How do people with strong views allow their minds to be changed?
On the podcast Reckonings, artist and activist Stephanie Lepp meets people who've undergone profound change, including a climate-change-denier turned environmental activist and a white supremacist who taught themself not to hate.
She tells Jesse Mulligan what she's learnt about the reckoning process and how AI-generated videos can help us "deepfake it 'til we make it".
Stephanie Lepp Photo: supplied
When it comes to people changing their minds, Lepp is most interested in the shift from certainty to uncertainty.
“What's exciting to me isn't just a change in views but a change in the way we relate to our views. You can think of it as a meta-change, but you know, that's what I would call a reckoning.”
In one early episode of Reckonings, she met a woman who'd overcome alcoholism and cocaine addiction, but while Lepp was editing the interview the woman relapsed.
“But then I sent her the episode and it helped her get sober again. Because it told her in her own words why she wanted to get clean in the first place.”
Another episode features a Neo-Nazi who became an anti-hate campaigner.
“Frank Meeink, his transformation process started in jail when he started playing sports with black inmates. He started getting to know black people really for the first time in his life.
“That was confusing for him. It was like 'I guess black people are okay, but you know, Jews are still not okay'.
“He's coming out of jail, he's looking for a job, he can't find a job, he's got swastika tattoos all over his body.”
The person who eventually offered Frank a job happened to be a Jewish antique dealer.
“So that revealed to him the difference between the righteous defender of the white race that he thought he was and just the violent and bigoted person that he had actually been.”
In a series of deepfake videos, Lepp depicted powerful people like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg experiencing their own deep reckonings.
“I was just kind of wishing 'who would I love to have on this show? You know, [billionaire industrialist] Charles Koch, Mark Zuckerberg, but they never called me.
“So I just decided to deep fake them instead. But it is explicitly marked.”
Lepp's intention is to show self-reflection as beautiful.
“We don't have great examples of what it looks like for someone in a position of great power to take responsibility for their abuse of power.
“So that's part of what I see as my work as an artist - to make critical self-reflection look stunning.”
