Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / How to be a Dissident

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How to be a Dissident · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans!
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  What does it mean to be a
• 0:09
  dissident?
• 0:10
  If you join a protest march, then are you dissenting or are you conforming?
• 0:17
  If you post a black square on social media to show your allegiance to Black Lives Matter,
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  Is that an act of defiance and dissent or an act of joining in a mob?
• 0:29
  It's tricky to be an independent thinker in this crazy day and age,
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  but today's guest has written an entire book about it,
• 0:36
  about how you push back against leaders who wield fear and intimidation
• 0:41
  and also, unexpectedly, against digital technology.
• 0:45
  That, he writes, dehumanises you and flattens us all.
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  Gal Beckerman is his name.
• 0:51
  He's a staff writer at The Atlantic.
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  He was previously at the New York Times Book Review.
• 0:56
  His first book was a book of the year, a recommended book by The New Yorker and The Washington Post.
• 1:01
  And his latest book is How to Be a Dissident, a guide to living with integrity in an age of conformity and authoritarian drift.
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  He joined me to chat about ICE agents and raids and Jimmy Kimmel and dissidents in Putin's Russia and the Jews who defend Gaza and Václav Havel in communist Czechoslovakia and what's more, the quiet task-by-task incursion of algorithmic media into all of our lives.
• 1:30
  and basically what the most courageous dissidents of all time can reveal
• 1:33
  about how to find your moral compass in a dizzying age.
• 1:37
  I hope you enjoy, as much as I did, the one, the only, Gal Beckerman.
• 1:49
  The question of how to stand up for things that you believe in, I think, is fascinating,
• 1:53
  and a lot of us feel that as we're kind of tossed around in the washing machine of current events.
• 2:00
  through Trump and populism and whatever, Gaza and climate.
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  The one that seems the most personal in your book is Gaza and Israel,
• 2:09
  which has left a lot of us on unsteady footing over the past few years.
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  How has that landed for you?
• 2:18
  You're just going to jump right into it, Josh.
• 2:20
  Absolutely.
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  I mean, because you're like, we don't have to.
• 2:24
  If you want to say that, what does it mean to stand up for something
• 2:28
  when you don't really know what the thing is that you're standing up for.
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  You know what I mean?
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  Attacking Jews, bad.
• 2:34
  Genocide, bad.
• 2:36
  Right.
• 2:37
  No, no.
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  I mean, that is where the rubber hits the road, as we say.
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  It is the most challenging question for me at the moment
• 2:46
  and has been for the last two years.
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  And I'll tell you sort of where I've landed that feels right to me,
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  which is, as you suggested, I fall on this kind of unusual, uncomfortable middle ground,
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  somebody who does see the value of Jewish self-determination.
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  I have family in Israel.
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  I feel connected to the place and to the people.
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  I don't see it in a kind of abstract way.
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  I see it
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  as a real location where individuals live who I know who were born there and their parents were
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  born there.
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  And, you know, so, so it's not theory for me.
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  Uh, so there's that on the one hand,
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  the other hand, I am, you know, enormously troubled and in a deep soul crushing way by
• 3:31
  what has happened over the last two years.
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  Um, and so how do I find my place in a American society?
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  And I mean, this is true internationally, but I, um, I feel it here too, more and more, um,
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  where one is forced to pick a side, there are litmus tests, you know, will you say the word
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  genocide.
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  If you do, then you're with us.
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  And if you're not, then you are evil.
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  So it is incredibly
• 3:55
  challenging to find a way to be a dissident or have a dissident-like perspective when you feel
• 4:03
  that you're getting it sort of from both sides.
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  Now, what has made sense to me, the way I've sort
• 4:08
  of resolved this for myself, is that there are people in Israel, many of them, who are fighting
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  the government, who want a different sort of reality for Israel's relationship with Palestinians,
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  who want a better life for Palestinians, who see the intertwined relationship between what happens
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  to Palestinians is very much wrapped up in the future of Israel.
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  And those are the people who
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  I'm supporting.
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  Those are the people who I feel like I need to stand in solidarity with and do
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  whatever I can from far away to be a help to.
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  And that is, in my own mind, sort of resolved a bit
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  the difficulties.
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  Does it make it any easier to sort of go through my days and have these
• 4:53
  conversations about Israel and Gaza?
• 4:56
  Not really.
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  How then does dissent or being a dissident
• 5:00
  differ from being, like, I guess I would say maybe a contrarian.
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  Like the person who,
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  So Hassan Paika, when he says that, you know, he's a popular far-left Instagram,
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  I mean, not Instagram, internet streamer,
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  when he says that he thinks Hamas is arguably more ethical than the Israeli government,
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  in his mind, he is a dissident.
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  He is standing up against powerful forces,
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  against taboos that prevent him from saying that,
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  against a pro-Israel lobby, against Israel itself.
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  and against the U.S. government.
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  Your position is more contrarian, more sophisticated, more nuanced.
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  You're trying to ally with people who believe in Israel
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  but oppose its actions.
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  It's a messier and more complicated thing,
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  and I wonder what moral clarity a person needs to bring to dissent,
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  or is that not the point?
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  Well, I would argue that neither me nor Hassan Piker are really dissidents.
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  You know, like that to be a dissident, you have to take a position that really puts you at some kind of risk.
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  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.
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  um i don't know what hassan piker is risking i mean i don't think anybody is shutting down his
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  live stream or making it impossible for him to grow his audience or you know so well he's probably
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  risking to be fair he's probably risking uh the wrath of the trump administration at the least
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  and maybe being hassled when he comes in and out of the country though you know i will say that
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  there is now kind of this horseshoe thing going on here in this country where you know there are
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  are plenty of people on the right, you know, the Tucker Carlson variety, you know, that who
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  probably agree with Hassan Baiker about Israel and have their own, you know, conspiracy theories
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  about the Mossad being behind various things.
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  So I don't know.
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  I guess my point is that like,
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  you know, when I looked historically at what it means to be a dissident and when I look at other
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  countries, when you look at what it means for a woman in Iran to take her headscarf off, you know,
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  when the rule is that you have to wear your headscarf.
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  I see what I'm calling dissidence,
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  which is sort of a defense
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  or a decision to kind of hold a line
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  on certain ways of being that feel like,
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  you know, they are what we should expect
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  to have part of our normal, a normal human life.
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  They're not, it's not just being outspoken.
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  I mean, we have plenty of, in a free society,
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  we have plenty of opportunities to be outspoken.
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  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.
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  And it is not just breaking a taboo, it's exposing a truth that powerful forces want to keep hidden.
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  So being a dissident is kind of a confluence of two things, to put it in a nutshell.
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  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.
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  But it's the confrontation of that with a society that is pushing back against what you want to do or say.
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  So it's important to sort of define that a little bit because lots of people use the word dissident.
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  I mean, Trump called himself a political dissident after, you know, 2020.
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  So it is important to define these terms a little bit.
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  I mean, yes, that's interesting.
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  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?
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  Or is it a natural outgrowth of a person's character that they cannot help but do?
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  Yeah, it's a good question.
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  And I think, honestly, it's sort of a tension in my own, in my book, because I didn't approach
• 9:26
  this from a perspective of being a dissident.
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  I approached it from the other end of the spectrum of feeling like a bit of a coward,
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  you know, and like, and worrying about what I would do if I was found myself at some kind
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  of moral crossroads.
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  And this wasn't a question that I had, you know, asked myself much in my life.
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  I mean, I've been studying, and this is my third book, I've studied social movements,
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  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?
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  like whatever it is that you think is kind of holding your line um if i'm called to do that
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  or if i feel compelled to do that and uh and i didn't know i didn't honestly know the answer
• 10:19
  to that because i think and i don't think any of us really know the answer to that because there's
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  a lot of things on the other side of the scale right it's our not just self-preservation but
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  our families our economic well-being there's so many other things that we worry about that
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  would prevent us from taking a truly risky action.
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  I think there are some,
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  my conclusion is that there are some people
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  who are sort of, do have this in a kind of a deep gut,
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  sort of innate way.
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  And I can talk a little bit about
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  sort of what I think that means.
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  But I think most of us don't.
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  I think most of us just sort of,
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  understandably, because we're human beings
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  and self-preservation is a good thing.
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  It's how our species has survived for, you know, as long as it has.
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  We're sort of deep, hardwired to conform.
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  Yeah.
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  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.
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  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.
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  We'll sit this one out.
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  And they didn't.
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  And they didn't.
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  I mean that honestly it was the thing that was the most shocking to me that the most powerful
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  most elite forces in society I mean look it was shocking to me at one level because I just didn't
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  expect it and I also think that Americans we have this sort of self-conception that we're
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  you know rugged individualism and nobody's going to tell us what to do and then it was just like
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  this quick folding this quick acquiescence as soon as power exercised itself and that I found
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  shocking.
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  And it was sort of like, oh, I mean, the shocking part was we're like everybody else,
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  you know, we're like, we're like people in Russia who are keeping their head down.
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  We're like people
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  in China who are keeping their head down.
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  This is what people, this is what human beings do.
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  We just hadn't been faced quite with this level of, you know, at least in recent American history
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  with anything like this.
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  And, and on the other hand, you know, those, those elite institutions,
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  maybe they feel like they have the most to lose right from because they have power they have money
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  they have um and so i think there is a kind of a rationalization that happens where they go
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  you know i mean lots of people did this even you know in trump's administration during his first
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  term they said they didn't agree with almost anything he did but they said we need to be here
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  to like be the ones if we're not here then nobody is sort of stopping him you know yeah uh well i
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  I mean, that's the generous interpretation, right?
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  I mean, the...
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  No, I'm saying it's like a self-rationalization.
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  You're like, it allows you to say,
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  I'm not going to give up my power and my authority
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  and my privilege, you know, in this situation.
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  But you also can tell yourself there's a good reason for it.
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  Yes.
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  And I mean, to be fair to them, there may have been.
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  In the first administration, if you look at the, you know,
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  who was the defense secretary or the secretary of state?
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  Like, you know, those people...
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  Yeah, you can imagine those people thinking, you know,
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  a constrained Trump is better than an unconstrained Trump.
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  And in hindsight,
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  they may have been right in the sense that he was able to do less damage in his first
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  administration than he has been able to in his second, where he surrounded himself with lackeys
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  and he's learned the lesson.
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  On the other hand, I think the rationale is a bit different when it
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  comes to corporations in the sense that they can argue to themselves, well, we have a fiduciary
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  responsibility to our shareholders.
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  We're not either going to fall on a sword here.
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  So there
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  are all kinds of different motivations that people can bring to the table.
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  Yeah.
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  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.
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  But, you know, it's not such a huge sacrifice.
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  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.
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  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.
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  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.
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  Like all of these things.
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  Or paying Donald Trump millions of dollars to make him stop suing them, even on lawsuits that they knew they would win.
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  It is this accretion.
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  And I mean, it happened very quickly, you know, I mean, it happened very quickly here.
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  And so and, you know, I looked around myself and I thought, we don't really have role models,
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  Americans, you know, like for for pushing back for doing some of the things that maybe
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  that this accounts for why, you know, people couldn't these institutions, these elites
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  couldn't act in ways that I thought would have been more more morally upstanding, you
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  know, is there's just it's there's a vacuum of it here.
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  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.
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  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.
• 16:09
  You're not going to tell us what to do law firm.
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  You're not going to tell us what to do academia.
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  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.
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  And, Gal, you mentioned that after 2020, Donald Trump was calling himself a dissident for disputing the election results.
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  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.
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  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?
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  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.
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  Instead, we're going to overturn the chessboard and dissent in a sense.
• 17:34
  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?
• 17:50
  Well, first of all, I'll say that to be a dissident is sort of a, that's a value neutral thing, right?
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  One can be a dissident for good or dissident for bad, if we're talking about definitions here.
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  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.
• 18:07
  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.
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  Now, he was a dissident whose vision was one of domination, was one of kind of an ethnic cleansing and ultimately genocide.
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  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.
• 18:40
  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.
• 18:58
  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?
• 19:17
  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?
• 19:30
  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.
• 19:37
  Let's talk about the heroes list then, because the book has a lot of them.
• 19:42
  Kundera, Havel, Solzhenitsyn, Snowden, the list goes on.
• 19:48
  Where do you want to start?
• 19:50
  I mean, Havel's Green Grocer is a classic analogy which you cite, which may be a good one.
• 19:58
  Right.
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  Yeah.
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  First of all, I'll say, you know, you called them heroes.
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  Like, these are difficult.
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  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.
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  You know, if you are really somebody who can split with the natural instinct to conform, you know, which is very strong.
• 20:19
  And I, you know, I talk about some like social science in this book that shows just how deeply wired we are towards that.
• 20:26
  And most of these people are probably like a little bit obnoxious, rude.
• 20:30
  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.
• 20:48
  I love them.
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  These are my people, Cal.
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  These are my people.
• 20:53
  so no i mean i do i do too you know but i also think it's important to recognize this and i
• 20:57
  you know i've i've had interesting conversations with people who respond very very much to the
• 21:03
  idea of dissidence as you know in their first association is like oh these sort of obnoxious
• 21:08
  stubborn people you know who aren't willing to kind of give an inch um yeah and and i my response
• 21:14
  that is like yeah some of them are like that but like thank god that we have these weird they're
• 21:18
  almost mutants you know in some way um in the sense that i mean you have mutations because i
• 21:25
  think that it's not normal necessarily to be like this um to say that you're going to sacrifice your
• 21:30
  life for example you know for something yes i mean you can't imagine that evolutionary biology
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  favors uh individuals who are likely to stand in front of a tank and have themselves you know
• 21:41
  mown down before they can have children so they are rare for sure not but like you know i i do
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  think that there is a a theory or understanding of history and the way that it progresses if you
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  believe that there is such a thing as progress um that demands people like that because otherwise
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  you know you have stasis or even the subordination you know like you have people who can easily take
• 22:09
  advantage of authoritarian
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  can easily take advantage of
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  that instinct of our people.
• 22:14
  Yeah, and you also
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  just have a general lack of
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  creativity and innovation, because
• 22:19
  I mean, what was the Dark Ages if not
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  just a very obedient time?
• 22:25
  Exactly.
• 22:26
  So these people are thorns in every respect.
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  And so just going back
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  to the conformism experiment so that we can set
• 22:33
  the baseline for how normal human beings who
• 22:34
  aren't crazy behave.
• 22:36
  Yeah, so
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  a lot of these experiments were
• 22:38
  carried out, you know, in the post-war era when there was, people really wanted to understand,
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  you know, how did an entire society like Nazi Germany sort of turn in that direction?
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  And, you know, there's some famous experiments that probably listeners will know about,
• 22:53
  you know, like the Stanford prison experiment where they essentially turned graduate students
• 22:58
  into prison guards in a very short period of time by just giving them uniforms and giving
• 23:03
  them power over somebody else.
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  And there's another famous experiment where people were
• 23:08
  told to administer electric shocks.
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  And they thought, because they were actors on the other
• 23:13
  side of a wall, they thought that they were actually, you know, coming close to killing
• 23:18
  somebody, but they just kept administering the shocks because they were ordered to.
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  So,
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  so these are, you know, these are, these are kind of well-known classic experiments and what they
• 23:28
  point us to is, is that hardwired nature that we have, which we just, and I think actually part of
• 23:36
  what was important for me in writing this book was to to to to to hold an awareness of that
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  um and not just in order to understand sort of why dissidence is so unusual but also why it's
• 23:49
  so important like that is the backdrop to it harville's green grocer who's that so this was
• 23:56
  harville's sort of parable for explaining how us you know individuals can contribute to the
• 24:02
  perpetuation of a certain ideology within a society.
• 24:06
  It's a story that he tells about,
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  you know, just your average greengrocer and communist Czechoslovakia, who's, you know,
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  puts in his window a sign that says, you know, workers of the world unite, the, you know,
• 24:18
  slogan of the Communist Party.
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  And, and he's sort of trying to understand sort of the psychology
• 24:24
  behind doing that.
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  And turns out, you know, he kind of theorizes, you know, that this hypothetical
• 24:30
  guy, like he doesn't really believe or care about this message, but he puts it up because he knows
• 24:34
  that if he doesn't, he's going to get in trouble that everybody else is putting it up.
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  And it
• 24:40
  becomes a kind of a self-perpetuating thing, you know, where he's contributing to the ideology
• 24:46
  by, you know, by just conforming, by keeping his, by keeping his head down.
• 24:49
  So, so, um, you know,
• 24:51
  Havel's point in that story is to say, well, if the guy just stops putting the sign in his window,
• 24:57
  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.
• 25:04
  That sort of we're the ones, each of us individually sort of holding it up.
• 25:10
  And I think that's true.
• 25:11
  But I think it's also very challenging to be the first person to take down the sign.
• 25:16
  You know, I mean, I think that that's, Havel is telling that story because he wants people to understand that they can be.
• 25:23
  That doesn't make it any easier.
• 25:25
  Were you noodling on any of this during the culture wars of the 2010s?
• 25:31
  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.
• 25:50
  because it seems like, or like, you know, refusing to, I don't know, put your gender
• 25:54
  pronouns in your email signature or something like that.
• 25:57
  Like, why are you being so contrarian?
• 25:59
  Why are you being on the wrong side of things?
• 26:01
  Why can't you just join in what we know is the right way of thinking about things?
• 26:06
  It's like, yes, there are dissidents who stand in front of a tank, but there are also just
• 26:11
  regular people who either do or do not follow that kind of instinct in their gut, which
• 26:16
  says, do I have to do this?
• 26:18
  It seems a bit echo chambery.
• 26:20
  Right.
• 26:22
  Yeah, no, I think it's a really interesting point.
• 26:25
  And I can kind of see it.
• 26:28
  I think you're right that there is a connection there because it involves a certain kind of thoughtlessness, right?
• 26:34
  Hannah Arendt talked about this a lot, that like the evil, if she understood it, this is the banality.
• 26:40
  in her banality of evil was thoughtlessness just sort of doing things without actually thinking
• 26:45
  through uh whether they are true to what you believe or how you feel and so so there is some
• 26:53
  of that um i think the complicating factor in some of those cases was that i think people felt
• 27:00
  that by doing that performative simple you know what became a kind of a thoughtless thing i mean
• 27:05
  i don't mean maybe it wasn't thoughtless for them but they they felt that they were sort of
• 27:09
  of helping to make a change in their own societies like changing norms um or defending an idea that
• 27:19
  they that they that they actually you know they believed in um but doing it in the most superficial
• 27:25
  performative signaling way so that they're not really taking any risk back you know doing the
• 27:31
  opposite of taking a risk they're sort of you know joint showing their participation in a community
• 27:36
  that they feel they need to, you know, show that they belong to.
• 27:40
  Right.
• 27:41
  Yeah.
• 27:41
  So there's probably a hierarchy of cowardice where the greengrocer who genuinely
• 27:47
  does not believe in communism and puts the Workers of the World Unite placard in his window is more
• 27:54
  cowardly than the person who thinks they're doing the right thing by putting, you know, I don't know,
• 28:00
  I stand with Palestine on their Instagram, even if they're not Palestinian, they don't know about
• 28:05
  the region um but uh the greengrocer is probably worse because at least he's aware well i don't
• 28:11
  know maybe it's not a moral judgment call maybe not knowing is uh is more of an indictment than
• 28:17
  knowing that you're doing the wrong thing and choosing to do so right self-preservation but
• 28:21
  yes there's a spectrum i mean the other just i would make and there's you know that sort of
• 28:27
  makes that analogy a little complicated is that in the greengrocer case the ideology that he's
• 28:34
  being recruited uh into you know holding up is the is the powerful ideology is the one that sort of
• 28:41
  controls most of the society that he's in that actually has power and authority over everybody
• 28:47
  um and in the case of black lives matter or palace free palestine i think at least in the
• 28:54
  minds of the people who are doing this they feel powerless or or if not powerless then um like
• 29:02
  they're not in a position to impose what they think or their own ideology onto everybody else
• 29:08
  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
• 29:14
  but i don't think it was true in 2014 to 2022 that that people um yeah that people who were
• 29:21
  on the side of uh imposing social justice orthodoxies were unaware that they were right
• 29:28
  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.
• 29:39
  But I take your point.
• 29:40
  They didn't have tanks and they didn't have guns and they didn't have secret police and so on.
• 29:44
  So, yes.
• 29:44
  Yeah, no, I mean, you may be right.
• 29:45
  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.
• 30:09
  the trump people doing when they came to power which is saying yeah i'm not just going to
• 30:15
  promote and defend the things that i care about i also i'm going to use this power to like shut
• 30:20
  down the things that i think so in a way there's a lot of mirror it reminds me of an interesting
• 30:26
  conversation that you have in the book about about principles and like you know the the difference
• 30:31
  between Trump's abuse of power and the cancel culture, social justice abuse of power is that
• 30:39
  Trump, I really don't think believes in any, you know, he doesn't believe that there's an
• 30:45
  overarching moral good that is derived from his throwing frivolous lawsuits at media companies
• 30:53
  and enriching himself through crypto.
• 30:55
  Like, I think he just thinks that the world is a jungle
• 30:57
  and you do what you can to get ahead.
• 30:59
  Whereas obviously people who were imposing speech codes
• 31:03
  and trying to get people fired from organizations for, I don't know, airing a Dave Chappelle special
• 31:10
  on Netflix or something like that did believe that they were on the side of the marginalized
• 31:14
  and they were standing up for principles.
• 31:16
  But the one point that you make in the book is that
• 31:18
  actually, if you look, for example, at Nazism, people who had very strong principles often
• 31:25
  didn't find it that difficult to switch over to nazism because they just had to substitute
• 31:30
  the principles that they held dear and then here was a new set of principles that the the people
• 31:35
  who were the real dissidents were in a strange way the less principled people who sort of followed
• 31:42
  their gut have i got that right yeah yeah that that was that was hanaren's conclusion um i love
• 31:49
  the kind of simplicity and the economy with which she sort of boiled this down.
• 31:55
  She said,
• 31:55
  essentially, as far as she could tell, the dissidents were the people who just
• 32:00
  asked themselves a very basic question.
• 32:02
  They said, can I live with myself?
• 32:05
  So they cut through the, oh, what are my rules for living?
• 32:08
  They just said, no,
• 32:09
  like, be honest.
• 32:11
  Can you live with yourself if you do this thing?
• 32:15
  And in that environment,
• 32:16
  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.
• 32:24
  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.
• 32:46
  So that does really shift.
• 32:49
  First of all, it puts the emphasis on the thoughtfulness, right?
• 32:53
  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?
• 33:03
  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.
• 33:21
  Um, so it, it is, it is a very sort of like, um, a deliberate way of going through, uh, through the world.
• 33:29
  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.
• 33:44
  but i really do think we don't spend a lot of time considering the power that that gives us
• 33:50
  like the power to actually make decisions in any given moment um and and not always just do the
• 33:57
  thing that everybody else is doing or the thing that we're just sort of uh our community or our
• 34:03
  tribe tells us is the right thing i mean this yes one of the chapters in your book is about how about
• 34:09
  how being alone is a prerequisite for being a dissident that it's hard to you can't really be
• 34:15
  a dissident you can't i mean you can but like it's not it's a almost by definition a lonely pursuit
• 34:22
  to stand up for what you believe in against massive forces yeah well look that's that's
• 34:28
  actually the first that's the first chapter is be alone and i and a few people who are you know
• 34:33
  activists have sort of taken issue with me uh over emphasizing that because they said well that's not
• 34:39
  true.
• 34:39
  If you really want to make change in society, you have to, you know, find,
• 34:43
  you have to build constituencies, you have to create networks, you have to find your allies,
• 34:47
  you have to, you know, it's, it is not, it's useless to just beat your head against the wall,
• 34:53
  you know, alone in a room.
• 34:55
  And, and they're right.
• 34:56
  Like, ultimately, that is what you need to do to
• 34:59
  really make significant change in a society.
• 35:02
  But I think that people sort of overlook this initial
• 35:05
  step.
• 35:06
  And I, you know, I really, this really came out of the reading dissident memoirs and talking
• 35:11
  to dissidents and they invariably describe this sort of initial, um, almost vertiginous moment
• 35:19
  that they have when they realize that the way that they feel different, the thing that they want,
• 35:25
  the line that they want to draw, um, is going to mean that they are putting themselves in opposition
• 35:30
  to their family, their society, their country, you know, it's going to, and they haven't,
• 35:36
  you know, they may not have like found their other, their people yet.
• 35:41
  But it is an internal process that is painful.
• 35:45
  It can be painful, often is.
• 35:49
  And so I think that we, we sort of do ourselves a disservice by not acknowledging that side
• 35:54
  of it.
• 35:54
  You know, people are, and especially in America, you know, the last two years, why aren't people
• 35:59
  in the streets?
• 35:59
  You know, like, why aren't?
• 36:01
  You know, there's so many, I mean, I live in New York City.
• 36:03
  There's so many angry people around me when it comes to Trump and what, you know, what has happened in this country.
• 36:09
  Why aren't there protests every day?
• 36:11
  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.
• 36:23
  And so it was important for me to pinpoint that because I think that it is the threshold for everything else.
• 36:34
  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.
• 37:00
  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.
• 37:12
  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.
• 37:42
  way, you know, during a spate of violent clashes between ICE agents.
• 37:49
  And something in my DNA
• 37:54
  makes, and maybe this is just me apologizing for my own cowardice, and this is the narrative I want
• 37:59
  to tell myself, just thinks that it is not the most constructive way to oppose power to literally
• 38:09
  join a mob of people who are furiously chanting against ICE agents and creating a violent
• 38:16
  kerfuffle, that just doesn't strike me as the truly dissident way if you're living in a community
• 38:22
  where 99% of people agree that ICE raids are terrible.
• 38:26
  Then you're part of perhaps a noble
• 38:29
  uprising, but you're essentially an interchangeable widget in a protest movement,
• 38:35
  which is not exactly the same thing as being a dissident.
• 38:40
  Well, I would just push back slightly because I feel that there were forms of protest against ICE in Minneapolis,
• 38:48
  you know, earlier this year that really rhymed with a lot of what I'm writing about in this book,
• 38:55
  which is they were not performative.
• 38:57
  They were not signaling.
• 38:59
  They were actually, you know, people coming together because they felt that they saw something,
• 39:04
  They experienced something in their community that felt to them deeply, from a humanistic point, just wrong.
• 39:10
  Things that were happening.
• 39:11
  I have a colleague at The Atlantic who coined a phrase, neighborism.
• 39:16
  You know, this was not a political reaction necessarily.
• 39:22
  I'm sure they all have views about immigration and views about Trump.
• 39:25
  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.
• 39:36
  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.
• 39:49
  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.
• 40:01
  Like, I think that that was the kind of visceral reaction that people had.
• 40:05
  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.
• 40:19
  Let's create, you know, meal trains to bring food to people in their houses.
• 40:23
  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.
• 40:36
  So they walked her to school every day.
• 40:38
  You know, these were the sorts of activities where those people are taking risks, right?
• 40:43
  I mean, two people were killed doing some version of what I just described.
• 40:47
  um but they felt that this was a kind of the humane thing to do in that situation and to me
• 40:57
  that's that is the that is the kind of dissidence that i'm really trying to spotlight yeah well you
• 41:03
  mentioned hovel and and one of the concepts from hovel that i that i really that really resonated
• 41:08
  with me that i used in this book is he was trying to understand what makes a dissident a dissident
• 41:12
  And he probably has his definition.
• 41:14
  My definition is the closest to his, which is he talked about a realm of code that he called the pre-political.
• 41:23
  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.
• 41:36
  to wear your hair the way that we want to, to gather with whoever, you know, whoever you want
• 41:41
  to, to be able to, you know, practice whatever religion, to be free of violence being inflicted
• 41:48
  upon you, to be able to pursue your economic interests.
• 41:52
  It's a fairly large bucket of things,
• 41:54
  these pre-political things.
• 41:55
  I think if we really think about it, and there are a lot of things
• 41:57
  that probably more that we agree upon more, you know, in America than we often imagine that we do
• 42:03
  because we're so tribalized and politicized at the moment.
• 42:07
  And I really believe that what people were responding to in Minneapolis
• 42:12
  in that moment was something very true political.
• 42:15
  Yeah.
• 42:16
  I think it was, and you could hear it in the comments,
• 42:20
  people would say, this isn't how you treat people.
• 42:25
  To me, when I hear somebody say that,
• 42:27
  as opposed to saying something that references Trump
• 42:32
  or, you know, pro or, or, or con Trump, you know, um, but just focuses on the individual
• 42:39
  and the kind of humanistic value that you feel is being violated.
• 42:43
  Um, that's the pre,
• 42:45
  that's the pre-political, you know, and I think that is, it is sort of an incredible thing when
• 42:50
  people stand up for, for that.
• 42:53
  Yeah.
• 42:53
  I like that.
• 42:54
  I like that.
• 42:54
  I like that distinction.
• 42:55
  I mean,
• 42:56
  And there's, I mean, by definition, the pre-political is also sort of pre-tribal.
• 43:01
  And I like the idea of neighborliness as being the sort of the lodestar.
• 43:06
  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.
• 43:23
  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.
• 43:45
  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.
• 44:14
  Right.
• 44:16
  Yeah, no, I think there's something to that.
• 44:19
  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.
• 44:45
  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?
• 44:56
  Like you're looking for other people who share your values, who are going to defend those same values.
• 45:02
  And I think that that's important.
• 45:04
  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.
• 45:26
  Right.
• 45:27
  And or even Black Lives Matter had this sort of element to it.
• 45:31
  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.
• 45:40
  You know, as many that the hashtag can go viral, like as much attention in a given moment.
• 45:48
  And I think that is counterproductive.
• 45:51
  Right.
• 45:52
  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.
• 46:17
  and also learn how to get the attention of people
• 46:23
  who might not agree with them, how to convince them.
• 46:27
  All of that process is a much more deliberative thing
• 46:30
  that takes time.
• 46:31
  And even just building up a sense of your own courageousness
• 46:37
  to do risky things can sometimes happen over the course of
• 46:42
  not just coming out to one protest where everybody's there
• 46:44
  and going home, but like, you know,
• 46:46
  I have in my community where I live here,
• 46:48
  there's like this elderly couple
• 46:50
  who like every week stands by themselves
• 46:53
  like on a street corner holding their Trump sign, you know?
• 46:57
  And you think like, you know,
• 47:02
  other people are seeing this, you know,
• 47:03
  and maybe they'll start to want to join the,
• 47:05
  it's like, it doesn't just feel performative to me.
• 47:07
  It feels like something that they've consistently committed to
• 47:10
  and that like they're making it clear
• 47:13
  that they're not just like, you know,
• 47:16
  turning away or lying down, you know?
• 47:18
  Yes, yes.
• 47:19
  I mean, you're reminding me of the intellectual stash
• 47:22
  that you write about between,
• 47:23
  to go back to Vaclav Havel and, you know,
• 47:26
  Soviet Czechoslovakia.
• 47:29
  Kundera.
• 47:29
  Yeah, the stash between him and Milan Kundera,
• 47:33
  the novelist and dissident of some people.
• 47:36
  Well, if they haven't read
• 47:37
  The Unbearable Lightness of Being, they should.
• 47:39
  And Kundera was dismissive of what you're talking about,
• 47:42
  this kind of moral exhibitionism um but you seem to fall on the other side of that equation in the
• 47:48
  book don't you well i mean they're you know they they had this sort of debate about like what do
• 47:52
  you sign a petition you know like you know and they and this sort of did you like if you're in
• 47:57
  czechoslovakia and it might draw attention to you and you might get you know suppressed for it do
• 48:03
  you sign a petition in defense of like political prisoners who are in jail right um and they played
• 48:08
  this debate out through their art.
• 48:11
  You know, there was like scenes in
• 48:13
  The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
• 48:14
  there's plays that Havel wrote where they sort of
• 48:16
  like reenacted
• 48:18
  this moment of decision making.
• 48:22
  And
• 48:22
  Kundera
• 48:25
  was like, I need to preserve my
• 48:26
  ability to be an artist,
• 48:28
  to be a critic.
• 48:29
  I mean, for him that meant
• 48:30
  exile.
• 48:31
  It meant actually leaving.
• 48:32
  You know, but from that
• 48:34
  place of not taking
• 48:36
  that great, huge risk,
• 48:38
  I'm able to kind of, you know, describe the machine, this totalitarian machine and what it does to people.
• 48:46
  Like that was important for him.
• 48:47
  And Havel said, no, like you need to actually throw your whole self into it and sign the petition.
• 48:55
  Because he said, I've been on the other side of that, meaning I've been in jail with the political prisoners.
• 49:01
  And I'm telling you, you know, he's saying it makes a difference.
• 49:05
  like it makes a difference that the government understands that not everybody's just going along
• 49:09
  with this um and and and he and he could see over the course of you know 20 years so you have to
• 49:16
  kind of look at it from a long duration that the conditions of those like you whereas you know in
• 49:22
  the 60s they could lock up political prisoners and not have to explain themselves to anybody
• 49:27
  um and they could just they would just sit there you know by the late 70s that wasn't the case
• 49:33
  and that was because of this sort of consistent applied pressure and the awareness that there was
• 49:39
  that there were people watching there were people paying attention willing to take the risk
• 49:44
  signing a petition so that the rest of the world could see so that other czech citizens could see
• 49:50
  that there was something going on so i i guess i do i do i i'm sympathetic to to kundera um and
• 49:58
  honestly i don't know if i had to like be one of them i probably would be more kundera than
• 50:07
  that's just because you want to get out of dodge and write your books uh yeah i've been reminded
• 50:12
  of this argument during the trump years where where like the it was it reminded me of a play
• 50:18
  do you know rock and roll the play i think it's a tom stoppard play yeah yeah yeah the
• 50:23
  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
• 50:31
  in czechoslovakia and and deals with i mean i saw it years ago but my mangled memory of it is that
• 50:38
  the father is all about like you know um more in line with traditional protest and the young
• 50:45
  son says that he doesn't understand that the truly uh subversive thing to do is to withdraw
• 50:52
  yourself from politics altogether and do stuff that the authoritarians don't know how to deal
• 50:56
  with like do rock and roll for example and i have been thinking about this during the trump years
• 51:02
  where like trump knows exactly what to do with a person who um defies him like that has a context
• 51:12
  for trump i'm not suggesting that trump is as bad as a communist authoritarian but but he will
• 51:18
  he understands the chess moves he understands the the wrestling moves to deal with people who
• 51:24
  stand in his way he doesn't really know what to do when like bill maher makes fun of the way that
• 51:31
  he dances by suggesting it looks like he's blowing two men uh two men's penises in his face it's like
• 51:37
  you know this that is that is off piste and i sometimes wonder whether the right and you talk
• 51:43
  about humor in this in in the book as well about oh yeah yeah you know whether really humor and art
• 51:50
  is sort of the the the last vestige of our ability to express our own autonomy in the face of
• 51:58
  rather than comply with the conventional mode of dissent yeah oh i i mean i agree 100 the only
• 52:07
  thing i would disagree with is that that trump isn't you know sort of aware and triggered to
• 52:13
  use our you know american word um oh he's triggered he just doesn't know how to he just
• 52:18
  doesn't know how to push back on it i mean he doesn't know you know he'll yeah but he's pushing
• 52:23
  back you know we had this whole situation with a late night caught with jimmy kimmel you know
• 52:28
  um who isn't even really that you know provocative comic at all he just didn't like the idea that he
• 52:33
  was making fun of him um and and so you know these are the people who do threaten him so i think just
• 52:40
  by virtue of the fact that we see how how threatened he is just let me push back on that
• 52:47
  gal because as someone who started out in sort of political satire myself i i actually don't think
• 52:53
  that kimmel and colbert were doing rock and roll i think they were doing conventional yeah political
• 53:00
  partisanship and i think trump could easily code kimmel and colbert's overt um anti-trumpism
• 53:09
  as belonging to the same category as a political opponent.
• 53:13
  What's weirder is South Park.
• 53:15
  What's weirder is Bill Maher.
• 53:16
  What's weirder are people who you don't know exactly
• 53:18
  where they're going to zig or zag, right?
• 53:20
  So I'm not sure I would put too much weight on the Kimmel affair.
• 53:24
  No, no, I think I agree with you on that.
• 53:29
  And I do think that humor is this refuge for actually doing
• 53:35
  the kinds of things you're talking about,
• 53:36
  which is that what humor does you know consistently i mean first of all it's very
• 53:42
  soothing to the person who's being you know if you're living in a in a society where you're being
• 53:47
  to be able to laugh about your situation you feel seen right but the other thing i would say is that
• 53:54
  what humor does that's so you know powerful and i use that you know word particularly is that it
• 54:01
  it sort of inverts the world you know it's sort of it is this opportunity to say the things that
• 54:08
  we take for granted the things that we think are just like natural in our reality let's play with
• 54:14
  them let's throw them up in the air let's laugh at them let's let's totally um make them seem
• 54:20
  absurd these things that are you know that we don't even notice most of the time and if you
• 54:25
  if you like really good observational comics this is what they do right they they sort of they'll
• 54:30
  be like, you know, they'll pick something completely, you know, banal or random, you know,
• 54:36
  in somebody's daily life, human relations, and really pick it apart and sort of force you to
• 54:42
  force you to, to like, look at it from a distance, right.
• 54:46
  And when you think about applying that,
• 54:48
  that approach to authoritarianism, like authoritarianism works, when the authoritarian
• 54:54
  is able to make the population feel that their power is natural, that their power is somehow,
• 55:02
  you know, the only thing that could be and the only thing that will be.
• 55:05
  So comedy has an incredible opportunity to puncture that.
• 55:09
  You know, it was interesting when I,
• 55:12
  when I was doing research on this question, I found this fabulous, you know, thing where in the,
• 55:18
  in the, before the French revolution, in the, you know, 20 years before the French revolution,
• 55:23
  there were these like pornographic jokes about the king that were circulating in the cafes of
• 55:30
  paris and we know this because like if you go into the police files of the late you know 18th
• 55:37
  century in paris there are police officers who are like you know trying to track down
• 55:43
  how these jokes are circulating you know it's like jean-jacques said you know this thing about
• 55:48
  the king you know in this you know um and it's there's a there's a um a wonderful historian
• 55:55
  named robert darnton at harvard who this is this is what he does like he's trying to understand
• 55:59
  the mentality that led to uh the rupture that was the french revolution and he's located it in part
• 56:05
  in these jokes because it was so threatening um to have this being who this authoritative being
• 56:13
  who's supposed to be like divine in that instance like actually divine be described and talked about
• 56:20
  in these you know kind of like debased human ways it was like the south park yeah of their time yeah
• 56:27
  um and and king louis was no no more of a fan than trump is no and and once you once you because
• 56:35
  once you do that you get that much closer to being able to once you see the king is human
• 56:39
  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
• 56:45
  harder to even conceive of um so i i i put a lot of stock in humor um and also even in in situations
• 56:54
  that are you know quite dire you know i was reading like alexei navalny's diaries for this
• 56:59
  book you know and here's a guy he's like sitting in siberia he knows in the best case he's going
• 57:05
  to be in prison for you know until putin as long as putin is in power but most likely he's going
• 57:09
  to be killed and he's cracking jokes all the time you know um again partly to soothe himself he's
• 57:16
  he's going on a hunger strike this is what i always remember he's going on a hunger strike
• 57:21
  uh and like you know a few days in the hunger strike he says and i still don't have a six-pack
• 57:25
  you know like he's about his own body you know so yeah it's not only the ability of the of the
• 57:33
  humor to take down you know the the ruling class by a notch or increase the likelihood that the
• 57:41
  king is going to get beheaded um which i think is an unfairly high bar for people to expect
• 57:48
  political satire to achieve most of the time but it's also the sense of solidarity and and um
• 57:57
  uh as you said earlier like the observational comic is very good at making you notice the
• 58:02
  thing that you hadn't noticed and also at airing and giving voice to the frustration or the pickle
• 58:09
  that you feel like you found yourself in this there's almost a curb your enthusiasm style uh
• 58:16
  effect to political satire i mean i was reminded i was thinking back through some of the most
• 58:22
  fulfilling acts of satire that i've seen in recent years and the one that leapt to mind was
• 58:30
  Jon Stewart on the night of the Biden-Trump debate when Biden had the horrendous debate performance.
• 58:39
  And Jon Stewart went to air live right after the debate with just the most, like it was,
• 58:46
  it felt like being seen.
• 58:48
  Like he ended the show, if I remember correctly, by showing a clip of the
• 58:53
  two of Trump and Biden both blabbing at each other.
• 58:57
  And it just cuts back to Jon and he just
• 58:59
  grabs his hair and screams fuck and that's the end of the show and like i was like yes that's what i
• 59:07
  need to hear i need to hear fuck holy fuck we're fucked right like and yeah totally like it doesn't
• 59:16
  that's all that's all you basically need to feel like you're not going crazy if you live in a crazy
• 59:22
  regime which that was at the time yes no and he i think john stewart in particular was always
• 59:29
  is always so good at just with his face just in his reaction you know like a photo and then like
• 59:38
  in a way that does feel like channeling all the feelings you know totally um the final
• 59:47
  sort of beat that we should address here before we move on is uh is out of before i let you go
• 59:52
  is artificial intelligence where um you write about how there's this kind of gradual incursion
• 59:58
  into our lives of, you know, we're not making choices actively about our addiction to devices,
• 1:00:04
  to algorithms, and now increasingly to artificial intelligence, but we're finding ourselves in a
• 1:00:09
  position in which you would essentially have to be a proactive dissident in order to avoid it.
• 1:00:17
  That sort of made me feel rather bleak, but can you unpack it?
• 1:00:22
  No, I mean, I think that it does feel, when I was writing this and thinking mostly about
• 1:00:28
  political dissidents uh i also was very aware of these other forces that felt equally
• 1:00:35
  dehumanizing and by dehumanizing i mean that they feel like they are robbing us day by day
• 1:00:42
  slowly of things that feel of that same sort of that same pre-political basket of things
• 1:00:49
  that feel very important to to hold to be aware of and to hold on to um and you know for me it even
• 1:00:56
  comes down to the kind of productive friction of thinking.
• 1:01:02
  You know, I think that there's something
• 1:01:04
  that we're slowly losing.
• 1:01:07
  And I wanted to say, you know,
• 1:01:10
  by drawing this parallel,
• 1:01:13
  that there are lessons that we can even learn
• 1:01:16
  from these dissidents who fought authoritarian leaders
• 1:01:20
  in thinking through, like,
• 1:01:21
  how much of this do we want to accept in our own lives?
• 1:01:26
  the friction is it is an interesting one it's what's something that i'm only just noticing
• 1:01:30
  the if you're at the end of a long day and i have attention you know adhd kind of uh you know
• 1:01:37
  symptoms anyway so it very it's very difficult for i'm i i consciously experience the physiological
• 1:01:44
  effort of ramping up the ram in my brain to try to think hang on where did i leave that thing or
• 1:01:52
  something or you know do i if i'm a task switching between one thing to a new conversation or
• 1:01:58
  something i can feel the inertia and the uh the kind of need for a an energy accelerator in order
• 1:02:07
  to get my brain into the next gear and now increasingly i can outsource that to my to ai
• 1:02:12
  i can just go like you know how do i what temperature do i cook the roast at for how long
• 1:02:20
  it's actually going to require a physical i can feel the energy that i'm required to tap into my
• 1:02:27
  memory bank and in the it's just easier to just tap it into claude and have it in three seconds
• 1:02:33
  and you're right that this is a vast psychological experiment that we don't know we don't know what
• 1:02:37
  the consequences are of spending 20 years doing that instead of mustering the energy to think
• 1:02:42
  and yeah and i think what's tricky about it is that you know what you're describing
• 1:02:46
  that particular use of it seems pretty like banal and inoffensive to me you know like great so we
• 1:02:52
  have a way to figure out how to cook you know what temperature we could cook the pot roast on you know
• 1:02:56
  like but it's the way and we've seen this with our phones right that you know there's so many ways
• 1:03:02
  that they're useful to us the directions communication you know like there's there's
• 1:03:08
  there's ways that they make our life more efficient but that efficiency begins to leak
• 1:03:14
  into so many other areas of our life that i think we do actually want to preserve because they
• 1:03:21
  preserve something deeply human you know like when i i'm a writer right and so like yes would it be
• 1:03:27
  like a lot easier for me in certain circumstances to just like plug something yeah you know plug
• 1:03:33
  something into ai and have it help me figure out like a writing problem like the writing writing
• 1:03:38
  for me is often like it's the thinking that's the hard part it's like it is my way of working
• 1:03:43
  through it or trying to figure out what I think about something, you know?
• 1:03:49
  And could I have AI
• 1:03:51
  do that for me?
• 1:03:52
  In many instances, probably, but it would really take away from, and it would make
• 1:03:58
  my life, it would save me time, you know, it would allow me to move much faster through my work.
• 1:04:04
  But I'm not willing to let go of that, you know, what I call productive friction of that
• 1:04:13
  that that process of sort of beating my head against an idea until i can kind of figure out
• 1:04:18
  the best way to clarify and to say it with my own limited capability as just a human yeah i mean i
• 1:04:25
  feel exactly the same thing when i'm trying to wrestle with uh an article i mean i write a
• 1:04:30
  newspaper column and you know i will occasionally use ai to different differing degrees purely as
• 1:04:36
  an experiment about where it's at and how good it is yet.
• 1:04:40
  And the challenge is, as you say,
• 1:04:43
  non-writers often think that writing is about being good with words.
• 1:04:48
  And that's what young
• 1:04:48
  writers think as well, which is why their prose is always so purple and florid and contains lots of
• 1:04:54
  words that you need a thesaurus to figure out what they mean.
• 1:04:57
  But good writing is about ideas.
• 1:04:59
  I mean,
• 1:05:00
  writing is just about clear ideas and it's very hard i have used i've found ai to be pretty good
• 1:05:06
  now if i have an overly complicated messy idea for a column that has too many bits in it
• 1:05:15
  and i talked to claude about it for a while then claude's pretty good at going you know what these
• 1:05:20
  bits are a different column why don't you focus on this and why don't you move a bit that's you
• 1:05:25
  know near the end up to the top and use that as the hook and then i'm like okay actually that's
• 1:05:30
  actually good yeah the only challenge is if it does anything more than that then when it comes
• 1:05:34
  to time to actually write the sentence or the paragraph because i haven't done all the hard
• 1:05:39
  work of figuring out why that point is being made there in the first place i'm not as good at
• 1:05:45
  stringing the words together and landing the point because you sort of have to have yeah you're like
• 1:05:51
  you have to have run the marathon in order to be a good runner.
• 1:05:55
  Like, you can't do the shortcut.
• 1:05:57
  I think that's really true, you know?
• 1:06:00
  And I, look, I have like two teenage daughters
• 1:06:03
  and I worry about this kind of thing all the time
• 1:06:06
  because there's a lot of joy and fulfillment
• 1:06:12
  that has come in my own life
• 1:06:14
  from working through those hard things
• 1:06:17
  to get to something that feels like I achieved it
• 1:06:20
  It's my own thought that I'm able to express myself in a way that gets across what I'm trying to say.
• 1:06:28
  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.
• 1:06:46
  Um, and, and I don't know, maybe they'll, maybe they will just be different humans, you know, like 200 years from now.
• 1:06:53
  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.
• 1:07:06
  um but i don't know that if you if you take out the work part of it if you take out the effort
• 1:07:12
  um if you're not robbing yourself of the thing the most valuable thing i mean my hope gal would
• 1:07:19
  be that the effort and work just escalates to a higher tier of uh of project management while the
• 1:07:27
  ai like i think we're entering a period in which we're realizing that the social media experiment
• 1:07:34
  or the algorithmic media experiment was a disaster.
• 1:07:37
  And so probably the next 10 or 20 years in terms of algorithms
• 1:07:41
  are going to look like us as a civilization and a culture
• 1:07:45
  trying to figure out how to undo what the past 15 to 20 years have done.
• 1:07:50
  And I hope that that will be a lesson somewhat for AI,
• 1:07:54
  that we will also in 30 years have a way of using it
• 1:07:59
  that is not just me punching in what the roast should be cooked at,
• 1:08:05
  but is me managing projects that AI agents can do,
• 1:08:11
  but me still bearing the hard mental work of figuring out
• 1:08:15
  what those projects look like and what I want to bring into the world.
• 1:08:19
  That would be my cautiously optimistic take.
• 1:08:24
  No, I think that there is something to that.
• 1:08:27
  I still worry a bit.
• 1:08:28
  if we just look at our own trajectories and our careers and how some of the things that you had
• 1:08:33
  to do early in your career that felt sort of grunt work and brainless to some extent was teaching you
• 1:08:43
  you know and allow you to build the confidence to do the higher level
• 1:08:48
  decision making and skills you know so like i don't know means to have like a shortcut to that
• 1:08:55
  Right.
• 1:08:55
  Yes.
• 1:08:56
  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?
• 1:09:03
  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.
• 1:09:09
  And it's, it's been formative for me to have to do it myself.
• 1:09:14
  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?
• 1:09:32
  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.
• 1:09:55
  Because we do have some control, like we have control over our own lives and decisions that we make.
• 1:10:02
  Um, uh, even when it's hard, you know, to say, okay, maybe I'm not going to use, maybe
• 1:10:07
  as a writer, I'm not, I'm going to put a wall around sort of what I'm willing to let AI
• 1:10:13
  do for me because, because that is my way of my own, you know, I wouldn't call it dissidence
• 1:10:20
  necessarily, but it's along the lines of saying, it's defiant.
• 1:10:23
  How is this useful to me and how is it?
• 1:10:26
  Yeah.
• 1:10:26
  And if it's not, if it's not useful to me, if it's something that feels like it's going
• 1:10:30
  to hurt or erode something that I care about, I'm going to put a line there.
• 1:10:35
  And I don't know,
• 1:10:37
  I don't know how long that line will stand, you know, how long I'll be able to like resist.
• 1:10:44
  But, but being aware of it and actually making a deliberate effort to draw that line
• 1:10:51
  is the thing that I just want.
• 1:10:53
  I think people could use more of that.
• 1:10:56
  Yeah, I think it's a good instinct.
• 1:10:57
  And I think what your book made me think about and what Hannah
• 1:11:00
  Arendt's line about can I live with, I mean, can I live with myself is an overly high stakes way
• 1:11:06
  of thinking about it when we're talking about something as prosaic and quotidian as like,
• 1:11:10
  you know, using my iPhone or not.
• 1:11:12
  But one way of thinking, one way of downgrading the same
• 1:11:17
  sentiment is just to say, is this who I am?
• 1:11:21
  Is this who I want to be?
• 1:11:22
  Is this who,
• 1:11:24
  if I were to take a 30,000 foot look at myself,
• 1:11:28
  I would be proud of doing, you know,
• 1:11:31
  like that's a simpler way, I think,
• 1:11:33
  to just catch ourselves and be like,
• 1:11:36
  will me in a week's time be glad that I did,
• 1:11:38
  that I behaved this way?
• 1:11:41
  And just the more we have that in our lives,
• 1:11:43
  it reminds me a little bit also,
• 1:11:44
  we didn't talk about Timothy Garton Ash,
• 1:11:46
  who's a great writer and Europe analyst,
• 1:11:49
  I suppose, who you quote as talking about,
• 1:11:52
  you know the the solution is to just behave as if you already lived in a free country if you don't
• 1:11:58
  live in a free country the solution is so yeah you can just behave as if you're free from algorithms
• 1:12:05
  and the behaving is the freedom it is and and i i want to say the important sort of spin i would
• 1:12:11
  put on it which made me feel better at the end of this writing working on this book was that
• 1:12:15
  at one level what you're describing it sounds like an incredible like burden an incredible
• 1:12:20
  responsibility.
• 1:12:21
  Like if you're going through your life and saying, well, I have to always be making
• 1:12:25
  these choices because I'm looking at myself from 30,000 feet up and sort of taking my moral
• 1:12:32
  temperature all the time, that feels burdensome.
• 1:12:36
  It feels heavy.
• 1:12:37
  But there's another way of looking
• 1:12:40
  at it, which is that it's an amazing opportunity.
• 1:12:42
  It's like an opportunity to sort of create your
• 1:12:44
  own life.
• 1:12:45
  You know, this is a very much a kind of an existentialist idea too, right?
• 1:12:49
  That I,
• 1:12:51
  and Jean-Paul Sartre, the French philosopher had a great thing where he said that, you know,
• 1:12:57
  actually moral choice is a creative act.
• 1:13:00
  You know, he sort of imagined each of us going through our
• 1:13:02
  life sort of painting a portrait with each of these choices that we make.
• 1:13:07
  Each of them being
• 1:13:08
  kind of like a brushstroke in a portrait that we're painting of ourselves, which I think is
• 1:13:11
  just a really beautiful and a different way of looking at it so that it's not that oh my god
• 1:13:16
  like every time i read the newspaper i have to kind of like engage in this burdensome you know
• 1:13:22
  way with what am i going to do it's oh i get a chance to do something um and to make my life
• 1:13:29
  to kind of give substance meaningful substance to my life you know i think i just like you're
• 1:13:35
  30 000 feet up like i've i've done the thought experiment like when i'm you know a very old man
• 1:13:41
  looking back at my life, like what are going to be the things that actually, what are going to be
• 1:13:44
  the moments that are going to actually make my life feel like it had meaning.
• 1:13:49
  And I I'm pretty
• 1:13:50
  sure that it will be the hard decisions.
• 1:13:52
  Like it will be those moments where I had to do it
• 1:13:56
  that felt like it maybe went against what everybody else thought I should do, but that felt
• 1:14:01
  right and consistent to me with who I was.
• 1:14:04
  And so, um, so, and, and what to be able to actually
• 1:14:08
  think about that as you're going through your life feels like a benefit, because you are creating it.
• 1:14:15
  It's a total flip of perspective as to whether you code it as an imposition or a form of
• 1:14:22
  liberation.
• 1:14:22
  I really do think there's something liberating about just going like, is this what
• 1:14:26
  I will have wanted to have done?
• 1:14:28
  And then I get a fresh perspective on exactly what I'm doing.
• 1:14:32
  Gal, it's a really thought-provoking book, a super thought-provoking conversation.
• 1:14:36
  congratulations on it keep dissenting and uh thanks for being on the show thank you so much
• 1:14:40
  it's a real pleasure