SARAH STEIN LUBRANO: How do we change people’s minds about what’s happening to the world?

I'm Sarah Wilson and this is Wild, a show where we talk with the biggest minds in the world about the ideas that can help us love and save our one wild and precious life together on this planet. So over the course of this wild series, we've been looking at ways to move on from collapse. So I've looked at a range of different ideas that we will need to or we will want to take into the what comes next and we've also been looking at how we actually do what will have to be an emergent transition from an old world or old civilizational structure that's collapsing under the weight of its own messy, knotted complexity and into this new world. We've discussed what to do with the grief that's bound to descend in coming years, how we raise kids going forward and how we can use the denial that will no doubt kick in, how we can do the emergence that keeps coming up as the modality for change and the vehicle for all of this. Now today in this 11th conversation in the 12th part series, I want to talk about how to bring people, so our friends, our neighbours, our family along on the ride, how to get them to actually change their mindset to let go of a system that really no longer serves them and to adopt a new more life-generating ideology or set of ideas, but also how we can cooperate and collaborate better together so that we can, frankly, save our species and the world. So my guest today is Sarah Stein Lubrano, Sarah is a neuroscientist and a political scientist. She's the head of research for the Future Narratives Lab which focuses on narratives about social and political change and serves on the Institute of Imaginations Global Imagination Board. She's also recently published a book on this very challenging subject called Don't Talk About Politics, How to Change 21st Century Mines, which is perfectly apt. Now this episode is one I've really wanted to have to bring together all the different things that we've discussed in this series. Sarah dispels many of the old ideas about how we go about moving in better directions as a species and uses science and new psychological approaches to show how we'll need to go about things moving forward. We cover why political debates do not change people's minds and why the marketplace of ideas does not work. Then we talk about what does actually work and what we therefore need to be focused on as change makers and how to go about it most effectively, the communication hacks, the mindset tactics and so on. We talk about social atrophy and how our brains actually change when we are isolated from other human beings. We talk about the critical role of third spaces and various gateways, rituals and practices that get people to the thing without using debate and other techniques that don't work any longer. We talk through the cognitive dissonances and how to get around them and we talk through the science that shows activists are happier than their non-activist peers. This chat is dripping in all kinds of very surprising factlets and science about how change can best happen when we're dealing with messy, complex, needy, tender humans. So I hope you enjoyed this conversation before we get started. We'll join over on Substac, so that's Sarah Wilson dot substac.com. If you're keen to ask her, all myself a question following interview. And if you like, you can also watch this over on the YouTube channel. I'll put the links to that in the show notes, where I put all other links that I mentioned in this conversation. So do share this conversation far and wide for me. It is much appreciated. So let's now meet Sarah Stein Lebrano. Sarah, it's really lovely to see your face there after a few false starts due to a heat wave. That's it. That's kind of ironic, I think, just last week. There was a big climate conference to talk about extreme heat and it had to be cancelled because of extreme heat. I wasn't alive. I think yesterday an extreme heat, it was wild. The irony is no longer funny. You've got a new book that's come out, don't talk about politics. And your thesis is that talking about politics doesn't bring people along. It won't move them into better, more life-generating kind of spaces. And it won't bring about the kind of cooperation we so desperately need at the moment. And we can to the US, UK and even Australia at the moment to see how that is in fact playing out. So why is it the case that talking through ideas and facts and so on and reasoning just doesn't work? Yeah, so in my book I look at a couple of things that we have long assumed, I think, at a cultural level, are the right way for democracy to work, debate and a marketplace of ideas. And indeed, there is very little empirical evidence in the case of the marketplace of ideas and basically zero evidence in the case of debate that people change their minds when they're exposed to these mechanisms. Like there's a lot of evidence that when people watch debates online or on the TV, they don't change their minds at all. And that little movement that you see the day after debate is just the statistical noise that you would see any given day. It's no different. And there are a lot of different reasons for this. And I kind of go into my book, you know, I look at like this cognitive dissonance theory, which is actually what I wrote my Ph.D. about, I look at some other reasons. But I think increasingly what I find most helpful to say is it's true for two reasons. So firstly, looking at cognitive dissonance theory as an example of a larger point about human psychology, we often can't change our mind when we're exposed to new ideas or information because they challenge, they threaten, really, our sense of self. And it particularly our sense of ourselves as good moral agents in the world. It's really difficult to change your mind if the thing you're going to have to do along the way is decide that you were wrong and then do like a massive surgery on the self. That's just painful. And there's particularly a lot of evidence in some of the studies I look at that it's political ideas in particular that challenge this. You know, if I tell you that you happen to be wrong about how trees grow or something, you might not have any sort of ethical moral attachments to that. It might not say anything about your agency yourself and so you'll change your mind. But people do change their mind when they're exposed to new information all the time when it doesn't challenge this part of ourself. But once it's a political thing, suddenly we realize, oh, damn, like I'm maybe I'm the wrong person, the bad person, the person that could cause a problem, et cetera, that's really hard. That's one way of answering a question. And I think that's a more common way of answering the question because many people write about these aspects of human psychology. People have written about persuasion before, you know? But the other reason that people don't do this sort of changing their minds and I think it's important to think about it this way as well is just that there are other things that are even more powerful than arguments and debates in terms of our political views. And those things probably are so powerful that a lot of the debating and argumenting that happens on the internet and otherwise is like building a sandcastle on a beach. But like the thing that really matters is the tide, right? The sandcastle will be there very briefly. And the tide in this case seems to be, according to empirical research, our relationships with other people that changes our mind about politics over the course of our life. And our own actions and experiences. Those things seem to change people in very profound ways, including their political beliefs. And they're so powerful that I think most other things are kind of ineffective, you know? Yeah, okay. Well, let's dig down into those a little bit because you mentioned the two of them. Let's go relationships. To what extent do relationships change people's minds? I remember in Australia there was a study done and it found that the most effective agents for the most recalcitrant climate deniers in Australia being middle-aged men were their teenage daughters. That was actually the way to get through to them in terms of it, you know, new information. Okay. So I hadn't actually heard about that particular one, but that completely makes sense to me. And fits in with a lot of other research. Yeah, I mean, you know, one example, this is minor one, but it fits with what you just said, is like there's good evidence that if you have an older sister, you become a bit more left-wing and if you have an older brother, you've become a bit more right-wing. And that's very simply because older brothers are more right-wing on average and older sisters are more left-wing and then they move their siblings, right? Yeah, that makes so much sense, Sarah, because I mean, I'm the eldest of six children and I just think about all the activists because a lot of my friends are activists and I don't know how often it comes up that we are the eldest daughters. So yeah, it's partially the sort of relationality and it's not by the way that we're like brainwashing people, you know? It's like a massive effect where the relationship just brainwashing is the person. One of the things I particularly liked as a study is they looked at college roommates who are assigned randomly and how they affect each other's political views, you know, because that's kind of an interesting case study. People are like basically living together for a year. They didn't know each other otherwise, but they are talking all the time. And what they found, and I think this is a good model for what we're talking about is yes, they move towards each other politically a little bit, not hugely, right? So it's the most important relationship in their life at the end of the day and it's only one year. And also we're not brainwashable mostly without calls or something, right? But what does happen is that if one of the roommates is, one of the roommates is very politically interested and the other one isn't, by the end of the year they're both very interested in politics. Okay. And I guess what I would say is, you know, I think this is a bit about what humans do for each other. It's not that we brainwash each other. It's not that we're always persuaded by each other. So we can, we become a costume, we become a tune to things mattering that wouldn't otherwise matter to us because of our relationships. Like, I don't know about you, but there are all these things that now matter to me because of my romantic relationship, but just because the other person cares about them. They would never matter to me otherwise, but now I have thought about how to take them seriously. And politics is a question of mattering, really. And so what I think the relationships really do for people is they they make the window of mattering much bigger. That's why it's climate change is a good example. I doubt that many of these men are incredibly intense climate deniers, although that could still have an effect anyway, but very often they just think this doesn't really matter that much. But then it matters to their kid and slowly it comes to matter and then their politics shift as a result. And our relationships are like our windows into the world, you know, or like the network of connection that we're strong across and as it moves, we move too, you know. Yeah, yeah. To what extent does really healthy role modeling work in that sort of instance? Because I often say to people who are concerned in this space, either previously as climate activists who are wanting to bring people along, now as I guess collapse aware types who are wanting to bring their friends, family loved ones into the space so they can have the same level of recognition and awareness so they can make different choices about their future and so on. And what I say to people is we need to role model that the fuck out of this. We need to actually illustrate how you can actually live vibrantly and positively in this space. If we walk around, you know, self-legulating because we're so miserable with this level of awareness, you know, we're not going to bring anyone along for the ride. So to what extent does the quality of those relationships and the sort of the frisson of those relationships matter? I don't have, I sadly don't have any studies on frisson, which is a great word, but you know, I think that the intensity of them matters for sure. You know, you are, although there's some interesting studies about how our weak ties are also very important for different reasons because they expose us to things that we already have access to, right? We ties are always fascinating in this way for sociologists as you might be able to tell them a big sociology nerd. But you know, the relationships matter, the intensity of them matters to a significant degree, but interestingly, I would say other things matter too. One of the things I look at in the book is that there are these kind of specific kinds of relationships that happen often in third spaces or workplaces that seem to make people less racist and otherwise less prejudiced. And what I look at is a field of study called social contact theory, which I think is pretty telling. And it basically suggests, and maybe this, this addresses your question about modeling, but in a different way. But what this field of study suggests is that when people are exposed to each other in conditions of equality with certain other qualifying factors, they become less prejudiced and those, and, and those conditions are really important. And if you don't have them, they probably won't become less prejudiced. And here are some of the conditions. The people have to be positioned as equals, both in practice and in theory. So it's not enough for the workplace to say your equals. It needs to also be that actually there are some people of color on the board, you know. There needs to be regular conversations about the reality of your lives at length with someone else. So that could still be like in a workplace context, but you need to be having the kind of job, for example, where you can talk to your colleagues for a long period of time and essentially become friends. And I mean friends in the lighter sense of the word potentially, but, you know, they have to be talking. And then interestingly, they have to have shared goals, right? They have to have shared goals. And one of the things I think is very telling about that is that the internet, I think on the internet, we basically never have shared goals. Or I mean, not never, but very rarely. It's very rare that you enter, I mean, unless you're on a very specific internet forum or something, you don't get to establish them. We don't get to establish. We might have shared goals, but the goals of the tech CEOs, right? Like the goal of the tech CEO is like, please scroll the internet aimlessly while feeling depressed about yourself and then buy some stuff. And that's not a shared goal that you could have with another human that would lead you to reduce your prejudice. So I guess what I'm saying is I think, you know, the intensity of the relationship matters, modeling matters probably certainly, but what seems to be most measurable as yet in this research. And again, you know, if I could design sociological research, we would be in a different world because we don't always measure the things I want to measure, you know, but the reason that we do have suggests that a lot of it is about really having time to experience the other person as an equal and understand what their life is like and share lived experiences with each other. And yeah, I want to say also that I'm not saying this in a perfectly like polyanna-ish way because I think there's a certain kind of basic messaging that is brought across about this that is like, yay, this is so good. We can like reduce racism by making black people hang out with white people who suck. And you know, like, I, that sucks for black people and also it away for everyone. I think it's important to see that research and care about it and also be like, well, that's going to suck for a lot of people, but this is the way people change their minds. And maybe it's not always there, you know, I'm not implying here necessarily that it's their duty. Like, I think it's a very complicated moral fact that this seems to be what shifts people. So there are two things really come to mind here. There's a study that you're probably aware of that looked into that shared goals idea on people who work on Wikipedia updates. Oh, and yeah, it's super interesting actually. Yeah. So what they found was that the more diverse, the political opinions of people who worked on a Wikipedia entry, the better the outcome. And it was, goes against what we often feel is the case because we think that people can't get on if they've got different political opinions. But what actually happens is that if they have a shared goal, I'm producing a great Wikipedia outcome. The dissonance, the difference in opinion in terms of where they come from actually assists what they're doing. And I think it's a really incredible sort of study because what it says is the shared goal trumps the differences in opinion in terms of politics. So I sort of was thinking of that one, the other one. I don't know if you heard about a study that just came out a couple of weeks ago here in France. They found that every time at a back, it's back is like a little corner coffee shops slash bar where people buy their cigarettes. They buy the newspaper in the morning and have a coffee standing at the bar with their their neighbours and so on. And it's also where they will come and have a sandwich at lunch, you know. And then it's also where they come in the evening and have an apparel and sit around chatting, you know, before they head off to dinner. And so every village in France tends to have one. They'll have nothing else, but it'll have a tobacco, you know. And in Paris, where I live now, there's one on, you know, every second corner. And what they've found is that every time a tobacco shuts down and there's been 18,000 of them that have shut down in the last, I think, 10 to 20 years, the far right vote spikes. And the connection, yeah. And apparently it's so direct. If you shut down a bakery or a hairdresser, the same thing doesn't happen. It's specifically these third spaces where the community comes together. And all of those touch points you mentioned, you know, come to bear here. It's an equalizer. People come to a tobacco and they come from different walks of life. So it's an equalizer. They spend quite a decent amount of time together talking about the issues of the day. It's not just a passing, you know, thing that the water cooler, it's a, you know, an hour or so of, of considered talking. And there may even be shed goals going on there. Maybe to the extent that it's so hyper local that you kind of end up with circles, you know, in ways that you might not otherwise, right? The epitome, you're like, well, I really hate the, you know, police station guys here. And they're like, yeah, we hate the police too. Yeah, yeah. We're going to need a new basketball court that the local school, yeah, we've all got kids that are crying out for. So I found that just a really, a really direct explainer of what you're talking about. And it really does suggest, you know, points to the importance of third spaces, which I'm sure we'll get to in a moment. But I want to kind of keep going on those two things that you mentioned that do work where, you know, it's a political debate doesn't. So we've covered off the relationships bit of things. The other one you said is our experiences. Look, talk us through that. Yeah. So this is the other thing. I think, you know, one of the things in my research that I really care about is I, I'm a very interdisciplinary thinker because I think some of the biggest issues that we deal with are just too big. And we, and we have to use multiple disciplines, you know, and, and honestly, with great deference of respect to so many academics that I use the work of and talk to and care about. Like I think we're, we're messing up some of the big questions because we're stuck in disciplines. We'd all just say a routine finding across many different fields of both psychology, sociology, neuroscience. And they always just find new jargon for this niche field. But it's basically the same finding is that people's views tend to follow from their actions and not the other way around, which is very much not how the Western model of the mind would imagine things. We tend to have the, the idea like, oh, I thought, you know, objectively for myself alone. And then I came up with an idea and then I action the idea in the world. And that might be how you, I don't know, decide to rearrange your living room. But it's probably not how you're into your politics. And in fact, the evidence suggests that very often what happens is that people engage in a small action in their life. They might even be compelled to undertake that action, which means they didn't really choose it. They had to for like whatever reason. And then their views shift after that. I'll give you a couple of examples. One of the more interesting ones is there's something called the turn away study, which is looking at people, obviously, mostly women who have been denied abortions that they wanted. And they kind of pair those women up against women who are otherwise very much the same in terms of demographics and other factors in their life, but did get the abortion that they wanted. So they kind of, it's a pairing study, but a big one like thousands of women. And they just say, you know, okay, let's see. Like, if you take a woman from the South who earns this much money, blah, blah, blah, one abortion got one and you compare to one that's almost the same, but she didn't get one. What happens to them and how do they compare? And you can kind of find out quite a lot from this sort of study. I mean, look, as a sidebar, obviously, lots of things happen to women who are denied abortions that are bad. They end up in worse relationship situations. They have worse finances. But interestingly, one of the things that happens to them that we might not expect, certainly I wouldn't necessarily intuit this as a very pro-choice person, is that the women who are denied abortions that they want become more in favor or more pro-life or less in favor of abortion rights. They become more in favor of the thing they actually experienced, which was having this baby, basically. And a lot of our political views probably are in part due to this fact, which is just that we confirmation bias that we're programmed to stick to. And again, it also allows us to have a narrative of ourselves as good people at agents in the world, which is again, like a lot of what that work of cognitive dissonance is doing. And there's lots of other evidence, and I mean, this is a more extreme case in a way, but there's lots of evidence for this and lots of other areas of our life. The people who experience extreme weather events become more convinced and concerned about climate change. People who, you know, interestingly when bands are passed in cities, and they seem pretty permanent, people get on board with the bands quite quickly. They sort of shift their mind by being within the band itself, like let's say there's a band of smoking or plastic water bottles. They're like, okay, yeah, actually it's fine. I don't mind not being able to a plastic water bottle. We tend to shift our mind towards our actions. And that's both amazing, and also obviously it could be really bad. Like it's also the reason people get on board with, you know, totalitarian racism. Yeah, like literal fascism, because it's just easier for us in a way to resolve that dissonance. And if we feel powerless, we'll resolve that dissonance toward the situation we're in. There's lots of evidence, for example, that the most depressed people in society often believe that the status quo is necessary, or at least inescapable, because that allows them essentially to get through the day, you know, and like fair enough in some ways, but also it's obviously heartbreaking. So what that means though is, you know, I'm not saying therefore we should just give up on humans, even though they function side. What it means, I think, for people who want to in some way change or improve the world, is actually something much more basic, which is that if you want to change people's minds, you need to change their life. You need to give them an experience of life that is different than what they've previously experienced, and that hopefully will allow them to shift their beliefs towards the point of view you hope they have. You know, and the way I talk about this in the book is in terms of gateway actions, which I is again a term I took from sociology, but now the activists I work with find quite useful, but a gateway action is a small political action. It might even be effectively meaningless, like recycling, like from an environmental perspective, yeah, recycling a little bit, whatever, you know, but like, but it turns out the people who recycle then become more interested in the rest of environmentalism, because if you make some people good to recycle, now they do other stuff, and you know, there are many, many gateway actions, a lot of which are basically useful, mostly as recruitment, that activists can bring into people's lives, you know, like imagine the tobacco, but now in the tobacco you can donate a little bit of money or clothing or food to migrants. I wonder what would happen to the people in that town. It's really easy for them to feel good about themselves by donating to migrants, and then maybe the next step is you have come to come bring the stuff directly to the migrants, and then they meet the migrants, right? Like this is the base, honestly, this is the basic fundamental building blocks of what has long been called community organizing, a term that could mean almost anything, but that is in reality a different form of political reasoning, and if the political reasoning form that has to do with relationships and with actions, and that's what's much more effective for people on the whole. So really what you're saying is rather than beat people over the head with ideology, ideas, facts, and reasoning, you actually try to find what spaces, practices, rituals that they can be exposed to that open them up to a way of thinking away of being. So what are some examples of I guess people who have been able to do that, who've reverse engineered things effectively? I mean, the example of getting teenage daughters to go and talk to their fathers, you know, and I remember Sarah Silverman did this in one of the, I think it was the 2016 election over in the US. She got a whole heap of Jewish people, her Jewish friends to go to Florida, and have afternoon tea, coffee with their grandparents, and just sort of be there talking politics, you know, and switch them around. She called it the great slip. And from what I understand, it was quite effective. So what are some examples? Is it spaces? Is it rituals? Is it, I don't know, inviting your friends to a food co-op situation or something like that? Yeah, I mean, I read a lot about food co-ops in my book. I'm a part of a food co-op. And to be clear, the kind of food co-op, I'm a part of is not like a bunch of bougie people getting organic kale. It's actually a food co-op that was started here in London to help people find accessible food, like cheap food basically. And the way it works is that you go around and you knock on your neighbor's doors and you ask them, like, hey, do you want to get cheaper food, especially vegetables, is the easiest thing, but you know, there's other things. We'll buy in bulk together. So you just buy in bulk together, and there's a distribution hub that they've kind of organized for this stuff, but you know, you could even do it without that. And you know, if you buy vegetables and fruits in bulk, you can massively reduce their price. And a lot of your groceries, especially once you add often places will donate food to this system. So you can get a lot of your groceries for about three to five pounds a week, which is nothing. Really, compared to what most people have to pay for groceries. And when I talk to the organizers who have this system, they said, you know, we don't really care about food. It's good. It's good, obviously, people who have little income have cheap food, but we're in it because what happens is that then 18 people are all together in a community. They're usually a block or two away. They're really close. And they know each other in London, in the city where many people don't know any of their neighbors. And then all the other magic starts to happen because then, you know, people start building solidarity. They realize, like, oh, you're not getting your vegetables this week. Are you okay? Oh, you're in hospital. Can I help you? Oh, like, you know, you don't know how to cook this thing. Let me show you. Oh, does anyone have like a vacuum cleaner? You know, and then, and then over time, when bigger things happen, especially like eviction, right? Suddenly, people will be like, I'm so sorry, but I'm getting evicted. And their neighbors will be like, no, I'm going to come and just stand in your house so you can't get evicted. And that is, it's a gateway, right? It's a gateway. And a lot of organizing is about gateways. And I would say, unfortunately, it's especially about gateways because we aren't particularly, believe it or not, de-politicized time. And I know that might not sound true because on the internet, everyone is screaming at each other about politics and they're super politicized in this way. But people are mostly not politicized in the sense that they're collectively organized. Yeah, you know, yeah, almost no one is collectively organized. We've seen the decline of unions, especially for, honestly, for working class people. Like, nowadays, it's more likely that you're in the union if you're an upper class person. And like, that's actually not as helpful. Yeah, you know, political parties are wilding competent and often run by bureaucrats and like criminals and people that are paying lining the pockets. You know, there's just not, we're not collectively organized in the way that we might have been in previous areas. There aren't goss social movements, partially because the governments have really shut them down. And so not only that, but individual people can't even imagine what it would mean to do collective action anymore. When I talk to people, the number one problem I find all the time is I'll ask them, like, what's your theory of power? What's your theory of how people collectively can change the world and they cannot imagine it? Really, they have a very hazy idea of how people collectively change the world or what they could do. They don't even really feel comfortable going to talk to someone else and saying, like, hey, do you also care about this? Let's work on it together. In fact, I would say that my number one goal is a writer over the next few decades. And a speaker is just to help people develop both the skills and the imagination. And I mean imagination in a completely unfluffy sense so that they could do collective action. I think that that's like the number one thing I could do for the rest of my life. You talk, you use the term in the book social atrophy and I totally agree with you here. There's so many reasons why we've descended into social atrophy. And they all work simultaneously and interconnectedly as part of the complex system set up that we're in. To make it really problematic, there's institutional structural reasons for why we can't connect in a third space together and get this kind of thing done. So let's maybe talk about that a little bit. I mean, we don't have to rattle off the reasons why we know what they are. The fragmentation polarization that's been created by AI, social media. As you say, the neoliberal setup has got rid of those, you know, the unions and those entities, I call them the moral umpires on the footy field of life. You know, these entities that would bring us together to be able to be politically engaged and ensure that, you know, certain people's worst excesses don't go and ruin the planet. You've talked about sort of ways that, you know, we can create, uh, you know, spaces and rituals, you know, like food cocks to bring us together. But how, what else can we do to combat this social atrophy? Let's first of all, just for a minute, I'm just going to define what it is. So social atrophy is a word that primarily I actually use it to talk about the actual changes in the brain when we are socially isolated because, um, the brain is a bit like a muscle to use a clunky, but reasonable metaphor. And when we don't use any given part of our brain, we lose that ability over time pretty much, right? That's why I've forgotten all the foreign languages I learned. And, but it's also why we can lose some of our social ability and skill and energy because, uh, much of our brain is set up for social life. It's maybe the most taxing thing our brain ever has to do on a regular basis. That's why people who are highly social get dementia less because they're just really exercising their brain every day. Um, it's why everyone felt exhausted having social interactions after COVID. It's a, it's a very important muscle in the brain that actually affects lots of the other systems in the brain. And when we don't use our social muscle in the brain, we lose it. That's like the term social attributes technically for that. Now, of course, it also ends up being used not so much by me, but by most people to talk about like the weakening of the social fabric as well, like the weakening of the ties between us. And, and in some ways it, it's a reasonable word for both, you know? Yeah, I don't want to be too sloppy, but, um, it's worth saying that these are very, um, significant psychological effects. that we're talking about and then I'm writing my next book on social attributes. I've interviewed these like neuroscience researchers and it's scary stuff. And one of the main things that happens is is that we lose our social appetite. So we stop feeling like we want to socialize. And this is why I'm honestly by this point in writing my next book quite unhappy that people call things a loneliness crisis. Because we are not lonelier than we have been in previous generations. There is no good empirical evidence that we feel any lonelier than we used to. We are just more alone. And that is a really different thing. People who are lonely crave social contact. They want to have friends. They want to see people. They have other problems. I mean, to be honest with you, when you look at the data and detail, people who are lonely are primarily anxious and depressed people. People who are anxious and depressed anyway. And then part of that manifestus loneliness. But people who just have social attributes just haven't been socializing for a while. They don't necessarily feel lonely. They are actually like, I'm fine. Other people are stressful. I'm happy to be on my couch with my Netflix/video game/phone. And that's much more worrying to me. The other thing that tends to happen to people when they're socially atrophied, besides that their brain literally shrinks, is that they become more paranoid. And I mean this in the social way. So they're not paranoid where they're like aliens are going to eat my brain. The FBI has a camera on my house. They're paranoid in the sense that they are like, my best friend doesn't actually like me very much. I think she didn't text me back. You know, people are talking about me at that party. I can't go to that party. And I would say I've experienced this form of paranoia personally. In many ways, certainly they're usually in very stressful social situations, anyway, for whatever reason. But I'll find myself having incredibly ungenerous interpretations of people. And the more isolated you are, the more you can be caught in that kind of loop. And it's very destructive because it means that you stop reaching out to people. You stop engaging with them. Anyway, I just want to say this is a very complex, systemic brain problem. You know, and it's something in there that I've observed on social media over the last couple of years is also the kind of cognitive justify that's going on. The number of memes sort of declaring to the world that somebody has, you know, neurodivergence or they're an empath or they're an introvert. And therefore, just to find why they don't want to go out, where they find people too much and so on. So it's now become a trope, you know, almost a fashionable trope to be incapable of being social. Yeah, I think there is a kind of glamourization of it, you know, and I think that is really unfortunate, not because everyone else is great, but because the cost of our social outrophy is incredibly high, you know, yeah. So yes, I mean, look, part of the solution to this, it's actually annoyingly a really complicated social problem. I get into it a bit in this book and then the next book is all about this. Some of it is, is what you would imagine is the kind of of the church, you know, and look, I'm not, I'm a secular Jew, but like it just turns out the people doing a religion does help them be social. And like, yes, certain kinds of coordinated work is the decline of the union. It's the decline of the workplace in a way, right? I mean, in general, like people are not going into the workplace, who are they socializing with? I don't know about you, but when COVID hit, I left my last workplace and I have never gone back. I don't have colleagues, you know, it's the decline of the comfort that people used to have with letting their kids run around the street is the fact that we move for work all the time. So we don't know our neighbors. I mean, it's kind of, it's one of those big social trends where everything has kind of made push in one direction and we're seeing a lot of effects. It's so many things. It's also, and this is a more awkward thing and I'm only really getting into that in the next book, but it's also partially that we're single. People are not full than they used to be. And look, again, I'm, you know, I'm a polyamorous, like weirdo. So I'm not saying like we need the nuclear family, but I am, I am saying that we have seen a bunch of interesting institutions decline and nothing has really taken their place. So whether or not you think marriage is great, it did basically cover a bunch of people's loneliness. Rather, yeah, it prevented their social atrophy. See, even I get caught in the language loop, it prevented their social atrophy because there was at least one other person in the house of them all the time. And we actually now have a very complicated gender slash financial problem with our society where especially lower income men and women just do not get married. And they are alone or they are living in their parents' house, but not really interacting with people that much. And that is very bad for us. It doesn't mean the solution is like we need more heterosexual marriage. I'm not a conservative in this respect, but we just have a bunch of social problems that are all pushing in this direction. We need social infrastructure, right? We need like the tobacco. I write a lot about that. And we're going to have to build it ourselves probably because of neoliberalism, yes, but also because governments actually don't love social infrastructure usually. They might build some big social infrastructure projects here or there for other reasons, often as a way of kind of, you know, in good years of the human history, they do that to like bribe the populace, you know, in the gentle way. But they also are pretty worried about social infrastructure, especially social infrastructure. They can't control. And history is long with examples of governments basically being like, especially coffee shops. There's like big fear of coffee shops because it's a place where people are together and they're not drunk. So they like might strategize, you know, and they might strategize you away. Is that real? Is that a fear of coffee shops? Is that something that's being documented or or written about? There's like great articles, but I actually write about it in the book. In Chopper 6, I give a couple of examples. You know, in the Ottoman Empire, they banned coffee shops for a while because they were worried that there would be a plot against the government. And there was, and then, you know, in England, there's like the first few coffee shops in the 1600s. And everyone loves this drug because obviously coffee is amazing. And then the government kind of freaks out because they're like, this is worse than pubs. You know, when people went and got drunk and in like a medieval pub, they were, they were sort of like boozing and maybe having crazy sex and whatever. But they're unlikely to overthrow the government because they're not that focused. Their worry was basically in the coffee shop people conspired. And they weren't wrong. The coffee shops did help organize revolutions. And then the government even like spreads rumors. They're like coffee will make men impotent. You know, they're just, it's a danger in a way to people in power whenever other people can gather together and meet, especially sober. And so look, we need a social infrastructure. And we're going to have to build it ourselves. And you know, it's worth saying usually people tell me like, I want to build a social infrastructure. I want to build a really like beautiful, like, queer centered crystals maze. And I'll be like, that's tons amazing. Don't do that. That's not what we need. So what do we need? We need social infrastructure. First of all, that is probably already in your community, but falling apart and being neglected. Like the number one thing you should do is even make a new social infrastructure. It's just go find the social and we see there that already exists that, you know, don't do because the thing is if you build a private or expensive social infrastructure, even something where the latte is five pounds or whatever, then only people who can afford a five pound latte are going to be in your social infrastructure. And meanwhile, everyone who can't afford that or has other problems, they're disabled. They need this or that, you know, they're not going to come. And you need to go find the social infrastructure that was already serving loads of people and then make sure it doesn't die. I mean, that's like the number one thing. And it's totally unglamorous. And the bad news about almost everything that's politically worth doing is it's really unglamorous. It's way less glamorous than debating. It's much less glamorous, even than making your own coffee shop. It's, it's like just showing up to the public library and doing stuff for it, you know. Yeah, give us some examples of the spaces, the third spaces that actually bring people together and give them these kinds of experiences that then enable them to open up to, let's say, life, bettering, life generating, political ideas. So libraries, coffee shops, what other sort of spaces should we be preserving, potentially also creating down the track if they've already been destroyed in our community. Yeah, I mean, the food cops are great one. The food cops are another example. There, there's these networks community gardens that they're every way. Yeah, yeah, libraries, parks, public places. I mean, I write a lot about the, the social fabric that was sporting civil rights movement, for example. And, you know, in a way, those folks were very good at using the infrastructure they had. And they had it part for bleak reasons. They had it because, of course, they weren't allowed in other people's social infrastructure because of segregation and hatred and racism. But, you know, it's a, for example, they used everything. I mean, they even used the hair salon, right? The hair salon for, for black folks is like still a place of cultural and social organizing, but certainly in that time it was. And, you might, you might be given like political materials by someone running the, the caught, sorry, the hair salon. So that's an example. I think, you know, increasingly, honestly, climate world, we're probably going to have to have cooling spaces that become the political third infrastructure. Like, I would love to see cooling spaces that Madrid, no, sorry, Barcelona has recently created a like every five minute walk. There is a cooling space. So you will always be living five minutes from a cooling space. And if people manage to make those into organizing hubs for social change, that would be amazing. But we're going to go into what he's talking about. It's, it's an air condition space. But the idea is that, you know, as you and I discussed before we started recording, it's not a good idea that every space should be air conditioned in a city because it completely screwed up the world, right? So instead, a better plan that we are trying to execute is like, okay, maybe there's one cooling space that everyone can go to in the neighborhood. There's one five minutes away from everyone, right? The prudent government here, once the heat wave was announced, open up the canal for swimming. Now, it's perfectly safe for swimming. It's just that it has to be policed and monitored so that people don't drown. But it is the hub of the city right now. Everybody is at the canal, especially in the evenings. And there's teenage kids, old people, you know, sitting there with their feet in the canal, kids jumping off the bridges, which theoretically not then allowed to do. But the police have given up. They're just, you know, keeping an eye on it, making sure people don't do anything too stupid and don't drown. But it's actually brought incredible joy and pride. Like everyone's super excited about the fact there's this craziness going on where people are swimming in the canal. And so, yeah, cooling spaces, that's a super interesting idea because I can tell you in Paris right now, I'm spending my days trying to find somewhere cool to be, you know, googling hotels that have lobbies where people can go and work. Yeah. So, so, okay, these infrastructures super important preserving them, supporting them and so on. But you mentioned the idea of the food cop, you go to a food cop, you find it really wonderful, you've explained why it works. I have two weeks to go up more than going anywhere, but yes, yes, yes. So how do we get the people that we're trying to bring along with us on this ride? How do we get them to these spaces? I mean, obviously talking about it, reasoning them with them and giving them lots of facts about third spaces and experiences that, you know, they need to be doing to be able to open themselves up, that's not going to work. So what are some techniques that get people to these spaces with us? Here's what I do. I tend not to tell people, look, it's great if you can offer people a thing they need, like obviously if you can give them cheap food or air conditioning, that's wonderful. But I would actually say I no longer primarily focus on that as an organizer, rather that's not true. I quietly build the material stuff people want, like I think that's really important. But the other thing that I tend to do in terms of like getting people into places is I actually ask them for their help because my experience is that people, and you know, there's lots of probably evidence about this too, but like I'll just start with that is that people are quite individualistic and they can find attempts to give them things they might want, like both understandably condescending and also it's just it's just uncomfortable for people. Like they feel like I shouldn't be receiving a hand out blah blah, right? So when I want someone to really join a movement, I don't tell them what they're going to get out of it necessarily. I usually ask them for their help, which is in my view, both more genuine and more humble. I'm like I need your help and I do need their help. I usually do need their help because I need everyone's help to do a thing. So I'll say, you know, it would be great if you would join the food club. We would love you know, you're such a good part of the community like we need you. And that's yeah. And so I guess I've been trying to flip that around in the way I work to say like I need you. You know, I didn't. Have you come across the Benjamin Franklin effect? Apparently when he was starting out in politics. Yeah. There was somebody I think yeah across from the other side who was just controlling him, trolling him. And he was unbearable. And eventually what he did is he went and asked this person's person collected rare books and he went and asked for a copy of this particular rare book. And the the trolls was so chuffed that he was needed, you know, he simply spoke over immediately. And off the back of that, they developed a friendship. So it's this idea that yeah. And it makes sense. This is what we're here for. You know, like we are, I mean, it's really boring. I'm not a very normative person in a lot of ways. Like you want to live your life a weird way, great, whatever. I think there's very few norms you can apply to human life. I think sociality is one of them. And I think our sociality is in large part about interdependence. It's not just chitchat, you know, it's like we want to be needed. We want to be important to other people. We want to feel like we had a good role in their life. And when we're lacking that, like we just think we fall apart. That's what we're here for. So yeah. Yeah, it's it's very much about show don't tell invite, don't force people into these kinds of new ways of thinking. One question I really wanted to ask you is like a lot of people who are listening to this podcast and who have read my work. We tend to hit a point where we find ourselves talking about all of this kind of information. And quite often we'll be at a dinner party or a barbecue or at a cafe and somebody's like wanting to discuss a complex idea. And it can be really difficult talking about some of the ideas that are going on in the world today. Because to do so, we've got to leave the linear mindset that we're all so entrenched in where we just talk about isolated issues, let's say the climate crisis. And we ignore all the externalities and the ripple on effects, the domino effect and, you know, the rare earth minerals that are being used, the slavery required to produce the batteries, all this kind of thing. Do you have any advice for being able to talk about difficult subjects? So I know that we're debating, doesn't work, you know, ramming people over the head with facts and figures, doesn't work. Are there some nuanced tips that you can give for people so that, you know, they're able to talk about this kind of stuff with friends and family? Yeah, I mean, one of the things I read about in the book is something called deep canvassing. And I want to start here by saying like this isn't how you should change the world. This is just what you might want to do if you have to deal with your difficult neighbor most of the time or relative. Because deep canvassing is like a very specific technique that you have to learn. It's really time-intensive. It does seem to work better than normal canvassing and it does seem to persuade people and that's amazing, but it's so time-intensive that for most social movements, that's not what you need. That said, I'll tell you how deep canvassing works, that way if you are at the dinner table with your uncle, you can at minimum have a less frustrating experience maybe. The way that deep canvassing works is like look with normal canvassing, you go to the door, you knock on the door, you're like, hey, are you going to vote for blah? And the person's like, yeah, and if they're like, yeah, then you're like, okay, I'll come pick you up on the day for the polls. It helps turn out. And most research suggests it only helps it turn out. You know, it doesn't help with persuasion. If you meet someone who says they disagree with you and you talk to them, that doesn't seem to help them. If they are on the fence, that talking doesn't seem to do very much. It's just a turnout tool for the most part. Relational organizing a little bit different because the relationship pulls people a little bit, but it's not the most effective thing canvassing usually. Deep canvassing, you go to the door, you knock on the door, you say like, hey, how are you, you know, how much in favor are you if I don't like gender neutral bathrooms or whatever, right? This has been used a lot for LGBTQ stuff. And then the person will say, say like, let's say you say like, okay, you're a hundred percent opposed or a hundred percent of favor, right? You know, zero to 10. And I'll say, oh, I'm a two. And you want them to be at 10. But you don't ask them like, why aren't you at 10? This is so important. Whoa, you say, oh, why aren't you at zero? And then that person has to say their own reasons why they're not at a zero. And they have to hear from their own mouth with their own words and their own motivations, why they might come to agree with you. Because as the person who invented this technique noted, they're always going to believe themselves in the conversation. You know, they're going to believe their own like voice. And that's an important part of the deep canvassing. And that's something you can do with your neighbors and your relatives, right? And then the other part of it is that you're going to, you're happening to express ambivalence, which is a difficult thing for humans. I'm very bad at ambivalence at times. I hate it. I've had a very painful, but it turns out I'm not alone. Like most people ambivalence is a really difficult thing to feel and even articulate and notice in yourself. So you're letting them do that. And this helps with cognitive dissonance, obviously, or perhaps not, obviously, but it's part of it. And then the other thing that happens is that you share an experience from your own life about how the thing affects you or at least someone you know, right? So like maybe you're not trans, but you can talk about your trans friend or whatever. And that seems to help, especially if you're really non-judgmental towards them. You know, like if you, if you can kind of be like, oh, that's really interesting. I can see your point of view. Well, I just know that, you know, I have a friend and this is how it affects them. Like that kind of conversation seems to essentially pull on all the relational parts of our brain. So that we are able for the first time, maybe, to consider the issue another way. And deep canvassing has been shown to be much more successful at actually moving people on the political spectrum and keeping them in a new position. It works over time, which is very impressive. I would say, you know, still, it's not the best tool for organizing because it's so much time. And if you only have 40 hours to do something, most of the time, unless there's like a really important building past near territory persuading people and defense actually isn't that important. It's not. I know we have this in our democratic model, but like, you probably need something else in that case. If you're working out to climate change, it probably isn't even the issue because most people kind of agree with you. They're just unmotivated. There are just other things we need to be doing a lot of the time. But it's my useful technique if you have to talk to someone you disagree with. You know, if you can manage it. So we cover the kind of a kaleidoscope of different eye interconnected ideas, you know, our experiences and getting people into spaces where they can have a shared experience with people who have other ideas and who role model a different way of being. That's a really great way of going about things. The relationship side of things, it's the third spaces. For anyone who's listening and they're really wanting to get more engaged, what would be some, and they're wanting to do something in the next six months, you know, they're wanting to really get started on this kind of thing. And be part of what I call the sort of, that the laying out of the ideas that need to be lying around as the old world crumbles and we start to build the what comes next, you know, to quote Milton Friedman's famous quote, you know, the ideas need to be lying around, you know, so that we can create the what comes next. So if anyone who wants to be part of that movement, what would you suggest they go out and prioritize? You said that so deep canvassing takes a lot of work. It's not necessarily what you would focus on. Yeah, what should we be doing in focusing? I mean, I actually have a blog post on my sub stack that just says like, yeah, sort of talking about politics and I would go and look at that. And like I think, unfortunately, all of the answers are like not incredibly sexy, but they're all incredibly important. And they are basically, first of all, you should join the thing with other people. Like this is not a thing to be doing on your own. It's not a thing to be doing with just one friend even, although I actually do some things with my friend Max who do love teaching to you, but you know, mostly you want to be in like a larger structure. And I know right away that that's going to turn some people off because you're going to think, what about people and now we're going to negotiate with them and they're going to bring them on snacks and they're going to have the wrong political opinions. And I hate this. And I like very much like that. So what kind of size group is the most effective for to get into the issue is unfortunately, I can't give you that. But you know, like at the end of the day, like something like climate change, sorry, we need to be motivated to be or coordinated in like in the millions, like with this is a big deal, you know. So and the other reason that we need to join something with other people is that, and I say this as a person who's certainly guilty of this myself, like we don't have the skills. And I think this is really hard for a lot of people I talk to to to accept because we're all very smart people who read so many books and like have so many good opinions and went to so many fancy degrees. And guess what? Like I have three fancy ass degrees from like Harvard, Cambridge, and Oxford, and I don't have the skills. You know, I don't have some of these skills because these skills are skills that you learn through doing. They're skills about like listening to other people, they're skills about reading a room, they're skills about being patient when other people. So I just don't have them. I have at least at minimum the humility to know that even after six years of being a mutual aid coordinator, working with like elderly people and poor people and disadvantaged people and disabled people and like I still have the skills. It's so hard. And you know, only really experienced organizers end up with these skills usually. And you need to build the skills now. So you're going to have to go join a movement now, just start building the skills. And the place where you join the movement is going to be massively imperfect. And you're going to be really annoyed by the people. And you're going to have to stick it out pretty much, well, occasionally switching movements maybe because you have to build the skills and community with other people in a coalition, which is annoying. And you're going to have to do consistently, like we just have a problem of both individualist mindset and the wrong skill set that needs overcoming it in this way. Yeah. And you need to reinforce the social infrastructure in your community. We need to do this because to be honest with you, I think we're not going to get to choose this, the issue that we're going to end up with, right? Like we don't know whether sadly and darkly whether we're going to end up mostly fighting this battle because there's a food shortage. And then that's how we like convince the government to do something or whether it's going to be flooding or whether it's going to be fire or whether it's going to be heat wave or what you know, we don't like we're basically probably going to almost certainly run into some massive terrifying issue. And we are going to be useless on our own. Well, we're going to be useful for is if we've built a network of other people who have learned to coordinate together, even when they're not getting long especially well to do an important thing for the community in the social infrastructure that they've been building up for 10 years. That's what we have to go do. And it is like not at all sexy. But you know what I will say this. And this is one of the few things that keeps me going. And I know you wanted to ask about that. I have a couple of other things as well. Yeah. One of the things I looked at at the end of the book is like, OK, all these things I've been describing, this huge shifts in mindset and skills and behavior and anti individualism, essentially, a certain kind of individual individualism anyway, right? You can certainly have your own individual art taste or whatever. Like, well, there's a lot of evidence that left in people are less happy than right wing people. And I was very curious about this. And I kind of ended up looking in depth at all this research. And honestly, even when you control for lots of other factors that you could blame for this, it's true. Like if you control for marriage, religiosity, money, whatever, like still, if you are left in person, you're more in happy than right wing person, usually because it's really females, young left wing females. And honestly, it kind of makes sense because you look at the world and you're like, damn, we're so screwed, right? And you see all the injustice. And that's very interesting. But the good news is that if you're a left wing person and you're actively involved in a social movement or some kind of activism, you're much happier. So basically, you can reclaim your happiness. If you were to say, yeah, yeah, yeah, and that is the medicine we got, you know, and I think it's and the reason I think this is difficult for people to believe when I first say it is that in our culture, the way that we model happiness is is as ease. The way we model it is as ease. We're like, oh, yeah, like totally with you on that and quality or this blender or this, I don't know, quick hack for your brain is going to make things easy for you. And then you're going to be happy. But I don't, but actually being happy and having ease are not that closely related to each other. You know, and especially they're not that closely related to each other in the long run. Because really, yeah, human history shows that it's actually when we're lived in times of friction and discomfort that we've produced the greatest well-being indicators, you know, the example being during the London Blitz, you know, everybody expected people to fall apart. In fact, it was the happiest time in British history. Also, the healthiest time because of the austerity measures that were put in place. So right art and philosophy has, you know, flourished in times of difficulty. Yeah, and you know, basically, in short, we are happiest. Most research suggests the number one producer of our happiness is the quality of our relationships with other people, right? It's like your marriage. And then you're never comfortable. Then they're comfortable or easy. I honestly like, you know, good luck having that, you know, marriage is hard, right? As they always say, but it is, it's just hard because you have to accommodate yourself to the other. And that's like, incredibly inconvenient. And your spouse always wants the wrong thing with the dishwasher and the metaphor for the closure. And so, you know, and what I'm saying is that the really unglamorous, uncomfortable, annoying, relational frictioning stuff that no one wants is exactly what will make them happy. And they just don't know it yet, you know, and so I am the proselytizer for that. But I, I will, all I can say is I have proselytizer for it as a person who has done it and has really done through like many of the really trenches of it as well, I like live in a communal home and like, there are problems. And sometimes people have to leave. That is honestly heartbreaking, you know, I've done organizing and I've watched most people drop off in just a few long distance runners keep it going. And like, that is heartbreaking. I have had movements fail, mostly if you have in a movement on the left it fails, you just don't get what you want, you know, like, I have been through it. And I'm, and I think I can still honestly say both as a data person and an individual person that the good news though is that when I wake up in the morning, I never worry that I'm not doing the thing I need to do. I mean, I sometimes worry I've got the strategy wrong. Don't get me wrong like I'm so much like, well, maybe I shouldn't write a book, maybe I shouldn't use anything else. But I, there is nothing really you can trade for that feeling. And there's nothing really you can trade for knowing other people exist in the world that you are, that have your phone number that you can call who care and are doing something. And so yeah, I'm just a big process for that. That's what we got to do. Yeah, okay, one final little element tool that is politics politically speaking. A lot of people are very particularly in the US, very, you know, disillusioned with politics, they've given up on democracy. What do we need to preserve and fight for in that kind of space? I mean, protest, I think is something we should fight for the, we should protest for the right to protest that's certainly out there as one of my priorities. Is there anything else that you would add to that in terms of what works, what we need to actually be doing to ensure we can keep communicating humanity, you know, with humanity and, and pulling them forward to the, to the better outcomes. Yeah, so one of the things I made a bit of real recently, which I think how you found me, which is just me talking about what protest. And here, I mean, specifically demonstration, because actually there are many kinds of protests, right? Like strikes are from protest, blowing stuff up as a forward protest, you know, boycotts are a form of protest. Those things work for other reasons, if they work, which is complicated, because they hold something material like from the hands of the people who are powerful, right? But with demonstration, it's, it's essentially a speech act, you're just kind of like in the streets yelling. And when they did measurements on whether demonstrations are effective, the answer is not in a direct way, right? I mean, the way I say it in the thing is more like polarizing, maybe, but like, it's not in the direct way, it's not that the government sees those a protest, a demonstration, and they think like, Oh, damn, we better do something. In fact, they rarely change their policy because there's a demonstration and there's not really any obvious, like direct effect. Similarly, with like public opinion, people's opinion changes a little bit around the time of the demonstration, then goes back to normal pretty quickly. So this doesn't seem that's not what a demonstration is doing. But there is one group of people who are really changed by demonstrations, and that's the people in them, the protesters, those people are changed for life, which makes sense because their relationships and their actions have shifted, right? And therefore, what I would say about demonstration is like, OK, it's a, it's a thing that is therefore mobilization retention and recruitment, which are very important things. It's basically a giant party and you invite all your friends and then you like get them hooked, right? Except that's not a French see it. The French see it is just what you do on a Saturday. It's their social life. It's their sport. They go to a protest and then they go and have a coffee afterwards or a beer afterwards with their friends. It's what you do. And it's an ongoing thing. You don't just go once for one big one, you know? Yeah. Right. And I guess what I would say here is, you know, this matters because we should have demonstrations sometimes, but we should use them for what they're for, which is making all of your friends come and then recruiting them. And then the thing I think most movements are frankly terrible at still is like, when someone comes to a demonstration, they should immediately be like, get all their contact information taken. A buddy is provided to them. The buddy follows up with them. The buddy brings them to the next meeting. The buddy checks in with them and figures out their skill set and a science and cool tasks to do. The buddy wishes the happy birthday. You know, I mean, like, there's so much more we could be doing at most movements, really haven't thought about because they're again, like we're thinking at such an individualistic level where everything is about ease. But this is not about ease. This is about like being in it for life, as I say, you know? Yeah. Yeah. So that's that's yeah. Sorry, I almost lost the question because I'm so passionate about this. But no, no, it was about what kind of political setups and structures should we be preserving slash creating that can spest service? Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, we've talked about a bunch of them. I think there's probably a role for a different kind of political party, right? And you know, this is always a controversial thing to say because people will think like, oh, you want Maoism or something that like I don't want Maoism. But like, there, there have been models of the political party where people are members, where they are committed in terms of their resources, both time and money, where they agree on a decision, and then they pursue it even when some members disagree, right? We're like, you basically come to a democratic decision making process about the strategy. And then you do it, even if you disagree. And I think we are in time where that is so important because the reality is like, a lot of people will come to me during our movement, organizing workshops or fascism stuff or what are anti-fascism stuff, obviously. And they're like, what can we do? And I don't have a single answer because we don't know, you know, like, and worse, here's the worst news. It's also not like an aesthetic question, right? I think a lot of people, you ask them, like, what is your view about how we should create social change? And they tell you what they wish were true? And you know, like, they're like, I really want to believe that if I create like really beautiful art, it will inspire people and then the world will change. But like, look, I want that to be true also, but it has no relationship between what I want to be true and what's actually true. And so instead, if you're working in politics, you basically, instead, and I mean this in the broad sense of politics, like grassroots and included, you're not going to get the answer you want. Like, reality won't conform to your desire for how the world will work. You're actually just going to have to try things out. And then if they don't work, you're going to have to pick something else until you find something that does work. And it might not be the strategy wants it. And I think that is really hard for people that are like used to consumerism, because they're like, well, whatever I feel like. And I'm like, no, like this has nothing to do with what we feel like. It's just to be now able to buy an outcome out. somewhere, you know. The thing that I say and I think it's relevant here is that a lot of people feel that all the work they've put into the climate movement or whatever it's going nowhere, it's all waste of time. No, no, no, no. The way that emergence works is that every single little piece of activity will move the system in a particular kind of direction. So if it's infused with care and if it's infused with the desire to connect and collaborate with other humans and produce more life-generating ideas, it's all going to count. It just might not be direct. It's going to be a more sort of interrelated build on layers, mushing kind of effect that we don't always see in, you know, with our linear lenses on. Yeah, I think basically we're not going to be able to tell in advance like what's going to work. We're going to have a price left, which means we're going to commit to someone else's plan for a while and just do it and see if it works because it needs a lot of people involved. I mean, do it because it's the right thing to do, you know? Yeah, and I think, you know, like it's just not an individualist thing. I mean, look at the food co-op. Something someone says to me all the time about the food co-op is they're like, but what if one week everyone wants to have broccoli and I want to have an eggplant, you know? And I'm like, yeah, that'll suck. I think you should get some broccoli because the idea of being in the food co-op is more important, right? Then they're like, yeah, or whatever. And I don't mean this in some sort of like sex-implied way. Like, you know, I think that ability to forgo most of the banal personal preferences to do a thing collectively is again, one of these skills that we have just like lost and we're going to have to go back and do it because if we don't do it, the reality is that we will end up with infinite personal choice and it will all be completely meaningless because like the planet will burn to a crisp and, you know, will live under like authoritarian fascist style governments and all of our rates will be reversed. And, you know, it just doesn't matter whether you get the Obergine, sorry. I think that's an awesome note to end on. That kind of says it all, you know, live with the Obergine. You know, it's going to be okay. Adjust and put your preferences second. Hey, I'm Sarah, that was wonderful. I've going to ask one last question. How do you personally cope? You've mentioned a few bits and pieces. I imagine activism is part of it. But yeah, how do you keep your, how do you keep your humanity intact and, um, be able to be such a bacon in this moment? Gosh, I mean, I don't know if I'm vegan, but I'm trying to be useful. Uh, I think, okay, so obviously I talked about like doing stuff really matters and I'm doing stuff all the time. So I think in many ways I really get to escape that trap that so many of us are stuck in. So many people I know are stuck in where they're like, I feel hopeless and I can't do anything because I every day I get them to do something, you know, every day I'm talking like another political group or I feel very useful and that that's probably number one thing. I think also like for me, maybe because I studied history, um, I have a kind of like, um, combination like pessimism, optimism, mix that is very helpful where I look at this and I'm like, man, it's going to be a hard millennium, you know, like, but I, you look, I mean, you know, I'm a very radical lefty Jew, but I'm Jewish and I'm part of six thousand year old tradition, you know, and I would say like for me, more than a religion, it's a civilization that just happens to be spread out all across the globe. And I, and six thousand years is like peanuts compared to some things. So I just look at this and I think one of the things I tend to do is I tend to be like, yeah, like it's going to be a rough millennium. Like probably isn't going to be fun century either. In fact, it's a particularly bad century bit. You know, I have this sort of sense that like time is very big and I'm really invested in what people think in a thousand years. So like, I don't know, we might figure some shit out in a thousand years, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Um, that cosmic insignificance that being really pulled back from the screen and seeing the bigger picture of what's going on here, I think really helps. And to that end, you know, reading and learning about humanity and how we've been in moments like this before is so important to what we're in. We can't be apathetic. We can't sort of shut off from this, um, at this juncture in history. Hey, Sarah, that was a wonderful conversation. I really appreciate your time and your care and good luck with your next book. Thank you. I'd like to talk again when it comes out. I love that. I would love to do that. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks again.