This is Spectator Radio, the Spectator's curated podcast collection.

Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Books Podcast.

I'm Sam Leith, the literary edge of The Spectator.

This week I'm very pleased to be joined by Cass Sunstein.

He's a professor of law who's moved out from law into

kind of areas of public policy. He's best known in this country and indeed around the world for his

work on the book Nudge and on how behavioral psychology can influence public policy interventions.

Cass, your new book is called How Change Happens. Big and Forbidding Title. Can I ask what's the sort of central

idea of the book? I think the big idea, at least what got me motivated to focus on a lot of pages,

is that when social norms start to change, two things happen. One is people feel unleashed,

and they can end up saying something they'd kept

private. And once they hear other people saying things they'd kept private, then you can see

a civil rights movement. You can see fascism in the 1930s. You can see feminism. You can see Brexit.

You can see all sorts of unanticipated things.

So the phenomenon of unleashing previously hidden thoughts inside people's heads is, I think,

an entry point into understanding a lot of puzzles, even cultural puzzles, when music gets really

popular, or people start liking some kind of dance or

clothing and the other thing which is kind of a sibling idea is that sometimes when norms change

it's not like people's get unleashed it's like preferences or beliefs change in fundamental ways

so people start thinking oh I care about the environment,

or, oh, I care about some old tradition that they'd never even heard of before.

And that generation of new beliefs and values is almost as interesting as unleashing.

...