Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Persuaders as Meaning Makers with Anand Giridharadas

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Joining Sharon on Here’s Where It Gets Interesting today is author Anand Giridharadas. Anand’s new book, The Persuaders, documents how people persuade others to change their minds and take action. Learn from Anand about how to move from a defeatist attitude of writing one another off. Changing our perspective about “lost causes” may be the exact thing we need to find true connection and repair our fractured relationships and communities. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What do Ontario dairy farmers bring to the table? A million little things. But most of all, the passion and care that goes into producing the local, high-quality milk we all love and enjoy every day. With 3,200 dairy farming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk, there's love in every glass. Dairy Farmers of Ontario. From our families to your table, everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. Hey friends, welcome. Listen, I've heard from so many of you who have said, Sharon,

what are we going to do? People don't even believe in facts anymore. And that's why I was so interested to talk about this new book called The Persuaders. Because there is somebody who has made a study of this and has written a whole book documenting how people persuade others to believe or do something. And this is a power that can be harnessed for good. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. I'm really excited to welcome Anand to the show. Thank you so much for being here. Oh my gosh, it's such a joy. I'm such a fan of what you are doing and the way in which you try to convey complicated and difficult and sometimes painful triggering issues to people

in a way that anybody can understand. It's very much at the heart of what I've been trying to think about over the last few years. Can we try to reach everyone? And you're really modeling what an everyone approach to civic education and just talking to people about these issues looks like. So it's great to meet you and great to be on the show with you. Thank you. Thanks so much for coming. And thanks so much for your work too.

Can you tell people a little bit more about it? Can you tell people what you've been up to professionally? And then I really want to talk about your book, The Persuaders. Yeah, I am a writer and journalist. I am the American born son of Indian immigrants. I grew up in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I lived in France for a few years when I was a child, then mostly in Washington, D.C., middle school onward. And I had my formative career experience actually moving to India after college. even though I'd never lived there, I'd visited. And I got some really good advice too, that if I wanted to become a writer,

a real writer, I should not go someplace that's fun and easy for me, but go someplace that's difficult and challenging. And I had read enough of those kinds of books, particularly the books of V.S. Naipaul, a great travel writer who won the Nobel in literature some years ago, that it's an encounter with what is difficult, that art and writing grows. And so I moved to India. I got a job in business that allowed me to go there for a year. It was an enormous disaster. Moved on beyond that. Got a journalism job that was my dream for The New York Times and ended up being a foreign correspondent in India for The New York Times

for the first five years of my career there. And it was this remarkable thing of going to the country that my parents had worked very hard to get out of. When I was on the daily show to talk about the book that resulted, Jon Stewart distilled it perfectly. He was like, so you basically, your parents spent their whole lives trying to come this way. And you were just like, I'm just going to go, I'm just going to go over there. This is not what I want. I'm going back where you tried to lead. Yeah.

Yeah. But thanks for all the hard work, guys. But it was an incredible thing for me because India in the 2000s, when I was a correspondent there, was kind of exploding in possibility. And it was the fact that there was economic growth of a kind that hadn't been seen similar to China. There was real government programs to help the most indisciplined franchise by the caste system and other things,

women, for thousands of years, arriving in an incredibly old society. And so I, since then, have came back to the US, became a columnist for the New York Times instead of a correspondent, and then left that and now write full-time, basically, on my books, taking on different topics. I wrote, after the India book, a book about hate crime in Texas and hatred and an extraordinary act of mercy after 9-11. I wrote a book about billionaires, my third book about billionaires taking over the world in part by convincing us that they're the only ones who can save us

from some of the very depredations they have caused. And then the new book, The Persuaders, which is about how we are living in this moment of extraordinary threat to some of the basic ideals that you are so often educating people about in your work of a liberal democracy, constitutional society. And in many ways, I think those things are threatened, not only because there is a dark political movement devoted to very bad things, but also because those of us who actually believe in those things have given up on the idea of persuasion, given up on the idea of changing minds. We have

gotten too comfortable writing people off. And so I am, you know, in this moment of my work, but also going back to those days in India, really interested in what people are going through when we talk about something like rising fascism, in what people are going through when we talk about something like rising fascism, or what people are going through when we talk about 40 million Americans believing in QAnon, or what people are going through when we talk about a war on women that is being waged. Those big forces are there. The policies are evident. The discussion of the machinations of politicians on those things is abundant. But I find myself very interested in what is happening in people and with people.

What is going on with us that we live in the kinds of times that we do? many people have given up on persuasion, given up on being able to even try to change the hearts and minds of their fellow citizens. There's a deep, deep level of fatalism and cynicism that I see afoot, and I'm sure you have experienced this as well. This sort of like, what is even the point? Like just burn it all down because there's absolutely no point. And that sense of fatalism is very dangerous. That sense of fatalism is what allows, as you mentioned, some of those dark forces to gain traction. That sense of like, there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do. It creates a crack in the door, creates an opening for other people who think to themselves, well, there's something I can do. If your view is, well, there's something I can do

and other people's like, there's nothing I can do. Guess who wins in that scenario? That's exactly right. And I love, and only because you are like the civic nerd that you are, will I like go into the civic nerdery of this for a second. But if you not to get too like grand about it, but like there have broadly been two ideas in all of human history about how decisions about the future should be made. The lake is rising. The lake is draining. What do we do about the lake? These people want to be in our community.

They're not in our community right now. Should they be in our community? These decisions are as old as time. That got okay. That got not okay. What do we do? People have been faced, communities have been faced with these decisions forever.

Most human beings, most of our ancestors, for most of time, who have ever lived, lived under idea number one about what to do when confronted with these questions about the future that needed to be resolved. And that idea was, it's a lot easier if you just let that one guy, and it was almost always guys, make it. And certainly the one guys loved that idea and promoted it. But also a lot of people

actually believed in that idea. It's too hard. It's too complicated. And a few hundred years ago, which is a very small amount of time ago, idea number two started to rise to the fore. An idea without real basis in empirics or in, you know, I mean, there's a reason the American founders like we hold these truths to be self-evident. That is what you say when in fact there is no scholarship available. It's self-evident. I was smoking this thing with my friends and it occurred to me that all men are created equal endowed by their created equal, endowed by their creator. Oh, great. Oh, you can't check that one either, right? No receipts, no receipts, because this was an incredibly radical notion that was actually totally untested. And it was the idea that we

ought to make the future, and we ought to make it in a way that sounds insane if you're not socialized in it the way we all are, which is that instead of having one person or a small number of people make all these decisions or one person in each little area, how about like 300 million people just argue all the time about everything and then we will somehow translate the sum of those arguments into decisions about the future. It literally sounds insane, and it would be insane if it was

not the most successful idea, I would argue, in the history of civilization, a completely radical idea that turned out to be right and turned out to not just be just and legitimate, because who the hell is that one guy anyway to tell us, but also turned out to make better decisions, right? Democracies make better decisions, generally speaking. What are some characteristics that people who you have studied, who you have written about, but people who are excellent at being persuaders, what are some characteristics that they share that perhaps people who are listening can begin to embody? That's such a great question. And that's really what I was after. I was, I was trying to, the people I, I do this in all my books. I speak to a range of people who are not all the

same and who are not all doing the same thing. And I try to figure out actually, what are they doing in common? Because I think there may be some wisdom there. In the persuaders that I spent time with over these last few years, I would say there are a few threads. years, I would say there are a few threads. One, their fundamental view, mental model of who is on the other side, whether it's the distant adversary in national politics, or whether it's their QAnon cousin or climate change denying uncle, their fundamental mental model is different from most of our mental models. And their mental model generally is that people are complicated, confused, torn, grasping for a worldview, almost trying to put an icing of certainty onto a completely porous cake. onto a completely porous cake. A cake that in fact has no structural integrity, is not as strong and monolithic and robust as it may seem

when you cover it in the icing of a confidently stated opinion. In other words, to use a phrase that I've heard people say, I think the persuaders I write about tend to think of many voters and citizens as having strong opinions, lightly held. And when you and I, and most people see a strong opinion, it's kind of normal to assume that it goes down all the way, right? That a strong opinion is by definition, strongly held. Many people do hold strong opinions strongly. Many, many people hold

strong opinions lightly. So let me give you some examples. When you think about immigration, an example, a very common strong opinion lightly held, according to a lot of research, is like, we need to strengthen the border. People should only come here legally. We have this crazy problem of people coming over here illegally. That's a strong opinion. It turns out to be quite lightly held because if you ask people, based on their sense of humanity, about different ways in which people should be treated, or about whether people who do XYZ should be subjected to ABC sounds right to them, suddenly people start feeling a different kind of thing.

In other words, they do have a view that the border is chaotic and we need to clamp down and America is for Americans. That's a real view they may have. And they have a view that kids should never be punished for choices their parents make. And they have a view that this country is generous at its heart. They have conflicting, complicated views. As Beyonce says in her new album, they're contradicted.

And what most of us do is say, you know, there's that border talk again. We just got to organize around those people. And the persuaders I write about think of those people as their clientele. They think about, I got to get in there. Those people, and this is a phrase that comes out a lot in the work of the persuaders, is those people need help with meaning making. They are seeing their stimuli from the world. They go to Walgreens,

they notice more Spanish speaking cashiers, or they hear something on the news. Their kids are coming home saying something about American history or whatever. And it's not automatic that their opinions form and flow and derive inevitably from those stimuli. Meaning-making is the gap. And by the way, it's what your listeners do when they watch your show. They're translating things they've seen. They don't need your help to see those things. They're seeing them in their life. What they need help with is like, what does it mean? That's why you have an audience. They don't know what it means on its own. That's why we watch things. That's why we read books audience. They don't know what it means on its own, right? That's why we watch things. That's why we read books. And the organizers I'm writing about, the persuaders I'm writing about, think of their

first job as meaning making. And I think if you look at a lot of people who work in politics, they think of policy as being their job. They think of slogans as being their job. They don't necessarily think of inserting themselves into that really fraught, important space in between the daily life stimuli people are receiving and the more solid story people are forming about what that is. People do not go from noticing more Spanish-speaking people at Walgreens to fearing an alien invasion on the

southern border automatically. People don't go from a one to a 10 by themselves. Someone is helping them. I think, frankly, the pro-democracy side, which is the side that I'm writing about in this book, has gotten lazy about meaning about meaning making in part because it rests on the laurels of a kind of moral righteousness. Like we want to do the right things. We shouldn't have to explain them to people. So I'd say meaning making, if I had to pick one concept is, is the biggest. I actually think we're on the verge of not only surviving this era, but building a kind

of country that has never existed in history, a kind of country made of people from all over the world, a real multiracial democracy of a kind of country made of people from all over the world, a real multiracial democracy of a kind we have never yet been, and no other country really has been. There's a very good thing for us on the far side of this extraordinary age of disturbance, if we can muster the will and the heart to get there. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey. We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind the scenes stories, hilarious guests and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve!

In the studio! It is my girl in the studio. Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more exclusive stories from the office and our friendship with brand new guests. And we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there. Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I want to touch on something you mentioned because it's something I've observed as well, which is this idea that in order to be part of our team, so to speak, it's a pro-democracy team that is inclusive and inclusive in a variety of ways, pick a lane, inclusive in all those ways,

variety of ways, pick a lane, inclusive in all those ways, that you must have a certain degree of purity of thought, belief, behavior. And if you're not pure enough, then you're outcast. You are cast out of the movement as being problematic. You're problematic. You made that one YouTube video and I did not like it, what you said in that YouTube video, whatever it is, pick away that you were problematic in the past. By today's definition, by our standards of purity, you used to be problematic and you are no longer welcome because we must retain our sense of purity. This is something that I have observed, that that is actually a lack of inclusion in many ways, that if you have not had purity of heart, thought, mind, behavior in the past, you're not contrite in the right way, you're not welcome. And I would love to hear your thoughts on that.

that you're pointing towards is that some of the least inclusive, most exclusionary movements of our time in terms of what they want to deliver, the world they seek, have managed to be the most inclusive and come as you are vibe in their attraction of voters and citizens. in their attraction of voters and citizens. And some of the most inclusionary, radically inclusionary movements of our time that truly want to build a bigger we can be as movements on the way to getting there, exclusionary and gatekeeping and seemingly small-hearted. And I want to say first

that this is in many ways for a good reason, right? Like, like I'm a critic of it in this book, but I'm not, I'm not like a critic from the far right. He's like, there's too much wokeness on the left. Like, that's not what I am saying. A lot of the reason for this purity and gatekeeping is that there are a lot more people in the conversation now than were before who are now telling us all the stuff that was making them, their lives painful and narrowed all these years all along that we just didn't hear and as except as the like mainstream truth of the situation. except as the mainstream truth of the situation.

So it's not that women were fine with how things went in meetings 40 years ago, but women of our mother's generation who were in those meetings, more often than not, sat through it and didn't have some social media account to go spout on, just didn't have any of a account to go spout on, just didn't have any of a number of means that women now have. And so why is there more calling out and saying that kind of man can't be in the meeting or whatever? Well, it's good in that sense that we now have

a lot more women's voice. We have a lot of laws to support those voices and it has become unacceptable to behave in a whole bunch of ways as a man that were totally acceptable 40 years ago, 20 years ago. And we've outlawed those, some of them legally, some of them culturally through shame. And that's really good. So I want to say that preface it to say a lot of what feels strident in the culture or what feels hostile or like you can't come in is like actually people standing up for themselves and actually saying like no woman ever again should be in a meeting that feels like that right no black person should ever again be in a classroom where their experience is kind of degraded in that way. Like we can build,

we can insist on, we can demand a kind of society in which that just doesn't have to happen. And a lot of the mechanism, legal, formal mechanisms we have to ensure that don't really work in that way. And things like shame and social sanction, you know, they're powerful. And I just want to say that to say I have respect for why the culture has gone a little bit too far in that direction. I am a beneficiary as a brown person who suffered a lot from racial bullying when I was a child. There was no language, no vocabulary for what was happening to me. There is now an entire vocabulary, a little too late in my case, but available for my kids' generation to say what those things are,

to provide a language for calling them out. And I think that is good. And a very large caveat. I think what has gone wrong is not calling things out and saying they're bad or insisting that people gender people correct. All of that I like. My concern is that these movements that want to deliver that kind of world, that scale for everyone, have a vested interest in having a higher membership role tomorrow than they do today and today than they did yesterday. That is literally their purpose. That's it. It's the whole game. And sometimes these important instincts toward calling things out and saying that things are not okay and trying to protect people in the room from the historical or other behaviors of other people in the room, sometimes that tendency

can go to such an extent that it agitates against what it takes to actually grow movements. That does not mean, in my opinion, that you say, okay, let's gender people properly is not important. Or, okay, people should be able to talk over women at meetings, because we don't want to lose the men. It does not mean that. It does mean that we have to think about a very hard thing, a kind of walking and chewing gum thing, which is how do we hold very clear on these values about what makes women feel safe in a space or what makes trans people feel safe in a space or what makes black people feel safe in a space and valued and protected and thriving while pulling in the next 5% of voters or citizens, the next 5% after that, each successive additional 5% is going to be less aware, less fully down with this program, maybe not clear what this program even is, not knowing these terms, the more you succeed in politics, in movements, the next 5%

of people know less than the 5% before. And you're going to start getting to, in successive waves, and you could talk about men, you could talk about white people, you could talk about white men, older people. These are all very large groups of people who are somewhere in between down with your program and willing to break the country because they so oppose your program, who are figuring it out, who do feel like the correctness has gone too far, who do feel like the wokeness thing is out of hand. I'm not validating that view because I don't agree with that view, but they feel that. They feel like suddenly there was a way to be a man before, and now there's some new way that's required, and they were never taught the new way. What am I to

do? I think a lot about what does it take to build the kind of movements that can hold certain standards and offer people the clarity that you are not going to be talked this way in space. We stand for certain things and we stand against certain things, but be small evangelical in their pursuit of souls, in their pursuit of new people. And in a way, have the self-confidence as spaces and movements to say, we know we are so good that we can bring you in here and we can educate you inside the tent. That's how good we are. We are not so insecure about our capacity to change minds that we need you to be fully baked for you to come in the tent.

Come in the tent. You're not going to disrespect people here, and we're not going to stand for that. You're not going to do this, that, and the other, but come in the tent because you were not raised with those ways of being a man because no one was in 1972. And you were not raised with those ideas of being a white person or even hearing the word whiteness maybe in your childhood. And you were not raised thinking of ideas like universal healthcare in this country because you grew up in the Cold War and those ideas were thought of being

communist and very dangerous. No one arrives fully baked. And if movements that want to deliver justice and dignity for all people don't fundamentally orient themselves to the basic mathematical truth that if you don't have people who don't fully get it in your movement, your movement is too small, right? The sign of a healthy movement is not everybody being down. The sign of a healthy movement is not everybody being down. The sign of a healthy movement is a whole lot of people in your movement who have no idea what the program is, but they just like being in your movement. Let's say just an average citizen is listening to this. By and large, most people are just like, I just work at my job. I'm a nurse.

I work in an office. You know what I mean? These are just people without access to governmental power, by and large. What can somebody who is just going about their everyday life, like trying to put food on the table, making dinner for these kids who want to be fed every single night. I know. I have two of them.

It's relentless. 365 days a year, they want to eat the foods. What can we do to be the persuaders? What can we do to make the pro-democracy movement more inclusive, more welcoming, more fun? Not everybody's role is to be out front on the stage. That's not everybody's role. Yes, we need those people. Yes, we need those people to be compelling. We know those people would be dynamic. We want people who are worth following. All of that is absolutely true. But it also, in order to have this sort of small e-evangelism, it requires all of us to say to our friends, like, get in here. You belong over on this side of the line. Get in the tent and we'll get you fixed up. We'll tell you what you need to

know. What can the rest of us who are just trying to like, I'm just putting food on the table for these kids every night, what can we do? If this was just a book for leaders and campaigners, I could have done it as an email. You know, dear 12 people. every single reader, every nurse and teacher and parent and truck driver and union member and small business founder to think of themselves as persuaders. And here's why. The evidence is actually quite clear that on most of these big issues, institutional voices have very limited persuasive power today. It just does not work for the New York Times and MSNBC to explain to people that QAnon is in fact not true. It just doesn't work. It literally reinforces the faith in QAnon that people have that the New York Times and MSNBC would be saying, don't believe in QAnon. What works is other people. What works is people in your community.

And so I really wrote the book to encourage all of you to become persuaders in your own way. And I think it means just that idea of being a persuader. I think it, I wanted people to find ways of being brave and standing firm while reaching out. That's my take on it. I think that's what makes the book different. There's a lot of things about reaching out. There's a lot of like, you can go somewhere else for Kumbaya.

Like this is not a book about just like, how do you, you know, roll over for the sake of pleasing other people and making them, you know, this is a book about like, right is better than wrong. And democracy is better than non-democracy and human rights are better than not having them and saving the planet is better than not saving it. There there's truth. There's reality. There's better and worse kinds of societies. But how do you, as that nurse or teacher or truck driver, how do you be brave about what you believe and stand firm in what you believe in the kind of future you want for your kids and reach out to that family member, reach out to people at work, reach out to people you may be unionizing with, reach out to people who may think differently from you at work. And what I have found from so

many people I spoke to is that so many Americans now have family members who have become disinformation cult victims. This is one of the top five issues on the minds of so many Americans that just doesn't show up in media. It just doesn't show up because it's one of these chronic problems, like a kind of diabetes of the body politic that is just like a slow burning forever story that doesn't have like an acute flashpoint moment that we cover. But like one out of six or seven of us, one out of seven adults probably,

is basically now a believer in like a permanent kind of durable conspiracy disinformation cult. I have a whole chapter in The Persuaders about what you can do to help pull people like that out. And spoiler alert, it has to do with not trying to replace the thoughts that are in their head with your thoughts, but trying to displace the thoughts that are in their head. You're not trying to plant reality, you're trying to plant doubt. in their head. You're not trying to plant reality. You're trying to plant doubt. And part of how you do that is playing up a sentiment that they have, which is the desire not to be anybody's fool, and building that up so it can compete against the other part of them that has fallen prey to a cult, which is the part of all of us that wants the world to make easy sense.

that has fallen prey to a cult, which is the part of all of us that wants the world to make easy sense. And cult victims are people whose desire for the world to make easy sense is currently routing their desire not to be someone's fool. And you can play up that latter desire. And there's evidence about how you can do it, strategies for how you can do it that I write about in the book. I write about people who are doing an incredible experiment called deep canvassing, which every single citizen listening to this can go do right now. You sign up for a few hours of training, and you don't have to be a fancy political operative or anything else. You go door to door in your community, lovingly talking your fellow citizens through issues that you care about. This is not traditional phone banking for a candidate you might have done.

It's not calling your senator. that try to surface the complex intuitions that a lot of people have on these issues and try to help people wrestle with their view, for example, that the border should be strong and their view that everyone deserves a dignified life. And it is an incredible experience, an experiment. I got to go see it up close and experience it up close in Arizona and just saw the remarkable power of this. This is something everyone can do. And I think it'll

make you more effective in your work life. I think it'll make you more effective in your civic life. It might even make you more persuasive with your children, which is, of course, the hardest problem of all. And I think, look, this book is for everyone who has spent the last many years despairing, shaking your fists at the TV, feeling powerless. are never going to do anything or waiting for some prosecutor to do something or waiting for some kind of miracle to strike down the forces of darkness. The only way we are going to get the country we deserve, that you're going to get the healthcare you deserve, that you're going to get the kind of schools your kids deserve, that you're going to get the kind of housing policy that would allow you to be able to afford the kind of homes your parents could afford. The only way we're going to get those things, we're going to have nice things in this country,

is if we insist on building a bigger we. And every single person listening to this, not just outsourcing it to the top, to the leaders, every single person listening to this aspires to become a persuader themselves, talks those cousins, those coworkers, those community members, those neighbors, talks them through their conflicts, talks them through their contradictions, and has the patience to say, I get that you don't like this new history teaching that your kids are getting, but here's why my kid's life has gotten so much better once this country became a lot more conscious of difference in recent years. I get that this

pronouns thing is confusing to you, but here's why we can build an extraordinary kind of society of a kind that would shame our ancestors in retrospect in their narrowness. If we can make people a little more comfortable in the spaces they operate in with not actually that much effort. I think we sometimes forget whether on climate or on some of this social and cultural stuff or on inclusion, on race, we are actually trying to do a lot. We're actually trying to put people through a lot. America's not in the situation it is right now for no reason. I think actually many of us on the pro-democracy side completely fail to level with people about this. We are actually asking people to change

the way they live a lot. Use new fuels, participate in a new economy. Like, oh, sorry, you're a man in North Carolina. You used to make furniture as the main thing people in your town did. Sorry, we're signing permanent normal trade relations with China, which now means no man in your community will ever make anything again. The kind of education that people got in your community is no longer valid as of this evening. And good luck. We have upended gender relations, the understanding of what gender is.

We've upended who people get to understanding of what gender is. We've upended who people get to love and what the family looks like. We've had the rise of a country in China that has changed every corner of the planet and changed our own economy and everything else. We've had a pandemic that has just totally upended assumptions about work and what work is and so much around that. We've had demographic changes that are turning this country into a superpower of color, a majority minority country within your and my lifetimes of a kind that has never been done by a superpower that is choosing democratically to open itself to be a country made of all the world, a country made of all the other countries.

And so we are falling on our face right now because we're jumping high. We're attempting to build an awesome kind of country. And we can't just, as a pro-democracy movement, we can't just skip to the problems. We can't just skip to the backlash. It's just a backlash. It's not a front lash. It's not a movement of the future we are up against. We are up against a backlash because of how much we have successfully changed to make this society more open to more experiences, more kinds of love, more kinds of identity, more kinds of origin. And if we remember that, then I think it's going to be possible to say we have to sell that vision to people who are skeptical of it. We're going to have to walk a lot of people through the psychological transitions we are demanding of them. Our position cannot be to stand at the end of history and be mad that people are tardy. People are tardy. And I think it's going to be an extraordinary era ahead.

And I mean that. It doesn't sound like that most of the days you look at the news. But I actually think we are on the verge of building a kind of country that's never existed. And I think we can do it. And I think we can do it if we learn again to persuade. The perfect way to end this. We are on the precipice of something that has never existed before, the history of time. We have the ability to then be the country that all others will look to for inspiration, but it cannot be the job of 535 people in the marble halls of the Capitol.

It cannot be the job of bureaucrats. It cannot be the job of people at your city council. It is all of our jobs. It is up to each and every one of us. And if that is the future that we want, we all have to work for it. This is our country. It doesn't belong to somebody else. In the words of Ken Burns, there is no them, there is only us. And it's all of our jabs to prevent those dark forces of authoritarianism, of tyranny, of fascism from taking root in the hearts and minds

of our children and our neighbors. And it's all of our jobs to invite people in to be part of us. I just love it. And I loved your book. And tell everybody where they can find you online, where they can sign up for your newsletter, all that good stuff.

Yeah, well, I mean, right now now the Persuaders book can be found everywhere books are sold, as they say. It's an ebook. It's a print book. It's an audio book. So find it in whatever form is most comfortable for you and tell me what you think about it. And you can do that by connecting with me on Twitter. My handle is AnandWrites, A-N-A-N-D-W-R-I-T-E-S, because that's what I do. And I also have a

newsletter called The Ink. It's The.Ink. Very simple. And that's another place for kind of longer form reflections, interviews, and a good place to just keep up with my work and this conversation that I'm trying to have. Thank you so much for being here today. This was truly delightful. Thank you for your interest and for the work you do. I wish you great success with this. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. If you enjoyed this episode, would you consider leaving us a rating or review or sharing a link to it on your social media? All of those things help podcasters out so much. Here's Where It Gets Interesting is written and researched by executive producer Heather Jackson. Our audio engineer is Jenny Snyder, and it's hosted by me,

Sharon McMahon. See you again soon. you