The New Playbook for Resisting Authoritarianism — with Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer

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This week on A Touch More, The Beautiful Game, I am talking with U.S. Women's National Team and Denver Summit Captain Lindsay Heaps about her journey from Denver, Colorado, over to Lyon, France, and now back to Denver, and her hopes for the 2027. As the U.S. Women's National Team captain, I'm also weighing in on the biggest moments and controversies from the World Cup quarterfinals. Check out the latest episode of A Touch More, The Beautiful Game, wherever you get podcasts, and on YouTube. Episode 405. 405 is the area code serving Central Oklahoma. In 2005, Reddit was founded. So, true story, my wife said that if this gets 1,000 upvotes, that she'll try a threesome tonight. Problem? She's out of town. Go, go, go! Welcome to the 405th episode of the Prop G Pod. What's happening? In today's episode, we speak with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Julia Englund and former White House senior advisor Ami Fields Meyer. We discuss their new book on courage, about how the everyday person can build courage and resist authoritarianism. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Julia Englund and Ami Fields Meyer. All right, let's bust right into it. Julia and Ami, you just put out your new book on courage, a manual for how to be a dissident in an age of fear, built on interviews with more than 100 dissidents across five continents. The book opens with this stat. Nearly three out of four people on Earth now live under authoritarianism, the highest share since the 70s. You spent two years asking the people who fought back what they learned. Why this book and why now? I think that's kind of a capped and obvious question. But say more about what the inspiration was for writing this book. After the election in 2024, I woke up the next morning and I really felt like I had maybe spent too much of my career really thinking about the harms inflicted by the industry we call big tech. And that maybe I needed to think a little bit more about what was going to happen when all that surveillance and data processing power was in the hands of a wannabe authoritarian. And so, I mean, as you know, Scott, I've covered, you know, big tech for decades and I wrote a book 10 years ago about, you know, the privacy and surveillance issues. And I basically felt like my threat model was wrong. And so I thought, how do you learn about what the authoritarian threat model looks like? And Ami was at that time doing his fellowship at Harvard's Ash Center for Democracy, which is literally where dissidents go when they're exiled. So I called him up and I was like, can we talk to some of these people about like what is going on and what we need to prepare for? I had worked on tech at the White House, and as Trumpism reared its head again, we saw, even from within government at that point, the forces of the far right, the global far right, and the forces of tech beginning to converge. And obviously, that made itself more and more clear. The other thing I'll just say, Scott, is that part of the reason we write this book right now is perhaps it's a Captain Obvious question, but I think actually even more authoritarianism doesn't look like what it used to look like. It's not your grandmother's authoritarianism. It doesn't ride into town on the back of a coup in the way that it used to in the way that so many of us have in our imagination. This is the slow hollowing out of institutions. It happens gradually. And so I actually think even if to folks like us, it was clear that there was a political crisis, it wasn't clear exactly what to do about it because the threat looks different now. And so part of what we needed to figure out is when everything looks relatively normal, when elections keep happening, when the courts continue to function, even if they're skewed, when the media continues to function, even if it begins to be tilted, how do you actually fight back? And that's what we were trying to figure out from these new dissidents. So the theme here, and it seems, I don't want to say obvious, but obvious where I wasn't thinking about it, is that, I mean, tech, it's just so ironic or so disappointing. The initial promise of social media was it would connect us. As it ends up, it mostly just depresses the shit out of people and makes them feel more lonely. And there was remember all these stories about the dissident human rights activists in the Gulf who thank God because of Facebook and Twitter could express their views and show what's going on. But the reality is the countervailing balance there or tell me if I'm wrong is much more powerful and worse. And that is these authoritarians are using social media, quite frankly, to develop, you know, greater oppression. Where do I have that wrong? Yeah, I mean, I think I still, sadly, want to be a little bit optimistic about social media, because as a journalist, I know that my profession was not covering a lot of groups, giving voice to a lot of groups that then found a voice when everyone in the world got a broadcasting platform. So I'm not willing to throw that away. But it is also, as you say, an incredible metric vector for propaganda and surveillance, right? Two things that authoritarians love. And so it's a really difficult situation. And then when you add to that the fact that for, I think there's an argument people make that I think is somewhat compelling, which is that for the past 20 years, we kind of fell victim to this idea of like, you know, hashtag activism where we could sit on our couches and didn't have to do the hard work of actually meeting with people together in real life, in real spaces and figure out ways to work together in the messy, complicated way that movement activism is. requires. My thesis is the ones most outraged by Trump are the ones that actually vote or the same people that decide not to vote. That it creates a level of, I don't know, like you said, a belief that you're actually doing something and that a lot of this, a lot of the online outrage is just, quite frankly, it's just empty calories. I want to talk a little bit about the word. I know you talked to quote-unquote dissidents, and I worry that that word has lost a lot of meaning. Um, tell us what you mean by the word dissident and who you were interviewing and what are the, you know, one or two most interesting findings you weren't expecting when you spoke to these people. It's a good question. And I will say that almost none of the people that we interviewed were comfortable being called dissidents. And actually most of the people we interviewed were not comfortable being called courageous. That was, both of those things were sort of universal across the board. We talked to people in, uh, across over a hundred people on five continents. And so we spoke to I'll give you a couple of sort of illustrative examples. We spoke to a mom in Venezuela who had been part of the Maduro and Chavez sort of political apparatus. But after the economic crisis started in the 2015, 26 and 2017, began to see the light, so to speak, and and at great personal risk to herself. This is a look, you know, a sort of low income working class person abandoned the movement despite real acute threats. So we talked about her. We talked about journalists in Hungary who, again, are not under who are not under violent threat, but who are under a sort of a slow rolling defunding and enormous political pressure to not cover certain things. Independent media is under attack in Hungary. It was for a long time under attack in Hungary in a similar way that is now. And then we talked to a range of people across the United States, undocumented folks who are dealing with ICE threats, but also folks inside the U.S. government, civil servants who have been asked to do things at risk of losing their jobs or their livelihoods by the Trump administration. So you get something really important, Scott, which is that this is not what Americans think of when they hear dissident. When Americans hear the word dissident, they think of the tank man in Tiananmen Square. They think of Navalny. They think of Mandela. And part of what we're describing here is a set of tools. Authoritarianism just makes you feel more and more constricted. And so what's important is to be able to have tools to take risk when it feels like you're really constricted. So what people have in common across what we're profiling is different kinds of risk, but people who in their context are finding ways to wedge something open, whether the threat is sort of acute, like I might be put in prison or I might lose my community or my status. I'll say one thing as a as a Scott Galloway listener, a longtime Scott Galloway listener. I've heard you talk many, many times about folks who you hear from inside tech companies or inside law firms who call you or text you and say things like, you know, I hate myself. I think those are your words. And and I've heard you say, well, I don't have a lot of sympathy for you because, you know, you're going to end up going on Bill Maher after this. And I think by that point, it's sort of too late. So what we're trying to get at in the book, and I'll turn to Julia for some of maybe some of the top line takeaways, but we're really talking to those people. I mean, we're talking – we take seriously in this book that there's a reason that people feel something and have what we call a moral collision and don't act on it. Like there are evolutionary reasons. We feel it feels dangerous even if it's not physically dangerous. So we're talking to those folks. We're talking to folks who might be listening to this podcast who object to what their company is doing sort of in alignment with the regime, who object to what they're doing inside an institution, but want to find a way to do something about it. And Julia, maybe you could say a couple of words on what some of the tools are. Yeah, I think, you know, I was really excited to find out. I wanted to find out about code words and spycraft. I was hoping for some real James Bond drama. And we did get a little bit of it. We put some of that in the book. But the reality is that fighting against authoritarianism is not sort of the masses in the streets story that you get from the movies. That is what the movement scholars call that. Basically, that's the victory lap. That's after you've already won, you storm the streets and you win. And that's the thing that, you know, you see the dictator fleeing town, etc. But all the work that goes into doing before that can be actually kind of like boring, right? So, for instance, the people inside of law firms who pressured their bosses to not comply, right, they forced their institutions to be better, right? We tell a story in the book of a Rutgers chemistry professor who saw what was happening with Columbia being coerced by the administration. And he was like, I don't want this to happen to my university. So he was at a chemistry conference. He, like, went to chat to me and he was like, how can I make a NATO for universities? and he basically came up with this thing, the Mutual Aid Defense Compact for universities. He brought it back to his university senate that he was a part of. As you know, as a person in a university, university senates are delightful and totally meaningless. And so they had a big vote. It passed and all these other Big Ten universities passed it. And none of the presidents ever of those universities ever said, like, I'm definitely going with this. We actually have a NATO Mutual Defense Compact. But that movement, which became a national movement, actually stiffened the spine, allowed those universities to understand not only were they facing pressure from above, but they're also facing pressure from below from their staff. And so part of the job of fighting authoritarianism is making the institutions you're already part of act in a moral way to throw sands in the gears of the authoritarian regime, because the regime cannot operate without compliance. They need everyone to go along. They don't actually have the tanks to make every single person do every single thing that they need done, right? So wherever you are in your life, you have some part that you can help do, which might just involve signing a petition or writing a sternly worded email. And so that we wanted to show people a buffet menu of options. So the book is really a whole bunch of different stories of people doing all sorts of different things so that people could understand there's lots of ways into this movement. So first off, courage is the right term because I can't imagine the dissidents at Harvard speaking to you. Quite frankly, I don't think that's courage. They're at a fairly safe place, I think, right now. What's courage? And I want to be, as Julia will know, my podcasts are basically an excuse just to talk about me. But if I was in Russia or Hungary or Turkey, I don't think I'd be one of those courageous people that would speak out. I just don't think. And I think 99 percent of rational people who think about their family and their personal safety and look at the risks, authoritarians are smart. I think we have one right now. I think I think he has created an incentive system where you would at a minimum be politically exiled or shamed or perhaps have the DOJ show up at your house unannounced and haul you out of bed at four in the morning. And the flip side is you go along, get along with my corruption. I'll make you rich. There's a second part of the coin or another side of the coin of authoritarianism. And I think those people who speak out and take those types of risks, I think the framers were like this. The last sentence, I think, of the Declaration of Independence was they basically agreed to they were risking their safety, their fortune, their reputations, but they were all in it together. That was real courage. The people you speak to who have demonstrated that courage while on the ground in these authoritarian societies, what would you say is the common attribute across the types of people who are willing to take that kind of risk? Is it a personality type? Is it the way they're raised? Is it a patriotism? Is it, quite frankly, they're a bit sociopathic and they just don't think about the risk? It's like, what do these people give me the profile of someone who is willing to take these kinds of risks? I'll let you go first, Ami. Yeah, this is the core question. I'm not sure that I would either if I were in one of these societies. And I think the reason it's important to give people tools now is because we're still at the beginning here. I would say there are a couple of threads in common. One is that everybody feels fear, Scott. I mean, all the people who we profile, it was really important to us to not profile people who we thought were preternaturally courageous. Like we didn't do dissidents you've heard of for the most part because anyone, any of us have heard of for the most part because we wanted to ask this question. That would have been an interesting book, but it probably wouldn't have been as helpful. So we want to do something that was more helpful that we could relate to more. So here are some of the things. One, everyone was really clear on their values. And I know that sounds almost Pollyanna-ish or cliche, but people were very clear on their values, very clear on what they wanted the world to look like, and that there was a divergence in what they wanted the world to look like. If you don't have a sense of who you are, you're not going to do anything like this. It's just not going to happen. That one Two is it wasn the fear you describing There were actually two different kinds of fears that every single dissident we spoke to from Venezuela to Hungary to the United States weighed against each other The first fear was sort of the framers fear that you just described, that I will lose my status, I will lose my wealth, I will lose my safety, something immediate. The second fear that folks weighed that against was the fear that I'm going to be judged in the eyes of history or the eyes of a higher power or the eyes of my children or that I'm going to live a life that feels from now until the end inconsistent with my values. And the people who we profiled didn't, it's not that they didn't feel the first fear, it's that they felt both and they were motivated by the second. They allowed themselves to be motivated by the second and not the first. The other thing I'll say is the other problem with the word dissident is that it suggests a solitary figure and not none of the people that we described from like inside government to people who were like engaged in more guerrilla organizing activity. Nobody did it alone. Not a single person did it alone. Everyone found a group of generally between like eight and 12 other people who who shared their sort of, you know, like if you do a survey, you start to notice patterns. And that was one of the patterns that we found. And so people gathered regularly. And I'll just give one example. The Soviet dissident movement that was, you know, with the aid of geopolitical forces, successful ultimately in helping to bring down that empire, never grew to beyond about a thousand active people at one time. It was a very small groups of people, but they gathered regularly. And when you when you read their accounts of what what it was that they were gathering about, some of it was like strategic. You know, what do we do next? What do we write next? How do we smuggle our writings out? But a lot of it was just psychological. Like, how do I make sure that I know I'm not crazy here to embolden myself to continue my activism? So I would say people were clear on their values. People weighed two fears against each other and were motivated by the second. and people gathered in community. And I would say those were three fundamental things. Julia, any additional thoughts to what Ami said? Yeah, I want to challenge your declaration that you would be cowardly in these situations. You just led a boycott movement in the United States that was, I think, pretty courageous and pretty successful. So I want to just say that I'm not sure what motivated you there, but I suspect that you did weigh the fears and still felt like it was better to stand with your values. And that's the exact calculation that everyone we talked to describes. You're being generous. I would argue that's bold, but no one's going to stick me in jail for asking people to unsubscribe from ChatGPT, whereas I think a lot of the people you probably interviewed risk life and limb. Not yet. Here's the thing. It's true that right now these are somewhat lower stakes, but that is actually the important thing. It's really important to stop the train of authoritarianism as it's rolling down the tracks. Like, we do not have a successful authoritarian regime yet in this country. We just have a wannabe one. And the more resistance we put up now, the more likely it is that we prevent this from happening, right? And so by acting early, you're taking a brave step to throw sand in the gears of something that would otherwise be inevitable. I agree. The stakes weren't quite as high for you personally, but it does mean you're on the list for the future. By the way, so are we. So like, we'll all be together in the gulag. Well, let me, can I actually, can I add one other thing on this, which is on just on, I think it's actually helpful probably to map resistant unsubscribe onto what we heard, like maybe even specifically. I mean, certainly Scott, I'm interested in what motivated you and how you weighed these things. But, but even the, I mean, I just, we just talked about some of the internal stuff that people go through in order to decide to dissent, but also like the strict, the, the tools that we describe in this book, we describe using the words of an academic who uses this term as the tools of collective stubbornness. Like Americans are used to a set of a set of political tools. It's elections, it's litigation, it's calling your senator, it's like exercising choice. And what it takes in these places is sort of a political reeducation. Like we have to keep doing all that stuff as long as they still work. But we also have to engage in the tools of what the scholar Maria Stephan calls collective stubbornness, which is just throwing sand in the gears wherever you have a place to do that. And so like you modeled that you have modeled that I think really well, just identifying where am I? What's my particular context? What's my sand? And that's the prompt for everyone else, wherever they might be sitting, like what's the pressure point and how do we clog it up? Yeah, there's, there's something about, I just dropped off my, my son at orientation at college. So I have all these emotions and I can't stop vomiting advice sad I'm thinking he's only going to listen to me for another 30 minutes. But in general, I don't want to hear your take on this. I think that our society has become way too risk-aggressive online, saying things to strangers and making very definitive, angry, coarse statements, and we're cowards offline. And that in terms of the energy we devote, voting with our time, our treasure, our talent at work, what we say to people to their face in person, our willingness to paint a sign and go to a no king's protest, our willingness to say things that our progressive colleagues might not like because we think it's true. I find there's way too much risk being taken online and a total cowardice and lack of risk taking offline. Julie, what are your thoughts about that. I mean, I think you're right, but have you met the young people? Because they are saying all this stuff to each other's faces. Yeah, I do. I think that there's a culture among young people where they have, you know, one of the things that's really interesting about the moment in the United States is that when you go to No Kings and some of this stuff, there's a lot of older people, because the reality is that the thing that we're fighting for, democracy, is something that was already hollowed out for a lot of the young people. And so they don't really see it the same way that I think the older people do as something to be saved. And I think there's a real narrative struggle we have to have about what is the thing that we're trying to sell people on, because actually, No Kings has been really successful in the sense of the numbers are quite large, although they are disparate and across different locales. But I think that there is still work to be done on what is the thing that unites, like my daughter is much more motivated by the issues in Palestine than in the United States, right? And I think that's true with a lot of different kinds of issues with young people is that we have to find a way to sell this story, because the reality is fighting authoritarianism is actually a narrative war. The reason that the authoritarian spend all their time trying to capture the media, which is item one, two, and three on their agenda, is because the way you get people to comply is you create an information landscape that just is a web of lies, but everyone believes it. And that's actually the way you keep people in line. You tell people that, oh, those protesters, they're just criminals, right? They were trying to kill people. That was just a law enforcement exercise. And we're doing all these things, especially these days when authoritarianism can look like democracy. They're like, oh, it's just weird rule changes. You don't need to worry about that stuff. Everything's still going just fine. And so the narrative fight is actually the way that you win, right? The Soviet dissidents, actually, there were very few of them, but they were great writers and artists. And so they actually were winning the narrative war because they wrote so poetically about what it was like to live inside this totalitarian regime. And it actually moved people around the world to support their cause. And so I think that we are in the beginnings of like building that new narrative. And I don't think it's fully emerged yet here in the U.S. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Z Biotics. 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But now we're going to be able to show you All sorts of things we never could before. You really have no choice but to just let your mind go wild. Unexplainable is going to have new video episodes every Monday on Netflix, with new audio episodes still dropping every Monday and Wednesday. Unexplainable. A podcast from Vox, now on Netflix. So I think when we talk about authoritarianism, we have an easy time bridging it to the current administration, or at least I have it. I see a lot of echoes and similar flavors represented by the Trump administration. I feel like he's literally taken a page out of sort of the authoritarian handbook. But at the same time, just because we like to be equal opportunity offenders, I think authoritarianism can easily come from the left. And that is I oftentimes think as a progressive that where I get the most pushback is when I say something that doesn't comport with the narrative from the progressive orthodoxy and you're treated like an apostate. And I think that's how you normalize saying this is offensive. And that's what a lot of the most, the darkest periods in history, it basically the government decided, convinced people that these people are being offensive when they have a viewpoint outside of the accepted orthodoxy, whether it comes from the far right or the far left. And I worry we don't give enough time or attention or acknowledge that, I don't know what you want to call it, political correctness, a certain type. I feel it a lot on campus that there's an orthodoxy among the faculty and you're an apostate if you veer from that orthodoxy. But that can be dangerous, too. And that is a form or a path to authoritarianism. Ami, can you address that? And then I want to get Julia Sox. First of all, of course, authoritarianism can come from the left. And even terms like left and right are, I think, broadly beginning to lose some of their salience. But Venezuela is authoritarianism from the left, for example. I mean, it's a worker revolution turned authoritarian state. And that's true in all kinds of places. So, of course, that's right. One thing that we try to address, and we do it later in the book because we really want to spend time with the individual and the individual-finding community at the beginning, but we spend really the last quarter of the book on the question of coalitions. And no country facing authoritarianism, no society facing authoritarianism gets out of it. No democracy repairs its democracy without a massive popular front, a big tent, sort of non-traditional strange bedfellows coalition. We know this from Brazil recently. We know this from Poland. And now we know this from Hungary, actually, you know, fairly recently. You saw everyone from the sort of MAGA equivalents in the countryside in Hungary to the sort of purple haired university students all voting for the same Liz Cheney type figure, which I think is something that Americans who have been sell, even progressive Americans who have been celebrating what's happened in a place like Hungary, have not fully wrapped their head around yet. That's called in political science, that term is called a negative coalition where you basically try to figure out what is the bare minimum that we can agree on and then move on from it. And it doesn't allow for purity politics. You know, that's just, there is no place for that in the narrow work of what one scholar we talked to Erica Chenoweth calls getting the Jeep out of the mud. It doesn't matter what brought you to the Jeep. It doesn't matter why you're at the Jeep. We all have one task. It's to get this Jeep out of the mud. And then we can decide later where exactly it's going to drive, but we just have to get it out. So I think, Scott, I worry about this version of what you're talking about as well. I think that there are lots of folks in our country and even, I would say, broadly construed on the American left and center left who understand that we're going to need to sit with people who we disagree with. But when the rubber meets the road, I'm not quite sure we're ready to do that. Julia? Yeah, I mean, Ami just wrote a big piece for the Bulwark on this exact issue, which is basically you can't shame people into joining your movement. Like you have to offer them something positive to be a part of. And I think what we are looking at, I mean, when the thing about authoritarianism and the thing that sold the selling message in Hungary I think is the one that often works which is anti right The reality is authoritarianism is about stealing from you It about stealing your rights and your money right And enriching yourself as the authoritarian and the friends of the authoritarian And one of the sort of things that really was able to tip the scales there was that the few last remaining independent media outlets, there were very few of them. They were under constant pressure. They were defunded. They were just hanging in there. But one of them, Direct 36, a YouTube channel, did this sort of seminal series on how Orban and his children had enriched themselves and showed their yachts and their boats and their planes and their mansions and all the rest of it. And that managed to break through to a lot of people who hadn't really known that that was what was happening, right? People forget that Navalny was leading an anti-corruption nonprofit, right? Like that is, the story is always about corruption. Nepal and the students who overthrew that government, it was all about the corruption and the wealth that they were stealing from us. And so I think one thing that is going to have to happen is we have to unite around that message. And right now, the corruption of the current regime in the United States is bold-faced, right? And yet it hasn't, I think, sunk into people that that's their money that's being taken from them. And I think there's more work to be done narratively on that issue. Something, I'll start with you, Julia, because I think you may have a different view on this than me. I worry that our fetishization of free speech and anonymity has essentially allowed it to become weaponized by authoritarians. And that is, I see the importance of the Gulf, you know, the human rights activists in the Gulf needing an anonymous account. At the same time, I spent a lot of time looking at the comments in social media. I mean, social media is now shaping most people's worldview mostly. And what I find is that if you look at the really vile comments or the comments that are most divisive, most polarizing, that are responsible for the greatest coercing of our discourse, that do the most damage to undermining our institutions, that it's anonymous accounts. And that anonymity, whether it's state-sponsored officials who wear masks or letting bots run unfettered with no consequence or being able to call child services and lodge an anonymous complaint that results in child services showing up at a former cabinet member's house with what I believe were just totally non-credible claims, that this anonymity or this fidelity to anonymity, which I understand has gone way too far and has been weaponized by bad actors to create more division in society, then we have this absolutism around it that I believe authoritarians have weaponized. Julia, your thoughts? Well, you predicted correctly, Scott. I do not agree. I think that, I mean, I think you're, of course, you're right to observe this phenomenon. But the problem is that the solution of requiring identity papers, essentially, to post online, which several states have already started to do, is absolutely the favorite tool of authoritarians, right? And just to be very, very clear, we are in a nation that was judged a democracy, has lost its status this year as a liberal democracy, according to the VDEM Institute, which tracks all the metrics that you would want to assess democracies by. So we are on an authoritarian backslide, right? And so do we want to provide the government with identity papers that allow them to identify every person who dissents? I think the answer is no. And so I think it's a dangerous game. I get what you're saying, that there's like all sorts of foment that happens. But, you know, there was in the American Revolution, a lot of anonymous pamphlets that were really inflammatory were strewn around the streets by men on horseback, right? Like this is part of the American tradition. And so I think that focusing on quashing some people who hurt your feelings, which is what a lot of people are like really just desperate to do these days, is missing the bigger point. That we need to have the freedom to express our views. It is absolutely the fundamental thing that we founded this country for. So I want to just follow up on it. And I mostly agree with what you said. I was just in Amsterdam. and Amsterdam was a kill zone for Jews in World War II. 70% of Jews pulled from their homes, murdered, versus 40% in Poland, I think a third in France. And it wasn't because the Netherlands was especially more or less anti-Semitic. It was because their local government had done a great job of keeping records and was able to attach identities to addresses and religious backgrounds. So quite frankly, and there were no escape routes. It was just the worst of all moons lining up. So when the Nazis got control of the local government there, they had a very easy time identifying people and rounding them up. So I agree that identity and unmasking has huge risks. The question I would have is, is there a middle ground where using technology, we can identify when anonymous accounts aren't there to try and hide their anonymity for the social good. They're there just, quite frankly, to wreak havoc and reject that anonymous account. I think, I mean, do you agree with this? I find that big tech hides behind the very important points you made around anonymity when they could easily use technology to go, OK, this quote unquote anonymous account is clearly here saying things contrary to one another just to start fights. that appears this account is not really, we can't find a theme of something you believe in other than just creating dissent and agita and controversy. And so we're going to boot this account offline. I'm not suggesting that everybody is, you know, the moment you say something, okay, you're on a list now and we know your address and who you are. But it feels like with just some basic technology, we could identify quote unquote anonymous accounts that aren't anonymous for the right reasons and that these firms have these technologies but hide behind the power of anonymity and the important things you highlight such that they can create more traffic and more Nissan ads. Julia? I mean, I think you're obviously the tech exists to do this, but here's the underlying assumption and what you're talking about that I think I want to question, which is why is it that we have just as an underlying assumption of this discussion, we're like, okay with the idea that there's basically four companies who determine what all speech can be around the world, right? So my feeling is let's focus on that because that is the actual problem. The problem is that we need much more decentralized tech and we need much more competition, right? The idea of the federated social media universe, which has failed to come to fruition but is a good idea, is that we all could live on our own little social media pods. You could be on one that is just cleaned up and super censored, and I'll be on the completely rowdy one where everyone says whatever the fuck they want. Oh, sorry. I don't know if we're supposed to swear on here. It's encouraged. Okay, great. And that is actually the way that we solve this problem because really, as I mentioned before, authoritarians want to control the information universe. And they have an incredible advantage in that all of our media is intermediated by basically four or five companies. And those companies have made it pretty clear that they are absolutely going to bend the knee to this administration. Right. And so that is extremely dangerous. Right. We are all you and me as journalists. We are gig workers for the platforms. That is what we are. Every institution, CBS, CNN, no matter how big you are, you're a gig worker for the tech platforms. And that is the fundamental problem because that is a real vulnerability that makes authoritarianism easier to pull off in this country. And it's extremely dangerous. Mommy? She said it. Not going to say it better than Julia Englund. I mean, I think we're all going to be in violent agreement here that antitrust and more competition, that there actually might be a market solution to this, that if there's enough competitors, someone's going to say, we have an environment here that is more legit. I'll give you an example. I think LinkedIn is a kinder, gentler place because my sense is people, one, are thinking, maybe this person someday might get me a job. but two, the bots don't just run free, the fake accounts. But there might be a market-based solution here, and that is if the FTC and the DOJ wake up from what is, I think, a 30-year slumber and force more competition, that if you have a dozen, two dozen, three dozen scaled platforms, that there might be more of a market opportunity for platforms that are just better actors. Julie, did I say that correctly? Yeah, I mean, I think you're right. I guess the thing I would say is I just don't think we need to leave this to the courts, right? This is something that a functioning Congress, if such a thing exists, could do, right? We could pass legislation to create a more competitive tech landscape. It would be a huge boost to our economy and to our society and the fact that we haven't done it and that we have left it to the courts. where the Google ruling on antitrust that declared their search monopoly and then actually declared they weren't going to fix it because AI would fix it. The judge wrote in there very compellingly, he was like, I don't know why I have to do this. Like, why am I doing this? This is something that should be done by Congress, right? They should pass laws to do these things because it's actually 10, 15 years too late. I do think what we have found over and over again is that ordinary people are more likely to engage in principled acts of defiance or whatever you want to call it when they have an alternative to go to. Like, I think just asking people, and I'd be actually curious, Scott, whether you found this in your resistance unsubscribe work, but I call this like a lily pad theory. Like, I think that people really like to exercise their values. People would prefer to not be in a social media ecosystem or prefer to be in a social media ecosystem or on an app or on a platform that doesn't do all the shit that you're describing. And if they have an alternative, they're going to exercise those values. I think that we've seen, even though I think this is largely true at the level of narrative and probably not true at the level of substance, the anthropic open AI war that's happening right now is, you know, people are moving over to anthropic because it feels better. It's the same thing. People are getting largely the same thing, but it feels better. And you just give people the opportunity to defect, to do it in a low stakes way and give them just some alternative. They're much more likely to do it. We'll be right back. It all started with Call Me Maybe. Over 10 years ago, we created Switched On Pop to Listen Closer, uncovering the song craft behind even the glossiest of pop hits. Since then, we've released almost 500 episodes. We've defined the sounds of our modern soundtrack and interviewed hundreds of musicians and music insiders, including the singer of Call Me Maybe herself, Carly Rae Jepsen. I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. And I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And on July 14th, Switched On Pop is embarking on a new chapter. We're stepping out from behind our microphones and in front of the camera to stream our podcast on Netflix. Now, you'll still be able to listen to the show anywhere you get podcasts, but now you'll be able to watch us each week, breaking down the sounds of the moment, digging into musical minutiae with your favorite artists and offering questionable dad jokes as always. We're kicking off our Netflix debut with a four-part series on the art of the song with help from artists, producers, and songwriters like Aaron Dessner, Audrey Hobart, Trevor Horn, Cypress Hill, and Taylor Parks. Stream Switched On Pop on Netflix and anywhere you get podcasts every Tuesday starting on July 14th. One, two, three. I'm stand-up comedian John Marcos Cerezi. And I'm actor-penis model Russell Daniels. The Downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are. Because let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests' lives, the world, but in a fun way. Bottom line is you're going to walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests. Caleb Huron, Busy Phillips, Stavros Halkius, Laverne Cox, Hassan Piker, Alana Glazer. I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is The Downside. Remember Snapchat? The app best known for being the place to send disappearing photos and videos to your friends? Well, Snapchat was back in the news recently, but this time it was not about disappearing photos and videos. It was about smart glasses that you put and keep on your face Snapchat was trying to get in on the game with a pair of black Horn-rimmed looking spectacles think the pair that the old man in up wears but like three times thicker and with a price tag of $2195 Photos of snap CEO Evan Spiegel wearing his specs. That's what they're called by the way specs were all over the internet and not in a good way. People were laughing. And they laughed all the way over the stock market where Snap took a hit. But as you're going to hear on Today Explained from Vox, Snap's playing the long game with smart glasses and the rest of big tech is too. Smart glasses are officially here, so we're going to officially talk about them on the show and worry about our privacy. We're back with more from Julia and Ami. You were both on American Conversations with one of my heroes, Heather Cox Richardson, last week. And Ami, you cited a study finding that the number one predictor of whether someone takes a political risk isn't education or party or gender. It's whether anyone asks them. Say more. I think this is the essential question about when we're – I mean, all of us are engaged in this question in some form or another. How do you get people who feel like something is wrong to do something about it? Scott, like you've already, you know, you've laid out the risks that people feel. So given that people feel those risks, and sometimes those are economic risks, and sometimes those are social risks, and sometimes that's, you know, my dad will never talk to me again, or, you know, only you know what those risks are. So it's really important to be able to get people on an on-ramp and to not ask people to make sure that the first thing that they do is stand in front of the tank. You got to give people something more gradual to do to get in there. And then like, yes, this study says that the way that people, the most likely thing that you can do, the determinant that gets people in is whether somebody asks them. Social connection is unbelievably powerful. And so, you know, I'll give you two examples of this. One is we talk to folks who are involved in the student movement right now in Serbia against a corrupt government. and they're doing things like barricading universities to try to get government reforms. It's an enormous movement. It's the biggest movement in Serbia since the Milosevic revolution at the turn of the century. And what we've heard from those folks is that what has brought their peers who don't feel federally courageous onto the front lines is they were asked just to bring the blankets to the protesters. And when they brought the blankets to the protesters not to sit not to sit in the protest just to bring something And when they got there and they saw the camaraderie they witnessed what was going on among their friends They felt a sort of a form of social connection They felt a form of belonging and felt more able to get involved in the work The one other example I give you is from a guy named Nathan Law who is a now living in exile, but a dissident from Hong Kong, who also as a student sort of felt like something was wrong and didn't like the way that Hong Kong was being treated by the Chinese government. But the way that he got involved was that he showed up to a student government meeting. And when they asked him, there were three options for how you can get involved in the protest. One was to sit on the front lines and risk arrest. The second level was to be like a little bit, be part of the crowd that makes the mass. And the lowest level of risk was to pass out water bottles. And he passed out water bottles. That passing out water bottles got him so involved in the movement, he witnessed so much violence against his countrymen, against his friends, that he ended up becoming the leader of the movement. This is not rocket science, but in order to get other people involved and in order to get yourself involved, you have to start with something small. And I will say one other thing here, which is that something I learned from working on campaigns, I always thought that working on campaigns, the way to get people involved and invest in your campaign was to do something for them. And the thing was always to ask them to do something for you, to make a phone call for you, to knock a door for you, because then you just feel like you're part of the story. And so that's the work of getting folks involved in a movement. So I'm curious. For your earlier comments, it's authoritarianism by a thousand cuts. You just don't wake up one night and the switch has been turned right. And it gets normalized. It feels incremental. Oh, that's too bad. And before you know it, you wake up and the president has extracted six hundred million dollars in corrupt crypto payments. And Larry Ellison and his donors are carving up tick tock. At least that's how I see it. And at the same time, I'm hopeful when I see 2% of America turning out for no kings protests, the largest protests in decades. And supposedly the tipping point is three and a half percent. I don't know why anyone got that number, but we're we're getting there. And there's a lot of there's a lot of young people per year comments who seem really engaged. But at the same time, I worry that. I guess the question. I'm a glass half empty kind of person. I feel like we're losing this war and we have normalized the level of corruption and movements towards authoritarianism, the likes of which I just never would have imagined. That the gag reflex has not been that severe or nearly as severe as I thought it was going to be. At the same time, there does appear to be reasons or signs of hope and a rejection of these of a refusal to normalize this kind of stuff. Where do you think we sit on the spectrum? Do you feel like we are absolutely barreling towards authoritarianism or that there is enough severe pushback that we will essentially get back to? And let me just put out there, I think America has shown an ability that when we get to these dark places, we not only bounce back, but we bounce back stronger. I think that's been the American story. Where do you think we are in that story right now, Julia? Yeah, I mean, I think it's complicated, right? Like you said, every single day brings another outrage, another breakthrough, another bit of lawlessness or corruption that just seems impossible to imagine, right? Every day would have been a different Watergate story, right? At the same time, it's possible I had just low expectations for Americans, but I've been actually very impressed by the resistance movements. They've been broad spread. they have been homegrown, and they have been, most importantly, nonviolent. So the data that you're referring to that shows that 3.5% is sort of like the tipping point for movements comes from this Harvard professor, Erica Chenoweth, and the movement scholar, Maria Stephan. And they studied more than 100 years of movements and rated them as to their effectiveness and their violence levels. And what they found is that nonviolent movements are twice as likely to succeed as violent movements. So there's an incredible difference, right? And it's really important because that is actually part of the narrative war. The narrative war is that the movement has to be the one that you would want to join, the nonviolent one, the good guys, right? And so whenever the state enacts violence against the nonviolent movement, it actually draws more supporters towards the nonviolent movement, We saw that in Minneapolis. The state violence actually ended up being the fatal moment where they lost the war. They had to retreat from that city. And so we are now in a situation where we're seeing winds like that regularly. We saw the Avello Airlines boycott, which basically all these people stood at their local airline airports and protested for months and months and pressured lawmakers until finally Avello canceled its contract to be the ICE deportation flight. We saw the universities. No one has caved since Columbia, right? I guess we have fingers crossed right now for Yale. But honestly, there has been a real pushback. The slush band for the J6ers was abandoned. And so we continue to do the right things. And what needs to happen is just more and more resistance, right? So we've done all these things. We're doing the most important work of keeping nonviolence disciplined. It's just that there needs to be more people in the movement and there needs to be more of these boycotts. I mean, honestly, boycotts, strikes, things that really gum up the works are the most effective ways to do resistance. Ami, any thoughts? I would say that we are, I agree with Julia that we're doing the things that we need to do. I worry a little bit when our conversations about authoritarianism and whether we're winning or not end up in the sort of abstract academic space, because I think that what people need is a set of tools. We've tried to do that in this book. We've tried to give folks 16 stories, 16 tools that they individually can use to get involved in the movement. And I have to imagine that there is somebody listening to this podcast who has had what we describe in the book as a moral collision, who hears the voice in their head inside their law firm that's cooperating with the administration or whatever it is. and feels like because the winds of authoritarianism are blowing in this particular direction, because we're now at 1965 levels of democracy, according to the VDEM Institute that Julia described, that everything is inevitable. And I think maybe the most important piece of our research is not everything is inevitable. We talk in the book about the toast when Soviet dissidents were drinking together in the 1960s and 1970s, their favored toast as they were raising their glasses of vodka was to the success of our hopeless cause because it felt so unbelievably dark, much darker, Scott, much, much, much, much darker than it feels here right now and much more inevitable that things were headed, you know, in a sort of endlessly negative, dark direction. And then in 1989, the wall fell. And so people in much, much, much worse circumstances have expanded their circles of commitment and have found ways to do this work. And what my message would be, and I think the message of the book is to anybody who's listening to this and who's feeling this way, is that there is a way forward. It's not just to stand in front of the tank. It's mostly usually starts with gathering with a few other people like you, a few other people in your office. Just start talking and then find a way to tap into the movement that's going on. But nothing is inevitable. And you are the vector to make sure that it's not. Just as we wrap up here, I had one of those moments, the spontaneous moments, you know, as you get older, all you want to at least all I want is I find I want to feel something like I'm just not that impressed or inspired anymore. I'm so fucking cynical all the time. and I had one of those surprising emotional moments. I went to the England-Norway match on Saturday, and the whole stadium, Neil Diamond's song, Sweet Caroline, started playing, and the whole stadium started singing. And it's largely associated, I think, with Team England, but the Norwegians were singing it. And then when the Norwegians started rowing and doing that whole chant, the English fans, we all started rowing. And when you see what I think was 64,000 people at the Hard Rock Stadium, all singing in unison, it just kind of brings you to, it kind of motivates you, makes you feel like when everyone is singing, if everyone decides to do something positive together, it just grabs you by the heart. And I was thinking, I was sitting there thinking, if you could just convince everyone in the stadium to do something that pretty much 99% are going to agree with something just very positive, just the power of that. We're going to reach triple that with this podcast. When you look at YouTube views and the number of downloads, we're going to get three times the number today of the sold-out Hard Rock Stadium. If you could ask them to do one fairly simple, not even courageous thing that would create that type of harmony, synergy, and effect around trying to arrest what I think 99% of people are going to believe is a good thing, and that is a slow burn towards authoritarianism, whether you see it coming from the right or the left or what have you. Most people on the left or right are going to go, authoritarianism, bad. What would be that one thing, based on your research, that you would ask people to do? Swami, I'll let you go first. And Julia, you'll have the last word. To find a political home. I think that this is a long, this is going to be a long haul. And Trump will, whatever will happen to Trump is going to happen to Trump. But they're going to keep trying to do this for a very long time. We know this from every other part of the world. We understand in our lives that in moments of spiritual crisis, it's important to have maybe a faith community. We understand that in moments of health crisis, it's important to have, you know, a social safety net. For whatever reason in this country, we don't have a sort of consistent political home, somewhere to engage with, somewhere to be regularly, somewhere to be with other people. Scott, this is deeply – all of this is deeply connected to the first thing you said about people taking risks online and not taking risks offline. We have to start gathering and building power together at the most local level. And I'm not – and the reason I say this is because there's not one thing that's going to end this. But if we are all deeply engaged in a regular political community where that is where we can decide our futures together and people are deciding together, what are the issues that matter to them? That is actually genuinely, according to the research, the first step in getting us off this path. Julia? I mean, I think I would maybe end with what I ended up doing because I writing this book sort of radicalized me to think about my own life and how I really as a journalist. I had the kind of view. I don't need to participate in this stuff. In fact, it's like more pure to sit here and witness everything. And so I put flyers up on every house on my street and I said, let's all meet. I didn't know my neighbors. I've lived on the street for 15 years. And I had a little wine and cheese party and I gave everybody ice whistles. And I said, let's get on a group chat. Now we're on a WhatsApp group all together. We've had a second meeting. I'm planning a barbecue this summer as soon as we're off book tour. And it's actually transformed my life in a way that is so positive. And it means we're ready, right? I learned this from the activists in Washington, D.C., which is basically an occupied city. There are 5,000 troops right now in D.C. patrolling and intimidating people, arresting people for being past curfew, people don't realize like we're already in a situation that we would write about in another country as like, oh, the Capitol has been militarily occupied. And the way that they prepared in D.C. for that was every block started group chats because that is how you need to know where are the military, who's going where. And we have to prepare now by getting to know everyone in our lives and building solidarity with them. Julia Angwin is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist and founder of Proof News. Ami Fields Meyer is a former White House senior advisor and political strategist. Very much appreciate your time today, and congratulations on the book On Courage, and very much appreciate your good work. Thanks to both of you for your time today. Thank you. Algebra of happiness. I'm at an incredible university on campus in a hotel near the campus. And I just dropped my son for orientation and carried over where there were all these, you know, nice parents and cargo pants and sundresses and some, you know, 18 year old kid looking embarrassed that they have to endure hanging out with their parents, carrying pillows and blankets. And it's just for one night. So I'm fine now. I think I'm going to be a mess during drop off day. But I've been reflecting a lot on kids and the separation. You know, I'm not going to lie. This is tough. I plan to do so much with my oldest. We were going to buy a car or an old car and fix it up and drive across the country. I always wanted to take him to Latin America. I always wanted him, quite frankly, to come on tour with me when I was speaking because I thought he would be impressed by these crowds. you know I wanted to take and we did a lot of stuff we did more than most dads did but the reality is I missed a lot because I was working a lot and no lesson here I'm glad I worked a lot we have a level of opportunity now in an absence of stress that is a function of the fact that I did sacrifice a decent amount but there's just no getting around it it's tough and the only thing I would say to you is that you know my kid not wanting me around when I drop him at the dorms, that's a good thing. He's comfortable on his own. He's confident because he knew he had someone in his life who's a good person that wants him to succeed. Your parents are the only people who want you to succeed or be more successful than them. And for the dads out there, one, it goes really fast. So if you're planning to drive across the nation with your son, schedule it now because before you know it, they're moving into the dorms. and that the most important thing is just presence. And whether that means FaceTiming from when you're on the road, I call my boys, something I'm really proud of. I call my boys every night, no matter where I am. And if they don't pick up, I call them again until they pick up, even if it's only a 15-second call. So what's the lesson? It goes fast. You've heard that before. But just presence and just them knowing that you're their priority or they're your priority, you drop off your kid at the dorm and he says, I'm good dad and rushes you out of the door, not because he doesn't like you, not because he doesn't love you, but because you were there and he has that basic confidence. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Janair. Cami Reek is our social producer. Bianca Rosario Ramirez is our video editor. And Drew Burrows is our technical director. Thank you for listening to the Prop G pod from Prop G Media.