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Another World is still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose and now it has gone - it is never coming back.
We have the power of gods to destroy our home. But we also have the chance to become something we cannot yet imagine,
and by doing so, create a future we would be proud to leave to the generations yet unborn.
What happens if we commit to a world based on the values we care about: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves (so we have to do the inner work of healing individually and collectively), between ourselves and each other (so we have to do the outer work of relearning how to build generative communities) and between ourselves and the Web of Life (so we have to reclaim our birthright as conscious nodes in the web of life)?
We can do this - and every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being. We have all the answers, we just lack the visions to weave them into a future that works. We can make this happen. We will. Join us.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
If we're going to emerge into a just, equitable - and above all regenerative - future, we need to get to know the people who are already living, working, thinking and believing at the leading edge of inter-becoming transformation.
Accidental Gods exists to bring these voices to the world so that we can work together to lay the foundations of a world we'd be proud to leave to the generations that come after us.
We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all work together there is still time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility. And one of the foundations of this podcast and everything that we do at Accidental Gods and in the Thrutopian Masterclass, is the concept of narrative shift that we need; to change the narratives that drive us. That humanity is at heart a storyed species. That everything every one of us does arises from the stories we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other, and our relationship with the web of life. That our current poly crisis, the accelerating annihilation of our cultures and our biosphere, arises out of a particular set of stories that tell us that we're isolated individuals caught in a system of separation, scarcity, and powerlessness. They tell us that we can't trust anyone else, and we have to do whatever it takes to get to the top of a steep sided pyramid. That anyone who falls or fails is not worth our empathy or compassion. That the living web is a resource to be exploited, that the ends of madmen always justify the means by which they steal control. This is how we end up with narratives of the humane genocide of non-productives being peddled in the backwaters of the alt right. How we end up with a world of increasing violence; where those who have taken part turn away from obvious atrocities. And they always have. It's just more obvious to us now and more obvious that we need to change it. So how do we change this? How do we create visions of a world that functions differently? A world where every single human being thrives as part of a flourishing ecosphere, where all life thrives together? One obvious route is to begin to seed stories in the various screen based media, where people engage with empathy and compassion. Where our goals and values have a compassionate base. Where people respond with genuine emotional literacy as adults, instead of as endlessly grasping adolescents.
Manda: And so that's where we go in this week. Our guest is Romain Sepehr Vakilitabar. Romain is the founder of Pathos Labs, a non-profit laboratory focussed on exploring ways in which entertainment and media can rewrite harmful narratives and change culture. One of the projects is PopShift, an initiative which convenes Hollywood's leading TV writers with leading experts in the US to determine how television there can help to catalyse new pro-social behaviours and attitudes. Before he set up Pathos Labs, Romain travelled between Palestine and Israel to better understand emotional relationships to the long standing conflict there. He spent weeks voluntarily homeless to empathise with the idea of absolute need. He hitchhiked thousands of miles to test the generosity of strangers, and lived with conservative rural farmers in Oklahoma to better understand cultural conservatism. In all of these times and all of these places, Romain found that people, no matter the differences, are more alike than they imagine, and Pathos Labs was born to prove it by using the arts to dismantle systemic othering. So this is absolutely Thrutopian. This is absolutely what Accidental Gods is here for. So there we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Romain Vakilitabar of Pathos Labs and PopShift.
Manda: Roman Vakilitabar, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on this amazing summer's day?
Romain: Manda, thank you so much for the invitation. It's a real honour. I've been a big fan of the show, and you're just so good at asking such beautiful, thoughtful questions. And so I'm really excited to be on the receiving end of those questions today. So today I'm calling you from Denver, Colorado, which is home, which is where I was born and raised. Aside from a little stint in Los Angeles where I lived for a little while. But I'm back home, actually, in the very house that I was born in 33 years ago. So yeah, I haven't left very far.
Manda: Does that mean you spend your winters skiing? All I know about Colorado is that it's a very cool place. And it's hot in the summer, and it's got brilliant snow in the winter. Is that true?
Romain: Brilliant snow is a great way to put it, yeah. I think a lot of people when they think of Colorado, they think of a place that's a lot colder than it really is. Supposedly, and this is maybe worth fact checking, but supposedly Colorado gets more days of sun than Florida does. We're known to have over 300 days of sunshine, so it's actually a really, really pleasant place to be. And even in the wintertime, despite the glorious snow, there is a lot of sun. So the snow melts very quickly, which is nice, because I don't really appreciate the cold weather too much, but I do enjoy skiing. So long as the mountains retain the snow and I'm not freezing my tail off for many months at a time, then yeah, all is good.
Manda: Ah. If the world's politics was a little different, I would want to be visiting Colorado. But possibly not at the moment.
Romain: Yeah, hopefully someday soon.
Manda: Someday soon. So we're all agreed if we're on this podcast, that things are looking quite interesting in the evolution of humanity; we're probably at a pinch point. If we want to avoid the total extinction of complex life on Earth, it would be a good idea if we were to change the direction that most of humanity is taking at the moment. And the direction for me, and I believe for you, arises as a result of the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves and each other and our relationship with the modern human world. And I've held this view for a while, and I talk to people and they go, well, what do you think we should do? And I'd say change the narrative. And they look at me like I suddenly started speaking Chinese. And you are the founder of Pathos Labs. And you really get it. I read the front page of Pathos Labs and and the PopShift project and I was so excited that here is someone who actually gets that narrative shift is where we need to be and is working towards it. So genuinely, I am hugely excited and honoured to be talking to you. Tell us a little bit about what Pathos Labs is and how you came to found it.
Romain: Sure. Well, I appreciate these questions that you're asking, Manda. The best way to talk about the work that we do is looking at the arc of history, our capacity for destruction that is at a higher scale, that has grown exponentially over the course of decades, centuries, millennia. If you look back at the very beginning, you know, our capacity as individuals for destruction was really limited. One individual could only cause as much destruction as maybe the very primitive, simple weapons at our disposal, whether that was, you know, stones and sticks and fire to some basic extent. But as we've 'grown', we've become more adept at using different technologies. We have at each juncture increased our capacity for destruction tremendously. And a lot of the tools and technologies that we've developed have really been beautiful and I don't want to be too negative and pessimistic as far as how we've evolved. But we also have adopted a moral responsibility at each juncture, to make sure that we don't allow ourselves to use the tools for destruction in ways that weren't previously possible. So today we're at a point where a single individual could wreak havoc on millions of people, on countries, on communities,let alone the collective destruction of our planet in many ways, from over exploiting beautiful resources, precious resources. And so what do we do? What do we do if we've seen over the course of many years this exponential rise in our capacity for destruction, not only destruction of ourselves, but just the precious planet, the other beings on the planet that seldom get enough attention? I think the only antidotes to this exponential increase in capacity for destruction, is an exponential increase in our capacity for moral restraint, empathy, compassion. Because if we don't increase exponentially our understanding of one another, our moral restraint, our compassion, then because of the exponential growth of our capacity for destruction, we might annihilate ourselves. And it feels more and more likely every year that passes. So what do we do about that? What is the solution? What is the antidote? How do we increase our moral restraint and capacity for compassion and understanding at scale, in a way that can reach the exponentiality that we need in this moment?
Manda: Yeah.
Romain: It's hard. It's tricky. And I don't think there's a panacea, but really where I've turned to is getting an understanding as far as what does it actually take to change behaviours and attitudes? What does it take to change mindsets at scale? And I've been really curious about narrative change as a way to do so. I spent a little bit of time as a research fellow, really looking at what interventions are effective, especially given a polarised climate, to change how people feel about different social issues. How people feel about one another, especially people who they consider outgroup members, meaning individuals that they don't necessarily consider part of their 'tribe'. And there have been some really beautiful bright spots that I've stumbled upon that really inspired me. And a lot of those bright spots were really connected to the change of dominant cultural narratives, and doing so at scale.
Romain: There was one example that I came across when I was doing some research, and it was the story of how in the 1970s, when the United States and the Soviet Union had nuclear missiles pointed at one another and we were on the brink of a World War Three. We were at the brink of a nuclear war that would have had cataclysmic scale and destruction. What did it actually take to prevent the pressing of the button that would have assured mutual destruction? And I came across this story, it was actually really beautiful how I came across this story. I was invited to spend some time with Norman Lear, the famous television creator who'd created some really prolific shows; All In The Family was maybe the most noteworthy, but The Jeffersons was another one. Some really big TV shows from back in the day. And he was attuned to the fact that entertainment could have a big role in shaping people's ways of thinking, behaving, perceiving the world, perceiving one another.
Romain: And so at the point when the US and the Soviet Union had these nuclear missiles pointed at one another and things felt very tense, he brought together, he invited a bunch of fellow TV writers and producers and screenwriters to his living room. He also flew in a bunch of policymakers and experts on the the conflict, Cold War experts. And he brought in Carl Sagan the famous astronomer to his living room. Ted Turner was there, too, of CNN. So it was a really interesting group of individuals who were influential, but also very well versed on the issue before them. And over the course of a couple of days, they brainstormed a bunch of different ideas for shows or films that could reach millions of people and get millions of people to consider what would maybe happen if a nuclear war ensued? And so this was the story that Norman Lear was sharing with me, from his living room. And I was just rapt with curiosity and fascination. And he was saying that one of the films that came out of that session in his living room was a film called The Day After. Have you heard of the film The Day After, Manda?
Manda: It's ringing vague bells, yeah.
Romain: Yeah, it's a fascinating story. I forget what year it was produced, but it premiered on ABC. It was a television film.
Manda: 1983.
Romain: Yeah, 1983 it was released. And the story is essentially what this small town in rural Kansas looks like immediately after a nuclear war begins with the Soviet Union. And it showed in a very real way the devastation in the United States and how everything really changed as a result of this nuclear war. And it was a scary film. It wasn't necessarily a horror film, but it was a film that really got... It was seen by over 100 million people when it was screened on ABC. In the 1980s it was a time when there were only a handful of channels on television, and this was a television film that was widely seen by the United States.
Manda: That's a third of the population. It's probably more than that because the population was less then.
Romain: That's a third of the population, I know.
Manda: Serious.
Romain: I know, it's crazy.
Manda: And do you think it impacted policy?
Romain: Well, yeah. Not only did 100 million people see it, but President Reagan at the time also did. And he described the film and sort of credited the film with shaping how he thought about the conflict. So an incredibly important film that really shaped policy, certainly, but also shaped the the mindset of of hundreds of millions of people. And you know, do I give Norman Lear, this television writer, credit for preventing World War III? Uh, maybe that's a big leap.
Manda: But it's part of the avalanche of feeling.
Romain: It's part of the avalanche, absolutely. And this story really inspired me, because you know, especially given the polarised climate that we're in, whether it's in the United States or anywhere around the world. It feels really tense. It feels very polarised. The only way to really change people's attitudes and behaviours is really by shaping their perception of what other people in their social group thinks. And so if you can shape this perception of what's normative within somebody's tribe or within their their community, that's the only way that you shape their perspectives.
Romain: So how do we engineer what's perceived to be normative within different social groups, within different tribes? You know, big tent entertainment, whether it's The Day After or whether it's the content that's a bit more ubiquitous today, whether it's social media, YouTube, TikTok, television, films, all of that really matters in constructing a perception of what's normative. And a more recent example is just perceptions and attitudes towards the LGBTQ community and how that's changed drastically within the grand scheme of things.
Manda: A few decades.
Romain: A few decades. It's a bright spot. And don't get me wrong, there's still policies that affect the trans community tremendously. There's still a lot of antagonism towards the LGBTQ community, but a lot less so than before. And people are feeling a little bit more permission to come out and to find community because the communities are there and active and protecting them. And it's only with how many people have felt permission to come out that we've been able to really change how people feel. You know, all of a sudden it went from being a political issue to then maybe conservative policymakers seeing their own kids come out. And that really affected them. And so now it's becoming something that, hopefully not speaking too soon here, but is something that within a handful of years we no longer question and we show up with love and acceptance for any sort of gender sexual identity. So, it's really beautiful. How did that happen? A big part of it was how television and film included and portrayed people who were coming out and making it feel possible. Creating courage within the people who were watching those shows and movies to follow suit. So I think that there's a lot that can be done in terms of engineering new social and cultural norms by changing the dominant cultural narrative. How we do that is is a different story. But I think that's where I've been led to in terms of my interests in narrative change.
Manda: There are so many ways we could go from there. So let's keep with Pathos Labs. How long has it been going and what are your theories of change? Because it seems to me that back in the day of 1983, which is not that long ago, there were the good guys, which was us, and there were the bad guys, which was Russia. And that was the tribalism within the dominant culture of your country, in my country. And now the tribalism is within families and neighbourhoods and cities. And there's woke or not woke, there's white supremacist or not white supremacist, there's so many fractures that reaching 'a dominant culture' is almost in and of itself a difficult thing. Because there are the people who won't watch Marvel movies because there was a woman in a lead role, and that's completely unacceptable and now they're going off to watch other stuff. Or there are people who really want to watch it because there was a woman there. I'm really curious, now; that's one, is how do we reach dominant culture? And the second is it has always seemed to me that narratives shift everything from changing the slavery laws in Britain to civil rights movement in the US, to Gandhi in India, to LGBTQ rights in all of the Western hegemonic nations. We were not trying to change the system, we were changing the franchise within the system. Nobody was saying capitalism needs to end, we were just saying, hey guys, you need to be slightly less nasty to this outgroup that you have previously considered unacceptable. We just want you to change where your outgroup boundaries are. And now we're saying we need total systemic change. Or at least I'm saying that! I don't think we get through, absent total systemic change. And that's a very different ask. It's an internal reframing of: Do we really think that we are inherently selfish? That scarcity and separation and powerlessness are the nature of the world? Do we understand that our connection to the more than human world is as important as our connection to each other? And can we heal the internal civil war that most people find within themselves, because that then gets projected outwards into the external civil wars? And it seems a much bigger ask than wouldn't it be a good idea not to have nuclear war, which is basically a yes or no question to which most people are going to go yeah, that's a good idea. Let's not have nuclear war. There are very few people going, no, no, nuclear war is a jolly good idea. Whereas now, I don't think that many people want the extinction of complex life on Earth, but there are plenty who will argue that that's not actually on the cards and so we don't even need to worry about it. We're in a different landscape. So that was a lot of questions all wrapped up. Pick whichever one is most alive for you and we'll get to the others in due course.
Romain: Yeah I think all of that is real I think. I would maybe push back and say I think a lot of people, most people, would accept that our ecology is suffering. But what priority does that take, I think is where there's a lot of debate. And I think that's a result of people not feeling taken care of, people feeling like they have superordinate needs that matter maybe a little bit more urgently than taking care of the rainforest or taking care of the biodiversity that they may not be connected to themselves.
Manda: Yeah.
Romain: And I think that's where the debate is. And I think rather than trying to convince people that the ecology is in crisis and that we really have to address it urgently, which I am certainly of that camp, I think we miss the opportunity to get really clear with what are the needs that they feel are superordinate to them, in the moment? I think a lot of people are suffering, whether they're at the whims of a system that doesn't really work in their favour. Or whether it's the lack of belonging and connection that they feel. I think back in the day, belonging was found in hyper local contexts, whether that was in your neighbourhood, at your church, at your school, you know, at the pub down the street. And there's a beauty to that, there's a proximity to that that I think is no longer possible. And of course everything is a double edged sword, I think. You know, nowadays you can find your belonging in an infinite amount of spaces, because of just the digital world that we now live in. And if you don't find belonging, then you can find it in very fringe communities. And I think that that's what's been really dangerous in many ways is the people who can't really find community or belonging in their proximate communities, and their proximate environments, at school or at church, or within their families are now finding it digitally. It's why I think there's such a thing as a flat Earth community.
Manda: But there's also an LGBT community.
Romain: Exactly.
Manda: I mean, I grew up in a place where everybody knew everybody else, and it was not fun if you were not like everybody else.
Romain: And that's what I was getting to, when I was saying it's a double edged sword, because a lot of people have found really beautiful, meaningful, enriching communities, where they've finally felt belonging and have been able to not be stuck in a community that doesn't humanise them. For who they are or what they think or how they act. So it's a beautiful thing, but also, you know, we're not designing enough for belonging. I think if we want to take care of our biodiversity and take care of our ecology and take care of our species, the thousands, the millions of other species on this planet with us, we have to start with creating cultures of belonging where everybody feels belonging and don't have to find it in fringe communities. If people feel belonging, then that is the superordinate need that I think typically leads us to focus on maybe what seems to be subordinate needs to us in our current moments. Thinking about the future is really hard when the present moment is difficult, when we're missing something really important to us in the present moment. And so I think if we really want to build a future world, we also have to create a dynamic where people in this present moment feel taken care of.
Romain: So all that to say that a big part of what we've been doing at Pathos Labs is how do we tell stories that make people feel seen, make people feel belonging? Make people feel connected to the lives and experiences of others. How do we tell stories in ways that characters on screen, whether it's in your favourite TV show or favourite movie, embodies certain identities that may feel a little bit distant to you? But in ways that create that connection that I think we really need to create. How do we widen that in-group and sort of challenge the fracturing of communities across very small, like disparate fringe communities that mostly exist in the digital sphere. So that's a big question that we've been asking, is what does it look like to scale a lot of these stories? Because it's one thing to tell stories, but if few people are there to perceive the stories, then it may not actually have the effect on creating new norms, engineering new norms, creating compassion at scale, creating understanding at scale. So one big question that we're also asking, in addition to what kinds of stories do we need to tell, is how do we tell those stories in ways that reach the level of scale that we really need right now?
Manda: Right. How do you reach 100 million people now, when everyone's in their own little camps that are all smaller than that?
Romain: Right. Precisely. Yeah. It's such a fragmented media ecosystem that we live in today. Whereas in 1983 you could reach 100 million people through a television film, today it's near impossible to reach that many people.
Manda: How many do the really big, I don't know, rival franchise or something, they may not be the biggest, but the biggest Hollywood or Netflix or whatever. How many people are they reaching, do we think?
Romain: Not as many as you think, unfortunately. Again, it's just a broad range. You would be lucky if you're on network television today, say, an NBC show on prime time, you would be lucky if you're getting 4 or 5 million people tuning in, at least here in the United States. And so it's become just a very different media landscape that we live in. So it makes it a lot harder to reach the level of scale that was once possible, not super long ago.
Manda: Because a TikTok influencer is going to outdo that with a three second video on TikTok.
Romain: Certainly could. Absolutely. Yeah. There's something that you said; i wouldn't necessarily go out and say that a TikTok influencer has more influence than a television show. I think there's a differing level of emotional investment.
Manda: Okay, yes.
Romain: That really matters and needs to be considered as part of the picture. But in terms of mere eyeballs, certainly a TikToker could reach more eyeballs than a well trained, very well respected television creator could. So, yeah, a very different landscape today than what it was not too long ago. So we've been trying to figure out, you know, given this, fractured Media landscape, where everything is so diffuse; what does it look like to organise culture creators across different mediums, to come together in coordination and collaboration? So that we can depict stories in ways that reach different demographics through different mediums, through different genres of television or through different kinds of content. Whether it's a YouTube channel or whether it's TikTok or a podcast or etc..
Manda: Or a marvel movie.
Romain: Or a marvel movie. Exactly right. So what does it look like to be a coordinated effort that brings a lot of influential storytellers together in community, to build with each other, to build from each other's ideas and inspirations? So that a lot of the collective narrative that's broadcast into the world can be in service of bringing forth a better world.
Manda: Whoa. Okay. This. This is where I want to go. I just want to get, just before we go there, it seems we're talking about compassion and understanding and empathy at scale. And it seems to me what we're asking people to do is to step into emotional literacy, emotional maturity. If we look at Bill Plotkin's scale, we're looking at them to grow up from early adolescence into adulthood and Elder Hood. And part of what we need for that is to have modelling of what adulthood and Elder Hood look and feel like. And in our culture, screens are the way to do that. In the old days, novels used to do that a bit. But you're doing that at the same time. So this is where I want to go. Your future space camp, or however you're effectively doing the same as bringing a whole bunch of Carl Sagan and policy wonks and writers all into somebody's living room. Instead, you're bringing people together to form a community to begin to have coherence in a world where there has been coherence, but it's been default. And I think it's worth looking at what you think the default has been. Because for me, the default has been business as usual is capitalist and capitalism is good and capitalism is right. And it's okay to ignore the externalities because that's what capitalism does. We're not going to look at the fact that sending a rocket to the moon creates extraordinary amounts of downstream and second order effects that are nothing to do with the exciting image of the rocket going to the moon. They're destroying entire ecosystems and entire communities simply to get there, but we're not going to look at that. And that is the scarcity, separation and powerlessness as the underlying value set.
Manda: And that this is the way humanity is. I had quite an interesting mini flame war on Blue Sky the other day. Blue Sky doesn't really do flame wars, it's not like Twitter, but somebody had posted a graph of CO2 from prehistoric times up to industrial times, and then it just did that, and it was going up to 2015. And the question was, what are your grandchildren's grandchildren going to think, knowing that we saw this graph and did nothing? And there was hundreds of comments after and most of them were, well, it's too late, why would we do anything anyway? People have moved from denial to despair without any intervening spaces, and they hold those positions with extreme emotional certainty, which for me is a hallmark of amygdala limbic thinking. That when you get to 'if you suggest to me that there might be possibility, I'm going to scream at you in all caps', you've got someone who's quite triggered and they're holding on to this position of 'it's too late to do anything', because that's a really easy position to hold. It means I am absolved of all responsibility or the need to imagine what I could do. And so what we need to do now, as it seems to me, is to help people understand their own triggers as much as anything else. To do the work of not having to react and being able instead to be in flow, and then to co-create the structures of what a viable future might look like in the understanding that the existing one is over. And I wonder how that lands when we exist in a media ecosystem that depends on the existing structures?
Manda: It's really hard to say capitalism is over when you're asking for several million dollars to make the TV or the movie or the YouTube or whatever that says capitalism is over. How are you navigating that? Or are you navigating that?
Romain: Yeah, that's a great question. Yeah, I think we're certainly trying to navigate that. It's in the zeitgeist, right. So many people feel like the system, the economic system is not working. I don't think we really know why it's not working. Some people are a little bit more systemic in their assessment, where it's like, oh no, it's the system that's not working. Others are quick to castigate or blame a different group. Oh, it's the immigrants, like we don't have enough money, we're struggling here. The problem is the immigrants who are coming in and taking our jobs.
Manda: Or it's the billionaires. You know, the other side.
Romain: Or it's the billionaires, yeah, absolutely.
Manda: Finding someone else to blame is is the first kind of entrenchment, isn't it? It's not my problem, it's someone else's problem. And that makes it easy. Somebody posted something that I read the other day, because I think this applies to everyone; and it comes from a book called Southern Man by Greg Iles. And it says: I watched in disbelief as businessmen voted for a repeat bankrupt; labourers for a boss infamous for stiffing his workers; evangelicals for a serial adulterer; women for an admitted sexual assaulter; patriots for a draft dodger who would sell his country's secrets for trivial gain; educated men for an ignoramus. But they did so with fierce gladness in their hearts, because what their chosen one had done was open Pandora's box. Yes, the old one, filled with the ancient calamities of race hatred and rage and cruelty and bloodlust and infinite greed, and tell them that these things were the remedy for all their grievances. That all their anger was justified. And most important of all, none of what ailed them was their there own fault or ever had been. And they took to this like infants...to their mother'. And we could apply that to anyone. What we're doing is getting to that deep limbic thing of It's not my fault. It's someone else's fault. And defaulting to the projection outwards of everything that I'm afraid of is going to fix everything. You know, Palaeolithic emotions, medieval institutions and the technology of God's. E O Wilson. It's not a winnable solution, but it's inbuilt.
Manda: And what we are trying to do, you and I, I think, is take the whole of humanity and create an emotional spiritual evolution, emergence to a new system where that's not the default, which is a big ask. And I wonder how it's landing. So I think you're right, yes, there's a lot of outgroup stuff going on, but I'm guessing that amongst the people that you're working with, the fact that you're working with them and you are clearly well-versed in this and highly emotionally literate; you've done a lot of work with in-groups and outgroups. You worked in Israel and Palestine. You've been voluntarily homeless. There's a lot of stuff that you've done to bring yourself to a space where you can respond fluidly, rather than react from triggers. And I'm guessing, I'm hoping, that Pathos Labs is bringing people like that together. What are the strategies that seem most workable in the groups that you're working with?
Romain: Hmm, it's a really good question. Yeah, I've been really curious about empathy, understanding, complexity of hatred, but also the simplicity of it. The fact that it feels good to 'A'absolve ourselves from blame, but 'B' strengthen our own belonging within different ideological or religious or different groups, as a result of creating, sort of constructing an other, you know, an enemy. Even thinking back to high school, I was a big soccer player and I was really competitive. I'm still quite competitive when I play games or sports.
Manda: Or a triathlete. Tell us about your triathlon.
Romain: Or a triathlete, yeah, I can share about the triathlon another time. But yeah, the sense of competition, the sense of my success is dependent upon winning over somebody else, you know, I feel like if we think about a lot of the narratives that we've consumed from the moments when we were really young, you know, the good versus evil, the success versus failure. A lot of these paradigms have been indoctrinated within us at such a young age. Not in a nefarious way, but in a lack of imagination way. In a way where we have limited ourselves to stories that are relatively devoid of complexity. A versus B, you know, good versus bad, this versus that. Left versus right. And I think we all aspired to fit into this sort of hero's journey as we know it in some way. And unfortunately, the way that we've constructed this hero's journey is overcoming and defeating the bad, defeating the right, defeating the left, defeating the immigrants, defeating the aggressors, defeating those who stand in our way. And I think that that is taking a toll on us all and in an emotional way that we haven't maybe made sense of collectively yet, but also from a planetary systems perspective as well.
Romain: And where I'm seeing all these dynamics being inflamed right now politically, socioeconomically, geopolitically, it's I think just a by-product of our indoctrination into that 'this versus that' mindset. So, you know, part of my explorations when I was a little bit younger, as far as trying to experiment with putting myself in different environments was really focussed on challenging certain perceptions I had about situations or about other people and realising through those explorations how quickly I was wrong. How off base I was with my perceptions. Even if they weren't negative perceptions or ideas about a situation or a group or an experience, they were just wrong and incomplete, so often. Even after the Trump election, the first Trump election in 2016, I found my, myself driving across the country to one of the most conservative counties in the country. This was a county where I think it was 86% voted for Trump. And I spent several weeks there just with a curious mind, trying to understand rather than place blame. But really trying to understand. Also having to be vulnerable in this environment where I didn't know anyone. I was there on my own. And I posted up at a couple of restaurants and sat with people asking them questions and eventually people invited me to stay with them.
Romain: People invited me to join them on hikes. I ended up shooting guns. I'd never shot a gun before, and I ended up learning how to shoot a gun, which I'm definitely not fond of guns and didn't see myself partaking in that experience before this trip. But I found myself shooting guns with the head of the Oklahoma chapter of the NRA and that was a fascinating experience. He invited me to his home where he showed me his armoury, full of guns. And we went out on his property in a very remote area and he was teaching me how to aim. And I'm not advocating for guns and that experience was not one where it convinced me that guns are right, but just sharing experiences with other people and hearing their perspectives. And also seeing how differently they were raised than how I was raised, you know, in a city with immigrant parents.
Romain: And so those experiences really shaped me. And a lot of my judgements or pre judgements going into this trip were quickly overturned, with a more nuanced perspective and a bigger space in my heart for the challenges and the experiences of these individuals, that had challenges that I hadn't necessarily experienced myself. And I think it's so easy for us to to place blame and castigate others and so, so difficult to try to actually have those experiences where you challenge those misperceptions or preconceived notions of others. But, you know, how do we do that at scale, right? Like, that's really what led to the creation of Pathos Labs in the first place. And I started the organisation after that trip. But how do we change how people feel about one another in a way that is scalable? And the evolution of the organisation, we took a very circuitous route to the work that we do now with TV writers.
Romain: So I went back to that community and I created a virtual reality experience in that rural community. And really the idea was for other people in bigger cities to have that experience that I had. And at the time, this was 2016, VR (virtual reality) was a technology that I thought was going to to scale at a faster rate than it really did. But, I did end up travelling across the country sharing this virtual reality experience with people in all sorts of communities, that probably had the same, you know, assumptions or misperceptions that I did before I embarked on that journey myself. And so that's what started the organisation. And then, I think the question of scale has been one that's been really interesting to me. Even the VR, and taking this experience across the road across the country was, you know, one person at a time behind a headset. Albeit, you know, a reduced experience. It was an eight minute experience, and could be scaled that way a little bit more than actually having to travel to that community and spending a couple of weeks there. But still, I felt like, you know...
Manda: You're not going to reach 100 million people at eight minutes a time. That's not going to happen.
Romain: You can't reach 100 million people. So that's when we started to think about, like, how do we actually work with the content creators that are already creating content that millions of people are engaging with? You know, is there an opportunity to bring them together in ways that get them to think a little bit differently about the world, about the way in which they're telling their stories? And what if it's a comedy writer for a popular sitcom and someone who's creating a drama and someone who's creating a documentary and someone who's creating a podcast. And I think the surround sound nature of it these days is really, really important. There's this academic named Centola, I think it is. Are you familiar with Centola?
Manda: No. Sounds like I should be, though. Can you send me a link and we'll put it in the show notes?
Romain: Yeah. Damon Centola, he was an academic. But he's talking about how behaviour spreads, and that's actually the name of one of his books is How Behaviour Spreads; the Science of Complex Contagions. And he talks about how behaviours and attitudes are shaped, not by hearing it from one person, but hearing it from a variety of sources. And the more that you're able to hear it from a variety of sources, the more likely it is to shape your perception of that being a normative idea or concept. And so I've been thinking about that idea. Like, okay, we have to change the mediums. We have to do this work across mediums in ways that reach people in different ways. Unexpected ways, perhaps, through maybe a page that they follow on social media to, you know, a podcast; a host that they really resonate with or gravitate towards to maybe a TikTok that they're engaged with; to a television show that they're watching. And if we can do that across mediums in a way that introduces different people to certain new ideas, maybe ideas that are currently on the fringe but could be really impactful, in a variety of different mediums, then that's actually how behaviour is spread. That's how new ideas enter the normative context from maybe being in a fringe context. And so, yeah, that's something that we've been really exploring, is how do we recruit and engage storytellers across mediums who reach many different demographics; to engage and think about how to tell better stories collectively.
Manda: Because it seems to me...I read 2017, Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains, and the right knows this. I mean, this is me othering, but they absolutely. I remember one of the very first executive orders that Trump had way back in 2016, was that up until that point it had been a legal requirement for every local US media station to source their own media. And he wiped that one off the board and within a couple of months, somebody whose name I'd forgotten but one of the billionaires had bought up all the local media stations in the US, and suddenly they were all putting out the same stuff, and it was all pro-Trump propaganda. And his approval ratings, which had been nose diving, went up. And they know, they know. And unfortunately, over here in the UK, the narrative of Brexit, which before 2015 it was like number 16 on people's priority list. It was basically not there. And then a concerted media effort that managed to harness the big newspapers and the major legacy news, made it number one. And and you know, we all know what happened. And now they're continuing to do that so that people will genuinely spend half of the evening news discussing migrants coming across the channel.
Romain: Yeah, yeah.
Manda: Anybody rational is like, guys, there are no migrants on a dead planet. Can we actually concentrate on the things that are important? And they make the narrative. We all understand that people have hierarchies of needs and they have hierarchies of attention. They have hierarchies of priority. But as you are aware, the media shapes these. So I'm really interested in the fact that we seem to be playing catch up and we're playing at a harder difficulty level, because the people with huge amounts of money have an enormous vested interest in us not managing to shift the narrative, from the places they are very carefully sending it. I'm really interested in how, with Future's Base Camp, you brought people together and without breaking confidences, how much can you tell us about the kinds of conversations and about whether this is actually viable from the perspective of endeavouring to create a unified sense of self within humanity, rather than endeavouring to maintain fractured polarisations, which seems to be one way that we're heading, and that's quite deliberately being taken that way. Does that make sense as a question?
Romain: Yeah. I think just to respond to your first assessment, the right has done a really, really good job of disseminating strategic ideas and narratives. In the 2024 presidential election here in the United States, the Democrats outspent the Republicans by almost $1 billion in media and messaging. Outspent by $1 billion. And yet we have lost so much ground. Why is that?
Manda: They had Musk putting his thumb on the scales. I think that's also a thing, you know.
Romain: I think that's partially it, sure. We're also seeing Gen Z move more towards the right, which is confusing all of us because...
Manda: Terrifying.
Romain: You know, I think it was safe to say for decades that the more young people you engage, the more progressive the policies, the more progressive elected officials. And now what we're seeing is Gen Z is turning more and more conservative. And how is that happening? I've been really curious about, there's one organisation here in the United States called Turning Point USA. Are you familiar with them Manda?
Manda: No, I will look them up.
Romain: No. Uh, Turning Point USA is a really fascinating organisation. It was started by a young person. I think he's still maybe 30 or maybe even younger at this point. A young man who started high school, then college chapters of this community called Turning Point USA. He now has, I think, about a half million young people involved in the community, whether it's through high school chapters, college chapters, they have engaged a lot of influencers.
Manda: Oh, wow. We believe in limited government. We believe in free markets. We believe in freedom. Oh, I was putting that in the show notes, I'm just taking it off.
Romain: Yeah, yeah. So this is an organisation that doesn't really align with me politically at all. But they have done such a good job in terms of mobilising young people. How have they done so? How have they mobilised young people who have traditionally gravitated towards more progressive ideas, in ways that are very sort of antiquated? They've developed a really tight system. So you join the high school chapter and when you start college, and here in the United States a lot of students go to colleges where they don't necessarily know a lot of other people. You know, some of them travel across the country. So you immediately have an in-group to join and so that becomes your friend group on day one, is these students who are a part of this community. And when you have a strong in-group, you know, you as an individual tend to conform your ideas and beliefs to what is dominant in that in-group. So all of a sudden, from the perspective of wanting to belong, you adopt a lot of these ideas. So they've done a really good job on that front. I haven't seen that done as effectively on the left. Two is how they've actually enrolled and engaged influential storytellers to take part of this sort of like tight system. And they have recruited loads and loads of conservative influencers, TikTokers, podcasters to spread ideas that sort of disseminate from Turning Point USA, because they use the students at the campuses as amplifiers for dissemination. So, you know, take a TikTok post that was posted, Turning Point sends it to, you know, half a million young people, and request that they comment, like, share as soon as it's been posted.
Manda: So they get the algorithms in their favour and it's amplified instantly.
Romain: Exactly, exactly. So it's a dissemination strategy that's really based around how do we get these algorithms to pay attention to these fringe ideas and train the algorithm to think that this is what young people want to see? And so they're able to then get that content out, to reaching people who wouldn't otherwise.
Manda: So we create a self-fulfilling prophecy by algorithm.
Romain: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. So.
Manda: So what are we doing on the other side?
Romain: We're not we're not doing much, which is really where I'm feeling frustrated.
Manda: Why?
Romain: I don't know I don't quite know why we're not tapping into some of these behavioural triggers that the right has tapped into.
Manda: Some people are. Zoran Mamdani did TikTok brilliantly in New York and got the Democratic nomination there. He was fantastic on TikTok.
Romain: Yeah, he's done a really good job.
Manda: So some people are. It's just not yet in that level of organisation. We are at an hour and I think you probably have to go. And I still really want to know what happened at your Future's Base Camp. If you can tell us or tell us what's happening. There must be some things that we're doing! Please tell me that some of the people that you're talking to are joining together in like minded groups and have a sense of a narrative that could begin to shift in the other direction, or at least in a more emotionally literate direction.
Romain: So, yeah, Futures Base Camp was an experiment with how do we take what Turning Point USA has done well, for example; bring storytellers together in a way where they're working on content together, thinking about ways in which we can depict a better future together, whether that was a YouTube creator or a social media influencer or a video game designer. We had the creator of Foundation in the room, we had the showrunner of The Walking Dead in the room. We had writers on The Handmaid's Tale in the room. We had the showrunner of Yellow Jackets in the room. We had just incredible...
Manda: Big names.
Romain: Television, big names. We had the the son of Gene Roddenberry who created Star Trek in the room, who now owns the franchise, the Star Trek franchise. To imagine together, how can we tell stories that we can scale to millions of people that inspire us to believe that the future is worth protecting. To inspire people to believe that we all collectively, especially, have power. We all have collective power in creating the future that we aspire to have. And also to help unpack some of these really complex systems that seem that they're doomed beyond measure. You know, I think it's one thing to speak about bringing hope to people in a very generalist kind of way, but unless we get really concrete in terms of the details of what some of these systems could look like, hope alone won't actually be that helpful.
Manda: No, no, you have to get specific.
Romain: Yeah, there's a black box in terms of what we actually have to do about it. And so a big part of it was how do we demystify the pathways to getting towards better systems and better structures. And telling stories that can offer audiences a glimpse of what that could look like, whether it's democracy, whether it's ecology, whether it's...
Manda: Different economic systems, different ways of governance.
Romain: Absolutely. Whether it's justice, whether it's governance. Absolutely. And so we spent several days in Joshua Tree, Under the stars and brainstorming some of these ideas, imagining what these futures could look like. Understanding how we could disentangle some of these systems that seem so complex and intractable. To telling stories in ways that make some of these complex systems changeable, maybe incrementally so, but still changeable. So it was a fantastic time and experience. And ultimately, you know, our goal was also how do we build community amongst these creators so that they feel connected through this shared mission? So that it's not just a provocation for them, but it's a community that provokes one another and continues to engage.
Manda: And supports one another.
Romain: Precisely, yeah. Supports one another and continues to entertain one another through the questions that will hopefully continue being asked far beyond just a couple of days in the desert.
Manda: That was happening late spring, early summer. And we're recording this early August. And I'm wondering, have you had much feedback? Are concrete things arising from this that we might see on our screens at some point?
Romain: Yeah, it's really cool. There have been just a variety of different levels. So there's, you know, some YouTube creators that are now thinking about ways in which they can leverage their many millions of subscribers and their reach to them in ways that can support some of these ideas. We've got a couple of follow up sessions too, to deepen and to get a little bit more pragmatic in terms of what the creative might look like. You know, I think it's one thing to better understand systems as storytellers and a different process to think about, like how that translates to creative content. So that's some work that we're going to continue to do. We've got a couple of big projects specifically as it relates to these questions, but more focussed on AI. So how do we, especially given the fact that we're seeing this big shift in how systems will comport themselves as a result of this new infrastructure that now exists, how do we really leverage this new technology in ways that can support the positive and also mitigate some of the negatives that might come with irresponsible dissemination of this technology that's not fully fleshed out. So, yeah, the work continues. We can't claim to change things in a matter of three days, even if it's a transformational experience.
Manda: We can plant seeds and who knows what they'll grow into.
Romain: Yeah exactly. But those seeds need to be watered.
Manda: Yeah. It sounded to me, from what I heard and what I saw, that video that you made, that people there were genuinely inspired. I think there's something about knowing you're not alone, which obviously the Turning Point people have hooked onto; is finding your tribe is really important. And once you've got it, then there is an exponential nature to the sharing of ideas. They don't just stack up linearly. They definitely have a fractal effect outward, I would say so. This feels really exciting. Is there anything towards the end? We're definitely over the hour now. Is there anything else that you're exploring into that we can inspire people with?
Romain: Yeah, I feel like I've talked a lot. So, um.
Manda: That's the point, Romain, it's why you're here, it's okay.
Romain: Yeah. That is the point. You're right, you're right. And I feel like it maybe took us on a circuitous path that hopefully you feel connects a lot of the dots. But I think really where I've been sitting most recently is thinking about how do we disseminate on a much bigger scale, than even leveraging the platforms of existing storytellers individually? Is there an opportunity in building a bigger collective movement, and a better dissemination strategy so that we're not just relying upon Netflix or TikTok's algorithm or YouTube's algorithm to get some of those new ideas out there. But is there a way in which we can sort of create a new model so that we're not at the whims of what the algorithms determine. We want to see and that's something that's been really top of mind that I'm personally trying to disentangle.
Manda: In a way, this is the kind of Audrey Tang field of if we could set up our own social media that wasn't aimed at polarising. If we were not in the extraction of everybody's attention and the race to the bottom of the brain stem and the monetisation of polarisation, and instead had something where the algorithm was designed to help people find the uncommon ground that united them, then that would be something to build on. And I know there was a point where Audrey Tang was hooked up with a billionaire whose name I don't remember, and they were looking at buying TikTok. And clearly that didn't happen, but the algorithm was ready set to go.
Romain: Yeah. Project Liberty. Yeah. Frank McCourt. Yeah.
Manda: Yes. So neither of these is a stupid individual, I am guessing that if we talk to either of those, they're probably still trying to make that happen one way or another. And that if it could be made to happen, everybody that I know who wants the continuation of complex life on Earth, which is setting the bar pretty low, would be very happy to join something that had functionality of Facebook and didn't feel like it was directly feeding into fascism, basically. If we could find the money and the finance, I mean, it all comes down to the fact that we need to end capitalism, but we need to use the tools of capitalism to do it. And we're not nearly as good at that as the people who are depicted in Democracy In Chains, sadly. But there must be a way.
Romain: I think there absolutely is a way. But how do you do so in a way that's...I think it's hard from a business standpoint. Businesses depend upon these algorithms, depend upon getting to the bottom of the brainstem, because that's where people are most likely to purchase.
Manda: Yeah. So we have a catch 22. We need to end capitalism while still sustaining ourselves with capitalism.
Romain: Right. But I think movements, you know, I think there's too many of us that feel dissatisfied with the status quo. And I think there's ways in which we can do it that don't necessarily rely upon an ad based capitalism entrenched model for doing it. That's something that I'm trying to investigate, is what does it look like if you can set up more complex distribution systems that don't depend upon algorithms and then get biased because of these algorithms. And don't depend upon, you know, the advertisers to keep us afloat. So anyways, that's the current exploration and maybe we can talk about that next time.
Manda: Okay, that sounds really exciting. Yes. Okay. You're right. All my lights went on and I was thinking yeah this is... But let's talk about that later. Excellent. In that case we are way over time. Romain, thank you so much for all that you're doing. It feels so exciting that somebody else understands that narrative shift is what makes the difference and is working on it. So thank you very much for everything that you're doing and for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast. I look forward to another conversation sometime soon. Thank you.
Romain: Absolutely. Likewise. Thanks Manda.
Manda: And there we go. That's it for another week. Huge thanks to Romain for all that he is and does. For Pathos Labs and PopShift and Future's Base Camp, and all of the conversations that bring people together to try and find the ways to dismantle systemic othering. Othering of ourselves, othering of each other, othering of the web of life. If we're going to get through this poly crisis, it will be because we've changed the stories that we tell ourselves and each other about ourselves, each other, and our place in the web of life. And if I was a philanthropist with a lot of money to spare, I would very certainly be setting up an equivalent to the Turning Point USA, something that could scale across the world, that would help young people engage with themselves and each other, and the web of life. Enable them to be open hearted, enable them to do the work of grief tending while still being open hearted and compassionate, and finding the motivation, agency, direction and empowerment that we need to get through. So if you know of anybody with a lot of money who wants to set that up, point them in my direction because I can see exactly how we could do it now that I know this exists. It's not rocket science, people, and it would be a very useful use of your money.
Manda: Otherwise, anything that we can do to shift the narrative is worth it. Just the conversations that we have with our neighbours, with our colleagues, with the people we meet in the supermarket queue; that the world doesn't have to be the way that it is; that there are other ways of relating. That most people want to be generous and friendly and connected, and to support each other. These are the conversations that matter and any one of us can do this. So whatever you do with all the other podcasts that we have, engaging with shifting the narratives in your communities of place and purpose and passion is crucial and doable. So go for it. That's your homework for this week.
Manda: And that apart, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, huge thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowell's of Airtight Studios, for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video, Anne Thomas for the transcripts, Faith Tilleray for the website and the tech and the conversations that keep our stories moving forward. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who wants to understand the process and the purpose of narrative shift, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.