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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with Srdja Popovic, author of Blueprint for Revolution.
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He was actually one of the organizers of the resistance to Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia in the 90s, and this is an interesting conversation, maybe seems a little bit off topic, but I think psychology, human performance, and revolutions probably have more in common than we think.
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We re going to talk about, well, first of all, how revolutions in business have a lot of things in common, like branding and logos,
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why nonviolence is more popular and more effective in so many ways, why there are no charismatic leaders in the most successful revolutions, and how to make a revolution cool by using comedy and other techniques.
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So enjoy this one with Sergei Popovich.
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And you know what?
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If you re not into it, skip to the next.
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We got a lot of content here at the Art of Charm.
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With that, welcome to the show.
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We bring together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, in your relationships, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss things like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, mentorship, and everything else we teach here at The Art of Charm.
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If you re in the US, you can text charmed, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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Alright, here s Sergei Popovich.
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Srdja, tell us what you do in one sentence.
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My name is Srdja Popovic, and I m super passionate about educating people on how to empower themselves to change the world.
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To put a little romantic spin on it, do you consider yourself a professional revolutionary?
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Because that s kind of what you do for a living.
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I do a lot of different things for a living.
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I teach, I write books, I produce videos, I travel, I give speeches.
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And yes, we work with the groups who are involved in the revolution.
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I don t feel like I m a professional revolutionary.
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I mostly feel like I m there to share my experiences with people who are doing the revolutions, because the only successful revolutions are those revolutions and changes that are coming from within.
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So there can t be somebody from the outside who tells you what to do.
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whether the skills and knowledges on this could be shared, which is the reason why I wrote this book.
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Now, I remember watching the Serbian revolution, the latest one, on television and watching a bulldozer go into a parliament building, and I thought everybody was pretty brave when I was watching that on TV.
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They d be doing that, and I remember feeling a little bit emotional about that, too.
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I thought that was really cool, and that did influence my decision later to move to Serbia for over a year and teach English there.
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And I ll tell you, one thing that we have in common
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is that we ve both been taken into custody and beat up by Serbian police.
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I think you and I have that in common.
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I m not sure how many people share that outside Serbia.
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This is a several foreigners shared that, but in Serbia it was pretty common, 2.5 thousand people were arrested during the time of Milosevic only for opposing him.
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Some of them were badly beaten, some of them even killed, including the editor-in-chief of the biggest Serbian opposition newspaper.
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First of all, I didn t know this part of your history.
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I would be super happy to have a beer with you and talk about your Serbian experience, because I think this is an amazing country that people should visit.
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You know, we, the Serbs, are not very well known for being nonviolent.
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And having such an international brand as the Serbian Nonviolent Revolution in 2000 was basically the main reason that is still driving me doing this job.
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The fact that there are people across the world who watch that movie, Bringing Down the Dictator, they get inspired, they come to us, they speak to us, they say, oh, the Serbs did something really cool against a really bad guy who was, you know, convicted war criminal and did so many different things.
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And I think the bravery is something you mentioned, and I don t think we were particularly brave.
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And I think very often in our life, we find ourselves in a situation where the situation dictates the rules.
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So if you would be a young Serb, if you would be born between 69 and maybe 80, if you were entering 90s from a very convenient middle class life, very cool rock music,
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and then the nasty guy comes in and then immediately everything turns around and people are becoming more nationalistic and you start being fed with this crazy propaganda that you need to hate people and get to war with them because of their ethnicity.
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The whole world falls apart and this is exactly the situation my generation finds itself.
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in 90s from a very convenient world, we ended up in a very nasty world, we ended up running into the five wars, we ended up running into what used to be at the time the second biggest world, hyperinflation, so complete crash of values, complete crash of economy, complete crash of perspective.
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If you would be a person of 20s in that type of environment, you would have only two choices, to fight or to flee.
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And some of our friends, of course, ended up living in a place like Chicago.
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We just commented off record that this is the second biggest Serbian city after my hometown of Belgrade.
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But a lot of us just stayed back and fight back and said to Milosevic, no, we are not going to leave.
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You are going to leave.
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So it was more a necessity.
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I m very proud if this inspires people.
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My Serbian friends, who are my age, slightly older, everybody knows about the group that you started, and I kind of want to give a little bit of history here, because a lot of people might be thinking, wait, Serbia?
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Isn t that that cold place that Russia has prisons?
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That s Siberia.
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So, Serbia, part of the former Yugoslavia, you had this leader.
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Not a very charismatic leader, Slobodan Milosevic.
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He came into power, like you said, you were in your, I guess, teens, early 20s, and basically turned what was a relatively prosperous socialist state, Yugoslavia, to a nationalist, almost fascist type of regime.
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Serbs are stubborn, and you and your friends, and tens of thousands of others, kind of got sick of his crap.
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pretty quickly how do you start thinking look we re the people who can do something about this because when i look around myself here in the states i look at my friends and people complain about politics all the time it seems like we re even as americans often afraid to vote because it doesn t count so
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I m wondering what s telling you as Serbs, as young Serbs, hey, look, we can actually overthrow the entire government.
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It just seems like such a massive undertaking and it s so dangerous.
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What gave you both the courage and even the thought that you might succeed?
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Well, I mean there are so many different levels of this question I think the first of all the historic context was very similar to that ugly thing we are seeing in Europe and lately in the United States that the national populists are taking over and they re spilling their poison and They re very effective in building on the hatred.
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I think the real problem we had is
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is that we were living in a relatively happy, though a little bit outdated, socialist state in the 80s, and then the nasty guys came in and started selling hatred.
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And whether we re talking about Serbia, Croatia, or Bosnia, because this is the
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ugly amalgam of three nasty nationalism that torn my country, the country I was born was called Yugoslavia, apart.
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And I think that, once again, only two chances to fight or to flee.
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There was this wider question that probably appeals to a lot of people in the United States and a lot of your friends and a lot of people in Europe.
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And this is why this book is so much related to my favorite personal Bible, which is the Lord of the Rings.
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So the hobbits, they re the least usual suspects to change the world.
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They are not tall.
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They are not wearing the shiny armors.
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They don t know magic and they re just lazy and love to eat and sit at home and smoke pot.
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And I think what, what made us think that or wish that we can change the world was the same force that was driving for other bargains.
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And I think this is because there was nobody else to do the job.
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And there was this attempt to do it in 1992 to fight against the war, the large student protest outbreak.
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And of course, he died.
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96, 97, Milosevic lost the first stray of local elections.
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We demonstrated and then he died because the opposition fell apart.
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In 98, we felt like we were hitting the bottom.
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After the five wars, we re getting in war in Kosovo, we re getting involved with the war in NATO, and the regime was growingly, increasingly autocratic, the people were arrested for, you know, demonstrating in the streets, the newspapers were banned, the professors were just fired from the university because they were not affiliated with the regime, and out of this desperation,
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growth, not only the hope, but that this marvelous idea, which I assume is in the back of each world changer, and I will speak about this later, if not us, who else?
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And I think that s the reason why we named the chapter of the book, It Has to Be You, because if you don t take the responsibility in your hands, if you don t fight back the things you don t like, if you don t believe in yourself, then who else will?
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And we understood in 1998,
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the movement called Otpor, which is the backbone of the book and used to be our launching pad to the world of activism, was formed, that there will be nobody else to take this ring to Mordor.
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us.
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Yes, we are hobbits.
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Yes, we are lazy.
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Yes, we have a big feet.
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Yes, we like to lay back lives.
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But if we don t do this, the whole future of our country is going to be swallowed in the darkness.
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And we didn t want that to happen.
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We loved our country too much.
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And I think that was the main driving force.
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And there is this marvel scene in Lord of the Rings where, you know, everybody else is arguing and Frodo takes the decision to take the ring to Mordor.
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and says, yes, I m going to take the ring to the murderer, but I don t know the way.
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Well, this is the decision we made.
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And fortunately, we have found a way.
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So Milosevic or Sauron was ousted back there in 2000.
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Well, I love the Lord of the Rings analogy.
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I feel like you put a lot of thought into that.
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You are not winging that one at all, as you describe it, and I love that.
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I gotta ask, though, why nonviolence?
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Because when a regime is so violent, like I said, I ve had run-ins with Serbian police.
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I ve been on both ends of fighting with Serbian police for various reasons.
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One switch landed me in a slammer, and the other time, let s just say I got away with it.
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But why nonviolence?
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Why was non-violence the cornerstone of Otpor?
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By the way, the word itself means resistance.
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Why was the resistance, why was the cornerstone of the resistance non-violent?
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Well, I think when you look at the principles of every single successful movement across the world, from Gandhi to Lech Walesa and Serbia and then everywhere else,
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You can see that there are only three principles, and we write about this in the book, that are keeping these movements together.
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If you want to be successful, you need to be united.
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If you want to be successful, you need to be strategic.
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And then the third principle is a nonviolent discipline.
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So for us, it was a little bit different than for Gandhi.
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And I think nonviolent discipline is a skill.
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And working with movements across the world, we very often face this question, how do we face violence with nonviolence?
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And first of all, we preached it.
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We taught that nonviolent way is more successful.
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It wasn t really cool being violent in a country which was driven through the rounds of the civil war.
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So it was also a cool factor.
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We also were teaching people to stay nonviolent.
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So the second level of nonviolent discipline, and we spent years training movements across the world how to maintain nonviolent discipline.
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is that you can teach your people not to attack the police, but to address them with flowers, not to really yell, but really chant the supportive slogans, not to really run into the police force, but sit in front of the police and show your indexes, which are your students  IDs,
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And the third level, very important one, is that in every struggle, there is a small group of the people who can share your goals, but may not share your commitment to nonviolence.
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Everywhere in the world is the same.
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You want to look at the Black Lives Matter or you want to look at the Serbia.
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In Serbian case, these were soccer fans.
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So the soccer fans in 90s were very, very effectively against Milosevic, but their idea of being against Milosevic was attacking the police.
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and spreading the violence.
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One single act of violence can destroy the credibility of the nonviolent movement.
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Because imagine the crowd of the 10,000 people peacefully demonstrating in a Times Square or whatever equivalent of this exists in Chicago.
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And then, you know, three drunk idiots start throwing stones and attack the police.
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So it s like there is this media thirst for violence.
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And you need to understand this.
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And different movements across the world have discovered very different tactics to deal with not getting affiliated with violent groups.
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So preach nonviolence, number one.
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Second, train your troops not to be violent.
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And number three, take a look at the battlefield.
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Take a look at specifically the groups that are sharing your values, but they are not sharing your commitment to nonviolence, because these guys can end up being the biggest threat to your movement.
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Now, one point of wisdom that I saw in the book that I thought was a pretty astute observation, that you re able to recruit more people for a nonviolent movement because there s lower risk.
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You don t have to be a combat age male to enlist, right?
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You can enlist literally old ladies to be nonviolent and stick flowers in the barrel of a gun, or you can recruit 18 year old college females.
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You guys had the strategy, a very Serbian strategy of putting very beautiful women in the front of the protest lines because nobody wants to smack a lady with the butt of a rifle in the front of the line.
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You have this protest line of just like really good looking women and the cops are standing there pretty impotent to do anything about it without looking just absolutely horrible to everyone involved.
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Well, I think there are like the several level of this.
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One thing is scientific.
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And to warn your readers, this is not an academic book.
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It s not boring.
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It doesn t have footnotes.
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So if you re explaining the academic book, don t buy this one.
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But there is an academic research on it.
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And the two great American scholars, Maria Stephan and Erika Chenoweth, were looking at the different aspects of nonviolent struggle.
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They found it out that nonviolent struggle is twice more likely to succeed over the last 100 of years.
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than the violent struggle.
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They were looking at the figures, and they were looking at the participation, and they found out that of course, the more people participate, the better the possibility of positive success.
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And the nonviolent struggle, it s all about the numbers, and of course, if you re running a very cool, nice street demonstration, which we can call protestival, because it s a combination of a protest and a festival,
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the cool people will come in, the people will feel well, the people will appear with their kids, with their girlfriends, you know, it s like everybody s going to have fun.
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But if you re running a violent demonstration, and you know the stones are thrown, and somebody shoots a tear gas, the less people will participate.
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That brings us to the second point in our teaching, where we are talking the workshop or university courses, we re always looking at the level of the participation.
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So what would make me participate in this protest?
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if I share the values, of course, be if the tactic is cool and if the risk is low.
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Not too many people would risk losing jobs or getting beaten up or getting arrested.
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OK, that makes two of us, you and me, a little bit of the crazy people.
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But we are very small proportion.
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of the society.
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So when you re looking at the methods of successful nonviolent struggle, you would be looking at the things which are low risk tactics.
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And it s like you can go to the Iran and understand that, you know, if people demonstrate in the street, in a society like Iran, everybody gets killed.
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But then if you get to the social media, if you get the ringtone, if you get on YouTube, then, you know, if you wear a symbol, which was our trick in Serbia, you re just wearing a little small badge on your jacket
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showing the symbol of the movement, you re not really likely to be arrested.
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Because even in the oppressive societies, it s very difficult to arrest people for wearing pins on their jackets.
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So we ll be looking at the low-risk tactics that we are advising to the world that will make participation bigger, but they will also make people feel that they did something important.
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One of the things that distincts the successful movement from just a random protest is that our people are feeling part of it.
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and they will peel part of it if they can do something and get away with it.
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So, 1996-97, we had a stray of street demonstrations, the police was beating us, and immediately somebody came out with the idea that instead of marching in the street and risking being beaten, we ll go on our windows and hitting pots and pans.
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So immediately this thing from, you know, several tens of thousands of people protest turned into the national thing.
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So grannies and kids and teenagers and daddies would come on the windows at the time of the state TV news, which were the symbol of the state propaganda, protesting by making noise.
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So immediately I would see my neighbor coming out, you know, with his baseball bat, hitting a big petrol can, making noise.
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Of course, as a musician, I was having a very loud speaker, so that was a combination of Rammstein and red hot chili peppers.
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and then you ll say my grandma would go and she was in her 70s she could never go on the street and demonstrate because you know if police hits in she will break an ankle so it s like a she was on her window she was hitting her pot that she was cooking a soup for me a day before so everybody was involved so you will look at the tactics which are low risk dispersive
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everybody can participate and very, very important, everybody can get away with it.
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Because if people get away with it and feel fun and feel good about doing something for their purpose, they re very likely to participate in our movement in the future.
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Now, back to the show.
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If you do dive into violence, people get scared sometimes, and they look for strong leaders and authoritarians to protect them.
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They rule by fear.
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So if you keep everybody kind of having fun, participating, and making it a wide swathe of people, it doesn t look like a fringe group.
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It looks like everybody, and you re getting away with it, and the risk is low.
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So basically, the regime, which gets an A plus in violence and not much more, can t use their best weapon that effectively.
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And so you re kind of taking that away from them.
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Absolutely, and when you look at the groups that were the most successful, these were exactly the groups that operate in a very violent area.
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I m running a small non-profit called Canvas, and this organization deals with the groups that are operating in a very, very violent environment.
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And, you know, if you read the book, you will discover how inventive these groups are and which are the great ways they are putting their opponents in a dilemma and how they re using humor and mocking and where they re using a very low risk tactics.
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You know, even in Assad Syria, which you can imagine the most violent place in the world, there are people who are protesting nonviolently.
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And of course, the first thought would be if you go on the street, you get shot.
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But they were super successful.
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They were a painting the fountains in Damascus, which is the capital of Syria in red, reminding everybody in Damascus that blood of the rebels has spilled elsewhere.
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And then B, they were capable of painting thousands of little ping pong balls.
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And you can imagine the
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Green market in the Sunday.
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Everybody s there.
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Everybody s buying immediately thousands of the little ping-pong balls Carrying the messages of freedom and you know anti sad messages have been released and people who do this are Hitting this thing and they are running away.
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So nobody gets arrested Everybody gets a message and I think making this tactics as available to the people is
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and as participative as they can be is the key to this.
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The fact that you are nonviolent doesn t guarantee that your opponent won t get violent, and violence is no cure for anything.
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And the less violence you experience, the better.
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And of course, being nonviolent doesn t mean you re not fighting a war.
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It just means you re fighting that war with different weapons.
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Why is it important to realize that this is still a war, even though it s nonviolent?
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Because every conflict is a war.
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The struggle against the Soviet Union was a war.
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The struggle for gay rights run by Harvey Milk in San Francisco was exactly waged as a war.
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And if your listeners really want to spend their weekend well, they would watch the Harvey Milk.
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This amazing movie by Sean Penn, where you can look at the development of the movement, and you can look at almost all the rules.
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So first of all, who was for Harvey Mill?
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He was a hobbit.
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He was one of us.
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He was not Harvard graduate guy.
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He was the guy who was running a small camera shop in Castro Street in San Francisco.
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So he tried from the fringe and he was advocating strongly for what he was passionate about was the gay rights situation at the time was terrible.
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Being LGBT was considered to be a mental disease in America these days.
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And he was running against this and he was trying to make an issue.
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And he decided to run for the parliament of the city of San Francisco or city council, whatever is that name.
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And he runs on a platform that the gay rights should be protected and he loses miserably.
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because people in the mainstream don t see this as an issue.
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So he wolves a little bit, he changes his methods, he s not making it a case, he s not turning himself a victim, and then he starts campaigning.
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And he ends up, he tries putting together the liberal communities of San Francisco, and he still ends up being third, not winning.
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And then one day he wakes up,
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And he understand that the majority of the people is those people who they need to listen.
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And he goes to the people and he figures out immediately as a revelation that for people in San Francisco at that age, it was the dog s poop.
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That was the top thing.
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Number one, kids, the people in calm neighborhoods were super obsessed with the fact that that was the dog s poop capital, which later turned to Paris, which later to Belgrade.
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And then he changes the tune.
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So he runs his third and victorious campaign based on a sentence that whether gay or straight, I m the guy who s going to curtail you of the dog s poop.
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Guess what?
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He wins.
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He becomes the first openly LGBT person to be elected in any state institution in the U.S.
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The rest is history.
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In the next 10 years, even the right-wing candidates are going to support gay marriage in the U.S.
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But that was made with one big shift.
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You understand that the numbers are always in the mainstream.
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B, you understand that you need to listen, not preach to the people for the social change, that people will mobilize and sacrifice for the things that they find personally important, even if they are so trivial as streets covered with a dog s poop.
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and you end up being victorious and being in the position to implement your great ideas and your great values, as Harvey Milk was.
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I would like to talk a little bit about how Otpor uses, essentially, business principles to create the brand of cool.
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You mentioned earlier you created things, you made them cool, right?
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You avoided charismatic leaders because you didn t want the movement to be able to be stopped by the police just by a simple arrest.
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but you had to brand it in a certain way that made the whole group cool.
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And I thought that was a really interesting theory and a really interesting way that you did this in practice because you actually made it cool to join the group and cool to get arrested.
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Can you tell us about that?
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Yeah, one of the reasons that I m getting letters from readers who are coming from a marketing sector and they read Blueprint for Revolution is they find this fascinating.
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It was also a necessity rather than the conscious business model thinking.
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What connects Serbs and Americans is that we have this great individualism and there is always a lone cowboy who solves the thing as opposed to the great leaders and great institutions in our social narrative.
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In 90s, we understood that the political leaders lost the contact with the people on the ground.
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Whether we are talking about the government or the opposition, there is no representativeness of the people on the ground.
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And we just filled this vacuum.
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So what we basically did, we developed a movement which was ideally related to the situation in Serbia.
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It was leaderless.
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So there were no leaders that can be corrupted, that can be killed, that can be arrested.
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So the movement gets, his head cuts off.
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On the other hand, we were looking at the very individualism of the Serbian people.
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So the basic idea was that we were uniting around the vision, and that was the joint vision of Serbian Europe, peace and freedoms that we lacked in the 90s.
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That B, we are communicating through the symbol, and the symbol of the clench fest that was used in Serbia in 2000, was later used in 8 different countries, from very different parts of the world, to Venezuela, to Egypt, to Georgia.
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behind this program or the political vision and the logo, there was a people who were taught to be leaders, not the members, not the followers.
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So our general idea was to develop so many different layers of leadership that A, people feel the movement belongs to them.
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Because if people feel the movement belongs to them, they give the best.
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And then on another level, we want to be sure if Milosevic arrest
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the ten fifteen people who are the logistically running the movement or fifty people who are running the top fifty branches the show will go on.
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And we were super afraid of the fact that.
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you know, the Secret Service was ready to pick us up.
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And we made a system which was based on individual leadership, a lot of local autonomy, the very recognizable symbol and the brand.
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I mean, you guys just put branding in Serbia, you ll get a great 11 minutes video on the YouTube about this in our website.
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what basically happened was that this thing exploded and there were so many people feeling like they want to contribute to this and they came in with the ideas and then we ended up in a situation where one of our local branches would compete with another one on who would be doing the crazier things that will gain more media attention, that will provoke the regime to the level that they get more people arrested,
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That was a nightmare for any centralistic regime.
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Because ideally, they will surveil up to 30 people, and they will know exactly what the thing will do.
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So by listening to my phone, they can t even predict what is happening in one of the Serbian municipalities, because in that municipality, it was the own creativeness of the movement people that was driving things on.
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SPEAKER_00
You did a great job, though, with the T-shirts.
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SPEAKER_00
Tell us about the T-shirts.
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Every time you get arrested, you end up with a shirt.
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SPEAKER_00
What was that all about?
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SPEAKER_02
Well, I mean, because the movement s logo was the Clenched Fist, and because the way to express it was to carry a T-shirt with it, and then later these T-shirts were super popular from Kenya to Georgia or wherever, what really happened was that we tried to reward our people.
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And we like to carry on the arrest as a badge of honor.
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And, you know, if you look at the American media, you will understand how much the purple hearts and silver stars are appreciated.
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So being arrested was a kind of purple star.
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You got wounded in the battle because you were great.
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and you came out alive and you came back to the battle, which arise the recognition.
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So every time you get arrested and get a release, you get a new t-shirt.
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It was like the ranks in the army or the ranks of honor, whatever it is.
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And you know, the more time you were arrested, you will be sharing the more rare t-shirt because the movement actually didn t have a local branches with leaders.
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So the real show of how important you are for movement are how active you were.
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And I think that s a great lesson for every movement across the world.
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You want to reward activism and the investments of the people energy and the investments of the people time.
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So what really happened was that we ended up with the people competing to getting the high t-shirt.
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But you know in their own social life, we re talking about the movement which average age was 21.
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making this cool and in-factor, both with a great strategy and this branding strategy, but also with this feeling of belonging to the group and also this great feeling of being non-violent and funny and party animals and humorous.
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And I think that what it really made, it s like, imagine being, reversing your world.
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Political activism is considered to be boring.
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And what about if you are not arrested, you can t date, you re not going to get laid.
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And you re 22.
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So the ugliest nerd that was arrested seven times has more chances with beautiful Serbian girls.
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then you are studying tough and you are not participating in the protest.
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Thinking about the peer pressure, what that will make you do, you will join the protest.
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You will give up trying to be the good guys, you will try being up at problem makers.
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SPEAKER_00
Amazing.
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SPEAKER_00
So if I hypothetically had been arrested or been to jail twice in Serbia, what color t-shirt do I get?
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SPEAKER_02
I probably you re going to get the black one with a white fist with nothing inscripted on it, because these with inscription were just, you know, printed in tens of thousands.
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SPEAKER_02
But with these without inscription, they were related to the fact that people were arrested several times.
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And then when you get to the red T-shirt, that would mean that you would be arrested five times or more.
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Oh, man, I got work to do before my red T-shirt in Serbia.
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SPEAKER_01
Although I think maybe the deadline has passed for getting arrested and getting a T-shirt.
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But then, man, there are so many different places in the world where this thing is happening.
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And I think looking at the world, amazingly how this stupid violence, and especially in later
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last several years, this terrorism threat has wiped out this brave activity from the people from across the world.
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And if you dig it a little bit, and that s the advantage of digital era, you will see people doing amazing things in Zimbabwe this week.
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opposing one of the longest lasting dictatorship in the world.
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You ll see people in Cambodia doing amazing things this year.
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You ll see people in Venezuela who are starving trying to, you know, start the impeachment referendum against the government.
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So don t lose hope.
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There are so many places where you go there and get arrested enough time.
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There is a plenty of good dates waiting for you, my friend.
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SPEAKER_00
Great, good to know everybody out there.
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SPEAKER_00
One of the things you note in the book is that if you want to get a mass movement going within a very short span of time, especially in the age of the internet and other distractions, you need to use humor.
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SPEAKER_00
Tell us about how you used comedy, not only to get rid of Milosevic, but the people that you re training in Syria and these other places, you re using comedy.
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It s one of the main weapons that you use.
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Well, one of the chapters of the book was named Lafayette Victory, and that s the intention.
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First of all, you need to understand the background of it.
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It was not scientific.
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It s just because the Serbs are not serious.
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And, you know, it s like doing the things against Milosevic, which was the classic dilemma actions, we would come out with the big petrol barrel, we will paint Milosevic on it, and then the people can put the money, a little coins in it, and get a baseball bat and hit the face of the president on the barrel, the way you are playing a pinball game or a Pac-Man video game for those who are my generation.
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the people felt relieved about it, and they were doing a little thing, and it was a low risk.
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And, you know, we came out with this idea, and we brought this big barrel to the Serbian version of the 5th Avenue, and the downtown shoppers came in with the bags and with kids, and they were looking curiously at this big barrel, and there was a cartoon of Mr. President on it, and first the kids start playing, the people start playing, and before 15 minutes pass,
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The people were standing in line, there were like 150 people standing in line, and they wanted to hit the face of Mr. President just to express how deeply they respect him.
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And that was funny.
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But the funniest part was when police arrived.
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Because if you would be a policeman in that situation, what would you do?
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Arrest people who organized the event, we were nowhere to be seen.
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We pulled back to the nearby cafe and having an espresso.
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arrest the downtown shoppers, take them to the police station, and do what?
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You will accuse them for hitting the barrel with President s face while they were shopping?
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They will be out in 15 seconds, and you will get sued.
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And then, of course, they made the most stupid choice out of all.
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They arrested the barrel.
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So the picture of the policeman dragging the petrol barrel with the face of Mr. President to a police car ended up being the most popular photo shared on Serbian independent media outlets.
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So when you re looking at this humor, and when you re looking at this power of the thing we call loftivism, is that it is everywhere.
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And there are like three reasons, in my opinion, why humor is so powerful.
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First of all, it breaks fear.
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It comes from our human nature.
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If you are preparing for a major surgery, the last thing you want to hear about is that, you know, somebody puts these beautiful metal objects in, and then they will take these things out, and you get scared.
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And instead of that, if your friend cracks a joke while you re waiting for a surgery room, you laugh and the fear goes away.
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It s in our human nature.
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The humor breaks fear.
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And very often, fear is the power of the status quo.
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The second very important reason is that humor makes things cool and in.
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Just think about your personal life.
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Who is the most likable person to be around?
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Look at your cell phone.
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Is it the tallest one, strongest one, richest one, the one in the best car, or the person who can always make you laugh?
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Everybody wants to be around the pranksters.
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That works for movement.
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If the movements are funny, if they re mocking the authority, the people would love to join in because they feel good.
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And it s in our human nature to join things that make us feel good.
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And then last, but not of least importance,
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Take a look at the guys in power and whether democratically elect or authoritarians, they re just too fed with themselves.
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They re looking their pages of newspapers, they re looking their face in the TV, billboards and things of that kind.
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And they start figuring themselves too seriously.
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So sometimes when somebody mocks them, they know how to react.
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And one of the case studies, or the anecdotes in the book, is a story from Barnul, Siberia.
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And Siberia is not Serbia, just for record.
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It s as far from Serbia as California, and it is in another part of Russia.
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So what happened there, 2012, Putin would win presidential elections anyhow, but some of his guys were super enthusiastic, so they were caught stealing stuff in ballot boxes.
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SPEAKER_02
So the people went on the street, they went on protest, and these protests were banned in provincials.
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So the people from a very small city of Barnaul, in the middle of Siberia, that s a very cold place, 4,000 people live there, which makes it a side of the
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Greenell, Iowa, which I know well, it s a very small place.
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Yes, I teach there.
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And so the size of the Greenell and the people are coming to the main square and they can t protest, but they decided that their toys can.
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So they re building a little legal city.
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and they re bringing a little legal toys and kinder toys and the things they collected from their kids and if you re running a two-year-old kid like I do you will know that three of us can build a legal city and build a legal protest.
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So they build a little protest and they make a little protest signs
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quoting for free and fair elections, claiming that 146% votes for Putin, things of that kind.
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And they build it in downtown.
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And the first day, everything is nice.
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There are people building their toy protests.
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The police is there.
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Everybody s laughing.
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It s a small place.
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People know they re policemen and you know, everybody s taping it.
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Then tomorrow, this goes viral on YouTube and somebody sees this in Kremlin.
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And they understand the ingenuity behind this.
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And they understand this is a very effective way to mock Putin.
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SPEAKER_01
So the phone rings to the chief police in Barnaul.
4
SPEAKER_01
Somebody calls him from Kremlin.
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SPEAKER_01
And of course he stands up in front of the cameras, making the most stupid statement in the history of the police, probably, quoting that the protest of 100 legal soldiers, 50 toy cars, and 20 legal toys is banned.
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because the toys are not citizens of Russia, and only citizens of Russia can protest.
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SPEAKER_01
So here we are in the situation where a bunch of very creative people is making a low-risk tactics using the resources which they have at their home, so there is no funding needed, and they end up on the cover page of The Guardian.
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SPEAKER_01
And the New York times, and more important, what does it tell you about the thing?
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Number three, you remember humor breaks here.
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SPEAKER_01
Humor makes you cool and humor puts your opponent in lose, lose situation.
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SPEAKER_01
So here he is the great strong man of Russia, the guy who likes posing shirtless wrestling tigers, saving dolphins from drowning.
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And here he is, and he s afraid of the legal soldiers.
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So when you re looking at the stupidity,
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with which people in power are responding to humor, you can understand how lofty is actually a super powerful thing, and it can be a very powerful thing in challenging power, where this power is coming from democracy or authoritarianism.
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SPEAKER_00
rights of these leaders are so autocratic and authoritarian they start believing their own propaganda taking themselves too seriously in ruling by fear fear of your own neighbors fear surveillance fear of the police and you pop that bubble with comedy and it starts to gain momentum because it s funny and people share funny things
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SPEAKER_00
more so than maybe dangerous things.
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SPEAKER_00
And so you end up with this snowball effect that put the police and the dictator in a lose-lose situation where they have to take action doing the only thing that they can do, which is exert force.
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SPEAKER_00
And you re making them exert force over Lego guys, stuffed animals, and generic Soviet-era G.I.
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SPEAKER_00
Joe figures that people don t want anymore that they found in their basement.
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SPEAKER_00
So it looks completely ridiculous.
4
SPEAKER_00
Where was it that you d sent the police chasing after turkeys?
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SPEAKER_00
Was that also Serbia?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that was Kragujevac, the third biggest Serbian city.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, the fourth if you count Chicago in.
4
SPEAKER_01
there was one of these crazy activities.
4
SPEAKER_01
When you really want to build a successful movement, you want some people being a part of this movement.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that means that you need to run and operate on their own ideas.
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SPEAKER_01
And one of the things my organization does is like we are giving the people the format.
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SPEAKER_01
So they come out with a creative ideas where they call the dialogue and action.
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SPEAKER_01
So one of the things we did, Serbia, his wife was a super
4
SPEAKER_01
bad character, she was into advocating violence, she was into advocating the repression, and there are people who hated her.
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SPEAKER_01
And instead of, you know, throwing things at her, they decided to mock her.
4
SPEAKER_01
So what they did was they were using her signature sign, and you can imagine the lady wearing the plastic, Chinese plastic flower in her hair.
4
SPEAKER_01
So they were putting this type of flowers on the turkeys.
4
SPEAKER_01
Turkey, which is not a very bad animal, was considered to be an offense in Serbia.
4
SPEAKER_01
You would say, Turkey, somebody s stupid, or it s not coping, or stuff like that.
4
SPEAKER_01
Very far from a traditional American political correctness.
4
SPEAKER_01
The Serbs are not politically correct.
4
SPEAKER_01
But they would put little plastic flowers on turkeys, and they would just let the turkeys loose.
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SPEAKER_01
So what happened was that police, in order to prevent people connecting the image of turkeys with a plastic flower, with the image of the most beloved Mr. President s wife or the First Lady, they start chasing turkeys.
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SPEAKER_01
But the game was to understand that, you know, it s like it is your who dictating the show.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of the things that this book, Blueprint for Revolution, is teaching you is that it really needs to be an offense.
4
SPEAKER_01
You will never win by sitting on defensive position and agreeing with the things of your neighborhood.
4
SPEAKER_01
If you want to win, you want to take the offense.
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SPEAKER_01
And you need to understand that, you know, it s like what your opponent is and what the pillars of support or the institutions are and what are your chances.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of the places you re really strong and your opponent is really weak is creativity.
4
SPEAKER_01
So really want to boost this creativity and decentralizations.
4
SPEAKER_01
You want to look at the people of the movement.
4
SPEAKER_01
You want to understand this is so many people with so great ideas and you want to nurture these ideas to the very successful actions.
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SPEAKER_01
Eventually your opponent will be ending up doing something stupid like arresting turkeys or a pet for better.
4
SPEAKER_00
Right, I mean, you ve got the petrol barrel, the turkeys running around, these fat overweight cops running around picking up ping pong balls, bouncing down stairs and streets in Damascus.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I mean, even, there s so many examples in the book.
4
SPEAKER_00
The police in Damascus having to reach into dog or horse, I don t even know what it is, poop.
4
SPEAKER_00
and fish out these little music players playing revolutionary music that were planted in garbage cans and just in the most disgusting places by people so that they would have to literally get their hands dirty stopping all of these little affronts to Assad and you definitely have all kinds of
4
SPEAKER_00
social mojo as well.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, embarrassing really strict and violent police officers  wives by showcasing their husband s dirty deeds at their favorite cafes and beauty salons and things like that, and essentially taking the wind out of their sails by making them feel consequences indirectly.
4
SPEAKER_00
Last but not least, the red hot chili pepper stunt that you guys pulled on New Year s Eve.
4
SPEAKER_00
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
4
SPEAKER_00
That was a pretty powerful, I think pivotal moment for your movement.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think that one of the very important things you mentioned that strategically what you want to look at it is that every social movement, whether you re struggling for preventing climate change, LGBT rights or democracy in a place like Zimbabwe operates on a very similar level.
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SPEAKER_01
You want to look at your opponent, you want to look at yourself, you want to look at the battlefield.
4
SPEAKER_01
You want to identify the groups that you need to make a change because the non-violence change, the democratic change, comes from numbers.
4
SPEAKER_01
And to pull these numbers on your side, you need to listen to the people.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you need to offer to the people the strategy and the tactics that they can participate.
4
SPEAKER_01
Because it s a participation of the people.
4
SPEAKER_01
The bottom-up change is very different than the elite-driven change.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I think the main reason I wrote this book was to inspire the future hobbits.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it s like one of the things we successfully did was looking at these symbols that we want to overtake.
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SPEAKER_01
And one of the symbols was the New Year s Eve and we re talking about the year 2000.
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SPEAKER_01
We wanted to face the hundreds of thousands of people who would normally come to the rock concert with the fact that we are living in a country where there is nothing actually to celebrate.
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SPEAKER_01
Milosevic was still in power, thousands of people were dying in his wars, where the Serbs or the Bosnians or the Croats
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SPEAKER_01
What we did, we made actually the biggest prank concert in the history of the region.
4
SPEAKER_01
We invited people to the rock event, and there were a lot of rock bands playing, and there was a big rumor that the Red Hot Chili Peppers are coming, and they were big at the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was several years after they were top on the charts in the US, and some of the rock bands from abroad also supported the Serbian movement.
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SPEAKER_01
The people were trusting that this is going to be the big event, so the crowd was really great.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then instead of Red Hot Chili Peppers, there was a 15-minute documentary naming name after name after name the persons who died in New York City s crazy conflicts, different nationalities, coming from a civil sector, coming from a military.
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SPEAKER_01
And there was a strong message that we need a change to put us in place where we are really gathering on the big squares and celebrating the New Year s Eve.
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and everybody here is sure.
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instead of celebrating, should go home and think, what should I do to make this next new year worth celebration?
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And amazingly, tens of thousands of people just went home.
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Tens of thousands of people amazingly went home.
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They were not throwing things at us.
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They were not disappointed by the fact that we basically cheated them because they were expecting a big rock concert.
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And the message was clear.
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it s you need to be something and you know it s like let s get out of our zone of comfort and let s get to the place where I need to do something and you need to do something and your neighbor needs to do something and so we meet on the same place next year Milosevic is out.
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and we have a future to celebrate and it was amazingly effective and I think it also influenced the common people and it was a kind of a sobering experience for a lot of people who really thought that the protesting is all about rock songs and getting together and having fun
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a cable of the ice cold war thrown on the hands of the people.
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But it went amazingly well.
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And I think it was the part of the very important campaign of sobering people and it has to be you.
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So there is nobody else who is going to do for you until you are listening to the rock concert.
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There won t be a rock concert, it has to be you.
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Now, how did you reverse engineer the things you learned overthrowing Milosevic and create a curriculum to teach other revolutionaries?
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Because I know when we look at things that have made us socially or successful in business here at the Art of Charm, when we reverse engineer those things to teach at our live programs, that s one of our biggest challenges.
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I mean, how did you think, okay, here s what worked, and we re gonna teach other people from around the world how to wage war against their own government?
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And that was exactly the question asked to me by Adam Grant, whom I am admiring, who wrote this original book.
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And when he was interviewing me, we were talking about this, and I think he was disappointed with the answer.
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And the answer was that we learned it through experience, and we get it to the point where something works.
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And then the real sobering moment was when Zimbabweans and Belorussians came to Serbs in 2003 and say, oh, we need your advice.
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So it started as a hobby.
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We were traveling to the oppressive countries.
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We were meeting with the groups who watched Bringing Down the Dictator, which is a great recommending documentary of the Serbian struggle.
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One hour well-spent.
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It s shorter than the episode of Game of Thrones, and it s equally thrilling.
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And it was translated to many different languages and people were looking at it and getting these ideas from Serbs.
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And from there we started building the curriculum because it became a little bit more serious after we worked with the groups from Georgia and Ukraine, 2003-2004, the two great nonviolent revolution happens in that places.
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It went virally, everybody was talking about this.
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And then we formed the organization called Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, still very small, it s five employees, 12 trainers, and we try to respond to the people who seek to build the movements for nonviolent change.
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Since the last 12 years, we worked with groups from 47 different countries, from very oppressive societies, places like Burma or Egypt, to the super cool groups like Greenpeace.
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And every time we learn, and we try to develop curriculum which will basically equip people with tools on how to build a nonviolent movement.
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And then in the last nine years, we started building it on universities.
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We teach this course at Colorado College, and we re going to do it this October in NYU.
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We re going to do it online in Harvard.
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So there is a growing interest in academic institutions for this type of practical knowledge.
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Because, you know, it s like when you look at the world, when you understand that 52% of nonviolent movements were successful, when you look at the great achievements that the nonviolent struggle really brought to this world, where we are talking about, you know, universal voting rights, racial rights, LGBT rights,
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the right for people to form the labor unions, or the democracy, it is a non-violent struggle you would look at.
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And what CANVAS, my organization, is trying to do is to figure out how to equip common people like you with the tools so you can get home, you can look at a problem in your neighborhood, whether it s the garbage, the dog s poop, or unlikely presidential candidate that will help you organize the people around this topic.
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Now, last but definitely not least, don t you worry for your safety?
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I mean, you mention in the book that when you were training the Syrian resistance, soon enough you started to hear about the government grumbling about Serbian agents causing trouble in the Middle East.
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First of all, how do you find out about that?
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Where does that word come from?
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And don t you worry that one day you might wake up dead?
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First of all, it s very important and very interesting how the autocratic regimes are becoming growingly paranoid about their own people meeting with us or learning this wisdom.
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You want to look at Russia, you want to look at Syria, you want to look at Turkey, you will see the regimes absolutely being obsessed with the idea
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of the nonviolent struggle and how the activists get this knowledge and they re super consumed with this idea that somehow it s all the foreign conspiracy and their own people are basically sheep that can t really organize around the issues so they need a foreign help.
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Either this is CIA, MI6, MI5, James Bond 007 or the canvas
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to ignite this revolt.
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We are very concerned about the safety of our own activists, which is why our next big project is called WISR.
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It s an online app we are developing with Wicker Foundation that will enable people to communicate
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report on human rights violations and leaks and also learn on a completely safe encrypted online platform.
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So we are aware that the people are in danger, we are aware that there are nasty guys hating us, and we are aware that there is a lot of propaganda spread around how to prevent people to get in touch with this evil Serbian knowledge, which is why I m super proud that book has been published in eight different countries.
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and five different languages up to now, including some I can t even spell, like Turkish or Korean.
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And I think that where we are going right now is that we are very different than the 20th century.
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20th century, it was who owns more rackets, who owns more weapons.
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In 21st century, it s a battle of knowledge.
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And if we can build the tools and videos and applications and university courses and workshops that empower people to fight for freedom, rights, democracy, faster than the bad guys can maintain the status quo, then the world is winning.
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If the populism overtake, if the hatred overtake, if this idea that we are all different
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as opposed to we are all born equal, wins in this world.
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We re looking at a very unhappy world for our kids.
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Father of a two-year-old and the father of the one that is coming in November, I m very concerned about this prospect, and I m ready to spend the most of the rest of my life working on empowering people on how to build a more better, free, and democratic world.
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Serge, thanks so much.
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I really appreciate you coming on the show and discussing the anatomy of a revolution.
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Is there anything that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure that you deliver?
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Well, I mean, thank you.
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It was it was a great talking to you.
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I know the great reputation of your podcast.
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I was proud to participate in it.
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If there would be one thing, people keep writing me from different parts of the world.
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And what is really interesting that somebody from Zimbabwe reads the book, then, you know, they or Venezuela or places of that kind, that s a usual suspect.
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And these are the people who are involved in democracy struggles.
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Recently, 80% of my emails are coming from places like America and Great Britain and France and Germany.
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And the question is how to stop the right wing Nazis populists from screwing up the values that we grew up to.
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This is really amazing development.
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I was expecting more of the climate change, LGBT rights, you know, it s like this typical activist profile to write me.
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And this knowledge can be used to prevent the very values our societies are based upon.
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It s funny coming
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I think full circle, right?
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I watched this on TV when I was a teenager, ended up working in Serbia, and now I m interviewing the guy who orchestrated, in part, this revolution.
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I mean, literally, look it up on YouTube.
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There s a bulldozer driving through the Capitol building, through this line of police officers.
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I mean, I just, I remember imagining being a cop and seeing this bulldozer coming and just going, okay, this is the fat lady singing, this is over.
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I mean, that guy s getting in, right?
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So, Serge, thanks so much.
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Interesting stuff, I mean I m just, I love the idea that they figured out how to engineer revolution, use comedy, be creative, and sort of push just enough on that bubble, the veneers that the dictator puts over them.
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to have them step across the line and make a bad move, and then capitalize on that, because you can t fight force with force.
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It s kind of a jujitsu type thing, and there s a lot of social dynamics at play here as well.
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The book is Blueprint for a Revolution.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, and Sergio will have his Twitter linked in the show notes as well, as the other resources mentioned on the show, including the book and documentary.
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You can tap our album art in most mobile podcast players to see the cheat sheet for this episode.
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We ll link to the show notes right on your phone, and I m also on Twitter, at The Art of Charm.
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You can say hello or engage
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with me or curse me out there.
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Bootcamp on live program details, bootcamp.theartofcharm.com.
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We sell out months in advance, so if you re thinking about it a little bit, you re curious about what we do here at our live programs, get in touch, get some info from us so you can plan ahead, and we ve got our social capital challenge at theartofcharm.com, slash challenge, or you can text charmed.
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to 33444, that s C-H-A-R-M-E-D, to 33444.
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It s essentially a free online mini course about networking, connection skills, inspiring people to develop personal and professional relationships with you, and we ll send you that Fundamentals Toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show, some videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward.
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All in all, it ll make you a better networker and a better connector, and especially a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed here in the US to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFilippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Go ahead, tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to The Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.