Unlocking Us with Brené Brown - Brené with Anand Giridharadas on The Persuaders, Part 1 of 2

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

I love this two-part series with Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders: At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Every now and then, I come across something that makes me think in a completely new way, and this was one of those times. We talk about this concept of persuasion — the ability to reach across differences and believe that others are movable, as well as the idea that I have the capacity to be moved — as being the heart of democracy. I’m so glad you’re here for this conversation, and get ready to be persuaded. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, everyone. I'm Brene Brown, and this is Unlocking Us. Ooh, man, I love this two-part series. Barrett, how good was this? Wow! Today, I'm talking to Anand Giridharadas, author of The Persuaders, subtitle, At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Anand has my heart and my mind.

And he's got my democracy too. I don't know how you can have that, but boy, this book, have you ever seen me tear up a book like this book? I have not. I mean, I bet, I don't want to be hyperbolic here, but I bet 25% of it is highlighted, underlined, or has an exclamation point, so much so that it became meaningless. I had to actually start like hierarchically ranking the importance of the different colors. It's just so good. This is a two-part special around Anand's book. And every now and then I come across something that makes me think in a completely new way. And this was one of those times. Persuasion, the ability to reach across difference and believe that others are movable and that I have the capacity to be moved as the heart of democracy. I'm so glad you're here for this conversation.

Welcome to Unlocking Us and get ready to be persuaded. Support for this show comes from Macy's. Fall is in full swing and it's the perfect time to refresh your home and wardrobe for the sweater weather with new finds from Macy's. From October 9th to October 16th, get amazing deals on shoes and boots on sale at 30 to 40% off. And you can shop new styles during the Macy's Fab Fall Sale from October 9th to October 14th. Shop oversized knits, warm jackets, and trendy charm necklaces and get 25 to 60% off on top brands when you do. Plus, get great deals I just don't get it.

Just wish someone could do the research on it. Can we figure this out? Hey, y'all. I'm John Blenhill, and I'm hosting a new podcast at Vox called Explain It To Me. Here's how it works. You call our hotline with questions you can't quite answer on your own. We'll investigate and call you back to tell you what we found. We'll bring you the answers you need every Wednesday starting September 18th.

So follow Explain It To Me, presented by Klaviyo. Before we get started, let me introduce you to Anand Giridhar Das. He is the author of the international bestseller Winners Take All, The True American, and India Calling. He's a former foreign correspondent and columnist for The New York Times. We're going to hear a lot about his story, which I think is, what did you think? So good, right? Yeah, I couldn't believe how, wait till you hear about his job in India. Yeah, his first job there. Yeah, it's a whole new insight on consulting. Anyway, so former correspondent and columnist for the New York Times for more than a decade. He's columnist for the New York Times for more than a decade. He's also written for the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and Time. He's the publisher of

the newsletter, The Dot Inc. He is an on-air political analyst for MSNBC. He's received the Radcliffe Fellowship, the Porchlight Business Book of the Year Award, Harvard University's Outstanding Lifetime Achievement Award for Humanism and Culture and the New York Public Library's Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn. They have two kids. Who is they? He's married to a total, yeah, drumroll, fan favorite of Unlocking Us and Dare to Lead, Priya Parker. Let's jump in. Welcome to Unlocking Us. Thank you so much for having me. Oh my gosh. We were laughing before we started actually taping at the condition of my book

and my like 14 pages of notes, my color-coded sticky notes, color-coded highlights. I was trying as I went through the book to capture everything I thought was important, but that was highlighting more than I wasn't highlighting. Then I realized I needed a way to rank order the level of importance, but I changed approaches six times. That's amazing. It's very moving to me.

And it's also, it makes me think that a book is one of the few products that someone sells where you want people to destroy it after they buy it. Like you want them to shred it apart through all the notes and all the labeling and all the underlining. You want it to get gritty. And so I love that you have a gritty copy. Oh, I have a really gritty copy that I have read at home, read outside, taken on four flights to reread. And I actually found myself reading a passage of it twice to two different people that were sitting next to me on flights.

You are that person. I am that person. So the book we're talking about is, of course, The Persuaders, At the Front Lines of the Fight for Hearts, Minds, and Democracy. Wow. Wow. The Guardian called it a thinky book. Did you read that? I did. I wasn't sure what to make of that one. It is a thinky book. It is. I can't tell if it's a British compliment or a British insult, but it felt perfect. It depends on their mood, I think. I've got so much interest in every question,

but I want to start with this one. Tell us your story. Walk us back to the very beginning. Of my life? Yes. Let's do it. Let's unlock. I am the son of Indian immigrants who had me in the major metropolitan world capital of Cleveland, Ohio. My parents grew up in post-independence India in a time that was incredibly stifling to each of them for different reasons. My mother, I think, experienced that kind of stifling primarily as a woman in an incredibly patriarchal culture,

where the answer to the question, can I do X, was usually a preemptive no, whether that was study or whether that was go to the movie theater or whether that was go to a party. And my father kind of experienced that stifling in different ways as a person who was setting out in the world, getting an education, wanting to work, do things with that kind of raring energy of a young person in a society that was close to the world, had a kind of struggling experiment with socialism after independence, and really denied young people opportunities to realize their dreams. And so my father wanted to come study in America, pre-internet. So, you know, he had a friend who was applying to business school. He just applied to the same business school that his friend was applying to. There was so much less,

you go to small towns in India today, people know, people research things, right? Back in those days, you applied to go with a friend and he came to graduate school in America, went to business school and my mother and he got together after that. And she came to America really primarily because of him. That's my origin. And it's an important origin because I think, and in the conversation we'll get into with the persuaders, I have become someone who has a lot of thoughts about America today and what we're not doing right and what we need to do better. But my story also starts with two people who left their country because they were pursuing something here. And I will never forget all that they and we have found here and the incredible

opportunity in this country to become American, which is not actually something that exists in many countries in the world. A lot I admire in Europe about their safety nets. There's a lot I admire in a lot of places about a lot of things. But the idea that you can uproot yourself and become part of this experiment and that that becoming is a kind of pretty widely accepted thing that we do at scale hundreds of thousands of times a year, all these new people becoming Americans. And that this happens under Republicans and Democrats, and broadly speaking is accepted by a very large number of people.

It's a remarkable thing, and is in many ways, the seed of my story as an American. I grew up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, outside of Cleveland, very racially integrated suburb, an unusually racially integrated suburb, subject of many documentaries and books. And when I was seven, my parents, this is a true funny story. I think they had an adrenaline rush of being immigrants. It was really hard at first and scary. And you're like, oh, can we make this work? Are we just going to fall through the cracks? And then they kind of leveled out. They

got it. They had the house and the two kids and the two cars. Like they got it. They got their American suburban dream. And I think they were kind of bored having gotten there. And so they said, let's do it again. Let's be immigrants again, a second time. Let's pick another country. They had that post-goal surge.

Yes, exactly. Exactly. Oh, wow. And so my dad had an opportunity to move to France for his work. And he said, great, let's do it. So we moved to France. My poor mother who had gone from Bombay, India, one of the most exciting, overwhelming, but exciting cities on earth to Cleveland, Ohio, which is not that, was thrilled by the opportunity to go to Paris. We all moved to Paris. We had three years there that were beautiful, that were full of art and culture and sites and

all the things that one knows Paris and France have. We traveled, you could drive to other countries within four or five hours. That's mind-blowing for a seven-year-old. However, from the moment we arrived in that country, it was incredibly clear that it would never belong to us. And so my understanding of America and all its flaws and complexity and awful history and struggles to live up to what it has promised is also colored by the reality that my parents tried the same thing a second time somewhere else in a supposedly advanced progressive society. My parents, by the way, were 10 years ahead in their careers at that point. They were 10 years more sophisticated at that point. They had more means. And on day one, it was very, very clear. You will never become of this. You can be here.

You can appreciate our wine and cheese and whatever, but this will never belong to you. And so when I think about, not to get to the end of the story, but when I think about my work now, I try to hold in balance in a way that I think some people who I agree with on issues struggle to do. The truth that this country has got a lot of work to do. I try to hold in balance in a way that I think some people who I agree with on issues struggle to do the truth that this country has got a lot of work to do and that this country is engaged in a pursuit that most countries in history have never even been interested in pursuing, to be a country made of all the world where anybody in theory can become of it.

And I think that is an awesome, extraordinary, incredibly weird goal by the standards of human history. And my family really lived it through this kind of weird science experiment of these double- Like a double blind task. It was as close as you could get to a randomized control trial with like two children and a lot of suitcases. And to kind of fast forward from there, we came back to America. They settled in the Washington DC area where I kind of really became very interested in politics through osmosis. My family would sit and watch meet the press when I was in middle and high schools, like around the Sunday breakfast table, we'd kind of

linger. The Tim Russert years. Yes. These are the Tim Russert years. And he was such a master and he would just watch. I write about politics now. I probably knew more senators names when I was 17 than I do now. You know? Yeah. I mean, if you just quiz me on like Oregon, like maybe I could remember, but I definitely knew it when I was 17. And one of the, I think maybe things that was unusual about my career, I think there's been a lot of advice in recent decades to young people to like try lots of things before you settle in a career. By the way, it's also like the dating advice that we give people. And I think there's a lot of value in educating yourself about your options and not getting stuck in things. I think all of that is true. My career story was very different in that I actually became really clear,

really, really quickly, exactly what I wanted to do. In high school, I started writing for the school paper. And once I started writing high school newspaper articles, I essentially had been working on variants of that problem since I was 15. What I do today is I can feel it in my butt. It's the same work that I found when I did that. I feel like an athlete who has like one hit that I do. And, you know, and I've just, I've just been like practicing, attempting to hit a home run over the

left, the third baseline or whatever, like my move is in sports or particular kind of throw in football or something like, or a particular kind of backhand. Because I got to it so early, I just knew when I started writing, I was studying English and history in my sophomore year of high school. And it really clicked for me of like, this is just a study of people. And it always felt like it was kings and queens and like memorizing weird poems. And somehow I had these really good English and history teachers in sophomore year of high school at the same time. And they were both PhDs, which is unusual in high school, but somehow,

somehow that, that was like the first and only time that I had that level. They were like college professors who'd come to teach in a high school, same year, same semester. And I was like, oh, English and history. I'd always been a math and science person in parks. My parents sort of pushed that as Indian immigrants. My dad's an engineer. I just had this breakthrough like, oh, English and history is the study of people. It's a study of why people are like what they're like, why I'm like what I'm like, why I feel what I feel. And that same semester, first semester of sophomore year high school, I started writing for the school paper, Horizon, it was called. I think that semester of sophomore year of high school, I just knew that was the activity I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

I have since added some other activities like, you know, sitting, talking to you on a podcast, which I'm so delighted to do and giving talks every now and then, going on TV a handful of times a year. Those are all ancillary activities. I could drop all of them in a heartbeat without any injury to my soul. The thing that I found that semester of high school, sitting at a desk with some thoughts, with some, not only thoughts, I'm not a fiction writer, like with some thoughts, with some material from the world, some unorganized things people have said, some documents, some grist from the world with some of my own reflections. And just making sentences and then making those sentences, stringing a few of them into a paragraph. That basic thing.

It was just so electric to me and powerful when I discovered it. And I got very lucky. The last part of senior year in high school, I discovered it. And I got very lucky the last part of senior year in high school, I got to, gosh, I'm not even done with high school, I'm riveted. I'm just riveted. Come on. Yeah. We're only going to be here about 12 more hours. So senior year of high school, we had this thing called senior projects where you had to kind of do an internship for the last month of school instead of being at school. And I was very fortunate to go to this school called Sidwell friends in Washington. That's a incredible school. And I was very fortunate to go to this school called Sidwell Friends in Washington.

It's an incredible school. And there were these phone directories back then. Now it's kind of harder. I mean, my kid's school, you got to look online. We had these printed phone directories they'd send home with home numbers. And I found this editor at the New York Times who was a parent in another grade at the school. And I called her home phone number. Her name was Jill Abramson. She ended up becoming the editor of the New York Times. I was going to say. She was like a junior editor in Washington at the time. I called Jill, I think probably in like the fall or winter of 1998

and say, I got this internship opportunity coming up in May or June. Do you want the opportunity to be my boss kind of thing? And Jill is like famously a little bit matter of fact. And she was like, I am managing the coverage of the impeachment of the president of the United States right now. I'm sorry. I just don't have time to like, talk about this. Okay. So I took that as a sign. I should call her back in like about a week. So I did. And so I did. And I got a kind of similar reaction. And that was that. I was then destined to become a lawyer or something. And when Clinton was acquitted in the impeachment trial, maybe in February or March of that year,

I don't remember, of 1999, I get a call unsolicited from Jill saying, I'm sorry, I was a little bit gruff on the phone. I was managing impeachment coverage for the New York Times. It was a lot. Would you still be interested in that internship? And I very much was. I went in there the first day in that May or June internship. She says, so what do you want to write about? And I'm looking at her like, I don't think that's a very good idea. I'm a high school student. Like, I just wanted to be around. I wanted to see these people up close. I just want to be around words.

Yeah. I felt it was like a trip to the zoo for me. I just wanted to watch these people get coffee and type things. And she's like, no, we write things here. We report things here. Like, you should do that. So I did. I wrote two stories kind of in her general beat area of money and politics,

lobbying, that kind of stuff. And I told you when I was in high school and feeling that power of writing, this is now a few years later. And that same power of making the sentences, making the paragraphs, seeing the thing, I'm obsessed. I tap the desk to hear the rhythm of it over and over and over, doing all of that. And then at 17 years old, with the added twist of talk to some editors around six, seven, 8 PM at night about some final things, no email back then, or maybe not that much the next day in a little blue bag in front of your house and in front of a million other people's houses, this little thing you wrote on your computer the night before and talked to a couple of editors about, it's just like in a bag, this object. And I remember, I mean, to this day,

to this day, I'm 41 years old, to this day, on any day, I mean, I don't write for the New York Times. I did for 11 years after college, but like, I don't write for the Times in any kind of formal way anymore. I do a few times a year a piece or a book review. I will still get up early at 41 years old and go get the bag if I'm in a place where I have the bag. Go get that bag, open it, look at it, touch it, go back to sleep. So that was kind of the very fortuitous beginning. And then Jill helped me kind of get internships here and there at the times I kind of tried to hang around. And when I graduated from, I went to University of Michigan for college. And when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life at the end of that, you know, you're finally where the gravy train be a foreign correspondent or something. I really tried to do that with the New York Times. And everybody was like, no, that's like the really like big fancy job after you do other stuff. Like, no. So I kept noodling or I applied for anything,

you know, and it was just very hard. And journalism is still like that. It was even more opaque then. I mean, now because of some of the diversity stuff, there has been some initiative to make it less opaque and not have to like know someone who knows someone to get in. I had this in with Jill and it was still just so hard to figure out, like there's no escalator. There's no entry-level jobs. It's like the whole thing is just like figuring it out somehow. It's a very weird profession in that sense and terribly exclusionary. What I came to, and Jill really helped me with a crucial piece of advice. She said, don't spend the next 10 years of your life after college hanging around the building, trying to sneak your way into this

institution or some other institution. Go out into the world, into a place of discomfort, into a place that is challenging to you. And writing and art will come from that collision. And I thought about, okay, what are some places that make me uncomfortable? And then it quite quickly came to me that India, where my parents had come from, a place, the first fact about which I ever learned was that my parents had chosen to leave it. A place I'd visited many times in childhood, but had always disliked. Loved my grandparents, loved the people in my family. It's a very hard country.

It's a very bleak country. I'd never seen children in that condition who looked like me living on the street in that way until I made those trips to India. Very tough relationship to India. Also just being a kid who wanted to assimilate, not wanting to be different. My last name is Girdhar Das, so you can imagine what middle school was like for me. So India was not high on my list. But when I got Jill's advice to make myself a writer by going somewhere that would force a kind of grappling with discomfort, it was immediately obvious to me that was the place to go. And I had been reading one of my literary heroes, V.S. Naipaul.

He was a fiction writer and kind of helped develop this form of book called The Travel Book, which really has become a form model for most of my books, which is just traveling to places and doing a series of interviews and profiles of people that amount to a kind of portrait of a place without being the definitive statement on anything. And I'd read some of his work on India and other places, and I just decided I wanted to get to India. And I tried to get journalism jobs in India, could not, very hard. And so I decided in a strange decision to get a job as a management consultant, because they would send anybody who had studied anything, including the history of political thought, anywhere.

So I was a 21-year-old expert, so-called, in the European history of political thought, who was then sent to India to advise pharmaceutical companies. My first thing was, can you advise this pharmaceutical company on leadership development? in history of political thought who was then sent to India to advise pharmaceutical. Like my first thing was, can you advise this pharmaceutical company on leadership development? And I was like, sure. Do you have any like pamphlets on leadership development I could read or any, I don't know. Sure. Sure. You could harken back to like Napoleon or something, something you had studied. Let's do the Napoleon plan. I mean, I was literally, I moved to India. I was like, okay, this is kind of, I'm doing it. I'm doing it. And then I have this job. And within two weeks, they're like, okay, second biggest pharma company in India.

All you got to do is just redesign their leadership development system. And I'm like, great. Who am I working with? Like, who's, who am I assisting on this important effort? They're like, no, no, you're running that initiative. I was like, I'm running it. I'm like 21, right? My thesis was about Machiavelli and St. Augustine. So incredibly prepared for a pharmaceutical company leadership in India. So much insights in St. Augustine. The early Christian thinkers really had a lot to say about that. Oh yeah. A ton on leadership. Ton on leadership. So I'm there. They're like, here's what you got to do. You just got to say like, what are the four traits of leaders at this company? And I'm glad we're not doing this on your leadership podcast, by the way. What are the four traits of leadership at this company?

And then you should just come up with like, and I was like, can I just pick any traits of leadership? They're like, hey, you can just pick any four traits of leadership, but there has to be four. And then they were like, I just want everyone listening to this who's like ever gotten a leadership evaluation at your company to know how this stuff is actually made. It was me when I was 21, having just studied St. Augustine. And then on each of the four traits of leadership, we want you to create a rating of one to four. And you just say, what is a one on that? What is a two on that? What is a three on that? What's a four on that? So I made this grid. I made up four traits of leadership. One was initiative. I remember that. What is a scoring on each one? And then I remember sitting

in this room in Ahmedabad, India with the CEO of the company, the head of HR at this company, who reputedly kept a small pistol in his sock, this bald headed man, just incredible, incredible characters in this town. His name was Ganesh, which is a god that is not associated with keeping a pistol in your sock. I was going to say, that's not on brand. His human avatar was quite different. As you know, HR is a tricky business. You got to pack that heat. And I remember sitting at this table with the directors who like flew in for this meeting. And we went through, there were like 40 or 50 leaders at this company. And I remember

the room, like based on my grid that I completely made up in like a day, because I had to, they evaluated the 40 or 50 top executives in this company on like how good leaders they are and who should be like fired or who should be promoted based on my made up grid. And then it happened to my horror. I'm like, well, no, no, no. Like, I don't know. I don't know. Like, maybe you should not get rid of that guy. Like, maybe that guy is not, in fact, the next CEO. And so it was an amazing education for some of the things that I'd go on to write about, just about, I think in business, a lot of the, frankly, like made up stuff that goes into a lot of business, business advice and how removed it is from the context and from actual study of people. And I was very much doing that sort of reluctantly, but doing it. And the broader point was that working in business was not for me. And I immediately started looking for a journalism job in India once I was there. I managed to get one at the New York Times within about a year of getting to India. It was easier once you were

there. Became a journalist, foreign correspondent for the Times in India, which is sort of my dream. Wrote the hell out of that story as hard as I could for several years. And it was a story about, I think that leads us in many ways to today, the India story. Like if I had been a China correspondent at that time, the story would have been like big news stories. It would have been like China devaluating the Yuan would have been the kind of stuff I had to write about. Or like China doing a certain military exercise with regard to Taiwan would have been something kind of stuff I had to write about. Or like China doing a certain military exercise with regard to Taiwan would have been something. So I would have been chasing big stories that mattered to the world. Human rights violations. Yes. Things you could see. Things you could see

and things you don't have a choice not to cover. They're just the news. And China matters to the world in that way and did matter in that time. India kind of didn't and doesn't. And it's just a little bit below that. There's very few things that happen in India on a given day that are going to affect you where you live here in the United States. So as a foreign correspondent, it is a story about people and about humanity. And the story that I found there that I think very much carries through my work in some ways was the seedbed of the work and method that I've developed since. It was a story about psychological change amid big social, economic, political forces changing. I was writing about those social, economic, and political

forces, but what I really glommed onto as my subject and my method was the kind of lived psychological and emotional change that people go through when processing and being kind of buffeted by the more visible changes that are in the newspapers every day. So the formal thing that was going on in India at that time was globalization had been kind of let in in the 90s and 2000s. And there was explosive growth, six, seven, eight percent GDP growth, which is, you know, if you've never lived in a society like that, it's just incredible thing that changes the society, remakes it like every few years, makes it unrecognizable to itself. Those are the formal things going on. Big government efforts to empower downtrodden castes by giving them set asides in universities and other things, all kinds of big things going on. Big government efforts to empower downtrodden castes by giving them set-asides in universities and other things. All kinds of big things going on. But what became my subject was

what people were going through amid these forces, right? When you are a woman in one of the most patriarchal societies in the world, and your dad doesn't want you to go work, and then your dad finds out that ICICI Bank is paying 15,000 rupees at the nearest branch, half an hour away. And suddenly your dad's like, you should go get a job. What is that inner experience for that daughter? What's that inner experience like for that dad? When the whole ordering principle of a society moves from a kind of caste status hierarchical fixed model to you are as great as the amount of money you can secure in this market economy. What does that do to people?

How does it change? When people get a cell phone, I remember my first article, one of my articles about the cell phone arriving in India, which has become such a big phenomenon in that country. It's like thinking about it. And I was like, you know, the cell phone is not a phone here. In this society, in this context, it's a bedroom. It's like the first

private space young people have ever had. Young people do not have their own bedrooms in India generally, unless they're very affluent. So the cell phone in India matters because it's a bedroom. The cell phone in India is like, I don't know, cars in the 50s in America. It's like a private space where you could go be yourself. And so that really became, I think, what has since become just like my method. I don't write about central banks as a journalist. I don't write about voting machines being tampered with. I don't write about the Mueller investigation. I mean, I read that stuff and I know about that stuff.

I write about people. And I think this I read that stuff and I know about that stuff. I write about people. And I think this is where your work and my work connect. I write about people through an emotional and psychological lens, living through the big political and other forces of our time. That started in that India work and it continued through when I came back to this country, wrote a book about hate crimes, hate crime spree in Dallas, Texas. I wrote a book about billionaires taking over the world and using the illusion of taking care of us to lubricate that kind of conquest. And then the new book, The Persuaders, which in many ways, going back to that kind of India heritage I was telling you, is about, I think, Americans living through an era of extraordinary change. Change that I think we actually don't often tell

ourselves we are living through. I don't think we're living through anything less turbulent or dramatic than actually what I covered in India in an age of extraordinary growth and social upheaval. I think we're living very much through a time of upheaval in this country in gender norms, in race, in the nature of what it means to be a good man, what it means to be a white person, what it means to not make things anymore if you live in North Carolina and find a new way to have esteem, what it means to be a man in West Virginia and find out that coal is not in fact a great way to power the world or your family. And that shift changes in the shape of our economy, changes in what kind of education

you need to attain to have a stable life. And we have put people through a lot over the last generation, much of it for good. I'm very happy most of these changes have happened, but we've put people through a lot. We are putting people through a lot. We're expecting a lot of people. I think one way to understand The Persuaders is a book that is trying to grapple with how do we, in a time where we are putting people through a lot and a lot of people are having an allergic reaction to what we're putting them through. How do we do better at fighting for the future so many of us seek by bringing more people into it, walking with more people,

and having an empathetic understanding of why there is so much allergy to the future that so many of us desire. Hello, I'm Esther Perel, psychotherapist and host of the podcast, Where Should We Begin?, which delves into the multiple layers of relationships, mostly romantic. But in this special series, I focus on our relationships with our colleagues,

business partners, and managers. Listen in as I talk to coworkers facing their own challenges with one another and get the real work done. Tune into Housework, a special series from Where Should We Begin, sponsored by Klaviyo. About a year ago, two twin brothers in Wisconsin discovered, kind of by accident, that mini golf might be the perfect spectator sport for the TikTok era. Meanwhile, a YouTuber in Brooklyn found himself less interested in tech YouTube and more interested in making coffee.

This month on The Verge Cast, we're telling stories about these people who tried to find new ways to make content, new ways to build businesses around that content, and new ways to make content about those businesses. Our series is called How to Make It in the Future, and it's all this month on The Vergecast, wherever you get podcasts. I want to ask a question because I think this is the right intervention point for the question because I'm brought into it by what you described observing in India and how it parallels in some ways with the upheaval that we're experiencing. I agree with you 100%. It has been, I hate to use the word trauma because I don't even know what meaning it has anymore, but it has been fairly traumatic for a lot of sections of the U.S.

What do you call the stage or how do you describe this space where we are emotionally reacting to and feeling the amount of turmoil and change but have yet to register it cognitively? Do you understand what I'm asking? I do. I don't think people cognitively understand the scope of change that we're emotionally experiencing. I agree with that. And I think about it this way. If you look at who populates public life, broadly defined, in public life, we could be talking about government. We could be talking about who goes into journalism.

We could be talking about who are pundits on TV. But there's some finite group of people, and they're not that many, you know, thousands of people, who really disproportionately shape our understanding of what it is we're going through. Right. What the issues are, what's at stake, right? Some book publishers, some radio people,

it's a finite, relatively small number of people. Curators in some ways of the narrative. If you look at who most of those people are, what their interests are, they're generally interested in things like laws and policies and facts and position papers and white papers and data and spreadsheets and things that they can touch and things that can be measured. And that's good. I mean,

for a lot of history, human societies are run on like the intuition of one guy. That's not necessarily a better way to go. Not great, yeah. But I think it has created a situation where the dominant thing that I have come to feel is going on when societies are living through change, which is millions and millions of people needing to emotionally and psychologically process the old them, the current grappling them, and some new as yet not vivid, not visible them, that they are promised could exist and could be better than the old them and could be happier

than they are now, but they don't believe it. They haven't seen it. That to me is actually what is going on when we talk about politics, when we talk about economic change. That's what is actually what is going on when we talk about politics, when we talk about economic change. That's what's actually happening. That's the, you know, we talk about lived experience, another overused phrase, right? But that's the lived experience of politics, of economics. For sure.

That is the lived experience of change no matter where it is. Yeah. But while that would be really an obvious statement, if we were talking about one person going in for therapy, talking to another person, or if we were talking about a classroom traumatized by some event. Somehow when we get to the scale of a society, we just kind of remove the psychological and emotional lens and we just talk about it in the realm of like hard stuff, like hard things, measurable, countable things. And so when I look at this moment to get to the heart of what you were asking,

I see, of course, we can talk about building infrastructure or like, do we do reparations or all these like policy questions, right? I just tell you how my brain works and what I see, which is there's a lot of journalists who are more successful than me because they don't see things this way. So this may not be the right way to see it. But what I see is a lot of people who kind of know

their old certainties, know their old way of fitting into a certain ecosystem. They may have liked it. They may not have liked it. They may have had problems with it. And who we're trying to kind of usher into some 2.0 understanding of themselves. And so if you look at something like climate, there's a million policy discussions. There's, should we do Green New Deal? Should we do solar credits? This and that. But what I sense almost no one is talking about, except actually the people who are

climate deniers who make very good ads preying on what I'm about to say. What no one's talking about is we're actually asking all of us to have a completely transformed relationship to the earth. Yeah. To have completely different types of homes, to think about things we haven't thought about,

maybe eat differently, right? And when it's framed entirely as this policy choice, I think we're not leveling with people, nor are we walking with people through what we are actually demanding. Right. And I think we're sometimes scared to do that because we think it'll make it more demanding sounding or it'll make it, you know, less popular than it already is. What I think happens is those coal guys in West Virginia, who, by the way, don't need to be necessarily educated about why coal is bad because like so many of them have black lung, like they know, but they're still voting for it. Right. I think we have to say clearly we have not offered them a future as vivid to them and as clearly preferential to them that would pull them away from a wound they

have in their own lungs. They're clinging to a way of life and a wound, thinking of myself as someone who's trying to be a persuader. I don't think of that as being on them. I kind of think of that as being on me. I agree. Clearly, we have not made the case. There's been a failure.

And then you look at, you know, race. We thankfully are living through a massive and honest reckoning with race in this country of a kind that frankly, as Elisa Garza, one of the leaders of Black Lives Matter says to me in the book, I mean, we have not had this kind of candid reckoning in her lifetime, maybe ever.

The kinds of people who are talking about this, learning about this in school, who never grew up talking about this stuff, never knew a thing about it, who are talking about it. It's amazing. And once again, to get to the kind of society I think you and I want to live in, that most people listening to this want to live in, is not just going to require some laws to be passed, although I'm a huge believer in laws being passed, and I'm a huge believer in that stuff making a difference and often leading the way. However, if we're honest with ourselves, we are really asking tens of millions of people to have a different life conception of themselves, to sever themselves from certain sources of esteem

that were really meaningful to them, totally problematic and toxic, BTW. But that's separated from the fact that those were people's pillars. That's how they knew themselves to be. And what we want, what I want for a world in which my brown kids can have a good and flourishing and whole life, we need a lot of people to come to different understandings of themselves. And that's white people. That's also people of color needing to come to a different understanding of themselves that does not internalize oppression. There's any number of, but a lot of people are going to need to go through a lot and be convinced and brought into a self-understanding that is as vivid to them and as convincing to them

as the certainties they have now, however toxic those certainties are. If we talk about gender, again, we can pass some sexual harassment laws here and there. We can create exceptions to NDAs for sexual assault. Like, we can nibble around the edges of things. We can go very hard in defense of reproductive justice or picture issue. But again, I feel like we're missing, like, the even bigger thing going on,

which is until about five minutes ago in human history, for generations and generations, generations going back, there were a bunch of ways of being a man that were considered totally fine. And that even good, decent people who were men participated in. And as of five minutes ago in human history terms, last few decades, a whole bunch of those ways of being a man have rightfully been kind of not legally, but outlawed, like not okay. Right? Like, even if you had a great dad and a great grandfather who never treated women badly, never hurt anybody, right? Like the best case scenario of your dad and grandfather guarantee you a lot of the ways in which they were men. Some of the worst men today would not do some of those things. A hundred percent. There's just been this blessed change in that direction.

However, swift, swift and merciless, swift. And we don't tell the story of like how much we've changed when we are telling the story of like how much more we have to do. And it actually really undercuts our own victories. Like we have successfully psychologically migrated tens of millions of white people into a new understanding of whiteness, into an understanding of whiteness. Forget new. That's happened in your and my lifetimes. We have successfully psychologically migrated tens of millions of men in this society into a new, not a perfect, but there is some new kind of man

that has emerged in our time, equal father, engaged equal father. That's a relatively new phenomenon in the history of the world happening in our time. In my lifetime. Right? And I remember reading this thing about there's almost no paintings of men holding their children until the 21st century. It's the 20th

century, right? In like the history of art. We've moved a bunch of men into that new, but we have not moved a bunch of others. Right. And one way to understand a lot of the political unrest right now, I think, is that next batch of folks who do not want right now, as the terms currently are, to be migrated across those humps, who reject them, some of whom are diehard militant activists against that change to begin with. And there's not maybe much that can be done there, but a lot more in the middle are people who I think we are failing to persuade that what we are offering in a new future, a future of racial equality, a future of gender equality, a future where this society can provide for all of us, no matter who we are, where we come from. I think in some fundamental way, we have failed to make the offering as alluring as it

deserves to be, as it can be. I think we have failed to talk people through their anxieties. And I want to be very clear. I mean, this is a podcast, but like I spoke about my heritage, like I am brown. I am a person of color. I am not walking around excusing racists and racism. I have suffered from racists and racism, sometimes even from people close to me. And it's the worst. It is the original sin of this country. But I think we are living in a moment where there is a diehard, fanatical group of people who want to obliterate all progress in the direction of greater human equality. And again, not sure what can be done there. I don't think there's that many of

them. And then another much larger group of people who are neither burning things down, nor are they sold on the woke future. They are somewhere in that great mass of the still waking. They feel some intellectual affinity towards ideas like a more inclusive society, a society where everybody gets a shot, those kinds of things. They recoil at some of the trainings they have to go to at work. And by the way, this is not only white people. It's not only men. This actually cuts across all kinds of groups who are not sold on this future that we want people to live in. And so I think I wrote The Persuaders in part as an intervention, a loving intervention with the kinds of people who I think share my desire to live in a more plural, egalitarian society where everyone can thrive, who share that fundamental goal, but who I think some of my kind of allies in that pursuit, I think we have failed to attend to bringing

enough people along with us. I think we have fallen into a pattern where we sort of assume people cannot change if they're not with us now. We kind of assume people are incapable of growth. We've fallen into a pattern where we expect people to come correct on their own time, educate themselves about issues, and then show up once they've arrived, once they're perfect. My vision, I think, with this book, The Persuaders, is for something different. I want us to build movements and spaces and a, frankly, a pro-democracy, pro-human rights, pro-justice cause that is big and boisterous and self-confident enough

to take in anybody on any stage of the journey and educate them in the movement instead of having them come correct once they have figured it all out. I want us to persuade. I want us to believe that we can actually change minds. What is honestly one of the great revolutions of consciousness in human history, the most powerful country in the world, a 80% white Christian country some years ago, voting by democratic means to change itself by opening it up to the world and become what it is becoming, which is a majority minority country, a superpower of color, it will be within your and my lifetimes.

No country has really done this. It is a remarkable thing. If you go to Europe, there's immigrants, there's brown people in European countries, but the numbers are not the same. The trajectory is not the same. They're all kept at a pretty comfortable level. They have their little kind of guest populations.

But Frenchness is not changing the way American-ness is changing. They're not talking about the colonial era in France the way we're talking about 1619 here. They're not talking about whether they should have a monarchy in Britain in a mainstream way, the way we are grappling with original sense. There is a conversation here that is actually so powerful and so generative. And I want us to bring more and more people into that conversation. And I think we can. I have to say that when I finished the book, I was like, damn him. I was intellectually reading about persuasion, but I've been persuaded without realizing it. I was so pissed. See what I did there. Okay. I want to get into the specifics of the book in part two,

but before we leave, I want to do two things before we go into the second episode. One, I want to read this quote to you from the book, if it's okay with you. Of course. I want to get your thoughts on it. And then let me do that first. So this is a quote about the culture of the write-off, how we write each other off. You write, the tendency to write off is rooted in the assumption that differences of identity are unbridgeable, that people are too invested in their privileges and interests to change, that the failure to achieve change in the past predicts failure in the future, that people and their opinions are monolithic and strong rather than complicated and fragile, and therefore the purpose of politics is to protect yourself from others, capital O, others, and galvanize your own instead of trying to reach across.

Yikes. That felt so painfully spot on. And I want to be clear, I do that. This is not a holier-than-thou book. This is a more sinner-than-thou book. This is a more sinner than thou book. I have participated gladly in that culture of the write-off that has grown. And I think folks listening to this will know that culture of the write-off in their own ways. Maybe it's the family members that you have just given up on. Maybe it's the town meeting that you just stopped going to because it wasn't worth it anymore. Maybe it's the door-to-door organizing or activism you stopped doing or kind of phone banking you stopped doing. It shows up in so many ways. in that paragraph was the basic idea of a free society, as opposed to a monarchy or a totalitarian society, is that a bunch of decisions land in the inbox of the village every day.

Do we let these people into the village or do we not let them into the village? Do we drain the- Drain the lake, yeah. Drain the lake or not drain the lake? Can this person play that sport or not? These questions arrive in your inbox no matter what kind of society you are. And for most of history, the way we handled those decisions landing in the inbox was let's let one guy just decide. And free societies, by contrast, only existing in the last few hundred years, have concluded beautifully, one of the most powerful ideas in history, that the best way to handle those decisions is that we all talk it out 24-7 in a permanent, rollicking, roiling conversation and resolve these decisions about the village through just permanent talk and occasionally registering our opinion in a vote. And if we give up on this basic notion that it is possible to change each other's minds because people who look like you will always

think this, people will never get me because they don't understand this. If we get to this place where our fundamental view of the other is a bunch of kind of immovable monoliths. I think we're asking to be ruled again. I think we're asking to go back to the norm of human affairs, which is just, it's easier to just be ruled. It's easier for one guy to make the decisions. And we're going back to political violence as the norm of how human beings settle those disputes. If I can't persuade you about the lake or about who gets into the village or about that sport, I can try to just eliminate you so you're not in the decision with me. So then it's just my choice. That's kind of how we did things for much of history. We have built this incredibly fragile thing where we choose the future together through talk. And right now we're squandering it.

I want to play back something I think I learned and tell me whether I've got it right or not. And tell me if I don't have it right, what I'm missing, because this was absolutely, I'm trying to decide whether I'm going to tell you it's a new idea to me or a new frame. I think it started as a new frame, but I think it was absolutely a new idea. I don't like it to be a new idea to me, but this messed me up a little bit. It was powerful for me. And I'm going to put it together with a tweet of yours from several months ago. Oh God. I know. I love your tweets. Fire.

Okay. I want to see if I get this right. This was new to me. That persuasion, the ability to persuade and be persuaded, the ability to listen, to understand, to have new ideas, to challenge what we believe. This idea of persuasion is at the very heart of democracy. And once we believe that I will never be persuaded, nor will I ever be able to persuade anyone else, it really sets us up for the end of democracy. Because you write that when we talk about democracy ending, this is your tweet, we tend to picture that moment as a big bang, a stolen election, a coup. But the end of democracy might be a whimper. That it's when all of us get used to the reality that even things that 90% of

us want will not happen. And so when we believe that others are immovable, that we are immovable, that the conversation, the rumble, the hard, uncomfortable learning and unlearning, when we believe that has come to an end, we have rolled out a carpet for authoritarian rule, that it doesn't matter that one person will make the decision and the decisions will be upheld by any means necessary. Do I have it close? You have it exactly right. And in your trademark way of distilling it down, I think we are so focused in the United

States right now, and most people listening to this will be in the United States, but many will not be. We're so focused on the particulars of our story right now and our democratic crisis right now and the particular players and chapters in our democratic collapse that we risk over-explaining. And you know this as a researcher,

you can kind of over-explain a phenomenon from like the wrong or limited data. I mean, it's not that the electoral college and these other peculiarly American things are not important. But why is the exact same thing happening in India? Why is the exact same thing happening in Brazil? Why did the exact same thing happen in the Philippines? Why is this happening in Scandinavia? You look at the Italian election. Italians. I forgot about that one because it's so awful. New and awful. And she is the smartest, maybe, and the most articulate of the lot. She has some of that quality of the mid-20th century

fascists that some of the more recent ones here and elsewhere have been a little more on the kind of dimwit side of the equation. She's not a dimwit. And emotionally really smart and persuasive. Speaks in that level of the emotional and psychological that I was saying I feel is neglected by people who mean well. Yes. So why is this happening in Italy?

Why is it happening in Brazil? Why is it happening here? Why is it happening in the Philippines? Why is it happening in Scandinavia? I think when you take that broader view, you say, it is not just the quirk of some system here and there or one country or one history. It is a breakdown in the basic underpinning of all of these countries as democracies, which is that we can talk our way into the future together. That talk is essentially the best tool of future choosing, future making.

Yes. And conversation and connection. And I know in India is probably the other country going through this that I know the best. I don't know the other ones super well, although I've visited and talked to people there. It's the same deeper pattern that, things are totally different. But that basic pattern of people like that are beyond my reach, I'm beyond their reach. Talk is futile. Changing minds is futile. That write-off, I think, explains more about the democratic crisis around the world than anything I can think of. And the reason I'm hopeful, I do not want to sound dour to people, because I think I intended this as an incredibly hopeful book. I think once you see it that way,

you say, well, in that case, actually, all is not lost. We just have a ton of work to do. We have a lot of people we have to talk to, talk with, walk with, listen to, listen to, to process an era that has been incredibly discombobulating, confusing, bewildering. Threatening. Threatening. Also incredibly uplifting for all kinds of people. Yeah, no, yeah. Me and you among them.

Oh, yeah. But we have to do a better job of talking people through the era and restoring faith, which is what I'm trying to do with this book, that we can choose the future through talk. I don't think we want to contemplate actually what it looks like when we can't. No, and I have to say, to me, it was an incredibly hopeful book.

I use words very carefully because the intersection of language and emotion is what I do. And you know, hope is not an affect or an emotion. It's actually a cognitive behavioral process that is three pieces. It's goal, pathway, and agency. So hope is actually people who have high levels of hopefulness see a goal that's attainable. they develop a pathway to it, and they have a sense of agency about their ability not only to follow that pathway, but to plan B, C, and D it when things get screwed up. And I really feel like in terms of hopefulness, the persuaders gives us a goal that's historically politically grounded in real experience.

It gives us a pathway and not just one, but many based on different stories and experiences. And it gives us a sense of agency. So I want to end part one right here. And then I want to jump to part two next week and just dig into some of the learnings from the book. Amazing. Okay, this conversation, just I can't wait for y'all to hear part two. I'm so glad you're with us. You can go to brennabrown.com and find links to where you can get a copy of The Persuaders. You will read this book with your partner, with a book.

It is the most amazing book club read. I mean, it's a great book. I am reading it for a second time. Steve's reading it. It's just, I hate to use the word persuasive, but it's a whole new way of looking at things, which I love. You can find links to everything

on bernabrown.com on the episode page. We are glad you're here. Stay awkward, brave, and kind. And we will see you for part two next time. Bye. Unlocking Us is produced by Brene Brown Education and Research Group. The music is by Keri Rodriguez and Gina Chavez. Get new episodes as soon as they're published by following Unlocking Us on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more award-winning shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. What software do you use at work? The answer to that question is probably more complicated than

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