In our current moment of social media algorithms fomenting vitriol, performative outrage, political point-scoring, battles over “free speech,” dog-whistles, gaslighting, and cancel culture, it’s easy to conclude that the state of public discourse is at rock-bottom. It can feel hopeless, and that democracy is on the line.
In all that noise, how will we recover a sense of collective social trust? This episode’s interview with Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don’t Talk about Politics: How to Change the 21st-century Mind, explores how we got to this nadir of public discourse, and how we can fix it. Instead of trying to persuade others to have better ideas, we should focus more on taking actions that align with our ideas, and doing so in the company of others. Action over words, community over isolation. Take actions that build relationships and trust. That’s her evidence-based message in these bleak times for democracy. I found it hopeful, and I hope you do too.
Shownotes
- Sarah Stein Lubrano’s book and podcast
- Jenny Odell’s book, How to Do Nothing
- Not action, but collectivity, that assuages climate anxiety article
- “The Introvert’s Objection” by Lubrano, here
- Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone
Transcript:
LUBRANO: What it suggests is not being on the left fundamentally deems you to be unhappy and miserable and see oppression in everything. No, there is a way of being on the left that allows you to live a good and meaningful life, but only if you are actively trying to do something about the world.
RAY: And with people....
LUBRANO: ... People help a lot. Humans in general, the number one predictor of our happiness after a certain level of basic material comfort is other people.
RAY: Welcome to Climate Magic, where we talk about the relationship between climate change and our hearts and minds. I interview experts, activists, and random people as we dive deep into the emotional life of climate politics. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, a professor at Cal Poly Humboldt and fellow climate-despairing human. Today I'm speaking with Sarah Stein Lubrano.
I came across Sarah's work recently as she was interviewed on several podcasts and I was just blown away. I immediately ordered her book and then waited in agony for a delayed pub date in the US. I devoured the book when I got it and put her on my schedule. I had to talk to her.
Her book is provocatively called Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds. In it, she argues that talking about things discourse and debate, and sharing ideas doesn't actually change people's minds. As much as we'd like to think with metaphors, the marketplace of ideas, with things like political candidate debates, we're seeing people talk about ideas - it’s presumed to garner or repel votes. All of these things, turns out, are a waste of time for democracy.
How else, then, are we supposed to change people's minds about things like science, public health, the common good, climate change, war, justice, nature, parenting, just about anything else I care about? I will let Sarah explain. This is what her whole book is about.
If you're wondering how we can get past the terrifying impasse of polarization in this country, if you're heartbroken about the fractious state of public discourse these days, if you are over talking and thinking about politics, and you want to know what will actually move people to do better, then this is the episode for you.
Hold on to your hats and glasses, folks, because this conversation with Sarah will get you out of your seats. Let's dive in. Welcome to the show, Sarah.
LUBRANO: Thank you very much for having me.
RAY: Oh, one more question. You had a stint as an obituary writer. I got to ask. What did that teach you?
LUBRANO: Oh, gosh. It was a particularly weird job because it was the job I had after I did a master's degree, which was a mess, by the way, because my department had a lot of issues which they have not yet resolved. And I actually quit that department and left academia for years. And I didn't know what to do with my life. I just applied to loads of jobs randomly, and they were all part time because it was the beginning of the precariat.
And I had a job as an obituary writer for alumni of King's College, Cambridge. And I also had this weird job about essays for this, strange organization I never heard of. I had a YouTube channel that turned out to be the School of Life.
And that was a weird summer. I also moved to Berlin and I learned some German. I wrote a motorbike for the first time and it was great. I had a German boyfriend and we broke up immediately. it was one of those 23 year old summers.
And when I was an obituary writer, it's the most obvious thing to say, but first of all, it's a mental memory because not that many things make it into your obituary. Most of the stuff you do is not going to be there. And a lot of the stuff that you worry about day to day is irrelevant. But I sorry, I really hate to quote David Brooks in a context that's not making fun of how he had to interview Steve Bannon. But he's There are obituary virtues and there are career virtues, CV virtues, resume virtues. And honestly the obituary virtues matter more. There was a lot of thinking that oh, this poor guy's life boils down to a couple of relationships, maybe one job, by the way, they're all men. Because of course, because the people that died that went to King's College, Cambridge, were all men until very recently. There is a perspective granting there. And then I think the other thing is because the people that were dying at the time were my grandpa's age, they had all been they're all basically served in World War Two, and they had lived through these profound, massive historical changes and I think something else I thought about a lot is just how political their lives were and what a fantasy it is that our lives are not going to be incredibly political.
Man, what a fantasy it is to live an apolitical life. There's no such thing and there could never be. And the idea that there could be is wild.
RAY: I love that. There's places in your book where you talk about this fantasy that we’re apolitical, and the drive to not pay attention to politics is happening. And this self-care, turning into being apolitical. It's just now one step. It's not even multiple steps. You talk about that in your book, too. It's that we're deeply, deeply political, whether we want to or not.
And even our gestures to tune out are political, are themselves are political, always already. It's amazing that you learn that from your obituary pieces. Did you love your people? Did you feel sad? Did you have some grief about it?
LUBRANO: No. But I try for a moment whenever you, unless someone's a fascist or something, I try to think about them seriously, I would say that way. And then do you do?
Because people, especially when people would send me all these different little documents or give me the artifacts of their life, and they'd be a little something from their wife and from their kids and their grandkids. And then there'd be maybe a statement from a colleague and there'd be some strange record of their career, you piecing together a person. It's very much being an historian. And they were quite thorough.
There was an obituarist for the college. And he collected all of this stuff when someone died. They're very serious about it, I assume, because it gives them money.
RAY: It's an archive too. It's beautiful.
LUBRANO: And they get the I think they use the obituary to get donations after the person's death. It's paid-for history work in a strange way.
RAY: Interesting. I thought I'd open with a zinger that one, just to see how the obituary writing shaped you. Because that's in your bio. And I keep saying, oh, that's neat. I wonder what she thinks about that. Now tell us about your wonderful book. This book is called Don't Talk About Politics.
What's the arc of it? What are you trying to do? What's the gap that you're trying to fill?
LUBRANO: Great. Yes. Perfect question. This is a book about why liberalism and this in the big broad sense, by the way. I don't mean the left half of the American political spectrum.
LUBRANO: The liberals, the libs that we own or whatever. We write for guys on the internet. No, in the sense of the tradition stemming from the enlightenment in Europe, very roughly, that has lasted and built upon itself for many centuries. Now, that tradition, liberalism, which focuses on a number of things, including individual rights, protections from the state, protection from religious groups.
I like those things, by the way, but also an emphasis on private property. I do not like that thing, and some others. That political tradition has both fundamental problems and contradictions and also a huge amount of cultural baggage. Now, that probably sounds really dry. Let me zoom out and think about it. For a person who doesn't care about political theory, we live in a culture where the basic fundamental underlying philosophy that most people have, even if they don't realize it when it comes to politics, is politics is the thing that you talk about a lot for a bit.
Maybe if you're interested in politics and otherwise you ignore and then everyone votes and then that's the best outcome. And that's how politics works. That's what politics is. Except lately there have been really weird, massive wildfires. And, a reality star is president. And maybe he is not great.
And also, I think there's some things that need taking apart there. And in my book, I go through a couple of questions about, oh, let's look at this fundamental theory which comes from liberalism, by the way, because various aspects of it are very liberal. The individualism of it, the idea that you think on your own by yourself, and that's how you get to the best political ideas, the idea that voting equals democracy, that's a very liberal intuition, because it doesn't have a material underpinning that you actually need. And also part of the cultural baggage of liberalism, in particular the idea that there's going to be this beautiful public sphere where we all discuss things together, there's a marketplace of ideas and notice it's a marketplace where there are commodities traded, just as in capitalism and justice and perfect capitalism, the best commodities are going to win the marketplace with the invisible hand.
And if you just say the ideas enough, then the ideas will be chosen, because that's how brains work?
RAY: Like evolution. It's the survival of the fittest or something, may the best idea win.
LUBRANO: And now, as Trump would put it, we have all the best guys we must have. Everything must be great. If you do not feel everything is great, it might be time to revise this theory. And I spend about two chapters looking at the data.
Then I switch over to social science mode rather than political theory mode. And we look at data for do people change their minds when they are exposed to new and different ideas? And the answer is absolutely not. No.
Especially when it comes to politics most of all, or anything that affects their sense of self or them, their sense of themselves as good people or people with agency. The last bit, roughly that people really do think about themselves is, if a bad thing has happened, they love to think about themselves as not culpable for it. And if a good thing has happened, they're yes, I have a lot of agency and I help that. Yes. When that gets challenged, we're very bad at changing our minds.
And I basically slowly take apart the idea that we could even have a marketplace of ideas, because actually, the most fundamental political ideas are not things we could hold in our hand after we purchase, after making some abstract, good decision. Big political ideas have us. The big political ideas in my life have me more than I have them. Feminism has me. It has made me the person I am. It has all of my sensibilities baked into it and vice versa. ? That's a myth. Once you take apart the myth of the marketplace of ideas and the myth that debate is how politics works. There's obviously a really important question which is, if it's not debate, it's not a marketplace of ideas.
Is there anything left for the concept of democracy? Let's say, and if what is it? What is there that could allow us to move through the world in a way where we encounter new ideas and are changed by them for the better, and then do better by each other? Let's put it that way.
RAY: Let's start. Let's find something to hang on to here. We'll have to. We have to be able to do something.
LUBRANO: I said, I'm very sanguine in the pre shot. I, I we're certainly in a bad place but there are many things that change our mind and some of them even change our mind for the better. And I then suggest there are two in particular that if you care about politics, you should care about perhaps the most, and certainly very much. And those two things, this is physically change our minds a lot, our own actions and experiences in the world and our relationships with other people.
And if our relationships with other people change, then our political ideas change. And then I spend two entire chapters talking about this and showing lots of data for it. if you have a big experience, if you experience a bad climate event, if you have an abortion, if you move states, all kinds of big life events change your politics very much, not always in the ways you'd expect, by the way. For example, getting turned away for an abortion you want actually makes you approve of abortion less. And your relationships change your politics very much. Fundamentally, one of the most important things they do is they seem to reduce prejudice against outsiders. if you have the friends and you're exposed to them in a way where you are positioned as equals, that seems to make you a lot less prejudiced.
Our friends are incredibly important for our politics. I'm fascinated by this data all the time. Really interested in it. It seems that our friends in particular do something for our politics that other people, including people on the internet, cannot.
They humanize others for us. And one of the bits of data that I love the most on this is that, if you make a friend a meaningful relationship of equals, we really get to know each other with someone who's in an outsider group. Let's say you're, I don't know, Islamophobic. And then you make friends with a Muslim person and now you're good friends. You become less Islamophobic. That's not that surprising. There are some very specific conditions that have to be met for you to do it in a way that reduces your prejudice, because otherwise you can say, oh, he's all but the rest of them are bad. But there are some conditions, and if they're met, you will probably become less, less prejudiced.
But also if you become friends with just some nice white dude and he becomes your friend, but he has a friend who's a Muslim, you also become less prejudiced and then almost as strong, but again, only within certain conditions where equality is happening, long form conversations are happening. You have shared goals with other people. These are some pretty profound underpinnings.
And I think about that as what democracy is more fundamentally that a lot of the other sanctions we mentioned earlier, it's about people being positioned as equals, seeing themselves as having shared goals, caring about each other, basically having very long form conversations. And that requires some very specific material set up, by the way, that we see increasingly less of, both in terms of infrastructure and material quality and then obviously, you need to be able to have interesting, life changing experiences that change how you see the world. And one of the reasons, implicitly, that I wrote this book is that I feel very lucky to have done that. I got to teach in prisons.
I got to teach in prisons. It was a privilege. It was a learning experience. I got to move to many other countries where I saw that it is fundamentally possible to live your life a lot of different ways.
I got to study history. That was very powerful for me. Most people are not getting all of the experiences that would necessarily benefit them. Anyway, we can do a democracy, but it requires a bunch of material stuff we often don't have. It requires different kinds of relationships compared to what people have.
And then I look at the crisis. How did we get here? And we are living in a world where people have fewer and fewer of the important kinds of relationships and fewer interior spaces to make and maintain those relationships where our brains are actually changing and shrinking because of our lack of social interaction with one another, and we are lacking the skills we might need to have these kinds of important relationships of equals, which is very dangerous and super convenient for people in power.
RAY: Important point. Yes. Very important.
LUBRANO: And also we're just more broadly not having a lot of big life experiences that would probably help us think about politics differently and better.
RAY: I want to get to the social infrastructure that is required for all of this because you have some beautiful chapters on, and I think that's where you're also going in your next book. But what I think is provocative about everything you said, is that you've asked your readers to reverse the cause and effect of these things. For example, I come to thinking about beliefs. I teach Donella Meadows systems theory with the iceberg principle. Where at the base of the iceberg, the concept being just for listeners who might not be familiar, is that, Donella Meadows is a systems economist theorist who basically says that there's stuff that's on the top of the water that you can see that are expressions of deeper, deeper, deeper values and systems. And the deeper you go, the greatest bang for buck, you have to make change in a system. And the bottom of that, the root, bottom of that for her is mindsets and beliefs. The mindsets and beliefs are the things that generate the soil from which systems grow.
The soil from which economic incentive structures grow, the soil from which educational ideas of how people learn and parents and whatever grow. And then those things become systems and structures and policies and whatnot. That there's a root of ideas, comes all this stuff. And I think for me, it's the cause and effect thing, change is where we should spend our attention a little bit. For example, you argue that action begets thought much more than we usually think.
We actually think the opposite– the belief or ideas or at the root of our actions. They cause the actions. This leads us to the faulty idea that we need to change people's thoughts if we want to change their actions. And in your book you say, no, that's not the way it works.
And I just love, this: no, your action actually generates this thought. Doing things that are outside your comfort zone or this to use nudge theory in a way. if you do a little thing that's different and new, it's actually likely to, you say, about showing up to a protest or act was likely to change you more than it changes the movement. It's likely to change your mind more than it changes actual politics. You're an expert on cognitive dissonance, and you've been playing around the edges of it while you've been talking, and cognitive dissonance explains the amount of people that come to talk to me about what's what they're angry about. And I'm sure you too, is that why aren't people acting in their own good interests?
Why, if everybody knew the science, then why can't they act in the interest of the facts? Because cognitive dissonance. What is it and how does it help us maybe explain and maybe even be compassionate for people doing things that are not? they don't feel they're in service to the earth or to justice or any of the things that we might love or care about.
STEIN LUBRANO: Great. Yes. First of all, I just want to say it is an overdetermined problem, to use a really crunchy social science word. Some things in our lives there's many causes that all push us in the same direction that even if one cause was removed, the rest would make that happen in that way. And I think there are many causes for the way that people often support systems that are not in their best interests. Dissonance theory is a good one, and it's also highly useful in explaining why it's fruitless to argue with people.
RAY: Listeners, I'm sure, will say, yes, that makes sense.
LUBRANO: Dissonance theory is actually something that was developed on the back of work psychologists did understanding people in cults because, and they started the cult that was an alien cult. The people in the 1950s believed that the aliens would arrive on Christmas Day and they would take everyone away in their magical spaceships, and then the rest of the Earth would be flooded, and that would be the end of humanity. And as you may know, the world did not end in 1954. And obviously, the people in the cult had to come up with a new explanation for how the world works.
And some of those people experienced most pretty clearly some intense discomfort about the fact that the aliens hadn't arrived. And then some of them left the cult. Some of them said, this is too much. I don't know what's happened, but I'm done with this. These are people who had given up profound amounts of stuff. They had often left their spouses wild for this cult. They had given up their physical belongings. They were absolutely prepared to be taken away by aliens and spaceships. And some of them left, but a lot of them didn't.
And those are the people psychologists are interested in. What happened for those people is they found a new rationalization for their continued participation in the cult. And they said, we have been good at being in this cult that the aliens have spared the Earth, which makes us incredibly virtuous. And it also means the aliens are incredibly real and we need to go and proselytize and get more people to join this cult.
And this began to be the beginning of a very long set of research about why do people behave like this? And usually it's not about an alien cult. Usually it's about a religious or political system that is actually harming you in various ways, but you continue to justify your participation in it. And the theory was developed, which I find fairly persuasive for many cases, although a limited set but very persuasive within that limited set of cases is that we experience dissonance when we notice a contradiction between two or more of our own beliefs or actions.
We might not notice it consciously, but we will notice it unconsciously, and we will be working behind the scenes, to speak, in our brain, to try to reduce that dissonance, that space, that gap, that contradiction in as much as we can. We can go back to feeling comfortable. And the people in the alien cult said, I've clearly given up all of this stuff. My spouse, my job, my this, my that and the aliens aren't here. And some of them said if I but some of them said, oh, I can continue to be involved in this cult and have all my friends in this cult and do this weird cult activity, as long as I just believe the alien spirit is all great, I'll go with that rationalization.
And people behave the same way in all corners of the political spectrum. Then they find contradictions in their worldview, including I do this too and then they rationalize them away. And I think on a much more banal level, most of us living through the climate crisis are doing this all the time. I'm getting on a plane tomorrow. That is a mistake in many respects, but I want to go promote my book and see my grandmother, who's 89, and here I go. And I have found all kinds of creative things to say to myself about how the plane would take off anyway, in my grandmother's old and this book is important and blah blah blah blah blah. But everyone I know who flies on planes does this because it's uncomfortable to bear the dissonance between our beliefs and our actions, our beliefs and our actions, our beliefs and other beliefs. What's particularly interesting is that people appear to be able to do this about entire systems. That's what system justification theory is.
It was built by psychologists who looked at some of the data on what people believe about the political or economic system as a whole, and they noticed that groups of people that were otherwise fairly comparable, we just changed one variable, and one group was a bit more oppressed. The more oppressed people would often believe more strongly that the system was either good or necessary. I'm a privileged white lady. There are problems in my life.
They are not as political as some other people's problems in certain respects. My actions are not necessarily that much in contradiction. I don't have to spend hours and hours and hours doing backbreaking labor for a person who's mean to me. Therefore, I might not also need to spend a lot of time trying to rationalize that because I actually enjoy the life I have. Most of this.
RAY: Alignment between your daily life, my life, is somewhat aligned.
LUBRANO: And there are, of course, inherently contradictions in the system, as the Marxists say. But I might not have as much discomfort about how terrible this is for me and what I'm supposed to believe, and therefore it might also not apply as much work to try to move my beliefs towards the actions I have to engage in day to day.
RAY: I might have some.
LUBRANO: Of that dissonance and say, yes, the system is really bad.
RAY: I accept the dissonance that I have, that pain is not bad.
LUBRANO: I can see this in hustle culture all the time. People will say but I'm just gotta grind harder and then I'm going to.
RAY: And the thing is, for example, feeling yourself as a good person, feeling you're not threatening your social standing with people, feeling that it doesn't challenge your efficacy or your agency. These are the big things you write about in your book – the desires to keep those feelings intact are going to override all kinds of other rationality reasons, facts that are given to you. If it's, for example, you're a potato farmer in Idaho, let's just use this example, you're more likely, even if you're experiencing terrible effects of climate change, if it affects your agency, if it affects your social inclusion in a group, your sense of belonging, or if it affects your sense of being a good farmer, it's going to be very difficult for you to start to get politicized, organize around figuring out how to stop climate change or becoming resilient. Although these things are happening and of course there are exceptions to this rule, but just to play around with, how do we understand how someone can operate in and one truth and believe or think our acts in ways that are it seem completely contradictory to that? Thank you for that explaining of cognitive dissonance and how it might lead to things where people are scratching their heads about all over the place now. And also some maybe some compassion too. I, for me, when I think about cognitive dissonance, it gives me compassion for myself. And it gives me a lot of compassion for other people’s, what I would call, craziness as, beautiful.
I want to dig into your chapter on how social media is designed to destroy these kinds of communication that might actually work to change our minds. In an ideal universe where the marketplace of ideas and thoughts and ideas and discourse and debate would actually change people's minds, what you're saying is not really what work is at work, which is great, but pretend it were the social media, that landscape that we live in now certainly makes it totally impossible. I don't want to talk about totalities with you because you'll find an exception, I'm sure. But in general, social media is challenging.
That's even more, how is it you have this great chapter on Twitter and the algorithms and the social media landscape and pull the curtain back a little bit and share with us how social media exploits these things in us.
LUBRANO: Good. Let's have that meme where there's the brain and then the bigger brain and then the galaxy brain and then we're going to do each step of the thing. Starting at the most basic level, many of us have been on Twitter. And it is really unpleasant now if you've been on Twitter. But we don't necessarily see all of the bits that went into that. And in the chapter, I go through some of the stuff that happened when Musk bought Twitter and in particular, he became far more radicalized in a more obvious way over a couple of years.
And when he took over Twitter, this became apparent in the way that he billionaire-emperored it. And one of the stories I tell in the chapter is about how there was the Super Bowl, which hopefully I don't going to explain to the Americans what that is, but it's a very silly sports ball event that happens in America. Everyone watches it. And, Joe Biden did a tweet about it, I guess, saying whatever men say about football.
And then Elon Musk did a tweet about it, and then Joe Biden tweeted better. And this made Elon Musk mad because I guess this is what he worries about. He apparently called the 2 a. m. meeting about Twitter engineers, plus anyone who could code at Twitter. Something that. we ours to re-engineer for the the algorithm that his tweets would do better.
RAY: No matter what, no matter what was in them?
LUBRANO: Pretty much. What you could do with an algorithm, sure. And pretty quickly, his tweets are now 1000 times more viewed, more viewed than they would be otherwise, basically. And if you open Twitter and you notice it it's just Elon Musk all the time. That's because he has engineered the algorithm that way.
And it's being stuck with the most terrible person at the party all the time. He's in the room. You can't leave for some reason. You're just out of the party.
And it's not a great party anymore. Let's stop and look the basic, little brain reaction here. What to say? Oh, Elon Musk bad. Yes, Elon Musk bad.
But also to zoom out Twitter bad. And always has been bad in certain respects. And I know this is hard because many people, myself included, I found my agent through Twitter. I did tweet a lot.
I had an ongoing sense of vague competitiveness of can I have a funny tweet? Can I have a clever tweet, blah. Blah, blah.
RAY: And not to mention that's where I was getting a lot of my community for my research.
LUBRANO: Yes, absolutely. There are many interesting, fascinating things happening on Twitter, especially for minority communities, interestingly. But for everyone, one great time on Twitter. And they were making some social connections, which is an interesting question about what happened to those connections.
But anyway, but also, even before Musk, Twitter had many issues. Some of the issues were that, to just wander off in the software world for a moment. All of the great features were designed by the users. And all of the success of Twitter, happened by accident, despite the best intentions of those running it.
And it was never very profitable. Wow. And all these backend issues, the code apparently, and the government kept worrying because big parts of it could be lickable. And there was all of these issues before, just not as obviously.
And and those are baked in. And one of the most important, though, to, to put on my Marxist sociology hat is that we didn't own Twitter. We felt we on Twitter, many of us I, I'm going to include myself in this way and constructor we of people who used to enjoy Twitter.
But we didn't own it. It wasn't ours. It was owned by a bunch of guys that had a lot of capital and they could do whatever they want with it. And we all discovered that the hard way.
When one day Elon Musk rocked up, almost tried to pull out of buying it, but bought it in the end and then ran it into the ground in many respects, but especially into a world that is far, more far than we could have imagined at the time. Look, this is a great metaphor and also a literal example of how if you don't own the public sphere, if it isn't actually public, then it is certainly not going to be any form of democracy at all. And it was a fire.
RAY: The second thing you argue in your book that changes minds better than arguing or talking is your affective or social context, which you call thinking with your friends. You. Researchers studying how to get people to shift their climate friendly behaviors, such as cycling or installing a heat pump, found that social influence from friends had a greater effect on the decisions that than education, or commitment appeals, or even financial incentives. In fact, studies show that the best predictor of whether someone joins a cause is whether their friends do. This is a great quote from your book that summarizes that thinking with your friends and over discourse. Let's now stop talking about it. Let's start doing something with our friends.
What's going on here? What can we learn from this?
LUBRANO: First of all, I want to say that when people hear that quote, I noticed some of them get very anxious and they think, oh no, our friends are brainwashing us. And I understand that anxiety. And I think there's some good evidence that that's not what's happening. First of all, obviously we pick our friends often based on their political beliefs. When people are incentivized by their friends to go do a thing, it's usually a thing they want to do anyway in the abstract, but they don't want to in the specifics of it sometimes.
Secondly, we do have evidence that when people actually disagree on political beliefs, but our friends, they do not usually bring each other around unless it's a prejudice issue. if they just think, oh, all people of this type are bad, you can break people out on that. But if you have a conservative person, then a liberal person and they become friends, interestingly, it makes them both more interested in politics. But it doesn't necessarily bring the person around. It's not that our friends are brainwashing us ,what they are doing, and I think this is absolutely fascinating and lovely is they're making politics more salient for each other, and they're making certain political issues more salient for the other person. I doo think about it as this: these are your windows into the world. Your friends are because you're only having one human experience, but your friends are all the other human experiences. And to be honest and, for better and worse, we can only realistically care about some things. I, in theory, care about lots of big world events because I'm supposed to. And I've read about them in the Guardian. But in reality I care about things, what is for lunch? And is my partner annoyed with me, or were they just bored when they texted me this thing? We call this the affective context of the user. It's the things they actually care about, not the things they pretend to care about. The things they are currently worried about, that you could probably get them to click a button about.
And our friends appear to extend that area for us and, and give us an insight into that area that we couldn't get before. They're not brainwashing us. They're doing something else. And that's great because we need our friends to extend our thinking.
And you just cannot put it fascinatingly. There are things you cannot pay people enough money to do. you, they kept trying to do all these, financial incentives, install a heat pump. People are not really interested. Your friend installed the heat pump. Great. Off you go to install a heat pump.
RAY: Yes, I just think, this is one of the insights about what actually makes people change their behaviors. Which leads me to another question, which is, your book, your subtitle, your book is How to Change the 21st century minds. By the time I finished your book, I thought, did she mean minds? Is changing the minds what she's talking about doing?
Or is it changing behavior? If we took all your tools seriously, what are we changing here?
LUBRANO: I didn't choose my subtitle. I wanted my book to be called Don't Talk About Politics and What to Do Instead, which is perfectly emblematic of what I think this book is.
RAY: Yes, that there's the word do in there.
LUBRANO: Publishing is an industry. You don't even get to change cuz the first part of your title. But I happened to propose it and they liked it.
RAY: Is a great title, I should say. That's what made me want to pick it up.
LUBRANO: Look, I could bore you with this stuff, but basically you have to use particular signifiers to indicate to people if you like books by Steven Pinker, you might like this book. And one of those words is words is Minds. And the other one is Change Minds. And they came up with a subtitle for me.
RAY: And here's what's great, but I'm curious. I'm just curious, if you do, you see there to be a miscalculation there in terms of that? I'm just curious.
LUBRANO: Do. And here's what I would say. And I think this actually relates to a question that, I was discussing earlier today with someone. Someone came to me, lovely person, really interested in their work. In no way is a donc on them.
I'm very excited for them. But they said I want to build a left wing online social media channel. Then we sat down for an hour and we thought about, cool, what would this mean? ? And there are many. I'm a content strategist by profession as well as a learning designer. I could tell them all the stuff, you could prototype this and you could try that and you could figure out this funding model and you could do it went on and on.
But then we also had to sit back and say, what's the plan here? What is this for?
RAY: And how are you doing it?
LUBRANO: What is it for? What the question is what is this for? And because when people consume media content, they do not generally change their minds, as we have already said. either you are motivating people that are already agree with you, or you are maybe training them in skills. If you're incredibly lucky and good at that specific thing, maybe.
Or you are, I don't know, having fun and making money, which honestly, number three is fine. It's an set of goals to a degree. But do you want to actually change something about what people are up to? And then this lovely person said, actually I want to change what people are up to. I said, cool, maybe you should organize instead of creative online social media channels, because the online social media channels probably not do that much in other respects unless you have some other complicated theory of change. For example, to be completely straightforward, I have been growing my Instagram following massively in the last two months, and I really encourage anyone to follow me, but I have a very specific theory of change. I'm not there. I might occasionally make a silly video about my cats, but that's going to be a quite rare. What the channel is for is very specific.
It is an educational show, and l show you and teach you skills. There will be skills, you will learn skills. Maybe on a good day, you'll also learn some cool, interesting facts and stuff, that those skills are about beating social atrophy, which is a big problem in our society. And organizing.
Then my current theory to be completely straightforward is that I believe we are going to experience a series of very significant crises wherever we live in the world in the next 5 to 20 years, maybe sooner. And we're going to need people that have those skills, and I will help you find a place to use those skills. I will keep you entertained along the way. And sometimes I'll make weird jokes and I will do silly sketches.
But mostly I will ask you to learn these skills and then find a place in your community and use them. And that is my theory of change for my media channel. And it may or may not work, but most people are not thinking about things that way. And that's a very different thing than persuasion, which is what most people think media channels are for.
RAY: Yes. Yep, absolutely. And there's an information provision thing that's happening there that has to do with everything that you're the space of your research. All of your research is based on the conclusion that the social infrastructure, which is a thing I'm going to get to in a minute, the social infrastructure for creating the conditions for exactly all these things that your research shows need to happen, is in fact, a prerequisite. We don't have that we have actually been to, your example of Twitter giving us an example of that. We've been actually deprived of that for some time, systematically and deliberately to take away the power of the people, and to make democracy to, to basically hollow out democracy.
I want to talk about that, but you're but to me, that makes sense. It's not just a persuasion thing. It's, you've bought into my arguments about social infrastructure being essential. Now you want to know what to do with it?
Come to my Instagram for those text tricks and.
LUBRANO: And then go build out infrastructure and maybe join an organization that isn't a cult, but is effective and use these skills and great news at the end of it, you will be happier, I promise. You will find more meaning in your life, which is a real pitch for most things. But you'll also be better off because we have lots of research that people that do activism are happier. Let's go.
RAY: Do, I have a question about that I want to ask you about the happiness thing, too. Here it is. This is the question I want to ask you. You write about action-possibilities. This is a word I think you made up with a hyphen between these two words.
Action. Hyphen. Possibilities. I like this.
LUBRANO: Not a good word for this in the English language. I know every academic word is affordances, and no one wants that.
RAY: I am actually really loving this word. It's rattling around in my head ever since I read your book. It's it is really alive for me. This is one of my favorite parts of the book I write in my question for you, you've got this quote.
“Thinking that the world is on fire makes you a lot less psychologically but thinking that the world is on fire and that you can do something about it with other people, makes things bearable, even inspiring and meaningful.”
And I guess I wanted to ask, maybe this will lead you to your happiness stuff. I guess I'll be up, make you happy.
Can you talk about what this important cocktail of self-efficacy, social connection and action possibility? Why it matters much?
LUBRANO: Yes, absolutely. I also have a viral video about this, and obviously it's a minute and a half long ago, and then I get all this feedback on it, and I'm going to, I'm going to do the spiel again in a way. But, we get to look at in a little bit more detail. There are multiple ways to measure happiness, and they're all difficult and imperfect. ?
There's are you feeling happy today, Sarah? And that might be because you had really great breakfast. That might be the pleasure meaning. I might also ask you, are you happy in your life?
And then you're probably going to give me more or less a meaning based thing, which is about, is this the good life? Is this the life I should be living? Am I satisfied with how things have gone? Which is largely a meaning perspective? ?
And then there are also all these, third, third measurements that we use to track, how self-aware is this person? Could they possibly be happy? And that has to do with things is the person sleeping? Did the person have a mental breakdown and try to commit suicide?
Is the person doing friendships there's all these other things you can try to track alongside this to see if the person is telling the truth. As much as there's a single truth about happiness.
RAY: Self reflexivity, checking the self reflexivity issue.
LUBRANO: And most of this is self-reported, but not all of it. It's not just a self-reporting because it's more complicated, because you can see this in many different ways.
RAY: Interesting.
LUBRANO: Is really just it's imperfect. It's totally imperfect. But here's why it matters. Because in general, centrist and wing critics tend to point out that left wing people are more than happy.
They have many more mental health problems, not just diagnoses, but probably actually they have more mental health problems in certain respects. They have many more relationship fractures. That's complicated. There's a lot of things going on where you can more or less estimate that left wing people. And I am very left wing, by the way, are not doing good.
They're, they're more unhappy. And the argument has often been from the these people are dysfunctional. This is not a good way to be a person. And I understand why. And I don't even think it's a relevant consideration.
Maybe if you look at everything, the argument has often gone. If you look at everything through the lens of oppression, that's a bad way to see the world, and you're just going to see oppression everywhere. You're going to be miserable all the time. And it turns out that they're Unless you also think you can do something about that oppression.
Because if you go back and you look at the data on UN activism in particular, somebody who feels they're going out and they're trying to change the world, those people are way happier than people that have the same political beliefs but aren't doing that activism. They are particularly interestingly happy and find meaning, especially if they say, I went out. I screwed up their plans. My opponents, they're doing great.
But even if they're doing other stuff and this matters because what it suggests is not being on the left fundamentally deems you to be unhappy and miserable and see the oppression and everything there. Some people may have that problem, that's more complicated, but they know there is a way of being on the left in the broad sense and in the narrow sense and whatever that allows you to live a good and meaningful life, but only if you are actively trying to do something about the world and with people.
RAY: People help.
LUBRANO: People help a lot. Humans in general. The number one predictor of our happiness after a certain level of basic material comfort is other people. Number one predictor of a happy, meaningful life is are you with other people? And do you have good strong relationships with them?
Number one, and we're very bad at figuring that out for ourselves and getting it which is an interesting human problem to have. But does it matter even further? The other reason this matters is almost philosophical, sorry to opine in a very serious way about this. But now, the capitalist system we live in, and also the behavior psychology that is designed the platforms for us and everything assumes that we are primarily incentivized by rewards and punishments, by attention alone and money, obviously, and these other rewards and then punishments and the meaning, the evidence that meaning profoundly transforms our life and relationships, profoundly transforms our life, suggests something else. It says, yes, there is this behaviorist bit of us. We are motivated by material stuff. We are motivated by rewards and punishments and dopamine bursts and likes and whatever.
And we are, I don't know, disincentivize by angry trolls in the internet who tell me I'm a hairy lesbian or whatever, but but they're also we are also driven by meaning in a way that might be far more profound and important and allow us to live the good life even in the apocalypse, which is really, really important. That means that if you are broadly speaking, or narrowly speaking on the left and you are feeling unhappy, it's probably not that you need to disengage from politics and go I don't know, touch grass and have a barbecue. you need to go touch grass and then take over the local school district, and then you will do fine. And I really, really believe that. it's I love it in the book. I can give you all the data in the world about your nice thing, about why you shouldn't argue with your uncle, but the other thing is, you should just do some stuff and you will think better and you will be happier.
RAY: I love it, I love it, I love it because I, I'm trying to find I keep thinking there's much language around climate anxiety, which is my area of expertise and you can assuage anxiety with action and you are not not saying that you are saying yes action to go do something. But in fact when they disaggregate in those studies and I can't remember the exact study, I will try to find it and put it in my show notes to you. But when they disaggregate and they think about what is the actual thing that made the person feel less anxious, it's not the action, it is the being in a collective part. It's the weird, messy combination of those two things. But I think the action of being in a collective that should be counted as an action in this broader idea of we don't we usually think of actions as changing everybody's use of straws or whatever.
It is taking over your local school district, you said. There are those kinds of actions that count as political actions. And then there's a maybe what would be called softer, which I would not use that word, but more maybe caregiving actions. And I love the work of Jenny Odell in her work, she talks about maintenance as an action. We never think of as maintenance is unromantic and unflashy, there's less flashy ideas of action, of caregiving and that thing that may be actually not just, prerequisites for the kinds of change we need to see the social infrastructure which I'll get to.
I'm getting to that question next. For what we need to do, but also the end in itself, because it assuages our anxiety. Because it gives us that sense of meaning and some mental health. Anyway, I love that. To that question, I keep saying I'm going to ask you about social infrastructure and social atrophy.
And then I have that one plus one more and then I can let you go. Great. Give me the social infrastructure one. You're going to write about social atrophy coming up. I'll talk a little bit about in your book about of course, Robert Putnam's famous book Bowling Alone and how people have been declaring a crisis in social trust and social capital for some time. What is it that you're saying a little bit instead?
Yes. And go.
LUBRANO: It's the Putnam. If you watch latest documentary about Robert Putnam, he cries. He is caring and thoughtful and hardworking and likes graphs. And, I'm not here to make you hate Robert Putnam.
RAY: No, no, no. Of course. Yes. And yes.
And that's why I said yes, and.
STEINLUBRANO: Yes, and, but and Robert Putnam's basic model from his very important and groundbreaking work in sociology slash political science, I say he's a political scientist. I think there's some sociology baked in here, but it doesn't really matter is that it really matters for democracy, how much people have strong social relationships of a particular kind. And these social relationships are what we might call weak ties in sociology.
Those are people that are maybe not your best friends. They're not within the realm of the private in a way, for you. But they are your friends of friends, or your acquaintances. Friends, your mom, friends that are not your deepest mom friends or whatever.
There's these important people that are not your absolutely closest people. And he's also very interested in associations. Honestly, much more interesting associations than I am, but that might just be a personal preference. He loved clubs, and he talks about clubs all the time. And why are people not in bowling clubs where they bowling alone when they could be in the club bowling much better anyway?
But that's it. Those, those ties are very important. They're actually important for reasons outside of any obvious democratic thing. They're the people who help you get jobs. It turns out you don't get a job from your close friends.
They would already have gotten you that job if they could. As your friends, a friend to get your job. They do lots of them.
RAY: Oh, interesting.
LUBRANO: Yes, but, but they also seem to have an impact on people's ability to handle the complexity of democratic life. The reality of, mediating institutions' trust in the government in general, ability to basically navigate social change that's premised on whether we trust our neighbors who we don't know that and are not our best friends. When we say are basically in a crisis, they'll show up for me and I'll show up for them. Huge deal.
And Putnam has been tracking for years and years and years the decline in social trust, the fact that Americans trust their neighbors less, and the even more significant decline in time we spend with other people, especially this relationship, especially in community and in association, we're doing more and more stuff alone all the time. This is really bad for us. It's also bad for us, for neuroscience reasons. And my research, which is separate, he doesn't look at this as far as I'm at all aware, it starts out from the premise of, I wonder what this is doing to our brains because I'm always quite interested in cognitive science, which is an unusual characteristic for someone doing the work I do.
But I am. And, turns out we just started getting lots of interesting data in, in the last five years, especially, maybe ten years before that, about what happens to people that are socially isolated. And it's really bad when you are socially isolated parts of your brain that are not being used. The best word I could use here for the general public might be shrink.
It's a little bit more complicated than this, but what happens is that you can actually see changes in the shape of the brain because of the changes that happen when you're socially isolated. And this makes sense because our brains are actually incredibly plastic, which means that they are constantly changing to suit whatever we're up to. That's why London taxi drivers have whole systems that are created in their brain as they learn every single street in the City of London. That's amazing. They're learning anything.
The brain grows, wonderful. But the other side of that is if you're not using a piece of your brain, it goes away because those neurons are being used for something else. And there are all kinds of scary facts that can give you about this, but I'm going to just stick with the social thing. When we don't socialize, when we socialize less than we were before, parts of our brain that we're being used for socializing get repurposed for other stuff. It turns out that that is pretty bad, because basically, some of the biggest work that's our brain ever does in its life, which is supposed to do every day, is face to face interactions with other human beings face to face, because we need to be reading those facial cues.
In fact, people that can read have repurposed a part of the brain. That's for reading facial cues to do something else. And they are worse at reading facial expressions. a big part of our brain is devoted to just saying oh, what is Sarah up to now? Is she mad at me? Is she upset and she interested? Is she paying attention? Why did she get distracted by that? I'm supposed to be judging your face.
And if part of my brain is trained to read the words instead, which is same rapid visual processing, I actually can't read your facial expression as It would all. Yes.
RAY: Oh my gosh.
LUBRANO: I know it's a problem. But it's not that I'm the problem is when you spend a lot of time alone in our rooms. And we lose abilities, and then we hit this negative cycle where we say, oh, social interactions are stressful now and a lot of work, I'll just say it. And then we further socially atrophy and then they're more stressful for us.
Many of us experienced this during Covid. I read that write about having experienced that a bit during my PhD. But the point is we're suddenly, without some of those skill sets and everything is more exhausting. And then we can cycle to the point where we really don't want to be socializing, and we might conceptually want to be socializing, but we're not actually going to do it because it's stressful and difficult and we're worse at it.
And also, and this is where the real kicker is, in some ways, we begin, it seems, from the best research available now to experience neutral social cues as negative. Someone doesn't text back and we don't say, oh, they're busy. We say they must hate me and they never us.
RAY: Oh, interesting.
LUBRANO: And all these other people didn't me either. And I'll just stay home.
RAY: Because there's a confirmation bias where you're, looking for clues to keep you in your shell.
LUBRANO: Probably is. And it's also probably something else, which is also, which is that when our brain isn't using these bits of our brain for social cues, it's doing this other thing instead, which my brain is very good at, which is ruminating. It's worrying and worrying and finding things to worry about and being anxious and scared. And what it does is it ruminates about exactly what it's not doing. It ruminates about the social world, because that's primarily what humans are designed to think about anyway. it begins to think, oh, this person doesn't me, and here's why they didn't me.
And here's probably where that social interaction went wrong, and here's what went wrong there. And here's why I don't these people. And here's what they probably think about me, and here's what I should think about them. And we become genuinely more negative, essentially about the social world.
RAY: And this is terrible, vicious, vicious cycle. And your brain is designed to keep you going down this path.
LUBRANO: And this is anathema to all the social trust that,
RAY: And anathema to democracy, anathema to what the planet needs now. Dare I say.
LUBRANO: You're already a little bit xenophobic. I'm sure you'll get more xenophobic. If you're really scared of your neighbors, you're gonna get more scared of your neighbors. and something that I was not prepared for. I will just say, when I became, I don't know, a vaguely public figure, I expected there to be an island.
Now experience, angry men in the comments saying anti-feminist things, the occasional anti-Semitism, random comments on my boobs, whatever. I was ready for a certain level of the nonsense that is the barrier entry ticket price for public life. I was ready for that. What I wasn't ready for is that people got really angry at me for writing about social atrophy.
They were furious and they took it really personally and I have written about this with attempts at real interest and nuance. I would say on my blog, I wrote about introversion and the concept of introversion, which is often used to voice this frustration towards me. I was oh, but I'm an introvert. Don't tell me to go out and hang out with people.
RAY: I have been asked this question to when I when my punchline is the solution to all that ails us on the planet. And democracy is social trust and your neighbor and community. And I've had that contrast. There's a couple people who are always that's not going to work for me. Yes. I'm an introvert.
LUBRANO: There are little elements, unimportant aspects of that. And there are also worrying aspects of that that may not be grounded in what the questions really are here.
RAY: Oh I will definitely pin two your, your piece on that because I think it's a deep, deep passion. a.
STEIN LUBRANO: Big question. But I guess what I would say is I will just say this much. Obviously there are introverts and there are extroverts. I am one of those horribly extroverted people, I am already a person that should approach this with caution.
However, there is evidence. Sorry to use data again that both extroverts and introverts are incredibly bad at predicting. This is not in my book, but I use some of the research I'm working on now for my next book. That both extroverts and introverts are very bad at predicting how much they're going to social interactions, and both extroverts and introverts think that talking to a stranger is going to suck.
And then if they are asked to do it, they really it. And the only difference between the extroverts in the introverts in these studies is that the introverts dread it more in advance. They still do it once they do it they are an inch and just, pointing out where we're this about lots of things, even things are really bad predictors even of pretty imminent events. We're very bad at predicting how much we're going to enjoy things.
I do this all of the time with running. I have never in my life gone on a run that I really felt going on in advance, and I always feel better after I go on a run and, and.
RAY: I think classic example, isn't.
LUBRANO: It easier for people to believe and I understand why, but actually a lot of social stuff is the same way. We don't think we want to do the thing and then we do it and we're glad we did it. It's just potentially because it requires a certain effort and cognitive focus and risk and stress. It's one of those things that we might need incentives and infrastructures to support us in doing. Now we get the infrastructure.
And I could go on and on about this.
RAY: To yes. And this is one of my questions for you is going to be what your next project was going to be. we'll, we'll can we can double the question here. Your next project is going to be social infrastructure and social atrophy. Go for it.
LUBRANO: Look I think there's a lot of solutions to the problem of our social decline. And we are by the way the common phrase for this is our expanding loneliness epidemic. But we're not people do not report being any lonelier than when people reported being lonely.
RAY: I think that's fascinating.
LUBRANO: You're you're actually more than they used to. They don't just we have no evidence for that now is happening from the only data we have. But it is across several countries. And the American data is really robust. We are more alone. We are just alone for more hours of the day. And that's probably not very good for us. And that's a very different problem.
Or to look back at Putnam's work again, respect to Putnam's work. But even the term he's using is is very specific. Is capital capital a capital capital. He's thinking about it money, the time we spend with each other is money, but it's not money.
And also importantly, it's it's most money cannot be owned except individually. That's how our society works. And maybe you can. that's not a good metaphor, but a lot of money is on individually. I guess some money can be owned collectively, but it is this concept of private property.
But social capital is a thing you can only have between two people is not really money in its properties. In a lot of money. I'm thinking about it as a thing that you. That's good because it's just generally good for society. But. But actually we can get really specific here.
What does it do. It makes us less if we actually have social connections, we're less suspicious of other people, we’re more open to them. Our brains are more flexible, we can get into the.
RAY: Weeds of resilience, psychological resilience, collective resilience, all of it.
LUBRANO: And then the other thing is, if we understand that it's a big barrier to entry for people and they need to be incentivize all the time to keep doing this thing to maintain themselves, which is a very different metaphor than capital, than money. Money just sit in a vault. ,Mostly we need this living thing that we have to cultivate within ourselves.
Then we understand the importance of having these institutions that support that. It's saying oh you can have a farm if you never water the plants, they'll all die. Same for social life. And in the last 40 to 50 years, it's not just our brains that have probably been shrinking, but it is absolutely, certainly our social spaces, all the infrastructure for this stuff, time spent with other people, which does some of that work, but especially the institutions that create that time. It's much more expensive to go out now is much more expensive to go to bars, cafes, whatever.
Public libraries are shutting down, they have reduced hours, green spaces are shutting down all across Europe and America, for sure. And also, although people actually haven't amount of leisure time, the barriers to them using that in a social way are higher. I would argue, these are complicated things to fully characterize, never mind on a podcast. But even at all.
But basically, we've created a world where people are more isolated for structural reasons, and that has huge costs on this living thing we have to maintain, which is this ability, an interaction system between all of us. That's what I'm writing about for my next book, and that's why we need infrastructure for this stuff.
RAY: And to get to me is the logical conclusion of your first book of this book about Don't Talk about Politics is what does actually change people's minds and behaviors and, and actual politics and the the root of that for you is not mindsets it might have been for dinner Meadows, but it's, social atrophy questions. You're going after that one next, which is awesome. I can't wait to read that one. No pressure, no pressure. I, I know writing a book is.
LUBRANO: One of those. Maybe I can write this book.
RAY: And you're going to have to make sure you're, actively being social and cultivating that soil, that organism you just described. While you do that, that's going to be hard. That's my reason why I'm on. I'm doing podcasting interviews now because, the social dimension of having conversation is somehow fueling me in a way that writing a book, just I couldn't tap and, just has an interesting side note that, what we're doing now is inform what are you're talking about in argument. for me anyway.
Last question, given the dismal state of the world, what gets you up in the morning. How do you focus on the work that's needed and make sure you feel efficacious and net positive. How does all what you've written about help you to figure out how to be human in these terrifying times?
LUBRANO: Look I, don't need these question to answer. Oh, I feel that, I feel despair. I particularly going through a very long grieving process about what has happened to the United States, which was happening long before I noticed it happening and was much more apparent to the less privileged people. Certainly.
It's not that I don't have sad. I have lots of sad. Not, nor obviously, is that I never encountered reasons to cry in my personal life, but actually, in a fundamental way that I think I've outlined throughout this interview, I am, a gramscian optimist, optimism of the will I am. My life is full of purpose and meaning because I am doing the work I am doing.
I am all in. I am in it. As I told another Jew for life, I have been interested in making the world more just and also more beautiful, and also more meaningful and also more sociable and also more actionable for people all my life. And I'm just going to do it until they put me in the ground and I am.
And that's that's it. I don't, I could say lots of other things. I have also lived my values in the ways that I live in a, I live in a big social house. I'm looking at my two cats, but I have them in my house and my partners and my friends live with me a lot of the time I, I live the social life that I preach.
I have built the infrastructure for that. That keeps me going. And I do think that's important as much as having any one idea inside. I have built the thing and I have committed to it.
I'm up to the top. I talk about in the book. I am a mutual aid organizer, but but fundamentally, I have built the things into my life that have much meaning and value that. I'm grumpy in the morning when I get up, I need a cup of coffee, but I am ready to go and I am super happy to have the ride.
And if you have enough meaning and relationships and action in your life, then all of the big and bad stuff will coexist with that. But it will not sink you. I really believe that.
RAY: Thriving in apocalyptic times is what you were mentioning earlier. It's possible.
LUBRANO: Mean I, I worked in the world of self-help for several years I, I'm always cool. What if instead of selling lotions and stuff we were selling I don't know.
RAY: CSAs.
LUBRANO: Just I don't know, revolution whatever.
LUBRANO: I will make you feel great. Let's do.
RAY: That'll make me feel really good. What would really make me feel good is if there was less carbon in the atmosphere, more justice in the world, all the things.
LUBRANO: That you're not getting there if you're trying and you're doing with other people who you can think with. That's.
RAY: That's the punch line. That was fun. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me on the eve of your big trip. Many hours ahead of me and time zones and all the rest.
LUBRANO: To Boston.
RAY: Yes. Off to Boston. Grateful. I will be following up.
LUBRANO: Great. I would love that.
RAY: You've just been listening to my conversation with Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st Century Minds. Shownotes and more episodes of Climate Magic can be found at KHSU.,org and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Sarah Jaquette Ray, and thanks for listening to Climate Magic.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
