The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Jonathan Haidt, Andrew Schulz, and Paul Mecurio

Episode Date: October 6, 2017

Jonathan Haidt is a scholar, author, and social psychologist. He has written two books, including "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion."  Andrew Schulz is a standup comedian and co-host of the podcast, "The Brilliant Idiots." He may be seen performing regularly at the Comedy Cellar. Paul Mecurio is a standup comedian and the host of the podcast, "The Paul Mecurio Show." He may be seen performing regularly at the Comedy Cellar.

You're listening to The Comedy Cellar, live from the table, on the Riotcast Network, riotcast.com. Good evening, everybody. Welcome to The Comedy Cellar Show here on Sirius XM Channel 99. We're here at the back table of The Comedy Cellar. My name is Noam Dwarman. I'm the owner of The Comedy Cellar. My partner, Dan Natterman, is not here tonight, but in his stead, I have Emmy Award winner, Mr. Why are you laughing?

You are. Emmy Award winner, Mr. Paul Mercurio. Hello. Becoming a regular guest on this show, comedian Andrew Schultz. And then, as a special guest,

we have a man who I met a few years ago who, and I don't say this lightly, I think has written one of the most important books maybe ever written. I kid you not. I mean, I have bought this book over and over for people. I've referred to this book. I see this book referred to in all sorts of places and all sorts of contexts.

I don't know if you have a way to have a Google alert every time somebody cites your book, but his name is Jonathan Haidt, and he wrote the book, The Righteous Mind, I want to get the subtext, Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. And you wrote this book like four or five years ago, right? Yeah, it came out in 2012 when things seemed so dire and we were so polarized.

It couldn't get worse, right? It couldn't get worse. So, you're reading it now, right? I am, yeah. So, my... Thank you, you gave it to me, I appreciate it. As I read it, I haven't read it in years. You gave it to me like it was drugs. And I noticed, I tried to look at some notes that I'd taken years ago, and I noticed that everything, so many things had faded in my mind

about the details of the book, except the one key point, which is that this man has proven scientifically that all of us, or virtually all of us, no matter how much we guard against it, no matter how much we think otherwise, we decide first and then rationalize backwards thinking that we're actually going forward. Is that correct?

Yep, you got it. Want to explain it to us a little bit? Sure. So humans have this big brain, and what do we use it for? Well, we use it for language. What do you use language for? Do we use it to figure out things?

Sometimes. But when we're talking with each other, when we're arguing with each other, when we're relating to each other, we're really trying to kind of press our case. We're trying to look good. We're always guarding our reputation. And there's a general thing called the confirmation bias, a very powerful principle. Our minds judge.

Paul's an expert in that. Go ahead, go ahead. Confirmation bias. Our minds judge instantly. If you see somebody, you like them or don't like them right away, and then you make up reasons afterwards. And boy, does that happen in our political life or when it's my group against your group.

There's this, Charlie Sykes, the conservative talk show host, has this theory, you know, he says conservatism isn't populism, right? So like this whole divide has started quite a while ago because of this idea of populism or nativism, which is that sort of we've becomeism, right? So like this whole divide has started quite a while ago because of this idea of populism or nativism, which is that sort of we've become tribal, right? So then really, rather than really caring about information from both sides of the argument and then making your own decision, people are more comfortable just going to the group and sticking with the group, regardless of what direction the group is going, which explains for some people the Trump

phenomenon, right? Which, to me, sort of ties into what you're talking about, sort of the division. Division comes in because, in some way, people are more comfortable being in their tribe and not walking away from their tribe under any circumstances, which is kind of what we're seeing with Trump a little bit, I think. That's right.

I mean, if you look at kids, beginning in junior high especially, we're just really good at forming groups, and we feel uncomfortable when we're out of our groups. And that's the basis of our political life. And a lot of European countries have lots of different parties, and so there can be shifting around. There's all kinds of shifting. But there's something about the human mind that's really good at doing us versus them. In fact, I just saw a scientific study yesterday that showed that when you have people play a game where there are three groups, they don't get all tribal. But if they make it two groups,

they just switch right into that us versus them mindset. Unfortunately, we have two parties, and there's no way out of it. I wanted to ask you a couple questions that I think about you all the time. I'm honored. Every time I send you an email, I hope I don't wear out your email

address. I hope they're worthwhile emails. There's something that I said. I wonder what Hyde thinks about this. But before I ask the question, I just want to make an observation that I think might have something to do with it. I noticed that you also have gravitated to other subjects

which interest me, and I've met you there and other places. For instance, you're very big into writing and exposing political correctness, campus speech codes, and all that stuff. And that's been a big issue of mine also. You also, this really got me, there's this, I think I sent it to you, this Brookings Institute study on poverty. Did I send you that thing? I had no idea. He was the, what was your title? I was the chairman of that, or the moderator, rather.

He was the moderator of that study. Give some background to the study for everybody who doesn't know. Yeah. Sure. So I was always on the left growing up. And, in fact, I started working on this book, The Righteous Mind, in order to help the Democrats win. I was just so fed up that Al Gore and then John Kerry

couldn't put together good moral arguments to convince people to vote for the Democrats. So I started writing this book, and I committed myself to really understanding conservatives. You traveled to India? That was part of your... That was beforehand. That was my post-doc. That informed your thought about it, right?

Right. So I started watching Fox News and reading National Review and all sorts of things. It's awesome, right? Fox News. Well, it's not. Way more entertaining. No, you know what? Way more.

Some of them are. Watch your interactive ladies. I didn't mean to interrupt her. Go ahead. Go on. So I just started trying to understand conservatives. And over time, what I realized is, wow wow they see some things that i just had never seen and that you actually have to listen to people who criticize your views in order to find

the truth and it's just such a basic obvious point and this was john stewart mill's main point in in on liberty and so that kind of moved me to the center and i realized we're all really kind of stupid especially if you put us just in our group and you isolate us. We all get really stupid. And so I've become a centrist, and I'm one of the relatively few people in the academic world who's really a centrist. There are a few conservatives here and there, but most people are on the left. And so because of that, I can be kind of a bridge builder, and I ended up putting together this group to work on the question of poverty, because each side, left and right, they have their own solutions, and neither side can solve this on their own. So it began as a dinner party where I invited a bunch of people on the left and right to talk it through,

and we actually enjoyed it. We had fun. It was actually really fun to talk. And it grew into this big report sponsored by Brookings and AEI. So I don't know. How did you find it? I mean, it's a pretty obscure thing, I thought. I found it because Nicholas Kristof wrote a Times editorial about something, and he cited this study. So I went to see what

it said. And now my confirmation bias on that study is that in the end, I felt it came down more on the conservative side, in the sense that it endorsed the sense that it endorsed the idea that single unwed

mothering is bad for kids. It is bad for kids. What a conservative idea. And that poverty, any gain in productivity in the economy cannot ever overtake the rising rate of singles. So unless we take care of that, we can never really overcome poverty.

That's right. It's one of the biggest single things. If you want to make a dent in poverty, the most important thing you can do is give kids a stable home life with two people investing. It doesn't matter what sex they are. And this is one of the problems, is that the left has difficulty saying that marriage matters. Now, now that we have gay marriage, now the left is more willing to say that it matters. But before gay marriage, there was a lot of resistance. And conversely, people on the right were reluctant to say that birth control matters. That's the other huge thing. If young women have easy access to not just any birth control, but LARCs, long-acting reversible contraception,

guess what? They don't get pregnant. Or they don't get pregnant until they're ready to have kids. And then you don't get the cycle of poverty. I think the study even gave credence to the idea that some of the social programs by creating a safety net even exacerbated the problem of birth. I think that was the next study.

We didn't really talk, and that's what people on the right are always saying. I mean, there's some truth to it sometimes, but we still need all those social programs. I don't think we found... No, it didn't advocate against social programs. It was just the irony of it seemed to... I think it's somewhere in there. I think that you were saying, at least when we were talking to the ladies last time, I forget what her name

was, but last time I was on, this idea that if there is a safety net... Rebecca Traister. Yeah, Rebecca Traister. This idea that there is a safety net, it might make a father more inclined to leave if he didn't like the situation because on some basic level he knows that his kid isn't going to starve to death. Whereas if he thinks his kid's going to starve to death, then he might be more inclined to hang out and make sure he doesn't. My wife grew up in the ghetto and her family's from Brooklyn and she's Puerto Rican, and she is adamant, and she's not against the programs,

but she's adamant that the check is definitely a mixed bag. No, that's right. So it's not just the existence of the safety net programs, because in Scandinavia they have really, really good safety net programs. What they also have in Scandinavia is really, really strong norms that you don't be a lazy parasite. But they also have in Scandinavia a

cultural phenomenon where they just don't have kids. No, they actually have among the highest birth rates in Europe. But they have a declining population. Sweden, literally, they have a declining population. So the rest of Europe doesn't have kids. All the Western world does. But America has a higher... America does. Yeah, that's right.

But America has a higher... And Japan. America has a higher, what's it called, birth rate than Sweden. Well, overall, I'm sure that we do, but that's because of both immigration and the fact that some recent immigrants have higher birth rates. So if you just compare, say, white Americans to white Swedes, I don't know what the difference is.

That I don't know. Okay, fair enough. So you're saying in order to, how did you put it? You have to be willing to listen to other people's points of view. So once you really internalize that, it leads you into wanting to get to the bottom of things in a way that you hadn't before. And then I think that also is why I'm attracted,

why I'm so disturbed about political correctness. Because if you believe that the most important thing is to be able to listen to the other side, and political correctness is actually telling us that you should never listen to the other side, actually the other side shouldn't even be allowed to utter, then it's a recipe for getting things wrong. That's right.

But I don't, I mean, I think political correctness in that issue is valid, but to me feels like sort of the sub-issue of the larger elephant in the room, if you will, which is this inability, and I don't know when it started. I mean, if you look at the Reagan years, right, you had compromise, you know, either side worked with each other. I mean, you look at Trump, I mean, the poor guy did something with the Democrats regarding

the six-month spending cap, and he got lambasted by his own party. And I thought that that was a really smart, good political move, and it gave me a little bit of hope. Where do you feel like... And did Schumer and Pelosi get lambasted? Well, I mean, you know, but where did we turn the corner in this country, roughly, where we just don't...

I don't know how you get the genie back in the bottle um and get away from tribalism and get away from this idea that i we're also you know we just you you can't if you don't get 10 out of 10 of your wins yeah then it's considered a loss from by the other side so where did we turn the corner yeah so there's like seven different things going on it's like you know we have like a house on fire and a hailstorm and a rodent infestation. I mean, we've got a lot of problems in this country. And so what happens in terms of the inability to compromise is that the mid-20th century had all these things going for it that gave us somewhat effective governments. You had a generation that had fought World War II together, the greatest generation.

They were really, really good at putting America first and working together. They had really, really good civic participation norms. They belonged to all kinds of clubs. You had a generational effect. You had this weird thing for a few decades where there were really just three networks, so everybody got the same news.

Now, if you go back 200 years, there were hundreds of newspapers, and they were all nasty, partisan rags full of lies. So we're back to where we were 200 years ago in that sense. Except it's basic cable news now. Yeah, and it's got all these different media. So the media environment was really good back then for commonality, for a shared political life, and that's gone.

Both from cable news was the first nail in the coffin, but then the Internet was like 27 more nails. You've got the loss of the Cold War. We don't have a common enemy anymore. You have rising education. The more educated people are, the more political they are. Working class people care more about things that are going to help them in policy, but the people who are all up in arms about these symbolic things, those are mostly college educated people. As a psychologist now, what about diversity? How does diversity contribute to the inability of human beings

to see themselves as the same people? So this is one of the... I guess, alright, we're here. We're talking about political correctness. So in my world, in the academic world, there are about seven things that are third rails. You can get in big trouble for talking about. Diversity is one of them. Race, gender,

immigration, a whole bunch of areas. And these are the most important areas where we really need good social science because we've got to figure these things out. So the very short version, which I can say because I'm among politically incorrect friends, I suppose, is that diversity, if you just look at it from a social science perspective, mixing people up who are different has got to have a lot of good effects and bad effects. So, yeah, it increases creativity. There are a lot of good effects and bad effects. So yeah, it increases creativity. There are a lot of good things about it.

America would not be the dominant force in culture if we didn't have so much immigration from all these different countries. So diversity has many good things. But it has a lot of bad things. The main one being it decreases trust. So Scandinavia has all this amazing social capital, which means the ability to trust each other because they all had the same language, same norms, same religion.

They were small countries. And as you get immigration, you get declining trust. Now you get rising creativity, you get better food. So there are advantages. But yeah, there are some downsides. But you can't really talk about that. Okay, question. Peter Beinart made the same point, by the way.

Yeah, that's right. Peter Beinart, that's right. When you say trust, is trust required to manipulate the tribe? So let's say I have this tribe, right? I'm Sweden. And, like, for example, I have some friends in Sweden, and smoking weed in Sweden is looked at as horrible. Like, it's looked at as bad as doing cocaine, right?

Matter of fact, there's very harsh drug laws on Sweden. Now, my friends smoke weed embarrassing. Like, embarrassed. Like, they do it in the privacy of their own homes. And this is like a really progressive place, right? But I think they're able to push that narrative because there is this, as you say, trust, right? We have this strong cultural identity. And it's easy to say Swedish people don't smoke weed.

So the powers that be at the top who make the decisions for the tribe can go, hey, we got to do this. Now, that's much more difficult when you have diversity because these tribes, this tribe likes smoking weed. So the powers that be at the top who make the decisions for the tribe can go, hey, we've got to do this. Now that's much more difficult when you have diversity because these tribes, this tribe likes smoking weed. This tribe doesn't. Okay, well I'm surprised that Sweden has such, in general they're very progressive on sexual matters, they're very progressive. So there might be some particular cultural history around weed or around drugs

in Sweden. But the point is, they have, it's not exactly a small town, but everybody either knows everybody or is related to everybody with two links. They're tied into this Swedish identity.

And whatever you attach to that Swedish identity, you can use to manipulate the people, right? Manipulate is perhaps a bad word. The only reason I'm hesitating

is because if you have low trust and a lot of fear, you can also manipulate the people. You can manipulate the people out of love or out of fear, out of confusion. You got Saddam or you got Jesus.

Yeah, or what's his name? Jim Jones, that guy from Guyana. There you go, yes. See, to me, it's not so much the concern for me. It's not so much the manipulation by the powers that be. But the manipulation of each other at ground level, right? So if I'm a liberal and you're a conservative, and you just have hell-bent on your point of view and I am on mine, and we do not come together because we just don't give in anymore,

that to me is where the erosion is. And I don't know that we go back. Did we ever give in? Oh, yeah. I mean, you look at Baker. Did we at uh you look at baker but there used to be majority leader hamilton and jefferson no but there used to be norms of compromise yeah so so one of the big things that changed in washington um is that it used to there used to be a political culture of men who lived in washington their wives were served on charities together their kids went

to school together and so politicians tend to be really social, really socially skilled people, usually very warm people. And you put a bunch of them together, they form communities. They can deal. In the back rooms, they can make deals. So we had an effective political culture for a long time. Now, what changed is that when Newt Gingrich came in in 1995 and took over, the Republicans took over, he did not want all these new Republicans coming. He did not want them making friends with the Democrats. Now, he had reasons for being mad as hell

because the Democrats had treated Republicans badly. I'm not saying he had no reason for this. But he came in, he said, don't move to Washington. All you new first-year Congress, don't move to Washington. Keep your family in your home district. I'm going to change the calendar. All business is done basically Tuesday afternoon through Thursday morning. And so just, you know, you get a room, you bunk together, don't have to ever meet Democrats. And so he changed the calendar and this kind of destroyed

the normal human bonds in Washington. And then those norms filtered up to the Senate as those men became then senators. And as the whole norms of Washington changed. I never knew this. Interesting. So you asked when did we turn the corner. Well, a lot of things came together, but the 90s is the key decade. We enter the 90s with an effective political culture, with the greatest generation still kind of in charge, and by 2000, the greatest generation's retired,

it's the baby boomers in charge. We have the internet, we have much nastier media, we have more money in politics. And so by then, by 2001, we were on the road to hell. Can I bring this to an issue which I think is more essential than any other issue that comes to mind right now that we need to be able to talk to people who disagree with us and we need, what's the matter? I was just going to get something to write something down. Oh, I have something. And we need – we can't solve it unless we're able to look at it in a kind of a disattached way. This is this whole issue of race and policing.

Now, I have been scouring every article that I can find for a long time to find out what's really going on here with the police. Are they shooting black people more than they're shooting white people? And every study that I find, including one that was in the New York Times by this black economist, is finding, now just saying isn't going to get me in trouble, and I saw it also in the Washington Post Post that the data shows that in actuality, black people are not shot more than white people. This is what the data shows. The data shows white people are actually shot more, even in circumstances where the officer had the right to use a lethal force.

And you add to that the fact that the crime rates are such that for instance in New York where only like 2%, less than 2% of violent crime is white that what let's take Chicago in Chicago where you have 500 murders in a year mostly in the black community how much friction is the white community going to have

with cops and how much friction is the innocent I'm talking about the wholesome innocent black community who are victims here. But they're going to have friction with cops all the time. So what's the truth of the matter? Because if the truth of the matter, here we are tearing apart as a country, and this is another brick in the whole beef

that half the country seems to have, that America's not a great country. Can I add one thing to that study, though? Just real quick. The study did show that blacks were pushed up against walls more often, they were roughed up by cops more often. So outside of lethal force, black people were

treated differently than white people by the cops. And I think what that helps someone to believe, it primes them to a circumstance where a black person does get killed. So if you're a black person who's been treated different than your white friends by a cop and then you see a black guy get killed, you go, well, that makes perfect sense because I'm always treated different. That's a really good point.

Like, the whole system is bad. Let's not get sidetracked. It doesn't mean that it's accurate. No, no, no. I agree with your point. But this is where the thinking comes from. I agree with your point, but I'm saying let's not get sidetracked because if this is not true, this is my big beef with the Kaepernick thing.

I don't care about the flag and I don't care if he takes a knee. And I think he should protest. They have a right to protest because of the NFL contract, and he can protest whatever he wants. Sure. But if it's not true, it's tremendously damaging to the nation. And I'm not even going to put you on the spot to have to say what you think about it. No, no, I'd be happy to say what I think. It's a nice example for us to work through.

So this is why things are so hard and this is why we're so divided because social science is hard and there is a lot of evidence on all sides

for whatever case you want to make. It doesn't mean that everything's true. So in the case what you're talking about, Noam, is there have been three or four studies

that have been done now that looked at the question of once a police officer engages with a suspect, is that police officer more likely to actually kill him if he's black? And as you say, the force studies have basically found, no, they're not.

Now, there are some small differences. One study, I think it was the Friar study, one study found that they were more likely to use force, but less likely to use lethal force. But those effects were not large, and so I wouldn't make much of them. So if you just want to look at, are the cops racist, and can we fix this problem by reprogramming the cops, the answer seems to be no. No, we cannot fix the problem that way. Now, let's turn it around, though. What do people on the other side say? Well, if you're a black man,

what's your life going to be like? So you guys here, how many times in the last 10 years have you been stopped by a cop for anything other than speeding? It's actually happened to me twice, but very unusual. Okay, sure. I actually got pushed up against the wall one time by a cop. Sure. But if I get stopped by a cop, I assume it's because he's a dick. Black guy gets stopped by a cop, he assumes because he's racist. Now, a certain amount of those cops are just going to be dicks regardless of race.

Okay, sure. Well, I don't want to be here saying, well, okay, yes. A certain number will be racist. That's right. But the larger point is this. The big difference, as Noam referred to, the big difference is that the crime rates vary a lot by race.

So that's the elephant in the room. And so what that means is that if you're a black guy who has not committed any crimes, you are still more likely to be a suspect. The police are going to be involved in your life. They're going to be looking at you differently. And so there are just repeated indignities. If you're a black person in this country,

there are just repeated indignities that we as white guys just don't have to experience. So that's very real. But don't you need to layer in economic circumstances? Because we're talking about an upper middle class black individual. No, no, no, no. He's saying even still. Even still. I put it this way.

I think to be raised black in America is a psychologically traumatic event. That is not, for whatever the reasons are, from the day you're born, what you see, the way you're looked at, the way you're treated, as opposed to the way my children are looked at, this cannot possibly but scramble your brain. Hold on a second. I would not go with you to say it is automatically a traumatic event. If you are black, you are going to face more daily indignities. Absolutely. That is true, and we all have to acknowledge that.

Now, is that traumatic? Well, that's where it's kind of up to you how to interpret it. And so this is where previous generations were taught, and you look at the way the civil rights protesters were prepared, say, you're going to go in, people are going to say these things to you, let's practice. Let's practice being insulted. Just don't react. Don't react. And these days, in order to cope with our crazy world,

I'm reading Marcus Aurelius in the morning, his meditations. It's, you know, how do you live in a world that's kind of insane? That's what an intellectual sounds like, Paul. Okay, go ahead. That's what McMaster reads that, too, I think. But this is what the Stoics and the Buddhists all say, is there's nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. Okay, that was Shakespeare, but it's all the same idea.

And so I'm just going to say, if we're teaching students, as we do on campus now, to do the opposite, we teach them to take more offense, to find ever smaller things offensive to the point where we tell them, you know, if you get a bunch of insults, it's actually going to shorten your life. It's going to kill you. So if we tell people, especially people of color, that they should find more offense and take more offense, we're actually hurting them. Yes.

So anyway, I think we're doing a lot of things wrong in this country. But I'm afraid that it is traumatic, only in the sense that these are children. A lot of this is before they're thinking people and they learn they've internalized this to some degree. I mean, I don't know. It worries me. It worries me.

And by the way, because I have been wanting to ask you these things forever. Was it in Minnesota where the guy shot the... Sterling? No, no, no. Philando Castile. Castile was in Minnesota, yes. So this also plays into what I think social science can help us.

So when it happened, I said to myself, well, look, if I'm a depraved cop and I want to murder some stranger I never met before in a car, am I really going to do it and not shoot his wife too or while his wife, you know, it's hard to imagine. Like if you want, if he's a murderer, just shoot them down. Right. Right. So I said, well, what could be going on here?

I said, well, so then it led me to think about the idea of what does it mean to panic? And I researched and I'm sure you know something about the fight or flight response and what I found was that science tells us that actually the mind

before the mind can think about it the fight action already is down the pike so that literally before the cop shoots before the cop even thinks about what's going on, he may shoot. But that's the whole point of training.

What the military said long ago... What can psychology teach us? Because this is how you solve the problem. But it sounds like something you can't have control over at some point in that moment. But if you call him racist, that's not going to solve the problem. I'm interested in what you're going to say,

but then I want to add something. So, stress or fear makes the most practiced response come out. So, if the thing that you would naturally do is run away, then you're afraid you'll run away. But if you're trained to drop to the ground or to raise your weapon or whatever, basic training in the military for the police makes it so that when they are facing a possible life-threatening situation, they don't just follow what they would have done as a normal citizen.

They follow the training. So if cops are properly trained, then this shouldn't be happening. So we're creatures of habit. It's very similar to like a boxer. If somebody throws a jab at you and you practice slipping that jab and throwing a right hand, that's going to be your natural reaction. If I throw a jab at you, you might run that way or jump and grab a chair, do something like that. But there are exceptions.

They are a train. Of course. But here's a question I have, right? Is it possible that we're looking at the cops and the cops are really the tip of the iceberg? So policing, is it really the tip of the iceberg. So policing, is it really the tip of, if we learn that police are going to be faced with impoverished and often minority communities at a rate that's 20 times higher than every other one. So therefore they're going to be forced to possibly arrest and maybe even shoot at a rate that's 20 times higher. We're going to have these

higher statistics. Maybe the way of tackling this issue isn't putting all the blame on police, but rather working on the factors that put these people in front of the police to get arrested in the first place. This is what I was saying about tying it to the economics. It is tied to poverty on some level. That's right.

No one's shaking his head. I want to hear what you have to say about it. There's two ways you can approach racism. One is you can try to change people's stereotypes and prejudices. Right. But we don't know how to do that. There are not any effective therapies. And the bottom line is that people are really good at noticing differences among groups.

You can't stop them from doing that. The better way to eliminate racism is to eliminate differences between groups, to try to actually create equality. That's what we need to be doing. And so that means trying to fix the pipeline. It means trying to break the cycle of poverty. And that brings us back to the poverty report. Until we can change the conditions of childhood, and that largely also means getting to the point of delayed responsible parenting.

When we have a lot of kids, of kids. Asians almost always are married by the time they have kids. There's almost no out-of-wedlock Asian kids in this country. They have norms that stress schooling and self-control and all sorts of things. There are cultural differences. Those are related to economic differences. Except when they drink. Go ahead. You don't have to

endorse that. That's for us. We know what we're talking about. You comedians can still make ethnic jokes. I can't. I'm a professor. Go ahead. We're going to notice. He didn't finish. So on a certain level,

is assimilation necessary for equality? Should we be enforcing assimilation if we want groups to receive equal treatment? I wouldn't say that it is necessary, but I would say that it is generally helpful. And now, at least two of us here are Jewish, but we are a product of a period of high immigration into this country,

followed by a long period of assimilation when there was very low immigration. So assimilation worked fantastically for the Jews. And so, you know, a lot of Jewish intellectuals think, oh, well, that's the way to go. You know, things are different now. If you come poor to this country now, it's a lot harder to climb up to the middle class than it was for our grandparents, our parents' generation.

My dad says, my dad was born poor in Brooklyn. His grandparents are from Russia and Poland. Exactly my same biography. Go ahead. And he got a scholarship to Purdue, was born poor in Brooklyn. His grandparents are from Russia and Poland. Exactly my same biography. Go ahead. Yeah. And he got a scholarship to Purdue, and then he put himself through night school and law school at George Washington. And he was in Johnson & Johnson, the corporate world. And he says in the 50s, the economy was growing so fast that they couldn't keep the Jews out, even though there were firms that wouldn't hire Jews. But things were growing so fast that they couldn't. And now it's different.

We've got stagnant growth. Companies don't invest in you for life. So if you come here poor, even if your parents are married and they have a good work ethic, assimilation is not going to work the magic now that it did in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. But there are groups that don't assimilate and have incredible success. Indians, Chinese, Nigerians. But they have a very strong cultural backbone, and they still have arranged marriages.

I mean, it's a really good point to bring up some India, but it's sort of, I don't know if this... They have a strong community backing them, but they aren't assimilating yet experience the same success. So is it assimilation, or is it buying into certain values of success? Right. So the most important thing is to have norms and culture that lead to success. So if you have a really strong work ethic in your culture, if you are Confucian or South Asian Hindus in particular.

So look, I've been at universities for a long time now. And when I'm advising students and they come in to talk to me, and if it's a Korean student, an Indian student, it's like my parents' generation of Jews. It's like, you know, my parents insist that I have to be a doctor or an engineer, but I want to be an artist. I want to be in the NBA. One Asian ruins it for everybody.

Jeremy Lin should be put down. So the point is that you don't have to assimilate to be successful in this country. But you do have to have the ability to delay gratification, pursue education, work hard, and have social networks to draw on. That was the secret that the Jews had. It's what Koreans have. So if you can draw on all your relatives who will give you a loan and get your business started, you don't have to assimilate. You're going to be successful in this country. Is there a reason that the African-American community

is still struggling with single parents and fathers that don't support their children? You know, as a society, we've progressed a lot from the days of slavery and downright straight-up racism. So there are very well-educated African-American leaders who are day in and day out, through a living example and through speeches and writings, are telling their brethren,

hey, we need to clean up our act, right? Why is that taking so long to land with that particular race. So the first thing is I wouldn't talk about it in terms of race because you look at Caribbean immigrants, black people from the Caribbean who come here with strong families, strong work ethic, and they're very successful. That's why I bring up Nigerians as well.

So it's not a race thing. It's a culture thing. And I'm not an expert in this, but... American-specific. That's right. So obviously, look, slavery destroyed the African-American family. I'm not a culture thing. And, you know, I'm not an expert in this, but... American-specific. That's right. So, obviously, look, you know, slavery destroyed the African-American family. I'm not a social or cultural historian, so I can say exactly what happened or how. But, yeah, so it's a subcultural thing. Okay. So, how do we instill social networks

in groups that don't have social networks, values of hard work and delayed gratification to groups that don't have these values of hard work and delayed gratification to groups that don't have these values of hard work and delayed gratification, and the value of education. How do you instill? If we know that's the only way to succeed, how do you instill that? Do you want to answer that? That's a tough one. I want to kind of save him from going on record about the specifics of what he thinks about these issues

and stick to more what we can learn from him about how we ought Thank you, Noam. That's what I'm... Yeah, about what he thinks about these issues and stick to more what we can learn from him about how we ought to be looking at issues. I'd much rather talk about that. Yeah, yeah. And for instance, I have this analogy that I use a lot now. My father once mentioned, like offhand said to me, you know everything looks worse under a

microscope. And it always stayed with me. And I thought about the issues that face us today. Like in the 50s, you know, you ever have a microscope where you spin the thing? So in the 50s, we're like a one-to-one thing, and things were pretty bad. You could see it. And then we kind of cleaned that up, so we switched it to two times. And we're looking at things at, like, 64 times now. But they look through this microscope as if they're the worst things ever.

I'm sorry, are you saying things aren't as bad as they seem? We're just looking at them in a different way? As things get better, our level of what's acceptable gets lower and lower and lower, or higher, whatever you want to say. To the point where we kind of lose perspective that we're zoomed in at 128 times, and it looks as

horrible as it used to. And how do we put things in perspective that way? I don't know if you have any thoughts about that. Yeah, no, just that, you know, by almost any objective— As a matter of fact, we seem to think they're worse than they were when they were actually worse. So I'm a big fan of Steve Pinker, who wrote a book called The Better Angels of Our Nature, and he documents how almost everything's

getting better in this country and around the world in terms of decline of violence, decline of racism, decline of genocide. So the long-term trends are really, really good. Now, we, what we do, at least in my world, on campus, is you never hear anyone say that things are getting better. We do exactly what you say. We change. So now

it's not, there's no more explicit, there's hardly any explicit prejudice, but now we talk about unconscious bias. There's a whole big area of research on unconscious bias. But if you're unconscious, then is it bias? We'd have to get into this, but it's like a whole... Yeah. So I think what you're saying about how we keep changing, we keep moving

the goalposts, in effect. I think that's true. We do. I imagine criminal justice, I don't know the stats, but I imagine in the 60s a lot more black guys are being shot by cops than are now. Did you read Andrew Sullivan's piece?

It's like.0006, the odds of a black guy being shot are.0006%. Yeah, it's less than a shark attack. Let's not get back to that. No, but I'm saying things... He'll get fired. In other words, one way to look at it is things have gotten exponentially better. Yeah, they have. So now let's bring in social media,

because this is one of the reasons why we are drowning in stories about things that are terrible. And so, just a little example. Did any of you guys see in the news this morning or yesterday, it was a lawyer at CBS, a vice president of something or other, said on her

Facebook page, ah, you know those people in Vegas, they deserved it because they're Republicans and country music fans, they in Vegas, they deserved it because they're Republicans and country music fans, they support guns, they deserved it. Okay, that's disgusting. It's repulsive, it's horrible. But now here's the thing.

If you go back 20 or 30 years, every time there was something like this, something terrible, you know, we're a country with 300 million people in it. There must have been five or 10 who thought the worst thing you can possibly imagine. But back then, they would think it, they would say it to someone, and that was the end in it. There must have been five or ten who thought the worst thing you can possibly imagine. But back then, they would think it, they would say it to someone, and that was the end of it. It's the same with, you referenced it

and so did Andrew about Hamilton and Jefferson. You know, this sort of partisan bickering and the nasty it was at least as bad if not worse 200, 250 years ago. So that validates what Noam is saying about sort of where, you know,

we're putting a microscope at 100 on this. But it's not just that we're putting a microscope. It's that because of social media and the new media landscape, everyone is now immersed in and inflamed by the worst possible stories about the other side. And this is now carefully curated. So, you know, when people get stories in to your Facebook feed or Twitter, whatever it is, you selectively decide what to forward.

And so we have actual evolution going on, like Darwinian evolution of memes. And so only the most outrageous ones get sent on. But here's the thing. This is an interesting point, though. We need a lot of cultural norms. When I think about what I think ought to be what guys, like whether Google should fire these people, I keep coming back to what we need is a cultural norm of respect for diversity of opinion.

You can't let it go. How much respect can you have? That's what people ask, right? Can somebody be a public Nazi is what people ask. A real Nazi. I would say yes. You would say yes, but I mean, you asked me. I have no problem with public Nazis.

If there's a choice between extreme censorship and extreme freedom, I'll take extreme freedom every single time. That being said, not everybody is going to take that. Okay, but let's get to the Nazis. I'm talking about like on an issue of police violence. Yes. There's, it should, you, people who think like me, which are a lot of people who really want to be on the right moral side, really care about this. Sure.

But feel that constrained that they have to know what the data is. And they, and they can't as a leap of faith, just like you, you have to respect the data on global warming. You have to respect the data on whatever it is, and you can't talk about it out loud. You cannot talk about it.

That is because the cultural norm is not what it should be. People should be ready to accept that. I'm sorry. Yeah, this is one of the reasons I'm so alarmed, is that democracy, universities, science, we have a whole bunch of institutions that take flawed, stupid, moralistic people and put them together in a way where their flaws cancel each other out. And so in science, for example, science is so successful not because individual scientists have such high IQs or are so open-minded. They're not necessarily.

You know, in science, we all try to prove our own theories. We don't try to disprove our own theories. But we're immersed in networks where other people are going to disprove them for us. So we have to be careful. We have to be conscientious. And if that breaks down, and this is why I started this group called Heterodox Academy with a few other professors, when you get political norm, when everybody's on one side politically, and people can't talk about diversity or race or gender in an open way,

then people who propose hypotheses that are pleasing to our side, well, those theories, those studies get passed through peer review more easily. And that's the kind of thing that supports what we've been seeing, especially with social media, is that the truth really doesn't matter. This election and this president right now, regardless of your politics, the truth, Garry Kasparov said that you can annihilate the truth by continually denying the validity of facts

that you don't agree with, right? Which is what we're seeing. And so if the life raft for all of this, in my mind, is truth, right, facts, reality, it's all been blurred now. And I don't know if you go back. And only one part of that is these planted stories by Russian hackers and whatever. And so where does that – why do you go – you don't believe that?

I believe it happened, but I don't believe that. Well, let's not get distracted by it. I think if it had not happened, we would – This is really central. It's not a distracted by it. I think if it had not happened, we would not be distracted. This is really central. It's not a distraction at all. We're at a very critical time in our culture, and social media is at the center of it, where truth and facts do not matter anymore because of everything that we've been talking about. Tribalism. We have to be right.

We'll be right to the point where— Can I tell you why I went, eh? Because there's always going to be somebody out there putting out bogus facts, whether it's the Russians or—I mean, the Russians were no more— Can I tell you why I went, eh? Because there's always going to be somebody out there putting out bogus facts, whether it's the Russians or, I mean, the Russians were no more. Now people are accepting the bogus facts. But what needs to change is the cultural norm where people just blindly repeat facts, don't have any skepticism about it. Well, what if we're not capable of that?

That's my fear. My fear is that we are so tribal. Like in your book, you say we're 90% ape. Our brains are 90% ape, 10% high. It's confirmation bias. Well, it is confirmation bias, right? It's like I go on, if I'm a Hillary supporter, I go, I turn on CNN and I go, tell me why Trump sucks. I don't seek information.

I seek confirmation. So what we're suffering from is the coming together of two trends that are, you know, it's like parts of a chemical weapon. They mix. And those two things are a media ecology that gives us ever more powerful outrage stories, whether they're true or not, and increasing cross-partisan

hostility that makes us want to believe. So why is fake news going up? Part of it is the business models, the algorithms used by Facebook and Twitter. You know, you probably read the stories in the Washington Post about these guys in Slovakia or somewhere in Eastern Europe two years ago. And they didn't care about politics, but they just found that if they did certain things, they took off on the right but not the left. So they didn't care. So the media story is a big part of that.

And for some reason, right-wing media is just more conducive to these outrage stories now than left-wing media is. But look at the passions. Okay, whichever side is more furious, that side is more subject to fake news. So back in the early 2000s, the left had what was called Bush derangement syndrome. They were so mad at George W. Bush that they would believe almost anything. And then Obama got elected and that was flipped. And now it was the right's turn to believe any crazy thing. Even about Bill Clinton, too, that he killed Vince Foster. It was crazy stuff.

That's right. So with each successive change of parties, things get worse and worse. Now, I don't think Trump is just one more in the story. Trump is a gigantic discontinuity away from normal democratic norms. I'm not saying it's more of the same. So the left is understandably outraged, you know, in a state of complete disbelief, which means that they're much more vulnerable to fake news than

they were back when Obama was in power. And somebody who wants to make a buck is going to know that there's a customer there. And you don't need the Russians to do that. Are we capable of critical thinking? Under the right circumstances, yes. How do we create those? What are those circumstances? Good question. Thank you. Well, in fact are those circumstances? Okay, the circumstances that, yeah.

Good question. Thank you. Well, in fact, in Chapter 4 of The Righteous Mind, I covered the research on this. I didn't get to 4 yet. Damn it. I'm at the hive break. No, no, no. When I do an interview, I know that people read only the first three pages and maybe up to five.

I read the whole book. Go ahead. I'm getting it. I just started. I need some time to dig it. Listen, I have notes in the phone. I take it very seriously. Go on. I'm going to show you the notes. I'm some time to dig in. Listen, I have notes in the phone. I take it very seriously. Go on.

I'm going to show you the notes. I'm going to show you the notes. But notice what's happening here is he is embarrassed that he didn't read the book. I need some validation. Exactly. He's trying to save his reputation by showing me proof. Like you were saying earlier, we're constantly in a state of saving reputation. I'm sure on some level, I want my questions to be validated because I view you as a smart person.

If you think they're good, then they're good. And so reputation is the key to critical thinking. So here's what the research shows. This is research from Phil Tetlock, a professor at Penn at Wharton. So you give people complex problems where if they really think it through, they could get the right answer. And

the crucial thing as to whether they do is what they think the social accountability is going to be. So if you just tell them, here, what's the right answer, they're kind of lazy, they don't do it. If you tell them, okay, figure this out, and you're going to go before a group of people and present, you're going to explain what this was about. Well, if they think that that group of people wants to believe one side, they're more likely to do the thinking to get them to that side. If they think that the group of people they're talking to is going to evaluate them and they really care about the right answer, or they're being evaluated for their own intelligence or something, then they actually will look at evidence on both sides.

So it's only if you're going to be held accountable by an audience that actually wants the right answer, not a particular answer, that you will think critically. In other words, yes, we're capable of it, but only under very rare circumstances. How do you get yourself to think critically? What checks do you have that go on in your mind? Well, first of all, I'm a lot less passionate than most people about politics. So in the 80s, I was always outraged at Reagan, and I was always outraged in the Bush years. And once Bush was out of office, and I became a centrist, so I'm not on a team anymore. So I think I'm a little less passionate. And because of that, you're able to think more objectively

and clearly and see both sides of an issue. Well, I think I'm able because I'm not on a team. It's like a man castrated. He's able to deal with hot women. Well, that's not a bad example. So I think because I'm not on a team, I'm not on a tribe, so at least I'm able to listen to both sides. But I still have my causes. I mean, I believe in viewpoint diversity. So I'm because I'm not on a team, I'm not on a tribe, so at least I'm able to listen to both sides. But, you know, I still have my causes.

I mean, I believe in viewpoint diversity and head right. So I'm passionate about that. So I do, like, I do seek out criticism. Like, I look at, you know, if someone tweets something nasty about me or something, I'll follow them or I'll read it. My favorite philosopher now is John Stuart Mill. It used to be David Hume. When I wrote the book, it was David Hume. But now it's John Stuart Mill who wrote In On Liberty, he who knows only his own side of the case knows little

of that. And he goes on to explain how we need dissent, we need critics in order to think well, and because the truth often is shared by both sides. So I read a lot of stuff on the right and the left, and I think it makes me a better social scientist. I would think just very similar to what he just said. I always think to myself, I've made this analogy on the radio before if I'm repeating myself, that every idea should be thought of like a criminal defendant. It's entitled to its best defense. Don't dismiss the idea until you – because most people are not interested in the best defense of the idea. That's right.

They're interested in the easiest characterization to dismiss the idea. And I go through it all the time as a matter of self-discipline. Even on issues very close to me, like Israel and things like that, I really try to force myself. You do, and you're very good at that. But to force myself when I feel myself getting uncomfortable. But here's the thing that's making me nervous.

Within the tribe, whether it's right or left, I have no agenda here, there is now sort of, there is a revolt within the tribe, right? So let or left, I have no agenda here, there is now sort of there is a revolt within the tribe. So let's talk about conservatives for a second. In 2015, Limbaugh went off because he didn't like the deal that the conservatives cut with the Democrats. And he felt like the conservatives were not representing the Republican values. And that started to ferment this sort of alt-right, whatever you want to call it, sort of the Steve Bannons of the world and the Breitbarts, and empowered them and empowered Trump. And so Charlie Sykes has this book, and it's called How the Right Lost Its Mind. And it's

a really great book. And I really respect him because he's a conservative. I don't necessarily see eye to eye with him on a lot of issues, but he is true to his cause and he's reasonable. He'll listen. He'll listen to the other side. So we've gone to another level now. Roger Ailes is gone. Bannon takes his place. We have Roy Moore

being elected. He doesn't want to get sucked into the... I'm just talking about within it, this tribalism. There's revolt within the tribe. I only see this... I don't want to get sucked into the... No, no, I'm just talking about sort of within it, this tribalism, this sort of revolt within the tribe. I only see this, I don't want to be negative, but I see it getting worse, and I don't know, this goes back to what Andrew was asking, sort of how do we use critical thinking and get back to a place where we're not sort of devouring ourselves.

Yeah, so I am not a big fan of people just sort of like snapping out of it, getting smart and thinking better. It's very hard for us to do. I'm a big fan of changing systems, changing systemic variables. So, what are some examples? Well, obviously, the algorithms used

by Facebook and Twitter to present you with things, if we could tweak those so that you get more of a mix of things and not just the stuff that you already liked. So, social media is a piece of it. not just the stuff that you already liked. So social media is a piece of it. Changing the calendar in Washington, getting Congress to be more functional, that's a piece of it. I do think we need to change the way a lot of things we do in universities. We need to

change the way that we orient students when they first come in. We should orient them with training for how to actually seek out debate dissent within a community that likes and trusts each other. We need to have more a sense of shared identity first. And when you have a sense of shared identity as members of a college or something like that, then you can actually disagree profitably. But if you start off with distrust in the sense that everybody is whatever.

Look at how this issue... Quick question. I want to talk about the Vegas thing. Go ahead. Just a quick question. Yeah. Is it possible we're not smart enough to have, or the majority of people are not smart enough to have social media? Oh, boy.

And I'll frame it like this. We have this idea of a representative democracy, right? We kind of lie to people. We go, hey, you guys are in charge. You decide what laws are made, et cetera. But realistically, the smart 0.01% of society makes all the decisions, and they fucking should. They're the smart people, right? Most people are idiots.

Let them be idiots. Then we get social media, and the idiots actually have a voice. They get to chase down the things that they like. I have a book for you to read. I have a good book for you to read. Maybe I am a snob. Yeah, I really do. On a real level,

I'm wondering if it even makes sense. I love representative democracy. Lie to the people. Make them think they have freedom. Then check all of my emails and make sure

I'm not blowing shit up. Should it be regulated? All right, so this is what Plato thought when he wrote The Republic. He designed the ideal society so that the... Plato had slaves, by the way,

so I'm going to take a knee right now. Take a knee! Go ahead, go ahead. But, you know, so this is an idea that has often occurred, and it especially occurs

to people who tend to be on the left that we should have a meritocracy and we should have the smart class in charge. And I think what you're pointing to is the reason that the founding fathers...

Don't say it. Lie. Well, that's right. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. And what you're pointing to is the reason why the founding fathers Fathers did not want a democracy, because democracy has all these problems. You get passions. But what we have is not supposed to be democracy.

It's supposed to be a republic in which the people don't get to make the laws. We don't consult the people and say, what do you want, people? No. But what you have to have, what you have to have, is that the people have to be able to throw their bums out if they're not satisfied. If you don't have that, then you've got tyranny. Love that, too. You believe in term limits? What?

You believe in term limits? No. It's an empirical question. That is, places that have term limits, do things get better? And the answer is no, they get worse. Okay. Because then the staff stays, and sort of the expertise that you need to get things done disappears.

So no, term limits. It seems like a good idea from the outside, but the political scientists all tell me no, it generally does not work. But what about the argument when you have power for that? Oh, you have to get re-elected. It's still an election process, but you have to... People have to be able to throw their votes. Okay, I like that, I like that.

I'm so forewarned of this, of this idea of a tyranny and this idea of... And some are saying with this idea of, you know, and some are saying, you know, with this manipulation of the press, all news that doesn't agree with me is fake news, right? Right. And I hearken to Stephen Miller maybe three months ago saying, and this will not be questioned when he was talking about Donald Trump and something that he was doing. It's sort of like, it's hearkened back to Tocqueville and his concern that we're talking

about right now, which is sort of, okay, if you have all this power centralized in one person and no ability to elect, kick the bums out, reelect, whatever, where are you? You're basically, you're within a monarchy is what you have. Right. Well, so there is no perfect form of government. And this is, you know, the nature of political philosophy for thousands of years. Right. This is the nature of political philosophy for thousands of years. There's just one other principle I want to put on the table here about this discussion about should we have an elite, the smart people who get to have more influence. That we don't tell people about. Just get rid of social media. We'll be fine.

I really think that. And limit the amount of news people can get. Go China. Go Singapore. Benevolent dictatorship. Well, there is something to be said for benevolent dictatorships at getting countries from poverty to middle class. 40 years. They go from the jungle to an

apple store. It's amazing. That's right. But those countries, like Korea, they start... So the chaebols, the military dictatorship, that's a much faster way to get a country up than, say, democracy in India. But once you reach middle class status, then every country... You can't really go once you reach middle class status than every country you can't you can't

really go much further with uh... dictatorship or selling okay yeah and i don't even skeptical of that like like democracy i don't know maybe you do known some jackass but i but it will be democracy is a very uh... inexact word i tend to believe that if you have a real free enterprise system and real rule of law and a government which roots out corruption, you would see faster growth of prosperity than any other system. That's the libertarian view. And I have a lot of sympathy for that if you can really get efficient markets, if you really can get efficient markets.

So I teach a business ethics class here at NYU Stern. And one of the consistent themes is if you have efficient markets, there are very few ethical problems. And as soon as you start getting, you know, external costs passed on to others and information asymmetry, when you get inefficient markets, then you get really smart people able to exploit them and hurt others. But the one other thing I want to put on to finish up our conversation before is that there's lots of interesting research from Dan Kahan at Yale and others that smart people are not better at finding the truth on politicized topics. They're just better at finding justifications for what they want to believe. That's right.

That's right. Because it's intuition justification. So Dan Kahan does these studies where, you know, if you give people like some problem, like they have to read a graph with some complicated data. And if it's just graph data, smart people or people who have a lot of experience with math, they'd solve it better. But if you tell them this is a graph of data on how gun control laws by state relate to crime later, well, then they'll find exactly.

Yes, interesting, interesting. They come to an answer that they want. So we're about to wrap it up. But the horrible thing in Las Vegas. Yes. And by the way, we're supposed to wrap it up, but the horrible thing in Las Vegas. Yes. And by the way, we're supposed to open a comedy cellar in Las Vegas.

Anyway. Do you think that gun control would have... If you were emperor and you could pass any gun control law that you would like, do you think you could stop mass shootings? No. But I often think the problem with this is when we

create gun control after mass shootings, we are often implementing laws that won't stop most gun deaths. And I think that's the problem with this knee-jerk reaction when it comes to gun control. We've got to get rid of AR-15s. 90%

of people kill themselves with handguns. Why are we not... Yeah, that's a great point. I mean, I think you can minimize the number of deaths the other day if you say, okay, everybody can... We were sort of joking

about this, but it's also serious. Everybody can only have a.22, right? So you can't pop off a lot of rounds if you have a.22. But you could drive

a truck right into it. Well, that's exactly right. So it's a volume issue. On the same day as the Newtown shooting of all those kids, there was, on the very same day it. Well, that's exactly right. So it's sort of, it's a volume issue. On the same day as the Newtown shooting of all those kids, there was, on the very same day,

I believe it was, there was a mass attack in China. In fact, a guy went into a preschool with a knife. Stab attack. And he stabbed

a bunch of kids and like one died, I think. Yeah. So you'll always have mentally unstable people. You'll always have vendettas. But, you know,

if you have a gun, they kill more. But if you have a gun, they kill more. And if you have a semi-automatic, they kill more. And if you have a machine gun, they kill more. So I used to run a gun control group in college. I'm a big fan of gun control. I do now see that it's more complicated than I used to think. But still, the headline in The Onion, the headline that The Onion runs after every one of these, I think it's something like, the only nation on Earth that has these mass atrocities

says there's nothing it can do to stop these mass atrocities. Something like that. Which, of course, we're not the only nation that's never had them. I think it was in Norway or somebody had a horrible

journal reference to today. Yeah, well, that's right. But they have one every 20 years and we have one every year. At the exact same thing happened at Concert. 125 people were shot. These are the questions

I really wanted. First of all, there's two questions. First of all, can you, in the same way with drugs or prohibition, can you actually keep the guns out of the hands of people who want them or want them? Are willing to do illegal activity, yeah. And part B of that is there's 300 million guns already out there.

And then the other question in my mind is that 50 years ago, when there was almost no gun control, why didn't we have these events then, like we do now? What's changed culturally? Clearly, guns are harder to get now, yet it's more and more common. Well, you have to look at why people do this. It's mostly individual men who do this. And so it's not that there's more mental in this, but it might be that we've deinstitutionalized people. It might be that high-powered guns are more readily available.

I don't really know why it's more common than it used to be. I'm afraid that people are aping the charisma of terrorist events and then each event they want to outdo the previous one. And we're on this kind of escalating. I think it's first important to understand if it is more. I don't think it is more. I mean, shooting deaths are trending down. They're trending down 50%.

These are mass murders. So mass murders may be happening more, but if overall shooting deaths are trending down 50% from, I think, the 70s... No, it's serious. That's because of the leaded gas. We used to have so much leaded gas, we all had brain damage. But once we banned leaded gas, seriously, once we banned leaded gas in 1980, 15 to 20 years later, crime rate plummeted.

Really? Yeah, look it up. Just look up Google, the real criminal element. There's a great article by Kevin Drum in Mother Jones, lays out all the graphs. Seriously, that's why crime plummeted in New York first, because New York banned leaded gas in 77. So crime starts plummeting in New York City just before Giuliani arrives. Just before he arrives. Giuliani got lucky.

Giuliani wasn't this hardball. If that was coming out of the mouth of anybody else on planet Earth, that's ridiculous. So is it gas that makes you more aggressive? I saw Star Trek like that. No, lead is like the worst possible thing for developing brains. Is this correlational or is this factual? So it is what's called a quasi-experiment. Because states and cities ban leaded gas at different times.

You could see the drop off? Exactly. About 17 years later, the crime rate plummets. So it plummets in New York first in the early 90s, and then it plummets everywhere else three years later. What's in Chicago? They still have leaded gas in Chicago? Just in that one area.

There's more to crime than leaded gas. There they have a gang problem. But let me just end the gun control thing with this. Maybe this is like a better way to end it. It's a complicated issue, and if we had a functional political culture, if we had a functional democracy where we could actually debate things, we could actually get together and solve it. And that's what they do in Scandinavia. I was there a year or two ago. In Scandinavia, when they have problems, they have problems too, but they actually get together and solve them.

They talk about them intelligently. We cannot do that anymore. So we will never solve this problem. How do we do that? Just one quick takeaway. How do we do that? What is your goal to getting us to a point where we will break away from tribe and have these conversations? I think we have to work on several of the components of it. We have to have a major congressional reform campaign. I don't know how it's going to happen. It'll probably take until one party can, I don't know how it'll happen, but there's a piece that we have to reform campaign. I don't know how it's going to happen. It'll probably take until one party can,

I don't know how it'll happen, but there's a piece that we have to reform Congress. There's a piece we have to make some changes to the media. We have to change the way we're raising kids. Our kids are overprotected. They don't develop some of the skills of argument that they used to have. So there's a whole bunch of pieces.

All right, I'll end with a plug for my next book. I'm writing a book with Greg Lukianoff where we try to actually analyze all of this. We have to say, what's going on? Why is everything going haywire? And the title of the book is going to be the same as the title of our,

an Atlantic article we wrote, which is The Coddling of the American Mind. Subtitle is How Good Ideas, I'm sorry, How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas

Are Leading a Generation to Failure. And we go through all the things that are happening so that young people today are just not as prepared for life in a rough and tumble democracy as

say our parents were. It's been getting worse ever since. And yet they're more informed theoretically because of social media, but it's not helping. But information, yeah, information is not that valuable. It gets back to the truth of it and the veracity of it. Alright, well, we gotta wrap it up. I just really believe that if anybody reads your book and internalizes the lessons in that book,

they will end up a little bit better in terms of being able to monitor their own thought and weed out their own biases than if they hadn't read it. So I think that's why I think the book is so important. And you haven't read it, but you really need to. I't read it. So I think that's why I think the book is so important. And you haven't read it, but you really need to. I will read it. I think, as I said again, I think about it all the time, and it really changed my life, that book. That's why I keep it.

The Righteous Mind, available in bookstores near you. Can I have one of those? I recommended it to you too, right, Mike? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I recommend it all over town. Okay. Jonathan, thank you very, very much. A pleasure.

Thank you, man. Good night, everybody.