EP 10 The Lost Art of Persuasion with Mary Kate Cary

In this episode, Hanna, Sage, and Julius sit down with Mary Kate Cary, former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and, until recently, Assistant Vice President, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of the University of Virginia, and director of Think Again at UVA— a student-facing initiative built around freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, intellectual humility, and critical thinking. She's now heading to the University of Denver to lead the new National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism. Mary Kate takes us behind the scenes of presidential speechwriting — from drafting the State of the Union to the time a jet-lagged President Bush threw up on the Japanese prime minister — and breaks down Monroe's Motivated Sequence, the century-old formula behind history's most persuasive speeches. She also walks us through Think Again's programming, including Disagree With a Professor, Low Stakes Hot Takes, a student-written free speech toolkit, the free online course Speaking of America, and the "low-tech zones" getting students to ditch their headphones and talk to each other in the dining hall again.

Key Takeaways from Mary Kate:

1. Take off the headphones, put down the cell phone, look people in the eye. Make new connections and engage with people around you.
2. Persuasion is important no matter what you do in life. Especially in the age of AI, learning to listen with empathy and speak generously is a critical skill regardless of your career.
3. One person speaking up can truly change the course of history. There are countless examples throughout American history of individuals who shaped democracy through the power of speech, and that potential still exists today.
   
   

Find out more about Mary Kate on:

• Mary Kate’s website
• Her X and LinkedIn
• Think Again at UVA
• Speaking of America
• National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism at Denver

Some of the texts, and resources we refer to in this episode:

• Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

Mary Kate’s Media Diet

Meat and potatoes: 

Outlets: 

Ground News (Blind Spot), RealClearPolitics

Junk Food: X

Palate cleanser: 

Babylon Bee, Uncommon Knowledge,and  Heterodox Out Loud

Off-screen (no phones/headphones):

Golf and fly fishing

This podcast is part of CAPT’s efforts to encourage open and diverse intellectual exchange. The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are their own and do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to a policy of institutional neutrality.

We would love to hear your thoughts on this episode! Send us feedback to captivatedpod@gmail.com

Transcript

In this episode, Hanna, Sage, and Julius sit down with Mary Kate Cary, former speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush and, until recently, Assistant Vice President, Deputy Chief of Staff to the President of the University of Virginia, and director of Think Again at UVA— a student-facing initiative built around freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, intellectual humility, and critical thinking. She's now heading to the University of Denver to lead the new National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism. Mary Kate takes us behind the scenes of presidential speechwriting — from drafting the State of the Union to the time a jet-lagged President Bush threw up on the Japanese prime minister — and breaks down Monroe's Motivated Sequence, the century-old formula behind history's most persuasive speeches. She also walks us through Think Again's programming, including Disagree With a Professor, Low Stakes Hot Takes, a student-written free speech toolkit, the free online course Speaking of America, and the "low-tech zones" getting students to ditch their headphones and talk to each other in the dining hall again.

Key Takeaways from Kate:

1. Take off the headphones, put down the cell phone, look people in the eye. Make new connections and engage with people around you.
2. Persuasion is important no matter what you do in life. Especially in the age of AI, learning to listen with empathy and speak generously is a critical skill regardless of your career.
3. One person speaking up can truly change the course of history. There are countless examples throughout American history of individuals who shaped democracy through the power of speech, and that potential still exists today.
   
   

Find out more about Kate on:

• Mary Kate’s website
• Her X and LinkedIn
• Think Again at UVA
• Speaking of America
• National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism at Denver

Some of the texts, and resources we refer to in this episode:

• Monroe’s Motivated Sequence

Mary Kate’s Media Diet

Meat and potatoes: 

Outlets: 

Ground News (Blind Spot), RealClearPolitics

Junk Food: X

Palate cleanser: 

Babylon Bee, Uncommon Knowledge,and  Heterodox Out Loud

Off-screen (no phones/headphones):

Golf and fly fishing

Transcript:

Mary Kate Cary (00:00:00): 
The platforms will change, but I would argue that young people need to know how to make an effective argument no matter how it's getting out to people. And we just need to, especially in the age of AI, be teaching young people the importance of persuasion, rhetoric, and oratory. Take off the headphones, put down the cell phone, look people in the eye, and try to change people's minds—'cause I think that's a skill no matter what you do in life. You've gotta know how to do that.

Hanna Sistek (00:00:32):
Welcome to another episode of Captivated, a podcast hosted by the Center for American Political History, Media, and Technology at Purdue University. In each episode, we examine a specific facet of our digital public sphere: how it works and how we got here. We are here to help you sort through the noise. I'm Hannah,

Sage Goodwin (00:00:52): 
I'm Sage,

Julius Freeman (00:00:52): 
And I'm Julius. Our guest for today's episode is Mary Kate Cary. Mary Kate served as a speechwriter for President George H.W. Bush.

Sage Goodwin (00:01:02):
She's also been a columnist and political commentator at U.S. News & World Report for many years. More recently, Mary Kate has served as the Assistant Vice President and Deputy Chief of Staff for the President of the University of Virginia. In that role, she handled presidential communications and strategic initiatives and taught in UVA's politics department.

Hanna Sistek (00:01:20):
She was also the director of Think Again at UVA, an initiative to promote free speech, viewpoint diversity, and critical thinking through student-facing programming. We spoke to Mary Kate just as she left UVA for a new job as the director of the new National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism at the University of Denver.

Julius Freeman (00:01:38): 
Mary Kate has appeared on numerous podcasts, webinars, and panel discussions relating to free expression and constructive disagreement. We had a great conversation with her about her experiences with speechwriting and why she thinks it's important for students to learn the art of political persuasion.

Sage Goodwin (00:01:54): 
Yeah, she gave us some incredible insights into how a presidential speech is actually written. I really enjoyed her stories about what goes on behind the scenes at the White House for something like a State of the Union or the turkey pardoning each year.

Julius Freeman (00:02:07): 
Yeah, and she really dove into the nitty-gritty of speech structure. She talked about one of my favorite speech structures, Monroe's Motivated Sequence. She talked about its function and its purpose, and demonstrated how she communicates this to her own students.

Hanna Sistek (00:02:21): 
She also told us about some of the interesting initiatives she's been working on at UVA. I particularly thought the one on low-tech zones in the dining halls was really thought-provoking. Here, the idea was basically to have people remove their headphones when they're in the dining hall to signal that they're open to human connection.

Julius Freeman (00:02:37):
We started by asking Mary Kate how she became a speechwriter.

Mary Kate Cary (00:02:41): 
So, I started as a columnist at the college newspaper, and I thought that you had to be a reporter first and then you graduated to being a columnist. And I found out that no, reporters are reporters, columnists are columnists, and so I started right away as a columnist. And I loved it, thought it was really fun to do, and then graduated from college hoping to go into the Foreign Service.

Never got posted abroad. I like to say it's the best thing that has ever happened to me because my life would be very different now if I had not been posted abroad. And I started taking writing jobs while I was waiting for the Foreign Service to come through. I had a string of writing jobs after college that really, if you look back on it, were the job skills of a presidential speechwriter. I didn't know at the time that there was such a job as being a speechwriter.

And so my job skills were—if you think about a columnist at a college newspaper, that is persuasive, fact-based writing on a deadline. In speechwriting, the ultimate deadline is that somebody has to go to the podium with something. You can't say, "I'll get it to you next week." So you have to be able to meet a deadline.

Then I worked for a news aggregator, and news aggregators boil down a lot of information into easily digestible pieces, which is something speechwriters do as well. I worked on the campaign for president, where I was writing soundbites for the people other than the candidate who were campaigning for him. So I learned catchy, soundbitey kind of writing.

And then we won the election. I was more shocked than anybody. I had joined the 1988 presidential campaign for George Bush, thinking that everybody should join a losing campaign once in their life—it builds character. And I thought, "It's only for three or four months. Then he'll lose, then I'll go get a real job." And he won, and I was more shocked than anybody. I thought they would offer me a job in the basement of the Department of Labor or something.

Instead, they came to me and said, "I'd really like you to come to the White House with us." And I was like, "Me? Like, White House?" And they said, "Are you turning down the White House job?" And I said, "Oh, no, no. I'll take it. I'll take it. What is the White House job?" And they said, "You'll be ghostwriting magazine articles by George Bush, and it'll be things like 'Why I Love Country Music' for a country music magazine."

And I said, "Well, I've never written a magazine article." And the same thing, you know? "Do you not want the job?" I'm like, "No, no, no. I'll figure out how to write magazine articles."

So I started writing magazine articles. I would have little questionnaires for President Bush, and I would send them by interoffice mail—this is before email. And he would sit on the plane and answer the questions when he had spare time, and then send them back to me. There was no bureaucracy between us. And I was 24 at the time, and I started writing these crazy magazine articles.

Six months later, the boss who was the head of communications said, "We're gonna move you over to speechwriting now." And the same thing. I said, "Well, I've never written a speech before in my life. Why would I start with the President of the United States?" And same thing, he says, "Are you turning down the promotion?" And I'm like, "Oh, no, no. I'll take it. I'll take it. I'll figure it out."

And so I was a junior speechwriter and started doing things like Spelling Bee winners and Boy Scout of the Year awards. I cornered the market on turkey pardoning. George Bush was the one who brought turkey pardoning back to the modern era. And in those days, it wasn't all dad jokes like it is now. It was somewhat serious. There was some joking, but the turkey pardoning I really liked doing because nobody has ever said, "That was the worst turkey pardoning speech I've heard in my life." They do say that regularly about things like the State of the Union. But with turkey pardoning, usually you get a free pass, and you make the nightly news no matter what. So, that's how I got into it.

Sage Goodwin (00:06:34): 
Amazing. I'm just really interested, how did you figure out his tone of voice?

Mary Kate Cary (00:06:40): 
Well, for the magazine articles, I realized that I do think, as much as I had done my 10,000 hours with this string of jobs, it is a gift to be able to hear someone else's voice and to be able to mimic it. Not everybody can do that. And so I believe I got that gift from God.

So I started writing the magazine articles, and if you listen to the way he used to speak, he often didn't use a subject in a sentence. He would say, "Packed up the car, drove to Texas," you know, "Raised the family," things like that. And so I was writing magazine articles like that. Well, English teachers started writing in and saying, "This is a bad example for the children of America and for the written word. He should be speaking in grammatically correct sentences."

And so we had a meeting about it, and we all talked about it. I said, "Yeah, they're probably right." The written word—that's the difference between writing for the eye and writing for the ear. Magazine articles are for the eye; speeches are for the ear. And so I was mimicking his voice a little too closely for the written word, and then got to go full bore when I got switched over to speechwriting. I could write the way he really talks.

Sage Goodwin (00:07:50): 
So you mentioned that the turkey pardons always make the news, but no one is really critiquing them, but they are critiquing the State of the Union. Can you take us a little bit behind the scenes for something like a State of the Union? What goes into writing that kind of speech?

Mary Kate Cary (00:08:03): 
Sure. So, in all honesty, I never got senior enough to write a State of the Union, but I certainly witnessed the sausage being made many times. And the speechwriters joke that getting assigned the State of the Union is the booby prize that nobody wants because it is a lot of work. It takes weeks to months to write it, and you usually do not come out with rave reviews, no matter how good you are.

So, in general, the process at the White House is that the scheduling office works with the president to decide which events he's gonna say yes to, and whether they would be speaking events. Then that list gets sent over to speechwriting. If it's a senior enough, big enough deal speech, the speechwriter meets one-on-one with the president to say, "What do you wanna say? How do you wanna do this?" If it's lower level, the director of communications meets, takes notes on a whole bunch of speeches, then comes back to the speechwriters and says, "Okay, Mary Kate, you've got the Boy Scout of the Year award. The president wants to talk about the importance of volunteerism and developing young people into good citizens," something like that. You get a sentence or two of guidance.

And then the researchers—I should say it's one person per speech, except George W. Bush's office. For most presidents, it's one speechwriter per speech. Under George W., they were written by committee, which I think would be very difficult; he called it the "triune," three speechwriters per speech. But normally, each speechwriter gets a researcher dedicated to that speech, and the researcher does two things. They go with the advance team to the location, to the venue, and see: what is it that the audience can see behind the president? What will the president be looking out at? Who are the VIPs who need to be acknowledged, and who will be on the stage with him? Are there local stories, or some local color at the college or whatever? Is there lingo that the audience would think is funny if the president used the local slang and things like that?

So the researchers come back and hand you all this goldmine of material as well as quotes, "this day in history," and all kinds of ideas for things to write from. The policy people will often send in the latest stats—in this case, on volunteerism and how many Americans are doing it, things like that.

The speechwriter starts writing. We come up with a draft. We send it to the chief of speechwriting to make sure the boss thinks it's okay. Then the boss does what's called the staffing process, and it goes to somewhere around 20 to 25 people—mostly senior staff at the White House and relevant cabinet agencies—and those people weigh in.

For the State of the Union address, it goes to all cabinet agencies. And there is a preliminary stage: before the draft is written, a preliminary note goes out to all cabinet agencies for the State of the Union saying, "If you would like a paragraph about your initiatives, please send it in now." And all these people weigh in, and that's when World War III starts over whose paragraph gets used and whose doesn't. That is why nobody wants to write the State of the Union address, because that is hand-to-hand combat.

Normally, all 20 or 25 people very politely rip your speech to shreds and say all the things that are wrong with it and what they want it to say. In the Reagan administration, the speechwriters were the ones who decided what got accepted and what did not get accepted out of all those comments. That's called reconciling the speech, the reconciliation process.

President Bush, as vice president, saw that going on and decided that he thought the speechwriters were too emotionally attached to their speeches and would often reject all comments. He didn't think that was smart, so under him, the chief speechwriter did the reconciliation. That way, the speechwriters do not get involved in the hand-to-hand combat; the boss does. Then all the comments get rejected or accepted or whatever. The researchers weigh in too in terms of arbitrating factual differences.

Then the final version goes to the president, and the president always gets the last word, because you never want to have a situation where he approved one speech, goes to the podium, and a totally different speech is there. So he always got the last word, and then the only thing left is to decide: is it going to be on a teleprompter, is it gonna be on cards, or is it gonna be in a three-ring binder if it's a windy day? You don't want the speech blowing away—you know, all kinds of logistics like that. We actually had a paper cutter with a big, huge blade that we would use to cut the president's speech cards down to fit into his breast pocket in his suit so that his suit wouldn't bulge where the pocket full of speeches was, you know? Just crazy details like that.

And then the last part is the speech, which is produced in full with "As Prepared" at the top. The speechwriter's name is nowhere on it at this point. "As Prepared" is what the president takes to the podium. If he starts ad-libbing and adding things, a second version comes out called "As Delivered," and that goes to the press. But those are the two versions that are released publicly.

So there's the whole soup-to-nuts. There you have it.

Hanna Sistek (00:13:20): 
That's unbelievable. So I'm curious—if there were three people for each speech for Bush, how many speechwriters were there in total?

Mary Kate Cary (00:13:31): 
Oh, so it depends on the administration. Reagan had nine speechwriters at any given time. Over the years, they get replaced, so the total number's higher, but at any given time, Reagan had nine. Our President Bush, 41, had five. I think George W. had somewhere around five or six as well, but the main three were the triune, like I said, for the big speeches. Obama, I think, had a much higher number—maybe over 10. So it just depends. But Obama also had a lot more events. As time goes on, there are more and more presidential events because of scheduling, travel, and all that sort of thing. It's increased exponentially.

Hanna Sistek (00:14:10): 
So interesting.

Mary Kate Cary (00:14:11): 
But you usually had about two weeks to write a speech. If it was a campaign, though, "Could you get us something by tomorrow morning?" was very common because of breaking news. And another thing is on all domestic and foreign travel—if you're outside the White House, a speechwriter is on every plane so that you can make changes. There are printers on the planes, and you do not have to have your tray table down and be seated when you're landing. So there are plenty of last-minute changes to speeches while in the air as you're landing at events. It's crazy.

Hanna Sistek (00:14:47): 
Did you come along on the planes? Were you senior enough for that, Mary Kate?

Mary Kate Cary (00:14:51): 
Oh, yeah. I often... because I was young and I didn't have a family at home, some of the more senior guys would say, "I'm sorry, I can't do that this week." So they'd call me, and I would jump on the plane and go. And it was great fun.

Hanna Sistek (00:15:05): 
Where all did you go with the president?

Mary Kate Cary (00:15:07): 
I was doing a lot of the speeches for the 1990 midterms, so there was a lot of domestic travel to some of the big, key Senate and gubernatorial races. The biggest trip I ever went on was my very last one, which was when President Bush threw up on the Japanese prime minister. I was on that trip. That one was from the White House to Hawaii, then to Australia—we went to Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney. Then we went to Seoul, South Korea, then Singapore, and then Japan, to Tokyo. And he was so exhausted. It was some ungodly number of time zones in five days or something, and he was so exhausted he threw up on the Japanese prime minister at a state dinner and made headlines worldwide.

Sage Goodwin (00:16:00): 
Yeah, for all the wrong reasons.

Mary Kate Cary (00:16:01): 
For all the wrong reasons, yes.

Sage Goodwin (00:16:03): 
That sounds like such an intense way to write—like, on the plane. Talk about writing to a deadline! That's so interesting in comparison to sitting at your desk and having all of your stuff in front of you. Can you tell us a little bit about what makes a good speech? In your mind, what is a speech, and what are the elements that make up a good presidential speech—or any speech?

Mary Kate Cary (00:16:28): 
Oh, I could talk about this for hours, but I'll boil it down to the most important elements. The thing that's most fascinating to me is that there are speechwriters who go to school for this, take oratory and rhetoric classes, study it, and know the names of all the Greek devices and things like that. And then there's the other crowd, which I'm in, who just fall into it and happen to be able to write.

I didn't know any of this until much later, when I started teaching. I looked back on the speeches I had written in my 20s, and all of these elements were in them. That's because the human brain is wired for persuasion, as far back as the cavemen.

The most interesting element, I would say, came from 1920 at Purdue—thank you very much. Professor Alan Monroe decided he was gonna look at all of the most persuasive speeches in human history. He went back to the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans, and Moses, convincing the Israelites to walk into the Red Sea. I think that would have been a pretty persuasive speech! He looked at how they got people to do those things, and he said there are five elements in common in all of the greatest, most persuasive speeches.

It's called Monroe's Motivated Sequence, and I renamed it so that my students could remember it more easily. First, you get everyone's attention with a "grabber" so that people say, "Wow, I've gotta listen to this." If you're just droning on at the beginning of the speech, you're not gonna hook people in. Then you define a problem that needs to be solved in a way that we can all agree is a problem. If you don't do that, people will tune out and say, "Well, I don't think this is a problem. Why should I listen to this guy?" And then you propose a solution to the problem. Sometimes there are multiple problems with one solution, and sometimes there's one problem with multiple solutions, so there are variations. Then you visualize how great your solution would be, and you end with a call to action.

Sometimes you see it reversed in, say, a campaign speech. You'll see the call to action first, or at the end, where they say, "We need to vote for this person for office, and let me tell you how great America will be if this person wins." So you can see how visualization and the call to action might be interchangeable.

The mnemonic device that I taught my students is grabber, problem, solution—GPS. You're giving the audience a roadmap of where we're gonna go. And then visualization, call to action—VC. If you do this, your speech will be "very cool." But the students at the University of Virginia said, "Professor Cary, we're at UVA. 'VC' is not 'very cool'—Virginia Cavaliers is 'VC'." And I'm like, "Oh, of course, Virginia Cavaliers." So all roads lead to the Virginia Cavaliers. That's how we do it! I'll have to come up with a new one or go back to "very cool."

I think that combination of an effective structure—where you move from piece to piece and you have roadmaps in the words saying, "Next I'm gonna do this," or "I'm gonna make three points," so that people know where you're going—is the first part.

The second is the use of ethos, logos, and pathos. Ethos is a way to establish your credibility as a speaker, showing that you know what you're talking about so people say, "Oh, I like this person. I'm gonna listen to them," or "They share my values." A great way to establish ethos is to have shared values. That's why you often see people saluting first responders and veterans at the beginning of speeches, because the audience thinks, "Oh, if he likes first responders, he must be a good guy, so I'll listen to him."

Next is logos: the use of data, statistics, testimony, and quotes from people. And third is pathos, which is "soul-bending moments," as the Greeks used to say—stories, things that make you laugh, and things that make you cry. It gives you a lot of credibility with the audience when you have all three alongside Monroe's Motivated Sequence; then you've got a great speech.

Sage Goodwin (00:20:32): 
Yeah, that's so interesting hearing it all broken down. As you're going through and saying all of those things, it's like, oh yeah, thinking about it, that obviously makes total sense.

Julius Freeman (00:20:41): 
And Mary Kate, I wanted to ask about the visualization aspect: do you see, maybe in recent years, more of a negative visualization? Obviously, you can have the positive visualization of "this is what the country would look like with my solution." But do you see that there's been a lean towards the negative, like, "this is what the country would look like without my solution or without voting for me—this is what would happen to us"?

Mary Kate Cary (00:21:11): 
Yes, there's definitely a decision that needs to be made in every speech. When you say, "Here are the ends that we all agree on," and you get people nodding—yes, we all want clean air, we want a good education system, whatever it is—and then you say, "Here are the means to that end. Here's how we're gonna solve that problem." The decision you've gotta make is: do you only talk about how great your path is, or do you present a comparative advantage over the competition and say, "If we go down a different path, here are all the horrible things that could happen"?

That becomes an audience analysis question: how many people in the audience are with the other side, or do you have 100% of the people from your base in the room? So it becomes a question of what is the most persuasive for the people who are in that room. If you go too negative, you're gonna turn some people off who will say, "Well, I actually thought it was a good idea, and I disagree." Or do they say, "You know, I hadn't thought about it that way. I'm not changing my mind yet, but that was a pretty good argument."

A lot of times, in a mixed crowd, that is exactly what you want—for people to say that. I say it to my students all the time: speechwriting is not "one and done." There are very few times in history when people listen to a speech and say, "I was completely wrong. I'm totally changing everything in my life." Most of the time, they say, "You know, I hadn't thought of it that way. That was a pretty good story. That was pretty persuasive." Then you can slowly start turning them around. Maybe it takes a number of speeches, maybe it takes a lot of meetings, or maybe it takes legislative negotiations. There are all kinds of paths to enacting change, and speeches are only one of them. So, that's why I think if you can just start changing minds, that's very useful.

Sage Goodwin (00:22:56): 
So going back to your GPS and defining a problem—as you know, we like to focus a little bit on problems on this podcast. Looking back at your time as a speechwriter and then also in your current role as an educator, what do you see as the problem with political rhetoric today?

Mary Kate Cary (00:23:16): 
I definitely think there have been some changes, because I would argue that our most recent presidents have not used speeches as a way to enact change as much. I would say our current president and our most recent president are not known as particularly good orators. So young people are not used to seeing speeches as a way to bring about change. They remember Obama, but your average 18-year-old cannot name an Obama speech, though they know who he is.

In my greatest speeches class, I don't teach anything more current than—I think the most recent one is Obama's 2008 "Yes We Can" on election night. The problem to me is, on one hand, you don't have as many leaders using speeches. The rise of social media is certainly not helping. Walking around with headphones on and not engaging with other people does not encourage that in them. And I would say the isolation and the popping off on social media on your cell phone is not useful for persuading people to change their minds and go in a different direction. It's a real problem, I think.

Julius Freeman (00:24:32): 
So, Mary Kate, would you say that the method or the art of the traditional standing-in-front-of-a-podium speech—that form of persuasion, political persuasion has kind of lost its power? Or is it more just a product of the shifting generations? Like, is it a lack in the form, or is it a lack in the culture around the form?

Mary Kate Cary (00:24:58): 
A little bit of both. In some ways, I think Americans are hungry for great arguments and great stories. They wanna hear both sides; they wanna hear contrasting... That's been my experience at UVA. At least the young people wanna hear both sides and wanna know your reasoning for why you're saying what you're saying.

If you think about the history of the last 100 years in America, you see, say, FDR on the radio—that was how a lot of his speeches got transmitted to the American people. Fireside chats were on the radio, things like that. Then we see by about Truman and Kennedy, you see television becoming more of an influence in this. Then, as you get to the later end of the 20th century, you see the rise of social media videos, posts, blogs, all those sorts of things. So I do not doubt that the platform is gonna continue to change, and it's just a question of what's next. But that doesn't mean that the power to persuade is gonna disappear.

The platforms will change, but I would argue that young people need to know how to make an effective argument no matter how it's getting out to people. So that's why I think this is so important to keep teaching this, because we know from Monroe's Motivated Sequence and things like that that this goes back as far as human history goes. And so I'm not willing to declare it dead. I think there's plenty of use for it, and we just need to, especially in the age of AI, be teaching young people the importance of persuasion, rhetoric, and oratory. Take off the headphones, put down the cell phone, look people in the eye, and try to change people's minds, 'cause I think that's a skill no matter what you do in life. You've gotta know how to do that.

The examples I use are things like doctors needing to persuade people to enter a clinical trial or take their medicine. Lawyers persuade juries. Used car salesmen wanna close the deal. No matter what you do in life, you've gotta be able to persuade people—that's an important skill to have.

Hanna Sistek (00:26:52): 
So is it that people have become more and more isolated in their own bubbles? Is that the problem with, you know, how social media plays into this? Can you just explain that a little bit more in detail—how the headphones and, yeah, how that work?

Mary Kate Cary (00:27:07): 
Yeah, so, I first got focused on it because one of my interns had gone to the dining hall at UVA, and apparently, the students all go in a group with the people they live with. They coordinate, they all arrive at the same time, they sit at one table, and then they all leave together. And so you're not meeting other people; you're going with the same group that you live with. Or, if you're not available when they're doing that, you go by yourself, and you wear your big, huge headphones that send a signal that says, "I don't wanna talk to anybody." And you sit by yourself with your cell phone or your laptop, and you eat and entertain yourself while you're eating with the cell phone or the laptop.

One of my interns couldn't make the usual dinner with his group, shows up at the dining hall, but forgot his headphones. And he's like, "Oh man, I forgot my headphones." So he sits at a table by himself with no headphones on, and another guy walks up who also forgot his headphones and says, "Would it be okay if I sat here with you?" And Peter says, "Yes, of course. Please have a seat." And the other young man says, "Would it be okay if we actually talk to each other? Is that okay?" And they both said, you know, "This is so awkward." But they sit, and they start... and they said, "Yes, of course. Let's talk." By the end of dinner or lunch, whatever it was, they're friends.

And Peter comes to me and says, "Hey, I made this new friend at the dining hall, but it was kind of awkward at first." And I just realized, this is what we're dealing with.

I then started talking to the guys who run the dining hall, and they are all parents. They are not PhDs running the university. These are working-class, really good guys who are parents, and they said to me, "We are increasingly concerned about how quiet the dining halls are. The students are not talking to each other. We think this is feeding the mental health problem of this age, and what can we do to fix this?"

And that's when we started talking about low-tech zones in the dining halls where, if you sit in this section of the dining hall, you are basically agreeing to do what Peter did—that you're open to conversations, you're not gonna have your headphones on, and you're willing to talk to other people. And that is taking off. I think there's an opportunity here because every college in America has a dining hall. If that's how we can get our foot in the door and start low-tech zones that the students are willing to try—to start looking each other in the eye with no tech and start learning civil discourse and how you deal with people who may have different views than you do, while keeping it away from bomb-throwing, name-calling, and hot political takes—let's start building that culture.

Hanna Sistek (00:30:04): 
I found that really fascinating. I get curious, like, how many people would end up in these low-tech zones? Was that popular?

Mary Kate Cary (00:31:10): 
It was just starting at the end of the school year just now. We basically got it put in place by spring break, so it had just started. The thing that I think is gonna start happening is—in Virginia, but I think I wanna say 15 to 20 other states have similar legislation—Virginia had just passed "no cell phones in the classroom, bell to bell," K through 12. So the students at UVA who just finished their first year came from high schools where, during the second half of their senior year, there were no cell phones in the classroom. And apparently, they loved it because it gave them social permission. If everybody else is on the cell phone, they're not gonna stop, but if nobody is... There were all these stats on the number of library books that were suddenly getting checked out, the number of games that were being played at recess, things like that.

And so if we look at the composition at UVA—at least in Virginia state universities, 70% of the incoming class has to be in-state. That means 70% of the incoming class just came from high schools without cell phones. And as the next four years unfold, it's gonna go to all four years of UVA students; 70% of them will have come from high schools without cell phones. So I think that's gonna start changing the culture across the country, where the students are asking for it. It's not the administration imposing it from above; it's the students saying, "I don't want my cell phone. I'm tired of this." So I'm cautiously optimistic that we're about to see some changes.

Hanna Sistek (00:31:46): 
That's really fascinating, and that it's driven by students themselves realizing that this is, like, no good. Yeah. Wow.

Mary Kate Cary (00:31:54): 
There's a whole crowd at UVA—it's a club called Flash—and they started... they purchased a whole bunch of flip phones. You can borrow a flip phone for two weeks and see if you like it. And then they started getting all kinds of data. I haven't seen the data yet, but I think they're collecting all kinds of numbers for the research to show that the students are asking for flip phones. Isn't that interesting? 'Cause remember when they first came out, and you had to click the 'A' three times to get to 'C'? You know, how long it took to text. Remember all that?

Sage Goodwin (00:32:25): 
I can... I think I can still... I think I still have that like imprinted in my brain, like that type of keyboard.

Mary Kate Cary (00:32:33): 
It makes you not want to text.

Sage Goodwin (00:32:35):
I think I could still... I think I could still text like that.

Mary Kate Cary (00:32:39): 
It was hard. It made me not want to text.

Sage Goodwin (00:32:41): 
So Mary Kate, the low-tech zones are one initiative at UVA, but I know that you've worked on a bunch of other things at UVA to encourage students to learn how to engage in healthy debate with each other. Will you tell us about some of those?

Mary Kate Cary (00:32:54): 
Sure. So, a little bit of background is that I arrived at UVA seven years ago and started teaching political speechwriting and the greatest speeches in American history. One year into it was the big election 2020 class. That class had been taught by the chair of the department for many years, every four years at other institutions, and she was brand new at UVA. She said, "Oh my gosh, I'm the chair of the department, and I'm so busy. Could somebody please co-teach the class with me to lighten the load?" And the outgoing chair said, "Sure. How about Mary Kate?" And she said, "Okay," because I had been on the 1988 presidential campaign and could teach about the presidential election. She had run for Congress years earlier as a Democrat, so people could Google both of us and see a Democrat and a Republican side by side.

We taught that class in 2020. Shortly after that, the president of UVA was under a lot of pressure to sign the Chicago Statement, which was the big free speech statement that was taking off across higher ed. If you look at the Chicago Statement, it's two pages long. The first page is about how great the University of Chicago is, and then the second page is, "Oh, by the way, we like free speech," right? So the president at UVA said, "I am not signing something that says how great the University of Chicago is," and he said, "We're gonna write our own thing."

I think because I was co-teaching that class, I got asked to be on the free speech statement committee because there were elements of it that had to do with viewpoint diversity and listening to other people's perspectives. That experience of being on that committee opened my eyes to all the problems in higher ed. So we started an organization called Think Again, which is named after the Adam Grant book—which is awesome—about intellectual humility and all that.

Sage Goodwin (00:34:53): 
And Adam Grant is an organizational psychologist, right?

Mary Kate Cary (00:34:57): 
Correct. Yes, and I highly recommend the book. So then we said our lane is going to be student-facing programming that helps them take off the headphones and put down the cell phone, rather than more white papers, research, and conferences. Our four pillars are freedom of expression, viewpoint diversity, intellectual humility—meaning "I can be wrong"—and the last is critical thinking, because you don't just believe what other people tell you. You investigate for yourself, see both sides, and decide what you believe.

Along those lines, we started creating student-facing programming. Probably our most famous is called Disagree With a Professor, and that is where we recruit professors to bring three controversial statements of their own creation to a free lunch with a small table full of students. We'll have four or five tables. Each table seats six to eight people, with one professor at each table sharing their three statements. Some of them pick statements specific to their field of study, while some pick current events or political hot buttons, like guns and abortion. Some of them pick silly statements just for fun, you know, like "Peanut M&Ms are better than regular." I did one the other day stating that "all driver's license tests in America going forward need to be taken in a stick-shift car," and I'm happy to defend that if anybody wants to question me.

It's out of the classroom, there are no grades, and we do it from 12:00 to 2:00 on Fridays. We offer free food that the kids actually like. And by the way, I should add that Disagree With a Professor is now a podcast because the students came to us and asked for it; they thought more people would be interested than just those who can make it on a Friday at lunchtime. So that has launched. We just finished the first season, and I highly recommend it. I'm hoping to get professors from other universities to do it and start growing the audience to students at other schools as well.

Then we've got another program called Food for Thought, where we get a free lunch, and the students ask each other softball, medium-ball, and hard-ball questions. No professor is involved. It's just to get used to talking about things that might be difficult. Another is Low Stakes, Hot Takes, where, again, no professor is involved. By the way, all of these operate under Chatham House rules: no cell phones, no recording, and no quoting anything you heard other than the general ideas. You cannot quote someone else by name. In Low Stakes, Hot Takes, students go around the table saying things that aren't going to get them canceled, but are still controversial, like: "Taylor Swift is the most overrated singer of all time." The whole room will go, "What? How could you possibly think that?" and they all start talking. They make up their own statements.

We also realized that the free speech rules at UVA for protests and expressive activity, as they call it, were written only in lawyer language and buried in pages and pages of fine print. It has since been fixed, but at the beginning, the students came to me and said, "What if we turned this into something that students could understand?" No one is gonna pull out a laptop in the middle of a protest to figure out what the rules are. So we invented a free speech toolkit for students, by students. It's paper, and they keep it in their pocket during a protest. It says exactly what is allowed under the First Amendment and what is not. UVA is a public university, so we could share that with other public universities that are also governed by the First Amendment, and then we included a specific section on the time, place, and manner restrictions unique to our school. That's been extremely popular, and we've handed out thousands of them.

The last piece is teaching persuasion and the greatest speeches. The demand went from a 20-person seminar for the greatest speeches in American history to a waitlist of 100, which tells you that students are genuinely interested in learning about these speeches and how to persuade people. So we changed it to an online course that is available for free to the public called Speaking of America, and it's free of charge on the UVA website. I think there are a lot of people interested in great speeches and great moments in our democracy where one person was brave enough to stand up, speak, and change things. Those are all the things I've been working on to try and encourage this among young people.

Hanna Sistek (00:39:42): 
Wow, those are really amazing initiatives. It's so fresh to be thinking like that; I really like it. I'm sure our audience would be interested in accessing that course, so we'll put some links in the show notes. Mary Kate, we also know that you just got a new job as the director of the new National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism at the University of Denver. We're really curious—what will you be doing there?

Mary Kate Cary (00:40:09): 
I'm very excited about this. It totally came out of the blue. I was very happy at UVA, and Denver kind of swooped in with this great new idea. I had a hard time saying no, obviously. It is a new national academy for free expression and pluralism. The idea centers on two things: first, there are a lot of great things going on at other universities across America, but they are very siloed. They are doing great things on their own campuses, but they're not necessarily sharing them across the nation with other schools. Second, there's a whole ecosystem of nationwide nonprofits coming in and doing great work, but they don't have a campus on the ground to actually demonstrate what they're doing—organizations like Heterodox Academy, FIRE, Braver Angels, BridgeUSA, and all that. The University of Denver has already partnered with most of the big national players who are doing great work, but now we have a place to demonstrate the success of these programs and share it nationwide.

The way they explained it to me is that the free expression, viewpoint diversity, and pluralism space in higher ed is like a building with various rooms. The rooms are very crowded. You've got a whole crowd of people working on litigation, for example. There's another crowd doing student-facing programming like Think Again. There's another crowd, like Heterodox, trying to help faculty change the culture. But none of these rooms have hallways between them, and nobody is talking to each other. Shouldn't there be a national organization that bridges both sides and moves everybody forward together? Just getting them talking to each other and sharing best practices would be a great start.

So I'm happy to do that and act as a sort of pollinator to figure out what the best initiatives are going on nationwide that nobody knows about, and get them to everybody. For example, Denver has a great curriculum program that is not at other schools called Debate Across the Curriculum. That's where rhetoric teachers come in, and, using subject matter specific to that class, they teach the kids how to debate. They come up with a prompt that has to do with the subject matter of that class, and they divide the class in half: pro and con. The students don't get to pick if they're pro or con. Then they debate it, and then they switch sides.

In my classroom experience, most of the students have never had to argue the opposite side unless they're on a debate team, and that is mind-blowing to them. I had one student where I assigned her the opposite of what she believed, and she wrote me an email that just said, "Crying." Another said, "I've researched the other side. Am I allowed to change my mind now that I've learned about the other side?" I said, "Yes, you are. You're always allowed to change your mind."

I think Debate Across the Curriculum could be a great template for other schools to use across the country, and they've got tons of metrics on how successful it is. They were in 80 classrooms this last semester at Denver. Let's get the word out about that, because it could easily be replicated at other schools. That's just one example of the stuff I've seen that I wanna try and help get out. I think it's gonna be a fun job.

Hanna Sistek (00:43:42): 
Yeah, sounds really amazing. And how great to get these organizations to talk to one another. I've been really interested in the bridging organizations that try to do that, like Braver Angels.

Mary Kate Cary (00:43:52):
For example, our Think Again website has something on there called Think Again Academy under the resources section. That's where the whole list I just gave you—Disagree With a Professor, Food for Thought, Low Stakes, Hot Takes—is available, along with the flyers we created for the students. You can just borrow them and replicate them for free. Change the colors to your school colors; we have the budget and the run of show included in there. We just wanna share it with everyone so that other schools do the same thing. We're hoping that many more chapters of Think Again pop up across the country as well, 'cause I think it's easy to do. If I can do it, anybody can do it. I'm an adjunct professor, and as I said, if I can do it, anybody can.

Julius Freeman (00:44:37): 
And so, Mary Kate, I just wanted to give you the opportunity, while talking about all the great work that you're doing, to explain the necessity and the need for working towards this freedom of expression, this pluralism, and this ability to think about ideas that may be different from yours. Why is that so necessary? Why is that so important, especially for college campuses?

Mary Kate Cary (00:45:00): 
I think it has to do with the nature of our democracy. For example, when we talk about the free speech toolkit, one of the biggest misunderstandings among young people today is that they think that hate speech is illegal and that you can get arrested for it. That's not true under our Constitution. It is true in Great Britain, but it's not true here.

We try to explain that this is not because we love hate speech. It's because in a democracy, who gets to decide what is hateful? Is a rude email hate speech? Who gets to decide that? So part of this is civic education on what our democracy requires of all of us. I would argue that getting people to learn how to engage in civil discourse is crucial. The point of civil discourse is not just to have polite conversations; the point of learning civil discourse is to learn how to persuade people, how to reach a compromise, and how to agree on the means to the ends that we all want. This goes to the heart of some of the concepts in the speechwriting class—it's all related.

It's hard to give a speech if you are on your phone with your headphones on. You're not gonna give a speech that way. A lot of these things are like Venn diagrams that overlap with each other. To your question, Julius, I would say that the point of this is to strengthen our democracy. I think a lot of people are very concerned about where our democracy is heading and how we are gonna get the next generation to strengthen it rather than weaken it. This is what motivates me, and I think that's part of why I'm teaching now instead of writing speeches for clients. I think this is a broader calling.

Julius Freeman (00:46:38): 
Well, I think this sets up a great transition. If you could give our audience some key takeaways about what you talked about today—and why it's important to understand the value of political rhetoric, persuasion, and all these things—what would those three takeaways be for you?

Mary Kate Cary (00:46:59): 
I would say, at the risk of being a little repetitive, number one: take off the headphones, put down the cell phone, look people in the eye, and make a new friend.

The second is that persuasion is important no matter what you do in life, especially in the age of AI. The more that we can all learn how to listen—as we say at UVA, to be empathetic listeners and generous speakers—the better off we'll be. That's very important in life, no matter what your career path is.

And finally, I would say we should all remember that one person speaking up really can change the course of history and affect our democracy. There are some amazing examples and fun stories to learn about that have happened in our country's history that most of us are not aware of. It's really fun to study and see how people did this in the past, and figure out how we can do it again in the future.

Sage Goodwin (00:47:50): 
Those are really great. Thank you for those. Now, before we let you go, Mary Kate, we like to ask our experts about their media diet. What are you consuming? We think of it as: what's your meat and two veg, what's your junk food, and what's your palate cleanser? So, what's your main news diet?

Mary Kate Cary (00:48:11): 
Okay, so I get asked this a lot by young people, especially in the big election classes. I taught it again in 2024, and it became even more of a question as time went on.

My top choice for a news source is called Ground News. I don't know if you've ever heard of it, but their subtitle is "Think Freely," which I love. For those of you who don't know it, they take 60,000 news sources worldwide and aggregate all of the news. You choose which topics you're interested in getting in your feed—mine are mostly politics, international relations, and things like that. As the stories get reported, Ground News summarizes them from the sources, and below the headline with the introductory paragraph, there is a little stripe that is red, white, and blue. Red represents conservative sources, white is independent or neutral, and blue represents liberal sources. They show you exactly who is covering that topic.

The stories where only one side is covering that topic go onto a second page called "Blind Spot." That's where you can see that people who don't agree with you politically are seeing a feed that you're not seeing. It totally helps you understand why there are people saying things that make no sense to you, where you normally say, "Where on earth did that person get that from?" Now you can see. It really opens your eyes to how siloed a lot of the news sources are that people are getting their political opinions from. It helps you realize, "Oh, well, they saw that. No wonder they think that." I think that's been a great invention.

Before I came on, I looked up their mission to see how they describe what they do, and here is their one-sentence mission statement: "Our vision is positive coexistence, where cooperative civil debate is the norm, media is accountable, and critical thought is the baseline for our information consumption." When I think about Think Again's pillars, critical thought is in there, civil debate is in there, and positive coexistence is in there. That's like mom and apple pie—who does not want positive coexistence? So I would say that.

For many years, I have also been looking at RealClearPolitics. On the left side of the page, it has the breaking news of whatever is going on in the world from pretty standard sources like AP and Reuters. The main part of the page features the most-read opinion pieces in America, and they try to match them up. It will say, "So-and-so is an idiot," and right next to it, the next headline says, "So-and-so is a genius." They try to put them right side by side with the authors and the sources so you can read the originals. It is great fun to see political commentary from both sides side by side, and I think that's a great way to go, too. Ground News doesn't have commentary—it just has the breaking news—so to get the commentary, I like RealClearPolitics. Those are my meat and veg.

What was the next one? Junk food, right?

Sage Goodwin (00:51:25): 
Junk food, yeah. What are your guilty pleasures?

Mary Kate Cary (00:51:27): 
Junk food. For my guilty pleasure, I would have to say I look at X a fair amount because, especially during the political election classes, there was stuff on X that was not getting reported by the mainstream news.

There was also stuff on prediction markets that I was watching because I thought the polling was out of whack. In this day and age, I always ask this in class: "Raise your hand if you have a landline." Nobody does. "Raise your hand the last time you answered your cell phone when it said unknown caller." Nobody does, but that's how the polls get conducted. In the old days, it was all done by phone, and I don't trust them anymore. If you do online polling, those are the people who opted in, and that's not necessarily a random sample. So I was watching prediction markets as well for the election results, and it turned out they were right. There was a lot of stuff on X that I saw that was not getting reported, but it is a guilty pleasure.

And then my palate cleanser, I would have to say, would be the Babylon Bee, which I love. I don't know if you guys have ever read that, but I am a big fan of comedy, and the Babylon Bee is all satire. It got banned for a while in the old days on X before Elon Musk bought it, but it features a hilarious skewering of the news these days and is very funny.

I also like Peter Robinson's podcast called Uncommon Knowledge, and I listen very faithfully to Heterodox Academy's Heterodox Out Loud podcast. They interview fascinating people from all walks of life. So those are my main ones. It's fun; there's a lot of good stuff out there right now.

Sage Goodwin (00:53:06): 
And then what do you do to take your headphones off, put your phone down, and step away from screens?

Mary Kate Cary (00:53:13): 
Oh, I play golf, and I fly fish. I am not a natural athlete, so I'm kind of amazed that I can play golf. Again, if I can do it, anybody can. I highly encourage people to take up golf in middle age because it's been a joy in my life, and I never played it as a kid. The good news is I don't have any bad habits to overcome. I just obeyed what the instructors told me to do, and it worked.

Same with fly fishing. There's a lot of great fly fishing in beautiful places. It's very peaceful and calming, and I highly recommend it.

Hanna Sistek (00:53:48): 
Really nice. So if our listeners want to find you and your work, where do they go, Mary Kate?

Mary Kate Cary (00:53:55):
There's the Think Again website. If you Google "Think Again at UVA," it'll pop up. That's where you can see all these templates for doing fun events, all the commentary we have, and things like that.

If you would like to learn about Speaking of America, the greatest speeches in American history, we've got 25 or so episodes. Almost all of them are out now. We're winding up toward the grand finale, which is the Gettysburg Address—the greatest speech in American history. If you Google "Speaking of America UVA," it'll pop up the registration page. All you have to do is give your name and your email so that we don't have a bunch of bots, and then you click the box that says you are a friend of UVA. You will have free access to it, and it'll stay up forever on that site. It's still being released, but the episodes will stay there forever.

And then the last thing is that hopefully over the course of the next year, we will build an online presence at the National Academy for Free Expression and Pluralism at Denver. I don't have a website yet for that, but hopefully, we'll start building that out and sharing amazing resources across the country. So those would be the three: Think Again, Speaking of America, and the National Academy.

Hanna Sistek (00:55:06): 
Really, really great. Yeah, it's been so nice to talk to you, and it's so interesting to hear about all the innovative things that you're doing, as well as just your amazing career trajectory. We really appreciate you coming on, Mary Kate.

Julius Freeman (00:55:18): 
Yeah, thanks for coming.

Sage Goodwin (00:55:20):
Yeah, thank you so much.

Mary Kate Cary (00:55:21): 
Thank you, and thanks for having me out to Purdue recently. I loved it. Go Boilermakers! It was great fun, and thanks again for having me.

Julius Freeman (00:55:29): 

This has been another episode of Captivated. It's been hosted by a CAPT, you know, CAPTivated you. You guys get it. It's the Center for American Political History, Media and Technology. 

Hanna Sistek (00:55:43): 

The ideas presented by individuals on the podcast are theirs and theirs alone. They do not represent Purdue University, which adheres to the policy of institutional neutrality. 

Sage Goodwin (00:55:53): 

To learn more about this episode's guest, check out the show notes. We really enjoyed this conversation today, and we hope you got something out of it too. Thanks for listening.