IN CLEAR FOCUS: Honorable Paul Johnson and Larry Aldrich, authors of “What’s Right with America,” challenge fear-driven narratives dominating media. They discuss how optimism drives innovation, the power of individual agency over collective thinking, and the economic strengths of the United States. The conversation explores marketing lessons from their data-driven approach to countering pessimism, the importance of entrepreneurship, and how brands can tap into shared American values rather than divisions.

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Episode Transcript

Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS … 

Larry Aldrich: You simply can’t solve problems from a position of fear and negativity. You have to be optimistic. You have to believe you can solve them.

Paul Johnson: The single greatest thing that our country ever did was, from the very beginning, it empowered the individual over itself.

Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led, full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Bigeye’s Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. In today’s polarized media landscape, marketers and brands face unprecedented challenges when communicating with consumers. As society appears more divided, many brands struggle to position themselves authentically without alienating segments of their audience. This challenge raises important questions about how brands can navigate these complex waters while staying true to their values and connecting with consumers in meaningful ways. Our guests today offer a unique perspective on America’s foundation, its values, and how understanding what’s right with America might provide insights for brands and marketers. Honorable Paul Johnson is a former State Department official, CEO and co-founder of Redirect Health, former mayor of Phoenix, and host of The Optimistic American podcast. Joining him is Larry Aldrich, a former federal antitrust prosecutor, former CEO of University Physicians Healthcare and two Gannett newspapers, and founder of Tucson Ventures. Together, they’ve authored a new book titled “What’s Right with America … And How We Can Keep It That Way!” Published by Post Hill Press, the book examines America’s core strengths and values, challenging the prevailing pessimism that dominates so much of today’s discourse. To discuss how their insights might inform marketing strategies in a polarized world, I’m delighted that Paul and Larry are joining us today from Arizona. Paul and Larry, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS. 

Larry Aldrich: Thank you. 

Paul Johnson: Thanks for having us, Adrian. 

Adrian Tennant: Larry, your book, “What’s Right with America,” comes at a time when many perceive the country as deeply divided. What inspired you to write this book?

Larry Aldrich: So I would say Paul, specifically. I don’t really kind of suck up when talking to Paul, but Paul is the inspiration for the book. He and I are running buddies, and I knew about his podcast, The Optimistic American. And one day I said, “You know, you might want to market this a little differently. You might want to write a book.” And he goes, “Well, I’ve written books.” And he said, “If you want to write a book with me …” meaning “you want to take the first crack at it.” And I said, “Sure. I’ve always been thinking about writing a book. So here we go.” So that really was the inspiration, specifically. Generally, I think I tire very much from the negativity. And I get caught up in it like everybody else, and you just kind of find yourself just spiraling down. And again, the inspiration of Paul just spending much of his time on a podcast talking about optimism and what makes America great, those two things intersected for me to be quite interested to write the book with Paul.

Adrian Tennant: Paul, when we were preparing for this podcast, you mentioned how fear-driven narratives dominate media channels on both sides of the political divide. Now, as someone who’s worked in both politics and business, how do you see this affecting the broader cultural conversation?

Paul Johnson: Well, I don’t think there’s any doubt that it’s had a big effect. I do want to say one thing about Larry. I appreciate Larry giving me so much credit. But Larry was a publisher. He worked for the Justice Department. He has an incredible understanding of the Constitution. And I have known him for a long time. And his fundamentals and his belief in the foundations of America are almost unshakable. It’s one of the things that I’ve loved about him. And he contributed and wrote a ton on that inside this book, that I enjoyed myself. You know, what we see that’s happening, and that is counter to my instincts, is a huge amount of pessimism that exists in America today. The pessimism is being driven really by both sides, and there are a wide variety of reasons for it. But there’s political advantage, and it’s profitable to be negative. But consequently, the American brand is being hit on a regular basis. If you were trying to figure out how to market into that, my guess is the first instinct would be you have to be negative as well. But as we know about branding, anytime you’re talking about branding, sometimes being counter to the existing culture is what actually gets you noticed. We’re hoping that is what happens. Although I can’t tell you how many times Larry and I have been up on podcasts and seen comments from people saying, “What’s right with America? Are you guys morons?” That there’s not much right with it. And here’s what I would say to that. “You’re wrong. You know, take a look at the data. Start with that.” You know, today, again, on the right and the left, we, you know, we can listen to the Bernie Sanders talk about inequality that exists because of income levels. We can also hear both sides talk about things like the need for tariffs because the United States has been hollowed out and our industry has been destroyed. Well, the truth is, that’s not the truth. There’s nothing like the United States of America. Ever in history, in world history, the United States is just quite simply the greatest superpower in the history of the planet. But what we try to do is we try to dig into the data, because if you’re going to confront the existing narrative, which is very negative, you should start with an understanding of what does the data tell us? So let’s just take a look. And we do this on income inequality as well as on tariffs throughout the book. But let’s start with the issue of tariffs and why it is that the world has been destroyed by free trade. Well, the answer is, if you go back to the 1990s and you look at the data, the United States was just about equal on a GDP per person with every single one of the other G7 nations, the wealthiest countries on the planet. Today, we’re almost double in GDP per person. If you look at the state of Mississippi, they’re about $53,000 some odd hundred dollars. They’re the lowest state in the country on GDP per person. They beat any of the other G7 nations with the exception of Germany and Canada. The reality is we have benefited greatly from free trade. We benefited greatly from the free markets and free enterprise. But this didn’t really occur in the 1990s. It goes all the way back to our foundings. And when you start talking to most Americans, what I find to be interesting is if you’ll ask them, “Well, how are things going economically?” You’ll usually hear from people, “Well, they’re going pretty well for me, but I know that there are a lot of people in the country that are suffering.” And we talk about ‘the other guy’ quite a bit. What I would say is, “In comparison to what?” If we’re not doing well in comparison to the 1960s, the 1980s, the 1990s, in comparison to Germany, Russia, China, what are you comparing it to? If you start to do the comparison, it’s just, it’s undeniable. And that helped us with our book because we’re starting with a set of data that is very different than the existing narrative.

Adrian Tennant: Larry, with your background in newspapers and media, you’ve witnessed significant changes in how information is consumed. How has the evolution from traditional to social media affected how Americans perceive the country and each other?

Larry Aldrich: I not only witnessed it, I think I was part of the cause, or at least from the early days. It was 30 years ago that we launched in Tucson, StarNet, which was the fifth newspaper on the internet in the country and could have been the second if I could have figured out what the internet thing was back in 1994. And Bob Kaufman, who really had the idea and came to me and pitched it, said, “Here’s what I’m thinking. Here’s how we increase communication with our readers. Here’s how we create democracy among those readers and us. We will create all these newsgroups, all these discussion boards, we’ll moderate this, it’ll be just fabulous.” And I so vividly recall that about a year after we launched, he came into my office and he said – he was quite profane, so I won’t say exactly what he said, but I’m sure it was filled with profanity. He said, “We have lost control. It is out of our hands. We gave the tools and they’ve been taken away from us. Basically, there is no ability to moderate the conversations.” That was part of the negativity, say that would be 29 years ago. On the other side, though, I just so vividly remember also being at a meeting early on where we’re explaining the internet thing and explaining what StarNet was doing. And a gentleman got to the microphone, he said, “I have this business that checks the title work in the newspaper called the Morgue, the library, the big books sitting just outside my office. I come down five days a week to see and go into the history. Are you telling me that I can do this from my home now?” And I said, “Yes.” And he cried. And that, to me, was an amazing sense of the power. We obviously spent a ton of time on the marketing side of that equation. I think Bob was right in the first place, though. Yes, we did lose control, but we gave those tools and those keys to average Americans to basically communicate, market, discuss with each other, good or bad, how things can occur. People bemoan the demise of the daily newspapers. I do too. However, there is a lot more information that at least is getting somewhere, much more today than ever. So we’ve seen the shift. We’ve seen the reduction in the scale of these large media companies who were gatekeepers. no matter how you describe it. There are many fewer gatekeepers today and the ability for social media to really be a force for good and not perceived as a force for bad is there in place today. And we will evolve into a better place.

Adrian Tennant: Paul, your book is fundamentally about presenting a positive narrative of America. How do you see the effort to promote American optimism as a form of national branding?

Paul Johnson: Well, you have to start with understanding the power of the other side. I’ve worked in three different presidential campaigns. And I remember one speaking to a pollster, which I won’t mention her name, but we were trying to talk about creating an aspirational message for our candidate. And I will never forget being told, “That’s not how we win. Here’s how we win. We win because of this thing called the amygdala hijack.” And the amygdala hijack is the reptilian portion of the brain that if I can ignite fear inside of it, then it forces you into a position where the fight, flight, or freeze instinct takes place. It also begins to capture, it begins to flood the neocortex, so you can’t think optimistically, rationally – you can’t think about optimism. You’re in survival mode. And the point was that we had a base of voters, and our goal was to ignite that amygdala hijack in them, so they became dependent upon us. They became dependent upon our candidacy. Now, that has been taken to an extreme in both parties, and it’s successful. It’s also successful with the nightly news. I mean, why would they use it? Well, if they can ignite that amygdala and you’re terrified and you’re worried about what’s going to happen, you’re going to turn on that television tomorrow. I would start by saying what am I optimistic about in the news media? I’m on what I’m optimistic about: a podcast. Podcasting. It’s democratizing things. It has the potential to change the existing narrative. Now, there’s a challenge to it, no doubt about it, which is factual information. Trying to find a balance for factual information and good information. But you’re kind of leaving that up a little bit to the person listening. And I don’t know about you, but for me, I can’t sit there and listen to negative podcasts all day long. When somebody’s speaking for two hours, that becomes a more difficult thing to do. So, in changing the brand, I think there are new tools that are being given to us. I mean, certainly, you know, anybody writing a book would love to be on the front page of the New York Times or on CNN or on Fox News. Those would be terrific to be able to market a book. Well, the difference with podcasts is you just have to do more of them. And in fact, many times on podcasts, they have much greater reaches than do the other elements. But the key is to recognize that what we’re trying to do, our challenge, is that we have to ignite that part of your brain that wants to think rationally, that wants to think about whether or not these things are as bad as we believe that they are. And here’s the good news. If we can ignite it, here’s what we’re positive of. If you are captured by the artisanship, by the tribalism, if you’re captured by these terrifying images that we’re watching on television on a nightly basis, depending upon what party you’re in, You’ve lost your agency. You’ve lost your ability to make rational, good decisions. And that’s going to have an effect on investment, on businesses, on your family. It’s going to have an effect on your friends. Your life is better. If you will expand out beyond that very narrow base, let go of the partisanship, and start looking at the data. Start taking a look at what really is going on in this country. And again, it’s just undeniable. There’s nothing like this place. What I know is that our democracy is dependent upon agency. What I also know is that if more people take us up on that, it in itself begins to change politics because politicians are simply a reflection of the people that they represent.

Adrian Tennant: Larry, what lessons can marketers learn from the challenge of getting people to set aside negative information and focus instead on positive aspects?

Larry Aldrich: Well, I’ll build Adrian somewhat on what Paul just said. It’s just hard to find any energy in negative information. You know, being driven to fear, being driven to anger, you know, you might go up like a skyrocket and then you come down quite rapidly. So it’s really hard to build a sustainable power, let’s call it, through a focus on negativity. I do think marketers, by definition, are optimistic people. We all hear all the time, you know, “What are you for?” Rather than “What you’re against?” You know, if you’re a Democrat and you oppose Trump, what are you for? Not, you know, “We just oppose Trump.” And so I think marketers take the easy way out when they do just what Paul was saying, which is basically let’s get them scared because it is easy. We can get attention that way. But in my view, it’s not sustainable. Now, marketers should do what they do best, which is focused on the quality of the product that they’re trying to communicate. What problem is this product trying to solve? What unmet need is out there? And how do you talk to the customer, potential customer, about those opportunities from a position of optimism and power, not from a position of negativity and fear?

Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.

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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Honorable Paul Johnson and Larry Aldrich, authors of the book “What’s Right with America … And How We Can Keep It That Way!” Paul, a central theme of your book is that America’s strength comes from empowering the individual over collective interests and government. How do you see this tension between individual rights and group identity playing out in today’s consumer landscape?

Paul Johnson: Well, before I get to the consumer landscape, let me just say that if you look back on our country, we’ve done a great many incredible things, right? We built roads and bridges and dams. We even put a person on the moon. But the single greatest thing that our country ever did was, from the very beginning, it empowered the individual over itself. Our book spends a lot of time talking about the great philosophers, the role that they played in this, how our founders played a role in it. But those words, “We hold these truths to be self-evident – that all men are created equal,” was from the very beginning about the empowerment of the individual. And we not only built a constitution around those words that came out of the Declaration of Independence, but we built institutions around that constitution, all designed around the individual. At the end of the day, the collective is driven more by fear. The more afraid you are, the more important your tribal instincts become. On the other hand, as people begin to gain optimism, they begin to find that they’re empowered to do all types of things. They begin to recognize that the decisions that they make today will have an effect on their long-term interest. It is inevitable we are going to turn back to that, and here’s why. Because we have turned, in the last couple of cycles, towards the collective, the thought that some person or some party could save us. The reality is, we will save ourselves. And in fact, in each of us saving ourselves and doing the things that we’re empowered to do as an individual, we save the country, not them. It’s not some savior that does it. It’s all of us acting as individuals that creates a collective benefit.

Adrian Tennant: Larry, your book touches on the evolution of media from traditional press to social media. How can brands and marketers, as key players in the digital space, contribute to a healthier information environment and help rebuild public trust?

Larry Aldrich: I think marketers are at the core of that communication. I would just say fundamentally everyone, especially folks that have the marketing expertise and the strategy focus, should simply just be more discerning on what they echo or what they use. So people talk about, you know, reaching more eyeballs or more ears. Well, reach more brains. you know, use the power of marketing to reach the brain, which is going to embed in a very different, more powerful way and more longer lasting way. You know, one of the podcasts I was on recently, the question was, what wasn’t the height of American ingenuity? The moon landing, as Paul touched on just a minute ago. I go, did you watch the chopsticks capture the rocket from Elon Musk’s SpaceX last year? You know, you think [19]69 was the height of our power in America? You know, we’re going to new heights. So I just say be more discerning, you know, choose to basically promote those more discerning ideas focused on brain power rather than ear and eye power.

Adrian Tennant: That’s great advice. Paul, you argue that despite polarization, most Americans share common ground and belief in the nation’s core principles. How can brands tap into this shared identity to connect with broad audiences rather than exacerbating divisions?

Paul Johnson: Sure. And on that, let me give you some math, because I think it’s important for people who are marketing today to think about this, because oftentimes our view of the world is based upon what we’re seeing in polling and what we’re seeing through the political parties. So just for a moment, if you imagine that about 70 percent of the public is registered to vote, about a third of those are Democrats, a third of those are Republicans, a third of those are independent or other voters. We know that the other voters tend to be a more optimistic lot, but now let’s go down to the other two-thirds. In a primary election, about 30 percent will turn out. Now, that 30 percent, if you just did that math out, longhand, what you’d figure out is it represents about 8 to 9 percent of the public. Eight to 9 percent of the public will vote in the Democratic primary. Eight to 9 percent will vote in a Republican primary. So when you see a poll, that’s usually when they say, “Well, here’s how Republicans think,” or “Here’s how Democrats think.” That’s basically what they’re looking at. Meaning their poll is based upon a sample that is of about 8 to 18 percent of the public. It’s a very, very small amount. That group of voters, I’ve done a lot of polling on them. I know them really well. They’re grievance voters. They’re angry. Like the single number one thing that the 8 percent of the people who vote in a Republican primary want is to stick their finger in the eye of a Democrat. And it’s the same on the Democratic side, right? They don’t like Republicans. But that doesn’t represent the other 80 percent. So what I would tell marketers is be very careful what your instincts tell you from watching the nightly news. It is not representative of where most people are coming from. And in fact, most people. We’re standing in this huge gulf between these two groups of people on each side that are yelling at one another, cursing at one another, saying terrible things about one another. And most of us down deep, we just want them to stop. If I were marketing, that’s the group I’d market to, the aspirational voter, the voter who wants something better, the voter who believes that we have a lot more to offer. And they’re the ones saying, “Well, it’s going pretty well for me, but I keep hearing from this other guy.” Well, the other guy is part of that 8 percent. It’s a small minority. And if you’re marketing to them, you’re not marketing to the majority of Americans.

Adrian Tennant: How do you see the concept of brand America evolving globally? And what implications might this have for American brands with international audiences?

Paul Johnson: Well, I think we’re going through a pretty negative period. We’re getting beat up around the world from people who were upset about everything from, you know, we’re going to invade Iceland to Canada to become another American state, all the way to what we’re doing with tariffs. But it’s a mistake to bet against the United States of America. Long term, when you look at our assets, you look at the benefits that we have. Economically, we’re still going to be a superpower. Now, here’s what we have to come back to. Our sense of agency, we are not a victim. And in fact, we had benefited greatly from our relationships with our allies. You know, if we went back to our grandparents and we were to tell them, well, my grandparents, maybe for some of you would be your great grandparents, but for my grandparents, if you were to go back to them and say, I don’t know why we need allies, that say, are you out of your mind? What do you mean? And if I said, measles vaccines, why are those important? That say, are you crazy? Right? The point is, we’ve kind of forgotten, but we’re going to remember again, it’s going to happen. Larry can talk more about it. We have these five traits of what it takes for us to be able to enjoin in the greatness that America offers. And one of them is gratitude. But I can promise you this, 80 percent of Americans, they are grateful. They like being known for being generous. They like being known for us helping out the world in everything from, you know, what we did with the Marshall Plan, what we did in giving away the COVID vaccine, how we’ve been helpful around the world. Their view of us is not that we’re a victim. The 80 percent does not view the United States as something that needs to be bailed out. And sooner or later, that group is going to find its way back into power.

Adrian Tennant: Okay, so one of those traits is gratitude. Larry, what are the other traits?

Larry Aldrich: Well, we call them CIGGO, because I need a mnemonic to remember, but C stands for Confidence, I stands for Imagination, GG, Grit and Generosity, Paul just mentioned, and O for Optimism. We kind of focus a lot of our book around those five traits that we think are pretty important. And by the way, I love ‘Brand America,’ Adrian. I don’t know if you’ve trademarked that, but you should. You know, we are unique. We are novel. There’s nobody like us. So we are Brand America.

Adrian Tennant: Perfect. You highlight entrepreneurship as America’s problem-solving engine. What role do you see for marketing in this entrepreneurial ecosystem in helping startups succeed or in communicating the value of free enterprise?

Larry Aldrich: Yeah, we do focus in the book on entrepreneurship, a major reason, because we are the engine of startups. Israel calls itself Startup Nation on a per capita basis, they’re probably right. But on an absolute basis, America is Startup Nation. And we really have been able to start new businesses and have them succeed and have them exit and in some cases have them fail and some entrepreneurs go on to other businesses. But entrepreneurs, they recognize a problem that hasn’t been solved. and they go out and try to solve it. Often they don’t know how to communicate that. And, you know, marketers are absolutely critical in understanding those problems, going deeper into the story. Why this problem is a problem worth solving and why this solution or solutions are a good part of the answer to solving those problems. Entrepreneurs are terrible at it. I mean, they can tell their founding story. There probably are some very good entrepreneurs who are marketers and they can do it better. But for the most part, You know, they’re tech people. How can they – they’re introverts? They work their tail off and they’re on their computers. I mentioned the founder of StarNet on his computer all night long coding and whatever with one F word, F bomb after the other coming out. But, you know, he’s not the guy who’s going to tell the story. I hadn’t told the story, but I wasn’t the person either. We had expert marketing people. So as you probably know, everyone thinks they’re a marketer. I mean, literally everyone. I’ve been on a number of corporate boards and they always want to do some branding around a logo. And I go, “Not interested.” “Well, Larry, you’ve been in the newspaper.” No, because everybody has an opinion. Everybody thinks they can do it. And the answer is they can’t. Marketing is a specialty. It’s strategic when done extremely well. And to be able to tell that story successfully, to make a company successful is just critical. So I assume every entrepreneur realizes, well, maybe my sales guy is over here, but if they have any brains, they realize sales is different from art.

Adrian Tennant: Paul, you describe optimism as a natural state and a choice that enables innovation. How does fostering an optimistic mindset within marketing teams potentially drive greater creativity and resilience in the face of market challenges?

Paul Johnson: I believe that the plight of the United States, as well as entrepreneurs, are fairly co-equal. meaning that there’s not only an attack on the American brand, there’s an attack on American corporations, on American entrepreneurs. There’s a lot of blame that’s being laid at the feet of business and entrepreneurs for our problems. The one thing that both of them are dependent upon is the individual. Now, good news, if you want to figure out why America is great and prosperous, it comes down to our focus on the individual. And the public likes that. It’s an important aspect. The thing that I would tell American marketers and people trying to brand who we are is get the public to think about this question: Who do you think is going to solve the big problems that are coming up? Who’s going to invent a cure for cancer? Who’s going to potentially extend human life? Who’s going to create a driverless car? Who’s going to be able to get us to Mars? Pick every major big problem that we have. So for the most part, they’re not going to be solved by government. They’re going to be solved by the private sector, by individuals. And that is a very powerful marketing message that can make the public very supportive. My answer to American entrepreneurship is, at the end of the day, be very careful about feeding the mouth of the tiger by branding your company in a way in which is playing to the negative. Because sooner or later, it’s not just the other guy’s business who gets eaten up. We have to make this country feel good about who we are. And again, the good news is in the data. The data tells us we should be very happy with who we are.

Adrian Tennant: Larry, if there’s one insight from your book that you would like marketing professionals to put into action immediately in their work, what would it be?

Larry Aldrich: You simply can’t solve problems from a position of fear or negativity. You have to be optimistic. You have to believe you can solve them. You have to believe that you may, of course, adjust as you go forward. That should be the focus. And, you know, it just simply should be stop being fearful. You know, I think the average American probably listens to news about eight minutes a day and only get a lot of that off of very biased social media. But you have to kind of work at it. And it’s real simple to be fearful and just hear it. So work at it, work at it, you know, if you want to solve the problems that Paul was talking about. You’ve got to believe you can solve, and you can’t believe you can solve them by being fearful and pessimistic. So I say optimism is a choice, and that should be the choice that everyone listening to your podcast should take.

Adrian Tennant: Paul, you point out that America has a history of overcoming significant divisions and challenges. What lessons from America’s historical resilience can be applied to long-term brand building in turbulent times?

Paul Johnson: I’m going to take us back to the very first story in the book, which was a story that I experienced, but Larry played a significant role in helping me write it, and then put it at the very front of the introduction. It’s the story of Rosa Parks. So Rosa Parks obviously was a fascinating human being in American history. She, by literally refusing to give up her seat on a bus, she ended up being arrested and became one of the icons of the American civil rights movements. In many ways, she had suffered many other injustices. So when I passed Martin Luther King Day, I was the mayor of Phoenix. I asked Rosa Parks to come out. She agreed to. And we took a bus literally from the airport to Civic Plaza. And while I was on this bus, I opened up this book, and I was looking through pictures of her during this era. There was this one picture where she was being fingerprinted by a police officer. You know, he had on this tight brown uniform with a leather strap across his chest, kind of a crew cut haircut, holding onto her little tiny fingers, fingerprinting her into this book. And I said, “Oh my gosh, Rosa, that guy looks like the wall of oppression. He looks like an expression of an authoritarian government.” And this little five-foot-two person – I don’t know, maybe she was taller than that, I’m six seven, so everybody sometimes looks like they’re shorter – but nonetheless, she puts her finger right in my face and she says, “Now, Mayor, don’t you do that. Don’t you do that. She said that was a fine young man who was just doing his job. He has a family just like you had a family. She said it wasn’t him that was wrong. It was the law that was wrong.” Man, I wept, right? Here’s this person who had all the reasons in the world to be a victim, and she refused to be one. And second, she didn’t separate the world based upon good and evil, based upon your race. She didn’t base it upon what party you were in. She knew that in each of us there was good and evil, and that we can decide to either try to apply to the good or to appeal to the evil. But what we oftentimes do is we export that onto some other identity, right? So you hear it today, you know, the Trump people will call the liberals “Libtards,” and the liberals will call the Trump people “Trumptards,” as if whatever group they’re in somehow or another is a complete summation of their entire life. You lose when you do that. You lose. You lose the ability to have other friends, to be able to listen to alternative ideas, to be able to grow and to be able to get better, to have a more interesting life. And if you keep doing it, everybody begins to recognize it. And you may not know it, but they begin to say, “Oh, don’t talk to him. He’s really kind of out of whack on that issue.” And now you stop getting input from other people because you put yourself into this box. To me, the greatest thing that we have to do is, if you want to be patriotic, quit insulting other Americans. Try to find a way to listen to their good, to try to understand where they’re coming from, even if you don’t agree with them. And if you do, it will not only be good for the United States, it’ll be an incredible benefit to you.

Larry Aldrich: Maybe something to underscore that we haven’t really touched on, which is how … and it was kind of shocking that the lawyer brings this at the end … but how important the rule of law is to America. We call it the scaffolding of democracy. We have our democracy that’s protected because we were fortunate that the founders of America created a written constitution that developed the framework for the rule of law. We basically often don’t even think about it. We buy a house, we drive down the road, we go shopping at a store. The rule of law underscores and protects everything we do. We take it for granted. But it is so critical that we basically understand how important it is to keep our democracy strong. And, you know, currently we’re seeing some significant attacks on the rule of law and the system, the citizens need to push back. Because the rule of law is really what sustains and will continue to grow our democracy.

Adrian Tennant: Paul, for listeners interested in learning more about your perspectives and your book, “What’s Right with America,” what’s the best way to do so?

Paul Johnson: Well, you can go on Amazon, and the book is available. You can go to our podcast. Our podcast is The Optimistic American. We have a variety of guests on that, as well as a segment we call The New Frontier. But again, what I would tell people is, it begins with finding your own agency. You know, this whole idea of cognitive dissonance is a really important concept. The idea of cognitive dissonance is that you can very easily begin to defend the people that are on your side, even though you know that morally it’s incorrect. Trying to find your own independence, staking out your own sense of morality, doing it as an individual and not as a part of a group is one of the most powerful things that you can do to help move this cause forward.

Adrian Tennant: Excellent. Paul and Larry, thank you both very much for being our guests this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.

Paul Johnson: Thank you, Adrian.

Larry Aldrich: Thank you. 

Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guests this week, Honorable Paul Johnson and Larry Aldrich, authors of “What’s Right with America.” As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.

TIMESTAMPS

00:00: Introduction to IN CLEAR FOCUS

00:18: Navigating a Polarized Media Landscape

00:40: Introducing the Guests: Paul Johnson and Larry Aldrich

02:48: Inspiration Behind the Book

03:52: The Impact of Fear-Driven Narratives

04:11: Countering Pessimism with Data

08:09: The Evolution of Media Consumption

11:04: Promoting American Optimism as National Branding

15:18: Lessons for Marketers from Negativity

16:35: Bigeye Book Club Promotion

18:11: Empowering the Individual in America

20:26: Rebuilding Public Trust in Media

22:08: Tapping into Shared American Identity

24:47: The Global Evolution of Brand America

27:14: Entrepreneurship as America’s Problem-Solving Engine

29:30: Fostering Optimism in Marketing Teams

31:38: Key Insight: The Power of Optimism

32:27: Historical Resilience and Brand Building

36:08: The Importance of the Rule of Law

37:14: Closing Thoughts and Resources