#1259 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Why Political Debate Does Not Work

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everyone. Welcome to a new episode of The Dissenter. I'm your host, as always, Richard Lops, and today I'm joined by Dr. Sarah Steinlo Brenner. She's a writer, content strategist and researcher. She is head of research for the Future Narratives Lab, where their work. Focuses on narratives about social and political change, and today we're going to talk about her book Don't Talk About Politics, How to Change 21st Century Minds. So Dr. Loren, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone.

00:33 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Thank you for having me.

00:35 Ricardo Lopes: OK, so let me start by, let me start with a basic question here. So what motivated you to write this book? I mean, was, does it, did it have anything to do with the timing with the current political context we're living in, or was for some other, was it for some other reason?

00:57 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, I mean, look, I'm a person who in 2016, uh I was working for a place called the School of Life, which is a very popular YouTube channel, basically, with a lot of other attached parts of it. And that was a great thing to be doing in many ways, but, um, obviously, in 2016, Trump won the election in the United States and also Brexit happened here in the United Kingdom where it was voted in. Here in the United Kingdom, and I was living in the United Kingdom as an American, so there was kind of a moment in my life where I thought, this is not enough. I need to be doing something. In response to this moment, and I know that the crises that caused things to happen in 2016 are much deeper, and they extend much further back in history, and that's just when I, like a privileged white lady, noticed them, but, um, that's a lot of the impetus, and that is the year that I decided to apply to PhD programs, and I went and got a PhD in a combination of cognitive science and critical theory, which is not a common combination, and um. And that's part of the motivation. And then I think another part of the motivation, and this is probably the secret fetish object of every writer at some level, is to understand a little bit about the contradictions in the way I was living. So the kind of way I had grown up in DC thinking about it implicitly because of everyone around me thinking about it this way as a sort of successful liberal democracy, right? That's how we saw, that's how you were taught to see it growing up and um. People were very attached to a lot of the ideas that I take on early on in the book. They're very attached to the idea of the marketplace of ideas, and to debate and, and those things as forms of political reasoning that basically they felt if those were happening, and then you had a democracy and you would be OK. Yeah, yeah, that, that those, that, that those two things, debate and the and the marketplace of ideas were certainly not enough, and maybe not even working at all. Um, AND I kind of wanted to understand my own disillusionment, or rather to see outside of it and understand what had really happened and what had always been happening. So that's, that's the beginning of it anyway, yeah.

02:59 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, because we have this very common idea and we can talk about where it comes from later on, but that arguing and debating political ideas in general can change people's minds. But I mean, does it, does it really work and particularly nowadays with, I mean, here in Portugal it also happens when we have elections like presidential elections, legislative elections. And so on, we're always flooded with debates on TV and so on between the different parties, the different candidates, and we tend to put some value on that and think that, oh yeah, if people just listen to them, they will be able to figure out which one has the better ideas and vote for them. But I mean, does that really work?

03:51 Sarah Stein Lubrano: No, amazingly, there's some pretty good data analysis about televised debates in particular. Um, AND it was done at Princeton University. They kind of went and took all of the available data on all of the publicly, or like, well, as many as they could at that time of, of the publicly debated either, you know, referendums or elections, and they looked at whether public opinion changed in a noticeable way in either direction the day after a debate. Because that would suggest, right, that if you're, if, if people change their mind more the day after a debate or between those two days, then that has some effect. Maybe it's not even rational, just end effect. And amazingly, the answer is that there's no, there's no noticeable effect when you see that like move up and down in the polls the day after, it's actually about the same movement that would happen on any given day. It's, it's a random statistical walk essentially, you know, about the people they happen to ring up on the phone that morning. And that is a very good piece of evidence that debates do not change people's minds. The watching debates certainly does not change people's minds, and that there's pretty good evidence to suggest that engaging in debating also does not change people's minds for the most part, because, first of all, by the time you're debating, you probably have an opinion. And secondly, that opinion is tied to other very significant factors in your life that are much more predictable of what you're going to believe politically and that are much more formative of what you believe politically. And the two that I conquer in my book, so to speak, well, no, that I cover in my book, are your own actions and experiences, your own life, which shapes your political intuitions, and also your social, your social ties. And so over the course of people's lives, if anything changes their views, it's probably going to be one of those two things or often a combination of those two, but none of that has to do with debates. Um, I, I sometimes compare debate to like drawing in the sand on the beach, because it might be that for a minute, you know, people say, well, he kind of took this point to heart or whatever. Yes, but then the waves come within, you know, 12 hours, and pretty much the same for our political views that the other big factors in our life, the giant ocean washes the little details of the conversation away.

05:50 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, and I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but I really think this is what I've been noticing over the years is that even political commentators when they comment on the debates after they're done and people online, it seems that they just watch the debates. It's a sort of a football match. It is to see if their side wins, which side won, to score points and stuff like that. It's not really with the intention of with a sort of open mind, listening to people and seeing and trying to figure out which one. As the better ideas, right?

06:33 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, so I would often say, you know, it's like gladiatorial combat for the modern age, and then in Roman times people loved watching gladiators. They didn't think this is making our political system valid. They just said like this is fun, right? And now we have sports, and Freud says that you have sports because it prevents people from going to war, right? Like it's a funnel for their aggression, and, and I think that debates are the same, and, and, and if we think about them that way, it's basically a sport for politically minded people. Great, you know, have fun. But, but what's silly is that we also elevate it to the status of something that's actually part of democracy itself, and there is no really good reason to think that that's true. Um, IT is a sport, it's something that requires skill that some people are better than others, it's kind of fun to watch, uh, that's very fun to watch drunk, OK, but that doesn't make it, you know, uh, the cornerstone of democracy, and in fact, it's not, it's not very indicative of democracy either way. It cannot furnish a democracy on its own or even do very much for it.

07:28 Ricardo Lopes: And where does this very liberal and by liberal here, I don't mean left wing but really liberal more broadly, this very liberal idea of the marketplace of ideas come from exactly because we've been fed for a long time now this idea that Oh yeah, if you just allow for people to uh debate in the public square to exchange ideas, then just inevitably the best ideas will come up on top and people will just accept them as the best ideas. I mean, where does that come from?

08:12 Sarah Stein Lubrano: I mean, I think there's there's, I can give you a historical answer, right? And then I can give you a materialist answer, and they're both right. So the historical answer is that this term is usually um attributed to a bunch of Supreme Court decisions about free speech, where they were first um considering whether it was acceptable to essentially censor a bunch of Jewish radical communists, I think, and then whether it was acceptable to censor the KKK. Uh, TWO very different groups, uh, but in any case, in those decisions, the Supreme Court justices use this term, the marketplace of ideas, and the question is like whether the state should intervene in the marketplace of ideas. But I think that that's like a historical answer, you know, and then it became a popular term, great, and people like it and whatever. But the other reason is because I think we live in an extremely market-based society right now, right? Everything is determined by various markets, and it's a, it's also a metaphor that people understand. Um, AND because, because we live in such a, it's a markety world, and so it became a very good proxy for talking about, um, everything else, including talking and, and saying, well, well, maybe what a discussion is, is it's, it's, you know, everyone brings out their best wares, and you buy the, like, you know, shiniest apples or the freshest looking loaves of bread or whatever, but the problem with this before is that an idea is not a commodity. You know, it's not, and, and in fact, one of the things I say in the book is that uh it's not that we have ideas, we're not like holding a bunch of ideas in a basket, and we're like, these are my ideas. It's that ideas have us, they shape us, and they determine how we are and how we act, and they really like are formative to us, and not only that, but they're formative to the way we behave, and the way we behave reshapes us. So they have a much stronger and weirder grasp on us than any kind of commodity we could hold in our hands. And um. And we cannot easily exchange them. And then I kind of spend a lot of time pointing out that we can't exchange them literally in the sense that I can't get you to take my idea even if I want to. But also we can't necessarily exchange our own. We're not that good at changing our own minds even when we want to become open minded. We are just not holding on to them like commodities. It's a very bad metaphor, but it's a very Powerful metaphor because we live in such a market-based society, and it kind of legitimizes a lot of people that that find it interesting. They'll say, well, you know, like people are believing what I'm saying right now, so that must mean my ideas are the best ones, you know.

10:25 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, I mean, it seems like a very capitalist idea as well, right, because it's the same as people as liberals or neoliberals or capitalists in general apply also to the market more broadly. I mean, the idea that, oh, if we just let, if we just allow for a free market to operate, then the best products will rise to the top, will be the Ones bought by people will be the ones available for people to buy and so on and so forth, but actually that's not necessarily what happens, right, right,

11:04 Sarah Stein Lubrano: yeah, yeah, it's the market as justice, and they're like, oh well, there'll also be the market for ideas, and that will be a just market, but it's a, it's an incredibly unjust market at every level, you know. I mean, a couple of billionaires own most of our news platforms, but it's not just that, it's just that humans don't relate to this idea really in this way. They want to relate ideas in general in this way.

11:21 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, so, uh, I mean, how do people actually change political ideas? On what basis does that occur?

11:32 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, so the two, again, the two things I look at in my book that there's pretty good evidence for empirically, and I'm, I'm a somewhat empirical thinker, not totally. I have lots of theories too, but I, I tend to write about things where I think there's a very high degree of evidence, um, because that matters to me, and, um. The two things I look at are the way our relationships change our politics over the course of our life and the way our own actions change our politics over the course of our life. So if you look at people's relationships, there's pretty good evidence that our friends changed our, our beliefs over the course of our life, not just by like magnetically pulling you towards their beliefs. In fact, um, one of my favorite studies, they look at people that are, you know, they can do this a lot on university campuses because they have access to all the students and students get randomly assigned to roommates in universities. So they look at what happens if two students are assigned to live together for a year, that are strangers beforehand, and you know, they don't necessarily move more than a little bit closer to each other in political views, but if one of them is really interested in politics and the other one isn't, by the end of the year, they're both very interested in politics. Um, BUT to, you know, to broaden out from there, it seems like what a lot of our relationships do is it's not that they brainwash us, it's just that they open the door to our involvement. Right, in the thing, whatever it is. And so the other thing that we see very big shifts in people's beliefs about are things that essentially involve forms of prejudice. So you, you see that basically, for example, if people are homophobic, but then their friends come out to them, they become much less homophobic if they in, in, in a very specific set of conditions, which we can get into if you want, but in the right conditions when we are exposed to people of other races, religions, ethnicities, etc. WE become less prejudiced against those groups. Essentially our relationships are like the the door being opened for us to explore another belief that we otherwise wouldn't, and we might not go through the door, but often if the if the idea is a better interpretation of the reality that we're now experiencing, we will, especially if there are relationships involved, because relationships are huge motivators for human beings, um. And yeah, and so you can see that over the course of people's lives, they tend to firstly um overcome prejudices when they're placed in conditions of equality with people different than themselves. I think that's very important and central to what I write about because I don't, I don't believe personally in a world where at the end of the day we're all going to agree, you know, even when people talk about polarization, like there are negative aspects of polarization. Firstly, we're mostly not experiencing ideological polarization where people are becoming more extreme in their views. We're mostly just experiencing effective polarization where people are just more angry, and I think that's fine. I think it's fine for people to disagree for the most part with, you know, with the exception of some very racist and horrible ideas like most ideas, OK, they exist on the spectrum, and the job is not to erase difference here. But, um, but I do think that overcoming prejudice is like a fundamental thing within democracies and important for like the continuation of life on Earth. Um, AND then the other thing is our own beliefs tend to shift our, our political, sorry, our own actions tend to shift our political beliefs over time. So, um, and the way I look at this a lot is in terms of what, what I call gateway actions. So there used to be a debate in sociology among political sociologists about, uh, you know, if people do small political actions, does this make them feel good about themselves and then they stop, or do they become more and more involved in that issue? Um, LIKE, like, if the levels, do they get really into environmentalism, or do they say I've done my bit, like please don't make me go on the climate march, you know. And obviously for any individual it could go either way, but on the whole, the research of this point just the gateways, these small actions or gateways again, kind of like the door opening, but with action, right? And then you, you become more and more likely to do more in that area. Probably because when you look at the psychology of it, once we start taking action on something even in a small way, our brain kind of interprets belief system in line with our own actions. So it says, oh, I did that thing, I must really care about the thing. In fact, I care about it a lot. Let me think about it more. What else should I do? And it kind of cycles this way. And our actions tend to shape our beliefs almost more than the other way around, more than the other way around in a lot of ways. So these are the two things that are fundamental in a lot of ways.

15:40 Ricardo Lopes: But when you say that actions shape our beliefs and in this particular case our political beliefs, what kind of actions

15:48 Sarah Stein Lubrano: exactly? Almost any actions. I've got a bunch of different examples in the book, but, you know, one of them is, is, is getting an abortion changes people's views on abortion, and interestingly, not always uh in the ways you would expect, or rather when you get denied an abortion, you, you sometimes become less in favor of abortion rights in the long run. So they're not necessarily actions that were freely chosen. In fact, our, our imposed actions could change our mind too, which is scary and interesting, helps a lot about cults and authoritarianism and, you know, all that stuff. Um, PEOPLE experiencing extreme climate events seem to believe more in climate change, which makes sense, um, but yeah, any kind of really any kind of action can potentially have quite an effect on people's political views. Um, THE more they seem to attribute their own army to it that that seems to matter, so they think they, they chose the action, but interestingly it can work either way, and people are very fond, it turns out of it's sort of deciding to do it all along or they always thought this all along. It's a big part of how the brain defends itself from feeling controlled. So, yeah, I mean, I've just given you some examples, but a very, very wide range of our own actions and experiences are gonna shift politics over the course of our life.

16:58 Ricardo Lopes: And, and those the more, let's say material conditions we live in, like for example, if we live in uh in a society which is economically and politically unstable or if, if we live in, uh, or if we have low socioeconomic status and so on, do those kinds of things influence how our ideas change over time?

17:23 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. But interestingly, again, it's not necessarily in a way that we might consider rational, right? So, um, one of the things that, you know, I think it's important to say it's not that like people, because I think we're living through a period of time where because there's so much, and I don't necessarily mean that this is bad, I just think it's worth noting like there's, at least until recently, so much emphasis on diversity and equity and inclusion and this kind of thing. There can then be the kind of cheap version of understanding this populating the internet, which is like, oh, you have a lived experience, and then you know truly how oppression works, right? But this is not sadly, how it always works. There are people that go through very oppressive experiences, but they interpret them in inaccurate ways, um, and that's not say everyone does, but it's important to understand this aspect of human behavior empirically, and one of the things I look at in the book is something called systems justification theory. Which is um from this guy John T. Jost who works at NYU. He's a really great guy writes really interesting books, but in any case, one of the things he notices is that there are big segments of the population in the United States who are certainly oppressed in various ways. For example, he looks at very low income black people in the southern United States, so they're experiencing a kind of compounded, uh, like racism and poverty and, um, kind of like worse, worse racism even then, you know, in the north, etc. AND, um. But interestingly, they tend to be less convinced of the systemic issue. They tend to say like, no, you know, there's less racism basically than other groups, uh, comparatively anyway, and what's happening there, he suggests is that people, um, they, they kind of need to find a way to Justify the system since they have to live under it. I could explain to you the psychological mechanics in great depth, but, but essentially what's happening is there's a contradiction between, uh, you know, your, your sense of agency and the reality of your life, and you, your sense of agency, real or false, winds, and it's easier for a person to tell themselves, interestingly, like, the system must be fair, but I just haven't quite worked hard enough yet, than it is for them to feel trapped. Um, AND, and so we can find ways essentially to rationalize the experiences we've had in ways that are inaccurate, that there is, of course, actually just a lot of systemic racism and poverty. But it happens to work better for a lot of human subjects to tell themselves, um, oh, like, you know, OK, maybe I got fired from my job, but if I just work hard enough, I'm not going to become an entrepreneur, so like capitalism still works, you know, it's much easier, and like you can see this like at other levels, like there's a lot of, I don't know, psychoanalytic literature, psychotherapeutic literature, but children love to like continuously believe that their parents um are just one step away from really finally understanding them because that's that gives them a sense of agency. Compared to knowing that maybe mommy and daddy will never get it, you know, so people love to like kind of believe the system could work. That gives them the sense that something might happen, and as a result, we justify systems that we shouldn't. We say, OK, the system is basically working even when it's not. So I guess what I'm saying here is these actions change our actions and experiences change our politics, but not necessarily in ways that are a good interpretation of how those systems work.

20:27 Ricardo Lopes: Right, but could it be the case that at least to some extent those rationalizations would be available from the current like political, economic, and cultural environment we live in. Like, for example, we live in. In neoliberal capitalist societies because that kind of narrative of oh it's of personal responsibility and things like that is something that we hear a lot from capitalists,

21:00 Sarah Stein Lubrano: right? Yeah, well, look, I mean, I think ideology is always a set of like The rationalizations, right, and some, maybe some ideologies have better rationalizations than others. Um, I think, I think a lot of capitalist ideology is a series of rationalizations of to help individuals navigate. Help is a strong word here, but you know, it's to enable them to continue to do what they need to do within the system. And it's, for example, a really compelling narrative that like you are an entrepreneur and you're gonna make it big one day. If you look at, I'm always fascinated by like studies of people who work gig economy jobs and and like, of course it's a minority of them certainly, but like a big minority, like 30% often will say like, I don't want any other kind of job. This is what I want because I believe that I'm gonna make it big, even though they're maybe like, you know, delivering for Deliveroo. And but, but, but ideology works really well that way because think about it, every day you get up and you do a bunch of rounds, and if you sneak in two more deliveries than you did yesterday, you feel good about yourself and you're like, I'm, I'm like growing my business, you know, how good does that feel? So, so the point is that a lot of our political beliefs, to get back to the main point of the book in a way are shaped by these daily actions. You take the daily action, then you rationalize it to yourself, and then it feels good, and then, right, and you could do this for like loads of things. You can do this for, you know, becoming a tradwife. You can do this for all kinds of stuff that's actually really destructive. But it feels good in the short run in terms of feeling agency and a sense of self.

22:20 Ricardo Lopes: And what do you think explains political polarization, because that's something that people talk a lot about and worry about nowadays. Apparently, I'm not sure to what extent that is actually true, but apparently many of our societies nowadays are very fractured politically. What kinds of aspects of our social lives do you think explain that?

22:47 Sarah Stein Lubrano: I mean, look, I, I would say there's, there's a lot, but this is the basic thing. In general, most of the research you look at does not suggest that people are more, more extreme in their views, right? And honestly this shouldn't surprise anyone who, I don't know if you ever got into like a little World War II rabbit hole, right, reading about like I sometimes read like biographies of people in the United Kingdom during World War II, but if you look at the, the family structure, like the aristocratic family structure, they'll have like one communist or like 3 fascists, and then like in the middle one kind of centrist person, and actually a lot of families looking at today, right. So I, I, I, I think the idea that we're, that we're ideologically more polarized is, is not that empirically well borne out, it's not even that like relevant to, you know, the briefest of glances. However, what we do seem to see is that people are more upset with the other side, they're less tolerating of them, they don't want to be friends with them, they certainly would be upset if their children married them, etc. ETC. And I think there's, there's a couple of different explanations, and one of the things I, one of the words I really like using a lot is it's overdetermined, which just basically means there's so many factors, um, pushing things in that direction that even if you removed one or the other, the factors it would still be true, right? Cause it's, but in any case, You know, part of it is that, um, Uh, I would say like the crises that we're currently facing make it at least more obvious to people that they truly have. Mm. Truly do not want the same outcomes in some respects, right? If you, if you are, for example, on, on the left and you see What billionaires are doing to both the planet and the economy, you will, you will just see them as fundamentally opposed to your interests. There's not like a really a good way of kind of mediating that divide. And similarly, I would say there are a lot of people on the right culturally where they look at what the left wants to do to. You know, social reproduction and politics and culture, let's say they just say like this is not, I cannot accept that world that you want us all to live in, and maybe there's some misrecognition there, but on the whole, there are different interests. People have different interests, and maybe they're becoming more obvious. The other thing though is I would say one of the things I talk about a lot in the book, and then my next book is about is something called social atrophy. Which is, um, the, the weakening of our sort of like mental muscles, and I, and I mean this in a very literal and scientific sense. There's a lot of good um medical evidence for this, that people who are more socially isolated, there's the weakening of their, their neural system for social interaction. So you don't, you don't interact with people socially as many hours of the day, you get worse at it. And eventually you are worse at reading social cues, you're more exhausted by social interactions. If you remember coming out of lockdowns and like feeling a bit weird, having conversations for longer than 10 minutes, you kind of know, right? And that makes sense because our social interactions are deeply taxing. They're one of the hardest things our brain ever has to do, and um when you don't use a part of the brain, you lose it pretty rapidly. This is why I can't speak any foreign languages cause I'm a terrible American, but You know, the many other things you could lose as well without practicing. And so, if you look at the amount of hours people are spending with other human beings in the West, we're spending fewer and fewer hours with other people, and like, especially over the last 15 years, you know, a lot of the, I mean, it's been happening for about 70 to 50 years in most countries that you can measure this, but the 15 last 15 years, especially, people are spending more and more hours alone. And so they're probably using their neural networks less for social interaction, they're getting worse at social interaction, etc. And one of the things that tends to happen when that occurs is that people become more paranoid. Just in general, they become less good at interpreting social cues and they ruminate more, they worry more, and the result of those two things is that you start being much more suspicious of other people and their motivations and their intentions, um, even at a low-key level, like you might think, oh, my friend didn't text me back, they must not like me or care about me anymore, you know, etc. That's, that's the level of paranoia of a person suffering from schizophrenia, for example, but it's, it's, it's an inaccurate perception of reality that is actually likely to harm your social choices in the long run. And when I look at similarly the like slow worsening of social trust, for example, I really see the mark. In parts of this neurological phenomenon. Um, AND I would say if you look at polarization, you can see a similar thing where you, you can say, OK, well, it's very possible that it's like the logical outcome of a world where people don't have shared goals anymore and can see that clearly, and they also distrust people more, is probably a world where we are effectively polarized where we hate the other side more, and I don't think that's good, and I don't think it's fixable without reintegrating the social fabric, which is like a big material project really.

27:23 Ricardo Lopes: But what do you think are the factors behind uh the fact that people, as you said, over particularly these past 15 years have spent more and more time alone? I mean, what factors have contributed to that?

27:38 Sarah Stein Lubrano: I mean, I know this is an annoying answer, but it is overdetermined, um, and there are a lot of factors, and I'm actually still working on this for my next book because my next book is all about social atrophy. But um, no, no, no, but it's a good question. I mean, look, there, there's a bunch. So in the book I just wrote, and don't talk about politics, one of the things I look at is the the very noticeable decline in third spaces, so places that are neither the workplace nor the home where people can go for either no money at all or relatively cheap. So we're talking about places like the pub, the church, the park, the gym, you know. Um, AND except for the last one, which is kind of growing, but most of the other ones are shrinking. They're shrinking because they're becoming more expensive or literally just less available. Also, people's housing situations are, are changing. So, um, it used to be that people would move into city centers. They're now increasingly moving out of city centers because of affordability problems, and so people are just further away from everything. So there's fewer third spaces they could go to. Third spaces are closing in the United Kingdom. I think we're, we used to be losing like 1 pub a day, and now we're losing 2 pubs a day, so it's worrying. I don't even drink really, but like, you know, you need these spaces, they do a fundamental thing for humans. We're living in a delivery culture, so if you're getting a coffee, you're not going to the local coffee shop and sitting there as much as you're like maybe getting a coffee delivered, you know, or like you're, you don't go out for anyway, I could go on and on, but we're living in a world where basically people are inhabiting the same space as others physically less, which is bad because it's probably true in most respects that the online spaces cannot compete in terms of how they help people integrate socially, um. And even politically in some cases, so we're losing social infrastructure, and that's a big part of it, and I really care about that. But I would say though is that in my next book I'm also beginning to, I mean, I want to walk through this research very carefully because it's politically tricky and uh can sound reactionary even though I'm a massive feminist and like weird radical polyamorous person, but um. Another reason that we are probably more alone is that we are more single. Um, THAT people are increasingly not in long term serious relationships where they live together or like they're not married basically, um, whether or not that's legal, and that marriage seems to have had like a, I mean, it does a lot of things, right? It's a big institution in our society, it, it kind of keeps men doing stuff, um, you know, it keeps everyone having some companionship. Um, AND I, and I think, you know, there, there's some, some reasonable evidence that a lot of the increasing number of hours spent alone is just that people are more single, and then the reasons people are single are very economic and complicated and like partially about feminism, and, you know, look, I'm not intrinsically ideologically pro marriage or even relationships. Well, no human relationships, but not necessarily romantic relationships, but essentially we're we're seeing the downfall of like this one major institution slowly, or at least maybe it will become like a more niche thing. And we need other institutions that hold people together, right? That that's, that would be my much more considered and um I would say like combination liberal radical view, which is like, maybe it doesn't need to be marriage, complicated, but it needs to be something. We need, we need. Social institutions that help people gently reintegrate into the social world all the time. I mean, I think about this a lot as a, you know, a very radical Jewish person, but, but I still go to synagogue. I go to like a little, you know, non-Zionist synagogue in London, and one of the things you realize very quickly is that that that does something for you, right? There are these people, they know you, it's a very small synagogue, obviously, and like everyone knows you, and if you don't go for a while, people worry about you, and then they check in on you. If you go, then you, it's your job and you look out for people, and then you take care of each other and someone dies, and there's a whole mourning ritual or whatever, OK, um. If you don't have that institution, you have none of that stuff anymore, you know, and we also have seen obviously the decline of religion, people move a lot between geographically, um, at least they did in the last generation, we're probably seeing the effects of that in the current generation. So anyway, there's like there's a lot of different things happening, um, and almost all of them, I would say have to do with our material conditions. Some of them have to do with gender roles, um, a lot of it is neoliberalism, of course, or the effects of neoliberalism down the road, um. But I guess one of the reasons I'm interested in looking at things at this level is that I think. This is still the level at which individuals together in relatively small groups can take meaningful action, you know, the, the, the, the crisis of like social atrophy and social isolation is a crisis that we can begin to solve in ways that we can notice, and I think if you tell people like, OK, we've got like a methane emissions crisis, I'm not saying we shouldn't work on that, we should, but it's very hard for people to imagine. What that would take, whereas in my book I, I feel like you could do something tomorrow about your neighborhood's level of social atrophy, you know, and you can do it even if you don't have, I mean, money helps certainly physical space especially helps, but you don't need the money, and in some cases, interestingly, you can create like the opposite effect where the less money people have, the more likely they are to band together to do things together, and then they form connections, so. I find it's a really useful way of thinking through this problem of isolation itself, but also it's other political variables that it touches.

32:40 Ricardo Lopes: Uh, SO which kinds of solutions to how we interact with other people do you suggest for, for us to be able to reason better about politics?

32:53 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, so I mean I wrote like a post in my sub stack which people can go read which says like what to do instead of talking about politics, right, you know, um. And it's got, it's got it all laid out. So in one, in one sense we can almost just like point people there, but, but more realistically, you know, to give a very broad overview, I think one of the first things I say is it's and I find it takes people a minute to take this in, and that's because we have the individualistic culture. That people want like and understandably my brain works this way too, because that's just how it works, but people want like an individual answer that they're going to go and I, I individually I'm going to go do this. I thought we were like vitamin C deficiency, OK, but we're not, you know, what you're gonna go do is join the group of people also doing the same thing in some way, right? You know, maybe, maybe that's will look very different for different people, like if you're a parent, maybe you're going to start with groups of other parents, maybe whatever, but OK yeah, so versus join a group, and maybe the group is, is less radical and more citizenship based. It's really radical and you're gonna like overthrow the government and blow burn coal plants. I don't know, but either way, you want to join a group of other people committed to doing something. And we're gonna come up with a strategy together, because the kind of political and social problems I write about are not ones that we solve on our own. Um, AND then I give some examples in the book of particularly useful infrastructures that I think are good models. So that is the food cooperative system I'm part of. So the way that that one works is that you are organizing around a material need people have, which is food, and food is very expensive, can be very expensive, and the way the food cooperative system works is that you recruit 13 of your neighbors or something, and then you each week go and you buy collectively from a wholesaler. Some kind, and then you split it up, right? And then you can make your grocery bill way lower. Um, WE get a lot of what we need for about 5 pounds a week, you know, and that's like really cheap for groceries. Of course, it's not really about the food, although that's good. It's about then you know all your neighbors, and then you have a site for organizing with your neighbors, and you've made all these social connections. It's a gateway action, and then maybe you'll want to do a financial cooperative, and then maybe you'll start to create a loan system for each other to get out of, you know, this or that financial problem, and then maybe you'll want to prevent each other being evicted, and so. This is a good example because people can imagine doing this, and it is genuinely doable. I mean, you could do it even without the particular system I'm part of, you could do this on your own. On your own, as in without the existing infrastructure, but with other people, so that's a good example. I think the other thing though that increasingly I almost wish I had put more of in the book, but it's, it's really come out more of the reception of the book is the other thing people have to do is build a different set of skills and impulses and like, uh, mindset is a good word for this as well, and I, I feel weird writing about this because it sounds like I'm a self-help guru or something, and I'm Really not, but I guess something I've noticed when I have begun to present this book to the public is that a lot of people are very interested in it, and they might be intellectually persuaded by it, and, and they care about it deeply, and then they hear about some of the things I'm suggesting, and it sounds really difficult and scary to them. And the reason that it sounds difficult and scary is not that it's intellectually difficult or scary, or at least they're very bright people, and they can certainly manage it, right? But it's um It's that it requires them to to employ a completely different set of skills than we are taught to use in school. And that, you know, I don't know about you, but like most of my formal education was teaching me to write essays and argue with people and debate them and like exchange in the marketplace of ideas and That was absolutely useless after a certain point, and it's really not very useful for activism because activism and organizing and protecting your community and, you know, however you want to frame these different things is not about that. And the skills that you need to do work like that, to do real political work is building relationships, talking to strangers, figuring out what other people need, getting them involved, giving them something that makes them feel like they have a sense of agency. I mean, it's all this like complicated interpersonal work. And it's tiring because social life is tiring, but it's meaningful because social life is meaningful, and we're not taught to do almost any of that in school, and people's social skills are pretty weak a lot of the time, you know, and there's a lot of social skills that we have to build. I mean social in the broad sense of social here. It's not that you should just like have nice chit chats, it's that you're asking someone like, hey, I know this is scary, but I think that all of us should go on strike, you know. Um, AND so, yeah, the other thing I would say is you want to not just join a community, uh, like a community or a struggle or whatever, and work on the problems with other people, although that's very important. You infrastructure like the food co op that gives you gateway actions and helps other people have gateway actions. It's all great, but along the way you're gonna have to build a different set of skills and impulses, and they are gonna feel weird and different and uncomfortable at first, and that work never ends. You just keep doing it.

37:29 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so look, I would like to hear your thoughts on social media specifically. I mean, on the show over the years I've talked with psychologists, sociologists, experts on communication and social media specifically, and I, and I mean, I, I think that the main message is Got from them is that people have actually been demonizing over demonizing social media in many aspects. For example, when people claim that social media has contributed to political polarization, I mean, it doesn't seem to be lots of very good evidence to support that idea, and then Uh, I mean, some claims that people make about how social media might affect people's social skills or even, uh, children and adolescents, more specifically, that it seems that, I, I mean, of course, some of the evidence is not straight. Forward or it's not pointing necessarily toward one answer or the other in terms of the negative or positive effects that social media might have, but in the context of your book and the topics you explore there, how do you look at the role of social media in people's lives?

38:50 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, this is a good question. So here, here's what I would say, right? I mean, I would, um, I actually worked as a content strategist a lot in my, in my like career, my career outside of academia, and so I think about what it does in a completely almost, you know, I have spent a lot of time thinking about it in a kind of like strategic way, just like how can we get a thing to go viral on social media, and I have an Instagram that has, you know, 38,000 followers because a year ago I need that and I built it from scratch, um. And so I think a lot about how this works, and, and I want to say like there's a little bit of truth in what you've just said and that it's not just like social media bad and people consume the social media and then brain stupid, like, no, this is a really stupid way of thinking about this. Um, I see social media as, first of all, television of our era, and I mean that in the literal sense, if you look at, this is the last year, 225 is the year people watched more short form video than they did normal television. So, you know, really it's like the main media dissemination for whole groups of people, especially people in the global south and young people, and that that just matters, right? Even if you're not necessarily being hardcore persuaded from a political topic online, you are being influenced in various ways. Um, AND I will get more, get into that more in a minute. So that's very important. And then the other thing is, it's a place where things circulate, so they, you know, if you create a successful part of social media, then the idea gets passed around and around and around and around and around and around, and you can make a lot of money, and you can reach a lot of people, and it's the game is circulation. And for that reason, it's a powerful infrastructure, but it's a powerful infrastructure because it slowly leads people towards actions and relationships, not because they just consume the message passively, right? So for example, let's say that you're already like a disaffected person, and then you go online and you stumble into a community of other people who are also disaffected in the same way. What's gonna happen is you're going to slowly build relationships with them, possibly by sharing memes with them, but also every time you repost the memes or whatever. You, that's an action of yours that you've taken, you begin to think, I must really believe this. I made a meme about it. And I think, you know, you can really understand a lot of like kind of far right stuff by understanding it's not so much that the moment where they like see a piece of right-wing propaganda and then they become like violently radicalized. No, it's it's very slow process, but first they post it kind of as a joke, but then they kind of also Like, begin to leave it a little bit because they they posted it, and then they meet more people, and then those people become their social net. At the end of the book, I, I put a quote from an interview with Steve Bannon, the, uh, you know, strategist for Trump, Donald Trump, a very right wing guy, obviously, I mean, beyond, and he has a strategy very much in line with this. He understands a lot of what I write about in the book, but obviously he's doing terrible things with it. But um, No, he says you use social media kind of to catch people like fish, she doesn't say fish, but, you know, he, he, he says they, they, I find them online, I get them to do lots of little actions, uh, then I asked them to take a step offline and do something in the local Republican Party, and they feel great, and they feel great, he says, because they have friends, they didn't have friends before, and now they're in these like clubs that I've set up for them, and they feel good cause they have friends and they're doing something. And that's fundamentally what makes human beings happy. I mean, it's why also if you look at the left, um, people who have the same left wing views can vary, statistically, they vary enormously in their happiness level, just based on whether they're actually doing any real activism. Left wing activists are actually relatively happy, despite all of the many frustrations we might have with each other. We're doing much better than our equivalently believing, but not acting peers. Um, IN any case, what I mean is I see social media as the sort of like media part of that function. Right, so it's like mediatizes people's social relationships, of course, that's fascinating. It, it like is a gateway mechanism for that gateway action. Um, IT'S probably not radicalizing them directly, though, and I think this is a difficult thing for people to understand off the bat, but it's, it's still true.

42:40 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah, so let me ask you one last question then. We at the, at the very beginning of our conversation started by talking about debate and discussion in the political realm and the market, the idea of the marketplace of ideas. Do you think That we, it would be possible for us to replace these liberal ideal of the marketplace of ideas with some other ideal that is more grounded on the kinds of suggestions you put forth in your book.

43:12 Sarah Stein Lubrano: Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't have like off the top of my head another like great metaphor for you, and I think this is also the danger of metaphors, right? They, they are beautiful, but they also like they simplify it, right? And the reality of how human beings form their political views is so um. It's not it's complicated because I think complicated is a is a is a plastic word. It kind of like can mean anything you want it to mean in a way that isn't helpful, but um. I think it is Difficult to find a good metaphor right now because Of the way that we are stuck. Uh, IN the, in the skill set, uh, kind of what I was describing earlier, stuck in the skill set, right, where people don't have the skills for the kind of work I'm describing, and so, Actually knocking on 20 of your neighbors' doors and asking them if they want cheap groceries, it's not that hard. It's just not, but it is for people now. Um, SIMILARLY, I think it's just very difficult for us to find a good metaphor for the way people actually politically reason because we're doing less of it than we used to, and we can't recognize it when it's happening. Um. So I don't have an easy one, an easy answer in the sense I can't tell you, yeah, we should just think about it like this, but I mean this is not, again, like it's not really a I think there's a little bit about my book that I carefully packaged it to look a little bit like, you know, a Steven Pinker book or a Jonathan Haid book, right? It's really like I, I know that genre very well. I think about some of the same mechanics in a way of thinking about studies and empiricism, OK, but, um, but it's not one of those books because it's not meant to give you, frankly, as easy answers as they give you. Um, IT doesn't have as neat of a story to tell, and that's a good thing because the reality is messier than they are allowing it to be. And it's not as self-helpy because I don't believe in self-help as something you do alone. I think it's something you always do with other people, the big important like self-help, you know, um, so I don't have a good metaphor for you, but I'm, what I am hoping is that I think over time once people begin to For example, like, engage in a social world when they want to engage in political reasoning, and they discover the benefits of that and the difficulties of that, often the marketplace idea falls apart. I don't know, you know, if you've ever been a part of a Have you've ever been part of the PTA, let's say, the parent-teacher association, like, I think this is like a great like example building block for political life. Like there's politics in there, there's the politics of like what what should the kids learn about sex, but also like how much recess should the kids have and like why aren't the teachers paid enough. There's loads of politics built into that stuff, but it's not a marketplace of ideas. It's a, it's a much more like complicated thing about like building relationships of trust and like trying to find, you know, complicated shared ground, but then sometimes you have to stand up for what you really believe in and OK. Um, SO all I can say is I think that the number one antidote to the bad metaphor is the real experience, you know. Um, AND maybe the real experience with a little bit of theoretical help and a lot of discussion with other people, and I'm hoping we replace it that way.

46:15 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So the book is again, Don't talk about Politics, how to change 21st century Minds, and I will be leaving a link to it in the description of the interview. Uh, AND you mentioned your sub stack. Where else can people find you on the

46:33 Sarah Stein Lubrano: internet? I'm painfully on on like LinkedIn and I'm, I'm painfully on Instagram, but I'm actually, yeah, I'm on both those places, so yeah, come, come find me and Blue Sky as well. I try not to use Twitter because it seems bad. I mean, it's always bad. I have a chapter in the book on why it's bad, so I'm only fake on Twitter, but I'm real on those other platforms and people can come say hi.

46:50 Ricardo Lopes: OK, great. So thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been really great to talk with you. Thank you so much for having me. Hi guys, thank you for watching this interview until the end. If you liked it, please share it, leave a like and hit the subscription button. The show is brought to you by Enlights Learning and Development done differently. Check their website at enlights.com and also please consider supporting the show on Patreon or PayPal. I would also like to give a huge thank you to my main patrons and PayPal supporters, Perergo Larsson, Jerry Muller, Frederick Sundo, Bernard Seyaz Olaf, Alex, Adam Cassel, Matthew Whittingbird, Arnaud Wolff, Tim Hollis, Eric Elena, John Connors, Philip Forst Connolly. Then Dmitri Robert Windegeru Inai Zu Mark Nevs, Colin Holbrookfield, Governor, Michel Stormir, Samuel Andrea, Francis Forti Agnun, Svergoo, and Hal Herzognun, Machael Jonathan Labrarith, John Yardston, and Samuel Curric Hines, Mark Smith, John Ware, Tom Hammel, Sardusran, David Sloan Wilson, Yasilla Dezaraujo Romain Roach, Diego Londono Correa. Yannik Punteran Ruzmani, Charlotte Blis Nico Barbaro, Adam Hunt, Pavlostazevski, Alekbaka Madison, Gary G. Alman, Semov, Zal Adrian Yei Poltonin, John Barboza, Julian Price, Edward Hall, Edin Bronner, Douglas Fry, Franco Bartolati, Gabriel Pancortez or Suliliski, Scott Zachary Fish, Tim Duffy, Sony Smith, John Wiseman. Daniel Friedman, William Buckner, Paul Georg Jarno, Luke Lovai, Georgios Theophannus, Chris Williamson, Peter Wolozin, David Williams, Dio Costa, Anton Ericsson, Charles Murray, Alex Shaw, Marie Martinez, Coralli Chevalier, Bangalore atheists, Larry D. Lee Jr. Old Eringbon. Esterri, Michael Bailey, then Spurber, Robert Grassy, Zigoren, Jeff McMahon, Jake Zul, Barnabas Raddix, Mark Kempel, Thomas Dovner, Luke Neeson, Chris Story, Kimberly Johnson, Benjamin Galbert, Jessica Nowicki, Linda Brendan, Nicholas Carlson, Ismael Bensleyman. George Ekoriati, Valentine Steinmann, Per Crawley, Kate Van Goler, Alexander Obert, Liam Dunaway, BR, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, Perpendicular, Jannaertner, Ursula Guinov, Gregory Hastings, David Pinsov, Sean Nelson, Mike Levin, and Jos Necht. A special thanks to my producers Iar Webb, Jim Frank Lucas Stink, Tom Vanneden, Bernardine Curtis Dixon, Benedict Mueller, Thomas Trumbull, Catherine and Patrick Tobin, John Carlo Montenegro, Al Nick Cortiz, and Nick Golden, and to my executive producers, Matthew Lavender, Sergio Quadrian, Bogdan Kanis, and Rosie. Thank you for all.