Your Undivided Attention - The Cure for Hate — with Tony McAleer

Episode Date: December 19, 2019

“You can binge watch an ideology in a weekend,” says Tony McAleer. He should know. A former white supremacist, McAleer was introduced to neo-Nazi ideology through the U.K. punk scene in the 1980s. But after his daughter was born, he embarked on a decades-long journey from hate to compassion. Today’s technology, he says, make violent ideologies infinitely more accessible and appealing to those who long for acceptance. Social media isolates us and can incubate hate in a highly diffuse structure, making it nearly impossible to stop race-based violence without fanning the flames or driving it further underground. McAleer discusses solutions to this dilemma and the positive actions we can take together.

This mother wrote us and she said, you know, my son's 18, he's got Asperger syndrome, and he's found this white nationalist community online, and she goes, you know what terrifies me the most? Is these people have embraced and accepted my son in a way that no one has in his entire life? That's Tony McAleer, a former organizer for the white Aryan resistance or war. As a skinhead recruiter, he knew the most effective way to lure young people into a hateful movement was to simply catch them at a moment of isolation. They didn't have to share his beliefs or frequent far-right chat rooms.

They just had to feel hopelessly alone. You know, when he was in grade 7, when he was 12, he invited his entire class to his birthday party, and nobody showed up. At this moment of desperation, a recruiter like Tony would show up, and he wouldn't reason with them. He appealed to their emotions. As human beings, we just want to belong. And those are deep, deep psychological trials.

I'm sure that that kid would believe that the earth was flat, if that's what it took to get that kind of social. acceptance. Tony isn't sharing his story to make you feel pity for him or for those who share a hateful ideology. Instead, he wants you to understand the starting point of hatred before the headline grabbing horrors of the Christchurch shooting or the torchlit march of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville. Because before all that, there's a private journey of one individual into a state of isolation. You can't understand the rise of extremist movements worldwide until you understand this first fork in the road and how technology pushes more young people towards isolation.

giving recruiters of hateful ideologies everywhere and opening to pull them in. It's a chain of decisions that our guest on today's show, Tony McLeer understands intimately. Somebody said to me, you know, Tony, he seemed like a nice guy. How in the hell did you lose your humanity? And I said, I didn't lose my humanity. I traded it for acceptance and approval to it was nothing left. When his daughter was born, he began his journey out of white supremacy, waking up to the horrific decisions he made, and co-founding life after hate. an organization that helps other extremists move beyond racism.

He just published his first book, The Cure for Hate, A Former White Supremicist Journey from Violent Extremism to Radical Compassion. The fundamental question here is a question about how society works. Is society just this good place? And then every now and then you get a few bad apples that show up. Or are there systemic forces that are growing bad apples? These are complex issues, and there's obviously many different sources of the issues. But we wanted to go deep with someone who knows quite well at an inner psychological level.

What is the root of this? You know, we have to get a handle on how and why is this happening. And what role does technology have, both in amplifying it and in potentially defusing the problem before it gets worse? I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Azaraskin, and this is your undivided attention. I was not a tough kid growing up, but hanging out with skinheads, people feared me. Not because of me, because of who I was with. And I remember my, you know, my mom's saying, like, why are you hanging out with these guys?

Like, I don't get it. You've got your whole life ahead of you. You've got, you know, you can go to university, you can do this, you can do that. Everything's made available to you. Why do you choose to hang out with those guys? And when I think about it, they had what I didn't, and that was toughness. And for me to have their protection, I had to have their respect. And for me to have their respect, I had to commit all the same acts of violence that they did.

And I willingly participated in all of that. And so how did you first encounter the skinheads? What was that progression from those early experiences of trauma that you mentioned? Well, I want to be clear. I don't ever, ever blame anything on my childhood. The reason I talk about what happened in my childhood is to help people understand the lens through which I made the choices that I did. and I have to accept responsibility and accountability for those choices. I came from a very affluent, privileged life.

You know, my father was a psychiatrist who, you know, worked 70, 80 hours a week, and I went to private schools for most of my schooling. So I didn't come from what you might think is a broken down, impoverished family. When I was 10, I walked in on my father with another woman. and that really started a series of events that had me a spiral. I was really angry when that happened. I was confused. I felt betrayed.

And after that, I started acting out at school. And the school got together with my dad and my mom, and they decided to try and improve my grades through beating me. And if I didn't get an A or a B on major tests and assignments, I was marched down to the teacher's office and hit on the rear end with the yardstick. The reason I talk about that is because I think even to this day, I do not think I've ever felt more powerless and helpless

as I did in that office over and over and over again. At the end of grade 9, the Catholic school had had enough of me. They said, you know, there's not any one thing that he's, done that is worthy of expulsion, but his general level of defiance is off the chart. You take him somewhere else and we won't expel him. And so I ended up wanting to go to England. And I got into the whole punk scene because it, you know, it vibed with the anger I was feeling the anger I was carrying. And from there, I got into the skinhead thing. You know, the skinhead thing was a youth subculture that was mainstream, not skinheads in the way that you think of them

in North America. It wasn't political. It wasn't political at first. And then in the early 80s, 1984, I think, there was a single came out from a skinhead band called Screwdriver. It was the first overtly racist song I can remember, and it was called White Power. And that set the whole scene alight. And then skinheads started to get in fights with punks over it. Skinheads going to fight with other skinheads over it. There was, you know, skinheads completely against racism. And there was those that, like me, completely adopted it.

and it became an identity. White power and white supremacy wasn't just what I believed in. It was who I was. It was the badges on my clothes. It was what I wore. It was what I listened to. It was what I talked about. It was in the movies and tapes I watched and listened to.

It was, you know, and this is the challenge with talking to anybody in that space today. Identity and ideology were completely intertwined. And when somebody has their identity and their ideology, intertwine, there's no rational discussion you can have with that person because to attack the ideologies, to attack their identity and all the ego defense mechanisms kick in. One of the reasons, you know, we wanted to have you on the podcast is obviously the rise of extremism of white supremacy. In 2018, there were 50 domestic extremist murders, all of which were committed by perpetrators with ties to right-wing extremists. Right-wing extremism is also

responsible for 73% of extremist killings over the last decade compared to 23% for Islamist extremism and 3% for left-wing extremism. So how do you account for these trends? I know we're going to get into technology's role and amplifying some of it, but what I really appreciate about talking to you is going into the inner experience. That's a great question. You're absolutely right about those numbers. And for the longest time, the focus of government response has been towards ISIS and al-Qaeda inspired extremism. And you can look at Isis al-Baghdadi, there was a head to the snake. This violent far right, it's the snake without a head. There's not this cohesive organizing personality or ideology. It's like the ideology exists in cyberspace and people come

into it and people exit it. But it's always there. And there's no way to remove it. When I first got involved. If you wanted information, you'd order a book or a video cassette, you know, when those things were still existing, or audio cassettes, and it might take a month for it to get to you and you listen to it and then you, you know, order something else. And it took months or years to really, you know, red pill and rabbit hole. But with the internet now, there is no bottleneck. The only bottleneck is your ability to consume information. And you can binge watch an ideology in a weekend now. Well, and it's sort of an anti-bottleneck because the, premises to remove as much friction as possible. I mean, what you're saying about having to order

the book or the cassette tape, if you think of the choice architecture of that moment and the fact that you have to wait a month for it to arrive and you have to dole out the money, so many barriers. So many barriers to entry. And if you wanted to go meet other people, you had to go physically meet them. And there might be protesters. There might be law enforcement. There was all kinds of barriers to entry. And the internet with the illusion of anonymity, that's all gone. There's no barriers to entry. Dylan Roof started his journey from Googling Black on White crime. There's a 2018 study in Germany, it was across all of Germany, is from the University

of Warwick. And what they discovered is that if you dose a city with Facebook, that is, they aren't using Facebook, then they use Facebook for a week in that week. Violent crimes against immigrants rose by 50%. The ecosystem, the ecological surround, really does change. behavior and it leaks into the real world. There's a sort of a famous quote by Reid Hoffman that social networks do best when they tap into the seven deadly sins. And he gives the example of LinkedIn as greed, but Facebook, it's ego. And then he says, I like to emphasize the importance

of the deep universal psychological structure in people's minds, which given the business model means we're sort of creating a digital Frankenstein that's finding the fractures exactly where people need to feel belonging and connection. It doesn't care who it's connecting. You know, it just is a connector, and it's a community builder. And, you know, therein lies the challenge. And what's fascinating is the University of Maryland and their studies of terrorism responses to terrorism,

they have their first data set of people enmeshed in the violent far right online that have never met another human being involved in that. always before until about, you know, up to about 2015, 2016. People were involved online, but there was always at least one human connection to it. And what they now have is people who've never met another human involved in the ideology that they're drawn into. At some point, you became a skinhead recruiter. And I'm really curious, what were you looking for?

What were the tells or the vulnerabilities to let you identify them? And I'm, of course, asking in a little bit because it starts pointing at directions for solutions. Right. I mean, I was looking for people to join us. And it was people with those vulnerabilities that responded to what we offered was, again, that acceptance, approval, safety. And when we found someone that was looking for that, it was like, come on board. I've studied cults, and they find people in moments of transition where they are about to abandon one identity and join another. and they're looking for belonging and kind of affirmation of something new.

And it's those moments in between when we're most vulnerable. When you go back to just the beginning of your story and talking about the importance of social validation and approval and safety in a world where you didn't have that coming from a more difficult upbringing, if I think about what's the quickest, easiest thing to reach for if I'm a person who doesn't have social validation, well, online is just a lot faster.

It's the fastest acting. It's false, but it's a form of social validation. That's what social media is designed for. You know, absolutely. And to draw the insoles into this. So Incel is involuntary celibates, and they are young men who are angry at the fact that they can't meet women. The Chads and the Nansies is their slang term. The Chads are the guys that have no problem meeting women.

And, you know, they pick up all the on the Nansies. And the Nantesies are looking at the Chads. And nobody's looking at the insides. cells, you know, and they're angry and pissed off. And what social media has provided and the internet has provided the ability for those people to connect with other people like them. So now there's, they're not just 100,000 people playing Atari's in their basement. There are now 100,000 people connected and they can complain and create this echo chamber where they're super angry at women because of their inability to interact. You're not going

to go on to Instagram and take pictures to get social validation. Where you will get it is through the extreme satire and excoriation of all that world that they feel excluded from. And then you're in this sort of echo chamber of extreme satire. To them, it's funny. But they become so desensitized that what they find is funny after a while is pretty hardcore. And in an age where internet pornography is everywhere, it would be the equivalent of, you know, 30, 40 years ago kids sharing dirty pictures amongst themselves that they couldn't get access to. and it becomes this trade in the illicit, the taboo.

You know, and the society that has rejected me, I'm going to gore their values in the most profane way possible. It's easy to look at these things and say, oh, it's, you know, there's these people who happen to be isolated as opposed to, okay, let's look at the 2.7 billion people that are jacked into one of these platforms, YouTube being very popular, for example. And it's designed, obviously, to capture attention,

which means it's designed to prefer to have people by themselves on a screen watching without talking to anyone. So each website is competing to isolate people. And then when you're by yourself and you're atrophying the kind of social muscles that are involved in the social awkward process of reaching out and talking to a stranger, you know, from an evolutionary psychology perspective, talking to a stranger is incredibly risky because that would be like, you know, you get hurt if you talk to a stranger. But what happens when people are increasingly pulled into an atrophied state where they haven't exercised those muscles where the entire ecosystem of supercomputers pointed at 2 billion people's brains

are designed to maximize that individual isolated experience. And then, as you said, it's even easier if I want, let's say, the romantic connection. The easiest fastest choice to reach for is pornography, not an easy way to connect with someone else. Imagine a world where, you know, it was actually easier to reach for a salsa dance class than it was for Reddit or Instagram. And dance classes were just everywhere, meaning environments in which charm and attraction and chemistry kind of automatically appear,

if those spaces were on the top of life's menu and they were abundant, how different would our world look? And I mean, going back to the beginning of your story of I heard two basic psychological needs, the one of this was a place of getting social approval, and the other was this is a place of feeling safe in a world that didn't feel safe. Right now, social approval and safety are most efficiently provided by these isolating tech platforms. Your expression of social atrophy is brilliant. I have not heard that before, but it absolutely hits the nail on the head. And what's amazing is, you know, we've never been

more connected and we've never been more disconnected at the same time. When we're in those isolated places, you know, where a friend or someone else might be able to pick up on something going wrong or might be able to hold us back, that doesn't exist. I think we will look back at this time and find it crazy that we use the entire might of technology to get us to look away from each other. How do you give up an identity? What did your mind do? How did you step away?

I left the movement at a time when social media didn't exist. And everybody in the movement knew me as Tony McAleer. My ID and my birth certificate and everything was Anthony McAleer. So when I embarked on a new career in the early 2000s, My business card said Anthony McAlear, and if you Google Anthony McAleer, you get a completely different result than if you Google Tony McAleer. I hid from my past at the beginning. You know, my daughter was born. I remember holding her in the delivery room, and she opened her eyes for the first time, and my blurry face was the first picture that she was going to take, her brain is going to take.

And, you know, for the first time, I connected with another human being that I, since I couldn't remember when. And that changed me. I know that I left that room a different person than that entered it. And it just, it took some time for it to play out. I became a full-time single father. That became my new identity. I mean, it wasn't easy to give up the old one. I had so much social capital invested.

I had so much momentum in that identity of who I was. But I started to get, as a single dad in the 90s, and it's completely unfair. where everybody was pat me on the back, oh my God, I can't believe you're a single dad. Like, no single mother in the 90s got that type of attention, but it gave me, again, acceptance approval and attention, but in a healthy way this time. And so I had an identity to transition too.

And because the movement I was involved with was so toxic, and I remember just about the time when me and the mother split up, two guys came to my house to ask me about, did so-and-so who I knew, sleep with so-and-so, who was one of the guy's girlfriends, and, you know, I knew, but, you know, it's not in my business. I want to talk about it. And they, you know, sort of knocked the door in, push me backwards.

And, you know, in front of my children, I had my two front teeth knocked into 45 degrees and one of them fell out and mouth full of blood and my son sitting there, you know, watching it. And I'm like, these are people supposed to be on my side. And this is such a toxic place to be. And it always is because you can't be that angry and hateful all the time and surrounding yourself with that and not live in toxicity. And so it was, you know, at the age of 20 when I didn't have children, I thought I'd be dead or in jail by the age of 30 as a white revolutionary. And once I had children, I'm like, well, is it? Is it really fair for me to continue down that path,

you know, with children? And for the first time in my life, I thought of someone else other than myself. One thing you've talked about in your previous experience of getting into white supremacy was, I think you called it bad serendipity, being exposed to the wrong thing at the wrong time. The Greek concept is Cairo's. Like, it's sort of the ideal goal of advertisers is you want to reach people with the message at the moment when they're most receptive to that message. But, you know, there's sort of this hate serendipity. If you think about YouTube is sort of offering something that if you start on one white

supremacy video and it says, well, here's 10 more. It's sort of the worst nightmare of being offered bad serendipity, the wrong thing at the wrong time. I remember talking to someone who was an Alcoholics Anonymous, and they said when they're feeling like they're going to take a drastic action, any kind of drastic action, they halt, H-A-L-T, which means they ask, am I hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? And you stop, and that's sort of a tool to say, you know, before I act as if this is an authentic choice coming out of me in a free, informed, wise way, are any of these preconditions true? And it strikes me that technology is not really aware of halts. You know, are we hungry, angry, lonely, or tired? And do you want to talk a little about that kind of serendipia? I think it's a critical part of fixing some of these issues.

Well, and I think it can be a critical part to the solution as well. To be that angry all the time surrounded by angry people all the time is draining. And there's a lot of churn that goes on in the movement. But I think that provides an opportunity not to counter the beliefs, right? Because the challenge, you know, someone who has got. their identity and ideology intertwined, you go and attack their ideology, you're also attacking their identity and all the ego defense mechanisms go up. But if you can give them something to think about that questions their involvement, not from an ideological perspective, but from an interpersonal

perspective, I guarantee you their relationships are going to be horrible. There's ways that we can trigger disillusionment. And if we could take someone that might be 10 years in the movement and get them to quit at six, that's harm reduction. And I think that rather than try and counter facts and figures, we take a more introspective and emotional approach and get them to question where they're at and what's going on, I think we have the opportunity to use technology to do a great deal of harm reduction

because I was a complete narcissist. I was into my ego, the glorification of everything I did, and I didn't think about the harm I committed to anyone else. It was totally in my ego and narcissism. But that changed once I had children. And it's a common theme that happens with, you know, people that join any kind of violent extremist group. And in 2011, you know, Google ideas put on this summit called the Summit Against Violent Extremism. And they invited 50 former violent extremists. They had to be working for peace. So it's not like they were active. And you had former members of the IRA and former members of the Ulster

volunteer force who were their Protestant nemesis. You had Joe Barry, whose father was killed in the IRA hotel bombing in the 80s. And, you know, she travels with the guy that planted the bomb. He's out of prison now and they work together to foster peace. You had bloods, crips, skinheads, neo-Nazis, you name it. Every race, faith, geography, gender, ideology, it transcended all of that stuff. And during that, I heard these stories of, you know, how people got into it and how people left. They were so similar, these themes that kept showing up.

And, you know, the acceptance, belonging, approval, all of that kind of stuff, a sense of purpose, a sense of joining something much bigger than themselves. And on the other side, you know, one of the things that was always there and those that had left was a story that in some way, shape, or form centered around compassion, whether it be compassion for someone who they had once dehumanized, you know, and was showing compassion to them. It really blew me and the other six co-founders of life after hate away. And we came back from that absolutely inspired and motivated and dedicated to helping people leave where we once were.

How were the conditions created so that so many people from opposite sides could come together? How do you create spaces like that? So life after hate, we despise the ideology that we once believed. We despise the activity, but we never. despise the human being. And I think that we must remember that, that no one is irredeemable. The answer is not to judge people. It's not to docks people. It's not to ban people. The answer is to rehumanize people. And I've seen it successfully practiced over and over and over again. If we drill down deeper into the psyche, you know, we get to, and this is, I think this is

a common thread amongst all violent extremist groups, gangs. It's also common thread. You know, from addiction, eating disorders, these ridiculous ideas that we have about ourselves, we call that toxic shame. What defines a healthy emotion is it's transitory. It comes and it goes. When we're dealing with toxic shame, you know, we're dealing with these beliefs deep at the core of our subconscious identity belief system, you know, that we're not good enough. And we either projected onto other people or we internalize it. And verbal abuse, rage, which is 24-7 anger, violence, gangs, violent extremism. Murder is the ultimate externalized shame response.

Or we do it to ourselves in that substance abuse, it's eating, cutting, eating disorders, risky sexual behavior, playing a sport where you break a bone, every, you know, I did both. And the ultimate internalized shame response is suicide. I was not the first kid that got beaten at Catholic school. I was not the first kid that had adultery in the household. There's millions of each of those two things. There's lots of people that didn't go down the path that I went to, but I guarantee you, they went down a different path that was destructive. Dr. James Gilligan, who wrote the book, Violence, Study of a National Epidemic, and I think he was a forensic psychiatrist at one of the prisons in California's.

And in his book, he says, you know, I never witnessed or became aware of an act of violence that wasn't rooted in shame and humiliation. I was reading some of the literature before this interview on the violence and shootings and how 80% of people who were incarcerated who had participated in a shooting had actually had suicidal thoughts before that. And what it takes to basically believe that you, you know, that this is the best option, that there isn't a sort of a better future. There isn't some other thing that's going to happen. And you mentioned earlier in your story.

You said that you assumed you'd be in jail when you were 20, I think is what you said. Debt or in jail by the end of jail. Yeah. And I think this is a really interesting thing about, like, can people imagine with the identity that they're wearing a future? And if you can't, then it's more natural that you would go down this different path. Would you talk a little bit about that? I think that's a very interesting, invisible belief that people hold, whether or not there is a future. For me, it's not surprising that we are having such an increase in mass shootings and racial shootings, as we've seen over the last,

you know, two years. At the same time, you know, if you look at these two studies from Princeton, death by despair, the suicide rate amongst white men has never been higher either. Suicide is the number one cause of death for middle-aged white men. And I think, you know, to understand what's going on in the country, we need to understand why people are, are either so angry that they're killing people in mass shootings or killing themselves. It's an indicator that something seriously wrong is it's happening. Something is disruptive in the ecosystem, so to speak. I want to make sure that we talk about how social media has been amplifying some of these things. So I just want to name a couple stats here. 4chan is a very famous message board where a lot of young people hang out.

70% of 4chan users are male. And 4chan is the second most frequently credited website in red-pilling stories into white nationalism. But 39 of the 75 fascist activists that they studied in this Bellingcat study say that YouTube was the single most frequently discussed website. So YouTube was the most discussed website as a red pill opening the gateway drug. It's becoming less so much about the videos that are actually recorded as the way that they use the comment section on the videos. How can we be smart about it? It's a challenge. I mean, back in the bad old days, I had a computerized voicemail system.

You know, press one for this, press two for that, and people from all over the world recording messages for other people to hear. and ended up going to the Supreme Court of Canada twice. My phone line received the most calls when it was under the most threat of censorship. You know, and at its peak, it was getting 300 calls a day to a single line. And so we have to think about the unintended consequences of how we respond to this.

It's easy for the uninitiated to say, well, it's just ban at all. What are the unintended consequences? Because I remember when I was, you know, getting into the punk thing in the late 70s and I was in England when God, I'd say if the Queen was banned from airplay by the sex pistols, and it became number one because of that.

So we have to find what the right balance is. There's a temptation when you see all this hate speech to say, just shut it down, take it off, ban it from the platform, kick it off. The second you do that, you just move it into a dark space, like the dark web, and then it's not tracker. You move it into signal chats or into telegram channels where there's 2,000 white nationalists on these things. I mean, even with Facebook's recent decision to say we're moving away from public news feeds and we're moving into encrypted private groups, you know, the challenge with this is you can't trace

anything that's happening. So Facebook's own security team, they're basically saying we're throwing away the key, so now it's not our responsibility if suddenly the anti-vaccine groups or the white nationalist groups or the hate groups all sort of suddenly triple, quadruple 10x in size because now they don't know. And also, obviously, the amplification of these groups has continued over the last few years. And now we're in the situation where we have to reverse from an unnatural state of how much additional hate and radicalization extremism is out there. But, you know, Tony, you have this project called We Counter Hate, the campaign.

Do you want to talk a little bit about the effect of that? Sure. We Counter Hate was, we partnered with a creative agency in Seattle called Possible. And they contacted us, and we helped them work with AI, machine learning. So when somebody posts this hateful tweet, the AI would flag it, send it to a human to go yay or nay. And if they said yay, the AI would post a response to the tweet and it would say, this message is being countered.

And if you want to retweet this message, we're going to give a donation to life after hate who helps to fight racism. And what they found was almost instantly, you know, 65 to 70 percent drop in retweets. 18 percent of the time the message was deleted by the author and an unintended consequences was 30 percent of the time the accounts were investigated and suspended by Twitter itself. But we found a way to reduce that amplification. And I think the key to what made it successful, because I've also talked to a Ph.D. at Yale, and in his case, what they would do is they would find people that were posting really nasty stuff in Twitter. Then they would, you know, send the messages saying, hey, you know, there's a human being on the other end of that. And when people were sort of dropped out of their bubble of perceived anonymity and like, hey, there's somebody watching, you know, and they had to think about what they did, all of a sudden the behavior changed.

I mean, this is so common if you asked people, you know, would you take a megaphone and stand in the middle of a, you know, a baseball stadium with 50,000 people in it and shout hate into the megaphone, right in front of 50,000 people. Be like, whoa, no, I would never have, I would never do that. But Twitter's kind of handing out megaphones that reach 50,000 people that are stadium-sized audiences, you know, every day. And what it's shifted is obviously this relationship to accountability, that you can kind of do it anonymously, do it quickly. and it's sort of a drive-by hate speech. You know, it happens so quickly, and then there's nothing that happens. And I think the question you're asking with these kind of projects is how do we reduce hate without censorship? Because we know that suppression doesn't change.

It just moves it. It's like you're squeezing the balloon over here and just pops up on the other side. You didn't actually solve the problem. Tristan here. We'll get back to the interview in a moment. But first, what can we do about this? remember the email from that guy who said Preventing Live Broadcasting of Hate Speech

Remember this guy? Oh yeah, that was a good. I love that idea. I wrote into us. Farza Fala wrote into us after hearing us talk about some of these things and he says social media companies can combat live broadcasting of hate crimes

if they announce that for each view of a hate crime video against a minority group, they'll show content promoting that group to a thousand users. So for example, after the New Zealand attack for every view of that video, they would show ads promoting Muslim scientists, artists, athletes,

and their contribution to the world for their users. This can complement their machine learning effort to detect and remove such videos quickly and can have an immense impact. Yeah, I love that idea. I have another stat here from the Anti-Defamation League. 30% of online anti-Semitic attacks are actually even initiated by bots, because in addition to the natural stuff that we're talking about, there's also bots that are being created to instill hate.

It's like we already have sort of autonomous drones. They're just speech drones. and they're shooting hate all around the internet. And I think it's confusing because you can't, when this is all happening so quickly, people don't even know what's real. Yeah, and Twitter's response to dealing with those kind of bot accounts and the larger implications around elections and all that kind of stuff, what they're doing to counteract that has made it impossible for the AI bought we were working with

to counter hate. And I think the project is actually being sunsetted now because Twitter's making changes that make it no longer possible to keep doing what we were doing. And so when you think about this, you know, you were asked in, I think it was a House committee, you know, what would you do with a billion dollars to go after the systemic forces with this problem? Given this is really urgent. There's likely to be multiple more shootings in the next few months because of this. And so I think whatever people in the technology industry or policymakers or media should hear,

you know, this is your opportunity to reach people. We need to empower local communities. You know, this is not something life after hate can possibly even put a 5% dent in. It's so huge. And it's a whole of society problem that requires a whole of society's solution. And we have resources in every community. We're starting to work at whether it be law enforcement, mental health, social workers, school resource officers or school counselors. How to recognize it when it's in front of you.

So, you know, there's some obvious signs that, you know, people aren't aware of, for example, 14, 80, someone might see that and go, oh, that's a weird number. But the one in the four stands for 14 words, which is we must secure the existence of our race in the future for white children. And then 88 is the eighth letter of the alphabet, H.H. Hall Hitler. There's all kinds of coded things. You've got Pepey, the frog, and you've got this and that,

you've got the hand symbols. And if people aren't educated, you know, people that are on the front line that are, you know, counselors, police officers, social workers, and such, they're not aware of that stuff, they'll miss it. They could walk right past them and they wouldn't recognize it. So we help them to recognize when it's in front of them. And then once they've recognized it, how do they interface with it?

And they can be, whatever their modality of training is, we add some evidence-based tools and techniques that provide the best chance of success in interacting with that person. It's not a guarantee. Nothing's a guarantee, but at least it gives you the best policy. chance to interact with it. This is a question I had. You talk a lot about compassion as sort of a main vehicle for helping people step away from that identity.

I'm curious, you do a lot of these sort of eight hour long, deep life studies, like why people are there. What have you learned about specifically why compassion helps people out? And then what lessons are there for technology from that deep work you've done? If the reason people are in is because they're disconnected from their hearing, humanity? You know, the answer isn't to go in through the head and try and change their ideas. It's to try and change the relationship with themselves. I've talked before about shame and toxic shame and the feeling of being less than. The antidote to shame is compassion. And when we're

compassionate with someone, we hold a mirror up to them and allow them to see their humanity reflected back at them. We teach them. My children did to me. I saw a version of me reflected in their eyes that I couldn't see when I looked in the mirror. If internal dehumanization is the cause and the problem, then internal rehumanization is a solution and the answer. We have to sort of look at it that way. And I tell you, the ego has incredible defenses to keep itself alive. That's what it's what it's there for. So going in through the head is an incredibly difficult process. But what it doesn't have good defenses for is when we come in through the heart. I think we're in our technological adolescence.

And in some ways, technology being a mirror, it's a distorting mirror, and we look into it, and we don't really like what we see. And the solution... We're addicted to it anyways. Right, exactly. And the solution is that compassion. It's the taking a clear-eyed look at ourselves, at our hardware, at our software, how we work, our vulnerabilities, our strengths, and our brilliance, having an honest conversation.

about that so that we can decide what we're going to do. And that's a great analogy that you use because I think if we look at the mind and the ego, that's hardware. The heart is where the software is. And I think the answer is not to, we can't necessarily change the hardware, but we can come in and change the code. We can change the code and change the software when you get different results out of the hardware.

The question I have is just how do we do that at scale. I know in something else I read about your background was how critical. it was, I think you mentioned a 10-day meditation retreat, and I've been on silent meditation retreat myself. These are incredible profound experiences and thinking about what are the experiences that do that. So when I say this on a technology-oriented podcast, I don't mean how does technology reconnect us to our hearts, but what are the life experiences that reconnect us to our hearts? And then if I think about how technology either supports that or doesn't, how can it privilege those kinds of choices? I'm just wondering how that can happen at scale. I think, for

Firstly, the message of my book is one of hope. I absolutely believe that the dehumanization, the polarization, everything we're going through, it's probably going to get worse before it gets better, but I'm absolutely hopeful. And the way that we do it is we have to start, we have to look at, we have to ask ourselves this question, who am I going to be in every moment of every day? We have an incredible ability to influence and inspire people around us.

And I think the people in the middle that are not the polarization and the dehumanization on either side, and being in the middle doesn't mean being neutral. Being in the middle is just me, is you can see the humanity in people and not write them off. And it's who am I going to be in every moment of every day? I spent 15 years in this movement thinking that I could change the world outside of me. And what I found is now I have more ability and influence to change the world outside of me by changing the world inside of me. I change myself, I change the world around me.

And I think that's what people need to start doing is to how can I be a better and inspirational human being in the face of all of this stuff, which seems daunting. I was just going to bring up the irony of the number of mindfulness classes inside of Facebook and Google

and the tech companies, which, and it's a great thing, right? We should have more technologists and people making software that has huge service our in daily lives, thinking about mindfulness, and yet there's this juxtaposition, this paradox that the technology they're creating is possibly the biggest driver against and away from mindfulness. There is, and to hold both of those in your head at the same time,

just I never quite understand how they can do it. No, that's, I chuckled when you told me that. That's, that's very, very interesting. One of the things that I learned, because I spent most of my, my life with the ego driving the bus, the ego should never be driving the bus. Never, never should the ego be driving the bus. And the ego, when it's not tethered to the heart, it's like a, it's like letting a balloon go. You don't know where it's going to go.

It goes into crazy, weird places. And I think the heart should always be driving the bus. And the ego, the ego should, we shouldn't get rid of the ego. The ego's important. But it's okay being a backseat driver, you know, giving a bit of chirp every now and again. But the heart should be driving the bus. Well, Tony, thank you so much for coming on this podcast, and I really hope people check out your book and your work at Life After Hate. Your book is called The Cure for Hate.

Thank you for coming on. Well, thank you for having me. It's been a real pleasure. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Our executive producer is Dan Kedmi. Our associate producer is Natalie Jones. Noor Al-Samurai, helped with fact-checking. Original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday.

Special thanks to Abby Hall, Brooke Clinton, Randy Fernando, Colleen Haikas, Rebecca Lendell, David Jay, and the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. We want to share a very special thanks to the generous lead supporters of our work at the Center for Humane Technology. including the Omidiar Network, the Gerald Schwartz and Heather Reisman Foundation, the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Evol Foundation, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and Knight Foundation, among many others.

A huge thanks from all of us.