It's Working: Flooding The Zone

So I want to start this one somewhere we don't usually start.

I'm like tired. Not tired like I stayed up too late or drank a little

bit too much last night. Tired like I opened three browser tabs this morning trying

to figure out like what we should cover this week and I closed all of them

and I sat there and I I didn't pick anything because picking one of them felt like

agreeing to ignore the other nine million things that could have been

in that very same tab.

And look, there were there were like forty.

And I know because we've been doing this show for like a year and a half that

the number is going up and not down.

So let's just say what this episode is.

This is not a news episode. There's no docket number this week,

there's no chart. This is the two of us talking about the fact that

we are exhausted. And that a lot of you are also exhausted,

and that the exhaustion is not like a side effect of what's happening,

it's kind of the point.

of what's happening. So that's the thesis today.

If you take one thing out of the next,

you know, episode minutes, take that one.

The tiredness, the exhaustion is the product.

It's not evidence that you're weak or that you don't care enough or that you've

got some kind of moral stamina problem that other people don't have.

It's the intended output of a strategy that has a name and an author

and a documented.

And I want to be careful here because I know how this can sound.

There's a version of this episode that's just like two guys complaining into

a microphone for 40 minutes, and then everybody feels pissed off,

and then you turn it off. And that's not what this is gonna be.

And that would actually be a small contribution to the problem,

is why we're not doing that. So here's kind of the shape of it.

For the first half, we're gonna be precise about

What's being done to us and how it works.

Not because I think that being precise and exact about it some sort of takes some

of its power away. But the second half is strategy,

not vibes, not you got this. Actual peer-reviewed research on

why people in movements burn out and what the ones who don't burn

out do differently. And some of that research is 40 years old and nobody talks about

it, which

Annoys me personally.

A noise may be an understatement.

Yeah, it annoys me a lot. And we'll get there.

One more thing before we start,

and I mean this. If you're listening to this and you've already stopped following

the news, if you've muted the words,

if you've deleted the app, if you just can't anymore,

you're not the villain of this episode.

So the phrase, flood the zone.

Some people have heard of it. Most people haven't.

Steve Bannon talking to the author Michael Lewis,

believe he's the author of Moneyball,

if not mistaken, or anyway, some of those economic books,

~ around twenty eighteen. ~ he's talking to Steve Bannon,

and Steve Bannon says, with the real the real opposition to the agenda

at the time he was working for for ~ Trump.

The real opposition is the media,

and the way to deal with the media is to quote,

flood the zone with shit.

And that's like the whole doctrine.

That's it. Just that's the sentence.

Just that. Flood the zone with shit.

I mean it's honest, I'll give him that.

He's not being cagey, he's describing a method.

And so we're gonna break down what the method actually assumes because this

is the part that is kinda clever and equally

~ combustibly evil all at the same time.

It doesn't assume you're stupid.

It actually doesn't assume you believe the shit.

No.

It it assumes that you have this finite amount of attention.

Like, that's it. That's the whole bet.

The bet is that attention is somehow a fixed resource.

It doesn't scale. You can't buy more of it.

And if I just generate the shit faster than you can process the shit,

I win by default. Not by convincing you.

Not by by winning the argument,

but just by

Exceeding you horizontally.

like the debate kids who just keep talking and talking and talking and talking.

You never you can't even track what they're saying much less get a word in.

But

Yeah, like a Jubilee post.

yeah. But that's why the scholars who write about this describe

it as specifically anti-democratic rather than just straight up dishonest.

Because it's not targeting your beliefs.

It's targeting your capacity to hold anything steady long enough to act on it.

And the ability to sustain public attention on a thing.

is sort of load bearing for the whole democratic arrangement.

Oversight requires attention. Accountability requires attention.

You can't actually hold somebody accountable for something you've already forgotten

because four other things just happened.

Or forty or four hundred, right.

Right. Or renaming Lake Ontario to Lake America.

So here's why I want to bring in an actual study because I I just I don't want

to be just the two guys with a theory.

There is a longitudinal piece by Julia Meetag and Gwendolyn Gurr published

in twenty twenty three and they they tracked people over time through

a referendum campaign. Not anything exciting,

but it was just a referendum campaign,

and they found a very specific causal change.

Not a correlation, a causation.

Walk us through it.

So information overload comes first.

That's the feeling of there's too much of this and it's updating faster than

I can possibly process it. And that overload reduces what they call news

efficacy, which is basically your sense that consuming this gish

gab actually does anything for you.

So it's not an issue of can I understand it?

It's an issue of does understanding it help me or how do I apply what I understood?

Right. And then that drop in efficacy is what predicts news

avoidance. So the sequence is basically just overload,

then loss of efficacy, then withdrawal entirely in that order.

And that matters enormously because the story people tell about news avoiders

is that they're lazy or apathetic or checked out.

That's exactly what we're seeing at the polls right now with who is voting

why and how often and whatever.

But the truth is they're not lazy or apathetic or checked out.

They're responding rationally to a system that stopped paying out.

If you pull the lever a hundred times and nothing comes out,

not pulling the lever is not apathy.

It's avoiding the definition of ex insanity.

It's it's learning

The system where every time you pull the lever,

nothing happens.

I'd say this might be closer to the experiments where they shock you

for pulling the lever. But that's where the psychology term comes in,

which we're going to use carefully here because it gets thrown around loosely.

The term is learned helplessness.

The original work is about what happens when a subject is exposed repeatedly

to a stressor they cannot control.

And the finding is that eventually they stop attempting to change the situation,

even when the situation changes and they could.

Even when they could, and that's the ugly part of all of this.

Right. The learning outlasts the conditions that taught it.

So basically if you wanted to design a system that produced a population that

had entirely given up and checked out,

but then felt like it was their own decision,

you would build exactly this. You wouldn't censor anything.

Censorship is expensive and it creates martyrs and it's pretty obvious.

You'd just publish everything constantly,

forever, and let people exhaust themselves sorting through it.

Feeling like I'm in a cage right now.

~ the exhaustion feels like a personal failing because of that rather than

a policy outcome. Right? Nobody forced them to turn off and drop out.

They did it on their own.

Which is

exactly which is why it's so easy to spot.

Like that's how you know it's working exactly as they designed it to.

When the harm gets experienced as a character flaw by the person it's happening to.

I wanna add the piece from my side of this,

which is the institutional piece,

because there's a second thing the flood of information on the flooding

of the zone does that gets less attention.

It's not just wearing out individuals,

it's overwhelming the whole machinery of the system.

Say more, King.

Every institution that's supposed to check power runs on a queue,

right? Courts have dockets, newsrooms have staff,

congressional committees have hearing calendars,

inspectors general, when they are allowed to carry out their inspections,

~ have caseloads. Every one of those is a system with a throughput limit,

and none of those limits are secret.

If you generate at four times the rate the queue can clear,

you don't have to beat the queue,

you just have to fill it.

And then all of those things passed because nobody got to them.

There just wasn't time. Not because they were argued for successfully,

but there just wasn't a lane open.

Right. So look, I wanna do the thing we always do,

which is actually check whether the story we're telling survives contact with

numbers, because we've been saying it's working,

and I I wanna be honest about the fact that it's not working evenly.

Sounds good.

So the courts by the middle of May twenty twenty five,

there have been thirty-nine injunctions issued against this administration.

They've blocked massive federal layoffs,

they've blocked funding freezes,

deportations, but ultimately it comes down to thirty nine things,

and that's just May. We're in September,

right? May of twenty twenty five.

So now we're in September of twenty twenty six.

Right, that's that's a lot of losing for something that's supposed

to be steamrolling everybody.

No, it is. And and more recently,

the the Congressional Research Service looked

at thirty-four predecision injunctions.

And as of June twenty seventh of this year,

forty one point two percent of them were still in effect.

So like a meaningful chunk of the early agenda

is still right now legally blocked and mostly in the immigration space.

And the biggest one.

Yeah, i i it is the biggest one.

Basically it's Trump versus Barbara.

June thirtieth, twenty twenty six,

just a couple of months ago, the Supreme Court struck down

the birthright citizenship executive order,

six to three. Like it wasn't close.

You know, it wasn't our nail biters that we're usually having,

like what overturned Roe versus Wade.

So that's not a like a technicality,

right? It's not a delay. That's like a that's like a ha a loss,

right? A landslide, as he said about the election.

And keep in mind six to three is this is going the other way,

right? Six to three is the ideological breakdown,

but the other way. There's supposed to be six conservatives

or roughly roughly conservatives,

you know, right of the other three,

and then three liberals left on the court.

Right. And it went opposite. So sit with that for a second because your entire

information diet is the flood.

And you've probably experienced that as like a a headline for like ninety minutes

and then it was gone.

Now for the other column.

Yeah, I'm going to because I I'm not interested in doing sort

of this like cheerleading episode.

The the Fourth Circuit lifted the block on the anti DEI orders.

So key provisions of those are live and enforceable.

But the Supreme Court led the administration ~ to keep denying accurate

gender markers on passports for trans and non binary Americans.

And the mail voting order has been a genuine shit show.

It was lifted partly in August and then blocked again just a couple of days ago,

but it's still moving.

So the honest summary is a split.

Right. Which is not as easy of a headline to really swallow,

right? Because some of it's dead,

some of it is currently law,

and a lot of it is just still kind of ethereal,

like we haven't figured it out yet.

We don't know.

And I wanna name why I think that split is actually the most important fact

in this episode. It's not the one people expect.

Go for it.

So both of the emotionally available positions are wrong.

Position one is they're unstoppable,

it's over, nothing works. That's factually false.

Thirty-nine injunctions, a six to three loss at the Supreme Court.

The courts are standing up to the administration to some degree,

and those things worked.

But

Position two is that the system held,

the guardrails worked, everybody relaxed.

Also factually false. The DEI provisions are enforcing right now.

Real people lost real passport access access.

So both of these these comfortable stories that we've been told,

one that the position held and one that the available positions

are wrong are both lies.

Right, and people want a clear cut answer,

right? But both of the clear cut,

comfortable stories are lies, and they're comfortable for the same reason,

which is that they let you stop paying attention,

right? One says it's hopeless,

don't even bother, don't turn on the TV.

The other says it's handled, so why bother?

Go watch something else. Different route,

same destination.

Yeah, and that that kind of lands directly on the thing you said about tabs.

The reason it's hard is that the actual state of affairs is that some of

it is is stoppable and some of it isn't.

And you have to figure that out for yourself.

And figuring that part out, that that cognitive load,

is expensive, both calorically as well as intelligently.

Right? That is the work.

And they're betting that you either won't or can't do it.

Right, which brings me to the thing I said last week and and I'll put

it on record here. A very large share of what actually gets announced

is not expected to survive. It's not drafted to survive.

It's just drafted to be loud.

And how do we tell?

I mean I go back and forth. ~ th there are there are tells,

right? Like I mean, you can kind of see through it a little bit,

but it's mostly opaque. But they're boring.

Which is exactly why they work.

A thing a thing that's meant to actually happen has like full text written

by attorneys and it's ironclad and it was already decided in Project 2025.

Not some like concept announced from a podium that they have ~

Hastings of a thought process of a plan that's gonna take place in two weeks.

And it it has a named agency that actually puts it into effect and

it has an effective date and there's money and a budget attached

and an appropriation or an existing line item that they can tap into.

It already has people hired to do it.

And it usually moves very quietly,

often on a Friday and a lot of the times with no press coverage at all.

And I'm guessing rubber stamped in a committee if if at all sent to a committee.

But the things meant to be noise,

what do we what do we think about those?

Yeah, they're they're just kind of announced rather than filed,

right? No no implementation mechanism legally weak in ways that

are obvious to actual attorneys who drafted it.

It gets a lot of press. But there's not a lot of paperwork or,

you know, adjudication put into figuring out what the law actually says.

It's just kind of a a weak argument that is loud.

It's

Gross. It's supposed to make you go,

there's no way they can do that and get angry.

But the biggest tell of all is that that's usually the thing that they carry,

right? That's the thing you see actually see in the headlines because

if passed would be awful. Because it's something that's actually moving,

that doesn't need to be announced twice,

that's happening in the left hand versus the right hand.

Right. So I mean it's it's not even it's not propaganda.

It's more like what is it they call that?

I don't know, there's all these words for these things where like is it rage bait?

Is that a thing?

Yeah, I mean Trump Trump is been doing this for quite a while.

Is is he puts the loud thing out there in front so you pay attention to that

so you don't pay attention to what's happening behind the curtain.

Right. ~ thank you, Donald Copperfield.

~ so we can we at least follow the staffing and the money.

I mean sure, but not the volume.

A quiet thing that hires and the appropriation part of it that

the Congress is actually backing him up with,

that's real. A loud thing with a podium and no personnel is kind of theater,

it's designed for that. And we've actually done this on this show before,

right? The controlling the checkbook episode was a was a docket number

and four hundred and twelve pages that nobody was reading.

That was the real one. It was silent and nobody had heard of it and it

was just kind of passing underneath the radar because it was a full build

and it was so big that nobody had even bothered to take it apart because it's also

not gonna get CNN headlines or MS Now or Fox News or or whatever.

And you may be circle circling back to this,

but ~ I mean that sometimes they can be mixed in,

right? Like the big bullshit bill.

~ that was like

Right.

some loud stuff and some quiet stuff,

right? That actually mattered.

~

Yeah, like the Save

Act. the I mean the the Senate just passed or was bragging about ~ the fact that

a hundred and twenty nine Democrats didn't vote for this this thing that denounced

what was it, d denounced socialism,

right? Specifically denounced socialism and look at all these things.

But it was earmarked with this very particular clause inside that would have passed

the SAVE Act, which means that anybody who's ever changed their name or been married

Has to bring like live birth certificates and legal documents just to vote.

It's super gross, but they're doing it out there on purpose.

And they know that it's gross.

So instead of carrying the fact that they're trying to pass the Save

Act underneath our noses, they're like,

~ look, Democrats won't denounce socialism.

They're all communists. I'm like,

well, those those aren't even the same thing.

And don't listen to those pink o commies because they're gonna tell

you what to think. We would never do that.

Right? As we tell you what to think.

Exactly. Literally.

~

okay, so I'm gonna I'm gonna take this next part,

take a lead on this next part because I think for reasons that'll become clear

as along the way, I'm actually qualified to talk about this a little bit.

That's why you're here.

Not for not just for my good looks.

Among other things. Yeah,

actually our our good looks actually translate rather well over this podcast.

Right. ~ there's

there's a body of research on this,

not on burnout generally, but on activist burnout specifically.

And the person who's done the most careful work on it is a a man by the name

of Paul Gorski. And the core study interviewed twenty-two social justice

and human rights activists across a range of different movements.

And what he found when he sorted out the causes was four categories.

Ooh, I like these. They're like ~ infographics.

Four categories. Go.

Yeah.

Yeah, some fun new words to learn and throw out at the dinner parties.

emotional and dispositional causes,

which is the stuff you bring in with you.

Structural causes, which is the scale of the problem itself,

backlash causes, which is what gets done to you for participating,

and then there's a fourth one.

Do I even want to know?

It's kind of sad. It's it's in movement,

which is causes

Mm.

that come from inside the thing you join.

So again, these are the four categories of things that can cause you

as an activist or cause activists specifically to burn out.

So the emotional and dispositional stuff,

this is what you're bringing, this is what matters to you when you start

as an activist. Structural causes.

Well, I

I'm sure I can guess the the most important one 'cause you left it for last.

Sure, it's the fourth one. and it's not close,

even in terms of how much the interview material it accounts for.

So people described infighting,

backbiting, struggles over power,

and they described movements reproducing internally the exact things that they

existed to fight, like sexism inside anti-racist and anti ~

or you know organizations seeking ~ gender equality,

racism inside progressive organizations.

Yeah, that's ~ that's the dark side of a lot of this stuff.

Yeah, it's definitely bleak and it's consistent.

And then there's the finding that I think about the most,

which is Gorsky named the culture of martyrdom.

Mm. That sounds interesting. Tell me more.

It's an implicit expectation inside movement culture,

which is an amazing thing that there's a movement culture,

but that if you haven't been burned out,

you weren't really committed. So this is like the for ~ for those

not steeped in this literature or this this ~ part of culture,

it's like the the CEOs.

This is the no true Scotsman

argument that a lot of the leftist organizations like to like to easily call upon,

right?

Right, or I'm thinking like something for more of like of our time is

the CEOs who brag about getting up earlier and earlier,

right? Like there's the four AM crowd and the three AM crowd,

and then if you're not if you didn't stay up all night,

you weren't really working. It's it's that kind of thing,

Okay. Sure.

right? So you feel guilty,

they make you feel guilty for wanting to rest and wanting to restore yourself.

And then, you know

Because you're not you're not in the grind.

Right, exactly. So if you if you raise an issue about being exhausted,

then you're marked as not serious.

Well, I I mean so essentially what you're saying is that basically

the movement kind of generates its own attrition.

Right. It's it's ~ eating their young,

right, in a sense, or eating their own,

~ in the the race to get the problem solved.

And I wanna be really clear about the implication here because it is uncomfortable.

If exhaustion is the opponent's strategy and your own side treats exhaustion

as a badge of honor, then your culture is doing their work for them for free.

Yeah, and I think I think that's kind of the the point of all of this

is that we have th when they win,

it's both by design, but also your own independent badge of honor that makes

it feel like you've done more than you really have.

Right. And there's a related finding I want to talk about from Christina Masleck,

a scientist who's essentially the person who built the modern research on burnout,

working with Gomez. and their observation about activists specifically

is that activism cultivates awareness of enormous problems that

the surrounding society will not acknowledge.

And that gap between what you can see and what everyone else around

you is willing to see produces a very particular kind of pressure and isolation.

Which then just feeds back directly in a loop to ignite or reignite the burnout.

Exactly, which in this case is driven by just sort of an ongoing despair,

right? an isolation, just a l a sense of deep loneliness,

lasting loneliness. Plus a culture that says you're not allowed to mention that it's

breaking you, right? So you just gotta grin and bear it while you're dealing with

all of this.

Can I can I say kind of what this what this seems to be the most obvious part of it?

Please, by all means.

And look, you know more about this than than the research does,

at least personally. ~ I just I I I think it matters for this one.

Yeah, and I I I hate to pull this card,

so to speak, or I don't wanna make this about me,

but for the benefit of those who may be going through this and feeling that they're

struggling alone. So if you haven't been with the podcast for very long,

or if you've wondered where I am in a about eighty percent of the last

few months episodes, I have been diagnosed with young onset Parkinson's.

And there's a whole lot to that.

I'm not gonna go into a lot of detail,

but essentially took my career

option from me practicing the law is just not an option for me anymore which i've

talked about a little bit ~ but it also takes away a good chunk of every

day which i haven't talked about the everyday stuff but you know there's

a a persistent sort of constant pain ~

and ~ just things that interfere with your ability to do basic things like

sit in a chair for an hour and talk

~ some days and many days I just can't do that.

And ~ so the thing you learn when your body is making the decision for

you is that pacing is not a moral failure,

right? Like it's not me. This is not me saying I need a break,

I need some time off, I I need ~ you know,

whatever mental health days. This is me saying I can't get out of bed or

I can't sit up straight for more than five minutes without being in agony.

Mm-hmm.

And ~ you know, you come from a a country that's that prides itself

on its Puritan work ethic. And you think,

wow, you know, I'm just if I'm not working hard,

then I'm not contributing to my society,

I'm not taking care of my family,

providing the way I'm supposed to.

And when that instinct becomes associated with something like that,

when you're feeling guilty for having a degenerative disease that

is affecting you and it's it's an objective,

real thing, it's not in your head.

~

That instinct is wrong. And so for me,

I've had to learn the lesson over and over and over again.

~ because my body is teaching it to me every morning when I wake up in

the middle of the night.

So can you kind of lay out what the lesson actually is?

So the the lesson here, one lesson here is that the goal isn't the most

you can do today. The goal is the most you can do across the whole span.

~ you know, you've all heard the saying,

you you overestimate what you can do in a year when you underestimate what

you can do in ten years. ~ that's that's kind of the difference we're talking about

here is just like keep in mind the big picture because there are gonna

be days where you just can't do it.

And it's not an option, it's not something,

you know, pretending is not the answer.

So when the research says culture of martyrdom,

I don't experience that as an abstraction.

It's the thing that would have taken everything from me faster if

I'd been allowed to keep obeying it,

right? If I just said, I know that my you know toe is like curled in like

a pretzel right now and it's agony to take a step,

but I should keep doing it because it's the you know,

it's the only way to do what matters and and to be a contributing member of society,

~ then that would have you know caused my pr disease to progress even faster.

Yeah. And that's hard.

Yeah, it it is. And ~ but we need to understand that rest is not

a withdrawal from the mission ~ or the fight when the attrition is the fight,

right? Like again, don't do the other side's work for them.

Don't put yourself in an early grave trying to solve the problem that

no one else can see. And that's not I'm not saying that as like a ~ you know,

a placebo pill to just say take this little saying and and rest easy.

It's actually a strategic claim and and I'm happy to defend it.

Yeah, I mean that's kind of the it sometimes it can feel like a platitude,

right? But I mean I I understand what you're saying,

like and I I I hear from your experience,

personally. ~ Well,

so I guess the next part is kind of what I've been waiting for,

and that's the the forty year old research that annoys me.

Is it the research that annoys you or the people ignoring the research that annoys

you? Yeah,

~ you know, it depends on the day.

~ depends

right.

on on my on how many spoons I've I woke up with this morning.

So yeah. ~ Yes,

Fair enough. So Karl Vik. Tell us about Carl Vik.

Karl Vik is an American psychologist from 1984.

~ he had a paper called Small Wins Redefining the Scale of Social Problems.

And that's the the sentence I want you to kind of hear and how well

it describes what we've spent twenty minutes talking about,

right? He wrote

That the massive scale on which social problems

are conceived often precludes innovative action.

precludes, not just discourages and and that's important because I think

for you and I this hits right close to home because depending on the day,

one of us you're likely to hear one of us telling the other one,

Yeah, but what do we do about it?

Like there's just nothing that can be done.

It's too big a problem.

Right. But it it does he says precludes means makes it impossible.

But then he also then goes on to give them a mechanism.

And now I want you to remember this is like nineteen eighty four,

okay? This is the year I was born.

Not Orwell's nineteen eighty four,

You were you were two, right. Well

but actually nineteen eighty four.

I mean, you know, is there any difference anymore?

But he basically says it's because bounded rationality is exceeded.

And dysfunctional levels of arousal are induced.

Clear, right, Crystal?

Sure, sure. Crystal mud.

Right. Bounded rationality exceeded means that the problem is basically bigger than

the amount of thinking that a single human can bring to it,

right? So you can't reason your way to the next step.

And then dysfunctional arousal is a very ~ three dollar college

explanation of saying that you get so

triggered so activated that you essentially become useless.

Just frozen and spinning you know,

you've got you've got forty tabs open in your browser and y you have

to close them all because you're just done.

Sounds like hell on earth. ~ but it also sounds like the Flood

the Zone effect thirty four years before Bannon named the the tactic.

Yeah, I mean he described I wish it was thirty-four.

It's like

'Cause well.

it's it's getting to be a little bit more,

but he he described that effect before Bannon named it.

And and the reason why that matters is that he wasn't writing about propaganda

at the time. He was writing about why well intentioned people like you

or me or anybody listening here who care a shit ton about real problems consistently

fail to do anything about them.

Which means the flood has not ever been a new invention.

It's a deliberate manufacture,

it's a deliberate product of a failure state we already knew that people had.

I'm gonna step out of my lane here for a second,

but it sounds like an exploit.

Is that the right word for that?

yes. I mean in a way, right? In a lot of ways,

in fact, they this is this has been the Republican tactic for for a good number

of years now. Essentially find the loophole and then exploit it.

I mean so exploit is I think is a perfect word for that,

right? They basically found a vulnerability in the the machinery,

and then they just scaled up and industrialized that specific workaround.

And and Vike, in the same paper,

he actually gives the counter.

He calls it a small win. And he's specific about the definition.

A small win, he he says, is it's a concrete,

complete outcome of moderate importance.

So not only was it concrete, it was complete,

but it was moderate.

And each of those words matters,

right?

Yes, and each of those words in their own fashion is kind of like

a cornerstone of of of the wall.

It's the it's the load bearing structure,

it's the steel beam that runs up the brick wall.

Concrete he he ~ goes on to mention that it's it's a real thing in the real world,

right? It's not like a raised awareness,

it's not something we're just noticing from from the periphery.

And then he says

Not vibes.

that right. He says it's complete,

meaning it's done.

Right? It's not like phase one of nine,

it's it's the whole thing. And then moderate means that you have deliberately,

on purpose, just not tried to solve the whole thing.

Which for some people sounds like giving up.

I think for most people it sounds like giving up,

right? Bec and it feels like giving up.

But it the truth is it's kind of the opposite.

And and Vik lists why. And this is the part that you know,

if you need to to make a cat poster about it or or find your your platitude

to live on, is that these properties are exactly what you need

in the specific situation we are in right now.

Think the right image for this motivational poster is the dumpster fire,

right? The the dumpster fire meme.

But nice.

I like I like cat with machine gun,

kitten with machine gun. Yeah,

I I I hear ya. Yeah.

I think I think it's a better one.

So

one, small wins preserve your gains,

right? I mean they're they're they're losing,

you know, if you lose the war,

that's a sad thing, but if you if you're winning battles,

you have to kind of close it, right?

You say, I won, and then it's done,

and it's behind you.

Okay, what's number two?

Basically you can't unravel them,

right? So two, because they're finished,

right? There's no half finished structure that collapses once you stop pushing

on it. This isn't like, you know,

I'm trying to keep the monster from getting through the door.

This is I can push the monster back long enough to close the door,

lock it, and then then we're just at the next door.

We don't have to worry about losing ground.

We just keep pushing forward. Right?

So there you

Basically when you stop pushing on it,

it you still have the the the the small wind to fall back in and

and relax before you push on to the next the next door.

Right, 'cause it's done when you stop with each one.

So ~ what's three?

So basically each one requires less coordination to execute.

It's this it's the ladder theory,

right? If you tried to jump up ten feet in one go,

every time you jumped up, you would have to fall back down to the first rung

or the floor the floor. But with a ladder,

you create individual steps. And each step is its own win and feels small.

But the next thing you do is you turn around and you realize you're

at the next floor because now you've

Climbed each one of these things.

So basically, once you understand what it's like to take a small first step,

the second step is the exact same.

It's just from a higher distance,

right? So each of these, you don't need a a coalition of forty organizations.

You might just need four people to get to step two.

Okay, and ~ number four is kind of the one that gave me pause.

Tell us about that one.

Yeah, so four four is kind of the one.

Small wins are are relatively unaffected by inter interruptions like changes

in political administrations, for example.

So that one's a little hard for me to wrap my head around.

Can you say more?

So relatively unaffected by changes in political administration.

A guy wrote that in nineteen eighty-four in a psychology journal,

and it's kind of the single most relevant sentence to this episode,

because the flood is designed to make everything contingent on

one enormous binary that's that's years away.

And that basically you personally cannot move to.

Which is the change of an administration.

But the but the small win is not contingent on that.

So you're saying.

A small

yeah, a small win doesn't care who won,

right? Like it's completed, it's done.

Hm. And the fifth?

Yeah, th basically the subparts,

each individual step can be reassembled into different configurations,

meaning it's a bunch of finished small things that become the

raw materials for something bigger later,

in a shape that you really might not have or could not have designed

in the beginning and then just executed.

But then you use each of those individual winds to piece together into

a bigger picture of what you accomplished.

So let's talk about how this fixes the psychological problems we were talking about

because it's not just tactical.

Sure.

So if we go back to

the MedTech and and Gur chain,

right? Overload, then loss of efficiency,

then withdrawal, right? The point of failure is efficacy.

It's the middle link. That's where people are lost.

Right, and a completed small win is just a direct injection of efficacy that can't

be undone.

And it's the only thing that is,

right? Like you can't talk somebody out of learned helplessness.

You can't argue a person into believing that their actions matter,

especially when they have evidence of the contrary.

The only thing that reliably restores it is an action that visibly produces

a result. Progress, right? Which means finishing something small isn't

a consolation prize ~ at all. It's it's the whole mechanism,

right?

Right, it is the mechanism. It's basically how you kind of stick to

the game because ultimately it's just a small step that we've taken together.

So there's one more piece of research that I want to handle carefully because it's

the most quoted and most abused in this entire space.

Yeah, is it that three and a half percent thing?

The 3.5% thing, you called it.

So ~ Erica Chenowith and Maria Stefan,

they built a data set of 323 major campaigns from 1900

to 2006 and compared violent and nonviolent ones.

Nonviolent campaigns succeeded 53% of the time,

violent ones 26%.

That's just over double.

Right, roughly double. If then that finding is robust and it's genuinely important

because here's the the headline version is the no nonviolent cam movement they

got there was no non nonviolent movement,

sorry, they got three point five percent of the population to participate

in its peak and then failed to achieve its goals.

And that number is now I mean it's it's used within within progressive movements.

Right, it's in every group chat and Chinnawith herself has spent years trying

to put reins on this because she published cautionary updates.

She wrote a whole book to add the qualifications.

So what are w what was she trying to kind of say after the fact?

She's saying, first of all, the number is descriptive,

not prescriptive, right? It's not telling you what to do,

it's telling you what they found.

'Cause it's a historical sample,

it's not a formula and

So it's sort of

like hindsight rather than foresight.

Exactly. And she's saying, look,

nobody can see the future. So it's not a cheat code.

Second, she says that she's trying to hit the threshold that trying

to hit the threshold without building a broad constituency underneath

it doesn't guarantee anything.

And third, and this is the one that actually changes what you do on a Tuesday,

she says the other factors are probably just as important as the head count.

Momentum, organization, strategic leadership,

and sustainability.

So s sustainability is in her list.

Right, and it's equally as important as headcount.

sustainability is in her own list of what determines whether a movement wins,

which ties this section straight back to what we were saying about martyrdom.

Not burning out is not adjacent to the strategy,

it's in the strategy.

So I guess what what is that number actually measuring then if it's not like

we need to hit this?

So this is the part that reframed it for me.

The 3.5% isn't the cause of the win,

it's a symptom of a condition that was already true.

If 3.5% of a country is in the street,

that indicates far deeper support underneath and it creates

a sense of inevitability. And what that does mechanically is produce defections from

the pillars that hold the thing up business,

political, cultural, media, security services.

Those pillars are kind of s the support system behind the mechanism.

Right. And the the the part of the iceberg that's beneath the surface,

but when you see the the smaller the the ten percent above the water,

you see enough of those and you start thinking,

wow, there's no way I'm making it through here and you turn back.

So that's what I think what she's kind of saying is that the three

and a half percent showing up,

that's the tip of the iceberg,

that once you become aware of it,

you realize there's something actually going on here.

So the

Right.

the crowd is the signal that the pillars are about to move.

So that kind of changes what your job is in the in the grander scheme.

Exactly. Changes it enormously because if you thought your job was to

be number body number three point five percent,

right? To to get over that that threshold,

that's a job you do once a year.

And it doesn't feel like it does anything.

Because if your job is to make defection thinkable for one person inside

of an institution, that's a job you can do on a Wednesday.

And there are a lot more of those jobs than there are marches.

Well, in effect that's kind of a small win,

right? Like it's a small step up the ladder.

Exactly right. Concrete, complete,

and moderate.

Okay, so let's see if we can we can land this plane.

the standard move here is kind of a list of action items that everybody nods

at and nobody actually does.

And we have a rule about that.

Right, so nobody's calling their senator on this show.

~ I checked. ~ nobody mentions the overlap on any of the FOIA requests

I placed to any senator that I could find.

So here's what I've actually got,

and and none of these actually comes out to something we just cited.

Go for it.

So one, pick a lane and let the rest go on purpose.

Not out of like laziness as a decision you make once out loud,

ideally with a witness present.

Because the flood only works if you accept the framing that everything

is equally urgent and equally yours.

It's not equally yours. You are the marginal difference on most of it.

And pretending that you're not is how you end up being.

The marginal difference on none of

It was number two.

Yeah, so triage by staffing and appropriation,

not by volume. We did kind of like the tells earlier,

what makes it look like, you know,

i it's trying to flood the zone.

And a a quiet thing with money and hires behind it is real.

We already said that. A loud thing with a podium and nobody behind it

is kind of theater. So if you only have bandwidth for one thing a week,

spend it on something with

a docket number and not something with a hashtag,

right? Like don't don't repost somebody else's post.

Like choose to do a thing. Use,

you know, fivecalls dot org or something and and just do that this week.

That is enough because it's a small win.

And number three is mine, because it goes back to the martyrdom issue.

Schedule the rest before you need it,

and don't frame it as a reward for having earned it.

That framing is exactly the thing that Kors Korski's participants describe being

socialized into, and it's the one that pushed people out of movements entirely.

Rest that you have to earn is rest you will never take.

And I'll do four. Do it with other people.

~ I mean, in a lot of things, right?

But ~ I'll be specific about why,

because i it's not it's not a warm sentiment,

right? Isolation shows up as a documented cause in this research.

So Maslak and Gomez, ~ on the gap between what you see and what

the people around you actually acknowledge,

being the only person in your life who is tracking a thing is not just lonely.

It is a known

Fire starter of burnout, right?

So fixing that is not optional wellness,

it's maintenance on the movement that you're building.

And take us out with number five.

Yeah, so five is just finish something.

Like actually finish it. Something small,

something concrete, complete this month,

this week, this day, whatever that is.

Get one ordinance changed. Find one thing that you really care about

and just push it as far as you can with reason,

with other people. File one FOIA request,

right? And read what actually gets back to you.

And then write something out to your community that explains.

Why this is messed up and it and we need to fix it.

Get a thing fixed at your kids' school,

right? Show up to one county commission meeting where twelve people are

in the room and your presence is a measurable percentage of everyone there.

And that last one is not a constellation prize,

which is the point of the whole Vike section.

Right. Efficacy is the link in the chain where people are lost.

And the only thing that restores that efficacy is a completed action with a real,

tangible result. And you cannot get there by like reading another article

or reading another news c p cast or listening to another podcast.

Reading more is what broke this whole thing.

And that that brings me to one that I wanna add that's not on your list.

Sure, go ahead.

Write down what you think is going to happen.

Make a prediction. Actually write it down with the date.

And then go back and look.

Well, okay, so what's the point in that?

Two reasons. One, it's the only defense against the flood's memory problem.

Right. So if everything that you think about or everything everything you're told

is a a flaming mess right now is being replaced every 90 minutes,

you lose the ability to notice that something that you were told

was inevitable didn't happen, right?

Remember all the the disasters that never occurred.

~ and two, it's how you find out you were sometimes right,

which you were. You will be. ~ you know,

you're making educated guesses or forecasts here.

So when you're right, it's worth noticing that you're right.

And you've been right about things and the and the pace of things

has just stolen your ability to notice.

Right. You can't even log those wins because you're so busy on the next thing before

you even have time to reflect on what you did.

And that theft is part of why you're tired.

Yeah, it's kinda like it's kinda like the dory like goldfish thing,

right? The goldfish memory where it just keeps being refreshed every time that

the the water moves by, right?

I think I think that that that's a a good example of of what we mean

in order to write it down. Sort

Right.

of like journaling, right? It's so you it's so you can count your wins.

Right. The goldfish of course comes from the same science with the the frog

in the boiling pot, but but it it makes the point.

And so for that reason I think we should take our own advice on this,

~ this one by the way.

Yeah, I think we should we should and and I think we're going to.

we've talked about this and we'll get to that in just a second.

So here here's where where I've landed,

and I'm and I'm not gonna tie a bow on it because there isn't a bow to

be had for this, but they are winning some of it.

Not all of it. The birthright order is dead,

six to three, the DI provisions are live and they're enforcing them.

Both of those are true this month,

and and I can't change that. Right?

So

Half of that alone is just selling you permission to stop paying attention,

and that's the same thing in different rap.

And the exhaustion is real, and it is manufactured,

and those are not intention. It can be a genuine feeling in your body

and an intended output of someone's strategy at the same time.

Most of the worst things are both.

Yeah, I I don't want to steal the former press secretary's words,

but d she she often liked to say both can be true,

right? ~ so I I think the thing that I want to leave people with is

the reframe on tiredness, right?

If if attrition getting you to leave so that you can be replaced by somebody else

is the mechanism, then your continued existence in this fight in eighteen months,

in in three years, is itself

The resource, right? You lasting is not the precondition for the work.

It is the work. There's no version of you where burnout in March the

and and and where basically you're just done,

right? And that was the strategically correct call.

Right, like an early flame out is not is never optimal.

~ and the thing I want to leave people with is a little bit smaller,

but you you're allowed to not know about something.

You're allowed to have missed it.

You know, when the when the group brings up like the did you hear about this,

did you hear about that? It's okay if you didn't hear about that.

You're not the answer to every problem.

And there are a number of things happening right now,

and the number of things happening right now exceeds what a human being,

a single human being, can hold in their head.

And the fact that you cannot hold all of it is not a referendum on whether you're

a good person. It's just arithmetic and biology.

And somebody did the arithmetic on purpose.

So essentially we're saying just like pick a thing and then finish it.

And then tell somebody that you finished it and take a nap.

And come back next week if if you can.

Right, and and come back next week.

But before you go, we're gonna do the thing Will said on the record so

we can be held to it. Here's ours.

By the end of this year, we think at least one more piece of what's currently being

described as inevitable will be dead in court,

the way birthright was. We don't know which one.

We think the the male voter order is the likeliest candidate given where

it was a couple days ago. So we're gonna come back and we're gonna check on that.

Out loud and tell you if we were wrong.

Which we might be.

Yeah, we we very well might be,

but that's kind of the point, right?

We're the overlap. Everything we cited is in the show notes and it's

all real and you can go and read it for yourself.

And and please do because you should not take our word for this either.

And take care of yourselves. That's not a sign off this week.

That's homework.

Yes. Make sure to do all of the liking things.

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Thank you so much for being here.

We hope to see you next week.

I

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