Full Transcript for How to be a Dissident

happens 67 00:04:28.602 --> 00:04:33.715 to Palestinians is very much wrapped up in the future of Israel. 68 00:04:34.457 --> 00:04:35.600 And those are the people who 69 00:04:35.781 --> 00:04:36.604 I'm supporting. 70 00:04:36.724 --> 00:04:40.980 Those are the people who I feel like I need to stand in solidarity with and do 71 00:04:41.020 --> 00:04:45.892 whatever I can from far away to be a help to. 72 00:04:46.413 --> 00:04:49.220 And that is, in my own mind, sort of resolved a bit 73 00:04:49.561 --> 00:04:51.168 the difficulties. 74 00:04:51.188 --> 00:04:53.900 Does it make it any easier to sort of go through my days and have these 75 00:04:53.980 --> 00:04:56.047 conversations about Israel and Gaza? 76 00:04:56.188 --> 00:04:56.689 Not really. 77 00:04:57.071 --> 00:04:59.780 How then does dissent or being a dissident 78 00:05:00.822 --> 00:05:06.597 differ from being, like, I guess I would say maybe a contrarian. 79 00:05:06.757 --> 00:05:07.840 Like the person who, 80 00:05:08.040 --> 00:05:14.140 So Hassan Paika, when he says that, you know, he's a popular far-left Instagram, 81 00:05:14.660 --> 00:05:16.540 I mean, not Instagram, internet streamer, 82 00:05:17.122 --> 00:05:23.820 when he says that he thinks Hamas is arguably more ethical than the Israeli government, 83 00:05:25.103 --> 00:05:27.000 in his mind, he is a dissident. 84 00:05:27.781 --> 00:05:30.920 He is standing up against powerful forces, 85 00:05:32.284 --> 00:05:34.640 against taboos that prevent him from saying that, 86 00:05:35.220 --> 00:05:37.840 against a pro-Israel lobby, against Israel itself. 87 00:05:38.020 --> 00:05:38.940 and against the U.S. government. 88 00:05:41.142 --> 00:05:45.460 Your position is more contrarian, more sophisticated, more nuanced. 89 00:05:45.640 --> 00:05:48.640 You're trying to ally with people who believe in Israel 90 00:05:48.843 --> 00:05:50.060 but oppose its actions. 91 00:05:50.340 --> 00:05:52.440 It's a messier and more complicated thing, 92 00:05:52.480 --> 00:05:56.215 and I wonder what moral clarity a person needs to bring to dissent, 93 00:05:57.641 --> 00:05:58.320 or is that not the point? 94 00:05:59.360 --> 00:06:03.920 Well, I would argue that neither me nor Hassan Piker are really dissidents. 95 00:06:04.260 --> 00:06:11.948 You know, like that to be a dissident, you have to take a position that really puts you at some kind of risk. 96 00:06:12.049 --> 00:06:22.880 I'm not risking anything by, you know, I might be risking sort of social ostracism from, you know, from certain communities that wouldn't want to have me around. 97 00:06:23.502 --> 00:06:27.899 um i don't know what hassan piker is risking i mean i don't think anybody is shutting down his 98 00:06:28.280 --> 00:06:34.940 live stream or making it impossible for him to grow his audience or you know so well he's probably 99 00:06:35.161 --> 00:06:41.440 risking to be fair he's probably risking uh the wrath of the trump administration at the least 100 00:06:41.580 --> 00:06:47.980 and maybe being hassled when he comes in and out of the country though you know i will say that 101 00:06:48.020 --> 00:06:52.860 there is now kind of this horseshoe thing going on here in this country where you know there are 102 00:06:52.880 --> 00:06:58.200 are plenty of people on the right, you know, the Tucker Carlson variety, you know, that who 103 00:06:58.561 --> 00:07:04.700 probably agree with Hassan Baiker about Israel and have their own, you know, conspiracy theories 104 00:07:04.840 --> 00:07:09.032 about the Mossad being behind various things. 105 00:07:09.854 --> 00:07:10.456 So I don't know. 106 00:07:10.837 --> 00:07:12.000 I guess my point is that like, 107 00:07:12.180 --> 00:07:15.760 you know, when I looked historically at what it means to be a dissident and when I look at other 108 00:07:15.820 --> 00:07:21.860 countries, when you look at what it means for a woman in Iran to take her headscarf off, you know, 109 00:07:21.900 --> 00:07:23.760 when the rule is that you have to wear your headscarf. 110 00:07:25.403 --> 00:07:27.700 I see what I'm calling dissidence, 111 00:07:27.840 --> 00:07:29.119 which is sort of a defense 112 00:07:30.063 --> 00:07:34.220 or a decision to kind of hold a line 113 00:07:35.264 --> 00:07:39.200 on certain ways of being that feel like, 114 00:07:40.384 --> 00:07:42.260 you know, they are what we should expect 115 00:07:42.522 --> 00:07:44.820 to have part of our normal, a normal human life. 116 00:07:45.981 --> 00:07:48.060 They're not, it's not just being outspoken. 117 00:07:48.220 --> 00:07:49.980 I mean, we have plenty of, in a free society, 118 00:07:50.060 --> 00:07:51.500 we have plenty of opportunities to be outspoken. 119 00:07:51.980 --> 00:08:08.540 If you're going to go to China and say, you know, talk about Tiananmen Square, you know, and, you know, investigate what happened and want to write about it and talk about it, then you are becoming a dissident because you're in an environment where that's not permitted. 120 00:08:08.700 --> 00:08:16.800 And it is not just breaking a taboo, it's exposing a truth that powerful forces want to keep hidden. 121 00:08:17.842 --> 00:08:21.420 So being a dissident is kind of a confluence of two things, to put it in a nutshell. 122 00:08:22.020 --> 00:08:33.040 It's both the inner sort of orientation that you have to your own society and to the people around you and your decision to kind of say the thing that speaks to your conscience. 123 00:08:33.741 --> 00:08:40.280 But it's the confrontation of that with a society that is pushing back against what you want to do or say. 124 00:08:41.704 --> 00:08:45.380 So it's important to sort of define that a little bit because lots of people use the word dissident. 125 00:08:45.460 --> 00:08:50.299 I mean, Trump called himself a political dissident after, you know, 2020. 126 00:08:50.861 --> 00:08:55.240 So it is important to define these terms a little bit. 127 00:08:56.240

--> 00:08:57.480 I mean, yes, that's interesting. 128 00:08:57.720 --> 00:09:12.960 And so staying on the truly courageous dissident who is standing up against something like the Chinese Communist Party or Putin's government, is that a choice that normies can make for themselves? 129 00:09:13.522 --> 00:09:18.480 Or is it a natural outgrowth of a person's character that they cannot help but do? 130 00:09:19.285 --> 00:09:20.560 Yeah, it's a good question. 131 00:09:20.620 --> 00:09:26.500 And I think, honestly, it's sort of a tension in my own, in my book, because I didn't approach 132 00:09:26.601 --> 00:09:28.580 this from a perspective of being a dissident. 133 00:09:28.820 --> 00:09:32.420 I approached it from the other end of the spectrum of feeling like a bit of a coward, 134 00:09:32.640 --> 00:09:38.180 you know, and like, and worrying about what I would do if I was found myself at some kind 135 00:09:38.221 --> 00:09:39.220 of moral crossroads. 136 00:09:39.841 --> 00:09:43.980 And this wasn't a question that I had, you know, asked myself much in my life. 137 00:09:44.140 --> 00:09:47.600 I mean, I've been studying, and this is my third book, I've studied social movements, 138 00:09:47.680 --> 00:10:08.620 I've studied dissidents, but it was really only sort of in those first few months of the Trump, this current Trump administration, that I sort of saw things and began to experience things in American society that made me think, do I have it in me to, you know, resign from the job, you know, go be part of the sit down where I'm going to be arrested? 139 00:10:09.061 --> 00:10:14.820 like whatever it is that you think is kind of holding your line um if i'm called to do that 140 00:10:14.840 --> 00:10:19.600 or if i feel compelled to do that and uh and i didn't know i didn't honestly know the answer 141 00:10:19.600 --> 00:10:22.760 to that because i think and i don't think any of us really know the answer to that because there's 142 00:10:22.800 --> 00:10:27.160 a lot of things on the other side of the scale right it's our not just self-preservation but 143 00:10:27.200 --> 00:10:32.660 our families our economic well-being there's so many other things that we worry about that 144 00:10:32.680 --> 00:10:35.820 would prevent us from taking a truly risky action. 145 00:10:36.721 --> 00:10:37.740 I think there are some, 146 00:10:37.840 --> 00:10:39.560 my conclusion is that there are some people 147 00:10:39.640 --> 00:10:43.560 who are sort of, do have this in a kind of a deep gut, 148 00:10:43.782 --> 00:10:44.660 sort of innate way. 149 00:10:44.760 --> 00:10:47.460 And I can talk a little bit about 150 00:10:47.561 --> 00:10:49.200 sort of what I think that means. 151 00:10:49.600 --> 00:10:50.789 But I think most of us don't. 152 00:10:52.400 --> 00:10:53.677 I think most of us just sort of, 153 00:10:55.121 --> 00:10:56.839 understandably, because we're human beings 154 00:10:57.021 --> 00:10:59.090 and self-preservation is a good thing. 155 00:11:01.560 --> 00:11:05.549 It's how our species has survived for, you know, as long as it has. 156 00:11:06.913 --> 00:11:10.080 We're sort of deep, hardwired to conform. 157 00:11:10.400 --> 00:11:10.721 Yeah. 158 00:11:10.821 --> 00:11:35.640 I mean, also, the self-preservation thing, what has been so disheartening for many of us in this Trump administration is that whilst it might be understandable that very few individuals want to put themselves in the firing line of a government that is doing all kinds of things that they disagree with, there are institutions that had power, organizations that had money, that failed completely. 159 00:11:36.140 --> 00:12:00.460 If you look at the universities standing up for their academic freedom, if you look at media companies not fighting Trump's frivolous defamation suits and so on, if you look at the tech bros going and kind of getting cozy with the administration, there were multiple opportunities for very deep-pocketed and powerful organizations to draw a line in the sand and say, actually, we don't really agree with the vibe of this administration. 160 00:12:01.440 --> 00:12:02.119 We'll sit this one out. 161 00:12:02.762 --> 00:12:03.456 And they didn't. 162 00:12:03.784 --> 00:12:04.196 And they didn't. 163 00:12:06.407 --> 00:12:10.420 I mean that honestly it was the thing that was the most shocking to me that the most powerful 164 00:12:10.520 --> 00:12:16.000 most elite forces in society I mean look it was shocking to me at one level because I just didn't 165 00:12:16.060 --> 00:12:21.260 expect it and I also think that Americans we have this sort of self-conception that we're 166 00:12:21.900 --> 00:12:26.000 you know rugged individualism and nobody's going to tell us what to do and then it was just like 167 00:12:26.020 --> 00:12:34.300 this quick folding this quick acquiescence as soon as power exercised itself and that I found 168 00:12:34.441 --> 00:12:34.883 shocking. 169 00:12:34.923 --> 00:12:38.280 And it was sort of like, oh, I mean, the shocking part was we're like everybody else, 170 00:12:38.460 --> 00:12:43.818 you know, we're like, we're like people in Russia who are keeping their head down. 171 00:12:43.838 --> 00:12:44.280 We're like people 172 00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:45.688 in China who are keeping their head down. 173 00:12:45.728 --> 00:12:47.700 This is what people, this is what human beings do. 174 00:12:48.181 --> 00:12:54.200 We just hadn't been faced quite with this level of, you know, at least in recent American history 175 00:12:54.742 --> 00:12:55.705 with anything like this. 176 00:12:56.948 --> 00:13:00.840 And, and on the other hand, you know, those, those elite institutions, 177 00:13:00.960 --> 00:13:06.100 maybe they feel like they have the most to lose right from because they have power they have money 178 00:13:06.281 --> 00:13:10.880 they have um and so i think there is a kind of a rationalization that happens where they go 179 00:13:11.040 -->

00:13:16.180 you know i mean lots of people did this even you know in trump's administration during his first 180 00:13:16.240 --> 00:13:20.640 term they said they didn't agree with almost anything he did but they said we need to be here 181 00:13:20.740 --> 00:13:27.180 to like be the ones if we're not here then nobody is sort of stopping him you know yeah uh well i 182 00:13:27.200 --> 00:13:29.320 I mean, that's the generous interpretation, right? 183 00:13:29.440 --> 00:13:29.960 I mean, the... 184 00:13:30.141 --> 00:13:32.560 No, I'm saying it's like a self-rationalization. 185 00:13:32.780 --> 00:13:34.520 You're like, it allows you to say, 186 00:13:34.600 --> 00:13:36.960 I'm not going to give up my power and my authority 187 00:13:37.121 --> 00:13:39.440 and my privilege, you know, in this situation. 188 00:13:39.960 --> 00:13:42.520 But you also can tell yourself there's a good reason for it. 189 00:13:42.740 --> 00:13:43.058 Yes. 190 00:13:43.682 --> 00:13:45.800 And I mean, to be fair to them, there may have been. 191 00:13:46.182 --> 00:13:48.780 In the first administration, if you look at the, you know, 192 00:13:49.002 --> 00:13:51.440 who was the defense secretary or the secretary of state? 193 00:13:51.881 --> 00:13:53.800 Like, you know, those people... 194 00:13:54.420 --> 00:13:56.580 Yeah, you can imagine those people thinking, you know, 195 00:13:56.741 --> 00:13:59.576 a constrained Trump is better than an unconstrained Trump. 196 00:13:59.677 --> 00:14:00.220 And in hindsight, 197 00:14:00.440 --> 00:14:03.600 they may have been right in the sense that he was able to do less damage in his first 198 00:14:03.640 --> 00:14:08.140 administration than he has been able to in his second, where he surrounded himself with lackeys 199 00:14:08.200 --> 00:14:09.406 and he's learned the lesson. 200 00:14:09.909 --> 00:14:12.260 On the other hand, I think the rationale is a bit different when it 201 00:14:12.300 --> 00:14:16.360 comes to corporations in the sense that they can argue to themselves, well, we have a fiduciary 202 00:14:16.501 --> 00:14:18.066 responsibility to our shareholders. 203 00:14:18.347 --> 00:14:21.499 We're not either going to fall on a sword here. 204 00:14:21.519 --> 00:14:21.680 So there 205 00:14:21.760 --> 00:14:25.240 are all kinds of different motivations that people can bring to the table. 206 00:14:26.021 --> 00:14:26.461 Yeah. 207 00:14:26.602 --> 00:14:32.188 And people can say, well, I'm just going to do this one thing, you know, that maybe we'll get them off our back. 208 00:14:32.288 --> 00:14:34.430 But, you know, it's not such a huge sacrifice. 209 00:14:34.510 --> 00:14:42.940 And, you know, like, and you don't realize that that's like, you know, a further step of normalizing something that hadn't existed before. 210 00:14:43.060 --> 00:14:55.840 You know, the government sort of entering into academia and making decisions about who can be on what faculty, you know, or telling law firms who they can defend and who they can't defend. 211 00:14:56.100 --> 00:15:02.600 Or media companies feeling a kind of self-censorship because they're worried that they're going to be sued for millions of dollars by the government. 212 00:15:03.387 --> 00:15:04.240 Like all of these things. 213 00:15:04.460 --> 00:15:10.160 Or paying Donald Trump millions of dollars to make him stop suing them, even on lawsuits that they knew they would win. 214 00:15:11.121 --> 00:15:12.160 It is this accretion. 215 00:15:12.160 --> 00:15:15.720 And I mean, it happened very quickly, you know, I mean, it happened very quickly here. 216 00:15:16.602 --> 00:15:22.880 And so and, you know, I looked around myself and I thought, we don't really have role models, 217 00:15:23.120 --> 00:15:28.400 Americans, you know, like for for pushing back for doing some of the things that maybe 218 00:15:28.521 --> 00:15:32.920 that this accounts for why, you know, people couldn't these institutions, these elites 219 00:15:33.000 --> 00:15:36.437 couldn't act in ways that I thought would have been more more morally upstanding, you 220 00:15:36.960 --> 00:15:40.080 know, is there's just it's there's a vacuum of it here. 221 00:15:40.340 --> 00:15:49.807 And instead, there's like an ideology of self-interest, one that is, you know, Trump is kind of the athiosis of this, where, you know, sort of like might makes right. 222 00:15:50.067 --> 00:16:08.880 And so there's a kind of a real absence vacuum of even the kinds of moral conversations, the trade-offs that one would have to go through internally to get to the point where they would say, no, we're not, you know, we're not going to, you know, you can sue us, you know, a media company. 223 00:16:09.400 --> 00:16:11.663 You're not going to tell us what to do law firm. 224 00:16:11.683 --> 00:16:12.925 You're not going to tell us what to do academia. 225 00:16:12.965 --> 00:16:25.080 So I think that I just felt like we need to ground ourselves in some history, in something that exists outside of the United States to see how this plays out. 226 00:16:25.921 --> 00:16:33.427 And, Gal, you mentioned that after 2020, Donald Trump was calling himself a dissident for disputing the election results. 227 00:16:33.987 --> 00:16:49.760 Part of what's so interesting, I think, about the American case at the moment is that when you say you realized Americans were sort of just the same as everybody else in the sense that they would roll over and fold when confronted with the opportunity to be a dissident. 228 00:16:50.601 --> 00:17:12.020 The way that I can imagine the more Trump sympathetic viewer or listener thinking, but actually Trump was an anti-establishment, free speech, anti-elite force that populism frames itself as the sort of more dissenting side of politics, right? 229 00:17:12.080 --> 00:17:27.300 I mean, the Trump movement, MAGA kind of got its mojo by being, we are not going to be constrained and held down and bound by the persnickety,

woke, left-wing, politically correct rules of the game. 230 00:17:28.161 --> 00:17:32.834 Instead, we're going to overturn the chessboard and dissent in a sense. 231 00:17:34.840 --> 00:17:49.380 Have you thought about how that mood, that vibe of kind of upstart-y dissent actually motivates the movement that has now become the most authoritarian in recent American history? 232 00:17:50.820 --> 00:17:55.600 Well, first of all, I'll say that to be a dissident is sort of a, that's a value neutral thing, right? 233 00:17:55.680 --> 00:17:59.880 One can be a dissident for good or dissident for bad, if we're talking about definitions here. 234 00:17:59.960 --> 00:18:07.528 Like dissident just means, as we said before, that you're sort of pushing back against or you're defending some norm that you believe needs to exist. 235 00:18:07.568 --> 00:18:18.920 Now people are, I mean, you could say, and I say this in the book, you know, Hitler, and just to be provocative about it, Hitler in the 20s, you know, when he was thrown in jail, kind of dissident, you know. 236 00:18:19.280 --> 00:18:29.811 Now, he was a dissident whose vision was one of domination, was one of kind of an ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide. 237 00:18:30.431 --> 00:18:39.500 And it was to the glory of his own people and to himself and to his own power that he wanted, that his dissidence was sort of based at. 238 00:18:40.221 --> 00:18:58.200 And so I, you know, if they want to see themselves as dissidents, like they're entitled to by the definition that I have of dissident, but I'm interested in dissidents who the freedom that they're fighting for, the norms that they're fighting for are ones that they want for everybody else. 239 00:18:58.620 --> 00:19:17.260 And so for me, the real test was, if you are the free speech defenders, you know, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and all these characters, if really what bothered you was that people aren't allowed to say what they want to say, then when you're in a position of power, are you actually giving everybody the right to say what they want to say? 240 00:19:17.701 --> 00:19:29.980 Are you just imposing a new regime that actually punishes and prevents the people who you don't want to speak from speaking and giving yourself a kind of a privileged position? 241 00:19:30.680 --> 00:19:36.900 So to me, that's not the type of dissident that I'm, if they see themselves as dissident, that's not the type of dissident that I'm interested in. 242 00:19:37.262 --> 00:19:41.380 Let's talk about the heroes list then, because the book has a lot of them. 243 00:19:42.020 --> 00:19:47.620 Kundera, Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Snowden, the list goes on. 244 00:19:48.220 --> 00:19:49.793 Where do you want to start? 245 00:19:50.840 --> 00:19:56.880 I mean, Havel's Green Grocer is a classic analogy which you cite, which may be a good one. 246 00:19:58.280 --> 00:19:58.420 Right. 247 00:19:59.546 --> 00:19:59.700 Yeah. 248 00:20:00.161 --> 00:20:01.879 First of all, I'll say, you know, you called them heroes. 249 00:20:02.564 --> 00:20:03.380 Like, these are difficult. 250 00:20:04.222 --> 00:20:12.280 You know, like I think I think it's important to recognize that like what makes somebody and this goes back to something we were talking about earlier. 251 00:20:12.580 --> 00:20:18.960 You know, if you are really somebody who can split with the natural instinct to conform, you know, which is very strong. 252 00:20:19.060 --> 00:20:25.378 And I, you know, I talk about some like social science in this book that shows just how deeply wired we are towards that. 253 00:20:26.120 --> 00:20:30.680 And most of these people are probably like a little bit obnoxious, rude. 254 00:20:30.800 --> 00:20:48.220 They're just, you know, if you are somebody who's willing to break with conformity in a kind of dramatic way to do the thing that you think is right, in spite of what your family, your country, your society thinks, like, has a high probability that you're also going to be occasionally unpleasant. 255 00:20:48.780 --> 00:20:49.244 I love them. 256 00:20:49.264 --> 00:20:50.434 These are my people, Cal. 257 00:20:50.454 --> 00:20:51.200 These are my people. 258 00:20:53.146 --> 00:20:57.640 so no i mean i do i do too you know but i also think it's important to recognize this and i 259 00:20:57.901 --> 00:21:03.120 you know i've i've had interesting conversations with people who respond very very much to the 260 00:21:03.240 --> 00:21:08.900 idea of dissidence as you know in their first association is like oh these sort of obnoxious 261 00:21:08.980 --> 00:21:14.440 stubborn people you know who aren't willing to kind of give an inch um yeah and and i my response 262 00:21:14.540 --> 00:21:18.900 that is like yeah some of them are like that but like thank god that we have these weird they're 263 00:21:18.900 --> 00:21:25.220 almost mutants you know in some way um in the sense that i mean you have mutations because i 264 00:21:25.260 --> 00:21:30.920 think that it's not normal necessarily to be like this um to say that you're going to sacrifice your 265 00:21:30.980 --> 00:21:36.020 life for example you know for something yes i mean you can't imagine that evolutionary biology 266 00:21:36.261 --> 00:21:41.600 favors uh individuals who are likely to stand in front of a tank and have themselves you know 267 00:21:41.760 --> 00:21:49.359 mown down before they can have children so they are rare for sure not but like you know i i do 268 00:21:49.840 --> 00:21:55.420 think that there is a a theory or understanding of history and the way that it progresses if you 269 00:21:55.520 --> 00:22:00.960 believe that there is such a thing as progress um that demands people like that because otherwise 270 00:22:01.321 --> 00:22:08.980 you know you have stasis or even the subordination you know like you have people who can easily take 271 00:22:09.060 --> 00:22:11.060 advantage of authoritarian 272 00:22:11.929 --> 00:22:13.080 can

easily take advantage of 273 00:22:13.100 --> 00:22:14.192 that instinct of our people. 274 00:22:14.374 --> 00:22:14.900 Yeah, and you also 275 00:22:15.465 --> 00:22:16.999 just have a general lack of 276 00:22:17.120 --> 00:22:19.120 creativity and innovation, because 277 00:22:19.181 --> 00:22:21.200 I mean, what was the Dark Ages if not 278 00:22:21.281 --> 00:22:23.040 just a very obedient time? 279 00:22:25.684 --> 00:22:25.998 Exactly. 280 00:22:26.722 --> 00:22:29.140 So these people are thorns in every respect. 281 00:22:29.721 --> 00:22:30.654 And so just going back 282 00:22:31.100 --> 00:22:32.980 to the conformism experiment so that we can set 283 00:22:33.040 --> 00:22:34.900 the baseline for how normal human beings who 284 00:22:34.940 --> 00:22:36.012 aren't crazy behave. 285 00:22:36.275 --> 00:22:36.680 Yeah, so 286 00:22:36.720 --> 00:22:38.558 a lot of these experiments were 287 00:22:38.840 --> 00:22:44.220 carried out, you know, in the post-war era when there was, people really wanted to understand, 288 00:22:44.320 --> 00:22:48.040 you know, how did an entire society like Nazi Germany sort of turn in that direction? 289 00:22:48.060 --> 00:22:52.760 And, you know, there's some famous experiments that probably listeners will know about, 290 00:22:53.000 --> 00:22:58.860 you know, like the Stanford prison experiment where they essentially turned graduate students 291 00:22:58.960 --> 00:23:03.320 into prison guards in a very short period of time by just giving them uniforms and giving 292 00:23:03.400 --> 00:23:04.846 them power over somebody else. 293 00:23:06.130 --> 00:23:08.640 And there's another famous experiment where people were 294 00:23:08.840 --> 00:23:10.407 told to administer electric shocks. 295 00:23:11.752 --> 00:23:13.720 And they thought, because they were actors on the other 296 00:23:13.780 --> 00:23:18.560 side of a wall, they thought that they were actually, you know, coming close to killing 297 00:23:18.741 --> 00:23:22.599 somebody, but they just kept administering the shocks because they were ordered to. 298 00:23:22.739 --> 00:23:22.880 So, 299 00:23:23.302 --> 00:23:28.360 so these are, you know, these are, these are kind of well-known classic experiments and what they 300 00:23:28.540 --> 00:23:36.020 point us to is, is that hardwired nature that we have, which we just, and I think actually part of 301 00:23:36.060 --> 00:23:42.340 what was important for me in writing this book was to to to to to hold an awareness of that 302 00:23:43.042 --> 00:23:49.660 um and not just in order to understand sort of why dissidence is so unusual but also why it's 303 00:23:49.680 --> 00:23:56.520 so important like that is the backdrop to it harville's green grocer who's that so this was 304 00:23:56.700 --> 00:24:02.820 harville's sort of parable for explaining how us you know individuals can contribute to the 305 00:24:02.880 --> 00:24:05.752 perpetuation of a certain ideology within a society. 306 00:24:06.134

--> 00:24:07.560 It's a story that he tells about, 307 00:24:08.020 --> 00:24:13.200 you know, just your average greengrocer and communist Czechoslovakia, who's, you know, 308 00:24:13.380 --> 00:24:18.180 puts in his window a sign that says, you know, workers of the world unite, the, you know, 309 00:24:18.260 --> 00:24:19.605 slogan of the Communist Party. 310 00:24:20.267 --> 00:24:24.040 And, and he's sort of trying to understand sort of the psychology 311 00:24:24.261 --> 00:24:25.164 behind doing that. 312 00:24:25.585 --> 00:24:30.080 And turns out, you know, he kind of theorizes, you know, that this hypothetical 313 00:24:30.080 --> 00:24:34.440 guy, like he doesn't really believe or care about this message, but he puts it up because he knows 314 00:24:34.480 --> 00:24:39.358 that if he doesn't, he's going to get in trouble that everybody else is putting it up. 315 00:24:39.859 --> 00:24:40.020 And it 316 00:24:40.060 --> 00:24:45.340 becomes a kind of a self-perpetuating thing, you know, where he's contributing to the ideology 317 00:24:46.002 --> 00:24:49.754 by, you know, by just conforming, by keeping his, by keeping his head down. 318 00:24:49.794 --> 00:24:51.600 So, so, um, you know, 319 00:24:51.680 --> 00:24:57.440 Havel's point in that story is to say, well, if the guy just stops putting the sign in his window, 320 00:24:57.600 --> 00:25:03.958 And if his neighbor stops putting the sign in his window, that is how you begin to sort of deal a blow to that world. 321 00:25:04.980 --> 00:25:08.520 That sort of we're the ones, each of us individually sort of holding it up. 322 00:25:10.044 --> 00:25:11.260 And I think that's true. 323 00:25:11.360 --> 00:25:15.920 But I think it's also very challenging to be the first person to take down the sign. 324 00:25:16.480 --> 00:25:23.060 You know, I mean, I think that that's, Havel is telling that story because he wants people to understand that they can be. 325 00:25:23.561 --> 00:25:24.638 That doesn't make it any easier. 326 00:25:25.961 --> 00:25:30.765 Were you noodling on any of this during the culture wars of the 2010s? 327 00:25:31.005 --> 00:25:50.600 Because the Greengrocer's sign in the window does remind me a bit of putting a black square on Instagram to show your solidarity with Black Lives Matter or some other sort of what you might call a performative act of virtue signaling, where it takes a tiny amount of courage to not do the thing. 328 00:25:50.781 --> 00:25:54.800 because it seems like, or like, you know, refusing to, I don't know, put your gender 329 00:25:54.921 --> 00:25:57.700 pronouns in your email signature or something like that. 330 00:25:57.740 --> 00:25:59.639 Like, why are you being so contrarian? 331 00:25:59.920 --> 00:26:01.640 Why are you being on the wrong side of things? 332 00:26:01.800 --> 00:26:06.080 Why can't you just join in what we know is the right way of thinking about things? 333 00:26:06.701 --> 00:26:10.460 It's like, yes, there are dissidents who stand in front of a tank, but there are also just 334 00:26:11.182 --> 00:26:16.480 regular people who either do or do not follow that kind of instinct in their gut, which 335 00:26:16.561 --> 00:26:18.040 says, do I have to do this? 336 00:26:18.120 --> 00:26:20.100 It seems a bit echo chambery. 337 00:26:20.740 --> 00:26:21.000 Right. 338 00:26:22.962 --> 00:26:25.405 Yeah, no, I think it's a really interesting point. 339 00:26:25.465 --> 00:26:26.886 And I can kind of see it. 340 00:26:28.228 --> 00:26:33.974 I think you're right that there is a connection there because it involves a certain kind of thoughtlessness, right? 341 00:26:34.494 --> 00:26:40.160 Hannah Arendt talked about this a lot, that like the evil, if she understood it, this is the banality. 342 00:26:40.682 --> 00:26:45.760 in her banality of evil was thoughtlessness just sort of doing things without actually thinking 343 00:26:45.900 --> 00:26:53.060 through uh whether they are true to what you believe or how you feel and so so there is some 344 00:26:53.120 --> 00:26:59.240 of that um i think the complicating factor in some of those cases was that i think people felt 345 00:27:00.042 --> 00:27:05.400 that by doing that performative simple you know what became a kind of a thoughtless thing i mean 346 00:27:05.521 --> 00:27:09.200 i don't mean maybe it wasn't thoughtless for them but they they felt that they were sort of 347 00:27:09.200 --> 00:27:18.960 of helping to make a change in their own societies like changing norms um or defending an idea that 348 00:27:19.120 --> 00:27:24.240 they that they that they actually you know they believed in um but doing it in the most superficial 349 00:27:25.383 --> 00:27:31.380 performative signaling way so that they're not really taking any risk back you know doing the 350 00:27:31.460 --> 00:27:36.580 opposite of taking a risk they're sort of you know joint showing their participation in a community 351 00:27:36.721 --> 00:27:40.280 that they feel they need to, you know, show that they belong to. 352 00:27:40.840 --> 00:27:41.081 Right. 353 00:27:41.221 --> 00:27:41.542 Yeah. 354 00:27:41.683 --> 00:27:46.840 So there's probably a hierarchy of cowardice where the greengrocer who genuinely 355 00:27:47.020 --> 00:27:53.357 does not believe in communism and puts the Workers of the World Unite placard in his window is more 356 00:27:54.841 --> 00:28:00.600 cowardly than the person who thinks they're doing the right thing by putting, you know, I don't know, 357 00:28:00.700 --> 00:28:05.060 I stand with Palestine on their Instagram, even if they're not Palestinian, they don't know about 358 00:28:05.180 --> 00:28:10.839 the region um but uh the greengrocer is probably worse because at least he's aware well i don't 359 00:28:11.060 --> 00:28:17.460 know maybe it's not a moral judgment call maybe not knowing is uh is more of an indictment than 360 00:28:17.540 --> 00:28:20.900 knowing that you're doing the wrong thing and

choosing to do so right self-preservation but 361 00:28:21.542 --> 00:28:26.719 yes there's a spectrum i mean the other just i would make and there's you know that sort of 362 00:28:27.160 --> 00:28:33.459 makes that analogy a little complicated is that in the greengrocer case the ideology that he's 363 00:28:34.121 --> 00:28:41.400 being recruited uh into you know holding up is the is the powerful ideology is the one that sort of 364 00:28:41.420 --> 00:28:46.900 controls most of the society that he's in that actually has power and authority over everybody 365 00:28:47.582 --> 00:28:54.460 um and in the case of black lives matter or palace free palestine i think at least in the 366 00:28:54.540 --> 00:29:02.760 minds of the people who are doing this they feel powerless or or if not powerless then um like 367 00:29:02.760 --> 00:29:08.380 they're not in a position to impose what they think or their own ideology onto everybody else 368 00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:14.038 so i'm not sure i buy that i'm not i that may be true in 2026 and it may have been true in 2008 369 00:29:14.740 --> 00:29:21.420 but i don't think it was true in 2014 to 2022 that that people um yeah that people who were 370 00:29:21.460 --> 00:29:28.080 on the side of uh imposing social justice orthodoxies were unaware that they were right 371 00:29:28.100 --> 00:29:39.260 They had tremendous power to exclude people from the public square or have them fired for, you know, writing articles about that had the wrong the wrong hot take on race or gender or whatever it was. 372 00:29:39.360 --> 00:29:40.060 But I take your point. 373 00:29:40.120 --> 00:29:44.060 They didn't have tanks and they didn't have guns and they didn't have secret police and so on. 374 00:29:44.140 --> 00:29:44.478 So, yes. 375 00:29:44.660 --> 00:29:45.621 Yeah, no, I mean, you may be right. 376 00:29:45.641 --> 00:30:09.000 And one of the ways of interpreting that moment was that that that force in society was experiencing power, you know, in a significant way for, you know, the first time or the first time quite like that and and did it in a kind of a pathological form, you know, like, you know, did a version of what we just talked about. 377 00:30:09.602 --> 00:30:14.399 the trump people doing when they came to power which is saying yeah i'm not just going to 378 00:30:15.604 --> 00:30:20.160 promote and defend the things that i care about i also i'm going to use this power to like shut 379 00:30:20.240 --> 00:30:26.100 down the things that i think so in a way there's a lot of mirror it reminds me of an interesting 380 00:30:26.200 --> 00:30:30.960 conversation that you have in the book about about principles and like you know the the difference 381 00:30:31.080 --> 00:30:39.440 between Trump's abuse of power and the cancel culture, social justice abuse of power is that 382 00:30:39.901 --> 00:30:45.300 Trump, I really don't think believes in any, you know, he doesn't believe that there's an 383 00:30:45.440 --> 00:30:53.280 overarching moral good that is derived from his throwing frivolous lawsuits at media companies 384 00:30:53.622 --> 00:30:55.210 and enriching himself through crypto. 385 00:30:55.250 --> 00:30:57.200 Like, I think he just thinks that the world is a jungle 386 00:30:57.381 --> 00:30:58.745 and you do what you can to get ahead. 387 00:30:59.247 --> 00:31:03.160 Whereas obviously people who were imposing speech codes 388 00:31:03.501 --> 00:31:10.060 and trying to get people fired from organizations for, I don't know, airing a Dave Chappelle special 389 00:31:10.221 --> 00:31:13.980 on Netflix or something like that did believe that they were on the side of the marginalized 390 00:31:14.301 --> 00:31:15.808 and they were standing up for principles. 391 00:31:16.291 --> 00:31:18.340 But the one point that you make in the book is that 392 00:31:18.440 --> 00:31:24.960 actually, if you look, for example, at Nazism, people who had very strong principles often 393 00:31:25.080 --> 00:31:29.920 didn't find it that difficult to switch over to nazism because they just had to substitute 394 00:31:30.582 --> 00:31:35.240 the principles that they held dear and then here was a new set of principles that the the people 395 00:31:35.280 --> 00:31:42.360 who were the real dissidents were in a strange way the less principled people who sort of followed 396 00:31:42.440 --> 00:31:49.740 their gut have i got that right yeah yeah that that was that was hanaren's conclusion um i love 397 00:31:49.860 --> 00:31:54.978 the kind of simplicity and the economy with which she sort of boiled this down. 398 00:31:55.098 --> 00:31:55.520 She said, 399 00:31:55.960 --> 00:31:59.740 essentially, as far as she could tell, the dissidents were the people who just 400 00:32:00.021 --> 00:32:02.712 asked themselves a very basic question. 401 00:32:02.753 --> 00:32:04.480 They said, can I live with myself? 402 00:32:05.661 --> 00:32:08.797 So they cut through the, oh, what are my rules for living? 403 00:32:08.877 --> 00:32:09.400 They just said, no, 404 00:32:09.800 --> 00:32:11.024 like, be honest. 405 00:32:11.485 --> 00:32:13.773 Can you live with yourself if you do this thing? 406 00:32:15.097 --> 00:32:16.060 And in that environment, 407 00:32:16.060 --> 00:32:23.680 And in that situation, given what they were being asked to do or what they saw around them, living with themselves meant living with a murderer. 408 00:32:24.861 --> 00:32:46.200 And so the people who were unwilling to live with a murderer, with themselves, took a stand or did the brave, risky thing because they just couldn't bear the thought of continuing to exist with a version of themselves that would do the things that they were being asked to do or to be complicit in the things they were being asked to do. 409 00:32:46.721 --> 00:32:49.504 So that does really shift. 410 00:32:49.564 --> 00:32:53.408 First of all, it puts the emphasis on the thoughtfulness, right? 411 00:32:53.428 -->

00:33:03.140 You need to be in tune with what you actually believe in order to even reach the point where you can take a stamp on something, right? 412 00:33:03.260 --> 00:33:20.620 So you're not just reacting and you're not just reacting or doing a performative thing because you see everybody else around you doing it and you're sort of in a panic to just not be different from other people whose moral side you want to be on or you can believe you're on. 413 00:33:21.180 --> 00:33:29.648 Um, so it, it is, it is a very sort of like, um, a deliberate way of going through, uh, through the world. 414 00:33:29.708 --> 00:33:43.800 You know, they, they, I think that for me, the big takeaway from the whole experience of spending time with the dissidents was just an appreciation for what it means to have a kind of moral agency, uh, which, which we all have. 415 00:33:44.542 --> 00:33:50.700 but i really do think we don't spend a lot of time considering the power that that gives us 416 00:33:50.780 --> 00:33:57.780 like the power to actually make decisions in any given moment um and and not always just do the 417 00:33:57.840 --> 00:34:03.220 thing that everybody else is doing or the thing that we're just sort of uh our community or our 418 00:34:03.320 --> 00:34:09.580 tribe tells us is the right thing i mean this yes one of the chapters in your book is about how about 419 00:34:09.660 --> 00:34:15.580 how being alone is a prerequisite for being a dissident that it's hard to you can't really be 420 00:34:15.600 --> 00:34:21.820 a dissident you can't i mean you can but like it's not it's a almost by definition a lonely pursuit 421 00:34:22.221 --> 00:34:28.740 to stand up for what you believe in against massive forces yeah well look that's that's 422 00:34:28.760 --> 00:34:33.700 actually the first that's the first chapter is be alone and i and a few people who are you know 423 00:34:33.860 --> 00:34:39.460 activists have sort of taken issue with me uh over emphasizing that because they said well that's not 424 00:34:39.540 --> 00:34:39.701 true. 425 00:34:39.721 --> 00:34:42.957 If you really want to make change in society, you have to, you know, find, 426 00:34:43.820 --> 00:34:47.460 you have to build constituencies, you have to create networks, you have to find your allies, 427 00:34:47.660 --> 00:34:53.040 you have to, you know, it's, it is not, it's useless to just beat your head against the wall, 428 00:34:53.240 --> 00:34:54.464 you know, alone in a room. 429 00:34:55.006 --> 00:34:55.889 And, and they're right. 430 00:34:56.772 --> 00:34:58.819 Like, ultimately, that is what you need to do to 431 00:34:59.020 --> 00:35:02.411 really make significant change in a society. 432 00:35:02.932 --> 00:35:05.380 But I think that people sort of overlook this initial 433 00:35:05.701 --> 00:35:06.042 step. 434 00:35:06.082 --> 00:35:11.340 And I, you know, I really, this really came out of the reading dissident memoirs and talking 435 00:35:11.360 --> 00:35:19.540 to dissidents and they invariably describe this sort of initial, um, almost vertiginous moment 436 00:35:19.781 --> 00:35:25.220 that they have when they realize that the way that they feel different, the thing that they want, 437 00:35:25.300 --> 00:35:30.800 the line that they want to draw, um, is going to mean that they are putting themselves in opposition 438 00:35:30.840 --> 00:35:36.620 to their family, their society, their country, you know, it's going to, and they haven't, 439 00:35:36.880 --> 00:35:39.560 you know, they may not have like found their other, their people yet. 440 00:35:41.482 --> 00:35:44.660 But it is an internal process that is painful. 441 00:35:45.020 --> 00:35:47.573 It can be painful, often is. 442 00:35:49.040 --> 00:35:54.140 And so I think that we, we sort of do ourselves a disservice by not acknowledging that side 443 00:35:54.162 --> 00:35:54.334 of it. 444 00:35:54.460 --> 00:35:58.840 You know, people are, and especially in America, you know, the last two years, why aren't people 445 00:35:59.003 --> 00:35:59.659 in the streets? 446 00:35:59.802 --> 00:36:00.640 You know, like, why aren't? 447 00:36:01.022 --> 00:36:03.660 You know, there's so many, I mean, I live in New York City. 448 00:36:03.740 --> 00:36:09.460 There's so many angry people around me when it comes to Trump and what, you know, what has happened in this country. 449 00:36:09.780 --> 00:36:11.159 Why aren't there protests every day? 450 00:36:11.641 --> 00:36:23.680 And I think that we sort of, by neglecting the aloneness involved in sort of taking the first step, we don't really acknowledge how hard it is, you know. 451 00:36:23.961 --> 00:36:33.520 And so it was important for me to pinpoint that because I think that it is the threshold for everything else. 452 00:36:34.200 --> 00:37:00.280 I mean, a protest is a really interesting and complicating, you know, protests, activism, group activity is a really complex thing to understand in the context of the way that you are describing dissidents, because they are, as we've said, by definition, ornery, contrarian, irascible, nonconformist people. 453 00:37:00.440 --> 00:37:12.219 They're the last person you would see in the middle of a march of 50,000 people, you know, all chanting the same thing, even if that is an anti-authoritarian march. 454 00:37:12.680 --> 00:37:42.560 And it does make me, like, of the three kind of modern flashpoints that you talk about as having informed this book being Israel and Gaza and the immigration customs enforcement raids in the United States and artificial intelligence, which we'll get to, the ICE raids, like, you know, I have some good friends in Portland who are super lefties and are conflicted about how much to put themselves in harm's way. 455 00:37:42.620 --> 00:37:49.132 way, you know, during a spate of violent clashes between ICE agents. 456 00:37:49.914 --> 00:37:53.000 And something in my DNA 457 00:37:54.785 --> 00:37:59.940 makes, and

maybe this is just me apologizing for my own cowardice, and this is the narrative I want 458 00:37:59.940 --> 00:38:08.520 to tell myself, just thinks that it is not the most constructive way to oppose power to literally 459 00:38:09.322 --> 00:38:15.800 join a mob of people who are furiously chanting against ICE agents and creating a violent 460 00:38:16.382 --> 00:38:21.860 kerfuffle, that just doesn't strike me as the truly dissident way if you're living in a community 461 00:38:22.101 --> 00:38:25.710 where 99% of people agree that ICE raids are terrible. 462 00:38:26.653 --> 00:38:29.180 Then you're part of perhaps a noble 463 00:38:29.942 --> 00:38:35.360 uprising, but you're essentially an interchangeable widget in a protest movement, 464 00:38:35.581 --> 00:38:38.860 which is not exactly the same thing as being a dissident. 465 00:38:40.220 --> 00:38:47.720 Well, I would just push back slightly because I feel that there were forms of protest against ICE in Minneapolis, 466 00:38:48.020 --> 00:38:54.940 you know, earlier this year that really rhymed with a lot of what I'm writing about in this book, 467 00:38:55.000 --> 00:38:56.769 which is they were not performative. 468 00:38:57.311 --> 00:38:58.960 They were not signaling. 469 00:38:59.341 --> 00:39:04.280 They were actually, you know, people coming together because they felt that they saw something, 470 00:39:04.340 --> 00:39:10.240 They experienced something in their community that felt to them deeply, from a humanistic point, just wrong. 471 00:39:10.521 --> 00:39:11.280 Things that were happening. 472 00:39:11.440 --> 00:39:15.940 I have a colleague at The Atlantic who coined a phrase, neighborism. 473 00:39:16.620 --> 00:39:22.180 You know, this was not a political reaction necessarily. 474 00:39:22.320 --> 00:39:25.460 I'm sure they all have views about immigration and views about Trump. 475 00:39:25.921 --> 00:39:36.140 But I really believe, and if you listen to interviews of people who got involved with this sort of activity, it was not motivated so much by I'm a Democrat or I'm a liberal. 476 00:39:36.760 --> 00:39:48.640 It was I see people who live in my community who are being harassed, who are afraid to leave their house, children who are afraid to go to school, people who can't leave their house to get groceries. 477 00:39:49.361 --> 00:40:00.960 And then on the other side, I see this extremely aggressive, masked force, armed, wandering through my community, intimidating people in a way that I have never experienced before. 478 00:40:01.080 --> 00:40:05.520 Like, I think that that was the kind of visceral reaction that people had. 479 00:40:05.840 --> 00:40:19.515 And the thing they did to combat that, you know, that I felt was productive was to say, let's set up networks where we observe what's going on, WhatsApp groups where we put people at different corners and alert people to ICE coming. 480 00:40:19.555 --> 00:40:23.780 Let's create, you know, meal trains to bring food to people in their houses. 481 00:40:23.940 --> 00:40:35.970 I remember listening to an interview with an elderly couple who were completely not politically involved, not the usual suspects for something like this, but they had, there was a child, it was their neighbor who was an immigrant who was afraid to go to school. 482 00:40:36.030 --> 00:40:37.792 So they walked her to school every day. 483 00:40:38.052 --> 00:40:43.717 You know, these were the sorts of activities where those people are taking risks, right? 484 00:40:43.737 --> 00:40:47.180 I mean, two people were killed doing some version of what I just described. 485 00:40:47.841 --> 00:40:56.638 um but they felt that this was a kind of the humane thing to do in that situation and to me 486 00:40:57.440 --> 00:41:02.960 that's that is the that is the kind of dissidence that i'm really trying to spotlight yeah well you 487 00:41:03.000 --> 00:41:08.020 mentioned hovel and and one of the concepts from hovel that i that i really that really resonated 488 00:41:08.221 --> 00:41:12.220 with me that i used in this book is he was trying to understand what makes a dissident a dissident 489 00:41:12.360 --> 00:41:14.384 And he probably has his definition. 490 00:41:14.404 --> 00:41:22.060 My definition is the closest to his, which is he talked about a realm of code that he called the pre-political. 491 00:41:23.141 --> 00:41:36.680 And for him, the pre-political was just everything that is part of the human condition that we take to be just sort of like what you would expect in order to live like a dignified, autonomous human life. 492 00:41:36.961 --> 00:41:41.460 to wear your hair the way that we want to, to gather with whoever, you know, whoever you want 493 00:41:41.520 --> 00:41:48.900 to, to be able to, you know, practice whatever religion, to be free of violence being inflicted 494 00:41:48.980 --> 00:41:51.550 upon you, to be able to pursue your economic interests. 495 00:41:52.293 --> 00:41:54.140 It's a fairly large bucket of things, 496 00:41:54.280 --> 00:41:55.346 these pre-political things. 497 00:41:55.386 --> 00:41:57.880 I think if we really think about it, and there are a lot of things 498 00:41:57.940 --> 00:42:03.620 that probably more that we agree upon more, you know, in America than we often imagine that we do 499 00:42:03.700 --> 00:42:06.960 because we're so tribalized and politicized at the moment. 500 00:42:07.740 --> 00:42:11.940 And I really believe that what people were responding to in Minneapolis 501 00:42:12.021 --> 00:42:15.120 in that moment was something very true political. 502 00:42:15.160 --> 00:42:15.317 Yeah. 503 00:42:16.001 --> 00:42:19.620 I think it was, and you could hear it in the comments, 504 00:42:20.420 --> 00:42:23.620 people would say, this isn't how you treat people. 505 00:42:25.144 --> 00:42:26.819 To me, when I hear somebody say that, 506 00:42:27.742 --> 00:42:31.820 as opposed to saying something that references Trump 507

00:42:32.281 --> 00:42:39.120 or, you know, pro or, or, or con Trump, you know, um, but just focuses on the individual 508 00:42:39.882 --> 00:42:42.993 and the kind of humanistic value that you feel is being violated. 509 00:42:43.575 --> 00:42:45.160 Um, that's the pre, 510 00:42:45.661 --> 00:42:50.620 that's the pre-political, you know, and I think that is, it is sort of an incredible thing when 511 00:42:50.680 --> 00:42:52.828 people stand up for, for that. 512 00:42:53.169 --> 00:42:53.430 Yeah. 513 00:42:53.450 --> 00:42:53.912 I like that. 514 00:42:54.013 --> 00:42:54.494 I like that. 515 00:42:54.836 --> 00:42:55.839 I like that distinction. 516 00:42:55.859 --> 00:42:56.020 I mean, 517 00:42:56.020 --> 00:43:00.800 And there's, I mean, by definition, the pre-political is also sort of pre-tribal. 518 00:43:01.982 --> 00:43:06.660 And I like the idea of neighborliness as being the sort of the lodestar. 519 00:43:06.960 --> 00:43:23.020 And I didn't mean to imply that people who are involved in big, you know, protest marches against ICE raids are being disingenuous or virtue signaling, just that they don't satisfy the condition of aloneness that seems to be part of the true dissident. 520 00:43:23.520 --> 00:43:45.280 Whereas you're pointing to examples, for example, if you're chaperoning someone's children to school, that strikes me as an act that is both lonely and neighborly and pre-political, which sort of ticks all of the checkboxes for being a true dissident in a way, especially if it has potential hazards. 521 00:43:45.400 --> 00:44:13.720 So I guess there's a scale of dissent, you know, with those small acts of defiance at the sort of most noble end, at least in my reckoning, and then joining a large protest group that is there to enact a political orthodoxy against the ruling government being probably the least noteworthy way of expending your efforts at dissent. 522 00:44:14.410 --> 00:44:14.680 Right. 523 00:44:16.281 --> 00:44:18.882 Yeah, no, I think there's something to that. 524 00:44:19.023 --> 00:44:45.060 I would say that, you know, the other thing that I think, the other dynamic that was taking place in Minneapolis and in other places where this resistance to ISIS happened is those activities were sort of community activities, you know, where people were connecting, coordinating, and not necessarily doing big, loud, performative protests where you just want to like show up to be seen and know that you're part of it. 525 00:44:45.661 --> 00:44:56.813 But the impulse was something similar to that, which is that you want to express, you're looking for a new kind of home, right? 526 00:44:56.833 --> 00:45:01.898 Like you're looking for other people who share your values, who are going to defend those same values. 527 00:45:02.159 --> 00:45:03.300 And I think that that's important. 528 00:45:04.981 --> 00:45:26.240 But it's also, I mean, one of the distinctions I would make is that, and I think this is a good sort of evolution in protest in America, at least for a long time, there was a kind of a one and done idea, you know, let's do like the, you know, the pussy hat protest was that to the woman's march, you know, like, let's do like, get as many people as possible to Washington, DC on one day. 529 00:45:26.640 --> 00:45:27.241 Right. 530 00:45:27.961 --> 00:45:31.744 And or even Black Lives Matter had this sort of element to it. 531 00:45:31.804 --> 00:45:39.971 You know, it's like I think there is a kind of a almost like a social media metabolism of like, you know, let's get the metrics so they're as high as possible. 532 00:45:40.431 --> 00:45:47.437 You know, as many that the hashtag can go viral, like as much attention in a given moment. 533 00:45:48.678 --> 00:45:51.180 And I think that is counterproductive. 534 00:45:51.202 --> 00:45:51.460 Right. 535 00:45:52.120 --> 00:46:16.300 I think that what's much, what makes a lot more sense, and this is actually my previous book was called The Quiet Before, and it was very much about this idea is that, you know, that you need to slowly build and quietly build and sometimes more private, more secluded spaces where people can speak more freely and share ideas and develop their radicalism, you know, and not just like, you know, scream it out to the world. 536 00:46:17.985 --> 00:46:21.415 and also learn how to get the attention of people 537 00:46:23.160 --> 00:46:25.712 who might not agree with them, how to convince them. 538 00:46:27.681 --> 00:46:30.780 All of that process is a much more deliberative thing 539 00:46:30.821 --> 00:46:31.680 that takes time. 540 00:46:31.760 --> 00:46:37.160 And even just building up a sense of your own courageousness 541 00:46:37.260 --> 00:46:41.439 to do risky things can sometimes happen over the course of 542 00:46:42.124 --> 00:46:44.420 not just coming out to one protest where everybody's there 543 00:46:44.440 --> 00:46:46.560 and going home, but like, you know, 544 00:46:46.741 --> 00:46:48.500 I have in my community where I live here, 545 00:46:48.560 --> 00:46:50.660 there's like this elderly couple 546 00:46:50.741 --> 00:46:53.060 who like every week stands by themselves 547 00:46:53.402 --> 00:46:56.580 like on a street corner holding their Trump sign, you know? 548 00:46:57.561 --> 00:47:00.980 And you think like, you know, 549 00:47:02.205 --> 00:47:03.680 other people are seeing this, you know, 550 00:47:03.700 --> 00:47:05.480 and maybe they'll start to want to join the, 551 00:47:05.560 --> 00:47:07.440 it's like, it doesn't just feel performative to me. 552 00:47:07.480 --> 00:47:10.179 It feels like something that they've consistently committed to 553 00:47:10.703 --> 00:47:13.180 and that like they're making it clear 554 00:47:13.321 --> 00:47:15.740 that they're not just like, you know, 555 00:47:16.702 --> 00:47:18.620 turning away or lying down, you know? 556 00:47:18.860 --> 00:47:19.720 Yes, yes. 557 00:47:19.780 --> 00:47:22.240 I mean, you're

reminding me of the intellectual stash 558 00:47:22.463 --> 00:47:23.720 that you write about between, 559 00:47:23.880 --> 00:47:26.260 to go back to Vaclav Havel and, you know, 560 00:47:26.946 --> 00:47:28.300 Soviet Czechoslovakia. 561 00:47:29.120 --> 00:47:29.337 Kundera. 562 00:47:29.980 --> 00:47:32.900 Yeah, the stash between him and Milan Kundera, 563 00:47:33.100 --> 00:47:35.680 the novelist and dissident of some people. 564 00:47:36.541 --> 00:47:37.560 Well, if they haven't read 565 00:47:37.620 --> 00:47:39.640 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, they should. 566 00:47:39.860 --> 00:47:42.360 And Kundera was dismissive of what you're talking about, 567 00:47:42.460 --> 00:47:48.440 this kind of moral exhibitionism um but you seem to fall on the other side of that equation in the 568 00:47:48.440 --> 00:47:52.740 book don't you well i mean they're you know they they had this sort of debate about like what do 569 00:47:52.760 --> 00:47:57.660 you sign a petition you know like you know and they and this sort of did you like if you're in 570 00:47:57.740 --> 00:48:02.638 czechoslovakia and it might draw attention to you and you might get you know suppressed for it do 571 00:48:03.060 --> 00:48:08.780 you sign a petition in defense of like political prisoners who are in jail right um and they played 572 00:48:08.861 --> 00:48:10.779 this debate out through their art. 573 00:48:11.120 --> 00:48:12.478 You know, there was like scenes in 574 00:48:13.287 --> 00:48:14.520 The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 575 00:48:14.680 --> 00:48:16.699 there's plays that Havel wrote where they sort of 576 00:48:16.841 --> 00:48:17.859 like reenacted 577 00:48:18.705 --> 00:48:20.760 this moment of decision making. 578 00:48:22.300 --> 00:48:22.380 And 579 00:48:22.400 --> 00:48:23.307 Kundera 580 00:48:25.002 --> 00:48:26.580 was like, I need to preserve my 581 00:48:26.660 --> 00:48:28.820 ability to be an artist, 582 00:48:28.960 --> 00:48:29.588 to be a critic. 583 00:48:29.750 --> 00:48:30.560 I mean, for him that meant 584 00:48:30.742 --> 00:48:31.188 exile. 585 00:48:31.249 --> 00:48:32.140 It meant actually leaving. 586 00:48:32.443 --> 00:48:34.080 You know, but from that 587 00:48:34.201 --> 00:48:35.680 place of not taking 588 00:48:36.305 --> 00:48:38.280 that great, huge risk, 589 00:48:38.820 --> 00:48:46.060 I'm able to kind of, you know, describe the machine, this totalitarian machine and what it does to people. 590 00:48:46.180 --> 00:48:47.440 Like that was important for him. 591 00:48:47.920 --> 00:48:53.760 And Havel said, no, like you need to actually throw your whole self into it and sign the petition. 592 00:48:55.581 --> 00:49:01.140 Because he said, I've been on the other side of that, meaning I've been in jail with the political prisoners. 593 00:49:01.720 --> 00:49:04.720 And I'm telling you, you know, he's saying it makes a difference. 594 00:49:05.182 --> 00:49:09.460 like it makes a difference that the government understands

that not everybody's just going along 595 00:49:09.500 --> 00:49:16.360 with this um and and and he and he could see over the course of you know 20 years so you have to 596 00:49:16.400 --> 00:49:22.640 kind of look at it from a long duration that the conditions of those like you whereas you know in 597 00:49:22.640 --> 00:49:26.560 the 60s they could lock up political prisoners and not have to explain themselves to anybody 598 00:49:27.383 --> 00:49:32.680 um and they could just they would just sit there you know by the late 70s that wasn't the case 599 00:49:33.643 --> 00:49:39.200 and that was because of this sort of consistent applied pressure and the awareness that there was 600 00:49:39.461 --> 00:49:43.640 that there were people watching there were people paying attention willing to take the risk 601 00:49:44.442 --> 00:49:50.640 signing a petition so that the rest of the world could see so that other czech citizens could see 602 00:49:50.700 --> 00:49:58.680 that there was something going on so i i guess i do i do i i'm sympathetic to to kundera um and 603 00:49:58.881 --> 00:50:06.160 honestly i don't know if i had to like be one of them i probably would be more kundera than 604 00:50:07.605 --> 00:50:12.400 that's just because you want to get out of dodge and write your books uh yeah i've been reminded 605 00:50:12.561 --> 00:50:18.160 of this argument during the trump years where where like the it was it reminded me of a play 606 00:50:18.401 --> 00:50:23.460 do you know rock and roll the play i think it's a tom stoppard play yeah yeah yeah the 607 00:50:23.741 --> 00:50:31.420 is it no is it no it's um it's yeah tom stopper yeah yeah and he's and it's about this era in 608 00:50:31.941 --> 00:50:37.900 in czechoslovakia and and deals with i mean i saw it years ago but my mangled memory of it is that 609 00:50:38.000 --> 00:50:44.640 the father is all about like you know um more in line with traditional protest and the young 610 00:50:45.001 --> 00:50:52.020 son says that he doesn't understand that the truly uh subversive thing to do is to withdraw 611 00:50:52.120 --> 00:50:56.620 yourself from politics altogether and do stuff that the authoritarians don't know how to deal 612 00:50:56.700 --> 00:51:02.780 with like do rock and roll for example and i have been thinking about this during the trump years 613 00:51:02.840 --> 00:51:12.500 where like trump knows exactly what to do with a person who um defies him like that has a context 614 00:51:12.640 --> 00:51:17.340 for trump i'm not suggesting that trump is as bad as a communist authoritarian but but he will 615 00:51:18.122 --> 00:51:24.200 he understands the chess moves he understands the the wrestling moves to deal with people who 616 00:51:24.280 --> 00:51:31.440 stand in his way he doesn't really know what to do when like bill maher makes fun of the way that 617 00:51:31.500 --> 00:51:37.020 he dances by suggesting it looks like he's blowing two men uh two men's penises in his face it's like 618 00:51:37.040 --> 00:51:43.560 you know this that is that is off piste and i sometimes wonder whether the right and you talk 619 00:51:43.620 --> 00:51:49.479 about humor in this in in the book as well about oh yeah yeah you know whether really humor and art 620 00:51:50.141 --> 00:51:57.820 is sort of the the the last vestige of our ability to express our own autonomy in the face of 621 00:51:58.641 --> 00:52:06.779 rather than comply with the conventional mode of dissent yeah oh i i mean i agree 100 the only 622 00:52:07.400 --> 00:52:13.060 thing i would disagree with is that that trump isn't you know sort of aware and triggered to 623 00:52:13.100 --> 00:52:18.860 use our you know american word um oh he's triggered he just doesn't know how to he just 624 00:52:18.880 --> 00:52:23.040 doesn't know how to push back on it i mean he doesn't know you know he'll yeah but he's pushing 625 00:52:23.161 --> 00:52:27.300 back you know we had this whole situation with a late night caught with jimmy kimmel you know 626 00:52:28.022 --> 00:52:33.800 um who isn't even really that you know provocative comic at all he just didn't like the idea that he 627 00:52:33.840 --> 00:52:40.600 was making fun of him um and and so you know these are the people who do threaten him so i think just 628 00:52:40.660 --> 00:52:47.240 by virtue of the fact that we see how how threatened he is just let me push back on that 629 00:52:47.300 --> 00:52:52.960 gal because as someone who started out in sort of political satire myself i i actually don't think 630 00:52:53.040 --> 00:53:00.140 that kimmel and colbert were doing rock and roll i think they were doing conventional yeah political 631 00:53:00.541 --> 00:53:08.340 partisanship and i think trump could easily code kimmel and colbert's overt um anti-trumpism 632 00:53:09.043 --> 00:53:12.540 as belonging to the same category as a political opponent. 633 00:53:13.382 --> 00:53:15.140 What's weirder is South Park. 634 00:53:15.401 --> 00:53:16.800 What's weirder is Bill Maher. 635 00:53:16.940 --> 00:53:18.780 What's weirder are people who you don't know exactly 636 00:53:18.881 --> 00:53:20.740 where they're going to zig or zag, right? 637 00:53:20.941 --> 00:53:23.960 So I'm not sure I would put too much weight on the Kimmel affair. 638 00:53:24.500 --> 00:53:27.920 No, no, I think I agree with you on that. 639 00:53:29.163 --> 00:53:33.395 And I do think that humor is this refuge for actually doing 640 00:53:35.281 --> 00:53:36.620 the kinds of things you're talking about, 641 00:53:36.700 --> 00:53:42.020 which is that what humor does you know consistently i mean first of all it's very 642 00:53:42.261 --> 00:53:47.340 soothing to the person who's being you know if you're living in a in a society where you're being 643 00:53:47.922 --> 00:53:53.720 to be able to laugh about your situation you feel seen right but the other thing i would say is that 644 00:53:54.121 --> 00:54:01.380 what humor does that's

so you know powerful and i use that you know word particularly is that it 645 00:54:01.601 --> 00:54:08.020 it sort of inverts the world you know it's sort of it is this opportunity to say the things that 646 00:54:08.040 --> 00:54:14.180 we take for granted the things that we think are just like natural in our reality let's play with 647 00:54:14.200 --> 00:54:20.560 them let's throw them up in the air let's laugh at them let's let's totally um make them seem 648 00:54:20.660 --> 00:54:25.520 absurd these things that are you know that we don't even notice most of the time and if you 649 00:54:25.701 --> 00:54:30.100 if you like really good observational comics this is what they do right they they sort of they'll 650 00:54:30.160 --> 00:54:35.160 be like, you know, they'll pick something completely, you know, banal or random, you know, 651 00:54:36.022 --> 00:54:41.560 in somebody's daily life, human relations, and really pick it apart and sort of force you to 652 00:54:42.081 --> 00:54:45.091 force you to, to like, look at it from a distance, right. 653 00:54:46.275 --> 00:54:48.000 And when you think about applying that, 654 00:54:48.261 --> 00:54:54.520 that approach to authoritarianism, like authoritarianism works, when the authoritarian 655 00:54:54.761 --> 00:55:01.060 is able to make the population feel that their power is natural, that their power is somehow, 656 00:55:02.102 --> 00:55:05.140 you know, the only thing that could be and the only thing that will be. 657 00:55:05.861 --> 00:55:09.835 So comedy has an incredible opportunity to puncture that. 658 00:55:09.855 --> 00:55:11.260 You know, it was interesting when I, 659 00:55:12.202 --> 00:55:18.220 when I was doing research on this question, I found this fabulous, you know, thing where in the, 660 00:55:18.360 --> 00:55:23.540 in the, before the French revolution, in the, you know, 20 years before the French revolution, 661 00:55:23.921 --> 00:55:30.240 there were these like pornographic jokes about the king that were circulating in the cafes of 662 00:55:30.882 --> 00:55:37.119 paris and we know this because like if you go into the police files of the late you know 18th 663 00:55:37.360 --> 00:55:42.860 century in paris there are police officers who are like you know trying to track down 664 00:55:43.622 --> 00:55:48.800 how these jokes are circulating you know it's like jean-jacques said you know this thing about 665 00:55:48.900 --> 00:55:55.180 the king you know in this you know um and it's there's a there's a um a wonderful historian 666 00:55:55.180 --> 00:55:59.060 named robert darnton at harvard who this is this is what he does like he's trying to understand 667 00:55:59.160 --> 00:56:05.040 the mentality that led to uh the rupture that was the french revolution and he's located it in part 668 00:56:05.782 --> 00:56:13.960 in these jokes because it was so threatening um to have this being who this authoritative being 669 00:56:13.960 --> 00:56:20.660 who's supposed to be like divine in that instance like actually divine be described and talked about 670 00:56:20.881 --> 00:56:26.940 in these you know kind of like debased human ways it was like the south park yeah of their time yeah 671 00:56:27.241 --> 00:56:35.400 um and and king louis was no no more of a fan than trump is no and and once you once you because 672 00:56:35.500 --> 00:56:39.740 once you do that you get that much closer to being able to once you see the king is human 673 00:56:39.760 --> 00:56:45.240 you're that much closer to being able to like cut off his head right if he's a god yeah that's a lot 674 00:56:45.360 --> 00:56:54.060 harder to even conceive of um so i i i put a lot of stock in humor um and also even in in situations 675 00:56:54.461 --> 00:56:59.700 that are you know quite dire you know i was reading like alexei navalny's diaries for this 676 00:56:59.800 --> 00:57:05.060 book you know and here's a guy he's like sitting in siberia he knows in the best case he's going 677 00:57:05.080 --> 00:57:09.700 to be in prison for you know until putin as long as putin is in power but most likely he's going 678 00:57:09.720 --> 00:57:16.680 to be killed and he's cracking jokes all the time you know um again partly to soothe himself he's 679 00:57:16.740 --> 00:57:20.020 he's going on a hunger strike this is what i always remember he's going on a hunger strike 680 00:57:21.024 --> 00:57:25.020 uh and like you know a few days in the hunger strike he says and i still don't have a six-pack 681 00:57:25.802 --> 00:57:33.740 you know like he's about his own body you know so yeah it's not only the ability of the of the 682 00:57:33.980 --> 00:57:41.880 humor to take down you know the the ruling class by a notch or increase the likelihood that the 683 00:57:41.960 --> 00:57:48.420 king is going to get beheaded um which i think is an unfairly high bar for people to expect 684 00:57:48.661 --> 00:57:55.640 political satire to achieve most of the time but it's also the sense of solidarity and and um 685 00:57:57.305 --> 00:58:02.240 uh as you said earlier like the observational comic is very good at making you notice the 686 00:58:02.280 --> 00:58:09.220 thing that you hadn't noticed and also at airing and giving voice to the frustration or the pickle 687 00:58:09.340 --> 00:58:13.714 that you feel like you found yourself in this there's almost a curb your enthusiasm style uh 688 00:58:16.463 --> 00:58:21.240 effect to political satire i mean i was reminded i was thinking back through some of the most 689 00:58:22.222 --> 00:58:29.540 fulfilling acts of satire that i've seen in recent years and the one that leapt to mind was 690 00:58:30.021 --> 00:58:38.760 Jon Stewart on the night of the Biden-Trump debate when Biden had the horrendous debate performance. 691 00:58:39.620 --> 00:58:45.920 And Jon Stewart went to air live right after the debate with just the most, like it was, 692 00:58:46.060 --> 00:58:47.624 it felt like being seen. 693 00:58:48.286

--> 00:58:53.060 Like he ended the show, if I remember correctly, by showing a clip of the 694 00:58:53.160 --> 00:58:57.012 two of Trump and Biden both blabbing at each other. 695 00:58:57.093 --> 00:58:59.460 And it just cuts back to Jon and he just 696 00:58:59.560 --> 00:59:07.800 grabs his hair and screams fuck and that's the end of the show and like i was like yes that's what i 697 00:59:07.860 --> 00:59:16.820 need to hear i need to hear fuck holy fuck we're fucked right like and yeah totally like it doesn't 698 00:59:16.880 --> 00:59:22.560 that's all that's all you basically need to feel like you're not going crazy if you live in a crazy 699 00:59:22.660 --> 00:59:29.200 regime which that was at the time yes no and he i think john stewart in particular was always 700 00:59:29.360 --> 00:59:37.140 is always so good at just with his face just in his reaction you know like a photo and then like 701 00:59:38.162 --> 00:59:46.420 in a way that does feel like channeling all the feelings you know totally um the final 702 00:59:47.042 --> 00:59:52.520 sort of beat that we should address here before we move on is uh is out of before i let you go 703 00:59:52.640 --> 00:59:58.260 is artificial intelligence where um you write about how there's this kind of gradual incursion 704 00:59:58.320 --> 01:00:04.560 into our lives of, you know, we're not making choices actively about our addiction to devices, 705 01:00:04.760 --> 01:00:09.860 to algorithms, and now increasingly to artificial intelligence, but we're finding ourselves in a 706 01:00:09.920 --> 01:00:15.740 position in which you would essentially have to be a proactive dissident in order to avoid it. 707 01:00:17.462 --> 01:00:22.080 That sort of made me feel rather bleak, but can you unpack it? 708 01:00:22.920 --> 01:00:27.799 No, I mean, I think that it does feel, when I was writing this and thinking mostly about 709 01:00:28.601 --> 01:00:34.980 political dissidents uh i also was very aware of these other forces that felt equally 710 01:00:35.742 --> 01:00:42.700 dehumanizing and by dehumanizing i mean that they feel like they are robbing us day by day 711 01:00:42.880 --> 01:00:48.560 slowly of things that feel of that same sort of that same pre-political basket of things 712 01:00:49.021 --> 01:00:56.120 that feel very important to to hold to be aware of and to hold on to um and you know for me it even 713 01:00:56.481 --> 01:01:01.399 comes down to the kind of productive friction of thinking. 714 01:01:02.400 --> 01:01:03.596 You know, I think that there's something 715 01:01:04.001 --> 01:01:06.400 that we're slowly losing. 716 01:01:07.962 --> 01:01:09.533 And I wanted to say, you know, 717 01:01:10.901 --> 01:01:12.640 by drawing this parallel, 718 01:01:13.240 --> 01:01:16.480 that there are lessons that we can even learn 719 01:01:16.601 --> 01:01:19.580 from these dissidents who fought authoritarian leaders 720 01:01:20.609 --> 01:01:21.780 in thinking through, like, 721 01:01:21.941 --> 01:01:24.140 how much of this do we want to accept in our own lives? 722 01:01:26.126 --> 01:01:30.220 the friction is it is an interesting one it's what's something that i'm only just noticing 723 01:01:30.601 --> 01:01:37.560 the if you're at the end of a long day and i have attention you know adhd kind of uh you know 724 01:01:37.620 --> 01:01:44.360 symptoms anyway so it very it's very difficult for i'm i i consciously experience the physiological 725 01:01:44.921 --> 01:01:52.220 effort of ramping up the ram in my brain to try to think hang on where did i leave that thing or 726 01:01:52.260 --> 01:01:58.240 something or you know do i if i'm a task switching between one thing to a new conversation or 727 01:01:58.260 --> 01:02:07.060 something i can feel the inertia and the uh the kind of need for a an energy accelerator in order 728 01:02:07.140 --> 01:02:12.520 to get my brain into the next gear and now increasingly i can outsource that to my to ai 729 01:02:12.801 --> 01:02:19.080 i can just go like you know how do i what temperature do i cook the roast at for how long 730 01:02:20.183 --> 01:02:27.240 it's actually going to require a physical i can feel the energy that i'm required to tap into my 731 01:02:27.300 --> 01:02:32.320 memory bank and in the it's just easier to just tap it into claude and have it in three seconds 732 01:02:33.284 --> 01:02:37.400 and you're right that this is a vast psychological experiment that we don't know we don't know what 733 01:02:37.440 --> 01:02:41.860 the consequences are of spending 20 years doing that instead of mustering the energy to think 734 01:02:42.382 --> 01:02:46.040 and yeah and i think what's tricky about it is that you know what you're describing 735 01:02:46.602 --> 01:02:52.740 that particular use of it seems pretty like banal and inoffensive to me you know like great so we 736 01:02:52.820 --> 01:02:56.700 have a way to figure out how to cook you know what temperature we could cook the pot roast on you know 737 01:02:56.720 --> 01:03:02.320 like but it's the way and we've seen this with our phones right that you know there's so many ways 738 01:03:02.360 --> 01:03:07.680 that they're useful to us the directions communication you know like there's there's 739 01:03:08.001 --> 01:03:14.580 there's ways that they make our life more efficient but that efficiency begins to leak 740 01:03:14.841 --> 01:03:21.200 into so many other areas of our life that i think we do actually want to preserve because they 741 01:03:21.280 --> 01:03:27.039 preserve something deeply human you know like when i i'm a writer right and so like yes would it be 742 01:03:27.401 --> 01:03:33.040 like a lot easier for me in certain circumstances to just like plug something yeah you know plug 743 01:03:33.100 --> 01:03:38.079 something into ai and have it help me figure out like a writing problem like the writing writing 744 01:03:38.360 --> 01:03:43.000 for me is often like it's the thinking that's

the hard part it's like it is my way of working 745 01:03:43.180 --> 01:03:47.712 through it or trying to figure out what I think about something, you know? 746 01:03:49.055 --> 01:03:50.799 And could I have AI 747 01:03:51.421 --> 01:03:52.223 do that for me? 748 01:03:52.564 --> 01:03:58.140 In many instances, probably, but it would really take away from, and it would make 749 01:03:58.240 --> 01:04:02.960 my life, it would save me time, you know, it would allow me to move much faster through my work. 750 01:04:04.301 --> 01:04:12.600 But I'm not willing to let go of that, you know, what I call productive friction of that 751 01:04:13.102 --> 01:04:18.300 that that process of sort of beating my head against an idea until i can kind of figure out 752 01:04:18.360 --> 01:04:24.900 the best way to clarify and to say it with my own limited capability as just a human yeah i mean i 753 01:04:25.060 --> 01:04:30.040 feel exactly the same thing when i'm trying to wrestle with uh an article i mean i write a 754 01:04:30.100 --> 01:04:36.400 newspaper column and you know i will occasionally use ai to different differing degrees purely as 755 01:04:36.480 --> 01:04:39.771 an experiment about where it's at and how good it is yet. 756 01:04:40.092 --> 01:04:42.760 And the challenge is, as you say, 757 01:04:43.260 --> 01:04:46.993 non-writers often think that writing is about being good with words. 758 01:04:48.117 --> 01:04:48.860 And that's what young 759 01:04:48.940 --> 01:04:53.559 writers think as well, which is why their prose is always so purple and florid and contains lots of 760 01:04:54.081 --> 01:04:57.071 words that you need a thesaurus to figure out what they mean. 761 01:04:57.653 --> 01:04:59.779 But good writing is about ideas. 762 01:04:59.799 --> 01:04:59.960 I mean, 763 01:05:00.020 --> 01:05:06.820 writing is just about clear ideas and it's very hard i have used i've found ai to be pretty good 764 01:05:06.960 --> 01:05:14.140 now if i have an overly complicated messy idea for a column that has too many bits in it 765 01:05:15.083 --> 01:05:20.800 and i talked to claude about it for a while then claude's pretty good at going you know what these 766 01:05:20.900 --> 01:05:25.840 bits are a different column why don't you focus on this and why don't you move a bit that's you 767 01:05:25.840 --> 01:05:30.500 know near the end up to the top and use that as the hook and then i'm like okay actually that's 768 01:05:30.560 --> 01:05:34.940 actually good yeah the only challenge is if it does anything more than that then when it comes 769 01:05:34.980 --> 01:05:39.380 to time to actually write the sentence or the paragraph because i haven't done all the hard 770 01:05:39.520 --> 01:05:45.080 work of figuring out why that point is being made there in the first place i'm not as good at 771 01:05:45.200 --> 01:05:51.180 stringing the words together and landing the point because you sort of have to have yeah you're like 772 01:05:51.180 --> 01:05:54.737 you have to have run the marathon in order to be a good runner. 773 01:05:55.680 --> 01:05:56.959 Like, you can't do the shortcut. 774 01:05:57.943 --> 01:05:59.620 I think that's really true, you know? 775 01:06:00.122 --> 01:06:03.320 And I, look, I have like two teenage daughters 776 01:06:03.582 --> 01:06:06.400 and I worry about this kind of thing all the time 777 01:06:06.480 --> 01:06:12.260 because there's a lot of joy and fulfillment 778 01:06:12.744 --> 01:06:14.359 that has come in my own life 779 01:06:14.964 --> 01:06:17.160 from working through those hard things 780 01:06:17.281 --> 01:06:19.960 to get to something that feels like I achieved it 781 01:06:20.000 --> 01:06:27.380 It's my own thought that I'm able to express myself in a way that gets across what I'm trying to say. 782 01:06:28.581 --> 01:06:44.858 And I want them to have that experience because I do feel, I mean, it is a fundamentally different sort of human experience to not do that, to not have that friction in your life. 783 01:06:46.960 --> 01:06:53.407 Um, and, and I don't know, maybe they'll, maybe they will just be different humans, you know, like 200 years from now. 784 01:06:53.747 --> 01:07:05.620 Um, and, you know, I've heard the sort of optimistic idea that this will free up our, you know, our storage space to think about other things and do other things. 785 01:07:06.101 --> 01:07:11.700 um but i don't know that if you if you take out the work part of it if you take out the effort 786 01:07:12.783 --> 01:07:18.940 um if you're not robbing yourself of the thing the most valuable thing i mean my hope gal would 787 01:07:19.020 --> 01:07:27.440 be that the effort and work just escalates to a higher tier of uh of project management while the 788 01:07:27.540 --> 01:07:33.880 ai like i think we're entering a period in which we're realizing that the social media experiment 789 01:07:34.041 --> 01:07:36.740 or the algorithmic media experiment was a disaster. 790 01:07:37.140 --> 01:07:41.240 And so probably the next 10 or 20 years in terms of algorithms 791 01:07:41.260 --> 01:07:45.180 are going to look like us as a civilization and a culture 792 01:07:45.280 --> 01:07:50.020 trying to figure out how to undo what the past 15 to 20 years have done. 793 01:07:50.860 --> 01:07:54.118 And I hope that that will be a lesson somewhat for AI, 794 01:07:54.840 --> 01:07:59.560 that we will also in 30 years have a way of using it 795 01:07:59.600 --> 01:08:05.420 that is not just me punching in what the roast should be cooked at, 796 01:08:05.581 --> 01:08:10.480 but is me managing projects that AI agents can do, 797 01:08:11.562 --> 01:08:15.720 but me still bearing the hard mental work of figuring out 798 01:08:15.760 --> 01:08:19.200 what those projects look like and what I want to bring into the world. 799 01:08:19.280 --> 01:08:22.900 That would be my cautiously optimistic take. 800 01:08:24.060 --> 01:08:27.260 No, I think that there is something to

that. 801 01:08:27.400 --> 01:08:28.440 I still worry a bit. 802 01:08:28.982 --> 01:08:33.780 if we just look at our own trajectories and our careers and how some of the things that you had 803 01:08:33.840 --> 01:08:42.480 to do early in your career that felt sort of grunt work and brainless to some extent was teaching you 804 01:08:43.624 --> 01:08:46.980 you know and allow you to build the confidence to do the higher level 805 01:08:48.203 --> 01:08:54.720 decision making and skills you know so like i don't know means to have like a shortcut to that 806 01:08:55.421 --> 01:08:55.682 Right. 807 01:08:55.843 --> 01:08:56.103 Yes. 808 01:08:56.163 --> 01:09:02.880 How do you manage a bunch of complicated projects that AI agents are doing if you've never been, if you haven't actually run the marathon? 809 01:09:03.360 --> 01:09:09.865 Yeah, it's easy for me to say now, like, I can outsource some of that stuff, you know, because I've already done it. 810 01:09:09.925 --> 01:09:12.987 And it's, it's been formative for me to have to do it myself. 811 01:09:14.388 --> 01:09:32.100 But that's why I think again, on my kids, and like, what does it mean for them never to never go through, you know, having to do that, you know, like, do they actually have a kind of a brain development that gives them or a maturity that gives them an ability to? 812 01:09:32.460 --> 01:09:53.980 So I don't know, but I think, you know, the thing that I wanted to express in this book, even about AI and about all these other topics is just like, is that the desire for thoughtfulness, for liberation, for just not letting things pass us by without feeling like we have any control over them. 813 01:09:55.561 --> 01:10:01.380 Because we do have some control, like we have control over our own lives and decisions that we make. 814 01:10:02.120 --> 01:10:07.480 Um, uh, even when it's hard, you know, to say, okay, maybe I'm not going to use, maybe 815 01:10:07.861 --> 01:10:13.339 as a writer, I'm not, I'm going to put a wall around sort of what I'm willing to let AI 816 01:10:13.901 --> 01:10:20.060 do for me because, because that is my way of my own, you know, I wouldn't call it dissidence 817 01:10:20.161 --> 01:10:23.360 necessarily, but it's along the lines of saying, it's defiant. 818 01:10:23.500 --> 01:10:25.120 How is this useful to me and how is it? 819 01:10:26.225 --> 01:10:26.520 Yeah. 820 01:10:26.661 --> 01:10:30.560 And if it's not, if it's not useful to me, if it's something that feels like it's going 821 01:10:30.580 --> 01:10:35.072 to hurt or erode something that I care about, I'm going to put a line there. 822 01:10:35.995 --> 01:10:37.780 And I don't know, 823 01:10:37.920 --> 01:10:42.760 I don't know how long that line will stand, you know, how long I'll be able to like resist. 824 01:10:44.380 --> 01:10:50.800 But, but being aware of it and actually making a deliberate effort to draw that line 825 01:10:51.422 --> 01:10:53.109 is the thing that I just want. 826 01:10:53.892 --> 01:10:55.880 I think people could use more of that. 827 01:10:56.040 --> 01:10:57.326 Yeah, I think it's a good instinct. 828 01:10:57.346 --> 01:10:59.999 And I think what your book made me think about and what Hannah 829 01:11:00.240 --> 01:11:06.440 Arendt's line about can I live with, I mean, can I live with myself is an overly high stakes way 830 01:11:06.540 --> 01:11:10.780 of thinking about it when we're talking about something as prosaic and quotidian as like, 831 01:11:10.980 --> 01:11:12.445 you know, using my iPhone or not. 832 01:11:12.525 --> 01:11:17.019 But one way of thinking, one way of downgrading the same 833 01:11:17.842 --> 01:11:21.012 sentiment is just to say, is this who I am? 834 01:11:21.153 --> 01:11:22.497 Is this who I want to be? 835 01:11:22.577 --> 01:11:23.240 Is this who, 836 01:11:24.003 --> 01:11:27.300 if I were to take a 30,000 foot look at myself, 837 01:11:28.141 --> 01:11:31.180 I would be proud of doing, you know, 838 01:11:31.300 --> 01:11:32.980 like that's a simpler way, I think, 839 01:11:33.061 --> 01:11:35.680 to just catch ourselves and be like, 840 01:11:36.362 --> 01:11:38.460 will me in a week's time be glad that I did, 841 01:11:38.842 --> 01:11:39.919 that I behaved this way? 842 01:11:41.301 --> 01:11:43.360 And just the more we have that in our lives, 843 01:11:43.663 --> 01:11:44.640 it reminds me a little bit also, 844 01:11:44.740 --> 01:11:46.440 we didn't talk about Timothy Garton Ash, 845 01:11:46.460 --> 01:11:49.280 who's a great writer and Europe analyst, 846 01:11:49.500 --> 01:11:52.080 I suppose, who you quote as talking about, 847 01:11:52.160 --> 01:11:58.460 you know the the solution is to just behave as if you already lived in a free country if you don't 848 01:11:58.480 --> 01:12:04.080 live in a free country the solution is so yeah you can just behave as if you're free from algorithms 849 01:12:05.203 --> 01:12:11.040 and the behaving is the freedom it is and and i i want to say the important sort of spin i would 850 01:12:11.100 --> 01:12:15.100 put on it which made me feel better at the end of this writing working on this book was that 851 01:12:15.943 --> 01:12:20.060 at one level what you're describing it sounds like an incredible like burden an incredible 852 01:12:20.201 --> 01:12:21.023 responsibility. 853 01:12:21.064 --> 01:12:25.620 Like if you're going through your life and saying, well, I have to always be making 854 01:12:25.720 --> 01:12:32.260 these choices because I'm looking at myself from 30,000 feet up and sort of taking my moral 855 01:12:32.360 --> 01:12:36.270 temperature all the time, that feels burdensome. 856 01:12:36.290 --> 01:12:37.073 It feels heavy. 857 01:12:37.714 --> 01:12:39.940 But there's another way of looking 858 01:12:40.061 --> 01:12:42.290 at it, which is that it's an amazing opportunity. 859 01:12:42.330 --> 01:12:44.500 It's like an opportunity to sort of create your 860 01:12:44.580 --> 01:12:45.283 own life.

861 01:12:45.303 --> 01:12:49.859 You know, this is a very much a kind of an existentialist idea too, right? 862 01:12:49.899 --> 01:12:50.160 That I, 863 01:12:51.141 --> 01:12:56.280 and Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher had a great thing where he said that, you know, 864 01:12:57.121 --> 01:12:59.790 actually moral choice is a creative act. 865 01:13:00.111 --> 01:13:02.560 You know, he sort of imagined each of us going through our 866 01:13:02.580 --> 01:13:06.976 life sort of painting a portrait with each of these choices that we make. 867 01:13:07.638 --> 01:13:08.160 Each of them being 868 01:13:08.240 --> 01:13:11.800 kind of like a brushstroke in a portrait that we're painting of ourselves, which I think is 869 01:13:11.860 --> 01:13:16.480 just a really beautiful and a different way of looking at it so that it's not that oh my god 870 01:13:16.600 --> 01:13:22.500 like every time i read the newspaper i have to kind of like engage in this burdensome you know 871 01:13:22.841 --> 01:13:29.420 way with what am i going to do it's oh i get a chance to do something um and to make my life 872 01:13:29.781 --> 01:13:35.320 to kind of give substance meaningful substance to my life you know i think i just like you're 873 01:13:35.400 --> 01:13:41.200 30 000 feet up like i've i've done the thought experiment like when i'm you know a very old man 874 01:13:41.280 --> 01:13:44.920 looking back at my life, like what are going to be the things that actually, what are going to be 875 01:13:44.960 --> 01:13:48.313 the moments that are going to actually make my life feel like it had meaning. 876 01:13:49.036 --> 01:13:50.120 And I I'm pretty 877 01:13:50.281 --> 01:13:52.329 sure that it will be the hard decisions. 878 01:13:52.489 --> 01:13:55.160 Like it will be those moments where I had to do it 879 01:13:56.123 --> 01:14:01.120 that felt like it maybe went against what everybody else thought I should do, but that felt 880 01:14:01.942 --> 01:14:04.268 right and consistent to me with who I was. 881 01:14:04.369 --> 01:14:08.680 And so, um, so, and, and what to be able to actually 882 01:14:08.921 --> 01:14:14.960 think about that as you're going through your life feels like a benefit, because you are creating it. 883 01:14:15.561 --> 01:14:21.539 It's a total flip of perspective as to whether you code it as an imposition or a form of 884 01:14:22.040 --> 01:14:22.683 liberation. 885 01:14:22.703 --> 01:14:26.760 I really do think there's something liberating about just going like, is this what 886 01:14:26.800 --> 01:14:28.125 I will have wanted to have done? 887 01:14:28.145 --> 01:14:31.940 And then I get a fresh perspective on exactly what I'm doing. 888 01:14:32.700 --> 01:14:36.400 Gal, it's a really thought-provoking book, a super thought-provoking conversation. 889 01:14:36.882 --> 01:14:40.760 congratulations on it keep dissenting and uh thanks for being on the show thank you so much 890 01:14:40.902 --> 01:14:41.640 it's a real pleasure