Happy New Year, Conspirituality listeners!
As with the much anticipated midterm elections, the holiday season is now officially behind us. Which means that in addition to any of the colds, flu, and COVID strains circulating, many of our listeners may still be in recovery mode from family time.
We're specifically referring to political tensions over the holiday dinner table. You know, the vegan sister insisting on a land acknowledgment before the QAnon uncle says grace, while the anti-vax aunt rants at her to take off her mask. Can somebody pass the apple pie?
Our guest today is journalist, author, and political analyst, Anand Giridharadas. Julian spoke with him about his new book, The Persuaders, in which he profiles people on the ground working to change minds, bridge divisions and fight for democracy. The Persuaders offers inspiration to those who refuse to accept that a rigid polarization in which no one ever changes their mind, is the new normal.
Show Notes
How to Become a Better Persuader
Understanding Your Circle of Influence: Calling In with Loretta Ross
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Conspiratuality 135, The Persuaders with Anand Girdardas.
Happy New Year, Conspiratuality listeners!
As with the much-anticipated midterm elections, the holiday season is now officially behind us, which means that in addition to any of the colds, flu, and COVID strains circulating, many of our listeners may still be in recovery mode from family time.
I'm of course specifically referring to political tensions over the holiday dinner table.
You know, the vegan sister insisting on a land acknowledgement before the QAnon uncle says grace while the anti-vax aunt rants at her to take off her mask.
Can somebody pass the apple pie?
Our guest today is journalist, author, and political analyst Anand Giridharadas.
I spoke with him last month about his brand new book, The Persuaders, in which he profiles people on the ground working to change minds, bridge divisions, and fight for democracy.
The Persuaders offers inspiration to those who refuse to accept that a rigid polarization
in which no one ever changes their mind is the new normal.
So at first glance, The Persuaders is about bridging the gaps in our polarized world, but
the subtitle tells us a little more about where the author is situated
politically and the subtitle is at the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds and democracy.
Girdardas is a journalist who's written for Time, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, and he's a former foreign correspondent for The New York Times.
The Persuaders is his fourth book and you've likely also seen him working as an on-air political analyst on MSNBC.
In each chapter of the book, Anand tells a journalistic story of someone at the growing edges of persuasive progressive politics.
And it highlights their surprising realization or counterintuitive strategy.
So, for example, we learn about Anant Shankar Osorio, who has tried to shape Democrat communication to focus less on problems or compromises and policy jargon and more on vision, values, and emotions.
Then there's Diane Benskoder, a former Mooney who becomes a cult deprogrammer, then has ethical misgivings and moves into academia before becoming re-engaged by the QAnon phenomenon and seeking the holy grail of inoculating people against misinformation.
Ana talks about Bernie Sanders' bold moves on canceling student loan debt and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez navigating playing the insider game while carrying an outsider's agenda.
Now he starts the book off with the controversial figure, Linda Sarsour, and covers how she bucked the prevailing wisdom in her activist community against collaborating with privileged white feminists to create the Women's March.
And the last person I'll mention here is Cesar Torres, an undocumented immigrant, who develops a surprisingly effective empathetic approach to door-knock, cold-call political conversation called deep canvassing.
Now the keynote here is an invitation to stay curious about the experiences and emotions that shape people's political beliefs while being willing to sit with the discomfort of conflict.
The hopeful takeaway is that people are often more persuadable than we've come to believe if we're willing to seek points of connection and overcome our prejudicial expectations.
I really love your interview with Anand Julian, and I love his book.
I devoured it in like three or four days while I was traveling on the East Coast, and it's really made me think about persuasion in my own work and life.
Some of it verified feelings I've long had, but some of it seemed counterintuitive until the entire landscape was presented, which is sort of the point.
Anand profiles a number of people who think about the long game of persuasion, not scoring a few quick points on social media, which is how a lot of persuasion is treated today.
And so, while I said I read the book very quickly, but the chapters on Bernie Sanders and AOC really stuck with me.
Yet, chapter two hit me the hardest and was called Waking Among the Woke.
And in that chapter, Anand profiles and talks to three longtime female activists.
As you said, Linda Sarsour, who is the co-chair of the famous Women's March, which took place, of course, shortly after Trump took office.
There's Loretta Ross, who's widely known for her work in reproductive justice and whose circle of influence I'm going to discuss in a moment.
And then there's Alicia Garza, who co-founded Black Lives Matter.
Now, Anand writes about a controversy that Linda Sarsour, who is a Palestinian Muslim, was involved with when she was co-chairing the 2019 Women's March on Washington.
So basically, another co-chair, Tamika Mallory, had attended the 2018 Savior's Day event in Chicago, and that was hosted by the Nation of Islam.
Now, Louis Farrakhan is well known for his anti-Semitism, bigotry, and his anti-LGBTQ and anti-woman stance.
A lot of antis in the nation there.
And one of the Women's March's founders, Teresa Shook, called for both Sarsour and Mallory to step down.
As I said, Sarsour is Palestinian, and she has previously been condemned for comments about Israel, so there's a lot wrapped up in this march.
Now, Shook's contention was that women didn't push back—these women, meaning Mallory and Sarsour—they didn't push back on Farrakhan hard enough at the time of the 2018 event, and Sarsour did eventually apologize for that.
Now, to be clear, really clear, both women condemned him, just not enough in the eyes of Shook and others involved in the march.
And this is where nuance enters the picture, right?
There's a lot going on in what I just said, but we're going to keep going.
So the father of Mallory's son had been murdered.
And so Mallory knew about the nation's bigotry, but she also recognized that they did really important work in black communities and work that other organizations refused to even entertain or go into those communities to do.
And it turned out that her support group, when her child's father was killed, was comprised of women involved in the Nation of Islam.
Oh wow.
That's complex.
Yeah, that's so much going on there.
And so you have an organization on one hand that's regressive when it comes to gender and race, and on the flip side, they're extremely progressive when it comes to organizing inside of black communities.
And so Mallory, and by extension Sarsour, were in a bind.
And it didn't help that the woman calling for their removal was a white woman.
So, Sarsour, Anand writes, had always been suspicious of working with white people, given her own history as a Palestinian, yet she knew that persuasion on a mass scale was necessary.
So, Anand writes of this conundrum.
Coalitions were important, and coalitions were hard.
Sometimes they required holding the line, refusing to bend.
Sometimes they required pleading for nuance, trying to reach this way and reach that way without being torn asunder.
While Anand's book is about persuasion, it's also about growth and about that very nuance he witnessed so many activists struggle with.
And I think nothing highlights this more than when he writes about Loretta Ross's circles of influence.
So, a little history.
Ross became an advocate for calling culture based on an early experience she had while working at the DC Rape Crisis Center.
She herself had been sexually assaulted when she was younger, and her activism began by helping other victims.
And then one day, she received a letter from a convicted rapist who wanted her help.
He wanted to reform, and it turned out that the feminist literature he was reading in jail created an inner struggle.
He knew what he had done was wrong, but rape was a source of power for him.
He hated it, but it was ingrained in him.
And so Ross was completely flummoxed.
Long story short, she went to the prison, and the man, William Fuller, was, in her words, a 6'4", handsome black man who, while he was younger, felt that rape and murder were sources of power, as I mentioned.
Now he was reaching out for help, and so Ross, along with her team, wrote guidelines for him and other rapists in the prison.
Now, years later, while walking down a street in DC, she was approached by William Fuller, who was released from prison and working in construction, and he was fully reformed, thanks in part to her work.
Now, like I said, this is a lot.
And I couldn't imagine being in such a situation.
And what Loretta did with William might not have worked with everyone, but it taught her about calling in and about persuasion, and so she developed a theory called Circles of Influence, and it's composed of 90%ers, 75%ers, 50%ers, 25%ers, and 0%ers.
Okay, so let's break this down real quickly.
50%ers, 25%ers, and 0%ers.
Okay, so let's break this down real quickly.
So, if someone agrees with you 100% of the time, that's a problem, right?
No relationship can sustain in such an environment.
One criticism of men like Elon Musk is that they have too many yes-men around them who pretend to always agree with them, and so when they're exposed to pushback, they crumble.
Now, the three of us on this podcast don't agree 100% of the time, not even close on some topics, and if we did, I think the podcast would suffer for it.
I just want to say I object and I disagree with what you just said.
So, 90%ers are people who you agree with on most issues, which is where we generally fall, the three of us, between 75 and 90 on most things, and definitely 90 when it comes to, I think, major social issues.
But, and this is really important, Loretta points out a problem she sees in the modern world with 90%ers.
She says, I think the 90%ers spend too much time trying to turn people into 100%ers.
Ouch, yeah.
And that's why I said social media before, because I've had too many instances where I come across people I mostly agree with that push back way too hard on one issue where we don't.
And pushing back is important, that's part of persuasion, so I'm not against that.
But Ross writes that you generally should be working alongside 90%ers and just avoid the other 10% or have good faith dialogues about it.
It's not worth getting in the weeds and then losing allies because of one issue.
Now, as I said, there might be some things the three of us are more 75% on, and there's still a good deal of crossover there.
So, for example, Ross is an abortion activist, but she works with the Girl Scouts, which is an organization that speaks a lot about female empowerment, but avoids the topic of abortion.
Right.
So, she doesn't bring it up.
She knows that more good work can be done alongside them, even if the reproductive justice isn't in their purview.
There's going to be tension in their working relationship, but it doesn't have to destroy that relationship.
You just have to know when to disagree and when to let go.
Now, we start to go down to the 50%ers, which Ross says are good for one-off initiatives.
If you can find an opening to work on a project, go for it.
You should just know the boundaries and know they're going to shift.
So, be prepared, but try to stay focused on that topic.
25%ers are people who are not going to be allies, but they can still be persuaded.
And here, this is pretty important, she says to know your fears around them and to take those fears seriously, as in try to understand where they're coming from.
So, most of the time, arguing with a 25%er isn't going to be worth it, but on occasion it is.
And if you can take their fears seriously and try to engage in a good faith dialogue, at least a conversation is possible.
Now finally to zero percenters, Ross labels fascists.
And this is probably my favorite quote in Anand's book is when Loretta says, I don't think I have any common ground with them and do my best to overpower and overwhelm them.
Okay, so I have a question there, which is, what's the metric for discovering the difference between the 0%-er and the 25%-er?
Because I imagine that it's very hard to talk to both of them and that you're only really going to establish the percentage based on, you know, at least some form of conversation.
Is it that you know that if the person is doing nothing other than shitposting or trolling, that they're probably 0%?
Is there anything around measuring that in that area?
Because we're not really talking to people when we get into those numbers.
Yeah, it's really tough.
I noticed someone tagged a podcast in a discussion on Twitter just today about someone calling for, like, how do you mass-scale solve disinformation?
And they even said that, like, you know, we've talked previously about the fact that you can't.
It's really a one-on-one or small group interactions.
So, I say that because I then think that you have to identify people in the same situations.
Like, if you know someone's a member of the KKK and they're outright racist, that's probably a zero percenter.
That makes it easy.
But in a lot of like, how do you juggle between a 50 and a 25 percenter?
There probably has to be some dialogue that's been engaged with along the way to kind of discover that.
And that's why I think she talks about trying to take their fear seriously because then you can find the common ground. And you're going to do that within your
neighborhood or within your church environment or within your city council. You're not going
to do that online. Yeah, exactly. I mean, she is an on-the-ground activist who, you know, is on
social media now somewhat loosely, but that's not where the work is done. Yeah, I wonder if one way of
thinking about this may be the difference between someone in any context that you can get into a
conversation with where the underlying kind of human emotions and values start to become clear and
there can be some connection established in talking about that as opposed to someone who just sticks
to their antagonistic ideological guns in a way that is, you know, insulting and not really
willing to engage on that human level.
I mean, I feel like You can disagree with someone.
For example, I think a reproductive choice is a great example.
You can disagree with someone on that topic and then get into a conversation underneath that about What you each care about.
I can understand that someone is quote-unquote pro-life because they have a horrific emotional association with abortion.
And that can then be something that gets discussed in the context of also adding, you know, the data shows that children who are born who are not wanted tend to have pretty terrible outcomes in their lives and it's bad for everyone concerned.
And if there's some back and forth there, even if they stay firm in their pro-life position, they might still be able to reflect on those values and emotions aspects.
Yeah, and speaking as a Catholic from childhood, we don't go any further into this territory part of the conversation where metaphysics enters into the landscape because you're actually making claims about the eternal soul of the person and things like that.
I think even there, there is room for discussion at least and mutual reflection in the sense You actually are both caring for something that you think is a human being.
It's just you're caring about different human beings, right?
It's not like it's not like the person is saying always saying I mean some of them do but it's not like the person is the opponent is always saying fuck you.
You're not a human.
Well, I've always said that I think that most even bad interactions that you have online if you were in the room with the person it probably wouldn't play out that way, but when you're dealing with a With an avatar, an anime avatar with a fake name, then how could you have that conversation?
Loretta, she's going to be 70 next year and she credits her success due to having thick skin.
It's much thicker than I can imagine ever having.
I was reading Anand's book while I was in D.C.
with our two-time podcast guest, Dax Devlon Ross, and I mentioned Loretta, who it turns out he spoke with on a panel last year.
Dax works in DEI as a facilitator and says her work is very influential, and now that I'm caught up on it, I agree.
Now in a time when we're so reactionary, again on social media and otherwise, often just reacting to a headline without actually reading the article or reacting to a tweet without any context beyond a few dozen characters, Loretta Ross's work is a reminder that in order to actually make change in society you have to understand your own influence and the influence of others and at least try to focus on the common ground that you share.
I think that's an essential lesson, especially for the left at this moment.
There are too many 90 percenters focused on that last 10 percent, and social media facilitates that with its outrage algorithm.
But, and again, you'll hear the interview with Anand, and you should read his book, Persuasion is a Patient and Nuanced Process.
Yeah, I want to mention here too for our listeners that on the website for The Persuader's book there's a free PDF download called Your Guide to Becoming a Better Persuader and it focuses on six key insights and these are things like playing the long game of building trust and not treating opponents like immovable monoliths or like idiots who've been duped.
It advises amplifying how you communicate your vision And above all, as we were just discussing a little bit here, getting offline and taking action in the real world, the insight that really struck me is about remembering that all of us are complex and contradictory.
The example Anand uses of this is someone who may take a harsh stance on America keeping a strong border, and yet they still identify themselves as being an underdog.
They may love Donald Trump, but disdain con artists who scam the powerless for profit.
Anand describes a conversational approach that seeks to gently evoke these submerged dissonances in productive ways.
And I have to say, in my own life, as I've shared on the podcast before, there's someone I interact with daily who's pretty deep in the Fox News daily wire kind of bubble.
And she's very smart and a kind person.
I sometimes forget, for example, that she's not familiar with democracies outside of the US or with any sort of broader political framework beyond what her steady diet of right-wing news feeds her.
So I found myself in a conversation the other day with her About how stronger social safety nets in other countries really function, and that them having higher taxes, you know, is part of how they make that happen.
And she was genuinely curious and receptive.
She'd never heard about this before.
She'd just heard, you know, that places like Scandinavian countries are communist.
But the real kicker for me was recognizing that her loyalty to Trump is really wrapped up in believing he's an outsider who came to drain the swamp.
So she's anti-corruption, right?
And of course we hear that and we're like, Oh, she fell for that one.
But, but you know, there's an underlying emotion there that, that is opposed to corruption.
So talking with her about what an outlier America is with regard to campaign finance, for example, got her really fired up.
It's like, wow, this is really not okay.
Now we haven't, I haven't broached the subject of what Trump's taxes reveal and I don't think I'll bring it up, but nonetheless, it's, it's just a really interesting unexpected discovery of like, oh, there's room for
discussion here. And she's not as locked into a set of ideological
positions as I might imagine, given, you know, what a political animal I am.
Doing the Lord's work, Julian.
Yeah.
Doing the Lord's work.
Julian, I want to circle back to the introduction, where you
mentioned a name that brought up this uncanny feeling for me
about how our research worlds intersect. Because currently, I'm having a
a nice day.
Melted look into HBO's The Vow.
And you mentioned that Anand in his book features Diane Benskoter.
Yeah.
Who, as you mentioned, has re-emerged after a kind of furlough into, or I guess a journey into academia after Coming out of deprogramming, she's reemerged as a sort of like a public commentator on phenomena like QAnon, but she also has a talking head cameo as an expert in psychological manipulation in The Vow.
And in the second season, she's in the scene in which she's very persuasively telling Marc Vicente and Bonnie Peace that their former community members are not mad at them for blowing up the organization, But they're mad because they're stuck in an us-versus-them dynamic.
And, you know, I get where the advice is coming from, it seems like it's generally sensible, but I'll just note how ironic it is showing up in just about the most us-versus-them documentary in recent memory.
And so, here, like, we might be looking at a very good persuader who is persuasive because they have a compelling model for discourse, but they might also, like, be using it on screen for interpreting the experience of people she has just met.
And, you know, so there are ethical matters to consider there.
Anyway, breaking the vow, yuck yuck, down to...
You know, show yet another example of absolutely cursed cult documentary making is, you know, a bunch of future episodes, maybe even a series, but I wanted to focus on a different story related to this interview that you've done.
Yeah, let me just say, because you bring that up, what's really interesting about when Anand covers Diane Benskoder in the book, he talks about how she was a moony and he lets her really tell her story and how she got sort of out of the blue, just sort of circumstantially sucked into this thing and it just took over and she became absolutely captivated.
She was a journalist or something for a student newspaper?
Is that the story?
Yeah, yeah.
I don't, you know, I'm not remembering if it was a student newspaper or otherwise, but it was a really early assignment that she had.
And she, so she was like, Oh, I'll cover this.
It'll be interesting.
In fact, I think she may, maybe even chose it herself and she just thought it would be an interesting thing.
And she traveled a certain distance to go and see what was going on and somehow just got, you know, really impacted by it and swept up in it.
And so, She gets out of the Moonies or the Unification Church by a kind of the classic cult deprogramming sort of intervention of that period and it works for her and she talks about her whole kind of reality suddenly crumbling when she
Allows herself to entertain that maybe Moon has been dishonest this whole time about basically being God on Earth.
And when you say classic deprogramming scenario, I think you're saying, and I believe that I saw this in her TED Talk, that she, her family actually hired deprogrammers to come and of course they had to get her into some sort of safe location and we don't know whether that Met the criteria of kidnapping or not, but that's what deprogramming ran into trouble with a little bit later, right?
Yeah, exactly.
And so, as a result of that experience, she ends up becoming a quote-unquote deprogrammer herself, and she's involved in scenarios like you just described, where, you know, young people are being kidnapped at the behest of their parents to try to rescue them from cults, and then, you know, put through this very intensive, you know, locked-in-a-room process of trying to get through to them.
And she arrives at a point where she has serious ethical misgivings about, you know, it's like, wow, is this really the appropriate way to deal with this?
Like people are being coerced so as to save them from coercion, you know, people are being quote unquote brainwashed so as to save them from brainwashing and she ends up leaving.
So yeah, it's a very, there's a lot of nuance and texture to her story.
And so very interesting now that we can loop back around and say, oh wow, she's showing up in the second season of The Vow and we are in this process right now of reflecting on the complexities of cult studies and the boom time of cult documentary filmmaking, right?
Right, and in this particular case, the transitive or non-transitive quality of her very poignant personal experience to a present-day situation that she may not have researched very well or that she may not have, you know, interviewed many participants in, you know, because that's the kind of role of the persuader in the cult expert commentariat, right?
Yeah, and it's interesting too that she's shown up now in this way because in The Persuaders, what's talked about is her really seeking to develop a communication strategy for educational institutions to help, they refer to it as inoculating people against misinformation and that, you know, really sounds like promising work.
I guess once you've become, and we will find out, right?
Once you become a commentator on cult matters, it's hard to resist, perhaps.
Well, what are you going to do when HBO calls, right?
I know.
Yeah.
All right.
So I've got a story that I didn't know when there was going to be the opportunity to tell
it, but I think this is a good time because I think it says a lot about the context in
in which we attempt persuasion, actually.
And it also illuminates, I think, the difference between persuasion and simply conversing across a divide as neighbors, as citizens, without any expectations.
And, and this story is specific to, you know, some of the subjects that we tackle here on the podcast.
And I think it's a story that's complicated by this additional stress of having a difficult conversation in public.
So it's not about the deep canvassing that you ask Anand about in your interview.
Where, you know, political activists are spending a half an hour on people's doorsteps trying to find points of intersection.
Like, we're not in neighborhood doorstep here.
And it's kind of odd because I think the intimacy and the warmth of the podcast format Maybe sometimes convinces us that we're we have very direct contact with people or or and I think when people are listening we're in their earbuds for a certain number of hours you know per month or something like that and that can feel very close but
If we're very honest, we actually don't know enough about people to perhaps try to be as persuasive as we are.
So anyway, this story is about the time I tried to have a conversation with a very passionate anti-vax activist here in my home city of Toronto and where that conversation ended up.
So this is episode 135.
If we go into our analytics, we can see that our sixth most downloaded episode was episode 91, and it was called, We Need to Talk About Stephanie.
And it was a panel discussion with four friends, perhaps former friends, of a woman named Stephanie Sibio, who is a Toronto wellness worker and a parent who's become prominent In the anti-lockdown movement.
And now that that has mostly dried up, I believe she's moved on to other sort of freedom convoy type interests and connections.
Now, these friends reached out to me after I reported on Medium about some of Stephanie's direct actions here in the city.
And they said they wanted to talk to me to describe what had happened to their friend group since the beginning of the pandemic.
So this is like eight women in total.
I think the interview features four of them.
But all together, they had this story about how, you know, the propaganda of anti-lockdown activists and the beliefs that come along with them and, you know, a kind of social media inflammation isolated them from Stephanie and vice versa.
And they painted this rich picture of the evolution of a friend group over decades, which, you know, was not without its frictions and conflicts, but it was a friend group that had its own resilience.
And it was just shattered in a very short period of time in this whirlwind of complex ideas and highly charged emotions and also stuff around the values of vaccination and gathering in public and how are we going to let our children play together and so on.
So, this is a deep topic, and the development of the episode took many months, and from beginning to end, I had this nagging question about how to do it.
Like, should I be reaching out to Stephanie for comment?
And if this was like an investigative piece where, you know, there were allegations against a person that hadn't yet been revealed or something like that, the answer would be obvious.
I was going to be speaking to people about a friendship experience in relation to the public statements of a public figure.
And Stephanie's not only a public figure, but she's someone who is actively campaigning for more exposure.
Like, we weren't going to be talking about her private affairs, we were going to be talking about the impact of her public actions on her social group.
And it's not like I had to fact check their estrangement, because Stephanie had actually posted openly about, you know, these friends from whom she was estranged.
So, I think I learned enough about the situation, well, enough to hold it properly, but inevitably And I understand it.
Listeners felt it was one-sided, as if they were listening to a bunch of mean girls talk about, you know, their dumb friend.
But I did think that the guests were super empathetic in relation to her, and we really stayed with the topic that was pressing for a lot of listeners who were really trying to understand, you know, what happened to my friend or family member who got sucked into this rabbit hole.
And at the time, and even now, I think it was an important topic because there are similar conversations going on publicly about, like, what happened to my QAnon uncle?
But we rarely hear from the QAnon uncle.
And I don't think journalism in general, and I would include myself in this, has done a thorough review of what it means to not hear from the QAnon uncle, and whether excluding them makes their lives worse, makes their views even more radical, it drives them into more isolated social circumstances.
Hold on a second there because that, you know, I just want to say people like Jordan Klepper and what the, what's his name?
Donnie.
Yes.
On CNN.
Um, they, they, they do, we do through them here from the QAnon aunts and uncles, but it's, it's the kind of thing where it's hard for it not to come across as a mocking because they're just being interviewed.
It's basically a straight man.
Yeah.
Interviewing them and letting them just spout, you know, whatever really Looney Tunes sounding stuff they spout.
In fact, the only person who has given, I think, some widely available public insight into the mind of the QAnon uncle is Jittharth Jadeja, who was a guest here with Rachel Bernstein.
When he's able to talk about his father in very empathetic terms, of course, we don't hear from his dad, right?
Yeah.
And we have set up a situation in which it would be really, really difficult for me to email Mr. Jadeja and ask for an interview.
Yeah.
Because what am I, you know, why would I have him on?
Why would, you know, what would I ask him?
Wouldn't I be trying to make him look like an idiot?
Yeah, and it's a really tough thing because, you know, we're not going to debate anti-vaxxers and we're not going to interview people and platform them so that they can spin out some elaborate conspiracy misinformation sort of narrative.
Yeah, that kills people.
That kills people, right.
Yeah, and that was the stronger sort of policy level reason for not reaching out to Stephanie for comment because we're not going to platform what we assess to be misinformation.
So I actually couldn't see how I could source a comment that then I wouldn't have to dispute or correct and then that would put me in this patronizing position, you know, especially being male talking to someone who's railing against patriarchal authority in medicine saying, you know, Stephanie relates replies with such and such but actually she's quite wrong.
It wasn't gonna work.
However, The episode aired, and to my surprise, and a little bit of relief, Stephanie herself reached out to me directly by direct message.
She writes, Hi Matthew, I just finished your podcast episode 91.
It was quite fascinating, and I think you posed some incredibly well thought out questions.
I think they brought up a lot of valid points, and I do know that they are like I am, rooted in love and concern for the opposing side.
I would be happy to come on the podcast and answer any questions you have for me.
I'm not interested in COVID-related debate, but I am interested in speaking perspectives and intentions.
I think civil discourse is a lost art, and I'd be happy to share.
So, this is a funny moment because, you know, what do you do?
And I know that you and I spoke about this and we had different gut responses to this direct message, right?
I really, I very strongly said, Matthew, there's no way that you can do this.
It's not going to go well.
The best intentions you might have will just be absolutely dashed on the rocks of some kind of just, you know, awful, awful interaction.
And, and after the blowback would be terrible.
Yeah, well, I mean, at the moment I think I chalk that up to, you know, Julian has really come to a place in his life where he's an avowed atheist and he doesn't trust in grace or, you know, he has, you know, the possibility of miracles happening is really just this kind of remote pipe dream for him.
And should I really, like, allow him to taint my pure heart any further than he already has?
And I was like, no.
You should though, you should.
Well, okay, but I mean, I think there's a good story that's come out of this anyway, because regardless of what was going to happen, I couldn't turn away from the DM.
Yeah.
And, you know, I know I don't know this person, and I don't know whether their message is in good faith, but it also is clear that it takes some bravery to reach out like that after listening to people talk about her for 90 minutes.
No, it absolutely does, and I would not doubt that she was in good faith, but I would doubt how consistent that good faith connection would, for how long it would be possible to sustain.
Well, right, and I knew going into responding to the DM that, you know, my concerns about her politics and her anti-vax stance was going to be some sort of line in the sand.
But, you know, there was this line in the DM that stood out to me where she writes, I'm not interested in COVID-related debate, but I am interested in speaking about perspectives and intentions.
And so I thought there might be a way To stay out of the weeds of COVID science and to talk about the mystery of why we stand in such polarized positions.
So, yeah, I came to you guys, I asked what you thought, you know, there was hesitation, doubt, you know, I think Derek was more like, yeah, whatever, you know, try it out.
And so this is a great example, right, of where you're saying, okay, how do we decide if this is a 0% or a 25%?
Yes, exactly, exactly.
And I don't think, I think you just got to test it, right?
You just got to do it and see what happens.
I actually reached out to a couple of friends of the pod, trusted science communication expert, a psychologist.
I reached out for their opinions.
I got the same reticence from them.
And the main warning was that, you know, I was proposing to have a human-level conversation with an activist who I vigorously oppose.
And that there was a strong possibility that the activist would benefit from that exposure in a way that made their harmful views seem more reasonable.
But also, like, is that a theoretical concern?
Or a real concern, right?
Like, it's impossible to predict and measure that.
Like, if we did manage to have a cordial conversation, would her anti-vax sort of influence within Toronto actually increase and damage more people like I think it would be very hard to measure and in the end I felt there wasn't a right answer and so I relied on what you've rejected on what we've we're all familiar with from the yoga world intuition inner you know inner
My primal starseed sense of hope, I consulted the tarot, I got an Akashic Soul Plane reading until the pathway forward was clear and I wrote back to her and we set up a meeting and we were going to keep it open-ended and we ended up recording for four fucking hours.
Two sessions, four hours.
Now, because we knew we had this issue of disagreeing about the science and whether COVID is part of a conspiracy or a great evil plan, I just laid out some ground rules by email.
So I wrote, so one ground rule would be that up front we would state concisely what our understandings and beliefs were regarding COVID, COVID protection measures and COVID vaccines.
The purpose would be to establish those differences clearly, briefly, and in good faith, and then leave them behind so that we could focus on issues of dialogue, relationship, and trust.
We could limit these statements to 250 words and then exchange them beforehand so that we could understand each other better.
So, she agreed to that.
I said that I would provide an outline of questions 48 hours in advance of meeting.
She agreed to that.
I said if she would like to ask me questions that she provide them 48 hours in advance.
I agreed to that.
I wrote that the prepared questions might lead towards unprepared follow-ups in the moment that we understand that.
And I also said, this was the most important thing, that it's understood that the podcast won't publish what we consider to be medical misinformation, so if after those opening clarifying statements we veer away from the agreed-upon plan and, you know, you end up making claims about COVID measures and vaccines that we consider false, we reserve the right to edit those sections out of the final cut agreement.
We agreed that neither of us would make unsubstantiated claims or accusations about the other.
I just threw that in there.
I don't know who this person is.
I wanted to have a way of, you know, if something went really wrong that I could just click off and say, this is cancelled.
And then, if the conversation goes off the rails completely in relation to our prior agreements, the podcast reserves the right to not publish it.
And then, we also agreed that our agreement would be published in the show notes for transparency.
You know, the whole time you're reading that, I keep picturing one of those movie scenes of the 19th century at dawn in an open field and a rainy England morning.
People in frilly shirts with pistols getting ready to march the ten paces in each direction and then turn around on their heels.
Exactly, exactly.
Except it's like big syringes or something.
So I sent these detailed questions and my objective was really to get down into that area that Anand describes in his book, where people on opposing sides of a political, cultural, or ethical divide can discuss shared concerns.
You know, I think he says, you know, we may disagree on this one really important thing, but I bet we have five things in common.
And to that point, in a very sort of visceral, personal, vulnerable sense, the vision that I held in mind as I prepared for the meeting was of how to deal with the fact that she and I are both parents in the city.
Great.
We share similar backgrounds, scenes, education, culture.
How did we get so far apart?
What were we gonna do when our children Ran into each other on the playground during lockdown, like ours would be wearing masks, hers wouldn't be.
I would be masked and she wouldn't be.
Would we feel distrustful around each other?
And like, how tragic would that be when the point is that children should be playing?
And then I also was thinking about this larger question, which is like, you know, the classic, if we do these things in the greenwood, what will happen in the dry?
And that's really about how as horrible as the pandemic was, you know, things can and probably will get worse in our lifetimes.
Like, let's say that a climate or geopolitical disaster takes out supply chains or narrows the growing season here in southwestern Ontario.
Like, would people like Stephanie and I put these things aside and invest in mutual aid?
If she and her child were hungry, would I open my door and pantry for her, like, on the condition she wore a mask?
Would she wear a mask to have some soup?
Or, I don't know, she couldn't wear it while having soup.
You know what I mean?
When the shit hits the fan, will our mutual needs outweigh our disparate values?
Will we approach the dividing lines between us to the extent that they kind of become invisible?
And, you know, I think this is a deep question, and it's embodied, ironically maybe, mystically maybe, by the demands of the virus itself.
Because, you know, how poignant that our closeness, our ability to love and to be together, to support each other, at least tolerate each other, should depend on our survival because we socially distance.
So I think there are a lot of COVID denialists who just couldn't wrap their heads around that paradox.
And that's why they kept saying that.
You're really forcing us apart?
How can that possibly help anybody?
You're stopping us from receiving the love and nourishment and from gathering to worship and to sing together, which are all things that boost the immune system.
Well, they would say that because that's what they're mimicking from public health, but they're also saying these things also give us life in a very sort of fundamental, primal way.
Okay, so four hours.
How did it go?
Interesting, but fucking exhausting.
And a bunch of reasons that you can imagine.
But, you know, I knew I was going to be editing.
And, you know, as we were going, I was clocking all of these talking point riffs that, you know, breached our misinformation agreement.
And I knew I was going to have to hack the audio to pieces for it to be sensible and presentable.
And then I began to be worried about how audible that hacking would be, and whether it would fuel the impression that I was censoring her, despite what our agreement had been.
And I found it hard to stay completely in touch with the human values element of our dilemma, because So much of her feeling of things is anchored to extremely over-determined beliefs about doctors, hospitals, Justin Trudeau, and so on.
So that really showed me that it was actually hard for someone with her beliefs to isolate feelings from the story.
And perhaps the same is true for me.
And I was also very aware of how easy it was for Stephanie to slip into speechifying on talking points that she'd given countless times before.
And I could feel myself shutting off when that happened.
And I imagine that she shut off when she heard something that sounded like it came from a public health official.
But we did remain friendly and cordial throughout, and I did my best to end these two meetings with rapport-building questions about our kids.
And that was good.
So, why am I telling this story instead of playing the interview?
Um, the edits would have been a beast.
And, you know, because there was this issue of intrinsic connectedness between the beliefs and the feelings, I wasn't actually going to feel comfortable with hacking it apart.
Because I would feel that I would really be distorting who Stephanie was in order to artificially manufacture this post-hoc conversation that I wanted to have.
The more important thing, however, was that after we recorded, Stephanie started to escalate on Instagram.
She supported and promoted the Ottawa occupation.
She memed some bizarre garbage about Justin Trudeau.
There was some anti-trans stuff in there as well, or just asking questions stuff.
But the thing that really set me off was that she did an Instagram Live about an encounter she had at a hospital.
There was a point at which she needed urgent care and the ultrasound tech, as per hospital policy, said that she had to wear a mask to get the ultrasound.
And on IG, she recounted being extremely rude with the healthcare worker and equating the mask policy to being refused care.
She was enraged at this worker, and then she just spilled that all over IG, and then she was socially rewarded for that.
And so, for me, that was just a line to draw at dissing healthcare workers.
I can't personally abide it, and I can't expose our listenership to somebody who does that.
And I wrote to her to say that I was canning the project.
I stated our agreement and I gave my reasons.
And she was really disappointed and even angry with me.
And she wrote something that stuck with me.
She wrote, just as I predicted, a coward who is scared to share part of someone's story for fear of how it will look politically.
You knew who you were interviewing.
How naive of me to give you four hours of my time while you play Mr. Compassionate.
I hope your soul got what it needed out of that experience.
Good luck to you.
So I have to say, I see her point of view.
As Mr. Compassionate, I see her point of view.
But what do you think?
What do you think?
Well, it's just really difficult.
I mean, part of the reason why I had so many reservations about you going ahead and doing
the interview, and I'll do my best here not to be inappropriately sort of intrusive or
psychoanalytic is just that to me, the overall sort of tone I was getting from the communications
as you shared them was that there might be a psychological component to how all of this
played out that would not be workable.
And that seems to have been the case.
In terms of the topic of our podcast today and in terms of persuasion and effective political
discourse, I think that someone like Anand would say, look, you're not going to go out
into the field and try to change the minds of people who are politically just completely
in the opposite camp and very committed and have very strong arguments and identifications
with that point of view.
Those are not the reachable people.
It's not saying you shouldn't try to have conversations with them sometimes, especially if they're in your circles, and especially if you choose to work in that way.
Rather, you're seeking out the people who are persuadable.
You're seeking out the people who are either on the fence or who have been influenced by some set of arguments that, you know, they're not completely dug in around.
And, you know, where is the wiggle room in our larger cultural and political conversation around the hot button topics that tend to get characterized by their polarizing exemplars, you know?
I think it also means you have to come to grips with the fantasy you might have around having a nourishing conversation with a person against whom you're so opposed.
Because I think that's what I kind of sustained through that process was, wouldn't it be great if...
Wouldn't it be great if...and I think, you know, there's a certain amount of mourning that you have to just go through in order to reckon with the arc of that story.
Yeah, so speaking of psychology, I really recognize that as well, and I know for myself, I carry a certain amount of baggage around that as well, entering into these conversations, because getting through to someone carries some kind of symbolic meaning that goes back to my parents, and it goes back to the society that I grew up in, it goes back to being surrounded by people who had really hateful and bigoted beliefs when I was growing up.
And this is surprising because your advice or your reticence about me doing the interview didn't really fit the profile of what I knew from you in that zone, which is, you know, super patient and receptive, actually.
sometimes to a fault where you really, really do want to take care of the other person's
emotions as a way of facilitating a renewal of relationship.
And so it's interesting, like maybe you have a way of applying that in circumstances in
which you know that it matters because it's intimate or it's really friendship-based and
you know where it's not going to work in the public sphere.
Yeah, I think because my approach is generally to want to get inside understanding why someone
believes what they believe and get to the emotional truth and sort of give them the
benefit of the doubt that they're really coming from a sincere place.
Because of that, I also then paradoxically have a really bright red line where if I If I see, if I see certain kinds of sort of intractable relational patterns, it's like that there's, there's like, there's just, because I've done it so much that I'm like, yeah, I know that this is no matter how profoundly I expose my heart, this is just not going to go well.
And it's, it's really interesting because there's a distinction here.
I was thinking about it as, as you were sharing that segment, you know, getting into the, emotional underpinnings of a set of beliefs there's some sort of distinction in there between finding an emotional point of contact and overlap versus discovering oh wow there is there is an emotional intensity here that's driven by a set of distorted misinformed perceptions on reality and that actually means it's going to be harder to have any kind of discussion about those things.
Yeah, and you're actually pointing to a possible fallacy in how I'm thinking about it in the sense that if I really want to focus on the feeling aspect of the problem and the human sort of contact aspect of the problem, I might be sort of severing the causal link between, you know, what's actually driving that like what actually came first. I'm presupposing
that the feelings and the intuitions came first and that they were sort of fired up by the propaganda.
They were co-opted by the misinformation, but that's not necessarily the case.
Yeah, I mean, I'd also say at the end of the day, after any experience similar to what you've just been
describing, recognizing that there will be other people
that you potentially can have satisfying and nourishing and perhaps even if not satisfying and nourishing,
conversations in which certain seeds get planted or certain epistemic assumptions get sort of shaken up
a little bit in productive ways, that's still possible even though it may not be possible
with Stephanie Sibio.
Well, you know, just to wrap up, I think we've discovered today that Julian is extremely empathetic, and because he's extremely empathetic, he can also be incredibly judgmental.
And I think that's a real lesson for all of us, and I think it's a good place to lead us because I think your interview with Anand really cuts through some of that fog.
Well, I'll leave you on that note with a quote from Walt Whitman.
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself.
I am vast, I contain multitudes, and so do you.
So now we turn to my conversation with Anand Giridharadas.
He's a prolific author, journalist, and political analyst who has also taught narrative journalism at New York University.
His latest book is titled The Persuaders at the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds, and democracy.
I'm joined today by Anand Giridharadas.
Great to have you here, Anand.
Great to be with you.
As you're aware, your book comes at a time when democracy itself is under threat and the egalitarian process, the progress of the 20th century.
Seems increasingly vulnerable to being dismantled by this right-wing populism of propaganda and conspiracism.
So your book really, to me, was a breath of fresh air.
In each chapter, you focus on a person who you found exemplifying, either in their messaging or in their evolutionary arc, an embrace of effective political persuasion.
Does that sound like an accurate description?
Yeah, I think you got it.
You got it exactly right.
I want to start at the most apparent intersection with our work, what we cover on the podcast, which is your reporting in a chapter specifically titled The Vaccine Against Lies.
And it's about how online conspiracies function to create cults organized around manipulative misinformation, how this breaks up families and causes harm both to adherents and to the broader body politic.
In that chapter, you tell the story of Diane Benskoder.
who escaped the Unification Church, also known sort of in popular terms as the Moonies.
She then became for some time a cult deprogrammer herself, and then after moving away from that, years later, she finds herself studying and teaching on the psychosocial aspects of extremism and, as it turns out just in time for QAnon, coins a perspective on cult indoctrination as being a viral memetic infection.
Could you tell us more about her and the approach she advocates for?
She talks about it as building national immunity against propaganda.
Yeah, I mean, it's it's such a fascinating story.
And, you know, as you know, well, there's this culture, nothing new.
And but often when we think about the story of cults, although they may grow quite large, it's a story of individuals succumbing to these groups.
And it's a human scale problem of one person falling in with a group of people who pulls them in.
So Diane Benskota was one of those.
And she was a kind of restless teenager in a boring town in Nebraska,
who recognized that her town was boring and no one else seemed to think it was boring,
but she felt it was boring.
And for a while, the Bob Dylan songs and maybe some other diversions
were enough to kind of soothe the sense of alienation she had.
But she was clearly longing for something more and couldn't find it where she was from and set out to a bigger town in Nebraska to try to become a journalist.
And while she was walking into this interview at a newspaper, A local community newspaper, I think.
She was approached by a guy who came out of a van and was handing out bananas with a flyer rubber banded around the banana.
A snack and an invitation.
And it was announcing some kind of rally, some march, rather, for peace.
And she walked into her newspaper Interview they said okay.
Why don't you go to a story for us that you prove your metal and She didn't have any story ideas in mind except the banana She'd just been handed and she was like I will how about I cover that this March that's happening.
Mm-hmm And let's just say she never ended up filing that story because she went to go cover it and she ended up falling in with these people and losing some years of her life to the Moonies cult and what she describes that will then kind of lead to our discussion of the present.
What she describes is how quickly and easily she was able to be socialized into a totalizing worldview of this thing she'd never even heard about, right?
That's what's so scary about it.
I mean, she's able to go from zero to 120 in days.
And what she described about it, I think it's useful to understand what works.
In these cults, she had so much anxiety.
How should I be living?
What kind of job should I be doing?
Am I wrong not to like my town?
Am I wrong not to, you know, what kind of relationships with people should I be having?
Am I straight?
Am I gay?
Am I someone who should just work in a nice little retail job?
Or should I go to some faraway big city and take that risk?
All these questions, right, that we all have to varying degrees.
It's just about who we are and how we should live and what's the right way to be.
And the cult took away the voices within her constantly asking these things.
The cult gave answers to everything.
And if you were afflicted with this problem of incessant questions about how to live and calm your agitated soul, it could feel quite soothing for there to be an answer, algorithmic answer to everything.
This is the kind of sex you should have.
This is the kind of place you should live.
This is the kind of job you should do.
This is the kind of, these are the kind of people you should know.
Here's where you should live.
Here's what you should believe.
Here's what you should feel.
That very much sounds like oppression to a lot of people, but I think to certain people who are, in a way, oppressed by their own questions and doubts and uncertainties, it can also be a beautiful, calming thing, which is what she experienced, even though it's all built on lies.
To make a long story short, Diane was lucky to get out of it because her mother scheduled this Cult deprogramming.
These two deprogrammers were former cult members themselves.
They somehow managed to snap her out of it first, and this cuts again to the present.
They tried the thing that didn't work, that I think doesn't work in general, which is rebuttal.
You say this about Jesus, but in fact the evidence is this.
Rebuttal doesn't work.
It doesn't work not just in that context, it doesn't work in all kinds of contexts.
The human heart is not a courtroom, and rebutting the evidence may work with a judge, but it doesn't work in lay human conversations.
What did work was when they started to show her how she had been conned, which is different from rebutting the substance of your beliefs.
And the thing that cracked her open, weirdly, they were reading to her about a book about Mao's revolutionary China's brainwashing techniques under Mao.
And what was interesting about that is she had no investment in that topic.
She had no investment in that country.
She had no thoughts about it.
She had no knowledge of it.
They might as well have been Mars for her.
Where she had a lot of thoughts about Jesus and she had a lot of thoughts about Nebraska.
Mao China's revolutionary brainwashing techniques were just, she didn't have defense mechanisms set up against it, she didn't have an established point of view around it.
And so she could hear it a little more.
And she's listening to these brainwashing techniques from a totally different world and context.
And she recognizes them.
She recognizes them as what is being done to her, has been done to her, is being done to her.
And she described it, and maybe she's a lucky one, comparatively, but what she described in that moment is just like this crashing of glass, like all of a sudden, oh my God, what if it's all a lie?
What if it's all a lie?
And so that worked on her.
And to move into the present, she Became a cult deprogrammer doing that same kind of work for others.
But it was always at human scale.
It was always one person or a couple people, you know, falling into a group of thousands of people.
She went into that work, out of that work, into that work, out of that work, got arrested for one of the deprogrammings, vowed to get out of it.
Yeah, so she starts to have profound ethical questions about like, what does it mean to interact on an interpersonal level like this until sometimes kidnap people and, you know, be really aggressive in terms of trying to save them, right?
Then as you were alluding to, she decided to become more of a theorist of it and did a lot of research and tried to understand this notion.
And she came to the conclusion that in the internet age, there's going to be more and not less of this.
And then QAnon happened.
And QAnon set up this challenge for her because she'd always worked on this scale of individuals.
With QAnon, we now have 43 million people, according to one estimate, who believe in this utterly cult-like, fraudulent fantasy.
You can't kidnap your way.
I mean, ethically, legally, or practically, you can't kidnap your way out of that problem.
This is not a whisking people, whisking loved ones into cars problem.
Not that I would even advocate it if we could.
43 million of our fellow citizens They're not going to a compound, but they are part of a dispersed online cult.
It's a cult with consequences.
The Moonies were not causing insurrections on the Capitol, but QAnon has fueled that kind of thing.
The question that she started to confront is, if you can't deprogram your way out of it at an interpersonal level, you can't kidnap your way out of it, you can't have parents saving their children from it, What does a national approach to mass dispersed online cults look like?
The answer she came to, which rhymes with the answer a cognitive scientist I also write about in that chapter came to in his own way, was we need a public health approach to this.
We cannot stop there being disinformation and cults and manipulators using their platform to try to make this happen.
That is here to say that's endemic, as we'd say in a public health kind of context.
If you accept that as endemic, however sad that is to accept, then the only approach is to prevent people from being infected, not to try to abolish the virus particles.
The virus particles, Diane and I think others believe, are here to stay.
The internet is inherently decentralized.
The gatekeepers are dying.
This stuff is going to be around.
You're not going to create a world in which there aren't crazy people on 4chan talking about pedophile pizza rings.
That's going to happen.
A public health approach to cult-like behavior and cult manipulation, organized disinformation, is really an education.
intervention.
Instead of trying to shut down these spigots of disinformation, which so much of the conversation has been about, it's about fortifying people against being conned.
And it's essentially, the argument is to treat this as a public health problem, is to rethink what we are teaching young people, and not so young people, so that they can't be deceived in these ways.
And I think it's going to require a kind of educational revolution if Diane Ben Scoder is right.
It's going to require the same way sex ed was something that was not taught in schools once.
You kind of, your parents gave it to you or you're, you figured it out behind the farm or whatever.
That led to a lot of consequences.
That led to a lot of assaults.
That led to a lot of rape.
That led to a lot of experimentation that we would now recognize as being like violations of people's bodies by other people.
It led to a lot of, you know, unintended pregnancies, all kinds of things, right?
At some point we decided it is mayhem to just, you know, have a laissez-faire attitude to how people learn about sex.
We need a plan for fortifying people against the things that can happen to you if you have a body in this world and are a sexual being.
We need a common minimum understanding of some of these things.
We need, like, everybody to get the same lessons on consent, right?
Now everybody, no one would say, you know, that There shouldn't be, I mean, no reasonable people would say that there shouldn't be sex ed in schools.
That's now considered a core part of an education.
It would have seemed quite weird to some of our ancestors to tuck that into, you know, in between algebra and Shakespeare, but today no one would doubt that.
I think one way to understand what Diane is saying is we essentially need that kind of addition for a set of skills to detect efforts at manipulation, efforts at cult-like prodding, so that when people watch those YouTube videos, you know, when young men start getting down the fourth video in the rabbit hole, something in them goes, Whoa, this is, this is that thing that I was warned about in school, right?
That it becomes a part of our educated human instinct to resist being duped in these ways.
It's such a powerful moment in the book when everything starts falling apart for her and she goes, what if all of this is a lie?
What if he's not really not divine, right?
What if the Reverend is not who he claims to be?
To your point, what we're seeing there is not, you know, we talked to Lee McIntyre, I'm not sure if you know him, who wrote How to Talk to a Science Denier.
He's a philosophy professor and science educator.
And he talks about the difference between content rebuttal and technique rebuttal.
And it's really this meta-cognitive ability to be able to look at an argument and instead of being preoccupied with the details of debunking each individual premise, it's being able to see the structure of this argument is fundamentally flawed and it employs Familiar fallacies, familiar manipulative techniques.
I hear you describing her notion that we can inoculate at a much larger scale if people learn how to think that way, how to be, in a way, media literate in that way.
Is that right?
Yeah, if you think about, you know, when you and I went to school, everyone, we got critical thinking training, right?
But what was it?
I mean, speaking for myself, it was like reading very well-written texts by great writers, being able to draw the main idea, or being, maybe, you know, as you got older, being able to poke a hole in the logic of a particular passage, right?
That was kind of critical thinking, like, kind of, do you understand what this person's saying?
Are they making a leap right?
I think basically what I would, one way to understand the argument is that that was kind of for the Gutenberg age.
That was for the age of like mass printed books.
Basically our critical thinking teaching and training was designed for a different problem, which is an era of Books, and you wanted readers who could read a book and tell a good book from a great book and read a few books and then draw the main idea out and make a presentation.
If you know a 14-year-old today who's just gotten their first cell phone two years ago, you understand that the critical thinking problem that they face in their life has very little to do with their ability to draw out the main idea from a James Baldwin essay.
They now have a real omnidirectional, ten times a minute, hitting you with information.
And their brains are constantly receiving information, interdicting some information.
It's just a different thing than sitting down with a James Baldwin essay.
And I think while we're still quite good at educating people to be able to read a James Baldwin essay and know what it's about and articulate their disagreement with it, I essentially don't think we've really updated education for what is happening cognitively to young people today and all people today.
You know, what happens when we go from the New York Times as a kind of primary news source to, like, TikTok as a primary news source, as it is for many young people?
You and I can sit and disagree and say they shouldn't use TikTok as a primary news source.
Good luck.
Good luck being, you know, non-teenagers telling, you know, teenagers how they should receive information from the world.
Like, teenagers are going to prevail.
Yeah, the quote I love from this part of the book from Diane Binskoter, she says, or maybe this is a mixture of you talking about her and what she discovered, but the quote is, the limited efficacy of trying to persuade people with better information, as well as the real potential of trying to warn people of attempts to manipulate them.
She says, the only desire that can compete with the desire to have the world explained simply and totally is the desire not to be conned.
I thought that was really brilliant in terms of, okay, what can we hook into that, you know, is innate to how people function?
Yeah, I think it, first of all, it reflects a larger idea in the book, even in non-cult, non-disinformation Context in more general context of political persuasion trying to win the world you want by being able to actually talk to and reach other people one of the common strands across different persuaders I write about is Their general view of other people is that other people are complicated that other people have more going on that are that other people are like battlefields of
Many fighting forces.
That's just the fundamental way these gifted persuaders I write about.
That's their mental model of other people.
People are like a constant site of contestation.
They are not singular, monolithic, self-confident blocks.
They may stand there very self-confidently saying they want to shut down the border, but they have five other things going on in them.
None of those other five may be winning.
But that doesn't mean those five things are not in them.
And what good persuaders have is an instinct to say, wow, you're really saying some pretty awful things about the border right now, but I know you've got five other things in you.
Maybe your sense of what your Christianity implies.
Maybe your memory of your grandparents being asylum seekers.
Maybe your desire to not have your children hate you and think you're a creep.
You have other things in you that might be resources for the persuader if they were to be able to see and recognize that complexity in you.
I would just say that as a meta point of the whole book.
And so in the disinformation stuff, a prime example of how that shows up in cult-like behavior and disinformation is, yes, There is, in the cult victim or the person who succumbed to this terrible disinformation, there is that human desire to have the world make facile sense.
That's a real part of people.
It's a real part of all of us.
That is clearly on overdrive in people who have succumbed to these things.
that part is really dominating.
What people like Diane Benskoder and John Cook, the scientists I also write about in this chapter,
what they view is that they have the self-discipline to say, but that's not the only thing going on
in these people.
There's another story in them.
And the other story that is most relevant in this conversation is, as you suggest,
this desire we also all have not to be anybody's pawn, dupe, mark.
Once you recognize that the person standing in front of you at Thanksgiving or whatever, babbling seemingly insane things, also has a kind of anti-authority streak and doesn't want to be, sees themselves as a critical thinker, doesn't want to be anybody's fool, you might be able, not always, but you might be able to play up that desire not to be anybody's fool Yeah, so you mentioned John Cook.
He starts off in this part of the book talking about what is for many a very familiar experience of having a belligerent climate denialist in his family.
between the two that can be generative.
talking about what is for many a very familiar experience of having a belligerent climate denialist in his family.
I think it's his dad, right?
And then this leads to his own research on, he sort of just doesn't engage and goes off
And one of his quotes I have here is, you need to fight sticky myths with stickier facts.
I think there is a, and this is interesting because he's a scientist and he's talking about the world of science, and he's Australian.
I would say what he's saying is as true of political parties on the left in the United States, it's true of policy wonks.
I mean, I think what he's talking about there is, if I were to kind of summarize like the kind of pro-democracy, pro-reality side against the kind of fascistic and anti-reality side.
There is, on the pro-democracy side, a kind of high-mindedness that is incredibly self-defeating.
It's like all about reason and ideas and policy and data and evidence and all these wonky things.
I mean, basically, a lot of center-left parties have become really kind of the parties of educated elites instead of labor.
Really?
And they've in many ways bled working class voters.
And correspondingly, they've become kind of these wonky brainiac parties.
You talk about, sorry to interrupt, you talk about it at one point as being a movement that has too few on ramps.
One of the on ramps is like emotion and psychology and like not looking down at that kind of stuff, not looking down at emotional appeals as being somehow less than or beneath or not looking down at the kind of belonging and transcendence that sadly people get from a Trump rally and not asking yourself the question, is there a benign version of that?
I refuse to accept that there's no version of a Trump rally for the left to develop except for generative, dignifying, inclusive purposes.
But let's be honest.
Every Trump rally is an exuberant, transcendent, gelling human experience for that cause.
And I think basically no one on the left has figured out an answer to that in this era.
Well, that's a really big problem.
Not being interested in belonging and not being interested in connection and transcendence and meaning and emotion and psychology, it just leaves the terrain of how humans actually are and process and connect leaves that to the bad guys.
And so what John Cook was talking about there was in the science world, the enemies of science are very good at catering to emotion.
They're very good at catering to human beings as they are.
They have a very astute understanding of human psychology.
And scientists, as he's describing, kind of look down on things like telling a personal story in a talk about your research.
It might hurt your tenure chances if you do that kind of seriously, right?
You write an article for the New York Times and it can be held against you that you're trying to reach a broad audience.
So here's the problem that John Cook is setting up that I think reflects throughout the progressive and reality-based spaces generally.
You are competing with people, anti-democratic, anti-reality people, who are very good at meeting people where they are and catering to the human brain as it is.
And you're meeting that with people who are like throwing facts and figures at people like little darts and just not connecting.
So what does it look like to actually have scientists able to think about communication as a core part of their role?
What is this 1.5 degrees Celsius that you keep repeating?
People don't understand what that means.
Like we have to tell people They are leaving their children with a world that is — their children are not going to be safe.
Whatever their children think today, 30 years from now, a lot of those children, when they're adults, are going to resent.
We need scientists talking like that.
Not just talking in this kind of dry language of numbers.
We need for the good guys, not only the bad guys, to be able to kind of speak to people at the human and emotional and visceral level in which most people live.
In a persuasive way.
It's really interesting because you're talking about science communicators stepping up to that plate of considering, okay, who's the audience?
How do we reach them?
How do we connect?
How do we communicate information to them in a way that's going to be viscerally relevant to their lived experience, to their needs, their feelings, their values?
And then at the same time, you have someone like Anat Shankar Osorio, who you cover, who I feel like her message is much more about like, okay, Democrats, how do you communicate in a way that is aspirational?
How do you communicate in a way, like you were saying before, that has a kind of inspired, aesthetic, really galvanizing people to move towards the more beautiful world that, you know, We want to have manifest as opposed to only describing problems.
Her advice, she also talks against what you were just saying in terms of the policy wonks, right?
She says, sell the brownies, but not the recipe, where the recipe would be like getting caught up in a bunch of jargon that people just really don't know what you mean.
But she also talks about, you know, she makes fun of the tendency to try to sell pizza burgers.
Yeah, Anant Shankaraswari is one of the stars of the book and people really love and connect with her as a character, I think, because she has so much to teach all of us, even people who are very good communicators or think they're very good communicators.
Look, I think Anant has much to teach.
She's a progressive kind of messaging guru.
But I think that underplays the extent to which really she is an educator in how all of us should have better conversations with each other.
And one of the kind of observations she makes is going thinking back, this is me now talking, not her, but like thinking back to the initial conversation we had about cults.
You know, look, I think cults understand people very well.
The whole thing is built on a very sophisticated, detailed understanding of how people actually are.
I don't think you could build fraudulent movements built on lies if you didn't have a very sharp, intuitive view of how people are, what their pressure points are, how they're motivated by fear and anxiety, how they're motivated by hope, what the different mix of motivations is, how those motivations interact with each other.
And I think one way to understand What Anat and others are talking about in the book is we need those who want good things for us to have at least as sophisticated an understanding of how people actually are.
As people who want to manipulate and lie and cheat and dupe.
And right now we don't have that.
So Anant is in some ways trying to equip the pro-democracy side with tools for being able to reach people with some of the same skill and deftness that a lot of the bad guys are routinely able to do it.
So one thing is offering people a compelling and vivid vision of the world you want, right?
There's a lot of problem porn on the left.
The world is ending.
Also, it's getting hotter.
Also, Trump is coming back.
And basically, people are kind of unlikely to follow a Pied Piper that's just telling them all the things that are wrong.
People are all set for problems.
People already have a lot of problems in their own life.
To the extent that you are like a traveling salesman of problems, as a movement, it's not that attractive to people.
That said, if you can come into people's lives in a different way with a kind of tone of, here's the world I want to build, here's why I want to build it, here's what your life would look like in the world that I want to build.
And by the way, We have some people trying to keep us from having these things, and here's why they're doing it, and here's what they're doing.
But we can overcome that as we have in the past and build these great things.
It's just a very different story that we're hearing than the story that we just live in a world of irredeemable, intractable problems.
You know, I think Anat also is Very good at thinking about the problem of whose conversation are you having.
If I say to you, immigrants are animals, and you respond, immigrants are not animals, on one level, congratulations, you are correct.
Immigrants are not animals.
Here's the problem.
Without thinking about it, perhaps, you have consented to having a conversation about the animalness of immigrants.
That's the conversation we're now having.
Given that immigrants and animals have nothing to do with each other, simply to have that conversation is problematic.
It's like these keywords should never be associated in the search engine optimization.
These things have nothing to do with each other.
And so you saying immigrants are not animals is still putting the word immigrant and animals close to each other in a way that is going into the air.
And you're amplifying that conversation.
Now, if you think about, so Anat says, you know, have your conversation.
Don't have their conversation.
Or be attentive to whose conversation you are having.
And now you think about how many of us have spent the last many years of the Trump era in particular, it is all too often amplifying the worst statements of people like Donald Trump in order to rebut them and talk about how ridiculous they are.
But what are we doing?
We're still amplifying them.
And what we're not doing is having our conversation.
And so I think another thing that I really take from her work is, what is the conversation you want to be having?
What is the issue you want to be talking about?
Start with what you're for, and the world you want, and the conversation you want to have.
Don't default into someone else's conversation.
Look, the pizza burger analogy is as follows.
to stay on message in terms of what their principles really are as opposed to trying
to win people over by being milk toast, right?
Look, the pizza burger analogy is as follows.
If you think about someone who's an undecided voter, right, let's say you're offering them
pizza and you're offering them a burger and they can't decide.
It doesn't follow that they want a pizza burger, right?
It doesn't follow that they want the mean between these two things or an amalgamation of two things.
It just means that they can't decide.
Eventually, they will decide.
Their hunger will get the better of them.
They will pick one of those two things.
Right now, they haven't.
The question is, how do you get them to pick the pizza, if that's what you're selling, not the burger?
And what the traditional Democratic Party theory of persuasion in recent decades has been, has been to say, I'm going to offer them a pizza burger because if they're undecided that'll give them a little bit of what they want from one thing and a little bit of what they want from the other.
Well, the reality is pizza burgers are kind of disgusting.
And often that milquetoast middle compromise thing ends up being actually appealing to nobody because people want a pizza or a burger.
They didn't want pizza and a burger combined into a dish.
So what you have to do instead is really encircle people with the sense, the atmospheric sense, that everyone's having pizza.
Pizza's just kind of like what people are doing these days.
Everyone you know is having pizza.
Pizza will make you happier.
People who eat pizza smile more.
We have to encircle people with the sense That's just kind of what we're doing here.
Last person I want to ask you about is Cesar Torres and this concept of deep canvassing.
You know, we're in this polarized climate, persuasive conversations seem all but lost in this cloud of irony poisoning and conspiracy rhetoric and this sort of reflexive tendency that we have across the political spectrum to demonize the other.
And yet here's this person who taps into the effectiveness of these like 15, 20, 30 minute knock on the door conversations where there's actually a kind of method for reaching people.
I thought it was really beautiful.
Deep canvassing grew out of a stinging defeat on an otherwise great night in November 2008.
The night Barack Obama won the presidency, a remarkable night in American history, was also the night that gay marriage, which had briefly been legalized in California, was abolished by referendum.
You know, I think a lot of these gay rights campaigners who eventually developed this thing called deep canvassing, that night, that moment in November 2008, they love Barack Obama, but they experience this really painful defeat at the hands of their own fellow citizens in California.
And for once, it wasn't the Republican Supreme Court, or it wasn't Mitch McConnell.
L.A.
County voted against gay marriage in that referendum.
Large parts of San Francisco voted against gay marriage in that referendum.
So suddenly this feeling that like we in California are living this life and some like Kentucky farmers don't get us, it didn't hold up.
It was their own neighbors who didn't think they were fully human.
And so some of these gay rights activists and others decided we gotta go talk to these people.
We didn't even realize that they were so against us.
And they began a series of conversations that has since grown into this very, now very elaborate and well-developed movement called deep canvassing with very laid out protocols of conversation.
But it basically began in the spirit of, let me go to people's doors, which is what it's still doing today.
And say, on the question of trans people's rights and dignity, are you, you know, very supportive, not supportive at all, on a scale?
And then you have a conversation with them.
And you don't rebut, as we talked about.
You don't shame them.
You don't call them out.
You restrain from doing all the 2022 things that we feel, like, morally obligated to do.
Instead, you listen.
You don't lie about where you're coming from.
You tell them why you care about the issue and what your stance is.
But then you listen and you elicit.
You elicit like all the bile, all the terror.
You listen to them call people groomers and you just say all this.
And you try to get under.
Why do you fear that?
Why?
And then having gotten there, gotten a lot out of them, you don't rebut, but you start to see mine for sources of cognitive dissonance with all of that.
Maybe they despise Latino immigrants, but they have a self-identity as a champion of the underdog.
They've been a Mets fan for 40 years.
They always feel like they're picking the underdog.
That's a key to their self-image.
I mean, it sounds like a joke, but being a lifelong champion of underdogs or someone Who kind of sees themselves in sports as always supporting the team that's not going to win, but just clings to them anyway.
That's a very powerful sentiment that could be turned against one's prejudice against gay people or immigrants or whoever else.
And so these canvassers start to look for those sources of dissonance within you.
And then kind of as the process ends, winds down, say, how are these two different things squaring with you?
How is your sense that of yourself as a champion of underdogs squaring with the fact that you're kind of stomping on the newest immigrants of this country.
been shown in peer-reviewed studies more often than you would think.
People are altered by these conversations.
People move.
People make connections that they haven't made before.
And I think we need, you know, a million people trained in deep canvassing now if this country
is going to have a chance.
It's a really inspiring chapter.
The memory I have that's sort of etched into my mind is of the veteran who comes to the door on his crutches who's lost a leg.
And he's wearing this super patriotic shirt that has slogans on the front and a flag and slogans on the back and defies all of the expectations of the canvasser by basically associating being pro-immigrant with being a hardcore veteran patriot.
It was such a beautiful scene, and this is what is missing from a lot of our political discourse right now.
Ideology does not form itself.
People have various kinds of experiences, and then they make meaning out of those experiences as a kind of layer that sits On top of the experiences themselves.
Being a veteran does not make you a right-wing person.
That's just an experience.
There's a layer of meaning-making where you process what it means to be a veteran in a way that leads you to vote for the right, which happens often.
Or, as we know in this country, having a really awful experience with the healthcare system, unfortunately does not radicalize people to advocate for universal healthcare.
Because if it did, 95% of people would be advocating for universal healthcare.
A very significant number of people who've been grossly mistreated by the healthcare system have unfortunately not engaged in the particular meaning-making process that would lead them to the conclusion.
And that's our failure, those of us who want that.
To help them array those experiences into that kind of meaning.
What I saw with that veteran that will haunt me and make me kind of hopeful forever is there was another veteran who we'd spoken to on the door right before, right after.
And that veteran, the first veteran, had kind of the meaning making that you'd expect stereotypically from A veteran.
He was a tough guy, veteran.
And this is the first guy.
And the meaning he made of his service was like, I fought to defend this country.
Random people should not be climbing across the border, like infiltrating this country.
And I'm going to protect this country if it's necessary.
I think a lot of us would recognize that kind of story from that kind of guy.
But the point is, that's not the only way to interpret being a veteran.
And so then we met this other guy who had lost his leg.
He's wearing a 9-11 Never Forget shirt.
You open the door and you think, God, this is another one of these veterans.
And his interpretation was, I hope Immigrants come to this country, more immigrants come to this country, because I fought and defended it and I want them, I want more people to enjoy what I fought to defend.
Why did I fight to defend this if no one's going to make use of it?
Like, why protect and defend this cornucopia if some of the fruit goes uneaten?
You can identify with that or not identify with it.
But that man had the same underlying experience of being a veteran, but his meaning making of it, somehow from books or from his own heart or from family, somehow the way he processed the meaning of being a veteran was, I protected this country, therefore it should be used by lots of people.
Versus, I protected this country so no one new should come in.
You can have that underlying experience and end up in both of those places psychologically and politically.
And to me, that is the most hopeful thing I can tell you.
Because if you're trying to build a pro-democracy movement, well, then we have a huge organizing challenge.
Because, yes, people are voting for madness these days.
But a lot of those people are the people who voted for Barack Obama.
A lot of those people thought Obama was going to shake up the system and then thought Trump was going to shake up the system.
A lot of them thought Obama had a fun, enticing vibe and movement and thought Trump had a fun, enticing vibe and movement.
It is completely incoherent in a certain way.
But in a different way, you know, I think people are complicated and are able to tell all kinds of stories to themselves to justify essentially what they're feeling.
And I think we need to build a politics that is built on an understanding of feeling and the role of feeling in people's lives.
Thank you everyone for listening to another episode of Conspirituality Podcast.
