Indispensable Newsletter #1

Midterms, Picking Presidents, and Planet Word

Author

Gautam Mukunda
November 04, 2022

Welcome to the Indispensable Newsletter!

One of the things I enjoy most about teaching is riffing with my students at the end of class. They jokingly called these “Mukunda’s Monologues,” where we tied what we’d discussed in class that day to current events, history, culture, and how they could apply it in their lives going forward.

My goal with this newsletter is to capture the fun of those conversations and bring them straight to your inbox.

Here’s what you can expect in each issue:

Deep Dive—A section where I take an in-depth look at something I’ve been thinking about lately

From The Pod—A section highlighting the great guests I’ve recently featured on my World Reimagined podcast

In The Arena—A roundup of my recent appearances and personal news, as well as a calendar of upcoming events

Mukunda’s Media—A look at what I’ve been reading, listening to, and watching

Plus, I’ll include a few more odds and ends that I’ve found interesting.

I’m so happy to have you here. Thanks for giving me the chance to share this newsletter with you. If you like what you read, I’d love for you to share it with your friends!

With that said, let’s get started on this inaugural issue!

Deep Dive: Midterm Madness

As we prep for the midterm elections just a few days away, I’m reminded of the unique combination of pageantry and circus that is our election system.

Elections have and will always be a mix of chaos and confusion. They take everything a candidate has—blood and guts, passion and skill, genius and luck.

We attach a lot of civic virtue to being involved in politics, and it’s important that we all have our say. But we should acknowledge that most people who follow politics closely do it because it’s fun. I think citizens should be involved in politics. But under normal circumstances, political contests elicit a lot of the same feelings from partisans - myself included - that the Red Sox do.

This tribal instinct is baked into our DNA. We feel the need to be part of an in group, and one of the most powerful ways we do that is by collectively railing against the out group. Studies have shown that we develop prejudice and anger toward those who are on the outside. The effects of groups on our behavior are so important that an entire field of psychology, social identity theory, examines them.

This certainly plays a role in the political polarization and the red/blue aggression playing out today.

I enjoy the sporting aspects of politics—they’re very real. But it’s critically important to remember that politics and elections aren’t a game. It REALLY REALLY matters who ends up as president.

As author Seth David Radwell pointed out in his recent book American Schism: How the Two Enlightenments Hold the Secret to Healing Our Nation, our base instincts can make us easily manipulable. Trump certainly exploited tribalism by, as Radwell put it “ignoring substance and instead provoking the primitive fear and anger instinctively associated with natural group intergroup conflict.” He invited a part of the electorate who felt “left out” into his own in-group and promised them victory. “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with all the winning,” he said in his 2015 stump speech. And it was, sometimes, highly entertaining. As long as you forgot that the outcome had real consequences. We citizens of a democracy can do the circus thing, but we shouldn’t ever forget just how much depends on the outcome of the process.

From the Pod

In the most recent episode of the World Reimagined podcast, I sat down with Ben Michaelis co-founder and CEO of the group.io and Kevin Delaney, CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Charter.

We talked about creating culture in a hybrid workplace—how leaders can build successful companies in this world of new work, including the importance of bringing humanity to work while maintaining boundaries between work and personal life.

Give the episode a listen here:

In the Arena

Picking Presidents

The big news this week is of course that my new book, Picking Presidents, hit shelves.

In the book, I discuss how hard it is to forecast how well a presidential candidate would do if they actually won the election. As Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.”

Forecasting is definitely hard, but it’s something that every voter must do. There’s no other way to make decisions. 

My research—combined with that of many other social scientists and historians—can provide a framework that can improve our ability to make those predictions.

I really believe that this book will help all voters decide how to choose leaders in the future. Be sure to grab a copy! And if you like what you read, please leave a review on Amazon and Goodreads!

Keen On Podcast

I recently sat down with Andrew Keen, the fantastic host of Lit Hub’s Keen On podcast. In the episode, we discuss my new book, and we rate the performance of several presidents throughout history—including Joe Biden—using my rating process.

The Chris Voss Show Podcast

I had a great conversation with Chris Voss a couple of weeks ago on his podcast. We talked about my method for assessing whether presidential candidates will succeed or fail and how Picking Presidents follows on the concepts I introduced in Indispensable.

Planet Word Event - November 8 - Washington, DC

Tom Friedman has been a friend and mentor since I took a class from him in college—more than 20 years ago! I’m excited to head down to see him next week for our Washington, DC book launch at his museum, Planet Word.

Tickets are free, and you can reserve your spot here!

Mukunda's Media: What I'm Reading, Watching, and Listening to

I recently finished reading Guy Gavriel Kay’s most recent book, All The Seas of the World. It is fascinating and thought provoking, and it’s just the most beautiful use of the English language you could ever encounter. I savor every sentence and how perfectly they’re constructed.

I’m also working through Jonathan Rauch’s book, The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Rauch says society’s knowledge base is like a funnel; anyone can lob ideas into the top, but they must go through peer review and rigorous testing to see if they’re true before they come out the other end. This constitution of knowledge has allowed us to solve our most challenging problems. As a result, we’ve advanced more as a species in the last 200 years than we did in the previous 2,000. Very interesting and timely considering the great deal of “fake news” and “alternative facts” we’ve been dealing with as of late.

Tweet of the Week

Moment of Zen

"If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more, and become more, then you are a leader."

- John Quincy Adams

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