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do it there.

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Speaker 2: Thank you.

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Speaker 1: I want to welcome everyone back to the Piking Yana Show.

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Josh Neils back.

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Speaker 2: What's happening, Josh, It's going well.

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Speaker 3: Pete love talking to you. Thanks for the invite as well.

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You're a very gracious host, and we always have good conversations,

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so I'm looking forward to it today.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that. I appreciate that a lot. Thank

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you for doing the Old Glory Club live stream last week.

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Gave us some context into the JFK mess and and

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other things. But last time you were, we were Last

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time you were on, we talked about the term woke right,

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and we talked a little bit about your second book,

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Understanding Conspiracy Theories. But the new book, Intolerant Intolerant Interpretations

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is starts to go even beyond that and really starts

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to get into start tearing apart. It seems like you're

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trying to tear apart like the basis behind these conspiracy theories,

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where they came from, and basically how they grew and

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specifically you know, it's really easy to say, oh, the

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president's head exploded, and you know it looks like it

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came from the front, but you know they're saying it

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came from the back. But no, it goes much deeper

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than that. When when when you start getting into conspiracy theories.

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So you know the first part of your new book

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you you specifically talk about Richard Hofstetter and Carl Popper.

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So jump in there and start talking to you know,

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if you can start, uh, start there and take us

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down the road of where we're at, where where we

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came from to get to where we are now.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, so again thanks for having me on to talk

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about the book available with their Antelope Hill Publishing. It's

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called Intolerant Interpretations.

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Speaker 1: And uh and if you if you use code, I

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guess code pete Q five percent off. So yeah, I've

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been an adult things so cool.

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Speaker 3: Awesome, awesome. I view it as a sequel to Understanding

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conspiracy Theories. Uh, it's written that way. And yeah, as

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you pointed out, the book starts with sort of a

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genealogy of this like anti conspiracy polemic. It's called actually

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the first chapter, it's called and abbreviated genealogy because honestly,

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if we really put our thinking hats on it, probably,

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you know, we could look much further into the past

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to figure out how we got to where we are today.

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But the very recent history, very recent past, is certainly

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enough history to kind of understand the climate that we're

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in now. And so yeah, I did single out Carl Popper,

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and I singled out Richard Hofstatter for two I think

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very important reasons. I was kind of imagine myself having

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to do a rebuttal when I talk about my books

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or offer some of my arguments, and one of those,

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like my imaginary interlocutor, is, you know, well, why pick

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on Carl Popper, Why pick on Richard Hofstatter? What makes

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them so important? And there's really two reasons, one for each.

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The first reason being that that Carl Popper is basically

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the philosopher of the open society. He's the philosopher of

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the great replacement. And he's also because of his a

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lot of his intellectual work dealt with epistemology and things

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like that, he's also kind of like the philosopher for

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the anti conspiracy theory point of view. And there's two

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really important works that he wrote that I critique in

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the book. Obviously. The first is The Open Society and

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its Enemies, And it's like a seven or eight hundred book. Basically,

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it's it's it's it's like the be all and end

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all of liberal democracy apology, right, that's kind of what

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it's a seven hundred, eight hundred page book justifying why

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open societies, which is to say, liberal democracies are superior

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and preferable to closed societies. And he gives several examples

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of what constitutes a closed society NSDAP Germany, Soviet Russia,

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Fascist Europe, whether we're looking at Spain or Italy or

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Romania or really any of the countries where there was

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a fascist movement. But he even goes way back into

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human history. The original closed society was Plato. Plato's republic

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is basically the if the open society and its enemies

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is the apotheosis of liberal democracy, then Plato's republic is

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really the apotheosis the intellectual apotheosis of you know, nativist, authoritarian,

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ethnically and culturally heterogeneous states. That's what Popper. And again

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maybe some context on Popper. He was from Central Europe.

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He was from a well educated, high cultured bourgeois I

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want to say, Lutheran family. I think Richard Hofstadter came

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from a Lutheran family, so maybe Popper wasn't. But anyway,

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they were upper class Jewish ethnically Jewish living in Europe,

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and Popper in particular saw both sides of that authoritarian coin.

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He was a communist in his youth, he almost died

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at a communist rally, and then he was some time

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later obviously persecuted or felt felt the heat of the

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German Reich on his heels, and he fled Europe and

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he sought sanctuary basically in you know what we tend

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to think of as the Atlanticist states, England, the United States,

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I think even New Zealand. And so that experience informed

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his philosophy about the superiority of liberal democracies, and as

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a kind of second hand to that work, in the

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mid fifties, he published a very very short essay like

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three pages called The Conspiracy Theory of Society, and basically

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this was his anti conspiracy polemic. He compares in that

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short essay, he basically compares conspiracy theory epistemology to something

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like homer or Homeric thinking, where that you've got this

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mount olympus of deities that are really pulling all the strings.

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And more than just pulling all the strings, they're specifically

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moving people into place and positioning them to take important roles.

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So he basically says, you know, when you abandon, when

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you abandon God, you elevate man into this theistic state

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and so men become these supreme agents, capable of all

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kinds of unexpected, unanticipated, shadowy conduct.

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Speaker 1: And what's interesting there is, immediately you know, I think

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of Raizard Luguco his book The Demon and Democracy, where

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he compares democracy and communism and just shows how parallel

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they are in having to sell themselves. And all that

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does is it sounds like he's selling. He's doing his

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best to sell liberal democracy while either hiding or not

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understanding that in order for liberal democracy to continue, a

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conspiracy does have to happen. But it's not one continuous conspiracy.

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It's one conspiracy takes over and that gets planted by

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another conspira or is he another and it's just not

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on down the line, I mean you have you just

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have competing conspiracies the whole time.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, what's a chain of conspiracy? Like a never ending

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chain of conspiracies? Well, what Popper says is different. He

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actually says that things that we don't like Basically, he argues,

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we attribute outcomes that we don't like to conspiratorial origins.

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But what he claims is really happening is that there

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are simply unexpected consequences sort of like that old line

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the road to hell is paved with good intentions, like

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the road to conspiratorial thinking is paved with unintended consequences.

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So and he says things like, you know, economic depressions,

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military conflicts, societal collapse, the whole list. These are these

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are all things that that come about as a consequence

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of other political actions that are being undertaken, and that

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are social theorists responsibility is to trace those lines and

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figure out the causality, right, But ultimately it's never a conspiracy.

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Man does not replace God. Everything can be understood empirically

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through proper social theory, proper social theorizing. And so that's

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why I chose Carl Popper, because he has such a

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monumental legacy and the more you dig into it, actually

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the kind of creepier it gets. A lot of the

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I will say a lot, but some of the most

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well known names in contemporary society, people who are strong

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advocates of not only liberal democracy, but also like the

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censorship regime and using state power to prosecute political minorities,

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which is something that Karl Popper advocated for. You find

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that a lot of the really relevant people today were

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also connected to Carl Popper. Cass Sunstein was a student

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of Carl Popper. George Soros was a student of Carl Popper.

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I think Richard Hofstadter may also have been at one

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point affiliated with him, so he, beyond his own works,

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Carl Popper was a mentor to, or had close relationships

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with basically anyone who's ever had a bugaboo about nativism,

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so he was a really obvious example to pick. Richard Hofstadter,

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on the other hand, I think, if I had to guess,

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it is kind of a name that not many people

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think of anymore. He died somewhat early on, but he

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had a very successful career as an academic historian and

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public intellectual in the mid twentieth century. Many of the

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several of his books won Polser Prizes, so he was

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really really krem de la Cremuh. The Age of Reform

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was a Politz Serprise winning book. I believe that The

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Paranoid Style in American Politics was another Politz Surprise winning essay,

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and in both of those works, uh, Carl Popper, excuse me.

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Richard Hofstadter basically takes aim at populists, rural types middle

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you know, flyover Middle America with San Francis would describe

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as Middle American radicals, the kinds of people who probably

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donated to the John Birch Society, the kinds of people

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who probably supported the Tea Party, the kinds of people

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who became Maga. Basically, in those two works, he's going

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after populism, and in particular he's going after what he

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calls the paranoid style in American politics. And Richard Hofstadter

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also has his own legacy of influencing academics to write

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anti conspiracys, and his most famous essay was the Paranoid

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Style of American Politics. Basically he uses Freudian psychoanalysis as

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a in an artful way. That's his own word. By

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the way, I'll give you this this second sort of

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two a to why I chose these guys. But it's

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because of they tell them themselves. Basically in their works

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they tell them themselves repeatedly, so it makes for a

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good learning.

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Speaker 2: This is a this is a.

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Speaker 1: Running theme with a certain group of people. They can't

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help themselves.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, and in particular, Popper and Hopstat are like at

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the top of the mountain of just letting you know

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exactly what's on their mind. That's how you can, at

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least for me, it's like, if you want to present

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an argument and you want to present people as spearheads

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or or figureheads of a certain movement or whatever, I mean,

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you don't want leave the audience feeling like you arbitrary

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really picked these people or whatever. So I mean it

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was really great that in both cases they just they

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just telling themselves. So in the essay of Paranoid Style

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in American Politics, he's talking about Barry Goldwater. He coins

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this term pseudo conservatism, and he talks about the paranoid style.

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So he says he uses paranoid in an artful way,

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appropriating it from psychoanalysis and psychology. I think he says

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something like, in the way that a historian of art

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would describe a certain period as barok or whatever, he

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wanted to use paranoid style in that same way. So,

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which is like a way of saying, you're not doing

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it academically, you're not doing it empirically, you're kind of

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literally bastardizing language to serve a partisan end. Like if

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you read between the lines, he's basically saying, I'm taking

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this term that has a very specific meaning, an application

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I'm taking it outside of his discipline and I'm plopping

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it in a completely different discipline, in an informal way,

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just because you know, and there's.

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Speaker 1: Like so much of that today, so much of that today.

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I don't know if you saw. And I hate to

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even talk about this person because it just gives him attention.

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But Joel Berry from the Babylon b he said, there's

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going he said, very soon, progressives are going to start

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embracing white identity, square peg round hole man, what the

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hell are you doing?

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Speaker 3: Yeah?

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Speaker 1: Yeah, And it seems you know, and and then obviously

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the most obvious one is the main wook right guy.

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What the hell is the same James Lindsay. I mean,

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he's forget he has nothing is he's incoherent. At this point,

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it's gotten to the point where they they can't make

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They know that they've lost. They know that neoliberalism is dying,

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they know that the open society is falling apart what

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they love the most, and they're doing every and it's

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this isn't right after World War Two when you have

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a couple of Jews who are basically advocating the open

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society because they don't want to go back to what

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it was just you know, ten years ago, and you know,

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they need a society that they can blend in in

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and yeah, I mean we're past that at this point,

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and especially especially since October twenty twenty three, which I

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think is like literally a changing of the age, like

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like we're in a new age now.

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Speaker 3: I totally agree. So Hofstadter basically, and there's a couple

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I don't want to spoil all of the really really

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juicy bits of it, but there's so many like telling

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on yourself moments, some of them like they weren't obvious

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at the time. But there's one passage where he talks about, Uh,

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there's a famous French psychoanalyst, Jacques lacan.

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Speaker 2: Uh.

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Speaker 3: He's sort of like a here's a structuralist, he's a feminist. Basically,

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he's like your average like shit lib French intellectual had

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all of the bad you know positions, political positions.

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Speaker 1: Like a precursor to post like a precur precursor to

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the French postmodernist or something like that.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, basically one generation earlier than that, sort of overlapping

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into the that movement getting its legs off the ground.

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But there's a famous Lakhanian line that I think most people,

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most readers in this sphere have kind of come across

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one way or another, gets quoted a lot. He says,

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you know, if you're paranoid, if you if you fear

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that your wife is cheating on you, even if she is,

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you're still paranoid, and it's illegitimate to have that fear.

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So your wife is cheating on you, you're suspicious that

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she's cheating on you, you're pathological. So look like Hofstadter

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takes that and he uses it in the context of

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floridization in the water supply. He says, you know, if

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even if it came out to be true at some

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point in the future that the government was putting contaminating

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the water supply for expressly political even socialist reasons, would

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that's still exemplary of the paranoid style. And then lo

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and behold, decades later, that's basically exactly what happened. And

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that's like only the tip of the iceberg, basically in

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terms of contaminating the food supply, the water supply, the soil,

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the air, everything that we kind of consume and and

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are just moving through even passively, like we all know

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we all have the receipts on that. It's not a

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mystery there's it's basically pretty much an open and shut case.

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It did happen, It happened for expressly political reasons. Still

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people still want it to happen. RFK Junior, as he

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was being sworn in as head of HHS, basically said,

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we're going to take the floride out of the water.

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So it's it's like, oh, but you're still a crank

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if you think that, You're still a crazy person if

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any of that troubles you in any way. So to

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my imaginary interlocutor who doesn't see any reason to specifically

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target these two people as being progenitors of this way

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of thinking, that's why that's kind of my rebuttal I

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was going to say before, there's like a two A

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aspect to that, or like you know, like a tertiary

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aspect to that, and it's it's entirely the way in

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which these these academics basically told you what the final

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outcome of their preferred political program would be. Towards the

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end of the Open Society and its enemies, Popper basically says,

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you know, if we followed this open society policy to

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its final conclusion. Then it's not only conceivable, I'm paraphrasing,

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by the way, just for the audience at home, it's

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not only conceivable but highly likely that you would have

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mass scale a demographic replacement. You know that it would

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so rupture the health and stability and coherency of an area,

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But the open society is still better, so we have

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to do it. So these are two guys who basically

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laid out a sort of series of justifications for liberal democracy.

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They also issued a series of polemics against people who

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are skeptical of liberal democracy, and they also kind of

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spilled the beans on what's wrong with their preferred political program.

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So it's very difficult for me to find like a

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better example of the kind of thing I'm trying to

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communicate to the audience, which is all of these kinds

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of things racialism, conspiracism, anti liberalism are inexorably tied to

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one another. And it's not for arbitrary reasons. It's for

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like first principles political theory. And also just like I

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was gonna say, urban planning, not urban planning, but like

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like basically like state craft and and and and and.

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Speaker 2: Social engineer social engineering.

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Speaker 3: Right, yeah, yeah, like your demographic construction things like that,

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social engineering is more succinct. So I started with them.

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Speaker 4: Uh.

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Speaker 3: And the more I read that and the more I

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do this kind of writing, I just feel like vindicated

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in that decision because they just keep proving to be

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relevant over and over again.

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Speaker 1: Before we move on to the next next one, the.

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Speaker 2: Term conspiracy.

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Speaker 1: Theorist Carl Popper wrote, use that term, and I believe

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it was nineteen fifty seven. And then there's this it's

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been revealed that the CIA was using that, like head said, Oh,

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that's the term we need to use against against people

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who are talking about the JFK.

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Speaker 2: Is that is that right? Or is it?

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Speaker 4: Uh?

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Speaker 2: Or should we be looking at Popper for that?

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Speaker 3: I you know, I've heard that. I've heard that basically

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all of my life. I've never independently researched that. I've

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kind of taken it at face value because I've heard

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other and I've seen other, you know, well regarded researchers

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make that claim. Before I would say, I would say

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this that there there's more than one road to critiquing

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liberal democracy, and I do think it comes down to

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sort of your specialization. I think people who are more

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into who are more like wonks and more into political culture,

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and more into the nitty gritty of institutions and and

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and the ways they sort of like octopus tentacles, get involved,

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have their have their their tentacles in every other pot.

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Because obviously the CIA has a long, a long history

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of social engineering. I'm actually just now reading this great

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book Who Paid the Piper, which is basically it's by

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uh Francis Stoner Saunders, and is talking about the CIA

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during the Cold War, and they're anti communist initiatives. And

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now people like James Burnham were you know, in effect,

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you know, whether explicitly or implicitly doing Cold War culture

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war stuff on behalf of America against the Communists.

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Speaker 1: I've kind of always known that it was kind of

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obvious if you work at if you were working at

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National Review when he worked there, you were you were

359
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tied to the CIA in some way.

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Speaker 3: Yeah. So well, naively, I actually didn't know that. I

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was very late to the James Burnham train. Everyone was

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reading him during COVID and earlier, and I picked him

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up like two years ago, and my head was my

364
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hat was blown off, my head I was like, Wow,

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this is great. And then and then like a week

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later someone was like, yeah, but Burnham was the spook.

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I'm like, wait, what so.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but that doesn't But but the thing the thing

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about it is that doesn't bother me because you know,

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when I think about the first two books that he wrote,

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when he wrote The manager or Revolution, he wrote Machiavellians,

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I can't be one hundred percent sure he was spooked

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up at that point. He was, you know, possibly, but

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still it doesn't mean that he was writing those books

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for any other any other intention then, because he that's

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that's the book he wanted to write at the time.

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Speaker 3: Yeah, in particular, The Managerial Revolution seems like a relatively

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non ideological kind of academic work. But anyway, I think

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there's probably multiple roads you can take. And for people

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who are you know, as they say on the internet,

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like theory cells, who are into the philosophical tradition, I

382
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don't think, you know, focusing on Carl Popper versus focusing

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on the cia that there's any obstacle or that there's

384
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any hurdles, or that they're not congruent with one another.

385
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This just happens to be the road that I took,

386
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and so I think there's legitimacy to both. I mean,

387
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obviously the CIA is involved in political assassinations, regime change coups,

388
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so we're If anything, I think what is worth extracting

389
00:27:12,400 --> 00:27:16,000
out of this is sort of the if you want

390
00:27:16,039 --> 00:27:25,480
to say, multidisciplinary or multi factorial, multi personnel engine behind

391
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liberal democracy. That you can come at it from the

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popular culture space, you can come at it from the

393
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academic space, you can come at it from the intelligence

394
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services space, and basically it all leads you to the

395
00:27:37,759 --> 00:27:44,640
same thing that you've got political conflict, rivalry, subterfuge, all

396
00:27:44,640 --> 00:27:47,319
the kinds of things that people like Carl Popper told

397
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you don't actually happen and are not really relevant in

398
00:27:51,079 --> 00:27:57,240
understanding political anything related to politics.

399
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Speaker 1: Let's jump forward to Jonathan Heyde. You talk about his

400
00:28:02,119 --> 00:28:05,079
book The Righteous Mind. That's one of those height is

401
00:28:05,079 --> 00:28:07,400
one of those people that really gets pushed by a

402
00:28:07,400 --> 00:28:10,880
lot of the people who call themselves classical liberals, the

403
00:28:10,880 --> 00:28:13,359
people who want to return to the nineties, the golden

404
00:28:13,359 --> 00:28:16,480
age of the nineties. But you know, one of the

405
00:28:16,519 --> 00:28:22,640
things that you point out is that they're his ideas

406
00:28:24,279 --> 00:28:32,240
about psychological about how he misrepresents political differences between people

407
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who have I think the terminology use was broader moral

408
00:28:36,240 --> 00:28:40,319
palette or what he used is broader moral palette, and

409
00:28:40,599 --> 00:28:46,599
liberals six intuitions versus h versus liberals have three. So

410
00:28:46,839 --> 00:28:50,599
can you talk a little bit about how hype continues this,

411
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how he explains how this continues and moves forward from

412
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you know, from World War two and the post war consensus.

413
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Speaker 3: Yeah. So I think a friend of yours, astral Flight,

414
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made this really great observation to me. I didn't even

415
00:29:07,640 --> 00:29:11,160
realize it that Jonathan Height was kind of like the

416
00:29:11,480 --> 00:29:15,359
Jordan Peterson Before there was a Jordan Peterson. Five or

417
00:29:15,400 --> 00:29:19,039
six years before Jordan Peterson got into political commentary and

418
00:29:19,079 --> 00:29:23,079
political culture, you had Jonathan Hight as this sort of centrist.

419
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And I say none of this with invective or hatred.

420
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I actually think pretty of all of the people who've

421
00:29:29,839 --> 00:29:33,640
done the IDW centrist, we just need to get a

422
00:29:33,640 --> 00:29:36,200
long thing. I really do look at Jonathan Height as

423
00:29:36,240 --> 00:29:39,759
being like the most honest and really the most competent

424
00:29:39,839 --> 00:29:42,680
person to try that out. But I would just say,

425
00:29:42,720 --> 00:29:44,920
like it's really remarkable if you want to compare the

426
00:29:44,960 --> 00:29:48,519
public intellectuals of say today or the last ten years

427
00:29:48,880 --> 00:29:55,200
compared to twenty thirty, forty, fifty, sixty years ago. It's

428
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really startling. The issue I had with Jonathan Hite was

429
00:30:00,279 --> 00:30:02,680
that his and this is really the same issue with

430
00:30:02,759 --> 00:30:06,319
Jordan Peterson, even though it doesn't seem that way with Peterson,

431
00:30:07,359 --> 00:30:15,599
is they're actually very narrow minded. I hesitate to say uneducated,

432
00:30:15,960 --> 00:30:21,960
but they are ignorant really of other disciplines beyond their own.

433
00:30:22,039 --> 00:30:24,559
Jordan Peterson, if you want to know about psychology, probably

434
00:30:24,599 --> 00:30:27,599
is one of the best living educators of psychology. But

435
00:30:27,640 --> 00:30:29,200
when and this has always been a parent when it

436
00:30:29,200 --> 00:30:37,359
comes to philosophy, history, political theory, He's basically indistinguishable from

437
00:30:37,480 --> 00:30:42,279
like your grandpa sitting at the actually your grandpa at

438
00:30:42,319 --> 00:30:45,880
Thanksgiving dinner probably knows more than Jordan Peterson. But same

439
00:30:45,920 --> 00:30:49,880
thing with Jonathan Hyde. Very good, very astute as a sociologist,

440
00:30:50,079 --> 00:30:54,079
as a anthropologically minded person, obviously as a PhD of

441
00:30:54,119 --> 00:30:59,319
social psychology. But the big glaring hole in his theory

442
00:30:59,000 --> 00:31:04,279
of the moral foundations as applied to the political binary

443
00:31:04,680 --> 00:31:07,920
is actually politically ignorant. So the job so that the

444
00:31:07,960 --> 00:31:13,839
heights moral Foundations theory says that there are six elementary

445
00:31:14,319 --> 00:31:27,160
moral foundations or intuitions care, fairness, liberty, sanctity, authority, there's

446
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a sixth one that I'm actually blanking on at the moment.

447
00:31:30,319 --> 00:31:35,920
And his research demonstrated that conservatives were more in touch

448
00:31:36,359 --> 00:31:40,920
with all six than liberals were. And he gives the

449
00:31:40,920 --> 00:31:45,559
example of the John Kerry campaign back in two thousand

450
00:31:45,559 --> 00:31:49,319
and four and the rhetoric that was on the campaign trail,

451
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and he basically said that that Democrats were unable to

452
00:31:54,480 --> 00:32:03,279
access rhetoric that touched on moral intuitions like authority, prey, sanctity, purity,

453
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Purity would have been the sixth one, right, that these

454
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are kind of like classically conservative moral intuitions. They have

455
00:32:11,759 --> 00:32:14,839
to do with They're they're inexorably bound up with like

456
00:32:15,359 --> 00:32:20,519
the church and religion. They're inexorably bound up with the military,

457
00:32:21,240 --> 00:32:25,400
hierarchy and the state. They are inexorably built bound up

458
00:32:25,440 --> 00:32:29,920
with the family and a paternal sort of view of

459
00:32:30,000 --> 00:32:32,960
the world. And so Heit says, well, this is really

460
00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:36,799
a big problem. Democrats are losing these elections, they're losing

461
00:32:36,839 --> 00:32:40,319
the culture war. They're not really able to communicate to

462
00:32:41,039 --> 00:32:45,759
all Americans. So he embarked on this research project to

463
00:32:45,839 --> 00:32:50,680
develop a way to help liberals expand their moral palate.

464
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There's a couple of problems with that. First, and what

465
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I think the biggest problem is is that his research

466
00:32:57,640 --> 00:33:03,279
actually demonstrates that liberals can access other moral intuitions. It's

467
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just that when they apply those moral intuitions, they're applied differently.

468
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When a conservative Bible thumping rust belter practices sanctity, they're

469
00:33:18,440 --> 00:33:21,599
thinking about Christ, they're thinking about God, they're thinking about

470
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the Church, they're thinking about the Beatitudes, the Ten Commandments,

471
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they're pastor. But when this is according to Height, when

472
00:33:29,480 --> 00:33:37,119
liberal secular humanist types think in terms of sanctity, well,

473
00:33:37,160 --> 00:33:40,319
they think about the environment, they think about pollution and

474
00:33:40,359 --> 00:33:46,480
climate change, they think about sort of these very novel, untraditional,

475
00:33:46,720 --> 00:33:51,000
outside of the box ways of applying these basic moral intuitions.

476
00:33:51,640 --> 00:33:53,960
You know, what was the old liberal maxim, you know,

477
00:33:54,880 --> 00:33:58,960
think globally, act locally. That kind of describes the problems

478
00:33:58,960 --> 00:34:01,720
are the way liberal think is in this fundamentally non

479
00:34:01,799 --> 00:34:07,680
parochial way. So that tells us one that liberals don't

480
00:34:07,720 --> 00:34:12,320
have a problem accessing these moral intuitions, it's just they

481
00:34:12,320 --> 00:34:15,639
apply them differently. So to me, the first problem that

482
00:34:15,719 --> 00:34:19,199
arises out of that is it tells us something about

483
00:34:19,800 --> 00:34:23,519
the populations themselves and the kinds of social worlds that

484
00:34:23,559 --> 00:34:27,760
they occupy. I extrapolate from that that we really have

485
00:34:28,159 --> 00:34:33,960
two completely different populations living side by side as though

486
00:34:34,320 --> 00:34:37,440
they were actually one people. You know, when we are

487
00:34:37,719 --> 00:34:40,599
we here in the whatever you want to say, the

488
00:34:40,639 --> 00:34:43,679
Trump right, the online right, the dissident right, to radical right,

489
00:34:43,719 --> 00:34:45,599
all right, whatever. I mean, A lot of us, if

490
00:34:45,639 --> 00:34:48,119
not most of us, are here because we have certain

491
00:34:49,239 --> 00:34:54,280
foundational concerns about our kin, about the folk, about the race,

492
00:34:54,400 --> 00:35:01,239
about homogeneity and a coherent national identity. This sort of

493
00:35:01,440 --> 00:35:04,960
issue in Heights. Theorizing betrays the fact that we don't

494
00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:08,679
have a coherent national identity, and that homogeneity is not

495
00:35:08,760 --> 00:35:14,559
just an issue in terms of racial characteristics or religious affiliation,

496
00:35:15,199 --> 00:35:18,360
but actually there are other ways in which people are

497
00:35:18,480 --> 00:35:22,079
or aren't alike, and that's meaningful in terms of how

498
00:35:22,119 --> 00:35:25,320
you organize your polity. So basically the punchline of that

499
00:35:25,480 --> 00:35:30,280
essay is there's two different political economies. This goes back

500
00:35:30,320 --> 00:35:34,559
to James Burnham. There are two different political economies operating

501
00:35:34,599 --> 00:35:39,719
in this country, and while they're not necessarily opposed to

502
00:35:39,760 --> 00:35:45,079
one another, they are in conflict. You have the classical

503
00:35:45,239 --> 00:35:52,079
liberal political economy, bourgeois entrepreneurial capitalism, which even though that

504
00:35:52,280 --> 00:35:58,199
was critical in displacing the old aristocratic order and the

505
00:35:58,239 --> 00:36:01,239
monarchy and things we think of as even more based

506
00:36:01,320 --> 00:36:04,960
and conservative and hierarchical and all these kinds of things,

507
00:36:05,280 --> 00:36:08,800
but relative to like modernity where we are now, you know,

508
00:36:08,840 --> 00:36:14,559
that's pretty, it's pretty. They were still deeply devout religious people.

509
00:36:14,960 --> 00:36:19,039
They were still deeply patriarchal. These were not people who

510
00:36:19,280 --> 00:36:24,119
who comparable today anyway, who thought like we will literally

511
00:36:24,199 --> 00:36:26,679
burn through all of our social capital if it will

512
00:36:26,719 --> 00:36:29,639
earn more money or help us achieve some kind of

513
00:36:30,039 --> 00:36:36,239
Kakami political agenda. You had this bourgeois entrepreneurial liberalism, and

514
00:36:36,280 --> 00:36:41,519
then what comes after that, as James Burnham said, is managerialism, managerialism,

515
00:36:42,119 --> 00:36:48,000
the technocracy, the cult of expertise, credentialism, socialism, you know,

516
00:36:48,039 --> 00:36:52,719
the welfare state, all of these things which are built

517
00:36:52,800 --> 00:36:57,320
on bourgeois entrepreneurialism, but also in a way sort of

518
00:36:57,599 --> 00:37:02,000
parasitize bourgeois capitalism. That's kind of like one of the

519
00:37:02,000 --> 00:37:06,119
stories of the recent Trump victory with Vance as his VP,

520
00:37:06,719 --> 00:37:10,360
is like we're trying to put the managerial revolution back

521
00:37:10,639 --> 00:37:14,119
in the box a little bit. Here. Burnham says that,

522
00:37:14,639 --> 00:37:19,440
you know, managerialism emerged because actually San Francis says this,

523
00:37:19,639 --> 00:37:25,000
expanding on James Burnham, that nation states were growing so

524
00:37:25,159 --> 00:37:29,119
rapidly both demographically in terms of like their geographical territories,

525
00:37:29,880 --> 00:37:32,440
and so you had this dual problem of mass and scale.

526
00:37:32,519 --> 00:37:35,599
They're getting larger, they're also getting more complicated. So if

527
00:37:35,639 --> 00:37:37,519
you're a you know, if you're like an early twentieth

528
00:37:37,559 --> 00:37:41,719
century robber baron, a capitalist, well you while it might

529
00:37:41,719 --> 00:37:44,880
have been possible for you in eighteen fifty or nineteen

530
00:37:45,000 --> 00:37:49,480
hundred or even nineteen fifty to literally micromanage everything and

531
00:37:49,719 --> 00:37:53,400
understand A good example of this is maybe Walt Disney

532
00:37:53,440 --> 00:37:58,079
trying to put together Snow White. He was intimately involved

533
00:37:58,280 --> 00:38:02,599
in every aspect of that production down to the finest detail.

534
00:38:03,199 --> 00:38:05,159
And then if you look at what Disney's doing today,

535
00:38:05,360 --> 00:38:09,000
like the people who bankroll it have no control what's happening,

536
00:38:09,559 --> 00:38:12,519
no idea, what's even happening in terms of casting and

537
00:38:12,599 --> 00:38:17,880
like CGI and whatever. So things were getting so large

538
00:38:18,119 --> 00:38:22,079
and kind of complicated that you had a new class

539
00:38:22,079 --> 00:38:26,039
of people emerge, and these were the managers, technically minded,

540
00:38:26,320 --> 00:38:31,000
technically skilled people, usually with a college education, usually living

541
00:38:31,039 --> 00:38:35,840
in an urban or suburban setting, who are not capitalists

542
00:38:35,840 --> 00:38:39,679
in the sense that they have large reserves of money

543
00:38:39,719 --> 00:38:42,280
that they can allocate and spend and whatever, and that

544
00:38:42,320 --> 00:38:47,239
they are captains of industry, but they have very narrowly defined,

545
00:38:48,239 --> 00:38:51,360
highly skilled roles that put them. I think the quote

546
00:38:51,360 --> 00:38:54,679
from San Francis is they literally put their hands on

547
00:38:54,719 --> 00:38:59,360
the levers of these industries. So, as San Francis said,

548
00:38:59,360 --> 00:39:03,360
you know, the change in the kind of people who

549
00:39:03,599 --> 00:39:07,199
became in charge of things also became who. Rather, he says,

550
00:39:07,280 --> 00:39:09,840
the change in the class of people also became a

551
00:39:09,960 --> 00:39:12,639
change in the kind of people. So we went from

552
00:39:12,679 --> 00:39:16,599
capitalists to managers. But also we're dealing with a different

553
00:39:17,239 --> 00:39:20,320
demographic of people. You know, a lot of you know,

554
00:39:20,719 --> 00:39:24,519
Ellis Islanders, you know, are getting into these positions. A

555
00:39:24,559 --> 00:39:27,840
lot of newer immigrant Americans are getting into these positions.

556
00:39:29,159 --> 00:39:31,960
To your audience, I'm bringing this to a conclusion here.

557
00:39:32,239 --> 00:39:35,480
If it seems like a crazy digression, we could say,

558
00:39:35,559 --> 00:39:40,519
in a sort of loose way that the liberal democratic

559
00:39:40,719 --> 00:39:45,519
you know, liberal progressive liberals, democrats, socialists, these kinds of

560
00:39:45,519 --> 00:39:50,800
people you know, in terms of heights, moral foundation, the

561
00:39:51,119 --> 00:39:55,880
threes versus the sixes. These are people who basically live

562
00:39:55,960 --> 00:39:59,719
in a completely different economy than the conservative person or

563
00:39:59,719 --> 00:40:03,000
concerned a person even today still lives in a farm,

564
00:40:03,360 --> 00:40:07,400
works on a farm, or runs their own business, or

565
00:40:07,920 --> 00:40:10,880
comes from a family that does that. You know, they tend,

566
00:40:10,960 --> 00:40:13,039
you know, statistically, we know this. You know, they tend

567
00:40:13,480 --> 00:40:15,719
not to go to college, They tend not to complete

568
00:40:15,719 --> 00:40:18,760
their degrees, They tend not to read as much. The

569
00:40:18,880 --> 00:40:24,760
divide what Jonathan Hyde treats as psychological differences between liberals

570
00:40:24,760 --> 00:40:30,039
and conservatives really is a demographic difference. It's an economical difference.

571
00:40:30,480 --> 00:40:34,719
So it's not that liberals are out of touch with

572
00:40:34,960 --> 00:40:39,960
the authority moral intuition or the sanctity moral intuition. It's

573
00:40:40,000 --> 00:40:44,639
that they are basically siloed into a completely different style

574
00:40:44,679 --> 00:40:48,199
of life, and so they apply these moral intuitions to

575
00:40:48,320 --> 00:40:51,719
the world in wildly different ways. They even apply the

576
00:40:51,760 --> 00:40:57,239
same moral intuitions differently. Jonathan Hyde points out that for conservatives,

577
00:40:57,360 --> 00:41:01,639
fairness has more to do with like portionality, for example,

578
00:41:02,079 --> 00:41:06,039
compared to liberals, where it's about like distributing to everyone.

579
00:41:06,440 --> 00:41:09,239
Now everyone gets a piece of the pie, but conservatives say,

580
00:41:09,239 --> 00:41:11,519
well that doesn't sound fair, Like why does the guy

581
00:41:11,559 --> 00:41:14,000
who does nothing have as much say as I do?

582
00:41:14,320 --> 00:41:15,519
Hence the proportionality?

583
00:41:15,599 --> 00:41:15,719
Speaker 2: Right?

584
00:41:15,760 --> 00:41:18,719
Speaker 3: Okay, well there's an opportunity. This goes into like one

585
00:41:18,719 --> 00:41:21,480
of the old debates like equity versus equality. Are we

586
00:41:21,480 --> 00:41:23,679
trying to give everyone an opportunity or are we trying

587
00:41:23,719 --> 00:41:27,320
to give everyone an outcome? Like? These are mentality differences

588
00:41:27,400 --> 00:41:34,519
that arise out of different economic social organizations. So, I know,

589
00:41:34,559 --> 00:41:36,000
I just threw a whole bunch at you. Maybe I'll

590
00:41:36,039 --> 00:41:38,039
take a pause there and let you pick apart from that.

591
00:41:40,639 --> 00:41:44,559
Speaker 1: No, I mean I think that that's it's something that's

592
00:41:44,599 --> 00:41:49,719
been covered on this on the show endlessly managerialism versus

593
00:41:50,719 --> 00:41:54,039
role by experts or you know, role by ads hark.

594
00:41:54,239 --> 00:41:58,280
So the next thing I wanted to move on to

595
00:41:58,960 --> 00:42:02,800
was just touch on this, you know, as quick as

596
00:42:02,880 --> 00:42:05,239
quick as we can, because I really want to talk

597
00:42:05,280 --> 00:42:08,079
about a Louis a little bit and get into a

598
00:42:08,119 --> 00:42:15,800
lull and Connoman, the the idea that unconscious group dynamics

599
00:42:15,840 --> 00:42:21,239
and not individual brainwashing drive shifts and culture, and how

600
00:42:21,400 --> 00:42:25,840
the American myth of individualism, you know, as a noble

601
00:42:26,079 --> 00:42:29,960
as a noble lie obscures how social forces shape behavior.

602
00:42:30,880 --> 00:42:31,840
Speaker 2: Talk a little bit about that.

603
00:42:32,400 --> 00:42:38,960
Speaker 3: Yeah, so I came. I came into contact with the

604
00:42:39,000 --> 00:42:42,800
work of a German, very well celebrated German psychologist. His

605
00:42:42,880 --> 00:42:45,400
name is Gerd. I'm probably butchering it. He has a

606
00:42:45,480 --> 00:42:49,079
name like straight out of German folklore. And he looks like, like,

607
00:42:49,440 --> 00:42:52,039
you know, like the most German Man on earth, a

608
00:42:52,079 --> 00:42:55,119
Gerd gigorinz er or gigor Or. I have no idea

609
00:42:55,119 --> 00:42:55,880
how you would say.

610
00:42:55,719 --> 00:42:57,800
Speaker 2: It, Oh, I have, I have no clue. I looked,

611
00:42:58,559 --> 00:42:59,519
no no idea.

612
00:43:01,239 --> 00:43:05,880
Speaker 3: He's a psychologist and well, a little bit of context.

613
00:43:06,079 --> 00:43:08,199
One thing that's really interesting to me about the last

614
00:43:08,199 --> 00:43:12,840
twenty years of psychology publishing, popular publishing, academic publishing is

615
00:43:12,880 --> 00:43:15,719
that since the turn of the century there has been

616
00:43:15,719 --> 00:43:24,679
an extreme focus on irrationality, on what's sometimes called choice architecture,

617
00:43:25,079 --> 00:43:31,119
a decision making basically cognition, but in terms of our

618
00:43:31,239 --> 00:43:36,760
capacity to choose. What are the actual cognitive mechanisms that

619
00:43:36,880 --> 00:43:39,519
are responsible for a decision making process, When do they

620
00:43:39,559 --> 00:43:42,199
go right, when do they go wrong? What are their limitations?

621
00:43:42,760 --> 00:43:46,079
This stretches all the way back to the really the

622
00:43:46,159 --> 00:43:49,039
early twentieth century. I want to say Herbert Spencer. Maybe

623
00:43:49,960 --> 00:43:52,280
I could be mixing up some of my names. But

624
00:43:52,760 --> 00:43:55,400
in the early to midish nineteen sixties you had what

625
00:43:55,480 --> 00:44:00,239
was called the probabilistic revolution in the social science is

626
00:44:00,280 --> 00:44:05,920
what basically refers to. Statisticians gained a lot of influence

627
00:44:06,199 --> 00:44:11,239
in academic psychological research, and so there became this quantity,

628
00:44:11,360 --> 00:44:16,039
this intent, heavy focus on quantitative sort of mathematical reasoning

629
00:44:17,280 --> 00:44:22,039
to understand and explain social behavior. And one of the

630
00:44:22,039 --> 00:44:25,119
people that was at the start of that was Daniel Konneman.

631
00:44:26,119 --> 00:44:28,079
Now let's just table that now, just to give some

632
00:44:28,119 --> 00:44:31,559
context for the audience. So Gert Gigorenzer is working sort

633
00:44:31,599 --> 00:44:34,800
of in this milieu, but he's coming at it from

634
00:44:34,840 --> 00:44:38,559
a different point of view. One of the actually he's

635
00:44:38,639 --> 00:44:42,920
kind of like hearkening back to the very earliest theorists

636
00:44:43,079 --> 00:44:50,239
theoreticians in this statistical revolution. He's basically saying that there's

637
00:44:51,440 --> 00:44:55,079
and this this is contrasting to the Daniel Konnomans of

638
00:44:55,119 --> 00:44:58,920
the world, basically saying that there's a type of logic

639
00:44:59,239 --> 00:45:03,559
that humans engage in that you could say is intrinsic

640
00:45:03,639 --> 00:45:08,840
to our decision making process. It's not arbitrary, it's actually evolutionary.

641
00:45:10,360 --> 00:45:15,679
And it's not only evolutionary, it's environmentally bound. Right, So

642
00:45:15,679 --> 00:45:19,599
in other words, thinking of human cognition, we need to

643
00:45:19,639 --> 00:45:22,719
think of it as something that developed within a context.

644
00:45:23,800 --> 00:45:25,960
We need to think of it as something that developed

645
00:45:26,639 --> 00:45:34,800
according to certain evolutionary pressures and limitations, selection pressures, for example.

646
00:45:35,719 --> 00:45:38,880
So he and again I won't spill all the beans.

647
00:45:38,920 --> 00:45:40,800
I'll leave some for your you know, your audience, if

648
00:45:40,800 --> 00:45:42,400
they want to read it. I hope you do. Pick

649
00:45:42,400 --> 00:45:45,639
it up an anal up Hill Publishing. He basically says

650
00:45:46,119 --> 00:45:52,960
that there are three rules of human social organization, more

651
00:45:53,039 --> 00:45:58,280
or less, and and there's actually no getting around them.

652
00:45:59,079 --> 00:46:02,280
There's no you can't break them, you can't refine them.

653
00:46:02,559 --> 00:46:09,199
They are fine tuned over countless generations of evolution. So

654
00:46:09,199 --> 00:46:13,639
when I read that, my first thought was, and you know,

655
00:46:14,000 --> 00:46:17,039
it's getting involved in all this radical politics stuff. I'm

656
00:46:17,119 --> 00:46:20,239
kind of a neophyte still. I've only since like twenty fourteen,

657
00:46:20,280 --> 00:46:23,599
twenty fifteen really been thinking this way. And one of

658
00:46:23,639 --> 00:46:26,039
the like kind one of the thoughts that are or

659
00:46:26,159 --> 00:46:28,920
just like repeating questions I've always had is actually the

660
00:46:28,960 --> 00:46:31,559
subtitle of the essay that you referenced. You know how

661
00:46:31,599 --> 00:46:34,880
did things get this bad? You know, we're always constantly

662
00:46:34,920 --> 00:46:37,320
asking ourself like, why are people like this? How do

663
00:46:37,400 --> 00:46:39,719
things get this way? Would you know? Or we play

664
00:46:39,800 --> 00:46:43,199
the historical revision game, you know, would things be different

665
00:46:43,360 --> 00:46:46,320
if you know Group X won this war as opposed

666
00:46:46,360 --> 00:46:48,800
to group HY, or you know, if this president won

667
00:46:48,840 --> 00:46:51,480
this election or this you know, and we're we're always

668
00:46:51,480 --> 00:46:53,960
asking ourselves like, why are people like this? How did

669
00:46:53,960 --> 00:46:56,199
things get this way? The point of my essay is

670
00:46:56,239 --> 00:47:01,920
to say that there's a profoundly evilulutionary reason for people

671
00:47:02,119 --> 00:47:09,920
to become conformist, because conformism is effectively an evolutionary mechanism,

672
00:47:10,239 --> 00:47:12,159
or at least for us, it's this sort of thing

673
00:47:12,159 --> 00:47:21,360
we've accumulated that helps us to deal with ambiguity, uncertainty, catastrophe, risk, danger.

674
00:47:22,000 --> 00:47:25,280
You can't know everything. It's impossible to know everything, it's

675
00:47:25,280 --> 00:47:28,960
impossible to account for everything, and really all we can

676
00:47:29,039 --> 00:47:32,199
do is just, you know, look to the person to

677
00:47:32,280 --> 00:47:34,880
our left and right and do what they're doing. And

678
00:47:35,239 --> 00:47:38,079
this is like deeply encoded into us, and so it's

679
00:47:38,159 --> 00:47:41,760
very common for people to think like, well, it's what

680
00:47:41,800 --> 00:47:45,119
the universities did. It was brainwashing through media, it was

681
00:47:45,199 --> 00:47:49,119
brainwashing through Hollywood. It was brainwashing through the universities and

682
00:47:49,159 --> 00:47:51,960
the academics. And I'm not saying that that's wrong. I'm

683
00:47:51,960 --> 00:47:54,199
not saying that that didn't play a role. What I'm

684
00:47:54,199 --> 00:47:58,039
saying is that before you ever read foucaut in freshman

685
00:47:58,119 --> 00:48:01,360
year of college, before you have turned on the TV

686
00:48:01,960 --> 00:48:06,159
and saw some subliminal, licentious thing getting beamed into your brain,

687
00:48:07,360 --> 00:48:11,199
you were conforming to the social dynamics in your home,

688
00:48:11,880 --> 00:48:15,639
at the park, in the classroom, at the lunch table.

689
00:48:16,119 --> 00:48:19,400
And these are the things we need to think about

690
00:48:19,440 --> 00:48:24,239
in terms of why and how people adopt certain political beliefs.

691
00:48:24,639 --> 00:48:26,960
And the real point of that I was trying to

692
00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:33,639
drive home in that essay. Maybe I'm kind of a

693
00:48:33,679 --> 00:48:36,440
bleeding heart here. You tell me if you agree or disagree.

694
00:48:37,760 --> 00:48:39,239
The point I was trying to drive home is that

695
00:48:39,599 --> 00:48:42,559
we want to have actually empathy. It's gonna sound like

696
00:48:42,559 --> 00:48:45,480
a libtard moment. We want to actually have a sort

697
00:48:45,480 --> 00:48:48,960
of like patience and compassion for people, because it's very

698
00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:52,679
common for us who are sort of like initiated and

699
00:48:52,840 --> 00:48:55,559
know a little bit about this to get angry and

700
00:48:56,079 --> 00:48:59,400
bitter and like man, like you should know better, or

701
00:48:59,440 --> 00:49:02,400
you got dooped where you get were brainwashed by the

702
00:49:03,320 --> 00:49:07,039
race communists or the woke mind virus. Actually, most people

703
00:49:07,079 --> 00:49:11,159
have no idea consciously in an intellectual way about what's

704
00:49:11,159 --> 00:49:15,559
happening around them. They're just simply imitating what the people

705
00:49:15,559 --> 00:49:19,840
around them are doing. They are simply using the same

706
00:49:19,920 --> 00:49:22,760
solutions that have worked for the people around them in

707
00:49:22,760 --> 00:49:27,400
a sort of unthinking, unconscious way. Because it's actually too

708
00:49:27,480 --> 00:49:33,800
mentally taxing, cognitively demanding, and socially punishing, ostracizing to get

709
00:49:33,840 --> 00:49:36,800
into the weeds on every one of these individual issues,

710
00:49:37,079 --> 00:49:41,800
whether we're talking about LGBT, or we're thinking about tariffs

711
00:49:42,280 --> 00:49:46,559
or the immigration policy or whatever. Most people don't think

712
00:49:46,679 --> 00:49:51,360
there is no actual rational, cognitive, sort of deliberative process

713
00:49:51,400 --> 00:49:55,760
going on. It's just simply people going along and getting along.

714
00:49:56,119 --> 00:49:58,840
And when I read his book in the Wild, actually

715
00:49:58,920 --> 00:50:00,440
I bought a bunch of his book, I read a

716
00:50:00,480 --> 00:50:02,719
bunch of his papers at around that time. When I

717
00:50:02,719 --> 00:50:06,199
was writing this, it gave me a profound Actually it

718
00:50:06,239 --> 00:50:09,519
felt like I was being like liberated, liberated by like

719
00:50:09,559 --> 00:50:13,639
this sort of anger at other people, like why aren't

720
00:50:13,679 --> 00:50:16,639
you taking up this challenge? Like I'm taking it up.

721
00:50:16,840 --> 00:50:21,239
Why aren't you trying to decode all of the bullshit,

722
00:50:21,320 --> 00:50:24,719
and why aren't you willing to ostracize yourself from your

723
00:50:24,719 --> 00:50:26,719
friends and your family in the name of the truth.

724
00:50:27,079 --> 00:50:30,760
Because that's not actually what the kinds of foundational social

725
00:50:30,840 --> 00:50:34,719
dynamics we've evolved to function with. That's not how they operate.

726
00:50:34,880 --> 00:50:37,760
Which isn't to say that they're like deviant or pathological.

727
00:50:38,039 --> 00:50:39,719
It just means that, you know, people like you and

728
00:50:39,760 --> 00:50:43,760
me are like a different breed of person basically, And

729
00:50:44,119 --> 00:50:47,360
if we're getting in front of an audience, whether it's

730
00:50:47,400 --> 00:50:49,960
you and your podcast or me and my blog or whatever,

731
00:50:50,519 --> 00:50:53,199
or somebody at like a rally or a pub, you

732
00:50:53,320 --> 00:50:56,000
actually have to have like some heart for the people

733
00:50:56,480 --> 00:50:58,320
in front of you, the people who are gathered around you,

734
00:50:58,360 --> 00:51:01,599
because they don't actually know better. And most of the

735
00:51:01,639 --> 00:51:04,679
time people treat that as a sort of insult or

736
00:51:04,719 --> 00:51:08,880
a smear, or they say in a pejorative and condescending way.

737
00:51:08,920 --> 00:51:10,719
In the same way that I don't know any better

738
00:51:10,800 --> 00:51:14,639
when it comes to physics or mechanical engineering doesn't make

739
00:51:14,679 --> 00:51:18,599
me like a loser or a conservative or adeb or whatever.

740
00:51:18,800 --> 00:51:22,920
It just means I don't have that specialization I would

741
00:51:23,199 --> 00:51:26,639
need to rely on a well meaning expert. I think,

742
00:51:26,840 --> 00:51:30,360
to the point of that essay, people believe and act

743
00:51:30,480 --> 00:51:35,840
the way they do far less for deliberative, conscious reasons

744
00:51:35,960 --> 00:51:42,960
than they do for invisible social dynamics that bind and

745
00:51:43,039 --> 00:51:45,719
tether people together. That was another really long winded answer,

746
00:51:45,760 --> 00:51:46,639
so I apologize.

747
00:51:48,360 --> 00:51:51,000
Speaker 1: I don't want to be a pedant, but I think

748
00:51:51,119 --> 00:51:54,960
when when using the term empathy, we have to be

749
00:51:55,039 --> 00:52:01,199
able to separate what's known as effective empathy and cognitive empathy.

750
00:52:02,760 --> 00:52:06,840
Cognitive empathy is the ability to see another person's perspective.

751
00:52:08,119 --> 00:52:11,199
Effective empathy is the more dangerous one, and I think

752
00:52:11,239 --> 00:52:16,079
it's what's taken over a large amount of the left

753
00:52:16,119 --> 00:52:22,079
and progressivism, which is being able to understand one's another

754
00:52:22,119 --> 00:52:28,119
person's emotions, but also sharing them with them, trying to

755
00:52:28,159 --> 00:52:31,599
share their experience. I don't have any interest in that.

756
00:52:32,960 --> 00:52:39,480
Understanding is a much different thing than actually seeking to

757
00:52:40,920 --> 00:52:45,480
seeking to put myself and to try to feel exactly

758
00:52:45,519 --> 00:52:49,480
what they're feeling. I think that leads that leads us

759
00:52:49,519 --> 00:52:58,880
down the path of the where you that what's become

760
00:52:58,920 --> 00:53:02,199
the meme of of how you know, most people who

761
00:53:02,199 --> 00:53:05,400
would be right wing care about the people most around them,

762
00:53:05,960 --> 00:53:09,719
and then out here, it's the people. Yeah, the heat map,

763
00:53:10,199 --> 00:53:13,840
and I think the we have to be careful of that.

764
00:53:14,880 --> 00:53:20,280
Understanding where people are coming from is one thing real

765
00:53:20,920 --> 00:53:25,519
that that section of empathy which has become the most popular,

766
00:53:25,960 --> 00:53:29,000
where you're trying where they want you to share and

767
00:53:29,119 --> 00:53:31,760
feel what other people are feeling. I have no interest

768
00:53:31,760 --> 00:53:31,920
in that.

769
00:53:31,960 --> 00:53:33,800
Speaker 2: I have enough. I have enough of my own problems.

770
00:53:34,320 --> 00:53:38,320
Speaker 3: Yeah. I give three examples in that essay, and they

771
00:53:38,360 --> 00:53:41,360
all are examples of cognitive empathy. So I'm glad you

772
00:53:41,400 --> 00:53:44,199
made that distinction. I mean affective empathy. That's the sort

773
00:53:44,199 --> 00:53:48,960
of Again I don't say this in a really negative way,

774
00:53:49,039 --> 00:53:51,719
but it's kind of how we've ended up in this squishy,

775
00:53:53,000 --> 00:53:57,559
womanly school marm kind of mentality where it's like, well,

776
00:53:57,559 --> 00:54:00,159
how do you feel if that happened to you? I

777
00:54:00,199 --> 00:54:03,880
would feel bad, So then don't judge them so harshly.

778
00:54:03,920 --> 00:54:07,519
It's like, that's not constructive. But one of the examples

779
00:54:07,559 --> 00:54:15,599
I give, if I can remember, one of Gigrinser's one

780
00:54:15,639 --> 00:54:19,360
of his three rules is basically the default rule that

781
00:54:19,440 --> 00:54:24,559
if there's no other solution, then you do what everyone

782
00:54:24,559 --> 00:54:29,320
else has done previously. And I give the example of

783
00:54:29,360 --> 00:54:34,599
somebody a young man who enlists in the US military

784
00:54:34,719 --> 00:54:37,320
in two thousand and two or two thousand and three,

785
00:54:37,400 --> 00:54:40,400
and they did that for rule one to what other

786
00:54:40,400 --> 00:54:42,599
people around you do. And so if you're a young

787
00:54:42,679 --> 00:54:44,800
man and you're watching TV and all of the men

788
00:54:44,840 --> 00:54:48,199
in your family are like, this is fucking a travesty.

789
00:54:48,280 --> 00:54:50,320
We need to go to war. We need to defend America.

790
00:54:50,360 --> 00:54:52,440
You think, yes, it's a travesty. I need to go

791
00:54:52,480 --> 00:54:55,960
to war. I need to defend America. Maybe ten other

792
00:54:56,000 --> 00:54:58,599
guys from your high school classroom did that, and you're like,

793
00:54:58,679 --> 00:55:02,159
I'm going to do that. And then you go and

794
00:55:02,199 --> 00:55:06,239
it's awful, and you come back and you're a fucking mess,

795
00:55:07,599 --> 00:55:11,599
and you look around at your other peers, other guys

796
00:55:11,599 --> 00:55:15,480
who you enlisted with, and they're developing drug problems or

797
00:55:15,480 --> 00:55:19,400
they kill themselves, and what do you do. You develop

798
00:55:19,440 --> 00:55:23,840
a drug problem and you kill yourself, and like that's

799
00:55:23,880 --> 00:55:25,519
the default. This is like a very sort of like

800
00:55:25,639 --> 00:55:29,119
bleak way of applying it, but it gave me a

801
00:55:29,960 --> 00:55:32,840
greater understanding. It's like, how does that happen? Does it

802
00:55:32,880 --> 00:55:35,960
happen because we didn't give them enough education? Did it

803
00:55:36,000 --> 00:55:39,719
happen because they didn't have enough socialization? Time did it

804
00:55:39,800 --> 00:55:42,719
happen because like, like all of these were not trying

805
00:55:42,719 --> 00:55:46,599
to understand the real problem types of explanations. It's like, no,

806
00:55:46,760 --> 00:55:49,079
he had he did it for like the three basic

807
00:55:49,199 --> 00:55:52,239
rules of social organization, you do what everyone else does.

808
00:55:53,000 --> 00:55:55,760
If there's no other solution, you do the solution that

809
00:55:55,800 --> 00:55:59,480
everyone else has been using. And if you're a young

810
00:55:59,519 --> 00:56:02,920
guy who listed in the military, well you see a

811
00:56:02,960 --> 00:56:06,719
lot of your peers falling apart completely and maybe killing themselves.

812
00:56:07,280 --> 00:56:13,239
Or another example I use is like a freshman aged

813
00:56:13,440 --> 00:56:17,000
college girl. You know, how do they all fall into

814
00:56:17,239 --> 00:56:19,000
or how does so many of them fall into this

815
00:56:19,079 --> 00:56:26,320
like destructive, licentious, borderline pornographic sexual behavior because they looked

816
00:56:26,360 --> 00:56:28,760
around at what the people around them were doing, and

817
00:56:28,800 --> 00:56:32,679
they defaulted back to the same type of social behavior

818
00:56:33,000 --> 00:56:35,719
that most of the people around them were engaging it.

819
00:56:35,960 --> 00:56:38,880
And I think if you can understand the degree to

820
00:56:38,920 --> 00:56:43,000
which just about everybody you know is engaged in some

821
00:56:43,119 --> 00:56:48,360
kind of like mimesis, then it really does de emphasize

822
00:56:48,079 --> 00:56:55,039
the extent to which you think of them as a competent, individually,

823
00:56:56,000 --> 00:56:59,679
rationally minded person. Now, they may also be those things,

824
00:57:00,599 --> 00:57:03,280
but we are most of the time we are that

825
00:57:03,480 --> 00:57:07,159
in a very limited capacity. You go to the hospital,

826
00:57:07,519 --> 00:57:11,719
your physician is giving you all these scans and using

827
00:57:11,719 --> 00:57:16,599
all of this large, you know, fifty thousand dollars words,

828
00:57:16,679 --> 00:57:20,199
and they're flexing their upper learning degrees at you, and

829
00:57:20,199 --> 00:57:23,199
you're like, Wow, this guy's really smart. And then they

830
00:57:23,239 --> 00:57:26,119
turn around and then they watch Bill Maher and what

831
00:57:27,599 --> 00:57:30,800
then they vote for Kamala Harris or whatever. You're like, wait,

832
00:57:31,079 --> 00:57:34,119
I thought you were like a thinking person. You realize

833
00:57:34,920 --> 00:57:41,880
actually this that type of demanding, deliberative cognitive function. You know,

834
00:57:41,880 --> 00:57:43,679
if there was a big pie chart, how much of

835
00:57:44,079 --> 00:57:46,280
your life you're you know, you're actually engaged in that.

836
00:57:46,320 --> 00:57:48,280
It's a tiny sliver of the pie. Most of the

837
00:57:48,320 --> 00:57:50,639
rest of it is. I mean, why did that guy

838
00:57:50,719 --> 00:57:52,960
end up in medical school in the first place. Because

839
00:57:52,960 --> 00:57:54,679
he looked to his left and his right and that's

840
00:57:54,679 --> 00:57:58,079
what the people around him were doing. Or because someone

841
00:57:58,119 --> 00:58:01,119
from on high their their father, their mother, their grandfather

842
00:58:01,159 --> 00:58:03,400
said you're going to do this, and so they did it.

843
00:58:03,400 --> 00:58:10,639
It wasn't a deliberative, individualistic process of rational choice. It

844
00:58:10,840 --> 00:58:18,159
was unconscious, evolutionarily informed social process. So all that to say,

845
00:58:18,199 --> 00:58:21,400
I agree with you. We have to be careful about

846
00:58:21,440 --> 00:58:24,960
the e word, and my essay does skew on the

847
00:58:25,039 --> 00:58:27,760
cognitive empathy and not the affect of empathy. So I

848
00:58:27,760 --> 00:58:28,800
appreciate you bringing that up.

849
00:58:30,119 --> 00:58:30,599
Speaker 2: No problem.

850
00:58:30,880 --> 00:58:33,840
Speaker 1: Let's let's move on to Conoman because you've already mentioned him.

851
00:58:33,880 --> 00:58:39,599
Daniel Kneman, he basically portrays human cognition as inherently flawed.

852
00:58:40,480 --> 00:58:45,440
How does that? How does that bolster a move towards technocracy?

853
00:58:46,400 --> 00:58:49,400
And yeah, I mean you mentioned it a little too,

854
00:58:49,679 --> 00:58:52,239
so I mean, whichever direction you want to take that.

855
00:58:53,039 --> 00:58:57,159
Speaker 3: Yeah, Cooman, I remember when I remember both when the

856
00:58:57,199 --> 00:58:59,880
Jonathan Hype book and then Daniel Conoman book came out.

857
00:59:00,639 --> 00:59:02,559
They came out within a few years of each other,

858
00:59:03,039 --> 00:59:06,119
and they were some of the biggest I mean, the

859
00:59:06,239 --> 00:59:08,760
podcast circuit of ten to fifteen years ago was like

860
00:59:08,800 --> 00:59:15,519
those two guys, like every talk show, every podcast, and

861
00:59:15,599 --> 00:59:20,039
it's it's actually really really difficult to overstate how influential

862
00:59:20,159 --> 00:59:26,719
Daniel Kahneman has been on social science research but also

863
00:59:26,800 --> 00:59:32,800
the general intellectual culture. So Daniel Conoman's Israeli psychologist who

864
00:59:33,360 --> 00:59:36,039
was in the ideaf. He died like last year, I think,

865
00:59:37,320 --> 00:59:42,199
killed himself. It's probably interesting, it's probably not totally meaningless

866
00:59:42,239 --> 00:59:48,360
to point out that he signed himself up for like

867
00:59:48,400 --> 00:59:51,880
one of these you know, end of life self terminating things.

868
00:59:52,280 --> 00:59:53,719
I don't know exactly. I don't know if you went

869
00:59:53,760 --> 00:59:58,199
to Denmark or wherever in those countries they have. So

870
00:59:59,239 --> 01:00:02,639
his partner, Amos Tversky, I'm probably butchering these names because

871
01:00:02,639 --> 01:00:06,679
I'm not Israeli. They had been research partners since the

872
01:00:06,719 --> 01:00:10,119
fifties of the sixties they were part of They actually

873
01:00:10,159 --> 01:00:14,480
originated what's called the Heuristics and Biases research program. So

874
01:00:14,519 --> 01:00:16,760
to your listening audience, you know, if you ever took

875
01:00:16,800 --> 01:00:20,480
a psych instruction to psychology class at any point when

876
01:00:20,480 --> 01:00:23,639
you were in college, there was probably a section on

877
01:00:23,800 --> 01:00:27,159
cognitive psychology, and a lot of it probably had to

878
01:00:27,159 --> 01:00:31,639
do with this idea of heuristics and biases. And basically

879
01:00:31,679 --> 01:00:35,800
the Heuristics and Biases program says that human and this

880
01:00:36,920 --> 01:00:40,320
Gerd Gigorinzer accepts this, by the way, he just sort

881
01:00:40,360 --> 01:00:44,800
of takes a different conclusion from the same general idea.

882
01:00:45,320 --> 01:00:51,880
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tavski were basically perpetuating this line

883
01:00:51,880 --> 01:00:57,360
of research. They were both you know, mathematically minded, statistical thinkers,

884
01:00:57,960 --> 01:01:02,280
so they both perpetuated through their research and their public advocacy,

885
01:01:02,360 --> 01:01:08,079
their intellectual work. The idea that human cognition is sort

886
01:01:08,079 --> 01:01:12,800
of a it's based on it like maybe a handful

887
01:01:12,840 --> 01:01:17,000
of mechanisms or principles, if you want to say, and

888
01:01:18,920 --> 01:01:26,679
we don't necessarily have an immediate ability to activate those

889
01:01:26,719 --> 01:01:29,800
mechanisms or principles. They kind of seem to have a

890
01:01:29,840 --> 01:01:33,280
life of their own, uh, And they work in the background,

891
01:01:33,360 --> 01:01:38,760
and somehow magically we draw inferences and conclusions and and

892
01:01:38,760 --> 01:01:42,440
and answers to things. You know, Like when I was

893
01:01:42,480 --> 01:01:44,400
a kid growing up, my dad would always say to me,

894
01:01:44,519 --> 01:01:47,320
you know, like, you know, if you've ever got a

895
01:01:47,360 --> 01:01:49,519
problem you don't know the answer to, you know, stop

896
01:01:49,559 --> 01:01:51,480
thinking about it for a while, and a couple of

897
01:01:51,519 --> 01:01:55,000
hours later, you know, poof, it'll hit you. And I

898
01:01:55,039 --> 01:01:57,079
was like, well, that's kind of crazy, and that would happen.

899
01:01:57,559 --> 01:01:59,199
Maybe you go to sleep and the answer comes to

900
01:01:59,199 --> 01:02:01,159
you in a dream, or or you're trying to remember

901
01:02:01,159 --> 01:02:03,159
the name of some actor and it hits you a

902
01:02:03,199 --> 01:02:06,760
week later. It's like, what happened in my brain that

903
01:02:06,840 --> 01:02:09,800
I went from really forcedly trying to think about this

904
01:02:10,000 --> 01:02:12,880
to not and then suddenly the answer comes. Well, this

905
01:02:12,960 --> 01:02:17,800
is the basic idea of deliberative executive cognition. There are

906
01:02:17,840 --> 01:02:22,840
a handful of mechanisms and principles that operate somewhere kind

907
01:02:22,880 --> 01:02:27,159
of nebulously in the mind or within human consciousness that

908
01:02:30,199 --> 01:02:33,440
help us to think and make choices and make calculations.

909
01:02:33,800 --> 01:02:37,920
There's a sort of a rudimentary brain calculator in there

910
01:02:37,960 --> 01:02:41,679
that is running all these programs and calculations, and we

911
01:02:41,760 --> 01:02:44,960
don't really get to ever put our hands directly on it.

912
01:02:45,320 --> 01:02:46,599
But that's how the brain works.

913
01:02:47,239 --> 01:02:47,639
Speaker 4: Now.

914
01:02:47,840 --> 01:02:50,880
Speaker 3: Canman and I'm basically, by the way, for your audience's benefit,

915
01:02:51,199 --> 01:02:54,760
I'm giving like a very stripped away version of that story.

916
01:02:55,679 --> 01:02:57,519
But the important thing to take away from it is

917
01:02:57,519 --> 01:03:03,480
that Caniman and Diversity basically argued that this is an

918
01:03:03,599 --> 01:03:12,519
inexorably flawed evolutionary process that leads us to basically make

919
01:03:12,960 --> 01:03:16,840
a lot of errors, that human cognition is barely better

920
01:03:16,880 --> 01:03:21,480
than a coin flip. And so their academic work was

921
01:03:21,519 --> 01:03:26,960
about helping experts become better decision makers by providing them

922
01:03:26,960 --> 01:03:33,000
with all of this statistically informed psychological research, which, by

923
01:03:33,039 --> 01:03:36,079
the way, is also what Gigorenzer did. But the difference

924
01:03:36,159 --> 01:03:41,320
between Counterman and Tversky versus Gigazers Gigorenzer's idea was that

925
01:03:42,760 --> 01:03:46,519
these heuristics, and he didn't use the word biases, he

926
01:03:46,639 --> 01:03:51,800
just talked about them in terms of heuristics, are like

927
01:03:51,840 --> 01:03:54,239
it doesn't get better than that. Like, if you're telling

928
01:03:54,280 --> 01:03:59,039
me that evolution over millennia formed our brain to work

929
01:03:59,039 --> 01:04:00,920
in this way, then it probably did it really well,

930
01:04:01,039 --> 01:04:03,800
because just about everything else about us works really really well.

931
01:04:04,840 --> 01:04:07,920
But you have to understand the context that the mind

932
01:04:08,119 --> 01:04:11,599
is developing it. You have to understand the context the

933
01:04:11,800 --> 01:04:15,239
kinds of choices we have been forced to make throughout

934
01:04:15,280 --> 01:04:18,880
human history to understand how the brain arrives at those conclusions.

935
01:04:18,880 --> 01:04:21,800
And obviously we're living in this sort of like fairy

936
01:04:21,840 --> 01:04:30,519
tale Disneyland world that's completely removed from like primary evolutionary

937
01:04:30,559 --> 01:04:35,760
selection pressures, and can you know, Gigorenzer's argument is, basically,

938
01:04:36,400 --> 01:04:42,480
we've got this finely tuned cognitive organ that now has

939
01:04:42,559 --> 01:04:50,039
to deal with a wildly unpredictable, unstable, information rich environment,

940
01:04:50,599 --> 01:04:54,880
which is a you know, historically a unique circumstance that

941
01:04:55,039 --> 01:04:58,079
we've really never there's a very little precedent for it

942
01:04:58,199 --> 01:05:00,840
in the past, and so when humans make mistakes, it's

943
01:05:00,880 --> 01:05:05,800
because we are we have evolved in these niches, these

944
01:05:05,840 --> 01:05:11,519
tightly bound ecological niches, to produce certain types of solutions

945
01:05:11,719 --> 01:05:15,559
and to think about information in a particular way. We

946
01:05:15,639 --> 01:05:17,280
don't live in that world if you want to think,

947
01:05:17,280 --> 01:05:18,599
if you want to zoom out and say, you know,

948
01:05:18,800 --> 01:05:22,199
the world of scarcity versus the world of abundance. Right,

949
01:05:22,239 --> 01:05:25,039
in the world of scarcity, there's limited resources, there's also

950
01:05:25,079 --> 01:05:28,599
limited information, there's limited choices to me. But in a

951
01:05:28,599 --> 01:05:31,280
world of abundance, such as as the one that we

952
01:05:31,320 --> 01:05:33,559
live in, to the extent that you could say it's

953
01:05:33,599 --> 01:05:37,599
a world of abundance, well, you see things like, well,

954
01:05:37,599 --> 01:05:39,760
there's a great study that got published some years ago.

955
01:05:41,920 --> 01:05:46,880
I'll ask you, actually, there's a magical number after which,

956
01:05:47,559 --> 01:05:50,559
once presented with this number a number of options, humans

957
01:05:50,599 --> 01:05:54,719
actually are not able to make a meaningful choice. Do

958
01:05:54,719 --> 01:05:55,679
you know what that number is?

959
01:05:57,199 --> 01:05:58,039
Speaker 2: I don't. I don't.

960
01:05:58,559 --> 01:06:01,679
Speaker 3: I think it's about a dozen between six and twelve.

961
01:06:02,480 --> 01:06:04,280
Speaker 2: Six. Yeah. Yeah.

962
01:06:04,480 --> 01:06:09,599
Speaker 3: So, like you go trying to buy a car, you

963
01:06:09,639 --> 01:06:13,599
see like three dozen cars on the lot, it's like, well, meaningfully,

964
01:06:14,280 --> 01:06:16,840
how do I know which is the right car for me?

965
01:06:17,079 --> 01:06:19,519
Or you go shopping for clothing like me and you

966
01:06:19,559 --> 01:06:22,519
go down the mail the Aisle and you see like

967
01:06:23,119 --> 01:06:26,519
thirty gazillion racks of genes and you're like, I just

968
01:06:26,559 --> 01:06:28,199
need a fucking pair of pants. Man, Like, I don't

969
01:06:28,199 --> 01:06:30,920
even know what I'm looking at. You know, this abundant

970
01:06:30,960 --> 01:06:37,320
information rich environment is not something we're really evolutionarily adapted to.

971
01:06:38,199 --> 01:06:42,239
For Gigaenzer, that's not a fundamental problem with human cognition.

972
01:06:42,639 --> 01:06:46,079
For Kaniman, it is, and so Canaman. The thing that's

973
01:06:46,119 --> 01:06:51,119
even more interesting about Caneman about not just his academic

974
01:06:51,159 --> 01:06:54,760
research program, but also his affiliations. If you read his

975
01:06:54,800 --> 01:06:57,000
book Thinking Fast and Slow, which you want to Nobel

976
01:06:57,199 --> 01:07:00,760
Prize for Nobel Prize and behavioral Economy, he's talking about

977
01:07:00,800 --> 01:07:05,800
his good friend Cass suns Team, my great friend cast Sunstein,

978
01:07:05,800 --> 01:07:07,920
whose judgment I trust so well, who at the same

979
01:07:07,960 --> 01:07:08,440
time that.

980
01:07:09,280 --> 01:07:12,880
Speaker 1: I mean, I mean Condoman like was literally born in

981
01:07:12,960 --> 01:07:15,360
mandatory Palestine in like the thirties.

982
01:07:15,719 --> 01:07:17,719
Speaker 2: Yes, it went to Paris.

983
01:07:17,800 --> 01:07:22,119
Speaker 1: His parents escaped Paris because you know, the evil Nazis

984
01:07:22,159 --> 01:07:25,880
came to power, they moved back to Palestine, like right

985
01:07:25,960 --> 01:07:29,039
before before it became Israel.

986
01:07:29,719 --> 01:07:30,599
Speaker 2: I mean this is.

987
01:07:32,199 --> 01:07:35,280
Speaker 1: You want to talk about having your child, like having

988
01:07:35,360 --> 01:07:38,559
your life, your life's attitude set up for you right

989
01:07:38,559 --> 01:07:39,679
from the start.

990
01:07:40,760 --> 01:07:47,239
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's a very charmed life. So, you know, there's

991
01:07:47,280 --> 01:07:49,239
so much to say about Countman. It's actually the one

992
01:07:49,360 --> 01:07:51,199
essay I'm the most proud of because it really gets

993
01:07:51,239 --> 01:07:52,760
to a lot of things that have bothered me over

994
01:07:52,760 --> 01:07:55,559
the course of my life. I'll just say this. You know,

995
01:07:55,880 --> 01:07:58,960
all throughout, Conoman's kind of portraying himself as on the

996
01:07:59,039 --> 01:08:03,199
side of like Joshmo. You know, here's all this research

997
01:08:03,320 --> 01:08:05,719
showing that you're kind of a dummy, but don't worry.

998
01:08:05,920 --> 01:08:07,760
You know, you're my dummy, and I'm going to make

999
01:08:07,760 --> 01:08:10,199
sure nothing Dad happens to you. So he has this

1000
01:08:10,239 --> 01:08:14,000
sort of libertarian ethic about him where he talks about

1001
01:08:14,039 --> 01:08:17,640
the need for sort of paternalism because people are so

1002
01:08:17,760 --> 01:08:21,159
dumb and can't think straight and can't make decisions for themselves.

1003
01:08:21,399 --> 01:08:26,439
That means that they are easy prey for other people

1004
01:08:26,479 --> 01:08:28,560
who would want, you know, demagogues, people who would want

1005
01:08:28,600 --> 01:08:31,760
to manipulate them, what have you. And he treats he

1006
01:08:31,920 --> 01:08:34,760
views his research as basically a way to help Joshmo

1007
01:08:35,439 --> 01:08:38,000
navigate this world of complexity that he's just too much

1008
01:08:38,039 --> 01:08:42,159
of a dumb, gentile group to navigate on his own

1009
01:08:42,359 --> 01:08:45,159
and he keeps talking about It's just really funny the

1010
01:08:45,159 --> 01:08:48,119
way he keeps talking about people like Cass Sunstein, you know,

1011
01:08:48,359 --> 01:08:52,119
my good friend Cass Sunstein with his tremendous work. Meanwhile,

1012
01:08:52,159 --> 01:08:54,960
at the same time Cauntman's writing that book, Cass Sunstein

1013
01:08:55,039 --> 01:08:58,039
is writing his a series of white papers with people

1014
01:08:58,079 --> 01:09:03,920
like Adrian Vermule on conspiracy theories, on cognitive infiltration, on

1015
01:09:04,479 --> 01:09:07,920
like the og misinformation, like his whole idea of cognitive

1016
01:09:07,920 --> 01:09:11,880
infiltration Cass Sunstein that is was literally, We're going to

1017
01:09:11,920 --> 01:09:16,039
go into spaces where people are generating novel explanations for

1018
01:09:16,159 --> 01:09:18,880
political and social crises, and we're going to fuck it

1019
01:09:18,960 --> 01:09:23,960
up by deliberately throwing in pants on on you know,

1020
01:09:23,960 --> 01:09:29,560
a head retarded counter conspiracy theories. So it's a really

1021
01:09:29,560 --> 01:09:31,880
really dangerous situation. I'll put it. I'll put a bone

1022
01:09:31,920 --> 01:09:33,199
it real quick, just like.

1023
01:09:33,239 --> 01:09:39,119
Speaker 1: You just describe right wing Twitter or what I mean.

1024
01:09:40,199 --> 01:09:43,680
Speaker 3: That was one of his big bugaboos was the Internet's basically,

1025
01:09:43,640 --> 01:09:47,279
you know, his essay on conspiracy theories was directly about

1026
01:09:47,399 --> 01:09:51,319
nine to eleven and the Israel conspiracies. We're in this

1027
01:09:51,439 --> 01:09:53,600
union is like two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine,

1028
01:09:54,119 --> 01:09:57,399
So not like at the birth of the Internet or

1029
01:09:57,439 --> 01:10:01,439
even the birth of like, you know, AOL within ten

1030
01:10:01,520 --> 01:10:04,600
years of it. And he's basically saying it's a really

1031
01:10:04,600 --> 01:10:07,439
big problem that all of He doesn't say this, but

1032
01:10:07,640 --> 01:10:10,880
I'm editorializing a little bit. Cass s Enstein is basically

1033
01:10:10,880 --> 01:10:13,960
setting to people, it's a problem that these dumb, gentile

1034
01:10:14,079 --> 01:10:17,600
rubs are looking at Israel the wrong way, and we

1035
01:10:17,800 --> 01:10:21,159
need to figure out a solution to discourage them from

1036
01:10:21,159 --> 01:10:23,520
doing that. And if we can't discourage them, we have

1037
01:10:23,600 --> 01:10:30,079
to make the information economy so contaminated and unreliable that

1038
01:10:30,479 --> 01:10:34,079
no social transformation can come as a result of that.

1039
01:10:34,920 --> 01:10:37,560
And so that's the reason I wrote about Konman is

1040
01:10:37,600 --> 01:10:43,039
because the basic conclusion of his research is that humans

1041
01:10:43,119 --> 01:10:48,239
need a class of credentialed technological experts to do the

1042
01:10:48,279 --> 01:10:55,199
thinking for them. And you mentioned elul Eluill, famous French sociologist,

1043
01:10:55,479 --> 01:10:57,640
probably published like a hundred books. He might be one

1044
01:10:57,640 --> 01:10:59,840
of the one of the most prolific writers of all

1045
01:10:59,840 --> 01:11:03,199
time time. He's a Christian, he was an anarchist, and

1046
01:11:03,239 --> 01:11:06,880
he was French. That was the worst part about him.

1047
01:11:07,439 --> 01:11:11,800
He basically argued all the way back in the nineteen

1048
01:11:11,840 --> 01:11:19,439
sixties that there's this encroaching metaphysical problem in human society

1049
01:11:19,520 --> 01:11:23,960
is called technique. This is very actually, very complicated his

1050
01:11:24,039 --> 01:11:26,079
definition of technique, so I won't really get into it

1051
01:11:26,520 --> 01:11:30,079
here on the show with you. I give a lot

1052
01:11:30,119 --> 01:11:32,119
of time in the essay explaining it in a lot

1053
01:11:32,119 --> 01:11:34,760
of different perspectives, so it's definitely comprehensive in the book.

1054
01:11:35,119 --> 01:11:37,880
But basically he says that, you know, technique is this,

1055
01:11:39,279 --> 01:11:43,119
to put it very simply, is this sort of efficiency

1056
01:11:43,199 --> 01:11:51,720
mechanism that throughout different periods of human history was subordinated

1057
01:11:51,960 --> 01:11:55,479
to some other aspect of human social life. He says,

1058
01:11:55,600 --> 01:11:57,600
you know, in the Roman in the Greek and Roman

1059
01:11:57,640 --> 01:12:02,960
times or the Roman times, that technique was subordinated to

1060
01:12:03,000 --> 01:12:07,720
state craft, and that in the Medieval times that technique

1061
01:12:08,239 --> 01:12:12,279
was subordinated to the aims of the Church and sort

1062
01:12:12,319 --> 01:12:16,079
of theological thinking that you know, what technique looked like

1063
01:12:16,319 --> 01:12:23,079
in the Mid Ages was you know, theologians debating sort

1064
01:12:23,119 --> 01:12:28,079
of the minutia of like Christian metaphysics. You know, how

1065
01:12:28,119 --> 01:12:31,079
many angels can dance on the head of a pin,

1066
01:12:32,159 --> 01:12:35,520
that kind of thing. But at some point in the

1067
01:12:35,600 --> 01:12:41,039
last couple of hundred years, technique has become unmoored from

1068
01:12:41,640 --> 01:12:47,159
other social forces or other social domains of human life.

1069
01:12:47,640 --> 01:12:50,479
Technique is no longer just something you do to build

1070
01:12:50,520 --> 01:12:53,560
a better bridge, or to build a better government, or

1071
01:12:53,680 --> 01:12:57,479
to build a better cathedral, or to build a better

1072
01:12:57,560 --> 01:13:02,880
love for God. It's actually it's own good, its own end.

1073
01:13:03,800 --> 01:13:09,119
That sort of like colonizing every other social space. And

1074
01:13:09,159 --> 01:13:10,880
if you look at the world around you, it seems

1075
01:13:10,920 --> 01:13:15,880
like every endeavor that people are engaged in is kind

1076
01:13:15,920 --> 01:13:24,079
of subordinated to this idea of more efficiency, more productivity,

1077
01:13:24,720 --> 01:13:30,159
more conformity. If people complain about the algorithm online, it's

1078
01:13:30,279 --> 01:13:32,720
kind of a way of talking about the problem of technique.

1079
01:13:32,960 --> 01:13:36,439
People want to talk about the rapaciousness of capital, and

1080
01:13:36,479 --> 01:13:40,159
even ilul gives there's a whole section in the technological

1081
01:13:40,159 --> 01:13:43,119
society where it basically says like even in the early

1082
01:13:43,239 --> 01:13:50,520
generations of sort of like Babarian, you know, wasp capitalism,

1083
01:13:51,119 --> 01:13:53,520
that it was still pretty much kind of confined to

1084
01:13:53,760 --> 01:13:59,279
economic logic and economic conscernts, and at some point after

1085
01:13:59,319 --> 01:14:04,279
that it became its own thing. Daniel Kahneman the people

1086
01:14:04,359 --> 01:14:10,560
involved in this heuristics and research program, contemporary technocrats are

1087
01:14:10,640 --> 01:14:16,119
really people who have become like the physical embodiment of

1088
01:14:16,159 --> 01:14:20,439
this principle of technique, where you know, we don't even

1089
01:14:20,479 --> 01:14:25,920
care about a nation, state or a community. All of

1090
01:14:25,960 --> 01:14:32,880
these things are inefficient, you know, they they don't they

1091
01:14:32,960 --> 01:14:36,800
don't grow or progress on their own. There's something that

1092
01:14:36,880 --> 01:14:39,079
Jacques Oleeuell says that I consider to be a really

1093
01:14:39,079 --> 01:14:45,159
profound thing. He says, people who are kind of hypnotized

1094
01:14:45,199 --> 01:14:51,039
by the magic of technique, if you talk to them

1095
01:14:51,720 --> 01:14:58,399
and express trepidation, trepidation about like the direction of technological progress,

1096
01:14:58,880 --> 01:15:02,359
they will treat you as an enemy of mankind, like

1097
01:15:02,640 --> 01:15:05,239
what you're not. You don't want to go to Mars.

1098
01:15:05,840 --> 01:15:09,920
You don't want to replace your eyeballs with glass computers,

1099
01:15:10,319 --> 01:15:13,720
you don't want to be able to erase down syndrome

1100
01:15:14,079 --> 01:15:19,319
from the human you know, DNA, like whatever thing we

1101
01:15:19,399 --> 01:15:22,640
can achieve through technological progress. If you are an advocate

1102
01:15:22,760 --> 01:15:27,279
of that, then your enemy are the Luddites and you know,

1103
01:15:27,399 --> 01:15:31,319
like the spiritually amish people who have some skepticism at

1104
01:15:31,399 --> 01:15:35,640
the idea that we can just keep innovating and progressing

1105
01:15:35,840 --> 01:15:41,479
and making everything more technical. Just as an idea or

1106
01:15:41,520 --> 01:15:45,640
as an example for your audience, Like I love heavy metal,

1107
01:15:46,520 --> 01:15:48,680
but I really don't like a lot of heavy metal

1108
01:15:48,720 --> 01:15:50,880
from the last twenty years, and it's really taken me

1109
01:15:51,039 --> 01:15:54,079
my whole life to figure out why. If you compare

1110
01:15:54,159 --> 01:15:59,600
Black Sabbath and Tony Iomi, t I don't know the

1111
01:15:59,640 --> 01:16:01,960
guitar one of the guitar players from Lamb of God

1112
01:16:02,199 --> 01:16:06,840
or Trivium or some death metal band. Like literally, Tony

1113
01:16:06,880 --> 01:16:11,439
Iomi grew up in like bombed out, burning Birmingham, like

1114
01:16:11,720 --> 01:16:16,239
around the factories, and the sound of heavy metal was

1115
01:16:16,600 --> 01:16:21,960
the sound of industrial technological society. But Tony Iomi never

1116
01:16:22,159 --> 01:16:26,600
like he still used that sound to write melodies and

1117
01:16:27,279 --> 01:16:30,279
things that sort of resonate with the human spirit and

1118
01:16:30,319 --> 01:16:33,239
our ears and are pleasing to hear. But you listen

1119
01:16:33,279 --> 01:16:36,840
to a band like My Sugar. I recently started listening

1120
01:16:36,880 --> 01:16:39,439
to My Sugar. That song bleed. The first time I

1121
01:16:39,479 --> 01:16:41,039
heard it, I was like, Wow, that sounds like an

1122
01:16:41,079 --> 01:16:44,479
airplane engine, Like that's such a crazy sound to make

1123
01:16:44,520 --> 01:16:47,760
on guitar. So I bought the whole album and every

1124
01:16:47,800 --> 01:16:51,640
single song is like, we're literally gonna recreate the sound.

1125
01:16:51,720 --> 01:16:54,399
You know what the inside of your washing machine sounds like,

1126
01:16:54,640 --> 01:16:58,920
And it's like guitar and guitar music was whereas in

1127
01:16:58,960 --> 01:17:01,560
the era of Black sabbag it's like we're sort of

1128
01:17:01,600 --> 01:17:06,840
imitating industrial society to produce music. It's like, and now

1129
01:17:06,920 --> 01:17:11,760
today it's like we're sort of using music to recreate

1130
01:17:11,840 --> 01:17:15,960
technological society. It's less pleasing to listen to, it's more

1131
01:17:16,039 --> 01:17:20,119
technically demanding. The guys, you know, James Headfield has a

1132
01:17:20,199 --> 01:17:25,199
much more aggressive rhythm hand than Tony Iomi has had.

1133
01:17:25,680 --> 01:17:28,560
But I mean, is every Metallica riff as great as

1134
01:17:28,560 --> 01:17:30,760
every Black Sabbath riff? And then you know, twenty thirty

1135
01:17:30,840 --> 01:17:34,479
years later, is who's ever headlining oz Fest? Now? Are

1136
01:17:34,479 --> 01:17:38,079
they really better than Pantera was in nineteen ninety four.

1137
01:17:38,319 --> 01:17:41,680
They may be better performers, the music may be more

1138
01:17:41,840 --> 01:17:45,600
on the cutting edge, let's say, of a particular genre.

1139
01:17:45,880 --> 01:17:50,800
But it's also like nobody buys those records anymore. Nobody

1140
01:17:50,800 --> 01:17:52,600
goes to those concerts. If you want to see a

1141
01:17:52,640 --> 01:17:54,800
Lamb of God, you've got to see them, like on

1142
01:17:54,880 --> 01:17:57,399
a big festival tour with the same seven or eight

1143
01:17:57,439 --> 01:18:00,199
other bands that nobody will pay to see on their

1144
01:18:00,279 --> 01:18:04,039
own tickets. Anyway, the point I'm making is that technique

1145
01:18:04,079 --> 01:18:08,119
sucks and it ruins good things.

1146
01:18:09,479 --> 01:18:13,840
Speaker 1: Let's uh okay, So you have an addendum that I

1147
01:18:15,159 --> 01:18:17,119
I don't even want to touch it. I want people

1148
01:18:17,199 --> 01:18:19,479
to read that on their own, because you know, that's

1149
01:18:19,520 --> 01:18:22,600
where you know, if we start talking about that here,

1150
01:18:22,720 --> 01:18:31,279
we're going to be we'll start getting into maybe, yeah,

1151
01:18:31,319 --> 01:18:36,199
having to couch some language, especially talking about certain groups

1152
01:18:36,239 --> 01:18:39,560
and things like that. Let's finish up talking about this.

1153
01:18:39,680 --> 01:18:42,520
So let's talk about let me ask this question, if

1154
01:18:42,560 --> 01:18:46,399
babies are born racist? What's that means? We're just racist?

1155
01:18:46,479 --> 01:18:48,680
Speaker 2: Right? Talk about Paul Bloom.

1156
01:18:48,960 --> 01:18:55,119
Speaker 3: Yeah, So let me tell you a short story. Back

1157
01:18:55,119 --> 01:19:00,800
when I was a university lecturer, obviously New York. I

1158
01:19:00,800 --> 01:19:04,720
taught in New York very racially, you know, multiculturally diverse

1159
01:19:04,720 --> 01:19:07,600
in every sense of the word. So whether it was

1160
01:19:08,399 --> 01:19:15,159
Midtown Manhattan or South Brooklyn or the Bronx or Nasau

1161
01:19:15,319 --> 01:19:19,880
or Queen's whatever, I had to teach the same material.

1162
01:19:20,800 --> 01:19:24,279
And one of the chapters was on human development from

1163
01:19:24,359 --> 01:19:28,000
you know, infancy to Cradles of the grave human psychology.

1164
01:19:29,079 --> 01:19:33,119
And at the time I was teaching, or around the

1165
01:19:33,159 --> 01:19:36,039
time I had finished graduate school, Paul Bloom had published

1166
01:19:36,039 --> 01:19:41,479
a series of studies that were well there were sixty

1167
01:19:41,479 --> 01:19:45,079
minutes segments on it. He wrote, you know New York

1168
01:19:45,119 --> 01:19:50,199
Times best selling books about it. Basically, he developed a

1169
01:19:50,640 --> 01:19:55,119
very unique set of research methodologies by which he claimed

1170
01:19:55,800 --> 01:20:01,119
you could get infants under twelve months old to demonstrate

1171
01:20:01,880 --> 01:20:09,119
complex social cognitive behavior, things that, according to the psychological

1172
01:20:09,239 --> 01:20:15,319
dogma of previous generations, really didn't show up until like four, five, six,

1173
01:20:16,119 --> 01:20:19,880
seven years old. According to Paul Bloom, it was present

1174
01:20:19,920 --> 01:20:24,239
in babies as young as three months old. Basically, what

1175
01:20:24,279 --> 01:20:29,439
he would do is a kind of rudimentary friend enemy

1176
01:20:29,600 --> 01:20:35,159
distinction test, so they were so infants would and there

1177
01:20:35,159 --> 01:20:37,439
are multiple iterations of this. I won't get into all

1178
01:20:37,479 --> 01:20:42,000
the minutia of it, but one such example was infants

1179
01:20:42,000 --> 01:20:45,640
would basically watch sort of a play of two dolls

1180
01:20:45,760 --> 01:20:49,399
interacting with one another, or three dolls interacting with one another,

1181
01:20:50,319 --> 01:20:54,439
where you know, the two dolls are maybe in conflict

1182
01:20:54,520 --> 01:20:56,760
over something, and then a third doll comes over and

1183
01:20:56,800 --> 01:21:01,600
helps one, maybe in a different a third doll comes

1184
01:21:01,600 --> 01:21:06,960
over and hurts another one. Basically, the infants were They're

1185
01:21:07,000 --> 01:21:11,960
measuring the responses of these infants to either aggressive or

1186
01:21:11,960 --> 01:21:18,359
cooperative social behavior between complete strangers. So you know, generally,

1187
01:21:18,399 --> 01:21:22,199
the outcome of the study was that babies tend to

1188
01:21:22,359 --> 01:21:26,880
like the helpers more than they like the kind of

1189
01:21:27,680 --> 01:21:32,239
anti social obstructive ones. They like neutral people more than

1190
01:21:32,279 --> 01:21:35,640
they liked hurtful people. They like helpful people more than

1191
01:21:35,640 --> 01:21:40,760
they like neutral people. And so I would show the

1192
01:21:40,840 --> 01:21:44,720
sixty minutes clip to my students, and invariably Paul Bloom

1193
01:21:44,720 --> 01:21:48,479
would would try to scale up the findings of this research. Okay,

1194
01:21:48,520 --> 01:21:52,199
so Tier one is infants have a preference for pro

1195
01:21:52,279 --> 01:21:56,119
social behavior over anti social behavior. Okay, So in Paul

1196
01:21:56,119 --> 01:21:59,960
Bloom's world, that means there's a sort of rudimentary fact

1197
01:22:00,000 --> 01:22:03,760
faculty there pretty much from birth, where infants can make

1198
01:22:03,800 --> 01:22:09,760
a friend enemy distinction. And with each subsequent iteration of

1199
01:22:09,800 --> 01:22:16,359
this experiment, they would fold in other social conflicts, including racism.

1200
01:22:17,199 --> 01:22:19,359
And again, around the same time, there was a whole

1201
01:22:19,359 --> 01:22:24,000
bunch of studies based on what are called looking time research.

1202
01:22:24,039 --> 01:22:28,640
Methodology is basically, how long does an infant stare at

1203
01:22:28,680 --> 01:22:34,199
something and how in particular do they maintain their gaze

1204
01:22:34,279 --> 01:22:37,319
or do they look away and get bored and seek

1205
01:22:37,359 --> 01:22:39,680
other kinds of stimulation. So at the same time Paul

1206
01:22:39,680 --> 01:22:42,840
Bloom is doing this research, there's other research showing that well,

1207
01:22:42,880 --> 01:22:46,119
infants have a sort of racial preference. You know, white

1208
01:22:46,119 --> 01:22:49,880
babies are going to look at a white face longer

1209
01:22:49,920 --> 01:22:52,239
and more intently than they'll look at a black face

1210
01:22:52,439 --> 01:22:55,319
or a yellow face, or a red face or a

1211
01:22:55,359 --> 01:22:59,479
brown face, and so on and so forth. And basically

1212
01:22:59,520 --> 01:23:04,680
Paul Bloom was making this argument that we are much

1213
01:23:04,720 --> 01:23:08,920
more cognitively complex at an earlier stage and human human development.

1214
01:23:08,920 --> 01:23:11,439
That would be part one. That part two, we have

1215
01:23:11,479 --> 01:23:15,840
an innate preference for pro social or what's sometimes called

1216
01:23:15,920 --> 01:23:20,800
you social behavior. And three that's part of that preference

1217
01:23:20,960 --> 01:23:28,760
is kinship preference. We have a bias towards people that

1218
01:23:28,800 --> 01:23:33,000
look like us, so on and so forth. And I

1219
01:23:33,000 --> 01:23:35,680
would show this to go back to the story time.

1220
01:23:35,720 --> 01:23:38,279
I would show this to my students. The students would

1221
01:23:38,279 --> 01:23:41,119
be you know, as young as fresh out of high school,

1222
01:23:41,359 --> 01:23:44,159
as old as like in their fifties and sixties, trying

1223
01:23:44,159 --> 01:23:47,199
to get another degree because the economy was totally shit

1224
01:23:47,279 --> 01:23:51,560
ten fifteen years ago, so you know, black, white, Arab, Jewish, Christian, whatever,

1225
01:23:51,720 --> 01:23:55,800
And routinely the two things I always observed, doesn't matter

1226
01:23:55,840 --> 01:23:58,239
where I taught it, doesn't matter who I taught it to.

1227
01:23:59,239 --> 01:24:02,840
One they were amazed at the idea that we have

1228
01:24:02,960 --> 01:24:09,920
that sort of cognitive sophistication that early on, so amazement,

1229
01:24:12,000 --> 01:24:15,880
but there was also a sort of horror at the

1230
01:24:15,920 --> 01:24:22,000
idea of implicating infants in the sort of nasty prejudices

1231
01:24:22,720 --> 01:24:27,880
and social evils that adults get messed up in. You know,

1232
01:24:27,920 --> 01:24:30,399
my class would be like, Okay, sure, maybe I'm racist,

1233
01:24:30,520 --> 01:24:34,159
but not like twenty four week old Timmy. He can't

1234
01:24:34,159 --> 01:24:37,840
be racist. That's wrong. And so my students had this

1235
01:24:37,960 --> 01:24:41,600
sort of innate sense that you shouldn't talk about infants

1236
01:24:41,640 --> 01:24:45,880
that way, that you shouldn't responsibilize infants that way, And

1237
01:24:45,960 --> 01:24:47,760
that kind of sat with me for a long time.

1238
01:24:48,640 --> 01:24:50,520
And the point of the essay that I basically make

1239
01:24:50,640 --> 01:24:56,359
is is there's a really really heavy presumption that Paul

1240
01:24:56,399 --> 01:25:00,720
Bloom is making that, whether it's wrong or correct, the

1241
01:25:00,760 --> 01:25:05,000
whole theory, his whole model kind of falls apart. And

1242
01:25:05,039 --> 01:25:08,600
the basic presumption he makes is that kinship is a

1243
01:25:09,159 --> 01:25:15,359
moral phenomenon as opposed to any other kind of cognitive phenomenon.

1244
01:25:15,800 --> 01:25:18,560
In other words, is it necessarily is there a moral

1245
01:25:18,640 --> 01:25:23,239
dimension to kinship preference. I think that's an open question.

1246
01:25:24,359 --> 01:25:28,239
I think it's a presumption that you're making that the

1247
01:25:28,279 --> 01:25:32,039
behavior or the type of categorization that the infant is

1248
01:25:32,079 --> 01:25:37,560
doing is necessarily moral as opposed to social, as opposed

1249
01:25:37,640 --> 01:25:43,199
to some other facet of social sorting would be the

1250
01:25:43,239 --> 01:25:47,319
technical phrase, some other type of cognitive sorting. Really, the

1251
01:25:47,319 --> 01:25:51,399
only way you can, seemingly, the only way you can

1252
01:25:52,119 --> 01:25:57,359
define those behaviors as moral, is if you have a

1253
01:25:57,399 --> 01:26:01,199
problem with those kinds of behaviors, if you see an

1254
01:26:01,239 --> 01:26:06,760
issue with an individual identifying with someone that they're genetically

1255
01:26:06,800 --> 01:26:10,920
related to, as opposed and showing preference for someone that

1256
01:26:10,920 --> 01:26:14,199
they are genetically related to over somebody else. And there's

1257
01:26:14,199 --> 01:26:16,119
a there's an excerpt in that essay from a New

1258
01:26:16,199 --> 01:26:20,199
York Times piece that that Paul Bloom wrote that again,

1259
01:26:20,880 --> 01:26:23,640
like the way we started our conversation basically gives away

1260
01:26:23,680 --> 01:26:28,279
the whole game. He says, oh, jeez, I can probably

1261
01:26:28,279 --> 01:26:32,600
pull it's probably worth pulling up the exact quote. If

1262
01:26:32,640 --> 01:26:34,680
you'll just bear with me for like half a second.

1263
01:26:35,439 --> 01:26:53,119
Speaker 4: Sure, here we go, all right, I'm not going to

1264
01:26:53,159 --> 01:26:53,680
waste your time.

1265
01:26:53,720 --> 01:26:57,079
Speaker 3: Basically, he says, there are there are there are key

1266
01:26:57,239 --> 01:27:02,960
differences in the ways that in develop morally, and the

1267
01:27:03,039 --> 01:27:07,159
problem is not that they have those tendencies, it's that

1268
01:27:07,199 --> 01:27:09,840
they differ from how we would like them to be.

1269
01:27:10,960 --> 01:27:14,159
So basically, he's saying, we need to social engineer kinship

1270
01:27:14,239 --> 01:27:17,119
preference out of infants, and if we can demonstrate that

1271
01:27:17,159 --> 01:27:20,439
they show kinship preference as early as two to three months,

1272
01:27:20,720 --> 01:27:24,000
then that's really as early as the social engineering program

1273
01:27:24,239 --> 01:27:26,600
ought to start. And that was what my students were

1274
01:27:26,600 --> 01:27:30,520
intrinsically picking up on in the classroom. They were recognizing

1275
01:27:31,000 --> 01:27:36,520
that if you are treating this novel cognitive psychology experiment

1276
01:27:36,800 --> 01:27:42,439
as a pretext for a sort of rigorous disciplinary educational program.

1277
01:27:43,079 --> 01:27:45,880
Almost none of them ever said that, but the horror

1278
01:27:45,920 --> 01:27:51,680
that they all saw in treating an infant like like

1279
01:27:51,760 --> 01:27:54,840
something you can mold was written all over their face.

1280
01:27:54,880 --> 01:27:57,560
And that's really the big issue with Paul Blum's body

1281
01:27:57,600 --> 01:27:59,720
of work, And that's what I'm focusing on in that

1282
01:27:59,840 --> 01:28:05,520
say is that, look, it's an open question whether or

1283
01:28:05,560 --> 01:28:10,439
not there's a utility and a benefit to studying moral

1284
01:28:10,640 --> 01:28:15,399
and social development and infants. But if you're doing that

1285
01:28:15,479 --> 01:28:21,439
with the express intention of trying to effectively derail cognitive

1286
01:28:21,520 --> 01:28:26,760
development infant cognitive development, then there's really there's neither a

1287
01:28:26,920 --> 01:28:32,279
moral nor even a scientific justification for doing so. I

1288
01:28:32,399 --> 01:28:36,159
chose ball Paul Bloom's essay because it's actually or his book,

1289
01:28:36,279 --> 01:28:38,199
because it's actually one of the worst books I've ever

1290
01:28:38,199 --> 01:28:41,840
read in my entire life. From an academic, you know,

1291
01:28:42,000 --> 01:28:46,960
Ivy League educated researcher. There's no citations, which, by the way,

1292
01:28:47,439 --> 01:28:51,960
like that doesn't bust my balls that there's no citations

1293
01:28:51,960 --> 01:28:54,399
in it. But if you're like an Ivy League person,

1294
01:28:54,880 --> 01:28:57,520
you're a department chair of universities, you're on sick like

1295
01:28:57,560 --> 01:29:00,199
that's what you're supposed to do. Like that, this just

1296
01:29:00,239 --> 01:29:04,079
like the bare minimum, and it's just non sequitor after

1297
01:29:04,119 --> 01:29:08,600
non sequitor after nonsequitor, and it's it's it's almost again

1298
01:29:08,680 --> 01:29:11,159
not to get too naughty and anti semitic here, but

1299
01:29:11,239 --> 01:29:14,439
like you're reading that book of his is like getting

1300
01:29:14,479 --> 01:29:17,640
into the mind of a Jewish propagandist because he's just

1301
01:29:17,840 --> 01:29:21,840
telling you he's he's demonstrating to you why his own

1302
01:29:21,880 --> 01:29:24,359
logic doesn't really make sense. You're getting to see the

1303
01:29:24,399 --> 01:29:30,279
weaknesses in their worldview. And there's a few other things

1304
01:29:30,279 --> 01:29:33,359
he cites in there in terms of like anti racist

1305
01:29:33,560 --> 01:29:37,960
race science that I think probably your audience would really

1306
01:29:38,039 --> 01:29:40,720
enjoy it. So that's, yeah, that's what's up with Paul Bloom.

1307
01:29:42,560 --> 01:29:45,239
Speaker 1: Yeah, it just it goes back to that. I mean,

1308
01:29:45,800 --> 01:29:48,000
at this point it's been attributed to so many people

1309
01:29:48,000 --> 01:29:52,079
a hypocryphal that give me a child before they're two

1310
01:29:52,239 --> 01:29:55,199
three years old, and I'll I'll own their mind for

1311
01:29:55,239 --> 01:29:57,159
the rest of their lives. I'll mold their mind for

1312
01:29:57,199 --> 01:29:59,600
the rest of their lives. Yeah, I mean, that's that's

1313
01:29:59,640 --> 01:30:02,159
all I ca here. And you know, and also what

1314
01:30:02,239 --> 01:30:06,199
I hear is, I don't want this kid to grow

1315
01:30:06,279 --> 01:30:09,520
up to be baby Hitler, so we need to we

1316
01:30:09,520 --> 01:30:12,000
need to make sure of that. So please let me

1317
01:30:12,079 --> 01:30:15,760
have access to that mind so that it'll never think

1318
01:30:15,880 --> 01:30:18,079
to turn its gaze upon me.

1319
01:30:19,600 --> 01:30:25,720
Speaker 3: There's in that book. I like it, really, I was thunderstruck.

1320
01:30:27,039 --> 01:30:31,800
They're peppered all throughout the book. His book is called

1321
01:30:32,239 --> 01:30:35,560
Just Babies Origins of Good and Evil, you know, a

1322
01:30:35,600 --> 01:30:38,079
little bit of a punny title, like they're just babies,

1323
01:30:38,119 --> 01:30:40,239
but also just in the sense of like justice and

1324
01:30:40,239 --> 01:30:45,560
all that kind of thing. Peppered all throughout the book

1325
01:30:45,880 --> 01:30:54,000
are mentions of basically like collective violence against other groups

1326
01:30:54,479 --> 01:30:58,199
and like in the first two or three pages he

1327
01:30:58,279 --> 01:31:02,920
mentions the show and almost with only there's one exception.

1328
01:31:03,000 --> 01:31:05,560
All throughout the book, all of his examples of like

1329
01:31:05,840 --> 01:31:11,520
evil racism, evil group conflict. It's always anti Jewish pogrim

1330
01:31:11,560 --> 01:31:13,840
stuff throughout the book, and like you just can't help

1331
01:31:13,880 --> 01:31:16,680
but read it and think, like there's an agenda here.

1332
01:31:16,760 --> 01:31:20,920
This actually isn't science, This isn't social theorizing. This is

1333
01:31:21,119 --> 01:31:24,560
just as I said in our last conversation, like this

1334
01:31:24,720 --> 01:31:28,199
is just like a racial polemic, like you are wearing

1335
01:31:28,479 --> 01:31:32,039
the And this is a concept I introduce in that essay.

1336
01:31:32,119 --> 01:31:34,119
It's not my own concept, but I've kind of put

1337
01:31:34,159 --> 01:31:37,760
my own flavor on it. Back in the sixties, you know,

1338
01:31:37,880 --> 01:31:40,800
there used to be this talk of ethnoscience as a

1339
01:31:40,840 --> 01:31:47,439
way to talk about like, you know, some African guy

1340
01:31:47,479 --> 01:31:51,640
in the bushes, you know, doing like witchcraft, voodoo, and

1341
01:31:52,640 --> 01:31:54,760
basically there there was an attempt to try to make,

1342
01:31:55,439 --> 01:32:04,159
you know, non industrial societies and their rudimentary like knowledge power,

1343
01:32:04,680 --> 01:32:07,960
make it on an equal footing to you know, Western civilization.

1344
01:32:09,239 --> 01:32:11,840
But I twist that a little bit, and I say, Okay,

1345
01:32:12,760 --> 01:32:16,239
let's accept the premise that different groups practice the scientific

1346
01:32:16,279 --> 01:32:19,439
method differently. That's basically what this concept of ethnoscience is

1347
01:32:19,439 --> 01:32:24,720
trying to say. Well, when when people like Paul Bloom

1348
01:32:25,119 --> 01:32:28,720
try to do the scientific method. It's actually not about

1349
01:32:28,760 --> 01:32:36,880
like objectivity, empiricism, uh, science knowledge, It's it's racial self defense.

1350
01:32:38,000 --> 01:32:43,640
And that's particularly egregious when you are making infants the

1351
01:32:43,680 --> 01:32:46,199
object of your racial self defense.

1352
01:32:48,399 --> 01:32:48,560
Speaker 2: Yeah.

1353
01:32:48,600 --> 01:32:50,960
Speaker 1: And I think if people pick up the pick up

1354
01:32:51,000 --> 01:32:55,520
the book and read the read the addendum, they'll get that.

1355
01:32:55,600 --> 01:32:59,760
They'll I think you wrap that up where basically a

1356
01:32:59,760 --> 01:33:02,119
lot of the writers that you're you know, most of

1357
01:33:02,159 --> 01:33:05,560
the writers that you're covering, that's what they're doing. It's

1358
01:33:06,000 --> 01:33:09,600
basically all of their work is in defense of their

1359
01:33:09,720 --> 01:33:11,520
own self interest.

1360
01:33:13,479 --> 01:33:15,279
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is why I think is an important book.

1361
01:33:15,279 --> 01:33:17,479
I'm certainly not the first person to bark up this

1362
01:33:17,600 --> 01:33:20,479
treat but I do think I did it pretty comprehensively,

1363
01:33:20,600 --> 01:33:24,000
and I tried to go after as many like central

1364
01:33:24,079 --> 01:33:26,920
figures as possible. Are there other people of the you know,

1365
01:33:26,960 --> 01:33:30,720
besides Daniel Conneman who are worth interrogating. Yes, And I

1366
01:33:30,760 --> 01:33:34,119
hope that somebody reads this and thinks, well, I'll plug

1367
01:33:34,159 --> 01:33:37,920
that hole. I mean, this book is like very much

1368
01:33:38,000 --> 01:33:41,520
in the vein of like a Kevin McDonald type of writing, right,

1369
01:33:42,079 --> 01:33:46,760
So you know, I don't think I'm necessarily trailblazing, but

1370
01:33:46,840 --> 01:33:51,039
I do think, you know, with regard to Daniel Kahneman

1371
01:33:51,279 --> 01:33:54,239
and Jonathan Hight. You know, these are two people who

1372
01:33:54,319 --> 01:33:58,560
I think, because of their recency, there's such a lack

1373
01:33:58,600 --> 01:34:02,520
of skepticism forwards their work. It's easy to look, you know,

1374
01:34:02,640 --> 01:34:05,119
fifty years, one hundred years in the past and say, oh, well,

1375
01:34:05,199 --> 01:34:08,720
Carl Popper kind of or Theodore Herzel or whoever, kind

1376
01:34:08,720 --> 01:34:10,920
of like, you know, their shit's all fucked up. Part

1377
01:34:10,920 --> 01:34:13,920
of my language, like it's obvious, but you're you know,

1378
01:34:14,199 --> 01:34:17,000
when it's in our lifetime and you're growing up and

1379
01:34:17,560 --> 01:34:20,479
maturing whatever, and you're seeing this work. You know, for

1380
01:34:20,520 --> 01:34:23,039
a whole bunch of reasons, people don't put their their

1381
01:34:23,079 --> 01:34:30,039
scrutinizing lenses on. And even in the right Jonathan Jonathan

1382
01:34:30,119 --> 01:34:36,680
Heights's work is cited pretty much uncritically, and to me,

1383
01:34:36,960 --> 01:34:40,560
like his ideas have always been on their face wrong,

1384
01:34:42,479 --> 01:34:47,079
same thing with Daniel Khneman, Like the idea that evolution

1385
01:34:47,399 --> 01:34:50,720
over whatever, thousands of years, millions of years, tens of

1386
01:34:50,720 --> 01:34:54,520
millions of years would create something like us that is

1387
01:34:54,560 --> 01:34:56,439
like a fifty to fifty coin flip in terms of

1388
01:34:56,680 --> 01:35:00,159
the shit going on between our ears as has any

1389
01:35:00,239 --> 01:35:05,319
positive utility. Like that's so obviously wrong. And the thing

1390
01:35:05,399 --> 01:35:12,479
that's so like to me kind of characteristic of someone

1391
01:35:12,600 --> 01:35:16,319
like a Daniel Conneman is that they develop all this

1392
01:35:16,520 --> 01:35:23,079
language and they develop all these concepts that you can't

1393
01:35:23,159 --> 01:35:26,479
like test or apply in the real world, or that

1394
01:35:26,600 --> 01:35:34,479
don't actually reduce confusion, but they actually create more confusion.

1395
01:35:34,680 --> 01:35:36,560
So like there's like one of the big concepts of

1396
01:35:36,640 --> 01:35:39,920
Daniel Connoman and this is a tangent I apologize this.

1397
01:35:40,039 --> 01:35:43,239
He talks about the human consciousness basically being broken up

1398
01:35:43,279 --> 01:35:47,680
into two systems, System one and system two. Hence the

1399
01:35:47,680 --> 01:35:51,560
title of his book Thinking Fast and Slow. One is faster,

1400
01:35:52,000 --> 01:35:57,920
one is slower, one's more prejudicial, one is more conservative

1401
01:35:57,920 --> 01:36:01,439
and reserved. One is more rational, one is more irrational.

1402
01:36:01,680 --> 01:36:05,800
And then if you ask yourself, well, where is System

1403
01:36:05,840 --> 01:36:09,039
one in the brain or in the body, or you

1404
01:36:09,079 --> 01:36:11,399
can't point to it. It's not a it's not an

1405
01:36:11,439 --> 01:36:16,479
actual thing that corresponds to like a material or social reality.

1406
01:36:17,560 --> 01:36:22,079
Speaker 1: Chemisphere is that one hemisphere versus another or something.

1407
01:36:20,800 --> 01:36:23,479
Speaker 3: Right right right? Even with Freud, And there's lots of

1408
01:36:23,479 --> 01:36:26,680
bad things you can say about Freud, but his tripartite

1409
01:36:26,720 --> 01:36:30,239
model of the mind more or less kind of corresponds

1410
01:36:30,279 --> 01:36:34,279
to the major areas of the brain prefrontal cortex, mid brain,

1411
01:36:34,399 --> 01:36:40,159
hind brain. There's this sort of analogical thing happening there,

1412
01:36:41,239 --> 01:36:43,640
but with kind of an it's like I'm just making

1413
01:36:43,720 --> 01:36:47,880
it's it's literally word craft, it's just word wizardry. And

1414
01:36:47,880 --> 01:36:49,800
and then you know, the title of the book, Intolerant

1415
01:36:49,840 --> 01:36:55,359
Interpretations is a very specifically intended title, like you need

1416
01:36:55,399 --> 01:36:59,279
to hear those kinds of things and immediately disregard them.

1417
01:36:59,680 --> 01:37:03,199
Like part of the problem that a lot of us have,

1418
01:37:03,960 --> 01:37:08,279
for one reason or another is we're just uncritically accepting

1419
01:37:08,319 --> 01:37:12,319
what's happening. And you can actually be like a like

1420
01:37:12,359 --> 01:37:15,800
a jerk, like a disagreeable jerk from the outset and

1421
01:37:15,880 --> 01:37:19,840
be right about like the whole affair. And that's that's

1422
01:37:19,840 --> 01:37:21,840
what I'm That's what I'm encouraging people to do. I'm

1423
01:37:21,920 --> 01:37:26,199
encouraging people to be a disagreeable jerk to basically fight

1424
01:37:26,680 --> 01:37:29,920
like like just don't accept the premise and and that

1425
01:37:29,920 --> 01:37:34,119
that that pertains to like our political activism, Like I

1426
01:37:34,199 --> 01:37:38,600
don't need to entertain the prospect that the United States

1427
01:37:38,640 --> 01:37:43,039
of America is a you know, giant job fair for

1428
01:37:43,079 --> 01:37:45,039
the whole rest of the world. I don't have to

1429
01:37:45,119 --> 01:37:49,479
accept the premise that our ancestors were bad people and

1430
01:37:49,560 --> 01:37:51,760
we need to be punished for it. I don't need

1431
01:37:51,800 --> 01:37:57,760
to accept that we should encourage people to forego family

1432
01:37:57,840 --> 01:38:03,760
formation so because reasons, because reasons that, like, on their

1433
01:38:03,800 --> 01:38:05,880
face don't even stand up to scrutiny anymore.

1434
01:38:07,800 --> 01:38:08,039
Speaker 2: You know.

1435
01:38:08,079 --> 01:38:11,159
Speaker 1: One of the things that was mentioned is just the

1436
01:38:12,199 --> 01:38:16,880
myth of the individual you know, coming from a libertarian background,

1437
01:38:18,600 --> 01:38:22,039
the first thing somebody does when they become a libertarian,

1438
01:38:22,159 --> 01:38:29,800
which is the most individualistic ideology out there political quote

1439
01:38:29,880 --> 01:38:33,439
unquote political ideology out there, is they're like, oh, wow,

1440
01:38:33,600 --> 01:38:37,199
I'm an individual I need to find other people who

1441
01:38:37,279 --> 01:38:41,039
consider themselves to be individuals. There's a fucking political party

1442
01:38:41,079 --> 01:38:45,800
in this country of radical individuals. I mean, if that

1443
01:38:45,840 --> 01:38:51,199
doesn't tell you that individuality and radical individualism is just

1444
01:38:51,319 --> 01:38:54,800
a myth that as soon as somebody finds, oh I'm

1445
01:38:54,840 --> 01:38:57,960
embracing this, but oh I want to hang out with

1446
01:38:58,159 --> 01:39:02,359
other people who who are radical individuals too, It's like

1447
01:39:02,720 --> 01:39:05,279
that doesn't make any sense. What are you talking about?

1448
01:39:05,560 --> 01:39:08,840
You know, and you know people should you know, once

1449
01:39:08,840 --> 01:39:11,079
you start going down the rabbit hole of you know,

1450
01:39:12,479 --> 01:39:17,119
who preach libertarianism and where that came from, and you know,

1451
01:39:17,319 --> 01:39:21,239
maybe look at some of the names yep, yeah, yeah,

1452
01:39:21,319 --> 01:39:24,600
may start seeing some some similarities there too to what

1453
01:39:24,600 --> 01:39:26,399
we're talking about.

1454
01:39:26,920 --> 01:39:30,439
Speaker 3: Yeah, which is again it's a fine line that we

1455
01:39:30,520 --> 01:39:34,119
have to walk because I I correct me if I'm wrong.

1456
01:39:34,159 --> 01:39:39,000
I don't think you would flat out reject anything associated

1457
01:39:39,039 --> 01:39:42,840
with individuality, like we are our own people, I mean,

1458
01:39:43,239 --> 01:39:44,880
but this is why.

1459
01:39:44,359 --> 01:39:49,319
Speaker 1: We're individual We're individuals within a group mmma.

1460
01:39:48,479 --> 01:39:51,680
Speaker 3: Which is why I emphasize people like Gerd gigorinz Or

1461
01:39:51,680 --> 01:39:53,880
in my book as sort of an antidote to that. Yes,

1462
01:39:53,960 --> 01:39:57,840
you are you, Peter R. Cononas, and there is no

1463
01:39:57,920 --> 01:40:01,319
other Peter R. Cononas, uh, and you are in critical

1464
01:40:01,359 --> 01:40:07,159
ways very different from everyone around you. But at the

1465
01:40:07,239 --> 01:40:10,520
end of the day, we're a collective. We're a sort

1466
01:40:10,560 --> 01:40:15,439
of hive organism. We exist in physical spaces in proximity

1467
01:40:15,520 --> 01:40:19,199
to other people that we all depend on, even in

1468
01:40:19,279 --> 01:40:22,199
ways that we can't possibly fathom. So that's those are

1469
01:40:22,239 --> 01:40:24,279
kind of the major take homes of my book.

1470
01:40:25,039 --> 01:40:28,760
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, And remind everybody again where they can

1471
01:40:28,800 --> 01:40:29,199
find the.

1472
01:40:29,119 --> 01:40:34,399
Speaker 3: Book Antelope Hill Publishing dot Com. It's also on Amazon.

1473
01:40:35,680 --> 01:40:38,439
If you like the way this stuff sounds, you can

1474
01:40:38,439 --> 01:40:41,640
pick up my old books at Imperium Press. And I

1475
01:40:41,720 --> 01:40:45,760
maintain a blog Janiel dot substack dot com where I

1476
01:40:45,920 --> 01:40:49,279
basically continue the same type of writing. So Pete, I

1477
01:40:49,319 --> 01:40:52,279
really appreciate it your total gentlemen, and to your audience

1478
01:40:52,600 --> 01:40:53,319
by my book.

1479
01:40:54,199 --> 01:40:58,279
Speaker 1: Yeah, and a reminder, yeah, five percent off of if

1480
01:40:58,279 --> 01:41:00,439
you go buy his books at Antelope Hill and any

1481
01:41:00,479 --> 01:41:02,880
other of the great books at Antelope Hill if you

1482
01:41:02,960 --> 01:41:05,720
use code pe q all one word at check out,

1483
01:41:05,479 --> 01:41:09,000
and I cover shipping most of the time. So yeah,

1484
01:41:09,399 --> 01:41:13,520
I've my library is on the other side of the room,

1485
01:41:13,560 --> 01:41:16,920
and if I were to start pulling out the amount

1486
01:41:16,960 --> 01:41:20,159
of books from Antelope Hill, it'd be quite the pile.

1487
01:41:20,840 --> 01:41:24,119
So head on over there. Thank you, Josh really appreciate it.