The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin E. H. Smith

Episode Date: August 4, 2020

Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason by Justin E. H. Smith Jehsmith.com A fascinating history that reveals the ways in which the pursuit of rationality often leads to an explosion of irrationality It’s a story we can’t stop telling ourselves. Once, humans were benighted by superstition and irrationality, but then the Greeks invented reason. Later, the Enlightenment enshrined rationality as the supreme value. Discovering that reason is the defining feature of our species, we named ourselves the “rational animal.” But is this flattering story itself rational? In this sweeping account of irrationality from antiquity to today―from the fifth-century BC murder of Hippasus for revealing the existence of irrational numbers to the rise of Twitter mobs and the election of Donald Trump―Justin Smith says the evidence suggests the opposite. From sex and music to religion and war, irrationality makes up the greater part of human life and history. Rich and ambitious, Irrationality ranges across philosophy, politics, and current events. Challenging conventional thinking about logic, natural reason, dreams, art and science, pseudoscience, the Enlightenment, the internet, jokes and lies, and death, the book shows how history reveals that any triumph of reason is temporary and reversible, and that rational schemes, notably including many from Silicon Valley, often result in their polar opposite. The problem is that the rational gives birth to the irrational and vice versa in an endless cycle, and any effort to permanently set things in order sooner or later ends in an explosion of unreason. Because of this, it is irrational to try to eliminate irrationality. For better or worse, it is an ineradicable feature of life. Illuminating unreason at a moment when the world appears to have gone mad again, Irrationality is fascinating, provocative, and timely. Justin E. H. Smith is a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. He is the author of Divine Machines: Leibniz and the Sciences of Life (2011), Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference: Race in Early Modern Philosophy (2015), The Philosopher: A History in Six Types (2016), and Irrationality: A History of the Dark Side of Reason (2019), all published with Princeton University Press. He is an editor-at-large of Cabinet Magazine. The main-belt asteroid 13585 Justinsmith was named after him in 2015.

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Hey, Chris Voss makes me laugh, et cetera, et cetera. That helps us get more views on the show and keeps the show rolling right along. Today we're going to have a very super topical discussion with a brilliant philosopher. And Eternal Lightbulbs, for me, we had a lot of aha moments. And I think you'll enjoy it, too. Stick with it. It's very cerebral, but I think it's something you'll see why our world is having the challenge it is and maybe how we can repair it.

He will be Justin E.H. Smith. He's a professor of history and philosophy of science at the University of Paris. He is the author of Divine Machines and another book, Human Nature and Human Difference. Another book, The Philosopher, A History in Six Types, and of course his latest book, Irrationality, from Princeton University Press. He's also the editor-in-large of Cabinet Magazine. And the main asteroid belt, 13585, Justin Smith was named after him in 2015. He has his own asteroid belt.

So there you go. That's up for cool. So anyway, let's bring him to the show and get it on. Hey, Justin, welcome to the show. How are you doing, buddy? Hey, thanks so much for having me. Doing very well. Awesome sauce.

You know, I had seen your book with the Princeton University Press. They had sent me a catalog of stuff. And I was like, a history of the dark side of reason, irrationality. And they started reading some of the details on it. I'm like, holy God, this is a topic for the ages that we're in right now. Yeah, very timely. Very timely indeed. So give us an overview about what your book is about in the context of it. Well, it's a strange balance because by kind of training and my background, I'm a historian of philosophy, right? And my specialty is in the 17th century in rationalist metaphysics, people like Descartes and Spinoza and Leibniz. But I also write and think about the contemporary world and social media and recent developments in electoral politics and so on and so on. So the book is a strange hybrid between this scholarly, dusty, antiquarian world that I inhabited for many years

and the contemporary world that we encounter on Twitter every single day. And essentially, I wanted to bring some insights from the long history of philosophy to bear on our effort to understand how it is that arguments that unfold in social media, for example, seem so hopelessly doomed from the outset. And to take another example, I wanted to bring the history of philosophy to bear on our effort to understand the recent rise of politics uh excuse me of populism in politics and what i take to be the serious crisis of uh liberal democracy throughout the

world so that's that's in a nutshell what the book is about and you bring a lot of that back from the fifth century bc murder of hippppasus am I pronouncing that right? I say Hippasus I'm not learning I went to public school yeah it's a wonderful parable to begin with because well first of all it probably never

happened it's probably something that was kind of added as an ornament in late antique doxography about the Pythagorean cult. kind of founders of what would come to be the ideal of reason in the Western world. It's thanks to the Pythagorean tradition that we have certain of the cornerstones of what we understand to be rationality. But at the same time, the Pythagoreans were a bunch of wacko cultists who all had to, you know, abandon their families, wear the same uniform, live together in dorms, eat the same food and respect all sorts of bizarre rules that their dear leader insisted on, like not eating beans and, you know, all sorts of curious things. Did they have to wear red hats? They didn't wear red hats. I mean, over time, in later Pythagoreanism, I think it was a purple and gold robe. But so it's an interesting, already right there, we have the paradox, right? Where wherever you have people insisting on the primacy of reason, if you start to probe into it, even for a moment, you start to discover that there's also what, you know, in the title of the book, I call it the dark side, right? Wherever you have people insisting on the primacy of reason, especially when they're insisting on how rational they themselves are, you find some pretty

irrational behavior. So what happens to Hippasus of Metapontum? Well, he's a member of the cult of Pythagoras, and he is one of the few who's privy to this new remarkable discovery of irrational numbers, of the square root of two or the diagonal that is a non-terminating decimal series, right, which freaked them out, right? Why did it freak them out? Well, because it meant that, you know, if the natural world is built on mathematical principles, and one of the principles is something that can't possibly be cognized, right, because it's a non-terminating decimal series, then this effectively shows that the world itself is irrational, right? So Hippasus makes the mistake of divulging this dirty secret to a non-cult member. So his fellow Pythagoreans take him out in a boat, tell him they're going fishing, and when they're out there, they drown him, right? So there's this explosion of bloody violence that is the result of this movement's

interest in kind of transforming rationality into dogma. And the argument of the book is that this keeps happening over and over and over again throughout history. And you can see the reign of terror after the French Revolution, for example. At the same moment, the revolutionaries are establishing or are transforming Catholic churches into what they literally called temples of reason. They are also chopping off people's heads in an insane kind of frenzy that nobody can control, right? So, Hippasus of Metapontum is just kind of the founding parable of this thing we see over and over again in the history of rationality. That scene of taking him out of the boat, Mario Puzo must have copied that in Godfather 2 when Fredo goes out.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the whole thing. You know, it's interesting to me what you're talking about because I've always, I actually grew up in a cult. And I've always, what changed me in coming out of it, and I always knew it was BS, but, but you know you had to exercise yourself from it was all my life whether it's been religion or anything else is what means what makes people believe things and start to believe the things that sometimes are either like you say in your book completely irrational or semi-irrational whether it's cognitive bias, et cetera, et cetera. But then it becomes such a complex belief system that supports that one crazy idea.

And, you know, sometimes it gets out of hand. Sometimes it gets people killed. Sometimes it kills other people. And we may be seeing, you know, some different things of that. But it's interesting to me. Now, was this cult that you're talking about, was there a guy that was the head of this? Or were they all just praying to a god? Was there like a Jonestown sort of guy?

Well, Pythagoras was their head. And I mean, I don't want to exaggerate this. I don't want to say he that it's telling irony that the very earliest beginnings of the history of Western philosophy are mired already in cult-like behavior, right? In what we think of as uh as irrationality right was part of their challenge and our challenge and their and their and their issue with uh hipposus uh for because everyone is trying to cling to the fact that maybe life isn't as horrible or is is untamed or or that it is random, you know. Sure, yeah. We're always trying to do these forms and functions.

In fact, people get up the same time every day and, you know, go to bed the same time every day because they're trying to reason this crazy life that many times doesn't have that. Sure, sure, sure. And you can see that, you can see religious ritual, for example, as an attempt to impose order on an inherently disorderly world. And inevitably, the disorder starts to creep in no matter how much you perfect your rituals, indeed, right? And I suppose, in a sense, you can see the history of Western philosophy as attempting to replace ritual with argument and proof, right? We try to come up with proofs that satisfy us in the view that the world is inherently rationally ordered, rather than imposing the rational order ourselves through ritual, right? And that's a huge transformation,

and it might, in the long run, turn out to be less successful than living life through ritual, right? But what I mean is, like, you know, what were the ritual practices associated with, say, Cartesian epistemology or something like that? There weren't any, right? Descartes just sits there and writes books, right? Or sits there and thinks. And the loss of that ritual dimension of life, the belief that somehow, you know, doing the sign of the cross or lighting candles or doing yoga or whatever, that all of those things are somehow less rational than the kind of pure use of the faculty of reason is perhaps a mistake. But I might be getting off on a tangent here. Well, I think we've seen a lot of different examples of this over time.

Like, you know, the earth is flat. Remember there were people killed over that? People like, and then there was Socrates who had to drink to his own death because he wouldn't subscribe to a certain thing. Sure, sure. It's kind of interesting. You know, you made me realize something that just occurred to me. I'm an atheist, and I'm very comfortable with the fact that I don't know what goes on outside this life,

and I'm not going to spend a lot of time fretting over it worrying about it wasting whatever precious time i have but i do have a ritual but i do have a ritual of of you know like more of morals of some type where i have to do good unto others you know i have a basis of being a good human being you know there's a lot of people that say well if you don't have religion then you just just go kill people and you're a rampant criminal because you have no morals. When, in fact, you know, we actually do. I mean, it's just the basic things that make sense. Like do good to others so they don't do good to you. I don't go pillaging, raping and killing and murdering.

I mean, maybe on Wednesdays, but, you know. Wait, so do you think that is this? But still, that's a ritual, right? but is this just strategic on your part i mean i mean well i i'm good to other people because i want them to be good to me and i realize that if we all just you know we all just go full chaos and apocalyptic stuff and we all start living the purge that it might not work out good for me because i'm probably you know the first one yeah i'm the i'm the first one they're going to cannibalize you know big fat guy hello thomas hobbs on this yeah if i'm on the if i'm on the donner pass thing man i'm the first one that gets eaten you know i'm not really that good with guns

and i'm kind of slow being old so you know i'm the first one who doesn't make it in the purge, and I'm an asshole. So everyone's going to try and kill me. You know, so I kind of follow the golden rule. You know, I just do it because it's right, and I try and be good. But I just realized that that is in a ritual in and of itself informed. So if I'm making fun of religious people for their little rituals of the cross or hail mary full of grace or you know i don't think there's anything wrong with that but but there is there is a programming to it that's the one thing i disagree

with is the programming you know like you say with the cult that he was in yeah all that stuff is a programming it's ritualistic but it's also a programming from the people running the show so you came up with your rituals on your own i think so i'm i'm yeah you know i'm just getting that from you because i'm like i'm like hmm i actually do have i do have some cultists short of ritual to my atheism of yeah whatever but i don't know if there's i don't think there's any way around it but I do have some cultists short of ritual to my atheism of whatever, but I don't know if there's, I don't think there's any way around it, but. No, no, no, there's no way around it.

But I mean, there's all sorts of arbitrary rules that like, you know, you, if you're like most people, you probably, you probably eat cows, but not chimpanzees. You probably, you know do all sorts of things stay away from the cute animals but we'll eat everything yeah yeah things that have absolutely no grounding in rational arguments even though philosophers try to come up with rational arguments for them in a kind of ad hoc way right like why Why would you do something for heaven and others? Yeah, go ahead. One of my favorite things to say is the one thing man can learn from his history

is that man never learns from his history. I think that's a, that's a, that's just one of mine, which is a, which is a kind of an update of, you know, those who don't learn from their history are doomed to repeat it. The problem is man never lives for this history which is why you're taking this this greek story and you're finding it on twitter today i guess yeah you know i think that i i forget where i saw this but you know um those who don't learn history are condemned to repeat it but those who do learn history are condemned to sit sit back and watch others who

haven't learned history repeat history, right? You can't win. Like, I tried to write a book that brought the full force of historical knowledge to bear on contemporary problems in the hope that it would help to resolve them. Has this book made a tiny, tiny drop of difference in the hope that it would help to resolve them. Has this book made a tiny, tiny drop of difference in the world? I think that would be self-deception on my part if I said it has. Probably. I don't know, man. It's such a weird thing how we always repeat history.

You know, I just had Jill Weinbanks with her Watergate story. Oh, yeah. And she was on the original prosecutor's thing. One of the things we talked about is I'm like, was it so weird that like 40, 30, 40 years later, you know, she was actually a commenter for MSNBC. She's a legal analyst for them. And you're reliving this whole history.

Yeah. 40 years ago under the same sort of principles the same sort of everything that she late she actually with her team laid a foundation for and yeah and i'm like do you pinch yourself is it weird that you're you're like wow this is some deja vu crap going on yeah and yeah you know i should say like i i often despair about how little good knowledge of history does in the world but i things might things might be changing right i went to get a covid test recently and um the the medical technician um uh asked me what i do for a living and i never tell people i'm a philosopher because they think it's... You have to wear the sandals and the toga. It's just too much, too much to process.

So I usually say I'm a historian. I tell them a half-truth. And so this medical technician said, what do you do for a living? And I said, I'm a historian. And he said, this is what really surprised me. He said, wow, that's an important job to have right now. Right. And I thought, what is he talking about? Why? Why right now? Because, you know, I don't live in the United States. And there's a lot of things that that you that I don't understand. But what he meant, what he meant was it's important to process historical information in order to take part in contemporary debates about, say, the demands of Black Lives Matter for reparations and what we should do with all the Confederate monuments throughout the United States, and so on.

And I thought this was really interesting because most of my life, if I have told people, again, telling them a half-truth, half-lie, that I'm a historian, the reaction has been, well, quit living in the past, dude, get with the program and start earning some money, you know, and finally it's changing. And so maybe that's good. I don't know. I think it is. I, you know, we, we opened up the show a couple of months ago to just all authors and all books. It used to be just CEOs and business people. And business people and and so uh i open up to everybody and

and it's been really wonderful but what's interesting is is a lot of the books and a lot of discussions we've been having in the history of what people wrote in these books like yours is is like you say it's it's it it's been like you know the black lives matter and uh you know dealing with uh donald trump and everything that's going on right now a lot of it's been like, you know, the Black Lives Matter and, you know, dealing with Donald Trump and everything that's going on right now. A lot of it has been very Black Lives Matter. And it almost became this serendipitous discussion about race through all the books that were up and history. And someone asked me, they go, are you just doing a whole bit for like, are you just having all these guests on on Black Lives Matter? I'm like, no, man, we just pick random stuff out of catalog and the serendipities has been coming through.

And the history of whatever, what all these great authors like yourself have written about have just, you know, all this stuff applies to what's going on right now. Because, man, this is history. But, you on right now because, man, there are stories from this history. But, you know, I'm a philosopher, too. I have a TikTok account. Of course, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. At least until Trump shuts it off. Every flippin' millennial in Gen Z. So what led you to write this book about irrationality?

Oh, let's see. It's hard to give an account of how it came into being. I think there are some things I would do differently now. In fact, you know, I had written in 2015, I actually published a book on the history of the concept of race, which was very focused. And right now I'm, I'm writing a book called the living mirror philosophy of the internet,

which is also very focused. And irrationality was my everything into the kitchen sink sort of, sort of attempt at a magnum opus, you know, just the thing that does, does it all says everything I've ever thought. And I would caution others against doing that. But I really wanted to kind of give a comprehensive statement of the way I understand both the history of philosophy, but also this curious kind of teetering in my own sensibilities, in my own way of understanding the world, between a kind of really no-nonsense kind of Neil deGrasse Tyson style, like let's cut the crap and do some measurements kind of attitude about other people's claims. So that on the one hand, but also on the other hand,

something that is very much the opposite of that in me, which is a love of elusive, imagistic poetry, a kind of fascination with fringe beliefs and appreciation for weirdo occultists like the Theosophists and Madame Blavatsky and stuff like that. Like, I love all of that, right?

I just love it. And so, you know, for years, I've kind of thought, what the hell is wrong with me? You know, I wrote my dissertation on Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who is one of the canonical rationalist philosophers, the inventor of the infinitesimal calculus, one of the inventors of what we now think of as computer science. So a real no-nonsense guy. And in a way, that's, my intellectual model. At the same time, I'm very attracted to movements and tendencies that are

much, much less kind of rigorous. And so in a way, the book is kind of an honest attempt to excavate both of these lineages that I see as constituting my own understanding of the world and my place in it. I like the title. One of my favorite lines, and I never have figured out who exactly said it, was a, it was a comment called, you know, the wilderness of mirrors or life is a wilderness of mirrors. Oh yeah.

And, and I love just thinking about what that means. Oh yeah. You're walking through a wilderness of mirrors and you know, you're seeing yourself everywhere and yeah. And so I like the title of the book that you have there. how does this how do we bring this forward to you you brought this forward and talked about your book about twitter and arguments that you know i spent all my time you know there's there's social there's you know we're arguing about our conscious bias or unconscious bias topics and trying to resolve these issues.

Like somehow your tweet is going to, like everyone's going to have an aha moment and go, oh, crap, we're all racist. We should stop that. That guy tweeted something. And then no one does it. So what's the paradigm of how that applies. Well, look, I mean, I honestly think that the world would be better off if all of the internet, except maybe online banking

and Wikipedia were suppressed, right? I think Wikipedia is a wonderful kind of exceptional success story. I agree with the person who said it works in practice, but not in theory, an inversion of the old of the great enlightenment encyclopedists, and it should be retained. Social media, by contrast, is deeply, deeply harmful to civil society. And it is what I have taken to calling a perversion or a parody of the idea of the public sphere, right? We engage in it as if it were the site in which deliberative democracy and the free exchange of ideas occurs, even though it is structured in such a way as to ensure that that never actually happens right through uh through no i'm serious it's really i agree with you i agree with you i'm just laughing because you're

so right it's structured by algorithms over which we have no control as users and because these are private companies it's it's taken for granted that we have no right to even ask what these algorithms are, but we all know, as users, that they exacerbate disagreement, and, well, disagreement, one, and two, radicalization, right? That is, we all know that if you say something subtle and carefully thought out and nuanced and hesitant, like any intelligent person should, it's going to fall flat, right? Yeah, no one will write that, yeah.

And so the radicalization and the exacerbation of disagreement mean effectively that we have to suppress this instinct that we have from being old enough into us the idea that participation in debate, in deliberation about the issues that affect us in society is a good thing, right? We take it for granted that that's a good thing because we grew up in the latter part of the 20th century. But I sincerely believe, and I'm arguing this in my next book, that it's your civic duty to not participate in the parody of deliberation that is social media, right? That even if you're right, even if your claim is substantively true, you're making things worse by stating it, right? So that leaves us in a real bind.

And for the moment, I sound like simply a nihilist, Huy Klo sort of thinker. I don't know what the way out of this is. I have some ideas that I'm going to propose in the book, but how they're actually going to be implemented is something that I think at this moment is objectively unforeseeable. And I think you're right. I'm might be older than you or about the same age.

I grew up without the internet. You know, when we were 10, 11, we were throwing dirt clods at the side of the house and running around building, ruling like tree houses and crap and, and adventuring through the woods and stuff behind her house um and so i watched you know all this stuff come up in fact like i said the beginnings of twitter we were on and there was this whole there was this whole kumbaya of like the internet it's the great democracy yeah democratization of ideas and freedom of information. You know, when I grew up, your parents had to spend, you know,

$5 billion getting the encyclopedia, botanica thing. Some guy would come knock on your door and it's like, how much is that so my stupid kids can learn? And it's like, yeah, $4 thousand dollars a book or some crap and you know like you say now they can go on wikipedia um and so there was this whole kumbaya moment and even early on in twitter's history and facebook you know people like me vaulted it and said said you know this can bring the world together we can become one you know and i saw a lot of that going on where people became uh people started realizing the humanity of everything where it wasn't so much

territorial anymore and tribal or less tribal but then yeah but then it turned you know we saw the failure of governments and stuff and then governments went hang on wait we can destroy each other with this this is yeah we can use this as a weapon and and a lot of people i think started turning that what you would put in your book the dark side and now it's come full circle where um the extraneism of ideas i'm not sure if that's the right word but like we're going just full batshit like on stuff like yeah yeah like it's like and maybe is that because is that the web do we i mean we kind of had fringe stuff before yeah it couldn't catch fire yeah you had to like buy like some really weird niche magazine and yeah i mean you know i i try to keep things in

perspective like i grew up in california in thes. A friend of mine you might want to have on the show, Eric Davis, wrote a wonderful book called High Weirdness about, let's say, esoteric occult movements, drugs and popular culture in the 1970s particularly in california um and um uh it's a wonderful book and uh without um being conscious of this i was steeped in that stuff just looking like you know when i was a kid i went into a bookstore a typical bookstore in sacramento where i grew up i went into the metaphysics section and it was all about astral projection and, um, and stuff that, um, academic philosophers consider beyond the scope of the project of metaphysics properly conceived. Right. And so we were just steeped in that stuff. And it's important to remember that, like, you know, so we were just steeped in that stuff. And it's important to

remember that, like, you know, that we've always been, we've always been a bit bonkers, particularly in the United States, particularly in California. And, and the internet didn't uh uh didn't generate that stuff de novo um but there are some telling figures right one figure that i like to point out is that um um um uh uh hits on or the metrics for flat earth YouTube videos spiked after Trump's election, right? And I take that as pretty revealing. It's not that Trump himself is a flat earther. I don't think Trump himself was a birther either, referring to Barack Obama's birth certificate and that whole scandal circa 2011. 2010s of the previous decade that we you know we had to get more kind of we had to up the ante uh and get more extreme in various ways um and this was certainly felt in electoral politics

but it was also felt in what you might call uh popular natural philosophy right right? So the stakes were too low, say, for creationism to have the appeal that it once had. People needed to go for something more kind of hard-edged, and I think that explains this kind of natural gravitation towards um flat eartherism right or q and o so is this a thing where just people need a new drug it's kind of like yeah it's kind of like uh you know uh an epistemological crack epidemic of the of the mid-2010s. That's one way to see it. I'm part of the artista. Where, you know, there was,

all of this stuff was always around, but it just got distilled into a more... Yeah, most times, I mean, these QAnon people, like if we would have found you like 20 years ago, running around spouting this QAnon stuff stuff we would put you in a facility right right right so you know there's a general sense that things needed we needed to up the ante but also the kind of the the decentralization of, right? Where you no longer have just a few media outlets telling you what the right version of, say, the Vietnam War, I'm thinking of Walter Cronkite,

is you now have just as many possible sources of authority as you might want to find. So it's like choose your own authority. Choose your own crazy. Yeah, and that's the spirit of the current moment. And that's definitely something that is a direct consequence of the rise of new information technologies. Like, you know, as an intellectual historian, it's important not to draw cause and effect relationships too quickly. But here I think it's really clear that the Internet is making us crazy. The Internet is making us crazy.

That should actually be the title of one of your books. You know, I see what you're saying now. It makes sense because, and I'm not sure if you're just a fringe crazy person that I've latched on to because I need your drug. Let's look at it from 10,000 feet. But no, I can see that. You know, even like I mentioned Watergate, the Watergate girl with Jill Weinbanks, you know, one thing she talked about was back then, you know, you had the three networks and, you know, you had a basis of truth, a basis of untruth. And now, I mean, just stuff is so blended i mean you talk to people and they have in in

sometimes their craziness makes you know there's some times where i've had to sit down and go do i do i do i really know what's true i mean maybe i'm not true you know i mean i i looked at justice kavanaugh when justice kavanaugh went through his thing. And, you know, we were the liberals like myself. You know, we put him through a big thing because obviously it was fair. I mean, Trump had said it, that he had put forth this guy because he was a guy who might help get him off and in a constitutional crisis. And, you know, the other stuff was a bit of an add-on as to why he was maybe unfit because of what he did in college. But even then, it was just the offense of what he was trying to do.

Yeah. And then recently, he actually voted in favor of, you know, not giving the same thing that nixon went through and not giving the thing yeah so it made me question i'm like geez do we do we ruin that guy's whole life and career and drag him through the mud just just because whatever and then of course now an article has come out that he was working in the back of the scenes to try and get them to not rule on it and to avoid it uh that in abortion issues and how you're like okay well maybe he deserved it but you know sometimes i look at stuff like that i try and i try and question you know i try and get outside of my own box and go

when i smoke my own crack these days you know yeah but of course that's a really good example yeah yeah i don't think a lot of people take that introspection, what they believe. Sometimes I question how I believe. I learned that from business. It's a business aspect that I learned where you go back and you – I call it the crazy eye. You go back and recheck your models. You go, why did I build it this way?

And then you improve it because you can question it and analyze it. And I've tried to do that with with logic and reason through my life as much as i can but then i always you know five years later i'm like i was an idiot yeah of course well i mean you know that's uh kind of like intro to philosophy day one the the um uh kind of message we try to get across is that there's a difference between wisdom and knowledge, right? And that the kind of cultivation of wisdom is all about constantly reminding yourself of your own epistemic limitations, right? That's what it is to be wise. And that's not to say you should never commit yourself to anything. And there's a deep problem that, you know, if wise people are

all like Socrates, and they all insist that they know nothing, then the wiser people are going to be the least effective people, and the stupider people are going to be the ones who are out there transforming the world. And that is indeed what happens. And that's, you know, an enduring problem. But you know, one of the one of the things I try to argue in, in irrationality is that we really need to see claims of the sort, the earth is flat, contextually. You don't need to assess their content. You don't need to go out and start looking at satellite images and stuff like that. But you need to understand why they're being said in this particular moment. And there was this one NBA player, a young guy who was really into flat earth theory for a while. And I watched a few interviews with him and I was

sincerely touched when I listened to him, you know, because it became very clear, very quickly listening to him that all he really meant was, hey, look, I'm out here trying to think for myself. And, and I don't like having other people trying to think for myself. And I don't like having other people telling me what to think. And I'm just a young guy trying to figure the world out. And it was so touching and sincere. I came away from it thinking, yeah, why not let this guy flirt with flat eartherism for a while? He's probably going to come out of it more intelligent than uh the kind of bien pensant uh literalist who thinks that whatever the scientific establishment tells you is ipso facto true yeah yeah yeah so i don't know how you you can't really put this back in the Pandora's box. That's out. We can't just go, we're shutting down the internet, man.

And like my example earlier with Watergate, I mean, now there's just so many of these different things. And one of the problems maybe with social media I've heard discussed is they gave everyone a voice, which probably wasn't always a good idea. Maybe it was better that, you know, there was a few companies that had to pay a lot of money the FCC and to get licenses so they could broadcast BS and there was kind of a standard of of modicum of of what was truth was and what they should report and and maintaining certain standards but you know now uh you don't you don't need an FCC

license you don't you know i mean i'm some idiot with a podcast i don't have a radio license you know i don't have to go you know i can swear on this say that george carlin uh what is it nine words um and and and i can spout whatever sort of crazy stuff i want in fact i think that's what the podcast is for but the problem is is it creates a million different genres of or i don't know if genres is that word but a million different things of how crazy you can be and a lot of people like they tune into it like you mentioned earlier that you know certain these videos will take off. And a lot of the algorithms, like you say, on social media, especially Facebook, aren't built for logic. They're built for emotion, right?

Yeah, yeah. And so they're built to play on our emotion, not our logic. I used to complain about how, you know, I'd make these logical videos on YouTube and I'd make logical posts. And the more logical the video was, the more logical the post,, and I'd make logical posts. And the more logical the video was, the more logical the post, the more no one would see it. But if I could have them start sucking down Tide Pods and talking crazy stuff, well, there's 5 million views right there.

And the same thing with Facebook, I get all the likes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's all very complicated because i have to say like everything i've seen of zoomers on tiktok doing crazy things i think is just so delightful and life-affirming like i can't get enough of it um and um um i don't want to come across in my articulation of concerns as just an old grump or as someone who wants to burn it all down. And I do hope that there would be a way to reform, a way to have more accountability. But I think that given that it's too late to just, you know, shut it all down, we do need to start rethinking, again,

the value of expertise and authority and coming up with new ways to have like a moderate kind of sensible expert oversight of, you know, what gets put out there in public and what gets let's say blocked in some way. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And there's a certain aspect of it. You know, I've watched flat earth videos for the entertainment. Like I a car crash person i love car crashes like i one of my favorite things to do used to be to watch cops and cheaters whenever i get depressed and i'd be like my life sucks i go watch cheaters i have a vodka and go watch cheaters or i go watch cops and then

at the end like two hours later i feel really good about myself because i'm like i'm not getting arrested and thrown in jail all the time i'm doing pretty darn good yeah um and and i think if we you know like you i have a tiktok addiction especially at night i'll lay down and be like i'll watch a few tiktoks fall asleep, and three hours later, you know, 100 TikToks. But as long as you recognize that's entertainment, right? Yeah. Like, if I go see a movie, it's entertainment. I don't, if I start thinking that The Godfather 2 is what everyone's doing in life, and I got to start walking around being Michael Corleone, they're going to put me in the fun house.

Right. But it's kind of become a fun house but it is interesting to me there's i'm going to try and pull up a article here one of the things that that's that's you know we talked about the cults and the in the um and the patterns that they do and there was an article that i saw today that i tweeted and I've tweeted so much crap, it's probably lost, but it talks about why religious people are, have been such fertile ground for people like Trump and usually for autocrats. It's because they've already been taught to start believing some fantasy stuff of stuff that,

you know, I mean, I think we can all agree that the Bible is kind of like a loosely interpreted and maybe he has some, I think most historians at least can say, you know, did Jesus really walk on water? I don't know about that, man. Maybe he has a good LSD, and so do the 12 apostles, and they're having a good old time in California.

But, you know, I mean, you read the book, and you just go, wow, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were in the middle east that's okay um but but but uh there's an article i just read today that talks about how if i can get you to start believing and suspending you know certain realities you're foreground for everything else yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah like i've had some friends that they listen to alex jones and uh and there's been a few different people that i've read that as journalists they sat down and started watching fox news and they're like at first you're resistance to it and like seems like entertainment you're like these people are stupid haha yeah and but after a certain amount of it with the repetition yeah and soaking in

your brain starts going but what if it's true and eventually you start down the path really oh yeah it must be true yeah it's it's a difficult thing isn it? Because I honestly think it's an important exercise to do that. And, you know, I've been in the US for a while now. But when I was living outside of the US, every time I came back, if I was in a hotel room, the first thing I did was tune in Fox, right? Because I think it is objectively virtuous to try to get inside people's heads. But it's like, that creates a tension, right? Because it's virtuous to do something that does involve some risk to yourself, right? Because indeed, you can get sucked in. Now, I think at this point, I'm pretty safe, right? I can read books about astral projection, about satanic cults. I can watch Alex Jones. I can do anything I want, and I'm going to come out basically who I already am, right? And I don't know what to make of that. I don't know that,

you know, the old approach, like the approach of, say, the Vatican in the 17th century was to, you know, keep all the crazy stuff for themselves, while making sure all of these books were kept out of the hands of the common people who couldn't handle it. And, you know, I have appointed myself one of those select few who's in a position to kind of engage with whatever dangerous stuff is out there. I realize that's a problem, but I don't know how to resolve it. You know, the thing is, you and I are old enough where we lived before this age, so we hopefully developed some, I don't know what you would call it, some formation of reason to a certain degree. And so we can see the emperor's close for what it is,

but if you're raised in this age as a young child, you know, I mean, I remember in 2010 seeing, you know, these one- and two-year-olds playing playing iPads and they grew up in this world. And it would be really hard for me to find a reason of anchor. Yeah. Yeah. You know, one thing that just astounds me, like I can remember being a kid and finding, for some strange reason, a book in German in Sacramento. And it was a book like something like a statistical yearbook of the West German forestry department or something like that.

Just totally, totally, totally banal in terms of its actual content. But I was so, so excited to find this book in German that I worshipped it like a kind of fetish object. And eventually, I would go on to learn German and write a dissertation on a German philosopher, and so on and so on. And so that, like the scarcity of information in the world of my childhood was in some respects a very good thing. And I don't understand how this immediate access to whatever information you want is, is not propelling younger people, people who've grown up with the internet to read so much great stuff. They still stay within their own little kind of uh world of comfort but that that's just me sounding old and griping and i don't know but uh no i think you have a good

point i mean uh especially as americans we're freaking lazy so we're just like i'm gonna believe five things burger because yeah i don't know i don't want to break my brain uh you know and and uh you know when you have to seek out like i can i can watch flat earth videos not for very long because then my brain will start to hurt now i'll find that i want to you know i i i start thinking dark thoughts of how do i choke this person to death um but uh you know you're gonna watch him for entertainment value and you kind of get that car crash effect but then after a while you you know for me i can only do it for so long it's kind of like country music like there's only so long i can listen i can remember one yeah one recent trip to the united states you know it must have been like five years ago so it was before

before garrison keeler got canceled. I was listening to one of his monologues, and I never really liked him that much. I always thought he was boring. But he was talking about being a child on the prairie and listening to the radio, and how important for his kind of discovery of his own interests and his own sensibility, these wacko radio preachers were, right? Like, he loved the radio evangelists. He loved to listen to them whooping and hollering. And, you know, it kind of made him who he was. And, like, you so rarely hear people acknowledging that today, right? And now Keillor has been blacklisted. We're not going to hear from him anymore. And more and more rarely do we hear people saying,

like, there's this thing that I don't believe wholeheartedly, like I'm not a part of that world. But man, I'm glad it's around because it helped to shape me, right? And like these days, you either have to affirm something wholeheartedly as true, as fully true in a dogmatic way, or you have to reject it. Again, I think that's one of the symptoms of our social corrosion by the forces of social media. You know, and it just occurred to me from what you were saying, is we've now reached a point where they're starting to take stuff back, where they're starting to go, there's a certain amount of crazies that we gotta we gotta start creating some scarcity of because it's dangerous yeah now we're seeing the reverse happen where social media companies are saying okay we can't trust these idiots with anything you know i've often said that that needs to happen because

you know you and i grew up through the age where we didn't have to have signs on bridges that said don't dump off jump off the bridge you might die and then we went to that ironic age where suddenly we had to put signs on everything you know don't put the plastic bag over your baby's head or they might die don't don't drink the bleach you know don't drink the bleach because it's probably you know and everything had to have a disclosure warning for shit for stuff that was completely obvious to anyone with half a brain yeah um the uh but now now we're having to dial that back like one video i just watched today off of cnn this teacher she wrote a an op-ed where she said that she had voted for trump and she may have

signed a death warrant because she's now having to go back to school and she may and she's acknowledging that she may have been complicit in and it's hard to draw a direct line to that but also i think we all contribute um to the death of of uh hundreds of thousands of other Americans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it was obvious to me what Trump was. I've studied all my life. But to her, she's like, I should have put more thought into it. And I'm not calling her a bad person. I'm just saying this is what she said.

And she said, I should have put more thought into it. I should have cared more about what was important. And's interesting you know early in the show you talked about how you know people this can cause loss of life a destruction of selves the problem is in in cases like what's going on with covet 19 we're all in the same damn boat right yeah so if one if you want to go crazy and upset the boat or start ramming holes in the bottom of the boat because i don't know you think that's the great thing to do then we all gotta either live and die with you yeah i mean it's so strange you know like my opinion of trump has not budged a millimeter since 1987 right right? The first time I saw him on Entertainment Tonight or whatever as a teenager,

I was like, I know who this guy is. And so I have a lot of difficulty listening to people who wake up at this or that moment, right? And say like, oh, wow, yeah. So that's one point. Another point is, I mean, you know, my friend Thomas Chatterton Williams spearheaded this letter on cancel culture and so on

recently in Harper's Magazine that caused a lot of discussion in all the op-ed pages around the country. And, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot. And I do think that the problem is more difficult than that letter led on, because there is a real problem of disinformation that is greatly exacerbated by new technologies that is something distinct from the problem of limitations on freedom of speech, right? If you ban, not just say a social media company banning by its own policy, accounts that pretend to be something they're not, but actually outright legal prohibition of that kind of disinformation, I recognize that that bumps up against the First Amendment in uncomfortable

ways, but I don't see how we can possibly respond to the monumental task of combating disinformation of the sort that has put forth QAnon and other movements without acknowledging that it's not going to be enough to just say, I'm a First Amendment fundamentalist and everything goes, right? So in that respect, I mean, I like to say that, you know, the First Amendment is a lot like the Second Amendment in that, you know, the Second Amendment was written with muskets and other 18th century firearms in mind. Similarly, the First Amendment was composed with broadsides and other slow circulating information of the 18th century in mind. And I don't know how to make it work for all of the challenges of the 18th century in mind and i don't know how to make it um work uh for all of the challenges of the 21st century see probably when you i i know when i grew up there were mental institutions all over and i guess reagan got rid of those or something um and and so if you started

spouting crazy stuff they took you you down to the mental tissue. Your family was like, Hey, Bob, you gotta go, go to the funny farm. They're going to give you some medicine, you know, one floor with a cuckoo's nest type thing. And, uh, they're going to make things better. And if not, we'll just cut a slice up here and we'll fix that for you. Um, and, um, now, like you say, with the First Amendment and what people think of their First Amendment rights, it's come to a point where it's like there seems to be no end to the bat shittiness you can go on. And sadly, with the videos we're seeing of people wearing masks, the entitlement and selfishness of being like i can think whatever i want and it doesn't

matter who i endanger like i said you know if you endanger people started acting weird and talking weird stuff they just uh they just put you in the funny farm home and gave you some drugs that or they just let you start your own religion or cult um which you know either one um i've always i always make the joke that that uh what's interesting about religion is is if i start telling you that i'm seeing people and i'm talking to people and they're talking to me you'll put me in a funny home for uh what's that called yeah but if i tell you that it's god talking to me that oh that's fine okay go yeah with that my brother but uh so i don't know but yeah there there comes a point where you're dangerous you know yeah we saw that with the pizza gate thing with the oh yeah where you know people decide one day to take up guns and and

fortunately no one was killed in that event but he went in there with the intent of killing somebody or shooting up and you know pedophilia and and all this sort of stuff i've seen this on twitter too people like really believe this stuff um you know you see the things they've said about bill gates and you know all this thing and um you know maybe it comes down to we're stupid too like one of my favorite quotes of george carlin to try and explain all this or reason with it is his quote that says, think of how stupid the average person is and realize that half of them are stupider than that. Which puts a good paradigm on it when you really think about it. That is the law of average, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. average right yeah yeah but look you know 100 years from now q anon could be uh seen as like

this old boring staid uh tradition or institution and the kids will be rebelling against that by saying more extreme things you know so so we're just gonna go like so basically what you're saying is there's gonna be stuff that's even worse than that. People, people like, ah, stuff like, no, it's more like, it's more like that. If it becomes mainstream, it will just, it will just get normal. Right. You see this, I mean, a great example of this is the Quakers, right? The history of the Quakers in the 17th century, they were flailing

around on the ground, right? In like this ecstatic religious fits, right? That's why they called them Quakers. Now, in American, in the American religious landscape, no one is more kind of sober and stayed than a Quaker. You bump into a Quaker, you know, you, you know, this is someone you can talk to, right? So, so this is, this is something that happens over and over again in social movements. They start out in a, in an ecstatic frenzy. And if they catch on, then they cool down.

So we'll see. We'll see what happens. And we mentioned this earlier, and I meant to bring it up when you were talking, but, you know, we talked about how everybody, you know, the democratization of ideas and people with mouthpieces went from a very scarcity concept to everyone has one. And now I lost the train of thought that I was trying to get back to. But basically, it gave everyone a voice and maybe everyone doesn't need a voice. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I mean, I don't want to say there are people who should be deprived of their voices, but we're mistaken to encourage everyone to think that they have something to say simply in virtue of the fact that they exist. I think there's an author of a book called Death of Expertise that I'm. I think there's a book author, an author of a book called death of expertise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know, I know the book you read.

It's Tom, Tom Nichols, right? Yeah. Yeah. Tom Nichols. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm trying to get him on or at least get ahold of that book. Yeah. I think that was part of it where we, you know, there is this rise and I don't know it where we, you know, there was this rise. And I don't know if it's, you know, over 40 years I've watched the collapse of the middle class, you know, starting the Reagan era, the trickle-down economics and all that crap.

And the middle class has collapsed. And I think with that collapse and the desperation and the, you know, trying to find reason or economic stuff, the death of manhood, or at least let's put it this way, the manhood the way we thought it was, the death of, you know, we've all had to rethink manhood now. And a lot of people are lost. Like you look at the incel kids. Sure. These young boys who in today's world, they can't figure out where it is between me too and everything else. There's nothing wrong with that. But they're trying to, you know, trying to balance who they are with their caveman brains and the societal standards that are changing.

And, you know, men went through that where men were like, I'm the householder and she stays home. And, you know, I watched that whole era go through. I watched the era of people who were like, you go to a job, you work at that one job, but that one company 40 years, they gave it, go watch and you're out of there. You know, and more and more when you look at everything that's gone on, everything in the aspects of all our lives, maybe I'm advancing my own thing here, has become more disposable. Our marriages are more disposable. Our relationships are more disposable.

Our jobs are more disposable. Our income is more disposable. Yeah. Maybe it's the failure of all of that or the loss of the security of that starting to drive us insane. Yeah. the loss of the security of that, it's starting to drive us insane. You know? Yeah, yeah. It's like, it's the old thing

where the military blasts Metallica, the Waco, Texas thing or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it drives the bees mad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I mean, new, like, new types of person are being generated, like the incel.

There are precedents for that, like in 19th century literature, the figure of the superfluous man. That's the incel. We've had that before, but it's making a comeback in the 21st century indeed for the reasons you mentioned that have to do with um mostly with economics and the precaritization of basically everything right it's so weird because this conversation we're having and when you wrote in your book you know from the greeks uh era he's just everything is just recycled man we're just like the flat earth stuff. You're like, I thought we had that resolved in, I don't know, the third century or whatever it was. And, you know, we see the rise and fall of empires.

There's questions about whether or not our little democracy is going to rise and fall because we got a little too uh heady about ourselves just like the roman empire did just like the um british empire did you know and everybody yeah infallible or or immortal finds out they're not the hard way and it yeah yeah comes to that justice position oh yeah yeah no the same problems just keep coming back i'm a i'm a perennialist about that i mean look you know given that we have exactly the same brains exactly the same biological makeup that the ancient greeks had there's no basic reason why we should be confronting different problems than they did you know did you ever see the movie idiocracy oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that was that was mike judge wasn't it the beavis and butthead guy yeah yeah yeah that was um that was

brilliant yeah because i told a joke the rest it's it's with the trumpers it's gone from a fiction to a documentary or a future documentary the way we're going with trump absolutely yeah just people becoming dumber and and i think i think the internet has made it easier to be dumber right because you don't really have to learn everything you can google it like you don't have to learn history yeah if you got a question you can just google it well it depends i know because i mean this is i'm not boasting i'm just i'm just describing something that i've observed like i feel like it's making me smarter right like because you know there are so many things like uh you know 20 years ago i'd be driving along and i might

think like what is a quasar anyway right and uh then i just think oh never mind it's too hard to figure it out right like but um but today like when i have the thought what is a quasar anyway five seconds later i'm on wikipedia finding out some pretty basic and clear information about about quasars, right? And so having done, having been in that mode for about a decade now, I feel like, I feel like it has changed the way I think, the way I learn, the way I process information. And for the most part, this has been for the better, right? Obviously, there are pros and cons to this, but for the most part, it's a good thing. But that's not the general rule, and I don't quite understand what the difference is.

50% of the people are lower than average. And the epiphany I just had is it's the utilization of how it is. I mean, you and I approach it from an analyzation basis of learning, and we also judge it. But we don't just go, oh, well, Bob Deere leader on high or Reverend Joe said so, so therefore it must be true. Right, right, right. And maybe that's what it is is is the application of the utilization yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and in part yeah it's because

because just in a fifth book title yeah right right no i've got i've got enough work cut out for me as a teacher. Yeah, you do. But, no, this is an interesting book. Anything more we need to know about your book and everything else? Because it sounds like you and I could spend hours doing this. You know, one thing worth mentioning is that a paperback edition has, I think, just been released. And they let me write a new preface for the paperback. And I finished the preface dated April 15, 2020, at which time I was in Brooklyn under quarantine. And it was at the moment of the peak of the pandemic in New York. And I think I was so grateful to have the opportunity to write this preface, because it allowed me to bring the book into the corona era, which is an era for which the book was i don't want to say

prophetic but uh like you know it was bumping up against this era and i think anticipating in curious ways things that would become crystal clear only after the original hardback edition was published so i'm not insisting that people buy the paperback after the original hardback edition was published. So I'm not insisting that people buy the paperback rather than the hardback, but I do want to emphasize that the preface deals with our present moment, or in any case, our present moment extending back to mid-April of this year. No kidding. I mean, I can imagine what you would have written over this thing that we do with the mask thing, where people are like,

I'm not wearing a mask. And you're like, yeah. Well, what really struck me were news reports from around the world. We were hearing the same reports from Israel, from Russia, and from evangelical preachers in the American South. That is, they vacillate between two possible approaches. Like, you know, we have the grace of God. We're going to be fine crowded into this church with no masks.

But then that and then another extreme, which is what this preacher in Louisiana, whose name I'm forgetting now, one of these mega churches, I loved the way he said it. For us believers, for us Christians, death has a different meaning than for y'all, right? And I thought that was so important. Like he was saying like, look, yes, we acknowledge the virus exists, but we're romantic about this. It's like kamikaze pilots reciting romantic poetry

as they're crashing their planes into allied ships. There are numerous examples of this in history of people who believe in something so fully that the rational calculus of, you know, will this course of action hasten my death or not, becomes something completely different. So I got to discuss all of that in the preface in ways that I was grateful for. And, you know, you see a lot of that. The challenge with that is there are people that decide it's okay

to take everyone with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like Jonestown was like, okay, we're all going to die and do the thing because, you know, God is good and all that BS. But then they go, but you have to come with us. Yeah, right, right, right. And then that's when it gets scary you know i ever seen saw some guy who killed you know this probably is which who knows the story because

it goes on every week kike wipes out his whole family yeah or or a mother who kills their own children which is really extraordinary when you think about it that what what the what the mind has to go to to cross that that thing especially with a mother i mean a mother has a different relationship i think with her children than amanda's um and uh and you know i've seen this this form of suicidal nature in religious people yeah um i have i have relatives who will make the statement, well, I just wish God would take me. Yeah, yeah. Well, I really like having you around, and I hate that you have this suicidal tendency about you that you almost want to prophesize or encourage your own death.

Yeah. And you think, and the madness of it with me being an atheist is uh you know what if you're wrong it's the old groucho mark show where you had to guess the word in groucho mark's head and if you didn't get the right word you were wrong you can live your whole life betting that catholicism is the is the what god wants you to be and you'll get into heaven if you're catholic but but then you know and i think south park did a beautiful thing on this but i was thinking long before south park but you know it's there's the magic word there's 3 000 gods that humans have created over all their lives from going back to caben and somehow you have to guess the right

answer that no one knows Groucho Marx has in his head is God and if you're wrong well you're going to go to hell and you're going to burn you're going to die and you're going to suffer but remember God loves you as George Carlin would say um lots of George Carlin today yeah right um and but but it's that whole suicidal element of it that makes me mental. And then the dismissal of it. Yeah. And then wanting to take people with you. Because we're seeing people that are not wearing masks.

And the thing about COVID-19 is, yeah, I mean, if you decide you want to go, hey, screw it, I'm not going to wear a mask. And if I get it, I die. Fuck it. The problem is you should take a bunch of us with you yeah through either infection or right the case is it's not it's not an island unto yourself and so we're stuck in that bro boat with you yeah it's a parable or a paradigm or a story of of deciding whether to throw people out of the lifeboat or

not right i can't replace it so someone can look at it. So thanks for coming on the show, Justin. Hopefully we had a really good discussion about your book and some of the different principles. And I don't think we solved anything because maybe it's unsolvable. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, the book itself just ends with a bunch of question marks as as any true philosophy book does but it's probably better in that way because like we've

talked about here yeah you know as long as we ascertain and question and theorize and think about stuff instead of accepting truth in a blind sense yeah then hopefully that's better because i mean if i was in q anon like i'd be sitting there the whole time going what the hell now what the hell now i mean that's what happened to me when i grew up in a cult i yeah i was constantly like you guys do what and there's what there's some space aliens and planets and shit okay you guys like at three years old i knew it was crack i knew it was all crack yeah yeah somehow i i learned enough about human nature at three to four years old where i was like somebody's making money off this huh yeah i can see what's going on right right right right anyway yeah it's eternal isn't it yeah guys check

out his book it's uh with Princeton University Press, Justin Smith, A History of the Dark Side of Reason, Irrationality. And I think this is really interesting. I'm going to look forward to getting a copy from Princeton so I can read it. And, of course, you guys can probably get it on Amazon or individual booksellers or yourself uh the book and i think it's an important thing for our age because we've got to try and get back to truth we've got to try and get back to figuring out and i think it's interesting that now now facebook and social

media things are trying to create some scarcity and are realizing that you can't trust people you know you've got to put up signs that say don't jump off the bridge and sadly people still jump off the bridge because like i didn't know it was a bad thing yeah yeah yeah yeah now we're all dead uh so thanks to my audience for tuning in we certainly appreciate you guys being on the show go to thecvpn.com refer it to your family neighbors relatives uh dogs cats all that stuff get in and listen to the show because it'll be smarter because you can listen to philosophers like Justin Smith here and his brilliant works.

Also, take in, if you get a chance, put a nice five-star referral on the show. We certainly appreciate that when you do that on iTunes. And you can see the video version of this on youtube.com. For us, that's Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button. Thanks, Matt, for tuning in. Stay safe, and we'll see you next time. It's been a pleasure. this on youtube.com for just christmas hit that bell notification button thanks about us for tuning in stay safe and we'll see you next time it's been a pleasure