Speaker 1
And this is a near term win for me as opposed to thinking the actual win is that we get to have a society that's free and thriving and that it's not going to just swing 180 in the opposite way when the people that I'm voting against take over because that's how it's always going
Speaker 2
to be. Talk about the third option. Yes.
Speaker 1
So the third option is the name of the book that my pastor wrote in 2017. Right after I lost my congressional race, I was kind of trying to figure out what do I want to do next? And that was the beginning of 2017. And I went in to see my pastor after one of the sermons one day that he gave and he said, Hey, I'm going to send you this manuscript. Like this is rough draft. Somebody ghost wrote it for me, but they're all my ideas. Can you just give me like a Republican perspective on how to heal the racial divide, which is what he was writing about? So it's important to remember the timeframe. This is 2017, not 2020. And so I said, well, I mean, I'm technically a minority. I'm half Chinese, but I don't really think that I understand your perspective as a black man that grew up in the 60s and 70s in America. And he goes, no, no, no, I really just want your perspective from like a Republican perspective, like a conservative, sort of more white mainstream perspective. And I said, okay. And he said, I kind of need it back in 24 hours. And then I'm a lawyer. So I can read fast and I'm good at editing. And so I took it and I do what I do when I was, you know, editing in law review and things like that at Georgetown. And I just made it bleed because I'm like, no, like I just had these reactions to the things he was saying, not because they were wrong, but I'm like, if you want to get people, if you want to speak to the people that you're trying to move the needle with, you can't say it like that. One of the chapters of his title initially was white privilege, which for him, I mean, he explains it beautifully in the chapter. But I said, you know, if you're trying to appeal to people about how we bridge the racial divide in America. So I'm looking at them with a charged title like that is just going to shut off a lot of people that you really want on your side. So let's rethink what you're really trying to say and package in a way that doesn't compromise the truth, but actually helps you convey to them without seeming offensive or shutting them down. And he, we actually got in a lot of sort of, we had tense moments where I think, I don't think he hung up on me per se, but let's just say like the phone went dead one time when I said, do you really believe that? And you know, he's my spiritual mentor. He's the one that cares. I love, I think he called me to a higher place in terms of believing that there needs to be unity amongst people. And that's who he is. So I knew his heart. And so I wanted to pull out what his heart was when he wrote this book. And so the third option was saying it's not about us versus them. It's not about partisan agendas, you know, Republican versus Democrats. It's about the principles that we stand on. And actually the third option was about whose side are we on, right? There's this Bible story that we really pulled it from. It's in the book of Joshua, which is an Old Testament story. And Joshua, you probably heard everyone's probably heard of the story of the battle of Jericho. And in it, Joshua is this great, you know, leader from Israelites and he's getting ready to go and take the promised land and the night before the battle, which is going to be a huge battle, his mind, someone walks up to him and says, and he pulls a sword and he says, who are you? Are you the bad guy? Are you with us? Are you on their side? Are you with us? And and turns out this guy, it's in the Bible, was a messenger of God. And he says neither, but as a messenger of the Lord, I come. And so Joshua immediately put down his feudal like weapons against someone who's like a messenger of God. And he says, then I want to be on your side and take out, if you take out the faith element of it, what you're saying is, you know, I want to be in the side of truth. I want to be on the side of love on the side of righteousness, which is what all of that stood for in that messenger of God. And put aside this divisive man made things of like you versus me. And let's come together on the principles. And so I talk about that a lot in the book. I say, let's get past the partisan. It's okay to be partisan. It's okay to fall on one side of it. I think it's great that you have really strong perspectives and they align with someone that you think represents what they are or a party. But let's be more committed to the principles that we all stand for than the partisan talking points and the agendas because those are always going to change. So the third option is us, like standing on the side of what's in the best interest of all of
Speaker 2
us. Does that eventually require like letting go of camps? Right?
Speaker 1
No, I wrestled with this a lot because this is what everyone kind of feels, right? Is like, do I have to become milk toast? Do I have to be someone who's constantly suppressing how I feel? But if you go back to what we originally started talking about, Drew, it's that you're so grateful for the diversity of opinions. Like we all are, right? It's like this full circle conversation where we can just kind of talk ourselves out of having any opinion when in fact it's the diversity of opinion that enables us to have so many perspectives that can help shape what we actually believe. So if we start to dim our own light, then, and we, and by that I just mean muzzling ourselves. Again, when you speak, it's important to do so with wisdom and discernment. But if you're always saying, you know what, probably the smartest thing is for me to not just say anything, you're literally robbing the world of that perspective that you might be the only one who shares that, has that perspective, or you might be the most eloquent person to articulate that perspective. Can you just robbed everyone around you from hearing it and literally elevating the tone in the room?
Speaker 2
I think one sort of parallel to that, not a counter, but a sort of a parallel is like, you know what I say? Like, where do you live? Right? So if I ask you, like, where do you live? What do you answer? Right? Like, where do you actually live? Oh, I live in Northern California. Yeah, in the Bay Area. You live in the Bay Area. Yeah.
Speaker 2
where's the trick in this, Drew? There's no trick in it. Right? So where do I live? Yeah. Like, I'm not Los Angeles. Like, people may vote more Republican. They may vote more Democrat. Yeah. But it's always funny to me when people are like, I'm a Republican, I'm a Democrat, I'm a this, and that I understand that we need identifications to understand, you know, some basic kind of components that are there. But the more that I feel like we can slip that in, it was just all of our identities, right? Like, even how we eat, again, it's not unique to politics. It shows up in a lot of different things. And then I'm not trying to take it away that I don't want people to identify themselves by what religion they are, right? But I think that that's where politics sometimes feels like it is a religion. It's like, I am a Democrat. I am a Republican. I am this, yes. And it's like, okay, great. You just told me how you look at the entire world through this lens that's there. And it's like, how useful is that as we start to end up in these more blended spaces and even, you know, previously, I remember growing up, my dad, I said, dad, you know, Republican Democrats, you know, I mostly vote Democratic, but you know, we voted Republican and here's the real elections that I voted this way. And our local representative in Delaware that I volunteered for in high school was a Republican flanking on his name. But there aren't many in Delaware. But he was in our area and I was like, okay, cool. I get it. Like, you know, there's that fluidity that's there. But I think that you can still, again, nobody wants to be milk toast, which I never heard of that before, but I'm, but I know it now what it means. Yeah. So you can speak up for who you are and you can still also like not have that identity. I feel like that's naturally the more you progress in sort of your wisdom, the more it's going to be like, why would you be beholden to anybody else's view that they would be shaping upon you versus just your own independent view on things. I hear you on that.
Speaker 1
I think in politics specifically, you end up in binary choices, right? You're either voting for the Republican or the Democrats. So in a sense, you have to ascribe to one candidate or the other. As long as you're still talking about the things that matter to you, I think that Americans have so much power than they realize to actually hold strong to principles and enforce the candidates. Because again, we get the democracy that we want. We get the candidates that we choose. We have primaries where we get to choose who we want to be in our party of choice as the representative or the head of that party. And so if we say, you know, we're not voting for you unless you believe in this or you represent this just standing together. I mean, I think the people in the middle could probably pull all of the candidates sort of into a more centrist perspective or at least I don't want to say centrist because that does seem somewhat watered down. But maybe more, okay, we bring all of this and you bring all of this now let's give and take, right? So you're not compromising the strength of what you believe, but you're also
Speaker 2
giving and taking so that both of those perspectives end up on the ballot together. And most people are centrist. Like you're talking about asylum majorities. Most people are centrist. We're not that divided. And we get pulled in one direction or another because it's just the way that elections are set up. Yeah. What do you think? Is there any chance of United States ever having
Speaker 1
ranked choice voting? You know, I've read a lot about ranked choice because it seems like so smart, but then sometimes you end up with like everybody's second choice, like being first, right? And it's like there's so many and I don't know it super well, but I've seen I've read articles on the pros and cons of that. You know, I always think that there's, you know, you've got the mansions out there talking about running and well, it's got Sonu in the background. All these like people from these interesting states, New Hampshire in particular is always interesting because everyone's just like, you know, live for your die. There's their own brand of politics. The thing is at the end of the day, you always end up having people who have, it always ends up being two camps. It just does. If you look at countries that have a thousand political parties, they have coalitions, which end up being what? Two camps.
Speaker 2
Two camps, but they end up being leaning a little bit more moderate because you have to work with others sometimes, not always. Sometimes. I
Speaker 1
mean, if you see what just happened in Sweden, I mean, a far right, it was like a huge backlash, right? I think it's Sweden. I hope I got that right. Gosh, I should be more up on the news, but I think it was Sweden and it was, they went from a very progressive government to a, or Argentina, the guy who looks like the Wolfman.
Speaker 2
Yeah, the former soccer player.
Speaker 1
Yeah. He's like, he doesn't care about anything. And he took like a, I mean, he swept. Yeah. The election. This is a huge backlash. So the libertarian. Yeah, whatever, wherever you end up feeling like, you know, gosh, it'd be so great if we could have more of a thoughtful sort of let's all trend together kind of perspective. You see that countries that have a bunch of different parties all end up still having the same trends because humans are humans or humans are humans, regardless of what society they live in, what country, what boundaries they're within and what they agreed to sort of live with as a form of government. And so I think I go back to sort of what you initially asked. And I was just thinking about it as you were talking as you make some really, really good points about, you know, do we need to be that committed to something? What I found in watching my dad, he just passed away in July at the age of 86 was that he was really kind of like us in when I was growing up. He didn't, he was Republican, but he wasn't like this die hard partisan. And you're seeing these trends as people get older and presumably more wise, they start to be really clear in what they believe. And I wonder if in 20 years we were here having this conversation, if we would actually think that being sort of more, I don't want to say open because it sounds like they're closed. But to be more sure of what you believe after having lived another 20 or 40 years wouldn't make you just kind of say, you know, I just know what I believe and this is what I stand for without any reservations or apologies or even concern about what other people think. And I don't think we can have that perspective until we live until we're 80 something. But I do think again, going back to my original premise, I think I'm better off when I'm able to say how I feel in the moment with, you know, all the degrees of respect and in a manner that encourages other people to say the same. And I hear what somebody has that says something very different from me. It really makes me think and I appreciate them showing up as their true self. Everything is time and place dependent. Different kinds of conversations are relevant depending and fruitful based on the type of relationship that you have. I couldn't have the conversations I have with my friend Andrea, who's a Democrat with someone off the street that I didn't know. They don't know my heart and I don't know their heart. So I can't make the same assumptions about them. So I won't naturally be as open to their perspectives as I would to somebody that I really love. So Arthur Brooks says this brilliant thing and love your enemies. It's a great book. He says, every time somebody comes or has a conversation, it comes at you and says, those people, the Republicans, those Democrats, their idiots, personalize it. Think of the person that you love the most that represents the person that other speaker came against and make it personal and say, no, no, you can't say that about those people because those people is the person that I love the most and that's not who they are. And when we start taking personally what people say about people we disagree with, you're going to start seeing a change of heart and change in the way that we engage each other.
Speaker 2
Well said, Denise has been fantastic.
Speaker 1
I'm just repeating.
Speaker 2
It's the sense of it's so easy to call the name when we depersonalize. But the second that we make it human about a coworker, a friend, a situation, a family member, you know, I had a mentor who said that, take somebody that you disagree with. And if you saw their entire life, even if you don't know them directly, saw their entire life from the time that they were born to how they grew up, the influences, the things that happened, the things that didn't happen for them, what worked out, what didn't, when they were bullied, when they were lifted up, when they succeeded, when they failed, you saw every moment and it sort of, you saw everything, every second, but it was fast-forwarded in a way that you could understand. You saw it as a 90-minute movie. You would leave that movie feeling two things. Sure, there may be areas in their life, decisions, or you say, okay, I wouldn't do that or I don't condone that. But one thing that you wouldn't be able to leave with is you wouldn't be able to leave with the sense of I don't understand them. I don't understand them because when you actually walk a mile in somebody else's shoes, when you actually see everything that they go through, so I understand them. It doesn't mean I agree with them. I understand where they're coming from. It's like one of the things that I look for in any kind of conversation, even if people are not talking about politics, is that people often set themselves up in conversation will say, I just don't understand. Now, sometimes it's a euphemism. It's just something that people are saying, but oftentimes people do mean it. I don't understand what my mom said this. I don't understand what my cousin did that. It's like, that's actually it. You don't understand if you did. If you did, it'd be different. So now the next question becomes, okay, yeah, I don't understand. What could I understand? What could I possibly assume people are not the vast majority of people are not crazy? They're doing things because of a particular reason. Again, that doesn't mean that you have to agree with them. And then the compassion that comes from, as you've mentioned many times in this podcast and I have two, we've both changed our mind on things. And people who are older, I often see this situation as we get older and we've become more refined in our views. Sometimes, not always, if the wisdom is there in the inside, it's like, wow, I was young and dumb and thought this XYZ. I was a staunch XYZ because I thought I understood the world and it all made sense. Let me have some compassion for people who are in that situation now. Sure, they might be doing it in a different way than I would do it. But let me have at least some compassion that they see the world the way that they do, even if I disagree with them, because I've been in that situation before. But sometimes, as people become more refined in their views, it's like, how could anybody think that way? Right? How could anybody think we forget? And that's the nature of humanity. Yes. It's the nature. And that's why young ideas, young beliefs, young thoughts ultimately end up shaping the world and sort of changing the world eventually. And we become a amalgamation of older generations and young to hopefully move society towards the better. But I think it's really that sense of maintaining that compassion, whether it's an individual conversation, whether it's before we tweet, before we chime in on stuff, and just to understand, if you think you weren't crazy with your views previously, you're either lying, right? Delusional. Or delusional. It's one or the other. So have some compassion for people, even if you so firmly believe in this idea. And I hope the people that are listening out there that you have an idea, you believe it, you're fighting for it. You're going for that thing that's out there. And again, we could all learn from the folks that do it with a little bit more compassion. Yeah, because at the end of the day, this
Speaker 1
book is about politics. I said this earlier, but it bears repeating. But at the end of the day, this is about how we treat one another. Politics is just one way in which we have become, we've really given a voice to the contempt that we feel for one another. If you do any relational, if you've read any books by John Gottman about relationships, and he talks about the four horsemen of the relational apocalypse, one of them is contempt, and that's the worst feeling that really spells the doom of a relationship. So these principles that I write about are really just extensions of how we relate to people in our personally, which usually goes back to a biblical principle that I think bears repeating, which is, Jesus said to love your neighbor as you love yourself. If you don't love yourself and you're looking for your identity in other things, because you don't have compassion for yourself, it's going to be impossible for you to have compassion for other people. It's just it's not in you. And so I think the best thing that all of us can do, regardless of where we sit on the political aisle, or in any relational situation, is to really continue to grow and love for ourselves, compassion for ourselves, grace with ourselves, so that I can look back at this book full of my mistakes and all the things I've done wrong without any shame, because I say those were all steps that I took that helped me become the person I'm still trying to become, the aspirational things that I write about in here that I still struggle with, but I'm so much further than I was back then. And so read it for what it is, a guidebook to politics, why you should get engaged, and there's a lot of practical things in there, but at the end of the day, love yourself, love the people you disagree with, but make sure that you're really holding space for at the end of the day, what it is that you believe and really holding space to believe that you could potentially also be wrong. That's called humility. The
Speaker 2
book is out there, Politics for People Who Hate Politics, or Love Politics. Everybody can benefit from it. If you want to help people see a different perspective and engage and create a better nation, regardless of where you live, but especially most of my audience here in America, this book is for you. We'll have the link in the show notes. People can get on Amazon and all the bookstores that are out there. Denise, how can people keep in touch with you?
Speaker 1
Well, I'm on all the socials. Denise, Grace, gets them. I think you can just do a little Google search out there and you'll find it all. But I really enjoy hearing from people and what they think about the book because I've found that people on both sides of the aisle, just the feedback that I've gotten has been to say, you know what, this just helped remind me of first principles. And really, how much I do love people that I disagree with, and it's going to help me in my personal relationship. That's really the stuff that's been most life-giving to me. And so I'd love to hear from you if you end up reading it or just listening to this podcast and just hear what you think because I'm sure that my views need to continue to evolve and I'd love to hear your perspectives on how I could get
Speaker 2
better too. All of us. All of us. Denise, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a pleasure. I love talking to you. I appreciate you. It's been fantastic to know you over these years. I know. And thank you for having this dialogue with me. Thank you for giving me a platform to speak. Hi everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already subscribed, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me. And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share with a friend, share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy to digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health. We cover everything from nutrition to mindset to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is by the way, free and get my weekly step by step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perowet.com. That's D H R U P U R O H I T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.