Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today's conversation on Deep Background grew out of an extraordinary new book that I read as part of a project of working my way through a whole pile of recent books of memoirs and non fiction essays. The book is called Unfollow Me Essays on Complicity, and it's by a remarkable intellectual called Jill Louise Buzby. Jill had worked for years in the nonprofit sector focusing on diversity and inclusion when she uploaded a short and powerful video in which she called out white liberal progressives and the corporate nonprofit machine in which she had been a participant. The video went viral, and it helped turn her into an Instagram influencer using the screen name Jill is Black. In the years that followed, Jill became a widely recognized figure on social media, commenting on issues of race and identity. In the book, what Jill does is she turns the very same sharp knife of her incisive analysis and criticism onto herself. The result is a book of searing honesty and genuine self reflection about the phenomena of power, identity, and race that are occurring in real time today and what happens when, through her own success, she starts to confront the possibilities of a role of power in an infrastructure that she has been deeply committed to criticizing. I'm thrilled that Jill agreed to come onto deep background to talk about this amazing book, and I know you're going to love this conversation as much as I did. Jill, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for your amazing book, unfollow Me Essays on Complicity, which I just had a chance to read. I know it just came out and it blew me away. Thank you. I want to start by saying something that I felt very strongly on reading the book, and that is you have an uncanny and exquisitely honed talent for calling bullshit. My mother would be so proud. It's definitely a family trait. My mother growing up, she could handle almost everything except for bullshit, so I knew that that wasn't allowed. One of the things I want to try to do in this interview is convey to listeners who might not have had a chance to read the book yet, and who might or might not have known about your online work before the book, the layering that's in this amazing book. And you know in the book there's this kind of subtle process where you start calling bullshit on white people with the dear white people mode, then you gradually start calling bullshit on black people with the dear Black people mode. Right, And then at some point we got to the third level, which is in some ways the most fascinating, where you start calling bullshit on yourself. Yes, talk a little bit about what the experience was like for you intellectually when you were discovering that your capacity to call bullshit drew an audience. Right. I always think that people want more honesty then they say, I think it makes them feel seen in a way that is intimate. And I think there was intimacy that I had with my audience and trust that was built very quickly because all I really had to do was stay consistent with saying things that they weren't hearing elsewhere. And I think that's still something that I get to do. It's not about intellect, I subjective. I don't know what that really means anymore. What I do promise is that I'm going to always be doing the work of being honest about how I actually feel. So I was already doing it personally with my family or with myself. It was interesting to me and I was very curious about myself. But then really all that happened was I began to say it in public, and especially as we become again more scripted and people are scared to be themselves online. I think, you know, the messages that I get now are like, oh, thanks for saying the stuff that we're all thinking, and well, that means that there is something that is happening where people are thinking things and they are scared to show up as themselves. And I don't think that's going to push us towards more honesty and diversity and inclusion or anti racism work to say, Oh, I know what to say now, but did we really fix anything with all of these words, all of this rhetoric. To me, No, and especially in the style in which I was doing it, which was one minute monologuing around. You know, I didn't really react to headlines because that felt like it was going to date my material. So I wasn't doing that. But I just I got tired of it, and I started answering my own questions, such as, if I were a white liberal person and a scary and chaotic society where I don't feel like I have a lot of control outside of my identity and the idea of privilege, would I give that up? Would I genuinely give that up? I mean, I don't know. I see people of all identities not giving up what they have all the time, including me, And we were entertaining this conversation that we didn't understand how white people could go and do all of these things, but we do them all the time. I pick up my phone. I don't know who that affects. I ordered from this company. I try not to think about. We were all doing this. So eventually it felt silly to single out. It could be true, but it felt silly in the work that I was doing to keep singling out when I was doing some of the same things without the same level of power history. Sure, but I understood what we were doing, which is trying to be safe, trying to avoid being the other group of people. You can say that you want to help them, but you never want to be them, right, and in fact, to say you want to help somebody is to self define as not that right to exactly. You know, one of the things that kind I found inspiring and that I have myself struggled with is and you just mentioned privilege, which is what put it into my mind. And I also was thinking this when I was reading your book. The formulation check your privilege often translates into acknowledge your privilege. And I happen to be someone who's had a lot of privilege in my life on pretty much every possible dimension, and I have noticed that when I acknowledge and speak about those facts, it sounds like to me, at least, I'm doubling down on reinforcing my privilege. Like I do it because there's a value in being honest about these things. And that was the part which I found inspiring. You know, you're sort of view of like, just say the truth regardless, but sometimes if you say a truth in the context where people want you to say, it actually a little bit, and then you listen to yourself, you can realize I'm actually doing the exact opposite of what the whole check your privilege is supposed to do, because in principle, it's supposed to be somewhat equalizing, and in fact, I experience it is having the opposite effect, Like I think I'm making myself less equal. When I start, you know, listening the ways in which I've been fortunate in privilege, I start, I'm like, Wow, that guy really sounds horrible, Like he sounds like he's really trying to like beat it into your head. Yeah. I said recently that it feels like its own status symbol, like I do this, and I do this, and I have a lot of privilege, and like, the more you say it, the more you're kind of emphasizing, let see what I got that you don't have. Yeah, I agree with you. It's not a phrase that I used. And even our idea of using privilege is the way that we solve this is silly because we know that in a few years we're throwing this away. It's going to be the next thing that we say, Oh wait, actually privilege was a problematic word, and so we'll move on to this one. It's it's an evolution, and we want the words and the ideas to fix everything right now so that we can really go back to our privilege. So I try not to get too deeply invested in the language that we're using, stating what you are is not working on it even when I do it. When you started writing the book and you hit on at some point presumably in the writing process, that you were going to do to yourself as it were what you had done onto others. Yes, you know that's in some way what this book is an exercise in. You've mentioned a few times that you thought of it as engaging with the ego. I've also heard you say this in a few other interviews that you've given that I've listened to. You've referred to the online persona, the Jilli's Black persona as having a lot of quote unquote ego in it. Your word, and it made me wonder, do you mean to hint sort of that the persona in the book is sort of the super ego, you know? And then I don't know where the it fits into this exactly, but you know it is playing a big role because the way that the your persona in a way was able to succeed just by saying stuff that everyone thinks that no one says. And that's what it is all about, right, It is all about doing the thing that you kind of want to do. That everyone's telling you not to do and then you just do it and it works. So I was wondering if any of that was in play, that kind of psychoanalytic troika was in play, or whether you were using you go in a different, maybe more vernacular way. I am using it in a more vernacular way. But I think the way that you've described it as also true. I think it's not just what I was saying. I think it was also the way that I was saying it, which was self righteously, which was doing it, you know, in a way that the drama that I had taken for many years allowed me to do it. There was I was sort of I mean, I knew that it could work, you know. So it's not like I just fell into it and I hoped that it would because I'm so noble. I also felt like if I were at that time smart enough to get this stuff out, it would be so universal that everybody would love it. That also wasn't true. But yeah, the super ego there, setting out to write this book and doing unto myself is as I was doing on others, is a great description of it. And I don't I don't know that I need to label it anything other than the attempt to do that that seems beautiful enough for me. Why does nobody do this? I mean, why does nobody do unto themselves what they do unto others. It's so powerful and it's so honest, and it must, in some ways feel like incredibly liberating, self liberating. Is it just that we're all scared of what will happen of, you know, like laying ourselves bear? What enabled you to do it? What enabled me to do it was an accountability from people that I trusted, who saw me as unhappy and we're willing to disagree with me. People that I really cared about, like my mother, who eventually was like, how do you feel saying all of the stuff about white people online? And you know, and of course it comes with like blocking people, ignoring people, telling them all all of the things that go along with social media. It's again, I just I got exhausted, you know, and I couldn't be myself, which is also exhausting. So I was hiding all of this other stuff about myself, identity wise, maybe even privilege wise, things that were really happening in the rooms that I described. I was hiding all of it, and that is very tiring, and so I derive a lot of pleasure from getting to finally say, Okay, here's what was going on behind the scene. So it's not that it doesn't come with benefits. But I also I don't think that most people have to I think we're fine with the persona, so you know, all right, maybe it's it's waiting for somebody to go first. And I don't think I'm the first one to do this kind of work. I think I'm amongst the first to do it from the position that I held on the Internet. I want to ask you about blocking, which I've heard you referred to just now and other times. And I was actually listening to in preparation for our conversation, I was listening to a podcast interview that you had given, and you talked about how you had a tendency, you know, if someone was questioning what you were doing, you blocked them, and it made me immediately want to ask you. Blocking is like some new thing, right, it's a product of social media. Before social media, we didn't have even the concept really of blocking in this way. Is there a special pleasure, human pleasure in the act of blocking, Like did we like, do we need a German word to describe that you need human pleasure? I think we always need a German word to describe anything, first of all. But I'd only blocked in the beginning. It was what people did, and I did what people did, but I didn't get enough pleasure out of that because then they were gone. So eventually what I like to do is engage. I'd like to screenshot it for my audience. So that was step two, which was a lot of fun. Then I was like, hey, chill, this is ridiculous and why are you doing this and who are you performing for? And so then I started engaging in the direct messages with people. Again I derived pleasure from that also because I got to use my brain to figure out why they were the way that they were. So, you know, blocking, Yeah, it's new, and these days I find it to be very performative because people don't block in silence. They tell us that they're going to do it, or they warn us that they will. You know, I've seen a lot of things go online where here's an example of who you don't want to be. Don't be this guy because I told him off and then I blocked him. So you know, it seems pretty performative, and I think it's something we wish that we could do in real life. But we only wish that we could do it in real life because we've been doing it on social media. Probably, But you've just say super suggestive, and it's something I've actually wondered about. Whether our impulse to block people in other formats in life might be derivative of the technology in a way, right, Like, until arguably, until you could block somebody as a technological matter, yes, you wouldn't think of trying to block them at a that's a grander level. You might think other things, I want to boycott them, or you know, I don't want to ever hear their names again. But then I wonder if you think that there is some connection between our impulse collective impulse it's right left center, it's everybody to sort of, you know, silence people who are different from from we are in this moment, and the actually technological capacity to block somebody, Like did the person who invented the blocking button actually have a bigger social impact than the person who invented the like button? Oh? Great, I can't answer this question, but I hope that you find a guest who can't because I'm going to be listening. It seems impactful, and of course you know it's hard to remove it from cancer culture or whatever we're calling it today. That feels better for us, but I think that it does feel increasingly more threatening that we can block people in this way. And I will not say threatening in my identities or the society and how I'm treated. I just mean me the human who showed up to this planet to do some work and is now like, do I get to do that within the confines of these rules of the inorganic society? And I think we all have that human desire. So when people say they're scared of cancel culture, maybe we should get more specific and say, do I get to be a full human here as long as this thing exists? Not to say that I didn't make a mistake or do something wrong, but do I get to recover, bounce back? Do I continue having, you know, a human experience? Do I get to learn? I don't know. So it does seem to be intensifying. We'll be right back. One of the phrases, Jill, that you use a lot that I'm really interested in is being in the rooms or in these rooms. And actually, the first time I heard you say it, I was like, huh, Like, isn't that an AA phrase? You know, the A people talk about the rooms as sort of you know, the places where the conversation happens. You're not using it that way. You're more using it in the like lin Manuel Miranda, you know the room where it happens kind of a space where certain elites have a certain kind of conversation and engage in a certain kind of social performance with each other. First, I guess I want to know if I am hearing you correctly when you use that formulation, and then I'm really curious about why that is a subject of interest to you you. It's a subject of total fascination to me and it always has been, although I've never used that particular phrase for it. It's sort of why this podcast is called Deep Background, because I was interested in trying to ask people about what happens in spaces of power where the general public isn't allowed in, and then asking people to say something about what's going on behind there. But I want to know sort of am I getting you, and also why you're so interested in that. Then we can talk about what happens in the rooms. Yes, you are getting me. However, you and I go into different rooms, and we go into them differently. So as a black queer woman going into the room, I have a lot more on the line than you do, and my conversations are different because I should know better. And the truth is is if your group got to the place where you keep saying you hope they get you wouldn't be in the room anymore. And I don't see anybody giving up any money, any vacations, any magazine covers anything, any homes. But you should know better because you're part of the group that you're saying is experiencing the greatest harm that's out there. And so the steaks aren't as high, you know, But if you had those steaks on your shoulders going into the room, how could you ever forget It's not just you know, toasting with whoever else is there. But I do see that there is a conflict. There is some kind of conflict, and we at least need to talk about the conflict of But how could you be you without them? So what I hear you saying, and I'm fascinated by this and I'm learning a lot from it, sounds like it imposes an incredibly high standard on yourself and anyone else who would say, look, because of who I am, I am supposed to be, and I am profoundly aware of the demand for equality, the problematics of privilege. Right. I'm in the room, as you're saying, as a black queer woman. And yet if I really took that seriously, there would be no rooms. Right, And I hear you loud and clear and as a kind of calling bullshit. It's incredibly powerful. But it also imposes, by implication, like a higher standard on the intersectional representative person that it imposes on anybody else. But I'm talking about the people who are like me. Is it a high standard? I do have a high standard now in my real life. What I'm going to say is I just wish we would say the truth if you want to be in there. Because I wrote the book. I wrote the book, I wrote the book proposal, I have an editor and agent. All of that. I'm trying to sell it right now. So all of that is me. Okay, that is happening to me. I'm doing this interview right now. This to me, I thought of that before I said I want to evolue. It's like, you know, now I'm clearly part of the system too. And I was like, all right, well that's true. It's hard to avoid that, right, that would be bullshit. But I think what I'm seeing is I find that it's dangerous for us to not say that this is what's happening, because then it imposes the higher standard on people where it's like, oh, but keep lying and saying that we're this moral and this nobel whatever, And I'm looking to free people from the idea that you aren't more complex than this, that it's just like we're going to save the world. And also I'm in this room just so lie about it. I just don't want you to lie about it, because then we keep trying for something that doesn't really exist as opposed to something that does. Will be complicit. You will, if you want these things here, you will be complicit. What does that look like for you? It's the same as starting this off by saying I engage with a million things every day that make me just as complicit as anybody else. But if I get a get out of jail free card for myself based on identities, when I know that I know better that doesn't make any sense. If you're just giving that to me because you feel sorry that I have identities that are harmed in again, inorganic society, then don't give it to me at all. I am a human being. I have enough intellect to say, oh, I'm being indulgent, or oh I don't care about anybody else. So it's like I do know better sometimes, and I trust that other people know better more than they're saying, because I'm also having those private conversations with them. You can go and talk about this person who doesn't agree with you politically, but you don't agree with you politically, so you know, I think there is a self righteousness that I practice online that yes, I am trying to remedy in society because I contribute it to that. And so this first book is really undoing part of what I have done, which is create a harder world for people to be honest about what they feel and think. There's a chapter in the book which walks through like a DM based conversation that you have with someone who's self presenting as a proud boy so a white supremacist, and not only do you give us an account of the conversation, you're like, totally empathetically engaged with him, and you make some degree of humanizing progress in which somehow it seems as though it's at least possible that the two of you are having some form of communication. Yet it also connects up to this question of is it okay to be empathetic to people who, at least by their persona, are reprehensible and repugnant? Reprehensible or repugnant. Wow, when you have to come back from that, that is really really hard. Yeah, I am aligned with people that are reprehensible and repugnant. So we find out about people that we believed in every day now and we thought we were aligned with them, and then they do this big, horrible thing and suddenly we have to act like we were never in agreement with it, where we never knew who they were, and that's not working either. The truth of the matter is is we had a conversation. It is a civil conversation. In the chapter, by saying nope doesn't mean you can do it all the time with everybody, or that I have some special skill with this person the things that are said to me reprehensible and repugnant. Sure, and he believed them, and I believe what I believe, and there's some stuff that I've believed that has been pretty horrible, not as extreme, definitely, And well, I guess it's not my job to say is dangerous, but I've believed things, and I don't understand why we keep talking to people who believe what they believe, Like he's going off of his own belief system, and so all I can really do is talk to him in a way where I gain information. I'm obsessed with this idea of how one talks to people who really really believe something when that thing is wrong on some dimension, you know, factually wrong, then how do you get people to not think of the thing is factually wrong, morally or ethically wrong, even esthetically wrong, like someone just has terrible taste in something and you want to talk them out of it. And I'm totally obsessed with this question. And I always say when people ask me, like, well, how do you try to do that? And I do try to do it, I always say, well, I start by trying to figure out what that person believes his or her big picture values are, and then try to suggest that it maybe would be more consistent with their beliefs or values to think some other thing. And I think the whole thing is like trying on clothes, you know, in a mall or something like that, back when people did that, right, you know, all you can ever really do is try on a garment and say to a person, hey, try this on, look in the marri and see if you like who you are in this garment. And if you do, hey, man, you might want to buy it. And if not, fair enough like walk away. And I have this, I guess naive fantasy that by doing that sometimes you can get people to re examine. And I have the feeling that if I ask you that you would say, yeah, that's really that's very naive or that's not like the right way to go about it. But maybe I'm misreading that the way you related to your own conversation in that chapter. I actually do have genuine hope, and that it's just scary to say, I feel like I am, you know, saying something that could get me canceled to say that I have hope almost in a group of people, but I do. That's the genuine answer, is that I felt better even though he was saying things that I imagined he would say to me that we're terrible. I still felt better afterwards. First of all, I had a firsthand count. And you know, in the book, I say that we sort of thank each other after this, and we're very like polite with each other. And I see some hope in it. I see some hope in that because I've changed. I've changed that I have to believe in that for someone else or else, I think that I'm bigger than someone else, or that I have more awareness than someone else, and I don't think that's true, or else I'm setting myself up for another ego battle. But if I change, then yeah, he can, and I can change from that conversation too. I can learn to talk to people differently. So it was reciprocal and we both got something. And maybe we don't get the nice shiny bow on it that people would like to say that we got we solved racism, but we got something, and these days, why not. It's getting so out of control you might as well try. And I think a lot of this is that I might as well try while I'm here because the other isn't working. Being negative about everything that I see out there, calling everything problematic, or saying that everybody is evil except for me, seems like I think I live a really big, important, magic life, and I don't. I think I'm here with other people who are in all of their own stuff and all of their own trauma, and all of their own belief systems, and we're doing it together, whether we like it or not. I absolutely have that hope. It is scary, but I'd like to have it anyway. I find that profoundly moving. In at the same time that I say that, I'm afraid that if I say it's profoundly moving, like I screw it up for you. I want to close by asking you about so far what you've experienced as the downsides of honesty relative to the upsides you write in the book about being aware that there could be a lot of downsides to talking in the honest way that you're doing it now. Book's been out for a bit more than a month. Seems to be in my world, at least the people who read it love it and are really interested in it. Have you been experiencing any of the downsides of this kind of honesty yet or is it sort of like its own reward to be honest like this so far it's its own reward. I think that the people who don't love it I expected wouldn't love it, and so that makes sense to me. But for the most part, it's been well received. At least the people who are reaching out to me have received it well. And yeah, that gives me some hope. First of all, I finally get to go out into the world with vulnerability, like the vulnerability that's present in this book. That's new for me. I've been hiding behind us smug persona for a very long time, and now I feel very exposed in a way. That is a relief. But also when I meet people and we connect around this book, it feels like a real connection. It doesn't feel like that same thing where we believe the same six things and now you love me. No, it feels like we're connecting around something deeper. It's been kind of amazing, actually better than I thought it would have gone. And so I guess that's the part of the book that I got wrong is all of my I doubt that it was going to be such a I don't know something that turned people against me, and that wasn't true, and so I would say, well great to everybody else. I think that this could bring us closer or whatever your honesty is, I think there's the chance that could bring you closer to people, not further away. And I didn't believe that going in. So that's a huge lesson for me. Some humility in like, no, what you're saying is also not so big, and you know knew that it's going to create the splash you thought it would either maybe it'll be just a soft sort of hug of a book. So yeah, I feel very hopeful. Thank you for writing a book that is unflinchingly honest. And if it is a soft hug of a book, it's a soft hug from someone who knows how to call bullshit. But I really want to I want to thank you. I want to recommend the book to listeners. De Louis buzbys unfollow me Essays on Complicity, which is the most honest book that you will read this year, and I think of genuine value to all of us in a moment where little self reflection can go a long way. Thank you very much, and I hope when you have your ethic of Postcomplicity ready book form or otherwise, you'll come back and we can talk more about it. I appreciate it and thank you for reading and sharing this book. We'll be right back. As I listened to Jill Louise Busby, I had the constant feeling that you get when you're listening to a genuine intellectual working out a very complex set of issues. In Jill's case, the format in which she's been working on fundamental questions of human connection, honesty, authenticity, race, and bullshit is the format of our contemporary lives, the world of diversity and inclusion, the persona that we produce on social media, and now the literary reflection on all of that, complete with calling attention to the honesties and dishonesties of the self. In a way, almost all great essayists all the way back to Montaigne have been interested in exactly this phenomenon. Where is the truth as I depict it about myself? Where is the truth as I try to depict it with reference to the rest of the world. What Jill is profoundly adding to that frame is her searing willingness to be honest and to call bullshit on every institutional actor in our current world who is trying to make sense of things and, at least in principle, to make the world a better place. Her standard is high, so high that I could certainly never survive it, and so high that she herself, subjecting herself to that level of scrutiny, finds herself wanting as well. And yet from this analysis comes not a throw your hands up in the air and give up, but rather a radically reformulated possibility of communication and connection and something that Jill herself was not afraid to call hope. All of that in a moment. Where As Jill herself suggests, just saying that you might be hopeful is itself an invitation for somebody to be very frustrated with you. They say that every society gets the government that it deserves, well, it may also be true that every historical moment gets the intellectual life that it deserves. Measured by that criterion, I don't always think that our current era is doing that well, but hearing Jill gives me some hope. Genuine thinkers with genuinely remarkable ideas have the capacity to shape the way we are thinking about some of the hard problems that face us. All until the next time I speak to you, breathe deep, think, deep thoughts, and if it gives you some hope, have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noah Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Bentaladay, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbn. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Garat at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jane Cott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor Xandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts and if you liked what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background

Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today's conversation on Deep Background grew out of an extraordinary new book that I read as part of a project of working my way through a whole pile of recent books of memoirs and non fiction essays. The book is called Unfollow Me Essays on Complicity, and it's by a remarkable intellectual called Jill Louise Buzby. Jill had worked for years in the nonprofit sector focusing on diversity and inclusion when she uploaded a short and powerful video in which she called out white liberal progressives and the corporate nonprofit machine in which she had been a participant. The video went viral, and it helped turn her into an Instagram influencer using the screen name Jill is Black. In the years that followed, Jill became a widely recognized figure on social media, commenting on issues of race and identity. In the book, what Jill does is she turns the very same sharp knife of her incisive analysis and criticism onto herself. The result is a book of searing honesty and genuine self reflection about the phenomena of power, identity, and race that are occurring in real time today and what happens when, through her own success, she starts to confront the possibilities of a role of power in an infrastructure that she has been deeply committed to criticizing. I'm thrilled that Jill agreed to come onto deep background to talk about this amazing book, and I know you're going to love this conversation as much as I did. Jill, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for your amazing book, unfollow Me Essays on Complicity, which I just had a chance to read. I know it just came out and it blew me away. Thank you. I want to start by saying something that I felt very strongly on reading the book, and that is you have an uncanny and exquisitely honed talent for calling bullshit. My mother would be so proud. It's definitely a family trait. My mother growing up, she could handle almost everything except for bullshit, so I knew that that wasn't allowed. One of the things I want to try to do in this interview is convey to listeners who might not have had a chance to read the book yet, and who might or might not have known about your online work before the book, the layering that's in this amazing book. And you know in the book there's this kind of subtle process where you start calling bullshit on white people with the dear white people mode, then you gradually start calling bullshit on black people with the dear Black people mode. Right, And then at some point we got to the third level, which is in some ways the most fascinating, where you start calling bullshit on yourself. Yes, talk a little bit about what the experience was like for you intellectually when you were discovering that your capacity to call bullshit drew an audience. Right. I always think that people want more honesty then they say, I think it makes them feel seen in a way that is intimate. And I think there was intimacy that I had with my audience and trust that was built very quickly because all I really had to do was stay consistent with saying things that they weren't hearing elsewhere. And I think that's still something that I get to do. It's not about intellect, I subjective. I don't know what that really means anymore. What I do promise is that I'm going to always be doing the work of being honest about how I actually feel. So I was already doing it personally with my family or with myself. It was interesting to me and I was very curious about myself. But then really all that happened was I began to say it in public, and especially as we become again more scripted and people are scared to be themselves online. I think, you know, the messages that I get now are like, oh, thanks for saying the stuff that we're all thinking, and well, that means that there is something that is happening where people are thinking things and they are scared to show up as themselves. And I don't think that's going to push us towards more honesty and diversity and inclusion or anti racism work to say, Oh, I know what to say now, but did we really fix anything with all of these words, all of this rhetoric. To me, No, and especially in the style in which I was doing it, which was one minute monologuing around. You know, I didn't really react to headlines because that felt like it was going to date my material. So I wasn't doing that. But I just I got tired of it, and I started answering my own questions, such as, if I were a white liberal person and a scary and chaotic society where I don't feel like I have a lot of control outside of my identity and the idea of privilege, would I give that up? Would I genuinely give that up? I mean, I don't know. I see people of all identities not giving up what they have all the time, including me, And we were entertaining this conversation that we didn't understand how white people could go and do all of these things, but we do them all the time. I pick up my phone. I don't know who that affects. I ordered from this company. I try not to think about. We were all doing this. So eventually it felt silly to single out. It could be true, but it felt silly in the work that I was doing to keep singling out when I was doing some of the same things without the same level of power history. Sure, but I understood what we were doing, which is trying to be safe, trying to avoid being the other group of people. You can say that you want to help them, but you never want to be them, right, and in fact, to say you want to help somebody is to self define as not that right to exactly. You know, one of the things that kind I found inspiring and that I have myself struggled with is and you just mentioned privilege, which is what put it into my mind. And I also was thinking this when I was reading your book. The formulation check your privilege often translates into acknowledge your privilege. And I happen to be someone who's had a lot of privilege in my life on pretty much every possible dimension, and I have noticed that when I acknowledge and speak about those facts, it sounds like to me, at least, I'm doubling down on reinforcing my privilege. Like I do it because there's a value in being honest about these things. And that was the part which I found inspiring. You know, you're sort of view of like, just say the truth regardless, but sometimes if you say a truth in the context where people want you to say, it actually a little bit, and then you listen to yourself, you can realize I'm actually doing the exact opposite of what the whole check your privilege is supposed to do, because in principle, it's supposed to be somewhat equalizing, and in fact, I experience it is having the opposite effect, Like I think I'm making myself less equal. When I start, you know, listening the ways in which I've been fortunate in privilege, I start, I'm like, Wow, that guy really sounds horrible, Like he sounds like he's really trying to like beat it into your head. Yeah. I said recently that it feels like its own status symbol, like I do this, and I do this, and I have a lot of privilege, and like, the more you say it, the more you're kind of emphasizing, let see what I got that you don't have. Yeah, I agree with you. It's not a phrase that I used. And even our idea of using privilege is the way that we solve this is silly because we know that in a few years we're throwing this away. It's going to be the next thing that we say, Oh wait, actually privilege was a problematic word, and so we'll move on to this one. It's it's an evolution, and we want the words and the ideas to fix everything right now so that we can really go back to our privilege. So I try not to get too deeply invested in the language that we're using, stating what you are is not working on it even when I do it. When you started writing the book and you hit on at some point presumably in the writing process, that you were going to do to yourself as it were what you had done onto others. Yes, you know that's in some way what this book is an exercise in. You've mentioned a few times that you thought of it as engaging with the ego. I've also heard you say this in a few other interviews that you've given that I've listened to. You've referred to the online persona, the Jilli's Black persona as having a lot of quote unquote ego in it. Your word, and it made me wonder, do you mean to hint sort of that the persona in the book is sort of the super ego, you know? And then I don't know where the it fits into this exactly, but you know it is playing a big role because the way that the your persona in a way was able to succeed just by saying stuff that everyone thinks that no one says. And that's what it is all about, right, It is all about doing the thing that you kind of want to do. That everyone's telling you not to do and then you just do it and it works. So I was wondering if any of that was in play, that kind of psychoanalytic troika was in play, or whether you were using you go in a different, maybe more vernacular way. I am using it in a more vernacular way. But I think the way that you've described it as also true. I think it's not just what I was saying. I think it was also the way that I was saying it, which was self righteously, which was doing it, you know, in a way that the drama that I had taken for many years allowed me to do it. There was I was sort of I mean, I knew that it could work, you know. So it's not like I just fell into it and I hoped that it would because I'm so noble. I also felt like if I were at that time smart enough to get this stuff out, it would be so universal that everybody would love it. That also wasn't true. But yeah, the super ego there, setting out to write this book and doing unto myself is as I was doing on others, is a great description of it. And I don't I don't know that I need to label it anything other than the attempt to do that that seems beautiful enough for me. Why does nobody do this? I mean, why does nobody do unto themselves what they do unto others. It's so powerful and it's so honest, and it must, in some ways feel like incredibly liberating, self liberating. Is it just that we're all scared of what will happen of, you know, like laying ourselves bear? What enabled you to do it? What enabled me to do it was an accountability from people that I trusted, who saw me as unhappy and we're willing to disagree with me. People that I really cared about, like my mother, who eventually was like, how do you feel saying all of the stuff about white people online? And you know, and of course it comes with like blocking people, ignoring people, telling them all all of the things that go along with social media. It's again, I just I got exhausted, you know, and I couldn't be myself, which is also exhausting. So I was hiding all of this other stuff about myself, identity wise, maybe even privilege wise, things that were really happening in the rooms that I described. I was hiding all of it, and that is very tiring, and so I derive a lot of pleasure from getting to finally say, Okay, here's what was going on behind the scene. So it's not that it doesn't come with benefits. But I also I don't think that most people have to I think we're fine with the persona, so you know, all right, maybe it's it's waiting for somebody to go first. And I don't think I'm the first one to do this kind of work. I think I'm amongst the first to do it from the position that I held on the Internet. I want to ask you about blocking, which I've heard you referred to just now and other times. And I was actually listening to in preparation for our conversation, I was listening to a podcast interview that you had given, and you talked about how you had a tendency, you know, if someone was questioning what you were doing, you blocked them, and it made me immediately want to ask you. Blocking is like some new thing, right, it's a product of social media. Before social media, we didn't have even the concept really of blocking in this way. Is there a special pleasure, human pleasure in the act of blocking, Like did we like, do we need a German word to describe that you need human pleasure? I think we always need a German word to describe anything, first of all. But I'd only blocked in the beginning. It was what people did, and I did what people did, but I didn't get enough pleasure out of that because then they were gone. So eventually what I like to do is engage. I'd like to screenshot it for my audience. So that was step two, which was a lot of fun. Then I was like, hey, chill, this is ridiculous and why are you doing this and who are you performing for? And so then I started engaging in the direct messages with people. Again I derived pleasure from that also because I got to use my brain to figure out why they were the way that they were. So, you know, blocking, Yeah, it's new, and these days I find it to be very performative because people don't block in silence. They tell us that they're going to do it, or they warn us that they will. You know, I've seen a lot of things go online where here's an example of who you don't want to be. Don't be this guy because I told him off and then I blocked him. So you know, it seems pretty performative, and I think it's something we wish that we could do in real life. But we only wish that we could do it in real life because we've been doing it on social media. Probably, But you've just say super suggestive, and it's something I've actually wondered about. Whether our impulse to block people in other formats in life might be derivative of the technology in a way, right, Like, until arguably, until you could block somebody as a technological matter, yes, you wouldn't think of trying to block them at a that's a grander level. You might think other things, I want to boycott them, or you know, I don't want to ever hear their names again. But then I wonder if you think that there is some connection between our impulse collective impulse it's right left center, it's everybody to sort of, you know, silence people who are different from from we are in this moment, and the actually technological capacity to block somebody, Like did the person who invented the blocking button actually have a bigger social impact than the person who invented the like button? Oh? Great, I can't answer this question, but I hope that you find a guest who can't because I'm going to be listening. It seems impactful, and of course you know it's hard to remove it from cancer culture or whatever we're calling it today. That feels better for us, but I think that it does feel increasingly more threatening that we can block people in this way. And I will not say threatening in my identities or the society and how I'm treated. I just mean me the human who showed up to this planet to do some work and is now like, do I get to do that within the confines of these rules of the inorganic society? And I think we all have that human desire. So when people say they're scared of cancel culture, maybe we should get more specific and say, do I get to be a full human here as long as this thing exists? Not to say that I didn't make a mistake or do something wrong, but do I get to recover, bounce back? Do I continue having, you know, a human experience? Do I get to learn? I don't know. So it does seem to be intensifying. We'll be right back. One of the phrases, Jill, that you use a lot that I'm really interested in is being in the rooms or in these rooms. And actually, the first time I heard you say it, I was like, huh, Like, isn't that an AA phrase? You know, the A people talk about the rooms as sort of you know, the places where the conversation happens. You're not using it that way. You're more using it in the like lin Manuel Miranda, you know the room where it happens kind of a space where certain elites have a certain kind of conversation and engage in a certain kind of social performance with each other. First, I guess I want to know if I am hearing you correctly when you use that formulation, and then I'm really curious about why that is a subject of interest to you you. It's a subject of total fascination to me and it always has been, although I've never used that particular phrase for it. It's sort of why this podcast is called Deep Background, because I was interested in trying to ask people about what happens in spaces of power where the general public isn't allowed in, and then asking people to say something about what's going on behind there. But I want to know sort of am I getting you, and also why you're so interested in that. Then we can talk about what happens in the rooms. Yes, you are getting me. However, you and I go into different rooms, and we go into them differently. So as a black queer woman going into the room, I have a lot more on the line than you do, and my conversations are different because I should know better. And the truth is is if your group got to the place where you keep saying you hope they get you wouldn't be in the room anymore. And I don't see anybody giving up any money, any vacations, any magazine covers anything, any homes. But you should know better because you're part of the group that you're saying is experiencing the greatest harm that's out there. And so the steaks aren't as high, you know, But if you had those steaks on your shoulders going into the room, how could you ever forget It's not just you know, toasting with whoever else is there. But I do see that there is a conflict. There is some kind of conflict, and we at least need to talk about the conflict of But how could you be you without them? So what I hear you saying, and I'm fascinated by this and I'm learning a lot from it, sounds like it imposes an incredibly high standard on yourself and anyone else who would say, look, because of who I am, I am supposed to be, and I am profoundly aware of the demand for equality, the problematics of privilege. Right. I'm in the room, as you're saying, as a black queer woman. And yet if I really took that seriously, there would be no rooms. Right, And I hear you loud and clear and as a kind of calling bullshit. It's incredibly powerful. But it also imposes, by implication, like a higher standard on the intersectional representative person that it imposes on anybody else. But I'm talking about the people who are like me. Is it a high standard? I do have a high standard now in my real life. What I'm going to say is I just wish we would say the truth if you want to be in there. Because I wrote the book. I wrote the book, I wrote the book proposal, I have an editor and agent. All of that. I'm trying to sell it right now. So all of that is me. Okay, that is happening to me. I'm doing this interview right now. This to me, I thought of that before I said I want to evolue. It's like, you know, now I'm clearly part of the system too. And I was like, all right, well that's true. It's hard to avoid that, right, that would be bullshit. But I think what I'm seeing is I find that it's dangerous for us to not say that this is what's happening, because then it imposes the higher standard on people where it's like, oh, but keep lying and saying that we're this moral and this nobel whatever, And I'm looking to free people from the idea that you aren't more complex than this, that it's just like we're going to save the world. And also I'm in this room just so lie about it. I just don't want you to lie about it, because then we keep trying for something that doesn't really exist as opposed to something that does. Will be complicit. You will, if you want these things here, you will be complicit. What does that look like for you? It's the same as starting this off by saying I engage with a million things every day that make me just as complicit as anybody else. But if I get a get out of jail free card for myself based on identities, when I know that I know better that doesn't make any sense. If you're just giving that to me because you feel sorry that I have identities that are harmed in again, inorganic society, then don't give it to me at all. I am a human being. I have enough intellect to say, oh, I'm being indulgent, or oh I don't care about anybody else. So it's like I do know better sometimes, and I trust that other people know better more than they're saying, because I'm also having those private conversations with them. You can go and talk about this person who doesn't agree with you politically, but you don't agree with you politically, so you know, I think there is a self righteousness that I practice online that yes, I am trying to remedy in society because I contribute it to that. And so this first book is really undoing part of what I have done, which is create a harder world for people to be honest about what they feel and think. There's a chapter in the book which walks through like a DM based conversation that you have with someone who's self presenting as a proud boy so a white supremacist, and not only do you give us an account of the conversation, you're like, totally empathetically engaged with him, and you make some degree of humanizing progress in which somehow it seems as though it's at least possible that the two of you are having some form of communication. Yet it also connects up to this question of is it okay to be empathetic to people who, at least by their persona, are reprehensible and repugnant? Reprehensible or repugnant. Wow, when you have to come back from that, that is really really hard. Yeah, I am aligned with people that are reprehensible and repugnant. So we find out about people that we believed in every day now and we thought we were aligned with them, and then they do this big, horrible thing and suddenly we have to act like we were never in agreement with it, where we never knew who they were, and that's not working either. The truth of the matter is is we had a conversation. It is a civil conversation. In the chapter, by saying nope doesn't mean you can do it all the time with everybody, or that I have some special skill with this person the things that are said to me reprehensible and repugnant. Sure, and he believed them, and I believe what I believe, and there's some stuff that I've believed that has been pretty horrible, not as extreme, definitely, And well, I guess it's not my job to say is dangerous, but I've believed things, and I don't understand why we keep talking to people who believe what they believe, Like he's going off of his own belief system, and so all I can really do is talk to him in a way where I gain information. I'm obsessed with this idea of how one talks to people who really really believe something when that thing is wrong on some dimension, you know, factually wrong, then how do you get people to not think of the thing is factually wrong, morally or ethically wrong, even esthetically wrong, like someone just has terrible taste in something and you want to talk them out of it. And I'm totally obsessed with this question. And I always say when people ask me, like, well, how do you try to do that? And I do try to do it, I always say, well, I start by trying to figure out what that person believes his or her big picture values are, and then try to suggest that it maybe would be more consistent with their beliefs or values to think some other thing. And I think the whole thing is like trying on clothes, you know, in a mall or something like that, back when people did that, right, you know, all you can ever really do is try on a garment and say to a person, hey, try this on, look in the marri and see if you like who you are in this garment. And if you do, hey, man, you might want to buy it. And if not, fair enough like walk away. And I have this, I guess naive fantasy that by doing that sometimes you can get people to re examine. And I have the feeling that if I ask you that you would say, yeah, that's really that's very naive or that's not like the right way to go about it. But maybe I'm misreading that the way you related to your own conversation in that chapter. I actually do have genuine hope, and that it's just scary to say, I feel like I am, you know, saying something that could get me canceled to say that I have hope almost in a group of people, but I do. That's the genuine answer, is that I felt better even though he was saying things that I imagined he would say to me that we're terrible. I still felt better afterwards. First of all, I had a firsthand count. And you know, in the book, I say that we sort of thank each other after this, and we're very like polite with each other. And I see some hope in it. I see some hope in that because I've changed. I've changed that I have to believe in that for someone else or else, I think that I'm bigger than someone else, or that I have more awareness than someone else, and I don't think that's true, or else I'm setting myself up for another ego battle. But if I change, then yeah, he can, and I can change from that conversation too. I can learn to talk to people differently. So it was reciprocal and we both got something. And maybe we don't get the nice shiny bow on it that people would like to say that we got we solved racism, but we got something, and these days, why not. It's getting so out of control you might as well try. And I think a lot of this is that I might as well try while I'm here because the other isn't working. Being negative about everything that I see out there, calling everything problematic, or saying that everybody is evil except for me, seems like I think I live a really big, important, magic life, and I don't. I think I'm here with other people who are in all of their own stuff and all of their own trauma, and all of their own belief systems, and we're doing it together, whether we like it or not. I absolutely have that hope. It is scary, but I'd like to have it anyway. I find that profoundly moving. In at the same time that I say that, I'm afraid that if I say it's profoundly moving, like I screw it up for you. I want to close by asking you about so far what you've experienced as the downsides of honesty relative to the upsides you write in the book about being aware that there could be a lot of downsides to talking in the honest way that you're doing it now. Book's been out for a bit more than a month. Seems to be in my world, at least the people who read it love it and are really interested in it. Have you been experiencing any of the downsides of this kind of honesty yet or is it sort of like its own reward to be honest like this so far it's its own reward. I think that the people who don't love it I expected wouldn't love it, and so that makes sense to me. But for the most part, it's been well received. At least the people who are reaching out to me have received it well. And yeah, that gives me some hope. First of all, I finally get to go out into the world with vulnerability, like the vulnerability that's present in this book. That's new for me. I've been hiding behind us smug persona for a very long time, and now I feel very exposed in a way. That is a relief. But also when I meet people and we connect around this book, it feels like a real connection. It doesn't feel like that same thing where we believe the same six things and now you love me. No, it feels like we're connecting around something deeper. It's been kind of amazing, actually better than I thought it would have gone. And so I guess that's the part of the book that I got wrong is all of my I doubt that it was going to be such a I don't know something that turned people against me, and that wasn't true, and so I would say, well great to everybody else. I think that this could bring us closer or whatever your honesty is, I think there's the chance that could bring you closer to people, not further away. And I didn't believe that going in. So that's a huge lesson for me. Some humility in like, no, what you're saying is also not so big, and you know knew that it's going to create the splash you thought it would either maybe it'll be just a soft sort of hug of a book. So yeah, I feel very hopeful. Thank you for writing a book that is unflinchingly honest. And if it is a soft hug of a book, it's a soft hug from someone who knows how to call bullshit. But I really want to I want to thank you. I want to recommend the book to listeners. De Louis buzbys unfollow me Essays on Complicity, which is the most honest book that you will read this year, and I think of genuine value to all of us in a moment where little self reflection can go a long way. Thank you very much, and I hope when you have your ethic of Postcomplicity ready book form or otherwise, you'll come back and we can talk more about it. I appreciate it and thank you for reading and sharing this book. We'll be right back. As I listened to Jill Louise Busby, I had the constant feeling that you get when you're listening to a genuine intellectual working out a very complex set of issues. In Jill's case, the format in which she's been working on fundamental questions of human connection, honesty, authenticity, race, and bullshit is the format of our contemporary lives, the world of diversity and inclusion, the persona that we produce on social media, and now the literary reflection on all of that, complete with calling attention to the honesties and dishonesties of the self. In a way, almost all great essayists all the way back to Montaigne have been interested in exactly this phenomenon. Where is the truth as I depict it about myself? Where is the truth as I try to depict it with reference to the rest of the world. What Jill is profoundly adding to that frame is her searing willingness to be honest and to call bullshit on every institutional actor in our current world who is trying to make sense of things and, at least in principle, to make the world a better place. Her standard is high, so high that I could certainly never survive it, and so high that she herself, subjecting herself to that level of scrutiny, finds herself wanting as well. And yet from this analysis comes not a throw your hands up in the air and give up, but rather a radically reformulated possibility of communication and connection and something that Jill herself was not afraid to call hope. All of that in a moment. Where As Jill herself suggests, just saying that you might be hopeful is itself an invitation for somebody to be very frustrated with you. They say that every society gets the government that it deserves, well, it may also be true that every historical moment gets the intellectual life that it deserves. Measured by that criterion, I don't always think that our current era is doing that well, but hearing Jill gives me some hope. Genuine thinkers with genuinely remarkable ideas have the capacity to shape the way we are thinking about some of the hard problems that face us. All until the next time I speak to you, breathe deep, think, deep thoughts, and if it gives you some hope, have a little fun. If you're a regular listener, you know I love communicating with you here on Deep Background. I also really want that communication to run both ways. I want to know what you think are the most important stories of the moment and what kinds of guests you think you would be useful to hear from. More So, I'm opening a new channel of communication. To access it, just go to my website Noah Dashfelman dot com. You can sign up from my newsletter and you can tell me exactly what's on your mind, something that would be really valuable to me and I hope to you too. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is mo La Board, our engineer is Bentaladay, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbn. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Garat at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jane Cott, Heather Faine, Carlie mcgliori, Maggie Taylor Xandler, and Jacob Weisberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to bloomberg dot com slash podcasts and if you liked what you've heard today, please write a review or tell a friend. This is deep background