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This week, Rosie reads you an excerpt from How to Protect Yourself From Fascists & Weirdos about how to become a journalist, and why you can help millions of Americans, right now, by becoming one. BJ is then joined by Dr. Daniel R. Kelly, co-author of Someone Should Do Something, about the need for all of us to step up and be the change we want to see in our world. No one else will do it for you.
Creators and Guests
Host
Host
Rosie Tran
Rosie Tran is one of the fastest rising stars in the entertainment business! Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, she moved to Hollywood to pursue her career as a professional entertainer. The stand up comedian, writer, podcast personality, and actress has toured internationally, at comedy clubs, colleges, and overseas for the USO in Europe and the Middle East.
Editor
Andrew
I am the Editor of all things on the Stupid Sexy Privacy Podcast.
What is Stupid Sexy Privacy?
Stupid Sexy Privacy is a miniseries about how to protect yourself from fascists and weirdos. Your host is comedian Rosie Tran, and the show is written by information privacy expert B.J. Mendelson. Every episode is sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. Tune in every Thursday night βor Friday morning if you're nasty β at 12 am EST to catch the next episode.
00:01
Back to the DuckDuckGo Privacy Challenge, where contestants get a chance to learn why millions use DuckDuckGo's free browser to search and browse online. Now for our first contestant, Julie. True or false? Google's Chrome protects your personal information from being tracked. Hmm, I'm going to say true. Incorrect, Julie.
00:24
If you use Google search or their Chrome browser, your personal information has probably been exposed. Not just your searches, but things like your email, location, and even financial or medical information. Wow, I had no idea. Second question, what browser can you switch to for better privacy protection? Is it DuckDuckGo?
00:46
That's correct. The DuckDuckGo browser keeps your personal information protected. Say goodbye to hackers, scammers, and the data-hungry companies. Download from DuckDuckGo.com or wherever you get your apps.
01:01
Welcome to another edition of Stupid Sexy Privacy, a podcast mini series sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. I'm your host, Rosie Tran. You may have seen me on Rosie Tran Presents, which is now available on Amazon Prime. And I'm your co-producer, Andrew VanVoorst. With us, as always, is Bonzo the Snow Monkey. I'm pretty sure that's not what a Japanese Macau sounds like. Oh, it's not. Not even close.
01:29
Let's hope there aren't any zoologists listening. Okay, I'm also pretty sure that's not what a snow monkey sounds like. Over the course of this mini-series, we're going to offer you short, actionable tips to protect your data, your privacy, and yourself from fascists and weirdos.
01:57
These tips were sourced by our fearless leader. He really hates when we call him that. DJ Mendelson. Episodes 1 through 33 were written a couple of years ago. But since a lot of that advice is still relevant, we thought it would be worth sharing again for those who missed it. And if you have heard these episodes before, you should know we've gone back and updated a bunch of them, even adding some brand new interviews and privacy tips along the way.
02:21
That's right. So before we get into today's episode, make sure you visit stupidsexyprivacy.com and subscribe to our newsletter. This way you can get updates on the show and be the first to know when new episodes are released in 2026. And if you sign up for the newsletter, you'll also get a free PDF and mp3 copy of BJ and Amanda King's new book, How to Protect Yourself from Bastions and Weirdos. All you have to do is visit stupidsexyprivacy.com.
02:51
That's what I just said. Stupid, sexy, privacy dot com. I know, but repetition is key to success. You know what else is? What? Alfonzo, eat your pablin like a good boy and pretty soon you'll grow up to be a big, strong, man just like your daddy.
03:09
then you'll have Swedish pancake too. I'm really glad this show isn't on YouTube because they pull it down like immediately. I know. Google sucks. And on that note, let's get to today's privacy tip. oh
03:27
The following is an excerpt from B.J. Mendelson and Amanda King's new book, How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos. The full text is now available at StupidSexyPrivacy.com, with the PDF and MP3 versions coming soon. We hope you enjoy it. And on the other side of this excerpt, you can hear B.J. speak with Daniel Kelly, professor of philosophy at Purdue University and the co-author of Somebody Should Do Something.
03:52
A book that argues, we feel correctly, that everyday decisions are among the most powerful drivers of collective transformation. Like the kind America needs right now. There is no such thing as an unbiased journalist or unbiased media outlet. Journalists who follow standards set by organizations like the Associated Press are still choosing how to structure their story, who to quote, and what information to leave out. That, even if done without intention, introduces bias.
04:18
The so-called liberal media outlets are also not factually part of a verifiable conspiracy, unlike their media counterparts on the right. In fact, being liberal ourselves, we can tell you that the one thing liberals are terrible at is being organized. We're far more likely to fight each other over stupid purity tests than plotting the corporate takeover of America. There's another lesson in that, which is we should embrace and even take risks on imperfect messengers, both those who want to serve as journalists and those who want to run for office.
04:45
And if the imperfect messenger turns out to be an imposter while in office, kick them out when it's time for re-election. Imperfect messengers will always be an improvement over any fascist or weirdo. Because at least when you have a 50-50 chance of the imperfect messenger turning out to be a decent person. If you're interested in attaching blind spots in coverage, from both the left and the right, we recommend Ground News' Blind Spot Report Weekly Newsletter. They point out what each side has missed.
05:11
Although we cringe at the mention of the word side when dealing with fascists and weirdos. There is a truth in the nurse fiction, a healthy and functional media ecosystem would call fascism fascism and a lie a lie. But that's not what we have. Instead, we have fascists upset at being called fascists and corporate media outlets telling you not to call them fascists. All while trying to pretend fascist policies like indiscriminately rounding people up, denying them their constitutional rights and holding them in brutal detention facilities are a normal thing for a democracy to do. It's not.
05:40
The role of a good journalist is to protect your health and safety. That's how you tell good journalists from bad ones. A good journalist cannot protect you by doing the both-sides thing with fascists and weirdos. One side is actively trying to kill and harm you, the other isn't. Fascist regimes try to overwhelm you with noise using the media. That is one of their hallmarks. They keep you distracted so that by the time you catch up to what they're doing, it's too late to stop them. The corporate media outlets will happily play along and cover the latest controversy.
06:06
That's why we want you to know what's happening. Understand the story behind the headline and then move on with your life. Pay attention to what the fascists and weirdos do versus what they say. This will help you get to the bottom of any story. And when you hear a ridiculous story in the news, ask yourself, is this news or is this a distraction? The odds are good if it's coming out of the mouth of fascists and weirdos or their corporate media enablers that it's a distraction. That's how our media ecosystem works. Would you like to fix that? If so, the following is everything you need to know about how to research, and publish a news story.
06:36
This list is based on BJ Middleton's two-decade career as an investigative journalist. If you'd like to solve a specific problem for millions of Americans, try your hand at covering local news within a 10-mile radius of your home. Local news coverage has a known correlation between keeping fascists and weirdos out of office and lowering your property taxes. That's because the first thing fascists and weirdos like to do in local government is inflate their salaries, give themselves longer terms in office, and give taxpayer money to their friends. So here's what you should know. Don't lie.
07:03
In life, you're only as good as your word. As a reporter, if you have no word, you have no career. People will expect miracles from you. Do not promise any miracles. Everyone's going to hate you. Everyone. That's because everyone is your friend until you write about something or someone they like. This happens every time, no matter who you think is your friend. Everyone will eventually turn on you when you're a journalist. Don't take it personally, and don't get into fights with people either. Some of these people may become sources later. Record all conversations and keep them archived for when.
07:32
not if someone wants to claim they were misquoted or taken out of context. Do not ever use these recordings for evil. They are only to be used to defend your credibility. Use silence. Take a long pause after people finish speaking in case they have more they want to say. Whenever you conclude your interview, ask your subject who you should speak with next. Join the National Writers Union. After two years with them, you can get a legit press pass. Until then, make your own. If there's law enforcement around, always make sure your press pass is visible. Otherwise, only flash it when needed.
08:01
Until your audience gets to know you, keep anything you publish capped at 800 words if written, 500 words if spoken, or about 5 minutes. If you're doing video, there needs to be a cut every 6 seconds. That can be an edit or a graphic on screen, or an image or another video clip. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the cut is every 6 seconds. Don't record anything longer than 90 seconds, not until your audience gets to know you. How do you know when your audience knows you? When you have more paid subscribers than free subscribers. The paid subscribers will want the longer stuff.
08:30
Don't put anything behind a paywall. People will pay for good journalism that solves a specific problem. Making the news inaccessible creates opportunities for fascists and weirdos to lie without being fact-checked. If you want money from potential subscribers, ask for their money. Don't just assume they'll give it to you. If you're doing 90-second videos, every sentence should be written and polished as if it were a headline. In text, every sentence should make people want to read the next. Keep your sentences to no longer than 12 words when possible. Learn how to read off a teleprompter. It's not as easy as you think.
09:00
And people expect you to maintain eye contact with the camera. Because on their end, it means you're looking at them. Always look at the camera. Talk to at least two sources for every story. Research your sources thoroughly before you speak to them. If a source doesn't tell you where or how they got their information, don't use them as a source. Anonymous sources are fine, but there must be a good, specific reason for keeping people anonymous. In our example of local journalism, anonymity is important because small communities know everyone's business.
09:30
That makes anonymity important to get the information you need. That said, try to use anonymous sources as little as possible. Always try to get people to speak to you on the record. Something is only off the record after both parties agree to being off the record. Never assume any conversation is off the record. Ask first, then confirm before saying anything further. Make it easy for whistleblowers to find you.
09:52
Use Signal or a P.O. Box. Advise people not to send you mail with a return address to that P.O. Box. Don't assume people know how to use something like a PGP key. The P.O. Box is the best option for most sources. They can simply print documents and put them in the mail to you with no return address, leaving behind no digital trail of what they did. But remember, the best way to share sensitive information is always in person. In reporting a story, look under every rock. Look on TikTok. Look at message boards. Look at public records. Look at everything you can find. Fact check every detail before publication.
10:21
It doesn't matter how small. As Robert Caro said, turn every page. Give every person mentioned by name a chance to respond prior to publication. After publication is written or via audio, say they were reached for comment when that person is mentioned. If in a video, place a note at the end of the video. Read your work out loud before sharing it with anyone. This is a great way to ensure a good rhythm to your story and catch typos. Have a good filing system. You will always need random documents you downloaded months earlier and forgot existed.
10:50
Invest the time to build this now so that you don't waste time later. Share your Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, and other Freedom of Information requests on muckrock.com. Use all the free resources that Muck Rock, Bellingcat, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Global Investigative Journalism Network provide. If you have questions about FOIA, talking to the FOIA officers at most government agencies is a good first step. Many are professional, knowledgeable, and will assist you in finding what you need. Others won't.
11:20
In those cases, FOIAadvisor.com and FOIAmachine.org are useful resources that can help. If your state has an FOIA-like law, such as New York State's Freedom of Information Law, FOIL, FOIL, use it as much as possible and know what to do when someone tries to stop you. Large language models, LLMs, can be a good starting point to conduct this kind of research, but they cannot be your only resource for reasons we'll discuss later.
11:49
Once you've settled on a publication schedule, stick with it for at least a year to build a habit. No matter the size of the audience, the attention economy is stupid. It's based on doing and saying stupid things for people's attention. Attention that they will give you, but only briefly. Then they will move on to the next dumb thing. Meaning if you want their attention again, you need to say or do louder, dumber things. That's a trap. Don't fall into it. Instead, if you want people to really pay attention to you and pay you
12:19
Filling a need with consistency and quality over time is how you do it. If you don't know where to start, just ask your neighbors what their biggest problems are. You will never ever run out of material. In terms of distribution, email works best because anyone anywhere on the planet can get an email regardless of what device they use. If you can, also try for print. Print has a higher rate for recall and is easier to pass on anonymously. Don't bite off more than you could chew. Recall error threat vector exercise, and if covering something could be dangerous for you, tread carefully.
12:48
Hi, Dan, would you like to take a moment just to introduce yourself and tell us about the book? Yeah, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to be here. My name is Daniel Kelly. I'm a philosopher in the philosophy department at Purdue University. lot of my work is on psychology, moral psychology, social psychology, how we can use our understanding of the mind to understand social change. It's been what I've been working on a lot recently.
13:15
The book we're here to talk about today is called Somebody Should Do Something, How Anyone Can Help Create Social Change. I'm one of three authors on it. It's Michael Brownstein, Alex Madva, and myself. And we were all three of us philosophers with basically the same kind of orientation. And the book is, like I said, we're academic philosophers, but the book was written
13:37
for a more general audience. We were hoping to be able to get our message out and some of the ideas that we had been playing with for the last couple of years and writing up in academic journals. But we thought this was uh a message and a kind of set of ideas that people would be interested in right now. So we wrote up a book telling stories and trying to communicate research about social change for a wider audience. Yeah, it couldn't be more timely.
14:05
I mean, we wish we wish for better circumstances that we were living through, but I was relieved when I when I saw the title of the book and I reached out and I was like, OK, this is definitely a thing that we we could use. Yeah, let me let me ask you, was that because I know you mentioned you started tinkering around with the idea a bit in academic journals like how long has this been in development? We met at a conference and, you know. uh
14:30
probably years ago or something while we were, so back then we were thinking about uh racism and this kind of at the time um surging research on implicit biases. so, you know, that's one of the main themes of the book when we're thinking about social changes, how to understand racism, both individually and at a structural level. And so that was, you know, we first started thinking about it in those contexts. And as we were, you know, we're philosophers of mind and as we were thinking about
15:00
these weird parts of our mind which can be racist even despite ourselves, even if they go against what we sort of value and explicitly believe. We were thinking about that sort of thing. And then part of that conversation which unfolded as implicit biases were starting to be taken seriously by philosophers and other academics was this kind of pushback, which was, the main sources and the most recalcitrant obstacles um to racial justice
15:30
or injustice are these structural matters. It's a matter of law, it's a matter of housing policy, it's a matter of something which is far beyond the scope of any individual minds. And our response there was something like, yeah, all that stuff's important, but that kind of feeds back into what individuals who make up um these different institutions that need to be changed, what's going on in their minds matters. It's all part of one big dynamic complicated puzzle.
15:55
So in a sense, once that conversation or that debate started picking up for us, those were the seeds of this book, which kind of grew in various directions since then. Yeah. mean, there's so much in here. I was struggling to cut down the questions I sent to you. ah So let's touch on some of the bigger ones, which is, can you walk us through the difference between the either or philosophy and the both? Because we here at Stupid, Sexy, Privacy run into this quite a bit, where
16:25
Someone will say to us, know, all my information's out there. So what's the point? You why bother doing anything? And we always tell them that may be true, but you know, that's not an excuse to do anything about it either. Right. um Yeah, the issue of privacy and just our general, you know, informational catastrophe that we find ourselves in was another one of the issues that we were hoping to talk more about in the book. But it's, you know, we did climate change and racism and that was that was enough for one book. um But
16:54
So part of the dialectic that we set up in the book, or not really dialectic, just part of the frame that we use to walk through all these different kinds of ideas that we're talking about, I alluded to in what I was just saying about the initial debates over racism and implicit bias. And for any of these big, uh big sort of complex social problems, there's a tendency when people approach them, be they individual
17:21
people who are concerned or theorists and academics who are studying these things or even policymakers. There's a tendency to separate out ways to approach the problems m into either on the one hand, you focus on individual people and how you might change their behavior or they might change their own behavior and what sorts of attitudes they're bringing to the table. Or on the other hand, there's thinking about it in terms of systems and bigger institutions and sort of structural factors which shape.
17:49
how we might address climate change or what we might do about racism or problems with privacy. And people just kind of settle into those two camps. It's very understandable. I mean, one of the metaphors we use in the book is that classic visual illusion of the duck rabbit. And it's sort of a static version. You can look at the thing and you can like from one perspective, it's a duck. From another perspective, it's a rabbit.
18:15
ah But then if you get into debates on whether or not it's really a duck or really a rabbit, like something's gone wrong there. It's it's both a duck and a rabbit, but like the perspective you take on it is going to bring certain things to the fore and push other things into the background. And you can sort of toggle back and forth between those. When it comes to these social issues, we think people have a tendency to either see them in terms of structural factors or see them in terms of individual factors.
18:40
but then like have debates about what's most important or what the real factors are, which are really driving uh different social dynamics. And we think that's just, it's counterproductive, it's useful as an idealization. But we think instead of this either or lens that people can kind of get stuck in, especially academics and policymakers, we should always be sort of pushing ourselves to think about different social challenges through a both and perspective. Like what can we bring to the table
19:10
And what sorts of ideas can we foreground that allow us to always keep before our eyes the interconnections between what individual people are doing and how that feeds into how the structures change and then the structures can change in ways which reshape the set of options that individual people have when they're thinking about how to protect their privacy and their data or what they can do to help address the climate crisis.
19:38
In terms of privacy, you're going to be able to think of different ways of connecting those two levels, the individual and the structural level, much better than I can. with climate change and racism, we were just trying to come up with an example after example after example. I could go into some of those if you want. Yeah, I mean, so I'm actually really happy that the book spent as much time as it did with climate change because that's the root of everything that we're dealing with right now.
20:08
If you dig deep enough past the fascist movements all over the world, you'll find mass migration mostly caused through climate change and war and policy decisions as well. That's really fueling all of this. So I think the climate is so important. that's one of the things that the three of you did a terrific job of is sort of differentiating between corporate propaganda that says tackling climate change starts with you, it starts with individual choices.
20:34
And the alternative view, uh which is what you talk about in the book, which is, no, we need to change the system itself. So I was hoping you might be able to walk us through an example of that. Yeah. So there is this part of what was really eye opening for me as we started researching this book is ah the kind of long and intentional history of taking social problems um and framing them in such a way that the burden and the responsibility for solving them
21:03
falls on individual people and their individual actions, even if the source of a lot of the problem is big oil or it's, know, car manufacturing companies or things like that. And some of what seems most insidious to me is how these PR efforts to frame big social problems in terms of individual responsibility, like the language itself has taken on board. It's seeded the way we talk about and think about these things at the level of terminology even.
21:33
So one of the examples that we talk about is em the very idea of a personal carbon footprint, which is, you know, it's a kind of a useful way to think about how you can keep track of how much carbon you yourself oh are pumping into the atmosphere with your individual actions. And if you want to do something like, you know, mitigate how much that is, there's a set of changes you might make, or there's a set of, maybe you're already doing some of them, there's a set of...
22:01
uh kind of lifestyle options you can adopt. So I think the single biggest one is just fly less. um But also take public transportation or maybe even better, your bike at every opportunity that you have. And then you can go all the way down the list from, know, switch from plastic straws to paper straws or something like that. That's not necessarily climate change, but you know, the manufacture of plastic is involved in all that. um And so then you can like keep track of your personal carbon footprint and then you can feel good about yourself if you've done things to lower it. um But of course,
22:31
getting people to think about what they can do to stem climate change in terms of these individual lifestyle choices or even better, their consumer choices, that shuts off an entire range of actions that someone might take, which aren't necessarily about changing their own behavior first and foremost. What they're about is, you might join an activist community, you might join some sort of social movement, you might spend time lobbying your elected officials to take.
22:58
to take action which would implement policy which would curb the pollution and the carbon release of structures, of systems, of corporations. And so there's a whole range of actions people might take which are just kind of closed off by this framing uh that's been sort of uh foisted on us uh by a lot of this corporate PR, what's sometimes called responsibleization, that they take the responsibility for solving these problems and
23:26
put them on someone other than who has generated these problems, which often is big uh corporations that are making a lot of money. And uh they don't want to be bound by policies that would cut into their bottom line. So these are the sorts of steps they make. Yeah. It reminds me so much of Edward Bernays uh putting cigarettes into the backpacks of every World War I soldier, because before that time, it was unmanly.
23:52
to smoke cigarettes and his job as a PR guy was to get everyone hooked on it. So he convinced the US government to include those as part of the ration packs. Did you find that? There's a certain strategic perspective where you can hear things like that and be like, okay, that's pretty good. We're looking for like stratagems and tools of that sort that can be used to fight the good fight, as it were. Right, exactly. But just to be clear, like for people listening,
24:20
they should still be recycling, right? Like you should still recycle. Yeah, so some of, you know, we're not like policy walks and we're not first and foremost activists. So part of what we're trying to do in the book is again, give people the tools to reframe these things and sort of loosen up their moral imagination and how they think about how they can contribute to social change and moral progress. um And so.
24:48
So one of the really effective ways that, or sort of ideas that stuck with me from my research on this book, I can apply it to climate change or to recycling. You can do with other stuff as well, but recycling would be a good one. So for any action you take, if it's putting solar panels on your house or actually using paper straws or recycling every week,
25:13
that you can think of three sort of directions of influence that ripple out from that individual action. There's kind of the straightforward material ones. So if you recycle, then there's some small amount of, uh you know, material like recycling material, which doesn't go directly into the ocean or into some landfill. It gets reused in ways which are beneficial or at least less harmful to the environment. So the material effects of recycling are good. But then there's also the social signaling that happens.
25:42
Whereas if you recycle and you sort of talk to your friends and your family about how important you think it is and you're sort of putting out your recycling bin there every week like I'll have to do when I get home today, you're also signaling your values to other people. And one of the things about humans is that we're not just susceptible to social influence, which we absolutely are, but we're also always sort of like active emitters of social influence.
26:07
So one of the ways we can affect change on what starts at a small scale is to be sort trendsetters or to act in ways which signal and embody our values. So by recycling, you're normalizing it. You're making it something that other people see that you care about, and maybe that'll sort of um trigger them to embrace those values and adopt those behaviors as well. But there's also, and I have an interesting example on this one, you're also
26:37
doing something to your own sense of who you are and what you care about. And so you can be exerting influence on future versions of yourself so that you can not just model for other people, but like model for yourself. So my wife and I spend a lot of time at uh Santa Nofri, this beach in California during the summers. And I saw some guys like every morning they would get there and they would have one of those garbage picker uppers and they would just walk up and down the beach and pick up plastic and stuff that people had left the night before.
27:05
And I was like so moved by it that I started, I bought one of those things and my wife and I started doing that ourselves in the morning. And then like, as I realized, I'm like, oh, I'm one of these people now. I'm one of these like weirdos that I used to think like, don't you have anything better to do? But no, I care enough about this place and about this particular issue that I'm willing to, you know, take 25 minutes of my day to do this. And then I started thinking, all right, well, if this is what I care about, what else might I be willing to do?
27:33
to contribute to this, you know, making sure this place stays beautiful and making sure our beaches and oceans continue to be something that we can take advantage of and appreciate. So there's those three different ways. Yes, you should keep recycling, not just because of the material effects, but because of the social signal. The real power of individual actions, a lot of times, is in how they can shape the broader social landscape. And we all have way more power there, I think, than we initially realize. Yeah, and I think change happens fast.
28:03
While I was reading your book, there was an article on Futurism where they were explaining that Facebook's meta-ray-ban glasses are now being called pervert glasses. And I was just thinking, all right, we'll see just by me telling you that, like you now may think that and you may now share it with someone else. And that also is social contagion, right? Like those little things do add up.
28:29
I mean, it's interesting. One of the metaphors we use in the book to, and again, like I said, part of what the book's trying to do is reshape and change our moral imagination with respect to this stuff. And to be honest, the three of us came to these issues into writing this book, not just from an academic sense, but from a sense of, you you grow up and you have a particular view of the world and you start to understand that there are all these problems and...
28:57
especially in such a self-reliant, rugged, individualist, obsessed cultures ourselves, you absorb all these lessons about the importance of individual uh action. But then if you start to get sort of hip to the actuals, you know, the shape and the size and the scope of these problems, you start to see how huge they are and how much of uh the really important factors are structural and institutional.
29:24
But that can have this really demotivating effect, right? It can like, oh, what I do is not gonna matter. There can be despair here because the size of the problems are so vast in comparison to the size of what I think I can do. um one of the metaphors that people use to express this kind of despair is that like, what am I gonna do? One action I do is but like a drop in the ocean.
29:54
Right. But I think a better metaphor, just to stick with the water-based metaphors, we use this in the book as well, is that, yeah, OK, like every drop in the ocean contributes the same amount as every other drop. But if you think about it in terms of temperature, it's that not every addition of temperature to a body of water is created equal. if you put enough, if you add some temperature to a pot and it goes from.
30:20
what, you know, 180 degrees to 190 degrees, nothing much happens. But if you add 10 degrees and it goes from, you know, 210 degrees to 220 degrees, it goes through a phase change. It starts to boil, right? we also know, like we know that uh social systems also cross tipping points and like actions can set off cascades. And so sometimes little actions are actually, you know, the beginning of a much
30:46
a much bigger phase transition in social systems. The thing is, we don't know exactly when they're gonna happen. Like they're extremely hard to predict. But I think that's both a reason for, know, it makes it difficult, but I think there's some kind of hope in that as well. Like change can happen, it's going to happen, we know change happens. But you never know which action's gonna be, you know, the one that crosses a tipping point.
31:13
and causes the pot to boil or the straw that breaks the camel's back. And there's all kinds of metaphors to express this idea. But we know that sometimes little things are the triggers for much bigger things. Yeah, I found that to be very motivating. Because to me, I'm one of those Kurt Vonnegut people where I don't think we're really here for any rhyme or reason. We're just sort of here and everyone's scared and confused. So what do you do in that situation? Well, the next right thing. And so if we all keep doing the next right thing, that
31:42
that will add up. That's beautiful. That's beautiful. Yeah. And there's a Carl Sagan quote, I think I've heard you mention a couple of times, which I think fits nicely with this. Yeah. I mean, I probably butchered it like a of times on the show. But essentially what he says is that no generation gets to see the entire picture. You know, you're only getting glimpses of it. So if things seem bleak, like at the time it's recording, things do seem bleak. That doesn't mean tomorrow will be. And so that to me is motivating to get up and
32:12
keep doing the right thing. 100 % agree. I just want to say like one of the things that no one generation, especially no one person gets to see the entire picture. But that's just not like the static picture of the universe. I know that's Carl Sagan would be on about. But like the picture of like, what's going to happen next? Like how's the change going to come? You know, if you would ask me seven or eight years ago what the single biggest change in higher education was going to be, I probably wouldn't have said anything about
32:42
chatbots and AI. But holy cow, that just dropped into the middle of things. And it's just the ripple effects of that are still just beginning to be felt, think, but it's already changed a ton. And who could have predicted? No, I mean, I I remember them being introduced as customer service agents and thinking to myself, this is stupid and isn't going to go anywhere. And here we are a decade later where it's, I mean, I'm personally one of those people who thinks a lot of it's completely overhyped, but the technology itself,
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can be useful. I just don't know if it's being used uh usefully in an academic setting. Yeah, for sure. And I mean, like as someone who has to teach classes about the stuff we're talking about right now, but also a bunch of other stuff, like figuring out ways to do pedagogy in an age where the college essay is basically, uh you know, it's not quite dead, but you can't do it the way you used to do because students know they can just
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order one up in a matter of seconds. Right. And then you have to sit there and use another AI just to figure out if it's an AI. Let me ask you, speaking of teaching, this is something that's bubbled up recently with our guests. A lot of them have suggested more civics education, more civics education in K through 12 in particular. And there's a great example in the book of a test where one said that people weren't given like an ethics or civics lesson. And then the only group was,
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and they found that there was a more thoughtful approach to the people who were given an ethics lesson. And I'm curious if you've seen that just in your dealings day to day as a teacher. Yeah, the civics and the ethics stuff is pretty interesting. I mean, I don't think there could be much of a downside for making sure students have a better understanding of the way that like the governmental and civic apparatus of
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not just at a federal level, of states and countries and municipalities work. The research on ethics is a little bit more interesting. was a famous one a while back about whether, it was trying to find a way of whether or not ethics professors were more ethical than other people. And the results came back a little bit muddy. But one of the things that you said in asking the question on was,
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how teachers can model ethics, something like that. And I think that's probably uh even more important than the subject matter of making sure students understand what the categorical imperative is or how utilitarianism is different than virtue ethics. If they can just, if they have a lot of good models of people uh being thoughtful in how they approach ethical challenges and being clear on
35:38
um What they value, I think that's gonna be a really big challenge as we move into the next couple of years and decades. One of other classes I teach is one on value pluralism. um And it's designed to help students think about what's important to them and how they would set their range of priorities um given what they wanna do with their lives. And I mean, I think that connects up to a lot of what we talk about in the book because these are huge.
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sprawling structural level problems that we're facing and then climate change and racism or the challenges of privacy and information. And there's only so many hours in a day, people want some leisure time as well. So I think getting really clear on one's own about what's ethically important to them, what they see as a good life, how much of their energy they wanna contribute to addressing some of these challenges and.
36:34
what the most effective ways to do that, given who they are and what sorts of jobs they're gonna occupy. think that it's sort of a non-traditional way to think about ethics, but I think that sort of thing is likely to be really important, especially as we sort of move forward into this brave new world we're heading into. Yeah, and let me ask you real quick about our last one, which is, this is something we kind of bothe our hands against when we talk about...
36:59
ah Medicare and Medicaid, where people don't necessarily understand that they receive Medicare and Medicaid because it comes through a different name. And so ah they tend to have negative thoughts about it, not realizing they're beneficiary. uh But what's important to being able to demonstrate for people the good that government can do to solve problems? Yeah, I mean, so the you sort of hinted at it in the way you asked the question. So there's a lot of and it's not just government programs, but that our example in the.
37:27
the book has to do with what we call surfacing the state. And a lot of times, there's a gap between uh the passing of some law, which is designed to address some problem or bring people on to healthcare or something like that. And the fight to pass the law is the thing which gets a lot of press and which gets a lot of attention.
37:53
And then once that's over, know, everyone sort of moves on and pays attention to something else. that's, you know, between the passing of the law and the implementation of the law and the publicity of the benefits that the law or the program or something, the policy uh gives, there's often a lag in what happens there. So just being able to understand what different uh programs and different policies do for people and how they are provided. Excuse me.
38:23
that and how they are provided and implemented um by the different infrastructure which is stood up. That's often just, it's kind of lost in this fog and people don't even realize the goods that governments can be providing them because they're not publicized the right way or they're not talked about in the right way. So even just um something like uh a better PR campaign,
38:50
on the side of the government, almost back to where we started this conversation, um can bring people along to support uh these programs which are designed to help them. And a lot of times actually do provide benefits. It's just that a lot of times people are sort of left in the dark or misinformed about what those benefits are and where they're coming from. Absolutely. That's all the time that I have. So where where can we find you? Where can we find your work? Are we by the book?
39:18
The book is available wherever you would like to purchase your books. um So any of the well-known ones in the independent bookstore is carried um as well. It's out from the MIT Press, so you can get it directly from them at their website. We also have, we just released last week an audiobook version of it. So if you'd to listen to your things, I've already had some friends who've told me that they've uh finally got around to quote unquote reading it while they go on their walks now. um
39:47
Yeah, and I'm you can find me at Purdue University. You can just Google Daniel Kelly, Purdue philosophy. And I have a home page which also has a link right on the front page there to the book where we have gathered together all kinds of uh accompanying things that come with this book. We have a long index for uh sorry, an appendix for academics, which goes into the nitty gritty of the details and a lot of these podcast appearances and everything. So fantastic.
40:18
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42:27
This episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy was recorded in Hollywood, California. It was written by B.J. Mendelsohn, produced by Andrew Van Vorse, and hosted by me, Rosie Tran. And of course, our program is sponsored by our friends DuckDuckGo. If you enjoy the show, I hope you'll take a moment to leave us a review on PocketCast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening. This won't take more than two minutes of your time, and leaving us a review will help other people find it.
42:52
We have a crazy goal of helping 5 % of Americans get 1 % better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdo. Your reviews can help us reach that goal, since leaving one makes our show easier to find. So please take a moment to leave us a review and I'll see you right back here next Thursday at midnight. After you watch Rosie Tran Presents on Amazon Prime, right? Bonzo, I wish that you'll have many more birthdays just like this one. With those you love and trust around you always to share your happiness.
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And I wish that you'll get a chance very soon to prove that being loved and looked after like a human being has made you feel like a human being. And that if love can do that to you, then it ought to be able to make some other human beings human beings.