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M. E. Thomas is the pseudonym of a practising lawyer and law professor. She is also the founder of the popular blog Sociopath World.
Twitter: @sociopathworld

Click here to read a transcript of episode 5.

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Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Francis: Hey Chris.

Chris: Hey, Francis.

Francis: So today I’m very excited, we have author M.E. Thomas, who wrote Confessions of a Sociopath, A Life Hiding in Plain Sight. When you hear the term “sociopath,” what comes to mind?

Chris: I would think it’s somebody who’s either a criminal, highly manipulative, or…generally evil. But that was before we had our conversation with M.E., and a lot changed in my mind in that hour.

Francis: So with that in mind, why don’t we just jump straight into the interview today.

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Francis: Hello! I’m really delighted to have M.E. on today. So welcome to the show…

M.E. Thank you.

Francis: Just to start, for people aren’t…haven’t read your book, or…would you like to introduce yourself, your background?

M.E. Yeah, sure. So I, I guess starting at the very beginning, I’m a westerner, grew up in California. I’m Mormon, the church actually is trying to get us to say the full name of the church, so I’m a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. I was born into it, raised into it. I have pioneer ancestors. I’m a musician, I majored in music and then I went to law school, and I happen to be a diagnosed sociopath, or anti-social personality disorder.

Francis: I guess what I’d want to start with is just maybe your thoughts about neuro-diversity…and just like the spectrum, even among sociopathy and how it’s generalized.

M.E. OK. It’s an interesting question for me, because I didn’t even realize that I was different, or how I was different, until kind of a later age. So I’ll just quickly walk you through that. Like, when I was a child I always thought that I was different but I mostly thought that maybe I was just smart. I am pretty smart, like in the way that I perform well on standardized tests, or whatever. There were just kind of things, you know, that other children didn’t see that I saw, and vice versa, honestly. I just had different blind spots than other people. So I mostly just grew up with a different perspective. It wasn’t until I was in law school, and I was sharing an office space with this other law student—we were both law students doing a clerkship at the time—and we were really bored, because they honestly only had like five to ten hours of work for us to do a week, but we had still be there. And during that time, we just talked about everything. She was really interesting, you know, she had a degree in theology, she was gay, though…and had grown up kind of during this era in which it wasn’t OK to be gay, so a little bit older. And after, you know, weeks of talking about basically everything, she said you might want to consider the possibility that you’re a sociopath. So I looked it up and I thought, wow, this really fits.

But I didn’t think of it as a disability at the time, I didn’t really think much of it at the time, which is probably kind of typical sociopathic reaction, to not really care about personal details in my life. And it wasn’t until maybe, it was about five years later that I was having some difficulties in my life. I had work problems, getting fired or kind of let go from a job, or relationship problems, long term friendship problems, romantic relationship problems…and all these things falling apart at the same time. And I started to notice a pattern, I started to notice, hey, this is not the first time this had happened. And in fact it happens about every three years. So to that extent I started thinking maybe there’s something to this sociopathy thing, maybe I should look into it, and maybe this is..this is somehow contributing to the fact that I, every three years, kind of have this cyclical self-destructive way of living. And I thought, too, you know, I’m getting older. When I was younger it was fine to self-destruct like that, because it’s more expected, people…other people were doing it, you know, it’s fine to total your car, you know, everybody does it kind of once in their teenage years. But you can’t kind of keep doing that as you become an adult. It was starting to become apparent to me, you know, it was starting to have more lasting consequences for me. And so I looked into it, I started a blog, which was sort of a journal I guess of researching different aspects about sociopathy. And the other reason I started the blog was I thought, you know, the stuff that I read, kind of online at the time—this was like 2008—so this is…there isn’t a lot written online, but the stuff that you did read was pretty negative, almost uniformly negative. And it said it wasn’t treatable, and it said, you know, there’s nothing that we can do for these people, and they’re just, you know, essentially a plague on society. And the best that society can hope for is being able to identify sociopaths and essentially set them up on an island together, you know, to live out their lives. Or people talk about, you know, just round ‘em up and kill ‘em, that sort of stuff. And I thought, that’s not been my experience. You know, I found out a lot of the research on sociopathy has been done on male prisoners. I don’t think, to this day, there’s research been done that either looks directly at the female population, or includes a significant female population. 

So then, you know there’s just, like, a lot that we don’t know about sociopathy. I think there’s a lot that we don’t know about disabilities in general, and the role that they kind of play in society, and the different things that people can do with a brain that’s wired differently. And I think it’s kind of…myopic to think, you know, there’s an optimal human. It’s like, what is optimal today is not necessarily going to be optimal tomorrow, etc. In fact I worked for a nonprofit, sometimes, do some work for them, legal work, and they quote this, I forget what the exact statistic…something like 60% of jobs that kids today will be doing when they’re adults don’t even exist yet. So they’re kind of suggesting, you know, like, we can’t just train people, we can’t take ‘em at eight years old and say, ok, this is the job that you’re going to be when you’re an adult, and we’re going to give you the education and training necessary to, you know, optimize that particular performance of that job, because we don’t know that that exists. So I think that sort of suggests that there’s a little bit of hubris in thinking that there’s going to be an optimal human, and thinking that the circumstances that we currently live in are going to be the circumstances of tomorrow, essentially. So I guess I think, in terms of neuro-diversity, you’re basically hedging your bets as a society. I think there’s the moral, kind of, reason for why we are interested in neuro-diversity, which is that all human life has value, you know. If you think that, then naturally you’re going to be on the side of neuro-diversity, but I think there’s also a good strategic way of thinking about neuro-diversity, which is that there’s sometimes situations in which you want  a certain type of personality or a skillset or experience; the more diverse it is, the greater chance society has of surviving. Just a quick funny kind of example: so one of my friends recently had a birthday party for stepchildren. And she does not get along with the ex-wife, right? And the ex-wife was going to be coming to her house, and the ex-wife before has come to her house and given her the silent treatment, and like treated her like trash. So she’s like, you know “I really want you to come, M.E., to this birthday party”…essentially—maybe you guys can kind of guess—to talk to the ex-wife, to put her down in subtle ways, you know, to basically check any attempts that she had about, you know, these little micro-agressions, and to, like, you know, instill my own—her own sense of fear about, you know, messing with this situation. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to come…

Chris: I’ve been invited to parties just to be the asshole..

M.E. Right. But being an asshole sometimes is terrible, you know, in social situations, and sometimes it’s really, really useful. I think most people can kind of understand, you know, you’re in a terrible work situation, or you’re, you know, you’re in a terrible like public situation, like one time—same friend—we were dining, we were eating Thai food, really one of these kind of hole-in-the-wall places with eight tables. We happened to be seated right next to these other two women. And then halfway through their meal, they turned over and said to my friend—and I think they had, like they had every moral justification in the world to say this, but they said—“you know what? you have a really annoying voice, and your voice has been annoying me this entire time that you’ve been talking during dinner. You have ruined this meal for me.” And …

Francis: Oh my god.

M.E. I know! (laughing) I went off on those people! I’m just, you know, not afraid of confrontation, you know, I just—I don’t even think I was rude. I didn’t yell, I didn’t get emotional, I just, you know, cut them to the quick,” that’s unacceptable, please leave now. Now they’re faced with this situation where they thought—who knows what they thought when they said that? They thought she was going to stop talking, maybe, or apologize, or whatever it is. But it’s just, you know, sometimes it is, like you say, it pays to be an asshole, or it pays to have an asshole around, I guess.

Francis: As long as you’re not a dick.

M.E. Right. (laugh)

Francis: The dick thing I don’t know if scientists have come up with whether it’s a nature vs. nurture thing, but in the absence of having a moral …a morality that’s universal and religiously based, I think a lot of people have whittled it down now to just, “don’t be a dick,” is sort of like enough for society to function with.

Chris: “Wheaton’s Law” comes up so often….

M.E. What is Wheaton’s Law?

Chris: Don’t Be A Dick.

M.E. Oh, ok.

Chris: It’s Will Wheaton, the actor from Star Trek. He did a presentation at a conference a number of years ago, just called “Don’t Be A Dick.”

M.E. (laughs) What is his definition of being a dick? I’m curious, because in this idea of, like, making things better, that you are all, are interested in, I often wonder, you know, what is the acceptable kind of neutral behavior, you know? And like you say, in the absence of having like a religious morality or, you know, in this world in which we’re trying to kind of look for that neutral morality, well what does it mean to be a dick? Like what are the things we can say, you know, never do this behavior, this behavior is not acceptable. Since we’re saying that so much behavior is acceptable in certain circumstances.

Chris: One of the things we in the humanist community are constantly wrestling with is how to prove to people that we can be “good without God” and how we actually do have an ethical framework and things like that. So when we’re encountering somebody with what we would believe to be irrational beliefs—you know, somebody who believes in a flat earth or somebody who denies climate change, or—you’re not going to convince people to become critical thinkers by being a dick. You know, don’t go up to them and say, “you’re stupid.” Maybe try to engage in a conversation with them about why they believe in what they believe, and maybe try to point out the logical fallacies and hope that they come around to our side.

M.E. Right. Yeah, I can see a, one thing that I have been thinking about recently, you know, and has like kind of a religious kind of coloring to it, the belief, it definitely comes from a religious perspective, but I think it’s interesting when you think about, like, the idea of how can we have a happier society, like a sort of utopia type society? Religiously, that’s what we think of heaven. Right? Heaven, and the Mormons are interesting, they have like a very practical idea, I think, about heaven. They’re almost kind of like science fiction-y the way they view heaven. They think of heaven as being just like a place where people are much more advanced, right? You’re much more advanced to the point where you’re, you’re essentially like, god-like. Right? And how do you have a society in which people have such great powers? You know, they’re very kind of god-like, but you don’t end up with wars and destruction. You know, you don’t end up with them getting so advanced, so powerful, that one person can sort of like set off a chain reaction and destroy everything. And in Mormonism, the concept is, you cannot interfere with other people’s agency. That is the one sort of “don’t be dick” rule, is that no matter what you do you have to allow the other person freedom. Right? You can’t impede on their own autonomy, I guess. So whatever you do, it can’t affect their own ability to do whatever it is t hat they want, or to be essentially unmolested. You know, like you have to make sure that all your actions and choices don’t affect others, or if they do affect others, that there’s some sort of consent. That you’re not infringing on somebody’s agency that way, which I think is a really interesting concept, and it’s a concept that I feel like has been…popular before, maybe, you know, there have been some movements in which it’s been popular, like, just “Don’t Tread on Me.” Right? Or even the Tea Party movement, which I think first started off with being, you know, like live and let live, and then kind of twisted to different things.

Chris: I hear similar ethical frameworks described, certainly by Unitarians, where belief in a god is optional but an ethical lifestyle is the most important thing. And I hear it at humanist events, really often, is, you know, in our “good without god” is, you know, here’s an ethical framework. It reminds me a lot of how you described your relationship with Mormonism in the book, in that it provides, you know, a set of guidelines for living and also gives you the rational reasons behind them.

M.E. Right. Exactly. It’s interesting that you say these things about ethics, but what…what are the rational reasons? You know, like, there are different…I guess if you are a, you know, sort of utilitarianism, right? Then there’s going to be a different kind of outcome that you’re looking for. Right? And that’s where the ethics come in, is that we’re looking for the outcome that allows for, you know, the best ultimate utility, right? And I guess Mormonism, the interesting kind of twist they have on it is this, this real focus on agency and autonomy. “Cause in Mormonism they have a belief, actually, that there was a war in heaven, and it’s interesting kind of thinking about where we are socially. You know, World War I, I think a lot of people don’t really understand what were the causes of that war. It seemed like people were just eager to go to war, right? World War II, there’s a greater kind of understanding of what the causes were, because they related to the aftereffects of World War I, which were so terrible. And now we have nuclear bombs, and I think the concern is—and I was just watching a Rick and Morty episode (laugh) where they reference this—you know, you’re going to get so advanced that you’re basically going to be able to bomb yourself out of existence. Right? The concern is that, you know, we have gotten so advanced that we have the real capacity to harm ourselves irreparably, as a society. That’s kind of the concern, and I guess the ethics, especially if you are going to talk about a utopia that would be so advanced, that would be a major concern. How can we avoid having these sorts of wars, or major conflict happen. And I think the simple Mormon answer, but it kind of makes sense to me logically, too, is that you just, you can’t interfere with other people’s agency. Like if somebody wants to—and this is the thing that I think is so hard for people to kind of get behind, today–is to allow somebody to be a racist. You know, this idea, and I talk about it actually in my classes that I teach, paralegal classes, is it OK to punch a Nazi? I would have thought the answer, from anybody who had, like, any sense of ethics, would be “no.” It’s never OK, like the ends don’t justify the means, right? Even if they’re a Nazi, you still, you still can’t punch them. Right? We have a legal system, right, where we hold people accountable in various ways, but you’re not a vigilante, you know. We don’t believe in vigilanteism, that’s why we have the legal system that we do, and all of its checks and balances, right? And the police system that we do, and all these things are intended to get to this point where we’re not just punching the wrong people, I guess, or you know, like people aren’t taking it upon themselves to inflict violence on others. But even rather well-meaning people, I hear them say, “yeah, it’s OK to punch a Nazi,” that’s an OK thing. And part of it I think comes from this idea that, you know, if you don’t fight bad things, you know, and fight them just as dirty, you know, as they’re trying to fight against you, then there’s going to be something that…bad happening. But I think a lot of it comes from just this feeling that you don’t like Nazis. You know, you don’t like Nazis, you don’t approve of the way that they are, you don’t agree with their beliefs, and you have a hard time existing in a world with Nazis. It makes you angry, you know, makes these people angry to live in a world with Nazis, and it offends them personally, too. I’ve heard people, and you know, there’s kind of a funny joke people say, you know, on Twitter, I guess a little bit of a meme, where they’ll say, you know I’m personally offended. Somebody says, you know, I eat my McDonald’s french fries this way, with the ketchup, and you know that’s disgusting, and they’re “oh, I’m personally offended.” You know? They’re…and it’s a joke, right? It’s meant to be a joke, but it’s also kind of true-ish, that people are getting personally offended, they feel personally attacked when they’re kind of called out about certain things. Or when there’s other people existing in the world that have nothing to do with them, you know, they’re just speaking, for instance, at a, the university that this person might be attending. They express feelings of, like, personal hurt, you know, or that they would be traumatized to have that person speak at the university. There’s something of like a personal trauma that they’re experiencing. That sort of thing, I think, wow. That would be a real impediment to allowing people to have the free agency, because if somebody wants to believe, you know, somebody wants to be a Nazi, why is that like a personally offensive thing to you? You may find it offensive, or you may find it logically, you know, like Nazism doesn’t make sense, logically. Or here are the other reasons why I find it distasteful or evil or wrong, that’s fine. You can have an opinion, but why does it offend you that somebody else’s opinion is different, I think is a really interesting question, and I think something that, you know, a sociopath would never experience. You know, so this seems really weird to me, to see it in so many people, it’s almost like this weird malady, like some sort of sickness like plague that’s spreading throughout, psychologically, throughout the community, especially I think in millenials, but not exclusively. You know, there are plenty of old, especially the stereotype old white people, who have similar thoughts. You know, they can’t stand the thought that there’s this gay couple next door that are raising their child with neutral gender pronouns, and have not told the child whether the child is a boy or a girl. There are plenty of people being offended by that, or the anti-vaccine people…you know, people get, want to kind of get angry about these things, and I guess I just don’t understand it. If somebody wants to do something, and it’s not infringing your agency, then why? And they’ll go through a lot of kind of mental leaps to get to the point where they’re saying, no, these people are affecting me. Because, you know, one Nazi’s gonna turn to ten, is gonna turn to 100 and eventually I’m going to end up in a totalitarian society of Nazism, and that will affect me. But I just don’t see it, and I especially don’t see how urgent it is from the one Nazi to you need to punch them. You kind of, what you were saying about “good without god” and these ethical lifestyles, and like this idea of trying to convince people to “don’t be a dick,” you know, with their irrational beliefs, you’re not going to convince people by punching them. It’s like an absolutely ineffective tool that they’re choosing to use, too. You know what, I think it kind of is, and it stems from like my own experience with sociopathy. I essentially think most personality disorders, from what I’ve learned, from what I’ve known, from what I’ve experienced and the people that I’ve met, I think most personality disorders involve an issue with the sense of self, with the sense of identity. Right? I think that’s why they’re called personality disorders, right? Like a narcissist has a false sense of self, there are other ways that people kind of distort their view of self in other personality disorders. For a sociopath, there’s just a very weak sense of self, there’s like, almost, like, you’re not an actual person, you’re just like, like a hologram or like a cypher. You know, an illusion—or you’re like, water or something. You take the shape of whatever vessel that you happen to be in.

Francis: People identify with their programming a lot of the time. Like, they’re born into a culture, they’re born into a sexuality or, you know, like they’re male, they’re female, they’re from this class; there are all these things that are sort of accidental, almost. They were just born into it, and then they identify with that. But how much of that is real in terms of what their potential to be anything is, you know what I mean? And what if, in that regard, sociopathy is more of an awareness that these are things that are almost like accidents that were put upon the human consciousness of this child, and then they identified themselves with it. Whereas, if you don’t grasp on to all that is like, this is me, then you have to figure it out for yourself.

M.E. Yeah, I think that’s definitely true. I wouldn’t say that that’s all that sociopathy is, but i think because they have such a weak sense of self, and there are other problems that are created by the weak sense of self. But I think one of the advantages is that they don’t feel like ego-hurts, for instance. You know, sometimes on the internet I guess we call it butt-hurt; you know, somebody gets so incensed because, you know, they feel like their ego, somebody has been challenging, kind of, their sense of identity, their sense of self. And that’s, is what sets them off so badly. I think we see it in politics a lot, when people have, you know, outrageous reactions, or people have these sort of temper tantrums. This idea that somebody has offended you—for whatever reason, like you said—because, you know, let’s say they’re American, and they identify so strongly with being an American, that whenever anybody says something slightly, what they consider to be unpatriotic, then they kind of flip out, you know, and they’re personally offended by it, because, you know, they’re an American. I think it is true, like a lot of these things are kind of…accidents, and I think the sociopath acknowledges it. I’ve never identified, for instance, strongly actually with my religion, even though I am interested in the religious beliefs, I’m interested in the theology, and the different kind of playing out those ideas—I never think of myself as being like, super-Mormon. I guess. Right? Like if somebody insulted Mormons or were like, “oh yeah, Mormons, polygamy, multiple wives, whatever,” I’d be like, “yeah, maybe this is true” right? (laugh) I wouldn’t take it personally. I have never identified for instance with my gender, either, and I think it’s one of the reasons why I wouldn’t either consider myself bisexual, because it’s not like I think of other people as having these very strict kind of gender roles, either. I don’t think of myself as being “I’m a libertarian” politically, but I don’t think of myself as being libertarian, in fact I used to never vote at all. I used to kind of just be like, these are things that are happening, and there’s not that much I can do, and kind of, who cares? You know, like I never had like these strong kind of beliefs or sense of identity. And these strong beliefs and sense of identity, I think, do harm people in particular ways. There’s kind of a concept…Paul Graham, if you google this you can read his article, it’s a really short article, and he says keep your identity small. And he’s just kind of suggesting there are certain things that you strongly identify with, for instance you love the Steelers, or something, you’re such a huge Steelers fan, if somebody says something bad about the Steelers, it can really incense you. Right, it’s going to trigger you emotionally, you’re going to have a particular kind of emotional, irrational reactions to somebody suggesting, you know, that the Steelers aren’t as good as you think they are, for whatever reason. And we see it in Europe all the time, with the football hooliganism, these soccer teams that hate each other so much that they’re like getting in fights in which people end up dying. And it seems so kind of absurd, but it’s like, if that’s what you identify so strongly with, then it’s not so different than, for instance, nationalism that we see today, where people are willing to kind of like shut off their empathy to, like, huge swaths of people just because they’re not part of their identity, and they want to maintain the identity they do have, which is a certain view of what it means to be Norwegian, or a certain view of what it means to be an American. And they kind of want to freeze in time this 2010 or 2019, whatever their view is, like, this is the perfect way to be Norwegian, we want to go back to the 1940s in terms of what it means to be Norwegian. They identify with these things so strongly that they’re willing to do similar sort of thing where the ends justify the means. They’re willing to infringe on somebody’s agency, they’re willing to punch somebody, they’re willing to, uh, hurt somebody in a way that I find to be…I don’t identify with it at all. Like, I don’t understand what’s going on there psychologically. I think there’s definitely something going on, but I think it’s an interesting concept sociopaths don’t have, other people do have.

Francis: One of the key things we’ve been talking about is, what are the things that are blocking our progress toward a more utopian society, and this idea that people can’t coexist or that people should persuade each other to be more like them, are not really true, and huge impediments…so, I’ve been liking the metaphor of the mosaic, and you know, like, when you talk about neuro-diversity, what’s great about that is you, you’re saying like on a biological level we’re even different. But that’s fine, and people will have strengths in ways that you might not, because they are different. And this idea that we’re all the same, or that we’re all capable of fitting into this monoculture and being happy, is absurd. And once you move past that, and say OK, the reality is we are different from each other and that’s cool…you know, like it kind of opens it up to not be intimidated and appalled by differences in the way that those people that used to pick on us and beat us, you know, want to beat us up, Where they saw us as a challenge to their own identity, as opposed to saying, wow, you know, that guy is onto something really creative, and you know, I would never in a million years feel comfortable walking down the street dressed like that but I’m really happy there’s someone who does, something like that, you know? But for some reason, it was seen instead as a challenge, and that’s I think one of the important things that we have to get rid of. And you know, this idea that we can’t accept certain types of people is problematic. You know, there wil be people who may be, initally at least in a more utopian direction, identify themselves as like, you know, Aryan-ness or whatever. But I think ultimately, once you take away the dangerousness or the anti-social-ness of it, a lot of them might lose interest in being Nazis. Or maybe they won’t, who cares, you know? If somebody wants to go live with their own race, I don’t think anybody has a right to say you can’t do that. And one of the failings of the left, I think, is that they are so black and white about things that when it comes to people having freedom of choice, it just even can’t happen, because there’s all these rules of what’s right and wrong in a politically correct context.

M.E. Yeah, I agree. this is kind of an interesting story, right. So when the book comes out, I quickly get outed as a sociopath by some of my law students. And it gets on this legal gossip blog, and I start getting phone calls, I start getting emails from people who are finding this out. And some of them are really positive and nice, you know, and I still think these people are great people and I really respect them.

Chris: I think anyone who spends the time to actually read your book is going to have a much more positive view of you as a sociopath than somebody who didn’t. I think the book really answers a whole lot of questions, just the average man on the street wouldn’t think, had he not read the book.

M.E. Yeah.I hoped that that was true, and I think it is true for a large proportion of people, but I think there’s still more than I thought, there was still a proportion of people who, for whatever reason—and you know, confirmation bias we know, if you have a previous belief it’s really hard to let go of that belief. Certain types of people are more open than others, certain types of people hold more rigidly to their previously conceived beliefs than others, for various reasons or in various contexts. And so there was kind of a negative reaction. But I had kind of hedged my bets a little bit with this, you know I was a law professor, wanted to stay a law professor. Was hoping I would stay a law professor—the end of the story is, no, I did not stay a law professor, right. So that kind of, uh, clues you in to how people ultimately reacted. But one of the schools I taught at was in San Francisco, I was there as a visiting professor, and I intentionally chose to visit there, because I thought, well in hedging my bets, you know if I have connections with more law schools where they know me personally, there’s a greater chance for instance that this school would end up hiring me even after the book was done, And I thought, San Francisco, liberal San Francisco, right? They’ll for sure be able to look at this and think, hey, you know this person is a…you know, neuro-diversity, we’re pro-diversity and we’re pro- people being able to be the people that they were born as, right? You know, we’re willing to support that, I thought that was maybe going to happen. But they had the worst reaction of everybody…they banned me from the campus, they not only banned me from the campus, they banned me from being a thousand yards from the campus. It was like the entire downtown San Francisco area they allegedly banned me from and said that they would call the police if I, you know, crossed that boundary. Of course that’s not legal. There’s nothing legal or right or rational about it. If you read the email they sent me, it was just such an irrational kind of knee-jerk reaction, which was just kind of like, sociopath=bad for whatever reason.I’m not sure what their sort of reason is, but there was something triggering about the very fact that I was, like, a sociopath that they just found so unpalatable, not just unpalatable, but dangerous, you know, unpredictable, who knows what it was. They went to the extent of violating so many of my civil rights, or at least purporting to violate my civil rights, for just having a published this particular book. It’s a really interesting reaction, and it’s one, I don’t think it’s indicative of all kind of reactions, or like a liberal progressive thing. When I think about—and it is true, you know, politics, like both parties seem very black-and-white thinking, in kind of unpredictable ways for me, I guess that’s why I’m a libertarian is, because I don’t understand how you can have a certain stance on the death penalty and abortion, for instance. (laughs) Which both parties have, which seem to contradict each other, a little bit, right? So these sorts of reactions, you know, the reaction that these people had, like why is it so threatening to them that I’m a sociopath? I don’t have a criminal record, I have no history, past history of violence, and to have that sort of reaction where you’re just like, you know, I can’t even stand to be around you. I said, OK, I’ll just come pick up my things or something. They said no, we will mail you your things. It was that bad. And I was like, OK, well I still need to like grade my finals, and they’re like, you’re gonna need to do that, you know, a thousand yards away from campus, you know, never come back sort of thing. And I….I even said, you know, I feel like you’re having an overreaction, they were like, no, we have thought about this a lot, you know, we’ve considered it. So it’s an interesting thing, in this world in which we allow for neuro-diversity, would that be something that is acceptable to do? They have a fear, and that’s what I kind of understood. You know, they have a—I don’t think I’ll say, legitimate, they had a legitimate fear in the sense that it was an authentic fear. They were feeling fear. They had like an actual sense of fear, but it was an unjustified sense of fear, right? Same with these people with the identity. They have a hurt, you know, they feel personally offended, but is it like a feeling of personal offense that we can kind of get behind and say, OK, you know, we’re going to allow you to feel personally offended and act however you want. Hit a Nazi. It’s fine to have the feeling, I guess, but then the action cannot be to infringe on people’s identity…er, I’m sorry, sense of agency. Even if it is, you know, you have that fear, you have that hurt, you have these various feelings.

Chris: So I was just sort of wondering how you felt neuro-diversity might fit in with diversity in general, because people with disabilities are the only minority who intersects with every other minority, and is also oppressed by every other minority.

M.E. Yeah, that’s a good point. You know, it’s interesting, I didn’t even think about it, but it’s like, even within neuro-diversity, people who say that they’re pro-neuro-diversity, they don’t like sociopaths. You know, it’s fine if you’re austistic—you know, in fact I have a Downs Syndrome uncle, I write a little bit about him in the book, he has violent tendencies that were so severe that he could no longer stay with my aunt, who was his caretaker. He had to go to an institution basically. And do I think that people with Deans Syndrome are all violent? No. But do I think that violence manifests itself in a way that’s kind of different to him, you know, with Downs Syndrome? Yeah, because we can’t call the cops, we can’t throw him in prison, we don’t have, kind of, these avenues that we have with people who, who don’t kind of have disabilities. I just think it’s a really interesting way to treat people. Like there are true differences in the way that we treat people—I think it’s great that we’re not throwing him in prison, but I think it’s also weird that we throw people in prison who are sociopaths, then, right? Because they also have unique kind of issues; they don’t respond well to punishment, just like my Downs Syndrome uncle. I think it’s so great that people have become so, kind of open minded about children with autism now, right? I think it’s great for the children, I think it’s great because it was like, kind of a kicking a wall, you know, to try to force these kids to behave like normal kids, and for what reason? You know, who is it benefitting? To try to get them to kind of conform to these, like, ideas of what a good kid should be in a educational setting, 32.5 kids per class or whatever, and they’re all sitting there with their workbooks. You know it’s such, so weird how we’ve gotten rigid about these ideas, but it…yeah, I find it…hmm…a little appalling that the same people who promote neuro-diversity in one area, and seem to be so, kind of, accepting and willing to accept, are the same people who are banning me from campus, a thousand yards from being on campus. It’s such an overreaction to me.

Francis: That kind of awareness issue, don’t you think?

M.E. If I thought—and this is kind of a little bit of jaded—part of my legal research was actually in information sharing, and misinformation, right? And what we can do about, kind of, free speech issues, you know, like what does the law have to do with free speech and do we really think that there’s a marketplace, a functioning marketplace of ideas, such that good ideas survive and bad ideas eventually kind of die out. And I think, you know, in the past five to seven, ten years, we’ve seen a lot of social behavior that suggests that our previous conceptions that people are really looking for truth and for facts—they’re not completely false, you know, like I think people still prefer the truth generally speaking, but there are situations in which they don’t. So it’s a misinformation thing, but I think there’s something else underlying their…reluctance to give the same kind of neuro-diversity privileges to other people. I’m really interested, I don’t have like an answer on it, but I think it is an issue when I was so interested in this concept of trying to make a better society and kind of, what would it look like? Of a utopian society and, uh, kind of the science behind it. Are there impediments to that—scientific, psychological, resource, economics, to having this kind of utopian society, and I immediately started thinking of these, because it’s been something that I have grown up all my life seeing, kind of the back side, the hypocrisy, of empathy. You know, the hypocrisy of compassion, right? The hypocrisy of these, you know, like these good feelings, kind of tribalism, you know, the negatives. Even before other people saw it, I saw it. Mob mentality has been, like, my constant fear, you know the idea that—and we know that it happens, you know, it happens to normal people, where they all just happen to gang up.

Francis: Well, I consider myself highly empathetic, and I would consider mob mentality one particular expression of empathy. I don’t think you’d have mob otherwise.

M.E. Yeah. (laugh) I agree, but I want to hear your ideas on it. Like go ahead and explain it.

Francis: Well, the thing is, empathy connects people. It makes you feel their feelings, but empathy is also sort of like an on-off switch. And if you can identify an idea of different people as “other,” then you can feel empathy towards your tribe and then no empathy at all, if anything like the opposite, towards them. You know, which is why in every war, they try to like de-humanize them, make the enemy seem like they’re really different on some fundamental level. And, you know, what they’ll do is they’ll whip up the empathy like they did in the lead up to the Iraq wars, where, you know just saturated you with the 9-11 stuff and the personal stories of how these horrible terrorists who like, they hate freedom, they want to do this, they attacked our homeland—and it’s like an empathetic response towards the people that were suffering on such a intense degree, that raises that mob mentality, where they “yeah, let’s kill ‘em!” You know? But I think if you didn’t have empathy at all, that wouldn’t be possible, because you’d be like, rational, and you’d be like, um…you know, you’re not subject to that same level of mob and tribalness.

M.E. Yeah. You know, I’ll take it one step further, I think it’s like not just empathy maybe, although I think it has a role, and say it’s also this, this kind of sense of identity. Because you think, would a mercenary fight as well as somebody who’s a true believer? You know, we see true believers doing outrageous things, you know, horrible things, 9-11, for instance. Right? Because they identify so strongly, they think this is like the absolute truth, and I’m going to impose this truth on everybody. You know, the infidels, the non-believers, they have to hear this message and the best way to reach them, I guess, is to kill them—that’s kind of the attitude. We used to think of that attitude as being associated mostly with extremists and terrorists, but now we’re like out there punching Nazis, right? I think Antifa is one of the most terroristic organizations that we have operating in the United States. But I don’t think it’s condemned often enough, to like go out there are commit violence against people who have opposing viewpoints to yours?

Chris: I don’t think Antifa has enough power or actual organizational capabilities to be a real threat.

M.E. I hope that’s true. (laugh)

Chris: I think they’re a bunch of kids who show up looking for a fight, and…we had that back in the 60s with the counter-revolutionaries showing up to start violence and…you know, I think they’re just troublemakers.

M.E. Hmm. I hope.

Francis: As Joe Strummer once said, they’re kind of Stalinist, maybe.

M.E. Stalinists in what way?

Francis: In the sense that, like, they, they act like they’re for the people and for like these higher values, but they’ll like squash you if you think differently.

M.E. Right, exactly. You know, I have a little brother who is solidly hipster Millennial, and I kind of use him as, you know, keep my fingers on the pulse (laugh) of that type of generational, like…he’s socialist, you know, he loves Bernie Sanders, the…kind of, this type of thinking, right? Which I don’t think is necessarily bad, it’s just like there’s a particular type of group of people that I think are associated with those kind of beliefs. And I think they’re sympathetic to Antifa, I think these younger people are kind of like…you know, I keep repeating it, but it’s like the “ends justify the means,” this concept of, we’re in this fight, good and evil, and we are on the side of good, and the people who disagree with us are necessarily evil.

Chris: I don’t trust Bernie Sanders, ‘cause he reminds me too much of myself. He’s an old man with messy hair who talks about things he can’t deliver.

M.E. Um-hm. (laughs)

Francis: I think the, the reason why people do find some sort of inspiration in Antifa is that, you know, there’s been this like, mechanism that’s been going on for a long time where the right wing are like street fighters, like they just want to win, they don’t give a fuck how they’ll go about it, if they win, they win. The left is like, you know we have to be democratic, reach across the aisle, and provide like persuasive arguments and data, and all this stuff, and when it gets down to the fight, they get their asses kicked, because, I mean, they’re bound in a way that people who are like street fighters are not bound. It seems like there are people who are willing to have the strength of their convictions enough to really fight for them. I’m not saying that that’s a good thing necessarily in this situation, but I also think there is a frustration amongst people on the left that, they’re just getting steamrolled.

M.E. Yeah. I see that, I see kind of why they feel that way, you know I don’t think it’s completely irrational, but I, I guess I disagree with that kind of attitude that they’re gettting steamrolled. They kind of, and this is..it’s, again, I think it’s this idea of identity and maybe identity politics, now that we’re talking about politics, is that any kind of—if you have such a strong belief that, you know, the people that oppose you, you know, it’s almost like a zero-sum game. You know, any gains that the right makes, you know, makes the left feel like they’re getting steamrolled, and I’m thinking, you know, not really. You know, what happened to, like, compromises and concessions, like most people would think of that as being pretty weak now. And they’re so sick of the compromises and concessions, that they think that they’re constantly getting ripped off. Whereas the left, they’ve had control of the Supreme Court basically since the Warren Court, right? Roe v. Wade and they’ve maintained that for decades and decades, right? Now they’re upset at the thought of that ending. They don’t kind of see that they’ve had their way, essentially, for the past, what is it, like four or five decades, starting with Brown vs. Board of Education. I think, controversially, and you can, controversially I say, but you can find Ginsberg also saying similar sorts of things about some of these cases, these big cases that even, you know, people who haven’t gone to law school know about. Some of the ways that the Supreme Court kind of justified—they’re not good methods. They broke particular judicial norms, you know, which is something we keep hearing about, you know, we’re breaking these norms, and it’s again kind of like the ends justify the means, right? Like we’ll be a little bit underhanded about the way that we go about kind of getting this result, because we’re so in…we’re so interested in the result. And I don’t think that that can happen ever. My kind of—and this is kind of a Stoic philosophy, too—is that it always has to be process-oriented, it can’t be result-oriented. Because if it’s result-oriented, then it really does turn into this kind of like zero-sum game. You can’t reach across the aisle if you want something and they want something else, you know, it always has to be a compromise. There can’t ever be, like, well let’s think about ways that we can like engage in this process and get someplace that, you know, neither one of us can even see right now. But it’s gonna be ultimately a better place than the current vision that we both have. Does that kind of make sense?

Francis: Yeah. And you know it’s a little bit dualistic to, to me in my mind, like we’re…we’re trying to come up with the uptopia where everybody gets to decide who they are, everybody respects everybody’s personal decision on who they are, and we have a society that it gives them the resources to actualize that life in a really exciting, fulfilling way. Or, you have this idea that, you know, it’s my way or your way, and it can’t be both ways. And actually, in reality, it can be both ways a lot of the time. And that’s why our system is failing I think.

M.E. Yeah. This idea of, just, coexisting seems to be kind of getting pushed out the window, there’s—I don’t know why, is it social media? We’re like, we can’t stand, you know, the cousin on Facebook or whatever who has different political beliefs than us, or something, and so people are just getting so incensed about it. They’re getting outraged, you know, we’re being steamrolled, where all it is is just (laugh) it’s just kind of like the natural shifts of power. I guess I just don’t see where anybody’s getting steamrolled, but both parties think that they are, because in the zero sum game, any time that the left wins, the right loses. Any time the right wins, the left loses. That’s kind of the attitude that people have. There’s no longer this idea of, like, hey we have a Constitutional Republic democracy, and this is the process, and if you didn’t like the result this time, then we have particular institutions that have been around for centuries, you know, that you can use and work within those institutions to enact the change. Now people are talking about, uou know, again, my little brother, who I think is a good indicator, kind of barometer of the way people are thinking, has just like, he thinks that the government is essentially useless Constitution garbage, you know, because it doesn’t lead to the result he wants. And that’s kind of, the mentality you have seen increase everywhere, where people are thinking constantly about the ends, they’re no longer thinking about means that we have been talking about. You know, how can you live a meaningful life, how can you live a life of fulfillment and purpose, and not have it being impeded by others. You know, like not have other people be offended by the fact that…

Francis: ..Or anyone’s business…

M.E. Yeah. It’s not anyone’s business. But people have made it their business, it’s gotten so popular, I think, in the past decade, to make everybody’s business your business. And I just don’t understand why.

Chris: Well, and we also live in a world where privacy no longer exists, I mean, you tried to publish a book anonymously, and how quickly were you discovered?

M.E. 24 hours (laugh), 48 hours…yeah. Definitely that same week.

Francis: Maybe what the college was angry about was that you didn’t abide by the “don’t ask, don’t tell” rule.

M.E. Mmm. Do you think there is, like, still “don’t ask, don’t tell” for that sort of stuff?

Francis: Well, there’s so little awareness about it, first of all. I don’t think the true nature of the heterogeneity of human minds, of psychology, has been brought to the attention of people in general. When you’re talking about people maybe that don’t have a lot of empathy, and you know there’s always a whole spectrum to everything. My yoga teacher recently, and if you’re listening, my apologies if I’m bringing you up without asking, but, she was talking about how she works with people who are dying. She helps them with the death process, she calls it a “death dula.” And I said to her, you know, “how are you on the empathy scale? Do you have a lot of empathy, or not too much?” And she said, “ah, I don’t really have much empathy.” I said, “I guess you’re probably libertarian, right?” And she said “yup.” (laugh) But here is a woman who does, like she’s such a, like, angel, kind of, you know? Like she’s doing this job that I could not do, because I have so much empathy, I would make these people feel horrible about the fact they’re dying. She can be emotionally detached and actually do the job properly, you know. You’re like a trailblazer that you even wrote this book and got people thinking about this stuff and opened the conversation, but you just opened it as far as I can see. And it definitely, in my mind, impacts a lot on the idea of neuro-diversity and that sort of stuff, but I also feel like it’s also really, it’s beginning. You know, it’s like a nascent kind direction that we’re going in, a movement where we’re going to find that different people have different aspects of personality that we have pathologicized. You know, we take like extreme examples of it sometimes, and turn it into a disorder. But you know, it’s a spectrum. You know, like I think people don’t understand, you know like you have all these primary colors that we’re figuring out now psychologically, but you know like people don’t, I don’t think, really understand what all that means, and what’s there. And honestly, even people like me who’ve been studying this stuff and trying to like really wrap my brain around and figure out how to use this to make society better, I feel like it’s still very new, to me, the cutting edge of human consciousness in some ways.

M.E. I hope. You know, I hope that this is, this is happening. I think people are becoming more aware. I think that, again, kind of—this has been the theme of at least my comments—the impediment I can kind of see to people being more open about the possibility that other people are living equally valid lives, even though they’re making very different choices, is this concept of identity. Can you believe, for instance, can I believe that my religion has truth to it without necessarily thinking that other people’s beliefs are wrong? Can I think that one way is a good way without thinking that other peoples’ ways are bad? I think there’s kind of like a, just like a…a broadening of your perspective that needs to happen a little bit more before we’ll get to that place where society is really capable of having that degree of acceptance for neuro-diversity. It reminds me, I follow on Instagram, I think it’s called “medicalpedia” and it has a…I don’t know why I follow it, it has like all these gruesome, you know, photos. Somebody, you know, got their foot cut off in a motorcycle accident, right? And it will show–I think it’s for medical students, but it’s really interesting, I think to learn so much about the human body and the way that it’s connected by seeing it in these kind of distressed ways. And I recently saw a picture of, there was a homeless man who got brought into the hospital, and he was complaining of having a lack of sensation in his feet, and he’s also diabetic, right? And they’re taking off this sock, and underneath the sock—yeah, you can look this up—are hundreds of maggots, and I was like “what!” Like as they’re peeling away this sock, there’s just these maggots, like falling off the sock, I mean literally, like his foot is covered with maggots. And you start seeing the maggots start coming out from under the skin, you know, and you’re like, how can somebody let it get this far? I’m sorry I’m not able to attribute the source on this one, I recently read this article, this comment about this guy talking about homeless people, and his comment was basically that if you don’t understand other people’s choices, right, if somebody’s choice seems so kind of stupid and wrong to you, then you really don’t understand the full background of their situation, their environment, why they’re making that particular choice. Like if we could get to the place where, instead of just decrying everybody’s choices as being wrong, where we would try to understand why is it that you’re making this choice? You know, why did you let it get this far? What are the kind of influences that lead you to believe this politically, you know, why is it that you have this particular emotional reaction to things? If we really tried to kind of understand why, then I think we would, we’d be able to understand better how everybody has good in their choices, you know, everybody is kind of doing the best that they can, and that there really is an ethical, kind of ultimate good in allowing people to have the autonomy to live their own lives, make their choices, that there’s value in that and we don’t have to have everybody look and act and be the same.

Chris: I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t really like labels like “left” or “right” or Democrat-Republican, blue-red, or whatever; because I think it creates a false dichotomy, and I think people have embraced that false dichotomy. I mean, I think we probably, as Americans, you know, Trump supporters and Clinton supporters and Sanders supporters, probably agree on 90% of stuff, if you asked them as individuals. And yet we join these teams, or become members of these tribes, and all of a sudden, as you were referring to earlier, it becomes a black and white, win or lose, situation.

M.E. Heh. Yeah, and it is kind of weird. Let’s say I like the Steelers so much, let’s say I like a particular member on the Steelers. In two years he’s going to be playing for, like, the Chargers or something. You know, it’s so weird that we’re kind of this way, we’re so rigid, in thinking that this moment in time is going to stay this way. You know, the Republican party is always going to be like this, the Democrat party is always going to be like this. Whenever there’s a new movement, right, we’re like, whoaoh! You know, this is shaking things up so much, and how are we going to kind of like live—I think it really just illustrates the falseness of the labeling. Right? That there isn’t so much a dichotomy as we thought before, even if there are things that are dichotomous, we’re not necessarily perceiving them correctly, they’re going to shift, possibly, and having more of this openness to the way that we understand labels. I went to Cambodia—when did I go? like 2010 or something—and at the time I had travelled kind a lot of places, but still, out of all the places I’ve travelled, it seems like the people were…and you know, I understand, I was only there for a few days, it’s hard to get an impression, but my impression of them was that they were very happy.. They were very happy, very kind of, um…content. And it was also one of the poorest places I have ever been. You know, so poor that I realized by the second day, when I saw like a little piece of plastic wrapper out in kind of these rice patty villages, I was so surprised to see it, and I was like, why am I so surprised to see this candy wrapper? And it’s because I hadn’t seen any plastic waste or any waste at all in the past, you know, 24 hours, right? So super, super poor, even compared to other SouthEast Asian countries. I kind of wondered why they’re so poor, and I thought maybe it has to do with, you know, Pol Pot and the killing fields and they had that civil war for so long that they were just sick of the violence, they had, you know, a similar sort of situation, one people trying to impose on the other types, and the types are fighting and they both think that they’re justified, and they’re willing to, you know, use violence to impose their beliefs and their worldview on other people, that can’t stand the fact that there are other people different from them. You know, very similar kind of story that seems to be behind so much conflict in the world. But after decades of this, and I think 20% of the Cambodian population was killed? And still now it has one of the highest amputee rates, right? Because they land-mined the entire country, basically. In fact, like you can still…I forget what the rates are, it’s like a thousand people a year die from land mines, and then many more end up maimed or otherwise hurt. There are like, you know, certain places are just unoccupied because of land mines, there’s like 10,000 landmines or unexploded ordnances. But they’re just sick of it, right? And so maybe that will happen to us, too. Maybe we’ll be like, you know, shaming each other, playing the zero-sum political game, until like we get to the point where we realize from personal experience, you know, decades later, that it was a terrible way to govern a country, it was a terrible way to relate to our fellow humans, and that there was just such waste. You know, human, human waste or otherwise, that we’ll just learn. You know, we’ll learn even though we have the capacity to do this particular thing, we’re not going to do. Similar thing with World War I, World War II.

Francis: That’s such a great thought. Before we end, I would like you, if you can, to maybe talk a little bit about what you’re working on now. You’re researching a book, right?

M.E. So I, I’ve started writing a second book, probably in the last year or so. The reason why I started thinking about it is, you know, I’ve learned a lot since the last book was published, I guess 2013, so almost six years ago, in May. Since then, I’ve gone to a therapist, I’ve learned some other things, and so I kind of thought, you know, I have…I have some more things to share. And so I wanted to share it with people, and there was this…young man, he’s in his mid-20s in Australia, and he wanted to join the Australian version of like, essentially the Seals, their Navy special forces. But he wasn’t allowed into the military, because during his college era, somehow he had gotten the diagnosis. He was seeing a therapist. The therapist never told him what the diagnosis was, but it was in his medical records, and so when went to go to apply to join the Navy, they saw that and said, you know, you’re not getting in. And he was like, “M.E., now what? Now that I have this diagnosis, I just found about it last month, and it’s ruined my dreams of what I wanted to do as a career”…You know, he was like a semi-professional swimmer, so it was definitely what he wanted to do. And I thought, this is the perfect question that I feel like I can kind of help answer. And I think I had a little bit of hubris, too, when I started, I’ll go down and meet him, and I’ll try to meet some other, kind of, sociopathic minded people, and try to kind of start sharing my ideas about things. And I..I still do think I have like, some insight that does help them, and I do try to help them. I’ve been, now, I don’t know, like ten different countries or something, I’ve been traveling the world this past year, meeting these people and other people who aren’t necessarily sociopathic minded but are interested, or have similar experiences, you know, are interested in neuro-diversity, or have friends, relatives, who are sociopathic minded. And I’ve since learned a lot, and I guess I’ve learned even more than, you know, thinking I have the right answers. And I guess talking to you today, this may explain a little bit of the background of why I think it’s so important to hold your beliefs lightly, gently, and keep and open mind, is that everybody has such different experiences. You know, the British sociopaths are different than the French ones, are different than the Russian ones, are different than the Australian ones…and it’s not even just their nationality, obviously, that’s different. It’s just everybody is so different, and things manifest themselves in such different ways for different people, and the answer that’s right for me is not necessarily going to be the answer, or the solution, for somebody else. So I guess even within the sociopathic community, I’ve learned to understand and respect that a little bit better, and understand that everybody essentially has to just make their own way, and that there are certain things that are more true than others, or will tend to be true is more situations than others, but I think when you take anything to an extreme, you’re gonna end up in a bad place. That’s true of virtues, they can become vices, and I think that’s even true of “truth,” that you can distort truth by taking it to an extreme. So, I guess I just think more in terms of everybody is different, there’s such a huge diversity of people, even amongst the sociopathic community, things that work for us, things that seem right for us, maybe aren’t going to be necessarily so for other people, and to just kind of be OK with that.

Chris: And with that said, what makes you optimistic about the future? I mean, I don’t think you’d be out there writing books and doing the activism you are if you’re optimistic at least at some level.

M.E. Mmh. That’s so true. It is so true, I really am optimistic about the future. I think one thing that makes me optimistic is that I, myself, have changed, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever been really kind of rigid about beliefs, even though I write the book, you know, the first book is just kind of a snapshot of what life was like, and a lot of it was, by the time I even was writing it, it wasn’t stuff that I was necessarily, you know, still engaging it. I guess (laughs) some of the more childish things, you know, or some of the more immature things, by the time I wrote it, they were mostly in my past. And things have changed similarly, like with therapy, other things that I’ve been doing, you know, relationships that I’ve had with other people—I just see things as being, like, this journey of change. I have seen change in my own life, I’ve gotten to happier places in my own life, and so I…just, I guess I believe in the power of change? Self-willed change, and I think I believe in the, I guess, the divinity of the human condition. You know, I believe in the, the potential that humans have to do really great, good things, and to have very deep, meaningful, lives, live lives of meaning, and to understand that they have quite a bit of power. Everybody has power. Sociopaths are more aware and thinking about power every day, but everybody has power to understand, you have the power to do of great good, and great evil. Which is why, you know, even if you’re just kind of shooting off a tweet, or shooting off a Facebook post, to kind of be more considerate and aware of the sorts of effects that that may have on people, to be more considerate and aware of the way your actions affect others, and this kind of getting to this concept of treating everybody as being equally, I guess, sacred. You know, and not interfering with their own ability to change and to…make their choices freely and uninhibited by…your own issues and hangups and your own feelings about what they’re getting up to.

Chris: Well, thank you, M.E. Thomas, for joining us on Making Better.

M.E. Thanks so much, Chris.

Francis: Yeah, Thank you very much.

M.E. Thank you, Francis.

—end

Richard Matthew Stallman leads the Free Software Movement, which shows how the usual non-free software subjects users to the unjust power of its developers, plus their spying and manipulation, and campaigns to replace it with free (freedom-respecting) software.
Born in 1953, Stallman graduated Harvard in 1974 in physics. He worked at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab from 1971 to 1984, developing system software including the first extensible text editor Emacs (1976), plus the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also nown as truth maintenance (1975).
In 1983 Stallman launched the Free Software Movement by announcing the project to develop the GNU operating system, planned to consist entirely of free software. Stallman began working on GNU on January 5, 1984, resigning from MIT employment in order to do so. In October 1985 he established the Free Software Foundation, of which he is president as a full-time volunteer.
Stallman invented the concept of copyleft, “Change it and redistribute it but don’t strip off this freedom,” and wrote (with lawyers) the GNU General Public License, which implements copyleft. This inspired Creative Commons.
Stallman personally developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system: the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various others.
The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also contains the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, is used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers. Alas, people often call the system “Linux”, giving the GNU Project none of the credit.
Their versions of GNU/Linux often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important, and even include nonfree software in those systems.
Nowadays, Stallman focuses on political advocacy for free software and its ethical ideas. He spends most of the year travelling to speak on topics such as “Free Software And Your Freedom” and “Copyright vs Community in the Age of the Computer Networks”. Another topic is “A Free Digital Society”, which treats several different threats to the freedom of computer users today.
In 1999, Stallman called for development of a free on-line encyclopedia through inviting the public to contribute articles. This idea helped inspire Wikipedia.
Stallman is officially a Visiting Scientist at MIT.
Free Software, Free Society is Stallman’s book of essays. His semiautobiography, Free as in Freedom, provides further biographical information.
He has received the following awards:
• 1986: Honorary life time membership in the Chalmers Computer Society
• 1990: MacArthur Foundation Fellowship
• 1990: The Association for Computing Machinery’s Grace Murray Hopper Award “For pioneering work in the development of the extensible editor EMACS (Editing Macros).”
• 1996: Doctorate honoris causa from Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology
• 1998: Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer award
• 1999: Yuri Rubinsky Memorial Award
• 2001: The Takeda Techno-Entrepreneurship Award for Social/Economic Well-Being
• 2001: Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Glasgow
• 2002: United States National Academy of Engineering membership
• 2003: Doctorate honoris causa from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel
• 2003: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Nacional de Ingeniería del Perú
• 2004: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Salta, in Argentina
• 2004: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Tecnológica del Perú
• 2005: Fondazione Pistoletto prize
• 2007: Honorary professorship from the Universidad Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, in Peru
• 2007: First Premio Internacional Extremadura al Conocimiento Libre
• 2007: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad de Los Angeles de Chimbote, in Peru
• 2007: Doctorate honoris causa from the University of Pavia
• 2008: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Trujillo, in Peru
• 2009: Doctor of Science honoris causa from Lakehead University in Canada
• 2011: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, in Argentina
• 2012: Honorary professorship from the Universidad César Vallejo de Trujillo, in Peru
• 2012: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad Latinoamericana Cima de Tacna, in Peru
• 2012: Doctorate honoris causa from the Universidad José Faustino Sanchez Carrión, in Peru
• 2013: Inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame
• 2014: Doctorate honoris causa from Concordia University in Canada
• 2015: Doctorate honoris causa from Universidad las Américas in Peru.
• 2016: The Association for Computing Machinery’s Software and Systems Award for development of GCC, the GNU Compiler Collection. Click here to read a full biography of Richard Stallman. Click here to read a full transcript of this episode.

Chris: Richard Stallman, welcome to Making Better!

Richard: Thanks for asking me on.

Chris: You’re most well-known for being the father of the free software movement, and I don’t believe most of our listeners know anything about free software. So can you start, maybe even by the most fundamental of definitions, by telling us the difference between “free” as in freedom and “free” as in gratis…

Richard: Well, I don’t use the word “free” to refer to price, I avoid that for the sake of clarity. Free software means software that respects the freedom and community of the program’s users. So it’s a matter of freedom, we’re not talking about price at all. In fact, when I want to say that something is available for zero price, I call it “gratis,” because that’s an unambiguous, clear word. And every time I say “free,” it refers to freedom, never to price. But why is it important for software to respect your freedom and your community? Well, with any program there are two possibilities: either the users control the program, or the program controls the users. You’ve probably heard about the issues that happen when companies control seeds, or companies control medicines, or companies control how you can watch TV or connect to the internet. These companies use their power to mistreat people. Well, it’s just the same with software companies. Nowadays, if you’re running in your computer a program that is not free software, whatever company owns that program has power over you, because it controls the program that tells your computer what to do. And the company’s programmers, they know that, and they are probably designing that program to give the company an advantage over you, to put you at a disadvantage. The companies do this by putting in malicious functionalities, like they make the program spy on its users, or they design it to refuse to do the things that the users will want, ‘cause it’s to their advantage not to let users do what they want. They may have it depend on a server, which might get switched off; they could make it censor users, it can have a backdoor which can be used to do whatever they want to do to users whenever they want to do it. The Amazon e-book reader—we call it the Amazon Swindle—has a backdoor to erase books. And Amazon used this backdoor to send a command to erase thousands of copies of a particularly book one day, and can you guess what book it was? It was 1984 by George Orwell. I’m not making this up! If I were writing fiction, that would seem just too unbelievable, I wouldn’t dare pick that example. But that’s what really happened!

Chris: 1984 meets Fahrenheit 451.

Richard: Well, in 1984 the government burned books, too, you know.

Chris: Yes. So you laid out the four fundamental freedoms of software freedom—could you go into, briefly, should the four freedoms?

Richard: Sure, but I want to explain how they figure in. I say that in order for the program to respect users’ freedom, the users have to have control over it. They need to have control separately but also collectively. Now there are four particular freedoms that the users need in order to have control, so these four freedoms—we call them the four essential freedoms—they actually make a practical definition of free software. So, freedom zero is the freedom to run the program any way you wish for any purpose. Freedom one is the freedom to study the program’s source code, those are the plans that a programmer can understand and then change it so that it does things the way you wish. In other words, so that it works differently, any way you like. And these two give each user separately control over the program, but in order to exercise freedom one, you need to be a programmer. Most users are not programmers, but they still deserve control over their computing, which requires control over the programs they run. How does a non-programmer get to have control? Through collective control, which is the freedoms for a group of users to work together to exercise control over what that program does. So maybe you and five other users decide to make certain changes, and then some of you, who know how to program, write those changes, and then you all use the result, including some of you who don’t know how to program. So this is the way non-programmers can participate in getting programs changed the way they wish. Collective control requires two additional essential freedoms, which adds up to the four essential freedoms. So, freedom number two is to make exact copies and redistribute them to others, either give them or sell them to others, when you wish. And freedom three is to make copies of your modified versions and give or sell them to others when you wish. So with this, the group’s members can cooperate. If one member of the group makes a modified version, then with freedom three, person can copies of that and distribute them to others in the group…then they, with freedom two, can make exact copies of that, and distribute them to others in the group, and this way everyone in the group can get a copy of this new, modified version. So this is why those four freedoms are all essential, so that users have individual, separate control and collective control. Collective control requires two additional essential freedoms, which adds up to the four essential freedoms.

Chris: The comment I was about to make was about the second freedom, I was going to say that the Free Software Foundation website has a list of other volunteer opportunities that people can do to help free software, who are not programmers.

Richard: That’s right, there’s a lot of work that this movement needs which is not programming, some of it which is not particularly technical. It’s like any other political movement, we need speakers, we need people to organize local activist groups and look for opportunities to try to move things to freedom. So you don’t need to be a programmer. Take a look at GNU.org/help and you’ll see our list of many different kinds of work we need.

Francis: If the free software movement succeeds, how will that improve the average person’s life?

Richard: Well, it means that you won’t be mistreated by the software in your computer. You know, right now many programs are spying on people. We recently found that programs sent sensitive personal information to Facebook because the developers of those programs, their mobile apps, use the Facebook library that sends data to Facebook. But you’ve got to expect programs to be spying on you if they’re non-free, that’s why I don’t use any of them. I just reject them all. If there’s something that would be convenient but it means using a non-free program, I won’t do it. I defend my freedom. I won’t sacrifice my freedom for convenience, that’s the first step in having any freedom is not trading it for convenience. But the thing is, if you make that trade, eventually you’ll be at such a big disadvantage vis-a-vis companies, that you’ll probably end up being lured into throwing your money away and being mistreated constantly by companies that profile you, your wallet will be emptied, your democracy will be emptied, your elections will be manipulated, and if the government knows everything about everyone, and of course whatever the companies collect in the US the US government gets to take from them, then heroic whistleblowers like Edward Snowden will be impossible because they’d be caught right away. If the government knows who goes where, what each one does and who talks with whom, there is no privacy left and you can see what that looks like in China, and that’s where the United States is heading to. It’s time now to organize and fight and say, “stop talking about regulating the use of our data, and stop collecting it at all.”

Francis: We live in a generation of kids right now who haven’t been brought up to appreciate privacy as a right, even.

Richard: That’s true, it’s very threatening. But there’s no use giving up. You see, I don’t need to be an optimist to keep fighting. I know that it’s better to fight than to surrender. If you surrender you’re immediately defeated. What good is that?

Francis: I agree completely. So what do you do about all this information that’s been garnered about everyone that’s on Facebook and all these other sites that have been tracking people—is that information just out there ready to be exploited?

Richard: Well, it is. Theoretically we could pass laws requiring them to delete it, but even if we don’t delete the old information, if we stop the collection of more information, that will gradually solve the problem of the old information. It will become less applicable and less complete, and eventually it won’t be enough to be a basis for tyranny by itself.

Chris: I’ve heard you talking, and you use a phrase that I really like, that if you use Facebook you’re not actually a “user,” you’re a “used”

Richard: Correct. Facebook uses people, people don’t use Facebook. Facebook uses people to collect data about them and about other people. If you talk with people through Facebook, then those people are pressured by you to be used by Facebook, to give data to Facebook. And when they do so, they’re also pressuring others. So they may be pressuring you to communicate through Facebook, while you’re pressuring them to communicate by Facebook. People are pressuring each other. And my conclusion from that is, it’s really our duty to refuse to be used by Facebook. But it’s important to note that Facebook collects data about people in a number of other ways, even if they don’t have Facebook accounts. For instance, there is a period tracking app for women, which was sending data to Facebook, and these women didn’t necessarily have to have Facebook accounts. It was still getting data about them, so of course it can find out when they’re pregnant, and not only that. Lots of programs have been sending data to Facebook in that way. And websites also send data to Facebook. If you look at a website and you see a “like” button, the Facebook server knows that your machine visited that page.

Chris: And we actually, after you and I went back and forth in email a little bit, Richard, we’ve decided not to have any “like” buttons on our website because Amanda, our web person (who you met in Cambridge once) looked at them and they all execute Javascript…

Richard: Right…but the point is, it’s not just executing Javascript, it’s malicious Javascript. It’s a non-free program which is malicious, as many non-free programs nowadays are. It’s the usual case. That may sound like a shockingly strong statement, but people have done studies of, I think, the thousand most popular android apps at the time, and found that the majority of them were spying in one particular way that was easy for the researcher to detect. Of course the rest could be spying in other ways, but without knowing that, the researcher had already proved that most of them were spying. And by the way, there are a lot of other things like, similar to the like button, but from other companies, and they’re all doing the same kind of spying. But we have a browser which blocks all of that, it’s called Icecat. Obviously, it’s a modified version of Firefox. And we’ve put in various features to protect users’ privacy.

Chris: And there are some social media outlets that are ethical…I’m thinking of Gnu Social, and Megadon perhaps?

Richard: You mean Mastadon?

Chris: Mastadon.

Rchard: Yeah. Mastadon is actually a modified version of Gnu Social. Yes, they’re ethical in two ways. One is that the client software you need is all free software, and the other is that the networks are run to some extent by the community, and therefore, they’re not constantly being designed to get people to give more data. Of course you still have to think about what you’re going to say to people. What you say in any social network, no matter how ethically run it might be, is going to be visible to a lot of people. So, you should think twice before saying things. You know, don’t post photos of other people, because publishing a photo with other people in it is helping to track them. You should ask them whether they really want to be tracked. Don’t post photos of minors, because those photos will be part of their permanently available data, available to whoever, whoever it might be depending on how you posted it. But the point is, that’s someone who hasn’t had a chance to think about whether that’s a good idea, and could conceivably be used to hurt that person, or even you.

Chris: So it brings us to a question of consent.

Richard: Well, a baby can’t consent to anything. So, people don’t realize how dangerous massive surveillance is. But if you want to understand that, read about China’s social credit system, which is designed to keep track of people’s behavior in many dimensions, and then punish or reward people, depending on how much the state likes what people are doing.

Francis: What do you think, say, 50 years from now, would be the ultimate landscape for how software is offered, the nature of software? Say, like 50 years from now.

Richard: I can’t tell you. Nobody can predict the future 50 years from now, it’s fatuous to try. Human as in technology may not exist. Technology might exist and no humans, or humans exist but no technology. Robots powerful enough might consider humans to be a dispensable toy, or an inconvenience. On the other hand, global heating disaster could destroy globalized manufacturing and leave humans without the ability to make high tech goods, and some would still survive, nowhere near as many as today.

Chris: What do you consider are the most successful pieces of free software out there today? I mean, in my mind, the internet wouldn’t work without free software, so…

Richard: I don’t know if that’s true. I can’t say that I’m sure that the internet would not work without free software, free software has, for much of the internet’s existence, played an important role in its use. But there were other programs to do those things, and so there could still have been an internet without them, it just wouldn’t have respected our freedom at all. But the most important free software is the Gnu/ Linux operating system, that’s what makes it possible to run a PC with only free software. And then Android has a relationship with free software. It’s not a simple relationship; a large piece of Android is released by Google as free software. It’s not everything you need to actually run a device, so you’ve to either pick your device carefully and put in some free replacements, or run non-free programs along with it. And then many of the original apps of Android were non-free, and over the years some apps that were free have been replaced with non-free programs by Google. And the next thing is, if you get an Android device, it’s not certain that the programs distributed in that device are free—they could be non-free modified versions of the free programs, they could be other programs that are non-free. It’s something that can only be checked on a case-by-case basis. There is a free variant of Android, it’s called Replicant, it works on certain models and it’s entirely free software.

Chris: Does Replicant also cut down on the surveillance as well?

Richard: Well, to some extent. There are various technical methods to do surveillance. Many non-free programs spy on the user and send personal data to somebody. Well, if you don’t run those programs, if you run only free software, you’re pretty much safe from that. It’s unusual for free programs to spy on the user, because the users can fix that. That means that the users, if they care enough, can make sure that the program doesn’t spy on them, and this is a powerful deterrent against anyone’s putting in surveillance functionalities into free software. It’s not guaranteed, you may have to check which version you’re going to use to avoid surveillance. But at least it’s possible to make the modified version which doesn’t spy. In any case, though, that’s not the only form of surveillance. For instance, there’s an increasing danger from cameras on the street that recognize license plates and recognize faces. Now, that doesn’t work through our computers, we can’t block that by changing the software in our computers. We have to organize and get laws to say that face recognition systems may not recognize any face except somebody put in the list by a court order.

Francis: I’m imagining that if this face recognition, the computer could look at you, your laptop could look at you, figure out who you are and then market…

Richard: No, no no, no. Your laptop knows who you are. If it’s running non-free software, it’s very likely spying on you also, but if it’s running free software and you use a system distro that’s developed by people who care about protecting privacy, it probably isn’t spying on you. No, I’m talking about these cameras that are placed in the street, they’re not on your laptop. They watch everybody who passes by. And Amazon is now recruiting people to put video systems, you know, at their doors to watch everybody who comes up and the video, I believe, just gets stored by Amazon, and so the FBI, I believe, could collect it all with a National Security Letter. But in addition, there are programs to get people to sign up to send some of this information to cops. I know in Detroit, there’s a program where the cops tell businesses, if you want us to show up quickly for a 9-11 call you better have a camera that we can watch through all the time. Well, cameras that they can watch through all the time should be flat out illegal!—unless a court says put a camera right there for the next five months. These strong measures are what it will take to give us actual protection from total government tracking of what we do. And anything less won’t do the job.

Francis: I think a big hit on freedom was the Patriot Act and how that undid a lot of these freedoms.

Richard: I like to call it the “Pat-riot Act,” ‘cause in a country based on an idea of freedom, there is nothing less patriotic than that law. The idea of the US is that the government shouldn’t have total control over what people do, it shouldn’t know every, where everyone goes. It shouldn’t know everyone you talk with.

Francis: Well, how do we get back to that sort of awareness in people?

Richard: …have to change laws. I don’t have a magic recipe for how to win this campaign, but I can point out what we need. Let’s think of the Green New Deal. For many years, most of us—except denialists—have acknowledged that global heating is very dangerous and that it needs to be stopped. But you’ve seen, over and over, inadequate proposals, proposals that wouldn’t do the job. And now finally you see Extinction Rebellion and the students climate strike and the Green New Deal, where people are demanding that solutions be considered that would really solve the problem, that are not obviously insufficient. Well, I’m saying the same kind of thing about how to avoid having a surveillance state that represses dissent. We have to put an end to the collection of so much data that it could repress us.

Francis: Are any bills in Congress along these lines?

Richard: Not that I know of. But in Massachusetts, a bill has been submitted to stop the state from doing face recognition. It’s presented as a moratorium until proper regulations can be adopted. But in the meantime, it says none at all. There are very limited exceptions, which I believe depend on a court order. So that’s the kind of solution that’s needed, except it has to apply to private companies as well.

Francis: Maybe we need a Free New Deal, like getting back the freedoms we gave up because of the 9-11 hysteria back in the Patriot Act days. I think a lot of what was promoted at that time were supposed to be temporary, like emergency measures, too, not like a permanent …

Richard: Exactly. That’s what typically happens. That law was initially temporary, the Pat-riot Act, and it got renewed a few times, and I think ultimately made permanent, if my memory serves. But it shouldn’t have been passed at all. It was obvious at the time that this was a worse attack than the September 11th attacks themselves. In fact, on that day I started to write an article telling people what the next target would be, our freedom would be the next target. In the article I started to write, I urged Americans that, in their frustration about being unable to fight back against the bombers, that they must not start destroying their own country’s freedom instead.

Francis: And Obama was such a disappointment. I mean, the way Obama treated whistleblowers, instead of maybe seeing Snowden as a hero with what he did…I mean, that to me was very telling about who Obama really was.

Richard: Well, I could tell that before the election. His slogans were “Hope” and “Change”—could you get vaguer than that? It was clear that he wasn’t the kind of person who would really try to solve the country’s big problems. I wasn’t knowledgable enough to foresee the specifics of his disappointing actions, his inability to push hard for anything, and his subservience to the banksters when the central problem of the United States is plutocracy. You can look at so many different areas, whether it’s surveillance, or pollution, or impoverishment of most people, or imprisonment, or the failure to curb global heating, and what you see is, plutocracy’s involved. I couldn’t see that much detail about him, but I did see that he was not proposing firm and major moves to address these problems.

Chris: I got excited about President Obama when he was still a candidate, because he was the first major Presidential candidate I’d ever heard who included disability in his speeches, and then he turned out to be an absolute disaster for people with disabilities. His Justice Department and his Federal Communications Commission were just an absolute failure for us. It was just a phenomenal disappointment.

Richard: Yeah. Well, it’s one more disappointment on many others from Obama.

Francis: Actually prosecute all the people that were doing the, uh, stuff the Bush team were doing that was obviously illegal, and the bankers, the banksters, and then his basic idea was, “we can’t look back, we have to look forward.” I was thinking, you know, if any lawyer tried that in a court, like “Judge, yeah he killed 50 people, but we can’t look back, we have to look forward”—what kind of justification is that anyway? But somehow he pulled it off.

Richard: Yeah, they stole a million Americans’ houses with fraudulent foreclosure, let’s not look back at that…but it was Obama and it was, Holder, I think was his name, the Treasury Secretary, who let the banksters off the hook, protected them, and when states were going to prosecute them for this fraud, it was Obama and Holder that pressured them to let it drop.

Chris: But if you compare what our Attorney General did in the banking crisis to Iceland, where 35 bankers in Iceland all went to jail—little Iceland actually prosecutes criminals while big United States gives criminals handouts.

Richard: Yeah. Well, part of that is because the companies are so big that it’s hard to fight them. Well, I have a proposal for how to make all these companies get smaller. The proposal is, a tax. You could think of it as a progressive sales tax. The bigger the total company is, worldwide, the higher the tax rate. This way, it pressures companies to split themselves up into independent businesses, because then each one will pay less tax.

Francis: Whoa. [claps] I love that idea! It’s so simple, and it has to work.

Richard: Well, it has to work if it’s tuned right. You know, there are economic questions in there, I can’t be sure it would actually work, but I’m sure it’s worth studying to see if you can tune it so you’ll get good results. It’s much better, though, than existing almost-nugatory US antitrust law, which requires suing the company and proving it did something in a very small range of prohibited kinds of actions, and then it can be split up…splitting it up in a way chosen by the government, which is not, again, limited by certain criteria, what…that’s not the way to do it. This tax would pressure companies to find the way to split themselves up, find an efficient way, but that would still give you n smaller companies instead of one giant company.

Francis: Well, you know, part of how we got here was this kind of scam that I think Reagan really started, where the free market became sort of a religion, and it was the answer to everything is just free market, free market, no regulations, and that sort of thing.

Richard: Right. It’s the cult of the invisible hand.

Francis: Yeah. And even with regards to free software, how do you think the free market system has backfired in terms of the common interest people have?

Richard: I wouldn’t say that. You know, free software can exist in a free market, in fact it does. Of course every market has regulations. Some markets have arbitrary regulations that limit participation to certain entities. That’s usually what’s meant by not a free market. But there are always regulations on any market. If you tried not to have them, everybody might start cheating unless they know each other enough that they won’t. And markets are unstable in many ways that economists know about but in neoclassical economics they tend to close their eyes to this fact. The reason that we have anti-trust laws, 100 or so years ago, Americans realized that the market was unstable against mergers and trusts that would conspire to fix prices. So, laws were needed and were adopted to stop that. Well, when the market hits an instability, if you don’t want to let society fall into that instability, you need laws to stop it. You need regulations of the market. So, I wouldn’t say that free software is in any way contradictory to the free market. But there are certain practices that are harmful that shouldn’t be done. Our society, our legal system and the ambient philosophy promotes the practice of non-free software which is basically subjugating people through their computers. If you want software to treat you ethically, the way to get that in practice is, insist on free software and that way the user community of each program can make sure it isn’t nasty.

Francis: Can you give an example of what that would look like to people who aren’t into programming and that sort of thing?

Richard: Well, suppose that there’s a certain program that is inconvenient to use “cause the designers made a certain choice about how you would tell it what to do, what it’s interface would look like. And suppose that it doesn’t cater to people with vision problems. People with vision problems can work together to add a screen reader into that program, or make it talk properly to a screen reader. You don’t have to wait and try to convince the program’s principal developers that it’s worth paying attention to this. You can just ignore them, you can fix it yourself. You personally could fix it yourself if you want to, and this kind of thing’s happened, you know. Do you know Krishna Kahnt (*)?

Chris: I do.

Richard: Yeah. Well, Krisha Kahnt is a great example. He came to one of my talks, I suppose it was in Mumbai, and he said “I’m a blind user of Gnu/Linux and I find that the screen reader is not working very well. What should I do?” And I said, “work on improving it,” and he did. And he made important contributions to the free software screenreader that we have.

Chris: They were tremendously important additions, and he works a lot on the project now.

Richard: Yeah. Oh, that’s good news, ‘cause he’s so effective. The point is, if you said that about Windows, it would be useless, it would just be pissing and moaning. It’s unpleasant that the screenreader in Windows is inconvenient in these ways, what can I do? The answer is, nothing. “Cause Microsoft controls it, and it controls you. But when the program you’re complaining about is free software, then you can improve it yourself, or you, being a group of blind users who don’t know how to program but you’ve got money to contribute, you could pool your money to hire somebody to make whatever improvements you ask for.

Chris: There is actually a group out of Australia called NV Access, who make a screenreader called NVDA for Windows that’s GPL.

Richard: Yeah, I know. It’s sad that it’s for Windows. I wish they would work on making it run on Gnu. So this freedom for the users is what distinguishes free software. So it means that we can fix things that are broken, it means we can add improvements, but in addition, it means that we can fix and also deter anything malicious. When a company controls the program and controls what it does, that company faces temptation, the situation gives that company power over the users, which adds up to temptation. And you can’t expect companies nowadays to resist temptation to exploit people. Exploiting people is what most of them think they’re there for. So they’re going to put in malicious functionalities: like stopping you from doing certain things. Like spying on you. Like the backdoor that allowed Amazon to erase copies of 1984 and at other times to erase other books, and then there’s the censorship control that Apple has, which allows it to prevent people from installing apps unless Apple approves of them. And Apple was exercising this censorship power arbitrarily until 2017, at which point China told Apple, “from now on you’re going to censor for us”—and Apple said, “yes sir.”

Francis: Was jailbreaking iPhones kind of an attempt at some sort of…?

Richard: Yes, the purpose of “jailbreaking” them was to be able to install programs Apple didn’t approve of. But I gather that it’s pretty hard to jailbreak them now, and it’s not done very much. So basically Apple won that battle. We can’t assume that we will always defeat malicious technology because we’re so clever. We have to fight against it on the ethical grounds, politically. We have to say, don’t permit computers to censor the installation of applications or other software. Why should we allow such products to be sold?

Francis: I agree 100%. I think most people would agree with that.

Richard: Well, why should we allow programs to spy on people? Why should we allow programs to be designed with DRMs so that they restrict what users can do with the data they have? Why should we allow programs to have backdoors? People have accepted, though, people other than me, and I hope you, have basically granted legitimacy to the software developers having power over users. There are many people that complain when they see companies use this power in ways that cause pain, but they mostly don’t say that the companies shouldn’t have power over people in the first place. That’s what the free software movement says.

Chris: When Tim Cook came out with his criticism of Facebook, and came very closer to your “user vs. used” statement, all I could think was, you know, Richard Stallman’s been saying this for ten years. Tim Cook is certainly smart enough to have known it ten years earlier, why wasn’t he saying it then?

Richard: Well, first of all, “smart enough to” is not the operative question when it comes to taking a political position. You need more than just reasoning ability to reach political conclusions, because these conclusions are based on events in the world. And if you don’t see the harm, then you won’t reach the conclusion. So that’s not where my criticism of Tim Cook would be. My criticism is that he presides over malicious software, too. Apple is, I think, the nastiest company in regard to malicious software. Everything about Apple machines is designed to be malicious. In fact, I read that as of September or so, it became impossible to install Gnu/Linux in a Mac, that the Macs that came out after that were configured in such a way that they wouldn’t permit it. It would easy…

Chris: I have Ubuntu installed in a virtual machine on a my Macintosh and use it, so…

Richard: Sorry, that’s not the same thing. You’re still running Apple’s non-free software, which I wouldn’t tolerate in a computer of mine. And if Apple has set it up so that you can only run free software by…run a free system in a virtual machine, and can’t make that the native system of the machine, that’s oppression. That’s one of the things that I’d propose should be illegal.

Chris: Apple does ship some free software on Macintosh, I mean Emacs is there…

Richard: Some free software doesn’t matter. The question is, can you live in the free world, can you have freedom? It’s like saying, well, gee, there’s no chain on my left hand, there’s only a chain on each of my feet and on my right hand and on my neck, but on my left hand there’s no chain! Isn’t that great! It’s a small step towards where things should be. You see my point? The goal of the free software movement is not that we have a few programs that are free. No, it’s to do our computing in freedom, which means no non-free software. That was the goal from the very beginning. That’s the goal that I announced in 1983, to develop a sufficient body of free software that we could get along without any software that is not free.

Chris: I’m going to ask you now, an entertaining Richard Stallman story, just because I’ve heard it told to me in about 30 different versions. You were coming home from your birthday party and were told that Symbolics was no longer sharing its software with MIT. Now the version of the story I heard most often is that…

Richard: Let me tell you what actually happened. It’s better than recounting a possibly incorrect story. First of all, I don’t know whether I had a birthday party that day. Most years I have not had one. But it was on my birthday that I was informed that Symbolics had effectively issued an ultimatum to everybody at the AI Lab. But perhaps I should explain the background for this, because most people listening don’t know what Symbolics was or what the dispute was about. Well, a group of us at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab had developed the LISP machine. LISP is a very elegant programming language that was often used for Artificial Intelligence, as well as for some other things. So this was a computer designed to run LISP programs faster and do so with full runtime error checking. If anything turned out to be the wrong data type and you tried to operate on it, the machine would show you that there was an error and where, and you could do whatever was useful to do. It wouldn’t go blindly on, treating the data as if it were the other type and do total nonsense. So the LISP machine was a big advance, and we wanted to give other people—other labs, not individuals, really, at the time—the chance to have that. So people started to create a company to manufacture LISP machines. By the way, LISP is short for LISt Processing. Anyway, there was a disagreement, and the group split and two different companies were started by different parts of the group. The person who had started the project, Greenblatt, wanted to make a hacker companies—we all called ourselves hacking, and “hacking” just meant playful cleverness, such as developing the LISP machine. That was hacking. We had a lot of fun being playfully clever, developing that software. So his idea was that it would not hire away everybody from the AI Lab, and thus not destroy our community, and in other ways be less ruthless than typical companies funded by venture capital. The other people decided to do it the usual way, with venture capital, and make something that would be ruthless. MIT set up an agreement between the two companies, for them to use the LISP machine software system, which entailed, by the way, making that system that I had helped develop parts of, into non-free software. And that, that hurt my conscience. What could I do? And things just went along, but basically the agreement was both of those companies could use and distribute MIT’s LISP machine operating system, and they both had to give their changes back to MIT. But the MIT lawyers forgot to include a clause saying that MIT could redistribute those changes. It sort of took for granted that that would be permitted. Symbolics was one of the companies, it was the one with the venture capital, the one that was going to be ruthless, and it was. And on my birthday, it said that from then on, it would provide its version of the system to MIT for people at MIT to use, but MIT would not be allowed to put those changes and improvements into the MIT LISP machine operating system. Symbolics’ idea was that since it had hired most of the programmers away from the AI Lab, and had destroyed our community, and the other company, Greenblatt’s company, since it didn’t have all that money, didn’t have programmers working for it at the time, Symbolics thought that it would destroy Greenblatt’s company this way. It thought that everyone at MIT would use the Symbolics version of the system because it would have improvements, and that the MIT version would languish, it would not be maintained, and therefore LISP Machine Incorporated, Greenblatt’s company, would fail. And I interpreted this as an ultimatum that required everybody at MIT to choose a side between the two companies. I didn’t want to choose a side, I had been neutral. I had stayed working at MIT rather than go into either company, because I didn’t want to take a side in that conflict. Although before it wasn’t a…burning conflict, it was just a potential conflict. It was definitely contention between the two, and I just wanted to stay at MIT doing what I’d done before. But I couldn’t do that anymore, Symbolics had forced me to take a side. Therefore, I took the side against the attacker, Symbolics. That’s what you do when you’re neutral and you’re attacked by one side. So, I said that I would develop replacements for all of Symbolics’ improvements and put them into MIT’s version of the system, and thus keep it maintained, keep improving, and also enable LISP Machine Incorporated to have a chance to succeed, stopping Symbolics’ attempt to destroy it. Symbolics didn’t like this, but I did this for almost two years, and that was to punish Symbolics for imposing an ultimatum that it thought would compel me and everyone else at MIT to be a supporter of Symbolics. I don’t like it when anyone tries to force me to support in an injustice against someone else.

Chris: So effectively in two years you did all the work of Symbolics’ team, that was heavily funded by venture capitalists?

Richard: Yes. I wrote equivalent different software to compete with all the people who had left the AI Lab that used to be part of the same group. I worked terribly hard. But it was my ability to succeed in doing that, that showed me that I could entertain the idea of developing a free operating system, which was an even bigger job.

Chris: And that’s what led to Gnu/Linux.

Richard: Well, Gnu is the operating system I developed in 1992, when Torvalds made Linux free software. It could be used as the kernel for the Gnu system, that filled the last gap in the Gnu system, which was almost complete at the time—complete in the sense of a minimal operating capability, a system you could use to do its own continued development. It didn’t have everything you’d want, but it was a system that could be run and developed. And that is the result of my decision, that I was going to develop this system no matter what it took, because it had to be developed, it was the only way that people would ever be able to use a computer in freedom. And that is, without any software that puts you under the power of somebody else.

Chris: And you’ve grown that community from basically yourself to tens if not hundreds of thousands of people around the world who are hacking on free software every day…

Richard: Yes. Although sad to say, most of them don’t support the free software movement. People in 1998 who disagreed with our philosophy decided to try to co-opt our work and substitute a different philosophy, a business-friendly philosophy, one that didn’t rock the boat. They called that “open source,” and the idea was they would not talk about freedom, they would never talk about it as a matter of right and wrong. They wouldn’t say that open source was their substitute for free, but it stood for a different idea, it wasn’t just a different name. It was a different name for a different meaning. Whereas we say it’s wrong if a program doesn’t respect your freedom, they would never say that it’s wrong if a program is closed source. That was exactly what they wanted to avoid even hinting at. Well, that led to a lot of companies, including even IBM, boosting the term “open source” and never raising the issue in terms of right and wrong. And that did lead to more development of programs that are free, but it led to our communities mostly forgetting about the issue of freedom, which is the reason this is so important. So, what that means is, our community is much wider now, but it doesn’t have the same deep roots.

Chris: How would you see to promote the philosophy moving forward?

Richard: Well, we can talk about it, which is what I’m doing now, and we can show that we treat this as a principle. So I won’t have a non-free program on my computer. I don’t say I use free software “whenever possible,” meaning whenever it’s not too hard. No, I say I will not use non-free software. I won’t have it on my computer at all, and if there’s something I can’t do with free software, well, then I’m not going to do it, I guess, until there is free software to do it.

Francis: What about having class action suits against companies to prevent the spying aspects…..?

Richard: I don’t know whether you have a chance of winning. In principle, if you’ve got a chance of winning, I’d say go to it. But I don’t think that there are very good laws against it. The most there is in some cases as far as I know is that, in some cases they are required to ask permission. Now that’s a very weak protection, because the computing industry, the software industry and digital dis-service industry, has become adept at the manufacture of consent. They can get you to say “yes” with a combination of several techniques. One is, writing carefully so that it’s not clear to you just what you’re saying “yes” to, and another is putting the consent in something very long, that would take you hours to understand, and you couldn’t understand because it’s written in a way that is above your reading level, and that you’re not even going to look at anyway.

Chris: And also typically you’ll find the “agree” button is before the text, so most users out there just hit the “agree” button so they can use the software.

Richard: I’m not sure exactly what you mean by “before”—I don’t know if it’s legally valid, legally binding if you can’t see the agreement before you agree to it…

Chris: They just put the button at the top, with the text below it, so…

Richard: They know they can manipulate people because people have not been…their consciousness has not be raised about how they’re going to be mistreated. But then the final pressure is, you want to use this dis-service, and you feel it’s very important to you, so even if you saw that they were going to do nasty things to you, you think that your choice is either to accept it or not. And in the short term, if you don’t value freedom the way I do, you might accept it. “Cause in the short term, your choice is either use it or don’t. But in the long term, society’s choice is either to have one that respects our freedom and privacy and community, or have one that trashes our freedom and privacy and community. Because if we tolerate the unjust one, it will fill the niche and it will be harder for us to replace it with the just one. So my feeling is, it’s my responsibility as a citizen to reject the unjust one.

Francis: Seems to me that, if it were other technologies that came before computing, the same type of behavior would have had people up in arms. Like if the phone company was listening to your phone calls and then sending that information to ..markers and stuff, I mean people…

Richard: Well, but that’s happening now.

Francis: It’s happening on phones?

Richard: Well, I know the phone companies are recording who you talk to, and some of them are telling the US government, one thing we learned in 2013, I think we learned this from Snowden, is that AT&T had been telling the US government—I think specifically the FBI—about every long-distance phone call it had made since 1988 or so.

Chris: And the government can collect all these phone numbers and know everybody who’s talked to everybody…

Richard: Exactly. And that’s exactly what we can’t allow the state to know about people other than court-designated suspects. That’s the system that we developed to protect people from being tracked in all their activities by the state.

Chris: We have Jim Fructerman coming on as a guest, and he’s built, at Benetech, a communications system that’s being used by more and more NGOs and nonprofits who are doing work in countries that…may have governments unfriendly to their work, that goes a step beyond TOR even, to make their communications private.

Richard: Does it support non-immediate messages, in other words something comparable to email?

Chris: I am not certain, I don’t know the details.

Richard: That would be important. You see, if it supports something comparable to email, something that people could have drop into their mailboxes, then I could use it. But if required that both people be online at the same time, it’s impossible for me. Totally impossible.

Chris: It’s pretty much designed for human rights organizations to communicate with each other.

Richard: It may be a very good thing, I don’t know enough about it. I’d be interested in seeing a summary of its features, maybe we could use it. Is it all free software? I’m hoping it is.

Chris: Yes, it is. Because of some mistakes they made early on, not everything Benetech does is free software, but they’re replacing everything they have with free software now.

Richard: I’m glad they’ve got on the right path.

Chris: They were doing some things in Windows. If Windows was free software, this wouldn’t have been required, but they had to use real—almost black-hat hacker techniques to get information out of some things in Windows.

Richard: Yes, that’s one of the problems you get when you’re trying to build on top of a non-free program, which is the developers tell you about how to do certain things, and they don’t tell you how to do other things. Non-free programs often have secret functionalities that other products from the same company can use, but your products can’t. Basically any chance they get to manipulate others to their own advantage, they don’t hesitate. Because there’s nothing to check their nastiness anymore. Windows has a universal back door. What this means is that Microsoft can forcibly change the software in a Windows machine in any way it likes. It can put any nasty thing into a Windows system.

Chris: And I’m sure there are many nasty things already there.

Richard: There are. We have a catalog of known malicious functionalities, hundreds of them. It’s in Gnu.org/malware. Malware means a program designed to run in a way that hurts other users.

Chris: You also have a list of all of the crimes Facebook committed, don’t you?

Richard: Well, I have a list of reasons to refuse to be used by Facebook, and that’s in Stallman. org/Facebook.html

Francis: How do they make all that data available? Like, how do they sell it, and who’s buying it?

Richard: It’s complicated and I don’t know all the info. I don’t actually care very much how they use it, the point is, those are details that don’t affect my judgment of anything.

Francis: I’m just wondering if perhaps it could be made illegal to use that kind of information.

Richard: Well, it could be. I think it’s probably just as easy to forbid the things they do to collect the information as it is to limit the harmful things they do with it. And one thing that we’re not likely to see laws to forbid them to do, is give the data to the FBI when the FBI asks for it. And that’s, of course, what the Pat-riot Act requires.

Chris: So if they’re not collecting the data at all, Frank, they can’t sell it, they can’t give it to the government, they can’t do anything. So Richard’s point is, pass laws that keep them from collecting it at all.

Richard: Right.

Francis: Well, I’m just being selfish, ‘cause I’m assuming there’s all this information about everything I’ve googled and everything I’ve bought and everyone I’ve talked to for the last bunch of years…

Richard: Well actually, if Google knows who you are, when you do a search, which it probably does more or less if you haven’t come through TOR using a browser designed to hide your identity…

Chris: I believe Google blocks TOR now…

Richard: Yes, it does. That’s my experience. Although…not actually it doesn’t block TOR, exactly. What happened last time I tried was, it sent me a capcha, but the capcha required running non-free software, and I wouldn’t run that. I don’t know what other nasty things that…the code of that capcha involves. We’re changing the subject…the point is, Google, if it knew who you were, kept track of what searches you did, and uses that to profile you and will give it to the FBI if ordered to.

Francis: I remember there was that time when everybody was worried about lists they were on, and how, like, if there’s some sort of other huge event that’s created like 9-11 that people would just be herded into stadiums and stuff, who are considered…potential threats to whatever they

Richard: If anything, we’re closer to that now. I wouldn’t be surprised if the supporters of the bullshitter do a thing like that. I used to call him “the Troll,” but that’s when …the main thing he was doing was saying outrageous things, in other words trolling. Even what he says is worse that just trolling, it’s making up total nonsense that’s different every day from what it was the previous day. I also refer to him as the Bully, the Cheater, the War-lover, the Saboteur-in Chief, whatever fits whatever act I’m talking about. The point is that they have such contempt for every actual meaning of human rights and the Constitution, that I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they put thousands of Americans into prison for political reasons.

Francis: During a crisis, they could easily pull that off.

Richard: Well, they have lots of cops that are right-wing. And so if they wanted to put leftists in prison, I’m sure they wouldn’t get much resistance from most cops. It’s not as if they would need to be careful about deciding who to imprison, people like that are not tremendously concerned about doing justice, even in terms of their own ideas of right and wrong.

Francis: I’m not sure if right and wrong really enters into their thought process. More like win or lose…

Richard: Well, in a way it does. They certainly do think that various groups of people are bad and they’re doing things that are wrong. The point is that checking carefully what each individual has or hasn’t done is not part of their thinking about it. They like saying “lock her up” and proving that she did something that is a crime, is not something that they think is even pertinent.

Francis: Well, we’re having to re-fight all these old battles. I think eventually where we’re headed now, we’re going to have to start arguing over whether democracy itself is valid.

Richard: Well, we know the answer to that. It’s the worst of all systems of government, except the others that have been tried from time to time.

Chris: So we’re bumping up against our hour—Richard, is there anything that you’d especially like to add?

Richard: For more information about free software and Gnu, look at gnu.org. If you’re interested in philosophical questions, look at gnu.org/ philosophy. If you’re interested in free software licenses and what they mean and which ones to use, look at gnu.org/licenses. If you’d like to see why schools have the moral obligation to teach exclusively free software, look at gnu.org/education. And if you want to look at why governments should move to free software in all their activities, look at gnu.org/government. And if you’re interested in why we should prohibit systems that collect personal data, make sure that they’re designed in a way such that they don’t collect data about who does what and who goes where and who talks with whom, look at gnu.org/philosophy/surveillancevsdemocracy.html–the title of the article is, How Much Surveillance Can Democracy Withstand? There’s also the Free Software Foundation, whose website is FSF.org. If you look at FSF.org/resources/hw you can find out about machines that can run with free software. And there’s other useful resources and campaigns in that site as well. And you can also donate or become an associate member of the Free Software Foundation. Donations are memberships are our main source of funds. There’s also gnu.org/help, which lists various kinds of volunteer work we’re looking for, and most of them do not involve programming. You don’t need to be a technical person to do them.

Chris: And that’s something that I constantly tell people I know who use Gnu software, that they can help out in one way or another. Whenever I talk to somebody who says “oh, Gnu—I use Gnu paint, or whatever Gnu program they use.

Richard: Thank you for doing that. And Happy Hacking!

Chris: Thank you so much for coming on Making Better, and we hope you’ll come back maybe in a year, give us an update.

Richard: Sure.

—[end]

Welcome to the Making Better Podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future.

Now, here are your hosts, Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris: Well, Francis, it’s Episode 3 of the Making Better Podcast!

Francis: Awesome! I’m very exciting, because I woke up this morning, I read the headlines, and once again…the Trump administration was at war with the environment, and I felt like, god I gotta do something! We all have to do better, we all have to do more. This aggression will not stand, man! So, I’m really happy that we’re doing this and, you know, in our own little way sending out a positive ripple in the world.

Chris: Well, that’s been the central theme of Making Better since we started, every guest we’ve had, and I think we’ve had nine so far, is somebody who’s out there already making the world a better place.

Francis: Exactly…and that was a Big Lebowski reference, by the way. You know, we are the majority, the amount of people who actually want to have a good life and not destroy the earth and each other, is the vast majority. And I think it’s just a matter of time before all of that effort gets harnessed in a way that the power goes to the people again.

Chris: This episode’s guest is Ann Devereux-Mills. She’s a former advertising executive turned activist, and she’s also a four-time cancer survivor. Her primary organization is called Parlay House, which facilitates communication among women to help them with their careers and with their lives. She’s also the producer of a documentary that aired on PBS called “The Return” and she’s an activist on prison reform issues in California. We had a terrific conversation with Ann, and I hope you will all enjoy it as well.

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Francis: So, I would like to welcome Ann Devereux-Mills to the show today. Hello, Ann..

Ann: Hey there! Nice to be with you.

Francis: It’s great to have you here. Your life story and your work, I think, is a really great platform for discussing a lot of the issues that we’re concerned with here at Making Better. So if I could, if we could just begin with you giving our listeners a brief overview of your story—where you came from, your history as a CEO and in business, and then where you’ve come to today.

Ann: Sure. Well, I grew up in Seattle before Seattle was the Seattle it is today, where the University of Washington was mostly it, but I was lucky enough to go to a little private school where people like Robert Fulghum, who wrote Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, was my English teacher and Bill Gates was a few years ahead of me, you know, doing the amazing things he was doing, it was just one of those kind of special times. And I left Seattle to go straight to Wellesley, where I had four amazing, unexpected years, because I’d been totally boy-crazy. So there I was in an all-female environment for four years, and really found myself on a whole different level that was terrific, and I graduated with a degree in political economy and it was 1984 and it was a recession, not like the 2008 recession but not a good time to get a job, and I got the one job I could get at the time, which was at an insurance broker called Marsh & McClennan. And got to my first day of work and my boss said, “you know, I hadn’t really thought about what you should be doing, why don’t you go home early and come back tomorrow and I’ll figure it out.” Now, many of us would like to be sent home early for a free afternoon by our boss, but this was the beginning of my corporate life and I was sort of distraught about it. But I decided, OK, I’m going to be a New Yorker, and I was really naive, really naive. So I just decided, OK, I’m going to walk up through Central Park, I’m going to walk up Madison Avenue, cross through Central Park and—I was living on the upper West side—and I got through to the middle of the park, and standing under a tree was a tall, handsome man and I had kind of never really talked to a tall, handsome man as an adult, and he had the Village Voice under his arm, and…it was raining and he asked for directions, and I heard one sentence and I immediately thought, Gay English Actor…and I was wrong, wrong and wrong. He was Irish, he was not an actor, he was straight and he was looking for a job and a date. And I was the safest person walking through Central Park and he asked me out for a drink, and luckily I had one friend in New York from Wellesley and she was working as a bartender, so I sort of knew that if he was a serial killer I would have someone who had seen me last…and of course, I ended up marrying him, and so it’s sort of a fun start of a story that didn’t turn out so well, ‘cuz we went our separate ways, but it was the beginning of my experimenting, doing things that were unfamiliar—marrying someone when I didn’t have a lot of relationship experience, and jumping into things pretty quickly. But my career as an insurance person didn’t last very long, because it was a really bad fit for a feminist in a very stodgy, old boys network, where I could do a whole program with you all talking about the sexual harassment of that time, and I won’t . But what I did do was learn how to understand what I do well, understand what I don’t like and don’t do well, and iterate my career until I got to a place that was a good alignment between my strengths and my interests. And that world was the world of advertising. And so I sort of evolved, first to corporate communications and liked that but didn’t like the small reach of just investors and shareholders and so when I got to the world of advertising, it was because Warner-Lambert, which no longer exists but it was a consumer package goods sister company of Parke-Davis, and I helped them get the ADA seal on Lysterine and do things way back in the day when we were starting to understand some of the health benefits of health care related products. And I just kind of got my groove, between the interesting and deep nature of science and the leadership and communications opportunities that sort of played to my natural tendencies. And so, I started the first direct-to-consumer advertising agency, along with some other leaders in the field pretty early in my career. And then I went on to found and build four different healthcare specialties for advertising agencies that you’ve heard of or seen modeled in Mad Men, like, you know, VBDO and TBWA and Chiat-Day and…you know, it was a fascinating career that I didn’t have any comparison to, so I didn’t really know that the pretty male exclusionary world that I was in didn’t have to be my story, but it was my story. And sort of getting out of the marriage that didn’t go well, it was a very abusive situation and not good, and I ended up being a single mom and running companies, and that was my life. My life was get up at 4:45 in the morning, drive into Manhattan, go to the gym, get to the office, run a company, get home and be a dedicated mom. And that’s very exhausting, mentally and physically, and what happened was, I had a series of cancers, and had some pretty major surgery when going through my divorce, and thought that would be the end of that. And then unfortunately a number of years later when I was in Uganda, where I’d helped start a school for kids who had very little access to anything, I got a call from my oncologist after just a usual follow-up, and he said “eh, sorry to tell you this, but your cancer has accelerated and we have to do some more major surgery. And so I just did what I’m used to doing, and I walked into my boss’s office and I said, “I know it’s…this is a tough economy (this is 2009) very tough time for businesses, and I know it’s not good for me to take two or three weeks off to have the surgery but I gotta do it, so I can live, but I’ll be back and I’ll run the company”…He said, “oh, I’m gonna have someone else run the company.” And in one week, I lost my job, my health and my youngest daughter was heading off to college, so my identity was just exploded, in one single week. So what do you do when…you know, I used to walk into the room and either, “Hi, I’m Ann, I’m the CEO” or “Hi, I’m Ann, I’m the mother of one of these two daughters”…what do you do when all those ways you defined yourself don’t exist anymore? It felt like a betrayal of someone that I’d built companies for and trusted, it felt like confusion because I’d always been a high performer and had multiple successful CEO roles, and the only thing that I had left that hadn’t been exploded that week was a relationship, long-distance relationship that I had with the man who is now my husband. But he was living in Santa Cruz and said “hey, why don’t you, after the surgery, why don’t you come and move out west?” and I’m kind of like, you know, I’m a city girl, I don’t think I can move to Santa Cruz, but if we can negotiate and move to San Francisco, why not? And I had to go through a lot of introspection, of what do I do now? Do I run a business in San Francisco?…but I had time, you know, I don’t think most of us as adults have the benefit of time to stop and think about, do I keep pushing hard against that door that’s straight ahead, or do I stop and look to the sides and around and recalibrate. And I decided to recalibrate, and when I did an assessment of my life to that time, I realized that when I was growing up I was one of three daughters, and when I was at Wellesley I was among 2,000 women, and when I was a mom, a single mom that was the house of hormones with my two daughters and me, and then I spent 20-some years sort of slugging it out in a very male world. And when I got sick, there were very few people who were there for me. And the people that were there for me were a few girlfriends, mostly not from business, and I realized that all the time in business it had been exceptionally transactional. and if I wasn’t in power, people didn’t need me anymore. And that made me long for authentic and meaningful relationships—for myself, I did not start out on a mission to build relationships for anybody but me, but I felt like I needed some intimacy, I needed a trusting environment and to have conversations about things that we weren’t talking about, like what it feels like to be a woman in a man’s world. This is way before MeToo was MeToo…but, you know, what it feels like to be afraid about your health, what it feels like to, you know, have female health challenges that no one talks about. You know, what it feels like to start a new relationship at the age of 50, what it feels like to no longer be the definition of who you were before. And so I just started asking friends of friends, since I didn’t know anyone except my boyfriend at the time in San Francisco, who do you know and do they want to come..and come over to my house and, you know, have a glass of champagne and talk about stuff? And so we did an experiment, and I think there are 12, 15 people in the room, and we had a marvelous time, and really got to talking about meaningful things early, early in the conversation, and at the end of the night, we sort of said, “hey, do you want to do that again?” And everyone sort of agreed and we said, well, why don’t you bring another woman who you think might enjoy this kind of conversation, that’s sort of around content, around some sort of speaker or panel or something. And the next thing I knew, there were 30 and then 50 and pretty soon 2,000 members in San Francisco who would gather (not all 2,000 at one time) in small groups at my home on a monthly basis, and really started to build an authentic conversation and a community of trust that’s way outside of our bubbles. And we’re 20 year olds, and we’re 80 year olds, and we’re working women and we’re women who’ve chosen to stay home or women who have retired or women whose careers haven’t started yet, and a broad range of interests, and….you know, it’s just turned into this sort of magical community that then has been replicated in New York, and now L.A., and London and, you know, I hope soon Washington DC. It was sort of a proof point that the loneliness and need for connection that I felt was actually a much more universal experience, probably even beyond women, but certainly with women that have become part of my extended network. So that was a very long answer to your life story question, but that’s where we are today, is 4,000 women in four cities, soon to be five, and hopefully many hundreds in the years to come.

Chris: I very much identify with having to make a major change in one’s life: before I went blind, I was, you know, this hotshot software engineer/contractor working for a lot of start-ups and venture capitalists on turnaround projects, making a real lot of money, and then the world found out I was blind, and my phone stopped ringing. And, you know, maybe there were still a handful of friends , you know, but as you discussed the transactional nature of relationships, I suddenly realized that almost all the relationships in my life were that way, they were people who wanted something from me rather than actually being friends.

Ann: Yep. It’s a sad state of our society…and I’ve done a lot of thinking about it, you know, does it go back to biblical references, whether it’s on the negative, an eye for an eye, or the sense of do unto others as you’d have them do unto you in sort of a transactional way, or is it about how we behave in the world. And I had a really interesting email exchange with a woman who I respect so highly, who’s been another senior woman multiple-time success, and she sort of said, I was talking about how challenging it is to roll out Parlay* House in cities where I don’t have someone who has the time and the means that I have to really build the content and post these on an ongoing basis, and we were talking about how much do you give of, you know, whether it’s the Parlay House list and community to someone who has something similar for a partnership; and it’s very hard to know what sorts of tradeoffs and exchanges that benefit both organizations, or both people, are meaningful and what are extractive. And I don’t have a clear answer to that.

Francis: I had a friend post something on Facebook today which was a question, “were you happier before or after social media?’ And I just thought that was kind of an interesting question to pose to people…and I love how Parlay House creates these connections, but it’s also, it seems to me, answering the limitations of the connectedness that we all have now through social media, which in some ways makes people and information so available, but at the same time there’s something lacking.

Ann: It’s so interesting you say that, Francis. One of my members in New York is an amazing young woman who has started an online movement called Half the Story, you can look at it, #HalftheStory, and she’s on a mission to encourage young people (she’s in her 20’s), to encourage young people to not just present their most beautiful, most perfect selves on social media but to really talk about things that we don’t talk about. And it’s a strong parallel to what we’re doing at Parlay House. You know, we’re sort of the opposite of social media in that we’re not forcing, but really setting the stage for conversations that are not the conversations that you have on social media. Like how do you rise to the top of a career while you’re battling mental illness or an eating disorder. We’ve talked about that. How do you take some pretty tough setbacks and turn it into strengths later on. We had a woman and her husband who had fallen into a cult and lived in a cult for 20 plus years, they had a child, they were an arranged marriage…they finally escaped the cult, how do you re-enter society after you’ve been living in another, false world? We usually talk about victories and ignore the struggles. And yet everyone struggles. I really made mistakes as a parent, I look back and think, what would I have done differently? I have these two phenomenal daughters, but they both worry when they are struggling, because I never talked about when I was struggling. I was so protecting them, ‘cuz they’d already been through a lot between the divorce and other stuff, I sort of felt like I needed to show them that you could be and do, you know, anything, and be superwoman. And all of a sudden, then, when they had normal people problems and struggles and fears and anxieties that everybody has, they somehow felt they shouldn’t have them, because their mother didn’t have them. And so I’m kind of on a, you know, trying to re-write that story in the second half of my life by talking openly about the things that are hard, and by setting the stage for us to talk about the truths of the human experience, which are so imperfect, and that’s just the nature of humanity.

Chris: I see that in the blindness community all the time, where organizations like the National Federal of the Blind, it’s the biggest membership organization in our space, seem to almost trivialize how hard it is to go through life on a day to day basis in a community with an 80% rate of unemployment, and, you know, they seem to suggest that, you know, blindness is just an inconvenience, and in fact it’s really, really hard, and I think they almost anti-motivate people when they show off, you know, somebody like Eric Weiihenmayer, the first blind man to climb Mount Everest. And I think a lot of people look at Eric, who is a very good guy, he’s a friend of mine, and say, you know, he climbed Mount Everest, you know, I have trouble getting to the Post Office or something, you know, I can’t do anything when we focus so much on the savants, so to speak.

Ann: Yeah, the outliers, sure. Sure, I think that’s true, and that’s why I’m sort of on a mission to create safe spaces to have the conversations that are the real ones. I mean, it’s great to have, we sometimes have superstars, women who have done things that very few women have ever done before, and I think we all get motivated by those stories of, sort of amazing achievement. But that can’t be the only conversation, because it just isn’t reality for most of us, even for those of us who want to be those outliers, those super-high achievers. We’re just not telling the story of their hardship, which I’m sure was there. I don’t know Eric’s story at all, but I’m sure that achievement was not a straight line of “I want to do it, and therefore it’s so.” I’m sure there were setbacks and challenges and risks and we’ve got to talk about those.

Francis: Can you give examples of how what has transpired at Parlay House has …tangible examples of how it’s changed people’s lives?

Ann: Sure. What it does is, it facilitates conversations, either at the event or after the event, that creates bonds that wouldn’t have been there. So we had a health-related topic, and two women were sitting on the coach who were strangers, next to each other, and they started talking about their personal health experiences and it turned out that both of them had ulcerative colitis, which is a painful and often embarrassing disease that affects your ability to have competent relationships, and sexual relationships. And they’d never talked to anyone else about this problem, and they happened to be sitting next to another woman in a safe space who had the same issue, and all of a sudden neither one felt alone. Now that’s a small example, it’s just two people, but it’s two people who all of a sudden didn’t feel alone in the world. And you know, we’ve had other examples, like we had a panel of these women who had followed their husband’s careers to Hong Kong, and they’d sort of put their own ambitions in the back burner because they were supporting the family, and they all sort of realized that they were letting go of themselves and their own goals and they formed a group that was called “the re-group” and they were holding each other accountable. This was not just a career oriented thing: one wanted to write a book, one … each wanted to do something different, but they met on an ongoing basis to hold each other accountable. Well, I didn’t know that in the audience that night were a number of women who, by anybody’s definition, would seem to be happy and successful and whatever, but they were feeling the same way, they were feeling stuck, and they were feeling like they need somebody to work with them, to sort of get on track to the next thing they wanted to do. And so another group that was very very similar was formed by women that I didn’t know and I didn’t know was happening, but happened because someone was willing to talk about that journey. So, there are so many examples. There are people who have gotten jobs, there have been people who have found an outlet for interests in philanthropy or supporting a cause, but most of the examples are the really personal one, where there’s all of a sudden an empathy, and I think empathy is kind of the most, most important component to everything that I’m trying to do is this ability to see and hear and not judge, but actually just see yourself in the position of another and hear and listen to what they need and somehow provide some of that as one new human to another.

Chris: I guess it must also help people feel less like the “other”…

Ann: Exactly. Exactly, and you know, when you look at our gatherings, you really see a diversity that, you know, the streets of San Francisco are generally not filled with people of color. And I see the difference, because I’m bi-coastal, I see the difference in New York where, at least visually, there’s a greater range of skin color on the streets than there is in the city of San Francisco. But in all of our gatherings, whether it’s San Francisco or New York, not only do we have age diversity, but we have, we have racial diversity, we have income diversity, we have diversity of sexual orientation…and it just feels so great to be…be finding connections that appreciate our differences. It’s not finding the similarities, because I think that’s…kind of bullshit, I think it’s recognizing that in our differences there are opportunities to learn, opportunities to feel yourself in someone else’s shoes, to think outside of your norm, to, you know, to just connect and stretch in ways that aren’t in our little bubbles. And I love that.

Francis: We were talking earlier about the transactional nature of business and you know, to a large extent, capitalism as it’s being practiced in this country today…and also talking about this idea of connection with people and the value of that. But, there are some people for whom these, like that transactional type of environment, it suits them, and it serves them very well. And I think partly one of the reasons why you see such a concentration of people who are more predatory and lack empathy in the higher stratas of business is because it’s sort of where their—at least in the system as it is right now, it’s where, it’s their comfort zone to some extent. So, given the heterogenous nature of our society, how do we say who have lots of empathy and want connection that’s meaningful and soulful between people in community, like, how do we have our needs met and they also have their needs met? Are they in conflict?

Ann: That’s a complex and interesting question. I mean, one of the experts that we’ve had speak to Parlay House a few times, and it’s always sold out, is a woman named Wendy Bahari who’s one of the national experts on narcissism. She talks about how to deal with the narcissists in your life. And, you know, we have a narcissist as our President right now, most of us have worked with narcissists in our career, and there’s a lot of data that shows that many of the most successful leaders have very significant elements of narcissism as part of their personalities. But, you know, we’re at a stage in society right now where we’re sort of looking at people as awful, or wonderful, as, you know, horrific or like a deity, and you know, I think that that’s a big mistake. And so there are people who are much more out for themselves and are willing to throw other people under the bus to achieve their own successes, and, you know, I don’t think we can control them, I think we can only control our own personal behaviors. But when you understand what is happening behind, in the emotional self, of those people who act in a narcissistic or self-absorbed way, a lot of times it’s actually driven by really significant insecurities that are being sort of masked and covered up by this aggressive, bullying, selfish behavior. And the more we can understand and empathize, even with those people whose behaviors seem more like terrorists than like humans, it helps understand where they’re coming from, it helps bridge the communication gap and helps us to not take those behaviors personally. I think we all have choice, of some…to some extent, but those of us who are able to make our own choices on how we want to live in the world, to try to find understanding for those who live very differently than us as much as possible, that’s sort of all we have control over. All we really have control over are ourselves and our …our decisions on how we live our lives. So I can’t reconcile that, but I can tell you, we’re not as black and white as it might seem when you cut it, cut it the way you just cut it.

Francis: Well, you know, with regards to our President, he is definitely, I think, making the paradigm for change that we have right now…seem much more like it needs to be evolved to…I think a lot of the old ways that we’ve relied on for change, like say marches and activism…it doesn’t seem like they really do much anymore…

Ann: Well, I guess that’s…I think that might be a little bit instrumentalist. I mean, I know that when Trump was elected and I was in Washington at the first Women’s March and I was there with my daughter who is of a whole different generation, I’ve always been someone who is a thoughtful and engaged member of society, or I’ve at least tried to be. But I was not an activist in the marching, protesting sort of way, and I think that there was an element of momentum that happened, that isn’t sort of end-result oriented but is part of this process of learning about our sense of power. And I think what you’re getting at, Francis, and I probably agree with you, is that the system is so broken that this two-party system, even our Constitution and how some of the things are being interpreted, related to gun control and other stuff, just doesn’t serve our society as well as our Founding Fathers intended. And to really move forward as a society, we might need to go to that really scary place that is after what was, and before we figured out what will be, and that’s a really hard thing to do. I mean I’ve done that as a human, as a personal…on my personal path, where I had to end my career in order to have the time to think about what else I valued. Can we do that as a society without it being too scary or chaotic? Or, you know, having the fear that an equally horrible next person will take over? I don’t know. But I agree with you that just going down the same path and making tiny jogs to the left or the right, in terms of political parties or policies, isn’t making the massive level change that we probably need to be a good society.

Francis: And massive level change is something that you in your own personal life know well…

Ann: Yeah. Some of that was forced on me, and when I realized that things were, the rug was pulled out from under me, I chose to take a really scary leap. I mean, it was so scary to not just do what I knew how to do, and just go back and run another company and have the same identity and, you know, build my self-image around this idea that I was a CEO because that gave me comfort. You know, to sort of start again and say, how do I define myself next, and how do I reconcile that I’m not the only bread earner in the family, that I’m contributing in a way that some, who are very income-oriented, or title-oriented, might not value. You know, I still find myself, when people say “what do you do?” I sometimes just subconsciously revert to, “well, I used to run advertising agencies, and now I…” you know, fill in the blank. Instead of just having the confidence to say, “I founded an organization that’s on a mission to empower women and to create safe spaces for the conversations that they can’t have other places. I mean, that sounds pretty good, when you…but it doesn’t feel as much of a success in the societal norms as I would want it to. I still fall back, sometimes, on what I used to do, and that’s a shame.

Francis: It’s also understandable, given how successful you were…that is pretty significant.

Ann: Yeah, but you know, when, when I’m at the end of my life, and I now know that could be any day, just because I’ve faced that reality, having been a CEO is not the most meaningful thing to me. I mean, I loved it, It’s in my wheelhouse, it’s where I feel very comfortable, but the level of pride that I feel about that is very different than—and not meaningful to me—as the level of pride I have with finding things that help people on a more empathetic level.

Francis: And perhaps even the sublime is relative…

Ann: Yeah. It is. he-he.

Chris: We were just talking about massive change that needs to happen in society, but taking on massive change all in one lump seems rather difficult. And I think I read this in some of your blog articles—making small, minor changes a little at a time and, you know sort of like the butterfly effect, seeing them spread?

Ann: Absolutely. And, you know, I write a monthly blog called One Small Thing. And it’s really a way of trying to say to all of us who feel overwhelmed by the amount of change that we feel needs to happen in society, to not be paralyzed by the size of the problem, but rather be empowered by the types of things I talked about that happen at Parlay House, by one conversation that might be meaningful, by one action that can start a cascade for someone else and someone else after them. And I just—I’m finishing up a research project that’s part of a book that I’m writing, where we tracked…you know, it’s hard to know what, I call it the “thing after the thing” is…so you do something without the expectation of return for someone else. It’s a stranger, or someone that you know that could use your help, and you assume that it was positively received and maybe even that something happened that they passed it on in some way after that, but you don’t know. So, we conducted this research study that we’re just getting the results in now, where we grouped people by whether they were an instigator of one of those actions that were meaningful to someone else, whether they were the recipient of something and what they did with it, or whether they witnessed it, was the third category, and what happens when people witness a meaningful action from one human to another. And the amazing thing was, that not only was there something that the recipient did for another person based on the recognition of how they benefitted from the kindness, but the witnesses also were motivated to behave in a very similar way. So that gave me a sense that this doesn’t even have to be a one to one to one cascade, but that there’s a multiplier effect when people understand their own power to help another in some way and then feel inspired to do it.

Chris: One thought that comes to mind is, I don’t know if you know the city of San Francisco has a law against restaurants giving free food to homeless people, and I know a terrific restaurant that I enjoy, and it’s actually kind of on the expensive side, but every night they take all the food that wasn’t served and one of their people bring it to a park and feed all the homeless people, it’s…some homeless people who recognize me walking down the street will whisper to me where the food will be that night.

Ann: That’s really awesome. I love that story. Yeah, that’s harmless anarchy, in my opinion. Maybe I don’t know all of the potential fears and risks, whether it’s tainted food or who knows what, what…

Chris: No, it has nothing to do with tainted food, it had to do with…it made homeless people hang out…and, you know, wait for the food, for the free food. It was a way to keep the homeless people away from the restaurants.

Ann: You know, a lot of these laws sort of, think, happen because you have a reactionary or strong person who’s pissed off about something, and they go over the top in creating legislation that makes things hard on humanity. My husband and I spent a number of years working on a Proposition in California that was in response to a very similar type of thing, it was the father of Polly Klaas who was unfortunately kidnapped from her home and killed by someone who was a formerly incarcerated person. And her dad was obviously, as we all would be, so distraught about what had happened that he was behind an initiative that resulted in California having one of the most tough 3-strikes laws in the country, and that meant if you had two prior felonies, and you were convicted of anything—and by anything, I mean, we have examples of stealing a piece of pizza, or a golf club from a store, or writing a bad check—these are not violent acts, these are, you know, small…you were sentenced to life in prison. And we have thousands of people in the California prison system who ended up with their lives taken away from them because of that law that was based on someone’s personal and traumatic experience, but resulted in a lack of fairness for everybody affected afterwards. And you know, we were fortunate enough to have our Proposition win with 70% of Californians supporting a much more fair third-strike policy that required that third strike be serious and violent before you take away someone’s entire life. And 3,000 people had their sentences re-assessed and have returned to the community with very low recidivism rates…it’s proof that we have to beware of reactionary laws that are disproportionate, and as a society if we can sort of base our actions on concepts of fairness or empathy rather than fear, I think we’re gonna make some progress. And again, that was a very small change to one law in one state, but the cascade that happened at that time was, it went from 3,000 Californians having their sentences retroactively re-evaluated to a new and fairer policy which meant people who were arrested subsequently did not face that same penalty, and rolled all the way to the White House, where Obama, before he left office, began pardoning people for minor third strike drug offenses across the country. And so that’s just an example of how—this was a lot work, but it was a very small Proposition related to one law in one state, and it ended up being a national phenomenon. And so that’s what gives me hope in this time where there doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of hope.

Chris: You made a documentary about someone released after the 3-strikes…

Ann: I did. Yeah.

Chris: I tried to find it, I couldn’t find it online, and…

Ann: It’s on Netflix, it’s called “The Return,” it was a PBS sponsored film and it was, we won an Emmy nomination for it, and it was an amazing story that uncovered the experience of not only the individuals, as they returned to society, but their families, and really uncovered, sort of, the next issue my husband and I are working on, which is related to mental illness as a huge problem in our society that’s contributing to our packed prisons and, you know, we have many, many, many people who don’t have access to mental health care in terms of diagnosis, in terms of treatment, in terms of care, and then they’re afraid or they’re confused and they break into an empty building because they don’t have a place to stay, or they act out because they don’t have access to medical care, and instead of helping them we throw them in prisons where their disease just gets worse. And so, that film not only was our way of telling the story about the importance of hiring and understanding the side of people who are re-entering society, but also helped us understand what to do next and what to focus on next in terms of helping restore mental health support. You know, Reagan, when he was President, understood that the mental health care system was relatively broken in our country, and so he did away with mental health institutions. And I don’t think it was completely ill-motivated, because they were pretty bad institutions, but what it means now is we’re starting from scratch and trying to find ways to support people who have not had the benefits of mental health care that we, who are more privileged, have.

Chris: I had a good friend released from jail here in Florida, he was junkie…and it was just a minor stealing thing, but his lawyer negotiated probation for him, and he was released from County jail with absolutely nothing waiting for him on the outside, and within four weeks he was back on the heroin, he overdosed and died in July.

Ann: Unfortunately, the situation of your friend is all too common, and we have, as part of our 3-strikes work, heard many stories of people being released from prison in paper suits, without the $200 they’re supposed to have to get them to wherever they’re going next, and many of them, because they don’t have a choice, return to either the abusive homes or the gangs or, you know, because they don’t have a plan and a program, there are terrible stories of people released in a wheelchair, at night, without any support, who sleep in alleys until they can figure out how to get to a place that can help them. One of the programs that my husband and I have been sponsoring is a program called Ride Home, where it’s run by people who are formerly incarcerated themselves, and they wait outside of the prisons, knowing that our Prop 36 folks are being released, and they help them create a plan to get to transitional housing that helps coach them on getting a job and developing a resume and giving them a safe space to transition back into society. But, you know, there aren’t enough of those Ride Home people all over the country to help other have that re-entry that can hopefully make them successful. And, you know, sadly your friend’s situation where, because he didn’t have any support and he didn’t have any money and, you know, where he went straight back to the drug addicted life that he had had before, is all too common. Again, what’s an easy thing that we can do to help create change, if that’s an issue that you care about, contributing towards a Ride Home program or offering an entry-level job to someone who is coming back into society is one of the greatest things that you can do that truly has meaning for someone else.

Chris: I find it interesting that the prison reform issue doesn’t seem to be a hardline left or right wing thing. I mean, we have Bernie Sanders working with Rand Paul in the United States Senate on sentencing reform, and you’d never think those two guys would work together on anything.

Ann: It’s so funny that you say that, because we noticed, when we were doing our fundraising for the Proposition, that we actually got…we tend to lean left in our political views, and we got as much or more support from Republicans as we did from Democrats, and in fact this was not a party-oriented initiative, it was a belief of people who value fairness over other measures that came together and supported and passed this. You know, when you pass with 70% of the vote, you’ve got to have a lot of people on both sides that believe in what you’re doing, and I love the fact that Bernie and Rand Paul are working together, or whatever those random divides are that we call Republicans and Democrats, or conservatives and liberals, because it really, what they’re uniting on are shared values…and that’s what we should be doing as a nation, to be honest. You know, this party system is so kind of arbitrary, and it forces us to dig our heels in without thinking. And I think if we did a little more thinking and feeling and a little less rule-following, we might benefit.

Francis: I agree with you so much about that. Part of the impetus to create this podcast for me was to try to start staking out alternatives to those kind of nineteenth, twentieth century political…the vocabulary, and just the boxes it puts people in…because I think a lot of that has lost its usefulness to us now.

Ann: Right. Completely agree.

Francis: I think there’s also two really different orientations towards how we relate to each other. And one is sort of the Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest…you know, it’s more of like, I guess what you would associate with a male kind of energy, which is predatory and…it’s about, if anything, thinning the herd. But then you also have another completely almost opposite approach, which is that we should be focussing on the weakest link, and that the health of the whole is something that is going to be increased by us helping each other, and those in most need. They’re very, very different approaches, I guess, to how the world functions, as a result.

Ann: Yeah, my reaction to that is, you’re right, and both are pretty polar in their approach. I’m not so sure that “thinning of the herd” or focussing exclusively on those with the most need is going to be the answer, and I think it’s just got to be brought down to a much more micro and individual level. I just think we, as a society, are talking so much in black and whites, in polarizing and sort of, if you’re not with me, you’re horrible, rather than, if you’re not with me, you might have something I can learn from that makes me more well rounded…I’m just feeling a little exasperated by the state of our thought processes, that “are you with me or are you against me” with nothing in the middle.

Francis: What I wanted to relate that to, as well, is you’re very active in…women’s movements, and you’re like a real trailblazer in terms of women in business, and I think right now what I’m starting to see, could be wrong, but are…people who are coming up and shaking things up, women, who almost seem like a new sort of archetype than we had before, because, say like in the days of Thatcher, for example. You had women who took offices of power, but a lot of their policies were indistinguishable from men, in any way. But I’m wondering if there is something uniquely feminine, to me, it would be something that was less like that survival-of-the-fittest kind of mindset, but something that we really actually need as a society right now, especially with regards to the state of the environment and our..

Ann: Yeah. You know, my gut reaction to that—and it’s probably not fair, because I know plenty of men who have this trait too—but I think there is the female desire to nurture, that comes from bearing children, and, you know, needing to support lives that are not sustainable on their own, that we sort of do when we have newborn babies that came out of our bodies…there is something about tending to and nurturing others that is more female, at least historically has been more female. I know many nurturing men as well, but, you know, I would say in my experience that quality is predominantly female quality. And you know, men needed to defend, and while they were off, you know, hunting and fighting off enemies, women were tending to families and tending to the land, and those genetics stay with us through the generations, and I think to be more nurturing as a society incorporates the empathy that I talked about earlier, and the awareness of, and value of, human life and what we need to survive. And that includes the earth being a healthy and sustainable place and, you know, it’s a whole cascade of what we need in order to not only live, but to be good humans. And so my new archetype is a weird combination of a stereotypic nurturing woman, but she’s now powerful and capable of not only nurturing in the home, but nurturing as a leader. And I tried, I don’t know what, I don’t know retrospectively what kind of leader I was, but I always intended to be a leader who empowered and nurtured and helped those that worked with me thrive. And, you know, I kind of think instead of trying to be masculine and gain power by behaving in the same way that our male successful predecessors have behaved, that there is an opportunity for all of us to take on some of those more loving qualities. And I know loving in a work sense, in a leadership sense, is kind of a weird idea. But if we make it acceptable to feel and care in addition to winning, I think it’s gonna create a better society.

Francis: I agree. Well my own personal evidence for it was, raising a son, I believed very strongly when I first had him that any kind of male-female sort of…I thought it was just modeling and what they were nurtured into being, and then what I discovered is that when he was like four, he was running around playing with trucks and stuff, and most of the girls were playing with dolls, and that wasn’t 100%, but it’s just one example of how, like at a really young age, he was very boyish.

Ann: Yep. And my sister did a very similar experiment. She had a son, she’s the only one of the three girls who has not had just daughters, and she had a son and wanted him to play with dolls and not have weapons and…he would turn anything into a weapon just by nature. And he’s the sweetest, nicest human. He’s not, you know, he’s not a violent kid or anything else, completely normal, now lovely man, but she tried to take away those gender stereotypes and he just, without even knowing, just created them in his own way himself.

Francis: It’s something you see universally in that age group. It was, it was very surprising to me. But, you know, there’s a way to work with it, I think, that…what I tried to do is figure out role models for my son, where he could feel like embracing that sort of warrior energy, but directing it in positive way. And honestly, it’s really hard to find good male role models in the media, because I guess the media doesn’t really benefit very much from these people who are living these quiet, heroic lives, there has to be like some huge conflict or something. So, I had a really hard time doing that, but what we came down to is that Mother Earth needs to be protected, and it’s your job to protect Mother Earth. So it became a way for him to sort of use his masculinity but at the service of the feminine. And I think that really stuck with him. It directs it in a way, I think, that’s necessary right now.

Ann: What’s he doing now, Francis?

Francis: He just got accepted to a high school that I’m really happy about, and he’s taking Kung Fu and Yoga, and I work very hard to keep him off of the video games…and that’s been a really big challenge. His generation is growing up with video games and YouTubers and all this stuff that we never had, and it’s…it’s new, it’s a little hard to navigate it as a parent.

Ann: It is.

Francis: Regarding the future, do you feel optimistic about the future, and if so why?

Ann: You know, I’m inherently an optimistic person, and so I’m not sure I could say I feel optimistic, there are things I worry about. I certainly worry about our environment and its ability to sustain us, given how we’re treating it, but I also feel that the pendulum historically in our nation and in our world has swung back towards center always. So for those of us who feel right now like the emphasis is on things that are not according to our values, and our leadership is not supporting what we feel is important and how we would want to behave as humans, I have to have a longer term view, and know that, you know, when I look through history in the times I wasn’t alive, or even earlier in my life when people were either running our country or massive acts of destruction or murder or violence made us fearful about what our society was, that there is some balance that’s in our system that will allow us to have more positive and better feeling times in the future. I just have to believe that in order to, in order to live and so…you know, I believe in good humans acting in small ways towards others to do what they can do personally, and I believe in our system in some form to get that pendulum back, back to a place where we all feel we can live with it a little more. And, you know, sadly I fear that it might take another five years before we see the pendulum swing back, but I hope to still be alive and making positive changes both in the meantime and when it comes back in to accelerate the ways that we can be a kinder society. So I’m working on it on a day to day basis, and I haven’t lost hope. I don’t think you can. We can’t throw up our arms, and we have to just keep doing whatever we can do, given the current circumstance. I’m on a mission to do that.

Francis: Yeah, I think a lot of us are, actually. You know who I think are, one of our big hopes is? My son’s generation…they’re growing up knowing that there’s an urgent need to change the way we’re interacting with the environment, and that sort of thing.

Chris: For the first time in decades, we’re starting to see young people organize among themselves. We have the Parkland kids, and now we have the climate kids who are skipping school every Friday to protest…I mean, I think we’re actually seeing energy among young people for the first time in what I think is a couple of decades.

Ann: Yeah, and I see my kids, who are little bit older than Francis’s, not being willing to take jobs unless there are good for society components in the actual companies. And, you know, I didn’t grow up in a time where we gave that thought. Corporate social responsibility was emerging, you know, fifteen years ago, and everybody thought, wow, that’s an amazing idea, a company can do well and also do good, and now the next generation is saying, well, we’re not going to work for you unless you do both. That’s awesome.

Francis: It is. I think our kids’ generation are gonna see people that came before them sort as, like, these crazy kids who just trash the place, and it’s time to clean up. And they’ll have, I’m sure when technology is really applied to the service of, say, cleaning the oceans, and cleaning the air, and…what we’re capable of doing is gonna be stunning. And it’s just a matter of will, and it’s a matter of, I guess, somehow creating the choice for people in the way that they recognize that, in a very clear, finite way.

Ann: Yep.

Chris: I had a young friend write to me this morning, he just turned down a job well over $200,000 a year—this kid’s only 23 years old—because he did not want to work on artificial intelligence drones that are used to kill people, and he accepted a job paying about half of what he was offered, where he could work for a company that does accounting software or something..benign.

Ann: Well, it’s very enlightened of a young person, you know, to be led by values rather than by money, that’s fabulous. He probably can live with himself and feel good, that’s awesome.

Chris: Well, we always end just with the same basic question: Do you have anything you’d like to plug, or…promote or…whether it’s something you’re working on, or something somebody else is working on, or just something you’d like to put out there that people might be interested in?

Ann: Sure. I would say if you want the monthly reminder of small ways that you can personally make a difference in the world, go on my website anndevereuxmills.com and sign up for One Small Thing, which is that monthly newsletter/blog. But I think, assuming that you don’t need that reminder and you just have a way to live your life each day where, at the end of the day, you sort of say, “was I the person that I would like to have been” and if so, great, ‘cuz I helped someone or I did something that feels additive to society, and if I didn’t, it’s OK, I thought about it and tomorrow’s another day to do that. So I’d encourage you to live the small life, because if we all do that, we’re gonna end up creating big and meaningful positive changes at a time when it feels like the world needs it most.

Chris: Well, thank you so much for coming on Making Better.

Ann: Well, thank you for making it better.

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Ann: Chris, you have a phenomenal voice. I’m sure people have told you that before, but this is a good vehicle for you, cuz your voice is very soothing….

Welcome to the Making Better podcast, interviewing some of the world’s finest thinkers about a more optimistic future. Now, here are your hosts Chris Hofstader and Dr. Francis DiDonato.

Chris, Well, Francis. it’s episode 2 of Making Better.

Francis: Yes, indeed, and this has been a really fun trip so far. What do we have in the can, something like 8, 7, 6?

Chris: I think we have 8 episodes total recorded, this is the second one we’ve released.

Francis: Yeah, and such a diverse group of people so far. I’ve been having a lot of fun with that.

Chris Yeah, it’s been interesting. Every guest has been different in their own way, but there’s a certain common thread that we see, I think, running through all of them. I think, you know, we’re talking to an optimistic group of people, people who are already making better things happen in the world. And one of those guests is this week’s interview, Michael Marshall. I first met “Marsh” seven years ago at the QED conference in Manchester, England, of which he is one of the co-coordinators. Marsh is also one of the founders of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, and is a full time employee at the Good Thinking Society, an organization dedicated to promoting critical thinking and science in the UK. Marsh is probably most well known for his work with the Good Thinking Society as one of the leaders that got homeopathy banned from the NHS in England, saving the British taxpayers millions of dollars on bogus cures.

Francis: And if you’re like me, and you didn’t know anything really about the skeptics movement, this is a really cool interview.

Chris: Michael Marshall, welcome to Making Better!

Marsh: Thank you for having me, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Chris: I’ve known you for quite some time, and I know a bit about your work, but I don’t think our listeners do, so…you work full time for the Good Thinking Society, an organization I find fascinating, but can you tell us a bit about the organization and the work you do there?

Marsh: Yeah, it’s kind of a tricky thing to describe what it is that I do, really, so I’m..I think technically the UK’s only full-time, professional skeptical investigator. Which effectively means, because I work for this charity called Good Thinking Society and the charity’s there to promote science and to challenge pseudoscience. So I spend a reasonable amount of my time investigating where there are pseudoscientific claims, and sometimes that will be about people who say they’re talking to the dead or reading palms, and other times it’ll be about people who say they can cure this disease or offer this alternative treatment, and we look at whether the evidence for that actually works…so I spend some of my time actually going undercover to have these claims made to me directly in person. I spend some of my time looking to see how we can bring these claims, where they aren’t backed by evidence, to the attention of people like the press, regulators, sometimes even the police when they’re making particularly egregious and damaging claims. And the rest of the time I spend doing public lectures, essentially encouraging groups of strangers to doubt stuff is kind of a big part of what I do, describing the work that I’ve done, and whenever anybody …whenever I tell people about my full time job, that it involves telling people to doubt stuff, there’s always at least a few people in the audience who look at me as if to say, ‘that isn’t a real job’…and to those people I always point out that’s how good I am at making you doubt stuff, that you even doubt the validity of my chosen career….so that’s kind of what I do in my day job, and that sort of takes all sorts of different forms and, yeah, occasionally I’ll be lecturing here or writing for newspapers there, or being in a strange undercover environment where someone’s telling me stuff that isn’t true and I see what I can do about it.

Chris: The piece you’re most famous for, that you work on with the Good Thinking Society, and that you started, I think, before you even started working for Good Thinking, with the Merseyside Skeptics, an organization that you co-founded…is on homeopathy and getting it banned from the National Health System in England…

Marsh: Yeah, so this is an area that I’ve been looking at for about 10 years now, so I just kind of started, I was one of the co-founders of the Merseyside Skeptics Society, which is just a local community group, really, the reason that we put the group together was because if you’re someone of faith, you know that you can walk into any city in the world pretty much and there’ll be a building filled with people of your faith, people who kind of agree with you at least on some pretty core principles…and if you’re somebody who is a believer in psychic ability, you can go to spiritualist churches, or you can go to psychic meetings all round the world, and you meet people who already kind of agree with you a bit, but there wasn’t really an easy access community for people who didn’t believe in those things, ‘cuz it can be quite a tricky thing to gather around not believing in a thing, and so that’s where this kind of community group came from. But as well as having an idea, an ethos to try and build a critical thinking, a community of non-believers, as it were, we also wanted to look out and say, how do we affect the world around us if we find these kind of pseudo-sciences that can be quite damaging and dangerous and misleading? How do we try and push back against that, and what can we do to try and encourage critical thinking and to challenge ideas that don’t work and don’t stack up? And that’s where we really started settling on homeopathy, which at the time was starting to make headlines because we got the major pharmacy in the UK, Boots, who admitted that the reason they sold homeopathic remedies wasn’t because they believed that they worked—because the don’t work—but it was because, they said, their customers wanted to buy them. So, essentially, “we’ll sell you it, even though we know it’s nonsense but you’re willing to pay for it,” was of the position of the UK’s biggest pharmacy. And so we came up with this kind of campaign, which we might sort of chat about in a bit more detail in a moment perhaps, to question Boots’ position and also to say to the public, you might think that homeopathic remedies are herbal remedies, you might think they’re natural remedies, you might not know that they’re neither of those things. Homeopathic remedies are based on very unnatural principle, the idea that the more you dilute something, the stronger it gets—that’s a central tenet of homeopathy—but it kind of runs contrary to pretty much every experience you’ve had of diluting things, I imagine, in your life…but the majority of people didn’t realize that.

Chris: If I’m pouring a scotch and water, I use about a gallon of water and just a teaspoon of scotch, and it’s just way stronger…

Marsh: Yeah, that’s the real hard stuff at that point…but funnily enough, the thing we found was that the majority of people, if you looked at surveys of public opinion, if you looked at the way people talked about homeopathy, if you looked at how it was discussed in the media, the majority of people really did think that these remedies were natural remedies, or they were just another word for herbal remedies. So we wanted to make the point that homeopathy is a very specific idea, and we also noticed that homeopaths weren’t going out of their way to say to people, “hey, do you know our remedies are based on the idea that diluting stuff makes it stronger?”

Francis: Where did homeopathy come from?

Marsh: Yeah, well the origin of homeopathy is quite interesting, I think it was about …late 18th Century Germany, there was a chap called Samuel Hahnemann who, at the time, was doing experimentation to try and treat malaria. And he found that if you..quinine, I think, it was from a particular tree, I forget which tree it was now, but he found that if you administered this stuff to people who had malaria, their symptoms improved…and partly, that was because it actually turns out that quinine is a useful antimalarial, it’s got some properties that could then be used and synthesized and used in sort of antimalarial treatments after that. So you had him doing sort of these natural experimentation initially, and he come up with sort of further ideas that when you give someone quinine they take on symptoms that seem a bit like malaria, in terms of you get a fever and things like that, so he figured that it was the fact he was giving you a fever that was treating the fever that you have. So he thought, if you give somebody something that mirrors the symptoms they already have, the body would learn to fight the symptoms of the thing you’ve just given them, and that would teach the body to fight the symptoms of what ailment they already had. But, of course, this should lead into places where the homeopathic cure for insomnia is coffee…because coffee keeps you up, but your body can fight the coffee and go to sleep it can fight whatever else is causing insomnia and go to sleep. Obviously, that’s not going to work, because coffee will keep you up.

Francis: Is there a homeopathy remedy for gullibility?

Marsh: (laughs) There may well be, there may well be…so you have this kind of idea that, you give someone coffee and it’s meant to treat their insomnia, and obviously it’s not going to do that. So…Hahnemann had the idea of diluting it in order to take out the ill effects…the negative side effects, but just leave the “essence” of what it was, and that’s where this kind of serial dilution comes from. And the majority of people we found—not just in the UK, but in opinion polls conducted worldwide—didn’t realize that homeopathic pills were diluted to the point that there was none of the original substance left in them. And we figure this was a really important point, because, for a long time people who didn’t…who recognized that homeopathy didn’t work, they would say, well, homeopathy doesn’t work because of all these scientific studies over here, and the homeopaths would say, well actually we’ve got our own scientific studies…and if you’re an everyday person going about your life, you don’t have time to go looking for medical journals that you might not have access to, to figure out whether those studies are valid or not. So you just hear the studies on both sides…and so the science alone wasn’t going to convince people that homeopathy didn’t work, and that’s why we came up with this idea of saying, if we can get people to understand one central, very simple point, and that’s that a homeopathic pill has nothing at all in it, most people are gonna go, if this pill’s got nothing in it, it’s not gonna do anything for me. Most people would realize that, and that’s why we came up with this, the first kind of activist thing that I ever did with regard to alternative medicine, was the …

Chris: That would be your 10:23 campaign…

Marsh: Yeah, 10:23, which is the series of homeopathic “overdoses”…where we had people go into their local Boots pharmacy and buy some homeopathic tablets and then everybody, all together, would stand outside of their local pharmacy and they would take an “overdose” of these sugar pills to demonstrate that you don’t get any ill effects, you don’t get effect at all, because what you’re “overdosing” on is nothing but a sugar pill. So, yeah, in the first year—this was 2010—we had 300 people in 13 cities across the UK taking this homeopathic “overdose” at 10:23 in the morning, and it made national news as a result of that, and really kicked off or re-energized, in the public consciousness in many ways, a new kind of debate about what homeopathy actually is. And slightly, for a little while, changed the way homeopathy was described in the UK.

Chris: And for our listeners who don’t remember high school chemistry, can you tell us the significance of the term 10:23?

Marsh: Yeah, so cuz we identified, not just that the public opinion was that homeopathy was either natural or herbal, but we also identified that the press coverage would also mistakenly not tell you what homeopathy actually was, so when the media talked about homeopathy, they’d say it was either a natural medicine or they would say it’s an ultra-dilute medicine, a very dilute medicine, they would say there’s barely anything in it…but they wouldn’t say there’s nothing at all in it. And that was the key point that we wanted to get across. So we figured, how do we force the media, when they report on our publicity student—cuz it was a publicity stunt—how do we force them to tell the real science of homeopathy? And I came up with this idea of calling the campaign 10:23, because odd numbers stick in the mind, if you hear a number, you think it must have a significance, and that number does have a significance. And the idea is that, I talked about the dilution of homeopathy, how you take a substance and dilute it into lots and lots of water, until there’s nothing of it left. If you take your initial drop of coffee, and you start diluting it into water, you will reach a point where there is only water left in any random sample that you take. And that point is called the Avogadro constant, and it’s 6.02 times 10 to the power of 23 drops of water to one drop of coffee. When you buy the homeopathic remedies in your local pharmacy, or you go and see a homeopath and they’ll give you these homeopathic remedies, pretty much all, the vast majorities of the remedies that they give you are past this point of dilution. So this is the point that says, there is literally nothing at all in this, in this remedy. So we thought, if we call our campaign 10:23 after this chemical point, the Avogadro point, then if we do our “overdoses” at specifically 10:23 am, all coordinated across the UK and a year later right across the world, when the media talk about this strange serious of publicity stunts, called this strange number, they have to explain what that number is, they can’t just say “the 10:23 campaign did it at 10:23 in the morning”…and just not explain that number, you’d feel it’s not a satisfying way of telling that story, there’s a very clear gap there. So when the media covered this, and this was front page news on the BBC website for the entire day, it made pretty much every national newspaper, I believe, every single piece of coverage explained the campaign group 10:23, which takes its name from the chemical principle that shows there’s nothing in homeopathy, blah blah blah blah blah. So we were able to crowbar real science into the media discussion by understanding what the shape of a media story is, and where the gaps are, and how to sort of fill those gaps with…science, really.

Chris: And that brings up your background in public relations, before you became a full-time skeptic, you were a full-time public relations specialist.

Marsh: Well, sort of, sort of. I worked in a marketing company for a long time, so I’ve spent…alongside my career as a skeptic, which I’ve been involved in skeptical activism for 10 years and I’ve been a full-time skeptic with the Good Thinking Society for five years. Before that I’d worked for many, many years in a digital marketing company. And so I always had a bit of an interest in marketing anyway, and that sort of did certainly feed into the branding of 10:23 as a campaign and some of the decisions we made about how to communicate. I’ve always had a very great interest in understanding how to communicate the messages, especially complicated messages, as clearly, concisely, as accessibly as possible, really. And so that really led to me kind of examining how stories end up in the newspapers, and getting really involved in understanding how much of the story the newspapers are actually fed by commercial sources, which has been another string to the various kind of various strains of the [?] that I’ve acquired over the last decade.

Chris: You often talk about Bad PR on your Skeptics with a K podcast, and you did a blog, 365 days of Bad PR, that I must admit to having never read…

Marsh: Yeah, so…

Chris: I’m the guy who listens to Be Reasonable all the way to the end, I’m the one hand raised when you asked that question at QED every year, so…

Marsh: Oh well, that’s good, ‘cause I can absolve you of never having engaged too much with my other blogs…no, I’m someone who likes to take on lots of projects, so it was actually…my interest is really piqued in this kind of subject, of how much of the news is kind of influenced by PR and commercial messaging. It was piqued by a book that I read by Neil Davis from the Guardian, and the book was Flat Earth News. (sorry, Nick Davis, not Neil Davis, Nick Davis) And it was a really fascinating book because Nick Davis is a very seasoned Guardian reporter, and this was kind of an insider’s view of what was going on in the news rooms, and explained how the commercial aspect of the media has really fallen away over the last, sort of, 30 years, and even more so the last, sort of, 10+ years of the internet…the internet’s kind of intrusion upon the media landscape, or participation in the media landscape. Because there is such a gap in funding of newspapers, because people don’t buy newspapers anymore, people expect newspapers to come to them immediately and for free…those twin evils of immediacy and completely without any expense involved…it takes the bottom out of it, it takes the funding out of journalism and really ends up starving journalists of the one resource they really need, which is time. A journalist sort of lives and dies, journalism lives and dies on the time you have to source a story and check a story and develop background facts and even to do the little bit of checking that tells you not to go ahead with this story ‘cuz it’s nonsense. So once you strangle that time out of journalism, and you still have a huge amount of demand, increased demand in fact, for content, there are people who are then going to step in and fill those content gaps. And that’s where newswire material and the idea of “churn-alism” which is to repackage content and copy you found elsewhere or was given to you elsewhere and you repackage it as a journalist as if you wrote it yourself, even though you haven’t contributed to it or haven’t particularly fact-checked it. And it’s also where the PR element of the media really has exploded over the last sort of 30 years, so that’s what I spend a long time tracking, on a blog that I sporadically upkeep on a project that I now sort of lecture at universities as part of their journalism and PR degrees on, is to track this story in the newspaper that might have an effect on the way that people understand the world…where did it come from? Well, we can show that it actually came from this press release, from this commercial organization, you can have this very specific marketing goal in putting forward this message. And so when we see these stories of research shows that men gossip more than women, or women gossip more than men, or whichever hook is a-la-mode at the time, when you look at the research behind those, and you look at the company involved in putting those out, you can spot the reason this company is putting this story out is that it supports their commercial message and it has a commercial incentive to them in this way, and you can see why it’s kind of trying to massage people into behaving a certain way…and then you question the validity of the data that they’re presenting is actually not great, and in many of these marketing research stories it’s not great, you can see this is just an advert for that company. So what I do on the PR blog, is I pick a story from the newspaper and point out who put the story there and specifically what message they’re trying to send with that story, what the sub-text of the story is. And once you kind of understand just how much of this stuff is out there, it really does make you, in my humble opinion, read newspapers a different way and engage with the media in a different way.

Francis: It seems to me that, especially in this country, there is a lot of interest in the idea of skepticism and the right, and particularly Trump, refer a lot to what he calls ..”fake news”….so, in a sense, it seems to me that the work that you’re doing is, it’s sort of being short-circuited in some bizarre way, by people who are just subverting the whole idea of…looking at the evidence objectively.

Marsh: Yeah, well I think it isn’t that they’re subverting the idea of looking at the evidence, it’s that they taking the terminology of something very, very specific and then misapplying it in order to rob it of any meaning or rob it of the initial meaning and context that it had. So if we look at “fake news” as a term, and this is kind of a thesis I’m sort of developing a little bit at the moment, but where the “fake news” term is most valuable is to look at stories that are wholly constructed, that have no basis in reality. And we saw a huge number of these during the US election, there were stories that the Pope had came out and offered an endorsement to Donald Trump, there were stories that there were Marines stranded in a country and Donald Trump personally signed off or paid for helicopters to go rescue these Marines…and these were stories that appear on sites that look like, they carry all the trappings of a media site…they’ve got all the, sort of, the signifiers that make it look like a media site, but actually there is no journalism involved, these are entirely made-up stories. And lots of these stories are actually, I think, initially made up first of all, just to get engagement, just to get people’s eyes on the page, because the page is covered in adverts and has affiliate links…and it’s really just trying to monetize eyes on the page…and when you have a landscape that’s set up to reward..people financially for the number of hits their website gets, which is a very reasonable sounding metric, and a reasonable sounding way to carry out online marketing and online advertising. But when that system exists, you almost inevitably set off an arms race between the people who are, amongst the people who are looking to get as many eyes as possible on their page, and don’t care what they have to do to get that. And I think that’s kind of where the origins of fake news came from, with these stories that sprung up not necessarily first of all with propagandist purposes, but with just sensationalist purposes. But I think going into several elections worldwide, one of them being the one in America, I think that ecosystem of almost Darwinian evolution of…you know, survival of the fittest in terms of who can put forward the most sensationalist headline and the most sensationalist form of clickbait headline: “12 Tips That Will Blow Your Mind! You’ll never guess number 7!” you know, that kind of ecosystem…when that was there, and then there were people who had a…bad actors with very specific political points to push, whether those points are true or not, so long as it points to a certain direction, I think that’s where “fake news” is a very helpful term to describe that system, where people are putting out sensationalist stories that are supportive of one candidate or lies of another candidate. And we saw this with, for example, the two stories that I cited, the Pope one and the Marines on a helicopter one….I believe both of those are…certainly the latter of those, was shared by Sean Hannity on his website, Sean Hannity obviously used them, Fox News, and you have kind of a very easy mechanism by which a story which had a sensationalist and maybe even propagandist point of view in terms of its initial writing, gets laundered into mainstream via the bridges along the way. So I think that’s where the term “fake news” is phenomenally valuable…but unfortunately, it’s such an easy term to co-opt, to say, well, anything that I don’t like I can just label it “fake news” in order to devalue it or to denigrate it, so Trump can stand in front of CNN and say the entire channel, the entire media company, media platform, is “fake news”….and there’s no real engagement with what he means by that, because what he means by that “I don’t like you.” But the term itself, and I think the tools that were behind the initial term and the scrutiny that the term initially represented are still very valuable. The tools themselves aren’t being co-opted by bad actors, but just the terms of them are.

Chris: At least in America, and I look back at, you know, relatively recent history, let’s go back to, like, the Ronald Reagan administration, we agreed on the facts…so acid rain was the big environmental issue of the time, and Ronald Reagan’s science advisor, you know, said, look, these are the facts, and Ronald Reagan had a climate…or acid rain denier as an Interior minister, he fired him, hired someone who was scientific and they invented the cap-and-trade program, which has been very successful. So they used a conservative, market-based solution to an environmental system and it was interesting, because both sides were at least able to agree on the facts, and the debate was over the policy.

Marsh: Yeah, I think that’s…that’s something that isn’t…that isn’t borne out in sort of, political discourse, conversational discourse…at the moment, and I think that’s a huge, huge issue with the way that people from either side of an aisle…interact, I completely agree…especially if somebody has a..an investment in muddying the waters and obscuring facts. And I think that’s where we kind of are, and it’s the line that’s been trotted out a million times, but I actually think it’s something many people don’t really grasp the full significance of, when Kellyanne Conway says, well, the President has “alternative facts”….I actually think she was saying something different toward a lot of people…will take from that…I don’t think she was saying, that what the President has, or what the administration has, is alternative-to-fact….as in constructs that are wholly invented. I think she was effectively saying, that, well, you have a…this statistic can tell you this, but I can pull up a different statistic that, if I use that in isolation, it will tell you another thing…you know, I don’t think she meant it quite as transparently as that, but I think that’s the phenomenon she was possibly referring to, or certainly a phenomenon that I’ve observed. So, you can find elements of fact…it’s not just when people outright deny the facts, I think there are facts that are true, but are narrow enough that the use of them actually constitutes a falsehood, because there’s a greater truth that is revealed if you…widen the scope, if that sort of makes sense.

Francis: I think, especially in the left-right politics in this country, there’s this undercurrent where the left will try to persuade with facts and data, and the right just want to win…and push through a policy or something like that, and will do anything, say anything, you know, just manipulation…so you have this one group who are trying to play fair, and another group who read books like Robert Green’s 48 Laws of Power, and The Art of War, and all that…

Chris: Or The Art of the Deal…

Francis: Yeah. and what you have is this sort of, just like a broken dialogue where one half isn’t even really interested in the truth. And the other half is trying to come up with, like, the correct formulation of the data that will eventually persuade the other group.

Marsh: Yeah. So, I mean…first of all, I would say that I do consider skepticism a-political, I have my own political..political opinions, and while I would say that I believe them to be informed by skepticism, I wouldn’t want to say that you can only have certain opinions if you’re a skeptic, you’d only be from one political side…so if we go into the politics area, I just want to make that clear. But I do think the idea that one side of an argument can be engaging on the facts and on logic, and to their mind reason, while the other side isn’t engaging at that level but are actually engaging at something else, and I think that something else is a kind of value system, an identity, I think that certainly is a very valid point. And I think we see that in some of the discussions that you see in political discourse in America, some of the discussions you see in political discussions in…Britain over Brexit, things like that. But we see it a lot in the stuff that I deal with in terms of my skeptical day job, or the skeptical world in which I kind of …move. When we talk about people who, for example, are against vaccinations, or the people who believe that the world is flat, I see an awful lot of people engaging with people who hold those opinions, and engaging on the facts, without necessarily understanding that it wasn’t the facts that got people into that position, it was something else. And if you just try and engage, if you throw facts at someone for whom facts weren’t their motivator to get them into the intellectual space that they’re in, those facts will be deflected. And instead you need to…you do need to engage at a values level. So I think that there is an element amongst people, amongst groups that would consider themselves to be progressive, critical thinkers where we also have to understand that we need to engage at the value system that the people we’re talking to have. When it comes to anti-vaxxers, the values that they have are probably, I would say, mistrust of corporations, mistrust of big organizations, mistrust of government, and compassion for their child, protection of their child. Some of those are very admirable and understandable values, you know, I absolutely would understand why someone would…protect and worry about their children. I understand why people would question the motivations of big corporations, we see pharmaceutical companies that we absolutely should be questioning some of their decisions on…in that one example of anti-vaxxers, if you want to try and get anywhere in that conversation, if you go in and say “well actually, here’s the statistics around measles in…over the last hundred years,” that isn’t going to affect them. But I think if you were to be able to go in and say, look, I know that you’re trying to do what’s best for your child…and I understand why you would doubt corporations, because there were these big problems here…but, the flip side of that is, protecting your child also means protecting them from these issues here, and try to engage with the fact of a shared understanding of values. I think that’s perhaps a more productive way of having those conversations, and that’s something I try and do in various parts of the…the work that I do, really.

Chris: How do you find common ground with a flat-earther though?

Marsh: Well, (sigh) I think, first of all, there’s an easy common ground in that they are humans, and I’m also a human. So that’s a pretty easy common ground…and that sounds like a very trite thing, but it’s actually something that a lot of people miss when they’re talking to people they disagree with. You assume they are the sum of their arguments, and miss the fact that they are people holding those…those opinions. So I quite often will have conversations with people who believe the world is flat, and the first thing that I want to do is kind, try to understand them as a person, and I’m not necessarily going to reason them out of their belief in the flat earth, largely I think because a lot of the people who will hold a flat earth belief to the point where they are, in the case of the people I talk to, appearing on stage at conferences and hosting podcasts and doing videos about why the world flat, I think that becomes quite a core part of their identity and who they see themselves as…so certainly an hour-long conversation with me isn’t going to…isn’t going to shift something fundamental about who they believe themselves to be. So I just really want to try and understand them, and I think we do find common ground. In some ways. I think a lot of people, when it comes to flat earth belief, will say these people are anti-science, they are uneducated, this is a failure…Neil DeGrasse Tyson says this is a failure of science education. And I think that’s actually quite a harsh view. I’ve talked to lots of flat-earthers who do believe in the process of science, and are even trying to do the process of science, but don’t understand the sensitivity of the tools that they’re using, or the makeup of the experiments that they’re doing, and they don’t understand why their own personal observations in the experiments they carry out shouldn’t be given a huge amount more weight and significance than the consensus of thousands of people who’ve made their own observations using far more sensitive equipment. So I think even there, writing off the flat earth believer as someone who is unreachable, has absolutely no common ground, misses some fundamental…fundamentally why it’s an interesting thing to do to talk to people you disagree with.

Francis: You talk about helping people learn how to think, even…what are the characteristics of optimal thinking?

Marsh: Oh gosh, that’s a big question. I think one of the most important ones, and it’s one that’s often hugely overlooked, is to question your own beliefs and particularly the beliefs that you hold more strongly. This is something that we, as humans, are just not very well designed to do. I’m exactly the same, in that you’ll get into arguments online, and you’ll get a little heated at someone saying something that you think is silly, and when they make a point, the first thing you do is to say, well that can’t be right, and you google to find the first link you can find that proves them wrong, and you don’t necessarily even read it fully, you just know that this is the thing that came up when you said, when you looked for why that person was wrong…which is a very motivated way of…it’s motivated reasoning, it’s motivated behavior. Whereas a better way to do it is say, well, what is this person saying and how do I observe that and evaluate that as objectively as possible? And similarly, a belief system that you hold incredibly strongly is precisely the thing that you should be sense-checking regularly, because that is going to be your achilles heel, really, that’s going to be the one thing that you don’t question because it’s so obvious to you and so, sort of, [?] So I think that humility of your own belief structure is hugely important, to try and grow as much as possible a willingness to change your mind based on the evidence, even if what you’re changing your mind about is something that you feel very strongly about, you feel very emotionally tied to. These are really, really difficult things to do. It sounds like an easy thing, but it’s one of the most remarkably hard things to do, and I’ve got a huge amount of respect for someone who’s been through that journey of completely being on one side of a fence, looking at the evidence, and going, actually, that was all completely wrong. It’s takes a huge amount of intellectual fortitude, intellectual honesty, to do that.

Chris: What do you think is the best way for somebody who may not have a great science education to start learning more about critical thinking, without, you know, having to go back to university?

Marsh: Yeah..so I mean, you’re absolutely right that it’s an issue that people haven’t necessarily got the vocabulary and the expertise in reading scientific papers. I’m also terrible at reading scientific papers, I find that…the structure of them often impenetrably boring. You know, I’ve got an English background rather than a science background, so I can also understand that, also you have the issue that a lot of science journals just aren’t accessible to the public, so in a way we are reliant, to a degree, on people who are science communicators, to translate the reality of the research into approachable language, and that translation is always going to be flawed. So I think one of the things you can do is to try and seek out multiple, multiple opinions on a topic, and then try and figure out what the doubt about those opinions might be. So if you were to look at vaccination, for example, you could take a look at what the pro-vaccination side are saying, and try and find out how much of those statistics are true, and how many people who make their careers in medicine are pro- or anti- vaccination, and we see the consensus of the experts there. And if you look at the anti-vaccination arguments, and you try and really scrutinize not just whether these are true, but how you could falsify them…I think the falsifiability is very important, because what I think I see a lot…and I have a lot of conversations with people who are very passionate on one side of an argument, is that they specialize in looking at the other side’s argument and deconstructing it and going, well, this can’t be true, for these reasons….but then they’ll put forward an argument of their own which they clearly haven’t done that level of scrutiny on, it’s gonna be a very sort of superficial argument. And again, I think this is kind of an understandable human trait, arguments and points and facts and ideas that gel with how we already see the world are gonna pass into our minds much more easily than ones that don’t quite fit. So I think that’s the biggest thing, is being able to question the information that you agree with the most…and where it comes to a position where you’re not sure either way, to really have a look around at the consensus of experts.

Chris: When it came to recommending books, though, two came to mind immediately to me, one is Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, which I think is almost the primer for skepticism, and then…I really like Brian Dunning’s books, I think he sort of turned Skeptoid into a series of books which I think are really informative.

Marsh: Well, certainly, and I’ve never read his books but have heard a lot of the Skeptoid essays…and I think what Brian does very well is cover the basics of an issue in enough depth that you’ve really got a pretty comprehensive handle on things by then…so yeah, I think he’s a good example of that. I must admit, it’s quite tricky for me to recommend skeptical books, because I spend so much of my time immersed not in the literature and culture of the critical thinkers, but instead reading stuff from people who aren’t critical thinkers, that I’m probably a terrible person to ask about what a good skeptical library looks like. I’m sat in my office right now and looking across at the books that I keep in my office, that are sort of science and skepticism related, the vast majority of them are from people who disagree with me, because I enjoy so much immersing myself in the arguments and ideas of people that I disagree with, and try and understand where they’re coming from. So yeah, that’s possibly…I’m possibly the worst person to recommend what a good skeptical library ought to look like.

Francis: You, in a speech to the Australian Skeptics national convention, sounded very optimistic. I was wondering if you could explain why you have this optimism?

Marsh: I think I am optimistic. And I think part of that is because I really believe in people, first of all. It’s very easy, I think, to have a very negative view, a very apocalyptic view, of everything is getting worse and people don’t care and people don’t engage, and especially when you’re very much in the middle of a particular issue. And so we see that with, go back to homeopathy or go to vaccination, it’s very easy to see the people who disagree with the scientific point of view, the critical thinking point of view, the people promoting homeopathy, the people advising people not to get vaccinated. It’s easy to see that and say, oh, there’s so many people and they’re so strong and they’ve got all this kind of success, and to see that as like a 50-50, like there are them and there are us, there are believers and there are skeptics, and it’s kind of a pitched battle, and I don’t believe that to be the case. I think actually it’s much more likely that there’s a vast middle ground of people who…aren’t really that invested either way, and are very reachable. And so one of the reasons I was particularly positive, especially being in Australia, is seeing how great the work of even a small number of people, how great that work can be. So Australia, for example, used to have an organization, an anti-vaccine organization called the Australian Vaccination Network. And…sounds like a legitimate organization, they’d get play across the media, every time vaccines were mentioned the head of that organizations would be on the phone or on the TV about it. And it was really the work of, maybe, sort of five, six, seven people in a group called “Stop the AVN,” or slightly more than that, who started pushing back against that, and they’ve completely changed the way that the Australian media reports on vaccination. They no longer take an anti-vax view when talking about vaccines on the media, and they put forward a much more pro-vaccination, pro-science, pro-reason point of view on those issues, and that’s because of the work of…a relatively small group of activists. So I think it’s easy to look at things like the fake news of the internet, and the hellsphere that social media can occasionally be, and be quite apocalyptic, but I think the powers of those platforms, the powers of those tools to spread misinformation, are also tools and platforms that we can use to spread positive information. And it doesn’t take…the barriers, the gatekeepers, to spreading good information, are down and the gatekeepers aren’t there anymore, so it…you can actually get an awful long way, and I think there’s a lot of people who really care about things and doing things the right way. So, yeah, I think I am quite positive. I think most people, I think there are very few people trying to harm people and trying to spread intentional untruths, and there’s a lot of people who care about what’s real. And I think, I do think we’ll kind of get there in terms of how to get out of the bubble we’re in at the moment, which is where unreason seems to be prevailing in certain really important areas.

Francis: We lost a poet recently, named Mary Oliver, I don’t know if you’re familiar with her…but one of the things she once said is that, instructions for living a life are: Pay attention, Be astonished, and Tell about it. And I feel like with technology offering so much right now to people, the flip side of that is, yes, there are existential threats that have been created by advancements in technology, but the good side of it is just not getting out enough. And part of my interest in this podcast is to get that part out, to tell about what the good things are in this world, and give the facts, give the facts about how the technology could be used in a different way that would benefit a lot more people, that kind of thing.

Marsh: It’s kind of the…the human condition, to a degree, and certainly the condition of the stories we tell, and therefore the story that the media tells, is that the stories that are worrying or troubling or negative and depressing—those are the stories that are much easier to tell. You’ll that, you pick up the newspaper and you can get a, in any or of the last couple, you can get a false impression of how terrible things are going, the last couple haven’t been particularly great years internationally, for lots of different reasons, but it’s very easy to get negative stories, stories about how awful this is and how sensationally terrible this other thing is. It’s very easy to cover those stories, but it’s one of the things that’s kind, you always have to bear in mind as you…look at a story of some awful tragedy or terrible event, someone behaving awfully, is that the reason these stories are news is because they aren’t common. If really awful things were a thing that happened….you look at an awful murder, or something terrible like that…it’ll make the news because it’s such a gruesome and terrible thing, but if it was happening 50 times a day in every town, it wouldn’t be news any more, it would be life. So I think we have the stories we tell and the way we tell them, do skew towards negative for various reasons, and sort of bearing that in mind is a useful way of engaging with the media, really.

Francis: It’s a…issue of a profit-driven media…

Marsh: It sort of is, but I don’t think it’s necessarily even—profit-driven almost suggests that there’s an overt decision to be cynically sensationalist in order to make money, and I suspect it’s, the business decisions are, for most media outlets, sort of different to that. Because it’s so hard to get by, it’s so hard to cover your costs in the media these days, and finding the stories that are more in-depth and interesting is a much harder thing to do with limited resources, so I don’t like the idea of…writing off journalists as being, or newspapers as being all about the profit and not about the truth. I think the vast majority of people who go into the media, and who are acting in the media every day, are actually trying to do a very good job. Even the forces that are stopping them from doing a good job are probably also driven by people who are trying to do a good job, but their job just runs contrary to the goal of positive and independent…and powerful media. I think it’s a broken system rather than broken people using a working system, as it were.

Francis: Yeah, I agree with that. I have a son, and not long ago I posted in social media a question to my friends, which was: If you had to name a really good role model for a man, for a boy to look up to, who would you choose? And I was astonished at how difficult that question was. And one of the people that responded to that question said that, well, you know, the thing is that in the media, you know it’s really hard for them to assume anybody is going to be interested in the story of, like, a quiet college professor or a teacher who lives a really great…has a great career, and helps people, and was happy…it’s kind of, in some ways, just not that exciting information, so it doesn’t get out there.

Marsh: I think it’s more about, personally I think it’s more about the fact that the majority of people know what good is, and that’s why bad sells..? Because you know what the right thing to do in many situations would be, you know what would represent an honest life and a just life and you know, just and kind behavior, those things are kind of ingrained in us in a way that we are drawn to the cases where those norms are broken. Because they’re such norms in us—the reason gruesome, grotesque stuff catches people’s attention is because we know that’s wrong, and we know that’s wrong because we know what’s right. So I think it’s more perhaps about the fact that we already have a good sense of what’s right and what the good way to be is. Now that does mean finding positive role models can be tricky, because it’s very hard to tell stories about the unremarkable thing. But I do think we have got an in-built and innate sense of morality that we all, whether consciously or sub-consciously or unconsciously, follow.

Chris: But you and I…you and I, Marsh, have discussed the difference between the message and the messenger, and that maybe the notion of role models and leaders is an older concept, and we need to be thinking more small-scale and following communities rather than individuals?

Marsh: Yeah, I’d say so, and I’d think it’s…more about gestures and work and contribution than it is about personalities and leaders, I think. I’m always very wary of elevating people, even within a relatively small community, to elevating people beyond the point where they are questioned, or beyond the point where they are…where people will…evaluate them. You know, I think for me, I like the idea of saying, “this is great work.”

Chris: During QED, you were talking about the Buzzfeed article about Lawrence Kraus, and how many people came and said, “well, Michael Marshall said it’s true, so therefore it must be true”…but discounted all of the women who were accusing him.

Marsh: Yeah, yeah that was a very disheartening..disheartening thing. So…but I think, again, that’s a symptom of the fact that our society still has some way to go towards ironing out the unconscious biases that we have when it comes to things like gender and race and sexuality and stuff like that. I think even a lot of…a lot people who have done a lot of thinking and have come around to getting rid of the conscious biases, aren’t able to recognize, or able to work on…haven’t finished working on, getting rid of the unconscious biases, and that can be quite a tricky thing when people will say, “well, I’m no sexist, ‘cuz I would never say anything bad about women directly”…yes, but it’s not about saying bad things about women directly, it’s about what your actions and assumptions are and the way that you talk about, the way you judge women in this kind of way compared to a man in the same situation, and those kinds of ways. So the idea that …the weight of the opinions and the weight of the reports from the many, many women who were named in that Buzzfeed article saying this happened to me, and I witnessed this and I was aware of this…the idea that those names, their opinions mattered less than the opinion of me–one of the few guys mentioned in the article who agreed with those witnesses–yeah, it just shows that there’s still this unconscious bias. But I think even if we look back 10, 15, 20 years, we’re seeing changes in that direction, too. It’s slow and it needs to go quicker and it needs to go a long way, but I’m still positive about the fact that I think people are moving in the right direction. And I think in many ways some of the subcultures you’ve seen grown up around rejecting some of the progress that’s been made, are in a way a reaction to the fact that progress has been made, that progress is making its way through society, slowly. And there are people who are will be made uncomfortable about the fact that their positions of unchallenged …acceptability are now shifting to a point where they will be called on, on even unconscious biases, and called on to try and address those biases. So I think even that is a sign that there is some positivity, even if that’s just me taking a silver lining to that cloud.

Francis: In a democracy, it’s really important people know how to think and have good information, and I’m wondering, have you envisioned any changes in how that could happen in our countries…is it a responsibility for people to educate themselves, and is it a responsibility for the media to at least have some outlets that are there to provide facts…like, real facts?

Marsh: Yeah, so it’s kind of tricky, because those are instinctually, you’d say those are good things, and those are things that should happen. But I think even scrutinizing those we come up with issues….so for example there are media organizations doing pretty good work in fact-checking some of the worst mistruths that are out there, it’s incredibly hard to fact-check in real time, so you have a lie getting around the world before the truth has to…has time to put its shoes on, as it were. But also, I think it’s missing the fact that some of the untruths that are…that are perpetrated by people, the incorrect facts, the lies that are being put out by people for their own political, personal or cultural gain, I think some of the reasons they take root with people aren’t because people are genuinely persuaded that one statistic has changed their mind or anything, I think it’s because it aligns and comports with what they already thought. So putting out an account of factual [?] isn’t always a very useful…it’s not the magic solution, because the people who believe a lie aren’t necessarily going to be the people who go seeking out evidence that what they believe was a lie. It’s great to be able to put out a fact-check, and say, Donald Trump was lying when he said these things, but unless you can get that to everyone who would still vote for Donald Trump right now, and convince them that they should care about this more than they care about the fact that he’s on their side when it comes to their…their views on…on trans rights or on their side when it comes to their views on tax, or on their side when it comes to their views on how many minorities should be allowed into America, then I don’t think you’ll reach those people. I think similarly to say that people should educate themselves, kind of …is an overly simplistic solution, because if you haven’t got a grounding in critical thinking, I don’t know where you go to realize you haven’t got grounding, and go to try and change that. The tool you’re using to evaluate your beliefs is the tool that also stores all those beliefs…and those beliefs impact on your evaluation, so it’s quite…it’s tricky in that regard. I had this kind of conversation with someone who was pointing out that there’s no barrier to social mobility in the UK, because people who are from a very working class background can get a loan and go to university…and they miss the fact that, where I come from—I was one of the few people I know who ever went to college—and, although there was no barrier to stop them, they didn’t know that people weren’t just led to believe that that was an option, it wasn’t part of the culture to just assume that that was an option. So, yes, the door was unlocked, but if you never realized that it’s a door in the first place…it doesn’t matter whether there’s a lock on it or not, and I think that’s also the truth when it comes to people educating themselves about what they don’t know. So I think where there are solutions, I think the solutions still have to understand what people’s values are and try and engage, first at that level of, of values so that they understand the purpose of trying to assess and challenge their own perceptions of facts and situations first, and then you soften the ground for facts to take hold, but unless you do that kind of softening first, by helping people understand what their missing, I think you might end up with some stony ground on which those seeds would fall.

Francis: It seems to me that, prior to internet and a long time ago even, there were…arbiters, and whether these arbiters were credible or not, you know, I can’t say for sure, but there were either sources, like say the Encyclopedia Britannica, I don’t know if you have that in your country…and there were certain news sources, maybe, that people felt were legit, and you know there was a way to kind of settle differences in opinion to some extent…where is that today, and how can we…do we need that, should we—is that something we should try to strengthen or create more in our society?

Marsh: Yeah, I…don’t know really, ‘cuz I’m not necessarily sure that..that it ever really existed. I think people have always been very siloed into their…their own chosen media, and I think what we’re seeing isn’t…isn’t necessarily a new sensation of extreme siloing, although I think we are seeing a bit of that. But I think what we’re seeing is that…there’s more transparency around what silos people are in. And I talk about this a little bit when it comes to looking at, say, the news media. If you go back to before the advent of the internet, people would read their own newspapers and not really deviate from that. So I grew up, my family would read the tabloid, the Sun, which is a very right-wing tabloid, and I think a lot of people who would read that the Guardian, which is a left-wing broadsheet newspaper, wouldn’t ever see what was being said in the Sun, and certainly growing up I never saw anything that was said in the Guardian. So you had your own siloed readership there. And then the internet came along, and all news went up online and everyone read everything for a short amount of time, it was brilliant that you broke those silos down, and then people started just bookmarking their own sites and only returning to the news sites that they already would read, or the news sites that kind of, politically or culturally or socially, agreed with them and you kind of re-siloed. And then social media came along, and everything was sort of…everybody was reading a bit of everything, and sharing that into everyone’s timelines, and you’d see it from all sorts of different places, and then people would then silo by choosing who they followed on social media, and we go back into our silos of …you’re more likely to follow on social media or be friends with on social media, the people who share similar world views and therefore would share similar media platforms and media organizations as their go-to places. So I think we’ve seen this kind of, concertina effect of an expansion of…what we read, and then a contraction as we become comfortable in…having filtered out the bits that…made us a bit annoyed or we disagreed or we thought was ridiculous because we disagreed with it. And I suspect that’s always been the case, it’s just…way more obvious now that we’re not reading everything, because…if I went to a newsstand 30 years ago, and picked up my newspaper, I’d have no idea what was even in those other newspapers, and I probably wouldn’t have that many people around me who would tell me what was in those newspapers…now we have social media kind of eco-system where the worst things from those newspapers do pass in front of us and we can see what’s being said on the other side of the divide, and that’s what makes this kind of, so outraged that the other side of the divide are saying these things. So I think it’s kind of…it’s almost ironic that we are less likely to be fully in our echo-chambers and silos than we were. And the fact that we see stuff that we disagree with, and it shows us that we’re in that echo-chamber, makes..it a new phenomenon, where previously we would never have heard what was happening in someone else’s echo-chamber, and we could quite happily assume that the bubble that we were in represented reality in the rest of the world. So yeah, I don’t quite know…know whether there was ever this sense of objective, unquestionable truth, even the Encyclopedia Britannica has been shown to be, I believe it’s been shown, to be littered with more errors than Wikipedia, across a representative sample. So, yeah, we didn’t have a better system to check it against at the time, so it stood.

Chris: Wikipedia’s interesting, because it really shows a positive effect that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have contributed to.

Marsh: Yeah, I think it’s a…it’s an absolutely remarkable tool. And the idea that…it is a tool that is, a tool that iterates based on what can be sourced or shown to be true, is a huge and useful thing. You can’t just put up a statement on there and accept…and have it accepted as fact. But even that, I think…I think Wikipedia is fantastic, but it just shows how we’re still not great at designing a system that doesn’t accidentally get some pretty serious flaws in it. And I was actually talking to somebody who had a problem, they had a Wikipedia page written about them, and included a fact about which university they went to, and why they…didn’t go to that university, why they didn’t finish their degree at that university…and the fact was completely wrong, and was taken from an interview the person gave, and said something as a joke, or it was a misinterpretation by the journalist…so they would try and remove that “fact” and it would re-appear because of the source…we can source this, it was in this newspaper, it must be true, and the person saying “I am the subject of this material, it isn’t true”—but because they couldn’t, paradoxically, point to anywhere official that proved what they said about their lives was true, the thing that was wrong about their life stood. So even there, we’re still figuring out how to iron out kinks in the system. And I suspect we’ll never fully iron out the kinks, we’ll just have choose which kinks upset us the least, and which kinks upset our ability to get as close as possible to…truth, as possible, really.

Chris: Isn’t that the ultimate goal of science, is just to make increasingly accurate approximations of truth?

Marsh: Yeah, absolutely, to see how we can get rid of the errors that are there without introducing grander errors…is the scientific…the scientific objective. And I think that’s what a lot of people fundamentally misunderstand about science, is they assume that science is a series of assertions and rules and statements handed down from elite intellectuals in ivory towers, and misunderstanding that any one of these things that are considered to near certainties could be overturned if we had evidence and examples and demonstrations that sufficiently overturned that weight. So it’s the opposite of that kind of decree from on high, in that everything is approximate, sort of pending further information. So that’s kind of a misunderstanding that people have about what science is and what it’s looking to achieve…

Francis: Getting back to the idea of an arbiter for a lot of people, the Bible is the ultimate arbiter…so, you know, how to reconcile the world with science, which is based on reproducibility, and the Bible, which is based on whatever the Bible is supposed to be based on, we’re working through this, I suppose, as part of our evolution.

Marsh: Yeah, I think so, and I think also the conversations around religion that way have to kind of come through this, and I think that it from both sides, I think it’s very easy for…I myself am an atheist, I grew up in the Catholic faith but not really being that persuaded a believer, and so stepping away from that wasn’t a huge thing for me. But one of the things I see with a lot of the people who I would agree with in terms of the likelihood of there being a God, is a complete dismissal of people that they would disagree with about, on that question. And I do, I guess this comes to a point or an idea that I come back to a lot of times, that it’s very easy to write off the people we disagree with and say, well, these people are Biblical literalists, and there is nothing that I have for them, nothing I can say that would engage them at all, so we should just leave them over there to their thing…and I’d far rather that we, that people like myself who are atheists, would see people who are believers in the Bible and try to engage on what it is in that book, or what it is in their religion, that they hold valuable. So if nothing else, I’m not trying to tell people their God doesn’t exist, but I would quite happily like to discuss with them whether their God really is right when they say that gay people are evil and transpeople are evil and all these other things that…extreme religious conservatives would hold as true. I don’t need to persuade people that God doesn’t exist to persuade people that people who are gay and LGBTQ are acceptable. And I think if we do go down that route of saying, well, unless you’re an atheist, you’re wrong….I think we leave all those people to…to follow the worst elements of a religious doctrine, of a religiously-derived doctrine. So yeah, even with that, of people who get their truth in the Bible, I’d still rather understand what truth they’re deriving from it, and what values and what needs in their life, from an emotional, intellectual and, kind of, social point of view that is met by those issues and see how we can work around those to get them on board with some of the more progressive values that I think are good for the world.

Chris: But you’re one of the few people I know with the temperament that doesn’t lose his temper when…I mean, I’m just thinking of this week’s Be Reasonable episode…how you didn’t lose your shit while I was like, screaming at my iPad.

Marsh: Yeah, so, I mean this comes up lots, I’ve got this show that I do, Be Reasonable, where I talk to people that I completely disagree with about an issue…and rather than be aggressive or antagonistic or have this kind of big slanging match that lots of people would recognize as the kind of conversation they might have had before, I try and have a polite and good natured and…try and check their ideas and try to be…pretty intellectually rigorous without losing the thread of the conversation. And partly the reason I think that I do that show, is because those are conversations that a lot of people aren’t having, and it might be because they feel they aren’t able to have those, either because of the people around them who hold beliefs that are so far outside of the mainstream of people that you…you might work with, you might be friends with, you might have in your family, and you don’t want to start picking at those threads because they’re too raw beneath them. Or people feel, kind of have those conversations because they don’t think they’d be able to stay calm in the face of someone saying something that they find either incorrect or morally objectionable or those types of things. But for me, I think the value is in being able to hear those arguments without losing your civility in that moment, and I totally understand why some people would see, you don’t need to be civil if someone is doubting your personhood as a…in terms of your value as someone of a race different to theirs, that being civil to them isn’t something you would be inclined to do, and I appreciate that. But I think with my show, it’s there to be the place where these…some discussions will happen in a civil manner, so we can understand what are people who hold these ideas saying? Because a point that I’ve made out to people is that, when I talk to someone who is anti-semitic, or when I talk to someone who is selling alternative remedies to cancer patients, that will almost certainly result in some of their [daft?s] Those conversations, the only time that person is having that conversation is not just with me, it’s not just that they only ever have that conversation with me, they’re talking to lots of other people who don’t know that the person’s wrong, who don’t know necessarily to challenge them or check what they’re saying. And so we can allow those conversations to happen in the darkness and never know about them, or we can, in very certain situations and very certain circumstances, in pretty specifically crafted platforms, have those conversations and understand what rhetoric is convincing people that white supremacy is a valid idea that should still exist in the 21st century. So that’s kind of why I keep my cool and try and have objective conversations with people who hold objectionable views or incorrect views, in a way that doesn’t shut down the conversation, because I’m there to understand what do these people say to people in order to justify their views, and how do we hear what’s wrong with those arguments?

Francis: You could also see…as different views, which if they don’t hurt anyone, if they don’t infringe on someone else’s rights to be who they want to be and live the life they want, I say live and let live, you know? And I think one of the problems with the left is, we’ll hear a lot of the right, ultra-right-wing rhetoric, and automatically assume that they want to take over the world and force everyone to think like them…perhaps they’d be happy to just live in some little encampment in Idaho, really far away from where I live, and that’s fine (laugh). You know, I think, you know, there’s so many differences, there’s opinions that are just gonna persist, that what you’re doing sounds great, because what you say basically is that, ‘I’m gonna hear you out.’ And maybe initially that’s all that we can really do.

Marsh: Yeah, I think you’re right to a degree. I certainly am saying I want to hear them out. And I absolutely wouldn’t be saying that if I, for example, did a show where I speak to lots of people whose views I completely agree with, and then the next show would speak to someone whose views I completely disagree with, where people who tune in might not know which side of this…they’re on. What I wouldn’t want to do is just say, you know, this eminent scientist, who’s got some really fascinating research on physics, is at the same level of…conversation and….given the same level of platform as someone who, for example, as I spoke to this week, is, would describe themselves as a “race realist” who believes that white people…that other races are not as intelligent or capable as people who are caucasian. I absolutely wouldn’t want to equate the…those two conversations, with someone that I respect. The reason that I have a platform specifically for people I disagree with is I think it affords me a level of safety, or affords the conversation a level of safety, that I don’t have to worry that the people listening to me might be persuaded that, actually this guy’s got some pretty interesting views about race. People who listen to the show will know that I disagree with this person, and the only reason that they’re on the show is because I think they are completely wrong. And accepting that these people are wrong, let’s hear how this person who wrong about what they’re saying, justifies what they’re saying. Now I think one of the real issues, one of the reasons that I think I…am not inclined to say, we should just let everyone have their own opinions, is because, I think, for many of the people who, when talking to me—someone they know they disagree with—they’ll put forward one side of a conversation. And they’ll put forward certain arguments, certain rhetorics, that are there to represent their side as best as possible. But when they’re talking to someone that they agree with, I wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if they say very different things. And if those things aren’t, hey, we just want to all get…do…have our own lives and not really worry about [?] too much, I absolutely would be surprised if they went much further than that into places where they are incited, at the very least the infringement of other people’s civil liberties and at worst, probably incitement of actual violence. So, I do think it’s important to have the conversation with people you disagree with, to understand what they use to recruit people and what they use to persuade people. But I think we also shouldn’t just assume then that, well, this is just opinion and you’re welcome to have an opinion on these issues, because it’s harmless. I do think opinions that are obviously false harm someone, somewhere down the line. Even when it’s something like the flat earth, which the idea that the world is flat isn’t going to kill anyone, but I went along to a flat earth conference and saw speakers there who didn’t just think the world was flat, but also thought it was run by “Zionists” and their Protocols of the Elders of Zion prove that it’s actually the jewish people who are intentionally in charge of the world and intentionally causing all these disasters, and did you know they killed JFK? and did you know they did 9-11? and did you know they’re behind vaccines and you shouldn’t vaccinate your children, and did you know they’ve cured cancer, so don’t take chemotherapy…if we were to silo people off and say, you can go over there and have a belief that is contrary to the evidence and completely runs in the face of logic, but you just go over there and we just…will forget about you, I think you cut those people off to a place where they don’t end up in places that are good for them, either psychologically, intellectually or…in the long term, necessary physically. So I think it is still incumbent upon society to try and reach people who are holding ideas that are so far out of the mainstream and so far against logic and reason…I don’t think, yeah, cutting them off is a necessarily good solution to that.

Chris: Lastly, Marsh, is there anything you’d like to plug? I mean, you have two other podcasts, and I know you have an event coming up this July in Liverpool…

Marsh: So I do a lot of stuff, so the place to see the work that I …think is kind of, the important stuff I do, is Good Thinking Society, that’s the charity that I work for, where we’re doing things like challenging government’s provision of alternative medicine and things like that. So you can find that at GoodThinkingSociety.org …You can find the podcasts that I do, so Be Reasonable, the interview show where I talk to people I disagree with and try and keep things civil but interesting, and Skeptics with a K, which is a bit more of a light-hearted look at skeptical…well, we’re skeptical of news stories and pore through the evidence behind certain stories in a light-hearted way, you can find either of those on iTunes or general podcast providers. And it’s actually ten years that I’ve been involved in skepticism, and ten years since we founded the Merseyside Skeptic Society, so this July, for any UK listeners or anyone who happens to find themselves in the UK in July, we’re having a one day, one-off celebration of skepticism, where we’re gonna have a load of speakers and entertainment and I’m going to be emceeing it and talking about stories for the first 10 years of the Merseyside Skeptics Society. And you can find out more about that at MerseysideSkeptics.org.uk as well.

Chris: Excellent. Thank you so much for coming on Making Better, Marsh.

Francis: Thank you very much.

Marsh: Well thank you so much for having me, I’ve really enjoyed it.

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[Bell End]

Chris Since you were an English major, therefore you must know this: I would like to spell, define, use in the sentence, and give us the etymology of the word “bell-end”

Marsh Oh, bell-end. I can do that, I can do that. It’s a…fantastic insult that I didn’t realize was not an insult that was used in America, I think it’s actually used in Australia as well, although I could be wrong about that. But a bell-end is the tip of a penis, the head of the penis above where the foreskin is—which might be why it’s not used in America because neither is the foreskin in a large part of America—but yeah, so the bell-end is the end of the penis. It’s just a lovely insult, ‘cuz it’s so evocative and ridiculous and has a lovely term to it, so to say someone is a “bell-end,” is a bit like saying, oh, they’re being a dick but not a dick in an aggressive way, more like a…an annoyance or a fool, or a bit goofy. So yeah, someone’s a bit of a bell-end, is a British insult, and it’s an insult that, when we use it on Skeptics with a K, which one of the podcasts that I do, and which is a bit more light-hearted than most of the stuff that I do, we didn’t realize it wasn’t a widely-used insult until one of our listeners used it in conversation not realizing what it was, and then had an English person there, they were like, “you can’t just say that”—they used it in a formal conversation, a formal setting, I think, and were told “why are you calling people the end of a penis?” Because people assumed that a bell-end was either end of bell curve.

Chris Susan thought it was the handle of a hand-bell that’s kind of shaped like a dick…

Marsh Ah, ok, I forgot that they did that…yeah, so some people did go with that, yeah. I know some people came up with that it was…that you’ve got a bell curve, and bell-end is someone who’s so far off the bell curve that they are not in a normal distribution, they are an extreme. So they used this in very sort of light-hearted and kind of, sort of slightly more academic kind of way, and British people in the audience were like, “did he just call you a bell-end?” (laughs)

Francis I never heard that one before…(laugh)

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