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- [00:00]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [00:21]
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- [00:52]
Mike Pesca
It's Tuesday, February 17, 2026. From Peachfish Productions, it's the Gist. I'm Mike Pe how to Kill a Dissident in Siberian Prison. Apparently, it's a frog dart poison. That's the answer because autopsy results reveal that Alexei Navalny was killed by a deadly toxin found in poison Ecuadorian dart frogs. Now, unless the tropical frogs somehow found a home In Penal Colony IK3, the Polar Wolf Colony located 40 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and I suspect foul play. Next, how to how to be eulogized throughout America after doing okay in the primaries in 1984 and 1988? The answer is say things like this.
- [01:43]
Eileen Gu Interviewer
But the genius of America is that out of the many we become one. Providence has enabled our path to intersect. His foreparents came to America on immigrant ships. My foreparents came to America on slave ships. But whatever, the original ships were in the same boat tonight.
- [02:09]
Mike Pesca
Now, I want you to know that Jesse Jackson, who died in that 1988 Democratic National Convention speech, certainly achieved some rhetorical heights. But I also want you to know, because I've watched all that speech and all the 84 speech and read recent biography and interviewed the author, Abby Phillip, about Jesse Jackson. Jackson was a good speaker, an entertaining speaker, but you know, there wasn't an analogy that he couldn't extend. There wasn't, and this is going to sound crazy coming from me, a bit of wordplay that he wouldn't embrace. For instance, after he got that applause for that great line, they came on immigrant ships. My four parents came on slave ships. But whatever, the original ship were in the same boat Tonight. He went on with the nautical metaphor for many, many fathoms, more than I can fathom our ships could pass in the night, was his next line. If we have a false sense of independence, or they could collide and crash and we could lose our passengers, he went on. Apart. We can drift on the broken pieces of Reaganomics, or at our highest, we can navigate this vessel to safety. Jesse Jackson was a great, great speaker and is a quintessentially American political figure. He will be missed how to get around court restrictions on dumping US Prisoners where they don't belong? Well, in Seekat or Eswatini, the government tried this. Now Cameroon. New revelations are that the administration contracted with the West African government to deposit deportees there, even though none of the people who were sent there were from Cameroon. One man quoted in the New York Times was from Zimbabwe. I would assume he is an English speaker, as Zimbabwe is an Anglophone country, whereas Cameroon is a Francophone nation. Who cares, right? It might take months to unwind as courts are now forcing the Venezuelan detainees who spend time in Seekot back to America. How to get your mind around this carelessness? By carelessness I mean lacking attention to detail and a total dearth of caring about humanity. How to it does seem as if I'm saying How To a lot. Well, I'll be saying it a lot more in the upcoming days because right now we have a new show. How to with Mike Pesca is the name of it. It's out there on Apple, Spotify. I have to say, wherever you get your podcast, just look it up. How to with Mike Pesca Follow the links in these show notes. Now this show has existed for years. Charles Duhigg was the first host and the founder of the show. And then he came to me and said, what could we do with it? And I said, let's work together. So now I've taken over How To. There have been a few hosts after Charles. I'm going to answer the question how to possibly boost a franchise, but how to maybe startle regular listeners? My it will be. Well, our first show is how to be a dj, not a playlist. And our expert is DJ Hooky Tom Nash, who has two hooks for arms. Actually a hook for each arm. His legs are also prosthetics. It's a great episode. And I'll tease a couple of the other upcoming episodes. How to emigrate to the Netherlands as a throuple. How to be a Ghostbuster Mesopotamia style and maybe how to How To So I'll be talking more about how to in the how to Feed and I'll give you a glimpse of it tomorrow. But on this show today, we go from how to to Eileen Goo, the Chinese American but competing for China in the Olympics skier. I wrote a piece on the Free Press about her. I will expand on the points I was trying to make. But first, remember I said Charles Duhigg, who is the original founder of how to, well, he's also just a great nonfiction journalist and he has a new piece in the New Yorker that I've been telling everyone about. You'll hear other interviews with me, with other people saying, hey, have you read Charles Duhigg's new piece? It's about what MAGA can teach Democrats about organizing, the difference between organizing and mobilizing. He looks at Mad Mothers Against Drunk Driving. He looks at dare and he brings us up to the present. It's really a fascinating insight, a great article and a great good conversation with the godfather of how to, Charles Duhigg. Up next, Let me tell you what HIMS can and can't do. It can't do the very difficult task in the bedroom of folding a fitted sheet. No one can. Science can't. Math can't. But what it can do is provide a solution to ed. ED doesn't mean your love life is over. It could mean you're just getting started. If you get personalized treatments through HIMS and you could access personalized prescription treatments if prescribed. They offer access to options ranging from personalized products to trusted generics that cost 95% less than brand names if prescribed. It's not a one size fits all thing. It doesn't forget you in the waiting room. It's your health and goals put first with real medical providers. Think of HIMS as a digital front door that gets you back to your old self. To get simple online access to personalized affordable care for ED, hair loss, weight loss, and more, visit hims.comthegist that's hims.comthegist for your free online visit himss.com thegist featured products and include compounded drug products which the FDA does not approve or verify for safety, effectiveness or quality. Prescription required. See website for details, restrictions and important safety information. Actual price will depend on product and subscription plan. So let me tell you about Claude. It is a miracle in your on your associated with your computer but also affiliated with you. So as you know, I do the Gist list list where I scan the web for stories and I use Claude to build a tool that doesn't do it for me. There is discernment, but it puts choices from all these leading magazines and all these not leading but like Trailing magazines where I find the best stories. And this was an amazing achievement that I couldn't have done without Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop it. Good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Claude Code is great if you're a developer or you're really good at what they call Vibe coding. Claude Code will vibe with you. Truly Agentic coding. This is Claude code. It's not just another coding assistant. The frontier of agentic code handles product wide refactors while preserving your coding style and showing its work. It's really important to know why it did what it did. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at Claw AI Slash the Gist. That's Claude AI the Gist. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.AI/the gist. The Gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations. If you were alive during the 1980s, you know Mad and Dare, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the anti Drug effort. In fact, they might say if you were alive during the 80s, you could thank us. I read a great article about Mad and Dare. It put them in a context, it offered a taxonomy. And then it took this context and applied it to something I'm sure everyone wouldn't have expected, but is very, very relevant. The Democratic Party and the MAGA movement. It worked great. Charles Duhigg wrote the article in the New Yorker. He joins me now. Hello. Welcome back, Charles.
- [10:35]
Charles Duhigg
Thanks for having me, Mike.
- [10:36]
Mike Pesca
So one Mad their organizers and the other DARE their mobilizers. And I have to say, whenever I heard activists talking about we have to mobilize, we have to organize, I never really thought there was a difference. I just thought it was either a synonym or maybe it was me. I was put it in a little bit of the soup of activism type lingo. But there is a difference, right?
- [11:00]
Charles Duhigg
There is a difference.
- [11:01]
Mike Pesca
So.
- [11:02]
Charles Duhigg
And within people who study social movements, they say, look, both of these are incredibly important to building a sustainable social movement. Mobilization is when you can draw thousands or millions of people into the streets, right? The Woman's March in 2017 is an example of mobilization. When DARE got President Reagan to declare DARE Day, and schools across the nation let students out of classes so they could go to some rallies where people would tell them how terrible drugs are. That's an example of mobilization. The no Kings Day that we recently see is mobilization. Mobilization is about getting people into the streets. It's about getting them to. To send in money. But there's another aspect of building a social movement which is organized, which is organizing. And in organizing, I care less about getting millions of people into the street. What I care about is I care about getting local leaders to take responsibility for building the social networks, for building the communities, for building the local advocates who all have connections to each other, who are all socially intertwined with each other, so that even after the protest ends, there's still people who want to go out and do the work that social change requires. Now, as I mentioned, both mobile mobilizing and organizing are important, but organizing is more important than mobilizing. You can mobilize till you're blue in the face and not change anything unless you have small groups of people who are connected to each other on the local level who are committed to this issue and will be committed for months and years. That's where real change starts.
- [12:34]
Mike Pesca
Now, is it all. Is it always the case that for a movement to have mobilization, it first had to have organization?
- [12:42]
Charles Duhigg
Well, not necessarily, right? Because we saw that with no Kings Day. When we see this going on right now, where basically, like, somebody just posts something online, you know, let's all march, and millions of people show up. But when we look at what's happening today, what's really clear? And this is when I talk to academics, they say this absolutely unequivocally, they say, look, the Democratic Party is really good at mobilization, right? If you think about those big protests that we've had, those are all examples of mobilization. And they're all on the left. The MAGA movement, on the other hand, is really good at organizing. They're really good at building these thousands or tens of thousands of small groups of neighbors in cities who are all in a kind of a networked relationship where they're encouraging each other and they're meeting with each other and they're working for each other, and they're talking to their neighbors and getting them to vote maga. And this happens. This is less obvious, right? This happens more under the covers than this big mobilization. But what Maga has spent the last basically 12 years doing is building a local Infrastructure to support local leaders to and to empower them to advocate on behalf of Republican candidates.
- [13:52]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [13:53]
Charles Duhigg
And that is much more sustainable than a million people taking to the street for one day.
- [13:57]
Mike Pesca
I want to dive deep into the politics, but I want to go back. An important point that you made is that when you compare MAD and dare, MAD had more of an effect. MAD because a few of its tactics and policies that fit in with organization, including essentially empowering people to define the rules for their own organizations. Empowering people to just come out based on one shared belief, one conviction that there shouldn't. That there should be less or no drunk driving. And then if they want it to be anti drinking, they could be anti drinking in general. If they wanted to work with local pub owners because they weren't anti drinking, they could do that. They could do whatever they wanted, however they wanted. They'd be assisted, but all the people would be empowered to do it their own way. And it's important to note, MAD worked and works, and DARE kind of flamed out.
- [14:50]
Charles Duhigg
That's exactly right. So. So what's interesting about Matt is if you wanted to start a MAD chapter in your city, you just emailed or you would. This is before email, you'd write a letter to Candy Lightner, the woman who started, created mad, and she'd say, sure, go ahead. Here's some. Here's some. Here's some tips. Do whatever you want. And so people would do whatever they wanted. Right. They would figure out what works on a local level. What do I. What's important to me? What. What's the issue that I want to talk about? And there were no litmus tests, except you had to be against drunk driving, right?
- [15:18]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [15:19]
Charles Duhigg
You didn't have to be anti alcohol. You didn't have to be pro. Any other issue. You just had to say, I'm against people driving drunk and you're a member of mad. DARE in, in contrast, had all these litmus tests. It wasn't enough just to be anti drug. You had to be anti drug, and you had to be for banning drugs from schools, for mandatory minimums for drug dealers. There were all these litmus tests that determined who was allowed in. And it was all controlled from Los Angeles, from the central headquarters. So if you started a day or chapter in your city, they would tell you exactly what to do. And you weren't allowed to do anything.
- [15:53]
Mike Pesca
That they didn't approve of.
- [15:54]
Charles Duhigg
The difference there is that because MAD was so disorganized, was so distributed, there were lots of people who tried different experiments and Tried to figure out what works. And by the way, what works in San Diego is different from what works in Des Moines, Iowa. And it was only through learning this that they were able to create this genuinely sustainable organization of leaders across the country who felt empowered to take ownership and build these local chapters that ended up becoming one of the most effective social change movements in the 1980s and 1990s. 90s.
- [16:26]
Mike Pesca
Right. So the Democrats are a little like dare in that they have a lot of litmus tests and they'll kick you out of the organization. You had some examples. A lot of people know about the Women's March, and you had to have a certain set of beliefs or one that maybe many people will agree with. You can't be a Democrat or run for office if you're pro life, if you're against abortion or you talked about people in pride parades having starved David on a pride flag, not being allowed to display that. So these are ways you get kicked out of the organization. Whereas the MAGA movement, such as it is, has one requirement. You got to love Donald Trump, and that's about it. And you could do. Absolutely.
- [17:01]
Charles Duhigg
You just got to put on the red hat. Right. You just have to say, like, I think he's the greatest thing since the sliced cheese put on the hat. And you remember. And if you look at what's happening on the right right now, there are a lot of disagreements within the right. And I don't know if you remember, Turning Point USA had this conference a couple months ago where on stage, J.D. vance criticized Tucker Carlson, Tucker Carlson criticized J.D. vance. There was all this kind of disharmony.
- [17:26]
Mike Pesca
Right. Ben Shapiro was getting into it.
- [17:27]
Charles Duhigg
Exactly.
- [17:28]
Mike Pesca
Big anti Semitism element. The Heritage foundation split with. Yeah.
- [17:33]
Charles Duhigg
And they were fighting. And on the left, people saw this and they said, oh, this is wonderful. Finally they're coming apart. But that's because the left didn't understand what was going on. That disagreement on the stage is actually a sign of strength for the Republican Party and for maga. What they're basically saying to members is, look, you can be pro life, you can be pro choice, you can be anti religious, you can be libertarian, you can be religious. We welcome you regardless of how you feel on all these issues, as long as you want to be a Republican and you're willing to wear the red hat, and that's really powerful.
- [18:05]
Mike Pesca
Aren't there counter examples? I was thinking of William F. Buckley in the conservative movement, and he kicked out the John Birch Society will never be taken seriously. So he policed the movement and defined the movement. So that's my question. There are counterexamples right there.
- [18:19]
Charles Duhigg
Well, what's interesting is to use that example, but also think about the Bill Clinton Sister Soulja moment, right, where Bill Clinton criticizes a rap artist, Sister Soulja. And in doing so, what he's actually doing is. It seems exclusionary, but what he's actually doing is he's saying there is enough room within this coalition for people who disagree with each other. So when William F. Buckley said John Birch Society should not be part of conservatism, he. He wasn't speaking for conservatism, Right? He was speaking for his brand of conservatism. But conservative, the conservative party, the Republican Party, was big enough to incorporate both of them and to incorporate this healthy debate. If you think right now on the, on the left in the Democratic Party, there are so many sacred cabs that if you cross, you're kicked out of the party. As one person I was talking to said, look, you have to. To be a Democrat today, you have to learn all these, like, code words, right? You have to know what Latinx is. You have to know. You have to be able to talk about gender identity. Like, these are all things that are relatively new and hard for some people. And if that's a litmus test to be a part of this movement, then we're just excluding a bunch of people who, so far, they might care deeply about things like the rights of immigrants, but they. They aren't on the same page on gender transition. And we want. A party only wins when it's big enough to encompass everyone around a shared set of common values and. And not a shared, specific set of ideologies.
- [19:43]
Mike Pesca
Right? Or they may even not be cruel or anti immigration, but want actual forceful laws and enforcing the border, let's say.
- [19:53]
Charles Duhigg
Absolutely, absolutely.
- [19:55]
Mike Pesca
So what a counter argument might be something like, all right, a Democrat now looks at the Republican Party and looks at all the people, the far right, the alt right, the Christian nationalists, and says, I don't want that for my party. You know what I have? I have standards and principles. And if you're saying the way forward is not to have standards and principles, well, that's not my way forward. What's the argument against that?
- [20:18]
Charles Duhigg
So you have to have some standard and principles, right? There has to be a small set of core values that you say, look, as Democrats, we believe that immigrants should be protected. We should have refugee programs. We believe that autonomy over bodily choice is something that should be preserved. There can be a set of principles, shared values that are core to what our party is or what. What a group is. But what's important is not to make every value a requirement. Shared value. Right. Like, if you think about it like, when was the Democratic Party the strongest? The Democratic Party was the strongest in the. In the 50s and 60s and 70s when. When the Democratic Party contained people who were open racists, right. In the south, the Dixiecrats and many of the leading civil rights crusaders in the rest of the country. And yet they all agreed on some basic principles about how the country should operate. And their differences didn't mean that they had to hate each other. Now, right now, we are living through a moment where things are so polarized and so distasteful with what's coming out of Minnesota and other places that I think that there's a lot of people who say, I don't want to be a part of either party. Right.
- [21:33]
Mike Pesca
I don't.
- [21:34]
Charles Duhigg
And we know this in the stats. There are more. There are more people who say, I want to be registered as independent than either party. What's important there is that if the Democrats or the Republicans want to get those people to vote for them, they have to offer them some core values that correspond with that person's beliefs. But it doesn't be. It doesn't mean that they have to offer every single value that everyone agrees with.
- [21:56]
Mike Pesca
Right. So from the premise that organizing beats mobilization generally, or almost always this thing that I was talking about, the embrace of some elements, but some powerful, prominent elements within the Republican Party of, let us say, Holocaust denial, some anti Semitism, right now, there are many Republicans who say there's no place for that in the Republican Party. And maybe that's a normative statement, but are you saying that just in terms of who's going to be more successful, if there is a place for that, you'll probably have a stronger party or at least more of a claim to know of a chance to get power. Go ahead.
- [22:39]
Charles Duhigg
Because. No, no, because I don't think anti Semitism is actually that big an issue for a voter bloc. Right. I don't think there's a bunch of people who are like, I'm going to vote for whichever candidate is. Hates the Jews. More like what tends to happen. And so these fringe elements, these fringe ideologies that get a lot of attention tend not to be the things that people really differentiate around. What is a good example is immigration. Right. Under the Democrats, there was a real focus on saying, we want to make immigration to the United States easier. We want to protect the rights for people who are in this country having broken the law without documentation on the right. There was a push, the non extreme push to say, listen, the, the whole purpose of a country is to have borders. We get to decide who's a citizen and who isn't. Citizens have different rights than non citizens do. And that, that distinction that we're talking about is a fairly subtle one. Right. And yet it's important to people who care about immigration. They either they either align as the Democrats or they align as the Republicans based on whether they think immigration laws are too strong or are too lax.
- [23:48]
Mike Pesca
Yeah.
- [23:49]
Charles Duhigg
Now whether we should be, you know, separating families or whether we should be taking people and dragging them out of prisons and sending them in countries they've never been in before, that's the fringe aspect of this issue. Where we find real commonality, where we find a political party being built is when we say here's a core value that most of us agree with. And that doesn't mean we agree with the fringe, but it does mean that we see a distinction between ourselves and the other party based on this issue.
- [24:16]
Mike Pesca
So an insight I got from the article is you often hear, especially conservatives or classic conservatives, my friends at the Dispatch saying, wow, the MAGA movement doesn't really have any principles. No, they just don't have your principles. It really is a broad coalition and the coalition is Republicanism or conservatism. Used to stand for free trade and now it just very much doesn't. But that is more of a feature, not a bug of the organizing way of looking at.
- [24:43]
Charles Duhigg
So what's interesting is if you talk to. So it's important to distinguish between the MAGA movement and Donald Trump. Right. Because Donald Trump is co opted and gave a name to the MAGA movement. But if you look at the MAGA movement as it stands today, many of them were anti Trump when Trump first emerged. Right. Ralph Reed and the Christian Coalition and now the Faith and Family Coalition, Faith and Freedom Coalition was anti Trump. Charlie Kirk, who created Turning Point USA compared Trump to Hitler. So what's important to realize is Marco Rubio.
- [25:16]
Mike Pesca
Exactly, exactly. Many of them were anti Trump.
- [25:19]
Charles Duhigg
Now that being said, what they realized were two things. Number one, Trump was winning and it was a good coattails to jump on. Number two, they could expand their tent by saying all you have to be is pro Trump. We don't care what you say, what you say on these other issues, you can be a part of the movement because we believe that once you get a foot in the door, we can convert you to our side on Questions like abortion, on gender identity, et cetera.
- [25:42]
Mike Pesca
Yes.
- [25:43]
Charles Duhigg
So to your point, what is important to distinguish is that what we're seeing right now is a real. Is a real delicacy within the MAGA movement, is can the MAGA movement survive without Donald Trump? I think the answer, because of all this organizing that's happened, because there's tens of thousands of small groups that are bound around ideological and shared values, is that when Donald Trump leaves, MAGA will become something that's bigger than Trump and it will have some core values besides just wanting to vote for the. For the Republican.
- [26:16]
Mike Pesca
You write about a couple of groups, some of whom we may heard of, like the Democratic group Indivisible, and you quote a Harvard researcher who said indivisible leaders have raised tens of millions of dollars from major donors, but have not devolved significant resources away from Washington, D.C. to empower democratically accountable state and local leaders. So it's the symbol of mobilizers who don't have an effect pretty much based beyond the millions that they specifically spent. You contrast them with faith and freedom, which we might not heard of, but they're incredibly important. They're a religious organization that also has backed Donald Trump and done it very well and has. Doesn't have all these purity tests. And then later on in the article, you talk about a North Carolina organization that is Democratic, and it more epitomizes the organizer way of thinking of it, which is, let's just get people help in the rural counties of North Carolina. That's it. We're not going beyond that. We're not asking that they adhere to any other precepts. We just want them to get lower drug prices and cheaper affordable goods in these counties. And the person who organized them said the goal was to be akin to a church where everyone's welcome. We talk about important things, but it's up to you to choose your path. Is there something of religiosity and how Republicans are more religious and do attend church more, that makes it easier for them to conceptualize or just to act on the organizer instead of the mobilizer frame.
- [28:02]
Charles Duhigg
Well, so to answer your question, yes. But it's a relatively new phenomena. And, and I think one of the big distinctions to think about is the Republican Party in MAGA has very much focused on local issues and local races. Right. They wanted to take over precincts. They wanted to run people for school boards. They wanted to run people for city councils. The Democrats and many Democratic supporters, they just want to think about national issues. Right. They care about who's going to be in the Senate, Are we going to win back the House? Who's going to be the next president? And this focus on local issues corresponds really, really nicely with many of the local organizations that have emerged, such as churches, such as gun clubs, such as homeschooling organizations.
- [28:43]
Mike Pesca
Right.
- [28:43]
Charles Duhigg
Such as labor unions. Now, for many years, the Democrats actually were much more influential among religious voters than the Republicans. Churches and labor unions were the local organizing, the local organizing arm for the Democratic Party. But in the last 20 years, obviously labor union membership has declined. Also non evangelical church attendance has declined. And into that gap, the Republicans have seen an opportunity with evangelical churches, which are the fastest growing part of religion. And what they have said is not necessarily like, we want to use this because we believe Republicans are more religious, because Republicans aren't necessarily more religious. Religious. What they have said is this is an organization, this is a structure, this is a, a local infrastructure that we can use to help find people and give them some identity and political purpose. And they've been much more effective than the Democrats have in accessing those evangelical churches, in part because the Democrats have increasingly talked about these federal issues and they've talked about the rights of minorities and they've talked about which. All of which are important but do not resonate quite as much with someone who's living in a, in a small town and says, I don't care about Black Lives Matter. I care about whether I can get Narcan for my relatives.
- [30:05]
Mike Pesca
Right. I also, as you were listing those groups, I was thinking of Moms for Liberty, which is there's a conservative, they're conservative, there's a religious element to it. But they had for a while a good record in taking over seats on school boards based on a couple of issues. But the trans issue was prominent. Now a Democrat hearing this might say, oh, no, we have mobilization or organization on that level too. For instance, we try to get the Moms for Liberty people off the school board and we're against book bans. But if it's a counter mobilization, it's still not organization, right? It's still mobilization.
- [30:40]
Charles Duhigg
It could be, it could be. But the problem is that oftentimes it's, you need to offer people something. You need to offer people something to vote for for instead of just vote against. So if I'm showing up and I'm saying, I hate Moms for Liberty, I want to get them kicked off the school board, it's going to be a uphill battle to actually create a movement around that. Unless I can say and by the way, here's what I want on the school board. I want people who, you know, aren't going to ban books. But also, I understand that, like, some kids are too young to be exposed to some ideas, and so we should have common sense rules around, around what kind of lesson plans are allowed. I think in many ways, the way to think about this is we move through these periods of history where the extremes seem in ascent, and then the radical centrists are in ascent. And when the radical centrists are in a cent, what they're really saying is, listen, we need to work together. We need to. We need to have people on the left and the right who come together. And if we can do that, and this is Barack Obama, we can win an election or we can have a Senate that can actually get things done. And right now, we are living through a period where the extremes on either side hold much more of the voice. And so as a result, everyone in the middle, because most Americans are centrists, everyone in the middle feels very alienated from both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. When we win, when Barack Obama won, when Bill Clinton won, it was because. And when George. George W. Bush won, it was because. They came in and they didn't say, I'm part of this extreme group. They said, look, all you people who feel out of place in both these parties, I want to create a home for you. That's what the parties need to be doing. And that's what the Republicans are currently doing a better job of because they're focusing on local issues and the Democrats are obsessed with national campaigns and national issues that resonate less deeply with local voters.
- [32:27]
Mike Pesca
Charles Duhigg writes in the New Yorker, the recent Annals of Politics article One Direction. What MAGA Can Teach Democrats about Organizing and Infighting. Thanks so much, Charles.
- [32:39]
Charles Duhigg
Thanks for having me on.
- [32:47]
Mike Pesca
The gist is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses, monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [33:08]
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- [33:39]
Mike Pesca
And now the spiel. China has paid a great American athlete to defeat Americans. Eileen Gu took them up on the offer. She'd have been crazy not to. And now Eileen Gu is the most recognizable star at the Winter Olympics as China touts her accomplishments in state sponsored media. I wrote this all up for the Free Press. The ascendance of Eileen Gu, the fourth highest paid female athlete in the world, competing for China on the payroll of China as an example pointed to by the Chinese of American weakness. So for the record, I bear Eileen Gu no personal ill will. She is my countrywoman in all ways, but the insignia on her snowsuit. She was born here, raised here, went to high school here, trained here, achieved her fame here. She reportedly got a 1580 on her SATs here and is engaged in that most American of activities rank commercialism. She has millions of Instagram followers, millions more Weibo followers, and a poise so preternatural she would be in the Charisma Olympics if it were a thing. Here is good. Nailing the landing for charm on the Today show.
- [34:48]
Eileen Gu Interviewer
And oh by the way, for folks who aren't familiar with your story, you've graced the COVID of Vogue Time, you've been a Runway model, you now have dozens of endorsement deals as well. And for folks also may not know the fact you almost had a perfect score in the SAT as well. So you do? Yeah. I mean how is your life changed over the last four years, Eileen?
- [35:12]
Eileen Gu
Yeah, I mean for one, I started college, so that has been so much fun going to Stanford. I also did a term abroad at Oxford, so I fully lived on campus at Oxford and that was just such a special experience. Additionally, I've worked in fashion since I was 14, so continuing to do that and explore the intersection of femininity and power of self expression as just been just as fulfilling. And you know, I like to joke that I picked my three favorite things in the world, skiing, education and fashion, and somehow made it a job. I don't know what job title this is, but I feel like the luckiest girl in the world to be able to do all three at the same time. So I'd just like to say I'm a college student who happens to be really athletic.
- [35:51]
Eileen Gu Interviewer
That's an understudy.
- [35:55]
Mike Pesca
It is tempting to find Eileen Gu so pretty and so good at her sport that it seems almost churlish to impose geopolitics on this transcendent light of athleticism, poise and eyelashes. But China doesn't look at it that way. They paid her millions of dollars last year, most of $6.6 million. They paid her $6.5 million in 2023. They market her not just as the inspiration to young girls she says she wants to be, but as a rebuke to America before the Beijing Games, they wrote in state sponsored news Quote as the US Faces more and more prominent racial problems, outstanding athletes with a dual cultural background at the Beijing Winter Olympics will be an awakening for the country, our country, to reflect on its deep rooted racism against Asian people. This was an article titled Goose Win Inspires Chinese Dissents in US to Break Racial Dichotomy. This was in the Global Times, the governments of official English language tabloid they wrote that the US faces racism poisoned by extreme nationalism and some white people feel insecure when they see a sluggish economy and a divided society. Since more and more people with Chinese heritage are struggling with racial problems in the US it is possible that certain talents will veer to China, a place that is not only their original home, but also more and more open and attractive to talents. The Winter Olympics is a good window for those talents to show China's rising influence. In other words, China pays Eileen Gu to beat Americans and then uses her victories to argue that America is a beaten nation. And this is why, for all her personal attributes which are impressive, I do call her a psyops on skis. And let's not forget, just for the record, that China is a country that rates nine out of a hundred on Freedom Houses freedom rankings. The US is 83 and the US is not perfect. But the New York Times has to go very far in stating this or maybe coming up something like an equivalency they wrote today. So often left unsaid by goo are the moral ambiguities that come with choosing to represent a country that has been heavily criticized by Human Rights Watch, among other watchdog groups, for denying rights of freedom of expression and for persecuting government critics. Parentheses in the Times article, Human Rights Watch has flagged the US for denying freedoms and persecuting critics under the Trump administration as well, both when goo decided to represent China and now. The Times is not comparing like to like. The United States has sins and flaws and a man at the helm who is autocratic or would be, but our system of government is not a dictatorship. We didn't turn the free colony of Hong Kong into an oppressed vassal state. More importantly, in this context, we the United States don't pay foreign nationals to compete for us and then use their achieve to wage psychological warfare on the home front to argue against our rivals as a people or a country. Normally I give athletes a pass on their associations with a government they didn't choose. It might be fun to root against an athlete from a bad or rival country, but in all honesty, yeah, hockey player Alexander Ovechkin isn't particularly condemnatory of Putin, but the guy's Russian. What do you want? It would be an act of bravery or stupidity to act otherwise. 2013 Wimbledon winner Peng Shui is Chinese. She can't help that, so root for her if you like her game. Don't begrudge her success. Of course it's hard to root for her because after she spoke out about being abused by a prominent Chinese government official, she's been essentially disappeared. Gu dodges questions about China's policies, China's paying her, and even the status of her Chinese citizenship. That's only important because by Olympic charter, only naturalized citizens can compete for that country and China doesn't allow dual citizenship. She is or was an American. Did she announce citizenship? Did China break the rules for her? No one's saying as the Snow Princess Racks Up Metals in Social Media Views now on the question of social media, I spoke to Zitu Wang, a USC based researcher and Chinese national who has studied Gu's social media impact, and he told me that her explicitly nationalistic posts on Weibo, the Chinese social media site, are less popular than the ones about skiing. Wang also studied her Instagram posting and found what I think might be a unique finding among attractive women athletes that her sexier posts do worse than her more athletic ones. How do you define sexier? Wang's scientist, you know, social scientist, was the percent of skin that was shown in the pictures. And so when she recently posted a midriff revealing mini camisole about bringing a rice cooker to the Olympic village, it did 32,000 likes. But her compilation of twisting 60ft above the ground to win silver in Big Air received 20000 likes. As Gu wins, China wins. And not just for vague soft power reason. While there is a debate in China about Gu's true Chinese, even among those who say she's mostly American, the success pleases them. Wang says that some think she's not truly Chinese. She's used by the government to compete for the nation, and others don't realize she's not Chinese through and through. But even if they knew she was American, Wang says, they think China is so strong that they can turn an American girl to represent us. US meaning China. That shows the strength of China. As I said in my piece for the Free Press, I have no personal issue with goo. She's great at a sport. She seems lovely. Rooting for her, however, to me is like rooting for a cross between Ivan Drago, a Blade Runner replicant, and a kind of Aldrich Ames by proxy. I would just like to see in the media a more fully rounded discussion of goo and what she represents. The New York Times had a piece today. It was. I quoted part of it. It was laughably short. It was all about the pressure of celebrity that she has to put up with. Well, yeah, that's how you earn $25 million. Not to mention the. The cash that China directly funnels you. The BBC, the New York Times, let's call it respectable media. Time magazine, they say she has critics, but the critics are always quoted as Fox News people, or maybe Tucker Carlson. The coverage rarely grapples with the propaganda campaign that she is a part of. This isn't ambient nationalism swirling around goo. She explicitly made herself a signatory to it. And she's not 15 anymore. She's 22. If we throw laurels at her status as a Stanford student, how do we give her a pass as an international relations major? Who says she has no opinion on the Uyghurs or Hong Kong? She told Time magazine about the Uyghurs quote, I need to see a ton of evidence. I need to maybe go to the place, Maybe talk to 10 primary source people who are in a location and have experienced life there. Then I need to go see images, I need to listen to recordings. I need to think about how history affects it. Then I need to read books on how politics affects it. This is a lifelong search. OK, get back to us when you're 70, Eileen. By the way, you can't talk to 10 Uyghurs. They're not allowed out of the country. And most Chinese have heavy restrictions on traveling into Xinjiang, the province where they live. Again, I don't care about. This is a gotcha about a bad question Eileen Gu was asked, or a bad answer she gave. No Chinese athlete who could comfortably answer that question. But that's the point. She chose to be a Chinese athlete and they chose to trumpet that status for a price. One of the prices should be a bit more skepticism and scrutiny within the Western media, but it's just not there. Attractiveness and athleticism have overridden even our basic sense of fair play. The gist is produced by Cory Wara, who, you know, has to put up with some different, different things in his threat matrix from time to time. Jeff Craig runs our social media. Kathleen Sykes runs the Gist list Booking by Ben Astaire and co. Michelle Pesca calls the shots from the top at the gist. Oomproo G Peru Do Peru and thanks for listening.
- [44:19]
Docebo Advertiser
It feels like AI can do everything. Write the code, analyze the data. It can even suggest your next move. But there's one thing AI can't do. Think for your people. With AI, the real advantage isn't the tools. Anyone can do that. The real advantage is human readiness. That's why the smartest companies aren't asking, do we have AI? They're asking, can our people keep up to build a learning program that keeps your people ahead. Learn with docebo Docebo Never Stop learning.
- [44:46]
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