What to do when the truth isn’t enough to be believed (w/ Dina Nayeri) (Transcript)

[00:00:00] Chris Duffy:
You are listening to How to Be a Better Human. I'm your host, Chris Duffy. Who do you believe and why do you believe them? They're relatively simple questions to ask and yet figuring out and understanding your answers to them is incredibly complex work. We've seen how crucial this is on a global level when it comes to things like widespread denial of climate change or vaccine conspiracies or so many other issues.

Questions of believability are often life or death when it comes to national policies around immigration, incarceration, or war. But, they're also personal questions, too. Questions that get at the core of who we see ourselves as being and who we trust. Today's guest, Dina Nayeri, is the author of two non-fiction books, the Ungrateful Refugee, and Who Gets Believed.

Dina writes and speaks about these issues and she thinks so deeply about our answers to them. We're gonna be talking with her about those answers today. But first, here's a clip from Dina's Ted Talk where she explains how she first came to this work.

[00:01:08] Dina Nayeri:
So, I was born in Iran just after a big revolution that changed the country into the Islamic Republic. Before that, Iran had been secular, you know, and after the Islamic Republic came to power, there was a big war with Iraq. So, suddenly things were very dangerous. My family were Christian converts. And, so, it was especially dangerous for us and soon after, I guess when I was eight, we ran. We ran westward and we became refugees.

So, you know, when I had lived in Iran those eight years, I remember always thinking, it felt as if the men never really listened, like really listened to women. And, so, I asked my parents, “How do I be the kind of person that gets hurt, like, gets listened to, like, taken seriously?” And my parents said, “You have to go and get yourself a big education.”

Preferably, they said “A Western one.” So, now here we were on the run. We were going westward and I was excited. I thought, oh, well here I am, then. I'm going to become this person in the land of respect and opportunity and equality. So, then we landed in Oklahoma just after America's war with Iraq.

So, now, imagine, I imagine that they didn't really realize that we had also escaped a war with Iraq. We were just kind of lumped in. But, more importantly, we were strangers. I guess the way we behaved, our culture, the way we spoke, it was all unnatural to them. It was all unfamiliar.

[00:02:39] Chris Duffy:
What does it look like to be believed, to be listened to, when you don't immediately blend in? We're gonna hear much more from Dina in just a moment. We'll be right back.

Today, we're talking with Dina Nayeri about believability, who gets believed, who doesn't, and why.

[00:04:22] Dina Nayeri:
Hi, my name is Dina Nayeri. I'm a writer of fiction and nonfiction and I'm on faculty in the School of English at University of St. Andrews in Scotland.

[00:04:32] Chris Duffy:
I think that the first thing that I want to ask you about is what is your own relationship with belief?

[00:04:40] Dina Nayeri:
Well, my relationship with belief is pretty complicated because I think as a kid I went through these huge, you know, kind of, changes in how I was perceived to my community. I started off as a normal kid in Iran. My parents were doctors, they were respected, and in Iranian society, you know, education matters so much.

So, I was used to my family, in general, being believed, and my parents took me seriously. Uh, there was a um, kind of, idea that actually my thoughts and my ideas, my imagination, those things mattered. But, then, when we became refugees, when I was, uh, eight years old, there was this kind of palpable understanding that my mother's place in society had fallen, that people around didn't believe us, and that we had to craft our lived experience for the asylum officers.

And, this was our, you know, mission, our goal for those months and years that we were refugees. So, suddenly, like, I became obsessed with why, in some circumstances, I'm believable and in some other circumstances I'm not. What happened?

Our status, our immigration status, our citizenship status had suddenly changed and we were living in a refugee camp. Like, it seemed as though even my mother's medical expertise was questioned.

Back at home, people would very quickly, kind of, accept whatever diagnosis she gave them. They would ask for her medical opinion. And then, suddenly, in this refugee camp, you know, people were asking her, “Oh, are, are you a real doctor? Are you a midwife?” She would get so angry when people said, “Are you a midwife?” She was an OB-GYN, you know, trained at the University of Tehran.

So, it, I was very young. But, I suddenly became really aware of the difference and I just wanted to grow up and become the kind of woman that's not really doubted in that way, and not questioned in that way.

[00:06:29] Chris Duffy:
It's also interesting because I think that for a lot of first generation families, there's, obviously, there's often a, an explicit translating right, of like language to language.

[00:06:39] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah.

[00:06:40] Chris Duffy:
But, there's also this other kind of translating the narrative of, of translating the story, of translating the emotional expression into the way that the new country that they're living in understands it.

[00:06:51] Dina Nayeri:
I think I had some early experiences of this as a child when I would try to, like, relay particular stories from my childhood in Iran to friends or, you know, classmates in Oklahoma, or if I tried to sing a song from Iran to my classmates in Oklahoma, or if I tried to say a riddle or a puzzle and, and it just didn't translate it. Like, we had these instincts and codes inside us about what is moving, what's funny, what's trustworthy, what's believable, and my codes were the wrong ones.

[00:07:22] Chris Duffy:
You often are writing about very high stakes versions of this, but it’s interesting to think about …

[00:07:26] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah.

[00:07:26] Chris Duffy:
… how they also exist at very low stakes versions. A friend of mine, Arya Shahi, wrote, wrote a, a book that's part memoir and he talks about how his Iranian mother, when a friend comes over and she asks, “Do you want a snack?” and the friend says, “No,” she still brings out a snack because, culturally, you have to say no so many times in, in Iranian family before you don't actually get the thing. And, the friend is baffled and Aria's like, “Oh, she's just being nice.” But the friend is like, “We said we don't want the snack. Why is she giving me this thing?”

[00:07:54] Dina Nayeri:
I love that. You know, it's funny because dealing with Taarof is such a big, um, thing with Persians. Taarof is the name for the thing, you know, where you refuse three times. The rule is precisely this: that if someone offers you something, you have to refuse it three times because if they're really offering, they would offer a fourth time.

So, in Iran, everybody understands this. And so, nobody ever accepts anything on the, the first time. And, of course, Americans don't know this and people in the west don't know this, so there's all kinds of misunderstandings. And, I remember one of the, my favorite examples was I was in a shop, an Iranian shop, with my ex-husband in Amsterdam, and he's European and he had no idea about any of this, but we had stumbled on this Iranian store, gathered up some stuff, went to the till and I rang up everything while making chitchat with me. And, it came up to like, I dunno, like 80, 80 euro or something. And, I came to bring out my credit card and the guy said, “Oh no, for you it's nothing.”

And, my ex-husband is like: “Okay, great!” I'm like, “No, no, no, no. Like this is we, we go back and forth. He's not offering us free groceries.”

[00:09:01] Chris Duffy:
That's so funny. I love that. Well, as you are someone who has thought explicitly about who gets believed and what do we have to say to be believed, and what are the, the tricks and pitfalls of belief, you're also someone who has written both nonfiction and fiction.

And, I'm curious, what are the ways in which fiction allows you to tell stories that are maybe in some ways almost the same story that you would've told in nonfiction, but with a different set of rules?

[00:09:31] Dina Nayeri:
The part of it that's more intuitive to understand is that fiction does give you more tools just because you're freer. You know, you can invent, you can reshape a story so that it has a more dramatic arc. You can get rid of inconvenient, you know, characters, inconvenient things. You can shape a story with fiction, you have much more freedom. So, I think with fiction, I think one of the things that I love about it most is that I can invent my way into something that is ultimately more truthful than some of the, the facts and stories that I have.

Then you can put together something out of the many stories that you know, that really fundamentally speak, speaks to what happened and what could happen, and what the dangers of a thing are. Right? Whereas, people can often poke holes into nonfiction or facts because of the fact that like you can take a look at a story and say, “Well, you know, had things been this way, maybe that person wouldn't have been so vulnerable.”

Or, “Maybe this person isn't so innocent as you think,” or all of that kind of bullshit that people use to dismiss people's stories, you know? So, I think with fiction you can kind of get around that and also you know that your audience is reading fiction in a different way than they do nonfiction. They read with an open heart and they read with a desire to believe.

I mean, it really matters how the listener is coming into this interaction of listening to a story. They go to fiction because they want to be transported into someone else's truth.

[00:10:52] Chris Duffy:
It's interesting to me because I, as a comedian and as a comedy writer, something that I think about a lot is how, if you tell a really great joke, if you really make an audience laugh at, at least in an American audience, I don't know if this is necessarily true all over the world, but one of the things that people often say when they're laughing really hard at a joke is, “that's so true.”

[00:011:11] Dina Nayeri:
Exactly. It's the recognition. I mean, when they're saying “that's so true,” they don't mean, oh, that occurrence is such a fact. What they're saying is, “Oh, that happens so often to so many of us.” I mean, we, we relate.

I think that's probably like the comedian's biggest challenge, right? To make it very, very specific, but incredibly wide ranging, I guess, appealing to many people or many people have experienced that thing.

[00:11:36] Chris Duffy:
Okay, we're gonna take a quick break, but we will be right back.

And, we are back. Here's another clip from Dina's TED Talk.

[00:11:54] Dina Nayeri:
I'm just still obsessed with this question of why are some stories so easily believed with no evidence? So, I went around and I asked a lot of people this question. How do you believe? What do you need to believe something? And people gave me all kinds of different stories or answers, I guess, to that question.

But there were, you know, four themes that kind of came up again and again, four categories of how people think that they believe. And I bet you think that you believe in one of these ways too.

[00:12:22] Chris Duffy:
In your TED Talk, you talk about how there are four categories of belief.

[00:12:27] Dina Nayeri:
Do you know, it's funny, at some point in my twenties I worked for McKinsey and they were always having us bucket things into like…

[00:12:32] Chris Duffy:
Oh! Yeah. Yeah.

[00:12:33] Dina Nayeri:
And, I think I have never, never shed that habit of, like, categorizing everything.

[00:12:38] Chris Duffy:
I mean, you talk about this in your book too, right? Like how McKinsey teaches you some of the, like, tricks of belief that are actually often used to make, uh, a, very unbelievable things believable. And, one of them is like categorizing things into these easy buckets, right?

Here's the four categories of belief.
[00:12:55] Dina Nayeri:
Exactly. They call these buckets like a really good, believable, easy to accept rule for categorization is to make things, what they call MECE, M-E-C-E, which is mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive. So, for example, if your four buckets or five buckets are not mutually exclusive, that means there's overlaps in them.

Some things fit into two. Some things fit in no buckets. And then, collectively exhaustive means that, obviously, there's nothing that fits in no buckets. They cover everything. So, you have to, like, divide that world of stuff into categories that, where, each example fits into only one bucket and definitely one bucket. Exactly one bucket.

[00:13:34] Chris Duffy:
Yeah. Your MECE categories where I believe my senses, I believe the data, I believe the experts, and I believe my instincts. And, you talk about how each of these, really, kind of like, foundational ideas about something that you should definitely believe can easily be exploited and, in fact, often lead you to the wrong places.

[00:13:54] Dina Nayeri:
Well, all of those are really very, very shaky. I mean, data can be manipulated by the time we receive data. It has gone through all of these places where it has been shaped and rejiggered and made into something. I mean, we're not looking at reams of, of, of raw data ever. You know, when we make our decisions, we usually look at data that's been manipulated with some, by someone and presented by someone and, and that person wants us to believe a certain thing, you know, so there's that.

Uh, experts, do we ever scrutinize the experts that we believe? Almost never. We choose them based on who our community thinks it's trustworthy and, you know, who kind of makes it to us, um, through various algorithms and our belief clusters and who the leaders in our belief clusters are. Our instincts are developed from childhood out of a culture, and they are extremely culturally biased.

You know, what we believe is a truthful story or signals of truth telling are absolutely cultural. And then, what was it? My own experience, that was the last one, and what we observe in the world. Well, it's almost never representative. It's just this singular, completely biased experience. But, those are the things that we use to make most of our decisions, none of them, all that reliable.

Something that is always baffling for me as a storyteller and someone who's appealing to emotions when I craft stories is that the best way to judge something is actually completely free from our emotional triggers. It's, it's on the aggregate. You know, it's looking past our own experience to other people's experience to see what is actually happening in the world.

But, human beings don't respond to those things as powerfully as they do to stories. So, then, the next step is really to try to, kind of, change the way people experience other stories so that they have room for the people and the stories that are not their own, that are not familiar, that are completely from the outside and, kind of, hit up against all of their own walls and barriers.

[00:15:45] Chris Duffy:
I can imagine that someone listening to this hears everything you say, just now, and…

[00:15:50] Dina Nayeri:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:15:51] Chris Duffy:
…they feel, like, while that's really true and, and reasonable, it also enables this world that we've seen that's a really dangerous world of people who, uh, dispute, uh, medical facts, uh, dispute climate change, right, to, to say, like, we have to be skeptical of data and expertise. I think for a rational person, often can be, uh, just a healthy skepticism, but I think we've seen in the last couple years that there's a way that you can go too far on this path. So how, how do you find the line there? Or, how do you, how would you respond to that?

[00:16:30] Dina Nayeri:
I mean, that's not the same path I. When I say scrutinize experts, I mean go looking for the real experts and then believe them. You know, when you're talking about things like climate deniers, vaccine skeptics, and all that stuff, you, they would like to believe that they're following this path of rigorous scrutiny, but they're actually not.

They're actually just going from one belief cluster to another belief cluster, and then imbibing whatever it is that's given to them whole, you know. What I'm saying, when I talk about data and experts, is that, is that there is a way to find the real expertise in the world, and it's not the person who came to you via the algorithms of your Twitter.

You know, there are centers of expertise for everything in the world and it's been vetted by, like, scientists and the people with actual education. It's actually not that hard to look at someone and say, is this a real expert? Does this person have, you know, kind of, the top most, um, kinda accredited sort of education in the world for that field.

Um, do other experts agree with him? Have they been tested in scientifically rigorous ways? We just have to actually put each person, everything that's told to us through that. Unfortunately, there's a lot of misinformation. So people often have things coming at them with sources that are completely wrong, you know, or data that just, there, there's no tracking back to where it actually came from, or quotes, um, taken out of context or attributed to people who didn't actually say those things.

It's really very, very hard to kind of, um convince people to dig through and find the original source of something.

Data is much, much harder. You know? Because data comes to us packaged. We never see the raw data. We don't have time to see the raw data, so that's another reason we need to trust experts because whatever data they're using and in the ways that they're using it, if they're explaining it in a way that is agreed upon in the scientific community or rigorous or whatever, it's a lot to ask people, I guess, to do all of this themselves, which is why I think it's, it's good to have like codes that are a little bit sharper or. like, have a sense of what falsehood looks like. You know? And, and I think that's where the danger is because falsehood is really good at wrapping up itself in the code of truth.

[00:18:40] Chris Duffy:
I love the way you put it. It also makes me think, something that I've got, an idea that I've gotten really interested in over the past few years is this idea of intellectual humility. Like, the idea that…

[00:18:50] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah.

[00:18:51] Chris Duffy:
…you have to accept that you could be wrong, and that that itself is actually a really important skill because often the people who are the most skeptical of the, I'm putting this in very heavy quotes, established experts, right? The people who go to these alternative places, they are skeptical of the establishment, but they're not skeptical of the new person they go to.

When you cultivate the idea of, okay, I might be wrong, and the people I believe might be wrong, but I have to continue to hold that. I can't just then jump to the other people and say that they are us, a hundred percent, unquestionably right.

[00:19:23] Dina Nayeri:
Well, and also I think people mi… uh, mix up rigorous debate, disagreement within established expertise communities with, like, just anybody coming in and just disagreeing.

[00:19:34] Chris Duffy:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:19:34] Dina Nayeri:
You know, like the scientific community, just like historians, and any, any other group. Those people disagree with each other all the time. Right? But that's not the same thing as some quacks of nowhere coming and saying that, you know, well what about this whole other idea?

Like, we don't have to look at those on any equal plane. We don't have to give the space and the time to this random other person, um, you know, who just has some idea with, with, with no real backing, you know? And, I think when people decide that they're going to just turn their back on the establishment, they're often then turning their back on all the experts within the establishment.

And, then, looking at, like, someone who the establishment has rejected for some reason, and I think it reminds me of this story, the UK Home Office, when the home officers were getting really, really sick of getting the same kind of Sri Lankan refugees coming in. They had thousands and thousands of people coming in with the same scars on their backs, all saying that they were tortured in detention.

And, all of the human rights groups were saying that in Sri Lanka, there's a very typical way of torturing people in detention with hot soldering irons to the back, you know? And, so, they left all the same kinds of scars. So, these UK home office asylum officers were seeing the same sorts of pictures, same sort of scars, again and again getting desensitized and then they just came up with this theory that what if these people were putting the scars on their own back in order to get UK asylum?

This is an absurd notion. So, what they did is they attached a term to it, which is self infliction by proxy. They said, you know, it, scars were SIBP self-inflicted by proxy and they started rejecting people based on that.

There was one person who was accused of this, who went all the way to the Supreme Court, whose story I write in the book. Uh, his name is KV or the, the, um, alias that he's given is KV and he, he took this case all the way to the Supreme Court and it's phenomenal just to read the Supreme Court's judgment of this.

They say, you know, basically that, um, you are creating this bucket that has absolutely no scrutiny and you scrutinize all the other buckets of possibility just so rigorously that everything fails. And, then, if everything fails, every single other bucket, you dump it into this bucket. It's a scrutiny free catchall bucket for all of your wildest fantasies um, of which, uh, which is obviously a wild fantasy, self infliction, no human being would do this to themselves for asylum. So, you know, KV won the case and the Supreme Court rejected this idea, but it was exactly the thing you were saying, you know, that they were doing is not really scrutinizing that last bucket that they wanted to believe.

[00:22:13] Chris Duffy:
For anyone who's listening who has not read the book, uh, the way that Dina writes about this is, it is extremely graphic and, and also extremely moving. I mean, it, it, you can see how bureaucratic classifications and anti-immigrant sentiments and racism and all these other things can kind of coalesce into a moment where you're allowed to stop believing what is the obvious truth and, instead, believe what something that's more convenient for your policy.

In the book, you talk explicitly about who gets believed, right, and, and how, who gets believed…

[00:22:46] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah

[00:22:46] Chris Duffy:
… in, especially in a refugee moment or in a court trial, these are extremely high stakes moments where if you don't get believed, it could very well be a life or death thing. What is the answer to what someone actually needs to do to be believed in one of these places?

[00:23:02] Dina Nayeri:
Well, I mean, in every context it's different, but one of the things that I found that they all had in common is that when you're sitting across from someone, you know, they have their familiar triggers, their familiar stories, their familiar, kind of, ideas of believable, believability that come from their own emotional places that they're sometimes even unaware of.

And, you know, to try to, like, get as close to that as possible. So, for example, yes, asylum officers have checklists of things that they need, but at the end of the day there have been asylum officers who felt a connection with someone and, and then that trumps everything.

I talked to an asylum, an asylum lawyer in Amsterdam who was telling me his hardest job was not gathering the facts or the, the paperwork and all that stuff for, for, for the people who he was helping or, you know, it wasn't language, it was, like, cultural translation. How do you tell your story in a way that a Dutch asylum officer will actually believe it?

Now, in the case of a Dutch, the Dutch are very literal, very fact based, and very succinct. And, like, he told me, you know who the biggest problems are. It's always the Iranians. The Iranians are such a problem because they are not very factual and succinct. They talk metaphorically. They talk long as you can see from my, the way that I speak. That's been super shortened by my American education already.

Like, he said, he made this joke, he said, “Iranians, you ask them to say why they've come to Amsterdam seeking asylum and they don't start at the beginning of the story, and they don't start at the beginning of their lives. They start at the beginning of the universe.” And, that's because that's how we were trained to tell stories as children.

You know, in a medical context, I talk to doctors and I ask them, you know, what makes you think someone's telling the truth about, you know, whatever they're experiencing. Obviously, there's a lot of groups that get labeled very quickly as drug seekers or attention seekers, all of that. You know, women are often disbelieved, they're said to be exaggerating pain. Poor people and people of color are said to be drug seeking, all that stuff. How do you overcome all that bias?

And, the doctor that was most helpful to me said, “You look at the person sitting across from you at that doctor and try to imagine his mother. You know, how would his mother translate their pain? You know, how would they manifest their pain? Are you sitting in front of a waspy, new England doctor? Their mother's probably not going to be very loud and very exaggerated. You know, this is a culture that's all based on subtlety. You know, are you sitting across from someone who's maybe an Iranian? Iranians are all about the exaggeration and all about the manifesting pain.

Nobody believes you're actually in pain unless you're ripping out your hair. The performance of the pain that they know and that they recognize as true, the same in, in court and in all kinds of contexts, you know? What is the performance that your listener believes is the honest one, the one that comes from their youth, the one that comes from their family, the one that comes from their storytelling culture.

[00:25:56] Chris Duffy:
So, just to push back on this a bit, 'cause I believe you, but it is putting a lot of work on the person who's in less power, right? Like, if you have to perform for the doctor, shouldn't the doctor be trying to imagine what your mother would say rather than you trying to imagine what their mother would say?

[00:26:12] Dina Nayeri:
Absolutely. I'm not saying this is how it should be.

[00:26:15] Chris Duffy:
Mm-Hmm.

[00:26:15] Dina Nayeri:
Chris, I'm saying this is how it is.

[00:26:18] Chris Duffy:
Yeah.

[00:26:18] Dina Nayeri:
What I wanna do is dismantle the whole unfair system. I mean, every single system that we, kind of, have governing our lives, bureaucracies and healthcare systems, and, and income redistribution systems and all that stuff is incredibly biased. The asylum system is biased toward the people who are whiter and richer and are closer to Western culture than anybody else.

All of that stuff needs to be redone. I guess what I'm saying is, what will help you in that moment where you're in that chair and the world has not changed, it's, it's exactly as you said, the person with less power has to do all the work. When I was interviewing doctors, is there was this one doctor, she was brilliant.

Um, she was this woman, she was black, and she had a lot of patients who were black women. And, she, she talked about how, you know, it's heartbreaking to watch them do this calculus of how much pain do I show? Because, the second you show too much pain, you become the hysterical, loud, black woman that they expect you to be, but, but already the bar for how you should behave is so high that if you're too subtle, they think, oh, well she's not in that much pain, really, because other black women I've seen are this way.

So, she must not be in any pain at all. So, they have to, like, toe this line of showing exactly enough manifestation of that pain to be believed. Nobody should have to do that while they're going through, you know, a, I don't know, ovarian cyst rupture. I mean, that stinks.

[00:27:41] Chris Duffy:
Hmm. You've talked a lot about how people from any sort of marginalized background are very familiar with having to do this work, right? This, this overt work of…

[00:27:51] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah.

[00:27:51] Chris Duffy:
…being believed, of translating something, or performing something in a way that it will be understood by the dominant culture so that they can achieve what they need to survive, to get a job, to get the healthcare that they need, that this is a real big piece of work. What are things that you think that people who are listening right now should do in the world as it is right now, some skills that they should practice, to achieve better outcomes for themselves. And, then, also, what are some things that we should do to move towards the world as we want it to be, rather than as it is right now.

[00:28:26] Dina Nayeri:
Two very big and difficult questions, but I think one thing we should do just, every day, is really question our biases and where it is that we get the idea of that, that person is trustworthy or not. Just try to reset your, your shortcuts so that, you know, you don't immediately dismiss someone just because they come at you from, with, with strange looks or accent or a type of storytelling.

But, also, another thing is if you find yourself in one of those moments, I think people are very easily disarmed when you call out that moment. I have had moments where I have said, “Let's stop. I, I feel as though you see me this way right now, and what I actually am is this.” You know, I have actually said to a group of people, “I feel like maybe you see me as, as some kind of aggressor who wants something, but what I'm, what I'm actually trying to do is just to understand and I'm a little bit scared about X.” You know?

And I think when you put things literally about people just suddenly disarm. You know? I remember my mom when we first arrived in the US was constantly furious. She was like, “They think I'm stupid.” And I would say, “Why did they say that? You, they think you're stupid. Maybe your English should be better.” And my mom would be like, “No, Americans say things without saying it, and I just know.”

And, now, decades later, I understand what she means. And so I think one strategy that I've developed is just calling people out on the untangibles or or naming the untangibles in that situation. And, that's often a really hard thing to do, but it does, kind of, disarm people. And, then in the long run, I think what we need to do is really scrutinize our systems and you know how they function.

There are so many, so many systems that we believe kind of work infallibly that depend entirely on human judgment. The asylum system is one of them. It's, it's just so shocking how much depends on one person's, like, emotional state in that moment. I. You know, someone has had their coffee, has had their porridge, and taken their medicine and are happy, and in comes, you know, a young mother from Afghanistan and that person is in the mood to love and they can pass you to the next stage.

Or, it rained and they didn't get their coffee and they're in the mood to question and they can ruin that person's life. I mean, can you believe how much is in just one person's hands in the welfare system, in the court system, in the asylum system, in the healthcare systems? If we are in a position to kind of question those or bring it to people's attention or to like, you know, petition policy makers or whatever it takes, I think, you know, we need to do that.

We can't always make change in the immediate, but it's a first step to understand, like, what are the systems that govern my life and govern those around me, and whose judgment does it depend on?

[00:31:00] Chris Duffy:
So, we've, we've been talking a lot about the ideas of belief and also, you know, refugees and immigration and pieces like that. I also wanted to talk about your book, the Ungrateful Refugee and I feel like there's a clear relationship here when we think about the power and the importance of stories, because your parents came to the United States as a refugee. You went to Princeton, you went to Harvard Business School, you succeeded in corporate America.

You achieved all of these things that we, I think, often think of as the quote, unquote American dream and, yet, they weren't always satisfying. They didn't necessarily bring the acceptance or the validation that they were kind of promised to believe and, and that itself is a story that people don't love to hear, right?

Like, people love to hear the story of the immigrant who made good and there's the, there's a pushback…

[00:31:57] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah.

[00:31:57] Chris Duffy:
…when you try and critique some of the systems from the inside. So, I wonder if you can talk about that idea of what it…

[00:32:02] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah.

[00:32:02] Chris Duffy:
…what it means to be an ungrateful refugee.

[00:32:04] Dina Nayeri:
I guess it started off with the idea that one of the things that refugees don't usually tell you is the fact that they feel this obligation to perform their gratitude in these, like, ways that are really ugly and they feel awful for the benefit of the native born.

And, so, you know, it's this kind of theater of like, oh, I'm so lucky. I'm so thankful to you and your community for being here. And, it's like their every action has to be this in order for them to feel the, some, the most basic welcome and no one in this interaction really questions, hmmm, well, you know, is it really fair that you were born free and we were born in war and oppression?

Like, nobody really questions that. So, should I really be kind of, can I just get on with my life now instead of faking some kind of gratitude? Um, and of course, gratitude is there. It's just between you and the people you love, the neighbors that you come to love. The actual immigrants themselves who wrote me after the first book and the second book, they had very different reactions. So, for Ungrateful Refugee, I got a lot of like, “thank you so much for expressing this.” I had so many migrants or refugees writing to me and saying, “Yeah, I wish I had had a way to express this myself, and I'm so glad that you did.”

So, the book was about the entire arc of the refugee experience and you know, all of the things along the way that refugees don't tell you and wish that they could tell you and, you know, really don't have the words for, because they are all, all a little bit, you know, kind of a calculus of shame and pride.

There was this, this idea that in this book I was going to kind of reveal those things, and one of them was exactly that, was that, you know, you come to the place that they, they say you are meant to get to. You know, you have American style success, and it, it, it's, it's, it's not ultimately the thing that you wanted because we're all human and we have a complex set of needs and, sometimes, the best that American can offer isn't, isn't the best thing for you.

Maybe, you know, maybe you miss home, maybe you wish for society that would recognize other things about you other than, you know, your ability to do math or whatever else.

The response from immigrants to the second book was much more complicated. It was more like, you know, “Oh, gosh, I, I don't like to see you this way. I don't like to see you as someone who knows too much about the calculus.” Like, because then we seem like we're scheming, you know, and or something along those lines.

And for me, um, I just wanted to kind of crack open the whole apparatus. You know, what is it that vulnerable people have to do and what is it that powerful people do, um, in order to be believed? Like, everyone really looks ugly when you crack open the whole apparatus because we are all forced to put on this little dance.You know?

[00:34:45] Chris Duffy:
But, it, you know, when I read this book, like I, I couldn't help but think of how so many opportunities and so many successes that I've had, I think came less from the fact that I was maybe like qualified or prepared or talented even if I was in those moments, but from the fact that I could connect with a person that I was, like, good at winning them over.

I, I think that honestly, if I look at, like, what has been the single biggest driver of where I've gotten to, I would say that that's probably it. It’s that skill of performing this kind of weird dance of, of likability, of believability.

[00:35:23] Dina Nayeri:
Yeah, and you also don't even know what the person is going to want. I think one of the, one of the most surprising stories for me in, in, I think this one, I, I, yeah, no, it was in this last book, was when there was this Iranian guy who was trying to get asylum and he was in asylum court in the UK and his performance was that I know your rules, I don't have to tell you that I love your country so much, or that this is the greatest honor ever. Here are the rules. Here's my proof that I was like, tortured or whatever. You, you have to say yes. And he was like basically saying this to the judge. And I, I remember like, um, the lawyer for the home office was just impressed.

He's like, I like this guy. He's like, someone, the likes of which you don't see because he knows the rules and he's saying, fuck you right there to the, that was the thing that, for that officer was the point of connection.

[00:36:10] Chris Duffy:
Well, Dina, it’s been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Thank you so much.

[00:36:15] Dina Nayeri:
Thank you for having me, Chris.

[00:36:19] Chris Duffy:
That is it for today's episode of How to Be a Better Human. Thank you so much to today's guest, Dina Nayeri. She's the author of several books, including Who Gets Believed and the Ungrateful Refugee.

I am your host, Chris Duffy, and you can find more from me, including my weekly newsletter and other projects at chrisduffycomedy.com.

How to be a better Human is brought to you on the TED side by Daniella Balarezo, Cloe Shasha Brooks, Banban Cheng and Joseph DeBrine, who have achieved American style success, but also understand the limits of it.

This episode was fact-checked by Julia Dickerson and Matheus Salles, who all kidding aside, engage and think deeply about questions of belief in their own work every single day.

On the PRX side, our show is put together by a team who, when they offer you an interview, they make sure you refuse at least three times before giving up on trying to schedule it. Morgan Flannery, Noor Gill, Patrick Grant and Jocelyn Gonzalez.

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