UNLOCK 10.1: Don't Talk About Politics w/ Sarah Stein Lubrano Part 2

In Part 2 of my conversation with Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano, we move from the critique of debate and “critical thinking” into the deeper question: what actually radicalizes us?

Sarah talks about the moments that changed her politics—teaching in prisons, supporting a student after sexual violence—and why no amount of abstract knowledge could have done the same work. I share how parenting an autistic kid has transformed my sense of who the world is designed for, and what it means to resist capitalist norms around productivity, learning, and success.

Also: why televised debates and “reasoning as warfare” formats (ahem, Jubilee) are great entertainment but terrible tools for social change, how the marketplace-of-ideas myth functions as liberal ideology, and why protest rarely changes governments or “the public” directly, but can permanently change the protesters themselves.

For Lubrano, good politics looks a lot like good friendship: long-term, non-transactional, joyful where possible. She offers advice to a hypothetical 15-year-old on how to enter political life without burning out: learn to be a good friend, find a broken part of the world you care about, and commit to fixing it together.

I close with an in-person story about meeting my previous guest, Sarah Rose Kaplan, and watching her improv a small act of mutual aid with three hungry kids in a Toronto restaurant—a live illustration of Lubrano’s thesis that new social experiences can change lives.

Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano is a political theorist and organizer with a background in feminist mutual aid, local grassroots work, and teaching in prisons. She holds a PhD from Oxford and a master’s degree from Cambridge, and works with the Sense and Solidarity Initiative and the Future Narratives Lab. Her first book is Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds (Bloomsbury).

– Website: https://www.sarahsteinlubrano.com
– Substack: https://sarahsteinlubrano.substack.com
– X (Twitter): https://x.com/SSteinLubrano
– Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sarahsteinlubrano/
– Sense and Solidarity Initiative: https://senseandsolidarity.org
– Sense & Solidarity podcast (Spotify): https://open.spotify.com/show/2dcKkTCJNZM2j2CLKJZS3W

Buy Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
– Publisher (Bloomsbury – main hub):
https://www.bloomsbury.com/ca/dont-talk-about-politics-9781399413923/

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