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whitehotharlots · 4 years

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“Literal violence” and the death of the heterodox

I teach college students. This means I assign young people things to read. If the students don’t do the reading--if they consider it too boring or uninteresting or difficult--they don’t do well in the class. I update my reading lists every semester, because what was interesting to students a few years or even months ago might not click with the students of today. Sometimes students love what they’re assigned. Sometimes they hate it. And it’s very hard to tell if a piece is or isn’t going to work until I’ve assigned it and gotten feedback.

As I’ve gotten older it has become more difficult to relate to young people. This is a completely normal part of life--nothing to be ashamed of or panic about, and I think almost everyone agrees that it’s more dignified to age gracefully than to try too hard to seem hip or with it. And so, over the past few years, as I’ve found it nearly impossible to find good, engaging writing with a broad appeal, I figured it was just because I, naturally, don’t relate to young people as much as I used to.

But lately--certainly since Trump’s ascendance, but perhaps going back as far as the early twenty-teens--mainstream writing has become incredibly predictable. Name any event and I can tell you almost word-for-word how it will be discussed in Jezebel vs. Teen Vogue vs. The Root vs The Intercept. And, increasingly, there’s been very little analytical divergence even between different publications. Everyone to the left of Fox News seems to agree upon just about everything, and all analysis has been boiled down to the repetition of one of a half-dozen or so aphorisms about privilege or validity. There is, in short, a proper and improper way to describe and understand anything that happens, and a writer is simply not going to get published if they have an improper understanding of the world.

This, I think, is the result of our normalizing hyperbolic overstatements of harm and the danger posed by anything short of absolute fealty to orthodox liberalism. If it’s “literal violence” to express mild criticism and incredulity, people aren’t going to do so. Editors don’t want to risk accusations of “platforming fascists,” and so there’s been very little pushback against fascism being recently re-defined as “anything that displeases upper middle class Democrats.”

Not long ago, it was commonplace on the left to celebrate the internet’s ability to allow writers to bypass the gatekeeping functions of old media. With mainstream liberalism needing a scapegoat to explain away the failures of the post-2008 Democratic party, however, the tone has shifted.

Case in point, Clio Chang’s rather chilling piece from the Columbia Journalism Review that seeks to problematize an open platform called Substack.. Substack allows writers to publish almost whatever they want, outside of editorial control, and then charge a subscription to readers. As more and more websites and print media are being hollowed out and sacrificed to the gods of speculative capital, a large number of big-name writers have embraced this new platform. It has also allowed writers to report on stories that are objectively true but inconvenient to the Democratic establishment, such as Matt Taibbi’s admirable work debunking Russiagate bullshit.

Chang begins with a lengthy description of Substack’s creation. She stresses that no one—not even the site’s founders and most successful writers—consider it an ideal replacement for the well-funded journalism of old. Chang focuses on one particular Substack newsletter called “Coronavirus News For Black Folks” which appears to be moderately successful (the piece cites 2000+ subscribers, and its founder is earning enough to have hired an assistant editor). Even after describing how the platform has given large grants and stipends to other newsletter run by women and people of color, the fact that this one particular newsletter isn’t as successful as others is held up as proof of the platform’s malignancy.

“Coronavirus News For Black Folks” may be somewhat successful, but Chang implies that it rightfully should be even more successful, and that something evil must be afoot. Simple arithmetic tells us that a specialized newsletter—one pitched specifically to a minority audience and only covering one particular issue—is going to have a smaller readership than a more general interest piece. Rather than accept this simple explanation, Chang instead embraces the liberal tendency to blame a lack of desired outcomes upon the presence of evil forces.

While Chang provides a thorough overview of the current, fucked state of media and journalism, at no point does she grapple with the role that mainstream liberalism has played in abetting the industry’s collapse. This is surprising, as a quick google search suggests she generally has solid, left-wing politics. This omission reveals a problematic gap in left analysis, and bodes poorly for any hope of leftism accomplishing any material goals while the movement remains aligned with more mainstream identity politics. Even as she cogently explains the destruction of media and the hellish future that lay before writers, Chang still embraces the mystical fatalism that liberals have been leaning on since 2010 or so, when it became clear that Obama wasn’t going to make good on any promises of hope or change. She blames our nation’s horrors not elite leadership, but on the presence of people and ideas she doesn’t like. In this case, Substack is problematic because many of its writers are white and male, and some are even conservative:

When [Andrew] Sullivan joined Substack, over the summer, he put the company’s positioning to the test: infamous for publishing excerpts from The Bell Curve, a book that promotes bigoted race “science,” Sullivan would now produce the Weekly Dish, a political newsletter. (Substack’s content guidelines draw a line at hate speech.) Sullivan’s Substack quickly rose to become the fifth-most-read among paid subscriptions—he claimed that his income had risen from less than $200,000 at New York magazine to $500,000. When I asked the founders if they thought his presence might discourage other writers from joining, they gave me a pat reply. “We’re not a media company,” Best said. “If somebody joins the company and expects us to have an editorial position and be rigorously enforcing some ideological line, this is probably not the company they wanted to join in the first place.”

I’m no fan of Andrew Sullivan, but the man has spent decades building and maintaining his audience. Of course he’s going to have a larger readership than someone who is just starting out. This isn’t a sign of anything nefarious. It’s basic commonsense. But there’s no other conclusions that can be reached: things are bad because people haven’t done enough to root out badness. Things are bad because evil exists. The only way we can attempt reform is to make the evil people go away. Anyone who says anything I don’t like is evil and their words are evil and they shouldn’t be published.

Chang doesn’t make any direct suggestions for remediating Substack, but her implications are clear: equity requires censorship and ideological conformity. Providing any platform for people who are disliked by the liberal mainstream, be they too far left or too indelicate with their conservative cruelty, equates to harming vulnerable people—even when those vulnerable people freely admit to making money off the same platform. There is no room for dissent. There is no possibility of reform. The boundaries of acceptable discourse must grow narrower and narrower. Only when we free our world from the presence of the bad ones will change magically arrive.

NOTE: I wrote a follow-up to this piece that I think does a better job of articulating the points I was trying to make.

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jq37 · 5 years

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sooo.... what’s the tea on the new ep? :)

**spoilers for family in flames**

I have so much to say I’m not drafting this on tumblr lest it crash and I lose a soul-crushing amount of yelling into the void.

And, I gotta say, THIS episode is the reason I haven’t posted my adult rankings list yet. THIS RIGHT HERE. I KNEW some crap was gonna go down and force me to make some HUGE adjustments.

Also, We are feeling vindicated in this house today! But let’s start from the top and work our way down.

“Raise your hands if you really care about your parents.”

Fabian having to be like, “Look, your parents suck but don’t you have siblings?” (Kristen: Ugh, I guess)

Adaine pointing out that she cares about Gorgug’s parents.

Brennan listening to them argue about what to do like he doesn’t know they’re about to be arrested for a whole ass MONTH.

Fig wanting to method act while texting the phone, pretending to be scared.

So is the arcade owner (Frank Dunford) relevant? Brennan had the name on hand. But maybe it was just him being a good worldbuilder and anticipating the question. I feel like it’s probably that because this is late in the game to be introducing new people who are super relevant.

“Gilear’s got a little knife”

I KNEW those arcade prizes were gonna be gear they could pick up! ALWAYS RAID THE ROOM. Some of that stuff might have helped in the fight. I loved the group silently reading the cards and exchanging them to whoever they thought it would help most in the background as Brennan did the ID spell.

“This has been, if I may say so, the *best* use of the identify spell.”

I love that Adaine thanks everyone, including her inanimate spells. She’s just a good person.

OK so this episode addressed a LOT of questions I had about how these literal children were getting away with all of these murders and such. Apparently, the adventuring academy kids traditionally just get away with this stuff because of Arthur’s influence and the nature of adventurers.

Adaine coming in hot with the diplomatic immunity and then remembering, oh wait, we’re at war w/ Falinel.

Fig immediately starting smoking when she gets arrested.

I love the federal agent outsider with perspective coming in and being rightfully horrified by the absolute nonsense that’s been going on the past 15 episodes.

Is Riz’s mom the only competent cop at this station? Is there a one competent adult per location rule?

Bill Seacaster Upon Learning the Bad Kids are In Jail: Did you try to escape?

“How are things going?”/“I mean bad. I’m in jail.”

Fig upon offhandedly and indirectly being called a vigilante by Sklonda: Thank you.

Emily loses it whenever anything happens in Gilear’s orbit.

Wild that Adaine decided to spontaneously call Goldenhoard considering what happened later. Like, it wasn’t a completely out of nowhere decision and it was totally logical but they could have easily overlooked that decision.

Like, I know things happen later that make this kinda moot but I loved Goldenhoard’s conversation with Adaine in jail. “Don’t to talk to anyone without a lawyer and kill anyone you have to to get out. The school will pay for the rezzes.”/“That’s exactly what our plan was. God, I love this school.”

Although, sidenote, I feel like you can only easily rez someone within a minute? Like, I know there are other D&D spells that let you do it after a longer period of time but with the whole phoenix egg thing and the fact that they haven’t come up so far, I feel like Brennan isn’t using the in this setting for stakes reasons.

Man that whole conversation with Fig and her mom. Emily plays Fig so balls to the wall that I kinda forget sometimes that she’s actually an intelligent adult woman who knows what she’s doing with the character so I really shouldn’t be surprised with how well she stuck the emotional beats of this episode.

Gorthalax man! TyraWeWereAllRootingForYou.gif If he left, like, actually left and isn’t just held up somehow, then that’s gonna be really not great for Fig’s general psyche.

Kristen COMPLETELY undercutting the moment by point blank asking if they had sex.

No wonder Sandra-Lynn was so worried about Fig. She was totally Fig growing up. Which, lol, she’s not even half tiefling. She was just *like that*

Oh so Gilear has always been super lame. Good to know.

Fig: I think I have mommy issues./The Rest of the Party: You have all the issues.

Fabian: You’re trying to hook up with a 25 year old adult./Fig: What do you mean trying?I’m successfully kissing him once every couple weeks. (Which, lol but also I’m glad that’s as far as it got…you know if it has to go any amount forward).

They just let Bill into the cell?????

Lou when Zac rolls a 1 for perception on Bill Secaster and he knows what’s coming: Don’t fucking do this. (Everyone else: Already trying not to lose it)

Zac’s Gorgug being contemplative and also completely wrong face is so funny to me every time.

“Why would you kill me?”/“Why would you know that?”

Who is more insane? Gorgug for suggesting him and Fabian could be twins (aren’t they different ages????) or Bill for thinking he’s so awesome he could somehow do that?

Kristen trying to help FIg distract Bill by blurting out, “Have you ever had sex?” After the conversation where he said point blank he’s slept with 100s of orc women.

Fabian yelling at his dad is kinda undercut by continuing to call him papa in the most poncy accent.

I don’t think I’ve articulated this properly before but this episode really drove it home: Fabian and Bill have a *close* relationship but not an entirely healthy one. Like, better than Adaine and her parents by leaps and bounds but he wrestled his son in a jail cell while his friends just watched. Like, who does that?

Imagine if Riz had tried to get between Bill and Fabian.

Also imagine being the rest of the party just sitting there, watching that go down.

“We’ve spent so much of our lives obsessed with our dads and we’ve completely ignored our moms.”/“You’re just again talking about yourself.”

I can’t believe Fig’s suggestion spell would have worked if head boss in charge fed lady hadn’t been there. Speaking of her, as soon as she showed up I knew they weren’t going to be able to shenanigan their way out of this one (which is literally the word Emily used, hilariously). I don’t think even a nat 20 would have gotten them very far. Remember last week when I said that I was sure there was going to be a prom finale but I was also pretty sure there was still a good chunk of time before prom? As soon as they got arrested and the feds showed up I was like, “Oh they are not getting out until prom for sure.”

Siobhan trying not to laugh while Emily tries a ridiculous plan that might have worked in a different episode honestly.

Ally trying to Pirates of the Carribean her way out of the jail cell.

The cops didn’t even take their stuff in a month!

“I’m glad this is in my head and no one else can hear things like this.”

I love how Fabian rolls his eyes at Adaine for thanking her spells but he always thanks the Hangman.

Realistically the Hangman would have told Fabian the plan before it happened but the way it played out was soooo good.

The return of Mr. Cubby!!!! I was hoping it would be him but man! It was still so awesome to see happen. I wonder if Brennan introduced that family specifically in case the group ever needed to be busted out of jail (a likely need).

“Laws are threats made by the dominant socioeconomic ethnic group of a given nation.”

“You guys wanna make some bacon?”

“That was on fire the whole time? You’re so brave!” Adaine likes adults who aren’t her parents so much.

Riz being like uhhhhh my mom works here.

“To the AV club!”/“It’s been months!”

OK so they took a palimpsest from Bill in this episode. That was there to tip them off that he’s up to something I’m sure, but I feel like that could also turn out to be a Chekov’s gun for next ep. I’m sure the ability to trap someone’s should would be useful in the finale.

S/O to Brennan for his excellent foreshadowing throughout the episode and honestly the whole series.

Siobhan thinking to check the trash folder of his computer was a good move, even if it didn’t end up being the right one.

OK, strap in guys. This is where things get WILD.

Siobhan’s “Oh shit!” when she got halfway down the page of Watches and Wards and then that Harry Potter sounding sting in the background.

(Before I get any further, I love that Adaine’s first thought was well that means my sister isn’t Kal Vaxis because she thinks her sister is the root of all evil).

But WOW. After all the trash talking of the old oracle, it turns out Adaine is the new eleven oracle! And she has been since EPISODE ONE. I almost thought she was gonna be *that* elven oracle because of the questions the cast was asking but nope. It is, as Zac and Siobhan put it, a The Santa Clause situation where the last one dies and someone else gets the job.

Brennan’s faint amusement as they work through that is so good.

You know what’s kinda hilarious in hindsight about that? I said before that, so far, every person Adaine has pegged as trash has ended up being trash of the highest order and an enemy of the party and of course she’s been good at predicting things! She’s the literal oracle.

Am I reading this wrong or is the Religious Studies teacher name Yolanda Badgood?

Also the sheet says “Lunchlad (Official Title)” RIP dude.

Emily low key thinking this is going to be about pay disparity between the races.

Will putting the book back retroactively get rid of anything bad currently cast in school?

Brennan going, “Nothing happens.”/“You see an upside down waste paper basket.” Is such a GM mood. I had a session once where I spent half an hour just saying, “You’re looking at the door,” in various ways.

No one knows what Goldenhoard’s name actually is and it’s the second to last episode.

I feel like Brennan must have gotten forehead/cheek kissed a lot as a child because he’s constantly having NPCs do it.

Are elves in this setting actually immortal (barring being actually killed) or just long lived? Because Adaine talks like she’s immortal but I wasn’t sure. Anyway, newsflash Adaine. You’ve been mortal this whole campaign! Because apparently, the elven oracle always eventually dies.

I love that Adaine finally confronted the oracle about sinking on a ship and actually ended up kinda sympathizing with her. I can’t believe this is how that running joke ends.

Fabian at the ghost of the past eleven oracle who’s imparting wisdom on Adaine: Who are you?

Ally: Can I do something weird? (Dude, when do you not?)

Ally mumbling through an inspiring spell as Murph clues in to the paperwork discrepancy that blows the plot twist wide open. And then miming the whole thing in the background as the scene goes on.

“He was mean so I thought that meant he was a good guy.” More stern than mean really but yeah! Same Murph!

You know how you know things are about to get real? When the DM starts letting you do stuff like bust down doors without even rolling for it because there are bigger fish to fry.

The 69 glyphs of binding. Nice.

But in seriousness, Kal Vaxis (apparently it’s spelled Kalvaxus but I can’t be bothered to change that in this post) was apparently trapped by Arthur and bound to work at Aguefort (as Goldenhoard) because…he’s a wildcard I guess. Sidenote, can you imagine what this season might have looked like if Arthur hadn’t died? Or was that always the plan for him to die in some way? Like to resurrect an NPC maybe if the crew hadn’t lost 2 party members.

Man when he said last ep that the girls were going back to school I thought OK that makes sense because it’s the AV computer that Biz used or maybe it’s Penelope. But I totally overlooked teachers.

OK so the binding spell specifically says “as long as I live” and Arthur is dead. So….what does that mean exactly? And this plan seems to have been in motion from before Arthur died. What does that mean? Also, if that wording means he’s freed when Arthur dies, what was Arthur thinking killing himself???? Did he need Kristen to sneak him into heaven so he could talk to Sol and do some scheming or something? AHHHHH I have so many questions.

Also in the binding is a clause about tea. Now, first of all, Arthur, bro. Come on. Second of all, a lawyer really should have looked at that. “I will drink anything you give me”? I work at a law firm. I’m a lowly first year but even I know that’s a terrible thing to put in a contract. I’m sure y'all non lawyers know that too!

Karam-Kajam (the binding spell words) kinda looks like “magic maker” backwards. That doesn’t mean anything. I just wanted y'all to know I was freeze framing every thing that might be a clue.

OK ok ok, so I’ve been saying for a while now (in posts but mainly over chat) that all this bad stuff must be like connected to a central person in service of a central goal but the players were probably all unconnected wild cards acting in self interest. The one thing I couldn’t quite put together was what because these plots have been mainly unconnected. But now, we have it! All the weird things starting a war (by manipulating the harvestmen), getting 7 maidens (by manipulating Biz), and reinstating prom king/queen (by manipulating (?) Penelope and Dayne, also yes! my wild card guess was that prom king/queen was going to be part of a spell or curse or something. Guess it was prophecy but yes! vindication!) are parts of a prophecy on how to bring back Kalvaxis! (Along with him getting his “glittering treasure”?)

But yeah! No wonder it was so hard to put the pieces together! They all connected but only through a prophecy. Good job Bren!

“The sun shall fall from the heavens” is part of the prophecy which makes me think Sol or Helios might be involved in this somehow.

Ally: There are definitely going to be 7 virgins at prom. (That deserved a rim shot).

Good on Murph for making sure none of them were on the virgin list bc that would have been a pain in the ass to find out mid-fight. Also, I KNEW “Where are their bodies” was the question to ask last ep when Biz said they were going back to their bodies.

“Who told you that? An oracle?”

I hope Adaine just uses her oracle status to make sick one liners like, “I predict this is gonna hurt,” before she witchbolts someone. She never does her actual job.

Adaine who hates her family, righteously indignant: Between our houses and the world, you expect us to choose our houses?

The rest of the group who loves their family: BYEEEEE.

Well, no. Kristen also had reservations before she remembered her brothers existed.

Adaine texting her mom: You should probably leave.

Siobahn and Ally fistbumping over their mutual not caring about their parents.

OK so what’s up with the rat? What’s so important about the rat? And what’s up with Zayne? We still haven’t figured out what’s up with him.

Still not clear on if the crystals trap your physical body or just your spirit and leave your physical body dormant irl.

So that’s how they got rid of the adults for the fight. Nice job again Brennan.

As far as I can tell, Brennan made up this usage of the word palimpsest and I’d never heard of the word before and now I type it so much. Wild.

“I’m calling an Uber. You use the minute to go look at as much shit as you can. Jump in the Uber with me, come to my house. Look Rudolpho will be here in two minutes in a Honda Civic. Use one of those minutes. Go.”

A Knight to Remember.

They freaking Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to Kristen’s house.

I love how Uber Drivers in this world are still gunning for 5 stars.

OK, time for the most stressful 30 minutes of Fantasy High (so far).

I think the wagering mechanic Brennan used for the fights was brilliant. For each conflict a d20 was rolled. 1-6=epic fail. 7-14=bad but not awful. 15-20=favorable outcome. The twist was that if the person chose to help their family they could give up half their HP and 14 spell levels and he would roll with advantage.

Everyone quickly took that deal except Adaine who truly does not give a damn about her family (and also, reasonably, thought that they wouldn’t even be at home. Idk why they apparently were tbh).

When Emily said, “She’s a complex person and she’s allowed to be,” that was the moment I was like, “Oh yeah. She’s not actually Fig. IRL she knows what’s happening.”

Siobhan uses her divination roll of 18 to save Kristen’s family without having to risk anything but the Ally turns around and decides to take the deal to try and save Adaine’s family WHEN ADAINE DOESN’T EVEN CARE. But it makes sense that Kristen would.

Lou’s monolog as Brennan rolls about how nerve wracking and terrible it is to have no idea what’s going on.

“This is the worst thing I’ve been a part of.”

“I was wondering why my mom visited me and humanized herself and this is exactly why.”

Lou/Fabian: What if my fucking family dies? (F O R E S H A D O W I N G, albeit unknowingly)

Brennan (sagely): It couldn’t have been any other way./Siobhan: It could’ve been!

lol at Adaine trying to trigger that ice cream later wish at their darkest moment (so far). Also, not that I think Brennan ever forgot about it but now I’m for sure it’s gonna come up next ep bc if nothing else that would have reminded him.

OK first up, Fig and her mom.

“Dang they’re already organized with costumes?”

That was so boss, her mom getting revived and then IMMEDIATELY shooting two guys w/ her bow.

Emily LEGIT crying through that scene. The whole room was on an emotional tightrope. You can tell.

Where in the mountains Sandra-Lynn!? I want specifics Sandra-Lynn!!

I love the idea of her jumping out of a window onto a dope griffin’s back. Fig’s mom just bought herself a bunch of spots on my grown-up rankings list.

Ally: THAT WAS NUMBER ONE

Me: SAME.

Next Riz at Strongtower

I knew Sklonda was going to be in the secret room!

I love that apparently Riz can recognize his mom’s gun by hearing it.

I know it was in the promo but Riz’s mom being like, “I was so scared you were gonna ask me to prom” was hysterical.

You just know Sklonda and Agent Angela have been fighting like cats and dogs this past month.

Riz and his mom high fiving. They have the best relationship.

Gorgug and the Thistlesprings

lol, looks like his parents had the easiest time wrecking their intruders.

But based on how it was described as compared to everyone else (bar Fabian–we’re getting there), it sounds like he got pretty dang hurt.

And I guess they have a tank (which they usually use to mow the lawn) and a bomb chest? Wild.

Anyway, if anything had happened to them insert Rosa B99 meme.

“You come to the tree, you better be ready to never fucking leave, you understand?” So boss. (Also, is that a pun?)

Gorgug’s parents launched a satellite while Gorgug was in jail.

Kristen and co.

Kristen’s dad (who is the worst): You think these guys were illegals, what?

Kristen: I’m gonna take the car, byeeee.

Kristen and Adaine bonding over their terrible parents.

I’m Concerned about Kristen’s brothers.

Abernants

They poofed out. Idk why they were still there to begin with.

So the damage they took was supposed to represent the danger the took in their respective fights. Kristen got Adaine’s divination roll meaning her family was fine either way but she did take damage for Adaine’s family. But the fight was already over by the time they got there. So, in story, any injuries sustained must have been from the fight at her house, even though that wasn’t technically the deal.

Anyway, Adaine doesn’t care about her family so let’s not waste any time moving onto

Seacaster manor

Geez

OK, you guys. Let me tell you my buildup to the realization that Bill had to die.

In the first set of episodes, when tone was established, I said to myself, a parent is going to die. I don’t know who, but someone will.

Then, Bill gave them a training montage and I thought, curse of the mentor. He’s going to die. Besides, he’s one of the biggest parental figures and he’s larger than life–perfect for a fall.

Then Sklonda took down the Harvestmen and I briefly shifted my worry to her.

But then Fabian started clashing with Bill. And I remembered all the constant talk of his mortality.

And then, this ep, Brennan made him choose between his mom and dad and I was pretty sure. (sidenote: Fabian yelling at his mom the same ep Adaine said he has a great relationship with his mom. But, like, compared to her, maybe. Also, mean Brennan.)

And then Fabian lost an eye (with a description that still makes me wince) and I KNEW. Once he lost his eye, there was no way Bill could leave the fight alive, thematically.

Honestly, it was a wrap when Fabian played the video from his dad. I was worried he’d die before he got there.

(It was a low blow, and I credit you that.)

Why were there Harvestmen attacking Fabian’s house and no one elses?

Fabian’s mom just drinking while the house is being raided.

I was so sure the tuxed Harvestman who attacked Fabian was going to turn out to somehow be Daybreak or something. Anyway, it has to come up again. There’s no reason for that level of detail otherwise. And tux sounds like prom attire.

Lou rolls a nat 1 and then rerolls it because he has the lucky trait. What’s funny is just started listening to NADNDPod and Murph (who reminded Lou about the lucky thing) disallowed one of his players from rerolling a nat 1 even w/ the lucky in the last ep I listened to. I don’t remember if the circumstances were different though.

Bill handcuffing himself up to keep fighting. Yikes.

Anyway, ugh that whole death scene. I would write more but this is closing in on 4k words and I’ve been working on this for hours. I just wanna say, that was a perfect way to go out for him. Killing 60 people and then getting stabbed by his son and exploding. So baller (as was Fabian jumping out the window onto his bike and catching Bill’s sword. He has so many cool swords now).

It’s a crime no one does animatics for this show.

We also got a piece of the puzzle. Bill was the one supplying the palimpsests (or at least one of the ones. who was doing it before?) not for an evil reason. Just a chaotic neutral reason of wanting to recapture the glory days. So now we know that.

I mentioned this before but…Fabian is Thor.

“I SHALL LEAP INTO HELL AND KILL THE DEVIL HIMSELF” and Bill Seacaster is dril apparently.

I love Fabian destroying the nice thing Bill said about him to preserve his legacy.

Ally: HE COULD HAVE SURVIVED.

I appreciate so much that Lou knew his character so well that without any hesitation he stabbed Bill and that was the right choice.

Whew, that was a lot.

Also, not that I don’t trust Brennan but it’s wild that Bill, the most thematically appropriate parent to die, was the only one who failed his roll apparently.

Aww at Zelda’s message to Gorgug. She made him a playlist! So 80’s high school. It gives him a bonus! Also I really wanna know what’s on the list. Like, is it all fantasy rock puns or actual songs? Yay for Brennan giving them cool items for good RPing.

Live band. Nice.

Emily and Zac both rolled 20’s for initiative for next week’s fight. Hopefully that’s a good omen. We have no way of knowing because THERE’S NO PROMO FOR NEXT WEEK.

AHHHHHHHHHHHH

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

This isn’t edited. This is more than 4000 words. This is so long my computer is about to die. Thank you and goodnight.

#fantasy high #fantasy high spoilers #spoilers #asks #anon #Anonymous

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riichardwilson · 4 years

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Transcript of Changing Minds in Sales, Marketing, and Business

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape marketing agency Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr CMS. It’s a modern cloud based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. You can find them at zephyrcms.com, more about this later in the show.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape marketing agency Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jonah Berger. He’s a professor, professional professor I suppose at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and he’s an expert on things like word of mouth and viral marketing agency and social influence and he’s also the author of several books. We’re going to talk about his newest one, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. Welcome Jonah.

Jonah Berger: Thanks for having me back.

John Jantsch: So before we get into talking about the book, I do want to compliment you on the palette of colors on your covers. They’re all very neatly tied together. If we had them together right now, people would see yellow for the new book, kind of an aqua and then an orange and they all just really fit together as a set.

Jonah Berger: That’s my goal, [inaudible 00:01:16] you want to collect all three, you want to have them as a reference next to your desk.

John Jantsch: That’s awesome. So I have heard you called a world renowned expert on change and I just wonder what’s the training for that?

Jonah Berger: You know, I’ve spent over 20 years doing research on the science of change, whether we think about changes as persuasion, whether we think about change as social influence, everything from a PhD in marketing agency in this general area to hundreds of studies that we’ve conducted in the space. So I don’t know if world renowned is exactly right, but hopefully it’s at least close.

John Jantsch: So before we get into kind of the framework and what the book is really, kind of breaking the book down in chunks, what would be the scope of the application? I mean, people need to change bad habits. There needs to be culture change at large organizations. Are you prepared to say this kind of works regardless of the scope?

Jonah Berger: I would say it’s more focused on others than the self, though, certainly you can apply some of the ideas to the self. I think the quick story behind this book is I’m an academic, so I’ve taught at the Wharton School for 13 years now, a number of years ago, came out with this book Contagious: Why Things Catch On, had worked with companies before then, but, nowhere close to the scope of what happened afterwards. And so I’ve gotten the chance to work with large fortune five hundreds from the Googles and the Nike’s and the Apples to small startups and mid size companies and B2B and B2C, dry cleaners, everything, every business you can imagine. And I really learned a lot about what businesses are wrestling with. And I realized that everyone in some level had something they wanted to change.

Jonah Berger: So the sales people want to change client’s mind and marketing agency wants to change consumer behavior. Leaders want to transform organizations. Employees want to change their boss’s mind. Yet change is really hard. Whichever of those things we’re trying to change, we often have tried a number of times and we’ve often failed. And so what I started to wonder is could there be a better way? And so, in the last few years, both on the research front as well as on the consulting side, spent a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, could there be a better way to change minds and organizations, might there be a more effective approach? And if so, how can we codify that approach and how people apply it?

John Jantsch: Okay. So before we get into that approach, and I was going to say, I was basically going to ask you why is change so hard? You just kind of stole my thunder there and said change is hard.

Jonah Berger: Oh, sorry.

John Jantsch: No, but really, I’m sure in your research, a lot of what you discovered is why it’s so hard. What are some of the reasons that people resist change so much?

Jonah Berger: Yeah, I mean I think at its core, often when we try to change something, whether it’s a person’s mind, whether it’s organization, whenever it is, we default to some version of what I’ll call pushing. So we send more emails, we provide more information. We give more reasons. We think if we just explain why something is a good idea, why we want people to do something, they’ll come along and that intuition makes a lot of sense. Implicitly it comes from the physical world, right? When you have a chair, whether it’s at home or at your office and you want to move that chair, pushing that chair is a great way to go, right? Provide more compulsion, more pushing in one direction, why people should do something in particular and that chair will move in that direction. There’s only one problem. People aren’t like chairs.

Jonah Berger: When you push people, they don’t just go, they tend to push back. When you push them in one direction, they don’t just listen. They tend to think about all the reasons why what you’re suggesting is wrong and they tend to sometimes even go in the opposite direction. And so what I soon realized is that successful change agents don’t think about why someone might change but what they could do to get someone to change. They ask a very slightly but importantly different question, which is why hasn’t that person changed already? What are the barriers or the obstacles that are in their way and how can I mitigate them? I think a good analogy, if you think about getting in a car, so you’ve parked on an incline, you’re getting in your car, you stick your key in the ignition, you put your seatbelt in, you step your foot on the gas, you’re ready to go.

Jonah Berger: If the car doesn’t go, we often just think we need more gas, right? If I just press on that gas pedal a little more, the car will move. But sometimes we just need to depress that parking brake. Sometimes we just need to get rid of the stuff that’s in the way that’s preventing change from happening and mitigate it. And so that’s what the book is all about. It talks about the five key or common parking brakes or barriers, obstacles that prevent change. And how by mitigating those obstacles, removing those obstacles, we can make change more likely.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about, and I do want you… You’ve even got a nice acronym, so we definitely want to unpack the framework, but there’s, again, I want to keep drilling on this where maybe people get it wrong. I know early in my career, I mean everybody sells. It doesn’t matter what your title is at some point you’re selling. And I remember I used to really make the mistake, took me a long time to learn this, I used to really make the mistake of saying, Oh, well this is their problem, clearly, and going and telling them what they were doing wrong. I learned pretty quickly, that was a great way to get a lot of resistance.

Jonah Berger: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Even if I was right.

Jonah Berger: Yes.

John Jantsch: In your research, is that one of the kind of common mistakes that, be they salespeople or anybody trying to change somebody’s mind makes?

Jonah Berger: Yeah, I think what you’re pointing out is to get someone to change, we really have to understand them and that’s often hard for us, even our personal lives, right? As you were talking, this happens in our personal lives all the time, right? We think we know what’s best for someone. We think we know why someone’s doing something. We make a suggestion, but we don’t actually understand the core, the core reason. I talk about this a lot is finding the root. So I think about this. I don’t have a large yard, but I have a large enough yard that I have to weed and often when we want to get rid of weeds, we do the same thing when we’re trying to sell, which is we just do the quickest approach, right? We just rip the top off that weed and we move on to the next one.

Jonah Berger: We want to convince 10 people, we want to as quickly as possible, convince the first and move on to the next. But the problem is if we don’t understand the core, that underlying issue, and if we don’t find the root cause of what the problem is, it’s going to be really hard to get that person to change or get rid of that weed. Weed is just going to grow back. And so we really have to spend more time getting outside of ourselves, understanding that person, where they are in that journey, whether it’s a customer journey, employee journey, whatever it might be, where they are in that decision making process, what stage they’re at, what the barriers are that are preventing them from doing what we want them to, and then figure out how to mitigate them. Someone said it very nicely, we need to stop selling and get people to buy in. And I think that’s a really nice way of articulating it. Right? Stop thinking about what we want. Think more about what they want and it’ll make it more likely that they can persuade themselves.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And on the flip side of that, I guess, where I’ve felt like I’ve had my most success in getting somebody to change is to actually get them to see how much it’s costing them, not to change.

Jonah Berger: Oh, yes.

John Jantsch: Or if we did achieve this result it would be worth like 10 times what the investment is and so I’d be silly not to change. I mean that, getting that kind of, I guess what you just called buy-in is really important, isn’t it?

Jonah Berger: Yeah. I mean one of the chapters talks about this idea of the endowment effect, which is basically we value things we’re doing already more than things we’re not, which is great for the status quo, right? We value the status quo highly. The project we’re doing, the client we’re using, the software we have already, we know it and even though it has problems, we like what we have already. The problem is we’ve got to get people to switch to something new and they think that sticking with the old thing is costless. People talk a lot about switching and costs, right? The time, money, effort or energy to get people to switch. When you buy a new phone, for example, it costs you money. You install a new software package it requires time and effort to get it to work without all the other systems.

Jonah Berger: As a leader you try to get people to be more innovative. Well that’s costly. They have to change their practices of what they’re doing, but it’s particularly challenging because they’re attached to that old way of doing things and they think the old way is fine. Essentially we think, okay, we just keep doing what we’re doing. It has no cost. But often the status quo is not as costless as it seems. And so what that chapter talks a lot about is how do we make people realize that doing nothing actually isn’t costless. There’s a cost to doing nothing and it’s more expensive as you articulated than people might actually think.

John Jantsch: Oh, often is, yeah. You know, today content is everything. So our websites are really content management systems, but they’ve got to work like one. Checkout Zephyr. It is a modern cloud-based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. It’s really easy to use. It’s very fast, won’t mess with your SEO Company. I mean, it really reduces the time and effort to launch your client’s websites, beautiful themes, just really fast, profitable way to go. They include an agency services to really kind of make them your plug and play dev shop, checkout zephyr.com that is Z-E-P-H-Y-R-CMS.com.

John Jantsch: So what role does choice play in getting people to change their mind? So in other words, give people 10 choices so that they can pick the one they want, because we all want options. I’ve learned at least over the years that actually causes paralysis.

Jonah Berger: Yeah. So the first chapter in the book, the first content chapter, the first letter in the framework, is an R for reactance. And I’ll briefly talk about reactance and then I’ll go to answer your question about choice. To understand why choice happens, it is important, we need to understand reactants. That’s basically what we talked about before where when we push people, people push back and in a sense people have an almost innate anti-persuasion radar, just like an antimissile defense system. When we detect incoming projectile, the boss is trying to convince us, a client’s trying to convince us, a salesperson is trying to convince us. Whenever we feel someone’s trying to convince us, we put our defenses up. We either ignore the message, we avoid listening to it in the first place or even worse, we counter argue, right?

Jonah Berger: People often talk about this, you pitch something, someone’s not just sitting there, they’re sitting there thinking about all the reasons why you’re wrong, why what you’re suggesting is a bad thing to do. And so whether we’re a boss and trying to get an organization to change, or get people to change or whether they’re a consultant or a sales person or a marketing agency person trying to get a client to change, we need to think about how we avoid that anti-persuasion radar. And in a sense, part of the problem is people like to feel like they have choice, freedom and autonomy. I like to feel like I’m the one driving what’s happening in my life. Why did I decide to take this particular job? Because I like this job. Why did I decide to buy this particular product or service? Because I felt it’s the best product or service.

Jonah Berger: But if someone else is also trying to convince me to do it, it’s not clear whether I did it because I like it, I’m in that driver’s seat or someone else likes it and they are in the driver’s seat. And so because of that, people push back. So one way to deal with that is to provide a choice but a certain type of choice. And that’s where I think it gets to your initial question. So think about a meeting, right? We’re trying to pitch somebody on something in particular. If we give them one option, they often sit there and think about all the reasons why that option is wrong. So if we’re a leader, for example, we’re trying to change organizational culture. We have an all hands meeting, we say, Hey guys, we need to do this. This is how we’re going to behave moving forward.

Jonah Berger: The challenge, everyone’s sitting there going, God, how are we going to implement this? Is it actually going to work? It’s going to be super expensive. How’s it going to affect my compensation? I was working with a midsize real estate firm, was dealing with the lack of this or changing the way they do business, but everyone’s worried about their compensation. So they’re sitting there going, what’s in it for me? And so rather than think about all the upsides of the change, I think about all the reasons why it doesn’t work. And so what smart leaders and smart catalysts do in this situation is they don’t just give people one option. They give people multiple. Rather than giving people one choice, they give them at least two. And what it does, it subtly shifts the role of the listener.

Jonah Berger: Because rather than sitting there thinking about all the reasons wrong with what’s being suggested, now they’re sitting there going, which of these two or three things do I like better? Which is the best for me? And because they’re focused on which is the best for them, they’re much more likely to go along at the end. It’s guided choice in a sense. And you’re very right, it’s not infinite choice. It’s not 50 options, it’s not 40 options, it’s not 30 options. It’s two, three, may be four, enough to give people freedom. It’s choice but with you choosing the choice set. You’re choosing a limited set, a guided set of choices among which people are choosing from. They get to feel they participated, they feel like they had some freedom and autonomy. But you’re shaping that journey along the way.

John Jantsch: So I should let you, at this point I bet you’ve mentioned several of the elements. I should kind of allow you to talk about the framework itself and how you would, as you mentioned, codify helping people make change.

Jonah Berger: Oh yeah, sure and we’re not going to have time to cover all five, so it’s no problem. But the book talks about the five main barriers or five main obstacles to change. Whether you’re trying to change minds, organizations or whatever it might be. The five fit into a framework. It’s reactance is the first one we talked a little bit about. Endowment is the second. Distance is the third. Uncertainty is the fourth. Corroborating evidence is the fifth. Take those five things together, they spell the word reduce, which exactly what good catalysts do, right? They don’t add temperature, they don’t add pressure, they don’t push harder, they don’t add more reasons. They’ve reduced the barriers or those obstacles to change. And so the book is all about what each of these obstacles is. What’s the science behind it, why is it such a prevalent obstacle, and then what are some ways that we can mitigate it.

John Jantsch: So we’ve talked, I feel like we’ve talked probably about reactance quite a bit. So you want to maybe just go down the chain and talk a little bit about endowment?

Jonah Berger: Sure, yeah. I’ll talk about whichever one seems the best fit, but happy to talk about endowment. The idea of endowment, and I alluded to this a little bit already, we tend to be very emotionally attached to the status quo, what we’re doing already. Homeowners for example, the longer they’ve lived in their home, the more they value it above market, right? Why? Because they can’t believe that no one would value it as much as they do because they’ve been doing it so long. But there’s lots of very nice experiments that show this in a variety of contexts. Compare something you don’t have already with something that you do have already, and we tend to value that thing we have already more. So if I give you a coffee mug, for example, and I say, Hey, so you don’t have that coffee mug yet, I asked you how much you’d be willing to pay to buy that coffee mug.

Jonah Berger: You assign a value to it. I ask a different set of people, okay, here is this coffee mug. It’s yours. How much would you pay to sell it? Now you think that the buyers and sellers would have the same valuation for that mug. It’s still the same mug, still holds coffee and tea looks exactly the same, but the people that already have it value it more, because for them it’s the status quo. It’s what they’re used to. They’re endowed with it already. And so as leaders, this is really hard because the stuff we’re already doing, people value it more. They know it, it feels safer. The new things feel risky and uncertain. And so it’s really hard to get people to budge off the old ones because they value what they’re doing already.

John Jantsch: What role does social proof play really in change? I see a lot of times people are more convinced by saying, Oh yeah, look at these other people are doing it. Okay, maybe that is a safe choice for me to make because… Is there an element of we don’t trust ourselves unless we get that kind of proof from other people?

Jonah Berger: Yes. Yes, and… I would say yes. We don’t trust ourselves. We also don’t trust the one person that’s trying to convince us. So imagine you walk into the office Monday morning or you’re talking to friend Monday morning and they go, Oh my God, I saw the most amazing television show this weekend. You’d absolutely love it. This is what it is. Okay. You have some information, you know that person likes that show, but you’re trying to figure out a couple things. One, you’re trying to figure out, does that mean the show is good, to say something about the show? Or does it say something about them? And second, what does their endorsement mean for whether I would like it? In some sense you’re looking for proof and there’s a translation problem, right? If one person likes something, it’s hard to know if it says about them or the thing itself. And so often we’re looking for multiple others to provide that source of proof.

John Jantsch: So how much, in your opinion, do these principles apply, say in copywriting? Obviously you’re not sitting across the desk, but you’re trying to make change. Is there sort of a path that you need to walk down or that you could potentially walk down say in a document?

Jonah Berger: Oh, certainly. I think a lot of the examples in the book are ones about people talking to others, but many are also about written language. Even something when we’re dealing with reactants, for example, asking questions rather than making statements, right? So as soon as we make statements, that radar goes up, right? People are counter-arguing with those statements. Instead, good change agents often ask questions. Think about in a health context, for example, rather than telling people, Hey, smoking is bad. Ask people a question. What’s the consequence of smoking for your health? Right? A great leader did this, this wasn’t in copywriting, but I was in a meeting, obviously leaders want to get their employees to work harder. Guy was trying, it was working. It wasn’t really working. When the boss says work harder, everyone says, ah, no thanks. So instead what he did in the meeting and said, Hey, what type of organization do we want to be?

Jonah Berger: Do we want to be a good organization or great organization? Now obviously we know how everyone answers that question. No one goes, we want to be an okay organization. Everybody goes, Oh, we want to be a great organization. And then he said, okay, well how do we become a great organization? And then what the room has is a conversation about how they get there. But because they’ve participated in that conversation, it’s much harder for them not to commit to the conclusion later on because that conclusion was something they reached on their own. Right? It’s they have stake, they have a stake in the outcome. They have skin in the game. And so in some sense they’re much more likely to go along with it. And so when you think about the same thing in copywriting, not using statements, but asking questions, giving people a chance to experience something themselves, not just providing information and reasons, but by reducing the barriers even in written form as well.

John Jantsch: Yeah, because it’s a bit of a journey, right? I mean you’re almost like going hurdle after hurdle, aren’t you?

Jonah Berger: Yeah. I think the customer journeys are really the important way to think about all this, right? What stage is someone in that journey? Why haven’t they moved to the next stage? Whether it’s a customer, an actual customer, or a customer in quotes, right? An employee can be a customer. They’re just a person who’s a part of a decision making process. Why haven’t they moved to the next stage of that journey? What’s stopping them and how can I mitigate that barrier?

Jonah Berger: I was working with a software firm a few years ago that helps companies find machine parts. So imagine you have a backhoe and it goes out. Something breaks. You got to find a machine part and they’ll help you find that faster and more cheaply. And they realized different customers had different issues, right? Some people didn’t realize they existed. That’s one issue. Other people realized they existed but didn’t think they had a problem. That’s the second issue. Other people realize they had a problem but didn’t realize that this thing would be a good solution or didn’t trust it. That’s a third issue. Other people trusted it, didn’t know if they could afford it. Other people knew they could afford it, but didn’t know how to integrate with the existing system. And so depending on where people are in that journey, we can write down that journey for anyone. What are those barriers, those roadblocks, those hurdles? How can we mitigate them and make it more frictionless to move to that conclusion?

John Jantsch: Well, I tell you the challenge in what I just heard you describing is, how do you get that story? How do you identify all of those challenges? I guess it’s just in objections that you’re getting maybe in sales presentations?

Jonah Berger: I think it’s some of that. I think it’s also collecting information. Even thinking about in sales presentation, asking more questions than just saying things. If you’re a leader of an organization, figuring out, well, how can I figure out what people need and what they’re not getting? Rather than sort of suggesting solutions, start with asking questions. Hey, we want to transform organizational culture, what are you guys worried about, about transforming our organizational culture? What do you think was good about the organization and what things do you think we could work on? Getting people’s buy in before making those decisions makes them much more likely to go along. And so some is, it requires a longer time, right? It certainly requires a bit more effort early on to collect that information, but it makes those transitions much more effective.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. So Jonah, where can people find out more about your work and obviously the book itself?

Jonah Berger: Yeah, so the book is available wherever books are sold. So Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you like, audio books as well. They can find me on my website. That’s just Jonah, J-O-N-A-H, Berger, B-E-R-G-E-R.com. And I’m also on LinkedIn as well as @j1berger on Twitter.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Jonah, thanks for stopping by yet again, and hopefully we will run into you soon someday out there on the road.

Jonah Berger: Thanks so much for having me.

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laurelkrugerr · 4 years

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Transcript of Changing Minds in Sales, Marketing, and Business

Back to Podcast

Jonah Berger: Thanks for having me back.

Jonah Berger: That’s my goal, [inaudible 00:01:16] you want to collect all three, you want to have them as a reference next to your desk.

John Jantsch: That’s awesome. So I have heard you called a world renowned expert on change and I just wonder what’s the training for that?

Jonah Berger: Oh, sorry.

John Jantsch: No, but really, I’m sure in your research, a lot of what you discovered is why it’s so hard. What are some of the reasons that people resist change so much?

Jonah Berger: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Even if I was right.

Jonah Berger: Yes.

John Jantsch: In your research, is that one of the kind of common mistakes that, be they salespeople or anybody trying to change somebody’s mind makes?

Jonah Berger: Oh, yes.

John Jantsch: So we’ve talked, I feel like we’ve talked probably about reactance quite a bit. So you want to maybe just go down the chain and talk a little bit about endowment?

John Jantsch: Yeah, because it’s a bit of a journey, right? I mean you’re almost like going hurdle after hurdle, aren’t you?

John Jantsch: Speaking with Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. So Jonah, where can people find out more about your work and obviously the book itself?

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Jonah, thanks for stopping by yet again, and hopefully we will run into you soon someday out there on the road.

Jonah Berger: Thanks so much for having me.

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scpie · 4 years

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Transcript of Changing Minds in Sales, Marketing, and Business

Back to Podcast

Jonah Berger: Thanks for having me back.

Jonah Berger: That’s my goal, [inaudible 00:01:16] you want to collect all three, you want to have them as a reference next to your desk.

John Jantsch: That’s awesome. So I have heard you called a world renowned expert on change and I just wonder what’s the training for that?

Jonah Berger: Oh, sorry.

John Jantsch: No, but really, I’m sure in your research, a lot of what you discovered is why it’s so hard. What are some of the reasons that people resist change so much?

Jonah Berger: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Even if I was right.

Jonah Berger: Yes.

John Jantsch: In your research, is that one of the kind of common mistakes that, be they salespeople or anybody trying to change somebody’s mind makes?

Jonah Berger: Oh, yes.

John Jantsch: So we’ve talked, I feel like we’ve talked probably about reactance quite a bit. So you want to maybe just go down the chain and talk a little bit about endowment?

John Jantsch: Yeah, because it’s a bit of a journey, right? I mean you’re almost like going hurdle after hurdle, aren’t you?

John Jantsch: Speaking with Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. So Jonah, where can people find out more about your work and obviously the book itself?

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Jonah, thanks for stopping by yet again, and hopefully we will run into you soon someday out there on the road.

Jonah Berger: Thanks so much for having me.

Free eBook 7 Steps to Scale Your Consulting Practice Without Adding Overhead

“This training from Duct Tape marketing agency has exceeded my expectations and I couldn’t be happier” ~ Brooke Patterson, VanderMedia

Website Design & SEO Delray Beach by DBL07.co

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source http://www.scpie.org/transcript-of-changing-minds-in-sales-marketing-and-business/

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goodra-king · 4 years

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Transcript of Changing Minds in Sales, Marketing, and Business

Transcript of Changing Minds in Sales, Marketing, and Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr CMS. It’s a modern cloud based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. You can find them at zephyrcms.com, more about this later in the show.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jonah Berger. He’s a professor, professional professor I suppose at Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and he’s an expert on things like word of mouth and viral marketing and social influence and he’s also the author of several books. We’re going to talk about his newest one, The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. Welcome Jonah.

Jonah Berger: Thanks for having me back.

Jonah Berger: That’s my goal, [inaudible 00:01:16] you want to collect all three, you want to have them as a reference next to your desk.

John Jantsch: That’s awesome. So I have heard you called a world renowned expert on change and I just wonder what’s the training for that?

Jonah Berger: You know, I’ve spent over 20 years doing research on the science of change, whether we think about changes as persuasion, whether we think about change as social influence, everything from a PhD in marketing in this general area to hundreds of studies that we’ve conducted in the space. So I don’t know if world renowned is exactly right, but hopefully it’s at least close.

Jonah Berger: So the sales people want to change client’s mind and marketing wants to change consumer behavior. Leaders want to transform organizations. Employees want to change their boss’s mind. Yet change is really hard. Whichever of those things we’re trying to change, we often have tried a number of times and we’ve often failed. And so what I started to wonder is could there be a better way? And so, in the last few years, both on the research front as well as on the consulting side, spent a lot of time trying to figure out, okay, could there be a better way to change minds and organizations, might there be a more effective approach? And if so, how can we codify that approach and how people apply it?

Jonah Berger: Oh, sorry.

John Jantsch: No, but really, I’m sure in your research, a lot of what you discovered is why it’s so hard. What are some of the reasons that people resist change so much?

Jonah Berger: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Even if I was right.

Jonah Berger: Yes.

John Jantsch: In your research, is that one of the kind of common mistakes that, be they salespeople or anybody trying to change somebody’s mind makes?

Jonah Berger: Oh, yes.

John Jantsch: Oh, often is, yeah. You know, today content is everything. So our websites are really content management systems, but they’ve got to work like one. Checkout Zephyr. It is a modern cloud-based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. It’s really easy to use. It’s very fast, won’t mess with your SEO. I mean, it really reduces the time and effort to launch your client’s websites, beautiful themes, just really fast, profitable way to go. They include an agency services to really kind of make them your plug and play dev shop, checkout zephyr.com that is Z-E-P-H-Y-R-CMS.com.

Jonah Berger: People often talk about this, you pitch something, someone’s not just sitting there, they’re sitting there thinking about all the reasons why you’re wrong, why what you’re suggesting is a bad thing to do. And so whether we’re a boss and trying to get an organization to change, or get people to change or whether they’re a consultant or a sales person or a marketing person trying to get a client to change, we need to think about how we avoid that anti-persuasion radar. And in a sense, part of the problem is people like to feel like they have choice, freedom and autonomy. I like to feel like I’m the one driving what’s happening in my life. Why did I decide to take this particular job? Because I like this job. Why did I decide to buy this particular product or service? Because I felt it’s the best product or service.

John Jantsch: So we’ve talked, I feel like we’ve talked probably about reactance quite a bit. So you want to maybe just go down the chain and talk a little bit about endowment?

John Jantsch: Yeah, because it’s a bit of a journey, right? I mean you’re almost like going hurdle after hurdle, aren’t you?

John Jantsch: Speaking with Jonah Berger, author of The Catalyst: How to Change Anyone’s Mind. So Jonah, where can people find out more about your work and obviously the book itself?

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Jonah, thanks for stopping by yet again, and hopefully we will run into you soon someday out there on the road.

Jonah Berger: Thanks so much for having me.

from http://bit.ly/2Q3WMwc

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fashiontrendin-blog · 6 years

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My Fiancé and I Look Forward to Couples Therapy More Than Date Night

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My Fiancé and I Look Forward to Couples Therapy More Than Date Night

Like everyone else, I’m obsessed with Esther Perel’s raw, intimate couples’ therapy podcast, Where Should We Begin? When I first started listening, I had just moved to a new city with a (newish) partner. Since meeting a year and a half before, we’d moved in together, gotten engaged and relocated to Boston for his new job (which meant temporarily giving up mine). The stress of these changes left our relationship frayed. To be brutally honest, it also highlighted what had become perilously obvious: We simply didn’t know each other that well. We had yet to become familiar with each other’s triggers and were still rooting through emotional baggage. Our fights escalated quickly both because the stakes were so high (I left my socialized health care for you!) and because we hadn’t yet learned how to argue well. After a particularly brutal fight on his birthday that ended with a waiter awkwardly sliding a free dessert complete with lit candle between us as I wept silently into my wine, my partner announced: “I think we need to go see someone.”

I’d been wanting to try premarital counseling even before falling for Esther’s podcast, eager for a framework in which we could constructively address the big ticket questions — money, babies, debt — that go unasked in the bloom of early love. I’m also a big fan of therapy, which has been vital for managing my mental illness and enabling immense personal growth. But I’d never been to therapy with a partner. Before our first session, I made him promise that he wouldn’t let our new therapist break us up. “Remember, we love each other!” I hissed in his ear as we walked into her office. I had the urge to perform our love — to basically sit in his lap on her couch during our session as he shifted uncomfortably and tried to extract his hand from my sweaty death grip. I was petrified that she’d excavate some invisible fault line I didn’t know existed, or diagnose us with an insurmountable conflict and present us with a prescription for immediate separation.

She didn’t. Abby, our therapist, is lovely — intelligent, insightful and real. She has gently wielded her magic therapy wand and endowed our relationship with new levels of intention and happiness. We look forward our sessions more than date night. I evangelize about therapy to anyone who will listen, but if you don’t have the resources or just aren’t sure that it’s for you, I present you with five lessons I’ve learned in my six months of couples counselling so far.

1. It’s Okay to Go to Bed Angry

I am someone who burns hot, so the idea that all arguments should be wrapped up before 9 p.m. has always made me itch. Sometimes I need to stew in my cauldron of righteous fury before I’m able to see a situation clearly. Our therapist has taught us how to recognize when it is time to shelve an argument: If we’re talking in circles or escalating a fight, we’ve become adept at slowing down and saying, “Let’s bring this to Abby.”

If you can sense that a fight is taking on a life of its own, don’t be afraid to call a timeout.

This isn’t a quick fix, but it allows us to diffuse the situation. By the time we’re next on the couch, we’re likely calmer, more willing to hear the other person’s side and more clearly able to articulate our true feelings. If you can sense that a fight is taking on a life of its own, don’t be afraid to call a timeout. Drink a glass of water, eat a few cashews, take a walk around the block. Do what you need to do to take care of yourself, and if that means waiting until the morning to figure it out, go ahead! Everything is better after a good night’s sleep.

2. “The Cat Is Just a Metaphor”

Tim Riggins is a totally unhinged ball of ginger fluff that I rescued as a kitten from a basement in Queens. He came with me into our relationship, and try as my partner might, he hasn’t been able to crack this cat. Watching the two of them at a standstill breaks my heart, and having to live with a maniacal animal makes my partner crazy. When we brought this to Abby, she gently floated the possibility that there was more going on here than just a disagreement over a (totally innocent!) pet. This is both true and not: Sometimes we are really fighting about the cat, but much of the time, the cat (or whatever the fight is orbiting around) is a symptom of something deeper — in our case, my rabid and anxious need to fix everything and his desire to have autonomy over his moods and actions.

Try treating your relationship like an archeological dig: Are you really fighting about the fact that she bought vanilla almond milk when you clearly asked for original, or could there be something else going on?

Therapy has provided us with a venue for unearthing these issues, which allows us to tend to them even in the midst of heightened emotions. Now I’m much more likely to take the time to ask my partner why he feels the way he does, rather than rushing to fix the problem or assert my own point of view. Try treating your relationship like an archeological dig: Are you really fighting about the fact that she bought vanilla almond milk when you clearly asked for original, or could there be something else going on?

3. Accountability Is Key

In one behavior study, people using a cafeteria were twice as likely to clean up after themselves when posters featuring human eyes were hung around the space. Unsurprisingly, we behave better when we think someone is watching. I can attest to this: Since starting therapy, I’ve often noticed myself thinking, “What would Abby say?” Mid-argument, I’ll imagine Abby shaking her head sadly as I come close to undoing all our hard work. There’s no therapy report card (IS THERE, ABBY?!?!?!) but I’m a chronic overachiever, so simply knowing that there is another person out there expecting me to behave better makes me want to ace my relationship. If you aren’t in therapy, it can be helpful to simply think about how you’ll look back on this fight in a few hours. Will you be proud of how carefully you listened or ashamed of your low blows?

4. You Partner Is a Beautiful Stranger

There are moments when I could tell you exactly what my partner is thinking, and then there are times when he might as well be an entirely different species. I find both of these truths completely magical. I’m thrilled by the prospect of getting to know him more intimately and also relish the secret folds of my own heart that he has yet to discover. This comes up again and again in therapy: I’ll believe that I’ve understood exactly why he did or said such and such, and yet in that room, on that couch, he’ll provide an explanation to our therapist that will completely blow my mind.

Coming to terms with the eternal mystery of other people has been immensely helpful in being able to let go of a lot of my expectations about what a relationship should be.

Coming to terms with the eternal mystery of other people has been immensely helpful in being able to let go of a lot of my expectations about what a relationship should be. Your partner is just as complex as you are, and it is rarely possible to understand the full permutations of another person’s thoughts and behaviors. When we argue now, I try to remember that there is more happening under the surface than I can see, and that asking questions — without judgement — is the only way to learn more.

5. Therapy Is for Everyone

The most common reaction we get when we tell people we’re in therapy is a confused, “But aren’t you happy?” We are, indeed, really happy — and we want to stay that way. I believe mental health check-ups should be part and parcel of preventative health care, and I COULD GO ON, but instead I’ll simply say: It is easier to shore up a whole and healthy relationship than it is to fix a broken one. My partner and I are learning tactics now that will, fingers crossed, enable us to weather the inevitable challenges ahead — challenges that will only increase as we start a family, build a home, and get old and dusty. It is both a luxury and a gift to be able to devote those 50 minutes to tending the gentle animal of us, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Photo by Krista Anna Lewis.

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