Find the Problem Behind Every Disagreement

Good morning, my dears.

Today is another heatwave day here in Colmar. Europe has seen a lot of fires these past months, and it feels like one giant fire stretching from Bordeaux all the way to Spain. Yesterday it was 36 degrees, but somehow it felt even hotter than that.

Last night I sat down and looked through the global markets and the turn the economy has taken. I was trying to figure out what the lessons for you should be, and how I could guide you better. The truth is, even I don't fully understand everything that's happening right now. Actually — I understand perfectly well what is happening, I just can't figure out how we got here. And that's the surprising part. If I don't understand how we arrived at this point now, then I probably won't be able to anticipate the truly important things in the future either.

The world is going through one of the hardest periods in the last hundred years, and it all comes from a mix of problems. First, in 2019 we had to deal with the Covid pandemic. That name probably won't mean much to you in twenty years. But the pandemic caused a lot of damage to our society — damage we still haven't recovered from. The economic damage is the biggest part. Most governments imposed lockdowns, where people weren't allowed to leave their own homes. What do you think happened to all the small businesses, or the ones that depended on foot traffic? Almost all of them closed. The failure of vision from governments wasn't a failure to foresee that these small businesses would close — it was the failure to understand that a closed, bankrupt business doesn't pay taxes anymore. That's the reason so many small towns in Germany suddenly found themselves without enough tax revenue.

Another shock to the economy came in 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine. Why? No sane person can answer that with any precision. After all these years, Russia seems incapable of winning this war. The imperial ambitions of one old man in Moscow shouldn't be enough to shape a world like this. But apparently they are. Because we don't have just one — we have two. Trump, on the other hand, is just as imperialist, maybe even more corrupt. There are so many signs right now pointing to the Trump administration being one of the most corrupt that has ever existed. For now it's still just a personal opinion or speculation, but I hope that once Trump and his allies lose power, there will be a public investigation and that everyone found guilty will be held accountable.

Even setting aside the question of breaking the law — hard as that is to imagine with Trump — just think about his track record as a businessman. Think about how many businesses he's driven into bankruptcy, and how he's now managing to do the same to the United States and to the whole world. Not many fools are capable of bankrupting the entire planet — he honestly deserves some kind of award for that.

If you don't fully understand everything I've told you so far — about Trump, about Ukraine, about all of it — that's fine. Go look into history, and try to understand the past. You'll find a lot of the answers there, to questions you may not even know you have yet. But beyond all these events, there's a bigger lesson I want to leave you with today.

My message to you is this: look at history, and see how every surprise arrives unannounced. I'm sure most people who voted for Trump did it with hope and good intentions — they genuinely believed something would change for the better. I'm sure some of the people who stormed the Capitol on January 6th believed, in one way or another, that their democracy was under attack. They're responsible for their actions, of course — but we have to remember that some of them made the wrong choices out of their own foolishness, lack of knowledge, ignorance, and probably a flawed read of the world around them.

My focus today, though, is on the people who supported Trump. I want to understand how they arrived at the decisions they made, so I can explain to you how to protect yourselves from the same trap. Most of them probably had some preconceived political ideas, and most likely, every time they got into a discussion with someone else, they dismissed the other point of view outright.

That's probably the answer: never dismiss an idea or an opinion without having really examined it yourself and tried to understand why someone else holds it. Let's try an experiment: find an idea or a viewpoint that opposes something you yourself believe, on some level. Try to come up with the arguments for why someone would think that way. Try to explain to yourself why the other person, or people, would think that. What is the core problem being addressed? For example, the reason so many people trusted Trump comes down to something simple: the world is getting poorer, and people can afford less and less. But instead of placing that poverty at the feet of the political class — the ones actually responsible for the inflation the world is dealing with — these people decided to look for other answers. They came to believe immigrants were the root of the problem, the same way the British not long ago believed that leaving the EU was the answer to all their problems. So underneath it all, we can always find a problem that urgently needs solving, and everyone tends to explain their own solution differently. Most of the time, we all end up at the wrong conclusion.

Finding solutions isn't what matters here — finding the core problem that needs addressing is. In other words, when we really try to understand people who think differently from us, more often than not, we end up understanding the actual problem.

Do you know who does this naturally, instinctively, without even trying? Your mother! Sometimes she drives me up the wall, in the truest sense of the phrase. I'll start telling her about something that happened, and halfway through she interrupts with questions or comments that, in the moment, I think are ridiculous. She always finds excuses for other people, always tries to put herself in their shoes, tries to explain why they reacted one way or another. There are moments when I realize right away that she's right, but most of the time her reaction just irritates me even more. It's supposed to be the two of us, a team — I'm telling her something that hurt me, and how does she land on trying to explain why I should understand the other side instead of just comforting me and saying that if I'm right about everything, well, that's beyond anyone's ability to understand?

At first I thought she was just "siding with the bear" — if you know that expression. But over the years, I've come to genuinely admire this about her. Listen to her advice — always. Pay attention to how she carries herself in a disagreement, because it's something worth learning. Some days I still wish she'd just say "you're right, love," and leave it at that. But the truth is, there's always something to learn from her, even when it's not what I want to hear in the moment. What amazes me most is that none of it is an act. She doesn't sit down afterward and work out how to be fair to the other person — she does it instinctively, right there, live, in the middle of the conversation, while she's still talking to them. That kind of understanding can't be faked, and I don't know many people who have it. She's one of the best people I know, and I want you to see that clearly, not just hear me say it.

My message right now is this: I want you to pay attention to the need to genuinely listen to every honest point of view. Whenever someone presents you with a different reality than your own, try to understand why they think that way, and ask yourselves — between the two different opinions — what is the shared problem that needs solving? If you find the problem, the situation is already half solved. And as much as I'd like to be the one teaching you this, I have to admit I'm not built for it. I'm too impulsive, too stubborn to pull it off. Your mother, on the other hand, does it effortlessly, naturally. Of all the things you can learn from her, this is one of the most important. Listen carefully to how she talks about other people, about situations she disagrees with — and learn.