Pessimists Archive

The Most Important Podcast of Our Lifetime! by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV1239100505.mp3 If you’ve ever voted in an election, watched the Bachelor, or worried about the end of days, then you’ve probably fallen for a specific rhetorical trick. In this episode, we explore the history of the phrase “the most important election of our lifetime,” and why the human brain is so UNIQUELY, INSANELY, OUTRAGEOUSLY (!!!) susceptible to hyperbole. EPISODE NOTES • Slate.com post based on this episode: The history of the phrase “most important election of our lifetime”  • Washington Post montage of “most important election” statements • Chuck Norris’s anti-Obama 2012 video • How Human Beings Almost Vanished from Earth in 70,000 BC • ABC report from 2012 about the Mayan calendar doomsday fears • Jeff Greenfield’s “least important election” article in Politico • Robert Cloninger’s Anthropedia Foundation • Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager • Robert Thompson, Syracuse University pop culture professor ← Election Hacking Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post The Most Important Podcast of Our Lifetime! appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

224 Years of Election Hacking by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV6897068658.mp3 We have a clear narrative about the 2016 and 2020 election hacking: It’s social media’s fault. But Russia has used the same strategy against America for 100 years (and that’s just the start). If we treat this like it’s only a Facebook problem, then we’ll never truly protect our elections. This is the history of election hacking in America, and the repercussions of calling something “unprecedented” when it’s not. TRANSCRIPT Jason Feifer: This is Pessimists Archive, a show about how change happens. I’m Jason Feifer. Consider the following details and tell me what year I’m talking about, an American presidential election is coming and it feels like the fate of the nation hangs in the balance. A foreign power wants one of those candidates to win, so it begins to interfere in the election by cleverly manipulating the greatest technology of the day. The people who run mainstream media outlets are aware that this is going on, but cannot stop themselves from becoming pawns in the manipulation anyway. So what year is this all happening? Well, 2016, obviously, and 2020, for sure, but also the year 1796. Jason Feifer: This was the first election after George Washington served his two terms, making it the first contested election in American history. And it’s also the first one in which political parties played a role. The election was between incumbent vice president, John Adams, and former secretary of state Thomas Jefferson. And the country doing the manipulation, The outside force that wanted to tilt the election in the favor of their guy was France. Jeffrey L. Pasley: Jefferson was their guy. And then if Jefferson were to win, that would be very good for them. Jason Feifer: This is Jeffrey. Jeffrey L. Pasley: Jeffrey L. Pasley, a professor of history at the University of Missouri and associate director of the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy. Jason Feifer: Jeffrey says it was no secret why the French wanted Jefferson to beat Adams, France was in the middle of the French Revolution and at war with much of Europe, they wanted America as an ally, just as France had supported America during its own recent revolution. And if America wouldn’t pick a side, then France at least wanted America to be a neutral party. France also wanted to be able to use American soil as a military launching ground so it could try to get back some of its Caribbean islands like Haiti, which it had lost to revolutions. But under the Washington administration where John Adams was vice-president, America was patching up its relationship with Great Britain and the French were at war with Great Britain. So France wasn’t happy about any of this and wanted to stop the alliance. Jeffrey L. Pasley: They had interfered in things before there was a treaty with Great Britain, a commercial treaty called the Jay Treaty that the Washington administration had signed and in the terms of which were mostly secret, so the French paid to have it leaked. Jason Feifer: So, now we can add leaking to the list of comparisons between 1796 and 2016. Just get some private government correspondence, a commercial treaty in one case, some emails in another and weaponize them. Anyway, France saw the 1796 American election as a pivotal turning point. They thought that if Adams won, he’d carry on building a relationship with Great Britain, but Jefferson on the other hand was seen as pro France. It would build a stronger alliance between France and America. So the French really, really wanted Jefferson. And as the election of 1796 neared, the French got bold. Jason Feifer: They had the French ambassador to the US send three letters to Thomas Pickering, America’s then Secretary of State, but the French ambassador also sent these letters to a newspaper called the Philadelphia Aurora a paper edited by Benjamin Franklin’s grandson, which reached all the important people in Philadelphia, which of course was the temporary US capital at the time, and was also generally sitting around in most taverns, if it was in the Aurora, it would be seen, and it would start conversation because these letters had a message. Jeffrey L. Pasley: With the very explicit intention of swinging the election, it’s essentially saying, “If you vote for John Adams, there’d be a war.” Jason Feifer: There would be a war, but that’s not how the letters read, of course, they don’t come right out and say it. Instead, the French just lay the guilt on thick. Here’s a little bit from early in the third letter where the French ambassador is explaining how the French people used to feel so close to Americans. Speaker 3: They expected to find in supports of the United States an asylum as sure as home, they thought, if I may use the expression. They’re to find a second country. The French government thought as they did, “Oh hope, where is the our face for people, how has we been deceived.” Jason Feifer: Then the ambassador recounts many grievances about how the French feel betrayed. And if America is Great Britain spread, then America can’t enjoy the benefits of being France’s friend too. But there is one way to ensure delicious croissants for everyone, they say, and that is to stop John Adams and elect Thomas Jefferson. Here’s how the French minister says it without saying it. Speaker 3: Oh Americans, covered with noble scars. Oh, you have so often flown to death into victory with French soldiers. You who knows those generous sentiments which distinguish the true warrior, whose hearts have always vibrated with those of your companions in arms, consult them today to know what they experience. Recollect at the same time that if magnanimous souls with liveliness resent in a front, they also know how to forget one. Let your government return to itself and you will still find in the Frenchmen faithful friends and generous allies. Jason Feifer: And just in case you don’t know how this story ends, it ends with French disappointment because Thomas Jefferson lost. Jeffrey L. Pasley: So France really didn’t want Adams, but of course they got Adams. They didn’t declare a war on us- Jason Feifer: No, it was BB. Or as they call bullshit in France. Speaker 4: Connerie. Jason Feifer: So why am I telling you this? Well, it’s because of a different, dirty word. Speaker 5: In the aftermath of an unprecedented attack on our democracy. Speaker 4: Adam [Alhaj 00:05:51] is with the DNC. Speaker 7: This is unprecedented. Adam A.: This is unprecedented for Russia or a foreign country in such a ham-handed and heavy way to be interfering in our political affairs. Jason Feifer: Unprecedented. When Russia meddled in the 2016 American elections, the leading voices in American media and politics all called it unprecedented. But as we now know, foreign election meddling, isn’t unprecedented, it stretches back literally to the earliest days of American democracy. And maybe you think, “Oh, shut up. That’s totally different. Comparing 1796 to our modern times is a rhetorical trick,” but oh no, you shut up because you are missing the point. It wasn’t just that once. David Shimer: After 2016, I was pretty alarmed at how so many commentators and so many policymakers tended to treat Russian interference in the 2016 election as somehow novel or unprecedented. Jason Feifer: This is David Shimer a global fellow at the Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a fellow at Yale university. And he was very concerned about that word, unprecedented. David Shimer: Because to me, that’s dangerous because if you treat something as unprecedented, what you’re saying is there’s no history behind it, what you’re saying is it’s never happened before, and that makes it much easier to create rumors, myths and even lies about a subject. Jason Feifer: And what kind of rumors, myths and even lies might you hear? Let’s set aside the stuff that’s purely political, which is a mess in its own, but what’s some way that mass culture could be impacted? Well, here’s a popular belief, which is captured pretty well in a trailer for a new documentary on Netflix called The Social Dilemma. It is about the many evils of social media. Speaker 9: You want to control the population of your country, there is never been a tool as effective as Facebook. Speaker 10: If technology creates mass chaos, loneliness, more polarization, more election hacking, more inability to focus on the real issues, we’re toast. Jason Feifer: Let’s talk about logic for a second. If something bad happens and it is truly unprecedented, then your first step would be to look for a very new cause. That’s logical. If I wake up and discover that my face has turned lime green, which would be an unprecedented problem for me, then I would think, “Well, what did I do yesterday? Did I eat something I’d never eaten before? Did I touch something I’d never touched before?” New cause, new effect, that’s what I’d be looking for. And that is how, if you believe election meddling is new, you would reasonably investigate the thing that’s newest, which you could argue is social media. But what if the problem isn’t unprecedented? What if the problem extends far into the past when the newest technology we have didn’t exist. Jason Feifer: That’s what David Shimer wanted to know, so he spent years talking to more than 130 former officials, including eight former CIA directors and a former KGB general. David Shimer: So what I wanted to do and what I do in my book is restore history to the subject of covert electoral interference. And to do so, you have to go back 100 years, Jason Feifer: 100 years to understand Russian interference, that is. France may have meddled in America’s very beginning, but what we’ve seen in 2016 and 2020 is actually just the latest in a century-long sustained effort from one nation. David just released the result of his work, it’s a book called Rigged: America, Russia, And 100 Years Of Covert Electoral Interference. And on this episode of Pessimists Archive, I want to take you through his findings because they really help contextualize the conversation that America is having. And look, I’m going to say this right up front, there is no easy answer to the question of election meddling, nor am I looking to diminish the subject. I’m looking to do the opposite, actually, I’m looking to say, “This is complicated, but over and over throughout history, including right now, we try to turn complicated problems into simple ones. Jason Feifer: Generally, by pinning them on whatever the newest innovation is.” Juvenile delinquency could be stopped by destroying pinball machines. For people who saw women’s roles growing in the workplace as a problem to solve well, the culprit was bicycles, novels and teddy bears. And Russian interference on the American election? Well, that was social media. Simplify a problem, and you are unable to solve it because you can’t see its fullness. It’s that simple. So let’s unsimplify this a little, because the crazy thing about the history of election meddling is, you will see the same tactics over and over again. Ready for the real repetitive history of bad behavior from abroad? It is coming up after the break. Jason Feifer: What is the psychology behind conspiracy theories? And how do you use an algorithm responsibly? And what are the ethics of genetic screening and genome editing? These are the kinds of big, weighty questions you want tackled by super smart informed people, and that is what the podcast Physical Attraction does. Physical Attraction is a podcast about how science and technology shapes our world tackling everything from the birth of stars to the end of the world, which is literally everything when you think about it, and it explores all this through fascinating interviews with academics, authors, and experts in fields like nuclear fusion, astrophysics, artificial intelligence, economics, and technology, as well as by taking its own deep dives into specific historical and scientific topics. Jason Feifer: I was really into a recent episode about whether there’s a hint of phosphene gas on planet Venus, because if there is, that might mean there’s microbial life in Venus’s atmosphere, which would be awesome. So check it out. Again, the show is called Physical Attraction and you can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or visit the show at physicspodcast.com. Jason Feifer: All right. We’re back. So before we get into the history of Russia screwing with other people’s elections, let me address a common technological skepticism that you may already be thinking as I start comparing yesterday’s meddling to today’s. I actually just saw it play out on Twitter recently with someone who tagged us in a discussion. By the way we are @PessimistsArc, Pessimists A-R-C on Twitter, check us out. So, okay, here it was the exchange. First. It was @thetheologan who tweeted, “Do you ever wonder what damage is being done to our psyche on social media, jumping from one post that enrages us to then jump to another that brings us joy. Is that healthy?” Jason Feifer: And then @thederrickmast replied in a very pessimist archivy way. “People made the same argument for newspapers.” To which @thetheologan made the very common retort. “I don’t know if that’s an apt comparison, do newspapers update as quickly as social media feeds?” Obviously they do not. And I hear this a lot. It’s what I think of as the, “This time is different,” argument. As in you can’t compare yesterday’s technology to today’s because this time is different. Today’s technology is just so much more powerful, but I talked about this with Jeffrey, the historian at the University of Missouri, and he said, “The thing you have to appreciate about technology and history is it’s all relative.” Jeffrey L. Pasley: The thing is, it’s all just a matter of speed. In those days, the fact that you could hear something that only happened six weeks ago in Europe, that was like a big deal. We think, “Wow, I can look at my phone and know whatever’s happening in the world. And they thought that about the four page newspaper that they had. Jason Feifer: Think of technology in terms of its relative experience. Yeah, fine, our phones are fast, but our phones are fast compared to what? To dial up modems, I guess. But do you think that in 100 years, people will think that the phones we use today are fast and complex? No. They’ll think that they were stupid toys made for babies. Fast isn’t objective, engrossing isn’t objective, it’s all subjective. So if you live in a world in which it used to take months or years for information to travel, and now you’ve got a system of ships to move information across oceans and a printing press to cheaply distribute the news to basically all the people who could vote and make influential decisions, well, that feels fast. That feels like an addictive, insane, overwhelming amount of information, just as Twitter does to us now. Jeffrey L. Pasley: And we have our speed fetish where we assume that this is all something that we invented, but they were gobsmacked, and it was a communications revolution for them. Jason Feifer: All right. Keep that in mind as we now look at how the technology of the day was used to interfere in elections throughout history. And we are going to turn back to David Shimer to tell us about it. He interviewed, again, 130 former officials for his book Rigged. And before we even get into how Russia meddled with elections for the past 100 years, David wanted to clarify what covert election interference is even for, because this too has been simplified in the modern conversation. David Shimer: There’s a temptation, I think with covert electoral interference operation, to say that if you were engaging in covert action to influence a process of succession in another democracy, that every operations to do so is the same. And that didn’t exactly sit right with me at the outset of my research, because if you had a Soviet operation or an American operation with wildly different objectives, but the same ideas to manipulate an election to achieve those objectives, there has to be something that’s both the same and different across those two operations. Jason Feifer: So let’s unpack that. First of all, note that David said Soviet and American operations, because it’s not like America never interfered with foreign elections. It has. And as David studied the intentions of these two nations, he found two distinct objectives, which he calls either individual change or systemic change. Individual change is the smaller one. This is when a foreign nation just wants to pick the friendlier winner. They think that they’ll benefit from having a particular person in power like when the French wanted Thomas Jefferson over John Adams. Systemic change is when a foreign power wants to influence another nation’s very system of government. Jason Feifer: They even said that on individual change, America and Russia are basically the same, both have inserted themselves into elections around the world with this very objective. But with systemic change, they are playing different games. David Shimer: There are differences there between American and Soviet operations, targeting elections, not around coup plotting or other forms of regime change, just around who you support, which is that Moscow tends to support disruptive authoritarian minded candidates whereas the justification for American operations is tended to be, “We need to support these centers candidates because they will maintain their democracy,” so the ends justify the means, the means being we’re going to manipulate this democracy in order to safeguard it, which is a very tense proposition, and that tension has played out over time. Jason Feifer: Again, we are not talking about one or two elections here. We’re talking about patterns over 100 years. America’s idea of systemic change is to help strengthen other’s democracies, Russia’s idea of systemic change is to weaken others democracies. So what does that look like and why has this been going on for 100 years? Well, it starts at the very founding of the Soviet Union in 1922. David Shimer: Vladimir Lenin founded something known as the Communist International, which was an international body meant to unite the communist parties of the world and fuel meant revolution abroad. And what Lenin sought to do was provide money counsel and support for propaganda organs to get communists elected so that those communists could then abolish their governments, abolish their preexisting borders and fulfill Lenin’s vision for the world. Jason Feifer: That didn’t succeed of course, but it did put nations like the US and the UK on high alert. Then the Soviets really stepped things up after World War II, when Joseph Stalin’s forces go marching around Eastern Europe and interfere really blatantly in elections in places like Poland and Hungary. There, you’ve got millions of pieces of propaganda distributed, and you’ve got ballots being tampered with, and you’ve got ballot stuffing, which is literally what it sounds like. David Shimer: You would literally have caravans full of soldiers riding from polling place to polling place, just putting ballots for their preferred candidates into the boxes of polling places, the most egregious form of ballot stuffing that you can imagine. Jason Feifer: And so, America sees this and thinks, “Ah, crap, we got to do something, which is why Harry Truman authorizes the CIA to engage in covert action to influence the Italian election in 1948 with a massive, massive propaganda campaign. And now, it is really game. David Shimer: So in fact, the starting point of CIA covert action was electoral interference. Jason Feifer: So now America and the Soviets are running around the world trying to save or destroy democracies by influencing elections. But of course, eventually these nations start targeting each other directly too. And this is where you start to see super interesting parallels to what we saw in 2016. So first of all, the Russians making direct contact with a presidential campaign, not new. David Shimer: In ’60 and ’68, the Soviet ambassadors to the United States directly approached first Adlai Stevenson, and then Hubert Humphrey who were leading democratic politicians of their day with direct offers to help them get elected president Jason Feifer: Both either rejected or ignored the offer. And here’s another thing that’ll sound really familiar, the KGB would try to find private information about the presidential candidate they didn’t like and then they would release that publicly to hurt that candidate. David Shimer: In 1976, they tried to do that with Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democratic presidential candidate, they couldn’t find damaging private information, so they made it up, and then they sent that file to a bunch of different news platforms and presidential campaigns. They opted not to run it, so the operation failed, but the same idea you saw in 2016 with WikiLeaks was present there. Jason Feifer: And here was another tactic the KGB used, find existing divisions among Americans, and exploit them. David Shimer: I spent about half a day with the former KGB general interviewing him for my book. I went through hundreds of pages of KGB archives. And what came out was that the KGB or the Soviet objective was to show the world that America was just a hot bed of hate. That’s that’s a quote to show that it was dysfunctional, that it was unenviable, that no country should want to be like the United States. So the motivation therefore was to emphasize fissures in America, exploit fissures in America, and then advertise those fissures to the globe Jason Feifer: For example, in 1960, various United Nations delegations from across Africa and Asia received a disgusting racist note that had been signed by the KKK. The delegations were understandably offended and the Nigerian ambassador actually read the letter for the record at the United Nations General Assembly, prompting the US delegation to get up and apologize on behalf of the United States. But as it turned out, the KKK didn’t send that letter at all, the KGB did. David Shimer: And it’s recorded in the KGB archives how thrilled they were that this letter got such traction that America was humiliated on the world stage based on a letter that again was said to have been signed by the KKK, but was actually signed by the KGB. Jason Feifer: David also found record of a plot, the KGB thankfully never executed, but you can see where their head was at. They planned to detonate a bomb in a predominantly black neighborhood in America and then make it look like the bomb was planted by the Jewish Defense league. Jason Feifer: Do you think that it’s reasonable for me to draw a line between the objectives of the things that you just said and the objectives of troll bots on Twitter,? David Shimer: Oh absolutely. One of the greatest myths about 2016 is that Vladimir Putin invented something or that his objectives were somehow new, they were not. Everything that Russia did in 2016 was a continuation of the past. One of those continuations was about sowing discord. Based on the interviews I did with the CIA director or deputy director, the DNI in 2016, the leading objective of Russia’s 2016 operation was to sow discord, discontent, chaos in American society. David Shimer: It should be surprising to no one that the IRA, the Russia Troll Farm that was involved in ’16 targeted predominantly black Americans, that is a tradition of Russian and Soviet intelligence to seek the fan racial discord in order to divide Americans from one another and also to discredit the American model in the eyes of the world. And a long running pattern here is that the more divided America, the more vulnerable America becomes. David Shimer: Russia doesn’t create fissures, Russia identifies fishers that already exist and exploits them, worsens them, exacerbates them. That’s what the Russians were doing in 2016, just as that’s what the KGB was doing during the Cold War. It’s a long running idea, the internet just presents new avenues, new pathways to do it. Jason Feifer: So, if the internet is just a new tool for old tricks, as David says, then I was curious what other technologies had been used in nefarious ways. If you dig through old media archives, for example, you’ll find a lot of people pondering how radio will alter politics. Now, the early days of radio in general were met with a lot of debate about whether radio was healthy, whether it was too addictive, whether it filled our lives in an unhealthy amount of information and communication. People worried that radio would harm children’s minds with conversations that sound exactly like how people talk about social media today. Jason Feifer: There is a great New York Daily news headline from 1932, for example, that said, “When it’s homework or radio to child, radio’s the winner.” But on the question of politics, the early days of radio actually brought out a lot of optimism. People wrote about how it could strengthen democracy and increase participation. In 1928, the magazine, Popular Science ran a piece that started by saying- Speaker 12: This year, radio will elect a president. Jason Feifer: But that wasn’t meant to be a bad thing. Popular mechanics offered a very optimistic view of how radio would change the electorate, saying for example, that this new form of mass media would- Speaker 12: Give people a wider understanding of concrete governmental problems. Jason Feifer: Which may be was overly optimistic. But it also said that- Speaker 12: By enabling speakers to talk directly to millions, make it possible for a man to be bigger than his party. Jason Feifer: Which I think we can all agree, turned out to be true. That same year in 1928, an article in Collier’s Magazine said- Speaker 13: The radio properly used we’ll do more of a popular government, than have most of the wars for freedom and self-government. Jason Feifer: But of course the story got more complicated, cut to 1936 and The New York Times is running a story headlined, “Europe’s radio jitters.” It says- Speaker 14: Back in the days when radio was younger than it is now, it was thought that the possibility of nation speaking direct to nation over the air, held out the prospect of better international understanding. But now that the European Radio is expanding from its original national basis and nation is at last speaking direct to nation, the net results so far seems to be a gathering flurry of propaganda charges. Jason Feifer: In particular, Europe was rightly concerned that Hitler was using radio very effectively. And just to speed history along here, now jump to the 1980s where people living in Florida, but also as far away as Texas might turn on the radio every night to find this- Speaker 15: This is Radio Moscow, here’s the news, first the headlines. Jason Feifer: That is Radio Moscow being broadcast from Havana. So I asked David Shimer about this, our Russian election meddling historian. I asked him how radio played a role in election interference. And he said, you’ve got to first consider a couple things, one- David Shimer: It’s important to distinguish between what’s overt and what’s covert. Jason Feifer: Radio Moscow in the 1980s was like the television station, RT today. There is no hiding that it’s state-sponsored media, it is literally right there in the name. But when I pressed him on how specific technology had been used across time, he said, “Look, the technology has never really the driving force.” David Shimer: Perhaps discomforting reality about covert electoral interference operations is they don’t have to be technologically advanced really. They often thrive in the most basic ways, just identifying, targeting and manipulating people, figuring out ways to get propaganda in front of people in a precise and targeted way. So what this looked like in the past, now Russia targets, or let’s say, corrupts the social media platform, before that, meant corrupting a newspaper. It meant corrupting a television station or a radio channel in order to plant propaganda that would then ripple more widely. Jason Feifer: And how would you do that? Well, it’s simple really, at any given time in any given medium, you just figure out the way into people’s attention. Today it’s Troll Farms and algorithms, and yesterday, it was people. David Shimer: You use cutouts or middlemen, like recruiting a vulnerable reporter to basically just launder your messaging through their platform, and then other platforms would pick up what that reporter published. And the idea was that the messaging would spread across the information environment of the country you were targeting. Jason Feifer: So, fake news? David Shimer: There was fake news long before there were trolls and bots. Jason Feifer: Okay. What have we learned here? In short, what happened in 2016 and what’s happening in 2020 is not unprecedented, not even close. It is the continuation of 100 years of sustained efforts by Russia. And for that matter, the continuation of efforts from foreign nations that date back to the very beginning of the American experiment. And although social media has become a useful way to spread misinformation today, it is simply the latest tool in which to do that. So if you want to solve a problem, you cannot act like it’s Twitter or Facebook’s fault entirely. You cannot say, “Oh, these are the newest things, they caused the problem.” Because as David Shimer said earlier- David Shimer: If you treat something as unprecedented, what you’re saying is there’s no history behind it. What you’re saying is it’s never happened before, and that makes it much easier to create rumors myths and even lies. Jason Feifer: So what is the solution if it’s not to throw Mark Zuckerberg in jail? What goes beyond the rumors myths and even lies? Well, that is a big question with no simple answer, because it is not a simple problem, but I will share what I found, and it’s coming up after the break. Jason Feifer: This goes without saying, but we are living through stressful times, stress at home, stress with work, stress with the state of the nation. And as we shoulder it all, it is easy to forget to focus on our own wellbeing, but we must. If you are struggling with feelings of not being in control or just need to talk with someone, well, that’s why there’s BetterHelp. BetterHelp is a professional counseling service where everything happens online. BetterHelp matches you with the appropriate licensed professional therapist who you can connect with in a safe and private online environment. Jason Feifer: It has licensed professional counselors who specialize in a range of issues from depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, and more. You can send a message to your counselor anytime, get timely and thoughtful responses and schedule weekly video or phone sessions. So start living a happier life today. And as a listener of Pessimists Archive, you will get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/archive. Join 800,000 people taking charge of their mental health. Again, that is BetterHelp, Better H-E-L-P, betterhelp.com/archive. Jason Feifer: All right. We’re back. So we’ve dispensed with the idea that today’s electoral interference is unprecedented or even new or reliant upon modern technology. So what next? Well, I put that to the two historians I talked to for this episode, and their answers were sweeping. First, here’s Jeffrey L. Pasley from the University of Missouri, who said that the first thing we need to do is reframe the problem. Jeffrey L. Pasley: Even when we say meddling like this, it’s an assumption that we’re kind of this bubble that somebody can get inside, and we’re never a bubble. We were never this isolate, people swing around and term America as exceptionalism, but one part of this is the idea that America is naturally isolated from the rest of the world. And that wasn’t true in the 18th century, and it’s never been true. Everybody’s who deals with us is in some major issue, probably thinks they have some interest in who’s going to win, who’s in power here, just the way we do about other countries that we deal with. So, there’s some level on which we should just get used to that idea and assume that’s happening. Jason Feifer: When he said that to me at first, it just sounded depressing. It sounded like, “Hey, what are you going to do?” But no. The more I thought about it and the more I listened to him, the more I realized that he’s giving us an important way to think. He’s saying, “Look, America needs to face reality. And reality is that it is not some self-contained space.” The entire world feels invested in the outcome of America’s elections. So the country, top to bottom needs to build that into its operating system. It needs to expect it, it needs to shore itself up because come on- Jeffrey L. Pasley: False stories on social media is enough to actually destabilize us, and I guess we weren’t that stable to begin with. Jason Feifer: So get it together, America. And how exactly do we do that? Well, rigged author, David Shimer has a plan. David Shimer: If Russia is seeking to tear down our democracy, which it is, then we need to renew our democracy, both at home and abroad. And what that looks like at home is tackling both forms of covert electoral interference, efforts to trolls the ballots and efforts to influence minds. Jason Feifer: Then, he started running through a list. David Shimer: The first thing we need to do is secure our election infrastructure, whether that means passing mandatory cybersecurity standards for states or otherwise. So long as our actual systems are vulnerable to manipulation and sabotage as they were in 2016, our government will find it very difficult to respond to this threat in a fluid and comprehensive way because of the fear of that worst case scenario of an election day cyber attack Jason Feifer: But protecting democracy goes beyond protecting voter infrastructure. So point number two, guard against the manipulation of voters and start with a focus on the latest tactics. David Shimer: Which are, and the stuff and release of emails and social media manipulation. With emails, what that means is reporters being more cognizant of the source of the stolen materials they’re covering rather than just the messages contained within them. It means citizens being less gullible and being mindful of the fact that someone’s trying to play them and caring about that, questioning why they’re seeing the information they’re seeing. And it’s on the government to attribute anonymous email releases in a more timely manner so that Americans have the information they need to know, “Okay, this was acquired by Russia, and therefore we know that it’s Russia that wants us to see this, and there’s a reason for that.” David Shimer: Because as long as this stays anonymous, it’s very difficult to make that assessment from the perspective of the public. Jason Feifer: I love that because it puts the onus on every stakeholder. A big part of the message from people who blame technology for social ills is to say, “Oh, we are powerless against this force of dark magic.” And David is like, “No, everyone has a role to play here from the people putting out information to the people consuming it.” And of course, that does extend to the people running social media companies. David says, these companies must be more transparent and responsible. They have a role in recognizing how they’re being played and stopping it. Jason Feifer: He said regulation could play a role here, though he didn’t say how, but the way he sees it, social media is just one part of a far larger ecosystem of media. And for that matter, the system by which we build and grow and maintain community, and all of that needs tending to. David Shimer: The more divided a democracy, the more vulnerable a democracy. So the more we invest in ourselves and local media, in public education, in our infrastructure, in healing racial divisions, that makes us less vulnerable to subversion for the tactics of the future because Russia’s methods will continue to evolve. Jason Feifer: And finally, there’s a major role to be played by the American and world governments themselves. So here’s David explaining that and taking his argument home. David Shimer: America needs to renew its leadership abroad. We need to work with a coalition of democracies, both to identify these operations, to target our elections, but we also need to impose jointly costs on Russia for executing these types of operations, because so far, Vladimir Putin has suffered minimal consequences for interfering in the heart of so many democracies, which is their elections. And until that changes, there’s no reason to believe that his calculus will change in terms of pushing hard to sabotage the democratic process of succession and to manipulate the directions of foreign democracies in a way that suits his interests. David Shimer: And I think if we do both of those things, I think if we tackle our vulnerabilities at home with both our infrastructure and along propaganda lines, and if we also work with our allies to deter Russian interference, we won’t be solving this problem by any stretch, because again, it will persist, but we’ll be in a much better position than we are now, which is basically no real effort to defend ourselves at home on the part of so many, the actors I mentioned and no real effort to punish the perpetrators of these operations abroad. Jason Feifer: Does any of this sound easy? No, of course, but you know what? That is the point, because the story of election interference is really an object lesson in treating big problems as big. And that may sound stupid and obvious, but I don’t know guys, this seems to be something we have trouble with from the earliest age. I have little kids and one of the books they love is called Big Dog, Little dog by P. D. Eastman, which is about a big dog and a little dog, a big dog named Ted and a little dog named Fred. Jason Feifer: And they’re best friends, but total opposites. And one day, they go on a trip and sleep in a hotel, and that is where the trouble begins. Ted, the big dog sleeps in a small bed and Fred, the little dog sleeps in a big bed, and they both get a terrible night’s sleep. And they can’t figure out why the next morning until a little Bird arrives. Here’s the Bird. Speaker 16: “I know what to do,” said the Bird, Ted should sleep upstairs, and Fred should sleep downstairs. Jason Feifer: Which is to say, they need to switch rooms. So the dogs run back to the hotel and get in the beds that actually fit them and fall fast asleep. And then the bird flies over and delivers the moral of the story. Speaker 16: Well, that was easy to do, big dogs need big beds, little dogs need little beds. Why make big problems out of little problems? Jason Feifer: And that’s a great message for kids because kids are constantly making big problems out of little problems. But adults, well, adults do the opposite, they make little problems out of big problems, and it’s easy to imagine why. Big problems are hard, they’re not easily fixed, and they’re also really inconvenient. They require work from everyone. People who don’t generally agree with each other, and this work is not going to be work that everyone likes and accomplishing it as a once Herculean and very grinding and systemic. Jason Feifer: Big problems don’t generally produce heroes because they require too many people and they’re too complicated to fit into a narrow spotlight. So you got to buy in to that, but if you’re a senator running for reelection or a television pundit, or the maker of a documentary series about the dangers of social media, well, you are not going to get a lot of traction with huge seemingly impossible 100 point plans to fix something as big as American elections. But, if you can shrink it down to something simplistic, down to one villain, to something that you personally can tackle yourself, well, then you can be the hero. All eyes can be on you. Jason Feifer: And that is why it’s so tempting to make little problems out of big problems. So here’s my proposal, whenever we hear someone say that they have an answer to a big problem, and they are able to say that answer in the length of a television soundbite, then we should reply with two words. And here they are, what else? What else? It is a modest proposition, I think, what else is a cry for complexity? What else is a push for more? What else has a built in logic? That what you’ve heard is just part of the story and maybe even a justifiable part of the story, but if it’s treated as the only part of the story, then mistaking a campfire for a forest fire is what you are going to do because boy, we have got ourselves a fire, but not an unprecedented fire and not even a new fire, it’s just a fire. Jason Feifer: So, who has got solutions? Please, bring them. And then let’s all say, what else? And that’s our episode. But hey, speaking of that Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma, a bunch of listeners of this show reached out to tell us about a particular moment that oh boy, they should have done some fact checking in that movie. Want to hear something really egregious, and that frankly gives you a good insight into how desperately people want to simplify complex problems, I’ve got it for you in a minute. But first, if you love Pessimists Archive, that we’d really appreciate if you subscribe, tell a friend and give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and stay in touch. Jason Feifer: You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram @PessimistsArc, pessimists A-R-C, where we are constantly sharing the ill-conceived words of pessimists throughout history. You can also reach us by email at pessimistsarchive@gmail.com. And our website, where we have links to many of the things you heard in this episode is Pessimists.co. And also, we’re now, sending out an amazing weekly newsletter full of fun, pessimistic predictions from the past. You can sign up by going to our site, pessimists.co, and clicking on Newsletter at the top. Jason Feifer: Pessimists Archive is me and Louis Anslow, sound editing by Alec Bayliss. Our webmaster is James Steward. Our theme music is by Caspar Babypants. Learn more at babypantsmusic.com. The voices you heard reading some articles in this episode were Gia Mora, you can find her at Giamora.com, and Brent Rose, find him at Brentrose.com. And we are grateful for the help from Pen Name Consulting. Pessimists Archive is supported in part by the Charles Koch Institute. Jason Feifer: The Charles Koch Institute believes that advances in technology have transformed society for the better and is looking to support scholars, policy experts in other projects and creators who focus on embracing innovation, creating a society that fosters innovation and encouraging people to engineer the next great idea. If that is you, then get in touch with them, proposals for projects in law, economics, history, political science, and philosophy are encouraged. To learn more about their partnership criteria, visit cki.org. That is cki.org. Jason Feifer: All right. The documentary, The Social Dilemma, a movie that describes itself as being about, “The dangerous human impact of social networking.” A movie that’s basically a handful of tech critics who used to work in tech who said dire things about social media over and over again, but offer little in the way of solutions. One of those people is Tristan Harris from the Center for Humane Technology. And at one point, he looks directly at the camera. And as a way of proving how uniquely dangerous today’s technology is, he says, Tristan Harris: No one got upset when bicycle showed up. As everyone was starting to go around in bicycles, no one said, “Oh my God, we just ruined society. Bicycles are affecting people, they’re pulling people away from their kids. They’re ruining the fabric of democracy, people can’t tell what’s true.” We never said any of that stuff about a bicycle. Jason Feifer: Are you kidding Tristan? Who fact check this movie? Nobody, I guess. We did a whole Pessimists Archive episode about how people thought the bicycle was the end of the world. Here are literal headlines from newspapers during the dawn of the bicycle in the late 1800 and early 1900. Here they are; do bicycles hurt books? Excessive use of bicycle fatal, do bicycles increase selfishness? Bicycles are blamed for youths insanity, bicycles affect church attendance. Jason Feifer: And it could go on and on and on like that. And if you are not willing to study these things and to take them seriously and to understand how the reactions of today are connected to the reactions of yesterday, then you are left to treat every new thing as unprecedented. And again, just to hear it one more time- David Shimer: And that makes it much easier to create rumors and myths and even lies about a subject. Jason Feifer: So, what else do you have, Tristan? What else? That’s it for this time. Thanks for listening to Pessimists Archive. I’m Jason Feifer, and we’ll see you in the near future.   ← Forks Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post Election Hacking appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

Why We Eat With a Fork (It Isn't the Food) by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV8380259839.mp3 The fork isn’t just a useful tool for eating. It’s one of the greatest symbols of individualism — a utensil that people opposed for thousands of years, and that only gained acceptance once we started thinking about ourselves differently. This is the story of how the fork shaped us. EPISODE NOTES • Darra Goldstein, and her latest book Beyond the North Wind • Ken Albala, University of the Pacific • Melissa Wittmeier, School of the Art Institute of Chicago • Niall Atkinson, University of Chicago • Christine Zappella, Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas  • Jesus’s Last Supper Menu Revealed • Madeleine Pelner Cosman’s description of the spice finger • The Hungry Food Band’s spork song • PRI’s The World: How birds flew out of pies • The Wedding Feast at Cana • Timeline: The cultural politics of fork usage are surprisingly complex ← What Will We Fear Next? Election Hacking → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post Forks appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

What Will We Fear Next? by Pessimists Archive https://chtbl.com/track/78333/http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/867260686-pessimistsarc-what-will-we-fear-next.mp3 COVID changed many people’s relationship with technology… so what comes next? We explore why technophobia always happens in cycles, how we misuse science in a way that amplifies fear, and what everyone will be concerned about in five to 10 years. EPISODE NOTES • Amy Orben and her Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics • Justin E. H. Smith writing about his evolving book project on The Point • Kevin Roose and his book Futureproof  • Peter Diamandis and his book The Future Is Faster Than You Think • Matt Ridley and his book How Innovation Works • Facebook Depression ABC Action News story • Senator Josh Hawley making “evidence”-based anti-internet case • 1941 Mary Preston paper on radio addiction • Scientific American’s coverage of Amy Orben’s social media research • The history of potatoes • Survey: 9 in 10 Americans have a better opinion of technology during Covid • There Aren’t Luddites In A Quarantine • NY Times: Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won. ← The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post What Will We Fear Next? appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

What Will We Fear Next? by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV7332222619.mp3 COVID changed many people’s relationship with technology… so what comes next? We explore why technophobia always happens in cycles, how we misuse science in a way that amplifies fear, and what everyone will be concerned about in five to 10 years. EPISODE NOTES • Amy Orben and her Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics • Justin E. H. Smith writing about his evolving book project on The Point • Kevin Roose and his book Futureproof  • Peter Diamandis and his book The Future Is Faster Than You Think • Matt Ridley and his book How Innovation Works • Facebook Depression ABC Action News story • Senator Josh Hawley making “evidence”-based anti-internet case • 1941 Mary Preston paper on radio addiction • Scientific American’s coverage of Amy Orben’s social media research • The history of potatoes • Survey: 9 in 10 Americans have a better opinion of technology during Covid • There Aren’t Luddites In A Quarantine • NY Times: Coronavirus Ended the Screen-Time Debate. Screens Won. ← The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post What Will We Fear Next? appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV1639947132.mp3 What does it take for two different people to find common ground? To answer that, we dig into a nine-year-old mystery. In 2011, two very different guys shared a pair of earbuds on the New York City subway. A photo of them went viral … but who were they, and what were they doing? All is revealed. EPISODE NOTES • Danny Rokit’s Break Fresh NYC • Matt McDonnell’s dog, Midnight • Where the photo appeared first: New York magazine’s approval matrix •Where the photo appeared second: BuzzFeed’s “35 Tweets About NYC That Will Make You Laugh Harder Than You Should” • Where the photo appeared third: Jason Feifer’s Instagram  • “Peach Fuzz” by KMD • Letters From Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia, by A. Leo Oppenheim • CBS News from 1981: “Why is everyone wearing headphones?” • Chris McDaniel against hip hop  • Geraldo Rivera against hip hop TRANSCRIPT This is Pessimists Archive, a show about how change happens. I’m Jason Feifer. I want to tell you the story of the greatest photograph I’ve ever taken. It’s a photograph that’s gotten a lot of attention, and I’ve thought about it a lot since I took it nine years ago. It’s a photo that seems to capture a better world, a world of tolerance and equality that so many people are rightfully demanding right now. But in truth, it’s also a photo I never really understood, and that I made many wrong assumptions about. Because I didn’t know the people in the photo—and they had no idea I took it.  So anyway, here’s what happened. The year was 2011, and I was riding the subway in New York City, where I live. I was looking down at my phone as usual, and then I looked up for some reason and… saw this amazing scene. There were two guys sitting next to each other, who couldn’t have looked more different. The guy on the right was this medium-build, blonde-haired white guy, who looked like a… first-year lawyer. He wore a black pinstripe suit, with a tie drooping way past his waist, and he had a pencil sticking out of his front pocket. To his left was a man that was basically the exact opposite of him. It was this skinny guy with darker skin, a big afro, cool sunglasses perched on top, and he had these bright, flashy sneakers. And by itself, of course, there’s nothing unique about these guys sitting next to each other. The beauty of New York is that it contains so many different kinds of people, and then it squeezes them together tightly so that they’re all shoulder to shoulder. But when strangers are next to each other on the subway, they usually stay in their own worlds. Not these guys, though! These guys were sharing a single pair of earbuds. Picture it. A blue wire coming out of each of their ears, joining together into an iPhone or something, which the white guy was holding. But the guys weren’t looking at each other. Both were looking at the phone. And when I saw this, I thought two things: Number one. What are they listening to? And number two. I need to take a photo. Now.  Because at the time, I was just thinking, this is like the New York moment. It’s the kind of thing that makes this city magical—when infinite possibility produces a perfect, small, beautiful moment in time. Here were two very different guys, from what I assumed were very different backgrounds, sharing something in this very intimate way. It’s life as it should be.  And also, not for nothing, but this moment went against the way we normally think of technology too. When people started walking around with headphones in the 1980s, nobody saw the potential for shared experiences. Instead, they warned of the exact opposite. Here’s Associated Press radio in 1984:  “Critics of the Walkman say the headset mindset excludes the outside world.”  And here’s the CBS Evening News in 1981:  “Just about anywhere you go this weekend you may be listening to music, or if you’re really lucky as Bernard Goldberg reports, you may be watching people listening to music.”  “This is the me generation gone wild, the height of anti-social behavior… electronic snobbery.”  But here, in front of my eyes, on the subway, the exact opposite of that was happening. A thing accused of people pulling apart was bringing people together… though it wasn’t entirely clear how.  So I was looking at these guys sharing earbuds on the subway, and took a photo quickly and secretly, so they wouldn’t see me. Then I posted it to social media, and also sent it to some friends at New York magazine. They loved it and put it in the approval matrix, which is this page in the back of the magazine that ranks things based on whether they’re lowbrow or highbrow, and despicable or brilliant. They ranked my photo lowbrow and brilliant, and wrote: “Only in New York, kids.” Right next to it, completely unrelated but also ranking lowbrow and brilliant, was a photo of Yo-Yo Ma laying down on a bathroom floor next to a wombat.  So that was fun, and I felt like I’d given this little New York moment its due. And, life went on. Five years passed. And then, in January of 2016, during a GOP presidential primary debate, senator Ted Cruz said this:  TED CRUZ: You know I think most people know exactly what New York values are.  [laughing]  WOMAN: I am from New York  TED CRUZ: We- well you’re from New York so you might not, but I promise you in the state of South Carolina, they do Oh Ted Cruz! He seemed so proud of himself as he insulted… what, what was he insulting? People who work hard and live in small apartments? I remember sitting at home watching this and thinking, what’s my definition of New York values? And then that old photo popped into my head, the one of two very different men sharing music on the subway. That’s it, I thought. That is the beauty that this city stands for. So I tweeted the photo with the hashtag #newyorkvalues and it blew up, and then Buzzfeed included it in a post headlined: 35 Tweets About NYC That Will Make You Laugh Harder Than You Should. Which… ok, not exactly what I was going for, but I was glad more people got to see it. And then four more years passed. In May of 2020, in the wake of the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many other black people at the hands of racism and oppression, demonstrations for Black Lives Matter spread across the world. I wanted to share something supportive on social media, and then thought, once more to that old photo, it just reappeared in my brain. At this point, I’d been thinking about this photo for years, and it had taken on a greater meaning for me. It felt like a shining moment … this image of all that could be right. So, I posted it on Instagram along with a note that included this: “We have the ability to bring each other so much joy. But that starts by recognizing how equally valuable we all are.” Within a day, more than 1,000 people had liked the photo. And one of them was a woman named Maria. MARIA 1: my name is Maria and I’m a lecture at the University of Illinois teaching language and literature. Maria saw the photo and built a little story in her head. Maybe these guys were both commuting home from work, and one was interested in what the other was listening to, and then… MARIA 2: two people just who are, who are in their own world, very unique and very accepting of who they are, who they truly are and their personality. They found each other. So, she shared my photo on her Instagram stories—which, for those who don’t know, means it’s visible for 24 hours to her followers, and then it disappears. Maria has a private account with about 900 followers, so not a lot of people were going to see it… but at the 23rd hour, just before it was gone, a car detailer in Queens named Mike Pappas saw it. Mike met Maria at a coffee shop a few years earlier, and they became friends. And when Mike saw the photo, he had a very different reaction. He wasn’t thinking, oh that’s beautiful. He was thinking… what? MIKE 1: I’m like, Oh my God. Some total stranger took a picture of my friend on the subway, just being himself I didn’t know it yet, but the mystery of this photograph was about to be solved. Now, before we go any further, I want to explain the purpose of this episode. If you’re a regular listener to Pessimists Archive, you know that this show seeks to understand how change happens, and what it takes for people to embrace change, and we usually do that by looking at the history of innovations. But right now, we are in a moment of massive and overdue social change, and it got me thinking about how innovations aren’t the only thing seen as scary and different. People are often seen that way too. And the reason for that is deep and systemic and historical and ugly, and I will not pretend to have all the answers here. But what I do have is this story—this delightful story about one small but beautiful moment, and the hopefulness we can draw from it. So that’s what I want to offer you today. It is a feel-good tale of togetherness, nine years in the making. All will be revealed… after the break. AD: We’re all balancing a lot during these challenging times. Our work loads are crazy, our families are stressed, and it’s easy to focus on everything else except for our own well-being. But that’s a mistake. Do not forget your mental health! If you’re wondering how to cope with feelings of not being in control, or being prevented from achieving happiness, or anything else that’s weighing you down, well, that it why there’s Better Help. AD CONTINUED: Better Help is a professional counseling service where everything can happen online. It will access your needs and match you with your own, licensed, professional therapist who you can connect with in a safe and private online environment. It has licensed professional counselors who specialize in a range of issues form depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, sleeping, trauma, anger and more. AD CONTINUED: You’ll be able send a message to your counselor anytime, get timely and thoughtful responses, and you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. Everything you share is confidential and the service is very affordable. Start living a happier life today. And as a listener of Pessimists Archive, you’ll get ten percent off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/archive. Join over eight-hundred-thousand people taking charge of their mental health. Again that’s better help, better H-E-L-P, betterhelp.com/archive. Alright, we’re back. So, like I said: I posted this photo three times, in 2011, 2016, and most recently on Tuesday, June 2, 2020. That next morning, I woke up around 6 a.m., checked Instagram, and saw a very confusing DM in my inbox. Someone had sent me three pictures of a guy doing … breakdancing moves, or something? And then there was a message that just said: “Hey, he’s a good friend of mine.” I was tired and bleary-eyed, and I stared at the DM for a while trying to make sense of it. I zoomed in on the breakdancing guy, who had a big beard and even bigger hair. Who was he? I didn’t recognize him. And then I sat up straight in bed, like a machine that had just been booted up, because I suddenly understood what I was looking at. It was one of the guys from my photo, the one with the big afro. So, how did this happen? Well, it’s thanks to the internet magic you heard a moment ago. I posted the photo, Maria reposted it, and then Mike—that’s the guy Maria met at a coffee shop—well, Mike saw Maria’s post just before it disappeared, and recognized his friend in it. MIKE 2: I’m like, yeah, I’m going to message him. He definitely took this picture. He would definitely love to learn more about the person in it. Of course that is exactly what I wanted! So, OK, let’s start with the basics. The guy with the afro … his name is Danny. And if you knew Danny, it would come as no surprise that he’s sitting on a subway sharing earbuds with what appears to be a perfect stranger. Because according to Mike, Danny is just… unlike anyone else. MIKE 3: He can mesh with anyone. If you put him in a room with four walls, the walls will love him by the end of the day. You know, it’s just how he is. Mike and Danny became friends in high school, back in 2006. I asked Mike to share a story that captures the essence of Danny—like, the quintessential Danny moment. And so Mike told me about this day in high school where they decided to skip class. They met up with some girls, and then just started strolling the city. And as they did, the same thing kept happening: Danny knew everyone. MIKE 4: we’re just going around the Chinatown, running into his friends in Chinatown, running into his friends in Soho, running into his friends everywhere. Everywhere we went that day we ran into people that Danny knew that were in different walks of life. And I’m like, dude, this guy is literally a chameleon. You could put him in any scenario or anywhere in your city, he has a friend there. So… of course, I asked him to put me in touch with Danny. Danny, who I sat across from on a subway nine years ago, and whose photo I had blasted around the internet, and who I had wondered about ever since. Danny, who it turns out seems to hold a skill we could all really use, which is the ability to connect with people very different from us… and Danny, who, to my great relief, was very happy when he saw my photo. DANNY 1: given everything that like is kind of going through our feeds that like we’re all posting and that we’re all saying, eh-fuck, it put a smile on my face. It was amazing. This, of course, is Danny. DANNY 2: the guy that I was sitting with his name is Matt. I haven’t spoken to him in years. I hope he’s okay, but, he was a good dude too. I remember that whole day. It was hilarious. As it turns out, I had captured a very specific, very awesome moment. Like, Danny knows the exact thing that was happening, and the exact thoughts in his head, when I took that photo. But to really appreciate it, you first need to know a few things about Danny. So, let’s rewind. Danny grew up in Harlem, and identifies as Afro-Latino. His full name is Daniel Nieves, but nobody calls him that. DANNY 3: I feel like if someone’s like Daniel Nieves, it’s either like you’re presenting me with something or I’m in trouble. Instead, everyone knows him as Danny Rokit—that’s R-O-K-I-T Rokit, which is like his stage name. Danny’s a member of a group called Break Fresh NYC, which sees itself as a defender and promoter of hip hop. DANNY 4: It’s like a collective of the underground version of hip hop that I feel as if we hold true to and not what the media kind of like plays it to be. So to be clear, here’s what Danny talks about when he talks about hip hop. DANNY 5: hip hop is comprised of four elements. It’s going to be: B-boying, which is really what break dancing is called. Technically we call ourselves dancers at the end of the day, but let’s start with B-boying to, to make it easy. B-boying equals break dancing. So, uh, B-boying MCing. DJing, and Graffiti. Those four things are, in reality, what hip hop is. And then for the OG, the fifth one would be over standing, having an understanding that all of those things that equals one and that all of those things is hip hop, not one of those things, but all of those things. So if you’re looking to have an extended debate about what is and isn’t hip hop, Danny is your guy. He will do that all day. Which artist is hip hop, which event is hip hop. He hates how the commercialization of hip hop makes things unavailable for people who are a part of the culture, and how it gets misrepresented through monetization. To push back on that, his group Break Fresh NYC does a lot of things. The way Danny says it, they hold events to have a safe space for the creation of hip hop as they know it to be. They have a DJ that spins actual vinyl, a mic in case anyone wants to rap, and they even make their own shirts to bring the graffiti element without, you know, spray painting the venue walls. Danny is the MC. They also produce videos and mini-documentaries, and celebrate hip hop’s musicality. And, his group will also show up at other events, events that they think are not pure hip hop, just to make a point. DANNY 6: We’ll go to a, like a, a break dance event and not enter. We’ll just be by the sideline. And the cipher is getting, is getting hype on the, the side. We’ll battle the judges if we feel like they did a call, that’s like wrong, you know, if somebody wins off doing nothing but power moves and we feel like that’s not hip hop, battle us. That’s Break Fresh. And I have to say, this element of Danny surprised me at first. Because here’s this guy who gets along with everybody, but he’s also… you know, haven’t we all met people who draw hard lines about what something is or isn’t? And aren’t they insufferable? I mean, don’t get me wrong, I have been that insufferable snob. I was a ska kid in the 90s, and I tortured people talking about first wave Jamaican ska, and who sold out, and how that band you like isn’t real ska, and— [FIRST FEW BARS OF NO DOUBT’S SPIDERWEB] No Doubt isn’t ska, OK? IT IS NOT SKA. … oh, sorry, I… guess I still have it in me. Anyway, now when I look back at that time in my life, I see insecurity. Like, in a big and scary world, I’d found something narrow that I could claim as my own, and I used it to make myself feel better than everyone outside of it. It’s a form of resisting change, I think. Anything that might challenge me, or force me out of my comfort zone—well, I had an excuse for why it was bad. I was exclusionary. And yet, I just don’t get that vibe from Danny. He doesn’t seem like someone who needs that crutch. So I said to him, you know, what you’re saying sounds kind of exclusionary, but I don’t think that’s what you’re up to. And he said, yeah, he’s thought a lot about that. DANNY 7: I had this great conversation with somebody recently. They’re like, well, at the end of the day, like, don’t you, don’t you think people are gonna see you to be like a hater of some kind. And I’m like, you know what, I’ll be a hater if it means I’m putting a stop to people bastardizing what saved my life. What saved his life. He uses that phrase a lot. Like: DANNY 8: anytime I talk about it, it’s because hip hop saved my life. So I asked him: Can you explain what, what you mean there? You said it a few times. Hip hop saved your life. DANNY 9: Yeah. I’m born and raised in Harlem. Uh, don’t get me wrong. I did school, but like, uh, how do I explain this quick? I feel like certain things aren’t like me, and given the circle that I have, given the experience that I have, given what I’ve been through and where I’ve been. It’s like, I feel as if I didn’t have something to, to get my emotions out in a way that’s like, not the norm, not like toxically masculine or like whatever people in the hood would say, like, like don’t do that. You can’t do that. That’s not the correct way to like, Hmm. Like growing up in the hood, you have this cookie cutter image of what you’re supposed to do. Who you’re supposed to be. How you’re supposed to act. And it’s really confusing when you don’t know what to do. You don’t know like who to turn to who to talk to. Cause it’s like, well, this is just, if you talk to somebody about that, it’s like, no, you can’t do that. I’m sorry that you feel that way, but you should stop feeling that way. So I was like, well damn, a lot of the times I was alone through, through most of it, trying to figure out who I was and like what I was supposed to do. Shit like that. But as soon as I found dance and I found like, this is a way to get that energy out, that’s like, like constructive, like I’m doing something. This could potentially be a career. Danny’s parents weren’t married and lived in different parts of the city, so as a little kid, he spent a lot of time being shuttled back and forth between them. The hand-off spot was at Grand Central, and there were always dancers there. Danny was just amazed by them—he saw them as superheroes, these people in full control of their bodies, collectively creating something amazing. In middle school, he decided he wanted to learn how to do that… but the only class he could find was in the local high school, which wouldn’t allow him in. DANNY 10: So in the middle school, I would kind of watch from the cafeteria windows and I’d see the instructor do something and then try it myself and then keep, like, just teaching myself through that. And then by the time I got to the high school, they still had the class, but they were teaching like beginners. And I was like, well, I kinda know this already. So he just went out into the city, befriending and learning from people on the street. He’d see someone doing impressive stuff and he would just ask them how it was done. And in the process, Danny found exactly the thing he was lacking back in his neighborhood. He found belonging. DANNY 11: this doesn’t make me feel like I’m doing something wrong. This is like, everything felt correct when I thought about it or when I was doing something or even if I was afraid to do something, it was like, well, try it anyways, dance. What could happen? You know, when a lot of my friends ended up dead in jail, selling drugs, doing gangster shit. It’s just what, it’s what New York city is sometimes. It’s what Harlem is. It’s what certain, certain projects are. So that’s definitely why I keep saying like dance and hip hop saved my life. Being able to find music, being able to host my own events that are safe spaces for people to think the way that I thought. Wasn’t safe to think and like have these conversations, you know. Or finding a group of people that I could do this with, that I wasn’t even throwing the event now. I’m just finding my people, you know, and it’s all the same frequency and energy. That’s why I keep saying it like that. So when Danny is focused on this pure version of hip hop, he’s not doing it to be exclusionary. Quite the opposite. He’s doing it because he knows what this version of hip hop can produce—a life-saving community, a place for people who shared his journey. That’s not available in $250 shoes or $300-a-seat concerts, or events where nobody exactly agrees on what they’re doing or why they’re there. Danny sees himself not as a gatekeeper, but as an ambassador—someone who can bring people into this community, and ensure that it remains vibrant. In time, Danny would become known in this world. He’d get paid to dance; he’d be invited to travel the world and educate people. But hip hop wasn’t the only thing Danny was interested in. He enrolled at the New York City College of Technology in 2010, to get a degree in computer information systems. In his second year of college, on the first or second day, he was hanging out between classes when a fellow student came up to him. This kid did not look anything like Danny. He was white, he was wearing a suit, and frankly… the kid just looked square. But, he was friendly. DANNY 12: he noticed me, he was like, yo, so, what do you- what exactly do you do? I’m like, yeah, I dance. Uh, I’m about to go to the bridge to have a little smoke in between classes. So you don’t really look like the type. He was like, man, let’s go. This is how Danny met Matt, the other guy in the photo. And in a few hours time, they’d be sitting across from me in the subway. Coming up after a quick break—we meet Matt. We finally learn what those guys were listening to. We explore just how much and just how little a picture can really show… and we try answering a question we all should be grappling with these days. What does it take for two people to find common ground? AD: As our homes have become our offices, bad WIFI is unacceptable. I mean, come on. Dropped calls, slow download speeds, we cannot work like this! So what is the solution? It’s called Plume. Plume is a cloud-based software company specializing in smart home services. On of which is adaptive WIFI. Which, you can think of as blazing fast WIFI throughout your home. You’ll get connection in spaces that you didn’t before, your streaming and uploading and downloading speeds will increase, and no more buffering. If you need it, Plume can also provide hardware that it calls pods, which will ensure your WIFI reaches every corner of your home. AD CONTINUED: And that is not all Plume offers! They also have advanced cybersecurity for your devices and home network, personalized controls, and all new motion detection. And it’s subscription-based so you continually get new updates at no additional cost. A digital connection is more important than ever right now, which is why Plume is offering two years of membership for fifty percent off. So instead of paying ninety-nine dollars a year, you’re paying forty-nine dollars a year for two years. To get it, just go to plume.com/pessimists. Again that’s plume, P-L-U-M-E dot com slash pessimists. Alright we’re back. So, quick recap here. Danny is between classes at the start of his sophomore year of college, and he’s just met Matt, a fellow student who’s in his class. Then, the two go for a little smoke. DANNY 13: we coincidentally had, the two same classes back to back. So he introduced himself that first class, I was like, alright, well, come on, let’s go chill. And we went back for the same class. And once again, coincidentally that we were done with the day. So we just took the train and, went home.  They both lived in the same direction so were both taking the same subway, and as they sat, they started talking about the music they listen to. Danny was listening to a lot of MF Doom at the time, and started telling Matt about some of Doom’s early stuff—back when he went by the name Zev Love X, and was part of a group called KMD. And Matt said, oh, I know all about this—I love hip hop. And of course, you know what Danny thinks when someone says that. He thinks: Do they love hip hop, or do they love something they think is hip hop? So Matt takes out his phone to show Danny what he’s got… because remember, this is 2011. Spotify had just launched in the U.S. that year, so for most people, listening to music meant listening to something you’d actually gotten an mp3 of and stored on your phone. So Matt pulls up his music and hands Danny one of his earbuds to listen with. DANNY 14: And I’m like kind of side-eyeing his phone. Because I- I really did not believe that he… I’m like, man, this guy is a business dude. He doesn’t listen to Zev love X, let alone Doom And that’s when I look up from across the subway, and snapped a photo. When I’ve looked at this photo over the years, I’ve always wondered about Danny’s expression. He looks so skeptical, and I figured he wasn’t into what he was hearing. But as it turns out, I caught the moment just before Danny realized: Oh, wow. This white guy in a business suit really does love the early work of MF Doom. [PEACH FUZZ STARTS PLAYING IN BACKGROUND] DANNY 15: Like he’s a really eclectic a wrapper that his lyricism is beyond. So people don’t even really understand what he’s saying. So for me to put somebody on it, who was like, man, I know this check game. I was like, okay, let me see. He really did though. He had the whole album. Really cool time. [PEACH FUZZ RAPPING CONTINUES] This is Peach Fuzz by KMD. Danny doesn’t remember exactly what song they were listening to on the subway, but he thinks it was either this one or another one called Black Bastards. And that finally answers a question I’d wondered for nine years… except, it’s now been replaced with another. How did this guy in a business suit become so well versed in MF Doom? Well. MATT 1: Hey Jason, how are you? Good. How are you? MATT 2: I’m doing pretty well. That is Matt. MATT 3: You know, the nostalgia of just being on the train and looking back when I had a full head of hair, uh, you know, it was, uh, no, it was just great to see. Matt’s full name is Matthew McDonnell, and, yes, he will admit. The last nine years have, not been kind to his hair. MATT 4: I showed my wife. She’s like, you know, again, I’m bringing up the house and look at the hair [LAUGHING] As Matt and I talked about that day on the train, he says Danny was not the only one to be surprised by his deep knowledge of hip hop. He gets it. He sees what people see… and, you know, we’re not just talking about hair.  MATT 5: there’s the idea that. having somebody like me, listen to, you know, the music I listened to, you might be like, Whoa, what’s going on here. But it’s all incredible. And I gave up on stereotypes. I joke about them, but I can’t take them seriously because at the end of the day, I’m a contradiction to most stereotypes there are, so Matt was raised Jewish. His dad is Irish. And Matt is now married to a woman from Mexico who loves Marilyn Manson. Matt grew up in midtown New York, which is where he still lives today, and that provided him with a really diverse childhood. His mom’s best friend is West Indian, so he spent a lot of time in that community, and in his schools, he was often in the minority. MATT 6: When I was younger, I went to a school called Ella Baker. I think I was one of like, four, five white kids in the entire building. As he and his peers became older, they became aware of their differences, of course—but they were more excited about what brought them together. One of those things was hip hop, and some of Matt’s friends became rappers. MATT 7: I’ve just always loved hearing people, you know, I even used the freestyle just for fun. I wasn’t any good, you know, we would, you know, we’d go in a circle when we were hanging out. Uh, and it was just. It’s so much fun Matt talks about hip hop on a lot of different levels. He appreciates the pure art and skill of it, and the ideas it contains, and the way it can capture people’s experiences. And as I listened to him, it occurred to me that Matt was talking about hip hop in an emotionally similar way that Danny does—which is to say, it created community. Each found that community in different ways, for different needs. But still. It was something to bond over. MATT 8: it definitely helps you understand what people go through, but I feel like there’s so many ways to relate to it. You know, like, people forget that the people that are either middle class or poor. Everybody, you know, unless you’re rich, you’re probably struggling somewhat in this world. And that’s a lot of what some hip-hop talks about. And to me, that’s, that’s what really drew me in the struggle. And to get past it, just motivation, keeping yourself in the right position. Much earlier in this episode, I shared some old news clips that claimed headphones are anti-social… You know, all from people who could not have imagined a world in which Danny and Matt were using the technology the way that they did. And so I think it’s worth pointing out that much worse has been said—and in much nastier, more racist ways—about the music that, in the case of these two friends, was coming out of those supposedly anti-social listening devices. Like, here’s Mississippi state senator Chris McDaniel, in a teaser for a talk radio show he used to host: CHRIS MCDANIEL: I don’t know anything about hip-hop that’s been good for this country. And it’s not.  And here’s Geraldo Rivera.  GERALDO: Hip-hop has done more damage to black and brown people than, than racism, in the last ten years. Over and over, you can find things that actually bring people together… and then see pundits and politicians claim that these things pull us apart. And you have to wonder: Who wins when people are torn apart? And who might have an incentive to keep it that way? And this is why I love the story of Danny and Matt. It’s about intersections. It’s about multiple ways into the same thing. It’s about togetherness now, despite where you started. And this got me thinking about the photo, and the number of assumptions that I made—and that I suppose many people who saw the photo made too—in order for it to resonate the way that it did. A photo is a single moment in time, divorced from any context, which isn’t all that different from our experience anytime we see anyone, anywhere. We know nothing except whatever momentary information we get. And we judge based on that. So, OK, consider this. One of the reasons that the photo is so striking is that Danny and Matt are dressed totally differently. Danny looks like an artist, and Matt’s all business-like in a suit. That suit is the reason Danny originally didn’t think Matt wanted to go smoke a joint, and frankly, it’s one of the big reasons the photo is as striking as it is. Because they look so different. But wait, why was Matt wearing a suit that day? MATT 8: [LAUGHING] Okay. So I was trying to figure that out too. I didn’t really wear suits too often, so it was either I had an interview or a death in the family. So it wasn’t just that I looked up and saw these guys across the subway. It’s that I looked up and saw these guys on the one random day that Matt either had a job interview or a funeral to go to. Without the suit, it’s still great to see two guys of different races share earbuds, but they’d look a lot less different. I made a judgment based on a fluke. So I have to admit that, as I talked to these guys, I started questioning what I had done in the first place, and what I’d revealed about my own biases and assumptions. I live in New York now, but I didn’t grow up there. I grew up in suburban South Florida in the 80s and 90s, when most everyone I interacted with was white and Jewish, like me. My graduating high school class had… I don’t know, it couldn’t have been more than five black kids in it. So decades later, as an adult, when I’m sitting on the subway and I look up to see a white guy and an Afro-Latino guy sharing earbuds, my instinct is to think: Wow, how unusual! But maybe, if I grew up like Danny or Matt did, I’d just think: Oh, there are two guys sharing earbuds. Which made wonder. Do you think that if you were, in my seat on that subway, and you looked up and you saw, you know, the two of you. Danny and… somebody else, somebody that got me, you know, whatever. I wonder if you would have even seen that moment as a unique and worth photographing? MATT 9: Um, I don’t know if I would have photographed it. I definitely would have had a laugh, you know, cause it’s just the concept that people… you know even have to question, like are they, should they be hanging out together? Like, do they fit together? It’s pretty mind boggling. Cause it, again, it makes perfect sense when you, you know, it’s not something you would see every day.  We’re both from New York city, but completely, you know, he’s from Harlem, I’m from Midtown. You know, I was wearing a suit. He’s got the crazy, I, I completely get it. I think the same question that you asked is what were they listening to?  That probably would have dawned on me. I might’ve even had to ask. I try not to think too much of it because at the end of the day, I’d like to think that that’s the direction we’re going anyway, but I think it’s important to also, capture those moments like you did because not everybody understands our reality,  I asked Danny a similar question—I said, look, I saw you guys, and you guys looked different, and so I assumed you were different. And, was that a bad assumption to make? But he said. DANNY 16: No, no, no, no, no. I don’t think, I don’t think that’s a bad assumption to make it all. It’s so evident. I have a steep tech and infrared air max’s on. With the giant Afro. And then you gotta dude with a suit next to me, and then we’re sharing headphones, like what’s going on there. So, no, it’s, I don’t think it’s wrong to, to, uh, to assume that at all, because that’s the beauty of hip hop. Or that’s just the beauty of togetherness. That’s love, you know. Just having one little interest and then just running with it, having fun with that. The problem isn’t acknowledging differences, he’s saying. Of course we have differences. The problem is seeing our differences as everything. DANNY 17: I feel like in New York city, what people, the instant question everywhere you go, everyone’s always like, so what do you do? And it’s instantly like, what’s your paycheck, you know? And then from there people can kind of just judge you. And instantly just like: Oh, well you make this money, I can respect you this way. Or you, you do these things, so we can talk about these things. Instead of doing that, whenever someone asks me, what do you do? I instantly tell them I dance. And they’re like, so this is your paycheck. And I’m like, no, I, I work at a watch store. Like we can have a conversation about that, but that’s, that has nothing to do with anything else. Like where, what I do is like who I am. That’s that’s hip hop, that’s dance. So let’s talk about that. And then I’ll try to separate myself from it and be like, your turn. Like, what do you do, please inform me so that we can continue the conversation. I can bring it back to hip hop all the time. Cause I feel like anytime I come into a conversation, hip hop is like a puppy to me. It’s like, hey, let me show you my puppy. You know, like- and everyone’s always like ohhhh puppies. But, I try to do the same for people too. Like what do you do? And then instantly people would be like, well, this is what I do for a living. And like, no. All right. That’s cool. I appreciate that. But what do you do? And if that is what you like, that’s not only your, your job, but it’s like your passion, your love, bangs with it. If it’s not, that’s cool too, Do you think, can we like pick any two random people, put them together? DANNY 18: Totally, totally. But see the thing is they have to be open with themselves to find that in the other person, it’s so easy for me to do it because I love myself that much, that I can just detach from myself to be like, well, what’s this person about. You know, even if it wasn’t hip hop, it could be two complete other random people talking about their loves. One could be like archaeology and the other person’s a librarian or something, you know what I mean? You know this is this dope book about archaeology. So, there’s something that everyone can meet and look with that same way, you know. That someone’s gonna be like: nah I don’t think you really know, but then they do know. And this- it was a beautiful experience in sharing ‘cause you find out that the person that you didn’t think was about it really is. We don’t have something in common with all of the physical things or all of our actual interests, the way that you feel, so fervently for your thing. I feel for my thing. And here’s my thing- that’s another, boop, now we connect, you know. There’s always a way to do it, but you have to be able to separate and listen and like just love, you know?  Danny mentions archeology, so… here’s a little something about archeology. Around the year 500 B.C., give or take a few decades, an inscription nearly 50 feet tall was made on a rock relief on a cliff in what’s now known as the Kermanshah Province of Iran. It was written in cuneiform, one of the oldest systems of writing, known for its wedge-shaped marks on clay tablets. And as time moved on, and the language disappeared, people who visited the area could see the scripts on the cliff, but they had no idea what it said. For thousands of years, various explorers and scholars would claim the writing was dedicated to this or that royalty, or this or that religion. By the 1600s, some Europeans saw it and said it was about Christianity. People saw, basically, what they already knew. Because that’s often as far as people can see. But in 1835, an officer of the British East India Company named Sir Henry Rawlinson was stationed near the inscription, and started studying it in earnest. This was not easy. He had to scale the cliff to get close enough to clearly see and carefully transcribe it. And it turns out the inscription was something of a Rosetta Stone. It wasn’t one single piece of writing; it was actually one piece of writing, written in three different languages. By this point in history, scholars had made good headway in deciphering one of the languages, known as Old Persian, which in turn helped understand the other two. This would crack open our ability to access some of the oldest words ever written. Our ancient ancestors, so different from us, could suddenly speak. And what did they say? Well, the inscription on the cliff was about the Persian king Darius the Great, but that’s not really the interesting part. The interesting part, to me at least, is that clay tablets with cuneiform writing are scattered throughout the region—they are, in fact, so common and widespread that new ones are still found today—and scholars began deciphering them all. These tablets weren’t generally produced by some king; they were simply the things people wrote down. Some turned out to be religious stories, or laws, or records of trade. But others were just… life. Regular life. Letters from one person to another. They were expressions of love and jealousy and fear and hope and ambition. Someone named Warad-Gula wrote to their father, “I cannot sleep at night on account of worrying about you.” A woman named Away-Aja wrote to her brother, saying that when he visited her for 10 days recently, “I was so pleased about it that I did not then report to you on my situation.” The situation was that she’s starving and worries about dying of hunger, but was uncomfortable saying so, and she hopes he’ll send her some barley. Meanwhile, a boy named Adad-abum also wanted a delivery—though for a different reason. He sent a clay tablet to his dad that said, “I have never before written to you for something precious I wanted. If you want to be like a father to me, get me a fine string of beads to be worn around the head.” Another, from a servant named Yakim-Addu, is about a lion that got stuck in his lord’s house and began to starve. He wrote, “I was worrying: Heaven forbid that this lion pine away.” So, scared as he was, he got the lion in a cage. I find these letters transfixing. I’ve read through them many times over the few years, because they’re so recognizable—as if we’ve looked back thousands of years, into a hazy world full of unknowable people, just to discover versions of ourselves. Which feels… surprising, but also, why would it be surprising? We’re all the same humans, after all. When we imagine other people—people not like us, whether separated by time or religion or region or race—it’s so easy to forget this. We work off of a limited understanding, something as flat as a hastily taken photo on a subway. But what we miss is that, sure, the details of another person’s life isn’t our own, but that’s not everything. It’s like Danny says: He may be passionate about one thing, and you may be passionate about something else, but you’re both passionate. The thing in common is at your very core. Dig deep enough, and the thing that makes you you also makes you us. The world is that small, if we’ll allow it. In fact, as I talked to Danny and Matt, I discovered just how small our own worlds are. Danny, for example, had already seen the photo I took—years ago! I always thought that I’d hear from one of the guys, should either of them ever see the photo, but Danny just wasn’t that surprised that some stranger would have posted a picture of him on the internet.  DANNY 19: so believe it or not, this is something similar things have happened like this, where I’ve just kind of popped up.  People take pictures of him all the time, he says. I mean just scan your eyes around a subway, and he’s the guy who stands out. One time, he even showed up unexpectedly in a music video by the rapper Joey Badass. And Matt? Well, when I reached out to him, he told his wife about my photo, and MATT 10: She looked and she was blown away. She’s like, I followed him on midnight Instagram Midnight is… their dog. Their dog, who by total coincidence, was already following me on Instagram. MATT 11: Midnight has an Instagram, yes. [LAUGHING] Wasn’t my choice. But you know, to each their own.  Oh, and Danny and Matt? They hung out a lot in college, and then lost touch for a bit. But then one day DANNY 20: coincidentally, I ended up going over to a friend’s house and he was just sitting there, years later.  Because as it turns out, they had mutual friends. So. Nine years ago, I sat across from two strangers to me, who I believed were strangers to each other, and who were sharing a brief, strange moment. In fact, I’d sat across from two new friends, who were just beginning to discover how much they had in common. And then, in the coming years, their lives would intersect with mine. And the thing I did in secret, taking a photo of them, would eventually bring us together to talk about togetherness. The world is small. And listen, I acknowledge I’m just one white guy speaking as best I can from my own experience, but my hope is that we continue to make our world smaller. To squeeze ourselves together, metaphorically at least, like we’re on a New York City subway in a pre-pandemic world, until we’re close, and we’re talking, and we see how much we overlap, and we do it over and over again, until someone looks up at us from across that subway, and sees us, and then looks back down—because that person across the subway didn’t see anything unusual at all, and certainly nothing worth taking a photo of. All they saw was people connecting. And that’s our episode! To see the photo you just heard so much about, head on over to our website, pessimists.co. Again pessimists.co. And seeing as this episode was about two guys connecting over things they loved, I figured I would share a letter from thousands of years ago from Mesopotamia that I think is about that same thing? But first… If you like this show, please subscribe, tell a friend, and give a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. And stay in touch! You can follow us on Twitter or Instagram at @pessimistsarc, that’s @pessimists A-R-C, where we are constantly sharing the ill-conceived words of pessimists throughout history. You can also reach us by email at pessimistsarchive@gmail.com. A huge, huge thanks to Danny and Matt for so generously sharing their story with me. You can find more about Danny’s work at breakfreshnyc.com. And… oh, just for the fun of it, you can find Matt’s dog on Instagram at @midnightofnewyork. Also, those cuneiform letters I cited, and that I will read one more from, all came from a truly wonderful book called Letters From Mesopotamia, by A. Leo Oppenheim. Strong recommendation there. We’ll also have links to all of this at our website, which again is pessimists.co. Pessimists Archive is me and Louis Anslow. Sound editing this episode by Alec Balas [BAY-LISS]. Our webmaster is James Steward. Our theme music is by Casper Babypants. Learn more at babypantsmusic.com. Pessimists Archive is supported in part by the Charles Koch Institute. The Charles Koch Institute believes that advances in technology have transformed society for the better, and is looking to support scholars, policy experts, and other projects and creators who focus on embracing innovation, creating a society that fosters innovation, and encouraging people to engineer the next great idea. If that’s you, then get in touch with them. Proposals for projects in law, economics, history, political science, and philosophy are encouraged. To learn more about their partnership criteria, visit cki.org. Again that’s C-K-I dot org.  Alright. Finally, here is one more letter from a cuneiform clay tablet in Mesopotamia, featuring what I would like to think are two guys about to have a good time. All we have are the words written down, so it is up to you to interpret. And I apologize for any mispronunciations of the proper nouns here, but, here we go: Tell Ahuni: Belanum sends the following message: May the god ŠamaŠ keep you in good health. Make ready for me the myrtle and the sweet-smelling reeds of which I spoke to you, as well as a boat for (transporting) wine to the city of Sippar. Buy and bring along with you ten silver sheckels’ worth of wine and join me here in Babylon sometime tomorrow. That’s it. That’s all we have. The rest is lost to history, but, I hope those guys had a good time. Alright, that’s it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening to Pessimists Archive. I am Jason Feifer, and we’ll see you in the near future. ← Why We Hate Being Told What to Do What Will We Fear Next? → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds by Pessimists Archive https://chtbl.com/track/78333/http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/846905662-pessimistsarc-the-mystery-of-the-shared-earbuds.mp3 What does it take for two different people to find common ground? To answer that, we dig into a nine-year-old mystery. In 2011, two very different guys shared a pair of earbuds on the New York City subway. A photo of them went viral … but who were they, and what were they doing? All is revealed. EPISODE NOTES • Danny Rokit’s Break Fresh NYC • Matt McDonnell’s dog, Midnight • Where the photo appeared first: New York magazine’s approval matrix •Where the photo appeared second: BuzzFeed’s “35 Tweets About NYC That Will Make You Laugh Harder Than You Should” • Where the photo appeared third: Jason Feifer’s Instagram  • “Peach Fuzz” by KMD • Letters From Mesopotamia: Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia, by A. Leo Oppenheim • CBS News from 1981: “Why is everyone wearing headphones?” • Chris McDaniel against hip hop  • Geraldo Rivera against hip hop ← Why We Hate Being Told What to Do Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  PODCAST | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

Why We Hate Being Told What to Do by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV5173721545.mp3 People are refusing to wear masks in a pandemic. Why? To understand, we rewind to the “Anti-Mask League” of 1919 and to the opposition to seatbelt laws in the 1990s. Then, we answer the big question: If people won’t listen to mandates, what *will* they listen to? EPISODE NOTES • America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, by Alfred W. Crosby  • Woods Hutchinson, early mask advocate • San Francisco Examiner, Nov 22, 1918: Stories of the mask law coming to an end • Washington Post: Coronavirus mask confrontations echo San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League a century ago • “Surgeon Gen. Blue Advises Against Mask Order” (LA Evening Express, Nov 5, 1918) • “Campaign Against Gauze Masks Is Without Facts” (Sacramento Bee, Nov 5, 1918)  • The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia  • Science Vs episode about mask research  • “The Promise of Prevention” • Jonah Berger’s new book, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind • Kevin Haggerty, University of Washington School of Social Work • Dan Albert’s book, Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless • San Francisco historian Gary Kamiya TRANSCRIPT This is Pessimists Archive, a show about why people resist new things. I’m Jason Feifer. The people of San Francisco were excited. It was November 21, 1918, and this was to be their day. Their day of freedom. Their day of victory! And it would all begin at noon. So as the golden hour neared, they gathered in the streets in front of clock towers, and watched, and waited. It must have been a little like New Years Eve in Times Square, except with big hats that nobody thought were ironic. You can imagine them counting down the time—11:58! 11:59! And then… [DONG] The clock struck noon. [DONG] And the people of San Francisco… were able to take off their masks. [CHEERS] Because this was the hour when San Francisco’s mandatory mask law ended—and it marked the end, it seemed, of the whole Spanish Flu situation. The flu had hit San Francisco hard the month before. Businesses were shut down, and people were instructed to wear masks, which they did. But now, with the law expiring, people were excited to uncover their faces. Here’s how the San Francisco Examiner reported it the next day. BRENT 1: Five minutes after the hour, 95 percent had doffed their masks and were laughing back at the sunlight and into one another’s faces as if they had just made a great and delightful discovery. The city had asked residents to deposit their masks at convenience stores, so that they could be gathered up and used as surgical gauze. The hospitals were running a shortage. But nobody remembered to do that. Instead, they threw their masks on the sidewalks, or they hung them on the front of an ice cream truck that was nearby. By 12:15, some newsboys saw a man walking by still wearing his mask, and they chased him, chanting “take off your mask” [CHANTING] In the San Francisco Examiner, right next to the news about all this, the writer Annie Laurie piled on the cheer. GIA 1: The war is over, the flu is conquered. Our masks are off. Come, altogether, now—smile, smile, smile. And with that smile, conquer fear and down pain and shake distrust. This is the day of the smile. But of course, as we know now, the smiles didn’t last long. GARY 1: That was a big deadly mistake. And they had what we now call the second wave. That’s San Francisco historian Gary Kamiyah. These days, of course, we all know about the second wave of the Spanish Flu—that wave of sickness and death that came after everyone thought the virus was gone. And once the second wave struck, as you might imagine, a second mandate to wear masks went into effect. And that’s when San Francisco got a second, far more assertive movement against the masks. I mean, the first time people were forced to wear masks, they complied and then they partied in the streets when the mandate was over. But… the second time? That’s when people organized… GARY 2: the anti-mask league. My phone connection with Gary wasn’t the best, so just to make sure you heard that right: He said The Anti-Mask League. As in, an organization… against masks… that called itself the Anti-Mask League. It was formed in January of 1919. GARY 3: and they had this notorious mass meeting where they had 2,500, or in different numbers, could have been as many as 4,000 people leading in an auditorium They did not want to wear masks. They were done with masks. GARY 4: the anti-mask league began to agitate and they actually, no doubt, played a major role in the resending of the mask law on February 1st. And so, it seemed, they liberated people’s faces to breathe in that fresh, virus-y air. This story may sound familiar today, and for a few reasons. I mean obviously first, there’s an echo of it in our own world right now. As I record this, in May of 2020, medical experts fear that our own second wave is coming, and our own protestors are outside of state capitals. And also, it’s possible that this story is familiar because you’ve actually already heard about the Anti-Mask League of a century ago. NPR reporter Tim Mak unearthed it in a now-viral twitter thread recently, and it caused a wave of media attention. For example, the Washington Post had this headline: Coronavirus mask confrontations echo San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League a Century Ago. And Time Magazine ran with this: 1918’s Warning for Coronavirus Shutdown Protesters. Now, these stories all play towards the same point—that the Anti-Mask League was foolish, and led to more deaths. But the thing is, we shouldn’t just shake our heads and say “oh, those dumb people”, and we shouldn’t resign ourselves to repeat history either. Because there is actually so much to learn here—far more than any media outlet that I’ve seen has given it credit for. The Anti-Mask League isn’t just about people being dumb. It’s not even, maybe about being dumb at all. It’s about human psychology. And if you want to understand how to change people’s behavior, then these days, there’s really no better place to start than with the Anti-Mask League. Because there’s a name for what’s happening here. It’s a well-known, well-documented, often-repeated phenomenon—and it’s called reactance. Here’s Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger. JONAH 1: so psychological reactance is sort of a negative emotional state that we feel when we feel like we are not in control of our behavior. People don’t like losing control, even if it’s good for their health. So the question is: How do you give them control, and still get them to do what you want? That is the question I want to explore on this episode of Pessimists Archive, because it’s a critical one right now. These are complex times, and they will not be clarified by simplistic anecdotes. So it’s time to take a trip into psychology. Into marketing. Public health. And, after all that, we’re going to get into the real history of the anti-mask league—the one that Gary says everyone is missing. GARY TK: there’s been a lot of really poor reporting and sort of sensationalist reporting on the mask laws, it’s simply factually wrong. So let’s get it right. And it’s all coming up after the break. AD: I have always been frustrated with WIFI. In my little apartment in Brooklyn for example, the router in the living room barely reaches the bedroom and I’ve thought there has to be a solution to this, right? Well, there is. It’s called Plume. Plume is a cloud-based software company, specializing in smart home services. One of which is adaptive WIFI, which you can think of blazing fast WIFI throughout your home. You’ll get connection in spaces you didn’t, your streaming and uploading/downloading speeds will increase, and no more buffering. If you need it, Plume can also provide hardware called pods which will ensure your WIFI reaches every corner of your home, and that is not all Plume offers. They also have advanced cyber security for your devices and whole network, personalized content and access controls, and all new motion detection. And it’s subscription based, so you continually get new updates at no additional cost. A digital connection is more important now than ever, which is why Plume is offering two years of membership for 50% off, so instead of paying $99 a year you’re paying $49 a year for two years. To get it, just go to plume.com/pessimists. That is Plume, P-L-U-M-E dot come slash pessimists. [AD BREAK CONTINUED] And here’s one more amazing sponsor I want to tell you about. These are stressful times, believe me I’m feeling them as much as anyone. And although we’re all very reasonably focused on our physical health, we can’t forget our mental health. How can we cope with feelings that we’re not in control? What’s preventing us from achieving happiness or our goals? That is why Better Help is here to help. Better help is a professional counseling service where everything can happen online. It will access your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist, who you can connect with in a safe and private online environment. It has licensed professional counselors who specialize in a range of issues from depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, sleeping, trauma, anger, and more. You’ll be able to send a message to your counselor any time, get timely and thoughtful responses, and you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. Everything you share is confidential and the service is very affordable. So please, take care of your mental health today. And as a listener of Pessimists Archive, you’ll get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/archive. Join over 800 thousand people taking charge of their mental health, Again that is better help, better H-E-L-P, dot com slash archive. Alright, we’re back. So I know, I just made a pandemic-sized promise to you, to draw some giant lessons from this tale of people not wanting to wear masks. So let’s waste no time getting into it—and we’re going to start by going back to Jonah Berger. JONAH 2: I’m a marketing professor at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, uh, and the bestselling author, uh, most recently, The Catalyst: How To Change Anyone’s Mind, uh, as well as some prior books: Invisible Influence and Contagious. And when I told Jonah about the anti-mask league, he said, yeah, that’s a great example of reactance. The word reactance describes that negative emotional reaction—like, if you’re at work, and your boss says “here’s the plan and here’s what you’re going to do.” Then you immediately start thinking about why it’s a bad plan and why you don’t want to do it and why it’s not going to work… and that is reactance. You are experiencing reactance. JONAH 3: we have a drive for freedom and autonomy, we like to feel like we’re in charge, we’re in the driver’s seat of making our decisions. Anytime we feel like someone else is trying to persuade us or shape our behavior or actions or attitudes. We essentially put up an anti-persuasion radar. You can almost think about it like an anti-missile defense system, or like a spidey sense, if you will, that goes up when we feel like someone’s trying to persuade us. And this is built deeply into us, as any parent knows. I mean, have you ever told a kid to stop doing something? Here’s us at dinner last night, trying to get our 5-year-old to stop putting his feet on the table. WOMAN: Nope, not okay. MAN: No, Finn stop putting your feet on the table Child: Well, it’s just what I do I mean I’ve got to hand it to him. It’s just what I do. That is a… indisputable fact. And Jonah says: It’s also not such a bad thing! JONAH 4: the same processes that drive our behavior when we’re young also shape our behavior when we’re older. They’re just a little bit more complex I mean, reactance helps us avoid scams. It’s why every advertisement doesn’t drain our bank account, and why we can develop into leaders and critical thinkers. Reactance can create a kind of overconfidence—which can be totally off-putting, of course, but also, who would start a world-changing company, or an ambitious new restaurant, or whatever, despite there being a high likelihood of failure, if it wasn’t for some kind of overconfidence? How many entrepreneurs have said some version of: If you tell me I can’t do something, then I’ll do it twice. Well. That’s reactance. The problem is that although reactance can help us stand out, it can also leave us blind to good ideas. Because not all persuasion is bad. You really should keep your feet off the table. And protective measures during a pandemic are not the only time that people have pushed back against things designed to protect them—like, OK, we’ll come back to Jonah Berger in a second, but do you know the history of people opposing seat belts? It goes back to the 1930s. DAN 1: There’s a plastic surgeon in Detroit stitching up faces and he notices that, hey, this gash on this forehead looks exactly like this radio knob on this Chrysler. That’s historian Dan Albert, author of a book about automobile history called Are We There Yet? And this plastic surgeon starts telling car companies—hey, people are slamming their faces into your cars! And that’s where you start to get things like padded dashboards—but from there, auto makers were generally resistant to adding safety features, because they were expensive and they would remind people of how unsafe a car could be. Also, people just didn’t want a lot of this stuff. Just straight up didn’t like it. In the 1940s, surveys of drivers said no, do not put in seatbelts. In 1956, Ford came out with a car that did have a seat belt, and it advertised all of the car’s safety features, and sales tanked. In 1968, the federal government forced car companies to include seat belts, and it barely mattered because only 5% of drivers actually used them. DAN 2: they are just kind of tucked behind the seat and nobody’s buckling up. In 1974, the government passed a law mandating something called an interlock—which is to say, the car wouldn’t start unless seat belts were buckled. People absolutely revolted against this. They flooded congress with complaints, and lawmakers scrambled to pass a new law… and that was the end of the interlock. In its place, a car could buzz to remind you to wear a seatbelt… but only for a maximum of eight seconds. DAN 3: And that’s my favorite because in a car today, the buzzer can only last eight seconds. What! I mean I know a cars beep when you don’t have your seatbelt on, but… only for eight seconds and that’s… by law? OK, let’s grab a timer and see about this… [CAR BEEPING] …2…3….4…5…6…7…8. Exactly. Well, senator, after millions of dollars spent to win re-elections, and years spent entrusted with immense power and responsibility, what did you accomplish for the American people? Well, I made sure cars could only remind you to be safe for more than eight seconds. Well, how about that. Then, in the 1980s, senator Elizabeth Dole struck a deal with the auto companies. They really, really didn’t want to install airbags, and so she said—OK, we won’t force you to, but in exchange, you have to lobby states to pass mandatory seat belt use laws. So the companies did, and the states started to pass them, and they made these arguments about how wearing seatbelts was a greater public good, and highlighted stories about people whose lives were saved by seatbelts and… oh boy, people were pissed. Here’s from a letter to the editor I found in the Berkshire Eagle of Massachusetts, from 1994: BRENT 2: I do not for an instant believe any slanted statistical evidence presented by their side, and I’m sick unto death of hearing this public-burden theory or that story of the child saved by the seat belt. If I wear my seat belt it’s because it makes me feel safer, but some faceless yahoo in a suit in Boston may not legislate my safety by coercion. And is that not a fascinating piece of writing? It was signed by a guy named David Vittone—and OK, let’s consider what David wrote there. He does believe that seat belts makes him safer, but he still sees seatbelts as something pushed on him and based on lies. And that is such a beautiful example of reactance, the psychology term we were talking about a moment ago. I got to wondering, like, how long reactance lasts in a situation like this. Like, what does David thinks about seat belts now, all these years later… now that they’re common, and most people wear them, and the emotions around the issue have died down? Does David wear a seat belt? So, I… did a little Googling… and some social media stalking… and I sent a lot of emails, and… DAVID 1: Do you remember writing that letter? Um, if I read it in my tone of voice, I can hear that guy. But no, I have no recollection of writing that at all. Still, there’s no question. It was him. DAVID 2: I mean, I’d write 10 letters a week. They’d print one. Just that kind of guy, troublemaker. Dave is a musician who’s usually out playing gigs, but of course that’s all gone these days so he had plenty of time to chat. And honestly, I liked talking to him. He’s funny and self-deprecating and never runs out of things to say—and at his very, very core, he hates being told what to do. Like, OK, let’s talk about seatbelts. He lives in a remote part of Massachusetts, and it’s miles from his home to the nearest main road, and he will not wear his seatbelt on those backroads… just to stick it to the man. Even though he has been in car accidents on the main roads, which is where he does wear his seatbelt. DAVID 3: Oh yeah. Airborne. I was airborne head on collision. I’m like airborne glass. I’m like this, ahhhh, you know, and right to the- right to the stop at the seatbelt, hold you in the seat seat and lap, lap and shoulder belt. I’m like, Whoa that works! That was exciting. What’s the- what’s the moral of that story? The moral of that story is that the seatbelt saved your life. DAVID 4: Maybe, well save me from injury, but just, um, um, I’m annoyed. I have a finely tuned hair-trigger sense of outrage So I wondered: Back in 1994, was there anything the government could have done to not trigger that sense of outrage in him, and still get him to wear a seatbelt? What do you think was the better thing for the government to do in that situation? DAVID 5: I really don’t know because all I know as a child, I could ride, um, facing backwards in a station wagon and can’t do that anymore. I could ride in the back of a pickup truck bed. It’s no more or less safe or dangerous now than it ever was, and I can’t do that anymore. He just kinda went on like this for a while, recalling all the freedoms he felt he once had, that he doesn’t anymore. But the short answer is this: He doesn’t really have a solution to propose. But he says that he’d be more willing to wear a seatbelt, if they didn’t force him to do it. And this is interesting because, if you were so inclined to argue with Dave about this, you could have a looong argument. You could argue about greater good or public safety. And Dave, or someone like him, could argue about personal liberty and the role of government. And I get it. This can be philosophical and political and ideological and it can get there very fast… for seatbelts and masks and anything else you wanted to throw into the pot. But my point is not to engage with any of that here, because those are bigger and stickier than the very human question at hand. And that is: If you’re in the position of trying to create change—to change people’s behavior—then what do you want to do here? Do you want to argue with Dave, even though there’s no argument that will ever convince him to change? Or, do you want to do something else? Do you want to find another way? Because there are other ways to change people’s behavior. And this brings us back to Jonah Berger, the Wharton marketing professor. Because… JONAH 5: One of the simplest ways to think about it is to give people choice. At its core, what drives reactants is people don’t feel like they’re in control. And so any way you can give that control back, rather than trying to persuade people, let them persuade themselves… they’re going to be more likely to go along. A simple example is this: Great presenters will often give people two options—you can do A or B. If they only told people to do A, people would think of all the reasons they don’t want to do A. But if you give them A and B, then people sit and think about which one they like better. Or, you could step it up and not give them any options at all… and instead, you let them create the options. JONAH 6: I was talking to a startup founder who wanted people to work hard and stay after work. And of course, when you tell people, hey, you need to put in more hours, they say, ah, no thanks. I’m not really interested. So instead he had a meeting, and in that meeting he said, Hey, you know, what kind of company do we want to be? Do we want to be a good company or a great company? Now you know exactly how people answered that question. They go, we want to be a great company. And then he says, okay, well how can we be a great company and people start throwing out ideas, and one of them is they need to work harder, and then later when he comes around and say, great, you know, that’s a great suggestion. Let’s do it. It’s going to be much harder for people not to go along because they came up with the idea themselves. But how do you do that at scale? Because if you’re trying to shift the behavior of millions of people—say, to get them to wear seatbelts in cars, or masks in a pandemic—then you can’t do it all by town hall. And so Jonah offered two courses of action here, with great examples. The first is, highlight the gap. JONAH 7: So rather than telling them what to do, point out a gap between their attitudes and their actions. Or what they are doing and what they might recommend for someone else. For example, Jonah told me about this amazing anti-smoking campaign in Thailand. The government had been telling people not to smoke, but that wasn’t working. So they hired the advertising firm Ogilvy Thailand, who executed a brilliant idea. They sent children out onto the streets, holding a cigarette. Then, with the secret camera rolling, the kid would find an adult who’s smoking, and walk up to them and say… [KID SPEAKING THAI] That’s footage from the advertisement that was eventually made out of the this. So the kid is saying: Can I get a light? You know, it’s the thing that adult smokers will say to each other all the time. Can I get a light? And in response, the adults all start lecturing the kid. They say… [THAI VOICES] One man here is saying, if you smoke, you die faster. Don’t you want to live and play? And another says: You know it’s bad right? When you smoke, you suffer from lung cancer, emphysema, and strokes. And then, here comes the gut punch—once the adult is done talking about all the ways that smoking is bad, the kid hands them a card and walks away. So the adult opens the card and reads it. And it says: You worry about me, but why not about yourself? This ad had a huge impact. It almost immediately led to a 40 percent increase in calls to a Thai agency set up to help people stop smoking. And it’s because of that thing Jonah said—highlighting the gap. Showing people the distance between their attitudes and their actions. And here’s the second way to change behavior at scale—and that is, social influence. JONAH 8: There’s a great campaign in, in the UK, for example, where some set of people aren’t paying their taxes on time, and so they send out a letter just letting people know who aren’t paying their taxes, that most of their peers pay their taxes, and that greatly increases the rate of compliance. Similarly, the utilities company O-power got people to use less energy by including a little note with people’s bills that said stuff like: Hey, your neighbor is using 50% less energy than you. This way, you’re never really telling someone what to do—you’re just giving them information that makes them reconsider their own actions. So, knowing all this, I wondered: During this pandemic, has Jonah seen anything coming out of state or federal governments, that he thinks has been an effective method of influencing behavior without triggering reactance? And he said… no. JONAH 9: public health officials and government officials think it’s all about information. And while information is useful sometimes, that often isn’t the biggest driver of behavior. Which is a kind of depressing statement—because, you know, I like information. I’m here providing information right now! But it reminds me of what we learned talking to Dave about seatbelts. You can have a logical argument all day long if you want to… and, of course, I think that’s what a lot of people just want. They just want to argue. But if the goal is to actually change behavior — not change people’s attitudes, or their core beliefs, or how they feel —just change the behavior, then you have to start from the understanding that arguments and mandates and information won’t work for a lot of people. So you might as well try something else. And what else is there? It is now time to tell you about the real history of the Anti-Mask League of a century ago… which is actually a really complicated history of how not to fight a pandemic, and what we should do… but probably can’t do… instead. And it’s coming up after the break. AD: Could you use a better nights sleep? I know I sure could. Sleep is a key to health after all, and these days, also a key to my sanity. That is why I am super into this new pillow I got from Hullo. A Hullo pillow is probably unlike any pillow you’ve ever slept on, because it is not fully, it is not feathery, you might not even describe it as soft. Instead, it’s filled with buckwheat. Which creates firm, comfortable, really excellent support for your head and neck. I mean, just consider it, unlike pretty much everything else that’s inside pillows, buckwheat will not collapse under the weight of your head. It’s all support, all the time. And, it’s also customizable, you can easily remove or add buckwheat to ensure that the pillow is exactly the level of thickness that you need. Seriously I am super into this pillow. Want to give it a try? Hullo allows you to sleep on it for 60 nights, and if it isn’t for you just ship it back for a refund. Go to hullopillow.com/pessimistsarchive. That is hullo, H-U-L-L-O pillow dot com slash pessmists archive. Alright, we’re back. So, it’s time to get into just what was motivating the Anti-Mask League. And it’s important to understand this, because like I said, the Anti-Mask League has been used to draw all sorts of parallels to today. Here are a couple more headlines to give you an idea. A post on Forbes.com said: Protesting During A Pandemic Isn’t New: Meet The Anti-Mask League Of 1918. And in a story that featured the Anti-Mask League, NBCNews.com said: San Francisco had the 1918 flu under control. And then it lifted the restrictions. But, just what is the lesson of the Anti-Mask League? It’s more complicated than it sounds. Before I started reporting this episode out, I kept wondering this question: Like, aside from just the simple fact of people not wanting to be told what to do, what else might have been behind thousands of people refusing to wear masks during a pandemic? And then I remembered something I’d read once. It was a piece about how frustrating it is to work in the field of prevention, because you have to constantly struggle to get financial or political support. KEVIN 1: Well, it’s always hard, um, when you think about demonstrating the impact of prevention, to convince people of something that didn’t happen. That’s Kevin Haggerty, a professor at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, who directs a research group that’s focused on the science of prevention. And I mean, think of it. If you’re a politician deciding where to throw your support, or where to direct resources, prevention doesn’t have a lot of payoff for you. Prevention requires money and effort. That’s money and effort that could have gone somewhere else. People must sacrifice in some way for prevention, which means sacrificing for… the absence of something. Something you can’t see, and that’s very hard for a politician to get credit for. I mean it’s nearly impossible to say: Hey, a bad thing didn’t happen to you, because of me. And also, keep in mind that prevention doesn’t necessarily mean elimination. It could just mean lowering the rate of something. So now, imagine trying to say: Hey, a bad thing happened, but thank me because it could have been worse! And also, for what it’s worth, many people just don’t believe that prevention is even possible. KEVIN 2: I work in the area of substance abuse prevention, and for many years people didn’t really believe that you could actually prevent things like: Substance misuse or teen pregnancy… If you ask people if drug abuse or teen pregnancy is a big problem, Kevin that they say it is. They say those rates up. But, not true! Prevention has worked. They’re both way down! So how do you actually get people to buy in to prevention? Well, Kevin offered two ways. One is leadership. If leaders buy in, and even participate, that makes a difference, he says. And on the question of masks today, well you’ve seen… shall we say, some mixed messages from our leadership. And the other thing you need in order to grow support for prevention is… data. KEVIN 3: it’s really pretty hard to convince people of the impact of prevention without having really strong longitudinal randomized control trials. That might sound like a contradiction with what Jonah the marketing professor said a moment ago… you know, about how information isn’t always convincing to people. But I think the two actually go hand in hand, because the thing is: Smart communication may bring people in, but they won’t stay if they don’t like what they see. They need to see something that feels convincing. And we do not really have convincing with most masks. The podcast Science Versus did a great episode breaking down the science of masks, explaining that we do have some good studies showing that surgical masks can stop virus transmission—but of course, those aren’t the masks that most people have access to, or even should have access to, given the shortage for healthcare workers. Here’s host Wendy Zuckerman from that show: SCIENCE VS: Frustratingly, we don’t have studies like the ones we just talked about for cloth masks. The research just hasn’t been done. Which is a big reason why we have the great mask war going on over cloth masks. No leadership buy-in, and no research. Basically, people are being asked to cover their faces today with whatever they have, as a way to improve some uncalculatable odds. And that is a pretty good setup for this. So take me to the flu of 1918 in San Francisco GARY 6: Yeah, so San Francisco, was very hard hit by this horrifying epidemic, and, unfortunately they didn’t react as quickly as some other American cities This again is Gary Kamiya, the San Francisco historian we heard at the beginning of the show. He’s the author of Cool Gray City Of Love: 49 Views Of San Fransisco, and he writes a history column for the San Francisco Chronicle. Now remember, the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco that he’s telling us about formed in January of 1919, but the flu first reached San Francisco a few months earlier, in the fall. So to understand where these anti-maskers were coming from, we need to see what led up to them. And let’s start in October of 1918. The city is hit hard and reacts late. Schools and businesses were finally shut down in the middle of October, but the centerpiece of the city’s response—the thing that they really put the bulk of their messaging and faith into—was kind of unusual. GARY 7: they thought the masks were more effective and made them the centerpiece of their efforts more than any other American city. Masks weren’t really a thing across America at that point, though they were more popular on the west coast. That’s because a well-known doctor named Woods Hutchinson had traveled up and down the coast, proclaiming that masks were a nearly foolproof way of avoiding the flu. At first, San Francisco just suggested that people wear masks. But by late October, they were mandating it. And here’s the thing—people wore them! And they generally wore them without protest, because of something else entirely unrelated. World War I was still going on, and fighting the flu became equated with the war effort. GARY 8: it was your patriotic duty to wear a mask. And if you didn’t wear a mask, you were a slacker, as the expression was called you weren’t out on the front lines with the boys, but you were at home and you had to do your duty. But despite that, confusion soon reigned. In late October, newspapers around the country reported that the surgeon general of the United States, as well as other top medical authorities, had declared masks to be harmful. A telegram statement from them had apparently said: BRENT 3: There is no virtue in the masks. Rather, they are a detriment to free breathing into the lungs of plenty of pure air and sunshine, the real antidotes for sickness of any kind where truth, itself, is not accepted as the shield. This was welcome news in places where masks were being worn. In New Orleans, a local order to wear masks was immediately cast aside, and the Times of Shreveport, Louisiana, reported that waiters in restaurants had “cast aside the masks and are now breathing freely.” Meanwhile, the captain who’d originally issued the order to wear masks in New Orleans was “transferred to other duty.” But, surprise! It was fake news. Here was the headline in the Sacramento Bee, a few days later: GIA 2: Campaign Against Gauze Masks Is Without Facts It seems someone sent a fake telegram, signed by the surgeon general of the United States, and the newspapers all printed it. So what did the surgeon general think about masks? Well… he told the Sacramento Bee that he recommends wearing a mask if you’re coming in contact with influenza. But otherwise, he said: BRENT 4: We do not recommend that persons not in immediate contact with influenza cases should wear a mask, but we do not advise against it either. For those keeping track at home, that was the rare— [DING DING DING] Triple negative in a sentence! The hat trick of negative. It was as if someone said, Mr. Surgeon General, are you a person who can bring clarity to this world? And then he said: “Uhhh, negative, I’m a meat popsicle.” Although to be fair to the meat popsicle, there just wasn’t good science on masks back then. I mean there wasn’t good science on viruses back then. And also, did you catch that surprising word in the headline from the Sacramento Bee? Here, let’s throw some verbal italics on it. GIA 3: Campaign Against Gauze Masks Is Without Facts Gauze masks. That’s what people were wearing. GARY 9: They were like two ply gauze. They weren’t very effective and gauze was better than some of the masks because in an effort to make it more palatable for women to wear masks, there was recommendations that: Oh, you can make a mask out of chiffon. And, y’know, people may not have understood much about viruses, but they were getting a pretty good idea of how pointless these masks were. In November of 1918, a group of doctors got together to advocate against the masks. The Salt Lake Herald-Republican reported on some of the highlights of the meeting, including this one: GIA 4: Dr. Stauffer called attention to the disagreeable features of masking and said sunshine and fresh air are of far more value, as masks are not efficient protection. He suggested that vaccine is far more effective in rendering persons immune. So, that’s and interesting snapshot of science, isn’t it?—when a doctor is like: guys, stick with me here, I think a vaccine might be a good idea? Meanwhile, a Dr. Edwards of San Francisco gave testimony about his own experience with masks. GIA 5: He said he had a dozen of them and changed every hour, yet he contracted the disease and was sick three weeks. So, that was the conversation happening about masks at the time. Now, let’s pick up the timeline. Late 1918, the second wave of the virus strikes. And once again, San Francisco is slow to respond. Fatalities soar in November, and December, and into January, which is when the city finally decides to take some action. And… GARY 10: they reinstated the mask law on January 17th but they never reinstated the other measures: the closures, the social distancing measures… Now San Francisco has completed the trifecta of pandemic mismanagement. They reopened the city too early, closed it again too late, and placed their entire preventative focus on wrapping gauze around your face. And here’s when they learned a lesson that we will almost certainly re-learn when the second wave of virus hits us: People might be willing to go along with some preventative measures the first time, but it’s really, really hard to get them to do it a second time. And a century ago, that was especially true because the war was over by that time the second wave hit. GARY 11: once the war had ended, people were weary of being told, it’s your patriotic duty to wear this mask. When they weren’t at all convinced that it was effective. So what happened? Well, among other things… the Anti-Mask League happened. This is where we get the Anti-Mask League. It appeared in January of 1919, after San Francisco had experienced months of deaths and then belatedly sprung into action with little more than a new law mandating masks. The anti-maskers held a big meeting. And they conducted some activism around the city. And, yes, as every story about the Anti-Mask League will tell you, they achieved victory… they played a role in rescinding the mask law on February 1. But how much of a victory was it, really? GARY 12: by February 1st when that law was rescinded, it had very little effect on the epidemic, which had run its course basically by that point. So in short, the anti-mask league appeared after every possible damage had already been done. Now, this tale does not give me much confidence. Because, yes, some things are very different between then and now. Our masks are a lot better. Our science is a lot better. But if you think back to the things we’ve heard can make a difference in this episode—say, consistent and participatory leadership, lots of compelling data, and tactics that do not trigger reactance—well, we are not doing much better in 2020 than we did in 1918. It’s a depressing way to look at it. But I do have a glimmer of hope. Because in the face of everything that’s happening—all of this chaos, all of this disagreement—do you know who’s wearing a mask? Do you know who was told to wear a mask, whose state government has mandated that he wear a mask, and who is actually… wearing the mask? Well, it is Mr. Seatbelt himself! DAVID 5: my daughter’s an RN, and she’s on the front line. And she said, yeah, you should wear the mask. You’re old enough to die from it, dad. Come on. Don’t be an old fool. Wear the mask. Yeah, yeah. Okay. That’s all right. I’ll wear the mask, but I’m not gonna wear the mask driving around. Dave, we would expect nothing less. And I—oh wait, he’s got more. DAVID 6: I don’t like the guys yelling in the face of the police, and I don’t like. I don’t like, I’m not wearing a mask because it infringes on my right to get a God damn haircut. It’s ridiculous. That seems ridiculous to me. Just was shut up and with a mask. Come on. Right, so anyway as I was—oh, wait, still going. DAVID 7: A lot of countries shut down the economy, blah, blah, blah. I think it’s a nice break. I like it. What other interesting things going to happen? Where’s the asteroid? How about the alien invasion? Come on: Zombie zombie apocalypse. It’s almost exciting. It really is almost like being in a disaster movie. Tell me. Yeah. Cool. Me and Tom cruise. Excellent. Yeah, that’s just me. Yeah. I, I have an apocalyptic worldview. See, I told you that guy can talk. So here’s what I take away from all of this. People may not like being told what to do, and they may not trust something they cannot see or understand, but they do respond to trust. I mean, Dave was told to wear a mask, and Dave hates being told what to do… but he’s listening because the mandate came from someone he trusts. It came from his daughter. I mean, it also came from the government of Massachusetts, but I doubt that matters much to him. His daughter however, does matter. This seems to be our override. This is our primary protection. We seem born with reactance, born with this sense that nobody can tell us what to do, but we have a failsafe. We have some way, equally built into us, equally as biological, that we can save ourselves from ourselves. It is trust. It’s listening to those we truly believe know more than we do, and if necessary, we’re willing to bet our lives on it. So how do you create change? You build trust. And you do it long before you need to; you start it when lives are not on the line, when there’s no agenda, when there’s nothing more for you to do than stand up and reveal your purpose. If you’re a leader, or a communicator, or an organizer, or just a friend or family member whose job or role or responsibility or desire is to be helpful, then build and lean on that trust. Earn it. Make it unquestionable. Make it pure. Because holy crap, in times like these, very few people seem to have any idea of what they’re doing, and that leaves us all as individuals to fall back upon the messy and complicated and contradictory instincts buried deep inside us, and please, please, if we need anything right now: It is someone we can trust. And that’s our episode! So, a little behind-the-scenes look here—at first, when I heard about the Anti-Mask League and decided to do an episode on it, I wasn’t sure what the episode would be about. Just the league? The history of masks? The history of people opposing medical innovations? Eventually I landed where you just heard, but in the meantime the team here had gathered some fun stuff from throughout medical history—and one of them really gave me pause. I’ll share it with you in a minute, but first… Do you have an idea for a future episode? Get in touch! There are so many ways to do it. You can reach out on Twitter at @pessimistsarc—pessimists A-R-C, and follow us there too, because we’re always tweeting out the ill-conceived words of pessimists throughout history. You can visit our website, Pessimists.co, which has links to lots of things discussed in this episode, and also an archive of historical pessimism searchable by innovation! And if you’re a fan of Pessimists Archive, then please subscribe, tell a friend, and give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You can really help us grow. This episode was recorded as I sat cross-legged on the floor in my parents’ closet in Boulder, Colorado with my foot constantly falling asleep—because, you know, the pandemic. Additional research by Louis Anslow and Britta Lokting. Sound editing by Alec Balas. Our webmaster is James Steward. Voices by Gia Mora and Brent Rose. Check them out: giamora.com. brentrose.com. And a special thanks to Irina Logra for her help on video—watch the internet, because videos are coming. Our theme music is by Casper Babypants. Learn more at babypantsmusic.com. Pessimists Archive is supported in part by the Charles Koch Foundation. Learn more about the Foundation at CKF.org/tech. OK, so. Like I said, we were rounding up some interesting pessimism from thoughout the history of medicine, and this one really got me thinking a lot. In 1839, when anesthesia was a hotly debated idea but very far from a real thing, the French surgeon Alfred Velpeau said this: BRENT 5: “The abolishment of pain in surgery is a chimera. It is absurd to go on seeking it today. ‘Knife’ and ‘pain’ are two words in surgery that must forever be associated in the consciousness of the patent. To this compulsory combination we have to adjust ourselves.” I went searching for some context for that quote, and discovered a book called The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia, which made a fascinating point. The authors wrote: “We suggest that the most likely explanation for the delay in the discovery of anesthesia was the belief that it did not, could not, exist. If it did not exist, then a search for this dragon would be fruitless.” And hat a lesson for our times, right? When everything at once feels impossible and suddenly possible. Do not ignore the possible, just because you think it might be impossible. Our lives are full of the once impossible. You know, maybe there’s an episode in that after all. I dunno. You’ll have to stay tuned. Alright, that’s it for this time. Thanks for listening to Pessimists Archive. I hope you are healthy and safe wherever you are. I’m Jason Feifer, and we’ll see you in the near future.     ← The Good That Comes from a Pandemic The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post Why We Hate Being Told What to Do appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

Why We Hate Being Told What to Do by Pessimists Archive https://chtbl.com/track/78333/http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/829958314-pessimistsarc-why-we-hate-being-told-what-to-do.mp3 People are refusing to wear masks in a pandemic. Why? To understand, we rewind to the “Anti-Mask League” of 1919 and to the opposition to seatbelt laws in the 1990s. Then, we answer the big question: If people won’t listen to mandates, what *will* they listen to? EPISODE NOTES • America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918, by Alfred W. Crosby  • Woods Hutchinson, early mask advocate • San Francisco Examiner, Nov 22, 1918: Stories of the mask law coming to an end • Washington Post: Coronavirus mask confrontations echo San Francisco’s Anti-Mask League a century ago • “Surgeon Gen. Blue Advises Against Mask Order” (LA Evening Express, Nov 5, 1918) • “Campaign Against Gauze Masks Is Without Facts” (Sacramento Bee, Nov 5, 1918)  • The Wondrous Story of Anesthesia  • Science Vs episode about mask research  • “The Promise of Prevention” • Jonah Berger’s new book, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind • Kevin Haggerty, University of Washington School of Social Work • Dan Albert’s book, Are We There Yet?: The American Automobile Past, Present, and Driverless • San Francisco historian Gary Kamiya ← The Good That Comes from a Pandemic The Mystery of the Shared Earbuds → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  PODCAST | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post Why We Hate Being Told What to Do appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

The Good That Comes from Pandemics by Pessimists Archive https://traffic.megaphone.fm/ADV5901597187.mp3 Covid-19 has interrupted our world, but it’s also likely to improve it. After all, history shows that massive disruption is followed by massive opportunity. So what’s in store for us now? In this episode, we learn the surprising consequences of past crises, explore the innovations that may come from Covid-19, and try to understand why disasters are so productive. EPISODE NOTES • How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Revolutionized Public Health (Smithsonian) • How Pandemics Spurred Cities to Make More Green Space for People (History.com) • Innovation Hub: The 1918 Spanish Flu’s Impact on Healthcare (WGBH) • The Coolest Products Created During Recessions (The Street) • Industry and Economy during the Civil War (NPS)  • COVID-19 Will Fuel the Next Wave of Innovation (Entrepreneur) • Andrew Rabin, University of Louisville • Hamza Mudassir, founder of Platypodes • Alec Stapp, Progressive Policy Institute • Michelle Moody Adams, Columbia University  • Heather Meeker, open-source software expert   • Brian Berkey, Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania TRANSCRIPT This is Pessimists Archive, a show about why people resist new things. I’m Jason Feifer. There was a plague. Well, there have been many plagues. More plagues than you can imagine. More plagues than I had any idea about, most of them far less famous than the plague—and, we’ll get to all that later, but for now, we’re just focusing on the plague of the year 686. It broke out in the north of England, in a place called Northumbria, and it absolutely ravaged the place. There were two early Christian monasteries there—these would have been places where men of the cloth lived and studied, and where young boys would have been raised. But then the plague came, and only two people survived—there was an abbot, and a young kid. We don’t know the kid’s exact age, but… he was old enough to understand. ANDREW 1: And so it’s interesting to think about how he must have experienced life and think about how impressionable you are at the ages of seven, eight, nine, 10, 11. at this moment when he literally sees everybody he knows except one person die around him. That’s Andrew Rabin, who you’ve heard on this show before. He’s a professor of English at the University of Louisville, with a specialty in the law and literature of early medieval England. And, Andrew says that we don’t know for certain who that surviving kid was. There are no records of his name. But we can take a pretty good guess. Because decades later, a man in that monastery became one of the most influential writers of his time. He goes by the name Venerable Bede. And although he never writes an autobiography, we know that he lived almost his entire life in the monastery, and that he would have been a kid at the exact time that a young boy survived that plague. So… was it him? ANDREW 2: We don’t know of any other person that it possibly could be. And in a way, that means we can answer Andrew’s question. What happens to a young boy who experiences that level of trauma? In this case, he grows up to question the fundamentals of the world. His writing is dry and impersonal, which was common for the time, but it also was revolutionary. Back then, for example, everything revolved around Rome. The attitude across Europe was basically, if you didn’t live in Rome, you are irrelevant. You’re not worth studying, or thinking about, or even recording for history. But Venerable Bede…well he grew up and said… no. ANDREW 3: he writes history in such a way where he makes the claim that it’s not one city that’s important to the, this one strand of history that’s important. What happens up here in the Northwestern corner of Europe in this tiny little town and this tiny little monastery that is just as important as what happens everywhere else. To Bede, this even extended to the way we tell time. Back then, the way we counted years tended to be localized. You’d say, oh, this happened in the fourth year of this monarchy, or the 7th year of this papacy. There was no universal calendar system. But Bede said, hey, we are all part of a collective whole. We should track ourselves together, using… well, what we know now as the system of years by BC or AD. The year 686. The year 2020. And here we can only take more guesses, because Bede himself didn’t offer much in the way of self-reflection, but you can see how the trauma of that plague might have made him think this way. He saw suffering, and he felt it, and it mattered. And if he felt it, then other people would have felt their own suffering too, and that should matter too, because we’re all in this together. ANDREW 4: one of his claims that runs really throughout his career is this idea that what happens here, and what happens elsewhere, was just as important as what happened at the center. These deaths, the experiences of this monastery, they’re not irrelevant. They’re not meaningless. They have as much meaning as they would have. This was right in the center of Rome. I was really taken by this, because what you’re hearing is the development of a foundational way we understand the world today. Yes, we struggle with it constantly—we are not above dehumanizing people we think of as other-ly. But at its core, our world functions how Venerable Bede wanted it to. We know there are stories everywhere. We know that individual lives matter. And if the history books have it right, we may have a plague to thank for that… because the plague forced a young boy to look at the world anew. And then he forced the rest of us to do it, too. Today, of course, we’re experiencing our own generation’s version of this story. I usually speak to you from a nice soundproofed studio, but now I’m speaking to you from the corner of a bedroom in my parents’ basement, because I, like the rest of the world in April of the year 2020, am locked away at home as a pandemic rages outside. It’s very easy to see tragedy in all this. Turn on the news and you’ll see tragedy. That is real. But I’ve been challenging myself to see something else too. Because, you know, the very premise of this show, and the way that I think, is that change is hard and unpredictable—but that it also creates a better and more innovative world. We are better in the end. So I wondered—what happens when change doesn’t take the form of some specific new innovation, the way that we usually focus on in this show, but instead, what if the change is a global event? A pandemic that impacts everything we know? That’s why I first called Andrew. I mean, Venerable Bede was something of a tangent we got off on, but I was originally curious about what happened after the black plague wiped out so much of Europe. The answer, it turns out, is absolutely fascinating—it’s the beginning of the economy as we know it now. And after talking to Andrew, I just kept calling people—in tech, in policy, in law, in business—asking about other disruptions, and what happened in the more recent past, and what’s likely to happen in the near future. These people spoke of a potential for huge innovation. They said very big things, like this philosophy professor, Brian Berkey: BRIAN 1: a crisis like this can, kind of shift the window on the options that we are willing collectively to take seriously. And also this, from disruption researcher Hamza Mudassir: HAMZA 1: So the change in power is going to happen and it’s going to suck for the older world Does it get any bigger than that? A shift in what we’re collectively willing to take seriously? A change in power that will suck for the older world? I’ll leave it up to you, to say how much sympathy you have for that older world. But I have to say, I came away from these conversations optimistic. That’s not to dismiss the terrible personal tragedies, or the great economic struggles we may all come up against. But we are now living in transformative times, whether we like it or not. We have no choice but to embrace it, to live with it, and to make the most of it, because there is truly no alternative. And what comes next just might be great. So that’s what this episode of Pessimists Archive is all about—it is the good that comes from massive change, and how we can make sense of a world where it all happens at once. We will get to the future, but we’re going to start with the past… and it’s all coming up, after this break. [AD BREAK]: These are stressful times, believe me I’m feeling them as much as anyone. And although we’re all very reasonably focused on our physical health, we can’t forget our mental health. How can we cope with feelings that we’re not in control? What’s preventing us from achieving happiness or our goals? That is why Better Help is here to help. Better help is a professional counseling service where everything can happen online. It will access your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist, who you can connect with in a safe and private online environment. It has licensed professional counselors who specialize in a range of issues from depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, sleeping, trauma, anger, and more. You’ll be able to send a message to your counselor any time, get timely and thoughtful responses, and you can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. Everything you share is confidential and the service is very affordable. So please, take care of your mental health today. And as a listener of Pessimists Archive, you’ll get 10% off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/archive. Join over 800 thousand people taking charge of their mental health, Again that is better help, better H-E-L-P, dot com slash archive. [AD BREAK CONTINUED] And here’s one more amazing sponsor I want to tell you about. I have always been frustrated with WIFI. In my little apartment in Brooklyn for example, the router in the living room barely reaches the bedroom and I’ve thought there has to be a solution to this, right? Well, there is. It’s called Plume. Plume is a cloud-based software company, specializing in smart home services. One of which is adaptive WIFI, which you can think of blazing fast WIFI throughout your home. You’ll get connection in spaces you didn’t, your streaming and uploading/downloading speeds will increase, and no more buffering. If you need it, Plume can also provide hardware called pods which will ensure your WIFI reaches every corner of your home, and that is not all Plume offers. They also have advanced cyber security for your devices and whole network, personalized content and access controls, and all new motion detection. And it’s subscription based, so you continually get new updates at no additional cost. A digital connection is more important now than ever, which is why Plume is offering two years of membership for 50% off, so instead of paying $99 a year you’re paying $49 a year for two years. To get it, just go to plume.com/pessimists. That is Plume, P-L-U-M-E dot come slash pessimists. Alright, we’re back. So, on this episode we’re exploring the good that can come from terrible things, and I wanted to start with what is really the mother of them all—the black plague. A.k.a., the black death. A.k.a. pestilence. This is the disease that killed upwards of 60% of all Europe. It was an unfathomable loss. But to understand how it changed the world, you first need to know what the world was like at the time. Because it was an entirely different world from what we know. First of all, we today keep describing our situation as unprecedented—Covid-19 is unprecedented, the world has changed in unprecedented ways. But back in the European middle ages, an epidemic was very precedented. Like, one would blow through every few years. ANDREW 5: a good number of them were smallpox, typhus, typhoid fever, viral hemorrhagic fever You’ve got some cholera in there too. Maybe some Hanta virus. Basically the all-star cast of death. And people understood this problem very differently than we do now, because they would not have asked what is causing all these outbreaks. They didn’t think to ask what. The asked… who. Who is doing this? ANDREW 6: Part of what that assumes, is of course, that these diseases are in some sense a visitation of either God or the devil. And so very much the reaction to many of these plagues is penance We are sorry for offending you, God. You’ve punished us for our misdeeds. We will appease you. Buuuut—here’s where things get tricky, because let’s say you weren’t harmed by the disease. Let’s say someone else was harmed. Well then, you’d think—ah-hah. God spared me and punished them, and that means God likes me more than them. And who would think something like that? Well… to start, the wealthy would. Much like wealthy New Yorkers of today who summer in the Hamptons, the wealthy of the middle ages also spent their summers out of the city. The summer was when diseases spread, so if you were able to get out, you got out. Theater even shut down, and actors performed on the road. Then a disease would ravage the poor people who were left in the city, and the wealthy would say—well, the poor must have deserved it. ANDREW 7: wealth and privilege were very much seen as something that’s deserved, you know, we hold the station we hold in society because we’ve been put there by God. But then, the year 1348 comes. It’s the year the black plague breaks out. ANDREW 8: It didn’t matter who you were, how good you were, how bad you were, how rich you were, how poor you were. None of that mattered. The plague would still get you. So if you’re somebody who lives in a universe that you see is basically, comprehensible, that there is this divine being… a just God who rewards the virtuous, who punishes the sinful, who has created society along certain lines. This throws that all out the window. And here we have our first major change—a massive shift in how the world was understood. Before the plague, intellectuals of the day like Thomas Aquinas and Dante were writing of a completely knowable world. Everything made sense to them. But after the plague, after entire families and cities suffered and died, the intellectuals of their day said… oh, we don’t understand this place at all. And you get a completely different kind of writing—writing like Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, where the knowable world is a complex, un-unified place. It’s the makings of the way we see the world now—a place of randomness. And if that wasn’t enough, the foundation of their economy was also about to change. ANDREW 9: when you learned about the middle ages in school, right? We all learned about the manner with the Lords and the serfs, and the serfs were owned by the land, which is basically, you know, sort of a euphemistic way of saying they’re little slaves. Europe was mostly agricultural, which meant this lord and serfs situation defined the economy. And of course, the lords believed that they deserved to be lords, and that the serfs should be happy with their god-given station in life. But then, the black death kills most of the serfs. ANDREW 10: These people who had been serfs, who had been basically slaves… Oh, oh guys, I’m in the middle of working. Somebody’s talking to me right now. Welp, there it is—the joy of working with small children at home all the time. It really is such a joy. Such… a… joy [PERSON SCREAMING] Alright, back to Andrew. What was he saying? Oh yes, so, about those people who had once been slaves. Before the plague, they were disposable human beings. After the plague, the lords needed labor, which meant the old serfs were in demand— ANDREW 11: and they can ask for actual compensation for it so they can improve their lot. Because, you know, the Lord of the Manor next door, or the Lord of the Manor, you know, three miles away… these people are trying to get them to move to their manner and offering them incentives to do so. It’s the beginning of employment and capitalism as we know it. Labor has worth, and you can put a value to it. And now that these former slaves are free to choose their own employer, some decide—screw it, I’m an entrepreneur. I work for nobody. Then they move to the city and start selling cloth and textiles, or transporting food and wine, or trading spices or cookware, or opening banks. They form the first true merchant class. And to be clear, it is not all roses and free-market sunshine from there. There were a series of peasant uprisings, for example, which were put down brutally. And when the lords couldn’t get enough workers, they went elsewhere… and started the African slave trade. So, no, this was not an easy transition. It was an awful transition. But all the same, we can look back to the black death, to this catastrophic loss of life, and say—this created the underpinnings of the world we know now. And this is basically how it goes, when you look back at violent, terrible, transformative moments. There is pain, but also significant and fundamental advancement. The Civil War gave us the gilded age and a sort of second industrial revolution, with the expansion of railroads and steel manufacturing. Around the same time, cholera epidemics of the mid-1800s led to massive urban redesigns, with wider paved streets that were easier to clean, and the introduction of parks—including Central Park in New York. A little while later, the 1918 Spanish Flu radically transformed medicine: It created the field of virology, and many governments around the world—though, not the American government—embraced the idea of free healthcare for all. Then the Great Depression was a… well, setback to healthcare… TWINKIE COMMERCIAL: Howdy partners, come on to Hostess Twinkie town Yes, the Twinkie was a product of the depression. But also, the depression led to the end of prohibition—which, fine, another setback for healthcare in a way, but one I’m more fond of—as well as the concept of federal disaster relief, and many other things. World War II significantly sped up women entering the workforce. More recently, the 2008 recession pushed us to rethink what we own and what it’s worth, which led to the rise of Airbnb and Uber, and a continuing shift in how we work that we’re still figuring out today. So what’s going to happen after Covid-19? Well, when I take all of this as a collective whole—from the black death of the middle ages to the last recession that we can all still remember—I’m struck by how at once logical but unpredictable the change is. You know, as we look at it in retrospect, it makes total sense that the black plague would lead to, like, the early idea of an employment contract… but it’s not what you would have anticipated at the time. It would have been too hard to see the zig-zag logic of it. So now, as we try to look forward, I’m realizing that we should probably first understand how disruption tends to happen in the first place. Like, why do things change in enormous ways? Are there ways to anticipate that zig-zag? And that, is why I called Hamza. HAMZA 2: Hi, I’m Hamza Mudassir He’s the guy you heard earlier, talking about how things will suck for the old world. And he should know. He’s the cofounder of a consulting firm called Platypodes, which works with companies on disruptive strategy, and he also researches disruption at the University of Cambridge. Though of course, in normal times, the disruption he’s looking at has nothing to do with pandemics. HAMZA 3: No. it usually means that there’s a new substitute or a competitor in town that does not play by the rules. It’s business, basically. But you know, I think that’s useful. It’s really hard to imagine what pandemic-driven disruption looks like on a global scale. A business, however, is a concrete and easier to understand thing. So let’s start by looking at disruption at that smaller level. How does a business get disrupted? Hamza says it’s when a new competitor doesn’t play by the rules, but there’s a bigger thing going on here. The competitor also often doesn’t look like a competitor. So, to see that in action, let’s take a classic disruption case, let’s look at… KODAK COMMERCIAL: Kodak film, for the times of your life Kodak, the most famous manufacturer of camera film. Most people think that digital cameras killed Kodak, but Hamza says no, that’s not quite right. Digital cameras didn’t kill Kodak—this guy did. MARK ZUCKERBERG 1: Well, so my sophomore year at Harvard when I first built this… Mark Zuckerberg killed Kodak. Because before Facebook, people weren’t necessarily ditching their film camera for digital cameras. Maybe they would own one of each. But then, Facebook came along, it became a replacement to the things that you do with physical photos. I mean, why make bulky photo albums that you’ll never look at again anyway, when instead, all your photos can just be organized online for anyone to see? If you buy into that, it means you don’t really need physical photos to begin with. Which means… KODAK COMMERCIAL: Kodak film, for the times of your life Good-bye, Kodak. And OK, next question: What happens inside a company like Kodak, as it’s facing the moment of disruption? Like, at some point they must have realized—crap, we are in trouble. What then? Well, Hamza says that most companies make the same mistake. They fall back on internal systems that they’d designed to keep employees on task and to compete against traditional competitors. But of course, disruption doesn’t come from traditional competitors, which means that these systems are useless. HAMZA 4: so, they try all of their systems, they all go into high gear, and they go like, okay, we have now responded. And really nothing happens. The disruptor is still added. Instead of changing, because anxiety levels are so high, the entire organization then keeps on falling into the loop of running systems and processes over and over and over again. They panic! The system doesn’t work, so they try the system again. And they do that until time runs out. From here I think we can zoom out and look at all of us on a global scale, facing a pandemic. Because what is a pandemic, if not a giant competitor that doesn’t play by the rules? And what are we—or what are our governments—if not organizations that at first didn’t take the competitor seriously, and then fell back upon very imperfect systems, and then, when those systems didn’t work, they basically just tried the systems again. If that’s the case, and we’re the thing being disrupted… well, OK, then how do we survive disruption? Hamza’s answer goes back to business. It’s this. HAMZA 5: the best way of figuring out if your business is in trouble is to check out what the end user of, whatever you produce, is doing next. Start with what people are doing and where people are going, and then extrapolate out all the ripple effects of that change. Go where the change is. And Hamza has some interesting ideas about what could happen as a result of Covid-19—changes that will feel disorienting, but could actually create massive opportunity for people who stay out in front of it. And I’m going to give you two examples. They’re both going to sound simple but they really aren’t. So number one is that companies will want more stability than they have now. And number two is that employees will work from home. I know, obvious, right? But… Well, let’s take the first one first. Here’s why many companies got screwed this year: HAMZA 6: most supply chains for most companies out of a linear set of affairs If you make chocolate chip cookies, then you get your flour from one place, and your chocolate from another, and so on. It’s keeps things simple and cost-effective. But, it turns out, we’ve now learned linear supply chains also leave you vulnerable to interruption. Cut off one part, and the whole thing collapses. So, what to do? Hamza says companies will learn from this, and build redundancies into their supply chains… so, watch the ripple effects of that. That means sourcing from multiple places at the same time, which distributes manufacturing more around the globe, which could have geo-political consequences and also means new technology is needed to keep it all cost-effective, which means new opportunities for companies big and small to serve those needs, and hey, maybe even entirely new industries. And, okay, here is the second thing. People are working from home, he says. Again, obvious. Most people are right now. And people are discovering that it’s pretty good! Companies are discovering the effectiveness of remote workforces, which means a lot more of us will remain working from home in the future. So what happens next? Well, here’s one of the ways of following the ripple effects. People will become more physically isolated, which means that there will be a greater need for tools that build community on or offline, as well as a rise in digital mental health services. And also, managers who were used to having in-person teams may not have any idea how to motivate people or keep them on task in this new world, which means new leaders with new skillsets will be able to step up. And who are these new leaders leading, exactly? Well, that is a tricky question. HAMZA 7: talent is only going to get, uh, scarcer and scarcer as time moves on, especially with people who are working from home. They can, effectively be working for three different companies at the same time because they’re so productive. How do you make sure you get enough of the timeshare back? I mean, hey, not to get myself in trouble here, but I am at home, and I have my full-time job, and I’m also… making this podcast… sooooo, how are you gonna manage me? By listening to this podcast, you contractually agree not to disclose its contents to my boss, my boss’s boss, or anyone who may question my whereabouts at any time. Violation of these terms will result in public shaming. Terms and conditions apply. So anyway, that’s Hamza’s story of disruption. But hey, while we’re talking about people working from home… HEATHER 1: while I imagine some people like me are wasting a lot of time and trying to figure out how to do workouts at home with two dumbbells. What a lot of other people are doing who are smarter and more dedicated is they’re writing the next piece of sector defining software. That’s Heather Meeker. She’s a partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers and also a venture capitalist at a fund called Open Source Software Capital. And, given the fund’s name, you might not be surprised to learn that she spends a lot of time thinking about open source software… and she says it is about to boom, because most open-source software development takes place among collaborators who work remotely. These are the ideal conditions for open source, she says. In fact, when she looked back at 50 companies that were unicorns in the open source space, she found that 75% of them were originally started during down markets. HEATHER 2: People are going to be starting projects that are going to be extremely interesting and valuable in a year or two. Once again, there is the zig-zag logic. Like, in 10 years, you could look back and try to figure out why there’s so much great open source software, and the answer was… because we were locked away in our homes, trying to avoid a deadly virus. I mean it makes sense. But it’s not obvious. OK, so. We’ve talked about disruption, and how it could alter the way we work and build and… That’s heavy stuff. I feel like… I dunno, after that, I think I need a drink … If only there was somewhere we could go. Tell me about the last time you went to the bar. STEPH 1: It was yesterday. This is my colleague Stephanie Schomer, deputy editor at Entrepreneur magazine. She lives in Brooklyn, and to get out of her apartment these days, she and a friend will go for what they call walk-tails. You know, cocktails you can walk with. Aka, door-to-door bar hopping. STEPH 2: you just go to the front door and they’re standing there with their square tablet and they will give you a, cocktail in a coffee cup or a, plastic cup with a straw and, send you along. This was not legal in a pre-coronavirus world. But like many states, New York’s state liquor authority changed its rules to help bars and restaurants survive. So now, people in New York can put their masks on, stay six feet away, and get some refreshment for their mental health. And, uhh, I think people are supposed to take these drinks home, but— STEPH 3: Everyone’s walking around drinking. Do you think that when this is all over, people would want this. STEPH 4: I mean, I wanted this before this situation happened. And it’s not like anyone’s rowdy. It’s very polite outdoor drinking. Which makes you wonder… honestly, why was this illegal to begin with? And when this is all over… why can’t it stay this way? Which brings us to the next phase of our exploration of how our current crisis may lead to good things. Hang on to your disinfectant, because it’s time to talk… Policy, policy, policy! ALEC 1: I’m really optimistic that if we permanently waive these regulations, you’d see large benefits That is Alec Stapp, director of technology policy at the Progressive Policy Institute. And he’s been closely watching the way that very fast changes in government policy have impacted innovation. So for example, telemedicine. I’ve seen doctors online many times before, and I love it. With my insurance, I pay $5 out of pocket and within minutes I’ve got someone telling me to say ahhhhh to the camera—which is infinitely better than schlepping to an office, filling out a mountain of paperwork, and sitting around reading a 6-month-old copy of WebMD Magazine. And I’ve always wondered, why isn’t telemedicine something everybody does? Is it just because it’s new and scary? But the answer, it turns out, is more far complicated than that. ALEC 2: two main barriers to telemedicine is one… rate regulation. So, reimbursement rates for doctors in the past have been, higher for in-person visits and so that obviously disincentivizes doctors from investing in or incentivizing their patients to use telemedicine. There’s also HIPAA regulations. That’s the privacy rules around your healthcare data, limiting video conferencing, um, from occurring between doctors and patients. Which is to say that, until recently, it was illegal to talk to your doctor on Zoom or FaceTime. But then coronavirus came along, and it made all the sense in the world for patients to see their doctors quickly and remotely, and so those barriers were removed. Doctors can get paid more using telemedicine now, and they can use a wider range of tools. And it isn’t difficult to imagine what comes next. Greater adoption leads to greater innovation—I mean, we’re seeing that already, with telemedicine startups releasing new products and features, and the company Teledoc’s stock going on a rocketship ride, and by the time we’re out of this, it’s likely that the old rules just won’t make any sense anymore, and our experience of seeing the doctor will be changed forever, for the better. But policy isn’t the only thing Alec is thinking about these days. He’s also thinking about another super sexy word… Incentives, incentives, incentives! So okay, consider this: most people’s lives are very heavily digital right now. I mean, you are going on Zoom dates, you’re watching Tiger King on repeat, you’re tweeting nonstop about this awesome podcast you’re listening to. Well… ALEC 3: I think people don’t often think of the infrastructure that underlies these services. As this changes the economy and changes the incentives for businesses to sell certain kinds of goods and services will change the incentives to invest in this infrastructure even further. When more people use something, there’s more incentive for businesses to invest in and innovate those things. So if we’re all suddenly in need of better digital infrastructure, that could mean that there’s a lot more incentive to create better cloud computing capabilities, and better broadband, and an accelerated roll-out of 5G. And what will that lead to, aside from some crazy people that are claiming that 5G is spreading Coronavirus, which is not true? Well, huh, I mean the possibilities are endless. Like, oh, oh! Oh OK. I’m going to give away my billion-dollar idea here, so… can you promise not to steal it? Actually, I don’t trust you. Lawyers, come protect me in an obnoxious way. By listening to this podcast, you contractually agree not to steal my intellectual property even though it’s not patented so it’s not technically my property, but I came up with it so violation of these terms will result in public shaming. Terms and conditions apply. I feel better. So, you know when it’s the dead of summer, and you’re lying in bed trying to fall asleep, and theb suddenly: It’s a mosquito that got into your room, and you’re like, ahhh, kill kill kill! But you missed it, and now it’s somewhere in your room, but you can’t see it, so your only choice is to go to sleep and wake up with five bites on your forehead, and isn’t that the worst? So I had this idea—a way to solve this problem. And it goes like this: What if there was an app that could find a mosquito in your room? Like, the app uses the camera on your phone, so you take the camera and scan your room with it, and the app is programmed to recognize the mosquito’s shape in a dark corner somewhere, or its flight pattern if it’s moving around. And it’ll tell you where the mosquito is—it’ll show it right on the phone, like, right there, by the closet! Then— Dead mosquito. Wouldn’t you pay for that? I’d pay for that. So last summer, I emailed a friend who works in tech and asked if this could be made, and he was like, cool idea bro, but technology is just not there. Like camera technology? Not there. Data processing? Not there. Buuuut, and now you can see where I’m going with this—yes, Alec was just talking to me about how coronavirus could lead to a massive load on digital infrastructure, which could lead to new investments and innovations in digital infrastructure, and so, I did tell Alec about my killer mosquito idea, and he said… ALEC 4: from a technology perspective, I immediately think of things like machine vision. So in that situation, your smartphone would be the machine, and it’s using camera to recognize objects in the room. And uploading that image file or the video file to the cloud, processing it, using some kind of machine learning algorithm, and then sending that file back down to your phone requires a huge amount of bandwidth, and having, uh, more mobile broadband infrastructure would facilitate those kind of services. And that is the zig-zag logic of what Alec is proposing here. The demand on digital infrastructure right now leads to far greater infrastructure tomorrow, which makes possible a new wave of digital technologies that we cannot even imagine… or well, maybe you can’t imagine, but I have already imagined. ALEC 5: what I have set up here is a world in which 10 years from now I can kill a mosquito in my room because of coronavirus. Exactly, exactly. Then you’re going to prevent the next, you know, malaria or something. That’s exactly right. Right, And then it nicely loops back on itself. Expand this outward and you see the endless opportunity. It is easy for this to feel like a time of shrinking potential and absolute devastation—but as I hear from people like Alec and Heather and Hamza, I start to think that THESE are the moments where we move fastest; where we take wild leaps over barriers both cultural and technological, and build better things as a result. Which makes me excited… and then, makes me feel bad for being excited. Because, you know, many people are not in a good place right now. There’s economic devastation, personal tragedies, a trail of ruin. And so… how are we to make sense of that? How can we reconcile the good that comes from bad? I mean, not to sound too bleak about it, but this is something we’ll all have to wrestle with if we’re fortunate enough to survive. So, to find a way to think about this, it’s time to talk to people who think for a living. MICHELLE 1: Well being human is a complicated thing This is Michelle Moody Adams, a professor of philosophy at Columbia University. MICHELLE 2: There has to be an effort to strike a balance between the readiness to preserve what’s familiar and traditional and known and understood and, and an openness. To what is unfamiliar and what’s new and what might be challenging or even initially mysterious. You want to understand what we’re really in for next, and how to process it? That means taking a cold, hard look at what makes us human… and why we’re so fearful of change… and yet, how we’re ultimately adaptable and resilient. So that’s what we’ll do—coming up after the break. AD: Could you use a better nights sleep? I know I sure could. Sleep is a key to health after all, and these days, also a key to my sanity. That is why I am super into this new pillow I got from Hullo. The Hullo pillow is probably unlike any pillow you’ve ever slept on, because it is not fully, it is not feathery, you might not even describe it as soft. Instead, it’s filled with buckwheat. Which creates firm, comfortable, really excellent support for your head and neck. I mean, just consider it, unlike pretty much everything else that’s inside pillows, buckwheat will not collapse under the weight of your head. It’s all support, all the time. And, it’s also customizable, you can easily remove or add buckwheat to ensure that the pillow is exactly the level of thickness that you need. Seriously I am super into this pillow. Want to give it a try? Hullo allows you to sleep on it for 60 nights, and if it isn’t for you just ship it back for a refund. Go to hullopillow.com/pessimistsarchive. That is hullo, H-U-L-L-O pillow dot com slash pessmists archive. Alright, we’re back. So, now we are wrestling with what I think will eventually become the big question of our time. How to make sense of the good that comes from bad. We haven’t mentioned this yet, but one of the largest positive outcomes to come out of one of the worst things of all time was how the movement of international human rights came out of the holocaust. But, here’s the weird thing about that. The idea of human rights was not some brand-new idea, says Michelle Moody Adams of Columbia University. You can find it in religion and philosophy going back centuries. MICHELLE 3: Why did it take that for human beings to try to put it down in international law and to hope that the laws of particular societies would adopt the same stance? I don’t think anybody knows. But here’s what we do know. Crisis changes the way people think. We missed or ignored things before, but crisis changes us going forward. So if we’re going to wrestle with the outcome of change, I suppose we should first ask—why does a crisis change us? BRIAN 2: one hypothesis might be what large scale crises do is they can make certain issues hit home for a large enough group of people in society that collectively we, are led to enter into more serious conversations of the issue than we otherwise would have. That’s Brian Berkey, an assistant professor in the legal studies and business ethics department at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. And the way he sees it, a crisis pops people’s bubbles—very much like the black death shook the wealthy of the 1300s, because they’d previously been able to avoid the waves of disease. These deaths didn’t matter to them that much before, because they weren’t affected by them. No matter the time period, people like being in their bubbles. And the big problem is, the people in power are in the most powerful bubbles. Social and economic problems rarely impact them, so they’re rarely sympathetic to calls for change. But then crisis comes along, and it gets inside their bubbles, and suddenly it’s like they’re seeing something for the first time. Brian says we had a version of this—a very different version of course, but a version nonetheless—during the debate over gay marriage a few years ago. You had conservative politicians oppose gay marriage, but then discover that their own children or family members were gay— BRIAN 3: And then all of a sudden, they’re willing to take the issue more seriously and maybe change their position. For somebody like me, this is just such a source of frustration because, you know, it seems like the right thought is, well, you know, these people should have been willing to at least have the conversation and take seriously these arguments, without it having to affect them. Right? I mean, they should care about other people’s lives and their suffering and the injustice that they face. I also find those turnabouts frustrating to watch. In fact, no, more than that. To be honest with you, when someone opposes something that I support, and then they change their position and agree with me because of a personal experience, my gut reaction is to hate them. Boiling, raging hate for them. I think: Well, you just admitted that you can’t understand people who are different from you, and that seems disqualifying for power. But then I have to stop myself and think… well, what do I really want here? I spend all this time making this podcast, and giving talks about the importance of change, and writing about it, and isn’t that what I want? For people to find the will to change, however they can? And let’s not forget, change is scary. It’s a challenge. It’s a challenge we must all face in our own way. The philosopher Immanuel Kant tells us that. MICHELLE 4: He wrote a wonderful essay, Kant did in 1784 called: What Is Enlightenment? Famous for the line in Latin is sapere aude. Translated, it’s “dare to know”, don’t be afraid of what might come from your efforts to know and to understand the world in a new way. Dare to know. It means admitting you don’t already know. Maybe there’s a limit to what you can know, to what any of us can know, and so the best we can dare ourselves to do is make as much sense of it as we can, knowing that our understanding will be imperfect. This un-knowable-ness, this state of being in a world of invisible forces, reminds me of something that Andrew Rabin said to me—he’s the medieval scholar we heard from at the beginning of the episode. He was talking about how terrifying a virus is, in part because it’s so un-knowable. We can try to avoid it, but it could be anywhere, coming from anyone, at any time. ANDREW 12: I can do the best I can to prevent it, but ultimately that’s out of my hands. That’s an aspect of my mortality that I can’t control. And that’s terrifying. When he said that, something clicked for me. And so I said— ANDREW 13: Also if you expand that outward, that is the, that is the way in which we get through the world is to, is to just accept that, um, we can’t possibly avoid all the bad things. And that goes for everything. Everything! I mean, in past episodes of this show, when we’ve focused on people’s fear of new innovations like the elevator or the car, I’ve wondered—how did we ever actually get people to use these things? The earliest elevators routinely sent people falling to their deaths. In the earliest days of the car, pedestrians were constantly hit and killed. How do we get through that? I mean, really! How do we tolerate it, collectively, and get through to the point where these things are relatively safe, and transform our world into the one we know today? And the answer is that… the unknowable is just built into the world. ANDREW 14: there is a kind of unavoidable badness that we just have to become accustomed to and hope that it doesn’t get us personally. Um, and, um, because we know that on the other side of it is something that’s, uh, that’s, I suppose better. I don’t know. I’m working that theory out as I go, but what do you think? Well no, I mean, I think that’s absolutely right. One thing I was thinking while you were just talking, back in ancient Rome, if a general is particularly victorious: if they have a particularly great accomplishment, they’re granted a trial, which is basically a holiday in their honor. They, there’s a big procession. They, you know, have gold and slaves and you know, all of the, sort of, profits of their military expedition. This, this is the highest honor that the empire can bestow upon a general. But as the general is riding through the city, there’s also supposed to be a slave right behind him, whispering into his ear: remember that thou are human and not divine. And in some sense, from a philosophical standpoint, that’s exactly what an epidemic does. It reminds us that, you know, here in the United States, as privileged as we are, as much control as we think we can exercise on world politics, the world economy, on our own health, on our own experience of life, there’s always this little reminder, this voice that says, remember that we’re human and that not divine, you don’t have control of things. Deep into our bones, into our DNA, even if we don’t realize it, and even if we don’t feel like we have access to it during a time of crisis like we have now, we have already reckoned with the world as it is. We know that our only option is to move forward, through an ever-evolving series of potential disasters, and our only hope is that tragedy doesn’t come for us too soon. Imagine what that does to us! It forces us to make sense of chaos, to create patterns where there may be none, to close ourselves off to the needs of others, to figure out what the safest path is for ourselves first. We know we’re human. We’d prefer to be divine. And so we spend some time convincing ourselves that we’re sorta divine, even maybe just a little divine, because it helps us walk through this minefield a little easier, forgetting that there’s danger around, forgetting that others have fallen and need help, and instead focusing on where we want to go. Then we build systems based on our limited understanding. And then, when crisis comes, we’re shaken out of it. MICHELLE 5: It is in fact, moments of crisis that show us, I think, where the ways we’ve been doing things regularly, actually do hinder our existence. They hinder our success in life, and they challenge human wellbeing, in problematic ways. If I’m being charitable, I’d say this: We didn’t mean to build things poorly. I mean, a few of us did. A few of us are rotten at our core. But the rest, I think, were just trying to make sense of the world, as selfish as it might have been. MICHELLE 6: It’s not that you want crises to come, but it sometimes can be the thing that wakes people up   So, back to my big question. How do we make sense of the good that comes from bad? I think the answer is: the good and the bad are nothing new to us. We’re always experiencing good and bad. Sometimes we do it to ourselves, sometimes it’s done to us by others, and sometimes it’s a force that nobody can control. Sometimes it’s large, sometimes it’s small, but it’s always there, a mixture of the two. The best we can do is make the most of it—to take those moments of clarity, where we see the world a little more for what it is than what we’ve convinced ourselves it is, and we say, we’re human, not divine. And that’s OK, because being human has its benefits. It means we get to explore, to discover, to build, and revise, and change, and learn from that change, and become better because of that change, and hopefully, hopefully, have the opportunity to move forward, and to bring others along with us, because that’s our history. It’s messy and cruel and full of crises and war and epidemics and pandemics, but we always build something better as a result, don’t we? Because we’re human. And humans can become better. And that’s our episode! But hey, remember how we started this episode with the wise and world-altering perspective of Venerable Bede? Well, not everything he said had to say was, shall we say, as veterable. I’ll explain more. But first… Do you like what you’re hearing? Do you have an idea for a future episode? Well get in touch! You can also follow us on Twitter at @pessimistsarc, where we’re always tweeting out the ill-conceived words of pessimists throughout history. We’re also on Instagram, same handle. Our website is Pessimists.co. It has links to lots of things discussed in this episode, and also an archive of historical pessimism searchable by innovation! Our email address is pessimistsarchive@gmail.com, drop a line , I will respond. Also, we’d love your help in reaching more people, so please—tell a friend about Pessimists Archive, and give us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We were recorded at the Feifer household in Boulder, Colorado, and by the way—big shoutout to my parents Barbara and Roy, whose help with childcare has made this episode possible. Pessimists Archive is me and Louis Anslow. Additional research this episode by Britta Lokting. Sound editing by Alec Balas. Our webmaster is James Steward. Theme music by Casper Babypants. Learn more at babypantsmusic.com. Pessimists Archive is supported in part by the Charles Koch Foundation. Learn more about the Foundation at CKF.org/tech. OK, so. Here is a fun little outtake from the work of Venerable Bede, great thinker of the 7th century. Andrew Rabin was telling me about the work Bede did on calendars, very important work, and threw in this aside… ANDREW 15: one of the things that bead does is he develops the means by which Easter was dated for a good thousand years after his death. Interestingly, the, uh, the book in which he does this, the first chapter on the other hand is how to count to a million on your fingers. Uh… say what now? I went searching for some more details on this, and found a deeply researched book about math called “Alex’s Adventures in Numberland,” which explained that Bede’s system of counting to a million was “one part arithmetic, one part jazz hands.” Different fingers, in different combinations, would mean different units of measurements—tens, hundreds, thousands—and they would go up or down depending on where on the body you held them. According to the book, the number 90,000 was a particular doozy—Bede’s instructions were to “grasp your loins with the left hand, the thumb towards the genitals.” So, you know… sometimes a pandemic changes your worldview, and sometimes it gives you an elaborate excuse to grab your crotch. Ehh, you know, I think we can all relate. Alright, that’s it for this time. Thanks for listening to Pessimists Archive and I hope that you are safe and healthy wherever you are. I’m Jason Feifer, and we’ll see you in the near future.   ← Refrigerators Why We Hate Being Told What to Do → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  EPISODES | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post The Good That Comes from a Pandemic appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

The Good That Comes from Pandemics by Pessimists Archive https://chtbl.com/track/78333/http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/810864880-pessimistsarc-the-good-that-comes-from-a-pandemic.mp3 Covid-19 has interrupted our world, but it’s also likely to improve it. After all, history shows that massive disruption is followed by massive opportunity. So what’s in store for us now? In this episode, we learn the surprising consequences of past crises, explore the innovations that may come from Covid-19, and try to understand why disasters are so productive. EPISODE NOTES • How the 1918 Flu Pandemic Revolutionized Public Health (Smithsonian) • How Pandemics Spurred Cities to Make More Green Space for People (History.com) • Innovation Hub: The 1918 Spanish Flu’s Impact on Healthcare (WGBH) • The Coolest Products Created During Recessions (The Street) • Industry and Economy during the Civil War (NPS)  • COVID-19 Will Fuel the Next Wave of Innovation (Entrepreneur) • Andrew Rabin, University of Louisville • Hamza Mudassir, founder of Platypodes • Alec Stapp, Progressive Policy Institute • Michelle Moody Adams, Columbia University  • Heather Meeker, open-source software expert   • Brian Berkey, Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania ← Refrigerators Why We Hate Being Told What to Do → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  PODCAST | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post The Good That Comes from a Pandemic appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

Refrigerators by Pessimists Archive https://chtbl.com/track/78333/http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/784095223-pessimistsarc-refrigerators-vs-ice-a-cold-cold-war.mp3 Refrigerators are unnatural, unhealthy, and probably just a fad — at least, that’s according to the people who once sold ice. But the history of refrigeration actually raises some very real, very relevant questions: What’s natural? How should innovation work? And why do some businesses guarantee their own failure? EPISODE NOTES • Dog A Fake Hero – New York Times, 1908 • Girl Bitten Trying to Make Peace Between Dog and Cat, 1909 • He ate dog meat and liked it, 1909 • Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1833, on shipping ice to India • New Orleans Crescent, 1848: We need ice! • Three Stooges: “An Ache in Every Stake” • Goodhart’s Law • Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveller, 1861 • More about the Paris Morgue • Raw water report on KOIN 6 • Why Big Companies Can’t Innovate, Harvard Business Review • Ice and Refrigeration, 1924: Will the refrigerator put the ice man out of business? Nah. • Natural ice ad, 1927 • Jonathan Rees’ books on refrigeration: Refrigerator, Refrigeration Nation, Before the Refrigerator • “Innovation and its Enemies” by Calestous Juma ← Birthday Parties The Good That Comes from a Pandemic → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  PODCAST | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post Refrigerators appeared first on Pessimists Archive.

Birthday Parties by Pessimists Archive https://chtbl.com/track/78333/http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/767184142-pessimistsarc-birthday-parties.mp3 Today, people complain about self-obsessed millennials. Yesterday, they complained about children celebrating their birthdays. When the birthday party became popular in the 19th century, people worried that it would corrupt community, spoil children, and contradict the bible. But the truth — about why we celebrate our birthdays and ourselves — is far more complicated. EPISODE NOTES •  Eleanor’s Three Birthdays (1867) •  Nettie Leigh’s Birthday (1864) • Our Birthdays, and How To Improve Them (1864) •  Ladies Home Journal, knocking birthdays in 1913 •  How many people have ever lived on earth •  Lessons of Altruism and Egoism in Children’s Birthday Stories •  Some of the religious videos from YouTube, featuring people explaining why you shouldn’t celebrate your birthday: here, here, and here And thanks to our experts interviewed in this episode: •  Russel Belk, York University •  Peter Stearns, George Mason University •  Mahtab Narsimhan, author •  Projit Mukharji, University of Pennsylvania •  Smitha Radhakrishnan, Wellesley College •  John Portmann, University of Virginia ← Faces Refrigerators → Return to Episodes Be Notified of New Episodes Done! Email Subscribe HOME  |  PODCAST | ARCHIVE  |  ABOUT  |  CONTACT AFFILIATE DISCLOSURE  |  PRIVACY POLICY © 2020 Pessimists Archive | All Right Reserved The post Birthday Parties appeared first on Pessimists Archive.