In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with my good friend and colleague, Jim Shermer, to talk about the current economic situation. We talk about how technology is changing the way we live and work, and what it means for the future of the economy. We also talk about some of the things we can do to prepare ourselves for the coming economic collapse, and how we can prepare for it. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts, and share it with a friend who could benefit from it. If you like the podcast and want to support it, please consider pledging a small monthly or annual subscription. Thanks to our sponsor, Ajinomoto, for sponsoring this episode. It helps keep us on track with our monthly payment plan and keeps us out of debt. Thank you so much to Jim and his amazing support of the show, and we're looking forward to seeing what he's up to in 2020. Timestamps: 3:00 - What's going to happen next year? 4:30 - What will the economy do in 2020? 5:15 - Is the economy going to crash? 6:20 - Will the economy be okay? 7:10 - What are we going to do next? 8:00 9:40 - Are we ready for the next downturn? 11:30 12:15 13:00 | What's the worst case scenario? 15:30 | What s the worst thing that could happen in the next decade? 16:20 17: What s going to be the worst? 18:40 | How will the future? 19:20 | What is the worst that we can we expect? 21:40 22: Should we be prepared for it? 23: How will we learn from this? 25:00 // 22:30 // Is it possible? 26:00 + 27: What will we get out of the next five years? 27:40 // 27:10 28:30 & 29: Is there a better way to learn from the past? ? 32:30 + 33: Is it better than the next one? 35:40 + 35:00 & 35: Is the future in the future coming in 2020 & 35, can we have a better than that?
00:00:13.000We were just saying before we got started that the last time we saw each other was we went to dinner about six weeks ago, and you're thinking that that might be the end of that kind of stuff.
00:00:25.000That was my last time I've been in a restaurant, actually.
00:00:28.000Well, I think restaurants, of course, will reopen, but I think the kind of social distancing we're seeing now, it's not going to go all the way back to the way it used to be.
00:00:36.000I think we may quit shaking hands and hugging to the extent that we used to, although I don't think we'll ever go all the way to, say, the Japanese model of social distancing.
00:00:46.000But I think there'll be modifications like that.
00:00:49.000The other thing I've been thinking about is the change of remote, say, meetings and education.
00:00:55.000I mean, I'm in the studio here in Santa Barbara where I've been recording lectures for my Chapman University class, Skepticism 101. And I just upload them and share them with the students, and then they watch them, and then I send them a quiz, they take the quiz, they send them back.
00:01:09.000Now, that's not a complete replacement of a brick-and-mortar building with a small-class seminar discussion, say, but it does adequately replace a lot of traditional education that you don't really need to be in a classroom for.
00:01:24.000Do you think that this is preparing us for the ultimate, where we embrace the symbiotic relationship that we have with computers and become one with the machine?
00:01:33.000I mean, it seems like we're becoming closer and closer to some sort of an electronic community.
00:01:39.000Yeah, I think it was happening slowly already, and this is kind of a jump-starting it.
00:01:45.000I mean, already tech companies like Zoom are having to, you know, ramp up their game because, you know, the systems are crashing because pretty much everybody's doing Zoom meetings now.
00:01:53.000And then they have to adjust to Zoom bombing because, of course, there's, you know, people like that out there that just want to screw with you.
00:02:02.000And then I was also thinking about things like theaters.
00:02:06.000Why do we need to go to theaters anymore?
00:02:08.000I mean, I love watching a movie on a big screen, but the screens we have at home now, big television screens, super high def, why not just watch movies at home?
00:02:18.000Well, I don't think we're going to have much of a choice.
00:02:20.000I was reading an article this morning about AMC theaters.
00:02:27.000I mean, you got to think, these companies are accustomed to having a certain amount of money coming in every month, and they never, no one anticipated anything like this, where all businesses are just going to shut down.
00:02:38.000Gyms, I mean, how many gyms are going to go under?
00:02:43.000I mean, it's a strange and trying time for people who have small businesses, for sure.
00:02:49.000Yeah, one of my cycling buddies owns the La Cunada Theater Complex and, of course, rents out the space to different retailers, including the theater managers.
00:03:01.000Anyway, he was telling me that they normally pay $93,000 a month in rent, but they bring in like $7.5 million a year or something, so it all balances out.
00:03:10.000But they just told him, we're not going to make our rent this month.
00:03:14.000So he has to go to his mortgage company, you know, the bank, where he pays off his mortgage and say, I can't pay you this month because these guys can't pay me.
00:03:21.000Okay, so multiply that by, you know, $10 million or $100 million or something, and that's kind of what we've been going through.
00:03:27.000Yeah, and I don't really understand the economics of this stimulus package of how they're going to be able to distribute it and sort of balance people out.
00:03:34.000It seems like it's just a small band-aid on a very large wound.
00:03:38.000Yeah, well, of course, the government can't just print money indefinitely.
00:03:43.000Then we're going to get huge inflation, and that could be catastrophic.
00:03:47.000You know, so this conversation that people have been wanting to have, but they get hammered every time they bring it up, I think at some point we're going to have to have in the next few weeks, is the economic trade-off and costs to people's lives.
00:05:16.000Well, statisticians do that sort of thing, and attorneys and accountants work on that, and judges and juries have to...
00:05:34.000Do you think that's another way to do this?
00:05:38.000There's been some talk of isolating the people that are high risk, isolating the people with underlying conditions, people that are elderly, things of that nature.
00:05:46.000Do you think that that's a way that they can move forward?
00:06:20.000You know, they got it right down to, I think it was the 31st patient they found who had gone to two church services, and then she was in a car accident and taken to the hospital, and that's when it spread from there.
00:06:34.000That one day, I think it was in late February when that happened, and they just jumped all over it.
00:06:40.000Total deaths in South Korea, I think, is just a couple hundred compared to most other countries.
00:07:16.000Because they have a very low death rate.
00:07:19.000I think they have a high, tight culture, a very tight culture.
00:07:22.000That is when my wife's from Cologne, Germany, so I know this from personal experience, but also their studies.
00:07:29.000Michelle Gelfin does these studies on loose and tight cultures, and that Germany is a very tight culture.
00:07:33.000That is to say, very law and order, law abiding, and when the German government says, all right, this is what we're going to do, people do it.
00:07:57.000We've seen yesterday this rise in deaths of African Americans versus white Americans and having to do with income.
00:08:04.000But, of course, money is just a proxy for something else, which has to do with The quality of the health care they get, the food that they eat, how healthy and exercise-prone they are or not, diabetes, obesity, these sorts of things.
00:08:20.000Down the line, when you're attacked by a virus like that, can have an effect on your immune system and therefore the response to the disease.
00:08:28.000I think those are the kinds of We're going to have to target to save lives.
00:08:35.000And I think countries like South Korea and Germany have been doing that pretty well without pushback.
00:09:05.000Let's pump everything back up to sustainable levels.
00:09:09.000I mean, that very well could be the difference between people who contract this virus and survive versus people who contract this virus and don't.
00:09:18.000I mean, how could it not hurt to be healthy, fit, and have a good immune system?
00:09:23.000Even if, for some reason, we can't find the exact connection to this particular virus, just as a global thing, even if you do all that, and it turns out there's no connection to this particular virus, it's still a good thing to do.
00:10:40.000And I find the more you work out, you know, you don't have to eat as much because your body becomes more efficient at processing fuel, so I have less desire to eat.
00:11:19.000The only time I don't do that is when I have explosive work that I'm doing in the morning, like if I'm doing Muay Thai or something like that that requires a lot of it.
00:11:26.000Then I'll just have a couple pieces of fruit, but I keep it pretty light.
00:11:30.000But other than that, I try to do 16 hours.
00:11:32.000I do a 16-hour non-feeding phase and then just eat in the other time.
00:11:40.000It's not hard to do because it becomes normal.
00:11:44.000The other thing I did that I've been recommending to people that are not into cycling or something like that is I got these wrist and ankle weights just at the local sporting goods store, but you can order them on Amazon.
00:11:55.000Just five pounds each wrist, five pounds each ankle, and just walk briskly.
00:12:00.000I just take my dog to the local park, and we just go up this hill and down, up and down this hill with these weights.
00:12:10.000But with the weights, you get extra...
00:12:13.000Extra upper body and it works the big muscles of your legs.
00:12:17.000I know a lot of people hate running, so you don't have to run.
00:12:21.000Just walk, get the heart rate up, work the big muscles, and circulate the blood and all the bodily fluids and so on.
00:12:29.000That's just good for general health, and I do think that has to help for response to the coronavirus.
00:12:35.000Again, these populations that are more targeted, You know, there's a lot of obesity and diabetes and some of these other secondary, you know, these preconditions, as they call them.
00:12:48.000And, you know, there's this peculiar thing we're all doing now, like what I've done for years, is you look in the obits and you see, okay, well, this guy, he was older than me or he had this or he had that.
00:13:08.000It's all a game of probabilities of just stacking the odds in our favor.
00:13:13.000Who knows if that'll make a difference for you or me personally, but on average, it's got to make a difference.
00:13:18.000It's such a strange virus, isn't it, in terms of the way so many people are asymptomatic?
00:13:25.000Yeah, so this idea that it came to America, what, January 28th or something in Seattle, I have a feeling it's going to turn out to have been earlier, like in December.
00:13:56.000But it looked like, I've read this article twice, I don't understand it because this isn't what I do, but they really showed that it very, very likely made the leap from probably bats.
00:15:21.000Well, a couple, I don't know, maybe a month ago now, my doc, who's also a good friend and a fellow cyclist, he's the guy that did my neck surgery.
00:15:28.000You know, I had a fusion on my neck after I had a bad bike crash last year.
00:15:31.000And so he's a good friend, and so he just texted me out of the blue and goes, Hey, have you heard about this hydroxychloroquine?
00:17:09.000What if someone at the grocery stores got it and I touched the cart?
00:17:13.000Two of my cycling buddies had really bad colds in December.
00:17:17.000Dry cough, fever, you know, all the symptoms.
00:17:20.000And they're now saying, huh, I wonder if I had it in December.
00:17:24.000And the reason this is important to know is because that would increase the size of the denominator of the equation, where you have the number of deaths divided by the number of people that got it.
00:17:33.000And it's that bottom number we just don't know because the testing has just been ramped up.
00:17:38.000So there might be lots of people that had it in January and February and they got better.
00:17:47.000That nature paper I referenced, they trace it back.
00:17:50.000I don't know how they do this genetically with mutations or whatever, but to say mid-November in China.
00:17:55.000So people were coming from China to the United States throughout November and December, so it's entirely possible it's been here longer, and therefore the death rate is not nearly as catastrophic as it seems like it could be.
00:18:09.000Is there a way to test whether or not you've had it for antibodies?
00:18:50.000You know, it's really interesting, too, because this has become such a hot political topic.
00:18:55.000You know, there's so many people that are angry at Trump, but they were angry at Trump back when he was closing the travel from China, which turned out to be a great idea.
00:19:05.000And, you know, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted today a compilation of CNN and all these other different networks giving out bad information way back in January.
00:19:17.000Bad information saying, this is going to be fine.
00:19:38.000Pointing fingers and everything at this point in time.
00:19:40.000What they need to concentrate on now is just getting masks, getting PPE equipment, keeping people healthy if they can, and then educating people on how to keep your immune system strong.
00:19:51.000Let's try to get people to understand the consequences of not taking care of your body.
00:19:59.000This has to be the worst job in the world, President.
00:20:01.000No matter what you do, half the people are going to hate you.
00:21:56.000So, you know, maybe we ought to do that.
00:22:00.000I know people just can't stand Trump, and just the idea like saying something nice or supportive or not being critical seems hard to do, but maybe this is way worse than 9-11.
00:22:10.000Yeah, and what you're saying is totally correct.
00:22:14.000It seems like the polarization is even worse, though, than when it was in 2001. It seems like it just keeps ramping up, and Trump is such a naturally polarizing figure that it's gotten the left versus right...
00:22:38.000I was just showing this graph of the people that self-identify as centrist versus now, which is more polarized.
00:23:05.000About 2008, the polarization got worse and worse.
00:23:08.000I mean, we can speculate why, but that's pretty much when it happened.
00:23:11.000Around 2004, 2005, and it gets ramped up.
00:23:14.000So just pollsters asking people, you know, how do you self-identify?
00:23:17.000You know, centrist, far left, far right, strong Republican, strong Democrat, whatever.
00:23:22.000And so that middle ground has been shrinking.
00:23:25.000The centrist has been shrinking, and the polls have been increasing.
00:23:28.000So more and more people are polarized.
00:23:30.000Now, you know, conservative talk radio...
00:23:32.000And television or MSNBC, whatever, you want to accuse the media.
00:23:38.000But in general, I think we've just been more polarized in the sense of not just saying, well, I disagree with you, I think you're wrong, but that you're evil, you're immoral, this is the worst thing that's ever happened to us, and so on.
00:23:53.000This kind of ramping up of the catastrophism is not healthy.
00:24:20.000The risk is just give up a little bit of your civil liberties, give up a little bit of your freedom, and we're going to keep you safe.
00:24:26.000And, you know, it brings you to the old Benjamin Franklin quote, you know, he who would give up liberty for freedom deserves neither, or liberty for safety.
00:24:57.000I mean, nobody wants to give up civil liberties, and civil liberties lost or rarely regained.
00:25:02.000And this is the real concern here, that if you do allow people to track who you're in contact with, And make sure that, okay, you're testing negative, and you're in contact with people that also test negative, so you're okay.
00:25:26.000In general, I'm against that sort of thing.
00:25:29.000I like the idea of privacy and that I do have a right to not be tracked and you can't have cameras in my home or my yard and so on.
00:25:40.000In general, I think across the board, that's a good principle, and it follows the Constitution.
00:25:45.000I think there are times, say, national emergency like this, of course, there's always the risk that, you know, any autocrat can declare a national emergency, grab the power, never give it back.
00:25:55.000I mentioned examples of this before in Turkey, say.
00:25:59.000But the difference here, I think, is we do have a constitution.
00:26:03.000We do have courts that litigate these sorts of things.
00:26:05.000I could see a reasonable measure being taken for, let's say, we're going to do the following for six months.
00:26:12.000Until we see what happens with this pandemic, and then once that's over, then we're going to revert back.
00:26:18.000Now, let's say the governor or the president says, well, I'm not going back.
00:26:21.000Well, then you have courts, and you sue the state or you sue the federal government for violations of civil liberties, and then you can get them back.
00:27:02.000Yes, and this program was started under Bush, and so supposedly when Obama became president, it's like the transparent president, so we're going to stop doing that.
00:27:13.000So here's a good argument for WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers that I recognize as valuable, that we wouldn't have known that without Snowden or the Pentagon Papers.
00:27:27.000It's good to know what your government is up to.
00:27:31.000Our mutual favorite subjects of conspiracy theories, we didn't know about a lot of the things Kennedy was doing and Johnson, all the way back to Eisenhower, lying about the Vietnam War, for example, until the Pentagon Papers came out.
00:27:43.000And then in the 90s, the Church Committee on Conspiracies from the 70s, a lot of those documents were And there was that business about the Operation Northwoods, where Kennedy administration people brought to him this idea of a false flag operation over Cuba, make it look like the Russians were harassing our aircraft or our airports as an excuse to invading Cuba or assassinating Castro and so on.
00:28:07.000It's like when you had Alex Jones on, he talks about false flag operations, and most of us skeptics go, oh, that's a bunch of nonsense.
00:28:13.000And then you read these documents that are revealed in the In these released secret documents, like, wow, okay, so we did do that.
00:28:22.000Not just that, signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, vetoed by Kennedy, was like, what the hell are you doing?
00:28:27.000You know, and then finds himself dead less than a year later.
00:29:08.000But I point to with you, with the Epstein case, like you were one of the first people, I mean, as a, literally, you're a professional skeptic.
00:29:19.000And you looked at some of the evidence.
00:29:32.000I'm still not sure about that one because after I posted something about the two cameras broke or whatever, somebody wrote me from that prison saying, oh, those cameras are always breaking.
00:29:42.000He winds up strangling himself in a way that Michael Batten, the famous autopsy doctor, says is completely inconsistent with hanging, and much more consistent with someone strangling you, including the actual area where he was hanging from,
00:29:59.000It's consistent with someone strangling you from behind, not consistent with you hanging by your own weight.
00:30:06.000Yeah, after Weinstein got his conviction, I thought, oh boy, they better have a real suicide watch on this guy, because he surely has a black book just as big as Epstein's.
00:31:28.000But it's so hard to know what's true and what's not true today.
00:31:32.000That's the thing is there's so much data.
00:31:34.000And so, I mean, one of the things that's really sad about the loss of respect for mainstream journalism and mainstream media is, well, if we can't count on them, then who's regulating the independents?
00:31:48.000Who's regulating these people that are just, you know, so-called independent journalists that are just tweeting things and finding things and putting things up on their websites?
00:31:56.000It's so hard to tell who's telling the truth and who's not.
00:32:01.000Yeah, when I was working on Giving the Devil is Due, this was kind of a challenge to me because I feel like...
00:32:07.000There's so much fake news, real fake news, and just bogus theories, particularly in my areas of quack medicine and cancer cures, and now coronavirus cures.
00:32:19.000The old televangelist Jim Baker was selling those silver derivative pills that were supposed to fight the coronavirus.
00:32:27.000So a lot of that stuff is dangerous to have out there.
00:32:30.000But as a civil libertarian, I feel like, well, but I'm a free speech fundamentalist.
00:32:35.000I really believe, you know, people, short of just lying about somebody or giving away the nuclear codes or something like that, you know, just let a thousand flowers bloom and just see what, you know, shine sunlight on all of them and see which ones rise to the top because they're supported by evidence.
00:32:50.000That is to say, people will take bad information and they'll go shoot up a pizzeria or something like that.
00:32:56.000Now this conspiracy theory about 5G related to the coronavirus, that is to say, the theory is that 5G is causing people to feel ill, to take ill, and that the government made up, the corporations made up this story about the coronavirus as a distraction from 5G. Okay,
00:33:21.000He's a hilarious comedian who also has a great Instagram page, and he put something up today.
00:33:27.000He retweeted something that says, if 184 countries have corona and only five countries have 5G towers, why the fuck would you dummies, why the fuck would you idiots think that 5G towers are causing COVID-19?
00:36:35.000They really, really love coincidences.
00:36:37.000They're fun, because they love to believe in spiritual connections, and they love to believe in clairvoyance, and they love to believe in haunted things.
00:37:06.000A lot of scientists met with him, right?
00:37:08.000Yeah, because he had a way of attracting famous scientists because he had a lot of money, and he said, look, I can fund your lab, help fund your lab to the tune of millions of dollars.
00:37:18.000It's hard to resist that, and then maybe you go down that road a little bit, and then you start hearing these rumors about his personal life, and you're like, ugh.
00:37:25.000Well, yeah, but the money's good for the lab.
00:37:28.000Somewhere down the line, it becomes obvious it was a bad thing, but it's too late.
00:37:33.000It's hard to judge people after the fact and the hindsight bias.
00:37:36.000We look back and go, how could anybody have ever had any association with them?
00:37:40.000It's like, yeah, but we know stuff now that maybe not everybody knew the extent of it back years ago.
00:37:47.000Now, this book that you wrote, Giving the Devil is Due, the idea is talking to people whose opinions you disagree with and that there's a lot of value in that.
00:37:58.000Why did you write that and what were you trying to get out of this?
00:38:02.000Well, in general, I've been kind of a civil libertarian most of my life in that respect.
00:38:05.000But to be honest, I was kind of inspired after the episode we did of your podcast with Graham Hancock.
00:38:11.000And I've since gotten to know him and I thought, you know, I was not really fair to that guy.
00:38:15.000I really didn't give him a fair shake.
00:38:17.000And there's value in people like him who challenge the mainstream.
00:38:23.000Now, it's not that outsiders can't make contributions.
00:40:20.000And even if the people who claim it are themselves anti-Semites, you know, I know it's in somebody's heart or minds, but, you know, let's assume the worst just for the sake of our argument.
00:40:28.000I would still defend their right to say it because, let's say by analogy, I'm in the middle of a debate about how many Native Americans died since Columbus came here.
00:40:38.000And now the figure is, I don't know, 90 million, 70 million, 50 million, it's debatable.
00:40:42.000But let's say I'm a historian and I say, I think it was 10 million.
00:40:47.000And I think it was mostly by germs, not by guns and steel.
00:41:27.000So that essentially is a thought crime.
00:41:30.000So even though I completely disagree with their arguments, and maybe I don't even want to like these guys because of their attitudes about Jews, I don't like that, but still, I would defend them.
00:41:59.000I agree with that, but can I give you the counter-argument?
00:42:01.000The counter-argument, particularly online, is that people develop these bubbles.
00:42:06.000They develop these bubbles where everyone agrees with your perspective.
00:42:13.000You isolate or self-isolate in these bubbles.
00:42:16.000And there's this theory that you can indoctrinate young, impressionable people into hateful or racist or ideologically disturbing ideas.
00:42:30.000By finding them isolated in these thought bubbles.
00:42:33.000If they get onto particular message boards or a particular website where they subscribe to a YouTube channel or some video channel, then they all meet up in the comments and they agree with each other, but they're all wrong.
00:42:47.000But they can find confirmation bias in these large groups of people that are also wrong, and they feed off of each other.
00:42:57.000It does happen, for sure, and my first response is to encourage people to get out of their bubble, so if you read the New York Times, you should read the Wall Street Journal, and vice versa.
00:43:07.000Now, of course, that doesn't apply to most people online, but there's new research now since the 2016 election by a number of political scientists and cognitive scientists, nicely summarized in Hugo Mercier's book called Not Born Yesterday.
00:43:22.000And he shows that those Facebook and online bubbles against Hillary, say, or for Trump or vice versa, probably had next to no effect on the actual election.
00:43:34.000That is to say, if you believe that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria, whether I convince you that that's not true, you're very likely not going to vote for Hillary no matter what.
00:43:47.000Somebody that believes that is already so far down the rabbit hole Say, down the spectrum of where they are politically, they're never going to switch positions.
00:43:56.000And even the idea of just sort of slightly negative stories about Hillary or slightly negative stories about Trump that might nudge people, it doesn't look like it had much effect at all.
00:44:05.000In fact, Hugo shows that most political advertising is a complete waste of money.
00:44:32.000And so I've been thinking about this with the Nazis because I've written a lot about that.
00:44:37.000The problem to explain is how do you convert an entire nation of people From this, you know, highly cultured, educated, intelligent, you know, Western civilization-leading culture into Nazis that are willing to exterminate Jews and other people.
00:44:55.000And the answer, I think, is now, you don't.
00:46:26.000Silence people who would have dissented that would tell the rest of us who think everybody else thinks this is the way everybody believes, but they don't.
00:46:34.000We'll never know because we don't hear those voices.
00:46:37.000So with those two things, pluralistic ignorance and the punishment of dissenters, you can have this Nazi ideology or Stalinist ideology hover in midair even though no one really believes it.
00:46:49.000And it's just think of like North Korea when Kim Jong-un's father died.
00:46:54.000You saw those videos of people just weeping in the streets for days on end.
00:47:00.000Who actually believes that they feel this way?
00:47:45.000There's a story where Stalin gave a speech and then got a standing ovation that went on for like three minutes and then six minutes and eight minutes, nine minutes, ten minutes, eleven minutes.
00:47:56.000Everybody's going, oh crap, please, somebody sit down.
00:47:58.000Finally, some apparatchik sat down and he was promptly arrested the next day and sent off to the gulag.
00:48:21.000There's people that are writing hateful things on social media, but then there's people that are writing things that are just disagreeable.
00:48:30.000And when they get silenced, this is oftentimes something that sends a signal to other people to not say disagreeable things, not say questionable things, not say things that is contrary to the orthodoxy.
00:48:47.000So even though we don't have censorship laws like other countries we've been discussing, there is this self-censorship that happens out of fear of being canceled in the so-called cancel culture or just squelched by the language police, the politically correct police.
00:49:02.000So when I ask a show of hands of my students every semester, how many of you self-censor?
00:49:06.000That is, you want to say something but you don't on abortion or immigration or any kind of politically charged issue.
00:49:32.000But we have to, for our own safety's sake.
00:49:35.000If I want to be heard, and I want you to take me seriously and listen to what I have to say, I have to respond in kind.
00:49:41.000I have to practice the principle of reciprocity or interchangeable perspectives.
00:49:46.000I have to see it from your perspective.
00:49:47.000He wants to have his voice, so do I. And so as a principle, it doesn't feel intuitive, like, no, I don't want to give everybody a voice, but you know what?
00:49:56.000I'm going to override that impulse and do it anyway, if nothing else, selfishly, for my own safety's sake.
00:50:02.000So my other case chapter in the book besides Graham Hancock is Jordan Peterson.
00:50:07.000Now, you know, after I saw him on your show and then I saw him getting hammered, He's a wonderful guy.
00:50:23.000He's the most misrepresented person I've ever met in my life.
00:50:57.000This need to misrepresent someone, paint them in a straw man fashion as some sort of an evil person so that you can dismiss everything they say that is uncomfortable or that...
00:51:13.000Is contrary to your accepted ideology, the ideology that you subscribe to and that you're defending and that you've identified with.
00:51:34.000They're not just a person who has a thought and they can, like if you and I disagreed on something, I would hope that we could just talk about these ideas as if they are separate from us.
00:52:13.000And this is one of the things that I love about the concept of your book.
00:52:18.000I love about this idea that we need open discourse and discussion.
00:52:24.000And I think We're dealing with a couple of things here, and one of the things I think we're dealing with is the limited kind of communication that's available through social media.
00:53:08.000This is one of the basic tenets of rational discourse, is the ability to communicate with each other in a comprehensive way, in a nuanced way.
00:53:21.000And so much of that is eliminated entirely when you put things to 140 or 280 characters.
00:53:57.000I hear that from so many people that are in the public eye that say something back to someone who says something rude to them, and the person's sort of like, well, I didn't mean it.
00:54:06.000Because it's just a shitty way to communicate.
00:54:08.000Sending someone an email or writing a blog about someone or tweeting some nasty shit about someone, it's a terrible way to communicate.
00:54:16.000It's such a one-way, you know, it's a very limited way.
00:54:41.000He wrote me that nice long blurb, and he says, this is a rather difficult book for me to blurb, given that an entire chapter is devoted to criticizing my claims about He's a great guy.
00:55:48.000The problem you identified, though, just a moment ago was that if people identify with their beliefs, that is, the specific, say, political platforms like on immigration, abortion, civil rights, whatever,
00:56:04.000those are sort of secondary to the deeper core moral values that people hold.
00:56:11.000I define myself as a conservative, Republican, whatever.
00:56:14.000And so when you attack one little thing here, well, you know, I agree with you on this and this and this, but, you know, on the abortion thing, I think you're wrong, and here's why.
00:56:21.000You know, the impulse is, well, but if I give up on that one, then I'm going to lose all these other ones, and then I've given up my identity, right?
00:56:29.000So, like, when I used to debate creationists, intelligent design theorists, and so on, you know, I could tell that if I give people a choice, like, you have to choose between Jesus and Darwin, right?
00:56:39.000For your life, you know, they're not picking Darwin, okay?
00:56:41.000Because, you know, this sort of belief in their, you know, Christian dogmas about Jesus, that is their core being.
00:56:48.000Who cares about Darwin and, you know, whoever this scientist was?
00:56:51.000But if I say, keep Jesus, keep your whole religion, I don't care what you believe, but the science is really good on this, and here's why you should follow the facts, and you don't have to give up anything for it, then it's like, oh, okay, I'll listen, right?
00:57:03.000So, and like with more recently with climate change, I Most of us don't know much about climate science.
00:58:23.000So when somebody publicly signals where they stand on, say, climate change, what they're really saying is, look, I am publicly declaring my commitment to my team.
00:59:32.000And I recognize, say, Ben Shapiro's arguments for the rights of the fetus, but I also think we have conflicting moral values there, the rights of a woman.
00:59:41.000And the history of the way women have been treated and men have always tried to lord it over women's reproductive choices historically and this has always led to bad things like infanticide and back alley abortions and so on.
00:59:54.000So I got to err on one side or the other.
00:59:56.000I recognize and acknowledge your arguments are really good.
01:00:00.000Ben or whoever is a pro-lifer, but I still hold this position.
01:00:03.000I think there's a lot of progress that can be made socially to kind of reduce the tension when you say, I acknowledge your position, I understand it, you know, steel manning the argument, and then the person on the other side feels like, well, at least this guy's listening to me.
01:00:19.000Well, I think that is the best topic when it comes to that, because when you get to, particularly when you get to late-term abortions, Boy, that's a very hard thing to defend morally and ethically.
01:00:33.000And it's also one of the things about the abortion topic is that it's so uniquely human in that it's such a messy topic.
01:01:10.000Well, that's such a messy subject, and it's such a human subject.
01:01:14.000And I, like you, I am on the side of pro-choice, and I think that it is the woman's choice to decide whether or not she wants to keep the baby.
01:01:49.000And particularly people on the left, when it comes to deciding when it's okay and when it's not okay, because they feel like this is angling towards an elimination of a woman's right to choose.
01:02:02.000It's a very difficult conversation where you recognize that there is a difference between someone who's seven months pregnant and someone who's seven days pregnant.
01:02:19.000We're sticking to our position because we feel like if we concede that this is a complex issue, then we open up the door to possibly losing a woman's right to choose and losing these reproductive rights.
01:02:33.000Yeah, I think part of the problem also is that we tend to dichotomize most moral issues as right or wrong, good or evil.
01:02:40.000And the problem is that the law has to draw the line somewhere.
01:02:44.000We have to have a law to get along and so forth.
01:02:47.000So we have to say the drinking age is this instead of that, or driving age is this.
01:02:53.000The point at which you can have abortion is right here.
01:02:56.000But most of life is much more on a spectrum, a continuum.
01:03:00.000So here I make the distinction in the book between binary thinking and continuous thinking.
01:04:05.000You have to account for that and on and on.
01:04:07.000So here, I think, you know, instead of thinking of it in these kind of polarized black and white, you know, it's either this or that, and if you're on this side, then you're on the bad side.
01:04:28.000But now it looks like by 20 weeks or so, you feel pain.
01:04:32.000Some consciousness comes online around 24 weeks, 25 weeks.
01:04:37.000At some point, you've got to draw the line somewhere around there.
01:04:40.000Now, scientists, of course, they don't want to put lines anywhere.
01:04:43.000It's a week by week, day by day, even hour by hour, the development of the Yeah.
01:04:59.000And it creates this, this is like the line in the sand, this polarization line between these two sides.
01:05:06.000And I think that so much of what people subscribe to when they do choose an ideology, once they choose an ideology, they have this conglomeration of ideas that they adopt.
01:05:20.000And they adopt in order to be accepted by the tribe.
01:05:23.000And this is also a very unique aspect of human communication and civilization.
01:05:27.000We have to adhere to the principles and the ideologies of that tribe.
01:05:33.000So you just take on all these thoughts.
01:05:35.000And it's one of the real problems with only having two choices in this country when it comes to politics and when it comes to just styles of life, you know?
01:05:44.000And there's so many people that take great relish in switching teams, too, which is interesting, right?
01:05:49.000It's like, I was a liberal my whole life, and then one day I woke up and realized I was being a moron, you know?
01:05:55.000And now I'm a pro-Second Amendment, pro-Trump, MAGA, make America great, keep America great.
01:06:01.000It's interesting, because those are sometimes the most...
01:06:05.000The most passionate supporters of the new side, whether they're newly liberal or newly conservative or, you know, some of the people that are the most Interesting to talk to are people that used to be vegans and are now carnivore.
01:06:20.000They just eat meat and I was realizing I was being a fool and like, oh my god.
01:06:27.000It's with almost every style of living.
01:06:31.000You can find a contrary style that people find appealing.
01:06:34.000You know, there's people that used to be atheists that become Muslims and they wear, you know, the hijab and they fully adhere to the Quran.
01:06:42.000It's really, really interesting because I've spent a lot of time watching religious scholars online talk and watching them preach.
01:06:55.000And there's something, and as a person who's very agnostic, when I watch that, it's appealing to me.
01:07:02.000There's a certain aspect of the confidence that they have when they're talking about what God wants or what Allah has in store for you when you die or what you should do because it's written in this particular religious text.
01:07:17.000The confidence that they have when they describe these things is very alluring, even to me.
01:07:22.000It's not like I'm going to join, but I'm sitting there in front of my computer and I'm recognizing, oh, I see the appeal here.
01:07:31.000It's not that it's working on me, but it's attractive to me.
01:07:39.000And I find it incredibly fascinating, and I think it has to have some sort of an evolutionary reason.
01:07:47.000There's some sort of an evolutionary benefit that adhering And being accepting of the morals and the ethics and the ideology of the tribe, that's how you stay alive.
01:07:59.000That's how you find other like-minded people that stick with you.
01:08:03.000Yeah, I'm glad you do that because that's really the only way to figure out why people believe whatever it is they believe.
01:08:09.000So monitor your blood pressure when I say this.
01:08:41.000But just in general, I mean, a good Hitler biography like by Ian Kershaw, the definitive biography, it's two massive volumes each, or like 600 pages long.
01:08:49.000I mean, it really gives you insight what he was thinking, why he did what he did, why the people responded the way they did, and so on.
01:08:55.000And, but we should be able to do that without somebody saying, how can you take Hitler's perspective?
01:09:01.000Because I just want to understand, you know, why evil happens.
01:09:04.000I mean, my friend and colleague Roy Baumeister wrote that great book on evil, in which he actually went and interviewed serial killers and rapists in prison and said, you know, why'd you do it?
01:09:14.000And, you know, he discovered that they all had this perspective like, well, this is why I did it.
01:09:20.000You know, I had a crappy childhood or, you know, I felt that, you know, that it was totally justified.
01:09:24.000That guy dissed me or she cheated on me or they all had justifications.
01:09:29.000And it was kind of interesting to see the rationalizations behind their arguments.
01:09:34.000Now, from the victim's perspective, the perpetrator is just pure evil.
01:09:38.000He did it because he enjoys the suffering of other people.
01:09:41.000Now, there are some You know, psychopaths or sadists that do that, but they're very small in number.
01:09:47.000Very tiny percentage of the population.
01:09:49.000Most people in prison that are killers, they did it for moralistic reasons.
01:09:53.000You know, he took my parking spot, so we got in a fight and then I killed him.
01:09:57.000Or, you know, this guy slept with my girlfriend and so I had to do something and defend my honor and one thing led to another and here I am in prison.
01:10:04.000They almost all have good moralistic reasoning.
01:10:07.000The problem is not that we don't have enough morality.
01:10:10.000Actually, we have too much morality, too much moralizing about other people that are harming us.
01:10:15.000So, you know, back to the free speech issue.
01:10:18.000The moment you say, we're going to create a category called hate speech.
01:10:25.000Well, you know, so I document in the opening page that this really begins the United States in 1919 with the Schenck versus the United States decision by the United States Supreme Court.
01:10:52.000Because the 14th Amendment protects your right to bodily autonomy, and when the government says, we're drafting you into the military and we're sending you to Europe, in this case for the European Great War, you know, we now own your body for the next four years.
01:11:08.000Okay, so this is what, and so here's the famous lines from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck versus the United States, that we're all familiar with.
01:11:46.000Okay, so you might say, okay, so somebody incites a group to riot and cause violence or something like that, so that's going to be called hate speech.
01:11:55.000But note what he considered at the time a clear and present danger.
01:12:24.000Category creep or category expansion happened where more and more things got put into the bin of clear and present danger.
01:12:30.000So you're now doing something that I consider to be a clear and present danger, a threat to our nation, our state, our community or whatever.
01:12:37.000So that category just got bigger and bigger.
01:12:39.000So back to why liberals used to defend free speech and now it's more conservatives doing it and liberals are in favor of censorship begins with this idea of something like in the 60s where we began to become sensitive to the words we use to describe other people.
01:12:53.000So, the N-word to describe African Americans is obviously the one we'd all agree with.
01:12:59.000Okay, what about the C-word to describe women, or called Jews kikes, or Vietnamese, call them gooks, or whatever?
01:13:06.000Yeah, yeah, those are all hate speech, so the bin starts getting larger and larger, and then all of a sudden you end up with these lists of microaggressions.
01:13:12.000I reprint one in the book from UCLA. The entire University of California system in 2014 issued this long list of things you can't say, like Where are you from?
01:13:22.000Or, wow, you're good at math, to someone who's not Asian.
01:13:27.000These are now considered hate speech that could trigger people's feelings of being hurt, and that is a form of clear and present danger to the sort of serenity of our community.
01:13:39.000And all of a sudden, this category is now huge.
01:13:42.000Is where are you from really on that list?
01:14:03.000But it's just bizarre that where are you from would be considered a microaggression.
01:14:07.000We can't make things so sensitive and this is one of the things that I hope comes out of this horrible tragedy that we're experiencing, is that people realize what actually is important and we spend much less time concentrating on stuff that's not really important because there's no real problems.
01:14:26.000One of the problems with society being so good And this is arguably the best time ever in human history.
01:14:34.000And Pinker points to that with statistics and gets criticized, like harshly criticized by people on the left that say, no, it's not.
01:14:46.000And then they'll start going crazy about all the things that are wrong in the world.
01:14:49.000And he's saying like, yeah, no one's denying the things that are wrong in the world.
01:14:52.000There's always been things wrong in the world.
01:14:55.000There are less things wrong in the world today than ever before.
01:14:59.000And one of the reasons why people can get upset about these things that many people consider to be not that significant, like asking someone, where are you from, is because there's no war.
01:15:15.000There's no real horrible tragedy that's taking place every day in our communities.
01:15:20.000You know, I had a friend, my friend Shuki was from Israel.
01:15:24.000And I went over to his house, and they'd be playing bongos and laughing and dancing and singing, and I'm like, I go, why are Israelis that come to America, like, why are you guys so fun?
01:15:58.000You know, he was a really fun-loving guy because he'd experienced some tragedy and because he'd experienced this horrific condition in the Middle East.
01:16:08.000Whereas here in America, when things get better, we find more shit that's not that important to complain about.
01:16:16.000I think in a way it's a sign of moral progress in as much as It used to be people would protest really horrific inequalities and prejudices and bigotry against African Americans and so on.
01:16:28.000Well, we've improved so much on that, and I wish the left would take more credit for that because liberals were drivers of the civil rights movement.
01:16:36.000So when they now say, you know, things are as bad as they've ever been or worse than they've ever been for African Americans and so on, in a way they're saying, you know, our immediate ancestors who supported these Well,
01:17:01.000it's also statistically foolish because it's inaccurate.
01:17:08.000You know, I mean, we should reinforce the positive.
01:17:13.000But when you see, like, a campus eruption at Yale over, you know, the Halloween costumes business with Nicholas Christakis, you know, I mean, you know, we all looked at that and went, oh, my God, this is ridiculous.
01:17:24.000But in a way, it's a sign of progress.
01:17:26.000Like, students in the 60s used to, you know, protest the Vietnam War or, you know, the way blacks were treated in the South.
01:17:31.000Those are, you know, those are really legitimate things to complain about and protest about.
01:17:38.000There aren't as many of those around anymore for students to get all riled up about, and they still have those moral impulses, like, I want to promote what's right, and I want to be against evil, and I'm all fired up here with my moral module dialed up to 11, and I'm going to go out on the streets.
01:17:55.000You know, people, that's cultural appropriation, and so on.
01:17:59.000I remember there was a – I tell the story in a book about this Taco Tuesday at Cal State Fullerton.
01:18:05.000I was invited to give a speech there years ago about protecting free speech over this issue that caused the campus to just erupt in protest about Taco Tuesday.
01:18:55.000It's not like we're saying that white people created it or anything like that.
01:19:00.000And cultural appropriation is so ridiculous in so many ways, but one of the most ridiculous ways it is is that It prevents people from enjoying some amazing aspects of the diverse cultures that we all coexist with, especially here in America.
01:19:15.000I mean, this is such a legitimate melting pot.
01:19:18.000I think it's amazing that you can go to all these different places.
01:19:22.000There's a guy, I'm trying to remember his name, Rick Bayless, I believe his name is.
01:19:27.000And he's a famous Mexican chef, but he's not Mexican.
01:19:32.000But he cooks Mexican food and he loves Mexican cuisine.
01:19:35.000He takes all these trips to Mexico to learn with the Mexican masters.
01:19:39.000And he has a famous restaurant in Chicago where he has a full, authentic Mexican menu.
01:19:57.000Like, do you have to be born in a certain patch of dirt to enjoy a style of food?
01:20:01.000And don't you think that he is actually boosting the signal and letting people know that there's some amazing things that come out of Mexico?
01:20:18.000He talks openly about the various parts of the country of Mexico, where this style of cooking came from, and how it emanates from the traditional ingredients, and he cooks them in traditional ways.
01:20:40.000There's not only these perverse reversals, because it used to be, like in the 19th century, there was this The idea of kind of a pure European culture and other cultures were somehow not as good and they define culture in a very specific way.
01:20:56.000And then, you know, kind of liberals then were pushing back against that and saying, no, no, no, you know, all cultures are equal and culture is a whole blend of different, you know, migrations and people mixing and that's what culture, that's what makes culture rich.
01:21:12.000And now all of a sudden, Liberals are saying, no, no, there's a pure, correct culture that only the people born there can use, you know, adopt those cultural features.
01:21:21.000That's the complete opposite of what liberals used to argue.
01:21:24.000Starting with anthropologists saying, no, no, no, this crazy idea that whites have, white supremacists have, and that you are European cultures, a bunch of nonsense.
01:21:33.000Europeans are just as amalgamated with lots of different cultures as anybody else.
01:21:40.000Yeah, it's a weird time, and again, I connect this to the fact that we didn't have as many real problems as we used to.
01:21:48.000And when you talk about Yale with Nick Christakis, I think there's this thing that kids do when they're coming of age.
01:21:54.000They're separated from their parents, and they want to establish that so many of these older people were wrong about the way life is, and they're wrong, and we're going to show them what's right, and we have a new way of living, we have a new way of thinking, and We want this campus to be safe.
01:22:10.000We want safe spaces and a lot of it is about taking control of their environment and enforcing their ideology and creating something that's in a lot of ways is very ego driven because they're trying to show that they're making a change in the environment around them and they have good intentions while they're doing it.
01:22:31.000It's just their brains haven't fully formed yet and they don't have a lot of life experience and this pattern This pattern shows itself over and over and over again.
01:22:41.000It's a constantly repeating pattern where these kids go away to college and become self-righteous and then try to impose their viewpoints on the older people.
01:24:59.000Even most liberals were against gay marriage, say, for example, until 2011, really, the switch began, and then 2015, it changed completely with the Supreme Court decision.
01:25:07.000But if you look at interracial marriage, that was illegal until 1967, and pretty much most Americans, including liberals, were against it.
01:25:16.000Now, conservatives are all—no one objects to interracial marriage by conservatives.
01:25:21.000They've all shifted in that liberal direction.
01:25:25.000And I think the gay marriage thing, I think that's pretty much fallen off the radar of anybody's discussions after the Kate Baker incident in Colorado.
01:25:33.000I think nobody's really talking about that anymore.
01:25:37.000Gay marriage, it's like the Seinfeld episode.
01:26:20.000First of all, I pity her that she cares.
01:26:23.000And that she's developed this ideology or she's been subjected to this ideology that she thinks there's something wrong with two gay people that are married.
01:26:47.000I would say this would be in my category of there's always going to be a few assholes driving around in their pickup truck scene in fucking Vegas.
01:26:53.000And, you know, what do you do about it?
01:26:55.000Again, just, you know, you can't give those kind of people that power over you.
01:28:11.000The idea is that you're punching down on people that are maligned and people that find themselves in a position in society where many people on the left consider them a protected class.
01:28:59.000And the problem is that those people, like the guy in the pickup truck, yelling the slurs to make people feel bad, those people still exist.
01:29:37.000Yeah, there's definitely some of that.
01:29:39.000You know, it would be great if all of the hate went away.
01:29:45.000It would be great if there was no prejudice, no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, none of those things.
01:29:53.000When you see someone acting foolish in a way that is discriminatory, one of the things about it is you recognize that this is a pattern of behavior that human beings can fall into, and it's some of the worst aspects of tribal behavior.
01:30:10.000And recognizing the folly of others is very beneficial to your own personal growth.
01:30:17.000If you're there when you see someone yell out a hateful slur to a gay couple, It's terrible that it happens, but you can experience how stupid that person has to be and how sad it is that those people exist and recognize that,
01:30:37.000okay, this is what it's like to be these people.
01:30:43.000It's like when you see people making mistakes and doing terrible things and doing dumb things, the good thing about it is you can learn from other people's foolish thoughts.
01:30:55.000Yeah, well, research shows that when you know somebody, say, who's gay, you're less likely to be homophobic, just the exposure to them.
01:31:02.000And so part of the effect of cause of moral progress is this bottom-up.
01:31:07.000Now, sometimes you have to pass laws to get people to change, like to abolish slavery in the United States.
01:31:16.000And, you know, sometimes you have to send in the federal troops, like I think it was Eisenhower did that, to desegregate Alabama schools that were segregated.
01:31:25.000And you remember the governor said, you know, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.
01:31:31.000And I forget who was president at the time, he said, no, you're segregating, and we're sending the You're integrating your schools and we're sending in federal troops, men with guns, to make sure you do it.
01:32:21.000Television scripts, movie scripts, the way characters talk.
01:32:24.000Richard Dawkins makes this point about you could pinpoint to the decade when a novel was written based on the words that are used to describe Jews, blacks, and women.
01:32:34.000But no one said, okay, we're going to pass laws to say you can't use these words to describe Jews, blacks, and women.
01:32:40.000We all just change the way we talk about other people in a way that's more liberal, that's more all-encompassing, that's more egalitarian in that sense.
01:32:50.000And it's not clear how exactly that happened, just incrementally, little bit by bit.
01:32:55.000It's like trying to figure out when a word started to be used.
01:33:36.000It's just expanding our consciousness, expanding the moral sphere, just including more people in your honorary...
01:33:43.000Circle of friends and family members or honorary family members or people that you will treat with respect.
01:33:50.000That has been happening just tiny bits every day, a little bit here and there, and over the decades you see it when you look back at the numbers like Steve Pinker does.
01:34:00.000But it's hard to pinpoint the day that that happened.
01:35:37.000So they eventually wind up giving up on their racism and they're friends with him now.
01:35:43.000And it was more important to them to be friends with him and to continue their friendship with him Than it was for them to stay in the KKK. And he's had, you know, these guys who are like henchmen for the KKK quit,
01:36:01.000And he brought in all these robes that these guys have given him, including like Nazi flags that they gave him and the bands they wear around their sleeves and Nazi uniforms.
01:37:41.000And so the way this is tested is they measure the kinds of things that people read or they actually have them read passages, like from a Jane Austen novel.
01:37:50.000And then they take this eye test, this test where you look at just a block of eyes, like I would show you a picture of just this, where you can kind of see the way the corner of my eyes is squinting or not or whatever, what the emotions are.
01:38:05.000And they have like six different emotions.
01:38:07.000And then you have to guess what the emotion is of this picture you're looking at.
01:38:11.000They have hundreds of them you go through.
01:38:13.000And anyway, the correlation was that people that read a lot of Of novels or that kind of fiction that has that interchangeable perspective are better at mind reading.
01:38:25.000They're better at reading emotions in the eyes.
01:38:28.000Anyway, a lot of this hasn't been replicated yet, but it's kind of new, but still the idea is that The rise of the novel since the Enlightenment, in which just common people become more literate, and literacy rates were going up over the centuries.
01:38:43.000It used to be like 10% of the population was literate.
01:38:49.000So as people start reading more, and then they start reading novels, they start taking the perspective of others.
01:38:55.000So, you know, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, It was the first time most whites had ever read anything about what it was like to be a slave.
01:39:05.000And they were horrified, like, oh my god, I had no idea that this is what it's like.
01:39:09.000And Abraham Lincoln famously said when he met her, so you're the little woman that started this great war.
01:39:15.000You know, in a way, that's right, because a lot of people say, I've never met a black, I have no idea what a slave even is if you're in the North.
01:39:23.000Now I see why this is so abhorrent, right?
01:39:27.000And, you know, back to this idea of hate speech, again, once you go down that road, the argument I make in the book is that in the 1850s, there were Southern congressmen who fought against Northern abolitionists coming down to give speeches in the South,
01:39:45.000or publish articles in newspapers in the South, or get books published and distributed in the South that were pro-abolitionists.
01:39:54.000This could lead to slave revolts and riots and violence.
01:40:10.000And the same thing in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, there were people in the South that said, you know, when Malcolm X comes down here or Martin Luther King comes down here and they give a speech, this is not good.
01:40:20.000This is To use the Supreme Court Justice's words, a clear and present danger to the peaceful nature of our society.
01:40:29.000Yeah, that's a similar conversation I had with a friend who's very progressive.
01:40:33.000There was a thing that was going on for a while where people were saying, punch Nazis.
01:40:40.000And what I think they were really saying is they were sort of – they were proclaiming their connection to this progressive ideology, proclaiming it so much so that, hey, man, I'm willing to fucking draw blood.
01:41:30.000So the point is, who is to decide who is a Nazi?
01:41:34.000If you're saying, like, there's a guy and he's running the gas chamber at a concentration camp and he's relishing the fact that he's going to put these Jews to death, that's a Nazi.
01:41:47.000But that's not what you're talking about.
01:41:49.000You're using this word in this very sort of flippant way and it becomes very dangerous to just say punch Nazis because you're just deciding people are Nazis who are definitely not Nazis and a lot of them are actually Jewish which is patently insane.
01:42:08.000I think that meme started after somebody punched Richard Spencer Yeah.
01:42:34.000You know, and emotionally, I feel like I would just like to punch that motherfucker because that is wrong.
01:42:39.000But this is why we can't go down that road, because the whole point of a civilized society is we can't just have people punching each other.
01:42:45.000What we need to do is put that guy on a vacation with Daryl Davis.
01:42:52.000He's got to hang out with Daryl for many days at a time.
01:42:55.000And by the end of it, hopefully he would get it.
01:42:59.000You know, then hopefully he's not so, as we were talking about earlier, it's not so connected with those ideas that those ideas are him.
01:43:08.000You know, we've got to be, as a society, more flexible in the way we hang on to ideas.
01:43:16.000And I think that's something that needs to be taught to people because there's a sort of a built-in reaction that we have to defend our ideas and when you're young and you're learning how to debate things you were learning how to argue things the sting of losing is very personal and so you sort of built in these people build in these defense mechanisms into their personality into their vernacular into the way to communicate where you you do think of your
01:43:47.000ideas as a part of you But if you really care about you, you should care about objective truth, and you should care about recognizing when an idea that you're holding onto sucks.
01:43:58.000You know, if you are valuable, if you care about yourself, you should recognize when an idea that you're clinging to is not a good one.
01:44:18.000But she's basically hanging out with, I think it was Richard Spencer, Jared Taylor, and a few of the others, particularly after Charlottesville.
01:44:31.000First of all, she's an attractive woman.
01:44:33.000So you see these guys are like, oh boy.
01:44:36.000This attractive woman's paying attention to me, and so she's very disarming in this way, and she says, well, just tell me what you believe.
01:44:43.000So they articulate all their beliefs about why brown people are inferior to white people and so on, and she's like, you know, I'm brown.
01:44:49.000They're like, oh, this doesn't apply to you.
01:45:16.000We put them into bins, cognitive bins, so we can keep track of them and distinguish them from others.
01:45:22.000Unfortunately, we do that with people.
01:45:24.000Yeah, and it's a normal thing that people have done since the beginning of time to sort of recognize who's in your tribe and who's not.
01:45:32.000Back when we were these little groups of 50 people, and we'd get invaded by another group of 50 people, and you had to be loyal to your group.
01:45:41.000My friend Jared Diamond tells a story of, you know, he goes to Papua New Guinea every year to go birding, and then now...
01:45:48.000I've been doing anthropology work as well.
01:45:50.000But back in the day, he said they would go out birding and he'd have one of his Papua New Guinean hunter-gatherers with him on some hiking trail somewhere and they've got their binoculars and so on.
01:45:58.000And they encounter some stranger from another tribe and Jared's like, hey, let's go talk to that guy.
01:46:03.000And his buddy is like, are you out of your mind?
01:46:26.000You know, like my favorite line from A Few Good Men, where Jack Nicholson is schooling the Tom Cruise character, you know, about, you know, you can't handle the truth.
01:48:03.000Yeah, but it's also, hey, if the fucking grid goes down and there's no power, you should have at least a certain amount of food to sustain you for a little while.
01:49:42.000But we also want to do the right thing.
01:49:45.000But we need some kind of norms and laws and customs or whatever in place to kind of attenuate the inner demons and accentuate the better angels and that everybody can see that.
01:49:55.000And then they feel better about, like, okay, I'm just going to buy one and I'm not going to hoard or whatever.
01:50:02.000There's interesting research, Richard Nisbet and his colleagues, on the culture of honor that's more common in the South than in the North.
01:50:09.000In that, in a culture of honor, you solve your own problems, you don't turn to authorities or the state, kind of in general on average.
01:50:17.000Also in the South, particularly in African American communities, law enforcement and the judicial system has not been very fair.
01:50:36.000So Nisbet did these famous experiments that are kind of amusing now, where he'd have subjects come in and fill out a form for some fake experiment they were doing.
01:50:45.000And then you have to walk down the hall and give the form to the person in that room at the end of the hall.
01:50:50.000In the hallway, there's like a bank of lockers or filing cabinets or something, and there's somebody working there.
01:52:02.000And if the state's not doing it, if the state says, we're going to do that, so you don't have to do it, so we're going to disarm the citizenry, and we're going to take care of that through a court system and a police system and so on.
01:52:12.000But if they're not doing it, or they're doing it unjustly, and some communities like African-American communities are treated differently, then of course they're going to push back.
01:52:22.000So that's why there's more gun sales and more homicides in the South and in the North.
01:52:27.000Anyway, I just thought of that when you mentioned that.