Moral Circles & The Conservative Brain
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Summary
In this episode, we look at a chart that shows the difference between what people think and what the actual data says about ideological differences in the moral circle, and why it's so hard to make sense of it.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. It is wonderful to be chatting with you today. Today, we are going to go in
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to the famous circles or charts of interest. It comes from a study titled Ideological Differences
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in the Expanse of the Moral Circle. And so this is a moral circle chart that everybody loves to
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show. And I wanted to go into this in an episode because one, what the study actually says versus
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what people think it says is hugely misinterpreted, mostly because the people who wrote the study
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made a mistake in the way they described the procedure of the experiment, which led people
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to completely misunderstand what was being shown in the graph, because the graph is intuitively not
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what you would expect it to be. So there is actually data that looks at what people think
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this is, which is on average, what conservatives and progressives care about. But it's not the
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graph that you think you're looking at, okay? So first, what a lot of people think that this
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graph shows that I have shown you is sort of moral expanses of what people care about. Where do they
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put their intention with each layer of this circle representing moving out from like yourself to your
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family to out, out, out. So let's go over what the various rings mean. The innermost layers include
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category. It's like immediate family, closest friends, et cetera. Then you have the innermost
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layers, sort of the middling layers, all people you've ever met, all people in your community,
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all people in your country, which reflects sort of a broader sense of community. Then you have
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the outer layers. These encompass all humans, all mammals, all living things in the universe,
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including nymphs and trees. And then you have the very outermost layer, which is all things in
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existence, like rocks and everything like that, okay? And what a lot of people interpret this chart
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is meaning is the average of what conservatives and progressives care about. And in a way it's
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telling because not a lot of people pushed back against this interpretation. I.e., you see here
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conservatives care about things like family, friends, their countrymen. Restives, in this
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interpretation, care the most about things like rocks and plants and stuff like that.
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Okay. And well, I mean, people intuitively hear this and they're like, yeah, that sounds like the
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type of brain dead thing a progressive would care about. The problem is, is they did ask that question
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in the survey. It's just the data that they collected from asking that question was shown in a separate
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chart, which I will show you in a second. And this chart shows data around the question of what is
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the furthest extent of the things you care about, which makes progressives look a little less crazy.
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I.e., conservatives often do not really care. It actually makes the conservatives look a little
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sociopathic, with many conservatives not really caring much outside of their family, their friends,
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et cetera. Yeah. And with, and I, and progressives being like almost sort of sociopathic in the other
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extreme. I care about the universe and everything. I care about all things. Yes. Yeah. So let's look
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at the real graph that, that actually looked at the answers to this rating and you'll see why nobody
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shares it because it's done terribly and it's hard to interpret. Now, if you saw this graph,
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you'd think that the first graph was the, what do you care about most? Not the extent of your
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beliefs. And this graph was the extent of your beliefs question, but no, they did it oppositely
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because they were bad at their jobs. Good God. That was great for memes. And they haven't really
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gone back and commented on it much because they're scientists and they don't like that it's become
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like a meme thing. And they feel kind of bad about messing it up to begin with. They sort of like
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my read of what's going on here. But what you can see from this chart is this took the thing that you
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care about most on average, basically gave people a number of tokens and you can slot them into
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different categories. You could put like all your tokens on family and only like one or two on country
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and stuff like that. Okay. Or you could distribute your tokens more evenly. And so when you divided people
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into human versus non-human categories, what you see here is that generally the more progressive
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somebody was, the less they cared about human things, more plants, animals, space rocks.
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Or more, I would argue the more equally you care about all things.
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Well, including non-human things. Yes. Including non-human things.
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This is assigning value to non-human things, which I think is weird, but okay. And then I'll put another
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graph on screen here, which can give you a bit more because it shows like the error bars on each of
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these or the margins. So you can get an idea of how much they separate from each other. And what you'll notice
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here is some interesting things, but in general, the broad trend is that yes, liberals actually do
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care about non-human things more. Now, I want to, now suppose you're like, okay, but what if we did
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like a heat map of what people were caring about? Okay. We graphed what people are caring about. And then we're
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going to go into the neuroscience of this because the conservative and progressive brain are actually a little
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different. Okay. Oh. So here you can see like a depth map or heat map of where people were actually
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clicking. And it kind of showed that yes, the conservatives largely viewed their loyalty in
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tranches, i.e. a lot of them were really loyal to family. A lot of them were really loyal to country.
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And then you have a smaller like out there group, whereas progressives are much more unified in their
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beliefs with sort of a out there, probably all plants and animals. Yeah. Like it's very,
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it's much more outwardly focused with very little emphasis put on the nearest circle.
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Yeah. And I, I'd say that I also understand this conservative idea of, okay, I'm distributing
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tokens. What do I care about? It's going to be family a lot in country a lot. Yeah. Or when I think
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of country, I mean like wider cultural system that I'm a part of. Right. Maybe not necessarily exactly
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like just a country for arbitrary, like countrymen's sake. Yeah. And I think that's the way a lot of
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people would interpret that. And then the second graph here that I'm showing, what you can see is
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approximate distance from center, progressive versus conservative. And you can see that what
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you actually get is progressives actually care about almost everything more, except for family,
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where the conservatives. That makes so much sense that you always make the point
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that like the urban monoculture works like a cult by starting with a separation between the person
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and their family and their support network. The therapist goes and finds about all the terrible
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things that supposedly were done by this person's parents in their childhood. And there's a lot of
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hatred for one's inherited group and their traditions because they're backwards and savage.
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Right. Yeah. So I think that why is this a meme before we go into neuroscience and stuff like this?
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Why is this all out there? I think because it shows something that we all know to be intuitively true,
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which is that progressives care about things outside of sort of their immediate circle.
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People will be like, well, why can't you care about everything? Why can't you just like, I guess you
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can say that, but care units are attention units. You can say care units are units of like, what are you
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weighing? Right. And somebody who distributes too many care units outside of, because that's what I'm
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saying when I'm, when I'm distributing a care unit, I'm saying when I'm making moral decisions or equations,
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how much am I going to reference things outside of my immediate community?
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And, or how much of your mental bandwidth goes toward certain things?
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Yeah. And this actually matters a lot. If I'm thinking about the type of people I want in my
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community, or I want to invest at, invest in, in members of my community, because these individuals,
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I can invest in them, but then they will make decisions or the community can invest in them and
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they will make decisions that benefit things other than the community. It's like, you know,
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you have the old grandma who you're giving money to, to try to help her and her cat. And you learn
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that she's been giving it all away to Rwanda. And you're like, well, you know, yeah, I gave you this
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cat grandmother. You were supposed to be taking care of it. Like, what are you doing? Like, it's like,
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well, I didn't give it all to Rwanda. And it's like, well, I gave you the money for you. Like,
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do you not have any loyalty to that? And it's like, no, I don't because we're Rwanda.
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Yeah. And I think that, that this is, this is why it makes sense for conservative cultures,
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i.e. cultures that have survived a long time and aren't just like made up modern philosophical
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hokum to want to reject and eject individuals who overemphasize moral weight of things far out of
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the system. I mean, I would also argue just from a logical standpoint,
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I've, I've definitely shifted from being very, very outward circle focused to very,
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very inward circle focused because I'm aware of where I, as an individual can make the most
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difference and you can make the very most difference at the local level, not, you know,
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And honestly, if you really care about Rwanda, the best way you could make a difference is probably by,
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well, one, either like donating as much of your income as you can to that and just focusing on it
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exclusively or honestly going out there and helping, like getting on the ground and helping.
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Um, if, if you can't make a lot of money and then, and then what, then it becomes your local circle.
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So now you're, you've, you've shifted the circles and now you're, you're, you're, you're an inner
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circle person. It's almost like they, they, they want to make the outer circles, their inner circles,
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but they don't. And so they're feckless. And that's, that's what bothers me.
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Yeah. It's almost like when I think having kids really switches this up for people,
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because then you get invested in this sort of the intergenerational part of life,
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investing in the next generation, thinking about how you're going to set things up for your kids,
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for your country, for your cultural group. And you begin to realize that a lot of the signaling
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of things far outside your immediate cultural group is ultimately signaling to make yourself feel
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like a good person. I think, uh, I don't think that a lot of this is actually deeply caring about
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these things as you see with a lot of progressive causes, you know, they care, they say, oh, I care
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about human suffering. And I'm like, well, population collapse is going to lead to astronomical suffering
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when social security systems and welfare systems collapse. Don't you care about that? Or I care about
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the environment. Well, then shouldn't we be doing nuclear plants? Why are you shutting all the nuclear
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plants down in Germany? Right? Like that's people who say they care about the environment doing that.
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Like that's nuts, but it's because they don't actually care. They care about looking like
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somebody who cares about the aesthetics of the environment or the aesthetics of family or, or,
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or human suffering. Whereas I think conservatives, when you are allocating your points pragmatically,
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like where am I actually going to be able to make an impact in the world? I think that that's
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a big part of why conservatives allocate their care in this way, because they know that that's where
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they can matter and where them, when you help communities that aren't your own overly, you
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typically end up one causing communities that are less healthy and cause more suffering over the time
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to proliferate and end up making your own community suffer. So just on net, you cause more suffering in
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the world. I think you look at our video on, on Nietzsche and philosophy on this, where we critique it,
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but we say, you know, it's not wrong on everything, but let's go into the, the, the brain and psychology
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of all this. Psychologically, progressives tend to score higher on traits like openness to experience
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a big five personality dimension tied to curiosity, imagination, and tolerance for ambiguity.
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They're often more comfortable with change and uncertainty, which aligns with their inclination
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towards social reform and making things up. Here it says innovation, but I'm going to say making
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things up. Conservatives on the other hand, typically score higher on conscientiousness,
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particularly the sub trait of orderliness, and they value stability, tradition, and structure.
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You see, Simone, you are always meant to be a conservative. Orderliness, conscientiousness.
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Oh, and why I was the black sheep of my family as I grew up in California.
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Low anxiety, structure, order. This can make them more skeptical of rapid change and more focused on
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preserving established norms. And, and I think that this is not as much what we see from modern
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conservatism because we live in an odd time where the dominant culture is a progressive culture
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and to maintain tradition. And what the conservatives largely make up today is people who are rebelling
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against a domineering and fascist like social order, attempting to force people to live and think
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what it believes. If you look, for example, let's say like the reason why the people who are labeled
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anti-LGBTQIA or whatever are anti it now, very few are anti it because they're like, this is what the
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Bible says. If you look at the most prominent leaders of this space, they're generally just anti-trans
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and started as pro-trans, but moved anti-trans when engaging more with the science and with like JK
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Rowling didn't go anti-trans because she was a Christian curmudgeon. Elon Musk didn't go anti-trans
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because he was a Christian curmudgeon. Both of these people started as avidly pro-trans and moved
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against it over time as they learned more about the the science and the social costs and the the
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nature and psychological, you know, stuff. You can look up our trans episode. We don't need to go into
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that here. But the point being is what motivates people to be a conservative today is often very
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different than what motivated them in the past, which was maintaining traditions, which I think
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changes a lot of the nature of the community. When the conservative community of today
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goes towards traditions, they go towards them, not out of a fear of change, but because they
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believe they work. Like you can look at someone like J.D. Vance, like why is he going towards
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traditions? And I love that all the four horsemen of the atheist tobacco and stuff all now said,
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because the evidence does show this, it turned out that the Christian traditions were probably better
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and we shouldn't enough with them. And the one, the Muslim one who did end up converting to Christianity,
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she even said when the people were like, why did you convert? You know, it wasn't like a
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religious argument. It was, it was a functional argument. She was depressed. She had tried
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everything and her psychologist was like, I know this is going to be offensive to you.
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And that's what did it for her. She tried and it worked and she started to feel better. And then
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And this is like Grimes saying she, she might, she might be getting Christianity because it helps
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Sometimes you just need, sometimes religious fixes problems. That's so true.
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But yeah, I think that, that, well, no, but I mean that, that, that means that the modern
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conservative today, actually the, when the old right tells the new, right, you guys have a lot
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of progressive traits or, you know, you, you guys used to be in the progressive movement. I think they're,
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they're right about both of those things, but they're misdiagnosing what's happening. What they picture
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is happening is the Overton menu, just moving window, just moving further and further to the left.
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And then people who, you know, in the nineties would have been like standard progressives in
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their ideology becoming conservatives today. And I don't think that that's, what's actually
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happening. The core reason why they look like progressives of the nineties is because that they
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are the rebels trying to buck the social order. And that's fundamentally where the new right comes in
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is most of them are people who are like, they didn't like the censorship of tech. They didn't like all
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of these like anti-reality stuff. Like, oh, men, when they transition, don't have an advantage in
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sports when like everybody knows that's like clearly, obviously not a true thing. And yet we're
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supposed to repeat it. They are people who feel like in the same way that many of them built a grudge
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against Christianity, telling them what to do in the nineties and in the eighties, that same instinct
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and those same cultures are now antagonistic against the progressives. And it's funny that
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it turned out that the way that you got these people to become Catholics, like, like say JD Vance
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or something like that was just to have atheists tell them what to do. Like, you know what?
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I'm going to become a Catholic. Damn it. And, and I actually think that this is where we're getting
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a lot of growth in Christianity today is the urban monoculture overplaying its hand and trying to force
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people to become believers. And I also think it's why when you look at faiths that are the minority
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within their region, their members are typically much more faithful, i.e. if you are a Catholic
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in a majority Protestant country and the Catholic communities in majority of Protestant countries
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are typically much stricter in their faithfulness and much more believing and in their sense of
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community than Catholics in Catholic majority countries where you see Catholicism dying out much
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more quickly in terms of fertility rates and in terms of strictness of practice. And, and I think
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that that's what we're seeing here is being a rebel is useful. And even within America, I think
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that it is fundamentally wrong to try to raise your kids to be full America American. You can be
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Americana so long as Americana is framed as a state of rebellion against those who control our society and
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the, the, the people in power and everything like that. But trying to try to push for this normalcy,
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I don't think works, but thoughts before I go further. I think you're right. And I think this
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shows up in the fact that you see lower rates of fertility in countries that are more homogeneously
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religiously conservative, like when it feels forced on you that back there's backlash.
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Emotionally fear and threat sensitivity play a big role. Studies like those from John Himmering and
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colleagues suggest conservatives have a stronger physiological response to threatening or
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disgusting stimuli, e.g. images of spiders or rotting food measured in conductance or brain activity in
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the amygdala. Yeah. The fear processing hub. This heightened sensitivity might explain a preference
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for security, authority, and clear boundaries. Progressives, while not immune to fear, seem less
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reactive to these triggers and more attuned to empathy-driven concerns, often prioritizing fairness
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and harm avoidance as seen in John Haydite's moral foundation theory. Now I note here that this has
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actually changed. John Haydite. John Haydite. Oh yeah. Where I do not think, I think in the 80s,
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a lot of the conservatives, and I mentioned this on other videos, you can check it out,
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really interesting, where we talk about conservatives motivated voters with disgust. You vote against
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gayness because of disgust, because it makes you feel disgust. This system largely just collapsed and
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fell out of favor, culturally speaking, where very little is motivated by disgust anymore. Then we had a
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system that was motivated by fear of social shame. This is the cancellation system that progressives
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really jumped onto. And the new conservative system is motivated positively through sort of vitalism,
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which you see in Trumpianism and everything like that. This idea of like, be alive, have hope in the
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future, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You think for yourself. Now, let's go start a
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fucking revolution. The entire world would be better off if these people were permanently removed
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from these platforms. Like there is no downside and only upside to see people like Candace Owens,
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Tucker Carlson, Tim Pool, never be allowed to publicly broadcast their opinions ever again.
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Tread on them! Tread the fuck all over them! Don't give a fuck about anybody that winds up at any of
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these rallies and gets shot or whatever the fuck, okay? You gotta fight for your right!
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Is free speech under threat in the UK? With the rise of so-called non-crime hate incidents,
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arrests over grossly offensive memes, can you really speak your mind in 21st century Britain?
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And there's very little disgust, but I can see why in the older disgust-based framework,
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when these studies were done, disgust would be found more among conservatives.
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Oh, here's a study I found actually, just in contrast to the one that you cited,
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that in this case, researchers found that conservatives do not appear to feel more
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disgust than liberals. Uh, when was it done? Remember, I told you that the way that people
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motivate political action changed over time. Yeah, so this is, my guess is, is disgust,
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a conservative emotion published 2019. When was yours? I told you.
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Yours was later? No, the one I did was a long time ago. That would have been like the 80s.
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What I said was, is that in the past, in the 80s and 90s, conservatives used disgust to motivate
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voting behavior. Today, they don't use disgust to motivate voting behavior. They use vitalism to
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motivate voting behavior. So it's just less. Which means that you would no longer see this trait
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clustered in conservatives like you would have historically. So that makes perfect sense and
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seems to validate my theory. Interesting. Okay. Fair enough. This is, this is interesting though,
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because I, I kind of gave up for a while on reviewing studies on conservatives and progressives,
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because after a while it became so obvious that it was just about people with agendas. Like
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basically a bunch of researchers just wanted to publish a study saying conservatives are dumb or
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conservatives are whatever. It's same. Like progressives are stupid. And, and then they,
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you just, they're, they're just not really well done. They're not very interesting. There's not much
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that I can act on. So I just, I kind of gave up on them, but I do think that when you see the averages
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that come out, you see patterns and there is, we, that, that should help us understand what's going on
00:22:04.820
and what it actually does mean to, to be more progressive versus conservative. So that it's a worthwhile
00:22:10.660
discussion and I'm glad you brought it up. If you talk about threat sensitivity, research actually
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suggests that leftists exhibit higher threat sensitivity to certain types of threats,
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such as environmental issues and social inequality when compared with conservatives.
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However, conservatives are more sensitive to what we would call real threats, such as physical
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threats or social order threats or crime and terrorism. Interestingly, social studies have shown
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that conservatives tend to be less threatened by social threats, e.g. out-groups, but more responsive
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to physical threats, which goes against what a lot of progressives would want to believe that
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conservatives are the ones afraid of people who don't think like them, which isn't true. They're
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afraid of being stabbed by somebody who doesn't think like them, but it is fundamentally the progressives
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who are more afraid and have a higher tendency of being afraid of people who think differently than them.
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I think this, this reveals though, a very deep set understanding of how you relate to the world.
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I remember, remember that interview around the pandemic that went viral of some woman who is
00:23:11.940
progressive saying that she was assaulted on, I think the New York subway and how that was just like,
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you know, normal, like she wasn't supposed to do anything about it. And I think it had to do with this
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broad concept that it's, I don't know, like it's, it's not your responsibility or there's nothing that
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you can do about these immediate physical threats. And really the, your way of relating to the world is
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so much more cerebral, so much more, I mean, if you want to be prerogative about it, you would be, or sorry,
00:23:42.500
derogative about it, you would say that it's performative, but I guess they would say that they're focusing on
00:23:48.420
the big problems that really matter. Whereas the conservative mind seems a lot more oriented around
00:23:55.300
what do I need to physically address in my immediate area now? Well, who can I actually
00:24:01.860
We try these like mass action solutions, as we've seen, whether it's, you know, social services or,
00:24:07.700
you know, UBI or anything like that, see our UBI video, they, they appear to make people worse
00:24:13.540
off intergenerationally. Yeah. Yes. And, and they appear to make cultures that they end up getting
00:24:18.900
bloated. They end up not serving their original function. Argentina is basically a case study to
00:24:23.540
all of this. The ways that progressives attempt to fix things doesn't work, but the ways that
00:24:27.780
conservatives attempt to fix things do work intergenerationally, i.e. because they're focused
00:24:32.500
on the cultures and people who they can influence, i.e. my own culture, my own community, my own people.
00:24:38.820
Yeah. And the paper I was talking about earlier is titled Who Fears Strangers and Spiders,
00:24:44.340
Political Ideology and Feeling Threatened. Neurologically, brain structure differences
00:24:50.980
pop in some studies. A 2011 study by Ryota Kanaya found that conservatives tend to have a larger
00:24:59.940
amygdala, potentially amplifying threat perception, or at least certain types of threat perception.
00:25:04.340
While progressives show more gray matter in their anterior cingulate cortex, ACC,
00:25:08.900
a region linked to conflict resolution and handling ambiguity, fMRI research also hints that conservatives'
00:25:14.580
active regions tied to rule-based reasoning more strongly, while progressives lean on areas involved
00:25:21.220
in social and emotional processing. I actually think what we're seeing here, and we've talked about
00:25:24.980
this before, is the mimetic virus. It's sort of like a self-replicating virus, which is represented
00:25:32.100
in the urban monoculture. When I mean it's a mimetic virus, I mean quite literally. It's a virus
00:25:36.820
that gets into people's heads and then starts replicating and then uses them to spread itself.
00:25:40.980
It needs a certain amount of structure, and so it's pretty bad at spreading in people below a
00:25:46.660
certain level of intelligence. In which case, those people only really conform to it when they realize
00:25:52.980
that they can use signaling their conformity to it to get other people to do what they tell them to.
00:25:58.820
This is what you see with the low IQ communities. They use the wokest concepts when they think that
00:26:05.380
they can browbeat someone into following them, or when they're afraid of bringing bowel break
00:26:10.980
Cognition is another divide. Conservatives often favor intuitive heuristic thinking,
00:26:15.780
quick gut level decisions rooted in tradition or group norms. Again, this might have changed. I don't
00:26:21.300
know. Progressives are more likely. I mean, it seems to me that now progressives make the gut
00:26:25.380
level decisions. It's interesting in looking at this research, you can see how much what aligned
00:26:31.140
people with conservatism has changed over time. It was, do you actually like, are you doing this
00:26:38.100
because of the tradition or are you doing like with progressives? Are you doing this because you're
00:26:42.180
part of the urban monoculture? Because there used to be an alliance with like elitist intellectual
00:26:46.740
culture and fighting back against the system, which, you know, you could say started with the
00:26:50.820
hippies, right? Are you actually fighting for individual freedom or are you fighting
00:26:55.380
with the ultimate goal of imposing your values on everyone else? And that sort of split, you know,
00:27:00.980
was now the progressives that are left are just the ones who want to impose their values on other
00:27:04.340
people. Yeah. Cognition is another divide. Conservatives often favor intuitive heuristic.
00:27:08.980
Yeah, sorry. I said that. Progressives are more likely to engage in analytical reasoning.
00:27:12.660
It seems to be one of your studies of like trying to make progressives sound smart.
00:27:16.420
Absolutely. Questioning assumptions and weighing abstract systems,
00:27:19.860
according to work by psychologist, John Just. This can make progressives seem overthinky to
00:27:25.380
conservatives while conservatives might strike progressives as rigid or simplistic. It's
00:27:29.700
interesting that I'm pretty sure this flipped because when I talked to progressives now,
00:27:33.220
one person has noted and I think I make questions is why do conservatives have like,
00:27:37.940
if you look at like eight of the 10 long form podcasts, why are they conservatives?
00:27:41.060
And as somebody was saying, when they were on the long form podcast, the gasm
00:27:44.500
newson has now done where he talks with conservative thinkers.
00:27:48.260
I want to get, you know, it's got a review of like 2.5 or something on, on
00:27:52.260
what's the progressives bombing it. Like, why are you giving these people?
00:27:55.860
Oh, you think that, oh my gosh, how sad is that? But conservatives are loving it though.
00:28:00.260
They're like, wow, he actually listens. Just this idea of a progressive actually listening
00:28:05.860
But the point being is the reason why conservatives have all this long form interview content and stuff
00:28:10.260
like that in long form talking content, like this show is you couldn't do this as a progressive.
00:28:15.380
Like I couldn't every day go over for like 45 minutes, something that is interesting without
00:28:21.220
updating my beliefs. It would just be telling you what you're supposed to believe. And most
00:28:25.700
progressives already know what they're supposed to believe. So they don't need to be told again.
00:28:30.900
You know, there is no curiosity about digging into these subjects because if you dig into things
00:28:37.620
like human sexuality or arousal or transness, you're bound to accidentally cross the line somewhere.
00:28:44.820
Uh, no, no, no. I, I, I listened to a decent amount of long form progressive content,
00:28:49.940
but it's mostly just building a case as to why something is something. So it doesn't need to
00:28:55.620
lead to a change in confines. So I don't really know what it is.
00:28:59.300
That is fundamentally, I think, you know, like what ContraPoints does and stuff like that,
00:29:02.820
like one long form progressive area where they do like broad philosophy, but they do it very rarely.
00:29:09.700
I don't know any that are regular shows like philosophy tube, ContraPoints, all of that stuff
00:29:16.100
So you mean just like philosophical discussion or do you mean discussion about current events?
00:29:20.100
I mean regular podcasts. If we're looking at regular podcasts,
00:29:23.540
eight of the top ten are conservative, like daily or weekly podcasts. I don't know, like the one I
00:29:29.460
can think of that's progressive is Hassan, but Hassan is mostly done in a short form context
00:29:34.340
and without really engaging with people who have different beliefs or attempting to update his view
00:29:40.020
of the world, which makes it, you know, less interesting unless you're just there for the shot
00:29:44.820
jock stuff. Hassan does very well. I mean, I do think that that's how you make progressive content
00:29:49.700
interesting is be shocking in how extreme you are, which is one reason why the progressives
00:29:56.260
who have done that and why progressives do well on platforms like TikTok and originally on systems
00:30:00.900
like Twitch before, you know, I wonder if that was moderation. Like, is it that the only reason
00:30:06.180
progressives seem to do well in any platform, whether it's Twitch because the Chinese are trying
00:30:09.540
to destroy us or old Twitter because they are very good at controlling bureaucracies and then putting
00:30:13.940
their finger on the scales. Once the finger is removed from the scales, they end up fleeing like
00:30:19.300
we've seen with TikTok. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Like, I don't spend enough time
00:30:25.380
on TikTok to be a good judge of any of this. I wonder if the blue sky is still growing.
00:30:30.100
I do too. I really do. Hmm. You're looking it up? Yeah, looking it up. It says it's gross and
00:30:36.660
slowed significantly. I mean, it would. And you get your initial boost, then it slows.
00:30:41.540
Actually, even the articles about it slowing are mostly pretty old at this point.
00:30:46.740
So, oops. I mean, it could continue to grow. I mean, it's astronomically small when compared
00:30:52.660
with two other platforms, so. Yeah. Well, any takeaways you've had from this?
00:31:01.060
That perhaps this isn't just a story of polarization. When we talk about very difficult
00:31:08.660
to cross political divides, perhaps it's also a story of a fundamental way of relating to the world.
00:31:15.780
And perhaps part of the reason why it can be so difficult for conservatives and progressives to
00:31:24.340
relate to each other and effectively communicate is because they have such a different contextualization
00:31:30.180
of self and a different contextualization of that which we must protect. So when people are talking
00:31:36.980
about protecting good things or, you know, we have to do this, it's just, it's difficult to have a
00:31:44.020
debate when your definitions are so different. I disagree pretty strongly. Yeah, I think that this
00:31:49.540
is what progressives tell themselves when they're trying to look like they're seeing both sides of the
00:31:54.180
issue. But I think the core thing is that conservatives, when they look at what they
00:31:58.260
want to protect and grow, it's typically realistic things. Like it is a real system that could potentially
00:32:04.820
work and improve the world. Whereas a lot of the progressive stuff, like shutting down nuclear
00:32:10.020
power plants and stuff like that, it's not realistic stuff. It's stuff that is based around personal
00:32:14.900
signaling. I think that that's the core difference is the conservative is okay with doing what actually
00:32:22.900
makes the world a better place, even if it makes them look like a villain. Whereas the progressive
00:32:27.220
cares more about looking like the good guy than doing good. And we've seen this from conservative
00:32:32.500
icons throughout history, like Ayn Rand, for example, like famously leaned into that. And I think that
00:32:37.700
we're seeing it even more was in the new, right? The acceptance of do the right thing, even if it makes
00:32:44.340
you, I mean, what is the pro natalist movement, but that what is hard EA.org, but that. Yeah.
00:32:48.900
Anyway, love you to death, Simone. I love you too. You're perfect.
00:32:55.540
What are we doing for dinner tonight? You can have potstickers or you can have green curry
00:33:01.380
with coconut rice. Green curry. Green curry. Your green curry is really good.
00:33:05.780
Well, then that is what you shall have, my love. Egg tower.
00:33:09.700
Go ahead. Take a bite, Octavian. It's ready for you. Whoa, whoa, whoa.