Hey everybody, I'm John Don Van from Intelligent Squared US and in this episode we're not presenting

a debate as we usually do. Instead we're doing something we do from time to time which is to have

a deep and rich and fascinating conversation about a thing that matters greatly to all of us

at Intelligent Squared US and that is the quality of discourse, particularly the quality of our

national political discourse. It's something we care deeply about. In fact, it inspired our founder

Robert Rosencrantz to start Intelligent Squared with the aim of raising the level of public discourse,

which I think we do pretty well. But let's face it as a culture, especially nowadays we have a way

to go, which is why in this podcast I'm sitting down with Arthur Brooks, who is one of our nation's

most influential political thinkers, to discuss his new book, Whose Title Is This? Love Your Enemies,

How Decent People Can Save America From The Culture Of Contempt. And in his book, Arthur goes into

what's going wrong right now with American political discourse and actually comes up with some

constructive or at least constructive sounding ideas on how Americans can better talk to each

other, especially when we are not agreeing with each other. So let's chat. Arthur Brooks, welcome

to Intelligent Squared. Thank you, John. Great to be with you. It's great to have you on this podcast,

especially as I've just completed a book that so directly goes to the topic that as I said before,

motivates Intelligent Squared US, which is the quality and also the lack of quality of our political

discourse, actually even our cultural discourse because it goes on politics. Just to remind folks,

you have been for years the president of the American Enterprise Institute, you're

believing that post fairly soon. Yeah, June 30th, 2019. You were there in nine years,

something like 10 and a half. 10 and a half, my goodness. But who's counting?

You've written a lot of books, a lot of them of best sellers, 11 books. You have a podcast of

your own. You've your new book, I just mentioned the title, Love Your Enemies, How Decent People Can

...