The New Playbook for Resisting Authoritarianism — with Julia Angwin & Ami Fields-Meyer

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**Scott Galloway** (1:24)
Episode 405 405 is the area code serving central Oklahoma. In 2005, Reddit was founded. So true story, my wife said that if this gets a thousand upvotes, that she'll try a threesome tonight. Problem? She's out of town.
Welcome to the 405th episode of The Prof G Pod. What's happening in today's episode? We speak with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, Julia Angwin and former White House senior advisor, Ami Fields-Meyer. We discuss their new book, On Courage, about how the everyday person can build courage and resist authoritarianism. With that, we hope you enjoy our conversation with Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer.
All right, let's first write in to it, Julia and Ami, you just put out your new book On Courage, a manual for how to be a dissident in an age of fear, built on interviews with more than 100 dissidents across five continents. The book opens with this stat, nearly three out of four people on earth now live under authoritarianism, the highest share since the 70s. You spent two years asking the people who fought back what they learned, why this book and why now? I think that's kind of a captain obvious question, but say more about what the inspiration was for writing this book.

**Julia Angwin** (2:50)
After the election in 2024, I woke up the next morning and I really felt like I had maybe spent too much of my career really thinking about the harms inflicted by the industry we call big tech, and that maybe I needed to think a little bit more about what was going to happen when all that surveillance and data processing power was in the hands of a wannabe authoritarian.
And so, I mean, as you know, Scott, I've covered big tech for decades and I wrote a book 10 years ago about the privacy in surveillance issues, and I basically felt like my threat model was wrong. And so I thought, how do you learn about what the authoritarian threat model looks like? And Ami was at that time doing his fellowship at Harvard's Ash Center for Democracy, which is literally where dissidents go when they're exiled. So I called him up and I was like, can we talk to some of these people about what is going on and what we need to prepare for?

**Scott Galloway** (3:48)
Ami?

**Ami Fields-Meyer** (3:49)
I had worked on tech at the White House, and as Trumpism reared its head again, we saw even from within government at that point, the forces of the far right, the global far right, and the forces of tech beginning to converge.
And obviously that made itself more and more clear. The other thing I'll just say, Scott, is that part of the reason we write this book right now is, perhaps it's a kept an obvious question, but I think actually even more, authoritarianism doesn't look like what it used to look like. It's not your grandmother's authoritarianism. It doesn't ride into town on the back of a coup in the way that it used to, in the way that so many of us have in our imagination. This is the slow hollowing out of institutions. It happens gradually. And so I actually think even if to folks like us, it was clear that there was a political crisis. It wasn't clear exactly what to do about it, because the threat looks different now. And so part of what we needed to figure out is when everything looks relatively normal, when elections keep happening, when the courts continue to function, even if they're skewed, when the media continues to function, even if it begins to be tilted, how do you actually fight back? And that's what we were trying to figure out from these new dissidents.