Cancelling cancel culture with Loretta Ross (transcript)

Please note the following transcript may not exactly match the final audio, as minor edits or adjustments could be made during production.

[00:00:00] Loretta Ross: It takes too much energy to hate people. You

know? I've always found that exhausting. 

[00:00:09] Adam Grant: Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Loretta Ross, public intellectual, activist and professor at Smith College. She's the author of Calling In, which is both a powerful memoir and a masterclass in constructive confrontation. Loretta's my favorite crusader against Cancel Culture, and she has a gift for helping people find better ways to manage anger and outrage.

[00:00:48] Loretta Ross: The emotions are real. The question is, will you be trauma informed or trauma driven?

[00:01:02] Adam Grant: Well, Loretta, I'm so happy to see you and could not be more thrilled to have you on ReThinking. 

[00:01:07] Loretta Ross: Oh, thanks for having me. 

[00:01:09] Adam Grant: I love the way you referred to yourself as a reformed call out queen. Tell me about that. 

[00:01:14] Loretta Ross: I refer to myself as a reformed callout queen 'cause I get pissed off a dozen times a day. I have a quick temper, and I mean, I don't have permanent angers or anything like that 'cause that's just too exhausting.

But I always want to vent. When somebody cuts me off in traffic or somebody is rude unnecessarily, I can't stop that visceral, immediate reaction. And so I'm trying to tame that and teach myself that your first thought is gonna be your trauma. It's your second thought you actually wanna be known by . And so I'm trying to develop discipline.

I think it was Mariame Kaba, says that hope is a discipline. And I said, well, not as much as biting your tongue. Because I swear, I have to do it so many times a day. 

[00:02:03] Adam Grant: It sounds like you had a long history of not biting your tongue. What kinds of things did you use to call people out for? 

[00:02:11] Loretta Ross: I'm one of those people who takes an unjustified and, and inordinate pride in what I think of as my intelligence. And so when somebody assumes I'm stupider than I actually am, it pisses me off. And I want to put people in their place. 'Cause I grew up with five brothers learning how to talk about each other's mama. And we all have the same mama. So I mean it, it's what I grew up with.

It's what I'm good at. And I've had many people tell me, Loretta, you can be awfully mean. And I call it truth telling, and they call it lack of tact. So 

[00:02:52] Adam Grant: go figure. 

When did you decide that that might not be the most effective way to reach people? 

[00:02:58] Loretta Ross: When it kept blowing up on me. I mean, all you have to do is have your crap blow back in your face and you realize you were spinning in the wrong way in the wind, you know. This was not happening.

[00:03:09] Adam Grant: Was there a particular moment when it blew up in your face? That, that really led you to say, I've gotta, I've gotta approach these situations differently. 

[00:03:19] Loretta Ross: Yeah. I'm one of 12 black women who co-created the theory of reproductive justice in 1994, and a younger woman of color, reproductive justice activist, put out over email that she had created the framework.

And I was so filled with indignation because it felt like basic intellectual theft. And not only that, why would you steal something that was freely given? I mean, we offered it to the intellectual commons. We didn't patent it. And so because she made the claim on email, I responded in kind with, you know, reply all to everybody that I thought had heard it.

And then I realized entirely too late that a woman 40 years younger than me could cry better over the internet than I could. So I became her bully. I was an elder in the movement, bullying this emerging activist, who made her cry. And how dare you, Loretta, do that to her. And so the original precipitating incident that she claimed our intellectual work got totally lost. But then even after I got called out for what I did, it still took me a while to figure out what I did wrong. Think about rethinking, right? I could have called her up and said, Hey, what's going on with you that you would tell such an obvious lie that's not to your credit, 'cause everybody you're telling it to knows better.

I, well, am deeply ashamed that I didn't stop, pause, and reflect. Like you say, rethink. That I had options in that situation. Even if I end up incinerating the other person, it doesn't make me feel any better. 

[00:05:11] Adam Grant: I've had the experience of other people borrowing my words more often than I would like to admit.

And usually what happens is someone will send me a screenshot and say, Hey, this person is, you know, posting your content under their name without proper credit. And it would be so easy to, to log in and post side by side screenshots with timestamps showing that they're basically stealing my words. I don't wanna be shaming somebody publicly.

So what I've done in a couple of cases is I've just reached out and said, Hey, um, somebody forwarded this to me and I was really surprised to see it and I would love to understand how it, how it happened that you were presenting my words as yours. I'm, I'm sure it wasn't intentional, but I would hate to see someone accuse you of plagiarism.

[00:05:57] Loretta Ross: Oh. 

[00:05:58] Adam Grant: And every time, they've responded, like sort of sheepishly and apologetically and then stopped the behavior immediately. So, is this an example of what you would call calling in instead of calling out? Or am I still missing part of the process? 

[00:06:12] Loretta Ross: Well, it was kind of like a backhanded calling in 'cause you actually called them out with it very subtly, you know?

But you did it with respect and you drew your boundary, which is always good. You made a, you made a ouchie as you did it, so yeah, it's good practice. Let's do it better next time. Maybe another way would be to say, you know, I love that passage that you wrote, and it sounds remarkably similar to something that I've written.

Do you have any idea how that happened? 

[00:06:45] Adam Grant: Oh, I like that. 

[00:06:46] Loretta Ross: That's a conversation there. 

[00:06:48] Adam Grant: I like that. I, it's, it's so funny. You're right there. There is a little bit of edge that comes out when I find myself wanting to say yes, I did love the words that you wrote. I love them so much that I took a time machine back to the past and wrote them myself.

[00:07:04] Loretta Ross: Yeah. 

[00:07:04] Adam Grant: Which is not gonna help anyone. 

[00:07:06] Loretta Ross: Right. Again, I'm not against people showing their vulnerabilities, but very selectively. And always be in control of when you show your vulnerability, don't let it seep out. In that example you used, it was seeping out that you were hurt and offended, but you said it in a kind way, but the message was still fairly clear. And I mean, I don't have any problem with somebody being hurt and offended, but just own it.

Say it.

[00:07:38] Adam Grant: I can work with that. Thank you. 

[00:07:39] Loretta Ross: Yeah, the emotions are real. The question is, will you be trauma informed or trauma driven?

[00:07:47] Adam Grant: I prefer informed.

[00:07:49] Loretta Ross: I do too, man. 'Cause after years and years of therapy, I figured out that this crap ain't going anywhere. So I better be in charge of it, because it's, you know, it's there.

[00:08:05] Adam Grant: It struck me as I was reading your book that some of your formative experiences, um, trying to talk people out of hate and out of violence, um, really laid the groundwork for the way that you have challenged cancel culture. I think we live in a time when, when people are really quick to write others off.

If you see someone hateful, the assumption is that the only way to deal with them is to cancel them because there's no possibility that they can change. And yet you have demonstrated throughout your career and throughout your life that even people who believe some of the worst things about humanity, even people who have done some of the worst things to humanity, are capable of turning the page.

And I wondered if you could talk a little bit about, um, maybe the, the epiphany you had with Floyd Cochrane or with William Fuller. 

[00:08:52] Loretta Ross: Well, in chronological order was William Fuller, then Floyd Cochran. Let's start with William Fuller. I was 25 years old and director of the DC Rape Crisis Center, which was the first one in the country.

And I got this letter from Lorton, which was DC's prison, from a man named William Fuller. And basically he said, outside, I rape women. Inside, I'm raping men. And I'd like not to be a rapist anymore. My first reaction was disgust and outrage. I'm like, how dare you? We're a rape crisis center providing services to victims, and we don't have enough money.

We don't have enough staff. And y'all are the perpetrators asking us for help. I mean, I was pissed off to the heights of pissivity, but I didn't throw the letter away. I don't know why. I think curiosity and outrage made me go to Lorton to talk to William Fuller. I can't say I was prepared to cuss him out, but I was certainly prepared to gloat that he was in jail.

But I did hear and recognize William's pain and the pain of those guys, that they talked about what they had been through, and that's when I realized that our society never wants to listen to what prisoners have been through. We only wanna know what they did. And I was like, wow, this is not what I expected when I walked into this prison.

I hadn't dealt with any of my trauma from being a rape and incest survivor from childhood and all of that. And because I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I just started talking about my story and they started telling about their stories and next thing I knew, some kind of weird kind of trust and bond was built through shared survivor stories.

And so then Floyd Cochrane came 20 years later, uh, as part of my job at the Center for Democratic Renewal, formerly the National Anti-K lan Network, was to parachute into towns that had experienced hate crimes or a Klan march or whatever, and help the communities deal with it. But Reverend CT Vivian, who was my board chair at the time, and my boss, also let me know that part of my job was helping people who wanted to leave hate movements.

Reenter normal society. And he very famously said that when you ask people to give up hate, then you have to be there for 'em when they do. Well, I didn't agree with that sentiment at all. I mean, I'd gotten shot at as a 10-year-old in Mississippi. There was nothing in me that made me wanted to feel any empathy for someone who was a Klansman and proud of it.

There are accidental racists. There's reluctant racists. These are the proud racists. But anyway, part of my job was talking to Floyd Cochrane. And Floyd Cochrane had become the national spokesman for the Aryan Nations. He'd become a Nazi when he was 14 years old, and now he's 35, 21 years in the hate movement.

And Floyd's epiphany, change of heart, if you can call it that, happened when his second son was born with a cleft palate. And his Nazi buddies told him that his son was a genetic defect who needed to be put to death. And that was Floyd's wake up call like, oh wow. These are the people I'm hanging out with?

They wanna kill my child. It's okay if they kill all the Jews and the blacks and the queers, but my child? Kind of thing. And so when I met Floyd, I was prepared to be disgusted by him. It felt kinda like, you made, you made your bed, you're lying in it. So what? How? How am I? Why am I supposed to care that you got kicked off of the Aryan Nation's compound?

Tell me why I'm supposed to care. But Floyd was surprisingly intelligent and funny, and self-critical after he finally woke up. And he had a delicious sense of irony and was amazingly humble. All the things that you would not have suspected if you saw his public performance as a national spokesman, quoting the Bible along with Mein Kampf, with equal ease, you know? He was really fascinating, but sadly, he was also the consequence of dedicating his life to hate groups. Because Floyd didn't have any marketable skills. He couldn't get a job. You join a hate group, you don't develop a resume that somebody wants to look at and hire you from, right? His only developed talent was as a demagogue, and even how he joined the hate movement.

Floyd was just a skinny white kid in upstate New York who was bullied at school. And he really was suffering. And then he found that once he put on a swastika, instead of him being afraid, everybody was afraid of him. It was just that simple. And I see that in a lot of alienated white youth. Today, even. If they can go around making other people afraid, they can disguise their own fears.

[00:14:03] Adam Grant: What's so striking to me about those, those experiences, Loretta, is it would've been so easy for you to go to Floyd Cochrane and to William Fuller and say, you're disgusting, you're vile, and try to shame them into abandoning their worst beliefs and behaviors. And even then, you might've had some of those emotions, but you didn't express them. Um, it, it seems like those were early versions of you calling them in instead of calling them out.

[00:14:32] Loretta Ross: It takes too much energy to hate people. You know, I've always found that exhausting. As a child, I found that exhausting. And so investing that much time and attention into somebody that I can easily ignore just made more sense to me. I mean, if I paid any attention to 'em, I'd fry 'em to a crisp and I'd choose to use my power in a different way. I tell all my enemies, the worst thing you want me to do is pay attention to you. Really, you do not want this, this storm coming at you . 

[00:15:06] Adam Grant: I think that's the friendliest threat I've ever heard.

[00:15:09] Loretta Ross: Really, I, I beg people to not bring themselves to my attention when they get on my nerves. 

[00:15:17] Adam Grant: Well, let's, let's talk about some of your lessons around using this power for good. First of all, tell me why shaming doesn't work. 

[00:15:27] Loretta Ross: Shaming has never worked to correct a behavior once the shame has been made public, because the person who is being shamed will always feel or assume that every time somebody says their name, they're gonna remember their shame.

They will not have an identity, a presence without this shame hanging over their head like a storm cloud. So as a corrective, it tends to drive people away rather than engaging them, bringing them in to correct the sources of that shame. And I also had to do a lot of reconciling with my own shame, my own sources of shame.

One of the things that made writing my book so difficult was how much self-disclosure I had to make of my own mistakes. And my mistakes were large and visible, and many of years I spent hiding them. And then when I decided to, to pull the cover back and show 'em off. Well, my therapist made a lot of money, but still.

I wanted to offer the perspective that you can learn from your shame. You can learn from your mistakes, and you still can control whether or not you're defined by those. That shame and mistakes. And it was liberating for me to finally disclose the secrets that I spent so much emotional energy trying to hide.

I don't know if it'll work that way for everybody, but I think that it could work for enough of us and certainly for some of us. But then, I don't think I ever had the luxury of having my worst secrets be, remain secret. I mean, rape at 11, incest at 14. Obvious baby from that incest at 15. Kind of hard to hide that you have a baby when you're supposed to give him up for adoption and disappearing.

[00:17:36] Adam Grant: Obviously my heart broke reading those stories, but I just, I applaud the courage that it takes to share them publicly. 

[00:17:44] Loretta Ross: It's a calculated organizing tactic. When you want to organize people in the human rights movement, your vulnerability becomes your greatest asset 'cause people then can take risks with you in sharing their stories and the things that have happened to them in a way that they maybe never found space for, room for, trusted that they could survive telling the story.

I used to tell my story to small groups of women at the Rape crisis center, and at a march I told it to 600,000 people on the National Mall. Each telling made me braver, till I could get to the National Mall with the television cameras and all of that kind of stuff. But it all started in those small little consciousness raising groups.

I didn't even tell my mother about the rape . It's a process to own all of your story, and it certainly is liberating to let sunshine in, in those dark corners of your, of your heart, your crevices and stuff. It's amazing what a little airing out of those secrets can do to make you feel better and healed.

[00:19:00] Adam Grant: Yes. Well, I think that's one of the many things that, that concerns a lot of people about cancel culture is it has a chilling effect on people's willingness to, to share their stories and put their vulnerability out there. Talk to me about why you're such a critic of cancel culture. 

[00:19:17] Loretta Ross: I think the main reason I criticize cancel culture is that I don't like the pain that it causes to other people.

Even if they quote, deserve to be canceled, it's another human being that you're dealing with and I can't forget their humanity. So that's one reason. The second reason I dislike it: because it doesn't work. Because if you got sufficient fame, power, and celebrity, you just laugh all the way to the bank.

Yeah, it, it only seems to harm the people who have the fewest resources to protect themselves, to survive in their communities and stuff. And so if you're aiming at harming the most vulnerable people, at least own that because that's what you're doing, and it doesn't make anybody want to be held accountable.

If they know that they're gonna be pilloried for being honest, it actually encourages people to lie, to avoid the punishment. There's so many ways it doesn't work. It's illogical for a human rights movement to use the tactics of the prison industrial complex. Because what do prisoners do? They silence people, they exile 'em, and they dispose 'em like a used tissue.

Like you're not to be heard from anymore in humanity. Well, Audrey Lord said that's a master's tools thing. The master's tools shall never disassemble the master's house. So we're using the prison industrial complex within the human rights movement and calling us, and call ourselves holding people accountable.

But if you dehumanize people, what does that do to the human rights framework you're trying to protect? 

[00:21:05] Adam Grant: There's just a huge body of evidence in psychology showing that when, when you shame people, it tends to make them defensive, and defensiveness is the opposite of you what you want if you're trying to get people to change their behavior. It doesn't open their minds up. It shuts them down. 

[00:21:20] Loretta Ross: Can I just interrupt? Because what has occurred to me as I've been studying this stuff for the better part of the last decade is that calling in is not about getting other people to change their behavior. Calling in is about getting you to change your behavior to other people. 

[00:21:34] Adam Grant: I was hoping you would raise that distinction. Yes. 

[00:21:38] Loretta Ross: You don't have the magic power to make other people change, but you have the power to offer the love and support to give 'em the space to grow. Whether they avail themselves of that space is beyond your control. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em think. I haven't found humans are that amenable to being bossed around unless they're in a cult, and we're not building a human rights cult. We're building a human rights movement. 

[00:22:05] Adam Grant: I've, I've asked a lot of people over the last few years why, why do you think it's effective to blame and shame people and to try to embarrass them publicly if you're hoping to try to facilitate their growth? I think in a lot of cases it's ego. They're too focused on how do I feel powerful and how do I make sure that I get my point of view heard, as opposed to how do I best communicate a perspective that's that's gonna reach the other person? 

[00:22:35] Loretta Ross: There's that. But I would also offer another interpretation. It is correct to want people to be held accountable for harm that they could avoid causing somebody else.

I mean, it's one thing if it's inadvertent, but if it's on purpose, what is our accountability process for that? The way that I put it when I teach my classes at Smith is that we have mastered the art of teaching people radical politics, and we have failed at teaching 'em radical love to handle those politics responsibly.

So the minute we teach 'em hetero patriarchy, they go around claiming everybody else should already know that word, and they're not woke enough if they don't. 

[00:23:19] Adam Grant: Yeah. 

[00:23:22] Loretta Ross: And so part of it's ego, but part of it is actually compassion for the downtrodden, for the underdog. They really do earnestly think they're doing the right thing.

[00:23:31] Adam Grant: Yeah. 

[00:23:32] Loretta Ross: They're just going about it the wrong way. 

[00:23:35] Adam Grant: I got so much out of your perspective on language policing in the book. I thought you had, you had such an insightful and timely commentary on what's wrong with language policing. Talk to me about that a little bit. 

[00:23:47] Loretta Ross: Because I always try to tell the lessons through what I've been through and what I learned.

And so we have to understand that language conventions are rapidly changing and nobody can keep up, and so we have to give each other grace while also understanding that we also do need to do better too. So I shouldn't get a permanent pass on getting the gender pronoun wrong. But I should also be appreciated for the fact that I am gonna correct myself as often as I can and remember to, because I wanna honor who you are.

I tell the story in the book of how in my, one of my classes we had gone around, the students that all introduced themselves. I have 50 students in my class, and they had given us their correct gender pronoun. And of course, the first time I called a student, I misgendered them. And I expected to be put on full blast.

'Cause we had made such an effort, right? And this 18-year-old looked at me and said, oh, that's all right, professor. I misgender myself sometimes . And I was like, an 18-year-old! Offering amazing grace and recognizing the lack of ill intent. Not choosing, choosing not to be offended. About the fact that we're all struggling with this stuff.

We're in a society where knowledge is a commodity, and so why are we surprised that people who call themselves human rights activists use the knowledge of wokeness as a commodity and as a weapon against each other? 'Cause this is how they, this is what they've learned, this is what they've absorbed. And it actually can get rewarded.

You, you can get rewarded for it. So teaching people that not only is there a better way, but there's a better representation of who they actually are is really fun. And I have fun doing it, because if, if being an asshole isn't who you wanna be, why are you acting like one? I mean, if you wanna be an asshole, own it.

You know, don't, don't just fake it. But if that's not who you wanna be, why don't you try another way of correcting somebody if they get something wrong? Offering love, sharing when you messed up. There's a whole lot of other things you can do. I am working with a educator, an educator who works on books for K through 12, and she had tried to use the calling in

methodology around a student using the N word. And she had the one boy tell another boy, we don't say that word, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, you are a jerk for trying to say that word. That kind of thing. And I had her rewrite that passage. 'Cause if you're gonna use the calling in technique, it wouldn't have been questioning whether he had the right to say the word, but asking the question, why would he want to? What's going on with you that would make you even think about using a word that risk hurting somebody else? 'Cause if hurting them is not your intent, why are you accidentally doing it? And is that what you actually wanna do?

[00:27:04] Adam Grant: That's such a good illustration of how to call someone in. 

[00:27:08] Loretta Ross: Well, there's some preparation you have to do before you call somebody in. First, you have to pause and take a deep breath, because in that pause you're gonna call yourself in first. And I find, as I said earlier, if I swallow that first trauma reaction and then give time for my integrity and intelligence to take over, that second thing I say is going to be the one that better represents me.

And by the way, if you ever parented a teenager, you know that stuff instinctively. Because if you say the first thing outta your mouth when your teenager comes at you wrong, they'll be in therapy for life. I swear, kids press you at the most awkward times, but let's codify what we are doing instinctively.

The second step is to do a self-assessment. Because if you're not in a healed enough space for building a container for this conversation that you're gonna have with somebody that you may disagree with, you may dislike, that you may be under misunderstood by, all of the things that could go wrong in a conversation between two people who are trying to feel each other out and see how we can find out how we can communicate.

We're we're, we're not as good as hiding how we actually feel that we think, as we think we are. And then after you've done that self-assessment, step three is to choose what your reaction is going to be by calibrating the conflict. Do I need a call out or can I just call on them to do better? Or should I call it off 'cause this is gonna be an unproductive conversation, or should I just get them canceled? 'Cause they had a chance to do better and now they're causing a whole lot of harm and they're refusing to be accountable. There's a buffet of options we have. One of the things that I say that's easily understood by people is that you can say what you mean and you can mean what you say, but you don't have to say it mean.

That's always a choice. And never pretend that it isn't. You have a choice about tone and temperature and register always. And of course, I believe Maya Angelou when she says, people may forget what you said, but they'll never forget how you made 'em feel. And when I call on somebody or call 'em out or call 'em in, I want them to feel like I sincerely respect them, and I've heard them.

I may disagree with them, but that doesn't mean that they don't deserve to be listened to. And by the way, one of the things I wish I'd put in the book, but I'm not sure if I covered it completely, is that we need to redefine what we mean by diversity. I want us to really focus on the diversity of human experiences and elevate that over, you know, these made up identity markers that, you know, just serve capitalism.

[00:30:13] Adam Grant: I wanna make sure we do a lightning round. Can I ask you a few rapid fire questions? 

[00:30:17] Loretta Ross: Oh yeah, like I told you, I'm good at those ones. 

[00:30:20] Adam Grant: What is the worst advice you've ever gotten? 

[00:30:22] Loretta Ross: I don't think, I can't ever remember any bad advice. And the reason I can't remember any bad advice? 'Cause if I think it's bad advice, I didn't pay attention anyway.

I never followed bad advice. I've never jumped out of an airplane, never done a whole lot of things. Because it seems stupid to me. 

[00:30:40] Adam Grant: What about best advice? 

[00:30:41] Loretta Ross: Leonard Zeskind, who taught me everything about doing monitoring of hate groups and stuff, he used to always say, Loretta, you need to lighten up because fighting Nazis should be fun.

It's being a Nazi that sucks . And I've interpreted that to mean that if you're not having fun fighting for hope and joy and human rights, then maybe you're doing the fight wrong. 'Cause we still are the ones that should be having fun and joy and unity with humanity. Let the people that are trying to divide us against each other have the miserable lives.

[00:31:20] Adam Grant: What is a question you have for me? 

[00:31:22] Loretta Ross: How do you keep your ego in check when you're so damn smart? 'Cause you do not come off as a guy who thinks he knows it all. And I think that has to probably be a struggle for you. So how do you do it? Because my ego can, can go crazy and it's a struggle for me every day.

[00:31:41] Adam Grant: Well, that's very kind of you. 

[00:31:43] Loretta Ross: I didn't say it to be kind. I'm asking it as a legitimate question. 

[00:31:46] Adam Grant: I think I got myself in trouble a lot when I was younger, uh, always trying to argue that, that I was right and other people were wrong. 

[00:31:53] Loretta Ross: Okay. 

[00:31:54] Adam Grant: And I felt like I, I won some battles and I lost a lot of wars. And it wasn't fun to go around feeling like I was wielding whatever knowledge I had as a weapon. What I love about learning is sharing what I know, not using it to, to berate people or belittle people. My greatest teachers were the ones who, you know, they had a wealth of knowledge, but they were much more interested in what they didn't know.

[00:32:28] Loretta Ross: Mm-hmm . 

[00:32:29] Adam Grant: And I wanted to be like that. I wanted to, you know, to share what I knew in the spirit of trying to figure out what I didn't know and what we could all teach each other. One of the things I realized as I was writing Think Again, was that the true mark of a lifelong learner is knowing that you can learn something from every single person you meet.

[00:32:49] Loretta Ross: Yeah, yeah, that's true. 

[00:32:51] Adam Grant: And if you remember that, you can't be a know-it-all. 

[00:32:54] Loretta Ross: Every genius I've ever met was an asshole in life. I'm like, wow. You know, when, when you, when they handed this gift to you, they certainly gave you his leavening agent. I mean, , you know, it's just, you gotta admire this, and you're like, whoa.

But this is what comes with it. 

[00:33:11] Adam Grant: You're, you've been meeting the wrong geniuses. Clearly we need to introduce you to the kinder ones. 

[00:33:16] Loretta Ross: Or maybe I got the wrong definition of genius . I wrote a long passage about how we have to deal with the art and the artist at the same time. And I'm not gonna stop listening to Michael Jackson or watch, you know, admiring a Picasso 'cause he was a jerk.

Or I can't separate the art from the artist. I, I like contextualizing the art with knowing more about the artist, but I've also been so disappointed when I met my heroes and sheroes and found out about their clay feet. And so I had to learn to take it as a whole package as opposed to just putting them on a pedestal and ignoring the clay feet.

So I learned that I like evil geniuses because I love that genius part about 'em, but I can't introduce 'em to my friends . 

[00:34:12] Adam Grant: Wow. Good. Good for you for being able to see the virtues in people that are full of vices. 

[00:34:19] Loretta Ross: Well, I am, who isn't? Who isn't? It's, it's so delightful to be complicated. I guess I don't have that Pollyanna instinct.

Matter of fact, I don't even like most people , so I find it amazing that I'm a human rights activist. I am an introvert. I get mad when my phone rings 'cause they're interrupting my reading. No one is more surprised than me that I have a public facing life and job. 

[00:34:46] Adam Grant: You are living proof that you don't have to be an extrovert to be charismatic and persuasive.

And Loretta, this has just been a joy to soak up your wisdom and I think we need more of it in the world. 

[00:34:59] Loretta Ross: Well hopefully one day I will find the courage to do a podcast or something like that, 'cause I'm told that's how you reach a lot of people nowadays. 

[00:35:09] Adam Grant: I will look forward to that. 

[00:35:11] Loretta Ross: And by the way, by the way Adam , I have to apologize 'cause I didn't know you were a big fucking deal when I met you at that TED talk. 

[00:35:20] Adam Grant: Guess what? Guess what? I'm not. 

[00:35:23] Loretta Ross: Oh hell yes you are. 

[00:35:26] Adam Grant: Well, thank you. I'm a huge fan of yours. 

Loretta reminds us that you can be forthcoming in what you say while still being respectful and even kind in how you say it. Being direct with the content of your message doesn't prevent you from being thoughtful about the best way to deliver it.

ReThinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. The show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our producers are Hannah Kingsley Ma and Aja Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original Music by Hans Dale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown.

Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Hai Lash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington Rogers.

I think we need you to run for office, Loretta. 

[00:36:26] Loretta Ross: Oh, no, 'cause I can't bribe enough people who can attest that I inhaled. I'm sorry. That's a Clinton era joke.