Offline with Jon Favreau - Best Of: How To Change Alt Right Minds, with ContraPoints

Episode Date: December 10, 2023

YouTuber Natalie Wynn, better known as ContraPoints, may be the internet’s most persuasive political commentator. Known for her carefully produced, elaborate video essays, Natalie has an uncanny ability to attract and de-radicalize viewers with reactionary, right wing politics. She sits down with Jon to talk about the importance of style in political persuasion, explain how the internet became fascist in 2017, and teach what it takes to actually change minds online.  For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

Hey everyone, so we had our first ever last minute cancellation on offline this week. It's okay, we're rescheduling, so it's going to be great. But because we needed a guest, what we're going to do is we are going to air one of my favorite episodes of offline with the YouTube star known as ContraPoints, aka Natalie Nguyen. We have talked a lot over the last few weeks about how the internet has flattened debates, flattened nuance and complexity, has distorted people's perceptions of the world around them, has driven people into binary thinking. ContraPoints on her extremely popular YouTube channel is the

opposite of all that. She makes these fantastic videos and her goal is to change people's minds, to persuade people. She is on the political left, but what she's been trying to do with her videos is to persuade people on the right, particularly people who otherwise would go down these right-wing rabbit holes online. And her videos are all about that. She's fascinating. I'll let her explain it to you because she can do it better than I can. It was one of our favorite episodes to make. It was one of my favorite conversations to have. So please enjoy this episode. And then we will be back with our regularly scheduled offline next week. or political science, this is a little bit infuriating because I think it's really an academic bias that assumes that like a reason is this thing

that has this kind of special unique place and democracy. Whereas I do think that, I mean, if you're making campaign videos, you're tweeting for all politicians, you'd know that this is not about reason. Like there has to be some room for reason, right? Otherwise it's literally just some kind of i don't know sick like then it's just vibes yeah it's vibes it's it's vibes and and violence like

at the end at the end of the day i'm john favreau welcome to offline hey everyone my guest today is self-described youtuber and ex-philosopher natalie winn better known as contraraPoints. I'm sure many of you are already huge fans, and you should all know that Natalie was as insightful and entertaining as you might guess. For the rest of you who are hearing about ContraPoints for the first time, stick with us. You are in for a treat. ContraPoints is one of YouTube's most thoughtful, effective political commentators. The Verge has called her an elegant,

whip-smart middle finger to the swamps of the internet. Vice has called her the opposite of the internet. She's earned these accolades because of her carefully produced, very long video essays, where she's usually moodily lit, dressed in some kind of Victorian costume and delivering a smart, compelling,

self-deprecating exploration of some controversial issue. Cancel culture, transphobia, Jordan Peterson, voting, justice, incels. Natalie's videos are treatises to understanding some of the internet's most heated debates. But what makes Natalie unique among the internet's political commentators is her uncanny ability to attract viewers with reactionary right-wing politics and actually change their minds. Her approach is empathetic, slow, nuanced, everything the internet isn't. And it works. In the comments beneath any of her videos, you'll see people saying she changed their mind. And I don't know too many other places where I see that today.

All of this is to say I was very excited to talk to Natalie. I was curious to hear her thoughts on style versus reasoning and the work of political persuasion, how, in her words, the internet became fascist in 2017, and what she can teach all of us about what it takes to actually change people's minds in an era dominated by online debate. We talked about all of that and so much more, including cancel culture, political organizing,

why the left is bad at persuasion, and why it's so hard for all of us to talk about climate change. As always, if you have comments, questions, or complaints, feel free to reach out to us at offline at crooked.com, and please do rate, review, and share the show. Here's Natalie Wynn, also known as ContraPoints. Natalie Wynn, welcome to Offline. Thank you. So we spend a lot of time on the show complaining about all the ways that the internet is breaking our brains. Oh, yes. The quick dopamine hits, the short attention spans, you know, the debates that lack context and nuance and the abundance of humorless scolds out there that are outraged about everything all the time.

You are this wildly successful YouTuber known for these incredibly thoughtful, entertaining, funny, long videos about some fairly controversial topics that rack up millions of views, all of which led Vice to call you the opposite of the internet. What do you think of that characterization? Well, I don't know that I'm the, I mean, if I'm the opposite of the internet, then I'm an opposite that's contained deeply within it. You know, in some kind of metaphysical way where every man contains a woman and every woman contains a man. Because I don't think that what I do can be separated from the fact

that it completely evolved online. So I guess in one sense, I am dissenting against the way politics is usually done on the internet. But also I think that what I do is kind of inherently linked with my experiences online. Well, so you've called yourself an ex-philosopher. Yes. Why the ex?

Just to go back a little bit before you started making these YouTube videos. Well, I was getting a PhD in philosophy. That was one of my previous career attempts. And so I was at Northwestern in a PhD program. And I think what it came down to is being an academic just doesn't agree with me. It's not a personality fit. I mean, I respect academics.

I think that the world needs to have academics, but to do that, you sort of need to be able to sort of focus your attention on one issue for five years. And that's, I mean, that's ultimately what writing a dissertation is. That's how you get a PhD. So that to me was the problem. I realized that I'm kind of more of a, I don't know if I'm more of a big picture person. I also kind of think I have a very short attention span, which, you know, I guess you might not guess

considering that I make videos that are 90 minutes long. But I think that to me, I just don't have that thing that makes you want to study one species of bacteria for five years or write about the same, like three paragraphs of Heidegger or whatever. Like I just, I just can't do it. I don't know. I like YouTube. I like the frenetic pace of it. I like being entertained. So there's a kind of hedonistic thing about me i think

that makes me sort of like yes i'm interested in politics i'm interested in philosophy i'm interested in ideas but i also want to be entertained and i'm easily bored so yeah that that's to me is why youtube is appealing i always felt like the further you get into academia too, the further removed you are from the real world of human beings. And it becomes, especially if you're like writing a dissertation like that, it feels a little lonely. It's like you're just sort of by yourself with all of these words and you kind of lose touch with actually what's going on in the real world. So what led you to start making these YouTube videos in the first place? And for people listening who aren't familiar with your videos, like, could you give an example of a few of a social psychology of the internet kind of phenomenon i started out more interested in kind of the far right and the way that i was operating online

specifically these kind of um alt right this was 2016 when i really got started so like the early stages of trumpism on the internet and if it was called the manosphere, which is a term I haven't heard in years, but basically it was this kind of loose network of influencers who were doing, I guess the sort of 2022 reference point would be Andrew Tate, sort of deeply misogynistic dating advice and gender politics

um it was very it was it was i mean it's still popular now um but it was it was it was a big deal on on youtube in 2016 so i guess the way it looks to me at the time was that i felt that these guys were kind of winning like they seemed seemed, at least on the online space. I think at the time I felt that, you know, people in academia were so disconnected from like what people actually thought. And I thought at the time the internet was a better reflection of that.

Now I'm kind of not so sure about that. But I do think that, you know, maybe it's not what the average person thinks, what you see online, but it is what millions of people think. And millions is something. Yeah. I mean, I've heard you jokingly describe your YouTube channel as you talking about how the internet became fascist in 2017. How did the internet become fascist in 2017? Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think what happened is you have, so there's this dynamic with the internet

as a forum for ideas where I think people who feel that their thoughts are sort of suppressed, not represented, unspeakable even in sort of more conventional media or even in kind of public spaces will kind of assemble online to discuss them so i watched this happen in the late 2000s with atheism there were all these people online writing about atheism making youtube videos about atheism and a lot of the time what you had

is like a lot of people who had very religious upbringings, sometimes they were the only atheist in their small town or whatever, but online this kind of like marginalized, like fringe sort of belief system. Of course, atheism isn't really a belief system. So that's why that community didn't last. But, but, you know, like, like I think I've watched similar things happen with, you know, the trans community on the internet. being trans is like fringe, marginal, isolating experience for most people offline. But online, you can create a kind of pseudo community around it.

Well, I think that's happened with people with sort of a variety of reactionary ideas. A backlash to the Obama administration. Feelings about race that seemed unsayable to a lot of white people, but they were thinking it. Feelings about gender, about sexuality that, you know, I guess in 2017, Me Too has gone too far. And like, this is kind of this terribly oppressive thing to men. All this kind of, I think, there was millions of people who felt that they weren't allowed to say what they were thinking. And reactionary internet influencers kind of gave them a incentivizes reactionary politics, or does the internet just give people with reactionary politics plenty of space to find each other?

Yeah, that's a good question. I don't have a definitive answer. I think that it's both. I think that, yes, there's the dynamic I just described where people who have kind of beliefs that are sort of considered more marginal in whatever their community happens to be will form a pseudo community online. I also think that because it's kind of an attention economy, that extreme and controversial viewpoints can generate a lot of attention. Where if people are saying something that a lot of people find outrageous,

well, everyone wants to talk about that outrageous thing. We're all dunking at it on Twitter. We're all making videos about it on YouTube. It generates attention. This is how Trump got big, the snowballing of negative attention and also people feeling that Trump sort of speaks for their sort of instinctual feelings in some horrible way.

Yeah. I mean, how much do you think the YouTube algorithm is responsible for sending people down these rabbit holes? It's, again, a little difficult to say. No one seems to fully understand how the YouTube algorithm works. It was widely blamed, I will say, but a lot of journalists blamed YouTube for what happened. And I think there's certainly some truth to the idea that the algorithm led people into extreme right-wing politics. I mean, I sort of watched this happen myself to some extent.

You would start out watching a video that would be called something like Feminist Cringe Compilation. And it would be this video, you know, know 10 minutes all these different cell phone videos of like blue-haired campus activists embarrassing themselves in public or whatever and this apparently is very cathartic to some people to watch um so you would watch that and then the next video would be someone sort of talking about how feminism is cancer and then the next one after that would be about how you know look at how the demographics of western countries are changing like white people are going to be a minority soon and then the one after that would be how the jews are replacing white people right so wow we got there yeah there

was kind of there'd be this kind of like escalation and i don't know i there there was sort of like um these sort of networks of influencers where some of them were just kind of politically incorrect comedy kind of people who didn't really seem to have that deep an ideological attachment to any of this, but who sort of wanted to be able to make, they wanted to say racial slurs. You know, that's kind of the extent of their politics was they don't like being scolded. They don't like being told what to do. And then you had these other people

who were reading like, you know, fascist philosophers in the 1930s and who had like a deeply entrenched ideological system that they were sort of saw 2016 coming in a way. You've said that the 2016 election confirmed that people were voting the same way they were leaving YouTube comments. I found that interesting because I had Jennifer Senior on to talk about her piece on Steve Bannon like a month ago. And she was talking about how Steve Bannon's evil genius was basically weaponizing the comment section of Breitbart to sort of build the MAGA movement.

Like, how do you think that's related to sort of the comment section in YouTube to actual voting in 2016? Well, I do think that to a lot of people, the internet has forced a more realistic idea about what the average person thinks, or at least what a certain subset of people think. Like, I remember in 2015, 2016, people would just very commonly assert that racism, it just doesn't exist anymore

right like sure it was it was we elected obama and everything's fixed right there was a problem in the 1960s but like we're over that obama won like why are you talking about racism like you're just trying to create this division that's just not there i don't hear anyone say that anymore it seems like we all kind of recognize that oh racism is this like massive force that is a hugely influential thing in American politics. And I feel that, you know, that I do feel I was right about it. Like when when you see hundreds of thousands of racist comments on every single thing about Black Lives Matter or about, you know, whatever it was in the 2010s, the Ferguson uprising, Freddie Gray in Baltimore. I don't know. That's not just people saying offensive things

because they're trolls. People on some level are describing how they actually feel. And if they'll comment that when no one's looking, they're probably also going to vote based on those feelings as well. So you come along and decide that you're going to create these videos with the hope that they persuade people to think differently about a range of political and cultural issues.

Persuasion seems like a rare goal of debate these days, especially on the internet. I feel like it's even more rarely achieved. But you've heard from alt-right people who've said that your videos have dragged them out of their rabbit holes and changed their mind. Like, can you talk a little bit about how you settled on your approach and your style in these videos? Well, to me, I suppose, first of all, I don't consider what I do to be debate. And that's, I think, an important part of the reason this works. Because in debate, it's true, your goal part of part of the reason this works because in debate it's true your goal can't really be to persuade certainly not the person you're talking to

because debate is it's like sports like the point is to try to win yeah it's like this dominance kind of competition um but so i guess sometimes what i do in videos, especially, you know, videos from that era, it's a kind of pseudo debate, I guess, where I respond to a figure like Jordan Peterson, right? And I guess to me, persuasion is an emotional thing. It's really, I don't know, I guess I'm interested in the psychology of persuasion. And I just think the importance of reason has been grossly overstated when it comes to how people change their minds. I think a lot of times it has to do with a personality, sensibility, making people feel like you kind of see where they're coming from on some level is kind of this, I feel

like entry point. You kind of have to get people to lower their defenses before they're even open to reasons and that is something that has more to do with style than substance um so i guess to me it's about you know when i come i don't know you if you want to convince jordan peterson fans or whatever uh i don't know you have to be in some way non-threatening to them, which is, I guess to me, I used to try to sort of achieve this with self-deprecation or, you know, like I'm trying to communicate to the viewer, I don't think I'm better than you. Like, I'm not here to scold you. Like, you're allowed to think that I'm trash or whatever. Like, but also like, you know, I think then that sort of opens them up to your way of looking as you say,

like, okay, maybe this psychology professor who insists that trans people wanting to be called by pronouns is not the same thing as Maoism. Like, you know, you can sort of get them to see that that's somewhat of an exaggerated claim.

I mean, but that is just back to sort of the opposite of the internet. That is just so different from how most conversation and most political conversation plays out today. I actually feel like, you know, the response to Trump and Trumpism over the last several years has been so focused on like, we're going to fact check the right, or we're going to find the truth, or the media must actually tell the truth, or journalists have to do their jobs,

and it's all about truth and reason. And I think what you're saying is that it's much more about emotion and sort of understanding where people come from. It sounds like what you're saying is it's about empathy in some sort of way. Yeah, I think that empathy is helpful in that you sort of have to know, you sort of have to be able to guess how people are feeling in order to resonate on a frequency that they're going to pick up. I think that that's a skill that's sort of not really part of, I mean, it's certainly not very much part of a Western philosophical tradition.

And any kind of idea of debate that comes from that, like it's not, you know, there's this idea in like Plato's dialogues, for example, where like, you know, I guess even Plato kind of figured it out because Socrates, they do kill him. Right. Socrates, they do kill him. But I feel like the conclusion of Socrates being sentenced to death is like, oh, this retreat from democracy as this awful thing. And oh, we need to create this academy where we only let in people who have studied trigonometry and who are open to reasoning and they'll see the truth. Well, I don't think even that will work. I think to me, I guess I have a more like psychoanalytic view of reasoning. Like, I don't know, I feel that a lot of it's kind of unconscious and it's motivated by anxiety and identity

as opposed to being a kind of process of reasoning to conclusions from premises. Well, and it does seem like if you want, I mean, to your point about democracy, democracy is necessarily messy and sort of requires the ability to persuade one another. Like without the ability to persuade, can you even have democracy? Yeah, well, that's kind of this big, scary question, right? Because I think that part of the reluctance, I think, especially for liberals to acknowledge what I'm saying here is that a lot of our ideas about how democracy works are supposed to be founded on the idea that it's possible to have public discourse where like reason to some extent prevails um and where like the better arguments do defeat the weaker and where like it's possible to reach some kind of rational consensus um and i i guess i am kind of questioning that that um what that means for democracy,

I'm not going to pretend I have an easy answer to. But I do think what's hopeful about what you do is, look, I mean, I got into politics because I thought that like, you could persuade people to think differently. And I was a speechwriter for Barack Obama because I thought like, not just through facts and reason,

but through emotion and by telling, you know, the story of America at its best, not just that it's worse that we could like move people. But I think that sort of like, over time, it feels like the left hasn't quite figured out how to persuade effectively. And yet I see, you know, with some of these videos you've done, if you can reach people who have been alt-right and who believed some of these reactionary politics, and then they say after watching some of your videos, oh, I actually think differently now, and you've actually pulled me out of this rabbit hole, that to me seems incredibly hopeful. And if we could somehow figure out how to do that, maybe we'd be in a better place. there is a kind of silver lining i guess in that it is possible to change people's minds um right

so that i have to believe that i mean i feel like if we if we can't believe that then we then we are sort of lost right if we if we don't believe that we can change people's i and i do believe that i mean actually some of the people who i think have the most realistic view of this are like campaign field organizers. I mean, I used to work on the Obama campaign at the lowest possible level, knocking on doors and things. And yeah, what the field organizers would tell us was like, look, don't overwhelm people with a bunch of facts and intricate policy discussion. Like tell a story that they'll connect with emotionally. Oh, my aunt or whoever had cancer and like couldn't, you know, but the Affordable Care Act, like she was able to get, you know,

this kind of thing. Like it's sort of a face-to-face interpersonal connection that makes people feel like, I don't know, you're talking to them on some kind of human level. And I think for people who, i don't know you're talking to them on some kind of human level um and i think for people who i don't know majored in economics or philosophy or or political science this is a little bit infuriating because i think it's really it's really an academic bias that assumes that like a reason is this thing that you, has this kind of special, unique place and democracy. Whereas I do think that, I mean, if you're making campaign videos, you're tweeting for all politicians, you know that this is not about reason.

Like, so I guess there is some, there has to be some room for reason, right? Otherwise, it's literally just some kind of, I don't know, sick, like... Then it's just vibes. Yeah, it's vibes. It kind of i don't know sick like then it's just vibes yeah it's vibes it's it's vibes and and violence like at the end at the end of the day um so that's a little scary but i think that i don't know i think it's probably possible to to incorporate the kind of more a rational part of persuasion and of political identity formation, and to engage that for whatever we decide are good ends. I mean, you mentioned this, but I think humor plays a very important role here as well.

And, you know, in your videos, you don't take yourself too seriously. You engage in a lot of self-deprecating humor. It does feel today that politics and political conversation and debate has like been sort of sapped of all humor. Like, and it's like that there's sort of, look, for good reason, there are a lot of sort of moralistic tones taken by a lot of people because there are big sort of moral issues at stake here but how do you think about like humor as an effective tool for persuasion well humor is uh i guess pleasure it's pleasurable people like to laugh and i think that, you know, people kind of have a tendency to chase what feels good. So being funny is inviting. It encourages people to come. It encourages people to stay.

And I think that, you know, the opposite is true of sermonizing. People, except for people who are very guilty and who have a kind of masochistic wish to be scolded, which is also a thing. But I think that if you're not engaging with guilty people, then humor is a much more inviting kind of stylistic choice. Because I think that when I'm going through a video script, I'm thinking, could someone who doesn't really agree with me watch this or listen to it and feel like they basically could get along with me despite

the disagreement? Even if that's an illusion and like we totally wouldn't get along at all, I do think that like, I don't know, if you can create a, you know, when you're writing a video script, you're creating a persona and creating a persona that people find sort of approachable and not, you know climate change too where like no you know no one wants to talk about climate change because it's just it just seems to be a promise of misery with with like no i don't know i feel that that sort of suppresses like engagement with with the topic i certainly think it does for me so if someone could find a way to talk about that without making everyone just feel depressed and hopeless i I mean, I thought you did a great job of that in your climate video, but we've wrestled with that here quite a bit too, because I do think the problem with talking about climate

change is you have sort of like the things you have to all sacrifice now to avoid existential elimination later on. Like it becomes so heavy that now when I see stories about how bad things are getting, like you don't want to click on those stories after a while because you're like, oh, because everything seems hopeless and awful and it seems too big to solve. I don't know if I want to engage in that. I believe it, but I'm like afraid of it. Oh, I'm exactly the same way. Like I don't want any climate change news because it's like it's not really i'm not going to help anything as a result of reading this and it's just going to make me feel more powerless more helpless and sort of you know i which i think it's like such a i think helplessness

is like such a devastating feeling when it comes to politics because it just completely saps people any kind of will to action. Well, I always think about this in terms of I talk about this with our team all the time. It's like, look, there's politics ends up being for better or for worse and often for worse. Sort of you're trying to get people to join your team. And do you want to join a team that is sort of like overly moralistic and scolding and everything seems miserable all the time? Or do you want to join a team that like recognizes that there are very serious existential challenges, but like wants to sort of address them and fight them in a joyful struggle, right?

And like, come be on our team and we'll take ourselves seriously and we'll laugh a little bit about it and we'll have fun along the way and it'll be hard. And, you know, we have some real enemies here, but like, we're going to have fun doing it. Like, I just think that's a better approach for politics and it doesn't seem like that's what we have right now. Yeah, I certainly agree. I think that's definitely the approach that works for me as the team that I want to be part of. I think we have to recognize that a lot of times there's these conflicts of personality masquerading as other kinds of more substantive conflicts. And I think there's different personalities who will kind of be attracted to different political styles or different rhetorical styles. So I think that it's kind of important to recognize that within one movement, you know, say a progressive coalition, you're going to have different sort of

subgroups that cater to the different personality types. And I say that because I think as hard as for people like me to believe, I think some people actually do like the misery and they actually do like being scolded and they like being told that the apocalypse is coming. I don't know. I think like either it sort of validates, it gives them a sort of rationalization for some kind of subjective feeling of doom or some kind of, you know,

they like being chastised because they feel guilty, or they are very angry about things going on in their life, and they want to be able to sort of, you know, moralistically vent that anger. So those people will be attracted to that kind of style. But I do think that, you know, if that's the only thing on offer, most people will be terribly put off by it, even if they want to support the issue. One of your more popular videos is about cancel culture, including your personal experiences with it. You've described yourself as a conscientious objector in the cancel culture wars. You just don't want to participate, don't want to call anyone out why is that how did you come to that conclusion well i think i kind of realized that most of most of these call-out posts on the internet they don't have a good effect it's incredibly divisive

uh i think it's also i guess like i got this sense that for a lot of people, watching the downfall of someone is its own form of entertainment. And the minute you call someone out, it's sort of out of your control. I think my views on this have really sort of evolved a bit since I made that video because I made a video on canceling when I was like very much in the heat of it myself. And it's hard to step out of that when you're, when you be cut,

when you get the heat. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think, I think at the time that I made that video also, like I was really not doing very well at all. I think that canceling,

you know, it can have a pretty serious effect on someone who's not doing well otherwise. And to someone who's sort of mentally together and has a support network, it's not a big deal at all. It really depends on the circumstances. But that's, I guess that is part of the argument I was making that to a more marginalized person, you know, social media shaming or ostracism poses a much more serious threat. It's not that I'm a conscientious objector from dunking on people on Twitter, because I noticed I haven't stopped doing that. But I do think I'm cautious about who I'm doing it to. And I try to, you know,

I think if I try not to kick people when they're when they're down, unless they truly deserve it. Yeah. I mean, during that video, I thought you gave one of the best, most anti-internet observations I've ever heard about why we should think twice before calling out or canceling. You said, sometimes people who seem ignorant or hateful just need to be given a nonjudgmental space to learn and grow and think and to just condemn them as hopeless bigots actually prevents that growth from happening. So I feel like that kind of growth should be a fundamental goal of progressive politics. And yet, I also think the left has had a harder time in recent years giving people that non-judgmental space. Do you agree? And if so, why do you think that is?

Well, I think that social media just inherently can't be that space because it's such like a public, like reactive thing where what you really need is a kind of offstage to work this kind of stuff out. And as long as people are on stage, they're going to perform their own correct, you know, their own victory, their own correctness. Like it's like it's like debate, basically. And so, you know, once you have a public figure, for example, as she got a very, I'm sure, vicious backlash on social media.

I think that when someone's a public figure of that size, it's honestly very difficult to get that kind of offstage space for them. And it's something they kind of have to do on their own. You know, we sort of can't do it for them. I think it's something that I like to hope that I will do. Like, I don't know, I understand how much it hurts and how it's humiliating to be canceled or to be shamed on social media. Your impulse is certainly to come out and defend yourself even harder and to double down and to show how right you were which which proves how wrong all the people who said all those nasty things were but i think that i've watched this dynamic play out enough that i will try i try sort of try to create it's been a while since i've actually caused any real controversy um in part because i'm i've gotten more cautious about how i tweet

but um i think that i don't know gotten more cautious about how i tweet but um i think that i don't know there's been a couple times in the last couple years when i did sort of see what was happening and and you know not make a conscious decision i'm not going to lash out at the people who are coming for me because i don't want to get sucked into a vortex of defending myself where I end up sort of becoming monstrous in the attempt to save face. Yeah, I mean, when I think about this, like, look, obviously, it gets over discussed, and the debates can get very boring around this issue. And, you know, I don't think about it in terms of like the JK Rowlings of the world as much people who are like in, you know, more privileged, powerful positions. I think about

what it does or what it means for sort of the quality of our conversation and the ability of people to sort of talk to each other and learn from one another and grow in a way where you can make mistakes along the way and still be allowed that space to learn and grow and become a better person. And one of, I think, the consequences of seeing some of the more powerful people in the world be canceled or be called out is that you're much more cautious of what you tweet and what you say and how you form an argument and look i think some of that's great because you don't want to say ignorant dumb things that hurt people but it's also i i sometimes wonder what that does to the to the overall conversation and public conversation yeah i definitely think there's a danger that you create this kind of superficial consensus through terror where

people you know they agree with whatever your talking points are because they feel like they have to but inside they're kind of thinking this is nonsense like i'm just saying this to not you know cause trouble but i think that that's an inherently fragile situation because the minute someone comes out and says look we aren't we all thinking that you know xyz um you know horrible bigoted thing well there's all these people who've been quietly you know staying in their place who suddenly are going to face a real temptation to to go along with this person who is, who has, who is in fact saying what they've been thinking. So I do think that, you know, people who want to do this type of, you know, public persuasion work, it is helpful to try to address like the thoughts that a lot

of people probably sincerely have. So I think I did, I did, I did end up doing a video on J.K. Rowling. And I think for the sake of that video, I kind of pretended that I thought she was more sincere than I in fact think that she is, in part because I'm not making this video to convince J.K. Rowling. I'm making this video because I think that probably most people, do I want to say most? I think I do. I think that probably a majority of people secretly kind of think she's right or not so secretly at all. And so to those people, I guess I want them to be able to watch this video and feel like I'm taking their thoughts

seriously. Yeah. No, I think that's, I mean, I think that's the right audience to target, right? Like I'm going back to politics again, and I've always drawn a distinction between Trump fans and Trump voters, right? Because you'll have a lot of liberals be like, you see those people at the Trump rally, like we're never going to reach them. And my answer is like, probably for 90% of them, correct, you're not going to reach them. But there's a bunch of people who voted for Donald Trump, who previously voted for Barack Obama twice, and voted for Donald Trump. And by the way, guess what, we got them back. And some of them voted for Joe Biden, because voters are weird and complicated, because they're human. Yeah. And if we think that we can't reach them, or they're not worth reaching,

or that they're all just like hopelessly racist and bigoted, like, we might, we might be right about a lot of them, but if we're, if we're trying to like build a productive, peaceful society, we kind of need to reach them and get them on our side. Right. Yeah. I think it's easy to kind of stereotype, for example, a Trump voter as, as someone who is just ride or die, who is, who is never, you know, because I think those are in some ways the loudest Trump supporters are the people who are not very persuadable. And so it's easy to think that that's what we're dealing with here, that everyone's like that. But in fact, there's probably a very wide variety of, I mean, there definitely is a very wide variety of people who are voting Trump for a wide variety of reasons.

And there's certainly a subset of those people who are open to outreach, who are open to doing something different, especially in four years. Right, yeah. What topics and debates are interesting you right now in your public persuasion work? Well, I guess I'm kind of taking a bit of a break from politics in the most literal sense.

I guess what I'm really interested in lately is psychology. And to me, politics is a very interesting way to look at psychology. about envy where I feel like what caught my attention is the way a lot of you know especially social media kinds of debates the especially those like adjacent to sort of the cancel culture conversations um oh isn't it horrible that Kim Kardashian had this big birthday party or whatever like it's all about optics and it's all about the kind of feelings that other people's posts evoke and i guess like i i noticed that envy seemed to play a big role in a lot of these as a completely like uns no one ever says the word envy right is how i felt and it just seems to me to be this like unobserved force acting on so many of

of the dynamics um not just not just cancel culture type things but even more elaborate things like I think when it comes to the sort of gender politics um wars that people get into so much of it has to do with um you know these feelings of envy between men and women or feelings of envy about trans people or feelings are in the other direction you know people who are sort of marginalized can be develop a politics of resentment that while maybe understandable is self-defeating in the end because it's this it's just this kind of negativity that focuses on how unfair it is that this person has it easier than you and and sort of endlessly picking at that wound in a way that doesn't really

i that's not really sort of it doesn't lend itself to progressive action because it's not really sort of, it doesn't lend itself to progressive action because it's so negative. Do you think the internet has made that worse because it's just in our face all the time? Whether it's what a celebrity does or has, or whether it's what someone that we know, some vacation they went on on Instagram. Do you think that the internet has made this worse?

I think that social media is bad for social cohesion um in part because it may it puts everyone's lives in front of everyone's faces and makes it really easy to to compare ourselves to other people um and i think that that does sort of make it more difficult for people to get along because it's not just like i have to i have to i feel that i have to speak carefully because i've kind of learned that when you talk about envy and politics everyone thinks that what you're saying is oh so you're saying that anyone who wants a more equal society is just envious of the rich right that's really not what i'm saying that's not it um right i'm really not saying that i'm saying that I guess what one of the points that I tried

to make in this video is that a lot of times it's the smallest differences that seem to generate a lot of envy right so it's like people who you sort of identify with are people who you consider close to yourself so that's who you're sort of most likely to fixate on in terms of envy and I think that it's not really Kim Kardashian at the end of the day who the envy is really causing damage for. So I don't know. That's something that definitely caught my interest. I'm kind of working on a project now that's about sex and power. So that's um well that's that's i mean i look i just want to everyone listening who has

not uh seen a contrapoints video uh do yourself a favor and and check one out the other thing too is they are i would have thought that in this age of internet where like all of our attention spans are shorter and shorter and shorter that uh a 30 or 60 or 90 minute YouTube video, like would not be the kind that a lot of people would watch. And yet, here you are with these like, long videos with millions and millions of views. What do you make of that that you people with in a short attention span sort of world, people are sitting down with these long videos? It definitely is something that surprised me too. think you know when i first started dabbling around on youtube in the 2010s the advice everyone was given was like oh keep it under five minutes like no one's gonna watch

long videos yeah and on youtube the opposite has happened um you know where i think especially in the pandemic people were spending more time online. There's this desire for really long-form content. I think part of it is people are putting it on while they're doing laundry, while they're going to bed, while they're cooking, while they're driving. It's sort of similar to podcast content in that way. Yeah, that's right. And I think that probably a lot of people who are watching long-form content aren't staring at the screen wrapped the entire time, you know, as much as I hate to admit it. But I think that things like AM talk radio are unfortunately, I guess, the predecessor.

That's true. i guess the predecessor but uh i think one thing that's exciting is that i think a lot of political youtube um long-form content or a lot of podcasts are much much better than talk radio ever was yeah you can get you can get into i mean yeah it's they tend to be smarter and then uh a little bit more nuanced than your uh your typical talk radio yeah i, I mean, I guess there was MPR and that's not new, but I think it's that type of content, yeah. Last question I ask all of our guests, what's your favorite way to unplug? Oh, to unplug.

Well, I play the piano. I was a music student a long time ago and then sort of gave up on it. But during the pandemic, I bought a piano and started playing again. Oh, good. That's super helpful to me when, you know, you have to be able to, especially if you're going to do this like professionally, like if you can't put down Twitter, you're going to go crazy. And I feel like I've seen, like I'm quoting a poem, but like the best minds in my generation generation like I feel like I've seen destroyed by Twitter like

it's a scary thing to watch happen to other people and you're like oh god that was almost me like in my case at least I think that so yeah I if things are getting too hot I go play the piano. I play piano as well and I don't get to play nearly as

much as I'd like to but even if you sit down and play a song or two for like 10, 15 minutes, it still just puts your mind at a different place. It's nice. And your hands are on the piano, so they can't be on the phone. Yes, that's very important, is that you cannot be doing the two things at once. And I don't know, it's a nice combination of like, it's physical, you're moving, and you're also sort of engaging your mind.

I don't know. It's important to have an activity like that. Natalie Nguyen, thank you so much for joining Offline. Your YouTube is ContraPoints. Everyone go check out a video. They are fantastic and persuasive and entertaining, and I'm glad you're doing that work. So thank you. Thank you so much. Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau, along with Max Fisher. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Emma Illick-Frank is our associate producer.

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