will make alterations. Right? We need to make them pause and make them deliberate. From a much younger age, we need to do it in all the settings they inhabit.

We need to do it in the classroom, as I said, at the kitchen table, on the soccer field, basketball court. Because I think they will be different consumers of social media if they are more conscious consumers of social media. We have the ability to develop and encourage social media platforms that don't use anger as the primary driver, that use algorithms that elevate and surface different sorts of things. If you talk to academic scholars who know social media, they'll tell you they they're developing these plans. It's just in its infancy and it needs corporate sponsors and maybe some good citizens will step forward and do that.

I think we need some government regulations. It is crazy to me. It is correct that the New York Times and other publications face restrictions about what they can say they cannot slander, they cannot defame, or if they do, they're gonna face some consequences. Facebook doesn't worry about that, or Meta or whatever we're calling it these days. Twitter doesn't have to worry about that because they're not seen as publishers.

I think we need to I don't I don't have the exact set of regulations in front of me. That's kind of not my expertise, but we certainly need to do some things that recognize that they are contemporary publishers and need to be treated more more like publishers than as something totally different under the under the law. Makes sense. So in your second chapter, a good word spoiled, you write that the fruits of the grievances on the left don't match the fruits of the grievances on the right. And for all the talk about how illiberal both camps have become, it's the right that currently poses the much greater threat to the country, both in terms of its disregard for democratic institutions, for democracy itself, and the behavior it provokes sanctions and sometimes even glorifies.

I think now is an interesting time to be making, you know, that statement because later in the book, you do touch on the left's response to October 7 Mhmm. Categorizing that response as cruel. Now considering, as we record this, we have college students camping out for SJP and for WL and organizations who have quite openly stated their violent intentions. What do you say to people who see what is happening on the left as insidious rather than just cruel? Well, as what you just read from the book says, I recognize and in the book fully explore illiberalism across the political spectrum.

This is a very difficult subject to write and talk about because when I define and when I reflect on and when I lament grievance culture, as I do in the book and I do in public talks, I am referring to behaviors and prejudices and cruelties and oppressive tactics across the political spectrum. But I think it is really important so that I don't fall into false equivalences or a kind of Bocizerism to recognize that if you're talking about, for instance, organized political violence, that is a phenomenon disproportionately on the right. If you're talking about election denialism, that is a phenomenon disproportionately on the right. It is on the right that we have a candidate for president, the de facto Republican nominee, who rejects the legitimate results of an election. We don't have Donald Trump's analog on the left.

So again, in the interest of total intellectual honesty, I wanna find fault everywhere that there's fault to be found, but I don't want to say it's all the same on the right and the left. There are huge problems on the right and on the left. They're not exactly the same and you can't measure them in exactly the same way. To go back to your question about the way some progressives have dealt with October 7. I think that the glorification, the celebration of Hamas is morally repugnant.

And I think it is indicative of a lack of moral nuance that is another big part of our grievance culture. We have to be able to say those social justice warriors on the left, and it's not all of them. Let's also be really careful. It's not all of them. The protesters who are saying ugly things on campuses, not necessarily the majority, in some cases, a very small minority, doesn't make it okay.

But the people who are arguing for a home for Palestinians, the people who are arguing, it's a defensible argument that Israel has not treated Palestinians fairly and that they've gone too far in the war in Gaza. They need to be able to make the moral distinction between that viewpoint and what Hamas and believing or suggesting that what Hamas did on October 7 is okay. When I have read about chance of October 7 every day, it turns my stomach. That's the death of moral nuance. And, yes, some progressives on the left need to be held accountable for that.

Yeah. And it's interesting because and I think that's beautifully said. I think it's interesting also that at a time when your book is coming out, that when you look at some of the things that Hamas stands for, I mean, in the same way you appropriately point out that Israel and and these these are very legitimate issues to be discussing in how you deal with these difficult situations. It is fascinating to me that people are, for instance, being asked questions about, you know, so you support Hamas. But when you really dig down and you get into their attitude toward, for instance, gay people or women, and these same people are out there protesting for them, I mean, it is ironic, I think.

I think ironic is a very kind word for what you just put your finger on. It's nuts. It's nuts. But it is reflective of this really reductive way in which so many people approach political debate. What's going on there is they're not so much considering Hamas and everything Hamas stands for including those things that they would supposedly be horrified by, you know, homophobia, misogyny, etcetera.

They're considering Hamas as a group of darker skinned, less affluent people who don't have power. And then they're imposing that very reductive binary on the world. The world is more complicated than that. Again, what we were talking about earlier, my mantra in classrooms, it's complicated. We need to do justice to those complications, and we need to keep them in mind as we enter the public square and not just impose these really, really warped and reductive lenses on every situation.

Yep. I agree. And it is complicated. So can you tell us a little bit about the term Oppression Olympics and your experience with the racism defined pyramid? Yeah.

So I saw this in a in a kind of online faculty development thing that I signed up for that I was ever. But you often see when people are talking about white supremacy, about oppression in the West, in America, that you often end up in this conversation and there's literally this kind of pyramid, this graphic that was a part of the course I took where it defines the world in terms of which group has the least power and is the most depressed and, like, literally kind of ranks them. And I remember this pyramid where, like, okay, black people are the most depressed. The next like, it literally went into different kind of racial designations, different ethnicities, And it suggested that everyone belonged to one of these categories and could judge his or her or their level of advantage or privilege according to where they fell in this pyramid. And my point, my rebellion against that in the chapter of the book that's called The Oppression Olympics is, again, it's complicated.

It is inarguable. It is a fact. Anyone who says otherwise is as cracked as those people who are saying October 7 every day. Right? It is a fact that there is racism in this world that persists to this day, and we need to be conscious of it, and we need to work really hard to eradicate it, and we need to maintain that consciousness as we develop public policy, if we have our discussions.

It is also the case that there are black people in America who by dint of fortunate circumstances have had many advantages and there are white people in the heartland whose factory towns have been decimated, whose friends have died from fentanyl, whose lives have had less privilege and are less blessed. We need to be careful about seeing everybody in terms of these groups because the way life plays out is more complicated than that. And we need, especially, and this is what I really hit hard in that chapter, we need not tell people that their their right to enter certain conversations and their invitation into certain conversations depends solely on whether they are in that group and by dint of being in that group can identify exactly and specifically with its life experiences and claims. That's antithetical to empathy. How do you say to someone, you need to understand my life experience, but you can't understand my life experience.

Those are conflicting signals. That's an invitation and then that's a dismissal, right? I just think we have to move beyond that. Like, and I use my own example. Am I someone who primarily knows marginalization or not?

I'm white. Obviously, I've had advantages in life because I'm white. No question there. I'm also a gay man who knew he was gay in the 1980s as a teenager who came out in the era of AIDS and people like Pat Robertson and influential ministers across the country saying that my friend's dying was God's punishment on us for a hard lifestyle. I, as a teenager, really feared that I would live my life in a hostile world and have to step on eggshells every step of the way.

So do I not understand marginalization because I'm white, or do I understand it very well because I'm a 59 year old gay man who didn't grow up in today's world, which is much more accepting? The answer is both. And we don't have conversations. We don't have discussions that do justice to those subtleties and those complexities. Well, I wish we could get John Stewart, you, Andrew Sullivan, and me on a discussion because when Andrew Sullivan had his big discussion about racism and so forth with with Jon Stewart, they went after him so badly in terms of not being able to have his own viewpoint because how dare he as a white man, you know, make the point, so to speak.

You know, your time is up. Sit down. And I I just said, you know, this when you have a a show with Jon Stewart and you have somebody who's intellectual and is is vulnerable and is open about his own challenges and making valid points and he's literally interrupted and the conversation is shut down, it was really, really disappointing. I remember that episode. I don't remember it specifically enough to to say much about it now.

But I don't think in a democracy in which we're encouraging engagement and empathy, I don't think we should ever say to someone, your thoughts on this subject have no place. Now if I'm standing there with a microphone as a white person talking about racial issues, as a straight person talking about gay issues, as a gay person talking about Muslim issues, and I want the most time at that microphone, and I'm not interested in hearing those people explain their lives more than I am talking about it, yeah, then people deserve to slap me and say, you know, I just I mean, people deserve to say to me, like, you know, you're behaving not just inappropriately, but you're behaving ignorantly and not constructively and in a way that people will find hateful and belittling. Sure. But am I supposed to bite my tongue about everything? I don't think you can tell people to do that in a democracy where the whole point is we each have a say, we each get our moment.

That moment is when we go to vote. You can't shut people out and shut them down entirely. It's just wrong. Yeah. So your last two chapters are called Don't Be a Stranger and The Antidote.

Why? Don't Be a Stranger is I was trying to think that chapter is about various things we could do in the country to lessen the culture of grievance, to turn down the temperature in our public debates. And it ranges across a lot of terrain. I talk about political reforms. I talk about investments in cities and the kind and I talk about urban planning.

Because this is I talk about a national service program, which I think would be a great idea. Not compulsory, but I think there are ways to build incentives into it where you could actually get many, many, a majority of young people to participate. They're diverse proposals, and I was trying to think of what united them, their proposals about social media regulation in there. And all of them come back to a fundamental truth, which is when we are caricaturing one another, when we are vilifying one another, when we are fighting and fighting and not even trying to create room for agreement, it is so often because we're not seeing each other as fully dimensional human beings. It's so often because we're so separated from the people whom we think can't understand us, the people whom we don't understand.

We're so sorted by where we live, by how we behave online, that we cannot see the people who are not in our most narrow tribe as anything but caricatures. And so don't be a stranger was my way of saying, like, if we come together, if we find ways to make people in America who would not otherwise cross paths, cross paths, if they cease to be strangers and they instead become people who aren't just like us in every way, whom we disagree with in many ways, We can deal with that. We can work with that. But what we can't work with is people being entirely estranged from one another to a point where they have no understanding of why someone would have a belief that differs from their own. Yeah.

That makes makes sense. And in Don't Be a Stranger, you have a lot of subheadings that begin with fixing as in fixing Congress or fixing our political culture or fixing social media. But as far as social media, you have described us as in the larval stages, and you suggest regulation. But what about broader based polarization and political gridlock? Well, in term I mean, that's that's what I get into in some senses in terms of fixing.

I think I have a section called fixing the political culture or something like that and fixing congress. I think, you know, in terms of political reforms that I think would help with polarization, I would like to see more open primaries. I would like to see more nonpartisan primaries, or some people call them jungle primaries. I would like to see us work a lot harder than we have. And, again, I don't know if this is solvable, but hopefully, it's improvable.

I would like to see us go after gerrymandering in the fiercest way possible because that has led to a kind of congress of extremists that makes the polarization so much worse. This is it's funny you say that chapter has a lot of subheads and I'm not a huge fan of subheads and the rest of the book doesn't have subheads. So I feel like it's a typographical oddity and the sort of, like, OCD person in me doesn't really like that. But it has all those subheads because if we are going to fix our grievance culture, if we are going to preserve this democracy with which we're so blessed, it requires effort across so many different fronts of American life. And that's why all those subheads are there.

This isn't about one thing we can do. This isn't about five things we could do to lower the temperature on American life and to lessen the grievance culture. This is about, like, 50 things we need to do in different spheres of American life. And if we do all those things in concert, I think we will make great improvement, but we have to be conscious of what they are. And we have to ask ourselves, what kind of country do we wanna live in?

Right? I don't think when people say to Gallup, I am not generally satisfied with the direction of America, that's a real sentiment. That is a warranted sentiment, but we need to then pause and say, okay, what the hell are we gonna do about it? And all of those subheads and all of those ideas are sort of my expression of ardor for doing something about it. Look, and I I completely agree.

And, you know, in terms of speeches, in terms of otherwise, sometimes when you repeat things, you you get people's attention. And I think fixing, fixing, fixing, I think is a great way to get your point across. And when you look at, again, some of the issues that we are facing today and you talk about humility, I think a nice way to put it together is to remind ourselves that we are the wealthiest country in the world, and we also have a low life expectancy. We've got this lack of feeling good about ourselves. You know, like, Houston, we got a problem.

Like, like, maybe it's not all as simple as secular materialism is gonna lead everybody to a place of blissful happiness, and that we've gotta somehow bring back these character issues like humility. And I love this. On on a lighter note, let me let me ask you a question because food's an important part of my life. In the past, you've written about food born round, and it's a meatloaf in every oven. What would you would you like to discuss or have anything you'd like to mention about your relationship to food?

My relationship to food is so complicated and has has been so tumultuous that as you referred to, I have a whole book about it called born round. I will say this about food to sort of try to integrate it into our current conversation. I think that food is such an extraordinarily kind of unifying force. What do we do when we're trying to take a moment of grace to return to a word we used earlier, when we're trying to carve out a moment of grace in the day or moments of grace in the annual calendar, when we are trying to reorient ourselves to what's important in terms of the people around us and our affection for them. What do we do?

We make a big meal or many of us do. And this goes across every culture. In fact, this notion that what unites us as people, not just as Americans but as people, far transcends what divides us. What happens across every culture? We make a big feast and we come together and we sit together and we nourish ourselves together.

We are able through food to make a statement and to make space for what's most important in life. So I feel like if we could extrapolate that aspect of our relationship to food and that aspect of our traditions with food to other dimensions of our lives, we would do ourselves a lot of good. Certain words have come up in our conversation that I try to hold on to. They're words that I think I put in the foreground of the book, and I would just kind of wanna repeat one more time. Nuance, grace, perspective, proportion.

Let's make those things as important as raw passion in our political lives and in our dealings with one another. And I think if we can do that, we're gonna have a better America. And maybe then when Gallup asks the question, in two years, are you generally satisfied with the direction of this country? Maybe we'll get back to 51%. Wonderful.

The POC Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMPG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation today and haven't yet subscribed to our show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Feel free to leave a review while you are there and maybe even a five star rating. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.