Good Life Project - How to Change Minds | Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: November 7, 2022

Is it even possible to have a genuinely open conversation that holds the potential to persuade someone to your point of view anymore? Or have we entered a “post-persuasion” state? And, if so, is there a way to change that?How to move people back into conversation, and set the table for openness and, maybe even persuasion to a different set of ideas, beliefs and actions? Our guest today, Anand Giridharadas, has been studying this very question for years. In our conversation today, Anand and I dive deeper into the politics of persuasion, dissect the underlying drivers behind division, identity politics, social reinforcement, and explore a number of specific ideas and strategies designed to help us all get back to a place of more empathy and understanding. You can find Anand at: Website | InstagramIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Zoe Chance about personal social dynamics and the art of persuasion. Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you start to believe that people are unchangeable, you're actually just dooming your own movement. If you really feel like the kind of political values you hold, powerful or meaningful, would make the society better, you should be profoundly optimistic about the ability of those values to conquer all kinds of communities and all kinds of moral frames. So is it even possible to have genuinely open conversation that holds the potential to persuade someone to your point of view anymore? Or have we entered a post-persuasion state? And if so, is there a way to change that for the good? As we all have navigated the last years of increasing conflict, deep identity level disagreement.

Maybe you've noticed an increase in culture of futility-driven apathy. Social, religious, political, and other views are increasingly seen as unchangeable. So why even bother? Increasingly, people are just writing off anyone who doesn't automatically see the world the way they do. It's just not worth the effort, they believe. The problem is, this assumption is not only wrong, but when we refuse to give others, and even ourselves, permission to ask questions, change minds, including our mind, or think differently than their current label or belief leads with, well, who really wins in either scenario? Nobody. This apathy only deepens or reinforces, divides behaviors and at scale policies that may well cause large scale harm. So how do we break through? How do we move people back into conversation and set the table for openness and maybe even persuasion to a different set of ideas, beliefs and actions. Our guest today, Anand Giridharadas, has been studying this very question for years as a journalist, former New York Times columnist, author of several books, including his

latest book, The Persuaders, at the front lines of the fight for hearts, minds, and democracy. This best-selling book takes a look at the seeming lost art of social persuasion and argues the current state of conversational apathy threatens not only our personal relationships and well-being, but the very fiber of good society. In our conversation today, Anand and I dive deeper into the politics of persuasion, dissect the underlying drivers and motivations behind division, identity, politics, social reinforcement, and explore a number of specific ideas and strategies designed to help us all get back to a place of more empathy and understanding. So excited to

share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes.

The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman.

I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

So as we have this conversation, the world is an interesting place. It seems like there is crisis after crisis, but also underneath it, there's sort of like this emerging sense of hope that seemed to be popping up in different pockets. And it's interesting because you're centering a topic that is fascinating to me on so many levels that I've studied from a perspective of marketing, of social impact, of movements. And it's interesting in that you tee up this notion that you describe a crisis of faith in persuasion, which I thought was a really interesting way to frame it. Because I'm thinking of crisis of faith in shared humanity, in kindness, in belonging. I get all of those. Walk me through the way that you sort of like

view the state of persuasion as a crisis. Yeah. I think we probably have crises of all those things you just, you just mentioned, you know, at the risk of sounding grandiose about it. I think if you step back and look at the history of humanity, there have been broadly two theories about how we make decisions about the future, right?

There's no alternative to making decisions about the future. Like inevitably in any society, hunter gatherers, agricultural societies, modern information society, you know, things come up and we got to decide, do we ban that fertilizer or do we not ban that fertilizer? Do we let those people into the village or do we not let those people into the village? And broadly speaking throughout human history, when societies, communities confronted with those decisions, for most of history, the theory about how you resolve them is that they're too complicated for all of us to weigh in on. So let's just get one guy to just decide for us. And it's hard to remember if you're born in the modern era, that that was the dominant theory and that most people bought into that, even the people who are not that guy, because almost all people were not that guy, bought into the idea that it's kind of easier for that guy to just handle it for all of us. hundred years, this incredibly powerful alternative idea arose, which is that actually maybe we should

all weigh in and decide this together, maybe through the incredibly complicated act of talking things through the way you and I are talking things through on a scale of whole nations, debating, arguing, newspapers, letters to the editor, you know, VFW halls, schools, we should have this permanent roiling conversation, and then weigh in through voting, knock on each other's doors. And maybe that's actually a better way. And if you could imagine from the standpoint of like, 16, 17, 18 centuries, when people were starting to make these claims about this being a much better way to choose the future, you can understand how crazy they must have sounded to people. Like, really? Like, it seems much better. Just let the one guy do it, right?

This is the most radical idea in the history of the world, that it is in fact better for 5 million or 10 million or 350 million people to have a loud, messy, permanently disagreeable conversation about how to make the future and that this is a better way. But it has been vindicated in the last few centuries as not only a more just and humane way to do it, but more effective. Democracies make better decisions. They're better at not going to war. They're better at improving living standards for people, right? Democracies are based on the idea of talking, of conversation, and at some essential level of me trying to change your mind and you trying to change mine. And essentially, if we get to a place where the dominant view, and I think we're now there,

the dominant view among many, many people is it is useless to try to change Jonathan's mind. It is useless. He is who he is. He's of this identity. Therefore, he thinks this. He lives in that place. Therefore, he thinks that. He said this once.

Therefore, he thinks that. He refuses to get that. Once you say people aren't worth it, people are never going to change, they are who they are. And by the way, I have said that myself in these last many years a lot. I think all of us have. Once you get to the place where your fundamental view is, the pursuit of a changed mind in your fellow citizens is futile work, it's a futile pursuit. I think you are essentially, in a way you may not be realizing, asking the king, asking that one guy to come back. You are opening the door to tyranny. You're opening the door to political violence, which is trying to get your way by hurting people instead

of changing their mind. I think the road to civil war and the road to tyranny is paved by this increasingly popular view that trying to change people's minds is futile. And so I saw, I heard it among people I respect. I see it in the movements that I was writing about and covering. I see it in politics. And it's just more present in the culture. I think everyone will recognize this thing of like, don't bother, don't bother, don't bother. And I get it. I'm here to say I get it. I have said these arguments myself. And I started to check myself and realize what I am saying, what I am feeling is actually inconsistent with democratic life. And so I decided to hedge against myself in a way in my own limitations by starting to spend time in conversation with a group of people who refuse to write people off, who are organizers, activists, people in politics, others. Most of them, I think, in the book with a kind of organizer sensibility more than any other sensibility and And people who are deeply committed to certain ideals, these are not milquetoast, wishy-washy people that I'm writing about, morally grounded and

confident and standing for something real, not blowing in the wind. But unlike too many of us out there right now, people who were interested in reaching out to the other side, whatever the other side may be on a given issue, and persuading. People whose view of those on the other side of them is that they are complicated, always complicated, no matter what they are for or against. And that there's something there to work with. Not in everyone, but certainly in plenty of people to make a meaningful difference in the trajectory of our communities. And so I started with this kind of fear that the crisis of persuasion, the loss of faith and persuasion was in a way, one of the major things leading to the breakdown of democracy, not just coups and insurrections,

but a belief in so many of us that this whole thing basically doesn't really work. And through the reporting in the book and writing the book, I ended up getting to a place of profound optimism that it is possible still to persuade, that it is possible to try to change minds. It's possible to build a bigger we, but it's going to require a whole new set of habits than the ones that have come to dominate the pro-democracy side, you know, in which I count myself in recent years. Yeah. And I want to dive into some of those ideas, those tools, and some of those people too. But the question that is really lingering in my mind as you lay that out is what changed along the way? Like you described this or like, you know, like this, this time spectrum of, you know, like for generations and generations,

there was effectively one person at the top who decided on behalf of everyone. And then all of a sudden, you know, a whole bunch of people start saying, well, maybe it'll be more equitable, more fair. Maybe things will just work better in general if we all have a voice. And that system grows roots and it gets codified and it becomes the way that we do things. It's embedded in culture, law, for generations and generations and generations. Not everywhere, of course, but in Western democracies. What's making the pendulum swing in the other direction now?

Because what you're saying is that's, that's crumbling. And I think all of us have felt that. And all of us have felt that sense of futility that you described. I'm curious, when you look at what's happening underneath that, that saying, well, maybe people are actually starting to back away from that foundation. What do you see as the things that are driving that reversal? Would you be okay with me actually reading a paragraph from the book that answers that? Because it's such an important question. I really tried to distill it. I don't want to give you like a off the cuff list. I wrote, in America in recent years, this fatalism that we're talking about has been on the rise and the hope of persuasion and free fall. The ascendant political culture, confrontational and sensational and dismissive, has many causes. The inflammatory incentives of social media, big one.

The cynical manipulations of billionaire-owned divide-and-conquer news outlets. The growing confidence and voice of once-marginalized groups, good development, the very real material crises that beg for solutions and continue to remain unsolved, the frustration with how little milder, kinder, more civil, and more hopeful politics has delivered, the sense that absent a politics of us and them, the them will continue to pillage the us. For these and other reasons, many Americans have grown alienated from an idea at the heart of democratic theory, that you change things by changing minds, by persuading. And I wanted to read that because I think if you notice in that list, there's some very bad trends and some very good trends that I think flow together into the inflammatory, more dismissive political

culture we have. And I want to like pause on that for a second, because I think it's very important to understand, you know, some of the obvious things, social media. I mean, I think social media is a very, very, very good thing in a whole bunch of ways, right? It's easy to just dump on it. It is an incredible thing. I mean, certainly, you know, I have way more of a voice and I don't need the op-ed editor of the New York Times to think I deserve to be heard on a given Tuesday to speak to the public. Is it aive, the dunk, instead of the generative, the questioning, the open, right? It's not inevitable that it would have turned out that way, but it did. Clearly, you know, toxic media. But I think also I talked about the growing power and voice of once marginalized groups. And it's important to note that a lot of what has, you know,

resulted in cancel culture, so-called, or mob pylons for people saying the wrong thing. And there's excesses in all of that. But I want to be very clear, a lot of that is very good. It's really, really good that you can now not say certain things about Black people that were a lot easier to get away with saying, because the only people who could easily sanction you in the past before there was that kind of voice on social media was other establishment people who, you know, didn't include a whole bunch of black people, right? Now you have the ability of the crowd and of people with various lived experiences to say, that's ridiculous. And so, you know, shame is an important part

of healthy human societies. People with less social power, what they have is the ability to band together. And, you know, so some of the things that have made the in general have a much more open and strident way of calling out economic power than was considered appropriate in American politics not long ago. It was considered class warfare and these kinds of things. No one says that anymore. No serious person says railing at billionaires is class warfare. I mean, it's become much more legitimized. So a lot of the kind of calling out and in some ways, aggression in our politics, from my point of view, you may disagree with me, is part of a good thing. My concern is where some of that generative calling out and generative and useful aggression in politics curdles into the idea that it's not worth bothering with certain people.

And I want to make a distinction between, I think it is totally fine to be angry in politics. This is not a book about being gentle with each other. The problem for me very specifically is when you begin to say it is futile, it is not worth it to endeavor to change minds. That is different from saying I'm mad at those people, I think those people are X, Y, Z. Say that all you want. But when you start to believe that people are unchangeable, you're actually just dooming your own movement. And I want there to be space for folks on the pro-democracy side to be able to be angry

and be fierce and champion a specific and sharp view of the future, and to view every single person who is not with them there yet as possibly someone who could come in. And not actually, but a significant number of fraction of those people as people who are actually gettable. And I think we need to find a better way to combine being strident and being clear and being demanding and being ambitious with being magnanimous and welcoming and inviting and not having movements that want all the right things, but make people feel like they can't belong, that they're like a club that you have to kind of know someone to get into. I mean, it's interesting the way you lay out.

There are a lot of mechanisms at work. And like you said, some of them are things that feel very dysfunctional and some of them are things that feel hyper functional. all of that, like where my brain is going is where does what I see as a wave of dehumanizing the other fit into this? Because I think about if you take social media, for example, there's a ton of media about how it's destructive and how it's manipulative and how it's all drawn around algorithms that are designed to enrich wealth. And then as you've just laid out, it's also incredibly useful because it's an organizing and it's you know, when, especially when we talk about, you know, like people being beyond a point of persuasion or conversation or openness, what I see happening, which is terrifying to me is us looking at the other and not only saying it's not worth it to try and convince them, but actually saying, and not only do they have a

different point of view, not only are they like the other person, but like literally saying like, if you don't see the world the way that I see it, I don't see your humanity anymore. You are not worth my time to persuade, not just because I believe you're unpersuadable, but I don't see you as being human anymore. And that's the reason that I don't care about trying to actually have a legitimate conversation with you. What's your take on that? I think it's very prevalent. I think you're absolutely right. And I think it is incredibly

self-defeating. And what I mean by that is I may not persuade someone listening to this that refraining from that kind of dehumanizing is, you know, is bad because it's, it's dehumanizing and it's, you know, it's bad for a bad way of looking at your fellow citizens. I may not even persuade them that it's a kind of bad way of looking at things because it's factually incorrect. People are complicated, much more complicated than that kind of simple story. But let me persuade you by saying, if you find yourself feeling that or thinking that, that it's incredibly self-defeating because what you are really saying is that your ideas are quite limited in their power to spread and take hold. If you really feel like the kind of political values you hold, powerful or meaningful,

would make the society better, you should be profoundly optimistic about the ability of those values to conquer all kinds of communities and all kinds of moral frames. I think an idea, whether it's a policy idea like universal health care, or whether it's an idea like we should respect immigrants regardless of where they come from, or whether it's a kind of notion of we should be open to the world and engage with the world rather than close ourselves off, any of these kind of political values, you know, we should be open to the world and engage with the world rather than close ourselves off any of these kinds of political values. I believe these ideas are all powerful enough that all kinds of people could be brought along. And what I learned in the book

from all these different types of persuaders I wrote about, the book was originally called Persuasion, but I changed it to The Persuaders because I realized it was a book about people doing a thing that I want more of us to learn to do. And so although I was writing about very different people, a messaging consultant, a cult deep programmer, race educators, activists, politicians, very different people. I tried to think at the end of the process, what do they all have in common? What do they all believe in common? And I would say the thing they pretty much all believe in common that most of us, I think, do not believe is that people on the other side of the divide from you are, as you would say, human. But I think the way I would frame it is complicated.

People are complicated. And here's the thing. We all know we are complicated, right? As I speak to you right now, I'm stating certain opinions, right? I know internally, I have doubt about some of those opinions. I feel sort of partially the other way about some of those things. At the end of the day, you got to stand somewhere. So I'm giving you what I call in the book, like I'm giving you my 60-40

position on certain things. Not everything. I mean, these are, I'm not saying I don't mean anything I'm saying. I say, I mean, all the things I'm saying, but I also mean other things, right? When I write a book saying billionaires have too much power, that's a really deeply held view. But is that the only thought I have on that? Are there any countervailing thoughts? Sure. You know, we know that about ourselves, right? Maybe we even, I would we look at people on the other side of certain divides, and we just think they're not complicated, the way we know ourselves to be. They are just monoliths of that view. They are dyed in the wool, committed to whatever it is. And the problem with this view is just empirically, it's not true. The simple evidence for this is like people swing around in politics a lot. That happens all the time in

politics. People are complicated. And it's so obvious when you think of yourself, when you think of others, that you are 60-40 on these things and you have a stance in the world where you are 60. The 60, the thing that narrowly won out is the stance, right? But if we start to regard others, people we are on the opposite end of, as also having that complexity, it's certainly granting them more humanity and not dehumanizing them. But it's really also just makes you much more effective because people who don't like immigration and think our border is a mess and that people should not be coming here illegally, they also think other things, right? They also think that families are sacred, or they also think that America is the

most humane country in the world, or they also think that they're good people. They have other things in there. Right now, in that moment, if they're obsessed with the alien invasion on the border, those other values are not winning the battle for their heart right now. We're all at war with ourselves. They are at war with themselves. And if you see them as a monolith you got nothing to work with, if you see them as a site of a contest, then you say, wow, I got to arm the rebels in their heart that feel a different way. Those rebels are losing an argument about immigration right now, but it's not inevitable. And I'm not talking about, you know, winning everybody back, but in this country, three, four, 5% of people shifting their view about something fundamental is the difference between like heaven and hell, right? So all we are talking about is refusing to get into, showing how you walk into communities, talk to people, listen to people, elicit the formal stance they have, elicit some of the B-side stuff that's not so processed, and maybe start building some of

that stuff up so that it starts competing within them. You're not implanting something on them, imposing something on them. You're building up a doubt, a questioning, a counter story within them. And more often than not, it works. And I sincerely believe we have to stop believing that we can defeat this kind of fascist threat the country now faces by investigating our way out of it, prosecuting our way out of it, condemning our way out of it, being rageful to get out of it, shaking our fists at MSNBC as a way of getting out of it. These people on the fascist side of the equation in America have, let's be honest, built an extraordinary movement. They have. They've built a movement that makes people feel at home, that provides a sense of exuberance and excitement, that has created real feeling, that has met human beings in the kind of reptile brain place where we all are, frankly. And those of us who want a future of democracy and justice and human rights for all, we have not built as good a movement as their movement. Our movement is more righteous. What

it wants is good. And what that fascist movement wants is bad. Let's be very clear. But if you're just objectively assessing the quality of these movements, the pro-democracy movement is inferior right now. It has not created that sense of home and belonging. It has no strategy for transcendence and emotion. It doesn't really have an astute psychological understanding of what moves voters. Its messaging is bonkers. It constantly hews to this old notion of persuading through diluting what you stand for, leaving everybody kind of cold. And so praying for rain to save us from fascism is not going to work. We need to organize a better, more magnanimous, more fiery, more angry, more humane, more loving movement.

All these things in one, if we're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun.

On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk.

And underneath it all, no matter where you stand, as you offered, acknowledging the fact that every human being is complicated. You know, it's, you look at the social research, you know, that shows us that when we do something that is clearly a quote, bad act, we see ourselves as good people having made a mistake or made a bad decision or done something wrong. When somebody else, maybe somebody else who we're looking to not want to give some level of grace to does the identical thing, we see them as bad people. So for us, it's a behavior. For them, it's an identity. And it's exactly what you're saying. We don't often acknowledge the fact that we are complicated, and so is everybody else.

In that firestorm of beliefs and actions and identity, there's a lot going on at any given moment in time. That's exactly right. And I just want to clarify also that this could sound like excusing or absolving people. So I want to make a couple of points. One thing I learned from all of these persuaders I have written about is that they view any kind of political movement. If you look at the left half of the country, the right half of the country, they look at each of those halves as in

fact containing two quite different groups, right? And we often conflate the two. And I would say one group is people like me and you on either side,'s fascists who have a real committed worldview right now in this country, people, conservatives, others. There's progressives that have a deep committed worldview, liberals that have a deep committed worldview. And then voting right alongside them for the same candidate causes on all sides are people who do not, in fact, spend most of their living, breathing time thinking about these issues at all. You know, we can laugh about, but I don't have any disdain for that at all. I think people have busy lives. You know, you see these funny interviews that they do on the late night shows where they go and they ask people like, can you name a Supreme Court

justice or like, you know, like what is the capital? And like, it's always a laugh line. But but, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things I don't know. Also, you know, I don't know anything about sports. Those people may know something about sports that I don't. A lot of people do not, in fact, have a fully baked moral worldview in which they have thought about why limited government is better than active government or why government-provided healthcare is better or worse than market-provided healthcare. And those people, from a voting point of view, they look kind of similar. They vote for the same things. They might even vote for the same things relatively consistently.

But those folks in the terms of Anatshankar Osorio, who I write about in the book, messaging consultant, she talks about those people as the kind of good point people. While they might significant number of people, and say, and this is a real example, say we must talk more about race in this country because we can't move forward if we don't face our past demons, an almost identical vast majority will say yes. Okay. My takeaway to be very clear is not that people are stupid. I think, I mean, I have an answer on my, I have a, I have a side on that question that I just said, but I, but like there is wisdom in both of those views. There is just in life, the truth that you face things in order to deal with them. And there is the truth that sometimes you got to let things go. That's not where I land on this particular debate. I'm a facer on the question of race in our history. But like, if you just step back, it's not completely nonsensical that you can rally 60, 70, 80% of people around both those propositions because they both appeal to some kind of deep intuitive place, right?

If you say we should raise the minimum wage because anybody who works for a living ought to, you know, make a good living, huge agreement. If you say we should not raise the minimum wage because it'll crush small businesses and destroy the opportunity. Again, huge majority. And so if you have that view, what Anat talks about in my book is that then the job of politics is not to treat kind of demand as fixed and say, like, I got to find my minimum wage supporters. It's to say, I have to conquer the ether and make people feel like the moral view that no one who works for living should earn a living is just everywhere in the air. And that the other view is just rarer

and weirder and more marginal. Your job becomes to saturate the conversation so that people who do not have a worldview so coherently baked, who are not reading eight books about this to form their opinion, just start to feel like that's literally in the original sense of the word, the common sense, the sense that is common to people. And I learned a lot from the folks in the book about how you play in common sense as kind of the canvas for the political artist, the place you play. You're not just trying to eke out a piece of legislation. Your ability to affect what is considered common sense is hugely important. And here I would say, as in many areas, the political right gets this. They understand who wins common sense wins the future. part because it's more of a kind of brainiac party. It's less interested in emotion and psychology. It kind of often looks down on those kinds of appeals. The left has just offered generally like policies and facts and in this hope that they're kind of self-evident. And it's been more absent from one of the core concepts of the heart of the book, which is meaning making,

which is really helping that latter group in each camp that has a stance, but is a little bit short of a worldview, helping them realize what is the normal thing to think. And generally, the left has been absent in so many ways from media to political speeches, et cetera, to that process of meaning making. And one of the big, I think, calls of the book is for the pro-democracy side, the political left, certainly Democratic Party, to invest in the project of meaning making above and separate and apart from simple electoral appeals. Yeah, I mean, there's so much in what you just shared.

The idea of, as you described, Shankar Osorio, you know, like saying, no, actually, it's not just about finding the people who just immediately say yes to exactly what you believe, but it's about understanding that a lot of people are kind of in the middle somewhere. And there's an opportunity to have a conversation that walks him through this feeling that, uh-huh, like maybe I need to question this. Can I just say one quick thing about that? Because you just said in the middle, and I totally get what you're saying, but I want to correct, like, I think part of the misperception is that sometimes being between two poles makes you in the middle, right? That wasn't my intention, right. Right.

I know, I get you. But like, it is a very common thing in politics. So like, we talk about moderates or like centrists or like middle of the road voters, right? And I think part of what I learned from my characters that I hadn't understood before is that if you are torn between two things, it doesn't mean you want the mean between them, right?

And my simple analogy for this is like the pizza burger analogy. If you, Jonathan, are not sure whether you want pizza or a burger for dinner tonight, you are a conflicted voter, undecided voter, a swing voter. It doesn't follow that you want a pizza burger. You may want a pizza burger least of all. That may be your third ranking choice, right? All it means is you do not right now know whether you want a pizza or a burger. You're torn. You don't have an easy way to make that decision. And I think what I learned from my characters is we need to make that guy think that a pizza

is what everybody's having, right? Or we need to make that guy think that a burger is everybody's having, as opposed to trying to average out the things that are pulling you in different directions, if that makes sense. No, it totally makes sense. I'm just thinking about whether I've actually had a pizza burger. There's definitely no, and I have no interest in having one, even though I love both. There's a leap in there that I'm curious about, which is if you've got a substantial percentage of folks who are certainly that persuadable group, you know, like they don't actually want the middle, like they're going to go one way or the other. And the job is to have the conversation. Is it that they, we want to move them to a place where they feel like, well, this is what everybody's doing?

And for me, the curiosity is always, but what's underneath that? You know, and what bubbles up for me is our physiological and psychological need to belong. And I wonder if part of what's happening now is that there has been, you know, you described the crisis of persuasion. I also happen to believe that there's a profound crisis of belonging. So many of the things that provided a sense of belonging, whether it was your workforce, you know, whether it was religion, whether it was the local leagues, you know.

Robert Putnam wrote this about, you know, bowling alone. They just don't provide that anymore, but the human need for that remains stronger than ever. So as we have this lack of places where we find belonging and increasing isolation, especially over the last few years, and then we're making decisions. My sense is that a lot of the reason that we make decisions, especially for folks who are in that persuadable realm is because we make decisions because it will allow us to be accepted,

to have a sense of belonging with a particular community of people. And that may be your neighbors, that may be your family. And that it's less about rational basis, less about deep analysis. It's more about what will let me feel less alone? What will let me feel like I can walk

out my door and get along with the people around me, rational or irrational? And I feel like the underlying, like the subtext of a lot of this is connected to our just deep yearning to belong. I think that's so profoundly true. I think in many ways, this is a core theme of the book. People have that need for belonging as you're talking about. And one of the things that is most disturbing to me, looking at the current American political scene, is that the extremist right, whose ideas and program is fully anti-belonging, anti-inclusion. However, in their political tactics, it is a movement centered on providing the experience of belonging and a movement,

national party, then dropping down into federalist society, campus organizations, evangelical church networks, hunting and fishing clubs, homeschooling networks for parents, where there's a lot of belonging going on on the right that feeds up into the national political program and a lot of ways in which the national political program trickles down, the only real trickle down, into belonging and association and like seeing those people on Sunday at church and getting help on the math curriculum with the homeschooling network. And then if you shift to the political left, I think there is a complete absence of a plan for belonging, of any interest in belonging. And again, I think this comes from a wonky, technocratic,

pointy-headed, brainiac bias in the Democratic Party on the left, particularly as it's gotten uncoupled from labor unions. This used to be a labor party, as left parties were around the world. It is no longer virtually anywhere in the modern West, a real labor party. And labor unions were about belonging and had, you know, kind of fractal, you know, units of belonging where people actually met IRL. And the, you know, the Democratic Party, but the left generally has become a very extremely online movement. It does not have the same networks of the evangelical church networks and the hunting and fishing clubs and so on and so forth. And you really look at the left, you say, like, who's doing that for good? Who is doing extraordinary rallies?

I mean, I'm sure you get these fundraising emails that you didn't sign up for the way I do, right? How many times are you being asked for five bucks all the time, right? When was the last time any of those email lists invited you to something? Have you ever been invited to like the park where you live to celebrate a value that is under threat by the other side? Have you ever been invited to like a drum circle or a sing-along or any kind of communal activity, or you just ask for five bucks. There is no strategy for belonging. Why is it not obvious for the Joe Biden White House to be doing fireside chats in the way that FDR did? TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, multi-format, Friday, 5 p.m., whatever, right? Talk us through the era. Talk us through the era. Make us drop it so that we're all listening to it

at the same time. So you have the most inclusionary movements on paper, basically uninterested in belonging as a political practice, and the most exclusionary movements on paper, incredibly deft at belonging as a strategy. And this to me, if I had to kind of sum up what I am trying to correct with this book, what I'm trying to make unignorable, it is this paradox, this problem. And I think we need those who actually want there to be democracy and justice and dignity for all in this country to step the hell up when it comes to belonging. Whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X.

Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. a lot of this conversation has been in the larger context of politics but i like i often bring this down to like like me and my down to me and my neighborhood, me and my family, me and the person who is in my life

on a regular basis, me and the few people that I work with. Anytime you're asking somebody to change a point of view, and that point of view is a fundamental tenant of the community to which they belong. I can't imagine a scenario where even if you can have a successful conversation in the moment, where that becomes sustainable change in belief and behavior, if you're not also creating a community for somebody to step into at the same time, Because fundamentally, you're not just asking people to change their minds. You're asking them to actively say, I am willing to ostracize myself from the community, which may have provided so much, maybe for generations. And maybe that's

even my family. I mean, that is a huge, huge ask. So I think part of what we need to understand when we're asking somebody to change a belief is if that belief is baked into, if it is a core tenant of a community to which that person holds dear and to which there is their primary source of belonging, unless we provide a community that invites them in, they're just, nothing's ever going to happen, but it gets really complicated. And you talk about this in your book, right? Because what if that person also is in reality or in perception, has done or is perceived as currently doing harm to what that new community would be, right? So maybe you have a conversation where somebody can actually, and these are some

of the people you describe in your book, say, I'm going to actually step into this conversation, even though I don't like this person, I don't believe in them, and I see them as doing harm. They're part of the problem, but I'm going to have the conversation. And it leads to some astonishing outcome with the profound shift in beliefs, right? And then maybe there's a community for them to step into, but how does that community even view that person after having potentially caused so much harm for so long? It's not just about creating an experience that shifts somebody's beliefs, but also creating an alternate or a new community to step into. And yet at the same time, if there's a dynamic where that community

perceives this individual as having been part of the problem? Are they even welcomed into that community? Is that even a realistic possibility? Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. It's a perfect way to put it that the, what we are asking when we ask someone to change their mind or come along with a particular idea, I think we sometimes don't understand the nature of what we're asking. We are asking you to kind of leave a family for another family or leave a certainty for another certainty. You know, you think about, for example, right now, we are attempting to get millions of men, I mean, all men, tens of millions of men to change. There's an old model of being a man, masculinity, the vast majority of men participated in

that we saw in our fathers or grandfathers. It doesn't work anymore. I mean, it wasn't great then either, but it's now understood to have not been a workable model based on misogyny, taking women for granted, all kinds of forms of behavior as being normal and okay. I'm not talking about the most extreme forms of behavior. I'm talking about things that 95% of good men would have thought are fine 50 years ago that are now widely understood not, in fact, to be fine. And we're trying to get tens of millions of men from one side of this line to the other. And by the way, we've succeeded. We never tell the stories of how we succeeded with these things.

We have already successfully migrated, I would say, a large number of men to a better, more enlightened way of relating to the world, to women, to their own masculinity, to all kinds of things, to violence. And we have a whole bunch of men who we've not yet so successfully migrated. Now, when we are inviting those men to make that leap, I sometimes think we don't understand what we are asking in the terms that you were talking about. We don't understand that we're not just saying that was wrong and this is right and be better, which is kind of how we approach these things. We're asking them to leave a community, a network

of being, a way they know how to be, that even if they at some level agree is flawed, is real to them, it's vivid to them, it's obvious what the codes are. And the thing we're asking them to join is a little ethereal to them. It's a little ethereal to all of us, not entirely fully settled in yet. We're asking them to be part of a new kind of compact masculinity that is maybe not as convincing to them, maybe not as vivid to them. Maybe they've never seen it. Maybe they don't know a lot of people who they feel are on the other side of that line. And when we think it's just like a question of kind of get right, like get your your heart right, like, get on the right side of things.

We're missing the communal nature of the loss that they're experiencing. And we're failing to offer them a kind of communal bounty of getting to that other side, that would perhaps be the biggest lure. And this is where I think, again, you could have the same conversation about kind of shifting on race and growing awareness of whiteness and accountability for whiteness. On any number of these things, we are oftentimes asking people to leave a world of certainties, good or bad. And often these migrations are very good and what they're leaving behind is very bad, but it's known to them. People understand how it works. And what we are offering is kind of vague

and unclear and not vivid and not very particularly well portrayed. And so the fact that people experience the loss, the fear of the loss much more acutely than they experience any excitement around the new thing they might be gaining, it's kind of obvious. And it's not entirely on those people. It's also on us who are making the pitch, right? If we want, as I do, there to be a lot more of the new kind of man, in addition to making a justice pitch and a human rights pitch, I need to make the new kind of masculinity more appealing, which I think it is, by the way. I think it's a lot more fun to play the role with my kids than what most dads were allowed to do throughout history. But you got to sell it. If it only feels like a loss, if it only feels like something's being taken away from you, you can't

say this, you can't say that. I mean, we're not selling it properly. And so I pin a lot of blame and accountability on folks who are dragging their heels and wanting the country to go back or cling to the past. But I also put a lot of blame on those of us who are failing to convincingly summon people into the next world we want to see. We need to make the world we want, the movements we have, seem more fun because they are more exuberant, more joyful, more life-giving. I think about this with climate change. Climate change is important. It's maybe the only truly important issue because there will be no other issues if there's no habitable planet. But there is a general aspect to the climate change conversation, and I've spoken to many leaders in this movement about this, that feels dour, that feels like homework, broccoli.

There's no reason that it has to have that aspect. The battle for the planet could be one of the great life-giving undertakings of our time. It doesn't have to be subjectively experienced as like things being taken away from you. I mean, we talk to very serious people who think about this. Climate change may be the biggest opportunity we've had to rectify racial injustice in the past historical legacies, because the sheer amount of money and social engineering power you'll have with it, you'll be able to solve other problems like racial injustice legacies. You'll be able to address things like gender. You'll be able to improve education, right? Just through such a massive project of public commitment. And so why wasn't the climate change movement framed as one of opportunity and can do and like, holy shit, this is going to be so fun to live in this new way. Is that the vibe anyone gets from any climate change conversation? I think it should be. I think this could be the

most exuberant, life-giving, purpose-giving thing of our time. So it's not always to blame the people who are dragging their heels that don't want to do these things. I think it's also to be a little hard on ourselves. Why is it that our causes are not appealing to people? And is some of the blame on us for not empathetically, strategically, shrewdly approaching people with the kind of pitch that would hook them based on who they are, what their actual experience is, what their actual concerns are, and summon them into the belief that the world we're offering them is far superior to anything that they might be clinging to. Yeah, I mean, I completely agree with that. And also understanding like in a bigger context, what are we really asking of these people? Because it goes beyond making a different decision. It goes beyond shifting a belief. It goes into something bigger.

What are we asking them to leave behind? And again, I want to circle back to this notion of that's not necessarily saying we're letting anyone off the hook or forgiving behavior or forgiving something, but it is basically saying if we want a net positive outcome, how do we step into this really taking a meta lens and getting super honest about what is at stake on both sides here? Let's acknowledge that. Let's step into the conversation from that point so we can have the conversation on a deep stakes level,

rather than on sort of like a superficial level. One of the people I write about in the book is this guy named Kurt Harvey, who was associated with this racial education camp for families where there's a kind of white parents adopting children of color. And he's an adoptive, transracially adoptive parent himself, and helped run this camp in Ohio. And he was thinking a lot about, he was very kind of reticent and didn't, uncomfortable with some of this kind of racial education at first, talking about white privilege, this and that. And then he got to a place over many years where he became the biggest evangelist for this kind of thing. We know what is now called CRT and all these big fights over it. But he was like,

he went through that whole arc as a white man of like, why are you saying this stuff to me all the way to like, we got to get these messages to everybody. Right. So he was reflecting on having known both sides of that thing. How can we get more white people, white men to have this conversation about race in a way that's not losing them. And one of the epiphanies he had, he actually looked at his day job. His day job is that he basically goes and he's a salesman who goes to dentists, independent dentists, who are very often

small business, single proprietor. And he convinces them to basically sell their practice to a larger company, which will then handle back office and kind of shared services. And they get to still run their own practice. But, you know, their practice will be owned by someone else. They don't have to worry about some of the business stuff. And when he was young and starting out in that work, he would call, he'd make a pitch and he'd say, you know, you'll save this much, you'll make this much more money. And, you know, people would kind of trust him.

They trust the spreadsheets often wouldn't get called back or people would take months to call back. And they'd have a whole conversation where it's like, yep, would love to do it. Great. Just give me a couple of, you know, and then he'd call and it would always die. And his Kurt's epiphany in selling these like dental back office services, these kind of acquisitions, his epiphany was that he had, as a young salesman, he had misunderstood the nature of the transaction. He thought he was selling the idea of practices being acquired and these back office services being pulled. What he was really selling was a kind of death and new birth to these dentists. They were going

to die as independent business people, which they'd been for a very long time, as business owners, as people on their own. That's an identity. That's a community. That's a self-belief. It's a way of conceiving of yourself in a world. He was asking them to die in that role,

in that incarnation of themselves. And he was asking them, he realized over time, to be reborn as another kind of person in this world, someone who works for others, someone who has a boss, potentially, someone who is not necessarily the captain of their own fate, someone who could be maybe laid off, no matter how prosperous they are. And it took him so long to understand that what he was actually asking was for these dentists to die in one incarnation of themselves and be born in another. Once he got that, right, then he could, then he started approaching them totally differently. He realized that he needed to walk with them through that death and allow them to really choose that and to make it clear for

them why the new life he was offering them was better. But until he could see it that way, he couldn't sell effectively to them. And I think about that so much with the racial conversation that he's now involved in, in this kind of side work for the adoption camp and racial education, where we are asking a large number of white people, a large number of men, to essentially give up, relinquish a whole way of life that is the only way of life. We're not honest about this, but equality in America, real equality in America, a multiracial democracy, will require pretty profound shifts in how people live, think, talk. And we're not recognizing, I think we fail to recognize, the real sense in which this is a kind of social death, a kind of real letting go for people. It is, by the way, a totally righteous one.

It is what needs to happen. But I think we sometimes don't understand what we're asking. What we're asking is a lot. And we are not offering in what is to come on the other side of change, any vivid, inviting picture, clarifying picture, illuminating picture of what your life will be like, who you'll be. What worked for Kurt, what works for some of those dentists he was selling to is when they can start to see that they're going to be okay on the far side of change. And that is actually partly their job as citizens, but it's kind of our job also, those of us who want those changes to happen. And I think we have kind of been abjectly bad at this, abjectly bad at this,

failed to convince a large number of people that they will be happier, more whole, more joyful, when they are men who get to participate in the full range of ways in which you can be a man, not just toxic masculinity, that convince white people that it's actually more fun to live in a society in which everybody has a voice and a say in the culture and the food are certainly better, you know? And if it all feels like being hit on the head, shamed, browbeaten, or homework and broccoli, we're not going to get there. We're not going to get there. We're going to get there if we can invite people into a future that just frankly feels more fun, more true, more exuberant, more life-giving. And I think that has to become the goal of the kind of

pro-democracy, pro-human rights, pro-justice side of the country. Definitely powerful. What this also brings up, I think, which is an important question, you use the phrase like, whose job is it? And when people think about the larger context of persuasion, I think oftentimes in a commercial, in a day-to-day sense, it's like, well, it's the persuader's job to persuade. If you're trying to sell somebody an idea, a product, a service, an offering, like you are, it's your job to make the case. When we zoom the lens out to larger social issues, to larger justice issues, the conversation around the burden of persuasion changes. And that's what you were starting to

speak to here. But there's a distinction between what is right and what is effective, because they're not always the same thing. That's exactly right. And it's worth remembering that persuasion is a tool and it can be used for good ends and bad ends. And I think part of my frustration that motivated writing The Persuaders is that this is a tool that right now is being better deployed by people who wish our society ill than people who wish it well. And I want the people who wish it well, people who want all of us to have a voice, all of us to have a vote, all of us to be included, all of us to be loved and have the right to love whoever we want. Those of us who want everyone's kids to have a shot, not just the kids of people who are lucky. If we continue to treat winning other people over as something that is either

futile or just kind of happens on its own, if we pursue the right policies and our heart is in the right place, that fantasy is going to be our undoing. And we have to have on the political left, a revolution of persuasion. We need to become persuaders in a way that can actually beat back the authoritarian menace, this kind of fascist uprising. It is the job of every single person who does not want that to be our future, our common future, to, I think, become a persuader and insist on leaders becoming persuaders. I have hope that a better path is possible. I think this is a neck and neck fight right now, a kind of dead heat between the forces of of darkness and the forces of light in part because the forces of light are kind of half asleep and my hope is that if they wake up a

little bit and get their act together they can kind of bury this awful politics of hatred and dehumanization of the last many years bury it in the garbage dump of history where it belongs. Feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. So in this container of a good life project, if I offer up the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? I think on the intimate scale, I think it means to me to be a good parent, a good partner, to have friends, real friends, sometimes hard when life gets busy and fragmented and, you know, to have space in your life for love and connection. And at the more societal level,

I think to live a good life is to engage yourself in the affairs of your community in whatever way is appropriate for you in whatever way you're called to do. And not just tend to family life and tend to your personal garden, but to make sure that you are engaged in a struggle for a better world, that you are saying the things that need to be said, organizing what needs to be organized, participating in projects of merit, so that you hold yourself responsible for the quality of the commons that you leave behind. And I certainly, when I think of that phrase, I think about it both very much in a kind of intimate, in the intimate realm. Because if you don't have that, the other thing can be quite hollow.

But I think if you only have the personal, you could end up, you know, with a happy family in a burning world. And that doesn't really work either. Thank you. Hey, before you leave, if you love this episode, safe bet you'll also love the conversation we had with Zoe Chance about personal social dynamics and the art of persuasion. You'll find a link to Zoe's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, Thank you. life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts

become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch,

getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun January 24th

Tell me how to fly this thing Mark Wahlberg You know what the difference Between me and you is? You're gonna die Don't shoot him, we need him Y'all need a pilot Flight Risk