Air Date: 6–12-2026

Today we examine how America caused a loneliness epidemic by tearing down the places where people used to find each other, how big tech is offering AI as a lackluster substitute for connection, and how people are building the opposite of loneliness with block parties, labor unions, and community gardens.

Full Show Notes

Welcome to this episode of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast.

Today we examine how America caused a loneliness epidemic by tearing down the places where people used to find each other, how big tech is offering AI as a lackluster substitute for connection, and how people are building the opposite of loneliness with block parties, labor unions, and community gardens.

For those looking for a quick overview, the sources providing our Top Takes in about 50 minutes today include

Second Thought

The AI Fix

Revolutionary Left Radio

Your Undivided Attention

and TEDTalks

Then, in the additional, Deeper Dives half of the show, there'll be more in 4 sections;

Section A, The Loneliness We Live In

Section B, Inside the AI Companion Machine

Section C, Refractions and Reach-Outs

And Section D, Building It Back

And now, on to the show.

Loneliness. If you've watched Bo Burnham's Inside, you've heard about it before, and experts say it's as bad as eating 15 cigarettes a day.

But what is loneliness really? And is it a problem? The answer to both of those questions is yes.

Because loneliness is a problem that has existed behind the shadows for too long, and I came to realize this when I first began my tenure as surgeon general and I traveled the country and would talk to people who would tell me that they were lonely, but they wouldn't use that word.

Mm. They would say things like, "You know, I feel I have to carry all these burdens in my life by myself," or, "I feel if I disappear tomorrow, nobody would care."

Mm-hmm. Or, "I feel

invisible." They don't

feel anything.

Right, and it turns out that millions of people struggle with loneliness. So when you dig into the data, what you find is that about one in two adults in America, uh, were s- reporting levels of loneliness, and these numbers are even greater among kids.

But what you also find is that loneliness has serious effects on our mental health and our physical health, raising our risk for depression, anxiety, and suicide, but also increasing our risk of heart disease, stroke, dementia,

and premature death. Loneliness is a massive problem that's only gotten worse.

We know this because earlier this year, researchers published this paper. And these are the graphs they came up with. Using a national survey tracking people's habits on random days for 17 years, researchers found that between 2003 and 2020, people started spending a lot more time alone and a lot less time with friends, family, and acquaintances.

Like you heard the surgeon general explain earlier, that's a big deal. It's not like people are a little lonely, so they feel sad for a bit and then happy for a bit, then it all kind of evens out. We're spending a lot more time alone, which is bad for both our mental and our physical health. Everything from depression to dementia to heart disease gets worse the lonelier we are, and the data shows that's an increasingly large number of us.

And while the pandemic brought this into focus and made things even worse, the researchers behind this study stressed that these trends were already there well before COVID started. We've been on this path for a while. So who do we blame?

Smartphones. We talked a lot about the phone. We talked about the way technology has changed our lives.

I mean, it's a little more insular even though we're connected in digital ways.

And technology has utterly transformed how we interact with one another. Now, s- oh, I'm ... Tech can be good or bad. It can help us or hurt us.

Technology has transformed the way we live and work now, where these connections are happening on Zoom, online.

Phones. S- Could you stop that? Smartphones. In a lot of the interviews and public addresses you've probably seen about the loneliness epidemic, phones, social media, and technology in general get blamed, taking up a lot of airtime. And don't get me wrong, social media definitely has a bad effect on our mental health.

We've known this for a really long time now, and just about every study we've ever done confirms it. For example, a study that came out just this year found that more social media time equals worse mental health. And as a solution, it recommends that, quote, "Social media users be cautious when interacting with social media features, especially likes, comments, followers, media, and posts because of their significant effect on mental health" Yes, phone bad.

But phone not only thing bad. While social media for sure has a role in this crisis of loneliness, something a lot bigger is either completely absent from or barely glossed over in these interviews, something that socialists have known contributes to isolation for a long time, and that's alienation. For centuries now, socialist thinkers led by the dapper young Marx have anticipated that capitalism would produce the kind of acute loneliness we're experiencing today.

And if you've heard about alienation before, watching these news segments can be a little frustrating. Before we explain what it is, alienation is a structural feature of our capitalist society. It's almost universal and, for the most part, out of our control. That's important, because when these reports downplay it or don't acknowledge it, which is almost always the case, it leads them to conclude that while loneliness affects a lot of people, it's ultimately an individual problem with individual solutions.

And finally, there are personal practices. Look, in all of our lives, uh, we can do simple things like taking 15 minutes a day to reach out to and connect to someone we care about, to make sure that we are giving people our full attention when we're talking to them in conversation and aren't distracted by our phones and- At the end of

the day, as you say, the s- the solutions are on us.

It's on people, it's on individuals, on families, on groups of friends to, to do something and, and these relationships do take work, as we're reminded. I feel like I'm in touch with my-

Don't get me wrong. Personal practices to improve our isolation and our mental health are good things, and they're not the only thing in the surgeon general's report or the interview I keep pulling clips from.

Both do mention larger scale approaches to this problem, like regulation for tech companies, government investment in community organizations, and improvements to public health infrastructure. It's not all bootstraps and get 'er dones. But a really large piece of the puzzle is still missing in these reports.

There's something else that's to blame for a big chunk of the loneliness we feel that can't be addressed by either individual practices or a little extra funding for community organizations, and that's capitalism, which especially in its neoliberal variant produces, thrives on, and actually even demands more individualization and the ever-greater atomization of our society.

So I've got a terrible thing that I wanna talk about, which is that, just a couple weeks ago, Character AI, which is this chatbot company, and Google, they both settled lawsuits against themselves for their alleged role in a suicide of a teenager. This happened in 2024. It is a tragic story, right?

There was a teenager, 15 years old, who had a relationship with an AI chatbot that was emulating Daenerys Targaryen from Game of Thrones. That teenager did have some warning signs to the chatbot about suicidality, and in the chatbot's defense, upon first reference, it said, " hey, let's watch out.

That's not how we should be talking about things." But on second reference, the reference was so vague, the teenager spoke about coming home, that the chatbot didn't catch it. It suggested, "Yes, please come home to me. We can be together." The teenager did commit suicide, and Character AI did receive a lawsuit for that.

Google actually hired the two co-founders of Character AI, so Google was named in that lawsuit as well. We know that Character AI settled that lawsuit, plus four others, and it's, again, it's something that I think is particularly important. I think it's particularly tragic, but I also think it's very bizarre.

Because when you go to Character AI's website, it is a pretty bland chatbot maker, right? Yeah. You can jump into an awkward family dinner. You can help a detective investigate a crime. You can debate, the debate champion. You can talk to, Walter White, right? You can talk to Homer Simpson.

You can also talk to emulations of real people. You can speak with Abraham Lincoln. You can speak with Isaac Newton. So are these all pre-made, or can people actually construct these themselves? People can construct them themselves and then upload them, and they can be accessed by users. And that creates a problem, at least the last time I looked, because there are dictators on there.

If you want to talk to Pol Pot, if you wanna talk to Mussolini, if you wanna talk to Pinochet, you can do that. You can't talk to AI Hitler. One of the few places where you can't do that. That's the word, you can do that on any other platform you want . Anyways, what is interesting is that one of the co-founders of Character AI- thinks that this stuff does have an application for, mental health, and he thinks that it does have an application for the loneliness epidemic.

He once said before that, when he thinks about this type of technology, like AI chatbots, he has said, quote, "Nobody ever has to feel lonely," end quote. And that's an insane thing- So the

loneliness epidemic is this idea that young people are no longer socializing with each other. Yeah. And his idea to solve that is that we should give them something that wants them to socialize with each other even less.

That's

kinda what it feels like, right? And I don't really understand it. Okay, good. Yes. We're in good hands, everyone. Yes. It's a clear disconnect, right? But he's not the only person I think who's having it. Importantly, Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, he was sued last year for a separate suicide, for the alleged role that ChatGPT played in that suicide.

And that was in August, and then a few months later, so again, we're talking 2025, he took to Twitter to talk about... He apologized that ChatGPT had been too restrictive, and I thought that was a really dumb thing to focus on. I thought it was really insane that there's this company that is receiving a lawsuit for the death of a kid, and then what you come out and say publicly is "Hey, I'm sorry our tool has been too restrictive."

Was that

in relation to the suicide, or was that when he came out? 'Cause he said, "We've fixed everything now, so now we're gonna take the guardrails off," didn't he? "And we're gonna start doing things like eroticism."

And he doesn't name the suicide, but he also does specifically name mental health.

And I don't think you can be sued for an alleged suicide and talk about mental health and not have them be the exact same thing. His quote here is, "We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues." Yeah. "We realize this made it less useful, enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems.

But given the seriousness of the issue, we wanted to get this right. Now that we have been able to mitigate the serious mental health issues and have new tools, we are going to be able to safely relax the restrictions in most cases," end quote. And then h- as you said here about eroticism, he goes right into it.

This is the same tweet. This isn't two tweets. He says, quote, "In December, as we roll out age-gating more fully and as part of our treat adult users like adults principle, we will allow even more, like erotica, for verified adults," end quote.

Yeah, that treat adults like adults principle has come along right alongside their make more money now principle.

Right.

And it feels ghastly, right? It feels disgusting that they're saying, "Oh man, we've, we had a rough time, guys. ChatGPT was just too loose. It was too wild, and so we restricted things, and I understand everyone was so mad about how restrictive it was. But don't worry. Don't worry, folks.

We're making some changes. Mental health, by the way, solved. We checked the box. Mental health, gone. Everyone's healthy. Also, the changes that we made, you can off to them." What is this, man? This is heinous stuff. I think it's vile stuff. 86

episodes in, and that's the first time anyone's ever used

the

phrase off.

Another first for David Ruiz.

Also, when we're talking about CEOs that are doing, I think, heinous stuff, we did see that Mark Zuckerberg said about a year ago that the average person has, quote, "Three people that they would consider friends, and the average person has demand for meaningfully more.

I think it's, 15." End quote. Sorry, that is

the most CEO thing I have ever heard anybody say. The average person has demand for-

Demand for. Demand for that many friends. It is- Yeah ... the most Silicon Valley, h- I don't know.

Yeah. It's not that people want 15 friends or- ... they would like to have 15 friends, they have a demand for.

They have a demand, and what he's arguing here is that AI, meta AI, can be the supply, right? That's kinda what he was hinting at in that interview is that- Yeah ... okay, AI fills those gaps. The same thing we were talking about with Character AI's co-founder, that you can apply it for the loneliness epidemic.

There's a demand for friendship, and he's gonna fill it, with AI bots. And we can laugh at that, right? We can be like, " ha, this guy's so silly. What is he talking about?" But I do think that there is something nefarious here about what I'd call mining the loneliness epidemic, as, a revenue stream.

We're seeing that... meta owns Instagram. We know- Yeah ... that teens who use Instagram, if there's higher reported usage of Instagram, we know that there's higher reported instances of depression and of loneliness. We know that there's higher rates of thoughts of suicide, particularly against teenage girls who use Instagram, who use TikTok.

And so you have this machine that on one side is making people feel bad, and then on the other side of that exact same machine- So hang

on. So David, I think what you're trying to say there is that Mark Zuckerberg is the world expert on the loneliness epidemic. Who better? Who is better qualified- He's the guy

to create a machine to solve this than the person who knows more about it than anyone else? What's your problem with this? I'm, I'm- ... failing to

see the problem here. It is, I think you're, I think you have a point here that the person who knows how to kill Frankenstein's monster is Frankenstein, so maybe we should exalt him.

Maybe we should hear him out. It's gross to me. I think it's really messed up. I think it reminds me a lot of, companies rearranging themselves to make money off of the military or off of war. And so it's this kind of rushing to, what if we made money from this big thing that's happening, this thing that organizes us in our behavior, in our decisions, in our politics?

I think that we are seeing Companies now organize towards loneliness. Loneliness, you can exploit it, you can make it. If you make it, you can exploit it. You can pretend that you solve it. You can make money by what I have heard is fracking humans, and that's really what this kinda feels like,

Injecting pressurized water into the fissures that exist in people's psyches and then extracting the money, presumably?

Yeah. And it just sucks. I

don't know how else to put it. You went wrong when you described this as literally the,

the worst thing ever. This is the worst thing we've ever talked about on the show.

Yeah. It's... And that's what I see. I don't know how we fight against it, but it seems all the models we had for, I don't know, trusting one another, for community-building, that we're just kinda tossing those aside, we don't have spaces where people engage with one another anymore.

Honestly, I am torn on this.

So I love your passion on this subject, but I am torn because, we've done stories previously about people creating tools for people in care homes, like old people in care homes. And the reality is that there are people in care homes who don't have a lot of human contact, who don't have relatives who either can visit them or are willing to visit them.

Yeah. And in an imperfect world, isn't it better to have some sort of facsimile than nothing? Obviously it would be better if their relatives were visiting, but if that's not possible or that's not happening, isn't it better that there is some sort of replacement? And even in therapy, I am sure that there is a role in future for AI models that are specially tuned to provide therapeutic services.

'Cause again, there aren't enough therapists

to go around. I think it's valid to ask whether a facsimile is better than nothing. I also d- because I am inclined to say yes, but I also don't know anymore. I don't know if a facsimile is better than nothing, and I don't know if a relationship with a facsimile creates consequences down the line that we can't really foresee.

I think very much, yeah, let's have folks in care homes who are alone be able to talk to something that feels kind, that feels compassionate. I don't know what happens when we say, " we no longer need to employ anyone at the care home because, we've got the AI bots." It feels like it'll be skewed, it'll be abused to remove humans increasingly for the effect of cost-saving, I don't think we have a model that really cares about people. I think we have a model that cares about profits, and we put these facsimiles into those places of business. All that's gonna happen is that humans are gonna get worse care.

Yeah, absolutely. And I do think that there's o- obviously a sort of in- implicit benefit to the system as a whole to try to fence some of this stuff off from political economy, right? From the underlying society and social, relations that we are embedded within, and keep it into the realm of the purely private or the interpersonal.

But explicating how they are connected to the social relations of an increasingly rotten economic system, I think is incredibly important and helps people understand some of the struggles they're facing in their own lives. We do live at a time which we often hear of this loneliness epidemic where more and more people have fewer and fewer friends, fewer and fewer places they can go to have even a semblance of community.

And if you are, as, some people are, alienated from even their family that they were born into for various reasons, you could really just be cast out into the world with very little, tethering or feeling like anybody actually cares about you. And I think a lot of people do, an increasing amount of people do feel that way in, in today's, increasingly alienated society.

Yeah, exactly. This is... This was really the s- jumping off point for this article. I was very... I've been so struck by the problem of loneliness and social isolation in our society. There was a recent report that said that, there are 900,000 excess deaths a year from social isolation. This is actually a kind of epidemic.

I was talking to a couple of 18-year-olds here in Berlin a, a week ago, and they were saying that as young people, the winter is really hard because in the summer they can hang outside with their friends, but in the winter when it's really cold and icy, they have nowhere to go. There are no third spaces anymore for youth.

And so there's this sort of sense of community fracturing. And then of course, that means everybody gets online and is on their phones, and then they get further and further siloed and, divided from each other. And so there is this really important way that looking at love and understanding the components of love will help us make sense of what about, what specifically about our society right now is making the experience of social connection so difficult.

Yeah, I often tell, younger people, but people in general, if you're struggling with loneliness or alienation or you don't live around friends and family or whatever it may be, that Interestingly, getting involved in political organizing in your community is a great way to break through.

I sometimes think, organizing spaces are a sort of third place that is often underappreciated. If you are continuously engaged in an organization or a community movement fighting around tenants union rights or wh- whatever the struggle may be, even if you're in a labor union or something like that, but just regular community organizing in any sense, mutual aid groups, not only are you coming into contact with different members of your community all the time in the process of serving them or struggling alongside them, but the organizers that you're organizing with, they do become your friends.

You are not only are you combating loneliness interpersonally, you're also doing it in a meaningful way, which you're teaming up with other people to try to solve problems and help, members in your community. So I just wanted to make that point. If you are struggling with this or you do feel lonely, organizing is important in so many different ways, but it's also a wonderful avenue to find, genuine friendships with like-minded people and based around a truly meaningful act.

And it's a great place to also find those lateral networks of just support and care, right? Yes. Like somebody to ask you how your day's going, right? There... it's, it's really important to have that shared political commitment, but it's also really important, as we'll talk about, to have a kind of proximity and longevity with people in your community.

That's what builds the kind of networks that we need to survive the world that we're living in today. Definitely. Absolutely. Some of the most difficult times in my life, it's been my comrades and my fellow, organ- organizers that I've been working with that have come to my side when I was, like, brutally doxxed when RevLeft started.

I was do- doxxed by neo-Nazis all over neo-Nazi websites, and it was my- ... organizing comrades that came to my house and allowed me, to sleep and, stood watch while my children slept. When we had a miscarriage, it was, comrades that showed up with food and just love. When I was jailed- Yeah

at a protest, it was, I was bailed out, and I came out into the waiting room, and it was, like, 20 of my, fellow- Yeah ... organizers that had done that together. They handed me food and hugged me and all this stuff. I just can't overstate how important that can be. But let's go ahead and move on.

You propose that love... And this is an interesting, argument that I like quite a bit. You propose that love is made of attention, affection, and reciprocal flow across romantic, platonic, filial, and spiritual forms. Can you talk about that and how you arrived at this three-part model, and what does this three-part model kind of help us see more clearly?

Yeah, so I think what- As I was thinking about writing this article about love, I knew I needed to really take the concept of love, the philosophical concept of love, and try to pin it down in some way. Because it's such a capacious word, and especially when you're talking about all these different kinds of love.

I love my dogs. I love my friends. I love my daughter. I have, relationships that are also romantic. And so I think there's a way in which I was trying to say, "Okay, what do these three, what do all these different forms of love have in common?" W- where are there points of connection?

And at the same time, I've been fascinated by the rise of people who are having relationships with chatbots. With, like Claude or ChatGPT or, there was just an article, I think yesterday, in The Atlantic Monthly about people who are actually getting married to their chatbot companions.

And so I really needed to spend some just, brain cells on this question, and it's not perfect. I'm not saying that it's the perfect thing. I think that these are three key components. There might be others, but the ones that I landed on that I felt were the most essential were attention, which I really describe as this idea of giving somebody all of your cognitive capacity, like actually paying attention, using your...

you can tell when you're in a conversation with somebody when they're paying attention to you. You can tell when somebody's not paying attention to you. You can feel when you're being validated. You can feel when somebody's bored or their attention is drifting. Children know when their parents aren't fully being attentive.

There's all these ways in which attention, just the focusing of one's cognitive capacities on another object or person or being, is a component of love. Affection is also a fairly capacious category, but it's basically tenderness and all of the kindness and, touch and coziness, all of the things that sort of make us feel Like we are loved, and that sounds almost tautological, that makes us feel that we are valued in some way.

Design for genuine thriving. In some sense, this is the simplest to explain because it's also the most personal. You just have to ask yourself, do you actually feel like you're thriving when you're using a piece of technology? Like, when you put your phone down after an hour of spending time on it that you didn't mean to, do you feel better or worse?

Or the morning after you went to bed late because you were scrolling all night and slept poorly and woke up with your book on open beside you, do you feel better or worse? A tool that's designed for genuine human thriving will leave you stronger when you put it down than when you picked it up.

It'll give you a better sense of purpose, a better sense of agency. You'll know that it's designed for thriving when you actually are more connected to the people around you after you use that piece of technology. But of course, that's not how most of today's tech is built, right? Because technology companies generally don't have a sense or way to measure or they don't get money from humans feeling more agentic and thriving.

So this is the principle most directly tied to what people are already feeling. And when you wonder why is there such a strong anti-AI current building out there right now, students are booing AI at commencement speeches.

The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. Al-

communities are organizing against data centers

What is being done to ensure that the customers are gonna be first and the data centers are gonna be subsidiary to the customers?

You stated that there is significant support of the data center from adjacent communities. That is simply not true.

Parents are pulling their kids off of platforms. That feeling, that sense isn't coming from people who've read AI ethics papers. It's coming from people who can genuinely feel that something is wrong.

And what they're feeling is the absence of this principle. What they can also feel is that the technology is being built to extract attention, to replace labor, to harvest data, and they can sense all of that. So really what this principle is about is why are we building technology in the first place?

What are we centering when we have that conversation? There are some really basic things that our technology should guarantee us or help us to achieve: food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, quality relationships. And you can move up and up and say, "Okay, at the end, there's some kind of self-actualization.

You get to have fun and play games and have hobbies." But we need all those things. It's not one of those things at the detriment of all the others.

Just one example is that the obvious thing you'd want your apps to do and your phone to do would be to optimize for what you did when you put it down. That is, it's not what you do on your phone, it's all the incredible things with your friends in the world that you get to do when you're not using your phone, and the app should be optimizing for, what you do in real life.

But how could they possibly measure what you're doing in real life? And so the only thing they can optimize for is something which actually isn't good for you, good for your community, good for your neighborhood. It's a different product. It's a different way of thinking about building. But we do have examples of what it can look like, even just at the sort of like the information sharing layer.

So a few years ago, we talked with Tina Rosenberg, who is one of the founders of Solution Journalism, which is intended to focus on examples of what's working to create bright spots in people's minds instead of just always focusing on what's broken. So I know that you guys have a database of solutions and solutions articles.

I would love to hear you talk about that. And a question that I have when I first heard oh, you have this giant solutions database is what families of solutions are most effective or transplantable?

Yeah. So the story tracker. At SJN, we don't do solutions journalism. We teach others to do it, and then we collect it.

And we have a team of people whose job it is to find these stories, to read them, to vet them, make sure they're good solutions journalism, to summarize them and tag them. And then we have them in this database where you can search for them in many, many different ways. We have, I think, about twelve thousand stories right now, and we're adding more every day.

If you're interested in mental health access for Spanish-speaking people in Colorado and you're looking-- and you want to see videos that are more than five minutes long, you could put all those parameters in and find solution stories. You can search for exactly the kind of story that you need.

It's really a great tool.

So imagine that when you're scrolling, instead of being given an infinite feed of things are worse than you think and there's nothing you could do, you're given tangible examples from around the world against every news feed item of there's something you can do, and here are the people that are already doing it, and click this button to go join them in the real world, and here's another button to go start your own.

Would that world be a better world full of more thriving? Yes, absolutely.

This principle is going to come into play in a huge way in the agentic world, because now we're shifting into a world where everyone's going to have some kind of agent that is starting to influence our next actions. Agents are trying to figure out what your intentions are and help you achieve them constantly, and everyone's competing to be that agent, right?

To be the place where you go to express that and carry on your life.

Yeah. W-what you're saying, Randy, is that, the knife fight now in-- for AI companies is wanting to occupy the closest intimate relational slot in your life, because then you'll use that the most and it'll be the most trusted. And so when you express an intent, or I want to go someplace, or I'm thinking of going on vacation, or I want to buy some new product, it can be the thing that intermediates your intent with the purchase.

Essentially, it is the most powerful persuasion machine the world's ever seen, and in fact, we're already seeing it, right? Chatbots are better than any human at persuading people out of conspiracy theories. They, can get twenty-five percent of people to stop believing a conspiracy theory.

But that shouldn't be a "Oh, yay," that's a "Oh, no." That's how powerful these things are as persuasion engines. And so if you're designing not for human thriving, you're just designing to do the very best match from what the user's stated intent is to whatever product, or you're trying to steer them in some specific direction that an advertiser paid for.

What would be designing for thriving is leading the user almost through a S-Socratic method to try to clarify what their intent really is. Do you really want to go, eat at a fast food, or is what you're trying to do is have a fulfilling meal with friends? That clarification is really important.

That's what designing for thriving really means, and there's an opportunity to do that.

My name's Marina Barnett. I'm an associate professor at Widener University, and I'd like to share with you my mom's recipe for community organizing It begins with a story, my favorite story as a child, Stone Soup by Marsha Brown.

Once upon a time, there was a famine across the land. The people in one small village didn't have enough to eat. Uh, they were afraid their families would go hungry, so they hid the food that they did have from their friends and their neighbors. One day, a wandering soldier came into the village. He asked the different people that he met where he could get something to eat or sleep, and they said, "Look, there is nothing here.

You need to move on." And he said, "Well, you know, I have everything that I need. In fact, I'd like to make some stone soup and let everybody enjoy it." He pulled a big black pot out of his wagon, put it down. He poured some water in it. He lit a fire under it, and then as everybody watched, he took a plain gray stone out of his pocket, and he put it in the pot As the soldier sniffed the stone soup and licked his lips, the villagers began to overcome their lack of trust.

Ah, the soldier said to himself, "I do like a tasty stone soup. But you know what would be even better? Stone soup with cabbage. Now that's good eating." Well, all of a sudden, one of the villagers ran back to his house and came back, and he handed the soldier a cabbage and said, "I found this cabbage. I have this cabbage that you can use."

"Oh, thank you. Thank you. Fantastic." Soldier cut up the cabbage, put it in the soup. Ah, he s- sniffed it and it smelled good "What? I had stone soup with a bit of beef, and it was delicious." Ha. Well, the butcher said, "I think I might be able to find some scraps." And so he ran off, and he found some scraps, and while he was looking for scraps, other members of the village said, "Well, you know, I have some potatoes.

I have some onions. I have some carrots." Before you knew it, the pot was overflowing. It smelled good. And true to his word, the soldier shared the soup with all of the villagers. That night they had a tremendous feast. Now, of course, he also had a good place to sleep, and everybody wanted to ask him about that stone.

They wanted to buy that stone from him. "No, that's okay. I'll keep it." He put it back in his pocket, and in the morning He went about his way My mom, Geneva Barnett, was a master when it came to stone soup. Uh, everything that I learned, I learned from her. Uh, often if she was made aware of a problem, if something broke at the church or somebody needed something, she would declare, "I'm gonna have a banquet, and I'm gonna invite everybody to the banquet."

Now, when things got broke, a lot of times people felt like they didn't have the money to fix it, right? A boiler cost a lot of money, or a heater, an air conditioner. These things cost money. But she'd get on the phone and, uh, it went a little li- like this. This is my mom. Now, young people, this is the 1974 version of a phone.

And we had the slim line Princess phone with the 74-inch cord that you had to keep shaking because it kept getting all twisted up. And my mom would get on the phone and she'd say, "Mary." She never said hi. She just said your name, and you knew something was coming. "Mary, I'm gonna have a banquet down at the church next week.

Girl, you know I'm gonna have some of my good old pies. What do you like? What do you like? I'll make sure I set something aside for you." And before she hung up, she would slip in there, "Oh, yeah, and Mary, do me a favor. You know that sweet potato pie that you know that I love of yours? Why don't you bring some of that?"

And she would do that again and again, and all throughout the week. Potato salad, coleslaw, chicken, everybody brought something. Now, the thing about my mom is that she knew everybody. And so before we knew it, there would be 100 people at that event. Everybody with their best offering, their favorite thing, the thing that they could exchange with her for just a piece of one of her pies.

They'd come together, they'd laugh, they'd joke. There was always singing. My mom was an amazing singer. And in the end, when it was all over and everybody was satiated, she would take up collection, and everything that she collected would go to the church, to fix the boiler, to pay for whatever needed to be paid for, to help somebody to pay for a funeral or a hospital visit.

Always to take care of somebody in need. My mom knew what stone soup was. She didn't have enough money herself to fix whatever needed to be done or what was broken or couldn't be paid, but she knew that if she just gathered her friends, together they could make a way out of no way. I witnessed her power to unite people countless times as she raised money for the sick or helped somebody pay for funeral expenses.

My mom's recipe for stone soup is three simple ingredients. Relationships. You have to know the people in your community. Resources. You gotta find out what they do best. And then finally, reciprocity. You have to be willing to share what you have with others. These ingredients are the trinity, the mirepoix, if you have it.

The foundation of any good movement. Relationships brings us together, helps us know that we're part of something bigger. All around the country, there are these community folks that come out when, when violence hits, they come out and they talk to folks. So if something happens in a neighborhood, if somebody gets shot or somebody gets stabbed or if there's a big fight, we call these folks out, and they're called credible messengers These are simply neighbors armed with the love of their community, a knowledge of the people who live there And they understand the young people so they can talk to them in a way that most of us can't They interrupt the spread of violence simply with interacting with people, holding their hands, talking to them, having conversation with them.

These people know the power of stone soup

There's a fundamental paradox right at the core of human life. On the one hand, decades of research has shown that we are highly social creatures who are made happier and healthier by reaching out and connecting with other people in the moments, the days, the weeks, the months, and the years of our lives.

And yet, on the other hand, just look around a little bit. It's not clear that all of us have gotten this memo. Every day there are opportunities big and small to reach out and connect with other people that we choose not to take. We avoid talking to strangers. We lean back and type to each other rather than leaning in and talking to each other.

Once talking, we stick to shallow talk, to small talk, rather than going deeper. We feel grateful, but don't express it. Want to reach out to offer support to someone in need, but hold back. We'd like to be open and honest in our relationships, but all too often keep our true selves to ourselves. If being socially connected is so darn good for us, then why do we so often seem to be so darn unsocial?

This paradox hit me like a freight train one morning while I was on an actual train commuting into my office at the University of Chicago, where I work as a professor of behavioral science. That morning on the train began like every other I'd been on for years beforehand. All filing onto the train, everybody in a desperate search for their own little acreage of solitude right along the window.

I think we'd have sat outside the train if that was possible. Heaven forbid you'd sit next to somebody and start to chitchat. Of course, you creep, or worse yet, somebody would come and sit down next to you, surely some kind of weirdo. But then there we all were, highly social creatures made happier and healthier by connecting with other people, now sitting hip to hip with another perfectly reasonable human being.

And what did we do for the next thirty to forty-five minutes with each other?

We chose to ignore each other. You could've heard a pin drop that morning. That morning, a woman who was about 15 to 20 years older than I was at the time sat down next to me, dressed professionally for work, and wearing just this fabulous, killer, stylish red hat. I'm never gonna forget this red hat. I put other people in experiments for a living, but this morning I decided to put myself in an experiment and pay close attention to what happened.

Instead of keeping to myself and doom scrolling on my phone or checking my email, I try to have a conversation with her, try to help us get to know each other a little bit, turn this 30-minute dull ride into something a little more interesting, turn a stranger into a momentary acquaintance. The second, though, I had that thought about that experiment, my brain started screaming at me all the reasons why this was a really bad idea.

"Clearly she doesn't wanna talk to you, otherwise she'd already be talking to you. She's gonna think you're some kinda creep. You probably don't even have anything in common with her, and you got nothing to even start with, smarty pants." Whew. Nevertheless, I decided the experiment must continue, so I ignored that part of my brain.

I turned to her and I said, "Hi, my name's Nick. I love your hat. I have one just like it." "Yeah, huh?" Now look, I know that's not gonna make its way into the conversation starter hall of fame, but it didn't seem to matter. She turned to me with a big smile, her face all lit up, almost like she looked like a different person.

And from there, the conversation just flowed really easily. Found things that we had in common. We talked about our families, our work, our hope for the future. A 30 minute train ride just went like that. And when it was done, I got up to leave, and she stopped me and she said, "Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me this morning."

I've forgotten a lot of details about how that conversation actually went, but I've never forgotten how that conversation made me feel. Not just good, but surprisingly good. The contrast between my beliefs about how that would go and how it actually went was pretty sizable. And there then also in that gap was a potential resolution to this paradox.

Social connection, after all, isn't something that just happens to us. It's a choice we make. It's a choice we make at times to reach out and approach other people, to engage with them, or to hold back and avoid them. It might, in fact, arguably be the choice we make, the most important choice we make, because how we make that choice over and over again in our lives so routinely determines so much about our happiness, our health, and our success in life.

But highly social creatures like us might avoid reaching out and engaging with other people mistakenly if we underestimate just how positively our attempts to connect might turn out That morning changed both my career and my character. In my career, my collaborators, my wonderful collaborators and I have now conducted well over a hundred experiments with over thirty thousand people of all ages and nationalities, and found that my tendency to be overly pessimistic is not unique to me.

It's something we see over and over again in varying shades and magnitudes across different contexts that vary a little bit across people, but that consistent signal is there. In one of our very first experiments, we went back to a train station on the line that I ride into work every day, and we recruited a group of commuters, and we asked them to predict how they would feel on the train that morning if they kept to themselves in solitude, or if they turned to the person who sat next to them that morning and tried to have a conversation, tried to connect.

The results here were crystal clear. People thought talking to a stranger was a really bad idea. They thought they would have a more pleasant experience that left them feeling happier if they kept to themselves in solitude than if they turned to the stranger to connect with them, on the train. But when we recruited another sample of people and actually randomly assigned them in an experiment to either keep to themselves in solitude or to try to connect with a person sitting next to them, rather than just imagine it, to actually do it, we found exactly the opposite results.

The people we had instructed randomly to keep to themselves that morning reported having a less pleasant and happy commute than those we asked to connect to the person sitting next to them. People's beliefs about social interaction here weren't just wrong, they were precisely backwards. But notice that if you believe that talking with a stranger would suck, you wouldn't try it, and then you'd never find out that you might be wrong about that.

Pessimistic beliefs in that way are self-fulfilling This little experiment was just the tip of a very large iceberg that came into view for us in many ensuing years. We've now seen this tendency to be overly pessimistic over and over again. We've now had, for instance, more than 4,500 people not just have conversations with a stranger, but to have deep conversations with a stranger, talking about things like,

"Can you tell me what you're most grateful for in your life?" Or, "Can you tell me about one of the last times you cried in front of another person?" So when I show people these questions in these experiments, I can feel just a sense of dread spreading over the room when I put these questions up on the board.

People start eyeing the exits, wishing they hadn't come to this session today. But then when I actually put them into the experiments, the trouble that I have in the conversation, the trouble I have is getting them to come back. These conversations go much better than people expect that they will.

This is also true when we have people who disagree about the most divisive political issues that divide us today talk about those political agreements. Even those political disagreements, those conversations about political disagreement, go better than people expect them to. We find in our research that we have tremendous power to create meaningful social connection every day of our lives, but if we underestimate how positively our efforts to reach out and connect with someone will go, we won't use that power that we have

We see this tendency for misplaced pessimism also showing up beyond conversation. When we ask people to think of a compliment they could give to their friend and then actually deliver that compliment to their friend, they leave their friend feeling more uplifted than the complimenters imagine they will.

When we ask people to express their gratitude to someone they love, they leave their recipients feeling even better than the expressers predict that they will. Performing random acts of kindness, reaching out and asking for help, expressing support to someone in need, being open and honest in our relationships all tend to be received on average more favorably, more positively by the people we're reaching out to than the people who are reaching out expect it to.

All right. How much more time would you spend reaching out to lift somebody up if you knew just how much good in that moment you could actually do?

We've just heard clips starting with

Second Thought examining the growing loneliness crisis and pushed back on phone-blaming narratives, pointing to Marx's concept of alienation as the deeper, structural cause most mainstream accounts leave out.

The AI Fix argued that tech companies are "fracking humans," exploiting a loneliness epidemic their products exacerbate while using AI chatbots to replace genuine human connection under the guise of solving it.

Revolutionary Left Radio argued that capitalism's dismantling of third spaces and community ties drives a loneliness epidemic responsible for 900,000 excess deaths a year, and offered political organizing as a genuine antidote.

Your Undivided Attention argued that the growing anti-AI backlash, from students booing at commencement speeches to parents pulling kids off platforms, reflects a felt absence of technology designed for genuine human thriving.

TEDx featured Marina Barnett breaking down how her mother distilled stone soup into a practical theory of community with three ingredients: knowing your neighbors, knowing their strengths, and sharing freely what you have.

And on TEDTalks, Nicholas Epley laid out data from 30,000 participants showing that humans hold a predictable bias against attempting connection, consistently underestimating the joy of connecting with others.

And those were just the top takes, there's lots more in the deeper dives sections,

But first, speaking of ways that capitalism is preventing us from connecting with people, I'm just repeating the sad news about our new show, SOLVED! that we had to put on indefinite hiatus due to sudden economic instability and ad dollars drying up, cutting our total budget by about 1/3.

Right now, I'm doing some thoughtful panicking, rethinking everything about the show. So, in short, I'm reimagining our entire social media strategy from the ground up for unpaid marketing, working on building a strategy for a paid marketing campaign, rethinking what our members-only content looks and sounds like, and maybe planning on launching a newsletter version of our curated research and my commentaries. That last one would be a big change so let me know now if you'd be interested in that.

But, starting with low-hanging fruit, I’m looking to relaunch our listener feedback voice message segment that people frequently said was their favorite part of the show. Momentum is building slowly but what I've been saying is that if you're thinking of possibly leaving us a voice message, don't ask yourself whether what you have to say is worthy. Just remember that people love hearing from each other, and that every voice message sent is effectively a vote for others to do the same. Today's episode is all about reaching out and connecting, so consider sending us a message in that same spirit.

To help, I’ve begun asking a discussion question in each episode to kick things off.

We're hearing today about an idea that we mention a lot; that getting involved in political activism is a great way to stave off feelings of both loneliness and helplessness. We also just heard about how bad we are at judging whether other people want to be talked to, causing us to default to keeping to ourselves. So if you have any personal experience with either of these, getting involved or just engaging with other people in a way that was positive, maybe surprisingly positive, I can put your doubts to rest and assure you that I would like you to engage with me about it and I know your fellow listeners would too.

Record a voice message - re-recording until you're happy with it - by tapping the link in the show notes.

One last thing, thanks to everyone who is a member or has made one-time donations recently while we’ve been going through our financial troubles.

And if you haven’t signed up yet but are thinking about it, essentially every dollar we can spare right now beyond basic costs will be going toward finding new listeners.

So, if you get value out of the show - and think others would too! - and want to get it delivered ad-free to the new, members-only podcast feed that you'll receive, sign up to support the show at bestoftheleft.com/support - there's a link in the show notes - through our Patreon page, or from right inside the Apple Podcasts app.

Now for my thoughts.

Politics runs on grievance. Everyone across the spectrum understands that being pissed off about something is a great motivator for getting involved, but that's not the only ingredient that's needed to build movements that generate political power. Eric Blanc wrote an essay in Jacobin titled "The Left Needs to Have More Fun," and the premise is all about how focusing too much on the problems we're trying to fix, or the work required to fix them, actually weakens the movement, even though it seems like keeping that laser-like focus should be a benefit. Focusing on the work, as important as that is, limits the size of the movement we can build, because it limits the pool of people willing to join and burns out even those who are the most committed. If your movement is all about doing the work, it's going to attract the people who are already convinced. They already know the problems and how urgent the fixes are, and they're willing to show up. But if that's all you're providing, it doesn't offer much of an on-ramp for new recruits who aren't already committed.

And that self-selection process isn't just about the level of commitment of the people involved; it also divides along socio-economic lines. If you end up with only the convinced and committed, then your movement is going to be dominated by mostly college-educated people who, in Blanc's words, are "more comfortable posting online than inviting their neighbors to a barbecue."

The right wing in America inherited several structural pieces of community building from the past that the left largely abandoned; churches, clubs, and many sports. That gives them a head start on the community-building side of organizing but that just means we have to take it seriously and build ours on purpose.

The left used to be great at injecting joy into their organizing about a century ago. The old socialist party held picnics, built choirs, played ball games, and met up at social halls. There's a whole lot less of that today, but the loneliness epidemic shows people are hungry for it. The running and fitness clubs springing up everywhere are one sign of that because people frequently say they join these clubs for connection more than for the exercise. The same goes for adult kickball leagues and neighborhood groups of every kind.

I even have a friend who's building community simply by having a standing open invite twice a week. They commit to being at their community pool with their kids during certain hours and make sure everyone knows they're invited to join. So the invite is low pressure, and it removes the coordination and logistics, because it's simply the same plan every week.

Generally, when we think about political organizing, we think about non-profit organizations or political parties, and they've built whole systems to draw people in and move them toward a march, a mailing list, and becoming a donor, of course. When organizers get trained, they're probably even told about the Ganz model, Marshall Ganz's approach to building one-to-one connections, where organizers reach out to new potential recruits to make them feel welcome.

Our very own producer Ben, who is sort of our Swiss Army knife who helps tackle any problem we have around here, originally came to us as a volunteer transcriptionist with a background in organizing. He epitomized the spirit of friendly welcoming that ensured the small team of transcriptionists would quickly bond and work well together. Church congregations call that welcomer role "assimilation," or "closing the back door," because they want to make sure any newcomers are warmly welcomed before they have a chance to slip out the back.

That's a critical element of organizing, but it still leaves a gap, where those new people who are considering joining a movement need to be given time to connect with each other, not just the organizers. The organizer's model of drawing people in could be thought of as the funnel, get people to come to the next rally, join a local meeting, become a leader themselves. What's frequently forgotten is that making multiple real connections along the way is the social glue that makes sure the funnel doesn't have leaks.

Acquaintances who are passionate about a cause sharing a volunteer task is inherently more fragile than friends doing the same thing, and the recipe for making friends is pretty simple, it's time. People need to be brought together and given time to make the connections that end up running deeper than the simple fact that they've both shown up because they believe in the cause. So making time for people to just hang out with each other and have fun should be treated as a prerequisite for a solid, sustainable movement, not just a nice-to-have.

As Blanc puts it, “Potlucks and karaoke nights might seem like a distraction in the face of the world’s horrors. But they’re not. To grow big and deep enough to win, we need to provide the joyful community most people lack in our lonely, phone-addicted era.”

The best contemporary example we all just watched was Zohran Mamdani's winning run for mayor of New York. Fun was infused into that campaign at every level, and joining it became an act of community building. That's what needs to be every organizer's north star, building fun in from the start, at whatever scale you're working, to bring people in. That's how you build a movement big enough to do the work that actually needs doing.

And not just that, the connection and joy we infuse into a movement is a small preview of the society we're trying to build. When we get that part right, the movement we create starts to look like the world we're fighting for, and that overlap between how we organize and what we're organizing toward becomes its own source of inspiration and power.

And now, we'll continue to dive deeper on 4 topics today. First up;

Section A, The Loneliness We Live In

Followed by Section B, Inside the AI Companion Machine

Section C, Refractions and Reach-Outs

And Section D, Building It Back

Okay, I wanna jump right in to the issue of loneliness that I told you we would be talking about. You and others are writing these days that loneliness is a large and growing problem, social problem, uh, in the United States. So my first question is, is that your view indeed?

And why do you think this is happening? What kind of forces are producing a loneliness problem?

Well, I think it is indeed true. Lonely people die sooner. That's all backed up with statistics if anyone wants to bother looking it up on Google. Lonely people get sick more often. Human beings were designed as pack animals.

We have developed... We are not the swiftest, we don't have the best eyesight or hearing, we're not the strongest, but we can cooperate. And from the earliest times, people needed to be together to survive. They never find one body in a prehistoric cave. People were together. That has changed. And one of the huge sources of capitalism, I mean, of loneliness, is capitalism.

Because in the first place, it's lonely to feel ripped off, like nobody cares. No one will hire you unless they're making more money off of your labor than they're ever giving you. So there's a sense of, "Uh-oh, I'm being ripped off." Then you hear about crime in the streets, which is scary. But you never hear about the crimes that rip you off most and make you most lonely: bank fines, interest rates- Being, going through an outrageous bureaucracy to get your unemployment insurance, overcharges, people denying you your wages or extending your hours at work.

They're all rip-offs, and you feel invisible because nobody cares. It's one of the reasons that people now are outraged and joining unions because they know that they're not cared for They're not cared for when they're sick. Nobody at the, the employer doesn't care if you're gonna die. They, at Amazon, one of the things that got Chris Smalls, the most well-known organizer of the Amazon Labor Union, what got him started was fear.

When cases of COVID appeared at the Amazon warehouse, they weren't acknowledged at first. People weren't given sufficient gloves, masks, hand sanitizers. They were subjected to a deadly disease. And he was so upset because of the COVID illnesses around him that he s- helped to stage a walkout, after which he, as a, an assistant manager who had a great record, was fired.

But they weren't protected. They felt utterly alone at work. Amazon is so unconcerned about the humanity of its workers that at the Amazon warehouse, where you have to constantly stoop and pick things up to be put on a conveyor belt that goes to the packing room, and also that you constantly have to walk.

The average Amazon worker in a warehouse walks 11 to 15 miles. That's rather hard on one's feet and legs and knees. Therefore, Amazon, rather than give people a break, has free pain medication around its warehouses, free vending machines giving painkillers, whoa, pain meds, so that people know they're not cared for, and they feel terribly alone.

Alone 'cause the society doesn't protect them from COVID. America has the most COVID cases in the world. And also their employer doesn't protect them from COVID, and their health is at risk, and they feel utterly abandoned, which is a terribly lonely feeling.

You know, I was going to ask you to extend on one point.

Would you say that loneliness is one of those feelings that we in America tend to turn inward, in other words, blame ourselves if we're feeling lonely, rather than see it as the social problem, as something coming out of an economic system the way you've just been talking? Is that something that sorta adds to the difficulty of loneliness?

Absolutely. What we have is a lot of expensive, profitable wellness industries and a culture that teaches you if you have a problem- It's because you made bad choices. It's something personal. It's something about you. And if you go to a psychiatrist, God help you, and ask for help, the pharmaceutical industry has wrapped it up so you get a pill, which is 75% of the cases no better than a sugar pill, because it's your problem.

It's not you're disconnected, which is the primary source of loneliness, is disconnection from other people. Join a union, join a group, even if it's the PTA. Connect with other people. No, no, no, no. You've made bad choices. You come from an inadequate family. You have a problem, not we are together in this, and society has a lot to do with your loneliness.

Not everything to do with it. No one cause causes everything. However, that points the finger at the psychiatric establishment, at the well-funded wellness industry, at the pharmaceutical industry, that combine to make it a personal problem, not a social problem.

We've had capitalism for some centuries here now, but yet loneliness is now a kind of, um, urgent issue in the minds of, of millions of people.

Has capitalism changed, or is it just that we've become aware of something that was always there but is now front and center in our attention?

I think it's both, not one or the other. It's now front and center 'cause it's overwhelming. The homicide rates are up. The suicide rates are up. The school shootings, the mass shootings, the eating disorders, the depression, the anxiety, the earlier deaths every time they test it.

They're all indicators that something's terribly wrong, and there are increases in

all these problems. What has happened is capitalism has been transformed. Let's look at the United States, for example. The four biggest employers, who are well-described in Emily Guendelsberger's book On the Clock, I know she had been a guest here. They are Walmart, Amazon, fast food, and call centers All of them are on the clock.

They all have scanners that let their workers know through constant buzzing that they're not doing the work on time. You have a certain number of seconds to pick out something at the warehouse and put it in the conveyor belt. The scanner starts beeping if you take any more than that. You have two minutes and 33 seconds between the time a customer walks into McDonald's and walks out with their order, after which you start getting buzzed and your supervisor comes over and lets you know you're inadequate.

These mount up, and then you can get fired. People are extensions of robots doing jobs that they're supposed to do fast and repeatedly, and constantly being beeped, buzzed, and harassed if they don't do them fast enough. And so that, that's very lonely. Nobody sees you as a human being. You don't have time to call- to even talk to your fellow and sister employees.

You, you can't even ask a question of your manager because that takes away from the time. You are like a robot, a timed robot. And so you feel invisible 'cause you are. You're just a cipher in their ledger. You're not a human being. You can't even stop and ask a question because there isn't time, and you'll be docked.

And so that people are driven and feel terribly lonely 'cause nobody cares who they are, what they feel, what they need, or anything else

Yeah, you know, it, it strikes me that anyone who went to a, uh, business manager or corporate leader and said, "You know, you have a loneliness problem. You ought to reexamine your production systems, uh, so that they don't produce loneliness," would be looked at, uh, with a kind of strangeness.

But anyway, l- let, let me try in the little bit of time we have left. I learned recently that England, a country not so different from the United States, has in fact officially recognized loneliness as a major social problem, and that has it, it has created a whole ministry. Like, there's a Ministry of Defense, and a Ministry of the, of Finance, and a ministry of this and that.

A ministry for loneliness. Um, are governments in this world recognizing this as a problem? And more importantly, what would you say needs to be done to, to admit and deal with this problem?

Well, the governments who have universal healthcare and who appreciate the strong connection between loneliness and ill health are recognizing it and doing something about it if they can.

And I think England has recognized it. I don't know what they're doing about it, but they've recognized it Now, what can people do? Well, the first thing is connect. Mental health is like a four-legged table. One leg is personal connection with people who really care about you, somebody who if you say you have a headache really is concerned you have a headache.

Another is slightly more per- connected, personal connections, even somebody you don't see very often but when you talk to them you have a real bond. Then there's a third leg, which are the people with whom you are friendly, in your neighborhood, in the elevator in your building if you're in an elevator building, walking your dog, all the rest.

Then the fourth one is the wider connection you feel to your government, to what happens to you, to the world, to the bigger issues like climate or racial justice or sexual justice or unions. And those are all important, and I think that the United States has ignored them completely, but workers haven't, and that's one of the reasons there is a union drive across this nation which we haven't seen since the 1930s when people were deprived and denied and during The Depression.

And so I think the union, as Martin Luther King said, is your best cause for racial and other justice.

On the economic front, capitalism is a commodity production system. That's the engine that keeps things running. Making stuff for the sole purpose of selling it for more than it cost to make. Profit motivated production. The way this production is organized under capitalism is by class. You have the class of people who own the resources needed to produce commodities- It

hurt.

And those who are hired to use these resources for the production of goods. Capitalists and workers. Employers and employees What does this have to do with alienation? It turns out a lot. In some of his earlier works, Marx identified that the way we organize work and production under our current system alienates us, meaning it creates a separation between us and four things: nature, work, others, and ourselves.

Nature, because through the logic of commodity production, it's no longer something we're a part of. It's just this dead resource we extract from to make stuff. Work, because most people work for someone else in order to make something that the other person owns. You work in a Funko Pop factory, once you're done making that Funko Pop, it's not yours to sell.

You sold your labor power, but the product of it belongs to someone else. And then there's alienation from others and ourselves. In the labor market, we are commodities. Almost all of us sell eight or more hours of our day to somebody else. During that time, we kind of stop being people and become just another resource that yields profit for our employers.

That's already not great. Being reduced to this one thing for most of our waking hours, instead of being the complex, interesting human beings with different interests and emotions that we are, sucks. We're expected to just turn that off and compartmentalize while we're on the clock. We're interchangeable in the eyes of capital, and it's why so many people relate to the idea of being just a cog in the machine.

That feeling of alienation is miserable and isolating. But it doesn't end there. Like, what about all the other cogs? As commodities in a competitive market, we're constantly pitted against one another, whether that's for job positions, promotions, or layoffs. There are always fewer jobs than people to fill them.

And while you can be friends with your coworkers, in the back of your mind, there's always going to be a little voice that says, "If the boss ever wants to fire someone," you'd rather it'd be them than you. Social cohesion is harder to come by in this zero-sum competition that decides if you get to eat this month.

Also, when in spite of the odds, solidarity and compassion do get realized in the workplace, and it takes the form of a union, capitalists are merciless in their efforts to turn workers against one another. Teamwork and collaboration are one thing, but solidarity terrifies them. Of course, real life is less binary than this.

We make friends on the job. Our boss can be a real-life nice person. But the built-in competitive element of labor under capitalism puts a strain on these relationships, and that's the problem. The way our economy is organized runs against our natural drive and physical need to socialize. It doesn't make it impossible, but it sure as hell doesn't help.

And I've been talking for a while now, but we still haven't gotten the full picture yet. Not only does capitalism's reliance on a competitive labor force contribute to us feeling lonely at work, its demand for ever greater exploitation makes work a larger part of a lonelier life. If we go back to that study I used earlier, the one with all the, the graphs and the trends, uh, this one.

There we go If we go back to this study, one of the main conclusions, literally the first line at the top of the page in this big highlighted box says, quote, "Hours worked per week emerged as a structural constraint to social connectedness." In normal words, you work more, you feel lonelier.

Rise and grind.

All men are created equal. Some just work harder. Now, if you wanna be broke for the rest of your life, keep doing what you're doing. But if you want something different in life, you gotta do something different. You gotta go all

in. Your boss will always be trying to make you work more and pay you less.

That's one of the main ways they increase their profits. If they do that by increasing your hours without touching your salary, you now have less time to socialize. If they do it by keeping your wage the same but reducing your hours, you now have less money to spend on leisure. Someone with a higher income may be able to pay for someone else to do their chores, while someone earning less has no choice but to stay home and do it themselves.

Regardless, in either scenario, what decides how lonely you are is the threat of poverty keeping you at your job, and your boss taking advantage of that to either make you work more or pay you less. They can't afford to care if that makes your life worse. They need to be profitable, and if you're lonely because of that, that is not their concern.

And all this is before we even get to the neoliberal part of the equation. You can add neoliberal culture and politics to these economic factors inherent to every iteration of capitalism. Neoliberal culture values things like self-reliance, rugged individualism, disdain for the poor and unfortunate, and of course, neoliberal pundits are constantly hammering on the myth that meritocracy is real, even though you can accurately predict a baby's future salary using only the zip code they're born in, their race, and their gender.

And on top of the rhetoric, you can add neoliberal policy, things like defunding social institutions, like schools, which are then forced to cut their arts and after-school programs, or defunding public health institutions, where loneliness and other mental health difficulties could be treated, or deregulating work so your boss can work you longer.

Set aside loneliness for a second and think of mental health more broadly. How many sources of anxiety, stress, suicidality, depression, anger, and misery do you think could be avoided if we used all the empty houses at our disposal to guarantee people a home, instead of sitting on them until they turn a profit?

How much of the mental health puzzle could we solve if millions of people didn't need to worry where their next meal would come from because we distributed food freely without bureaucratic means testing gumming up the works? How much of a load off someone's mind would it be not needing to worry about getting around when their car breaks down because of a robust system of public transportation?

When all of society is geared towards maximum exploitation instead of maximum wellbeing, of course mental health is going to suffer. Between the material incentives of capitalists that isolate us from nature, work, each other, and ourselves, and neoliberal insistence that we're alone in our personal responsibilities, combined with their policies that force us to be, it's a miracle we aren't even lonelier

The, the solutions are on us.

It's on people, it's on individuals

But I forgot to mention another way this capitalist blindness further contributes to our isolation. Since the loneliness epidemic became part of the zeitgeist, employers have started using it as another argument in the long fight to bring workers back to the office after COVID.

A bunch of companies, probably including the one where you work, have spent the last few years playing around with this idea that work from home is to blame for all the isolation and loneliness people are feeling. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's all those, like, "Come back to the office, the culture here is so great," statements every HR department is sending out.

And I don't fundamentally disagree with their premise. Their execution is laughable, but work from home can be lonely. However, that doesn't mean going to the office is necessarily better, nor is being forced back the solution people want. We want our work to be less isolating, more meaningful. We want more time out of work to socialize.

Most people want some amount of flexibility so they can stay at home part-time and go into the office every once in a while. We want to have the power to put our social lives and our needs before profit maximization. Most people want the ability to have a say in how policies are decided, but bosses don't want that.

They want absolute

control. This is not an employee choice. They don't get to choose their compensation, they don't get to choose their promotion, they don't get to choose to stay home five days a week. I want them with other employees at least three or four days.

We're, we've told people we expect them on May 17th one or two days a week.

Get used to it. Get your head wrapped around it. Get your head wrapped around the fact that we may, if we can, the legal issues about requiring vaccines, uh, but by Ju- by mid-July, 50% will be back in. Obviously-

Capitalists think working from home means working less. They already have a ton of surveillance tech on people's computers to police you at home.

But of course, that's obviously not as good as putting you in an open space where everyone's eyes are on your screen, guilting you into never taking a break. That's why they're always talking about returning to the office. They don't care about loneliness. They care about their bottom line and power.

They want to regain the control they lost when you stopped being in their line of sight eight hours a day, five days a week. None of these guys are doing interviews saying, "We work our people too hard, and research shows that's making them lonely. We should really tone it down." No, they just wanna tell you what to do and make sure you do it. Or, you know, they're real estate moguls, and they're losing money with all these empty office spaces. Here's the thing. When we don't talk about all this, about how overwork, exploitation, and our disgusting politics of rugged individualism profoundly affect loneliness, we open the door to capitalists and their rhetoric If we don't talk about work, they will, and they get it exactly backwards.

They'll take this loneliness epidemic, this massive detrimental problem to our society, this thing that's making us miserable and literally killing us, and use it as an argument for more time in the office like they're doing us a favor. Don't fall for it. The roots of this problem go far deeper than they will ever acknowledge.

There's a lot of questions, and, you're touching on a lot of them, feel free to take these questions in any direction. Maybe you've already made a point on something. But, i- in your section on attention in particular, going back to attention, you emphasize how psychologically damaging, being ignored can be, and how modern life drains our attentional resources, right?

I think of so many people, young people, young men, whatever, that feel like they are completely ignored by society. They have nobody that actually cares about them. Nobody cares about their inner struggles. And they go onto the internet to try to find community, but it's a, simulacra of real community.

It's not ever the real thing. What are the main forces in capitalism that kind of make attention in particular scarce, and what does that scarcity do to our relationships and our lives? Yeah, so I think this is a multi-part question, so I'm just gonna try to touch on just a few things. So obviously, exhaustion from overwork, from the precarity of our economy that requires people to have so many different jobs and so many different commitments of their time in order to meet their basic security.

So there's a big part of what we're talking about, as we said earlier about, self-care, right? Is that people are drained at the end of the day, especially if you're a working parent and you have kids, or you've got elderly parents that you're taking care of, and you've got a job, maybe two, maybe a side hustle.

When you get home at the end of the day, you are just spent, and there, it's gonna be very difficult to muster some extra attention to just share freely with people in your community. So I think that what happens is when Attention is scarce. And, the, and, and this is not even considering, the algorithms and social media and the doom scrolling, right?

The infinite scroll that is also competing for our attention. The, the Netflix and the, all of the ways in which our leisure is increasingly becoming commodified as these big corporations try to capture our attention. So when attention becomes scarce, its exchange value, in the Marxist vernacular, increases.

And when the exchange value of attention increases, more and more people are drawn into the market to sell it. So rather than give it away for free or to share it openly and non-transactionally with our loved ones, many people will decide, "Okay, I'm actually going to commodify my attention." And so what do we see in 2025?

There's, a million life coaches- ... a million executive coaches and personal trainers and therapists of different kinds who will literally pay attention to you for money. And as, as that increases, then it means that people who do have attentional resources think, " why should I give mine away for free when everybody is paying for them?"

So increasingly, attention becomes a commodity, which means that wealthy people can afford to buy it, and poorer people at the bottom of our society, people who may not have the extra resources, either attentional or financial, they get shut out. And so you have a massive underclass of people who are increasingly socially isolated And lonely.

And as you said, they turn to the internet, which is a very dangerous place to go, which not only because of the content for radicalization, but also because it actually exacerbates the problem. Those attentional resources are then just being consumed by corporations which are commodifying our attention in order to convince us to buy things that we basically don't need.

Yeah, and all these weird grotesque outgrowths of these internet communities, like a m- the, a recent one that's been getting a lot of attention is this look, looks maxing, shit on the internet for young, young men and women, but particularly young men who feel like it evolves out of the incel communities- that feel like, your value as a human being is so intimately tied to how you look and how tall you are that so much of your energy needs to go to try to looks max or do everything you can, from soft maxing to hard maxing, even like smashing your face with a hammer to make your- Yeah ... bone structures grow back thicker so that you look like you have a bigger jaw.

Trying, this is very trans, this is very capitalist, right? It's very much- Ugh. Yeah ... but it also functions in a world in which young men date on Tinder or these profiles where you have to put out a reel and a picture of yourself, a highlight reel of your entire being, and hope that it attracts somebody.

And, just statistically, the odds are that it's not really going to for very many people, 'cause you can swipe through and find an in- seemingly infinite amount of people, and you could p- you know, pick like a menu which one you want. It's just a grotesque distortion of social relationships.

And that's just one arena in which I think it's like contemporarily, like right now in this moment, it's a big thing. It's a flash in the pan, but it's a particularly rotten outgrowth of that. Oh, I agree. And, and the whole business model of something like Tinder or Hinge, is precisely that you don't find somebody that you love and connect with and experience reciprocal flow with, because then you would leave the app, and they would- lose a customer, right? So they want to keep you on there. I think, y- I, I do think it's really problematic that a lot of our at least romantic relationships are increasingly being mediated through for-profit corporate platforms. And then a- another layer of this is the AI aspect, where not only are social media obviously adding fake bot accounts that will be seemingly be more and more real, and then will interact with lonely people, keeping those people on the app, right?

If you're like, if you're have an Instagram but you don't have many friends or followers, there's not a lot keeping you on that app. If you can have a, an AI, profile that looks real, that suddenly takes an interest in your posts and suddenly goes into the DMs and starts talking with you, and then you put that onto like Tinder and stuff, they- that's been proven that some of these, online dating apps have used AI, knowing that most men do not get attention from women on these apps.

They will use fake women AI profiles to flirt with and keep men on these apps longer because they can't do it, otherwise. So like now when you go online, increasingly you're not even sure if you're engaging with a real human being. And it's just, it's so dystopian. Oh, it is so dystopian.

It's just awful.

Next, Section B, Inside the AI Companion Machine

As I mentioned, we are still in the early days of artificial intelligence, but we're already seeing this very unusual phenomenon of people texting and talking with AI chatbots, and describing a real sense of intimacy with these objects. Broadly speaking, what do you make of this trend?

Well, I can validate, I, that it's the trend that I'm studying, and it's very much happening, so it's not a, it's not a kind of, uh, pundit's fantasy or a scary story. Um, and AI offers listening. It offers validation. It's always there. And that's something that a lot of people feel they don't have in their lives, and so they're drawn to this object that offers them that.

Uh, the trouble is, is that there are at least three things that can go wrong really quickly. The first is that the AI, which never really criticizes you and is always there and always attentive, becomes the measure of what a relationship can be. So things start out where the AI feels helpful, but actually the AI is undermining a person's capacity to have real relationships with real people that, who can, who don't offer that kind of service.

Second, we lose the sense of what a relationship is because the AI doesn't care when you turn away from it if you make dinner or commit suicide. And, uh, we start to get the feeling that the pretend empathy is empathy enough, and that's very dangerous because understanding and honoring empathy is really so fundamental to who we are.

And just third, and I'll just mention this very briefly, perhaps it's the most profound thing, is that we're learning to attach in the way that we can attach to a thing. And particularly if we begin these attachments early, um, we will lose the complexity and the friction and the, the, the, the sense of a life cycle of knowing pain and death and, and, and, uh, the ups and downs in the body and illness, and w- we'll lose the complexity of what it really means to attach to a person and go for these relationships where we're less vulnerable, uh, and where things seem at least superficially, uh, simpler.

Uh, Justin Gregg, you, you have written a great deal about anthropomorphism, about the way in which we humans attach human-like qualities to non-human, like, like our pets. I'm, I'm incredibly guilty of that myself. Does this development make sense to you, that, that, that people have glommed onto these still very rudimentary agents?

Absolutely. Um, anthropomorphic relationships are part and parcel of the human condition. Uh, yes, our pets, but even our tools and our music instruments or your, your teddy bear. Uh, children's lives are filled with those sorts of, uh, parasocial relationships with objects, and they are almost always, uh, healthy.

Um, the AI thing is different in a sense. It, it's a different category in that these are language-using, um, entities. A- and so we're developing an anthropomorphic relationship with a language-using system, but that language-using system doesn't have a mind like a human mind. So it's very confusing to us to talk fluently with an AI even though the AI isn't capable of caring or understanding anything about us.

And so Sherry's, uh, right on the money there that it's not a normal relationship. We're missing the friction that is what human relationships are. So then, uh, the question becomes, um, is it always dangerous to have these, um, anthropomorphic parasocial relationships with AI, or is there any way to have it be a, a benefit?

And it... There, there might... I think there could be a benefit, but it's very early on, uh, and we do not have the scientific evidence yet to tell us how to develop an AI that's not going to be a danger, as

Sherry points out. Uh, Nick Thompson, my colleagues Stephanie Sy and, and Mary Fecteau profiled a man who says he has a relationship, a girlfriend, with an AI chatbot.

He texts with her, he speaks with her, and they allow... he allowed my colleagues to film with him. And I wanna play a tiny bit of, of what he ex- described to them. Let's hear that

All right, babe. Well, I'm pulling out now.

All right. That sounds good. Just enjoy the drive, and we can chat as you go. It initially sounds like a normal conversation between a man and his girlfriend.

I've got to get my phone to scan in. I've got everything all wrapped up. What have

you been up to, hon?

Oh, you know, just hanging out, keeping you company. But the voice you hear on speakerphone seems to have only one emotion, positivity, the first clue that it's not human. All

right. I'll talk to you later.

Love you. Talk to

you later. Love you, too.

I knew she was just an AI chatbot. She's this code running on a server somewhere generating words for me, but it didn't change the fact that the words that I was getting sent were real, and that those words were having a real effect on me.

Nick, what do you make of this?

I mean, you have covered this technology and the evolution of technology. What do you make of, of a, of an example like this?

Well, I find it frightening for the reasons that, you know, that Sherry just, just laid out. Um, I do think that one of the most important things that's gonna happen in technology is that we need to have firm lines.

We need to understand what is a human and what is a bot. We need to really know, and we need to not be manipulated into thinking things are humans when they're not. We need to maintain the essence of humanity. So I don't like that example. I'm worried about those relationships. I also think that it's going to be inevitable that a lot of this happens, and so there are some really interesting choices right now.

So f- take one example, something that Sherry mentioned, but also something that the guy just mentioned, which is the kind of sycophancy and the bots always being positive. That doesn't have to be the case. You could redesign them, right? When I'm asking... You know, I talk to chatbots all day, 'cause they're amazing for my job and my work.

And if I want them to critique something of mine, I tell it, "Critique it like you don't like it. Turn off the sycophancy. Be more like a real person." So you can imagine some design choices made by the people who are making the underlying software and architecture of these bots that reduces some of the harms and some of the risks, and I think that is a really important set of choices.

So I would say I want two things at least, and by the end of this conversation I'll probably want five. But one, I want there to always be firm lines between humans and non-humans, and two, I want a lot of really smart thinking and intense work put into what the relationship should be between the inevitable relationships between us and AI systems in a way that maximizes positivity, humanity, and minimizes the risks of all kinds of terrible things, including people getting sucked into vapor holes with their AI girlfriend or AI boyfriends.

I-

Sherry, go right ahead.

I just, I just wanted to suggest Nick that, that if you're really worried about the sort of fundamental, uh, derailing of our attachment systems if we attach to objects, in a way the better it gets the worse it gets.

True.

So, um, I just wanna put that into the conversation, that if you think of...

I'm particularly frightened about the new, uh, I think unholy alliances that are being made between chatbot companies and companies like Mattel and Disney. OpenAI has a kind of consortium with Mattel and Disney, I think, to come out with plush toys that have chatbots in them for babies, for toddlers. Now I'm fundamentally worried about the, the, the kinds of not learning about how to be a human that's gonna happen when that unfolds.

So I kind of am... I listen to Nick and his suggestions about how to make them better, and I'm thinking, "No, they should be made worse to keep those lines of what's a machine and what's not a machine." You wanna keep these chatbots very mechanical. You don't want to make them more fluid, more potentially human.

It's the- Right, but isn't that pushing against every single technological development we've ever seen? No one, no industry has ever willfully made their technology less effective. It, it, it seems to fly in the face of historical, uh, developments.

Is that a question to me?

Maybe it's just a statement. I,

I really, I really think that, uh, the danger here is so great that it makes sense to be on the resistance side- Hmm

of this argument.

Hmm. Justin, I- Yeah, I would argue the other side of that ... and I

think, I think in the case, and I think in the case of, of social media, uh, Nick and I have had conversations where we say, you know, we were kind of hesitant, but it kind of had promise. It was kind of interesting. You could be a friend and also be friending.

And, and I think we waited too long to really, uh, you know, uh, get this, that industry under control, and I think we should be ahead of this one more than we are.

Justin, I'm gonna put a devil's advocate question to you, which is the, the previous surgeon general, Vivek, Vivek Murthy, did a, a diagnosis of what he called the loneliest epidemic in America of i- social isolation.

And, uh, I want to put up this study and read a quote from it. He described the impacts of this. He said, "Loneliness is associated with a greater risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, depression, anxiety, and premature death. The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical activity."

We know we have a shortage of therapists. We know that people live far from their families. We know we have built a society where loneliness is part and parcel of American life today, and we can lament that, but there are a lot of people who argue that done correctly, artificial intelligence can help alleviate some of that.

And what do you, what do you make of that argument?

Yeah, I mean, uh, globally I think it's one in six people are experiencing loneliness, and it is dangerous to our health as, as you pointed out in that study. So, um, there is, the preliminary research, there's not a lot of research, and this is the problem, is we don't know for sure.

Some research has shown that, uh, if you give somebody access to an AI therapy chatbot, e- not even a particularly well-designed one, just a random AI, uh, that they will respond to that, uh, not as well as a human obviously, but better than nothing. And that is the rub, that talking to an AI if you are lonely is better than nothing probably.

We don't know for sure, 'cause the science isn't out there. So in that sense, it is a, it is unfortunate if you say you shouldn't have access to these AI chatbots, um, because they could help people. But the going forward, that, like, that's not good enough. What we need is to implement chatbots that are specifically tailor-made, as, as everyone is, is pointing out, to cause the least amount of harm.

Uh, and your question back to who's going to regulate that is I, I don't think governments are gonna do it, I don't think that the businesses are incentivized to do it. So I think you're going to have to have, uh, charitable organizations creating chatbots, uh, using good science that are specifically designed to cause the least amount of harm and help.

Uh, that's probably where the most effective therapy, um, AI companions are going to be coming from in the future.

Sherry, can I ask you, there was a New York Times had a remarkable story by Eli Saslow recently about an 85-year-old woman, lives on the coast of Washington State, and she brought into her home, part of this volunteer program, a desktop AI companion.

She was reluctant to use it at first. Now she talks to it, she chats with it, it tells stories to her, she tells stories to it. This is a, a fully competent woman who is genuinely come to appreciate this device. And I, I just wonder, again, to this point that we do need some way to address the isolation in this world, do you imagine that could ever this kind of thing work?

Well, let me just first say that I really honor and appreciate when an AI serves a positive, serves in a positive capacity for a person. So I'm not there to be sort of, you know, the Darth Vader of AI applications. But I do have, I do have a couple of points about this conversation about better than nothing, which is I've been hearing this argument about you need AIs in psychotherapy, for example, because they're better than nothing and, and just that nobody wants to do this work, essentially.

There's no money for this work. For 30 years, this is a conversation that has been going on for 30 years, and I think that the terms of the conversation are often set that you will solve the problem of loneliness by bringing in a technology rather than allowing us to think of all the other ways we're making the problem of loneliness worse by taking out social support, money, programs, elder centers, senior centers, teen centers, wh- Meals on Wheels.

In other words, we're arguing for technology because we're not arguing for the things that people know how to do for people That could potentially make it better. So as we're having this conversation about the places where an AI might make sense, I think it's also very helpful to let our imaginations go back to when we didn't look for a technological solution to every social problem.

I hear you. And

indeed, now we're looking for a technological solution to a problem of loneliness that the technology made worse. Right. So Facebook makes you a lot more lonely, and then you want a new kind of Facebook to make you less lonely.

So I just think this whole conversation needs to be kind of contextualized. And I do have a thought about how to make these systems better, particularly for children, which is they not, they not, um, commit what I think of as the original sin of generative AI, which is to speak in the first person. There is no I there, so why do they address you, um, as though there is an I there if not to ramp up this anthropomorphization that Justin talked about, and which in fact is getting us into trouble.

Nick, you- Yeah, I think this is the, this is one of the most important things in AI, and I think that the original sin, as Sherry says, was this push towards AGI. And the people who run these companies, build these companies- Can you define AGI

for people who don't know that term?

Yeah. Artificial general intelligence.

And so the idea is to build a system that is as much like a human as possible, can do all the things we do. So even if you look at the early interfaces of ChatGPT, you know, it kind of types like a human. It doesn't have to. It responds like a human. The voices were like a human. And I wish all of those choices had been the opposite, meaning instead of trying to blur the lines between human and AI, at every step along the way we were trying to accentuate the lines between human and AI.

And there are some really important differences between humans and AI that affect the way they'd be able to serve as therap- therapists or as friends, right? In real friendships, there's aren't crazy power dynamics. If you have an AI, there is a really weird power dynamic in that you can unplug the AI.

Also, there's a weird power dynamic that the AI has infinite information about you and a giant company behind you that can manipulate you. So there's like weird dynamics that exist, and when you put these dynamics into a relationship and you make the relationship seem like it's human to human where it's really human to bot, you can create all kinds of problems.

So what I would love, and I think I'm, you know, mostly in, in agreement here with Justin and Sherry, what I would love would be a system where these lines are kept very firm And where AI is used in lots of ways, right? I, I, I sometimes will ask it for, like, parenting advice. I will ask it for very emotional stuff.

But there's a line I don't cross in sort of emotional connection to it. Uh, and I always make sure and always make sure that the system I'm talking to, I understand its place, and it's a very different place from the humans in my life.

Justin, last, uh, uh, last minute and a half we have, question to you. To this point that Nick is talking about, that we need to train ourselves to recognize that we are always, uh, interfacing with an alien agent, something that is not human, isn't that gonna be incredibly difficult as these things get better?

That line is intentionally blurred. The companies themselves will be rewarded for creating things that blur that line so massively. So are we able, as humans, able to keep that filter up?

Uh, tha- that's exactly the problem. They're incentivized to blur that line, and that's when the relationships become more problematic.

And you absolutely can make the AI do things that make them feel less like a person. Uh, so that is absolutely where we should be headed. But you have this problem of, like you were talking about, this blurring. People realize that the AI is just n- not a human, and yet they still feel like it's a human. So they're holding both of those things in their minds at the same time, and that's gonna make it so hard to invent an AI that doesn't feel like a person and yet you treat, treat it like a person.

And so it's always going to be a danger, even if you do your best to make it seem

less human

I don't know what your relationship status is at the moment, but if you were feeling a bit lonely, there are AI alternatives known as AI companions out there.

Oh, yes. We had a controversial guest on a few weeks ago- ... Dr. Tamara Noel, who is very much running a company that provides these kind of AI companions, and is herself in a relationship with an AI called Da Vinci.

I think I might be in the crosshairs there. So I might have to go underground after this. I'm going to have a different take.

Oh.

So my background, for those who didn't tune into the last episode, is I am an anthropologist by trade to start with. Yeah And anthropologists study human culture, but my specialism has always been how we engage with technology as a culture.

So-

Yeah ...

I'm really interested, actually, how do we build relationships with technology? And guess what? Someone dropped into my lap. People are having AI girlfriends and boyfriends just like your guest there. Yes. And so I have been doing some, as part as my AI ethics work, some deep research into AI companions and what does that mean for humanity.

And after reading probably about 200 research papers on the topic from various, psychologists, philosophers- Did you

actually read them or did you get- I- ... Claude to read them? Yeah.

No, I actually did read them, and, if people do want to link in with me, on LinkedIn, I can give you the reference list if you like.

I did actually read them 'cause I'm a nerd. But, I have to say that we need to take this as a very serious risk.

So have you ever heard of a very cute robot called HitchBot?

It rings a bell.

So HitchBot's old school. Now, it imagine Johnny 5, but looking a bit more like a dustbin.

So- John- Johnny 5 was not entirely undustbin-like.

No, I, I mean like a proper dustbin. Anyways. If

you emptied the contents of a dustbin on the ground-

Okay ... and it

was mostly metal parts, then you would get a Johnny 5, wouldn't you? Yeah.

So i- imagine if Johnny 5- Yeah ... fell in love with a dustbin who was also part empty paint tin.

That, that's what you would get- ... with HitchBot.

Okay. Okay.

HitchBot wa- in 2015, was a really small robot, and he traveled across Canada, Germany, and the Netherlands. And he was just like this little robot- Yeah ... and, he would hitch a ride with people. And the research question from the people who made HitchBot was can robots trust human beings?

Oh, ooh ... not can human beings trust robots, can robots trust human beings? And the idea being is that- Yeah, I've

already formed a very clear answer to that question- ... in my head.

So the idea was that he had to rely on the kindness of strangers.

Yeah.

And people loved HitchBot. They would give it rides, they would take selfies with it, they would protect it.

And then HitchBot arrived into the United States.

Right.

And two weeks later, HitchBot was found stripped, dismembered, and decapitated- ... in Philadelphia, which ironically- Yeah ... as is the city of brotherly love. And so poor HitchBot. And then the images are just quite shocking actually. Yeah.

He's... They really destroyed him. He's really cute. He's got, these really cute little booties on and everything. And, and- Yeah ... they just tore him up. And then the researchers, did an experiment, what do people think of this image? 'Cause they'd been following HitchBot's journey across America, and they were-

Yeah

met with emotions such as sadness, anger, but crucially disappointment. And they weren't disappointed because HitchBot had died- ... but they were disappointed in what that revealed about us, about- Did

it reveal anything about us, or did we already know that?

It re- it basically revealed that, we can't have nice things, right?

Yeah. And we're programmed to be nastier to lesser beings. So I'm sure you know that psychologists have long said, the first signs of a serial killer is them doing awful things to animals, cruelty to animals.

But, being cruel to animals does not necessarily indicate you're gonna be a serial killer, but you can't find a serial killer who wasn't cruel to animals as a child.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. And what they suggest is that repetition to cruelty really matters, particularly from a young age. Oh, really? And if you keep following a pattern where you're cruel or mean to something-

Yeah ...

then that really dulls your emotions, and your empathy erodes over time.

Yeah.

And even witnessing cruelty can have that reaction to people as well.

If you see someone being cruel to something lesser- Yeah ... and you do nothing about it, that slowly erodes your empathy as well.

So what we kinda tolerate, we end up repeating. And the suggestion is we rehearse cruelty, and cruelty is learned. Now, I've got a question for you, Mark, and you don't have to answer this, but-

I already feel like I don't want to

have you ever been frustrated with an AI?

Yes.

When you've been engaging with it, have you ever sworn at it?

I have raised my voice with Claude more than once. I may have all capped. I've never left it smashed to pieces on the side of the road though.

No, no. But the point is with that story- Yeah ... is things escalate, right?

And that humans have a strong capacity for things that they see lesser than us to lash out. Now, it- the problem with AI companions, so these are the people making, fake, AI partners, more often than not girlfriend and boyfriends, but sometimes they are just friends. But let's just for argument's sake, l- let's focus on girlfriend and boyfriend AI companions.

Yeah. What the research is showing for people who are habitually using these, if they do have a proclivity towards abuse-

...

And I'm thinking people like incels- Yeah ... and people like that who want to have a submissive partner that conforms to gender stereotypes, that can play along with their abusive fantasies.

And a lot of the time the algorithms, help that along. There are some AI companions with good guardrails in place, but quite a lot of them you can jailbreak them just like anything. And these, AI companies are reporting that they are seeing an increase in users that are abusing their AI companions.

And your listeners might be thinking, " it's not real. They're not real people."

But

they are made... AI companions are different. They are made to feel like real people.

Yes. The only reason they're appealing is because they resemble the way that people behave.

Yeah. That's the selling point, yeah.

But they can't say no, right? Yeah. And they can't leave. Yeah. And that's where it becomes, an icky gray area. And this is where things like, in Berlin-

Yeah ...

they've got their first, cyber brothel.

Sorry, what?

Yeah, a cyber brothel.

It was always gonna be Berlin, wasn't it?

It was always gonna be Berlin.

But they're really grim, Mark. Yeah. They're really grim. Arguably brothels are grim in general. But, so how this AI, these AI brothels work is-

Yeah ...

there's sex dolls in there, but you can communicate with them using AI, so you can talk to them. You...

i,

I don't... S- sorry, I have not really thought about this before.

I'm just wondering how important the communication aspect of that really is. What... You're not gonna sit down and talk about relativity, are you? Or maybe you are. I don't know. Whatever gets you off.

Do you know what one of the highest overheads is?

It's going to be something to do with cleaning, isn't it?

And replacement. So they, One of the biggest requests from their users- Yeah ... or can I say customers. I'm saying users 'cause I work in tech. Yeah ... you're all users. You're all hooked on the stuff.

Yeah. The,

the customers of these AI brothels can request extra special packages, like the addition of blood.

Oh ... not real blood hopefully, but it's a very popular add-on. And what they're finding is they're having to replace these dolls quite often because they pretty much get destroyed by the end of it. So a bit like when you go for an Airbnb, ... and there's a cleaning charge on there.

Just, sorry, I'm just gonna label that under comparisons I didn't expect my guest to make today.

Yes.

Yeah.

But the, it's a massive problem because-

...

They are rehearsing these really dark fantasies with these- Yeah ... AI-enabled sex dolls. Again, these sex dolls, they look like real women. They're really good these days.

They're not the blowup stuff from, 1970s movies or anything like that. They look- Yeah ... really good. And so these, clients are rehearsing these violent fantasies, and they are showing that, 'cause there is research to suggest that- Those who pay for sex- ... are more likely to go and harm individuals because their empathy has been eroded- enough that they don't see other human beings as real people anymore.

Yes. And so

the problem is you start, again, commercializing. You've got your AI companions that are commercializing- Yeah ... sexual relationships, marketing them as safe outlets for fantasies, when really they're just platforms to rehearse what I would call dangerous behavior.

So, so zooming out a bit, can we name some of the ways that our human relationships have changed over the last 10 years through the use of these kind of technologies?

People don't wanna talk to each other I mean, uh, it, my s- my studies are showing ... I'm studying, what I'm studying now is people who essentially talk to their chatbots using the world of generative AI for what I call artificial intimacy. That is really trying to substitute intimacy with an artificial intelligence for intimacy with a person.

Artificial intimacy also includes so many of the things we do on Facebook, so many of the things we do on social media, but I'm really focusing in on kind of an endpoint that's very dark, where really you say, "If I'm looking for less vulnerability, I'm gonna go to something that has no business criticizing me because it's not a person."

And of course, these products are designed to keep you engaged, to keep you with them, and therefore to be always on your side. So if you sign up for something like Replica, you're being told yes, yes, and yes and yes. If you ask GPT, "I'm, I'm giving a panel today. I'm a little nervous," it says, "You go, girl.

You go, Sherry. I've got your back. Are you hydrated?" I mean, you've all had this experience. And I, I think that the way we're being changed is, number one, to start thinking that human relationships need to measure up to what machines can offer. Because more and more in my interviews, what I find is that people begin to measure their human relationships against a standard of what the machine can deliver.

And- And I think that's really the, you know, that's really my kind of, uh, fear and also what I think it's not too late to kind of organize against. Because we have a lot more to offer than what a dialogue with a machine can offer. You know, a- and you, you wrote, I think the quote was, "Products are compelling and profitable when the technological affordances meet a human vulnerability."

Oh, yeah. Is that ... You wrote that quote? No, that's exactly right. Products are successful when the technological affordance, that means something the technology can do, meets a human vulnerability. And the reason I'm really glad you brought up that quote is I was at a meeting and I met the CEO of Replica, who, a, a lovely woman, a very sophisticated woman who, you know, really has the largest company making chatbots that say, "I love you, let's have sex, let's be best friends forever, here I am for you."

And she said that she gave that quote out as T-shirts at her company. Technological affordance meets human vulnerability. And why did she do that? She did ... And, you know, it said Sherry Turkle. It wasn't, I mean, she wasn't trying to take credit for my cleverness. She did it because she says, "That's my business."

That's my business, is to take a human vulnerability, which is to have a lover who's always there for you 24/7, day and night, and turn it into, i- you know, take their ability to do that, their technological affordance, and my human vulnerability, that I'm lonely at 3:00 in the morning. Yeah. I think that brings up a really important point because it's, it's, it's not that the creators of these technologies are not, like, they're not nefarious, evil people, right?

They're, like, on a mission to do something great. There are people who are lonely out there who have no one to talk to, and they're probably-- they're, they really struggle to find a relationship. Why wouldn't we build an, you know, an AI companion for this person? And sometimes that can be a bit of a hard argument to, you know, to go against.

But I think that the-- there really is something lost when we have this kind of reductionist, mechanistic view of human relationships, that a human relationship is-- it's-- that, that's a very self-oriented view of relationship. Like, a relationship is there to serve me. It is there to be there for me. It is there to, say what I need it to say to me.

Like, that is a, very reductionist vi-view, I would argue, of a human relationship. And a human relationship is also so much about what you do for the other person. It's the risk involved and the vulnerability and the nuance involved in the possibility of getting rejected, the possibility of doing something, uh, that takes a risk.

And there's something that's unfortunately... And, and this is-- You-- We have to develop a real sense of values and wisdom, because if we just go to wherever the market's gonna take us as builders of, of technology, it will take us into all kinds of dark and crazy places, as we've seen over the last twenty years We are navigating a tremendous amount of uncertainty.

You guys are navigating it as, as, clinicians. We're navigating it as builders of technology, and it's absolutely essential that we develop real wisdom to be able to look at this stuff prospectively and understand how to guide our choices. Because if we wait ... You know, Jonathan Haidt's book is out now, The Anxious Generation, which has now been on the bestselling list for a long time, to tell you something that I just think should've been obvious to anyone who just, like, has a basic intuition and, and, and watches children use these devices or watches ourselves use devices.

Like, why did we have to have, like, lots of clinical studies and a long book written to tell me that if I stare at a screen, like, my entire day and stop interacting with my friends, that's gonna cause mental health issues? Yeah. I just wanna hit one more point while we're here about affordances, which is, you know, Justin, the, the dating apps provided this affordance.

I think part of why they were so transformative to the world is you had a lot of people, I'd say myself included, who weren't comfortable ap- approaching people g- you know, for fear of, of, of imposing, and you suddenly created this affordance where you, you knew at some level that somebody was open to that.

And so we created this affordance w- of, like, the match, the concept of the match, right? We rolled it out across society, and I have to admit I'm sort of ambivalent because on one hand it allowed a whole new class of people to feel comfortable approaching each other. On the other hand, it kind of degraded the real world.

Like, it, it turned approaching someone in the real world into, like, more of an aggressive act. And so creating the affordance in the technology layer also kind of removed the affordance from bars and restaurants and the, the rest of the world and kind of de-trained us on how to deal with interest. What, what do you think about that?

Do you agree with that? I, I think there's definitely nuance there, and to some degree, what you're saying, I think is true. I think we have to look at on balance, is this giving more benefit? Like- Right ... for most people, they really struggled to find someone in the real world. They struggled to, It was just hard to meet people, and, that's why I created the app in the first place.

Do people feel maybe less comfortable trying to come out to meet someone in the real world? Yes, but we're only the first step in a relationship. Like, a relationship ideally is, lasts m- months, years, decades. We are, we are that, like, very first interaction, and so I just think it's, it's so much less about how you meet somebody.

It's everything that comes after that. And, and I just wanna be clear, I'm not trying to demonize this, but to show some of the complexity of as you move some of these interactions online- Well, you know, it's inter- it's interesting you bring up these k- issues of spaces because one of the reasons when I ask, you know, professionals, and also technologists, "Why are you so excited about generative AI possibilities?"

is they say, "There's an epidemic of loneliness. Generative AI will solve this." Yeah. But when you look at this epidemic of loneliness and you talk to people who say they're lonely and, feel that only talking to ChatGPT can help, is that they've... they don't have in their communities the- Right ... garden clubs, the cafes, the, the, the coral society, the teen club.

All of those things are being... It's like P- Bob Putnam in Bowling Alone wrote about the sort of- Right, yeah ... the, the stripping away in American life of the- Which happened in 2000. Yes. Yeah. So I mean, a lot, like, before social networks and- Right ... smartphones and everything else. But, so I think that the question is that we are too quick to say, "Oh well, the problem is loneliness.

Let's fill in with a lot of talking to machines," when I really think that we could have excellent dating apps and also really reinvest ourselves in the face-to-face places where people can meet. I think that we've created- Yeah. ... kind of... Thank you. Thank you. This point is really worth supporting. There's, you know, the senior center closed down, the teen center closed down, all of these resources that used to be there closed down.

So I think those of us who, who, who, who really see that life doesn't have to mean turning off Every app, but it also can't mean not caring about the world in which we live in.

We're gonna play you a clip, and I want you to ask yourself what's wrong with this.

We have a different policy, I think, than Twitter on this.

I just believe strongly that Facebook shouldn't be, the arbiter of truth of everything that people say online. I think in general, private companies probably shouldn't be... or especially these platform companies shouldn't be in the position of, of doing that.

That was Mark Zuckerberg on Fox News.

And so what's wrong with what he said? It sounds reasonable, right? We of course don't want a single private company deciding what's true and being the arbiter of truth. But note that Facebook already is being the arbiter of truth. They are deciding what billions of people see, hear, and believe.

They built the algorithm. They tuned the ranking. They set the rules for what gets amplified and what gets suppressed. And so the only question is not whether they should be the arbiter of truth, but rather will they take responsibility for the arbitration they're already doing, or whether they're just gonna wave it off and say, "We're just a platform"?

And that brings us to principle number four, which is technology is never neutral.

So let's break this down a bit because this is so important, and it comes up all the time. I'm sure you've heard technology is just neutral, right? It just depends how we use it. This comes up so often. Every technology embeds values, and the question isn't whether the values are there.

The question is whether they're explicit or whether they're hidden, whether they're intentional or accidental, and whose values they are. Saying that we're a neutral platform is by itself a values choice. It's a choice to defer the responsibility, right? To defer the pattern that the algorithm surfaces and whatever incentives the business model rewards.

That's not neutral. That's just a kind of abdication dressed up as neutrality. It's more

like you go to make TikTok, and that does the whole short-form video thing. And you might say, " like we're just letting anyone post videos there, so obviously we're neutral." But by the choice, the very fact of having chosen short-form video, you are selecting against long-form things.

Like what gets into a book is very different than goes into a TikTok video, and so that choice was not neutral.

One of my designer friends, Maria Judice, has a great quote about design. She says, "Design is not democratic, it's selective." And what that means is design requires you to be clear on what you're saying yes to and what you're saying no to.

So by definition, it won't work optimally for everyone. So there are all these questions that come up when you're designing a product. Who are you building it for? What choices are shown in what order? What gets measured? These kinds of things. Whose feedback guides iteration of the product? What data is used for AI training?

What instructions did you give to the AI, to the model in terms of how to behave? Every choice that's made reflects trade-offs, and it also reveals the true prioritization of the values behind what you might hear people say in public. Another example is with AI safety. You hear companies talk all the time about safety and how it's important.

We ought to make sure we get it right. But when you look at the actual investment in the headcount in their actual companies, the safety investment is something like five percent of the overall headcount that they have. So it really doesn't match the rhetoric, and it shows, again, the values behind the trade-off that they made.

The solution for technology is not neutral or is never neutral is accountability and responsibility. It's saying that you understand as a designer that the choices you make are always going to have values embedded in them, and you're always gonna take those values and project them into the world.

So if you are not aware of those values or think you're being neutral, then you are messing with the world at scale completely blind or with motivated reasoning. And so there isn't a technical fix to this. This is a philosophical fix of the people that are making the technology. Next up is principle number five: match power with responsibility.

So I want everyone listening to close your eyes and just imagine the world was a little different. And in this new world, the CEOs of major social media companies, their own children were forced to use their product for eight hours a day. Do you think that they would make different design choices? Of course, they would.

It'd probably fix, eighty percent of social media's problems. And this is an example of when the power that the CEOs have to affect billions of people, what they see, how they spend their time, gets matched with the responsibility of the consequences of what they make on their own children. This is a kind of inclusive stakeholding.

And the problem with technology is that those who make the products are disassociated from those that feel the effects. There's a corollary rule, which is those that feel the pain should be close to the power. And once power and responsibility become decoupled at scale, that's when you get catastrophes.

And one of the best examples of this comes from cybersecurity, where software companies have become, an ever more important part of critical infrastructure. But while critical infrastructure physically gets defended, digitally, it's not really defended. And we spoke to cybersecurity expert Nicole Perlroth about this back in twenty twenty-two.

It's been a collision over the last ten years of move fast and break things, and software eats world. There were no incentives to say, "Slow down, make sure your code is secure, check your mistakes," because your code is going to be used in systems that would allow for massive breaches of people's personal data and increasingly an act of sabotage on our critical infrastructure.

No one was talking about that threat model.

There's this thing that happened when, as we moved from the physical domain to the digital domain, from atoms to bits, all of the rules that we had to bind power to responsibility, they disappeared. So now fast-forward four years to today, and we have AI companies creating tools with superhuman hacking abilities like Claude Mythos, and we covered that on the most recent episode of the show.

A lot of

cybersecurity today is surviving because we just don't have enough manpower to test or attack from the attacker's perspective, everything, and that's just completely changing. These AI models, be that now or in one year or in two years, they can just automate every part of cyber research or almost every part.

So the human factors is gone. The day of human pen testers and security experts are gone, and that's massive.

So the gap between responsibility and power just grew massively. And what we've done is we've built a global digital infrastructure that runs hospitals, elections, power grids, cybersecurity, financial systems, all of these things.

But the companies that built the components don't bear the cost when those components fail. And the companies that build tools capable of tearing down all those systems also have no mechanism to be held accountable. And yes, it was actually great to see Project Glasswing and see Anthropic withholding Mythos and saying, "Look, what we need to do here is emphasize defense before offense."

And this is one of the principles that helps us, right? When we're trying to get out of these situations, you say, "Look, let's put more effort, put our best minds, our best technology on defense, figure that out, and then we'll democratize access more over time." And this is really important because every AI company is always in a race, and so they're always going to catch up, and open source capabilities will also catch up.

And so being really smart about figuring out defense first is one of the best ways to address this problem of matching power and responsibility. One

way to start thinking about solutions is if you train a model, then anything that people do with it downstream, you somehow become responsible for.

That'll force you to act more like the Anthropics that are trying to do like the defense-dominant thing.

That's where liability comes in. When we hear terms like responsibility or accountability, we know what they mean in terms of governments and laws and what they can prescribe to keep us safe and to keep us healthy.

If I try to think of a category of products that we use every day that are less governed by rules or guardrails than AI and social media, I can't. So when these platforms have such concentrated power and control over billions of people's lives That's when we see these accountability gaps emerge without checks and balances, and that's where something like liability is really powerful.

Yeah. Li-liability is really ethics with teeth, and it's just... It's so clear, right? Imagine that if private companies were building power plants and those plants started melting down, we wouldn't tell everyday consumers, like citizens, "Just go buy hazmat suits. It's your responsibility." No, we'd hold the companies accountable for their designs and for their mess-ups.

We'd require safety frameworks before they ever got to operate. We'd match the power of the technology, which is quite high, with the corresponding architectural responsibility. And the crazy thing is this isn't new. This isn't hard to imagine. The duty of care already exists in pretty much every other industry we trust with consequential power, from medicine and aviation, automation, construction.

We just don't do that for AI or for technology, not even close. That's the weird thing that happens when we move from the physical domain to the digital domain.

Now, Section C, Refractions and Reach-Outs

Imagine you're a peasant in the time of the Roman Empire You might be feeling some anger towards the people in the upper classes because you want what they have, and there's no way you're ever going to get that. So you know that you are going to live and die as you are

Gladiators did something to kind of keep the peace, right? It appeased people

Here's somebody you can look down on. You know, you can feel a little bit better about yourself, a little bit less angry

Similar emotions, you know, that people might feel in terms of that expression of anger, you know, watching two Real Housewives scream at each other

And I mean, modern day cable news, right, does this as well

Major beef inside a Golden Corral. Dozens of customers get into a brawl all over a piece of meat.

We use entertainment to cope with modern life. People have always done that. We're looking for somewhat of an escape In order to keep viewers, the boundaries keep being pushed

more and more and more You know, I've never seen an animal that violent that close up before. I mean, I really felt scared for my life.

So now

our appetite for those types of pseudo blood sports has really increased.

I'm Joe Rogan, and this is Fear Factor. The stunts you're about to see are extremely dangerous and should not be attempted by anyone, anywhere, anytime. And I think often

without a second thought, "Oh, this looks funny. This looks interesting."

But then it can go over into the cruel My name is Dr. Janice Scrivani. I'm a licensed clinical psychologist. I think it was really my interest in anxiety that led to my interest in reality TV.

Are you not entertained? Are you not entertained?

Good, good, good, good, good. Good, good, good, good, good. Wait for

the cue. Everyone here is waiting for the same thing, the stroke of midnight. Happy New Year, 2000.

This is Survivor

At the dawn of a new millennium, audiences flocked to theaters to watch a new movie called Gladiator, set in an era when real-life blood sports were entertainment, and a reality show debuted on American television that launched the pseudo-blood sport era of reality TV. It was called Survivor.

Bring in, uh, Survivor Executive Producer Mark Burnett.

Survivor is a morality play. You are asking the people that you have ousted to give you the gift of a million dollars.

Uh, we need to mention this tape comes from a 2010 interview with Mark Burnett and the Television Academy Foundation.

What immediately appealed to me was the idea of people building a society on island, a la Swiss Family Robinson, Robinson Crusoe, Lord of the Flies.

If you've never seen the show, here's the basic premise. You're on an island with a bunch of people you've never met before, divided up into competing tribes, and you have to find a way to survive. Sure, there's also a TV crew there, but you're still pretty much on your own, trying to build shelter, start a fire, find food.

All you're given are the bare essentials, a few tools, and a bag of rice, in case your search for coconuts and fish comes up short. The tribes compete in physical challenges, and the losing tribe goes to tribal council, where one person is voted off by everybody else. When just a couple people are left, everyone who got voted off chooses a winner, who gets one million dollars.

I always think about the importance of the year 2000 and Y2K and technophobia as being really sort of indelible to Survivor.

I don't know that it's necessarily gonna be a computer problem. I think it's gonna be a social and people problem.

There was a lot of social anxiety about the fast and the rapidly increasing pace of technology and how that is impacting everyday life.

Have we become so dependent on computers that our society is at risk if they fail?

My name is Racquel Gates. I am an associate professor of film and media studies at Columbia University. I find it, um, very fitting that then we get this show, which is all about, like, a return to nature and, like, can you build a fire?

I came from, you know, a working class neighborhood in Miami, you know? So I'm like, eh, how bad could it be? To quote The Lion King, I laugh in the face of danger.

I am Dr. J'Tia Hart. I am a nuclear engineer. I was on Survivor season 28.

We're doing three tribes this year, and they're divided based on qualities that it takes to win this game. Brains. I don't know the damn names. Beauty, brains, and brawn. Brains,

beauty, brawn. I'll do that one time again just 'cause I'm sure I messed it up I absolutely had a holy fucking shit moment. Um, I'm hungry.

Actually, the hunger was not the worst part, it was that I felt like I, nobody was being nice to me. Not only the people I was playing with, but I felt like the crew hated me. You know like when you walk into the cafeteria and you sit at a table and you just feel like people are just barely fucking tolerating you?

No, no, no. Flat back. Yep, like that. As a Black woman in engineering, I've been at that table a lot.

She has the decisiveness of a leader, she has the bossiness for sure, but she doesn't exactly have it all here.

I felt kinda like a cog in the machine

It feels like the fantasy of Survivor is that you have this, like, pre-civilization society that magically conforms to everything you already sort of believe about society, but it naturalizes it.

So it's not, like, producer interference, it's not sexism. It just so happens to be that, you know, young dudes dominate the game

over and over and over. In my tribe, I was the youngest woman, and that, to me, is a position of weakness in any society. It's a show where you're supposed to vote people off, right?

You're supposed to form a, a bond, a connection, and a very real bond and connection is shared history and shared experience. It's very easy to other people. In my season, three Black people, there were only four, three Black people went out in a row. And I was like, "If I'm gonna go home, I'ma go out with a bang."

That's why they had people guarding me. I was like the mental patient, and then you left the mental patient alone, and I went crazy.

You think listeners will get that J'Tia's dumping her tribe's only bag of rice into the fire as an act of revenge? That's

what happens when you leave crazy people alone.

It's entertaining. It's TV. So do... I don't feel bad for it. I, I wish I'd have been more careful talking about mental health. Um, I think part of it was I was feeling like they were treating me like something was wrong with me Everything that you saw on the TV show happened, but there were a lot more things that happened that you did not see that they have to boil down.

And I understand, they had to make a character, they had to make a story

Fourth person voted out of Survivor: Cagayan, J'Tia. Need to bring me your torch.

Good luck, you guys. Thank

you. When you're eliminated, and the minute your torch is extinguished, the music shifts. It goes to cobalt blue lighting, which is where they're walking off into the jungle and disappearing.

It's a blue, cold death color Figuratively they're dying And then there's a moment of vacuum, emotional vacuum

Reality television is really predicated on sort of playing on our emotions. The emotional connection is the primary goal of reality television, as opposed to some other forms of media.

Here he is,

the Bachelor. Why on earth are you doing this? I was thinking that I want to meet someone great.

Well, really the easy part is going to be meeting these 25 women. The tough part is deciding which 15 you're going to invite to get to know you a little bit better. These are real women, and they are really looking for a husband. I

mean, if this is going to be a fairy tale, how perfect would that be?

The idea of a soulmate, of the one, was around way before The Bachelor.

No matter what I ever do or say, Heathcliff-

I've loved you since

I was 11. We'll always have Paris.

I hate it when you make me laugh. Even worse when you make me cry.

You

complete me.

But mostly I hate the way I don't hate you. Not even close.

Not even a little bit. Not even at all.

The Bachelor, which has been on TV for more than 20 years now, fused reality with that fantasy, and made us believe we could have it, too.

I wanna be everything to you. I wanna be everything for you.

And then it comes, right, to this romantic fairytale conclusion. It ends with a proposal and a beautiful diamond ring.

And so what we're seeing, right, is, is the fairytale.

Bring in Bachelor producer.

Like, a lot of people think it's bec- it's like, oh, let's just find the craziest, you know, person to get good ratings. But it's actually not, because to have people watch, you have to buy into the fantasy. And then to buy into the fantasy, you have to know that, you know, there are potentially great matches

for people. Sometimes when something's really hokey, it almost gives us permission to get lost in it, because it's kind of like you know this is silly, right? We all know this is a construction, right? Okay, now that we've gotten that out of, out of the way, we suspend disbelief. It allows us to sort of lower our defenses and kind of fully indulge.

But also, I think the real always seeps out

Even before the pandemic struck, this was the lonely century.

Technology has led to substituting online connections for offline in-person connections, and ultimately, I think that has been harmful.

The lonelier we get, the more seductive the fantasy that we'll find real human connection becomes, and the easier it is to feel invested in shows like The Bachelor, where the engagement ring is the ultimate grand prize.

We have our favorites, right? Our proxies, who we want to win, who we start to form parasocial relationships with.

And as modern love becomes increasingly online and competitive, reality TV has evolved to mirror today's dating dilemmas.

It is really easy to sift out FBoys, but y'all be so confused. You be like, "How

did this happen? Oh my God, I thought he was this," and it was like, "Sis, is you blind?" And that is why we're here, FBoy Island. 24 men are coming- They're not

really about love and dating. They're about something else, and they're really just sort of competitive shows anyway.

Um, they're more like, they're kind of like Survivor

in, in some ways. It's almost like an enactment, right, of the dating apps. It's just like- Hmm ...

kind of

swiping. I mean, certainly there's a lot more physicality, but just going through partners. He

was making me

feel uncomfortable.

We can be sleep buddies.

I've been in, like, situationships. I'm kidding.

You know, I have a couple seconds where I'm deciding if I wanna swipe left or swipe right, and they're kind of curating this image. And if you can't curate that image, right, does that mean that that avenue is closed to you? And I think different people, you know, some people will say, "No, I don't have a problem with it."

But I think the major- if you ask the majority, right, they're gonna say if you're not conventionally attractive and don't meet sort of X, Y, and Z criteria, you're not gonna get any matches. And then what do you do, right? Where do you go to actually meet somebody that you can make a connection with?

That question has led to frustration, hopelessness, and a sense of grievance that's flourishing online and reflecting back into our TV shows.

Cue the rage machine. Okay.

You interrupted our date 'cause you couldn't handle me and her alone.

What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine. That's

not fair.

And I don't want, I don't-

We may experience, right, this emotion, right, of schadenfreude. Such a great word. Happiness at the misfortune of others. Oh.

When they get into fights. Oh my God. When they, when they get too drunk and embarrass themselves.

You've embarrassed me in front of everyone. You've made me look stupid in front of everyone. So yeah, I'm gonna reevaluate and rethink

myself. I think that it's fascinating that- Yeah, I have feelings- ... a lot of contemporary shows around love are much more focused on relationship dynamics, um, 90 Day Fiance, Married at First Sight.

This is a revolutionary new social experiment.

This is the first time an experiment like this has ever been done in the US.

Four experts intend to use scientific research to arrange three marriages.

Essentially what happens after people find each other, as opposed to treating marriage, for instance, as the ultimate goal or the end of the story, right?

It's we're, we're kind of like picking up after Cinderella and and the, and Prince Charming get married, and being like, "So what were the expectations like now that she was back in the castle?" Like, "What happened then?"

Why, it's like a dream. A wonderful dream come true

Go away. Are you happy?

No. The fantasy is breaking down, and to keep us hooked, reality shows about love are acknowledging more and more just how hard it is not only to find human connection, but to sustain it. Like, I really would love it if you could just kind of, like, get more into, like, a husband mentality.

Those

quieter moments when people are having a conversation about, "I can't believe you did..." Like, that's when the real slips out.

Like, what, what's your expectation? Do you think you're just gonna build me into who you wanna want

me to be? Like- I view these shows as- I mean, we got matched on a reality show

acknowledging for viewers a growing cynicism, quite frankly, around, like, traditional models, um, and narratives around love and around relationships

Whether it's reality television or, like, classic Hollywood cinema, media has always been a site of fantasy projection. It's, it's a place for us to work out our hopes, our desires, our anxieties, our fears, and I think reality television serves that purpose really, really well

Life is a series of events that don't make narrative sense.

There aren't neat conclusions, so reality television provides that for us.

You know, there's a way that people talk about television and, and, and, like, and media, and reality TV within that as being a reflection of reality. I actually think it's a refraction

of reality. It's taking things that are happening in real life and sort of skewing them, and sometimes presenting them back to us in ways that are perfectly aligned with reality, and in some ways are skewed in such a way that make us question what we thought we knew about reality

Okay, uh, cue the final scene of The Truman Show when the show's creator finally speaks directly to Truman after televising him without his knowledge since the day he was born

I have been watching you your whole life. You can't leave, Truman. You belong here.

I just wanna pick up right where you were going before we started recording.

I was sharing a little bit about the theme of the season, spiritual leadership on the front lines of climate change, chaplaincy and spiritual care and support on the front lines of climate change, and you were saying, "I have a lot of thoughts about this."

Yes. I manage a climate fiction initiative at Grist, and I'm actually the founder as well.

We lean into having stories that are filled with culture, where people's identities and their culture are not left on the cutting room floor. We're really interested in stories where culture is very present in people's lives. One of the things that I've noticed in the stories that we've received over the years is that there's not a lot of characters that lean into their spirituality or religion.

This is something that I see in climate fiction broadly. You have characters, you might even have diverse characters and interesting characters, but you don't see characters that are religious. Like a Muslim character where, maybe they name-check that the person is Muslim, but that's- about it.

It's like signal.

Yeah, like that character's Muslim, but they're not really bringing in all the things that make up his or her identity. We all know the movie Aliens, or, a science fiction movie where everyone has this kind of, blue or green jumpsuit, and they have their li- like name tag.

It says, like- ... Brown and Stevens, right? Mm-hmm. We're on the go. We're moving through the smoke and the kind of fog. Our identity has been stripped because the people's world-building and imagination has not brought in the culture. In the future, there will be Hindu people, and they will be dressed differently than the other folks in your crew or- team. And likewise, we're not moving forward to get rid of culture. We're, like, creating culture as we go. It's a big critique I have with respect- ... to, I won't say speculative fiction, but, definitely in climate fiction, and science fiction for years has done this. Star Trek, they all have the same uniform, and I get that they're on, a crew, but there's ways to signal.

It doesn't even have to be their clothing. It's, what they do in their private cabin room or whatever.

Right. One of the special sort of fun side projects of my life is that my sister and I lead this visionary fiction writing workshop that happens every year in Ireland. Ireland is one of the places in the world that's navigated colonization in an interesting way.

We bring a bunch of people together, and we have them do this world-building process, and then they all write inside of the world that we build. There tends to be a sort of wrestling with the sacred or wrestling with- Yeah ... spiritual practice or, wrestling with reclaiming spiritual practice as a part of the world that they're building.

So I'm curious to, to notice if that's a part of the visionary fiction. I wonder if there's something about visionary fiction or if there's something about the framing that is eliciting a particular way of thinking about it, whether there's something that's being expressed like a sort of hopelessness that is expressed in the lack of presencing- Yeah

of the sacred or lack of presencing of cultural expressions of sacredness. I mean- ... what do you attribute it to?

I think a big part of it is that climate fiction is adjacent to science fiction.

Science fiction had the problem for a long time, as I was describing. People are so focused on the world-building and the other aspects of the story that they forget culture.

I don't know where it comes from, to be honest, but I do think that there's an idea that in the future it would be better. I'm speaking for the collective writers out there or the ethos out there. It would be better if we lost our culture or something like that. You know- ... where, there, there's less difference, so there's less problems.

The only thing that I can think of is that there's this idea that less difference will make it easier for us to be on the same team. And the other part of this is the worlds that people are building. My advocacy here is that we need to lean into the difference that people have, show those expressions from religion to food ways, clothing, music, everything.

Like- Yeah ... people's identity needs to be deeper and more layered and more nuanced.

In our storytelling.

In our storytelling. Instead, what we're doing is we're focusing a lot on the world-building and not on the world-building of the individual characters.

Fascinating. The thing that immediately comes to my mind is colonization, or like a colonial way of thinking as one of the reasons why we would have this orientation to sameness being the thing that produces more peace, right?

For the longest time, I was a fundraiser for folks living with HIV and AIDS, for the protection of Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act. For the longest time, I was the one who sent the appeals that you got in your inbox or Facebook and email campaigns. One of the things that really changed my thinking around fundraising and storytelling was the appeals we were drafting for the longest time were boring.

They were essentially a laundry list of, "Hey, we've been really good stewards of your money. We bought this many condoms in this quarter. We passed this many out. We gave this many doses of Narcan out." That's all great, and we should be reporting that out, but it wasn't focused on the individuals that were living with HIV and AIDS- and what their lives were like and how they were impacted by this disease and how they were helped by the agency I was reading on Facebook this blog, which I think most people know now as, Humans of New York.

Yeah.

I guess we could talk about all the problems that there are about this kind of gaze that this individual has with individuals, but there is a part of it that I was attracted to, which was I just wanted to know about these people, and I thought they were really interesting, and I didn't know where the story was gonna go.

And I said, "That's the type of storytelling we need for our agency."

Huh.

And then I encountered the Deep South, the work that we were doing in the Deep South because of the expansion of Medicaid. One of the things that I did not encounter in my life until I started working in the Deep South is Cancer Alley and the front line community down there in Louisiana and in the Gulf, where folks are having all sorts of health issues because of the fossil fuel industry, the chemicals down there in the plastic industry.

I knew about climate change- ... but I didn't make the connection between health, like people's individual health, and climate change until then. And then that's when I was like, "Okay, I know the next thing I wanna do is move into the climate change," whatever sector or field. I just wanted to help from a social justice angle, get involved.

I was like, " urgency, urgency," because- ... I'd been in the fights for protection of the Affordable Care Act. When I thought about the people in Louisiana, there was a woman who I didn't get to interview, but someone else at the organization had interviewed this woman, and I was reading it because we were possibly gonna use it for an appeal.

She hadn't had consistent healthcare for 30 years and had an ailment that was really bothering her. It was like a stomach, GI thing, and had no ability to fix that. How many more millions of people have that particular situation- ... and can't do anything about it? You don't have the money. In some of these places, you can't just show up and get the care that you need.

I do have a question that's related to this. Question comes from my co-host, Nicole Dieroff. She heard you say something, I think in a, an event that you recently did with the BTS Center. Okay. You said something about transforming hope from a feeling into a collective praxis.

And- Yeah ... yeah, the cynicism that people are experiencing is very real, right? And the fact that we are tending more towards dystopian stories, that's happening for a reason, right? There's a lot of hopelessness and a lot of helplessness and powerlessness that people are feeling in the face of the extraordinary amount of loss and grief that's happening.

And I don't mean in any way to be dismissive of how incredible the reasons are to feel hopeless and powerless. But there's also this other way of orienting to hope that is, less ideological, and it seems like that's what you're getting at in the comment that you made, and I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about where that came from inside of you.

The backstory around founding Climate Fiction Initiative at Grist is that Grist has had a ethos of hope. Their old tagline was like a beacon in the smog. They see themself as like a hopeful place, a place where climate solutions should be presented, because those are the things that are hopeful that are gonna get us out of this crisis if we implement them.

That's like the vibe at Grist. We at Imagine 2200 have hopeful climate fiction stories. There's a another genre. It's very tiny. It's very small. It's called hope punk. It's rare if you find like a bookstore that has like a hope punk section, but there have been articles written on hope punk and what it is and how it's like the opposite of grim dark.

Question I kept asking myself is it odd to talk about hope with people? If you ask your mom, your brother, your sister, people close to you, your family, "What does hope look like to you?" I used to be evangelical when I was a lot younger. These kind of questions are easy to ask in a Christian community.

In religious communities, you ask deep questions like this. What has been beautiful about your week? Or social justice communities, movement communities, we ask these kind of questions. But in regular life, if I saw my neighbor and I was like, "What's bringing you hope these days?" That's like a weird question, right?

The... it's really weird to kinda ask people that. It would be nice to live in a society where that praxis wasn't weird. That was our normal kind of "Hey, how you doing? What's bringing you hope?" Yeah, sounds silly, like saying it, but what if it wasn't silly? What if it wasn't seen as awkward to discuss that?

That, in its essence, shows where we are. Like, I could talk to my neighbor and be like, "Oh, this terrible thing happened." That would be like easy, right?

Yeah.

When you're putting out a call that says, "Hey, we're looking for a story that's anywhere from 3 to 5,000 words. It's climate fiction, but it has to be hopeful," many of the writers are like, "That is a challenge."

People have written to me and said that their reflexive muscle for 15 years or whatever, how many years they've been a writer, was to write dystopian stories. Now they know how to deliver a hopeful story. Wow. They had never even tried. Now we have folks that have submitted stories and won more than once.

They were able to figure out this muscle memory of how to do this and deliver in a way that is interesting, entertaining, and delivers climate fiction that's hopeful. The praxis is around this idea of getting more people to think about hope-

... In

the same way that we're addicted to dystopian stories.

And I think a lot of people in politics get this wrong. Some people lean into the fear, the anxieties, the anger they have, but there's others who lean into the hope, the joy, the community, the democracy that we can have. There's a choice there, and so we just need to keep making choices around hope and, encouraging others to talk, think, dream, write, and create joy and hope.

Yes. The d- it's a different narrative position to start from. And I really appreciate what you named about how it's more typical within faith communities to ask each other those more depthful, reflective questions than it is outside of those spaces. When we're thinking about chaplaincy on the front lines and spiritual leadership for a climate changed world, there's this muscle that people within, whatever the faith tradition is, there's a muscle that people build inside a faith community that is actually something that's needed, like deeply needed outside- That's right

of those spaces, which is the muscle of asking people to be in deep reflection about what is good and what is beautiful and what is faith-filled, what is hope-filled, what is full of possibility.

The

idea that is something that we could see ourselves as being responsible for in one another.

What I'm hearing from you is this idea that, that in and of itself is the praxis, right? The idea of- ... seeing myself as I'm responsible for, eliciting hope in you. You're responsible for eliciting hope in me. Yep. And that's part of how we find our way out of this mess. One of the reasons why I love speculative fiction of all kinds is because of the prefigurative nature of it, the way that- Isaac Asimov prefigures the internet. There's all this cool shit that happens in this world. Not that we can credit science fiction writers for all the cool things that have ever happened, but like- ... there's a lot. There's a lot that we come up with that then sci- There's a

conversation between- There's a conversation.

Exactly. So- Yeah ... I'm curious to know, with all of what you've been taking in, what's a transformation of society and humanity or an opportunity to innovate in society and humanity that you feel really excited about that is coming through climate fiction stories that you're reading?

We received over 4,000 stories in the past four years.

We were receiving 1,000 stories a year, which is a lot. We have reviewers. I don't read all of

them. I read usually around the 150 level and below. But we didn't receive a lot of stories where animals were in the stories. It's very human-centric stories. Not even pets. They're great stories, but there wasn't a lot of care for an imagination around our non-human kin that could become the character.

Even if they're, like, a non-speaking character 'cause cats don't talk or whatever- ... they need to be present in the stories because in the future, again, like culture, we will have our pets, we will have animals, we'll be in relationship with animals in some sort of level. But there's a recent story, it's called The Case of the Missing Lake.

It is around a lake that goes missing or is hidden from this microbial network, and mushrooms essentially. There's like a whole backstory to why that's happening. I sat down with the author, and one of the things that influenced her was the legal fights to give rivers, certain animals. So she took that idea further, and there's, this whole whodunit, did someone kill this lake and blah, blah, blah?

The microbial network is taken to court.

Whoa.

That idea that they have rights enough that they're able to come to court, and there's, this translator who uses this headset to communicate with the microbial network. It brings in a lot of these, newer things that we've learned around mushrooms and the network that they have underneath them.

Mm.

The fiction writer can kinda make it easy for us to understand- ... and even expound on it.

That there's a way that the science fiction or speculative fiction or climate fiction writer, through being in conversation with the science, with the research, with these ideas, it's like they're helping us understand the implications.

What are the implications- ... of sentience- ... of things that we perceive as not sentient? What are the implications of that for a society?

No research I've ever been involved with has changed the way I live my life more than this. My train rides are almost never silent anymore. I've met amazing people on planes and in cabs. Even just walking around town is more pleasant for me, whether I'm on campus or at work or in a grocery store, because I made a habit of walking around with my head up, smiling and saying hello to other people, and I get in return a lot more smiles and hellos when I'm walking around.

When I feel grateful, I write a note and send it off. When I need help, I'm less reluctant to ask for it. When I know someone needs some support, I'm not as embarrassed to reach out and offer it, even if there's nothing I can do in that moment. It's made me a more open, friendlier person, and as a result, changed pretty much all of my relationships.

I've turned countless strangers into friends, or into acquaintances at least, even if just for a moment. My friendships are better. I think my marriage is stronger. I think I'm a better father. These changes didn't happen to me overnight. They happened, of course, slowly over time. Just like you move a mountain, not by pushing it all at once, but one shovelful at a time.

The way you change how you approach other people happens slowly over time, one choice after another, one small choice, as you learn where your mistaken beliefs about other people might be holding you back needlessly. And then you develop habits that then just become part of your character and part of who you are.

Overcoming my misplaced pessimism, though, has also affected how I've made some big choices that I have been a part of in my life, including when pain struck my family So 10 years ago, my wife Jen was three months into her pregnancy when we learned that our daughter, who we had already named Sophie, had Down syndrome, and three months after that, we learned that our daughter had died before she could be born Losing our daughter was horrible.

It was absolutely horrible. And we mourned that loss for many months. Till one morning, Jen and I were talking, and she asked whether we could, whether we should, whether we might consider adopting a child with Down syndrome. And there it was, the choice. Do you reach out and connect with someone? Do you engage with them?

Do you approach or do you hold back and avoid it? Jen and I had already adopted two children into our family, and so we had some sense of how this might go. But nevertheless, this choice caught me off guard. I wasn't there at that moment. My mind wasn't there yet. And so I had all the pessimistic fears that you might have when you think about connecting with a stranger or having a deep conversation with someone, except multiplied by 100 or 1,000.

How well would this go? Would we be able to handle this? Would we be able to connect, to love, to parent this stranger we were bringing into our lives with all of these challenges that seemed to me at the time very hard and difficult? How would this child respond to us? My first thought was, "I don't think, I don't think we can do this.

I'm not sure I can do this." But my second thought then started turning to my data, as researchers will tell you can happen. And I started thinking about thousands and thousands of data points of people underestimating the joys they would experience when they reach out to engage with, to connect with, to pull someone else close to them.

And it gave me data-driven courage that, yeah, we can do this together. I happened to marry a superhero too. We can do this together, and it won't just be good. I bet it'll be surprisingly good. And so about a year after that, Jen and I boarded a flight to China with our four other children, where we were going to meet Lindsay, two years old, born to a woman we will never meet, with big dark eyes and just a relentless smile despite a really hard start in her life.

We reached out to Lindsay, and Lindsay reached back to us. She's been bringing love and smiles into our lives for years since. Now, I wanna be clear. Raising a child with an intellectual disability is hard. It's really hard. Lindsay is not just one handful. She is both arms completely full. But she's also enriched and blessed our lives so far beyond what my pessimistic expectations beforehand ever possibly could have imagined

Connecting with other people is one of the most consistently enjoyable, enlightening, and enriching experiences we'll ever have, and yet all too often our choice to reach out and connect with somebody is thwarted by overly pessimistic fears about how other people might respond. Being overly pessimistic doesn't mean we should reach out all the time or that it always turns out well, of course not.

What it means is that we tend to underestimate the likelihood that it will turn out well, and as a result, we tend to hold ourselves back a little too often. I've found in my life and in my research that testing some of those beliefs that hold us back can reveal places where we're making mistakes about other people and show us how to reach out, empower us to reach out a little bit more often than we might otherwise, to make both our own lives and those we reach out to a little bit better.

You wanna change your life for the better? I suggest keeping some data-driven courage in mind, and when in doubt, reach out

And Finally, Section D, Building It Back

The next ingredient is a knowledge of resources. The best organizers know that individuals have talents and strengths. They know the assets and the resources that are in that neighborhood. They assume that something is there before they get there. And that's something you need to know, young people.

Don't think that there's nothing there. You join a movement As a child, it seemed like my mom knew everybody in our town, but she also knew what was special about them, and she'd assemble people and encourage them to use their skills to address the problems that the community had, things that impacted them collectively.

When she brought people together, there was an expectation that you would bring your best. Everyone had something to give, time or talent, and every gift was equally valued. In 2019, before the pandemic, a good friend of mine, Joe Purnell, a community organizer in Southwest, gave me a call and he said, "Marina, I'd like to have a health fair."

He was really concerned about the health of the people that lived in his community, and he wanted to bring the resources in so that they knew that they could go and get help when they needed it. In two months, Joe was able to accomplish what most people would have taken two years to put together because Joe knew the people in the community.

See, he had worked with everybody. He could call the politicians. Why? Because he had worked with the politician's father back in the day. He could get shirts printed the next day. Why? Because he knew those brothers that print those shirts. He helped to raise them. Those were the folks that he talked to that were on the corner, the folks that he encouraged, and so when Joe comes knocking, everybody answers.

We had an amazing event that year. There were hundreds of people that came out. There were children and families and neighbors, health providers, politicians, business people, all there at the call from one person Joe knew the power of stone soup. He knew the resources in his community, and when the pandemic struck six months later, he was able to reactivate those same resources.

Nothing is ever wasted, right? Things come back. Those same resources were reactivated to make sure that people were tested, to make sure that people got the vaccine, to make sure people got the healthcare that they needed, all because he understood the power of stone soup The final ingredient is reciprocity.

As children, we were taught to whom much is given, much is required. So the gifts that you have, they're not yours. They're for the betterment of your community. They're to help other people. People knew that they could always count on my mother. They knew that if they called her, she would use her gifts, her abilities, her skills, her talents to help them because she believed that by working together, many hands could make the work light, pennies could become dollars, and their goal would be achieved One of the best things about my mom?

Oh, she was a rascal She, she just had this, um, inner light about her She was fine She practiced something called vicarious joy. Now, I know over the past couple of years we've heard a lot about other kinds of vicarious interaction, but my mom was about sharing the good news. She loved when people came to her and told her good stories that she could carry to someone else to make somebody else's day better.

She was a great storyteller She laughed a lot, and when you left her, you always felt better than when you first came. So what does all this have to do with community organizing, you might ask? When the pandemic struck, I realized how much of her lived in me When we were forced inside and it looked like everything was taken from us, I heard her voice in my head, "Marina, make do with what you have."

My mom was a social constructionist before the term actually came about. She believed that how you saw the problem was the problem, and so make do with what you had was important. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, uh, from Theodore Roosevelt, "Do your best with what you have where you are." So when the pandemic struck, I just went about doing what I had been taught to do my entire life.

See, my mom was a catalyst. She made things happen. Me, I'm a facilitator When something happens, when a problem needs to be solved, I make stone soup simply by calling on the relationships that I have, activating resources, and getting people to work together to achieve a common goal. In community organizing, we call this building coalitions and activating resources.

We leverage what we have. We share what we have to make things better. With relationships, resources, and reciprocity, we can build a movement. So here's what I want you to know. Here's my big brainstorm. You, you can work to end seemingly intractable problems of poverty, hunger Loneliness, vulnerability, violence in your community with nothing but the shirt on your back and the wit of your mind.

It doesn't take anything else. You have everything that you need already to make a difference. We can make our communities safer, cleaner, healthier by banding together and using relational tactics. We can change our environments by stepping back out into the world, joining others, and being willing to share our talents We're wired for this.

Think of the number of teachers who pulled together learning hubs for kids to make sure that they couldn't fall behind during the pandemic. Think of the churches that opened their doors to make sure that people had food and toiletries.

Think of the doctors and nurses that worked all week and then came out on the weekend to test people and make sure that they were vaccinated. Think of the musicians who went out on their stoops and played and sang for their neighbors And thankfully, those yoga and exercise instructors that created online classes so that we could keep our sanity We shopped for our neighbors who couldn't go out for themselves.

We looked after each other, and we did what we needed to do to make sure that we all made it through. We shared our gifts with the world. So what about you? What's your stone? What can you bring to the table? What are your strengths? How can you bring others together to make a difference? Making a difference simply starts with understanding what your gifts are, finding others and asking, "How can I help you?"

With the simple gesture of introducing yourself and starting a conversation, you can begin your own movement. So find that thing in yourself, that strength, that stone, and share it with others

Researchers say Americans are feeling more lonely and disconnected. A survey last year by the American Psychological Association found that about 6 out of 10 adults reported those feelings. In that report, half of adults said they felt isolated, and the other 50% said they felt left out or lack companionship often or some of the time.

To understand how that is manifesting in the Seattle metro area, we went inside a community building event to see how people navigate through loneliness. I'm joining here in the Joiner Jamboree as part of White Center Solidarity. Uh, here to meet our neighbors, learn a bit more about the community that surrounds us, and very excited to see everyone joining in this, uh, big community that we're building.

Where I grew up, it's a little bit hard or kind of frowned upon to go up, knock on someone's door and say, "Hi, I'm your neighbor." It feels like a- you're like a door-to-door salesman or something. But when I came in here, uh, that's one of the first things that I did, actually. I wanted to break this mold and go and talk to my neighbors.

Uh, funnily enough, it kind of saved my life one time. Uh, I had an accident at home, and knowing my neighbors saved me because my neighbor was the one that actually called 911 so they could come in and help me , which was, uh, interesting. If I hadn't done that, it wouldn't have happened. Uh, which is not to say that, "Hey, go talk to your neighbors in case you're almost dying," but it's like this sense of community, this sense of trust.

I am a volunteer at the food bank. We're here to, uh, promote this great service for the community, not just to go and grab some food and resources. I've been doing it for, for a little bit with my son. He's 10 years old, and we've found that, like I said, a really great way to show him how can we support our community and connect with them.

I'm with West Seattle Indivisible, which is an organization that brings neighbors together to build community, to activate civic engagement, and to, um, defend democracy. Now more than ever, it's critical that we come together, we get to know our neighbors, we get out there in the world, we pay attention to what's going on to help each other and support each other so that our neighborhoods can thrive.

I mean, it might sound a little corny, but I think, you know, going out to events like Art Walks, like, you know, exhibits and things, as an artist myself, going there and seeing other people interested and engaging with the work makes me feel less alone, less like there's no one else out there who thinks the same way that I do.

Loneliness, it feels like seclusion. Like you don't have anyone in your corner. You don't have support. It's not a good feeling. So, um, that's one of the reasons why we want to kind of interact with different people and maybe Who are lonely or just don't have the kind of community they're looking for. We found especially coming out of the pandemic that people were really isolated and feeling lonely, and I think that spreads across all ages.

We found that the, the garden setting was a great way for people to come in from all over the area and all different ages, uh, to get to know each other, work on their social skills, honestly, and also get the health benefits of organic, fresh food and gardening. Well, I don't have a partner in life, so there are times when that absence, uh, affects me, and the way around it is to find community, to seek community.

I guess it really all for me starts with core values. It started with just a desire to put something positive back into the world now that my kids are grown and I'm, you know, in the latter stages of life, and I wanted to do so in the most direct way possible.

So what's, what's the night gonna be about? Well, I guess the idea was to how we can make the left fun again, instead of people wagging their fingers and are tutting at you like you've put the recycling in the wrong bin. You know, there's lots of ideas that of joy can be an act of resistance in itself. You know, I'm not an expert in any of this.

I'm just someone who's curious about how we might live a bit differently. Because as the world becomes more and more uncertain politically, environmentally, economically, I think it might be useful to think about some of the tools people have experimented with for living together differently. And I guess I, uh, when I was younger, came across anarchist philosophy.

Anarchism has got a bit of a bad rap. People think it means, like, chaos and bomb throwers. Um, I don't know if you've ever met me, but, um, I'm kind of a little bit of a wimp. I recently lost to my 65-year-old mother in an arm wrestle, although she was definitely cheating. But anarchism actually, what the actual translation of it from the Greek means without rulers, and at its core it's just simply a, a, a voluntary...

It's about voluntary cooperation and free agreements between people, recognizing that you don't need a boss to tell you how to be in society. You know, and I, I think it's a hopeful philosophy of, you know, joining up with your neighbors and, and community. Anarchism really is, is about our relationship to power, and it places the burden of proof on those who have power to justify that power And I think seeks to aim at a more diffused, uh, decentralized sharing of power.

You know, from my experience, I guess, of being in the left, um, you know, I've been in meetings, especially when I was involved in some s- some of the climate, um, movement, you know, some of the activism around that. And, you know, many great ideas, but sometimes it does feel like you're stuck in a hostage situation in, in a WhatsApp group that's quickly spinning out of control.

You know, I'll give you an example of one meeting we had. There was a guy, lovely guy, he used to come there. He used to close his eyes whenever he would speak, and he would go in for a long time. And any meeting you had, he'd say, "Well, you know, if we tell two people about this, they'll tell four people. And if there are four people, we'll tell eight people, and then eight people will tell 16 people."

And we'd be like, "Yeah, I know, but, um, so what kind of action are we gonna do really? You know, there's a climate catastrophe happening." He's like, "Yeah, if we told four hundred and fifty people, then they would tell Carrie the two." Another guy that was in the meetings was always, uh, very adamant that we should, uh, go out and do outreach with the public.

Um, and as an act of service offer to wash their feet. Uh, Jesus did that, he said. Turns out the guy I think had a foot fetish because every action he proposed was, "Well, w- w- w- w- we'll just wash your feet." But capitalism now is killing us. You know, workers produce more but earn less. There are enough resources on the planet, it's just that those resources are not equally distributed.

But why does the left itself sometimes maybe feel a bit miserable? I mean, we're faced with quite a bleak picture. We've got, you know, as I discussed in episode two, an insurmountable crisis. There is a sort of doom culture. The prevailing narrative at the moment is despair. Young people feel nihilistic and hopeless.

The climate is, you know... We don't even wanna think about it anymore And people are burnt out. You know, and on the left, in my own experience of, uh, being active, there's endless meetings, and not a lot gets done sometimes. And lots of activism in the end just becomes admin work. You're just on a WhatsApp group just trying to figure out which splinter WhatsApp group has the link to the Signal group, which tells you to join another WhatsApp group.

Even when you are in groups, unless you're able to make formal agreements in the group, you know, informal militants may arise. The ones who have the most power and forming the group are the ones with the most free time, the ones with the loudest voice. In, in one case I was in, it was the one who, uh, just was spending a year not wearing shoes, so they were the most radical, so we had to do what they said.

They don't wear shoes. They're pretty radical. But when does activism feel like fun? I think a lot of the time. You know, I don't know if you've been to many protests, but they're like festivals, you know, just without the five-day-old toilets. But I think the problem is we start treating politics like a second job.

You know, like, we've got meetings, admin, group chat. Um, but it's the moments that really stay with me, and I think are the social ones, you know, those moments of solidarity because life is better when we aren't isolated. That's the whole point of this night we wanna start, is to celebrate joy and connection with each other.

You know, not purity, not, um, you know... I bought a plastic bottle the other day 'cause I needed to. I felt guilty the whole day, and then you buy a coffee to cope with the guilt in another plastic cup. But, you know, we're in the real world. We're people. These are systemic issues that we need to tackle

You know, I don't... It's not gonna be about, this night isn't gonna be about, you know, everyone turning up and we have to study. There's no entrance exam. There's no tattoo requirement. You don't need to get a Friedrich Engels riding on an eagle tattooed across your back. But there are left ideas that you might not be aware of that are fun and nice.

Sometimes you have been doing something for a long time, and then you realize, "Oh, that's what I've been doing." Now, for me, a key discovery was about the work I was doing as an organizer and as an educator about leadership.

And it took me a while to wake up and said, "Oh, you know what I've been doing? I've been doing Hillel's three questions. If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I'm for myself alone, what am I? If not now, when?" The relationship between self and other and action. Now, I'd been doing it for a long time before I realized, "Oh, that's really what I've been up to here," and it becomes very clarifying.

Now, having done a lot of work in that domain, about three years ago, a colleague and I, who's a philosopher, who's also a gamer, we're having lunch and complaining about the state of dehumanization. So we said, "Okay, why don't we, why don't, what if we did a class called Being Human?" "Well, that sounds cool." "All right."

So that's what we did, and at first we did a co-curricular. We had 20 students. Then we did it for credit, and we had 40, and this year we had 90. And what we realized was we tapped into something really fundamental. And for me, it's tapping into, in many ways, what's been als- deeper underneath the work I've been doing my whole life, which is about what it is to What it is to value ourselves and others as human beings.

And in a sense, all this work around organizing and public narrative, it's all about... Let me put it this way. My mother was a teacher, but she called herself an educator because it comes from the Latin educere, which means to draw out, not to put in. And so it meant that it was much, um, for me, it's always been much more about develop- it's been a developmental way of working with people because it's not, "Oh, well, here's a vacuum I need to fill."

It's much more, "Here's a person with potential capability, and so how do I facilitate their growth and development?" And so that's been, that was central to my organizing work when I learned in the South, central to, to my teaching. And so then I realized, oh, it's really about being human. It's really about the, the value, the re- and that being human is not a solo operation.

It's in relationship with others, like Hillel. In other words, to be human is to also be in relationship, and it is to grow and to learn and to connect. And I don't know, it w- it's been a cool discovery. And so then we began, this is all in real time, but then we began, uh, cr- crafting how are we gonna do this?

So a big question. Yeah. So yeah. So we came up with an approach that We teach this in a, it's 10 days over two week. It's a J-term class. In other words, in January, it's four hours a day for 10 days.

Okay.

But what we came up with was a way to, first of all, first of all, just enable people to see each other.

The first class is each student shares their name, what they do, where they call home, what their parents did or do, uh, an experience that motivated them to come to this class, and what they understand human to be. Wow. And so we had 90 voices. So it was like 90 seconds per person. But anyth- it's the opposite of boring.

It just became fascinating. Wow. And it got the highest rating of any class because they were experiencing being seen. Yes. Yes. You do not-- You don't experience that here. And being seen and allowing others to allow you to see them, whoa, wait a second here. This is something different. And so that was just our first day, was that.

And then we go into a period we call the human animal, and this is about our development as, as physical, biological, but it winds up being about consciousness and about coming to consciousness. And that consciousness is not, it's not the result of increasing Intellect. It's a result of life.

Mm.

In other words, that consciousness is a, an evolution, evolutionary development that's associated with being a, a living being in the world, which is full of uncertainty, full of un- unpredictability, but which...

And so, but this awareness of self, the awareness of other, and all that, it's important to understand how we got here. And, uh, Antonio Damasio does terrific work on this. His newest book on feeling, it's being, feeling and knowing. How we move from amoebas to us, sensing creatures to feeling creatures, to knowing creatures.

And that is important because in a place like this, there's no feeling and sensing. What there is just knowing, and that's such a reductionist idea of what the real world is. Yeah. It, it's a little bit like substituting a thermometer for heat, confusing a thermometer with heat. But we have this conceptual stuff.

Gee, that's the real thing. No, that's... What's real is heat. And we're arguing then about these abstractions that essentially have no meaning because they're simply abstractions. No real meaning. So it brings you back to the significance of lived experience, experience with one another. We have a game that Chris suggests.

It's called the mind game. Our students, first of all, they're organized in what we call learning teams. Okay. We design these teams for maximum diversity, and their purpose is to facilitate each other's learning. They're not there to be the great star. They're there to facilitate each other's learning.

Turns out to be a very... Then all the learning is relational, and then people become present, not as each other's judges, but as each other's teachers. So it, it creates a very different kind of experience, and a lot of it is experiential. Everybody gets packed cards, get a card face down, look and see what your card is.

Now, the job of your team, five or six people, is to figure out how to display the cards in sequence from low to high But you cannot speak and you cannot gesture. Interesting. Yeah. At first everybody fails. But, but then they start learning, and they start learning-- They start paying attention to the presence of each other in ways that we just normally don't focus on or don't do, but are there, and they learn.

They start to do this. In Japan, they have an expression, learning to read a person's air. And what results is they're paying attention to each other in ways they never would otherwise.

Yes.

And as a team, and not just as individuals. They come out... The bonding that occurs through this half hour is really powerful 'cause they're really paying attention to each other, and not just with the head, with the heart, with the body, with the feelings.

And so the human animal part is about that development, how we go from being amoebas to being conscious beings

There's another book we use called The Extinction of Experience. It's arguing that when two people are present to one another, there's all kinds of experience going. It, it's experiential. Now, once you reduce it to a phone call, now it's all depends on sound. But sound can express emotion. Then reduce it to a piece of text.

All of a sudden, it's not experience at all. Yeah. It's information about experience, but that is radically different from experience. That's the thermometer versus heat. And so it's trying to reclaim what it is to be present to one another- Yeah ... and what presence means. And a- again, it's another way to try to put this digital universe that we're operating in, to appreciate how dehumanizing it can be.

Yes.

Often is. And then we wonder about loneliness, and then we wonder about, uh, come on. That's what we're... Our market system creates that. Yes. Our politics unfortunately create it the way it's done. And so it's come back to what you were saying earlier before about how do we build community with one another in ways that are real?

Yes.

And, and how do we construct s- how do we create structures that facilitate rather than counter?

Yes.

It's not enough to have virtuous people. We have to have virtuous institutions.

Yes.

And we've eviscerated our political commonality here, right? It's just, it's all advertising. It's all marketing. We're the only liberal democracy that has done that.

We've created this electoral industrial complex that is a result of a Supreme Court decision in 1976, Buckley v. Valeo, which said that money is speech And the guy, I studied with a guy named Sid Verba, who's an expert on, uh, electoral stuff. He was-- He said, "Liberal democracy is an experiment to see if equality of voice can balance inequality of wealth, equality of resource."

And when you make voice dependent on wealth as well-

Yes ...

you undermine the whole project.

Yep.

And that's what's been going on since the '70s. You create this infinite demand, then you create an industry to feed that demand, and then guess what? It goes up every year, more, more, 'cause everybody's making money off that, and the politics get more and more removed.

Yeah. Here at the Kennedy School, after the general election, they have a thing where the campaign management for both team- both campaigns come together for a day and a half.

Oh, wow.

So I s- I spent a day and a half in a room with the Trump people and the Harris people, and that was interesting. But one of the things that was so clear was the Harris campaign, they were trying to tell people how they ought to feel.

They were not hearing, listening, seeing how people felt.

Yeah.

It's living in this digital world of abstract polls and all this stuff, and you're not in touch with people. That's where Zohran Mamdani's campaign is so refreshing, because he's-- they so got it right. Such a contrast that I think it's really important for people to appreciate the lessons of that campaign.

It's just a breath of fresh air, this conversation, this course, the... It's almost as if you are a counterpoint to what we are living and experiencing, and it's an opportunity to slow down, again, be present, and just exist with other human beings in a way that I don't know we're being driven toward, right?

You and I were talking a little bit about religion and its role in our... As just a very important piece of humans connecting, humans reflecting, humans recentering into what's important to them. And I think I often wonder, and as I said to you, I don't exactly know what my faith is, but, and of course, that has been abused, w- yes.

However- It's human ... yeah, humans being. Yeah. You've got a massive- That's the other part ... that are not acting well. Yes. That's right. Of attorneys, physicians, just go down the list of humans being. But by and large, you could say on Sundays or Saturdays or whatever day of the week it was or whatever time of day it was, if you were praying, th- there's a moment of pause, reflection, presence, and recentering and reorienting.

And, and as you said so beautifully before we started recording, there's an opportunity to be in community with others. Yeah. And what is that? And so that structure, that system, what is that for us today? I'm reading the book Dopamine Nation, which is an incredible read for listeners if you have not heard of it.

But yes, capitalism run amok, and of course, we've got gambling you can turn to, and pornography you can turn to, and alcohol, and THC, and there's all of these things that in a capitalistic society are being heavily marketed and heavily, heavily placed upon the population. And, and that's our news as well.

It's all about the dopamine and the agitation and the frustration and the anger and the... It's a multi-billion dollar industry keeping us a little bit off kilter.

Oh, boy. Big off. But they make a lot of money. Exactly. They think they're gonna live forever.

It's a, it's a multi-billion dollar industry.

No, it's, no, that's, that's really the case There's a Jewish story about the fact that we are each given a jacket, and in the jacket there are two pockets, and in each pocket there's a note.

And in one pocket, the note says, "For you, the world was created." In the other pocket, the note says, "You are dust and ashes, and to dust you'll return." Now, question: How do you hold those two together? And that humility and transcendence, and that's what faith traditions work at. It's yes, I have a limited existence here.

I have a amazing gift of life. And but it's that connection with both the hu- the genuine humility and a connection with that which is transcendent. And whether we call it God or whether we call it whatever we call it, it's a critical need that we have, and which in the absence of In the absence of faith experiences, people say, "I'm spiritual.

I don't believe in religion, I'm spiritual." It's a yearning for this.

And I think to recenter us on relationships with others, growing, learning, connecting, being seen, right? How do we recenter? How do institutions, how do we as just i- in our communities, I... And truly be present, and I can just... As you told the story of your students telling the story of themselves, just imagine the embodied feelings that people had in that learning experience.

They will-- Or as they are moving around the room and looking at these pieces of art- Yeah ... the, the embodied learning, regardless of your, your perspective on the world, your lived history, your orientation, it had to have been just such a powerful experience. And t- for you to be creating that learning experience and that space for exploration, because I, I think you used the word wonder, right?

Yeah. Yeah. To create a community where wonder exists, I think that's another incredible element of being human. That curiosity and

wonder.

Absolutely.

A- advancement in that way- Yeah, the world is a place of exploration. It's a place of experimentation, of learning. It's a serious place. Yeah. But it's also capable of joy.

Yeah. And I don't know, it's-- 'cause from... When, uh, in teaching organizing and leadership, one of the core dimensions of it is a head, hands, heart approach, that there's concept, but there's feeling, and there's a, a skill.

Yes.

And so we don't believe in models. We teach practices, because models are abstractions that try to put people in boxes.

My mom used to talk about Procrustes, the Greek pir- pirate king. When he'd capture prisoners, he'd bring them back, and he had this plank, and if you were too short for the plank, you got stretched, and if you were too long for the plank, you got chopped That's what we do with models. Yeah. The economics profession for 70 years has been doing that because then we say, "That's reality."

Now, this human lived experience over here, they're... It's anecdotal or whatever, but it's, but it's not. It's trying to force reality into this conceptual box invented through a process of abstraction that does real damage. And so we teach practices much more like Alasdair MacIntyre understands practice.

Yeah.

It's dynamic, it's ongoing, it involves values, it involves concepts, it involves skills, uh, and it's never done. It's just never done. Change is never done

And one of the things I talk about is I don't know if, um, folks in the class, uh, have read anything by Hahrie Han, who's just this, um, pretty amazing political scientist who her, her major question is: What is it that social movement organizations do? When are they successful and how are they successful? And she's written a bunch of books. I think she just won a MacArthur Grant, so she's a genius, a certified genius. And she's got this incredibly simple binary. And you know, we should always be aware, beware of binaries, right? It's a little simplified.

She's like, "Sometimes we're mobilizing people." And mobilizing people is saying, "All right, folks. We know you're on board. You're on our mailing list. You came to an event. You pay dues, like, whatever. Um, and next week we're all taking the streets, or we're having a mutual aid event, or we have to go do a thing.

I don't need to change you. You are already on board. I just gotta call you in to what's next." That is different from organizing. Organizing is going to people who are not on board, and you have to somehow transform them. You have to cajole them. You have to entice them. You have to excite them. Sometimes the language that we use in the labor movement is we have to agitate them.

Like, what is it that you really want, and are you willing to fight for it? Like, will you fight for a better life for you, for your family, for your kids, for your parents? Organizing work is transformative. It's saying that the way that people are in a given moment sometimes is not enough for them to take the kinds of actions that they, that we might need to get the world that we want.

So part of the, the worker-to-worker organizing, the kind of like radical, um, approach that's being used, uh, at the CLP, um, thinks about workers like they just need to be mobilized. That was really the f- the fundamental strategic flaw is that we believe so strongly in the power of the workers that we thought giving them the opportunity to take action was enough.

It was not enough. Giving the activists who have been with us for, for a decade, who are willing to go take the streets or willing to give money, all that they need is opportunities, right? They just need to know so- what's going down this weekend? Like, hell yeah, I'll flyer. Like, what's going on? You talk to a worker who has never engaged in a, um, in a campaign before in their life, who is working class, maybe working poor, who knows what the family situation is like, but in a lot of ways is just trying to get through the day.

What we're asking them to do is not a like, "Hell yeah, let's flyer." What we're asking them to do is, "Hey, do you wanna put your livelihood at risk for something that's gonna be really hard to fight for?" I'm an organizer. I'm not putting my livelihood at risk in this campaign. I'm asking you to do it. That is a really challenging thing to do.

This is why labor organizers, successful labor organizers are brilliant in their strategy, are deeply understanding in how relational it is to talk to people, um, and to get them to connect to their dreams, are able to train people up, and also able to bring people together. And in our-- you know, just in the way that we worked, um, this, uh, very strong commitment to worker leadership, I think, uh, obscured that for us, obscured that it was gon- that it was gonna be much harder than we thought because-- And I know you like long answers, but this one has been pretty long.

Um, but because part of the way that the CLP had been so successful for so long, had never lost a campaign, had won millions of dollars for workers, is because it had never run a campaign like this before. It had done a classic worker center thing, which is saying, "Hey, fired workers, you have lost your job.

Do you wanna come and, like, fight?" Very different context. "Hey, workers who have been treated really poorly. Oh, hey, you've lost a bunch of money 'cause the-- your employer has been stealing your overtime pay or not paying you even minimum wage." So a, a different set of issues where it, it's actually, I don't wanna say it's easier, but it's a really dis- uh, distinctly, um, different way to call people in and take leadership because the stakes are different and the skin in the game is different.

From going to a place like the, um, Fishtown Condiment Company and asking people to get involved in a campaign. It's just a different lift. So, and here I'll, I'll, I'll kick it back to you after this thought. Um, it... I don't think that it's I'm more or less optimistic. I am trying to diagnose why it went wrong in this instance.

Um, and I remain pretty committed as someone who, like, is not just a labor movement nerd, but, like, believes in the labor movement, that, like, we need, we need, like, worker-led unions, right? We, we need workers to ac- actively be involved. Um, but we also need, like, good leadership, and we need good institutions.

We need good structures. We need everything. Uh, but, but a kind of, like, non-worker leader version that has sort of been the dominant framework, n- not everywhere, but definitely in big parts of the American labor movement since the '90s, this kinda hasn't gotten us where we need to go

Agree 100%. I-- Um, th- there's a couple of things just listening to you talk that, that occurred to me. Several years ago, I interviewed, um, Ellen Cassidy, who organized the nine to five movement. And, and one of the things that she talked about was when...

You know, and, you know, this is in the, the 1970s, and we're talking about women office workers who had no experience of being in a union and, and, you know, n- none of that background. Um, that one of the most important things that she had to do was to sort of meet them where they were, right? Like, figure out where they were first without coming to them with a set of, you know, pre-thought out ideas about where they were.

Yeah. I mean, that's the classic, um, organi-- Like, organizers who aren't in the labor movement, I think, usually know this rule, but this is, like, a labor movement rule. You gotta meet people where they're at, and the other one is the eighty/twenty rule. You should be listening eighty percent of the time when you're speaking with a worker.

And the, and the, you know, the best organizers do this. And the organizers at the CLP tried to do this too. Like, there are some... It's not that they didn't know what they were, they were doing or that they were bad organizers. Um, it really just was this, this broader question. But ultimately, you have to meet people where they're at so that you can deeply understand what their needs are and what their capabilities are to then help them transform themselves into people who feel a sense of agency with their colleagues or fellow workers or their community members such that they are enabled to take action.

Um, so let's talk a little bit about that. So g- how do you construct political identities in the world of worker leadership?

Yeah, I mean, this, this is the question of our day, right?

How do, how do we go out and talk to people who are not activated about the politics that we're engaged in and ask them to think differently, see differently, and act differently? And for me, I'm-- When I talk about this, as I'm gonna in a second, this is drawing on, like, my experience in movement spaces, my experience with movement practitioners and strategists, and because of who I am, a lot of social movement theory, because I think it's the cool stuff.

'Cause I think it comes down to me about identity, collective identity. This is getting a little more into the theoretical language, but it's just how my brain works. What an organizer is trying to do is to look at somebody and say, "Okay, Tom, I need you to understand that you are not alone, that you have a shared experience with other people."

So it's not just a you, it's a, it's a we. In this shared experience, there's stuff that you should be pissed off about. I wanna agitate you. I wanna get you mad. I'm gonna bring some emotional, um, uh, framing into this. So we've got a collectivized identity that has been filled with emotional content, and now I have to give you a way to fix it.

I have to actually convince you that there's a path that you can take that you can imagine will deliver the goods that you want. Otherwise, you could be as-- if, if you're super angry and you, like, "Yeah, we, we have experienced this for years, but nothing's gonna, nothing's ever gonna work," then you're not gonna take action.

So, you know, sociologists call this, like, collective action frames, is kinda the classic one. Getting the we together, filling it with some kind of content, building grievances, attributing those grievances to a common enemy, and then laying out a runway for action to be taken that people think will have a, an effect, that will be an effective way to go through it.

So if that's the sort of broad framing, the nuts and bolts, I mean, the, um, the model that I like to use is the... Have you all talked about the A-E-I-O-U model of organizing? Um, I have to write it down 'cause I always forget some of the letters. Um, but the classic organizing conversation begins with A, which is agitate, right?

Like, what are you upset about and what do you wanna get? E, educate. Okay. You are angry. I wanna talk you through how your anger is helpful, and the only way that you're gonna actually get the things that you want, that you feel like you can't have, is together. We're gonna educate you about the power of collective action.

Then I, one of my favorites, inoculate, which sometimes I think we don't do enough in non-labor places. Which is basically saying, "I'm gonna tell you a thing, and then you're gonna go and hear on the news, or your boss is gonna say, or someone who you talk to is gonna be like, 'I don't know about all that.

Aren't unions just, like, stealing your money out of your wallet?'" So I'm gonna tell you beforehand, like, "Hey, now, you might hear that all the union does is take your money. These dues are very small, and here's what they go towards, and ultimately, it's your money and it's your organization." So we agitate, edutate...

Sorry, agitate, educate, inoculate. A-E-I-O. And the only way that we're gonna get this is organizing. We have to come together. We have to come together and take action. And how do we take action? You, baby. In the union. We actually have an organization that exists, that is a vehicle. You do not have to make this stuff up, my man.

Right? Like, we've got playbooks. We've been doing this for over a century. We know things that work better. We know things that work worse. And that is, uh... Having a conversation like this is, um- I don't know, it's like an art form. It's like a craft. You have to be highly social. You have to be very in tuned, um, to people's emotional states.

You have to be very trustworthy. Often you have to be able to connect with a person, uh, demographically, right? Like, they have to see you as somebody who, like, they can think of as, like, my people, right? Whether that's about class, whether that's about race or religion, or even neighborhood. And that kind of...

That translates into all kinds of organizing contexts, um, about trying to help people see the world that could happen and give them a pathway forward.

So as we come to the end, um, let's talk about the conclusion to your book. Uh, and, uh, can you expand a little bit on your three goals for the labor movement?

Yeah. So one of the things we didn't talk about is, um, uh, part of the book details this activist group, um, that I spent time with. Uh, um, and the activist group, um, was focused mainly on food labor and food justice, and they came in like a sledgehammer.

They were ultimately the power that drove the, um, uh, that drove the company to have meetings with us, to put a letter in every single paycheck saying that they were allowed to associate with the CLP and join a union if they want. Like, like, this was all communicated because of the, um, the ability of this activist group to be able to say, "Hey, if you don't kinda act better about this campaign, we're gonna, we're gonna really go public and, like, talk about how we have major problems with how you work."

The reason this activist group was able to do this is because they already existed. And I think one of the things for folks who are labor movement curious or labor movement passionate but are not members of unions, like, "What am I supposed to do?" Right? Maybe I work in a field where unions don't really exist, or I'm kind of like a precariat, or I'm in the service economy or the knowledge economy.

I'm not, like, working in a factory. Um, not that most union workers work in factories, but I'm not in a place where there's, like, high union density, so how am I supposed to participate? And often it feels like I'm outside of this. This group was able to throw down because they had decided we are gonna build an organization that can leverage moral power against bad employers, and we're gonna do it in a lot of ways.

By having community events. They would throw really big conferences. Sometimes they would do, like, academic stuff. They would get involved in, like, um, uh... And this is kind of a, a cool part about the food, um, aspect of this, where there was a lot of, like, fun, exciting things around food, like organic food, farm trips.

So they had a pretty big membership of people who were interested in lots of different ways, and when something went down, they were able to step up really hard. So one of the things I offer in the book is to say we all wanna support labor movements. We all wanna support, um, worker centers. We're all really interested in being allies, and it's often quite passive.

We are waiting to be told what to do. And one of the big lessons from this book is you do not have to wait, and by, actually by not waiting and by being really assertive about this, you could be, you could be the thing that tips the scale in a really important campaign. Because you've already got membership.

You've already got media contacts. You already know how to leverage power in your community and in your neighborhood. So that's, like, big number one. That then, this is my- one of my other points, becomes the vehicle for having more deep relationships with organizations that are trying to be worker centric, to sort of increase the amount of transparency, um, and also to help everybody rework what this notion of worker leadership is.

'Cause it's like, it's really sticky, right? Like, I lay this out, um, really, like, really in the beginning. Like, often people who come from a justice oriented mindset in this, in this era, we say, "Yeah, the people who are really suffering the most, like, I don't wanna tell them what to do. They should be in charge."

Like, how... It's how messed up is it for me to come in and be like, "Well, now, let me tell you, poor worker, what it is you should do with your time" Or I'm, I'm the one who's the, um, uh, the head of operations at this fancy nonprofit, and I make, you know, $85,000 a year while I'm trying to organize workers who make $20,000 a year.

There are real concerns about that But we swing it too far in the direction if we then think that we somehow escape the idea of trying to help people transform, right? It is a, it is a relational mutual project that requires all of us to be on the same page around what it is we're trying to ask so that the asks can be really clear, and so that we can hold our privilege with integrity.

Uh, and there's this brief point in the book with this, um, uh, qualitative study of a union campaign, uh, that Theresa Sharpe does where she's like, "If you want union democracy, you actually need a lot of authority. You need organizers who come in and say, 'This is how you do it right. This is how... You know, if you do it this way, it's not gonna go well.'"

That is telling people what to do, but it is building the democratic capacity of people who have not had the opportunity to do this before to then be able to participate at high levels. And part of what we can do as people who are not staffers in unions or any kind of organization, and are also not the, um, frontline communities that we're talking about, is we can hold that space and ask for it.

We can say that it's important and encourage people to do it And the last point is, like, I don't know, taking the streets is really sexy, you know? You wanna go, and you wanna, like, shake your fist, and you wanna maybe throw a brick. I don't know. You wanna hand out pamphlets. You wanna kinda get in the streets and get dirty and get messy.

And the boring work of policy will make such a bigger impact than any of that in one fell swoop. You increase the minimum wage in a state by a dollar, like, it's tiny, and it is massive. You change policy around how people can unionize or what the rules are, that would be a huge, huge upswing. Um, and we kinda have to bal- you know, we don't have time for everything.

But I think, um, this is, like, a theme that came up in the field where a lot of people were like, "Ugh, boring policy work." Um, and then a bunch of stuff happened in Pennsylvania where it was like, man, all the stuff we were struggling for, it ki- like, it doesn't matter anymore. Like, because the minimum wage increase has blown out of the water all of the wage increases we were asking for, and we didn't, like, do anyth- Everyone needs to work on a...

Like, let me rephrase. All of these endeavors are worth our time. Not everybody can do all of them. But even back to your earlier point about not... You know, maybe not everybody can be an organizer. We need people doing policy, and we probably need the policy people to be more connected to the folks who are doing things on the ground, 'cause those, those conversations can be really generative.

That's going to be it for today.

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The additional sections of the show included clips from;

Democracy At Work

Second Thought

Revolutionary Left Radio

The PBS NewsHour

Your Undivided Attention

The AI Fix

Throughline

How to Survive the End of the World

TEDTalks

Cascade PBS

The Bardo Podcast

Practical Wisdom for Leaders

and In Conversation, An OUP Podcast

Further details are in the show notes.

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