 Hey, we're back for live. It's what is it? Tuesday morning. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Think Tech. And more specifically, this is Community Matters. And we have an author, a thinker, an analyst, call him a social analyst based on his own experience. And that's Scott Brody. He's an author. And he wrote a novel called, what is it, O-R-G. New York. New York. Okay. And it's a, it's, it's very interesting book. It's fiction, but it rings true in our time. Welcome to the show, Scott. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. So let's talk about you first. Aloha. Thank you. We really mean it out here, you know. So, you know, the, the book sort of has a lot of you in it. And the book is about someone, about activism. It's about groups. It's about demonstrations. And it's, as you told me before the show, it's something you started writing a long time ago after college. And you have continued to do that. So it is an expression not only of you, but of your evolution since then. Wow, what a book. So tell us why you started writing the book and whether I'm right in saying that it defines Scott Brody. Well, I put it, there were decades where I put it down and didn't do anything with it. So didn't take me quite that long. Yeah. I mean, there's some autobiography there. After college, I got involved with, with a political cult similar to this group. I, I, you know, took some inspiration. This group is the George Floyd demonstrations group. No. The group in the book. I'm talking about the group in the book. Okay. Which is called the eco party USA. Okay. But yeah, I saw a lot of things. And when I kind of found the right way to take what I had experienced back in the past and translated into today's world and today's politics, it made a lot more sense. That was kind of when the book sort of came to life and started to really fall together for me. What's your orientation? What's your training in college and thereafter? What's your way of looking at the world? Well, as my little bio here says, I grew up in a liberal Jewish family in New York back in the 50s and 60s. And, you know, I was definitely a child of the 60s. And you mentioned that you had an active family that the family sat around the table. I know this scenario, family sat around the table and had discussions of some depth and arguments and the like. This is a very good background, I think. Yeah. Constantly talking about that. And lots of friends, my family, new friends in the civil rights movement in the early civil rights era. I had Uncle that went freedom riding. So, yeah, there was a lot of stimulation around all that. And that was great. So it was natural for me to kind of keep going with my political interest in the 70s and into college. Of course, it wound up getting me into that organization, which turned out to be a mistake. What was that organization like? Regimented. It was all based around the charismatic leader who was quite charismatic and they controlled you pretty well. It's a matter of how they control their people. They isolate them and they keep them going full-time and they make them believe that the charismatic leader has all the answers and you just need to believe what he says. What's the difference? We talked about this before the show. What's the difference between that and Jim Jones and the Guiana cult? Well, luckily, our cult didn't take Kool-Aid. Okay. Good. Otherwise, we wouldn't be here today. That's right. The answer would be obvious. There was no difference. Yeah. And my group was a little bit less regimented and isolated. It wasn't that when it came time that I was disenchanted and decided it was time to move on. I just pretty much told everybody, okay, well, I'm leaving now and just walked out and that was that. So, their cults have different levels of control and have different ways of dealing with their membership and just depends on what we're talking about. There are plenty of cults that aren't really that big and regimented. They're just based around the charismatic leader. Yeah. Well, hold that thought because we do want to talk about leadership in any event. So, how long were you in there and what kinds of things did the cult do? I was in there for about three years and day-to-day we went out and distributed our political newspapers and pamphlets and flyers and tried to convince people that we were right and everybody else was wrong. This was on civil rights issues? Not really somewhat, but it was really more economic and political. It was like a socialist type organization. Not sort of didn't fit all the classic models, but that's what I would say. And in the three years were you completely devoted to it? I mean, was it a 24x7 experience? 24x7, yeah. That's so interesting. Yeah, you don't socialize with people outside of it. Limited contact with your family. This is in New York City? The group was based in New York. I spent a lot of my time in Pennsylvania. Okay, and that would be what in the countryside or in the city of Philadelphia? In Philadelphia and also in Pittsburgh. Wow. And so ultimately, why did you leave? You had some sort of evolution, some transformation that made you leave, no? Yeah, we were running for office. Our leader guy was running for president. I ran for Congress. A lot of people ran for different offices in 1976. And we didn't win. We didn't do very well. We didn't make much of an impression anywhere. And I started thinking, really, this doesn't seem to be working. And I stayed with it for a few months more and then just said, no, this is not the way to do it. So I'm out of here. So in the years to follow, what did you do? How did you spend your career and how did your experience in the cult affect all that? Well, most of the time after that, I was just had a pretty normal life. I've been in business, been in the radio business for a long time. And I got married and had three kids. For a while, we lived in New Hampshire. And New Hampshire is a very interesting place to be if you like politics because it's just, you know, right outside your door. I'm warning you, Scott, that our engineer who is watching you very carefully during this show comes from New Hampshire. Oh, great. Awesome. Anyway, I got involved there in the Democratic Party. I became the chairman of my town Democratic Party. I kind of did it in a way to get my kids involved and show them what it's like. And it was fun. We had a really good time. We had our dean at our house one time for a party. We had John Kerry for a party. Everybody did a lot of campaigning, a lot of door knocking. So kind of got involved at that level. But eventually had to move on just for business reasons, had to come out here to California. And, you know, I've been somewhat involved with the local Democratic Party, but really not much more than that. Well, it sounds like your original attraction to public politics, public politics and policy, you know, stuck with you to some degree through your whole life. Am I right? Yep. So the book will reflect that. Can you give us the track of the book that you wrote? The book begins with the cult, portraying the cult as a very small group, very esoteric. Nobody's really noticing them. And then one of the people from the cult gets killed in a public way. And that starts to attract more and more attention to who they are. I've said it in the future, not that far. But, you know, five years, six years, something like that. So the background struggle is for stopping climate change. My guys are bound and determined to stop climate change from happening. And that's their campaign. Those are their main issues. And they get more and more popular as we get further into the book. They're growing bigger and bigger crowds. They're causing more and more fighting going on because the powers that beat try to fight against them and stop them. So we follow what happens with the murder. And on a personal level, there's one of the guys who is in the cult, lived with the woman who was killed. And so he's trying to figure out who did it and why. And at the same time, the cult itself is moving forward and getting bigger and bigger. And we see that the charismatic leader is, shall we say, highly opportunistic, pretty much of a user, not that much of an appealing guy. On the other hand, you think, well, maybe he's the kind of guy we need to get the job done. Because he's very, very into practical politics and cuts deals with people you wouldn't expect him to kind of deal with. I'm not going to reveal everything here. No, no, no. But I wanted to get your prose. So I asked you to identify a paragraph and say you can read the paragraph and give us a sample of how you write. Can you do that for us, Scott? Yeah. I didn't have a whole lot of warning on this. We never provide warning on this. Sorry. So here's the, I'll set the scene. This is shortly after this woman whose name is Marianne has been killed. And our main character, our protagonist, James, who was his girlfriend, his boyfriend, I mean, is listening to a speech that's coming out on live video from the charismatic leader, Lee Beloit, he's talking about what's just happened. Okay. So he says, we grieve for Marianne Wolf. We know nothing about her death and hope the authorities solve the case quickly. We hope it's not the harbinger of a political attack on my campaign, but it may be just that. We will not be deterred. We will continue our mission. The more people realize how damaging President Pine and his gang have been for the earth, the more they will come over to us. Our numbers are swelling. Our donations are spiking. Now is the time we need you to join us. March with us. Educate with us. Disrupt with us. Our survival depends on getting our message out. Many in power are starting to see our growing strength and fear us. And fear us they should. We will not stop until they are out of power and have paid for their crimes. The time for action is now. Please share this video, donate, and help us continue this all-important work. That tells us a lot about the book, doesn't it? It tells us a lot about the kind of organization and the leadership. It tells us a lot about you. It sounds to me like it's an extension of your earlier experience with an organization like that. And you sort of bring it current. You take it over the years. You even refine it from where it was. You are more incisive perhaps than you were when you were a kid. And you have learned a lot about these organizations, about the way they work, the dynamic. It sounds like you started out as a young person, and then you look back after you left it, and then you bring it current. So it's very interesting. Someone else who had not been in a cult in his youth might not have had the same perspective on this sort of thing. It's a primer in a funny way about how you operate this kind of organization and how it works and how the leadership works, and how the motivation of the people in it works. So here we are. We learn a lot from a book like this. It's almost like one of those Mao books, where you tell people how to function in a complex and controversial society. Wow. Well, what it tells me, okay. You certainly got a lot out of that one parody. Yes, well, there it is. There it is. Well, knowing a little about you and hearing the paragraph really opens my mind. I think everything you said was right on. Thank you. So the question is, is that relevant today? Because if we look at, and I mean, it's hard not to look at the George Floyd demonstrations over the past couple of weeks. Is that the kind of thing that would help them understand themselves, help them coalesce as a group, help them get greater leverage on political power and having an achievement of some sort as an activist group? I would hope so. There's a lot in here about how a group like this gets organized and how they define their goals and what they decide to go after. There's a lot of decisions that have to get made when you're trying to build any kind of a movement constantly. And there's a lot in there about it. I think it may be more relevant to the COVID pandemic for a number of reasons. One of which is, you know, the level of expense and the level of death and the level of suffering that we're experiencing with this pandemic, if you compare that to what could happen down the road with climate change, I mean, this is just a little bit of a dress rehearsal, and not much more than that. There's way more to deal with. Can you talk about that, Scott? Because, you know, we're actually, ThinkTech is involved in a project, okay, to compare and talk about the interaction of COVID and climate change and of climate change and COVID. Because we see this interaction going in both directions. And what you have to say now will really help us in undertaking our project. Well, I'm not an expert at that, but I mean, one of the themes that I try to keep coming back to in the book talking about climate change is the fact that this is not a national issue. We can't address this as a national issue. It's really an international issue. And that seems to be so far beyond human ability at this point, is to get away from all the parochial and nationalist movements and to try to realize that we actually really seriously have to work together or we're all we're all just going to die together. So the same thing I think is true of the pandemic. I mean, this is not just a national thing by any means, right? There's vast amounts of dying going on right now all over the third world. And if people can't realize that, look at it that way and attack it that way, you know, it's going to make it that much harder. We're all going to be in trouble. And at the end of the day, it doesn't get done without everybody working together. So they're in terms of how you have to approach it and attack it. I think that's an important piece of the puzzle. You know, I'm not an expert on the the technicalities and what the relationship is. Certainly, we know that the changing climate can make it easier for diseases to survive and spread. And, you know, it brings up things like health care, which is, you know, big. I keep thinking that all of these issues relate to how we take care of ourselves and take care of each other. And if we don't have universal health care, then we're never going to stop any of these things. So a lot of it has to do with how we work together and what we do moving off into the future. And was that helpful? Yes. Well, let me let me go a little further with it. I mean, are you, it sounds to me like you're somewhat pessimistic, because it's a great challenge. I take that. And in fact, it's a biblical challenge as to whether humankind, the species can work together or not. We could have a kind of collective flaw that makes it impossible for us as a species that populates the world to actually do things together to collaborate and saving ourselves. Because at the end of the day, we're mammals, we're, you know, biochemical mammals, which ultimately who ultimately are interested in their, their own self preservation and maybe not the collective effort. So would you say, would you say that you're optimistic or pessimistic about survival, survival in face of climate change, survival in case of public health? I feel optimistic. I look at that way. This is not a dystopian book. I'm working on the sequel to this. It's not going to be a dystopian story, right? Because I am basically optimistic. And yeah, I think these are things we can overcome. I think it'll take some work and some, some fighting, I'm afraid. Because, you know, some of those people aren't going to go down without a fight. But I think it's, I think it's something we can do. I mean, we're pretty smart. Knock wood. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder. So, but looking off into the sequel, can you tell us just a little what you have in mind, you know, the, the theater involved in the sequel? No, I haven't really fleshed it out altogether. So I, there's, I can't tell you that much about it, but this issue of creating an international movement is how I see the second book going. The first book doesn't deal with that. He mentions it, you know, from time to time. But it's, it all takes place in the U.S. and within the framework of a presidential campaign within the United States. What a perfect sequel, actually, in the sense that we need to go there in the real, in the real world, not the fiction world. Well, in both, we need to go there. We need to find a way to make a, to make a group, a movement that will address this effectively cross border, which I, you know, I don't think we've effectively done that yet. So, so the question is the leadership part. You know, as I mentioned the George Floyd demonstrations of Black Lives Matter, it's hard to find a leader there. And I have looked, you know, I don't think I found somebody who I would say, like Martin Luther King, who emerges for me as a leader with any personal magnetism to, you know, draw people together and, and, you know, get something done, as you put it. I, I think, I think if you don't have that, you don't get anything done. So I would like to ask you about the process by which a leader emerges. Is it just a personality cult? Or is there an organic process within the group where some person is found and extolled and elevated to leadership? And that person is enabled then, you know, to have followers. And together as a leader and followers, they achieve their goals. Well, do you know, do you think about, does the book talk about the organic process by which that could happen? Yeah. Yeah, although also I'm sort of at the starting line with all that. Yeah. You know, the Black Lives Matter movement takes pride in not having a real leader or a real leadership. I feel that makes them stronger. And, you know, I like that, I respect that way of thinking because it makes them less vulnerable to the leader getting killed or arrested or something and it makes it a little bit more diffuse and more organic. So all of those things, I think, are important. I mean, at some point, somebody's got to have a platform, run for office, say we got to do this and we got to do that. But is there still room for just people at a movement without a leader? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I saw the Vietnam, the anti-Vietnam War movement fairly up close. It's not like I was anybody special. I was just there. And there were leaders, of course, but a lot of it was just on the strength of the crowd. People protested. People came down by the millions and protested. And there were speakers, but sometimes you liked what they said and sometimes you didn't. And, you know, they tried to be leaders and that's okay. But if there's not a real groundswell, then it's not going to work. So I don't know. Yeah, well, we learned about groundswell in the Vietnam time for sure. I mean, although there was a certain motivation to avoid the draft, to avoid going into the you know, going into the jungle and getting shot. But it was also a nobility to you know, a principle involved about the relationship of the citizen and the country. And although, you know, the U.S. has had many protests and demonstrations in its history, that was a big one. You know, the Vietnam protests, as you said, really big. And I think it awoke us. It awoke us to the notion of protesting and having an effect on things. The same time, there were plenty of protests over racism too in that period. And I think they had a relationship and they actually had positive change to some extent in that period, like with Lyndon Johnson. Oh yeah, very much so. Yeah. And the question really is, is it baked in now? Are we, have we become aware, especially with respect to the Black Lives Matter movement? Are we now aware, is it part of government? Is it part of the country that you know, you have more than three branches of government? Or four, some people think that the press is you know, the fourth one. But these demonstrations and protests, these expressions by the people have an effect and will have a greater effect going forward. The experience you had when you were a kid, the experience you describe in the book, perhaps this is part of the future of America now on an increasing scale. What do you think about that? Not just America, we see it around the world. And that's a very positive thing. It was amazing to me to see, you know, demonstrations in support of Black Lives Matter all over the world, you know, for Floyd George. So there's great potential there. I mean, let's not forget that, you know, at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, when there were literally millions of people came to demonstrate that Nixon got elected twice. So it's never that easy. But you know, if you don't fight, nothing happens. Yeah, and sometimes, you know, Nixon can get elected, but somehow the country is changing under him. You know, that he may be the titular leader, that maybe, you know, people who vote for him and support him and enable him. But under all of that, country changes. It correlates up over time. You know, but I want to talk about the flip side of this. We have a few minutes later and I want to, if you don't mind, I'd like to cover the flip side. And that's the side where you have a leader who emerges. And he may be a good leader. He may be a leader that you like, you can follow, who has only altruistic purposes. Or he may turn. He may be a bad leader. And this is not unheard of in the world, certainly. And it's not unheard of in our country, including especially now. You know, it's the bully pulpit. If you are in a position of leadership, the average human being follows you. It's like a cult thing, isn't it? Where, you know, you're drawn to this leader. Right or wrong, you follow him. He tells you that a certain hydrochloroquine, hydroxychloroquine is a good drug for you and you buy in. And you do not apply your rationality, your education or science in general. And he is taking you down a path of a demagoguery and fooling you. And that leader is not exactly the kind of leader we want, either in the movement or the government. So how do we deal with that? Big question, Scott. How do we deal with the human condition, which sometimes extols a leader who emerges from within a movement? And he's the wrong person. Yeah, that's a tough one. We've seen some examples of how bad that can be down through history. Yeah. And how you change the minds is really difficult. You know, we, if we can change the minds of 10% of the Trump voters or 5% really, that's probably all that we need to do and win all those states that we lost last time around. But I mean, there are people now that are getting ready to go to his demonstration, regardless of coronavirus, regardless of anything, because, you know, they're hypnotized by him. So I'm not sure what the answer is. It'll wear off one day and one day he'll go away and that will be that. It's not an organized political movement at all. It's just him, period. There's no ideology. There's no principles to it. There's nothing there. But there are too many people that are sort of captivated by him. I can't really understand that. You know, I came out of the cults realizing that you have to think for yourself. You can't trust somebody else to do their, your thinking for you. And God help you if you turn over your, your better judgment to somebody else. Because that's when you get trapped and you can't find your way out. So you know, that sort of there's a scene at the end of the book here, where one of the guys sort of figures all that out, talks about it, talks his way through it. But we all have to think for ourselves and not let people like this tell you what to do. But I mean, there's so many examples of it. And there's so many ways in which people seem to crave it that I don't have any great answers for that. Hopefully my book will help a little bit. Yeah, I think it will for sure. It's an examination in fiction, but it's an examination based in your personal experience and your observation of the world around you for all these years since the 60s. I was going to ask you, Scott, for your advice to people and what to take from the book and what to apply in their own lives. And in large part, you've given us that advice. But is there anything else you'd like to tell the ordinary person from all that you've learned and all you've written and all you might write about how to deal with this? Well, I mean, it sounds very simple, but, you know, climate change, are we taking it seriously? No, we are not. And it's all just catching up with us. It's like, how can people not want to plan for this and do something so it doesn't happen? So that's a big part of the message is like, get off your ass, let's get going, there's too much work to be done. The solutions are right in front of us. There's no doubt we could solve all this immediately if we have the political will to do it. And that's one of the questions I ask in the book, is do we have the will to survive really? Because the solutions are right there. Well, thank you, Scott. Scott Brody, an author, a philosopher, if you will, a political science observer and participant. Thank you so much, Scott. Scott Brody, hello. That was great. It was a great conversation. I really enjoyed spending the time with you. And I did too. Thank you.