The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Majority Minority by Justin Gest

Episode Date: March 9, 2022

Majority Minority by Justin Gest How do societies respond to great demographic change? This question lingers over the contemporary politics of the United States and other countries where persistent immigration has altered populations and may soon produce a majority minority milestone, where the original ethnic or religious majority loses its numerical advantage to one or more foreign-origin minority groups. Until now, most of our knowledge about largescale responses to demographic change has been based on studies of individual people's reactions, which tend to be instinctively defensive and intolerant. We know little about why and how these habits are sometimes tempered to promote more successful coexistence. To anticipate and inform future responses to demographic change, Justin Gest looks to the past. In Majority Minority, Gest wields historical analysis and interview-based fieldwork inside six of the world's few societies that have already experienced a majority minority transition to understand what factors produce different social outcomes. Gest concludes that, rather than yield to people's prejudices, states hold great power to shape public responses and perceptions of demographic change through political institutions and the rhetoric of leaders. Through subsequent survey research, Gest also identifies novel ways that leaders can leverage nationalist sentiment to reduce the appeal of nativism--by framing immigration and demographic change in terms of the national interest. Grounded in rich narratives and surprising survey findings, Majority Minority reveals that this contentious milestone and its accompanying identity politics are ultimately subject to unifying or divisive governance.

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So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now.

We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. Or order the book where fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing author on the show. His name is Justin Guest. He's here with his new book that's going to be coming out, releasing March 22, 22. You've got to love these numbers, huh? March 22, 22.

The book is called Majority Minority, and it's going to be a very interesting work we're going to be talking to him about. He is an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University and the Schar School of Public Policy and Government. He is the author of six books on the policy... Let me just recut this, Jason. I'm just going to recut this because I'm fighting with the screen here and all the things are in all the wrong places. So we'll edit this and post. Justin Guest is an associate professor of policy and government at George Mason University's SCAR School of Policy and Government. He is the author of six books on the politics of immigration and

demographic change, including The New Minority, White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration, Inequality, and Crossroads, Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Democratic Change. In 2007, he co-authored the Migration Studies Unit at the London School of Economics. He's provided reporting or commentary for ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, The Guardian, Los Angeles Times, NPR, The New York Times, Political, Reuters, Vox, and The Washington Post, and now The Chris Voss Show. Welcome to the show. How are you, Justin? Thanks. All's good.

Thanks so much for having me on, Chris. There you go. There you go. There you go. So the new minority, the rest of the line is the white working class politics in an age of immigration equality. Is that correct? Yep. That was my book from 2016. Oh, okay. They put a semicolon in there. So I wasn't sure if that was the subtitle of the book that we were missing. So the book's just majority minority. Is that correct? That's it. There you go. So, uh, what motivated or give us your plugs so people can find you on the interwebs. Oh, sure. Well, they're welcome to check out my personal website, which is just my name, Justin guest, G E S T.com. Uh, and also, uh, follow me on Twitter, which is just at

underscore Justin guest. And then Google, you can Google me. It's an open sewer. Everything is on there. There you go. So what motivated you to write this book? So in many ways, actually, it was that first book that you mentioned, that earlier book, The New Minority, which was all about white working class politics and the politics of nativism, populism, backlash. It was a fascinating subject matter to study to really understand what's at the sort of core of this populist turn in transatlantic politics right now. And one of the key findings, I think, was the specter of demographic change, the way countries are shifting. It really was a sort of shadow that hung over the politics of white working class people.

And I think of just American politics more broadly and European politics too. And so I wanted to really just better investigate how societies respond to demographic change. And is there a good way? Is there a bad way? And what pivots our societies towards conflict or away from conflict and closer to coexistence? We've certainly been going through some things. And the part of this country's history is it's 450 years of issues with race and slavery, and we never have resolved any of it. Right now, we're kind of at this crossroads where it seems like we have two political parties, one that is fighting the fact that I think it's 10 to 20 years, you'll correct me here, I'm sure white people will be a minority for the very first time in this country. And that seems to be causing a lot of disruptions of power. One party seems to embrace the progressiveness of it. And like,

what's that old line from the country? No country from old men. You can't stop what's coming. That's vanity. And the other one is clawing and fighting to keep power no matter what it is. That's kind of my opinion or take on it. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think that that's a reasonably accurate way of looking at things. I think progressives in this country are pushing our population into the future in many ways, I think faster than some Americans are comfortable with going. And on the other side, conservatives are trying to hit the brakes. And it's a future that many of them fear or feel enormous amounts of uncertainty and discomfort around. And what is that future? Well, a very important part of that future, critical part of that future is the demographic composition of the country. And you're absolutely right. And about 20, it'll be about 25 years,

more or less when we're projected to be a majority minority country. And that's viewed in very uncomplicated, very simple ways that I don't, that I really wanted to. So give us some things I've heard Republican, um, conservatives say that outright. They're like, we, what's one of the reasons they're against immigration. They really, they, it's really a loss of power. I think some of it is racially based for some people, but it really is a loss of power and control. I think maybe when it comes down to its core. Yes. Well, so much of politics is about power, right? It's an identity politics as well, right? Because of the symbolism involved. But I do think that at its core, the backlash that we've experienced for such a long time now, it feels

like longer, but it's only been about five to seven years, is really driven by that sense of lost control and the desire to somehow recoup it. And so as a result, we sort of aggrandize what the past was actually really like. We look back through rose-tinted lenses at periods of time that were subject to intense segregation, a lot of suppression of different people and social exclusion and discrimination, but also economic trials and tribulations and cold wars. And I mean, it wasn't all that it was sort of cut out to be. The problem is that I don't think that progressives have won enough of a job persuading many white working class people who fear that future that we've been discussing that there's a place for

them there too. That's really the sort of biggest challenge of inclusion. Can inclusion mean being inclusive of everyone, including people who have a longer period of heritage in the country. Yeah. I've even heard, I've heard this a lot of Republicans say, we treated them horribly for 450 years. When we become a minority, they're going to treat us badly when they're a majority. And you're like, that's a really awful way to think, but this is the way they think. So what are some aspects of the book that we should touch on and tease out? Sure. Well, I think that there's a lot of aspects. I mean, the book, I visit six different majority minority societies because most people seem to think that the United States is experiencing this almost like a guinea pig. We're the first ones in the whole world who have ever had to go

through this kind of milestone, but that's actually not right. There's a lot of other societies. Well, not a lot, but there are a number of societies that have actually gone through this change before. And so I visit six of them, study them historically and also in the present, do a bunch of interview research on public officials up to the level of a former prime minister's countries to better understand how they transitioned and what they did right and what they really didn't do right. And then I use a bunch of public opinion research, political behavior research to understand how contemporary attitudes are right now in the United States and in Europe as well. But the overarching, you know, argument of the book that I think that is in some ways counterintuitive is that we've been focusing so much on the extent of prejudice in our society, so much on the extent of discrimination and racism. And that's not to suggest that those aren't powerful subjects and that they're not inherently true. There is a lot of prejudice in American society and elsewhere, but those sentiments are really

not, they're not really going anywhere. And if we are kind of hitching our chances of finding a way of coexistence and depolarizing society on everyone becoming a whole lot less racist, we'll be waiting a really long time. Prejudice is, in many ways, as psychologists are showing, is that prejudice is in some ways innate. Our minds are wired to prejudge. Our minds are to create double standards that are terribly unfortunate and riddled with double standards. And so the question is, what can we do, thinking of prejudice and discriminatory public opinion as a sort of bedrock that change has to take place upon, we have to get better, we have to learn to coexist, despite all those things, not not

prioritizing the complete eradication of prejudice before we actually make progress. And so what the book does is it shows what societies have done, all of which, by the way, were subject to large amounts of prejudice and how they were able to overcome it and the ones that do and how they inflamed those racial politics, those religious inside of their respective societies. Yeah, it's really interesting. You talk in your book about several different things here, and I had some of that on my mind. You talk about what happened with the six societies. Do you want to give us just a summation? Because we don't want to tell everybody the book.

They've got to buy it to read it. Of course. Did the six societies end up better for, or is that giving away too much of the book? No, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it. We don't have time here to get into the stories of each society. Each society is just a marvelous story. Like each one's so interesting and rich.

But what's fundamental across all of them is that unexpectedly, minority group or more than one minority group eventually overtook in terms of population on the original majority group. And they have all that in common. What happens after that is really a matter of governance, and they govern it differently. So I have six societies, two that are subject to a lot of suppression, social exclusion, places where the national identity effectively ignored part of the population. And that's Singapore, and that is Bahrain. Bahrain, you have a Chinese majority

that does not ignore the minority groups, quite the opposite. They actually acknowledge them quite a bit, but they keep them in their place with a lot of really discriminatory policy that sustain their demographic advantage. In Bahrain, it's much more overt. You have a society that is divided across along sectarian lines of Islam. Then you have two societies that are democracies and that kind of resemble some of our politics at times in Trinidad and Tobago and Mauritius. All of these are island nations, and these two, they're split between people of African origin and Indian origin. And one group overtakes the other in each situation. And rather than have this sort of society that's characterized by suppression, Instead, these societies are characterized by just terrible tension, constant racialization of politics, legislative paralysis. Does that

sound familiar? And so they've been struggled with this majority minority shift. And the last two societies are familiar to us. One is historic New York, which actually used to have sovereign control over its immigration policy up until 1882. New York was able to control who came in and who they could deport. And that was true of all US states until 1882, when immigration policy became federalized. And the majority minority shift came with an enormous amount of Irish people, and then eventually Germans, Jews, Slavs, Italians, et cetera. And then in historic Hawaii, until 1898, Hawaii was a sovereign kingdom. It was actually annexed in 1893 in a bloodless coup. But before, it was its own country. It was independent

and it had its own immigration policy, and it was a majority-minority state. And we can learn a lot from these countries. What happened in those two places, New York and Hawaii, that makes them different from the other places is that they reconceptualized their nation. They reconceptualized who they were to adapt to what their population was. And that made them fundamentally different. And not everything's hunky-dory, and New York's not perfect today. And of course, Hawaii was ultimately gobbled up by the United States. But the truth is that they certainly are a happier ending than we see in the other four countries. Does that include ours?

Yeah. I mean, where we stand right now is really, I think, at a pivot point. I think that how we manage demographic change, how we govern, how we model what intergroup relations should be like in the next 10 to 20 years is going to be very determinant about what happens to us as a society, whether we pivot to conflict or coexistence. Yeah. And what's really interesting, you talk in the book about the real threat of immigration is not having enough of it. What was funny was this morning I put out on the newsletter an old episode we had

with Matthew Iglesias, who used to be with Vox, his book, 1 Billion Americans, The Case for Thinking Bigger, which is ironic because you're probably going to go out tomorrow, this show on the LinkedIn newsletter. And so talk to us about why that's important because he really blew my mind with what he talked about in the book and I'm sure you have the same. Yeah, well, look, in some ways, I'm a little bit more cautious, I think, than that. I think that we can't just hurl ourselves into enormous demographic change. In fact, what we see is that the backlash is intensified when native populations feel like they've lost control over the direction of their society. And so just throwing ourselves face forward into transformative demographic change usually does not work out well, even if it makes sense in sort of economic theory,

which economically, it would be a boom. We need immigrants desperately in the United States for engines of growth and innovation. And they also are important for labor supply and aging distributions. And I know that's, you know, what Matt's main point, but I'm very concerned about backlash and the paralyzing effect that it has on our social relations and our politics. Yeah. So, you know, in many ways, what my book does is give a little bit of pause and recognizing the incredible power of nationalism and of people who want to hit the brakes. And so we have to navigate that. We can't pretend like everyone is just going to blindly accept what happens with the population composition. People notice and it makes many people feel uncomfortable.

And that's unfortunate. And it's not ideal, but it's something that we have to respect if we want to actually see progress made. Yeah. We're declining. We're declining society. We're declining. We're almost, I would call us an empire on the downside like any other empires i mean china he makes the case in his book and china is you know what one billion two billion people something like that or is it six billion about one not 1.4 1.4 i think seven billion people around the planet it's monday so so you know his case is that we need to expand we achieved everything we've achieved so far being, quote unquote, the greatest country on earth. Take that with a wink and a nod. But part of it was because we

were the greatest economy in the world. And now we're not, or we won't be. And China will eclipse us with that. And really the only way it can grow, I mean, you look at what we're going through right now, where we had a lot of the baby boomers and 50 years older just cash in their retirement and go on, hey, I want to go live my life and I want to be tied to a job. We certainly could use some immigrants to deal with some of the things we're doing. Everywhere in my town here in Utah, things have had to close early. 24-hour stores aren't open 24 hours anymore. Everywhere you go, there's a sign begging.

There's like one restaurant I go to, they have a sign offering a hundred dollar bonus to me, any consumer who comes by, if they were for somebody who works there. A hundred dollar bonus. I'm like, geez, I can get free dinner. You can get a lot of fried chicken for that. You can, yeah. But you talk about how there's backlash. Maybe one of those aspects you talk about in the book is how a major majority of Latinos, I think, especially in Florida, the Cuban population voted for Donald Trump in 2020. So it doesn't always work to our favor. No. So up until recently, the US population, the US politics has been quite severely racialized,

actually. So the Republican Party is better than five out of six white people. So the party is heavily white, skews a little older as well, more male and a lot more rural, which is precisely the areas of the country that are depopulating. The Democratic Party, you still have plenty of white people in the Democratic Party. But what you also have is that a sort of dominance among the minority groups, the vast majority of minority groups are pro-democratic and lean democratic. And that wasn't always true. So in as recently as 2004, George W. Bush nearly split the Latino 4% to 56. In 2000, the majority of Muslims in the United States supported the Republican Party.

In 1992, George H.W. Bush won the majority of Asian American voters. It's not that the Democrats have always had this kind of stranglehold on minority, on the appeal to minority groups. It's just that our identity politics have pushed us this way. If you're a Latino in the United States right now, if you're a black person or a Muslim, you probably feel vilified in certain circles or in certain political, despite certain political rhetoric. So I think this is a relatively recent phenomenon. But what we are seeing is that's beginning to change a little bit on the margins with Latinos. The results from the most recent election, the most recent general election in South Texas and South Florida, where you have a large number of South

Americans in South Florida, and you have a large number of Tejanos or Texicans, if you will, in South Texas. These populations are starting to lean more and more Republican. That's not necessarily going to suggest that Latinos in Arizona or California and New York are going to do the same, but it is significant nonetheless. I recently wrote an op-ed for CNN Opinion about this, arguing that what we're really seeing is not the way Latinos are seeing the Republicans or Democrat parties is different now. No, what's different is actually the way that they see themselves. Many Latinos are beginning to see themselves and self-identify as white. And so they're actually converging on the sort of white nationalist politics that we're seeing come out of the popular right right now. That would explain, after Donald Trump was elected for four or five years, I watched Latinos and there was like the Latinos for Trump group. And I would watch them say, I watched their interviews and they would be like, no, we shouldn't have, Mexicans shouldn't be able to come here. And the people would be like, yeah, but didn't you come here illegally and then gain citizenship? And they'd be like, yeah,

but we don't need more people here because it's kind of that take, they're taking off of my plate sort of mentality or not in my backyard. Maybe, I don't know if that's the right thing. They call it shut the door behind you. But actually what we see really in South Texas in particular is really fascinating because Tejano largely did not come on without, you know, papers to the United States. In some cases, Tejano has never even migrated at all. The old saying is, I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me, because part of Texas used to be part of Mexico. That's very true. And so when the border moved south, they became Americans without having actually migrating anywhere. And so those politics are also really fascinating. I mean,

they're exceptional. That's not going to be true of Dominicans or Salvadorans who are in the country or most other Mexicans. Yeah. It's really interesting to see them embrace that. I saw some joke memes about how people are supporting Russia trying to re-annex Ukraine. It's like, hey, if you want to support that, then Mexico wants Texas back and California and Arizona and New Mexico. I mean, if we're going to play that game, let's all just give it all back. But, yeah, it's really interesting. But they really see themselves as white. Is it because they feel they're American?

Is that what trips that over? what is your ethnicity? And when they ask your ethnicity, you have two choices. You are Hispanic or non-Hispanic, right? And so they will choose the Hispanic option because they are indeed Hispanics. But then the second question is race. And there is no Hispanic option for race because it's viewed as an ethnicity. And so faced with a choice of whether you are Black, white, Asian, or Native Pacific Island, or Native American, 60% of US Latinos opt for white. And it might be a matter of just affinity, even if from the complexion of their skin, it may not be as white as Donald Trump is, but they identify as white. And it makes sense. You're less likely to be discriminated against if you're thought of as white. You're maybe less likely to be excluded socially or whatever is on your mind.

There are some degree of aspiration towards whiteness, which has always been part of the American mainstream for the worst. But then also one thing that's worth bearing in mind is that we think that the United States is a very racialized society, but actually Latin American countries are terribly racialized. Poverty is terribly racialized. There are hierarchies of skin color, of color tone. So in their countries, in Latin American countries, people are acutely of skin, of colorism. And when they come to the United States, many migrants thought of themselves as rather light-skinned relative to the indigenous population or the Afro-Caribbean or Afro-Latino populations in their home countries. And so when they come here and are told that you're brown, that's news to them. And so many of these folks may have already arrived thinking that they were always white.

And frankly, it's hard to argue with them because many of them actually have European heritage, which is conventionally associated with whiteness. Many of them have ancestors just two or three generations ago that came to Colombia or Argentina or even Mexico from Germany, from Spain, from Italy, from France. So they are about as white as any other American who came from those countries of origin. And so racial politics are just filled with these complexities and subjectivities. And ultimately, people have a lot of control over how they self-identify. Wow. That explains everything. You've answered the question. I've been wandering around for four or five years going, what the hell? But that does explain on the Census Bureau because I didn't really thought of it that way. So do you think, it sounds like we can never really

get rid of racial judgment racial problems i know black people have the same thing where they they they discriminate based on the variation color of the darkness of their skin to each other which is i i i found that when i first discovered that i was like seriously but do we just have to learn to live with it or are we ever going to beat racism we we have to stop making our national identity contingent on race at all. Yeah. I mean, we just have to accept the fact that our society is highly diverse, but none of it is actually material to belong. And that's the bottom line.

We have to, I suppose our biggest problem is our, the politicians. I remember there's this great picture of, it's a drawing, a political cartoon, and it shows like a rich guy who looks like Rupert Murdoch, and he's got like a whole pile of coins in front of him, giant pile. And then there's a worker who's clearly a blue collar worker, who's got like one or two coins on his plate. And then there's an immigrant, and the rich guy is saying, hey, that immigrant guy is stealing all your money from you when really it's, and this is a trope that's as old as the beginning of man is politicians have been using this thing of the immigrants, always the one who's stealing from you. Meanwhile, the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. They're gaming the laws,

they're gaming all sorts of different ways that they can use to avoid taxes, et cetera, et cetera. So do we just have to get wiser as a populace and go, hey, don't play identity politics with us anymore? Well, I do think that there's a place for calling out politicians who are trying to divide us. I think that the more political opponents and social movements actually call people out when they are trying to use race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexuality, as a way of dividing us against each other for short-term electoral reasons to just win an election. We should call them out for that and say, look, this person is trying to distract you with identity politics from what really matters. And what really matters is wages, your employment, your access to healthcare, climate change, whatever it is that's on your mind, crime waves, whatever else you should be really worried.

These kinds of politics are absolutely distracting. It's keeping me in business because I study these things. But I would much prefer a world where our politics are not as subject to identity. Fortunately, there are very few points in history where we can really claim that outside of authoritarians and socialist regimes. So we need to craft something new. We need to actually, we're trying to do something revolutionary here. If we're trying to build a society that's driven through a civic identity, rather than an ethnic or religious identity. And the one thing you talk about is self-identified Republicans change their opinions when they listen to Sean Hannity. What does that mean? So in the book, I mentioned that beyond these deep studies of six other societies,

I also do a lot of polling research in both the United States and Europe. And one of the things that we try out is we've seen how powerful partisanship is and whiteness is and maleness is as a sort of symbol, as a signal to supporters of the Republican Party and of people who co-identify as white, male, and Republican. And what we wanted to test was, what is the effect of having someone who you co-identify with telling you something that you naturally are inclined to disagree with? What is the effect of them saying it all of a sudden? So it's almost like a Nixon to China situation where imagine a Barack Obama for Democrats, for those of your listeners who are Democrats. Imagine if you're a really big fan of the Obama

family and all of a sudden the Obama family, listen, I've thought a lot about it. And actually coal isn't that bad. And a little bit of coal, burning coal is not going to kill the world. And we should probably be a little bit more accepting of it. Now that's anathema to most Democrats, surely. But when the Obama family endorses, it actually makes people open their ears to it and consider it. On the flip side,

what we want to try out is what would happen if someone who is a hardcore Trumpist like Sean Hannity were to endorse a much more moderate approach towards immigration reform, granting citizenship to the undocumented, trying to have a much more moderate approach towards immigration reform, granting citizenship to the undocumented, trying to have a much more open policy towards immigrants. And to our

surprise, and it was a very pleasant surprise, he moves the needle. People like Sean Connolly and other white male Republicans that we tested out were able to move the needle on a political attitude that is actually almost hardwired into the Republican Party right now. And when I say move the needle, it really is a moving of the needle. It's just a small marginal effect, but that's just from a 30 second intervention. So it really is remarkable the power of these influential leaders can hold. And that's why I have hope that with the right leaders in place, they can cultivate support from people who, you know, people who are more native nativist already identify with. Definitely.

Definitely. I Fox News is on at my gym. And so when I'm in the locker room, I have to put up with hearing it because they have a blasting in the thing. I think I'm going to figure out how to change it with my phone for the channel. But every time I go in there especially on the what recent week or two where trump had a lot of legal problems every time i go in there it's they're just like obsessed with black lives matter like it's just a complete trope running and i'm really good at i'm really good at listening to words and understand how they're manipulative and they're

really good at like being able to deliver stuff and putting all the right trope words and code words in. And even when they do interviews that they claim to be very down the middle or something, or an interview, you'll see, especially Tucker Carlson is good at this. He's good at injecting words. And even the person that they're usually interviewing doesn't catch the messaging he's really trying to send. And he's really good at messaging and not in a healthy way for the country. But that really goes by a lot of people. And yeah, the power of Fox News and its ability to just turn these people into zombies.

What's interesting to me is you see the same thing, from what I understand, going on in Russia right now. A lot of the old people who are the Fox News type demo in Russia believe the TV shows that are telling them that, oh, Ukraine is some sort of bad actor and we have to do this. And they're believing the lie. And yeah, like somehow we've got to get rid of that media or I don't know how we deal with that media. No, we can't get rid of it, Chris. We've got to succeed despite their presence. They're not going anywhere. We've got to succeed despite their presence. They're not going anywhere. We need to find ways to reach people in a way that disarms what propagandists and fear mongers are doing because we can't just wish them away. And in fact, actually, what I would actually say, I'll say something pretty counterintuitive.

When you see Fox News on at your gym, listen, I would actually not change the channel. I would want to know what my fellow Americans are listening to, what they find persuasive, what mobilizes them. Because one of the real problems I think in racialized countries and polarized countries in particular is that people stop listening to each other. They're not having enough contact with one another. And so it's easier and easier to vilify the other side when we have no appreciation for how they're thinking. And we may find what they're thinking vile, and it may be based on falsehoods and completely baseless.

But it's beside the point to the one I'm making, which is that we need to understand what other people feel and show some degree of empathy if we're going to actually engage in some kind of movement towards coexistence. I think definitely empathy is more what we need. And yeah, you bring up a good point. I do learn a lot about what's going on. It helps me combat some of my communication and how I talk and what goes on.

We need a society that's just smarter. This reminds me of the George Carlin quote, think about how stupid the average person is and realize half of them are dumb. Somehow we need better education in this country. And of course, that's why we do the podcast and have people like you on. And hopefully we influence people to read books and learn more. They don't even have to read books, although I would love it if they checked out the book. I think we'll have to take time with it. But if they just want to kind of dip their toe in the water, that's why I write op-eds and commentary pieces. I just had one come out today in the Washington Post. I mentioned my piece in CNN. These pieces give folks an opportunity to

sort of just get a little frozen yogurt taster before they decide to go for the whole ice cream cone. Yeah. I mean, we had a lot of authors on. Eddie Glaude Jr. came on, and we did a show where we talked about race and stuff, and I had a lot of white people write me after the show and go, the way I saw you approach it and be open and not be defensive and be pliable to new ideas or different things that you could do, they go, that really changed my mind a lot of things. And so a lot of people do learn from these different avenues and venues,

like what you're doing and what we're doing here. Anything more you want to touch on in the book before we go out? There's a lot in there. And I think I'll leave it to the imagination of your viewers and your listeners to explore some more. But what I will say is that this is the greatest social challenge that is facing our country and the next generation. If we get this right, a lot of other good things follow. It's the bedrock of our politics. It's our population.

It's who we are. So when we say we, the people, this is the we part. And we need to get that right and everything else will fall into place. If we don't get it right, I think the stakes are really high here and the consequences could be grave. And so it's a fun subject matter and it's something that everyone can relate to, but it's something that I think we all need to take seriously. And if my book can be a sort of gateway into thinking about these things more seriously, then I'm thrilled. That's awesome. That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, we really were filtering towards authoritarianism and fascism.

Hopefully now, from what we've seen, the ugly side of it, and we've been reminded by history, unfortunately. It's sad that we have to learn from the ugliest parts of history, not the beautiful parts, if we learn anything at all, for that matter. But it sounds like an excellent book, great history lesson. And like I always say, the one thing man can learn from his history is man never learns from his history. So if you just stop doing that. I'm trying my best to see if we can push back on that. Definitely. Give us your plugs, Justin, as we go out. Sure. No worries. If you're interested in the book, it's called Majority Minority. It'll be out March 22nd from Oxford University Press. And it'll be at all major book sales.

If you're more interested in the book, you can check it out on my website, which is justinguest.com, or you can follow me on Twitter, which is at underscore justinguest. There you go. Thank you very much for coming on the show, Justin. With pleasure, Chris. Anytime. There you go. And you very much for coming on the show, Justin. With pleasure, Chris. Anytime. There you go. And guys, read the book.

Understand what's going on in our world and try and unite us instead of separate us. Go pick up the book. It's going to be coming out March 22, 2022. Majority, minority. And pick that up where fine books are sold. Don't go into those alleyways because you might get stabbed. Anyway. There'll be an audio book soon enough. You don't have't go into those alleyways because you might get stabbed. Anyway. There'll be an audio book soon enough.

You don't have to go into an alley. No more stabbing. We're against the stabbing. I don't know what that means. Fine bookstores wherever they're sold. Also, to be honest, go to youtube.com for us as Chris Voss. Hit the bell notification button. Go to LinkedIn. Subscribe to the newsletter and our big group that's over there.

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