How To End Political Violence (From an Ex-Gang Leader)
Curtis, Curtis Toler: I can remember sitting and watching the TV. This actually happened, you know, at the Capitol, right in front of our own eyes. And it seemed like it couldn’t be stopped. You know, I frequent the Capitol, you know, sometimes and I see all the security. Right. And just for that to be able to happen was really, really scary.
Amanda Ripley: Welcome to How to. I’m Amanda Ripley. Today, we’re going to continue our deep dive into how to prevent more political violence, which, if you haven’t noticed, continues to be an urgent concern both here and abroad. Chaos in Brazil as thousands stormed the country’s capital, protesting October’s election results. Supporters of far right former president.
Amanda Ripley: Last week, we heard from Dr. Rachel Kleinfeld. She’s a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on democracy and security. She explained how political violence can happen when influential pundits or politicians create a climate of fear. Then other people might hear that narrative and take violent action. There are people who generate an atmosphere in which other people act. And if you don’t recognize that the creation of the atmosphere is part of what’s enabling it, you might think that you are not guilty.
Amanda Ripley: We really need to find a way to convince the people who are creating this atmosphere that they are really the ones holding the gun and someone else is pulling the trigger. How do we convince people who are ginning up the fear to realize the effect they’re having? And by the way, that includes those of us who share violent means or degrading jokes on social media? All of that contributes to this atmosphere. So today we’re going to talk to someone who has personal experience coming to this realization and helping others get there, even in the midst of very violent conflict.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: My name is Curtis Toler. I’m currently the director of outreach for Chicago Cred, which is the organization founded by the former Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan. We want to have a transformative reduction in shootings and homicides in Chicago and abroad. I guess you can say I’m an expert in conflict resolution.
Amanda Ripley: For my last book, I Conflict, I spent many hours with Curtis in Chicago learning how people get into violent conflict and how they get out. And lately, he and I have been branching out, talking to groups of people who don’t think of themselves as gangs but are trapped in similar kinds of dysfunctional group conflict. People like politicians. Okay, so it might seem like political violence and gang violence are really different, but actually, the history converges right where you are in Chicago, right? Mm hmm. In the late 1800s, Chicago politicians actually sponsored gangs, right? What they call them athletic clubs and use them to intimidate voters, stuffed ballot boxes and enforce segregation. So that is the definition of political violence and the tool. Were gangs of mostly, I think, Irish immigrants at the time. Is that right?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. Yeah. You hit it, right? I did. Even having a conversation with some folks from the Hill, it was, you know, kind of easy to get them to understand that they did act as gangs. And some people feel that they are gangs, and sometimes they themselves feel that they are gangs, because when they say they, you know, we refer to them as the Gang of Six or the Gang of Eight, Right? I was like, Yeah, yeah, that’s a gang banger.
Amanda Ripley: You’re talking about. So a couple of months ago, you and I had dinner with a small group of senior staffers in the Senate here in D.C. to talk about what you’ve learned from gang violence, interruption that might apply to political violence. And when you and I met before then, I was a little bit nervous because I didn’t know how they would respond to that analogy. But they got it right away. Yeah, right. I mean.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah.
Amanda Ripley: What was your takeaway from that conversation?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: I was kind of, you know, like you I was like, are they going to get it? Are they going to be able to correlate the two things together to see that they’re right? Yeah, They have a lot in common.
Amanda Ripley: Are they going to get on this right.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: That you got right on the train and road rolled along with us? Right. And, you know, I think that, you know, some really good conversations came out of it. But then, you know, not too, too long after that, we had the thing, unfortunately, that happened to Nancy Pelosi, too. I heard.
Amanda Ripley: Pelosi.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah, right. And so this thing is getting even more serious.
Amanda Ripley: On today’s show, we’re going to talk about how regular people, people like you and me and Curtis get sucked into intractable conflict, the kind that can so easily tip into violence and how we can break free. Stay with us.
Amanda Ripley: Before we get into solutions, it’s worth getting to know Curtis a little better. He grew up on the South Side of Chicago. He loved to break, dance and play basketball. He was the oldest of several kids and was best friends with his mom, who had him as a teenager. He also witnessed a lot of violence at home and in the streets, and he joined his first street gang at the age of nine years old.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: When I think about that, right, I think about a man that was really, really young, he says. That’s one of the things that really, really makes this relevant, right? Because if we don’t get a handle on this right, then it shapes the thought processes of other generations, if that makes sense. Right? Because when I think about, you know, I was nine joining a gang, so I took on that gang’s identity in my brain, wasn’t even fully formed yet.
Amanda Ripley: The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes about how humans are group ish by nature. We have, in our minds a sort of hive switch that shuts down the self and makes us feel temporarily that we’re part of a larger group. And it’s just impossible to understand gang conflict or political conflict without understanding this our deep wiring to live through our various tribes vicariously.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: There were these ongoing wars that I just became a part of, and some of them I didn’t even really know why. You know, that even relates to what we’re talking about now. When you say some folks don’t even know why, it’s just the people that I side with in some of their views and some of them look like me and act like me. So, hey, I’m a part of it, right?
Amanda Ripley: Increasingly, American kids do not have parents who disagree about politics. In fact, it’s more common for people to support interracial dating and interracial marriage than into political dating and marriage today. And so you have this really homogeneous experience and your parents identify with Republicans or Democrats, and so do you. And we know from the research that when your group experiences humiliation or pain or loss. The brain processes it like it’s happening to you, like physical pain. So I was just looking at the study where you could. Yeah, you could see the brain scans and they’re the same. Like if I, if I give you an electric shock or I give your family member an electric shock or your group an electric shock, the brain kind of responds the same way, lights up the same way. So that’s really like it’s almost like it’s a beautiful curse, right, of humans that we experience such vicarious triumph and suffering.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. Think about people who are really embedded into their sports, to their team, right? You know, when you see a in and when they win a squad set at me. Yeah, right. And you like. But you’re not even in the game right.
Amanda Ripley: Now.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: You know. But we have a new quarterback here in Chicago. He’s doing great. Justin feel like when he makes that little move that he does and spins around and runs for a 60 yard touchdown, I feel and I hear my son in the other room yelling and screaming and jumping up. All right. And it’s something right now we identify with those who we choose to be a part of. And we think about the gang culture. Right? We’re saying that these people are our family members, which they you know, they are our kinship. Right. And so their thought they’re paying their heart becomes ours. Right. And so it’s been it’s even been times, right, that I knew what we were doing And who were we doing it to was wrong.
Amanda Ripley: Mm hmm.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: But I still did it right. And it was we had this saying, right, right or wrong. We’ll find out about that later. And that’s total garbage. It’s right. Think about that. Right. I’m going to be with you. Right, Whether you right or wrong. And then we’ll discuss it after it happens. But, you know, I’m sure other people have those kind of philosophies as well.
Amanda Ripley: In other words, winning starts to matter more than anything else, more than right or wrong, more than your country or your values, more than your own safety. Even this past election season. To take just one example, Democrats spent nearly $19 million amplifying far right Republican candidates, according to a Washington Post analysis. Why would they do that? So they could help them win the primaries and thus be easier for Democrats to defeat in the general election. And in a lot of cases, it worked. But at what cost? In really poisonous conflict, humans will start to work against the things they hold most dear. Eventually, they can start to justify all kinds of things they would never normally support, including violence.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: When you think about stopping a civil war, what it or what it would look like, you know, we would first have to define who is the conflict between. Then you have to go deeper to figure out what is this conflict really a bow.
Amanda Ripley: Like what you’re doing is kind of mapping the conflict. Right. And that’s where you sort of start. Yeah, right. Like, who are the players? Who are the people who are respected on both sides? Who maybe are formers on one side who or maybe never were in the conflict, but are respected or have some influence. So you’re trying to get a sense of all the different players. Mm hmm. And part of why you’re trying to do that, right, is because you want to see if you can get some percentage of them to agree to a different way of being in conflict. Is that right?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. We tried to shift the norms. Right. And we also have to think about what harm has been done on either side.
Amanda Ripley: Yeah, right. It reminds me of there’s a great book by a woman named Donna Hicks, who’s worked in Northern Ireland and South Africa and all kinds of conflict zones. And it’s called dignity. Mm hmm. And what she found is that no matter where she was at every negotiation table, at some point, they just hit a wall and they just could not go on, even though rationally they should be able to continue negotiating. And what she finally realized is there were these deep violations to people’s dignity. That’s how she talked about it. That had to be talked about. They had to be dealt with. And until you dealt with them, you just could not make progress. Right. And is that kind of what you’re talking about?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah, because in a conflict, usually both sides have done harm. So you have to get both of them to even agree that harm has been done because you’re going to keep hitting that brick wall. Because if a person don’t feel that they’ve done any harm, then it’s kind of hard to get them to move forward.
Amanda Ripley: Here’s our first step. We got to get at least some of the leaders of rival groups to acknowledge harm that was done, even if they personally did not do that harm. This is really hard to do. As Curtis knows all too well.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: You say. Can you admit that there was harm done right? They won’t actually say. Yeah, they’ll go to the. But. But six of my guys were shot. You kind of know what I mean, right? They always jump.
Amanda Ripley: Right in the defensive justification.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: So it’s easier for it to become violent now because you never talked about the first time that the harm was done. Right. So in the back of your mind or in your conscious, right. You have that this person harm me. Right? And they never said they never even acknowledged it.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: But then we have to go to when was the most recent episode of violence?
Amanda Ripley: Well, this does feel extremely relevant to politics, because I will tell you, when I talk to members of Congress, what happened on January six has never been talked about in private with a facilitator between the parties in an honest way for most members of Congress. And it is just fermenting underground like the Democrats are extremely angry. They don’t feel like this attack on the institution and on themselves and their staff has been acknowledged. Right. Hmm. And then on the other side, it seems like a lot of the Republicans feel like they’re doing the buttons right. The justification. Right. I didn’t I didn’t tell them to go in there. And plus there was Antifa there and all the other, like dubious claims that you hear. So you get you get into this cycle where it’s not being talked about, but it is definitely driving the conflict. I mean, these are these are people you know, these are humans. That’s trauma that just doesn’t get talked about.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. And that’s really, really unfortunate. Just to be frank, it’s kind of hard to move forward if someone is not willing to just say, hey, you know, it happened. It was wrong, at least, right? Yeah. Going to just like a street conflict, right? I’ll have a guy that will be like, Yeah, I would. I wasn’t actually the guy that shot him. It was such a, such a such. But he was part of your group. So you know what I mean? So it wasn’t you directly, but it was you indirectly. And if you’re the leader of this particular group and it’s coming from you, trust me, the people that harm was done to will take it and receive it.
Amanda Ripley: And look, calling it out can be politically risky, to say the least. Take Liz Cheney, who broke from party lines to seek justice and accountability for January six and ended up losing her seat in Congress. It helps if a group of leaders take this step together. And it can also take years for this to happen. But the goal ultimately, is to get people to acknowledge the harm so that they can then start to talk about the future and how to do conflict differently, usually by coming up with some sort of nonaggression agreement or code of conduct, something politicians in other countries have done many times before in order to reset basic norms of decency. But the more violence that happens, the harder it is to get people to the table.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: We’re talking about conflicts where there has been loss of life. Right. And sometimes a lot of loss of life. Right. And those are extremely hard to overcome when you’re talking about the death of a loved one. And when I say love one, I don’t mean that they had to be actually related to you through blood. But they’re your loved one because you love them and they’re part of your particular group. And when you think about someone who’s experienced that kind of loss, it’s sometimes majority of the time really, really difficult to get them to come to to the table to talk about a nonaggression agreement. Right. Because we’re just set up to get our league back or retaliation.
Amanda Ripley: So it’s really hard, but it is not impossible to get people to come to the table. Take Curtis, for example, who voluntarily left the high conflict that he’d been trapped in for over a decade. He didn’t do this after he got shot. He didn’t do this after he went to prison. He left after he had kids. And he started to think of himself as a father, as a husband, as something more than a gang leader.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: And I think that’s something that, you know, we all have to think about, even talking about this political realm that we’re in. Right. Do we want our children and our grandchildren to go through this?
Amanda Ripley: That is the question.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: That is the question, right.
Amanda Ripley: It is always kids who suffer the most in this kind of conflict.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: In any.
Amanda Ripley: Country. And it does seem like I hear this again and again, whether it’s in the Colombian civil war or in, you know, a high conflict divorce, that the most powerful sales pitch there is for people to come to the table is their kids.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: I definitely agree. Kids and family.
Amanda Ripley: All right. Now we’ve got something to work with. The loudest voices in our political conflict may not be willing to dial down the vitriol for themselves, but they might be willing to do it for their kids. After the break, we’ll hear how this played out on one Chicago playground. Stay with us.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: So we had these two groups who have been in this conflict for at least ten years. Right. They were going back and forth. And when I say bodies would drop, you know, I don’t want to. Say that as if these aren’t human lives that I’m talking about, because they are right. But, you know, there were bodies on both sides when we said, what would it take? For you guys to come up with a non-aggression agreement right in both of the sides to agree to it. We thought they were going to come up with these outlandish offers. Give me $1,000,000. Give me a new house.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Right. You know. But they came to the table and they both agreed upon saying that we just want the park that we already have refurbished. Right. And we want we want it to look nice. And we both will agree that this will be a safe haven for everyone to come to because our kids don’t have anywhere to play. And it went from a non-aggression agreement to an actual peace treaty between these two groups based upon them wanting their kids in the community to be safe.
Amanda Ripley: I love that example because it’s like something tangible that you can see. Yeah. And it’s a it’s about the kids and safety, but it’s in the future. Right. But it’s also you must have felt like, Oh, okay, great.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yes. Because it’s really doable, right? You know, because. Right. Because sometimes they don’t know what they want. And you have to have some options for them. Right. Here’s the options. Do do these work for you? A menu? Yeah, a menu. But we also have to understand, in any non-aggression agreement or whatever you want to term it is, is that there has to be give and take.
Amanda Ripley: Oh, I see. You got to let them have something. The other side without feeling like that’s an inherently a loss.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Exactly. Is that what you mean? Exactly. No one wants to leave away from the table feeling that they had to lose something.
Amanda Ripley: So we’ve talked about some things that seem to work, and it’s hard. You know, so I don’t want to suggest that there’s like a three step solution. You know, I mean, I know you know that this is hard. Chicago still has a very long way to go to be as safe as other large American cities right now. But, you know, in the two neighborhoods directly served by you and your colleagues at Chicago CRED and other organizations, the homicide rate is down this year, 32 and 45%, respectively, compared to the same time last year. And there’s lots of reasons for that. Right. And lots of programs working in those neighborhoods. But there is some evidence that this can work. And I mean, if we just pull back for a second, all you’re trying to do right, is dial down the threat level with this nonaggression pact. Is that right?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: That’s it. Right? We’re not saying that, you know, that you all have to stand together and hold hands and, you know, we will want it to get to that, you know, to that level, you know. Right. Where you all singing in the choir together. But that’s not what we’re asking to do. We’re just saying to stop being so damn violent.
Amanda Ripley: I know that’s going to sound like a dumb question, but what causes people to be violent?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Hmm. And this is cliche, right? Hurt people. Hurt people. And violence is addictive.
Amanda Ripley: Hmm. It feeds on itself.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. Yeah. Violence. Oh, my goodness. It is an addictive. And it really comes down sometimes to not being able to speak or to feel that someone is more than and you are less than.
Amanda Ripley: That’s the disrespect, the humiliation.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Disrespect and humiliation and also how easy it is to put someone else in their own little box for you not to like them. Right. They have this thing in Chicago and it’s abroad now. But I kind of think it was popularized here in Chicago through rap and through the gang culture. They call each other ups, right? Meaning that you’re opposite of me and you’re my opposition. Right. And so once you tag someone as being something different from you, it’s easy to become violent towards them.
Amanda Ripley: I often quote you to groups of people when I’m trying to explain this because you said any time there’s a better than and a less than there’s always room for war.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Always.
Amanda Ripley: So if we if we try to transfer this to politics, a lot of what you’re doing in these nonaggression pacts, ideally, is you’re trying to to rein in the language used on social media to describe the other the ops or to humiliate or disrespect the dead. Is that right?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. Again, we say it all the time, right, With someone who feels disrespected and humiliated, it’s really, really easy to turn into violence. Right. And so you’re talking about with this advent of social media that a person can be disrespected and humiliated and millions of people see it at the push of a button.
Amanda Ripley: And this is a direct analogy. So to politics, because you have politicians and pundits who have a lot of influence, huge followings on social media, on cable news, who are dialing up the threat level, are saying that half the country, you know, worships Satan and is grooming children because they’re pedophiles. That is dialing up the threat level. Right. Or that that half the country hates democracy. Right. Hates America. So you have these people saying these things and it’s become pretty normalized. So now it’s just kind of happens all the time and. If you confront them about it. They say this is free speech. When you’re talking to people, how do you connect the dots for them that actually words matter?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah, And, you know, we get some of these young men who are, you know, really, really you know, we call them law students, right? And they’ll say that, you know, free speech is. Yeah, is free really free, Right. Because it’s usually not right. Usually some of this free speech or some of the things that you’re saying is free usually or can or has cost someone’s life. Right. So is that really free speech? Right. If what you’re saying can cause someone to harm someone else, then there’s a price that is being paid for it. So it’s really not free anymore.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: So we had this one guy really, really influential. He had brought a million followers, right? And so what we were noticing is that and I’m sure this is in the political realm as well, is that when you have a person with a million followers say one thing and you have another person with even a thousand followers and another, the person with a million followers seem like they’re easily more attractive to the masses, good, bad or indifferent, right? So it was like, how do we counteract this guy who has this huge following and people are listening to him, right?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: And so what we did was we found the guy. We found three or four people with 100,000 followers. We found ten with 10,000. You know, we found 25, you know, with six or 7000. Right. Until we got to enough of those influencers. Right. Who had just as big a following as the person with a million, even though it wasn’t just the one person. Right. And we had them kind of co-mingling their followers together. Right? We’ll put them on something together. We’ll put five of them on something together.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: So now all of this. And so that was one of the things that, you know, that we did. And he was like, Oh, okay, Yahtzee, Y’all are teaming up against me, right? And so eventually he did say something different. He didn’t go all the way to the side that we wanted him to go to, but we just wanted him to at least see that it was that we could form, you know, a coalition to go against the rhetoric that he was speaking, because at first he felt like he was untouchable. Right. Because he just had this a norm as far right people were listening to.
Amanda Ripley: It was impossible.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. Yeah.
Amanda Ripley: I love this. It’s basically a math problem, is what you’re saying.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Like, yeah, majority of our problem, right?
Amanda Ripley: Because I’m thinking about all these, you know, fire starters and conflict entrepreneurs in politics who have millions of people following them. Well, you know what? You add up a bunch of lower level politicians and pundits who are not as high conflict. Now you have equal reach.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah, and I love it. And that was one of the things that we were talking about, even when we were talking to the folks from from the Hill. Right. Is that a lot of them felt that they didn’t have enough power and just felt power. Right. Right. And they felt.
Amanda Ripley: Powerless.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: And I think that’s one of the ways when you can get them to all come together to increase their power. I think that’s one of the strategies that has worked for me as well.
Amanda Ripley: Here’s the next insight. While we’re asking our leaders to please, please come to the table and do things differently, we can also do something in our own spheres of influence. We can condemn violence in all its forms on all of our social media channels. We can remind each other that we are all Americans, all human, all worthy of dignity. We can call out people within our own groups who are dialing up the threat level. And here’s the magical thing. Even if we are not personally Tik-tok influencers, we are loud together. Let’s say there are roughly 100,000 people who will listen to this show and let’s say they all have on average, I don’t know, 200 followers together. That’s 20 million followers. That’s more than three times the number of followers that Tucker Carlson has on Twitter. Just sayin. Maybe we’re not as helpless as we feel.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: The time is now, right? I think that enough has happened for all sides and all parties to really be like, Yeah, we should do something now. Do you do you feel that something is happening in the political realm or No?
Amanda Ripley: Yeah. I feel like they’re there. They’re just miserable enough. You know what I’m saying? Like to hit that saturation point where. You know, you got to be miserable, right? You got to be at a level of misery where you want out, and then someone has to invite you out.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Mm. You hated the invitation.
Amanda Ripley: And I remember you saying something like 80% of the people who are in high conflict want out. If only someone would ask.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: If only someone at school who wants to live in a world of fear. Right. The majority of people don’t want that. Right.
Amanda Ripley: And sometimes you have to invite them more than once.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. Many times. I mean, because this is. This is becoming the norm. Right. Right. And then when something has become normal for them, it becomes habit. Right. And we know how hard habits are to break.
Amanda Ripley: What are the words that you would suggest people use here talking about street violence?
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Focus on what they care about and who they care about and usually who they care about. And, you know, in conflict, we always use who’s there, why or what’s there why. Right. And how that what they’re doing is impacting their why or impacting what they’re trying to accomplish. And some of them may not even know what they’re trying to accomplish. But there’s usually someone or something that they care dearly about.
Amanda Ripley: That’s listening to you. It seems like there are there’s an analogy with politics. So most Americans know someone who is deeply bewitched by our political conflict. And maybe they’re not in politics, right? But they’re listening to extremely partisan podcast. They’re on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube for 4 hours a day. They’re really deeply motivated by the political conflict. And there is a cost to that for them, for their family. You know, there’s a temptation, I think, to distance yourself from from people who are really bewitched by conflict. And sometimes it’s for your own safety, which is one thing, right? But sometimes it’s because it’s. You know, it’s toxic.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: And it’s sad.
Amanda Ripley: And it’s right and they’re right. And you don’t feel like having an argument about this. And, you know, it’s upsetting. Right? But what you’re saying is you got to find out what their why is. What do they hold dear? And maybe it’s their religious beliefs, maybe it’s their children. Right. And and can you speak to that and can you connect with them? And not just once, but again and again.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Yeah. And again. Like, we’re taking real small steps, right? Because I think sometimes we go into. These conversations and we try to change their whole belief system, Right or.
Amanda Ripley: Right, right.
Curtis, Curtis Toler: Right. Or when they’re this or when we’re talking about these st involve young men and women. We go in saying that, you know, and I hear, you know, a lot of the people in politics, we’re going to we’re we’re anti-gang. No, I’m not anti-gang. I’m anti-violence. I don’t care about the gang. Right. The gang could have some benefits. I just want them to stop being violent. Right. And I think that’s the same conversation that, you know, that we need to start having. Right. Okay. Your belief system. I might not believe in it, but can we all agree that violence is not the answer? And I think that’s the start, right? Because you go in like, I don’t think that you should be a Republican. I don’t think that you should be a Democrat. That their whole philosophy is rock you. It’s kind of hard to sway someone like that. But can we just say I think that hurting someone or harming someone is not good for anybody? Can we agree on that?
Amanda Ripley: That’s the start, the spark, the thing we can work with. Can we agree that what we’re doing isn’t the answer? We need to start seeing each other as human again, even as we disagree. And by the way, if you’re at a place where you really are ready to have bigger direct conversations about politics with your family, we have a few episodes for you that I think will be really helpful and we’ll link to them in the show notes.
Amanda Ripley: Meanwhile, a big thank you to Curtis and Rachel for talking with us in these last couple of episodes, and thank all of you for bearing with us for two pretty heavy episodes about a pretty serious topic. We promise we’ve got some lighter problems to solve coming up very soon in the next few weeks. But we are always open here at the how to hotline for all of your problems, big or small. Send us a note at how to at Slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 6464954001.
Amanda Ripley: We’d love to have you on the show. And if you like what you heard today, you know what to do. Give us a rating and a review and tell a friend that helps us help more people and save more democracies.
Amanda Ripley: How TO’s executive producer is Derek John, Rosemary Belson and Kevin Bendis produced this episode. Mara Jacob is senior technical director. Charles Duhigg created this show. I’m Amanda Ripley. Thanks for listening.
