Factually! with Adam Conover - Philosophers Explain How a Single Person Can Make a Difference with Alex Madva and Michael Brownstein

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

The rumors are true: our world is a dumpster fire, and it feels like it’s growing hotter and stinkier by the day. If it feels hopeless, like it’s useless for one person to even try, perhaps it’s a change in perspective. This week, Adam sits with two philosophers to explain why change is ALWAYS possible. Alex Madva is a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona, and Michael Brownstein is a professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Together with Daniel Kelly, they wrote the new book Somebody Should Do Something: How Anyone Can Create Social Change. Find their book at factuallypod.com/books--SUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAbout Headgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgum» Advertise on Factually! via Gumball.fmSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is a headgum podcast. Folks, you know, the holidays are almost here and you still have names on your list, don't you? Well, don't panic. Uncommon goods makes holiday shopping stress-free and joyful with thousands of one-of-a-kind gifts you cannot find anywhere else. You'll discover presents that feel meaningful and personal, never rushed or last minute. Uncommon goods looks for products that are high-quality, unique, and often handmade, or made in the U.S. Many are crafted by independent artists and small businesses,

making every gift feel meaningful and truly one of a kind. When you shop at Uncommon Goods, you're supporting artists and small independent businesses. Many of their handcrafted products are made in small batches, so shop now before they sell out this holiday season. You know, I've discovered amazing gifts for friends and relatives that I wouldn't have found anywhere else. For a pinball fanatic friend,

I found a beautiful custom DIY kit to build a wooden tabletop pinball machine. How cool is that? It's not just a game, but it's a craft, too. And for my dad, who loves national parks, I found some retro-style smoky bear merchandise. These are things that will really surprise and delight them unless they're listening right now and realize I'm talking about them.

Dad, I told you not to listen to the podcast. You know, I also like that with every purchase you make it uncommon goods, they give back $1 to a nonprofit partner of your choice, and they have donated more than $3.1 million to date. So don't wait, make this holiday the year you give something truly unforgettable. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com slash factually. That's uncommon goods.com slash factually for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer.

Uncommon goods. They're all out of the ordinary. Yeah, but that's all right, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hey there, welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Kanover. I'm thrilled to have you on the show right now. I hope you're happy to be here, too,

because the rest of the world really fucking sucks right now, doesn't it? So many bad things are happening from so many different angles that it can feel overwhelming. It can feel like all. the tools that were normally given to fight back and to make the world a better place have simply failed. I mean, we voted, we donated, we protested. A lot of us have organized and we still have an insane fascist government that does 10 new bad things every day, not to mention looming problems that we're refusing to address like climate change, AI, and I don't know,

all our bodies being full of microplastics plus name half a dozen other things. So what is the average person like you or me supposed to do about it. You know, you can be forgiven for shriveling up, retreating inside your home and just spending the rest of your life watching sports or playing Silk Song, which is a really fun but long game. And I think it's going to take me the rest of my life to finally complete the motherfucker. But obviously, that's not going to help anything because it's not the case that we have no

impact on the world or that nothing that we do matters. clearly it does. The world was created by people. Every system that we live under was created by people. Everything that has ever happened on the planet Earth has happened because of people. So people like us clearly can affect the world around us. The question is, how? What can we actually do to make the world a better place? I mean, we know that our individual choices aren't going to change the world by themselves. We know that the problems are structural, but how can we, as individuals make change on a structural level. Well, today on the show, we have two philosophers who have taken a deep look at how change works, how it has worked historically, and how we as individuals can actually contribute to it in a real tangible way. I know this conversation is going to leave you feeling inspired and enliven it and perhaps a little bit less pessimistic about the future of the world, not because things are just

automatically going to get better, but because maybe you're going to have a couple ideas about how you can actually do something to make it a little bit better. Now, before we get into that, I want to remind you that you want to support the show and all the conversations we bring you every single week. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conner. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of this show, ad free. You can also join our wonderful online community. We would love to have you.

And if you want to come see me doing stand-up comedy on the road, coming up soon, December 4th, I will be in Washington, D.C. at the Lincoln Theater. December 5th through 6th, I will be in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. January 8th, Madison, Wisconsin, a comedy on state, one of the best clubs in the country. So excited to be there. On January 15th and 16th, I will be in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Oh, January 17th as well, almost left that out. January 15th through 17th, Fort Wayne, Indiana.

February 12th and 13th and 14th, I'll be in Houston, Texas, and February 19th, 20th, and 21st. I'll be in San Francisco taping my new special at the punchline. Come on out to see me, Adamconover.com. all those tickets and tour dates. I'd love to see you and give you a hug at the meet and greet after every single show. And now let's get to this week's episode. My guests today are Alex Madva and Michael Brownstein. Alex is a professor of philosophy at Cal Poly Pomona and Michael is a professor of philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Together with Daniel Kelly, they wrote the new book, Somebody Should Do Something, How Anyone Can Create Social Change. And yes, that means you.

Please welcome Alex and Michael. Alex and Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. Thanks so much for having us. I'm thrilled to have you guys because things are pretty shitty right now in America, in the world at large. I feel like a lot of people are tapping out. A lot of people are saying, hey, you know what? I did all this stuff. They said I was supposed to do.

I voted. I donated. I took to the streets. I joined the ACLU. Like what the fuck else am I supposed? supposed to do like you know what maybe maybe things are just going to get worse and there's nothing anybody can do about it um that's some people feel that way other people just feel furious and pissed off uh your new book incredible title somebody should do something i love you've

written about this what so what where can people start if they actually do want to make a difference or or why why does positive change actually happen that's a lot of questions that's a A lot of questions. I fucking suck at this, man. I, I, I load it up at the top of the interview. These are the questions that, like, made us want to write this book because there's so many. Yeah, where did we start? Well, we started from doing a whole bunch of, like, scholarly research over the years

on how people change their minds about things and what leads them to take action. But in very specific context, like, what gets someone to make a different decision when they're hiring at their job so that they hire more diverse people? or what leads people to get involved in advocacy group, whether it's for climate change or like providing more affordable housing or whatever the issue is. And what we realized was there was this ongoing conversation amongst all of our lefty progressive friends

about feeling like they know that just focusing on themselves and their own individual decisions is not enough. Like we're not going to change the world by disqualification. by deciding to recycle or riding a bike one day rather than getting in your car. And we've like absorbed this message that we have to change institutions and change the system and change social structures instead. But that just feels like very vague and very far away from anyone's own individual choices, like in your own day-to-day life.

And so what we wanted to do was take all this academic and social scientific and philosophical research that we had been doing for years and try to plug it into that challenge, that question that we felt like lots and lots of people, including ourselves, were asking. So that's sort of the background, and then we got into, okay, what are some answers to that? And the book is organized around different kinds of answers that we find both in history, like the history of social movements and the history of how people have made big change in their worlds, but also in the scientific literature of all the different corners that people are studying social change. Has anyone studied this before? Are you guys the first ones to try to do this? Like, we invented all of the ideas. All of the

ideas are ours. I mean, people have been talking about how you change the world generally, but to actually, you know, it's usually a political argument for how you should, how you can or should change the world. It's, I can't think of talking to someone else who's done like a literature review, a scientific review of how it actually happens. Well, so we're definitely standing on the shoulders of tons and tons of giants across tons of different fields, activists, scientists, philosophers, and so on. But we did think there was a missing piece in terms of taking a lot of the cutting edge research and packaging it in ways that was story forward, narrative nonfiction kind of stuff that would engage people but would also kind

of show people a way into social change. And I do kind of want to go back to the part of the premise of your first question was sort of saying that like people are checked out and everything is terrible. And if you had asked us, you know, in late January, then we would have felt the same way. But, and on the one hand, it's true, like, news avoidance is at an all-time high right now. The percentage of people who say they sometimes or always avoid the news is very high. But on the other hand, we were shocked to learn recently that, according to some estimates, six of the eight largest protests in U.S. history have been since 2017.

Wow. And the No King's protest was the largest since Earth Day in 1970. Wow. And so in some ways, the golden age of protest is now. People are out there in the streets all across the country in all kinds of districts and all kinds of states. And so there's an interesting question about why we don't have that perception. We're not as aware of it as we are. But people have been doing stuff.

And so, you know, some people are doing something. Well, there's a feeling that, like, I went to a No King's protest. I was in Tacoma doing stand-up and they invited me to go and speak. It was very nice, right? And it was wonderful to see people out there in the streets. but you know I grew up my parents telling me about like protests in the 60 Vietnam protests right and it felt like oh that's how you change shit now I participate in those protests but it feels kind of like hey we're just saying we're unhappy nothing is going to happen as the result of that

you imagine Trump or Stephen Miller or whoever else going like okay have fun in the streets you're not fucking up my day like you're not giving me a problem you know when I contrast that For instance, the writers and actor strikes that was a part of two years ago, the whole point of that, we weren't protesting. We were fucking up the CEO's days by withholding our labor, right? It's like material. And so that's, I think, the gap that people maybe have where it's like, okay, great, I made a giant Trump puppet. And that made me feel better for a day. But like, how's this going to result in some change?

So part of the thing that we write about in the book is making a distinction between actions that you can take that are basically like to soothe your feelings. and actions that you can take that have some realistic chance of making a difference. But it's not always clear what's going to make a difference, particularly if you remember that even if it doesn't make a difference tomorrow,

it might make some difference that you couldn't have foreseen a week later, a month later, a year later. And so I think that the protests are really important even if they don't have some immediate payoff that we can see yet. I think, like, embedded in the contrast you drew with the strike

is the point that, like, all of these actions work when they put pressure on people who are in power, right? When they force them to make some choice they don't want to make. And so just getting into the streets just for the visibility itself, I think, doesn't do that. But it's a precondition for doing that.

And it also is probably the best instrument we have for, like, making it clear to all the people who might be sitting on the sidelines that, like, we care, and we are on the same team here, right, fighting for democracy or justice or whatever it is. And so, like, I don't have a lot of hope that I'm going to go to some protest and then tomorrow, like, Trump is going to be impeached and, you know, democracy is restored. But I don't think that's the point of it, right?

The point of it is that, as I just heard an immigrant rights attorney say last night, the antidote to authoritarianism is community and I think protests are one of many ways that people can build community and that's where it looks inspiring because at the very least it's the community of people who are not okay with this and they're all in one place

and I felt that when I was in Tacoma I was like man look at these people turned out and that was just part of the whole Seattle metropolitan area you know there were multiple other ones happening around that same day So that's true and cool. I want to go back to the distinction between individual action and structural change because that's what I've drawn in my work tons of times, right?

I'm constantly in the last decade of me doing material about how to, you know, television, YouTube, stand up, whatever, about making the world a better place. It's almost always, hey, this thing that, you know, corporate America told you to do to make their world a better. That was actually a lie. The crying Indian was a lie to distract you. from the structural change and so what we need is a new structural change in return made a general argument like that over and over again um do you keep making it you're doing this you think that's

true still that's what i was going to ask basic well for sure yeah so you know i had i thought i had actually come up with this joke myself but at the in the last episode of your g what the netflix show the g word the g word sorry can i just tell you something that wasn't that wasn't my first choice for a title okay it's not a good title I wanted to call a show, big government. I thought that that was funny and punchy. Yeah, yeah. The political people who were involved were a little bit.

Does it? What does this say? They overthought it and they didn't like it. And so that was our number two, the best number two we would come up with. I've never told that story. You happen to be hearing this story. It's now years later. We had some bad number two titles for our money.

The G spot on your show, the G spot? Like, what was going on? What was it about? Orgasms, you know, so anyway. What is the government doing for your orgasms? Yeah. What were you about to say? So one of the things you say in the last episode is like Soylent Green, the government is people.

And I had thought that I had come up with that joke, but clearly not. But so, right, so part of what's great about that joke is that it's when, so this is one of the things we talk about in the book is there's this tendency towards either or thinking where you're thinking either I'm just acting as an individual and that means recycling. or, you know, buying an EV or just whatever I'm doing in my private sphere to reduce my personal carbon footprint, or maybe I'm just, maybe even I'm voting, but then you're only thinking about the action in terms of sort of, is my vote going to tip the skills of the election or not? And so that's the one component of the either or equation. But then it seems like, but those actions don't make any difference, so why bother? So then we switch over to structural change, but then it's like, okay, let's change the system. How am I going to do that? How am we going to get

the government to enforce an international treaty. And so part of the problem there is that when we're thinking about structural change, we're thinking about the systems as these big abstract entities that are just out there in the world and not realizing that they're made up of people. Of course, they're not just unconstrained people. They can't just do whatever they want, but that they are also composed of people. And so it's, you know, it's all about influencing and being influenced by other people and bootstrapping that up. So if we're thinking specifically about something like elections, one thing your audience can ask themselves is how many of them have ever voted in an election that came down to a tie or a one vote win, right? And, you know,

maybe, maybe in their like chess club election or maybe in something, you know, really small scale. But for the most part, hardly anybody has. Yeah. The rarest elections or the ones that are like a couple hundred votes. Right. Sometimes we'll get that for a state. Every once in a while, they do come down to one vote. And then sometimes they'll like, you know, draw names out of a hat and then that's that's democracy at its finest but um so when we're thinking about voting if we're thinking that the point of it is just my isolated action right now is going to change the fate of human history then it's going to seem pointless but we're forgetting all the other things that are involved here and so and so one thing that a lot of people probably have worn is an

i voted sticker right and like what are you doing when you're wearing that i voted sticker you're you're signaling to other people that you're proud of being a voter you're encouraging other people to vote. And now we're starting to think about the ways that we can impact other people and outcomes in a different way where we're thinking about social influence. So if we're thinking about something like, you know, why does someone put solar panels on their roof? Is the number one predictor that they really care about the environment? No. Is the number one predictor that people want to save a bunch of money? No. The number one predictor is whether their neighbors have solar panels on their roof. The number one predictor of whether you're going to

quit smoking is if your partners quit smoking, right? Yeah. And the second and third, most biggest predictors are whether your friends and family quit smoking, right? One of the biggest predictors of whether you become a voter later in your life is whether your college roommate was a voter. And so when we start thinking about those opportunities for social influence, that, you know, that's where we can start to leverage a lot more of our power. Your college roommate has that much of it. Like, I'm not voting. I went to college with a pothead who thought it was bullshit. Yeah. Ah. Like, that's a, that's a high predictor of all the people in your life. Well, it's almost as big a predictor as your parents, but it's, yeah, but it might be,

depend on which college you went to. Sorry, go for it. No, no, I was just going to say another way of thinking about the point Alex is making is that I think many of us have been raised with the concept of peer pressure, right? Like where you're supposed to be a little bit on the lookout for all the ways in which it's hard to resist doing what all the people around you are doing. But if other people are such sources of influence over us. That means that we are sources of influence over them. Like each of us is someone else's situation. And that means that we sort of form the world in which they are making their choices. And so like the point of wearing that I voted sticker isn't just to like look good. It's to like create the world in which people's impression is

that, oh, voting is something we do. And I think that's the like lesson throughout all those examples where you have more of an opportunity as an individual person to shape the social world that is this amorphous thing we're trying to change. But we don't often think of it like that. Folks, do you have anything on the internet that you really wish wasn't out there? I mean, for me, it's the mountain of extremely graphic slash fiction that I wrote as a teenager. What can I say, U-woo. I was of the fervent opinion that JRP's needed a lot more open-mouth kissing between the characters, an opinion that I still have today, but I choose to only share in podcast, ad copy and not sweaty 6,000-word stories with accompanying illustrations that I drew myself in Microsoft

paint. Now, while all of that was humiliating to reveal to you, it's not necessarily that harmful. While you may have embarrassing remnants of the past lingering on, what you really need to be worried about is that your actual personal data, including email addresses, phone numbers, names of relatives, all of it exists out there on the internet waiting to be grabbed by anyone looking to exploit you. And that is why I simply have to recommend delete me, a service I have been using for years and actually really believe in. Their teams of experts diligently hunt down your personal info, remove it from the internet and keep it gone, keeping you and your loved ones safe from all those bad actors out there. And you know, as the world gets more wired, there's

an uptick in online harassment, identity theft, even real life stalking, all because of this easily accessible information. So why take the risk? You, your family, and your loved ones, deserve to feel safe from that kind of invasion of privacy. So once again, do what I did years ago, do what it has kept me safe for years and check out, delete me, not just for your security, but for your friends and family too. And get this, you can get 20% off your delete me plan when you go to join delete me.com slash Adam and use promo code at checkout. That's join deleteme.com slash Adam, promo code Adam. And please, again, do not look up that fan fiction.

Folks, this episode is brought to you by Alma. You know, I cannot tell you how many times I've encountered people who think that they are getting real mental health advice on social media. Worse, it seems like there's a growing number of people who turn to chat bots because they assume that a real therapist is too expensive or just out of reach. But, you know, in my own mental health journey, it would have helped me so much to know how easy it is to access affordable quality care, care that is provided by a real person with a real connection who actually

understands what's going on with you. That's why if you are on your own journey of mental health, I recommend taking a look at Alma. They make it easy to connect with an experienced therapist, a real person who can listen, understand, and support you through whatever challenges you're facing. Quality mental health care is not out of reach. 99% of Alma therapists accept insurance, including United, Aetna, Cigna, and more. And there are are no surprises. You will always know exactly what your sessions cost up front with Alma's cost estimator tool. With the help of an actual therapist who understands you, you can start seeing real improvements in your mental health. Better with people, better with Alma. Visit

helloalma.com slash factually to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's hello a l-m-a.com slash factually. You know, folks, not to brag, but a few years back, I accomplished a lifelong dream. I filled out enough paperwork and I sent to enough non-descript offices in Sacramento that the state of California finally recognized me as a business. I have transcended. I am more than a simple man. I am now an idea. And unfortunately, being an idea means even more goddamn paperwork. But you know what? Luckily for me, now when I pay freelancers that help with this podcast or my other projects, I use gusto. Gusto is an online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses that absorbs all the annoying pieces of being a small

business so that I can focus on the important stuff, like puffing my chest out at dinner parties and saying things like, actually, Gerald, I'm something of a small business owner too. Gusto is all in one, remote-friendly, and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Can Gerald do that? I don't think so. And you know, my payroll is pretty simple, but Gusto is ready to be as complex as you need. Automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, commuter benefits, workers comp, 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget.

You can also save time with automated tools built right in, offer letters, onboarding materials, direct deposit, and more. So try Gusto today at gusto.com slash factually and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash factually. One more time, that's gusto.com slash factually. I like what you're describing because you're putting you're giving me like a mental image of like an interconnected web of influence that each of us is a node in and if enough of those move at once you could create like a big wave or a big ripple at the very least which is really cool but I I want to tell I love the example of voting because that's an example I think most people listening to this show are probably in the cohort of people who do vote, and they know that their individual vote isn't going to tip

the election, but they also know, well, if everybody didn't vote, then my candidate wouldn't win. And so it is a individual and collective action simultaneously, but probably everyone listening also thinks all the emphasis on individual recycling or me buying, you know, an organic purchasing decision, as opposed to a non-organic purchasing decision. is kind of bullshit, right? And so what is the difference between those two types of examples? Like, do you agree with each of those examples?

Yeah. And what difference is there between them that could be instructive here? Well, I think it's complicated. And that's a general lesson in the book is that we need to be humble about this. And these social dynamics are super complex. And so we shouldn't assume that we know how it's all going to play out. But it is, it's an initial premise of the book. We go through all the ways that we were brainwashed by corporations into this individualistic,

individualistic way of thinking about these problems. But in terms of like, you know, thinking about our actions and making a difference. So one thing that we've been talking about is social influence. But there's also the point that the choices that I make today shape the person that I become tomorrow. So folks who do get solar panels on their roof, even if they initially got them just for the money savings, actually in Europe become more likely to go vote for green parties in the future. Right. And so there's something to be said for paying some attention, not being obsessive about it with, you know, being an environmentally friendly person in your daily life and that building up a sense of yourself as someone who cares about the environment

and then that could potentially, you know, sort of bootstrap you into being a more consistently politically engaged person in favor of the environment and so on. So like when we're thinking about these kinds of action, there's different kinds of sort of effects that the action I take today might have on the action I take on the future. And I should say that our co-author, our other co-author on this book, Dan Kelly, who's at Purdue University, this is more his area of specialization. So on the one hand, there's something like what could be called negative spillover effects or moral licensing effects, where I do the good deed now, and then I now have permission to check out. So I like recycle, and now I don't have to worry about it anymore. And that's what,

I think, when we're worried about the corporate brainwashing into individualism, I think that's a real danger there, right? But then there are these other sorts of cases where the, you know, I start biking to work or whatever it is, and then I become a more politically engaged person and then I'm trying to, you know, influence other people and talk to other people about how great I let, you know, how much I love biking and so on, where it can sort of build up into becoming a more consistent actor in the future. And so again, even if you're, you know, this specific act of you recycling right now, that's not going to change the fate of human history, but if that's part of you becoming a person who has a strong sense of identity,

as someone who cares about the environment, then maybe there will be opportunities in the future where you do in your action have the chance to tip some kind of scale or tipping point. So can I just add one thing? So this is not like a listical book where we're like, here are the 10 most important things you can do. And so I don't particularly care

whether the right answer is, you know, yes, organic food, no worrying about recycling. Yes, ride your bike to work. No, you know what I mean? Yeah. The way we talk about it is like, these are tools for thinking differently about our own impact in changing the world. And so the question that I keep asking myself, whenever I come across whatever the specific

example is like, should I give a shit about recycling, is not the first question that comes to mind, which is like, well, how many pounds of carbon dioxide pollution is this going to prevent from going to the atmosphere? It's rather like, how is this going to affect my future choices and how might this affect other people, right? Like, what role am I playing in the community and what role am I playing in like becoming the person I want to be by doing this thing or not doing this thing? And I just think that's like a different framework for thinking about the question and that then can be applied to whatever the specific example is. I have an example from my own life that that makes me think of, which is that a number of years ago I started taking transit around

L.A. Bus to work in the beginning of your special. Correct. Yes. Oh my gosh. You really, you really know my. Wow, thank you for watching. It was legit. And that's, yeah, and I have a whole chunk about that in my special. And people know me for that. And they're like, oh, you're transit guy, basically. And since I've been doing that, more people that I know are like, hey, I took the bus or whatever.

I just feel like there's been a little bit of a wave that maybe I've been a part of. But I would stress myself out about going like, fuck, I'm late. I just got to take an Uber. Right. Like, I got, oh, man, I don't want to take an Uber. I don't want to pay them money. Ah, shit. But, like, that's not the important part.

The important part is sort of, like, the identity formation and the group identity formation. And, like, you know, I'll fess up. I started driving again last year, but I still take transit all the time. But it's just, like, my life changed in ways that made me need to do that. But that doesn't change the fact that, like, I'm still an advocate and, and, you know, still write it more than most people and still have that effect on the community. So is what you're saying, actually, that virtue signaling is good?

Is that what you're saying? So we had a section that we had to cut for length that was about virtue signaling is virtuous. We stole that title from Nealevian, another philosopher, but yeah, but people hated it. So that's one of the reasons it didn't make it. They hated the chapter or the title? The section, yeah, virtue signaling is virtuous. Yeah, we had like the photo of the Democrats in Congress kneeling with. Kente cloth.

That is maybe that photo would, I was like, why would people be pissed off? That photo would piss me off. Although, I don't know, maybe you talk about like that's such a Well, I think it's a good provocative test case, right? Because I think there really is good reason to think that it is important for people to be willing to talk about their values and to be willing to be a little cringe about their fears and their hopes and so on.

And so like, you know, we've been saying in bookstores talking about the book, like, gone are the days where politics is not permissible at the Thanksgiving dinner table. Like, it's just too crucial to be able to wear it on your sleeve. And to me, that's like what the virtue of virtue signaling is, because what you're doing is you're making, like, your values clear. When it bleeds into, like, this clearly attention, like, your only goal is to get the attention and to comply with whatever the sort of raw, raw thing of the day is, like, you know, like in that example, you know, then it becomes a little gross.

Part of the problem now is that if you're chronically online, you think that we're just like all yelling at each other all the time. They were all just virtue signaling that we're, you know. But actually the problem today is still the same problem that it's always been, which is passive bystanding. People are not getting engaged. And so if people are worried about being cringe in their virtue signaling and that prevents them from talking about the things they care about

and the things that they're doing, to me that's a bigger concern than like putting yourself out there and talking about your values and you know continuing to fight for the things that matter i'll give you an example of that that um we talk about in the book which is um social scientists call it the problem of pluralistic ignorance which is just a fancy way of saying that um most people don't know what other people think and so for instance most people don't know what other people think like in their community or in their country so here's the here's the clear example if you ask americans to estimate what percentage of other Americans

want stronger climate action, right? So if you say, what do you think? Like, do 25% of Americans want it to 50% of Americans want it? The average of their answer is about one-third. So they think that about one-third of Americans want stronger climate action. The reality, when you just ask Americans,

do you want stronger climate action, is that two-thirds want it. Right? So people get it exactly backwards when they're trying to just guess what the rest of the community thinks. And so the solution to that is talking about it, right? Being, like, more willing to say, even in mixed company or at work or just, like, beyond

your immediate friends where you know it's safe, like, here's something I care about. Here's something I feel like we're screwing up or that we need to do differently. What do you think about that, right? And again, it's like the same with the voting example where what that does is it helps to reshape the social world that informs everyone else's opinion. Right. You want to have that perception. Everybody is voting. Or in the transit example, you want to create the perception. A lot of people take transit. That's sort of my whole thing in L.A. is that when I moved here, the whole cohort I was friends with were like, nobody takes transit. Right. And I looked around after being here a couple of years, I was like, we know, lots of people do. L.A. has the second biggest transit system in the country. But the people I know don't think that. And so just me by saying, no, actually, it's quite good. And I take it all the time. That changes the perception and gives people social license. Oh, maybe I could take the bus.

Yeah, yeah, because it runs up against, like, one of our deep-seated psychological needs, which is not to look like a sucker. Like, nobody wants to be the sucker who's doing the thing that everyone else is like, nobody does that. Yeah. But in fact, often we're in ignorance of what lots of people are doing. Yeah. But the flips, I think, where the criticism of virtue signaling came from,

and it was a right-wing idea, I think, initially, but was the idea that you're putting the, onus on other people that I would say, hey, I ride transit because I'm better than all you jackasses in your cars. And I do feel that way sometimes. But when I'm like, you know, looking over the traffic on the 101 or whatever. But I'm not, that's not what I'm saying to other people. Yeah. Well, and for sure, I mean, I'm glad that you said like offhandedly like it was a right wing thing because, I mean, while I think some segments of the particularly online progressive left sometimes have that problem of being like, you know,

looking down their nose at everyone for making the wrong decisions or having the wrong beliefs or whatever. Really, I think that, like, depiction of the left as scolds is coming from the right in this country and is, like, painting the left that way. And then, of course, it's, it's no wonder that, like, the Democratic Party is, like, so reviled. Yeah. And for some reason, the left kind of shoulders the, the depiction, you know, and goes, you know, there's a bunch of people on the left going, Hey, wouldn't it be better if we had better public transit? And the people on the right say, you're scolding the rest of us. And then the people don't left go, oh, we don't want to scold anybody.

Let's stop. Let's stop trying. Like that feels like the dynamic we have allowed that right wing depiction to sort of run rough shot. I think this is very much like what's underneath the whole conversation right now about getting the left to fight and like getting the resistance to Trump to like stand up and fight is that people are sick of what you just described. right that we're like oh no no no sorry we didn't mean that right like no we do mean it like we do want democracy we do want public transportation we do want like a government that takes care of people and like like supports their basic rights and also i i literally just like an hour ago was on uh x the everything app and saw a discussion people talking about how the right

wing is now vice signaling that their rejection of anything progressive has gone so far that they gleefully just sort of live in shit and we'll talk about the horrible things that they're doing even just private citizens will do this and you know literally the the discourse is we need to bring back virtue signaling it's good to say that you're doing good things and it's bad to say that you're doing bad things. But we have like, we're in this weird bizarro world now where the dominant political position seems to be, be an evil asshole and be proud of it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's a really weird phenomenon where like the progress made at the level of sort of general beliefs about racial equality, for example, like people sort of learn to talk the talk, even though we continue to live in an incredibly racially stratified society. But so then there were all these norms, especially in elite academic spaces and so on, or super lefty online spaces where there was like, you know, a sense of like, this is how we talk. And then there was this perception that like the racial justice ideology had like taken over and was the power structure, even though as a matter of fact on the ground, it was still, you know, it's been a deeply racially unjust society the whole time. Well, no progress was made on the issues of. Trust is made. But lots, I mean, but it's still horrific in all kinds of ways. But the perception was that, like, that the, you know, the people fighting for racial justice had the power. And so then the, you know, like, like right wing comics and politicians have been able to say, like, we're fighting against the power by defending racism, right? Where, like, there was this hilarious kind of switch where, you know, it had only kind of been perceived as dominant at the level of, like, talk and what you could say and so on without actually.

actually, you know, materially changing reality. But nevertheless, it had the perception of this is the power and now we're fighting back against it, right? Yeah. So let's say on that because the degree to which progress that we want to make becomes replaced with progress in how we talk about the world is one of the most frustrating things. The point that I was making about no progress to meet on racial justice was a very important

issue to me that I covered in my work was mass incarceration and criminal justice in America, which like is one of the greatest sins we're committing. If we ever repaired 100 years from now, we'll look back on today the way we look back now on slavery. It's that bad. And that was what the George Floyd protests

were about. And I was like, holy shit, we're going to do something about it. And then like, within a month, everyone had forgotten about it and everyone just debated language for the next three years. And so one of the big themes in our book is climate change. Another one is racism. That was also a big sort of point of departure for the book.

But, I mean, let me just ask you right now, what do you think in the, in the U.S., if we're looking at African-American incarceration rates from 2006 to now? What would your guess be about, have they gone up? Have they gone down? Have they stayed the same? So African-American, so percentage of the percentage of the African-American population. Well, how is the rate, the percentage of the African-American population has the total, number of, like, the total proportion of African Americans that are incarcerated, has that gone up

or gone down or stayed the same since 2006? I would guess stayed the same. It has actually gone down by 35%. Really? And it's gone down more than white incarceration rates have gone down. Latinx, Latino incarceration rates have gone down as well. They have not gone down as much, right? And so now, please, like, you know, don't clip this and be like, Alex is saying that racial

justice has been achieved. But there has been progress. And this is something you've also talked about in other parts of your work, where if we're thinking about like the last couple hundred years, like our life expectancy has improved dramatically. There have been all kinds of positive social changes. And when we're thinking about mass incarceration, there has been some progress. And I think that's it's important both to, you know, bear in mind that the dedicated efforts of activists have borne some fruit. And we, but we have to hold two ideas in our head at the same time. And also recognize that there's still so much further to go.

But this is another area where there's kind of pluralistic ignorance, where people just sort of think that there hasn't been any movement on the problem at all. And part of the reason that people think that is because there's this perception that it's like, if it's going to happen, there's going to be some giant bill in Congress that, you know, like is this one huge thing. And it's like, and then we just pass the bill and then we can just check out or or a president signs of, you know, like just. you know, commutes the sentences of everyone who's incarcerated or something like that, whereas actually the progress has been piecemeal and small and all these sorts of different places. So like you have Larry Krasner, who's a progressive DA in Philadelphia, and he's been doing important work there, right? So, you know, we had George Gascon here and he got voted out.

So it's like, it's complicated. It's fits and starts. There's lots of different things happening in different places. There's some things getting better. There's something's getting worse. But there is real evidence that the dedicated efforts of activists on this issue has moved the needle somewhat. Okay. That really turns me around on that quite a lot. Like, and you make a great point. Like, I was looking for not a, not a big bill. There was, what was it, the first step act or something

like that? That was like a couple of good things on criminal justice reform that were done before the George Floyd moment. But I think what I was looking for was, you know, a public acknowledgement of the fact that, hey, as a society, we send the police into black and brown neighborhoods to just harass the people living there, just to fuck them up a little bit, just to keep them down, just to keep them poor. That's literally the way that we've structured our society. You can read plenty of ethnographics, criminal justice studies, whatever you want. It's all over the place.

And, like, there was this moment where white America, where literally my Hollywood manager calls me and goes, oh, did you know about this? You know, like, what can we do about it? And I was like, yeah, man, do you watch my show or what? Right? Like, we were having this cultural conversation. Like, oh, my God, have we been doing this the whole time? Similarly to the awareness of climate change, right?

We're like, we used to not know about it. And now at least, hey, we don't all agree. It's become a divisive political issue. But at least there's, you know, a bunch of people are like, holy shit, this is a problem. Whereas that, like, ceased to happen with criminal justice reform. Everybody read Tana Hasi Coates for three weeks. And then they just forgot that they read the book, except for the same people who cared about it before that moment.

And so I wanted some bigger social thing. But true, why do I want that? Maybe that would just make me feel better. No, I don't think that wanting that is wrong. It's just wanting only that is not enough, right? I mean, and this is American history where you get these moments of breakthrough, and then you get retrenchment, and you get fits and starts of progress in different ways, and then regress. And like it clearly feels like right now in many ways in the like fight for racial justice or in this moment of regress, at least in the national conversation, that doesn't mean it's over. And I guess for me, like this is where it's so important to take inspiration from the people who have suffered from these long histories of injustice.

because, like, you ask black Americans, you know, who have lived in the circumstances you're talking about, and you're like, can you believe what's happening now? And they're like, yeah, no shit, right? Like, welcome to the world, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you get the same dynamic when you talk to people who've been in climate politics for 30 years where you're like, oh, my God, we passed the inflation reduction act, and it was amazing. And now look what's happened, right?

And they're like, yeah, that's the story. Right? Like a little bit of progress, little bit of regress. Like, and there's no guarantee that it goes in the right direction. But the fantasy of the like one big moment can can like take a lot of the energy away. But at the same time, it's not like wrong to want big, splashy progress. It's just like that can't be the only part of the story. Yeah, maybe we sort of got trained to want that because of, you know, things like the civil rights movement of the 60s or, you know, the Obergefell decision or, you know, that's sort of

these big inflection points in American history. And that's how we tell the story. But the story of gay marriage is a good, sorry to cut you off, but like the story of gay marriage is a good example because there were, you know, decades and decades of work going into that big triumphant moment. And the moment may not be over yet, right, given that like people are partitioning the Supreme Court right now to try to overturn that decision. But like the work that went into that, speaks to the kind of work that Alex was talking about with progressive DAs in fights for racial justice, where you had people in Hollywood trying to create positive images of gay people in media. And then you had activists working on the streets in different domains. And you had

professors doing work on like the outcomes for raising kids in gay families, right? And like all of these things can coalesce. But it's not, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that it's not obvious you're making progress all the time. And then you have some big moment and you can see in retrospect how essential all that work was. But the reason to remind yourself of that is that in moments like this where you don't know where to turn, it's like, okay, well, you just keep doing the work. So the other big thing about, so it's, of course, we want to pass the biggest, you know, legislation that we can to impact the most lives and so on. But another mental trap that we can fall into there is thinking that once we pass it, our work is done, right? And so we also have a

chapter in the book that's focused on the problem of implementation and the problem of uptake. And history is littered with examples where people cut the ribbon, they toppled the statue in the town square, they like did the big thing, and then it all sort of died in the process of implementation. Because it's way cooler to be like, you know, they're cutting the ribbon. That's like, you know, fun and sexy and exciting. But then like actually doing the grinding work of persuading people doing stuff on the ground to make sure changes actually get implemented is incredibly important. And it's where a lot of positive social change goes to die. It's also where, you know, negative social change goes to die or more complicated cases. So like if we're

thinking now about what is like the biggest example of a structural change that seems so out of reach in the U.S. that like maybe someday we could do it. It's like passing a constitutional amendment, right? That just seems like so impossible. Right. Yeah. But even if we did, how confident would we be that just by passing that amendment, things would really change. And so another example we talk about in the book is one of the biggest amendments in the 20th century, which was to ban alcohol, right? And like, that didn't go so hot. And it was actually the result of decades of collective action and like really people working really hard and political organization. It had all those features. But it was never actually all that popular. And they sort of, they overshot in all

kinds of ways. It obviously had notorious unintended consequences in spawning organized crime and so on. And so then 11 years later, it's the only time we ever passed an amendment to unamend an amendment. And so it's like even when we're thinking about the deepest, biggest change we can make, if there aren't individuals who are supporting it or at least not having backlash against it, it's not worth anything, right? And so this is again where the both-and thinking comes in, where it's like we have to put in changes that are actually empowering individuals to live, you know, the lives they want to live and not just sort of forcing them to comply with things that are going to seem coercive. Yeah, I mean, that also reminds me of, you know, the, the Roe versus Wade Dobbs decision.

Right. Because that's a big inflection point. That's similarly the only time that people often say a right has been taken away or that one of these big famous Supreme Court cases has been reversed. and, you know, that moment was built up so much over the course of my life. Hey, they're going to do it. They're going to do it. They want to do it. No, they're not going to do it.

Yes, they will. And then they did. And it's like, oh, my God. But then on the other hand, well, how easy was it to get an abortion in those states that have now banned it, like the day before the Dobbs decision, you know? And things got a lot worse. And we've covered that on this show. And things will continue to get worse.

It's probably still an undertold story in America. But like the, the anti-abortion movement, the anti-choice movement, did not pin all their hopes on the amendment. They were fucking doing nicks and cuts and doing everything they could. Sure. And they still are, right? And that's still the battle is really happening there. And we should learn from them. I mean, in the same way that we should learn from the NRA, like in what successful movement organizing looks like.

Yeah. I mean, for totally different goals. Yeah. But I think it's one of the most prominent examples in recent American history of like a long-term well-organized endeavor for social change. And well, and I thought you were also going to mention that like actually in the U.S. abortion rates are up. Like more people are getting abortions now than before because blue states responded by doubling down and increasing access and mailing pills and so on and so forth. So it's, you know, it is one of the, you know, greatest heartbreaking setbacks of my life for sure. in terms of, you know, being part of a fair world. But the effects of it are complicated. I mean,

I definitely, if you had asked me 10 years ago, like, what would happen in that case. I would have thought that the left would have, you know, risen up in a much stronger way than they actually did. But there was some, you know, pushback. And lots of states have, you know, enshrined access to reproductive justice, you know, into their, into their constitutions. And, and even, you know, like Mexican feminists leap to arms to like start mailing pills to Texas, you know, which kind of, you know, inverts a stereotype that many people have of us being so progressive on feminist issues. And so the effects of these things are always complicated. The story is not over. And sometimes, you know, short-term losses, even though they are unbelievably tragic for

the people who are affected by them, could in the longer run lead to longer-term gains. So, you know, the story is not written. Do you have a clothing white whale? You know, that perfect article of clothing you've been searching for your entire life? The one that makes you feel like it was made to go on your body the second you slip it on. For me, it's been denim. You know, I've been hunting for a classic pair of blue jeans, but a pair that actually feels, you know, comfortable when you put them on.

And I have finally found that with the perfect gene. Imagine denim so stretchy, it's yoga ready, sharp enough to turn heads and comfy enough you'll forget you're wearing them until someone compliments you on them that. is. Seriously, this denim is so soft, so flexible, you'll feel like you could do cartwheels even if you've never done cartwheels before. Please don't try. Take it from me. It's harder than it looks, but you'll feel like you can. Most jeans don't just constrict because of rigid fabric. They constrict due to rigid fits. And that is why the perfect gene has six fits for all shapes and sizes of guys. With 26 to 50 inch waists and lengths up to 38, if you

really want to crunch the numbers, that means there are over five. thousand ways to find a pair that matches your shape. These genes are made for real bodies, not mannequins or guys who look like mannequins or mannequins that look like guys. Again, real friggin' bodies. And for a limited time, our listeners get 15% off their first order plus free shipping at theperfectgene.n. NYC or Google the perfect gene and use code factually 15 for 15% off. That's 15% off for new customers at the perfect gene.n.com with promo code, factually 15. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them,

and please support our show and tell them we sent you. Fuck your khakis and get the perfect gene. I want to thank homeserv for sponsoring this episode. You know, stories about haunted houses rarely focus on the actual scariest part of being a homeowner, which is all the regular crap that's already going wrong before the ghosts even move in. Like, you know, some ghost shows up and starts throwing plates around, and I'm supposed to give a hoot when I'm dealing with a malfunction. breaker box?

Hell no, you attention-hogging, undid sheet, man. I've already got a bursted pipe, and the HVAC is on the fritz again. So if you really want to spook me, show me a quote for how much it'll cost to fix all of that. And, you know, regular homeowners insurance usually doesn't cover a lot of those day-to-day wear and tear. Plumbing failures, HVAC breakdowns, electrical issues,

and that is where homeserve comes in. It's like a subscription for your home. For as little as $4.99 a month, you can quit sweating the small stuff and get back to worrying about whose spirit occupies that creepy doll you found in the crawl space. You know, repairs hit fast and hard. You could find yourself searching for a contractor in a panic, which is even more inconvenient if you're already in the middle of an exorcism. Or you could already be on the phone with homeservs 24-7 hotline scheduling a repair. They have held homeowners like you for over 20 years with a trusted national network of 2,600 contractors. You know, I'm lucky enough to own my home

and have a relatively manageable amount of vengeful spirits that share it with me, but I still cannot tell you how many times I would have loved to have something like homeserve on my side. A burst pipe or a bad water heater experience is not what you need when you're reconsidering new ideas about life after death. So help protect your home systems and your wallet

with homeserve against covered repairs. Plan start at just $4.99 a month. Go to homeserve.com to find the plan that's right for you. That's homeserve.com, not available everywhere. where most plans range between $4.99 and $1.99 a month of your first year. Terms apply on covered repairs. So is the kind of process that you're talking about where, you know, we do these small contributive, you know, pieces, is that capable of causing structural change?

Because, like, okay, let's go back to the election example and the I voted sticker and this sort of communal creating the norm and making sure more people vote, you know, the community expectation, well, hey, that doesn't change the reality of how the Senate is apportioned between the states, right? That actually is in the Constitution. And that is like a deep structural problem and the structure of American democracy that locks in certain outcomes or biases towards certain outcomes that I think are bad. Right. So is that a, is that a problem that I can work on with my I voted sticker or my little accretive work, you know, like, so how do we connect to that?

Well, I mean, here's the question that it makes me think in response. What's the alternative? Mm-hmm. For whatever, so one thing that has come up in conversation about this book a lot is to what extent our message is conflated with a kind of moderate, like milk toast kind of politics. where you just focus on the things you can change and, you know, big systemic, changing the filibuster or the electoral college or amending the Constitution, like those big ass or like taking down capitalism or whatever, like, that we're like trying to push people away from that.

And I think that's actually a misreading. Okay. So the book is written to appeal to anyone no matter what their political program is. I mean, conservatives are not going to like the book. But like, but no matter how radical you are, right, whether your goal is like to create the socialist utopia or whether your goal is to like create moderately better housing policy in your city, the answer of how to do that is always going to be the same,

which is, right, starting where you are, building a community of people who are like-minded, growing that community by affiliating with us, other people who might not agree with you about everything, finding a way to motivate and gin up fire for like fire in the belly, for people to care and make those changes. And so, like, I just don't see what the alternative is. If the answer is, well, we really have to change the electoral college. And me just wearing the I voted sticker is peanuts compared to that. Tell me how to change the electoral college, right? What is it going to be? It's going to be getting more

and more people, starting with the people I can connect to and the people they can connect to and the people they can connect to, um, to think that representation, like fair representation in our country, which the electoral college prevents, um, matters and is like the thing they're going to be willing to vote on. Um, that, that work is only going to happen in these ways where we like bring it into our lives in the choices we can make day to day. That makes sense? Mm-hmm. Yeah, like you have to find something that you can do day to day to affect the larger problem. Yeah, but I guess I mean it's just like that question of what choices you can make on a day-to-day level are in some sense the same questions no matter where you're trying to go. Whether the thing you're trying to do is get bike lanes in your neighborhood or whether the thing you're trying to do is get rid of the electoral college.

Yeah, I mean, we're definitely not saying like the I voted sticker is the solution to all the world's problems. But part of what it means to be an actor that's trying to make social change is being aware of the real structural constraints that you face. And on the one hand, trying to navigate them. So if we're thinking about something like the Senate, a lot of that is pretty locked in. If we're thinking about something like the Electoral College, there is a bill that's, you know, been gradually, yeah, that's been gradually gaining steam where states are agreeing that they're going to cast all their electoral college votes in favor of whoever wins the popular vote. And that's, you know, it's like, it's still in the works. And so that, you know, the story on that remains to be written. And then if we're also thinking about something like the Senate, like, you know, maybe we can make Puerto Rico a state.

Maybe we can split California into multiple states, you know, in the same way that we have a gerrymandering arms race right now. Maybe we can have a proliferation of states' arms race. But so, and, you know, part of the issue here is that although we have to be clear-eyed about what the structural constraints are, we always have to remember that the structures can be changed. some of them are harder to change than others but for example if you know if the current presidency has shown us anything it's that like people can come in and take a sledgehammer to a lot of structures even including down to like the literal physical structure of the white house so these things can be changed and then we have to think about um you know how can we best direct our efforts given the particular roles that i occupy given the particular social networks that i'm in which are the the best opportunities i have to leverage my social position to fight for which kinds of structural changes. And again, the I voted sticker is just sort of really just about sort of an example to get your foot in the door of thinking about what does it mean to be someone who is consistently paying attention to the things that matter. And it's certainly not

just like the hope that if I tweet enough and virtue signal enough, then that will spread outward to the land of milk and honey or something like that. It's definitely going to take a lot more of this committed action. But then we have to think about how can we persuade people, to really get engaged into this committed action and to focus on the changes that are within reach and that will have the biggest impact. I'm curious just because you mentioned, you know, if I tweet enough, what is your opinion about, you know, social media? Because sometimes I look at, you know, I have friends who, or just people in my social circle

who, you know, for instance, during the beginning of Israel's assault on Gaza, just sort of spent all day going add to story, add to story, add to story, right? And like, I was like, man, this person is maybe, they are really perhaps traumatizing themselves by looking at a lot of horrible footage, which like we all need to confront. But, uh, you know, I was like, man, there's, you are just in Mark Zuckerberg's human zoo, right? When you're doing that. Like, you're, you're, you're, you're really in Mark's amusement park, you know, like is this action? I'm not, I'm not saying those people weren't taken to the streets or doing other political action. But it seems to me often that the social media networks have created the illusion that posting is anything or that posting is more than almost nothing.

There's a political scientist named Eton Hirsch, who has a great term for that, what he calls political hobbyism. And it's the idea of treating politics like any other hobby where you don't really have skin in the game, right? but it's where you get a kind of thrill. And he has data showing that of people, particularly on the left, who spend like hours a day posting online or arguing online or just like getting some emotional thrill from, whether it's good emotions or like negative emotions online. If you ask them how much time they spend doing any sort of political work, like volunteering for an organization or anything, it's almost nothing. Like, it's nil. So to me, that's the case against social media, that it really does seem like it is this conduit for our emotions around justice and around the political sphere that often leads to kind of nothing. Yeah, I've had that same intuition where I've had that conversation, like, say, in political circles in L.A.

where, you know, we're trying to get something done on the city level and some people who don't understand it or are against it or whatever are like making a lot of noise on Twitter. And my intuition is, well, I think the people who are spending the most time, they're actually matter the least because they are not the ones who show up often. That like the cohort of people who are chronically online or online enough to have created an avatar and do all these other things, which most people have not done or the people who have signed up to a subreddit or whatever,

that's actually the same cohort of people that's like less likely to show up in the real world and do anything else. And that's not to say there's many activists who do both, many, many, many, many on every issue that we've mentioned so far, including Gaza and left wing shit on the city level. But, like, sometimes the tempest in a teapot online

is like, because they're online, they're self-marginalizing. And, like, they actually matter less than the people who matter who show up in real life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So I just think it's a, you know, social media presents a bunch of opportunities and constraints and risks and rewards. And so this again goes back to the earlier question about sort of are we engaging in actions that have a kind of negative spillover effect where I do this

thing and then I think my work is done and then I check out. Or are we engaging in actions that have a positive spillover effect where this is my foot in the door where I then go on to do other things. And so when we're attending a meeting. Yeah. Yes. In person, for instance, is like, yeah. We'll often lead to that next thing. Exactly. And so. And so. And so. And so, So maybe connecting with someone on social media is a foot in the door to getting them to do something, IRL, right? And so when we talk about, you know, the golden age of protests being now, there have been tons of protests in really small rural towns that voted for Trump. And I, like, I can't say for sure where those folks met, but I imagine that some of that communication did take place in some kind of, you know, on some kind of online network where you're planning on, you know, it might be Facebook or who knows what, where you're saying, hey, we're going to have the thing on this. day and then you and then you go there even if you go back to the arab spring like so much of that

was made possible by social media organizing so and you know zoran's candidacy for sure i was just was hugely powered by social media and literally i just messaged uh my friend cassie wilson who's a comic in new york and i was like you know the first time i ever saw zoron it was like a video that you like a reel that she did and i was like oh that's nice of her to like support this like local progressive who's probably not going to go anywhere, right? I've seen many posts like this. Oh, she met this guy and he's an assemblyman and he's like, I'm sure he's got great politics and like, good, good for her.

And like literally her post was like one of the first one. He like shouted her out like a couple of weeks ago as being like a very early, you know, person who like showed him how powerful that sort of model could be and like helped get the ball rolling. And then that obviously became an avalanche. And so that's the counterpoint to my whole thing. about Mark Zuckerberg's Zoo is that that did matter. But it was, but what was the distinction between why that worked in other forms of online

activities? I don't know directly the answer to that. But to me, like, there's things to be worried about social media. There's opportunities. But the reality is that's the world we have right now. And so to me, the more interesting question is what are really innovative, creative, political entrepreneurs like Mamdani going to do to take advantage of it? And you can't predict them just by like sitting here, right?

There's no science of it. Like people have to actually go out and experiment and try stuff and see what works. And so to me that's just like the more interesting question is like learning from the innovative people who are who are figuring out the next thing on it. Got it. Yeah, because there's plenty of pointless action on social media, but people like Mamdani have figured out how to do something productive. So we should just look to their example to see what's the difference between what works and what doesn't. And one thing he did was he was out in the streets talking to people, right? And so a lot of the posts were about him doing things in the real world, having real conversations with people maybe who disagreed with him, but then trying to find common ground, right?

Which is why when you see, like, Democratic operatives go like, oh, how do we get a social media strategy? It's like, no, actually the social media strategy wasn't the important part. It was the political strategy, the engagement with the citizens that was broadcast via social media because that's the form of media we have. But it wasn't actually a media phenomenon. It was like a real life political phenomenon that was brought. Podcast. Right. Yeah. Ah, that's really fucking cool. Another example that we profile in the book is Chris Smalls and the unionization of the Amazon warehouse in Staten Island. And we also talk about some of the other main organizers there. And so Angelica Maldonado was another. And it was really interesting because she said that they did have a telegram or a WhatsApp sort of channel where they were trying to like do stuff digitally talking to people. But that that wasn't really what did it. What did it was sitting in the break room being ready to talk to people. sitting, you know, sitting outside, like doing that, you know, hard work of actually talking to people in real spaces. But so then I think part of what's important about Mamdani's approach to it is then

sharing that with the world that here's what I'm doing. Here's how I'm trying to welcome people into the coalition and using all the social media tools in this kind of integrated way. So when you're talking about you guys get accused of as being too moderate or whatever, I'm interested in pulling apart that a little bit more because there's plenty of people that say, you know, the problem is capitalism, right? And we need to overthrow capitalism. And let's grant for the purposes of this conversation that to be true, just say it's a suboptimal economic system. And maybe there's a better one out there. We haven't discovered it yet or no one's implemented it quite yet, or at least not in America.

But like, and so the accusation that will be made of someone. as being too moderate is like, ah, you're just making like liberal tweaks to something that's fundamentally unjust and destructive. You're, you know, painting a mural on the side of a bomber, you know what I mean, to like make it look prettier, but it's still going to be fucking killing people, you know? And like, yeah, how do you sort of respond to that critique? I mean, you already have been, but but keep going. Yeah. Well, I mean, I guess the first thing I want to say because I can't, I don't want to necessarily speak for my co-authors is that like, that's not the point of the book, right? So for our, for our specific goal here, the point isn't to take a

stance on a particular political project. It's to say, like, whatever the sources of injustice that worry you are, here's different ways of thinking about how you can contribute to making those changes. If you're asking me, like my own personal sense of, let's grant for the sake of argument that there is this overarching organizational structure to political economy that needs to change and what are the ways that people can make that change? Yes. I mean, the short thing is to say, I don't have the solution to that, but what I would do is look at history and look at other examples where people have invested in long-term

structural change, like endeavors to really change the fundamental features of how we live. And I think what it takes, again, I mean, I feel like I'm being repetitive here is not any one person with the solution, but a whole community of people with a whole bag of different interconnected parts of solutions that work together in often unpredictable ways. So, like, for my money, one of the biggest structural changes that has happened in the last couple hundred years in the world, kind of to go back to something we were saying in the very beginning is just the changes in mortality rates and basic education levels, literacy, right? The kinds of things that, like, you had Hannah Ritchie on your program that she talks

about. Like, what led to those changes? It definitely wasn't any one thing. There were scientific discoveries, but oftentimes those scientific discoveries took decades or even like a century to catch on in politics and culture, right? So Louis Pasteur figures out how to pastor milk. It's not like the next year everybody was drinking safe milk and the mortality rate plummeted. It took almost 100 years for the first state in the United States to make laws for pasteurization in order to protect kids from contaminated milk, which was like a huge boon to people's lifespans and just like changed everything about life. So it took science, it took technology, it took changes in culture, it took changes in politics and I guess I would

say the same thing if you're if you're like I think there is some better political economic system to capitalism out there I can't define it yet but I want to work in service of it some people think they can define it well that's fine but like they need to invest in in in like the thing they can do there and work with a lot of other people to form a community and a culture that that achieves that so there's the best three things I want to say here and if I said them all that would take the next 30 minutes. So, I mean, just so briefly. So we're not defending incrementalism in the book.

We do have a section called anti-anty incrementalism, which is specifically about it's not defending incremental progress, but not getting defeated by it. And so there's a specific kind of bias that can come into play. For example, if you have people, you know, read about two different businesses that each set sustainability goals, neither of them reached their goals, but one of them got much closer than the other.

If you ask people what they think, they're like, well, they all just fail. right and it's like no the one that got closer that really mattered that really did make a difference and so you can think about it in dieting people talk about that oh fuck it effect like if i didn't get to my goal oh fuck it i'm just going to like and and so being able to take pride in the small victories i mean this also goes back to like when you feel good doing public transit or something like that's okay it's okay to feel good about that and and not thinking like okay even though i didn't solve all the problems you know that that wasn't hopeless it did make a difference and

Especially if we're thinking about something like climate change, every fraction of a percent that the climate doesn't get hotter, that's better than if it did. And so that's, again, not by way of defending incremental change, but not by not getting defeated by it. But I think, you know, the last thing you said was like some people are really, really confident about what the solutions are. And we think if you, as scholars of social change, we think if you look like history is riddled with examples of people who were super confident and they put those changes in place and they blew up. in their face. And there's even just small sorts of examples like this. So one that we talk about in the book is ban the box campaigns. So this was, so there was a movement to, so in many cases when you're applying for a job, you have to check a box that says whether you have a criminal record or not. And for applicants, especially black and brown men who have a criminal record,

having to check that box seems like devastating for their chances of getting a job. And so people thought, let's just remove that information, right? We're just going to not have you check the box at all. Maybe at a much later stage you'll check it. Right. And this was also interesting to think about in the structural versus individual terms because people thought, we don't have to change anybody's hearts and minds. We don't have to make anybody less racist. We're just going to remove this information. And now people will not be harmed by this. And there was some evidence that specifically for applicants of color with criminal records, it did slightly increase their chances of getting a job. But actually, for black applicants overall, it decreased their chances of getting a job.

because now let's say there's a gap on the resume and the employer's just looking at it and they're like geez I wonder why that black eye you know wasn't working there's no affirmative I do not have a criminal record exactly and so so overall applicant overall employment rates went down and so that's just an example where people were super confident that they had the fix and it had unintended consequences that arguably made the problem worse and so so a fundamental current in the book is is defending humility and saying we don't know what the solutions are but But whereas, like, many libertarians and economists will say, like, every time you intervene, you just fuck it up. So don't bother it. That's definitely not the message. We instead argue for a kind of pragmatist experimental mindset approach where it's like we're going to, this is an untenable situation. What can we do about it? Let's try this. And then we're going to gather evidence formally and informally to see how it goes and build it into our interventions that if it's not working, we're going to go back to the drawing board and reprogram.

Because I think this is another pitfall of the fantasy of like just. passing the one amazing bill is that you think you'll pass it and then it'll be done. But if it's not working, then, you know, all, again, it's, it's equivalent to this scenario of going to the protest and feeling good about yourself and not actually making a change. It can also be you're passing some policy that seems impactful, but it's not. And so it's incredibly important to pay attention to the data and, you know, see what's working and what's not and then retool on that base. You are the fantasy of having a revolution that sweeps the old system away, but then many countries have revolutions and then little changes or you know the arab spring is there's

plenty of examples in those nations right right and as you were talking the example that came to mind when i was talking about the overthrow of capitalism or any system that's that's large when someone is is making a claim that's what we need to do is the abolition of slavery in america right because hundreds and hundreds of years of people saying this is a moral abomination the system must be destroyed it has no legitimacy it has no there's no version of of it that is ethical in any way. And it was deeply embedded in the structure of society on every level.

Every single person participated in it whether they wanted to or not. And that is, I'm actually, I wish, this is making me want to have a scholar of abolition on the show because I, like, how exactly did that happen? Well, there's an interesting. I'm curious if you covered it.

Well, we don't cover it that much in the book per se, but there is an interesting. contrast case between the story in Great Britain and the story in the United States, because you might say, like, well, it is to Americans, like, great moral credit that we did end slavery. And then you might hesitate and be like, but we had to fight a horrific war to do it, right? That's not like a great story about the abilities of democracy to solve its worst problems. But in the British case, it's quite different. And so, like, I think one, One lesson you get from studying the history of social change is that it happens differently in all kinds of places and in all kinds of ways, and there is not a formula. What there is is people being creative and innovative and forming collective wisdom with others in the face of whatever the new problem is, whether the new problem is like technological challenges from, you know, getting rid of like, you know, I don't know,

the spinning jenny or some shit like to social media um like when those when those uh challenges happen you see people being creative but not as individuals as communities and so again like i don't think we're going to have the formula but we're going to have the outline of it that looks different in different places it's a matter of i i feel like i'm making you guys say the same things over and over again um but i'm still trying to get my head around it because so often I think we've accepted this notion that, as you said at the beginning, our individual choices don't matter as much as the structural concerns. And then that makes us feel like we're just like ants under the boot of a structure that must be changed that is too large for us to change. And yet we must find a way to change it.

And we do. And we do. And we do. Yeah. And so let's really make that like, you know, granular. Like, like the first step is, is what? When you're feeling that way, right? When someone is like, oh, my God, I'm so worried about the climate.

And I live under, you know, an extractive energy form of capitalism that is seemingly designed to pump hydrocarb is into the atmosphere. And all of human society, or at least the country I live in, is based upon this logic. And like, what the fuck? Oh, and then you want to just like, and I have to drive my car to work still. Yeah, yeah, right, yeah. I mean, activists sometimes talk about that the antidote to despair is action. Yes.

And it's not action that you have antecedently found evidence for is going to solve all the problems. It's just doing anything. Like, doing anything is better than doing nothing. And I guess to me the addendum to that, and now I feel like a broken record. But like the addendum is doing anything with other people. Because, like, it not only is the effective route to change, but it's the one that actually, like, sustains our well-being. We're not going to do anything successfully alone. And so, to me, that's the first step, even if it's a somewhat vague one.

I don't know if you have a different. The first step is definitely buying our book, which is available. Sure. No, right. So, well, yeah, and I think, I mean, in some ways, we want to try to get away from the idea. of first step talk in the book because it's like all these processes are already ongoing. But so it's sort of like thinking about, you know, looking to what are the different social roles you occupy? What are the different places you're already in? And given that, what are your

opportunities? But so again, one of them is just talking to people, right? So like, to the extent that pluralistic ignorance is a huge problem, the only way that we get over it is by sharing our experiences and sharing our knowledge. And I think that is, you know, a very important and actionable piece of this. And so it can be hard when it's just like you just read another headline and you're just sharing your anxiety or something like that. But if, you know, if you're partly oriented towards trying to build consensus around controversial issues that are less controversial than people realize, you know, for example, a majority of Republican gun owners think that people should have to pass a safety course before they can get a gun, right? And that's just like not something

you would know because people just aren't having those kinds of conversations. So I think that that's a huge piece of it. And but I, and I do think that, you know, another thing is sort of building these kinds of third spaces, right? So like people go to work, people go to school, people, you know, have their home life or something like that. Are there third spaces where you're interacting with people in some, you know, different kind of context that could potentially be an opportunity for, you know, working together

to create social change? So for many people, that might be their place of worship. For me, it might be like the pickleball courts nearby or something like that. But it's like, you know, what are our opportunities where you're interacting with people who are not just your like, you know, friends who are exactly like you in every way, but you have some kind of common ground. And then, you know, over time you build up trust. And then you can sort of say like, hey, what did you think about this in the news or whatever it might be? And then there's an opportunity to say, oh, it turns out there's going to be an organizing event at this thing in two weeks. And then you have like an organizing buddy who's going to help you, you know, peer pressure you and you peer pressure them to go to the event.

And so a lot of those little things can be really important. And this, but something you've also focused on is like showing up for local politics, right? Yeah. But also we've talked about social media tweeting about local politics, right? So like to the extent that local news has been decimated, we each have a role in trying to share with people like what's actually going on in our communities. And that is, again, I think, an area where social media holds. a lot of promise. Yeah.

So the two things I'm hearing from you are finding ways to, like, be a person who does shit about the issue. Like, not just, like, do things, but, like, change your identity such that you, both for yourself and for your community, are someone who is doing something. In the same way that since I get involved in some of this stuff, people, people, people text me and say hey do you have a voter guide write or whatever like they you know I have made that enough of my whole deal

that it is having some sort of effect and then the other thing is doing with other people in the real world presumably and social media too but like yeah having a broader conception we profile in the book people who show up to try to make change in some of the most dangerous places in the world to do that, you know, so very different from going to a no king's protest,

right? But like, at least for now, not good. Depending on where it is. That's right. But, you know, people in 2010 who were doing this in Hong Kong or Ukraine or like, you know, whatever. And there are interesting studies to look at, like, well, what distinguishes those people from everyone else. What's special about them that they're willing to go out and like risk their life to speak out? And one, some of the things they find are not very surprising, right? So one is that they like believe change is possible, like to go back to a point that Alex was making before about like the importance of knowing that that structures and institutions can change that were not locked in. But the surprising thing that researchers find is that they're not delusional, like that

they think that they're going to heroically overthrow the government tomorrow, or even they're not too sanguine that they're ever going to necessarily succeed, like, in the goal that they have, even though if they think change is possible. What they have is a really strong commitment to the other people who are there. Like, they think they can make a difference to the group. They think that they, if, like, if they're there, maybe their buddy or their neighbor, or just that random person's kid might be slightly less likely to be hurt or be taken by the secret police or whatever. And to me, that's like a really powerful lesson

because it's not that you have to fool yourself into thinking you are an agent of world historical change who's going to overthrow capitalism or whatever it is that your goal is. Yeah. But it is like a sense of agency, a sense that you can make a difference, but it's, you know, that you're making a difference

to the people your group to your community, which is, at the end of the day, why you're doing it. And actually, you're making me think about in all the various organizing spaces I've been in, the people who come into those spaces and talk really big about whether it's homelessness or local politics or like overthrowing capitalism or like union work or whatever, the people, the people go to the union meeting and say, we need to overthrow capitalism and that or and we're going to do it and this is how we overthrow it. Those are the people who are full of shit, right? Like, everybody wants to do that.

You said it, not us. Everybody wants to, like, I'm there because I want to do the same thing, right? But what we're talking about is, no, no, no, what are we doing on Tuesday? Yeah. Like, what is we trying to accomplish for each other? Who's going to bring the coffee? Yeah. And so it's about those smaller goals or that we're showing up for each other in furtherance of the larger project.

Yeah. And it's also partly how we think about those smaller goals. So the last section of the book, it's a short section, is called Happy Warrior. And we talk about people who have. jobs and some of, you know, different people who have the exact same job and have completely different experiences of it. So in some of the important research, they looked at hospital cleaning staff. And some people find those jobs really dreary and flattening and, you know, deadening basically. But other people find a lot of meaning in it. And why? It's because

they understand themselves as part of the larger system that is there to support patients. And so they talk about cleaning the ceiling because they're thinking about the perspective of the patient on their back looking up at a dirty ceiling. And they're like, what if that was my mother or my father or my brother or my sister? How would they feel? And so they're like thinking about, you know, just getting the coffee for the protest, which could seem like this boring, tedious thing. But they're understanding it as part of something that's being there to support other people

that's part of building community, right? And that's what sustains them. So that's called job crafting, right? And so I think similarly, when we're thinking about, you know, what are our social roles and change? It's like finding ways to think about the work, which can be. really hard and tedious, but nevertheless sort of, you know, framing it as something that is an important part of movement building and other people being there for us and us being there for

other people. You reminded me of Zoron again. Yeah. Because I'm going to assume that the man wants to overthrow capitalism and, you know, end colonial genocides around the world. And he will say that he wants to do those things. But then when it comes down to campaigning, he's like, no, I want to let's get people food, let's make the buses free. Let's like, and then even beyond that, it's like, oh, the guy is really focused on good governance. Oh, let's make sure we fully staffed this agency. Let's make sure that we have enough money for this program that we say we're going to have.

And so it's about, you know, again, that, that like smaller goal in furtherance of people's lives, like creating the world that you want to exist around you before, you know, and that's your first step to building that world for everybody. Have you heard of the Milwaukee Sewer Socialists? No. So, so, wow, you got to do like a whole. Yeah, they're fascinating. You got to do like 10 episodes.

Is this like a community of like mutant socialists that lives under? Right. Yes, they were turtles. Yeah, they were actually the last socialist mayors before now, Mamdani, of a major American city. And they basically held office for half, the first half of. the 20th century in Milwaukee. And they, for that time, were wildly popular and successful. And they got called the sewer socialists at first as a kind of epithet, a criticism from the

socialists, especially like the East Coast socialist elite at the time, the kind of intellectual socialist elite, who thought that they were being too focused on humdrum, like, ordinary quality of life stuff, in particular improving sanitation in Milwaukee. They had built this big plant where they were actually turning human waste into fertilizer, which they still sell. It's like milorganite. Yeah, millorganite, yeah. And so the criticism was like they're not appropriately attuned to the socialist goal of overthrowing capitalism. Right.

But what made them incredibly successful was something very similar to the way you just described Mamdani, which was they definitely wanted to, They wanted all those big picture goals of creating a more just an equal world that they shared with the, like, intelligentsia of socialism. But they thought that the way you get there is by you make people's lives better. Yeah. You improve the ways that people interact with government in a day-to-day way. And I don't see that as an either-or. And the thing that I find most impressive about Mamdani, like, whatever you think about his particular. policies, and I don't know if he's going to be successful or not, but in the way that he has

framed his role in politics, is that it's not like he's making trade-offs between these humdrum, I'm going to make the buses free, and I'm going to start some government grocery stores, instead of radical policy solutions. Like, no, I think he thinks that the way to be a socialist or a radical thinker that's, like, transformative is to go through these daily changes that are the ways that we actually interact with government. And, like, bringing those together as one and the same project is, I think, really powerful. And he's been asked, like, do you see yourself as a sewer socialist? And he's like, sure, I'm happy to wear that label.

So, like, I hope he continues in there. Yeah, I sort of tell people, you know, people ask me, oh, do you think he'd be successful? I'm like, he needs to do like one thing. He needs to do one thing that works. Like the free buses, whatever it is. And people need to ride the bus and go, oh, the bus is free. Great. And it needs to be a success at the end of the four years to just show like life is better in this way.

In the same way that like, you know, congestion pricing has worked out in New York and people are like, well, it's good. Yeah, there's less traffic. Great. There's got to be like one thing like that. And that's more important than anything ideological or whatever. Because he just needs, like, builds trust. Builds trust with the people going, okay, the way this person thinks will actually makes my life better.

Hey, what else do they got? Well, it needs to be successful, but then people also have to know. And this is one of the reasons that to be optimistic in his case is because he's really good at getting the word out and broadcasting. So like, even when there are successful changes, if people don't know that they're happening, then they'll think everything is just the same. And, you know, in the same way that more people are protesting now than ever before. but we have the perception that more people are checked out than ever before.

We need to be able to trumpet the successes. And of course, we have to be able to frame that as saying, like, we haven't finished the job, but we worked hard and we got this much done and then, you know, get the word out. And so there's, again, this brings us back to social media and mainstream media. But, like, the media has to show up to tell that story. So, like, for the no kings protests, we were looking at, like, different news websites that day and who was, you know, advertising it, or not. And it was the top line on a lot of different websites. But on the New York Times,

it was number seven. And number one was George Santos getting pardoned, right? Which is just like the classic example of like, yeah, it's not a good thing, but it's just this like individualistic distraction from, you know, the drama or whatever of politics. And so that, you know, they weren't putting it on blast that like seven million people came out to protest this thing, right? And so that's another piece of it is. However successful he is, we've got to get the out. You know, it's almost like we need to, like, make a TV show about what the government does or something. And it should be called the G. We'll come up with it later. So in the, in the, in furtherance of getting the word out, I'm curious at a time when a lot of people are despairing and just cataloging the problems of the world and how deep of a hole that we're in. Are there examples that you guys see in the world around us of people doing this, right? Of, of, of, uh, uh, uh, uh, the The No King's protest seems to be one.

Are there others that you feel like are successful? Well, go ahead. I mean, I think the Navigator's example is an interesting one. It's not exactly the same kind of thing in this case. But so Peter Berman and Raj Chetty and colleagues are economists that have done really exciting work. And some of their studies are about access to housing vouchers. So there are these Section 8 housing vouchers that allow folks to, potentially move to, you know, better housing and better neighborhoods with better schools,

less environmental toxins, and so on. These, there are definitely not enough of these vouchers out there, but they are actually pretty generous, and they can, like, really help people as a tool for socioeconomic mobility. But it turns out that even when people get these vouchers, they, it might be really hard for them to use them. It might be hard for them to use them to move into a better neighborhood. Maybe a landlord doesn't want to admit them. Maybe they don't want to admit them for the color of their skin.

or maybe they just don't even know there's polarization in our social network so they don't hear about these things and so what Chetty and colleagues did was they created a certain social role of a navigator and this was a person who was basically an advocate for people who had gotten these vouchers who provided them with lots of information

but they would also for example call the landlord and reassure them that this person was not going to be a problem they would help them fill out forms if there were surprise fees that came up along the way they would help them pay for those fees and so on And so whereas normally only about 15% of people, this was a study done in Seattle, are able to use the vouchers to actually move into a neighborhood that's likely to enable their family to have socioeconomic mobility, in this case, it was, you know, like tripled or quadrupled the effect size where lots more people were now able to use this to move into a better place, right? And so this is an interesting example where we have a policy. It's definitely not well-funded enough. I'm sure the current administration is trying to destroy it in 12 ways. But, you know, even if we had more of those vouchers that wouldn't guarantee that they were being used.

And so even when we have a good policy in place, there's roles for individuals in order to, like, help people use them, right? And so this idea of a navigator who basically, I think Dylan Matthews at Vox said that they were like really good customer service, right? And so it's just like having a concierge who's like going to help you do the thing, right? And so that's an example of like a really important social role. And we need to create lots more for, you know, helping people. access financial aid, helping people access different social safety net benefits and so on, where there are people whose job it is not just to like filter people out, but to actually help people access these things. Right. Yeah, I want to draw, that's wonderful, but I want to

draw a little bit of a contrast that occurs to me as you're talking. Because some, some of the things that you're talking about where things have gotten better, right, increased lifespans, some stuff related to climate change, you know, et cetera, is we've made incremental advances that, you know, a total, a big change. But those are examples where there isn't a countervailing social group that is trying to end the progress, right? Like, you know, the Trump administration may be against it. But there isn't literally like a right-winger trying to tackle anybody who tries to help

someone get the housing voucher. You know what I mean? And we do have that for a lot of social problems. Like, I think the thing that is frustrating about climate change, just as an example, And the thing that frustrates me about like the technocratic, hey, well, we just need some more solar panels. It's going to happen. You know, I'm like, we've got a right wing movement that is so now against the idea of progress on climate change that they got rid of the fucking energy star program, a program everybody like that's been around since like the 90s or something. It's just like a slightly more efficient washing machine.

It's become such an article of faith for an extremely motivated political. movement that's like we can debate how what percentage of the country it is but certainly double digits percentage of the country and that is like that there's a really big thing to be up against and that is we're up against it in more areas of life than I think I ever thought that we would be

and and I'm curious that's what I feel despair about and I'm curious if you have examples other than no kings of places that that we're doing that or well I was gonna I was going to go talk about climate change a little bit more, but then we can talk about other examples. I mean, I think the story, the way you framed the fight to address climate change in American politics is exactly right. It's been politicized for electoral gain by the right. Right. And quite successfully, I mean, they saw a opportunity to like make a cleavage in the

electorate and make up a whole bunch of shit about the energy star program. and wind turbines and everything else. And now it's so, you know, so difficult to see how we're going to move forward. But of course, like, the big story about climate change is a global story. And what the United States does right now, although hugely consequential, is actually quite like in contrast to the way most of the rest of the world is moving, which is like pretty rapidly toward renewables. So I would be, I would sort of tell the global story.

much differently than I would tell the American story right now. And in fact, you know, for most of the history of the climate change movement, the United States has been the laggard and the one kind of standing in the way of a lot of progress. Yeah. But you could take a stance on that and say, like, my goodness, what progress like the world has made in despite that, right? Despite the fact that the richest and most powerful country in the world has basically tried to stand in its way. And so I know that technocratic solutions can be unsatisfying. But to me, it's like a fundamental shift to think that now the cheapest way to create energy in the world, which really is as fundamental as it gets, like on the order of like capitalism as a political economy, is now by like, as Bill McKibbin loves to say, like pointing a sheet of glass at the sun.

And that has the promise of enabling all kinds of things that are like hard to picture now. Like once energy becomes basically free, you can do all kinds of things that we really never thought possible. So again, that's not a story about how we defeat like the forces of opposition in this country. But it does contextualize it, I think, quite. That's a great answer. Because it seems more hopeless from our vantage point. Yeah, and we're going to suffer because of that. I mean, clearly, I think the United States is going to give up a ton

because of the position we've taken up. And other people in the world will suffer. Oh, no question. But people elsewhere in the world didn't need to create a counter-social movement to or a counter-counter-social movement to the counter-social movement against climate change. They just invented better solar panels and passed some tax credits and did whatever the fuck they else needed to do to build the incremental solution. We need to get in the streets, perhaps.

Although even that, I mean, honestly, like, look at, like, you know, climate politics doesn't just happen here. And in Australia, for instance, there have been a lot of, like, parallel polarizations around climate. And now, like, what you're seeing is the fact that they have deployed rooftop solar so effectively that the government just passed a law that all the utilities have to provide three hours of free electricity every day to everyone in the country. And what is that going to do? It's going to incentivize people to put batteries in their hands. houses so that then they can store the energy they get for free and use it later in the day. And there's all these like cool spill-off, fill-over effect. So you could look there and say, actually, that's a place where like the politics, you know, I can't say have been one for

once and for all, but are headed in a different direction than it feels like here. I also think with the climate stuff, it's important, although not to, I don't disagree with your framing it in terms of like the movement and the counter movement. But a lot of it was a lot more complicated. And in particular, if we're thinking about carbon taxes over the last 20 or 30 years, so one force against having like meaningful carbon taxes was the corporations that were doing the drilling and so on. But another force that was pretty crucial, not just in the U.S., but also in Europe and in other places in the world, were unions, the unions who did the drilling or the mining or the fracking, right? And so it's easy when we're in here to be like, we love

labor power, right? Sure. But then there are some unions like police unions or or these drilling and mining and fracking unions that were really important, you know, parts of the overall political project to stall these things. And so when we think about it that way, then I think it's, again, a matter of, instead of just thinking, like, we have to defeat like the supervillains on the other side, but recognizing that we have potential allies where we could build potential coalitions around other sorts of issues, people who might see the world similarly on certain kinds of things. And that could be a foot in the door for, if we're serious about labor power, then we have to confront the histories of, you know, racism and exclusion and sexism and anti-climate stuff

within the labor movement, right? But so that's a sense in which it's like, you know, that sort of is a project that begins at home where we're thinking about, like, working with our own people, right? That's a great example. All the things you bring up are like serious problems for the labor movement that I think are too often glossed over, including when people in unions are just like, oh, well, cop unions aren't real unions. Well, no, they are actually, and they're using the same tools.

to do bad things, right? Do the things we think are bad? So how does that complicate our idea that worker power is always good power? Or how do we, how do we account for that? But I like your flip of it that it, are you saying that because the pro fossil fuel forces found strange bedfellows with a couple unions, with the unions that employ their workers? Yeah. That like, you know, those of us on the opposite side should find strange bedfellows.

Right. look for who are the unlikely community members for us? I mean, that's a precondition for some of the best instances of positive social change in American history, like probably exhibit A there is the new deal where, you know, it wasn't perfect for lots of reasons, I mean, and built on the back of racial exclusion in particular. But one of the sort of biggest coalitional moments that led to the FDR's ability to pass New Deal legislation was getting the unions and the communists to both sign on. And they hated each other. I mean, they were like mortal enemies. The CIA and the Communist Party were just like at each other's throats. Right. And yet it were

able to see some sort of mutual benefit not to like love each other or even to necessarily respect each other, but to stop fighting long enough to sign on to a coalition. And so, like, to me, that's something that the left today needs to keep squarely in mind when thinking about, like, what policy fights to take on and what to make salient. There's been some issues, again, this is my experience in local politics. There's been some issues and some candidates that we've made progress on because Chappo Trap House and Crooked Media agree. You listen to both podcasts

They have the same guest on saying the same thing Slightly in slightly different ways You know what I mean But it's like they're on the same side of the issue Right And sometimes I think of like Progressivism as being like That's what liberals and leftists agree on

Perhaps or that's where that's That might not be great analysis But that's you know there's That's what I'm always looking for Is is uh, you know What is the all of the above synthesis approach that You know gets us all pointed in the same direction I love what you guys are saying.

Thank you for coming on the show. I could ask you to summarize, but I feel like you've been summarizing your point very well over and over again, almost every single answer to the question. Staying on message like politicians. Find stuff to do every day, make a part of your identity,

do it with other people, don't let the big goal distract you from the small stuff that you can do to make that goal present in your community and your daily life for people around you. Did I encapsulate it pretty well? Is there anything else that you would see? say? No, I think you did. I mean, I think for me, what I like about the book is all the detail

that explains the lessons you just talked about, like the stories that we have in there that really are inspirational, I think, like the people who have gone out and organized and made a difference. And then I think also like all the evidence that we try to muster from across the sciences where it really does tell a story about how people can make change. Well, the name of the book is somebody should do something. And honestly, and I really think somebody should. So I think, and it shouldn't be me. It should be somebody else this time.

You can get it, of course, in our special bookshop, factually pod. Factuallypod.com slash books. Is there anywhere else that you would point people to? We're on, I'm on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. You're on LinkedIn? Yeah. You led with LinkedIn. So I was a holdout on social media until this summer when I finally caved.

And I was like, all right. And so I'm going, at some point, I'm going to get on. Instagram, too, but I have not gotten there. You're posting, like, I was kind of bummed out. Success influencer. I was expecting, I didn't, I've, like, so this was like a, you know, blue sky. I was like, wow, there's really nobody here. I mean, I shouldn't say that.

But like, I was like, I'm experiencing firsthand, like the polarization or whatever. I go there to read Jim L. Bowie, and that's about it. Yeah. Yeah. His stuff there is great for sure. Yeah. I'm on blue sky. But you can get, I mean, I've been encouraging people to get the book at their local

bookstore as sort of the first line of defense, but obviously you can buy it anywhere. books are sold and we are in the process of having an audio book right now. Yeah. Hoping for mid-January, which I know you would like. Yeah. We have a lovely Irish actor reading it. So it'll even be fun to listen to. Oh my God.

Alex and Michael, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks so much for having us. It was super fun. Yeah, really, really cool, really grateful. Thank you once again to Alex and Michael for coming on the show. Once again, you can pick up a copy of their book at factuallypod.com slash books and every purchase you make from that link. supports not just this show, but your local bookstore as well.

If you would like to support the show directly, you can do so on Patreon. Head to patreon.com slash Adam Conover. Five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. For 15 bucks a month, I'll read your name in the credits. This week, we're going to thank Adam P.E., sushi, Sue, Solar Yeti, Philip, Andrew Sogren, Tara Wilson, Alan, keep masks in healthcare, Andrew Ampurafoy, and Kratone. Thank you so much, Kraton. If you'd like me to read your name or silly username at the end of the show,

once again, patreon.com slash Adam Conover. And, of course, if you want to come see me on the road in Pittsburgh, Philly, D.C., where else are we going? Fort Wayne, Indiana, Houston, Texas, and San Francisco, California, where I'm recording my new special, Adam Conover.comber.com for all those tickets and tour dates. I want to thank my producer, Sam Rodman, and Tony Wilson, everybody here at HeadGum for making the show possible. And, of course, I want to thank you so much for listening. See you next time on Factually. That was a hate gum podcast.