No Mercy / No Malice: I Disagree

Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from I DISAGREE by Jessica Tarlov, read by the author. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Speaker 01

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• 0:57Speaker 02

  Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore.

• 1:08Speaker 03

  What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me?

• 1:17Speaker 02

  This week on Explain It To Me, How To Mind Your Manners. New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:28Scott Galloway?

  I'm Scott Galloway, and this is No Mercy, No Malice. Most of us live inside a media bubble. My Raging Moderates co-host, Jessica Tarloff, moves across them. As the lone liberal on The Five, Jess is able to engage with her conservative colleagues at Fox News with real aplomb. She appears fearless, but as she writes in her book, I Disagree, Fear Doesn't Disappear, You Just Decide It Won't Stop You. I asked Jessica to share an excerpt from the book about channeling rage without letting it consume us and finding calm without becoming complacent. Her advice? Get louder about your convictions and gentler with your people. I Disagree by Jessica Tarlov.

• 2:16Jessica Tarlov?

  On Raging Moderates, I ask my guests the same closing question. What's one thing that makes you rage and one thing you think we should all calm down about? Every week, I think about how I'd answer. Sometimes it's a frivolous frustration, like the jockeying for overhead bin space on an airplane. Other times, I'm raging about something deeper, maybe American citizens being detained by ICE. When I ask about what we should calm down about, it's the same pattern. Sometimes it's a minor frustration with my kids, and other times, I'm considering something more meta. Right now, the thing that makes me rage is fear. Or more particularly, the feeling so many of us have that we can't overcome our fears. When I started at The Five, facing four conservatives and millions of viewers who might not agree with me, I'd wake up with my stomach in knots and rehearse arguments

• 3:01Jessica Tarlov?

  in my head, terrified I'd say the wrong thing. But eventually, I learned that fear doesn't go away. You just decide it's not going to stop you. You learn to live with it, to feed off the energy, and hopefully, to find a way to express it that doesn't sap your strength, but makes you stronger. When your fear is harnessed, no matter what it's about, you become a more complete, self-aware person. That's what I want for you. Not to be unafraid. Fear is a rational response to the challenges ahead, but to decide that you're not going to let that fear keep you on the sidelines of whatever challenge is making you tense. And what's the one thing we should all calm down about? Each other. I know that sounds simple, maybe even naive, but good people have flaws. It can be hard to see the humanity

• 3:45Jessica Tarlov?

  in people whose politics feel so foreign to yours, or imagine bonding with those who excuse, or worse, endorse, behavior that's antithetical to yours. But those same people can be loving parents, generous neighbors, and devoted friends. The reverse is true as well. People with the right politics can have serious personal feelings. If we demand perfection from everyone, we end up alone. And loneliness, that's what's really killing us. It's also okay to listen to bad ideas. In the past decade on Fox, I've been exposed to a lot of conservative thinking that I can get on board with, or at least peacefully coexist with. But I've also heard arguments that range from misguided to flat out wrong.

• 4:26Jessica Tarlov?

  Conspiracy theories dressed up as facts. Policy positions held up by vibes alone. Being exposed to those arguments didn't convert me. It didn't shake my core principles or change my vote. Actually, it's been the opposite. Listening to bad ideas has taught me what people fear, what they believe in, what they know and don't know, and sometimes, just sometimes, how I might change their minds. The weakest arguments are the easiest to dismantle. The strongest are actually worth wrestling with. But the biggest reason we need to calm down about each other is that the world is less scary when we're together. I'm lucky to have people I can share my thoughts and beliefs with. Fewer and fewer Americans can say the same. Some loneliness is imposed on us by work, distance from family, health,

• 5:10Jessica Tarlov?

  circumstance. But some of it is voluntary. We hide from one another when things get tense. We ghost friends, skip family dinners, mute people on social media. Politics matters. Of course it does. But the most meaningful parts of life, love and loss, opportunity and disappointment, triumphs and mistakes, are rarely related to a new law or Truth Social post. That's true even for me, and I live and breathe this stuff. What all those meaningful moments have in common is that they're shared with other people. My father squeezing my hand on my wedding day, even though he could barely stand. Brian making me laugh when I wanted to cry. My daughters' faces when they figure out how to do something they thought was impossible. Random acts of kindness from Fox viewers who disagree with

• 5:54Jessica Tarlov?

  almost everything I say, but still sent me those baby blankets when Cleo was born. Remembering that calms me down more than anything. So yes, rage when you need to, fight for what you believe in, use your voice, show up prepared with facts and conviction. But don't forget that the person across from you, whether across the Thanksgiving table or across the cable news split screen, is a person. Flawed, complicated, sometimes infuriating, but still human. That's not weakness, that's strength, and it's the only way forward.

• 6:28Scott Galloway?

  Life is so rich.