Transcript - Episode 2: Nobody Knows Until They’re Taught
Hey, It’s Me
EPISODE # 2
Hosts: Mike Sakasegawa and Rachel Zucker
Transcript by: Leigh Sugar
Transcripts formatted after those from Disability Visibility Project
Please note: transcripts are transcribed directly from recordings of live conversations; as a result, quotes and statements may be approximate and there may be unintended memory errors.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Hey, it's me. So I just sent you three videos that I saw on TikTok and Instagram that were making me think about some stuff related to how we talk about young people and what young people do and don't know, how they think about stuff, and also I think about how we remember our own selves as younger people.
There's also a bit in there about media criticism, and I think could be expanded to just, you know, how we understand art in general, and is that different, you know, between generations? But I think there's something interesting in here, and it's, it's come up for me a lot in the past, I don't know, a couple of years.And I just thought it might be kind of interesting to talk about.
Okay, bye.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. I don't know how to start these things when it's not, like, me running down my checklist with the person because I have to make sure they're going to be comfortable. I've never… I'm not used to this [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Isn't that great?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Ahhhh. It feels very uncomfortable. I feel very anxious about it. But I guess we probably should just start. I don't know. Should we just start?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Let's just start.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So I sent you three videos and I'm not 100 percent sure why this is such a bug up my ass, but t's just, there's the, the, the sort of state of intergenerational discourse online… I find it irritates me in a way that makes me feel like such a grouchy old man, but okay.
So the first video that I sent you is the actor Natalie Morales saying essentially, “Haven't we learned our lesson?” And I'm not sure if you're aware of the drama that she's talking about, it's something that has been going on the past, I don't know, a few months. Do you know who Jojo Siwa is?
RACHEL ZUCKER: No.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay. Jojo Siwa was a sort of internet child star, recording artist who was very known for being like extremely girly and having these big bows that she wore in her hair and that she sold, like the Jojo bow was, a humongous, popular item when my older daughter was, mmm, probably like five or six, and, she's now a teenager, JoJo Siwa is. She came out as a lesbian sometime last year, I think, and she's sort of totally changed her aesthetic and the way that she talks and, her personal fashion, the kind of music that she makes.
And notably the way that she's talking about herself is as though no one from, well, certainly no one from her generation has made a change that's extreme as she has, with the implication that, you know, she's really breaking new ground here in terms of gender presentation and sexuality, which she's not. But she's also very very young.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I believe she is for her.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Sure. Yeah I believe she is actually still legally a child, you know, but you know as one might expect for someone who's grown up in the spotlight, she's gotten a lot of discourse and people criticizing her. Some people criticizing her for just being cringe, some people for not knowing her queer history, things like that. And this video that I sent you is saying, “Hey, don't we remember this kind of thing happening before, you know, don't we remember leave Britney alone, that sort of iconic moment?”
You do know that one. Do you know that one?
RACHEL ZUCKER: I mean I have watched the Britney documentary but I don't know the exact moment, the exact leave Britney alone moment in my memory, hazy memory, there were so many, you know, just like the constant media attention on her life. But if, but I'm, oh, you're much younger than I am. We should probably get that straight for the record. I'm 52. How old are you? Young man?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: [Laughs]. I’m 44. I'm 45 in a few months.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right. Okay. So this is, this is very helpful to an older person like myself, if you'd like to fill me in.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You’re not that much older than me [laughs].
[5:00]
The leave Britney alone thing, there was a really, it was one of the early viral videos. And it was, I don't want to use their dead name because the person is trans and we didn't know that at the time, and I don't know their current name. It was a very popular video of, of, of sort of like an effeminate queer man, young man, just weeping and being like, leave Britney alone and that it was sort of a big moment in the, you know, early 2000s or maybe late 2000s, I don't remember exactly when it was a long time ago at this point, but this video is her saying, “Hey, didn't we learn this lesson already?”
The second video that I sent you, which was also on TikTok is a young, to me, young looking woman, probably a younger millennial, perhaps, complaining about Gen Z and how they do or do not understand media and media criticism, and the context being that Sex and the City was either recently re-released or they're gonna do another movie. I don't know exactly what it was, but you know, Sex and the City was obviously a long time ago and Gen Z adults are starting to discover it and complain about how there's nobody likable on the show, nobody to root for, everybody is a terrible person. And this millennial interlocutor is essentially criticizing all of Gen Z for not having good media literacy and not understanding that you're not supposed to like those characters and essentially saying, you shouldn't be talking about this stuff in public if you don't know what you're talking about.
She also gave the example of Gen Z people not understanding that you're not supposed to like Larry David's character in Curb Your Enthusiasm. And there was a third one that I, I don't remember what, what it was that she, it was a very condescending video I felt.
And then the third one was an Instagram video from the Jimmy Fallon show where it was sort of a man on the street kind of thing, accosting Gen Z teenagers and young adults and asking them to address an envelope, and none of them were able to do it, and in that, I mean this style of video of you know accosting people on the street and saying look how dumb these people are, is, that's something that's been going on I'm sure since long before I was born. But it does sort of reflect a certain theme about how how people talk about Gen Z, I know there's a popular stand up comic bit that's been going around for several months talking about, you know a woman who's probably, you know, somewhere between my age and your age talking about how, um, you know, if there was a generational war, she's not worried about it because Gen Z doesn't know anything. Like they don't know how to address an envelope or write a check or write in cursive or do any of these really basic things.
And there were two pieces of this that I found sort of interesting. The first part has to do with that second video and just has to do with media criticism in general, and how we understand these things, and whether or not any generation has ever been particularly good at it, because what this person was saying is, you know, the people that are older than you, we know what we're, we have these skills, and you don't have these skills, and so you shouldn't be talking about these things.
And the second thing is just the sort of caricature of this entire generation of young people as just being particularly inept. And, so that first part, and I feel like I've been sort of monologuing here and I don't know if that's how this show is supposed to go…
RACHEL ZUCKER: We're figuring it out together, Mike.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: That first part. So I'm kind of curious, like, do you remember how people talked about Sex and the City when it was still on the air when it was new, because I have very specific memories of how people talked about that show. Do you, how do you remember people talking about that show? Did you watch it when it was on?
RACHEL ZUCKER: I did not watch it when it was on. I mean, I certainly watched an episode here and there and I knew what it was. Just for context, I'm extremely good at watching television [laughs]. I have a lot of experience with watching television. So it's not like I'm like, “Oh, I didn't watch that because I don't watch television.”
I watch a shit ton of television. I love television. And it's interesting, I didn't like what I saw of Sex and the City myself for a lot of different reasons. Do you remember when it started airing?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I mean, I think it was 30 years ago. I mean, I think it was sort of mid 90s is when it started. I didn't really become aware of it until like I was maybe in late high school or early college. So it was sort of like ‘98 ish, something like that.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Right. So I graduated from college in ‘94. I was in a committed relationship with the man who was going to become my husband, who I stayed married to for 25 years.
[10:09]
I think I felt threatened in a certain way by the whole concept of Sex and the City. I certainly was not… I never was a single woman, until recently, in New York City. I wasn't having sex in the city, I wasn't, I didn't have the same language then, but I'm not high femme, I don't understand fashion, I don't understand, I don't, I don't, like, the Carrie Bradshaw character was annoying to me.
I didn't, I didn't really know who to identify with, you know, in the show, and I didn't like the wealth and the, I also didn't have any female friends really, so I think I was jealous and critical and I couldn't relate to it. It wasn't compelling to me in that way. And I think it had a lot to do with the female beauty and the, I don't know.
You know, I mean, I was like identifying with Counselor Troi on Star Trek. I was like identifying with, you know, non human, you know, aliens more than I was with the Sex and the City women. So, yeah, it wasn't my show. I wasn't like that into the women whose show or it was… yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Yeah. I think it's interesting because the way you're talking about this right now, the way that you sort of bounced off that show, because you didn't, you couldn't find anybody to sort of identify with, right? Or that being at least part of it, is interesting because I feel like in large part that's sort of what the, this Gen Z critic is also being criticized for, right? Because whoever this person was wrote an article and saying everybody on this show is garbage. And I don't know enough about the writers, the creators of that show to know whether or not those people were supposed to be garbage. I do know that it is probably somewhat loosely based on a real person, a real writer whose name is, I think, Candace Bushnell. The Carrie Bradshaw character is sort of supposed to be Candace Bushnell. So I have a hard time believing that, you know, that it was based on, I mean, I know that it was based on a real column that was being written. And so I have trouble imagining that this person who at least was the inspiration behind the show was developing this character with the intention of herself being a terrible person, but leaving that aside because it is a TV show that was created by a writer's room and she wasn't, as far as I know one of the writers of the show, so, you know, it might be that these people were intended to be terrible people.
But the way that I remember people talking about this TV show in the late 90s, all through the 2000s, when it was sort of part of our lexicon, our cultural lexicon was not as, “Look at these idiots” or “Look at these assholes.”
It was, it was like, I remember there being quizzes about, you know, which Sex and the City character are you? And people would say, say, like, “Oh, I'm such a Miranda” or like, “Oh, I'm really more of a Charlotte.” People really did strongly identify with these characters. People didn't think that they were terrible people. People thought these were aspirational characters.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: And so I feel like this, this thing about treating people, young people, like they're stupid for correctly identifying that these people are kind of insufferable, especially by contemporary standards, and not recognizing that they were never supposed to be relatable is really missing the fact that the cultural context at the time was that they were all very relatable. And that they were supposed to be relatable at the time, which sort of connects to this other thing about the whole, “Haven't we learned our lesson? You know, about the leave Brittany alone thing.
Yeah, I do think that it is a good conversation to have about, that the point that Natalie Morales was trying to make broadly was, you know, let's think about how we talk about women. Let's think about how we talk about young women. Let's think about the context here of this being a very, a person who has very little life experience, but has spent a lot of that life in the public eye. And what that does to a person and let's maybe think about this and more broadly just that the way that we talk about people on the internet can be pretty vicious and really unnecessarily so.
[15:00]
I think all of those are very good points to make, but the idea, didn't we learn our lesson?- the thing that really jumps out to me about that is that I don't think most of the people who are involved in the Jojo Siwa discourse did learn that lesson because I don't think they were even alive yet when that happened. Or if they were, they weren't old enough to be on the internet. Cause I mean, this is something that happened like 17 or 18 years ago, maybe more. And a lot of the people who are, especially on TikTok, who are making videos criticizing Jojo Siwa are teenagers or at the very least they're like young twenty somethings. Some of them are a little older. I do see some like sort of queer elders saying let's make this a teaching moment. But those ones are not as mean most of the time. They can be a little exasperated and perhaps rightly so. But also, I really don't think people did, like they weren't around to learn these lessons.
And then that ties in the third one, which is like, yeah, it probably is true. You know, if a teenager nowadays doesn't know how to, you know, address an envelope or write a check or use a can opener or any number of other things, there's a level on the surface of that where that's kind of funny. But to me, it really doesn't read as an indictment of the young people. It reads as an indictment of the people who was, whose job it was to teach them those things, because nobody's born knowing how to address an envelope or use a can opener. These are skills that you have to either figure out on your own or someone has to teach you.
I actually remember being in like fourth grade. And I went to daycare after school and I remember, one day, one of the teachers at the daycare brought in a bunch of like check, her checkbook with like the numbers at the bottom cut off and just had us all practice how to write a check. And that's the only reason that I know how to do that is because someone decided that it, you know, someone in a position of authority over me, a position of mentorship over me decided, “I'm going to teach these kids this life skill now.” Otherwise I wouldn't, I mean, maybe I'd have learned it some other way, but other than that, that's the only reason I know. So if these kids don't know stuff, it's not really their fault, you know?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I have so much to say. First of all, I love that you brought these videos to me. For so many reasons, it hits on so many of the things that I want to talk about with you on this podcast and just in general. Also, thank you for sending me to TikTok videos because I had the experience of downloading TikTok for the first time. [Laughs].
That's how old I am. That's how involved with TikTok I am. So that was, I didn't get it on my first try, but I did, I did finally figure it out. You know, so I love this, these questions, this topic. Here's a few things that I hear in here: Why do we like what we like and how does that, in terms of media in particular, how much of what we like has to do with our ability to identify with the characters? Overlappingly, where does the likeability of a character fall into this question of popular media?
Number two, the takedown culture. And I don't mean the cancel culture. I mean just like this, the kind of criticism, the delight in criticizing like a whole generation or a whole group, a kind of person. And then this question of meanness versus kindness and humor, and where the media, how that intersects with like, generational questions and questions of media. And I think this has to do with us personally, with our relationship, with podcasting, with like, how we consume media, how we produce media, all of these things. So I'm loving this.
Then from a personal perspective, I love this topic because it brings up for me, and I don't know if you did this intentionally, it touches, or could touch, very much on my dating life, on my teaching life and on, you know, because I have, I've been saying to you that part of what I want to talk about is my dating life and also, the war in Israel and Gaza, which I feel like it's a, even though you might be like, well, what does that have to do with, you know, you know, criticism of Sex and the City?
What it has very strongly to do with it is the student protests that are going on and how older people are viewing the student protests at the university pro-Palestinian protests.
[20:09]
So can I respond by telling you two stories?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Sure [laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. So a few days ago, I got an email telling me that my very favorite teacher from high school, John Aune, had passed away.
There are a lot of reasons why John was my favorite English teacher, but the main thing is, when I was a ninth grader, I had, I went from Yeshiva, I went to Ramaz from first grade to eighth grade. It was a terrible, terrible experience for me. All eight years. I had no friends. I was socially ostracized. I was isolated. I was, my family was not religious. We didn't keep kosher. Many of the teachers were Holocaust survivors. It was a sad, terrible educational environment, terrible for girls, especially. I was constantly in opposition to the teachers, the curriculum, the administration. I was, I got in trouble all the time. I didn't do well in school. I was told I was stupid. I wasn't, you know, a strong student. Okay. And I wasn't allowed to leave this school. And it was misery, like really eight years of misery for me.
And then I was allowed to apply out for high school and I left. I went to Fieldston, which is an elite private high school in a neighborhood of the Bronx called Riverdale, a very wealthy, neighborhood in the Bronx. And it was like I had been released from a cult. Like when I first got there, I wore what I had worn in elementary and middle school, which was like, you know, skirts, dresses down to my ankles. You weren't allowed to have your arms exposed. So I had to like, it was a big transition for me into a secular humanist environment. And it was pretty wild and pretty fabulous for me.
I fell in love. I got a boyfriend, I made friends. It was all this great stuff was happening for me. So, and, and I, I'd always been really interested in writing, but I had been told in my previous school that I wasn't a good writer because I was a poor speller and my handwriting was terrible. And I definitely had some learning differences that were, you know, not addressed.
Anyway, I get to Fieldston and my high school, my ninth grade high school English teacher was named Miss Berger, and she was a first year English teacher. Early or maybe mid twenties, you know, and I treated her like shit, and I thought the class wasn't serious enough. I thought she wasn't serious enough. I thought we were reading baby stuff. And so I took myself to the chair of the English department who was John Aune, and complained. And I said, and I criticized my teacher and I bad mouthed her and I was like, this class is stupid. It's too easy, blah, blah, blah.
And you know, there's so many ways that that could have been handled, and then I think that might be handled now. What he did was essential to me and like my becoming a writer and a teacher and a person. He said, “Oh, okay, well, here are some books.” And he gave me “Technicians of the Sacred” the very first day, which is an anthology of indigenous writing edited by Jerome Rothenberg, who passed away this week.
He ended up giving me Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, Joy Harjo, and he gave, he said, “Read this and come back to my office next week and we'll talk about the books.” And I met with him every week, and he just kept giving me more and more things to read. It was the first time I'd ever been given poetry by contemporary living women, or women really kind of in general.
And we had like kind of an informal independent study. I never got credit for it. And the more, you know, the more I complained, the more he gave me, and the more, and it was, you know, it was really life changing. And I think about it all the time, like when I have a student who complains about another teacher at NYU or who complains about me. Students, you know, it's, it's not easy when a student comes and says like, “I don't like your class for this reason.” I think about that moment and I think like, what can I do to engage this student? What more books can I give them? What different kinds of assignments? What, how can I like open myself up to more contact, to more listening, to more asking, to more understanding, rather than like, you know, making this like cracking down on the student.
[25:28]
Like he could have been like, “This entitled little shit is coming to my office to complain about a first year teacher? She has no idea how hard it is to be a first year teacher, especially in a classroom with all these like obnoxious elitist little snotty brats,” you know, and he was, he had been an experienced enough teacher and he was chair of the department that he could have put me in my place. Easily.
And he didn't. And, you know, so I, I feel like on one level, this criticism of younger people, exactly what you say, like, how are they supposed to know how to address an envelope? They don't send letters. And also also nobody knows how to address an envelope until they're taught. And really, you could say that about, about every single thing, everything.
Nobody knows until they're taught. And this like desire, I mean, it is funny. The first time that I asked my kids to address an envelope, they had no idea how to do it. And they made mistakes, and their mistakes are very funny a lot of the time. But this like delight in like, look how stupid the young people are, is, I think it's lazy. I think it's mean spirited. I think it's not taking responsibility. And I think it's misguided.
I think that, you know, the young people, which makes me sound very old to say “the young people.” I mean, first of all, obviously they're not all the same, but there are so many fucking things they know that I don't know. And that I didn't know when I was their age, and I'm learning so much from them. And I don't know. I think this, this like meanness is really wrongheaded.
So I have another story to tell you about that happened in my dating life that's real, that's very much related to this, but I won't just keep talking, you know, endlessly [laughs].
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think, you know, I think that there is this really interesting phenomenon that happens that, and I don't think that it's limited to people who are currently, you know, in their quote unquote prime years of adulthood, right? I think that this is something that probably has always been happening, but there is this phenomenon that when people get older they forget what it's like to have been a child. They forget what it's like to be a young person. And they have this way of forgetting how ignorant they personally were when they were younger, because they know things now, and so they forget that they didn't always know those things. The thing that's really ironic to me about that second video and the woman who made that second video is that to me, she reads as very young.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: She's probably, I have, it's hard to guess how people, how old people are from the way they look. But I would guess that she's in her early 30s, possibly her late 20s, but probably somewhere between 30 and 34. So you know, like a decade or so younger than me. And that's not just based on how she looks, but also how she talks and sort of her affect in videos that, you know, people who came up at different points of the internet have a sort of identifying affect in how they talk when they're making internet content.
The thing that really strikes me about the way she talks about the people who are younger than her is that she seems very young to me. And, I don't know if this is something that people necessarily grow out of, this sort of uncharitableness towards people younger than them. I just always find it so ironic because I know that, you know, Millennials, when they were young, got so much shit from the people older than them.
People of our generation, of the Gen X generation, you know, we were the ones that kind of, like they were, they called us the slacker generation in Time Magazine back in the early 90s [laughs]. People said the same thing about the Boomers when back in the 60s, and yet we all keep turning around collectively and doing the exact same thing to people who are younger than us, and I think that is just it's so weird, it's so ironic and I don't, I mean, I don't fully understand how or why that happens that we all just sort of forget that it happened to us, or we think, “Well, no, this time it's different,” you know?
[29:57]
I do think that that impulse to judge and to be critical of these people is very related to how just in general, we understand so many of the interactions that we have in this world. So I don't know if I would have necessarily connected it to Israel and Gaza, but, you know…
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. Well, let me, let me tell you the second story, because that's where the connection is. And I had the same perception as you, Mike, where I, in that second video, I was like, I mean, I was abused. I was like, Wow, you're really, you really, you're really all in on complaining about Gen Z, who in your words, like, don't know how to watch television, you know, basically, with this tone of like outrage and urgency about like, the media illiteracy of Gen Z.
And I, but, and I definitely had a moment where I was like, “How old are you?” And also like, I could feel myself being drawn into her kind of discourse in my mind and, and wanting to kind of be like, “Don't you have anything better to do than make a video about how dumb…” [laughs]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: There's a line in her video about like, where she said, you know, “You should think before you put something on the internet. How much water is it going to use to be stored there?” I'm like, what about what you're saying? [Laughs].
RACHEL ZUCKER: I know, I know. And so I, you know, I was -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: What about what we're saying right now? [Laughs]
RACHEL ZUCKER: I know, I know. Well, so, so, but this is the thing. Like I found myself like, going toward that mindset of like, I need to correct other people. I need to, or at least I need to talk to you, Mike, about why she's wrong and why I'm right. And then I sort of caught myself and I was like, this is not the hill I want to die on at all. And like, I don't agree with her, but what can I see in her passion? Like, what is this passion about for her? How can I connect to that? How can I, you know, she's not wrong about everything. It is funny. It is funny when people are like, you know, the Curb Your Enthusiasm stuff is so interesting to me, you know, or the fact that Sex and the City is being talked about right now.
It's very interesting to me. So it's not just so simple as me being like, oh my God, shut the fuck up. Like, I don't care. And it's also not as simple as me being like, lady, you sound crazy. You know? [Laughs]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I think the question of, you know, of more interesting, you know, like what you're pointing to is not so much, why is there this pattern in Gen Z discourse about, you know, this sort of moralistic approach to art and media? Or, you know, why are they like that? Or, you know, they're wrong for doing that. Or, you know, that this Millennial people, people complaining about young people are wrong for doing that.
It's more like, How did we get here? How did, how did this happen? You know, what is it about the external pressures of the world that might create a pattern among young people now towards a more moralistic read of certain kinds of art? What is it about the aging process that makes us do this to younger people? You know, those are the interesting questions.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yes! Yes! And, and I mean, for God's sake, like, thank God they're moralistic. Maybe they don't like Sex and the City. Who fucking cares? They're out protesting the end of the world and the oppression and war and murder.
So maybe they're a little moralistic. I think that's fine, you know, like, do you know what I mean? Like, I, like, I was thinking that, but, and okay. So, to come back to this question of like, is this kind of like a developmental stage? Like does every generation as it, you know, becomes older, look at the youth and say, “You guys are stupid. You're missing it. Like if you, you know, trust me, you know, listen to me,” you know, and I, I think that there is certainly a tendency. But you and I are just two examples of “We're not going there. I'm not going there.”
So let me tell you one other story. So I was on a date with the guy that I'm seeing, and I'm going to preface this by saying I'm using him as an example. But he is the norm, like I have many interactions with other people our age, like this, that's, that's much more normal than my relationship with you, which is politically, we are of a much more similar political mind than I am with most other people my age. I'll say it that way.
Okay. So, it's early on in the relationship. We have only been seeing each other for a few months.
[34:57]
And the other night I had a Passover Seder. He went to the Jewish Voice for Peace protest at Grand Army Plaza. And I really wanted to cancel my Seder and go to the Jewish Voice for Peace protest, but I decided not to do that and have my Seder and… lots of reasons behind that.
I had gone to a JVP protest in Grand Central Station, months and months ago. So the guy I'm seeing was describing the protest to me. I didn't ask him to describe it. He wanted to tell me about it. He was describing it, he was describing it in very similar terms. as what I experienced when I went to Grand Central Station. So in other words, that like, there were, you know, lots of peaceful protests, most for the most part, they're totally peaceful protests. A lot of Jews organizing it, showing up, not just Jews. And also, some counter protest and also some, you know, chance that he didn't feel comfortable chanting that, you know, I wouldn't have felt comfortable chanting, and some stuff that was going on as there, in my opinion, in my experience, as there always is in these large scale protests, you know, like when I was in Grand Central Plaza, there was a person of color who was saying very, very loudly, “I love to see White people fight.”
And, you know, there were some White protesters and police who were kind of getting into it. And it was like this, just, it was a, it was a comment that this person kept making and sort of egging them on. And like, that's, come on, it's like, it's a protest. There's a lot going on. There's a lot of, you know, for the most part, you know, right on target, you know, I'll just say one other thing about this, which is, you know, if anybody's listening to this ever, I know so many people who teach at universities at this point, and I'm getting reports, firsthand reports from faculty, from students at all of these student protests, Columbia, NYU, University of Texas, that are basically saying that the media reports of what's happening there are really inaccurate, and that they are peaceful and that all of the violence is coming from the police towards the protesters.
Okay. All right. So anyway, this guy is describing the protest, but his takeaway is very different than mine. His experience, his opinion is very different than mine. He's much more focused on the exception to the rule, which are, you know, maybe people there for not the reasons he's there and chanting things that he doesn't want to chant. And, you know, maybe, you know, causing a disturbance and something that he perceives as anti-Semitic, or maybe something that is anti-Semitic.
And, and then he says, you know, “These young people who are protesting are so naive.” And he sort of starts to talk about the student protests, and, basically says like, “What do they think, you know, you're, they're really gonna, you know, convince their universities to divest from everything having to do with Israel or for everything having to do with oil, or it's not a coincidence that these student protests are happening at these very elite universities where these students kind of like have everything,” you know, and lapses into what I think of as some, a very similar set of complaints to like, oh, Gen Z doesn't know how to watch television.
These are more like these entitled, naive, liberal snowflake protester kids. This is not his language, but moving in that direction, “They're not realistic. They don't understand. They don't have experience. Like, you know, when they get to be our age, they'll grow up. You know, they'll, they'll learn why their demands are entitled and ridiculous.”
And then I wasn't saying anything and he said, “What do you think?” And I, you know, I'm like, you know, it's like a trap, right? Like I'm dating this guy. And I said, “I don't agree.” And he was like, “What do you mean? You know, give me more, give me more.” And I didn't want to fall into this trap of like, you know, trying to correct him and, you know, tell him how he doesn't know anything and, you know, how I'm right and he's wrong.
And I said, which I think came across as extremely condescending and obnoxious now that I think about it. But in the moment, it was like, all of my Buddhist practice, like resulted in this answer. I said, “I don't really think we should talk about this because I think the students are right. And I think that they're not that naive and I think that their demands are great. And I think that universities aren't going to look like they look now in 20 years. I don't think they can. Most people don't agree with me. Most people don't have this, these opinions that I have. And I think if the students don't win we're fucked.”
[40:09]
But between you and me, I'm saying to the guy, like, “I'm happy to hear your opinion and your experience. And if you want to know mine, I can talk about it. But I'm not, I'm I've no interest in trying to convince you of something other than what you think. And there's no chance you will be able to convince me. So this won't really be a conversation. And I'd rather have a conversation with you about something else.”
And he did not like this. This did not go over well. [Laughs].
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: People usually don't.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, I mean -
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: It's been my experience.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I mean, it's really bitchy of me in a certain way.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Is it though? Is it?
RACHEL ZUCKER: Well, I mean, then what happened was he said, “Well, let's take divestment, for example.” And he started telling me about how much he knows about the business world and all this stuff.
And I said, “Are you about to explain divestment to me?” And he said, “I'm not mansplaining you.” I'm like, “I did not use the word mansplain.” And he said, “I'm not mansplaining you.” Which is like, there's like every level of this is so ridiculous. Right. And then he, I was like, “I'm just asking, are you about to explain divestment to me? Because I know what divestment is.” I mean, I didn't say this to him, but like my kid was arrested twice, for exactly this issue, you know, for occupying the office of Yale investments as part of the Environmental Justice Coalition to try to get Yale to divest from anything having to do with fossil fuels.
And it's one of the proudest moments of my life, both times that he was arrested and for the organizing and the activism that he does. I understand what divestment is. I understand, you know, how hard it is, and how important it is. And, you know, I believe 100 percent in student protests of this nature. And, I don't know.
So I guess I tell you this story for a lot of different reasons. One being, this is a straight, cis, White, Jewish man in his mid fifties. And his feeling about the young people seems very shared, like in my generation. I mean, my son Moses, when he was canvassing a few years ago, said to me that whenever he would, he was in Virginia and when he would knock on the door, if someone my age, our age would answer the door, he would know there was no chance. There's no chance. He was like, “Younger than you and older than you were people that he could talk to. But basically Gen X, we were, by and large, a group of like apolitical, unmotivated, impatient, critical people that were like, kind of, he knew it was just going to be like, not worth his time.”
I mean, he still did it. I mean, that's the thing, right? So I don't know. I, I, you said, “Why are they so moralistic and how did we get here?” I think, “Thank fucking God. they are moralistic and in the ways in which many of them are moralistic.” And how did we get here? I don't think it's just a function of age. Like for sure people get, tend to get more conservative as they get older and more critical of every person and group that's not them.
But something, I think it's, there's something particular to this moment or this kind of, I mean, I, I don't think it's the first time, right? Like I'm thinking about Kent State and, and the student protests during the Vietnam era and the War in Korea era. Certainly there was like a massive divide between the parents and the kids around those issues. And I guess I would go with Natalie Morales. Like, didn't we fucking learn anything? The kids were right. You know, the anti-war protesters were right. The establishment was wrong. The government was wrong.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: You know, even more recently than that, the protests after 9/11.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, yeah. And, and the Black Lives Matter protests and the way they were portrayed and the way they were carried out. These student protests, you know, pro-Palestinian sovereignty protests, the same thing is happening. I see the same thing happening. I don't know why we're not learning something. Like I guess if I really could say anything I wanted to, and like, I guess one question for you is like, where does your liberalism come from? Does it come from being a parent? Where does your openness to listening to the kids, as let's call them, come from?
[45:05]
Because I think what I would say to another person in our generation, or even to this woman, who's clearly younger than us, probably a Millennial, even I would say to her, criticizing Gen Z, start from the position of, you're probably wrong, and the kids are probably right. And start from that every time. Every single time, really sit with the possibility or the probability that you are wrong, and see where that gets you. Wee what you can learn. Wee what you can figure out. Wee what you can be open to. Because I'm even trying to do that with her. I'm trying to say, like, what, what's in it for her? Why is she, why is she having this huge fit over Gen Z? How can I, what can I learn from that?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I mean, I think it's, the question is, where does my liberalism or progressivism, where does that come from? I, I honestly don't fully know. I've had a very strong sense of justice for my entire life, but that has been expressed in many different ways and in different directions over the course of my life.
They say that, autistic and neurodivergent people often do have a very overdeveloped sense of justice. What, but what it kind of brings up for me, I remember having this argument with my mom a long time ago, this was probably like 25 years ago. And I think that it was about, we were arguing about political candidates. I don't remember who it would have been, but she was making the argument that like, you know, “You really want someone with experience to be leading, you know, to be in charge of stuff.” And the argument that I made at the time, as a relatively young adult, was “Experience can be very useful when a situation comes up that you've already been through before, then you can kind of have some, some idea of how it's going to turn out and of, of what might be helpful in that situation. But experience can also be a trap because it makes you tend to think that your experience is the only kind of experience that could happen, you know, and that it's applicable outside of situations where it actually is applicable.”
You know, if we're talking about young people being naive, we're saying they're inexperienced and they don't know how this is going to turn out. Really, that's the only way that anything ever changes is because people don't know enough to say that it can't be changed.
I remember early on, like shortly after Trump's election, when I started getting a lot more vocal online about politics. One of my friends, not one of my great friends, but a guy I knew who, you know, I used to talk to a lot more often, kind of took me to task in our private messages saying that everything I was doing was just virtue signaling. And I said to him, and this is probably why we stopped talking, I said, “What is the difference between virtue signaling and just virtue in this situation? And if we can just write everything off, like any form of visible action as just being virtue signaling, then doesn't that just excuse you for not doing anything? You know, isn't that just a way of making you feel better for your inaction?” And I think that is probably why we stopped talking to each other [laughs].
But, you know, I think, I mean, you, as you know, I always try to start from, I have a real distrust of myself, right? I have a real, I'm very attached to doubting myself. And I think that that is important from an ethical standpoint, but I think it's particularly important, the necessity of questioning, am I, maybe I'm wrong, or starting from the position that I, I'm probably wrong here, is most important in any arena where I have some kind of structural power. So being older in a lot of ways, especially being older but not like, elderly, does grant me a lot more institutional power, a lot more credibility. Being a man does; being straight does; being affluent does. And so finding ways to distrust that the sort of comfort and the experience of those things is, I think a responsibility, and it's not one that I think a lot of people live up to; it's not one that I always live up to.
How did I get to that position of being willing to question those things? I don't know. Because I know that there were definitely experiences that I had where people kind of took me to task for some sort of, you know, regressive ideas that I had or biases or things like that, and particularly, you know women who you were part of my friend group or especially my online friend group pointing out the, you know, pretty misogynist ways that I would talk or talk to women or things like that.
[50:08]
And those were a shock to the system enough that it got me to where I was going. But the thing is, is that like, the first many times that that happened, it didn't shock me to the point of saying, “Oh, maybe I am wrong here.” It was just, it just hurt my feelings and made me stop talking to those people.
So how do you, how do I get over that feeling to the point of actually questioning, “Maybe I am in the wrong here.” I honestly have no idea. And I don't know how anybody does.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Okay. We have to end soon because it's almost an hour, but I really want to say maybe next time, or in a next time, doesn't have to be the very next time, this question of doubt and certainty comes up between us all the time. And, you know, I'm thinking about the fact that, like, I just made this big speech about, like, “Maybe start from the position that you're wrong.” And, you know, that I, the as you've said, I'm sort of addicted to, you know, or maybe I said about you, like addicted to doubt, you know, and that, that questions and questioning is like a core part of who I am and how I exist in the world.
I also just thought about the fact that like, I did not do that with this guy. I basically said to him, “I am so certain of my own opinion in this matter, I'm not open to hearing anything that would change my mind. And I don't, I don't want to change your mind.” And I think that's really interesting.
I think there's a way in which I'm right on the precipice, maybe of a new stage in my life. And I'm a little worried that maybe I'm crossing over into the land of like, take down. And for me, this really has to do very much with the situation in Israel, which is, this is a moment in my life in history where, when people say like, “Well, it's complicated.” And there's this and there's I haven't said this publicly, you know, on my podcast, and I haven't put it on social media for a lot of reasons, but I don't know that I've ever been so certain of anything as I am that like, what Israel is doing is wrong and needs to stop.
I don't know how it's going to stop. I don't know what I can do to make it stop. I don't know exactly what should happen. I don't know what the alternative is, but it's murder. It's oppression. It's war crimes. There are a few things in my life - my relationship with my kids, my relationship to writing in some ways is very solid and certain and this. And I guess, you know, part of me also wonders, like, is this the thing that is the most certain thing to this millennial woman who wants to argue about Sex and the City and Gen Z? Like, is that what this feels like for her? Like, is she that clear and certain and passionate and defended about Gen Z's ability to watch television the way she wants them to and to be, you know, critical of media? Maybe. Maybe. And maybe that's something for us to think about too, like, I feel that I know what's at stake for me, you know, and, and what seems to be at stake in the world, to not judge, you know, the situation in Israel, same about environmental degradation of the world and other kinds of like, what I consider to be very clear injustice.
So maybe the way for me to be more open, even from a place of certainty, is to try to not make fun of the people who are making fun of other people, but to be like, “Do they feel this way about their thing that I feel about my stuff?”
I don't know. I don't know. But something about doubt and certainty, maybe we could go even further on that. Because these topics…. I don't know. I guess another question, Sorry, I'm just I'm like all over the place right now. But in terms of these recorded conversations and this podcast, do we want to try to find the places in which we're not aligned? And push into those places?
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I mean, I think we probably will, we probably will find those places, whether or not we're looking for them.
I just want to say for the, you know, whatever hypothetical audience this might reach at some point in the future, that to me it actually is very important, this distinction between expressing something and attempting to persuade someone. And, you know, you told this guy that, I'm not interested in trying to convince you of anything. And you're not going to convince me of anything.
[55:01]
And I think that that is really different from saying, “I'm not open to hearing what you have to say,” but you are saying, “I am not open to having what you say change my mind.”
I think that this question of like, what we owe other people, is an important one. You don't owe it to just some random person on the street to hear them out about something. If you have some other relationship, existing relationship with them, then maybe you have a reason to hear what they have to say, to hear their thoughts, just so that you can understand them. But that's not because of the topic, that's because of the relationship.
And so to the point of this being a podcast, and some audience that we're imagining is going to listen to it in the future, nobody has a responsibility to us yet of hearing us out about any of these things. But for me it, and I don't know if this is how you feel exactly, but I think that it is - I'm really not interested in trying to tell an audience what they should think or what they should do.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Mmm.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: So if hearing the things that I or you think about any of these topics is useful or interesting, then that's great. And if it's not useful or interesting, I'm very happy for people to discard it, right?
But I think that we do generally have, and this is not limited to a particular generation or a particular mode of communication, whether that's online or offline or, you know, via the phone or in person, people have a tendency to view any kind of disagreement or dissension as an attempt to be persuasive.
And so I just want to be really clear that at least for me, I'm not, I'm not interested in trying to persuade people, but I'm also not really that interested in being persuaded, you know. So, you know, I don't tend to get a lot of feedback at Keep the Channel Open. But to the extent that, I mean, if somebody feels like they need to send us an angry letter or something like that, I probably would end up reading it. But it's really not necessary [laughs], because I'm not telling anybody what to do.
RACHEL ZUCKER: Yeah, I agree with everything you said, except I don't want an angry, angry letter [laughs]. I don't, I don't, I don't want it. And maybe one day we can talk about the phrase, “Owe it to someone,” that you used, which I'm interested in, and what you owe someone as you develop a relationship with them and what that means and what that, what that equation looks like. I'm really interested in that.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay.
RACHEL ZUCKER: All right.
[Music]
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: I don't know how we, I don't know how we sign off.
RACHEL ZUCKER: I love your discomfort around this and I'm just going to like keep it going. Your discomfort around how to start and how to end. It's, it's fantastic.
MIKE SAKASEGAWA: Okay.
RACHEL ZUCKER: All right. I'm pressing stop.