50. JACOB MCHANGAMA: Disagreeing Without Losing Each Other

Episode Transcript

Note: Transcript is AI-generated and may contain errors. Please refer to the episode audio or video for exact quotes.

[00:00:00] Jacob: I think you can yourself be a small vector of change. If you approach discussions on social media, for instance, with a mindset of saying, okay, I’m not going into this debate or discussion to win. I’m going into this discussion because I’m passionate about this issue, but I might be wrong.

[00:00:25] Michael: Hi, I am Michael Hyatt.

[00:00:26] Megan: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller,

[00:00:27] Michael: and you’re listening to The Double Wind Show.

[00:00:29] Megan: We are super excited to share our recent conversation with Jaka Mission, who is the founder and executive director of the Future of Free Speech, which is an independent, nonpartisan, think tank based here in Nashville at Vanderbilt University.

[00:00:44] He’s a research professor at Vanderbilt and a senior fellow at Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He’s the author of. Free speech, A history from Socrates to social media and has a new book coming out called The Future of Free Speech. His work explores how societies sustain open inquiry and disagreement without sliding into fear, coercion, or fragmentation.

[00:01:05] Now we feel like. This conversation is particularly relevant right now, and that’s because as advocates for Human flourishing, just something we know you care about, we care about as we’re advocating for the double win, winning at work and succeeding at life. That presumes that you have real relationships in your life and real relationships are require that we have real conversations with people, but right now.

[00:01:36] That feels harder than ever oftentimes because there’s such pervasive divisiveness and polarization, particularly in the us but in many places around the world, it can feel like our disagreements are actually dangerous to our relationship, and we either have our conversations with the people we love most blow up, or we avoid real conversations altogether.

[00:01:56] Regardless, it’s kind of a mess. And it’s something that’s getting in the way of our human flourishing. And so Jakob today is gonna help us think about habits that we can cultivate for how we engage with one another in our conversations that allow us to talk through our disagreements in a healthy way.

[00:02:16] Instead of just around them or avoiding them altogether. So let’s get into our conversation with Yakob

[00:02:26] Yakob, welcome to the show.

[00:02:27] Jacob: Thank you so much. Delighted to be here. It’s an honor.

[00:02:30] Megan: Okay, well, we have so many questions. This is gonna be, I think, a really fun and interesting conversation, but let’s kind of start at the beginning. So you grew up in Denmark and you went from kind of this quiet. Homogenous culture.

[00:02:46] That was your reality growing up to being in the center as a dane of this global controversy over cartoons. What did that teach you about what happens when people with very different assumptions suddenly have to share a space with each other?

[00:03:02] Jacob: Yeah, thanks Megan. That’s a great example because the so-called cartoon affair, this Danish newspaper that published cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad that led to a, uh, sort of a global battle of values, if you like, between the relationship of, of between free speech and religion.

[00:03:16] Uh, was, was really the reason I got into to free speech. Uh, and I think it was an eyeopener in the sense that it highlighted the dangers of taking basic values for granted and also that you can have. Existing parallel societies that can be extremely corrosive to human flourishing in a, in a country, under a thin veneer of what has been labeled as mutual respect and tolerance when reality was that there was much less mutual respect and tolerance than what the, uh, o official picture suggested.

[00:03:55] Uh, so that was a huge eyeopener, and I think what I took away from it is that it is much better. To confront those differences head on rather than try to sort of hide them under this veneer of, of mutual intolerance and respect, which really is not based on mutual tolerance and respect if you can’t have those difficult conversations that divide people.

[00:04:18] Michael: I’m just curious, if you had a do-over and you were in total charge of Denmark, how would you have orchestrated so that it didn’t lead to that?

[00:04:30] Jacob: Yeah, so I think this should have started, uh, a long time before the, the cartoon affair really erupted. It should have started from the point of view where. That should have been a, I think, an official, much better official understanding that when someone comes to a new country with a very different culture, so Denmark is a very secular liberal country.

[00:04:52] Right. And uh, a lot of immigrants who came were from Muslim majority countries where religion is much more important, who have much more. Conservative values that are at odds with sort of traditional Danish, um, liberal secular values. And so I think it would’ve been wise to be more upfront about what does it mean to move to Denmark?

[00:05:16] What are the values that has shaped Danish society for good or worse? That does not mean that you ha should abandon your religion, that you can no longer be a Muslim. But I think that would’ve been. A good part of, of Danish integration policy if people had been given that lesson, because then they might better understand the, the society that they were trying to navigate in.

[00:05:38] ’cause I think a lot of people, immigrants who came to Denmark were just shocked at the idea that you could poke fun of a religious figure that they. Thought was beyond reproach, and you can sort of understand that if that’s been your, your, your cultural reference, then it, it’s very difficult to understand and it comes across as other people being gratuitously offensive or wanting to, to humiliate you when that is not the case, when that is just a different culture.

[00:06:10] Megan: I think, um, probably a lot of us just listening to what you said could imagine the frame about that not being what was happening in Denmark, but what’s happened in our own families or our Thanksgiving tables or our conference tables or wherever. Right. That those same dynamics can be in play at a national level.

[00:06:29] Yeah. Uh, at a global level, at at a dinner table level. And I think a lot of people feel right now, I think us included just the incredible. Tension around having conversations about things that feel like they really matter with people that we dearly love who do not agree with us.

[00:06:48] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:06:48] Megan: Um, and that, that tension is just, whew, it’s a lot, you know, I can feel it in my body as I’m even talking about it.

[00:06:54] Just this, the stress and the anxiety that a lot of us feel around those things. And. I know you talk a lot about this idea between having wisdom as we think about the words that we speak our, our speech, and the kind of self-censorship that a lot of us feel right now given to, that’s driven by fear. So like how do you think about those kind of two ideas, wisdom and fear with regard to speech?

[00:07:23] Both kind of in a big picture, but also like. It gets down to brass tacks in our own lives.

[00:07:28] Jacob: I think you’re absolutely right about this moment in America. I think one of the most frequent things that I hear from people is that we just don’t talk about politics anymore. You know? So you can have people with their colleagues, family, maybe even some friends where they just.

[00:07:47] It’s not necessarily that it has been an officially art articulated position, it’s just that we’re just not going into that territory because it just becomes too draining and exhausting and too di divisive. So therefore, it’s sort of. An unstated thing that we’ll talk about other things, we’ll talk about sports maybe or other things than, than politics or sort of hot button culture war issues that divide a lot of Americans right now.

[00:08:14] And I think it’s useful to distinguish between different types of self-censorship. So I think it would be very, very difficult to have meaningful human relations if all of us just said whatever. We thought at ev any given time, you know, whatever thought popped into your head, right. I think there’s very good reasons to, to, to self-censor for that.

[00:08:36] Like you could imagine, like if you walked into an elevator with a group of strangers and you looked around and, and instead of just thinking what you were thinking, you just said, you know, commented on, you know, people’s appearance or, uh, of, and so in that sense, that’s not problematic. That’s just a way to make sure that, you know, we keep social relations.

[00:08:55] But when you self-censor. About issues that are deeply meaningful to you, issues that affect society as a whole, when you think that you cannot speak out on an issue where you think someone. That you’re close to is wrong, and where it would be normal for you to try and say, well, what makes you think that I actually think this is wrong?

[00:09:20] That I think becomes much more problematic because then it breathes loneliness. I think if you can’t be fought right and open with the people that you spend most of your, your living hours with, then I think that breed breeds loneliness. And, and then if you can only be very forthright about certain issues with a group of.

[00:09:41] People who are completely like-minded, then that might also be self radicalizing in a way, because then you know, whether you’re a liberal or conservative, then when you get. You know, with your little gang of friends who think the same thing, you might sort of be self radicalizing. Uh, the, the views that you had might be more extreme on one particular topic than before because there’s no meaningful pushback.

[00:10:04] You don’t have that conversation with your colleague who, who has a slightly different take on it because you’re afraid to have those open conversations. And at a meta level, at a societal level, I think it is likely to undermine. The culture of free speech and tolerance that is ultimately necessary for free speech to survive and thrive in a society.

[00:10:28] So in, in that sense, I think it’s a very unfortunate, uh, development.

[00:10:32] Michael: I sometimes feel like trying to recover civil discourse is a little bit like in search of the holy grail because all the modeling that’s public from our leaders is the opposite of this. It, it seems like. Almost everyone has caved to this kind of antagonism and hurtful debate, and people are willing to say anything to advance their particular argument, including objectifying other people.

[00:11:03] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:11:03] Michael: And you know, engaging in ad hominem arguments and all the rest. But the worst part of it, and the part of that I think could be corrected except that social media and apparently even our more traditional media seems to reward. The extremes, which continues to elevate this as a norm. It makes it more normal to have these destructive conversations.

[00:11:27] What do we do about that?

[00:11:29] Jacob: I think we start with ourselves, right? Because that’s really the most simple place to start and I think you can have really meaningful, some of the most meaningful conversations and aha moments in my life have been on, on social media, and I think you can yourself be a small vector of change.

[00:11:50] If you approach discussions on social media, for instance, with a mindset of saying. I’m not going into this debate or discussion to win. I’m going into this discussion because I’m passionate about this issue, but I might be wrong. If you adopt the mindset of I am willing on social media where there could be an audience of potentially thousands to admit when I’m wrong and when.

[00:12:20] The person that I’m debating with has a point that is valid. And what you’ll often see is that the mindset of the other person also changes and they say, oh. This is not a, a verbal fist fight where, where it’s about winning. This is actually about having a meaningful conversation and you’ll see that the structure of the conversation suddenly becomes much more interesting and then suddenly it can have this tendency of, of going from bad faith to good faith and suddenly there’s sort of a center in your brain that sort of opens up to being much more curious and being more charitable towards the, the viewpoints of that other person.

[00:13:00] And, uh, so I think. If you can see that in the small, it’s about, you know, how do we scale that? And I think there are incredibly smart people who are. Working on more alternative social media platforms that don’t optimize for engagements, but that optimizes for agreement. So that is a potential where you can sort of, from a design perspective, maybe help shape more civil discourse.

[00:13:24] Of course, I think it’s important to also say that there never was and there never will be. This nirvana. Where public discourse is always agreeable and where everything is a Socratic discussion. We are tribal, our species is, is tribal. And, uh, I, I think that will always be withers. So we shouldn’t expect to have like a, a perfect social media environment or um, you know, discourse that is always.

[00:13:52] Shaped by these principles that I just mentioned, but I think we can make a difference. And I think it’s, it’s really meaningful when it happens. Uh, and that incentivizes you to try and, and do that more consistently, even though we’re all, we’ll all fail at times just because we’re, we’re also very emotional as human beings.

[00:14:07] Right.

[00:14:08] Megan: Jakob, I’d love to get your thoughts on why things feel so threatening now. You know, I certainly, there have been other very contentious periods of history. Um, for most of us in our living adult memory, you know, we’re at a real apex kind of moment. Not for all of history, but on in our own personal history.

[00:14:29] I was thinking this morning as I was thinking about our conversation and preparing about a, a book I read years ago by, uh, rabbi Jonathan Sacks from the uk who has done a lot of work on the idea of the common good and that part of what. Causes societies to cohere is a shared understanding and commitment to the idea of a common good.

[00:14:54] You know, that allows for lots of diversity of perspectives. It doesn’t require that we sort of have a homogenous view of, of everything, but. I don’t know if, if you think that’s part of it, like what, you know, there’s something that feels existential right now when we have these disagreements, I feel it in myself.

[00:15:11] Jacob: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:11] Megan: It’s surprising to me that how existential it feels, and I know I’m not alone in that. So what do you think’s going on?

[00:15:18] Jacob: So I think it’s probably, um. A number of contributing factors. I think trust has been in decline even before social media in America in particular. So trust in the traditional institutions that sort of mediated the, the public sphere, but also in politicians, so it’s educational institutions and so on.

[00:15:39] That I think is quite important. Then I think your conception of the shared good is more difficult to. Apply on social media where you can be in conversations with strangers that you’ve never met. You can be in conversations with people who are completely anonymous and also because a lot of the people who are the most active on social media are not really representative of, of society as a whole, that it tends to be those who care most about politics, those who are the most partisan, and maybe even people who have the most narcissistic tendencies and therefore.

[00:16:19] If they sort of shape conversations, it might give those of us who hopefully do not share those, uh, characteristics, but sort of the, the, the more passive audience, a skewed perception of the public discourse. If you think that X or Twitter. Representative of American society as a whole, then you are likely to think, oh my God, we’re doomed.

[00:16:44] Michael: Good point.

[00:16:44] Jacob: But, um, but it’s not, thankfully it’s not, most people are not part of the very online subset of the, of the population who exhibit certain pathological tendencies online. Then I also think that identity plays a huge role. I think we’re. We may be at a time where political beliefs, but also beliefs about the big sort of cultural themes that are that that dominate public discourse are wound up with identity.

[00:17:15] And so it becomes difficult to distinguish criticism of a political position from criticism of yourself and your identity. And I think. Being able to distinguish between those things is hugely important. So the Buddha, some 2,500 years ago, talked about how, um, I, you said something along the lines that anger has a honeyed tip, but poisoned roots in the essence that, you know, anger, giving into anger and the polarization feels really good in the moment, but it’s, it has poisoned root, so it’s deeply corrosive.

[00:17:51] So, and if you’re able to sort of separate. Uh, identifying with, uh, criticism or what is being said on a, on a given topic. I think you can, you, you can maybe sever public discourse from the poison roots.

[00:18:12] Michael: What I hear you saying, and this is something I believe and even teach, but you know, all these conversations on social media and everything are kind of. Our circle of concern, but they’re definitely not our circle of control. Maybe not even influence, but where we do have influence is in our family relationships, our relationships with our friends and our neighbors, and our local communities.

[00:18:36] And so I wanna shift a little bit to talk about the habits that can help us with that. You’ve written that quote, real tolerance requires understanding. Understanding comes from listening and listening Presupposes. Speech. So what does that look like in practice with someone you that, that you genuinely disagree with?

[00:18:57] Jacob: Yeah, I, I, I think you can approach it from the point of view where if you have a conversation with someone and, and you know that you have very, um, different positions on a, on a given topic that you’re actually. You have an opportunity to learn something, even if that person is not able to convince you about that position, they might have points that make you understand your own position better.

[00:19:27] Maybe you tweak your own position. Even if you tweak it 5%, that’s quite valuable, right? Even if you had, like, let’s say you feel that you’re generally right about a certain position. Your argumentation for that particular position is very dogmatic, but if you then have a conversation with someone who has a, a different position, even if you, if you don’t change your view, you might say, well, there’s actually some pretty important arguments against my position that I need to rethink.

[00:19:55] You know, you could imagine a discussion between someone who’s very religious and an atheist, right? That could be potentially a very polarizing discussion. But it could also be a very interesting one, right, where neither the e atheist nor the religious person comes away abandoning their position, but sort of saying, okay, yeah, okay.

[00:20:15] There are things here that I learned, things here that make me appreciate why persons know. The atheist might say, okay, might have gone into a, a, a conversation with, with someone who’s very religious saying, oh. All religious people are superstitious fools. And then they might have a conversation with someone who’s very religious, who’s very thoughtful and gives them reasons for why they have those profound religious beliefs.

[00:20:37] And the atheist might come away saying, well, I still, I’m still not convinced. That God is real by. I was impressed with the positions that someone who was very Christian or Muslim or whatever, uh, had for staining their beliefs. I think that has real value, right? And you could have that, that could also be true about politics.

[00:20:55] Someone you could have, let’s say it’s, uh, the, the family did it from hell prior to the last election, uh, Kamala Harris and a Trump supporter sitting down for Thanksgiving. That could be really, really ugly. And that might be. Stuffing flying, uh, from one end of the table to the other. But it also could be an opportunity for a discussion where, you know, someone says, well, okay, I’m still very, very, very opposed to your candidate of choice, but I understand where you’re coming from.

[00:21:29] I can see why you decide to vote for that person, even if I still very much disagree. I think that’s the sweet spot. It’s difficult, so you validate

[00:21:38] Michael: the person without validating the argument.

[00:21:40] Jacob: Yeah. I, I, I, and that’s tough. It’s, it’s a difficult pursuit, but I, again, if you allow yourself to be in the mindset, again, as I said before of I’m not entering this discussion in order to win.

[00:21:53] I’m entering this discussion because it’s a topic that I’m passionate about. I have certain beliefs, but I am willing. To change my mind. I am very cognizant about the fact that I am not omniscient. I am a human being with very limited knowledge. And just about every person that you meet will have some kind of experience of some kind of knowledge that you don’t have, and if you are willing to tap into that.

[00:22:26] You can come away from a conversation with, uh, something that is really valuable to you, even if it doesn’t change your fundamental beliefs about certain things, and also coming away from conversations and dialogues without the need of having one of sort of owning the other person as sort of as part of online culture where, where it’s really about winning the, the discussion.

[00:22:51] Megan: I think that’s really helpful and. You’re right. That’s kind of the holy grail. You know? If we could, if we could manage to do that, it would change a lot, I think. Yeah. You know, one of the things I was thinking about this morning, again, as I was kind of preparing for this is not so much at the meta level, but at the personal level where the idea of boundaries comes in.

[00:23:14] You know, like where a conversation, like imagine the same conversation you were just talking about, and in one scenario that conversation can. Potentially deepen the relationship. It certainly could make the, the individual people in the conversation, um, refine their arguments and have sort of intellectual benefits, but hopefully even relational benefits of understanding, you know, that that can go deeper.

[00:23:37] We have also all been in conversations that were damaging. To us, you know, emotionally, psychologically, that the relationship was in worse shape at the end of the conversation than it was at the beginning, and that that real damage was done. And so I’m curious as a free speech advocate, how, at a personal level, how do you think about boundaries?

[00:23:57] And really what I mean is safety. Like how do we create some semblance of psychological safety? And not sort of abandon ourselves to being maybe victimized in a conversation for just lack of a way, a less extreme way to say it. And also not infantilize ourselves. I mean, there’s just like a lot of tensions wrapped up in that.

[00:24:21] Yeah. But I think people feel this sense of, I would like my conversations to have the potential to make my relationships with people. I disagree with deeper, but I also don’t wanna get hurt all the time.

[00:24:33] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:24:33] Megan: And so how do we reconcile those two things?

[00:24:36] Jacob: Yeah, so I think, you know, if you strive to live up to those ideas that I outlined before on your own part and you start out with that, but if your interlocutor does not.

[00:24:50] Is not interested in going down that same route in order to making it more productive. And you know, you give them the benefit of the doubt and if they then consistently only try to. Denigrate you then you’re not under no obligation to continue with that conversation. It’s not like, you know, free speech does not mean that you have an obligation to listen to anyone, uh, at, at any given time.

[00:25:13] And so you can have these ideals that you try to uphold knowing that you’ll probably upholding them imperfectly. But if that’s sort of generally your outlook. But whoever you, you’re in discussion or dialogue with is not interested or incapable. Of extending the, the same to you, then I think it, it becomes more meaningful to just disengage and say, you know, you know what?

[00:25:36] I would like to have a conversation with you about this, but it has to be within certain meaningful parameters. If you are. If that’s not how you want to have a discussion, then I suggest we cut our losses here. And I don’t see that as corrosive to, to free speech, uh, at all. Uh, I mean, it’s not like you have to on social media, go out and actively subscribe to the most toxic accounts and just sit there and listen passively to whatever they say.

[00:26:06] Michael: When you were in those difficult conversations with other people, are there any rules that you kind of rehearse in your head? To manage your own behavior. Because one of the things that will often happen to me, and I suspect it help happens to other people too, is that my nervous system gets activated before my brain.

[00:26:25] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:26:26] Michael: And so that I’m speaking and I’ve said something hurtful and I, if I had have been able to think about it with a more regulated nervous system, I probably would’ve done a much better job.

[00:26:38] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:26:38] Michael: So how do you. Self-manage that on the front end. So you just, uh, get so easily, and I hate this word, but triggered

[00:26:45] Jacob: if those who listen and watch are interested, they can go and, and look at my social media footprint and they can tell me how good a job I’ve done.

[00:26:54] I don’t want to come across and sound like I’ve, I’ve sort of, uh, the perfectly virtuous social media user and I, I feel it like there’s a, I have like a throbbing vein here where I get. When there’s something where I sense my intolerance really rising, that’s when I know it’s probably better to log off or take a deep breath.

[00:27:15] So often I’ve sort of said, okay, I’ll type something in and then I will, I’ll end up not publishing it, not pushing the button, because I, I know I’m, I’m likely to, to regret it. I’ve also, and I don’t know how consistently, but I think it’s quite powerful to apologize. If you said something, you know, say, you know what, that was out of line, or what I said there was.

[00:27:43] My emotions getting the better of me. That encourages more good faith discussion rather than the other person being then tempted to respond in kind. So you, there’s actually an an opportunity there to get back on track, however difficult. I’ve certainly been guilty of, um, writing stuff that, um, I’m not proud of.

[00:28:04] And that has been guided more by emotions than than recent.

[00:28:08] Michael: You know, one little hack that I’ve engaged in. Megan, you may have done this too, I don’t know, but if I get an online comment, for example, on a Facebook account and it’s nasty.

[00:28:17] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:28:17] Michael: My temptation of the past, as Megan will verify, is that I would, you know, just respond.

[00:28:25] In anger and say something that somebody else had to clean up after. And one of the things I’ve done with those kind of comments, they, they’re not, thankfully, they’re not too frequent, but I just copy and paste it into ai and then I’ll say, look, I wanna respond gracefully to this, but I also wanna be clear about my position.

[00:28:46] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:28:47] Michael: So I have a hard time doing those two things at the same time. It’s been frankly amazing. I had one particular person on Facebook who gave me a really nasty response to something, and I don’t even remember what the issue was, but I, I went through that process and posted, and that person actually apologized

[00:29:06] Jacob: Yeah.

[00:29:06] Michael: To me, because it just, it, it deescalated exactly the conversation. Yeah. And so, you know, from my perspective, if I have to use a crutch like AI till I can get trained to do that myself. The world’s better off for it.

[00:29:20] Jacob: Yeah, I think that’s quite creative, especially if you’ve trained the AI on your, your, your writings and your personality so that it, it it knows who you are so that it stays true to your values.

[00:29:31] I also think that sort of self-deprecating humor can, can be, uh, can be quite a, a powerful, uh, tool because if you, you know, if you do that, sometimes the other person will. Realize that they weren’t went too far and will look at themselves and their, and their post and say, oh, so there are, there are different, uh, strategies that you can use but escalating and it’s responding in kind rarely leads to anywhere productive.

[00:30:02] It’s like the honey tip with the poison roots that the Buddha talked about a long, long time before social media.

[00:30:09] Megan: I’ve been thinking about this with myself and. I think one of the things that I, I’m trying to do more intentionally is to say out loud when I’ve been wrong about something and own it. Yeah.

[00:30:21] We’re not engaging in a lot of controversial stuff, you know, professionally, so it’s, it’s more like in closer relationships, but to try to be intentional when my mind gets changed by something and I, I wanna be open to that. You know, like that’s a, that feels like a spiritual discipline almost for me to say, like, I’m gonna be intentional about being open.

[00:30:39] To being wrong. And then when I am, say I was wrong about that and here’s what I changed my mind, you know, why I changed my mind or whatever. For me, that feels important, you know, just to, I think we need more of that. Like that’s what I would like to see other people do in the world is, is to say, you know, I thought that was right, but then the more I thought about it or had whatever experience, I realized that was really wrong.

[00:31:00] Or maybe not. Maybe it wasn’t even really wrong. Maybe it was just like. In some nuanced way off base. And I think it’s helpful the more when we have to always be right or we always have to be totally wrong and, and we, and our, like you were saying earlier, our identity is wrapped up in that to the point that we can never say we’re wrong or we can never say that we made a mistake.

[00:31:19] That’s a really dangerous place because then you kind of get into this sort of ideological sunk cost fallacy situation where like you can’t ever backtrack or change or evolve or grow. Yeah. And hopefully. In relationships, you know, we are able to evolve and grow, and that’s one of the, the gifts of relationships.

[00:31:37] Um, so I’m, I’m trying badly, um, to do that, but I think that’s one of the things that I’ve kind of put into practice myself as like a little accountability check.

[00:31:46] Jacob: It also makes it much easier for the other person than to be quote unquote vulnerable in that conversation. Yeah. And, and being open to, to change because suddenly it’s no longer sort of.

[00:31:57] Win at all costs. Uh, and, and, and by winning, I mean denigrating the other side. Um, it’s the the win-win situation where we both can say, you know, yeah, I was wrong about this. Um, okay. Yeah. Thank you for acknowledging that. I, I, I also made a comment that I regret about this, and then you move into a, a space where there’s more confidence, uh, and a closer connection.

[00:32:21] So I think that’s really helpful.

[00:32:23] Megan: Okay, let’s talk about leadership for a second. So a lot of the people that we’re talking to have some leadership responsibility, um, that might be in a nonprofit context, that might be in the context of their own business or their organization. But certainly we all have leadership in our lives, even if it’s kind of informal.

[00:32:41] But when we’re in, in a context where, you know, maybe we’re in a workplace and everything’s so contentious and consequently we can just have these surface relationships. Rather than going deep, how do we create a culture within our organizations where we can have honest disagreement, but the relationships can remain intact?

[00:33:04] So I guess really what I’m asking you is to take what we’ve talked about now and now apply it at scale.

[00:33:09] Jacob: Yes.

[00:33:09] Megan: You know, where you’ve got 10 or 20 or a hundred or 500 people in a context and we’re trying to do this.

[00:33:16] Jacob: Yeah. It’s been really interesting for me to. Move as a CEO from Denmark to the United States because obviously work culture is is quite different in Denmark, it’s typically a very flat, non-hierarchical structure.

[00:33:35] Huh, that is not, uh, the same in the US where there’s more, in my experience, where people are more deferential towards the bus, for instance. Whereas in Denmark, I mean, obviously someone has the ultimate responsibility and so on. There are hierarchies and stuff, but it’s much more flat and, and non-hierarchical.

[00:33:53] And I think I, I have not really known any other way, so I think the way that I try to manage here. Please have my employees, uh, colleagues can come up with anonymous comments and call me out if I’m, if I’m wrong, but I think I’ve just not, without even being particularly conscious about it, tried to just have that same style here.

[00:34:17] Um, for instance, many of my colleagues here were not used to. Having lunch together where we all meet at, around the table and have lunch together. Um, that was very alien to them. Whereas that’s something that I’ve, I’ve always done and where you can have, where everyone from the intern to the CEO just sit around and, and we can have a conversation about things.

[00:34:38] And also no one needs to. Call me boss or, or sir. Or, or anything like that. So in that sense, I think that, I hope that people in my organization feel more confident about being open and, and also coming up with, with criticisms about things. I’ve certainly, when we’ve done sort of retreats, encouraged where we’ve had these processes, oh, I think last year we, we went somewhere and we really wanted to.

[00:35:10] Be very more precise about our mission and vision. And again, that was a, an exercise that involved everyone in a setting where you could, where anyone had the opportunity to speak out. I think that’s extremely valuable. Obviously this is also a relatively small organization. It’s a very value based organization, so that might be different from a much bigger one, but that’s been my experience.

[00:35:32] I I, I would not want to be. CO of an organization where my employees do not feel confident in telling me if they think even a strategic decision or something is, is wrong. Obviously, you know, at the end of the day, someone’s gotta make a decision. But then it’s also up to me to justify why I might. Stick with the decision, but I just feel that ultimately the decision making process just becomes better because there are a lot of things that I don’t know, and I have a group of smart people, uh, deeply committed people who care about the mission and vision of this organization.

[00:36:10] And so I want them to contribute, and that also means pointing out my potential blind spots, and they certainly are there.

[00:36:19] Michael: Do you think it’s ever legitimate in a context like before the last election or during the pandemic when policy was hotly debated, whereas a leader, you just say, look, we’re not gonna talk about that at work.

[00:36:33] Because it’s, it’s disruptive and it’s a drag on our productivity, and if you wanna have those conversations elsewhere, we encourage it. But not here. Is that legitimate or do you think that’s

[00:36:43] Jacob: Yeah, I, I, I, and I get, I think, I think that also depends on the size of the organization, but I, yeah, I, I could imagine that might be appropriate in some organizations.

[00:36:56] We’ve not had to. I’ve not had to do it here. And maybe that’s in the DNA of an organization that is committed to free speech. But on the other hand, uh, you know, there are also, we do, we do self-censor in certain ways, in the sense I don’t comment on now. I think it would be inappropriate for me as the boss if someone, you know, when we sit around and have lunch, if someone says something about, you know.

[00:37:21] Their political views or religious views or whatever. And I was just to say that’s flat around you shouldn’t believe that that would not be, uh, constructive for, for the CEO to do that. Uh, but where we are now, I feel we can have. Pretty candid discussions, but then again, we also do not, so I, I would never, I, I never comment, for instance, on, on social media, on broader political issues, just because I don’t think that would undermine the credibility of the organization.

[00:37:49] And the same thing with my employees, even though we, our mission and vision is to create a resilient culture of free speech, that means that we have to stay silent on certain topics because otherwise. We would lose credibility in the eyes of the public. So that’s counterintuitive, but I think important.

[00:38:14] Megan: Okay. So you’re also a dad?

[00:38:16] Jacob: Yes.

[00:38:16] Megan: You’ve got a couple of teenagers. Uh, my husband Joel and I had dinner with you and your wife, Sarah, just on Friday, and we were talking about challenges that we’re both facing with our teenagers and all the rest. How are you guys modeling? With your kids how to engage with disagreements.

[00:38:35] Jacob: We’re failing.

[00:38:39] Megan: It’s really

[00:38:39] Jacob: hard. Right. I’m just trying to get any kind of conversation with my son these days, who’s 16. And uh, we both watch religiously follow, uh, an English soccer team called Arsenal. Uh, so we get up very early. Um. Sometimes to watch that. That’s sort of our main quality time together these days.

[00:39:02] But in general, he’s not very interested. But then there are times when, you know, he is interested in history. Uh, he’s also intellectually curious. So there are sort of little windows where we, where we do have these kinds of conversations. One thing that I. I am concerned about, and this I think is maybe particularly relevant to teenage girls, is that there’s a strong sense that they have to conform, that I think is being reinforced by social media.

[00:39:34] So how do you create that resilience and that sense of self-worth? That doesn’t depend on external validation of a peer group, whether it’s in school or on social media. That I think is something that I’m, um, my wife and I are still, still working on building up that confidence muscle. And, um, I can’t say that we’ve, we’ve succeeded, but I think that’s really important to grapple with and something where you need to have.

[00:40:04] Some difficult conversations with your children. The problem is that I haven’t cracked the code for how you have long engaged discussions with, with teenagers when very often they just roll their eyes and think that you, that you’re wasting their time.

[00:40:20] Megan: We haven’t figured that out yet either, so I think we have to defer to my dad who’s successfully raised five adults.

[00:40:25] Now we’re, we’re still mid-process, right?

[00:40:29] Michael: I dunno if I could call it successfully raised.

[00:40:32] Megan: Hey, Hey,

[00:40:35] Michael: lemme just put it this way. I did my best. No, I’m really proud of all five of them, but they are their own women for sure.

[00:40:42] Megan: Okay, well, as we are kind of wrapping up our conversation, Jakob, I’d love to hear you just reflect on if we, if we could fast forward, it’s 20 years from now.

[00:40:54] As a culture, particularly in the US maybe in the Western world at large. We’ve learned how to talk through our disagreements with tolerance, with respect, rather than around them or shutting them down. How is the world 20 years from now different? If we’ve successfully been able to do that,

[00:41:12] Jacob: well then maybe we’re in a position where we look back at the current era and say, um, wow.

[00:41:22] That was a crazy time. And, uh, we never wanna repeat that again. And here are the main lessons that we can draw from that and that we’ve implemented into, you know, education into civic life, into professional life, into political reforms, into reforms of public discourse. Uh, I think that would be, that would be the sweet spot.

[00:41:43] But again, I, you know, I’m very. I’m an anti utopian, so I don’t think that, you know, I, I think we can, we can definitely get to a better place than where we are right now, but we’re probably, we’re, we’re not gonna get to this place where there will never be polarization and there will never be bad faith arguments, uh, and so on.

[00:42:05] But I mean. When you think about the consequences of the printing press, for instance, right? That led to brutal persecution to religious wars and so on. And, uh, you could have been forgiven if you lived through that to like, if you were in the 1530s of having said, well, that was the worst invention ever because my family was just wiped out.

[00:42:27] But. Today, we look back on it as something extremely valuable that really pushed our civilization forward. So hopefully we can also look at, at this time that we, we live through now and see that there were also extremely valuable things and we’ve learned to navigate them more wisely, uh, than we’re currently, that we’re currently doing.

[00:42:46] I mean, for, for me, like it’s in, in Europe, you know, if you go back three or 400 years, there was a. Widespread belief that you could not live in the same country if you had different, uh, religious beliefs, right? People would persecute, kill each other over what many today would view. As, as you know, these, um, really, really weird theological differences that have very little, uh, relevance for ordinary life.

[00:43:15] And that is something that we learn to overcome. Through religious tolerance, through freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. And so maybe we can, maybe we can apply some of those lessons to this moment, uh, that we’re living through now.

[00:43:29] Michael: Jacob, thank you so much for this conversation. For people that wanna follow up with you and learn more about your work, in addition to buying your book free of history from Socrates to social media, and I know you have a new book coming out, but where can people go to find sort of the one-stop shop to find all things?

[00:43:46] Jacob: So you can go to, um, at j that’s my ex, but also my substack that I’ve become a bit more, uh, active on. Those would maybe be the the best resources.

[00:43:59] Michael: Thanks again for great conversation.

[00:44:00] Jacob: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

[00:44:03] Megan: Thanks Jakob.

[00:44:13] Michael: So Megan, what were your takeaways from that conversation?

[00:44:16] Megan: Well, I really appreciated Jakob’s perspective, first of all, because it made me realize that I’m not alone and feeling like talking with the people. I love the people kind of in my real day-to-day life is harder than it’s ever been. That’s like a, that’s normal, not normal isn’t good, but like that’s an experience that we’re all having to greater and lesser degrees.

[00:44:41] So I, I think it was validating on the one hand, but it was also hopeful because I felt like the nuances and guidance that he provided for how to be curious, for how to stay open when we’re disagreeing with someone for how to not. Kind of fight to win, as he said, but rather seek to understand and, and kind of stay in that place of curiosity, it helped me realize that there is a path forward.

[00:45:11] Not in all cases, obviously, there’s just gonna be some, you know, full stop, like deal breaker ways that people wanna interact with us, including sometimes in our own families or, you know, in our, in our circle of friends, so to speak. But that in our, in our real personal lives, there is a way to talk.

[00:45:30] Through disagreements and come out with our relationship strengthened instead of necessarily harmed. That felt like good news to me.

[00:45:38] Michael: It felt like it to me too. And I can think back over my decades of being on this planet and whenever I’ve gotten into a debate, shall we say, and I felt like I landed that zinger and it was a mic drop moment that I almost immediately afterward felt regret.

[00:45:58] I think in conversations where I’ve been able to not pull any punches, but be be respectful and listen as much as I talked, that I left those conversations feeling really good, not only about my participation in the conversation, but hopefully how the other person felt when they left. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that.

[00:46:23] And the worst possible outcome. And we’ve probably all had these relationships with people where, you know, we left the conversation feeling diminished in some way, maybe feeling like we weren’t as smart or we weren’t as articulate as the other person. And we just didn’t feel good about it. And it didn’t, it didn’t draw us together.

[00:46:40] It didn’t make us wanna get with that of the person again. And so, I just wanna make sure that I’m clear. About how I want everything to end the conversation to end and then reverse engineer my behavior so I get there. Does that make sense?

[00:46:54] Megan: Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing that he put words to that maybe I hadn’t really found the words for yet, is just the loneliness that results.

[00:47:06] When we choose to disengage entirely mm-hmm. When we sort of make that unconscious, preemptive decision, you know, before we go to Thanksgiving or before we go to, you know, on that trip, we’re gonna see family or something like that, and we just decide we’re not talking about anything. You know, it’s like we sort of do the.

[00:47:23] The preemptive damage control in our mind and think, okay, these are the things we’re gonna talk about ’cause they’re safe and we’re not even gonna go there. And what that means is you feel a lot less known and you don’t have connection because you’re not talking about anything that matters. You know, you’re just trying to get through it.

[00:47:38] And it should go without saying, I may, it’s probably worth saying in some situations that is the best decision. You know, like,

[00:47:45] Michael: yeah,

[00:47:46] Megan: that is the lesser of two evils. But what I took away from this is. So a lot of times my instinct would be to assume that that’s the lesser of two evils without counting the cost, and that there is a cost.

[00:47:58] And if you’re gonna pay that cost, you better know what you’re, you know what the exchange is for. Because a lot of times the discomfort of finding a way to have a conversation that that is simultaneously one where you don’t compromise. What you feel to be true in a way that that would diminish you and, you know, be a violation of your values or whatever, but you also choose to engage with somebody else in a way that’s honoring to them.

[00:48:24] That is the harder path for sure, but it is a path that makes it possible to maintain connection. Even where disagreements are, are are still existing.

[00:48:33] Michael: Well from our faith tradition, yours and mine. I think there’s a couple of admonitions from the Bible that are helpful. One is speak the truth in love.

[00:48:42] Those are two things that are difficult. It’s almost like two magnets that are trying to move away from each other. They seem in contradiction and yet the best outcomes happen when we hold those two things together, both truth and love. And the other watch word for me, and this is really personal for me, I just keep saying to myself over and over again, be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger.

[00:49:07] And if I can do that. I think I’m good.

[00:49:10] Megan: And I, I think one of the things that can happen in our current, like social media climate is this pressure to respond quickly to everything. Yes. To have a take, like right now. And there’s a lot of value in just taking a second, it doesn’t have to be a long second. I mean, like, you know, some of this stuff is so darn obvious.

[00:49:29] Like it, you know, it doesn’t take a, a lot of time, but, but the pressure should come from. Moral clarity, not from other people telling us, like to jump into the fray, so to speak. I don’t think there’s a lot of value in just jumping into the fray for its own sake, and I, I find that I think better if I give myself a minute, and sometimes that’s literally 15 minutes.

[00:49:51] Sometimes that’s overnight to get my thoughts together and reflect rather than just. We just don’t wanna be in reactive mode. I think that is the big idea. Right.

[00:50:01] Michael: Well guys, thank you for listening to this episode and you would do us a great favor if you would rate the show. And give a short review.

[00:50:09] That’ll help us get visibility with other people that are just passing through podcast land and looking for a podcast. It raises our visibility and we’d be grateful. Until next time, have a great.