 to another episode of In the Studio. I'm Nin Weaver and today our guest is Sasha Abramsky. He is the author of at least best-selling books and he's also a journalist and a UC Davis lecturer in the writing program. Thank you very much for coming in, Sasha. I'm so joy to be here. So looking forward to reviewing with you your latest book, Jumping at Shadows, The Triumph of Fear and the End of the American Dream, which has already had national acclaim. Someone said that the book is a serious or pensive rather exploration of the American culture of fear. But it's much more than that. So much more than I wasn't able to catalog it and it would be best in a way to discuss it chapter by chapter but of course we're not going to do that. So let's talk about the central theme of the book which is this fear that affects every aspect of American culture and in a way society. It's almost like an epidemic. And one of the aspect that seems to be affecting at the moment is politics and you talk a lot about this, are you right about this in your book? So how do you think this culture of fear plays into the hands of our current political narrative? Yeah, that's a great question. The book itself came out of a lot of reporting I've been doing over many, many years about how people were making decisions that affected their daily lives and some of those decisions were political and some of them were economic and some of them were about how they parented their children and some were about things like medical care or travel. And one of the things that struck me was for many, many people fear was the sort of petri dish in which their daily lives were growing up. That the way in which they were understanding the world it was almost like they had a distortive lens in front of their eyes and they put on those lenses and they saw the world as this very, very bleak, destructive place where it was very predatory where people were out to attack them or their property or their families. And it struck me that if you live your life that way if you're in this permanent state of alert this permanent state of nervousness of anxiety that it affects you very fundamentally it affects you physiologically it changes the chemical structure of your body you have chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline passing through. But when it changes the chemical structure of your body it changes how you actually respond to events that in an era of stress we look for simple sound bite kind of solutions much more than we do nuance. Oh, that's very true. You know, nuance seems to be sort of almost irrelevant at a moment of heightened fear. We want action. Yes. And it plays very well to the sort of demagogic strengths of a candidate like Donald Trump who is willing to use that fear and stoke divisions and pit one religious or racial group or economic group or sexual group against another. All for the sake of personal political gain. Yes. And I got fascinated by this that what happens to our political culture what happens to our democratic culture in an era in which fear is the currency of the realm? Well, and particularly in the United States because of course this demagoguery we've seen over the years and centuries everywhere else but America being a democracy and a cherished freedom and common sense is very new in my way and very frightening. Now, would you say that part of the reason why we have this culture of fear comes from the fact that we watch and read every day a almost impossible dose of violence so whether it's fiction or real events would you say that is part of the reason? I think it's probably less to do with fiction in the traditional sense and more to do with how we understand the news and the rise of what actually is fiction this sort of whole industry of fake news this whole industry of trolling and everything else. So look, when I was growing up in the 1970s in England we had three television channels if you wanted to get the news there were certain times a day you go for the one o'clock radio news you go for the five o'clock evening news or the nine or 10 o'clock TV news and the rest of the time whatever was happening in the world there were bad things happening in the 1970s but you got on with your lives and as technology shifts the news becomes more omnipresent and so one thing that happens is the amount of news as we get cable TV as we get satellite radio as we get the rise of computer technology as we get smartphones and tablets and everything else we sort of end up in this omnipresent news environment where you can just sort of click, click, click and you get one bad story after another. The second thing that happens is the type of news and the way we approach the news changes. So if you sort of think of the BBC and the sort of keep calm and carry on mentality and you then contrast it with the hyperbolic sort of breath, shouting, screaming, breathing, fox news or what? CNN and others. No, I mean it can be anything. It's not necessarily ideological. It's just the way we approach news increasingly is as entertainment. And this started before satellite TV it started before the internet. It begins with local news about 30, 40 years ago when the business model changes and you end up with this idea if it bleeds it leads and lots and lots of crime stories lots and lots of stories about car crashes things that make us scared and that are going to attract our attention. And all of that's magnified in the current moment. And one of the things that's really fascinating about social media in particular is it compresses space and time. So 40 years ago if a bad thing happened 10,000 miles away we'd pay it some attention but it wouldn't saturate our consciousness. Today if a bomb goes off in Iraq or in Syria or that's an epidemic in West Africa or whatever it might be that sense of distance is removed. And the internet, the way it functions it lets us feel that everything is in our own backyard. And partly that's good. It means that we have the ability to go further and further afield and roam further and further afield culturally in how we get the news. But the downside of that is it means we feel we're permanently under threat. Because there's always going to be a bad story somewhere on earth. There's always going to be a disease outbreak somewhere or a bomb attack somewhere or a resurgent, fundamentalist terrorist group somewhere. And when we lose that sense of perspective we feel permanently besieged. And it plays perfectly to our political moment. It's fascinating to watch the interplay of politics and fear and technology in 2017. And I would go even beyond that because we are so encapsulated in this world of news whether it's real or accurate or whatever or propaganda we lose sight of our reality perhaps. I'm not sure it's that we lose sight of our reality is that we view our reality in a very different way from the way we used to view our reality. So an example would be, you know if you were around in the 1960s or 70s most families let their kids go to school by themselves or maybe walk down the street to visit a friend unaccompanied or go to the playground with a friend. That was just normal. And then in the 80s and 90s and 2000s in particular we got really scared and we started making these assumptions if we let our kids do these basic things like go around the corner by themselves really bad things will happen. Now it wasn't because the crime rate had gone up the crime rate actually fell between the 1970s and today the crime rate's gone down dramatically. But our perception of risk shifted because we became so saturated with the stories of bad things happening. So it's how we understand our reality how we interpret data, how we calibrate risk. That's what shifted and to me it's fascinating and the interviews I was doing as I was going around the country, you know this book is marketed as a political book and it sort of really is in many ways but it is a reportage mostly. It's a reportage and it's about the psychological moment as much as the political moment. It's about the psychology that occurs the changes in our psychology in a risk based culture or a risk averse culture where we assume really bad things are gonna happen and we invest a lot of energy financial energy, political energy, economic energy in stopping those bad things happening and it's sort of batting ourselves down as a culture. Yes and this is why I thought it was a very complex because you do interview many experts, psychologists and anthropologists but it also offer us so many examples. Some of them are really example from real life which are really terrifying in some ways and of course we could talk about the guns the obsession with guns and the phobias and the drug. I mean there's a lot of things that pervert in a way and conducive to. I think what's really interesting is both what we fear and what we don't fear. Tell me more about that. This is fine. Most Americans are more afraid of gun control despite the fact that we have one mass shooting after another after another. More Americans are scared of spiders than nuclear weapons. If a nuclear weapon went off it would be an absolute civilizational catastrophe. Very few Americans until very recently gave much credence to the notion of climate change and the same thing, climate change is this slow moving catastrophe that is going to displace populations it's going to impact the economy, impact the environment, impact agriculture. It's something we should be very nervous about should invest a lot of energies into trying to prevent the worst consequences of but we don't and that really interests me. Why is it we're scared about certain things and not others? This is why your book is extremely fascinating and many levels as I said but we have a limited amount of time and I want to squeeze in some more questions for you. In your view, how can we and this is a difficult question take out of this terrible equation of fear an element that would help the American culture to come back to a certain common sense, sanity. That's a great question. I think part of it is just about introspection and about thinking before we act. Because really a lot of times we see something on the news we go into a sort of panic mode we look for a quick solution that doesn't necessarily make much sense and then we have to live with the consequences. So a case in point would be we're very fearful of terrorism at the moment. With reason because there are groups like ISIS out there which want to do harm but we might have become so scared of terrorism that we start sacrificing civil liberties and it doesn't actually keep us safer but it does make us less free as a people. And then we go for political solutions that sound sort of simple and effective but actually are very counterproductive. So an example would be Trump saying well I'm going to torture terrorism suspects. Well if you torture terrorism suspects where's the prohibition on someone torturing Americans and reciprocity or if you ban Muslims from entering the country where's the incentive for other countries to not say you know what we don't feel like having Americans come to our country and once you go down that road you start building walls you start imposing bans nobody wins, it's a lose-lose situation. And so one thing that I've been urging people to think about is do the solutions that we're glomming on to actually make sense. But the second thing is you talked a lot earlier about the news and how much we sort of you know we get our cell phones out we click, click, click bad news, bad news, bad news it's important to be informed but it's also important to understand when to slow down and sometimes it's good to take a breather not in anything other than the fact it's a sort of mental health check and you end up just as well informed if you look at the news at the end of the day then if you're looking at the news 20 times an hour and I'm not immune from this I have to say you know there are days when I'm just obsessively checking my cell phone and it's so easy and it's so seductive and then I have to slow down and you mention that in your first chapter which is very interesting. You know one of the things that I'm trying to look at in this book is what are the collective impacts on community of the ways that we're behaving? Yes. And one of the things we're doing with technology is we're atomizing. Yes. We're not talking to other people we're not going outside of our comfort zones we're not looking to sort of cross barriers but we're battling down the hatches we're looking for the echo chamber online and echo chambers are never healthy in the end they just deafen you the noise gets louder and louder and louder you just end up with this noise in your head and I think it's really important that we work out ways to use technology effectively but not to let technology use us that we want to be in control of that and I think that's a really good way of unplugging and you know getting a less fear based more rational based culture. Yes, yes and time is running very very short and there's a couple of other we should have a sequel to this interview but there is one quickly if you may what would you like to say to the future readers of jumping at shadows the triumph of fear and the end of the American dream what would you like to say? Just a couple of words. I wrote the book in 2016 I was feeling very bleak as Trump's election. 2016? No, 2016 as Trump's election as Trump's election campaign took off even closer and the subtitle came about in the aftermath of the election I think what I'd say a year on if I'm talking to readers in the future about this is the subtitle's too short it shouldn't be the triumph of fear in the end of the American dream it should be this really long unwieldy subtitle that doesn't fit in the book page which is the temporary triumph of fear and the temporary end of the American dream until a vast number of Americans across ideological divides realized this isn't a good way to live realized that supporting demagogic candidates like Roy Moore in Alabama who was recently handed the thumping defeat that supporting candidates like Roy Moore or Donald Trump isn't the way forward and until they came to their senses and re-established optimism at the core of the American dream that's a terrible subtitle but it's how I feel I love it I was wonderful and it is a hopeful way to I don't like to say end but to wrap up this interview thank you so much, Sasha Abramsky for taking a little time out of your very very busy schedule and to come and talk to us I really appreciate it very much I've read it with a lot of joy and I will probably re-read it until it really sinks in and thank you all for watching from all of us here at Davis Media thank you and see you next time