The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Peter Boghossian - DMT the Objectivity of Numbers, Arguments About Race and IQ, and Jew hatred

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

Peter Boghossian is a Founding Faculty advisor at the University of Austin and the Executive Director of National Progress Alliance. His most recent book is How to Have Impossible Conversations, and his writing can be found in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Scientific American, Time Magazine, National Review, and elsewhere. His work is centered on bringing the tools of professional philosophers to a wide variety of contexts to help people think through what seem to be intractable problems.

Excellent. This is Live from the Table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy cellar coming at you on SiriusXM 99. Raw comedy, baby. Also available as a podcast and on YouTube for that multimedia experience. You get to see us.

You get to hear us. We have with us, well, I'm here, of course, Dan Natterman, comedy cellar regular. They're trying to squeeze me out, but I'm still here hanging on. Noam Dorman is here. He owns the comedy cellar. Perrielle Ashenbrand is with us.

She's a comic herself. Doesn't work here, but maybe one day she will. And we have a very special guest, Dr. Peter Boghossian, best-selling author, philosopher, born in Boston, and you'll hear his accent when he starts talking. And his areas of academic interest include atheism, critical thinking, scientific skepticism, and the Socratic method. Peter Boghossian, thank you for joining

us. What's going on, guys? Thanks for having me. I'm really excited. So right before we started, you were telling us about... You wanted to say what you're talking about? I was talking about DMT. I did DMT for the first time and about a month and a half ago with some friends of mine, and I found it to be an absolutely extraordinary experience.

And what is it like? How does it compare? It's like mushrooms or LSD or the... Well, this is the first time I've ever talked about it. Usually, I can't talk about this stuff, but as I age at 57, I really don't give a shit anymore. It's extraordinary because it's five minutes five minutes it's a five minute trip and you're in in in i mean and i can explain what i saw to you if you're interested and then you're out instantly just like boom instant out like out is in terms of so it's so instantaneously you you

could drive wow it's in and out so there are two types of dmt there There's a 5-MeO DMT, which is from a toad, and then there's just the other DMT that you can get from tree bark. And what's the experience like during those five minutes that you're on a trip? Are you seeing colors and hearing colors? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a synesthesia. Tasting music. Yeah, yeah.

So there are, if you take one hit, two hits, and three hits. So one hit, basically, you're in the room. And it's an incredibly potent psychedelic. So I can share with you my experience at two hits. So I took two hits, my arms melted into my chest, and I saw a mandala floating. It was black and white and two-dimensional. And then instantly, instantly, I rocketed off,

and I was... I didn't know if I was in the quantum realm or inside of a black hole or in another dimension, but I... Nice haircut, Reed. Reed travels around with me everywhere. I agree. But I occupied the body of a

crustacean and I could see back eons in time this is like that movie Altered States with William Hurt yeah well that movie I haven't thought about that in a long yeah but the movie is based upon I think it's Lily's book

I read it a long time ago Dolphins, LSD, that whole thing. So I'll just finish. No, that's cool. I'll just finish the story. So I saw the word that popped out at me was lineage. I saw eons back to just not quite the beginning of time, but I just saw these creatures doing this mechanical thing,

kind of like lobster-esque creatures. And then I inhabited one of their bodies. And then boom, I was out just like that. Bam. Is there anything you've taken from the experience that will live with you? Or was it just a good time while it lasted? Well, it's interesting. So many people are...

Some people claim that it maps an actual space and that there are many models. I don't think it maps any space, personally. I think it's just some bizarre artifact of consciousness. You mean that your notion of what the beginning of time looked like has nothing to do with what it actually looked like. It's your mind creating a vision. Yeah, and it maps a topological space, like a physical space. Some extra-dimensional space. And people are giving people DMT drips, IV drips. And they're trying to plot those experiences to see if there are commonalities.

So that's the fascinating thing to me about it. I just mentioned at lunch and someone that experienced it at lunch because I've been thinking about it. It's so profound to me. And somebody said, someone said, did you see the elves? So they're like mechanical elves. So the regularity at which people have these, I don't want to say hallucinations or delusions. I don't know what to call them, these experiences.

And I had a friend who took it, and he swears that he had sex with this blue alien. And a lot of people see the same blue alien with the tail. But just the regularity of these experiences are fascinating to me. that he had sex with this blue alien. And a lot of people see the same blue alien with the tail, but just the regularity of these experiences are fascinating to me. If nothing else, doesn't this teach us that we are not at all in charge of our own minds? The mind is a physical organ.

It can be altered. What we think, we think because our brain is telling us to think it. And chemicals are rearranged in a certain way. We'll think something else. Yeah, one way you can think about that was when you take the ghost out of the machine is only the machine so if i had your experiences and your genetics i'd be sitting there and dressed in the same way with my hands folded so you know that's one way to think about

it consciousness is a is a very interesting thing It's something as a general rule I don't think you should fuck with. But at 57, you have a kind of a different view on things, you know? So real quick, so Reid and I did a podcast with the physicist David Deutsch from Oxford, and he said something about, you know, the Fermi paradox. Like, you know, where is everybody? Because I've been fascinated by that since I've been a kid. You mean extraterrestrial? Yeah, like where is everybody? Why haven't we seen any evidence of extraterrestrial? If there are different answers, Carl Sagan said we could be the first. We haven't seen these things that Carl von Neumann for a von Neumann probe, like these self-replicating probes that

go out and pull from matter to expand. There's no evidence. But he said to me something that was so fascinating to me, it literally never occurred to me, but I've just been thinking about it a lot. Why go out rather than down, right? Why not go to the quantum realm? And the whole idea that you would expand in terms of a colonist mindset.

And by the way, I think... What is the quantum realm? You know, the realm of the very, very small. Quantum physics. Yeah. He said that there's more space down than there is out. And then I started thinking about that, and I said, well, I wonder if that principle is operative

in other domains of our lives. Like, I wonder if that principle is operative. Like, why go out into the world when you could go into your own consciousness? And so Timothy Leary, I don't know if you're familiar with Leary, yeah. Well, obviously. Dropout. Yeah, I spent a weekend

with him in New York. He's actually right here in New York. So, you know, he has a lot of really interesting stuff about psychedelics and consciousness, and you know, different people do this for different reasons. But anyway, I've just been thinking about that, like plumbing the depths of my own consciousness through psychedelics.

It's not really the same thing, right? Like getting deep into your own mind is not similar. It's not really the same thing as exploring space. That's almost like a figurative kind of exploration. Yeah, no, so the analogy would be, so when you want to explore, why not go to the quantum realm rather than out to the stars? But you could take that same principle, the same principle as operative in the cognitive domain. Like, why not explore our own consciousness as opposed to the world? I mean, ideally, maybe you could do both. And I think it's ultimately, it's a kind of Socratic question, right? Is the unexamined life worth living? And do people gain something more

of, do they participate in a form of the good, if you will, if they start exploring their own consciousness? I mean, I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's a reasonable question. So in that movie, Altered States, he actually shows, he actually showed this exact same hallucination as you described, going back to the beginning of time.

I'm wondering if that's some common, that must have been based on some actual trips that people had, wherever that book came from. Anyway, you are, this is pretty fascinating. minutes all of a sudden i'm tempted to try it because my big fear about taking psychedelics has always been that well what if somebody calls me and i need to function i need to make a decision about something and the one time i took ecstasy i realized as opposed to drinking yeah uh i would i i was out like there was i just i could not deal with anything important if i had to deal with it i couldn't like snap out of it yeah but what you're saying is it could just be five minutes. It is five minutes, yeah. I could spare five minutes.

Do those five minutes feel like five minutes or it feels like five hours or five years? You have no way to judge the time. It's like Narnia. Yeah, like Narnia. They come back and they're like, wait, we're gone two minutes ago. Yeah.

Let's talk about wokeness. You're one of the nation's best puncturersurers of wokeness yeah so let's just a a few things do you think we're past peak woke a hundred percent and what do you attribute that to oh just a lot of things people are sick of it it's it's okay so what level do you want the answer i'll just i'll just throw out the answer so the it is inherently so fucking, oh, can I swear? Yeah, it's the internet. It is inherently so fucking stupid that it's not sustainable. Like there's no, in order to keep this deranged ideology going,

you would have to have some mechanism to keep it in place, like political correctness or state-sponsored or what have you. So we're past peak woke. When I first started my nonprofit, everyone who worked for me had a fake name because they didn't want to be associated with things, especially like the woke space is crazy enough, but there are some things within that space,

like the trans stuff is just super crazy. And the people are, I mean, those people can be incredibly nasty. Now, what is the craziest thing about the trans stuff that we were all forced to recite that none of us could have actually believed or ought to have believed? I mean, how much time do you have for that question?

The fact that we were basically asked to pretend to know things. We were asked to pretend to not know things that literally everybody knows. His mom is a woman. Her dad is a man. We were asked to pretend that we don't know what a woman is. And we were asked to pretend that when people presented themselves, that we have to not treat them a certain way, but actually believe. So it was the robbing of our cognitive liberty by a small group of fanatics yeah it's right it went beyond it's just respectful and polite to to do this trans women are women that's right and you were supposed to believe it we he and she and i had this argument a million times she went so far as to tell me at one point she'll deny it now but i that if i met a girl in the bar yeah and i found out she had a penis yeah and that then I wouldn't be a girl that, that,

that I was then a transphobic or some sort of bigot. It was like, just why? Because you wouldn't sleep with her. Yeah. Because I wouldn't sleep with, cause I cared whether she had a P if I would. No,

that wasn't the question. The question was, is if she had been post off and no, it wasn't. Anyway, let's go. Let's go. It was,

that was not the question. So, but let me, let me, so something asked me literally something was just, you know, free form. Something is going on now with this Trump trials with Stormy Daniels. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And she's, she's a porn star.

And she's apparently, I haven't watched it, but I read in the papers that she's claiming in some way this, the power dynamic. She's traumatized by this sexual react sexual relationship with trump yeah and that the details uh experts say that you know the details are she's giving contradictory details because often with trauma details come back later on because that's the way the mind was trauma and my reaction is she's a porn star like like how, what kind of delicate flower is she about sex? Yeah. This is wokeness. You're not supposed to say that. You're supposed to say, oh yes, she must be traumatized by sex. Well, you're not ruling out the possibility that a porn star can be traumatized by a sexual experience. Not by rape. Yes. But, but the fact that she slept with

Donald Trump in a consensual way. Yeah. I'm kind of ruling that out. Yeah, unless he was horrific in bed, which apparently he was. No, but this is a little, this is still post-woke momentum here, right? Well, yeah, the vestiges of the ideology will remain with us for a long time, especially since they have institutional support, right? So we're not going to, we'll see this ebb and flow. We're seeing it fade now, but it's not gonna fade for a while i mean you also see a reaction against it and that's actually the some of the things that i'm i'm concerned about i'm concerned that in the anti-woke space you see a kind of christian nationalism emerge you see an echo chamber emerge. You see the pushing of another kind of hostility to cognitive liberty,

like people have to believe certain moral values, you know, trad wives or what have you. So I'm concerned that the reaction to this, or, you know, I'm very much pro-gay marriage, for example. I'm concerned that gay adoption would fall within that rubric, that those hard-fought rights will be eroded because of a direct consequence of wokeism, the reaction to wokeism. How would that happen? Well, people would vote out, people would think, for example, it's just homosexual, it's quote-unquote disgusting you know that operates the disgust module in the brain for morality or people would you know make

claim i mean i i personally am very much pro-abortion in the first trimester and so i'm afraid that you're against it in the second trimester only uh they would have to be a pretty extraordinary circumstance and i'm militantly against it in the third trimester. Yeah. And that's because. Um, well, this is another conversation entirely. I don't, we can take a detour. You can say, you can literally, there's literally nothing that you can ask me as long as it's not about my personal life. You can ask me anything you want.

Have you ever had any, no, I'm kidding. You can ask me anything you want. No, I meant to make abortions, but go ahead. Go ahead. No, I meant to make abortions, but go ahead, go ahead. No, not personally. So the reason for that is I think that those differentiated cells, there really is something to the life argument at a certain point, right? So when Reid and I go around the world and we'll ask, we'll do the spectrum street epistemology when we put people on the line, strongly agree, agree,

slightly agree, neutral, and we'll ask questions. You know, we'll say like, abortion in the first trimester should be legal. Abortion in the second trimester should be legal. Abortion in the third trimester should be legal. Abortion at the last day should be legal. And we've even asked people, the one at Dartmouth, abortion after the last day should be legal. And, you know, some people will still stand on the strongly agree line.

But I think, so two reasons. I think as a country, we're in deep shit right now. We're not talking to each other. We look at each other as existential threats and ideological enemies. And I think we have to make some compromises. I think abortion in the first trimester is a very reasonable. I know if you're a fanatic or you're extremely religious, you're unwilling to compromise on that. And I think at some point we have to start talking about

transitioning. The day of your 18th birthday, you can transition, but not before. I think that's a very reasonable compromise. I think we just have to start talking to each other again and making compromises across divides, because if we don't, we're all fucked. I mean, acknowledging that that's an arbitrary date, the first trimester, but a date has

to be picked on the left. I want to ask a question. Yeah, that's one of the lines. If you had perfect scientific knowledge to answer any question that you could think of, what question would you want to know the answer to, to then set a date for the abortion? Oh boy, if you didn't say abortion, that would have been a much more interesting question. I'll go on. The date that it can feel pain, the date that it has its first neurological trace, like

what? Yeah, it's less clear to me that the question is ultimately scientific, although I think that the science would inform the moral decision that one made. I think if you have a moral infrastructure in place and a kind of set of first principles, then the science can inform that, and then you can make a better decision.

Well, for me, I have a very hard time explaining how it's okay to have an abortion if the fetus is going to be in pain. That's just, maybe that's my shallowness. Because you think that pain is causally attributable to life. Like if there is pain, there is life. My instinct is that way. If there's pain, there's pain.

And that the notion that there's no suffering going on here. Pain is just, you know, it seems to me, it's like the notion that you're going to have an abortion. We're going to anesthetize the fetus, which is not alive, but we're going to give it anesthesia so it doesn't suffer through the abortion. This becomes a bit much.

So if may I, yeah. So the word that you use was suffer. Do you think in order for an organism to suffer, it has to have a conception of past and future? No, I don't know. That does it.

I never thought of that before. Well, I mean, there's a difference between being in pain and the consciousness of being in pain and the consciousness of being out of pain, which would mean you'd have to have a memory or recollection of not being in pain, or the expectation or hope that you won't be in pain. I think those things are embedded in the concept of suffering.

Well, like when they gave my wife ketamine and they fixed her dislocated shoulder, she had terrible pain. And then she came out and had no recollection. But they still did inflict pain on her. And if they did it in a sadistic way, I would say that was wrong, even though there's no chance she'd remember it. I think if that's what you're saying. Yeah. In that case, and correct me if I'm wrong, the reason you'd make a moral judgment about that

is because that wasn't the purpose of the procedure. No, I don't know. Listen, I get what you're saying. Yeah. Well, I don't even know what I'm saying. I'm just kind of thinking. You're saying if a tree, if, if, if a tree hurts on the forest, it doesn't make a sound. You're saying if I'm,

if I, if you cause me pain today, but I don't remember it tomorrow, has a moral wrong been committed? I guess. I think the intention is also part of the question here, right? Well,

you, I mean, I'm, I'm just asking the question. Yeah. So if we had to, if we had to pick a day for, we'll put anyway, at the point where the fetus feels pain,

at least it becomes a more complicated question, because then we have to start answering these very esoteric questions you're asking before it feels pain, before it has any markers of life, the same markers that you use to decide when somebody's dead. They're dead, Mr. Dorman.

There's no heartbeat. There's no brainwaves. Okay. You're alive, Mr. Dorman. It has a no heartbeat. There's no brainwaves. Okay. You're alive, Mr. Dwarman. It has a heartbeat. It has a brainwave. Yeah. So I, boy, I'm hoping the questions aren't esoteric.

I'm hoping the questions are just questions that people would seriously think through whether either they want an abortion or as it informs public policy. Well, do you believe there's objective morality? Yes. Yes. Yes. And why is that? Because I think you can rationally derive principles of right and wrong, justice.

Are they rationally derived in terms of, like, you can't rationally derive whether Israel's doing the right thing in Gaza, right? Yeah, I should have added that to the list of the other things that I don't talk about. You can kind of derive, in my opinion, you can rationally derive a system that works best for the human race in terms of when you should and shouldn't do certain things. So I'll rewind that. Is there an objective? Yeah, I'll rewind that. The only reason I don't talk about it, I just don't know enough about it. You're asking the wrong guy about Gaza,

but I can tell you about... No, I wasn't trying to ask about Gaza. I'm giving an example of... It's not objective. Yeah. So I can tell you what people far smarter and more knowledgeable than me have said about it as a way to think through the problem. You know, the question of justice goes back to Plato's Republic,

which is one of the most, in my opinion, the most important books ever written, probably the most important book ever written. And if anybody's listening to this, if people ask me, oh, you know, which one philosophy book I should read? Plato's Republic. It's a no-brainer. Okay, so in the Republic, in the first three books in the Republic in particular, he talks about what is justice. And he gives all these examples, like is it just to

hurt your enemies? And is it just to pay your debts, etc.? If you fast forward the clock to John Rawls in the 1970s, the Harvard philosopher, he has a great idea. He said that justice is fairness. And that's an incredibly profound thing. You cannot have a just system unless it's a fair system. And then once you say that, then you can derive certain principles of justice. Like I can bring three kids in here or two kids in here or two coke addicts in here, and I guarantee you we can have a definition of justice that can be easily adjudicated. I would put a pile of cocaine on the tray,

and you know how they would divide it? No. Yeah, you do. How would they divide it? Three ways. No. The coke addicts would snort up as much as they possibly could as quickly as they could.

Okay, but let's say, so I brought in three. Say the scenario again. Okay, so I have two scenarios. Let's use the kid thing first. I have a bunch of ice cream in a container and I bring in two children and I have two containers for the ice cream. How do they divide the ice cream?

You're saying kids are selfish, they'll try to take it all for themselves. No, I think they would share it. Okay. No. So I'm doing a terrible job. I'll tell you. We're idiots.

At a certain age, they don't share it. Okay, so one person would divide it, and the person who divided it wouldn't choose it. So the other person would choose it. Like Solomon. Yeah, like Solomon. So there's a built-in mechanism that kids and drug addicts know for fairness. But I don't think a kid would think that.

But not radio shows. No, I know that's it. Yeah, if you want to divide something fairly, you say one person cuts it, and the other person chooses which half they want. But kids wouldn't be smart enough to come up with that. But my question is... I don't think that's true. But even if it wasn't true, let's accept that it wasn't true.

What if you suggested that's true. But even if it wasn't true, let's accept that it wasn't true. What if you suggested that to them? You say, is this the most fair way? People can rationally derive that that is the most fair way. And then once you can say that they can rationally derive that, look, if you're willing to say, so first of all, this is accepting the fact

that you think justice is fairness. If you don't think that, then that's another discussion. I'm happy to have that discussion. But the moment that you say that, what if you say, well, I'm going to give you nine tenths of the pizza or whatever, and you're going to get, what is it, eight slices of pizza? You're going to get seven.

This person will scream. You know, Plato in the Republic said, it is not the fear of doing, but of suffering wrong that calls forth the reproaches of those who revile injustice. In other words, when you're being treated unfairly, the person treating you unfairly is never screaming about injustice. It's only the people who are being treated like shit that scream about injustice. But the larger point is that you can offer people solutions to things like children at a basic level. And the moment that you, I don't want to say admit, but admit that some of those people will say that she gets seven slices, he gets one is unfair. Then that is the instant you

admit that you can rationally derive certain moral principles. I agree. You can rationally derive some more principles. I think they're genetic within us. I think that the, the, the, the ability to understand that the conscience has all been, uh, evolutionarily selected for. But the question is if i say fuck you i'm stronger than you yeah give a shit if it's fair there's i mean i say well it's immoral who gives a shit there's no such thing that you moral is morality is a human construct plato talks about that and and the people that writes about that in the republic another plato justice is in the interest of the stronger but i want to push back on something you said earlier um so is that a feature of the architecture of human consciousness

so for example if you're on another planet but instead of pizza they were dividing like black goo would the same principle of fairness be operative we mean with another is it another species that evolved under different evolutionary mechanisms natural selection was the operative? You mean with another... Another species that evolved under different evolutionary mechanisms. Natural selection was the operative principle. You have different organisms. Would they... Because you realize the consequences

of your answer, right? It's hard to imagine that it wouldn't, but I don't... I think that's just because it's hard for me to imagine it. You have a thought on the answer to that? Yeah, I gave a talk in Sydney about that for the Ramsey Center. I said that's something I've been thinking about a while.

I don't think that those principles are features of human consciousness. I think that there's something univocal something in all rational beings that enables whatever under any any planet any evolutionary mechanism to figure certain moral principles out in the broad sense mathematics is an objective concept equilibrium the the laws of physics which what happens when things are equal so somehow this is all related to justice in a way am I talking too much? can I slow you down on that?

okay so this is I think a really important point we talk about the objectivity of numbers but I think and a lot of people much smarter than myself I have substantive disagreements like Max Tegmark from MIT. So I think that with all due respect to these people,

I think that they fundamentally misunderstand something. Like when you chop off of your ontology, like what you think there is, any platonic realm, any like metaphysics, any spiritual realm, like I think all that stuff is totally silly. I think you don't need any of it And it's just a complicating factor. Like, so I think that the way that we derive mathematical principles is that mathematics is a property of the world. Like

it's, it's an experiment that we can, that we can and have run over and over again. You know, if you take one bottle, this, these are fungible and you take one bottle, these are fungible, and you take another bottle, you have two bottles. And you can come up, you can make derivative properties, subtraction, multiplication, et cetera. But those principles, mathematics is of the world, right? So I don't think that there's anything, you don't need to posit any of the realm, just like in morality. That's why I was giving the example. one plus one wouldn't that's absolutely equal to on any planet it would right yeah it would have to because it's just unless it had a different physics because math is derived from the physics and so that's how we interpret things but there

is some relationship to just the general concept of math and all that to the way you're explaining justice like i think i think that's right. I think similar, they're similar. They're certainly not exact. I think that the analogy somewhat holds. It breaks down at a certain point. But you can derive, you can rationally derive certain principles of justice. And you can derive, and I just gave you one, the principle of fairness. You know, if there's an old lady and a young man,

we don't think it's fair that they should all carry an equal weight or have the same food or get the same respect. Fairness isn't actually as easy as just dividing things equally. There's many times we think it's

absolutely... How dare you speak to the old person. We have a progressive tax system that doesn't agree with you. Okay, so let's do something that people don't ordinarily do. Let's take the statement that you just made and let's give woke people, let's steel man the woke position.

The steel man. In other words, let's make the best possible argument for that. If any big words or concepts like that, make sure you find them because Perry will... I didn't look at her, did I? No. Okay.

You're fucking sexist pig. No, I'm just saying you're looking at me so intently over there. It's a running joke we have on you. Running joke that runs its course, I think. Alright, so let's take a look at that. So...

I'm so sorry if I did that. No, no, no! It's not you! It was fair. So that's kind of a system of equity in a sense. So the idea is equity and equality are not the same thing.

Vice President Harris has a wonderful video on equity, and I say wonderful because it accurately describes the concept of equity. You want equal outcomes. Looking over the fence, is that the one? Oh, well, yeah. No, that's kind of one. She has that in the video, but maybe you can pop it up for your viewers. Can you look up Kamala Harris' equity video? Yeah. So when you say, for example,

that how should younger people be treated, how should older people be treated, there is something that is intrinsic to properties of people that you treat them differently. So, for example, I'm a 57-year-old white dude, and I find it fascinating, like, when I go into stores now, no one thinks I'm going to rip shit off, right? And when I'm someplace, everybody always calls me sir.

And, you know, 10 years ago, I was, like, looking around, like, who are they calling sir? And I'm like, oh, shit, they're calling me sir. But I think that there is something into the equity-based argument or just I'm placing it there to think that the immutable properties of people, and you can extend this into race or trans status or gender or sexuality,

but in this example, it's age. There's something about the immutable properties of people that we treat them differently. Like we use different words, like, you know, sir, of people that we treat them differently. Like we use different words like, you know, sir. Yes. We,

we just treat them differently based upon, I don't mean to use a big word, epistemic status. No, like, you know, we, we,

we treat them, we treat them differently. And maybe the idea is that we should treat people differently to a certain extent, you know? Um, and I, but I,

I think that also now all wokeness doesn't come natural, but I think a certain amount of what we're talking about is innate to humans. It goes across all cultures, a certain respect felt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's interesting. It's interesting shit. You want to play this video here? Yeah. Sound on max. Yeah. It's on. Let's see.

Max. The problem with that. I've started over. You'll get it Max so there's a big difference between equality and equity equality suggests oh everyone should get the same amount the problem with that

not everybody's starting out from the same place so if we're all getting the same amount but you started out back there and I started out over here we could get the same amount but you're still going to be that far back behind me. It's about giving people the resources and the support they need so that everyone can be on equal footing and then compete on equal footing. Equitable treatment means we all end up at the same place.

Yeah, that's precisely what it means. It's enraging. It's, well, it's part of the derangement syndrome, right? So, but she also, did you see that she did the Mott and the Bailey? You familiar with the Mott and the Bailey? Like the Mott is the castle, the defensible position, and the Bailey is the kind of indefensible position, and she switched.

She mixed up in that video equality. So her argument there is that people who have suffered from historical injustices or have a lot of historical oppression markers, they're already behind in the economic and social race. So we need to remediate that somehow by giving them extra dispensation, reparations, or what have you, to enable them to achieve. And what's wrong with that? Would you want me to steel man it, or do you want me to tell you what's wrong with it? Tell me what's wrong with it.

The problem with that is, there are many problems with that, but the first problem with that is the way to remediate those injustices is through equality of opportunity. And so anything that you say, there'd be an arbitrary, the line would be arbitrary, right? Well, this person should be given this. But if you fix it on the back end, then you don't have to worry about any outcomes. Now, there's a massive assumption in that, massive. And the assumption is that is that there are not genetic or racial differences in intelligence, because that throws the whole game off. But let's operate under the assumption. So the other assumption that's embedded in that is that, this is Ibrahim X.

Kendi's idea, is that every disparity in outcome is due to systems, right? So if you somehow just fix the systems, you'll have equal outcomes. But the other thing is, it's not clear to me why you should have equal outcomes well you'll never you'll never have equal outcomes but why would you even want it i mean my friend matt thornton said if you want equal outcomes you'd have to send the worst singers to the best singing schools right um maybe not equal outcomes within categories, meaning that everybody's exactly the same, but what you don't want is a society that has lots of resentments.

I think that's really what this is about. It's not really that we care whether there's equal outcomes. It's really that we care whether we can all live and have a nice social fabric where everybody feels. Yeah, there's a problem with that, though. So resentment is focused on the consequences of achievement. But they're just going to be naturally high achievers and low achievers. I'm with you.

But I do want to say, just to be fair, this idea of equal opportunity, that's not so simple. I mean, when does opportunity start? Somebody might say, yeah, I want equal opportunity, so I should be able to go to Harvard like everyone else does. And that's where my- Harvard's a cesspool. Well, whatever. What does equal opportunity mean? If by the time you're six or seven years old, you're just not equipped.

Yeah. Okay. So- And that's because of past discrimination. I'm still manning now. Right. Well, part of the problem is that you can never truly have equality of opportunity because some people come from broken homes bad families and we know like if

you look at incarceration rates they're seven times higher if one parent has been incarcerated and they're significantly higher so so you can't you can't there's only so much you can do but that's the idea that you want to fix the system certain that's kind of the idea from welfare right or you know john rawls the philosopher mentioned before he says part of it is everybody and i believe this everybody should be given a public education of the first rate but the problem is and to be blunt it is it has largely been a problem of the fault of the republicans that they haven't given everybody a public education of the first rate the school systems have been given certain

money if you're in rich neighborhoods and less money if you're in poor neighborhoods. And if you do that to people long enough, they're going to start to hook on to crazy, right? They're going to start to hook on to these really anti-evidence-based affirmative action policies or reparations policies. I have this feeling, and I've always had it since I was in grammar school, that the amount of money that a school gets has almost nothing to do with the educational. Yeah, that's true. I mean, you can look at the data in South Korea on that, and then you can look at the highest achieving schools. But the other thing is, can I tell you why I look at it? Yeah. If you just look at the way our grandparents were educated, no computers, you know, horrible textbooks,

one-room schoolhouses. Like, you know, any of that existing today would be considered. How can you expect those people to learn? Obviously, that's the reason they're having terrible educational outcomes. Yet, people of those previous generations were extremely well-educated.

Yeah. Well, okay, there are two things there. First, if you do it cross-culturally, which I started to do, in the United States, we educate everyone. But in China, they take this thing called the gaokao. And then certain people are, based upon your score, you go to one university or you don't go to the university at all. So that when you look at the outcome assessments of examinations,

they're only testing a certain percentage of the population, and we test everybody. So that skews the perception. And then we know if you break it down in zip code, and you can give an explanation that's rooted in social Darwinism for this, you can give any explanation you want, but we know that if you, nutrition, what have you, we know that if you break it down by zip codes,

one of the most, and then I'll say something inflammatory. Yeah, we like that. We like inflammatory. Well, then just hold tight. Could be a clip. It goes viral. One of the, if you want to figure out who's going to do well on their SAT and you know nothing else, you can just look at zip codes. Even if you look at the African Americans accepted at Harvard, the vast majority of those have the median income. You could break down those statistics. If you just looked at it

as test scores and you took out all exogenous characteristics like race, at the top 10 performing schools, Asians would be over 51% of the graduating class. Whites would drop a little. Hispanics would plummet. And African-Americans would go between 13% and 16% to 0.9%. And then that's not even talking about Ashkenazi Jews. We talk about them enough on this show.

So, and when I was, this is very disturbing. As an American, that's a very disturbing thing to hear, right? And the question is what, we've tried so many things, how do we address it? Okay, so that's what we should be talking about, right? Just to make one other point to add to,

is that, if you could show me that, let's say Texas 1950, as we spent more money, we've introduced computers, we've introduced this technology, that technology, this teaching method, we saw that the ability to do things has gone up since the 50s. It's the wrong way to look at it. No, but if you could say that, then I would say, yes, money matters. These things matter.

But if good achievement, the level of good achievement has not changed since the 1800s, then obviously money is not what the schools need. Well, obviously. They need good students. Calcium. No. Well, yeah, nutrition, of course. But they need what people on the left don't want to talk about. They need an adult male in the home.

That's what I said. When I said good students, I mean— But that's not schools, right? That's not the problem with a pedagogical approach or how we institutionalize education. We need a culture that produces kids who go to school and learn. So then the question is, given

that we don't have that, what do we do? I don't know. Do you know? Well, I mean, people have written entire books about that. If you were a benevolent dictator, what would be the one thing you would want to do? I think he would be benevolent as a dictator. No, no, once they get power, they'll turn bad.

What's the one thing you'd want to do? He'd be on drugs all the time. What's the one thing you'd want to do? Give me five minutes. I'll take my five-minute DMT break. What's the one thing you'd want to do to put the country on the right course? The country? Yeah, if you were a benevolent dictator, you could do anything you want. You want to do to put the country on the right course? The country?

Yeah. If you were a benevolent dictator, you could do anything you want. You want to help kids who are not doing well in school. What change would you make first? I would change the way that teachers are certified in this country. It's the one change I would make. And what you... So we...

And my writing partner has a book about this. So we've lost many... Okay. So we got to rewind the partner has a book about this. So we've lost many, okay, so we got to rewind the tape here a little bit. You're a comedian. I don't generally do, he's steel manning you, Dan. That's good. That's good. I can tell everybody knows each other well.

So the purpose of education has shifted in this country from a true seeking mission to alleviating oppression. And no matter how many publications you have or what degrees, you can't just walk into a school and start teaching. You have to get a teaching certification. And it's ubiquitous. Every single teaching institution in the country that confers degrees are based on the Brazilian educator

Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And so the idea is that you teach to overcome oppression. So you're creating people. It's just a different way to think about education. But the moment that you lose the truth-seeking component of education, the whole society, then merit collapses. Then you have to look at other factors to kind of address those disparities. I mean, the only way to solve a problem is to be honest about it,

and we're simply not being honest about our problems. And we're looking at everything through the lens of oppression, and we're telling everybody, like Robin DiAngelo, the uber best-selling book, that racism is the ordinary and everyday lens of oppression. And we're telling everybody, like Robin DiAngelo, that Uber bestselling book, that racism is the ordinary and everyday state of affairs, right? So we're teaching people to have this critical consciousness, as it's called, to have a lens through which to view the world

in a binary, in an oppression. So the one thing I would do if I were a benevolent dictator is I would completely destroy that system overnight. That'd be my first order of business. Yeah, I would want to give, and this, I went to public schools. I would completely destroy that system overnight. That would be my first order of business. I would want to give, and I went to public schools, I would want to give, it's not dissimilar from what you're saying, the school administrators much more leeway to identify the good students and segregate them out, forgive that term,

from the kids who are holding the classroom back, who are misbehaving, who are bringing, because I believe we are throwing away these good students because we're so worried about the impact on the bad students. Okay, so again, we could have this conversation. I don't know how long we're going to be on here, but... Well, so part of that issue, that issue that's called inclusion and the idea behind inclusion and there are veins of literature on this but the problem is that those veins of

literature have largely been ideologically corrupted but the idea is that there's a interesting documentary educating peter about a kid with down syndrome that i would recommend but the idea is that if if people who have behavioral disorders or maybe even cognitive disorders are in a class with other people, they see decent behavior being normalized. And so when it becomes the norm, it helps them to become functioning, productive members of civil society. The problem is that then you demean or decrease the truth-seeking. That's right. So we have to try to think about it. If you look back from the talented and gifted programs, we've switched from when we were in a space race with the Soviets,

educating the top talented and gifted percent, to now we have a new mindset of educating people in the bottom quartile. But when you really think about what are the, what's the best that could come from educating people in the bottom quartile as opposed to educate. And, and if you think about it numerically, one in 10 people have an IQ of below 81. And so as Jordan Peterson's famous said, if you have an IQ below 81, you can't fold an 8x11 letter in thirds and put it in an envelope.

And so what is incumbent upon society to help those people, either through job training or what have you, and how much resources is the society going to attenuate, or is the society going to give to those people as opposed to people in the upper 1%? I don't know if you know Coleman Hughes at all. Yeah, very well.

So, you know, he's, I don't know if he know Coleman Hughes had gone to a typical New York city public school in Brooklyn or something, I don't think the world would have ever heard from him. And by imagining that, I think that's what we have to figure out what we're doing wrong. If there was a kid like Coleman Hughes and he's stuck there among misbehaving kids, a class that moves slowly because yet again, the teacher is going over basic arithmetic and he just never has the

opportunity to thrive. Because there's got to be a lot of these kids. So you've just made an argument for equality of opportunity. Yes. So I would argue that that's not a Republican or a Democrat or a liberal or conservative. That's an American attitude. And that's what we are, citizenry.

I must say I'm skeptical that we wouldn't have heard of Coleman Hughes, even had he gone to one of those schools. I would find that- That's also a possibility as well. It's a counterfactual, so we don't know the answer. And one would imagine that Coleman Hughes, even if his parents were poor, they would still be his parents. They would still have instilled, if you're supposing that his parents were the same people, just without any money. I think there's something to that, but I think, you know, just as an analogy, since the internet has equalized everybody, so many creative

geniuses kind of have, through this merit system, become household names on Yeah. On YouTube or whatever it is, Twitter, we would have never heard from these people. For sure, yeah. And I think in any group, there are many, many people, for whatever the reason is, who are never heard from. And I think there's got to be

hundreds of thousands of young minority kids who just can't break through. They have the brain power. It's quite a coincidence that Coleman is this genius, and he went to this private school. You could make the argument that he had that genetic, and that's why his father was like that, whatever it is. And maybe in that case, it could even be true.

But I just feel in my heart that that's not the case. So what do we do if we invest in a public education of the first rate for every American citizen and the racial disparities persist? Well, I don't know. Noam will be dead by then. I don't know. We have to cross that bridge when we get to it, but we can't not try. I mean, I totally agree. But we've been not try. I totally agree.

But we've been not trying for quite a long time now, since the founding of the Republic. We notice that immigrants from any gene pool around the world do better here than the homegrown version of that. Now, you could say they had more pluck, they're not actually the same as the homegrown

version. So I don't know, it's possible. But I somehow think there is something. Culture matters. Yeah. Okay. So when you get more granular and you look at that data, the reason for that is because the United States, as opposed to the U.K., takes more skilled immigrants. So if you look at the work of Eric Kaufman, for example, in the U.K., there are certain groups that remove money from the treasury and there are certain groups that contribute.

I think if memory serves me correctly, Somalis remove the most from the treasury. Eritrea is right up there, the neighboring country. And then Northern Europeans, and I know that people are going to clip this out and say it's kind of a racist thing, but that's just what the data is, right? So it depends on the kind of immigrants you take

and the skill sets they have. Like Australia does a great job at that, and they have this thing, Manus Island, where they put people who try to get into the country or try to get into the country illegally or what have you, but the overwhelming majority of skilled immigrants, and Vivek Ramaswamy has been tweeting about this, so has Mark Andreessen,

the overwhelming majority of the difference in immigrants is the immigrant pool is we take immigrants who are more highly skilled than in Europe, particularly Western Europe. Can we say a nice word about the Nigerians just to sort of even out the... Yeah, Amy Schur in the Tiger Mom writes about that to a large degree. And the idea is that the culture that they've created, the kind of emphasis on education, the emphasis on family, the emphasis on structure, Nigerians have, I believe it's the highest in Africa standardized test and among the highest of income levels for that region, higher than their counterparts in the United States. And Jason D. Hill, the philosopher at DePaul, has some stuff on that as well. But doesn't she also say that within the same group, the third generation underperforms

the first generation? Yeah, I think that's, I think, I haven't read that in a while, but I think that that's what it is, that we wax in and out of, depending on the generation, where we are, and the attitudes. Like, if you've been in here, there was a line of literature called the stereotype threat. That didn't pan out, but it seemed to be fashionable. And the idea was that educators will look at someone and have a stereotype of a black kid or what have you. And then they they normed it out by discipline, how much discipline, how much attention different kids get. Now, the question is, are teachers targeting kids because they're black or do black kids or whatever minority kids?

Are there more disciplinary issues among among those children or both? Yeah, it could be both. But in any sense, you need to talk about the role of the institution, the purpose. You know what role fairness should play? Should truth be the governing principle? And once you figure out those kind of higher order questions, then you can construct the systems that best discharge those goals. So Coleman Hughes's book, The End of Race Politics, he tells a story about the traffic cameras where everybody... I haven't read it. It's something like there was...

No, it's about the end of race politics. What's that? I'm summarizing the book. It's about the end of race politics. What's that? I'm summarizing the book. It's about the end of race politics. The traffic, the police were giving too many tickets or disproportionate number of tickets to minorities. Yeah. So they demanded traffic cameras. Yeah. And then it turns out that it got worse with the traffic cameras, that there was actually a difference in the way people were driving.

So they demanded the repeal of the traffic cameras. So that's when you, it's not capricious, but that's when you subject, like you have a governing principle or ideology, like, oh, we should arrest so many people who are black, right? Like those crime statistics should match. And the guy I mentioned before, Matt Thornton, has a great book, The Gift of Violence, where he talks about that.

Like nobody says that the police are harboring some animus against men because men, this is a fact, because men are just far more disproportionate in terms of violence and predatory behaviors. No one says that the police is harboring, no, no, that they just, the police go where the crime is. So it's not like that they, and I'm sure there are certainly bad apples, there's no question about it but the idea that somehow the police force is is racist and that's manifest in other data too um uh god I just heard a talk by him um um Roland Fryer has a talk about this he's done some great

work on this and this got him in the in in the shit in the shithouse at Harvard about the the number of African Americans who were arrested and then shot by police. And if you look at that data, it's African-Americans are shot at no higher rate, but they are roughed up more in prisons. Sorry, they are roughed up more by police. And they're even roughed up more, yeah, they're even roughed up more by black cops.

When I see the movie Oppenheimer, and I see this physics lab filled with these Ashkenazi Jews, I think there's something that we're talented in that way. And the best proof of that— The Armenians are no slouches. The Armenians are no slouches. The best proof of that is that the Ashkenazi Jews have a higher average IQ, however— That's right, 108 however, slightly lower than average

in spatial ability. Yeah, you know who has the highest in spatial ability? The Pygmies from Australia. And the hypothesis there was that those who couldn't find their way back died out. So if it was simply environment, then how would you explain this slight deficit? You can't explain it, and Pinker talks about that repeatedly. You can't explain it because you can look at identical twins' rare birth and the difference between a four and eight point gap in IQ. And that could just be noise. Four and eight point gap.

No, it's definitely not noise. In other words, if you took two people, two siblings raised in the same household, they would differ four points in IQ. If you just plucked, with 100 being the norm. Two siblings or two identical twins? Two identical twins, excuse me, on a standard Gaussian curve, right? So if you took two people and just plucked them out of the population,

they'd be eight points. So when you take a child, an identical twin, where to birth, and Pinkerger is the example of the Malifert twins, and there are others, that identical twins separate at birth, they retain the four-point gap.

But what's really interesting, if you look at the number of Ashkenazi Jews who have gotten Nobel Prizes, when you really drill down on that data, they're all from a very particular region in Bratislava and Germany, etc. So it's not just Sephardic Jews either.

No. So what I meant by noise, I meant that the IQ test is only an attempt to really figure out what's going on under the hood. The difference of four points between identical twins may not actually be any difference. It just may be, though, you know, he spent more time doing puzzles like that,

so he was a little bit better at that test. Yeah. You give the same person multiple IQ tests. They do the same. They won't get the same score every time, right? No, but they'll be... Within four points. Well, more than that more than i mean you can

train people to do well on it but again this is the thing that like literally nobody talks about um and i'm not this is way out of my domain of expertise but you know why are all the best runners kenyans well okay so but the why are the west africans uh faster than the east africans well i mean but but the the idea the idea isand again, I'm just acutely aware of even talking about these things. It's just fraught with danger because people think—people make—derive an ought from an is. Like if you take an is, some fact about—I don't even believe in the concept of race, but people whose ancestors have been subject to different evolutionary pressures, like I said before,

they look at that is, and they pull an ought, like we should treat people differently. Well, that doesn't follow literally at all. In fact, almost the exact opposite follows, again, with that principle of fairness. So let me, actually, I didn't realize that in terms of my point, it was important.

So I, no, no, it's my fault. I lost my train of thought, which is happening to me at 60, 61. You can fix that, by the way. Well, you can tell me about that in a second. So I do think there's going to be differences with people. I know this is going to sound stupid, but anecdotally, as a sophisticated, pretty smart guy,

being a boss for many, many years, many, many people of all different walks of life. I have not noticed any difference in intelligence between peoples in terms of their ability to do a job. As a matter of fact, I might even notice minorities being smarter because in a certain sense, the smarter ones didn't have the opportunity to get to the jobs that they might have been able to be doctors. So let me go through some of your tweets.

Oh, how can I fix my attention? Do you remember I said that? Yeah, that's a long conversation, but I'm happy to tell you in like, oh, we are? Well, I mean, you're having dinner. I'm going to sit down with you guys for a bit. I was invited. That's how I a bit. Oh, okay. I was invited. That's how I know you. Oh, okay.

Cool. So American students are bowing, are converting to Islam. Yeah, that's great. What the hell is going on there? Why is that a bad thing and what's going on? Well, I mean, I personally believe in cognitive liberty. You can convert to any religion you want to convert to. If you want to convert to Islam, you want to convert to, I don't know, Christianity

or I don't know, whatever you want to do. It's a free country. to, I don't know, Christianity or, I don't know, whatever you want to do. It's a free country. You can certainly do that, so best of luck to you. But your tweet was a little skeptical of that. Well, I don't, I think they could be just cosplaying. I don't know if they're actually converts to Islam. And remember, in the 11 Sharia countries,

and this is in two surahs in the Quran if memory serves me correctly, the punishment for apostasy is death. So, I don't know, maybe someone should take their picture and when they decide they're not Muslims anymore, maybe they should show their picture around. I'm not advocating that, but I'm saying that that would be a consequence of cosplay.

Recent video with Jared Bernstein. Is that his name, Jared Bernstein? Yeah, Jared Bernstein, who is Biden's chief economic advisor. Holy fuck. Who seemed, and I actually downloaded the movie to see if it wasn't just a horrible edit. Oh my God, was it? No, he really gets backwards what it means to sell bonds when the country is borrowing money,

when the country is lending it. I was hoping, hoping, hoping that that was maliciously edited. No, it's not. Okay, that terrifies me. You should play that clip. That's the clip that you should play right now. Look up Jared Bernstein video. So I have a possible explanation for it.

You think he's senile? It's related to that. Okay. And it's not that he doesn't understand this stuff. What I've noticed as I got older, and I started noticing it in my late 50s, that certain things, really with math is what I noticed, certain things that I always just assumed would just come to me,

all of a sudden didn't. Okay, you'd have to fix that immediately. Like, I'm dead serious. All right, well, fair enough, but still. And it would be a little glitch, a little bump. And then it would come to me or that I could recreate it. And something as elementary as what happens when you sell bonds. He said, wait, is that right?

We sell it. He just assumed it would come to him. It's basic, but it's not something he deals with every day. And then that's I'm it just didn't. I'm just so struck by that charitable interpretation of that. Then he shouldn't be Biden's economic advisor. Well, the question is, then, does that mean that he's no longer able to do come up with the same answers he would have before that started happening to him. That his wisdom is... I would offer to you that that's the wrong question. The right question is,

is somebody in... Is he going to pull it up? I'm trying to find it. Was it just on the last day? Jared Bernstein documentary. It's on my Twitter page. Oh, go to Peter Bogosian. Yeah.

Respectfully, I think that's the wrong question. I think the right question is is someone who gave an answer like that capable of advising the president on economic policy? I mean, obviously not. Well, I'm

asking that because I think no, I don't feel that way. Really, I'm asking that because I think... No, I don't feel that way. Really? I think that you can have a glitch like that, just like you can make a dumb arithmetic mistake or forget something that you've known for a while, and it doesn't really reflect on your ability to...

It's just, if he had given him five extra seconds, like if he was writing an editorial for Wall Street Journal, that would have never, that would have never been exposed. Why would you assume, okay, so isn't the assumption there that it's a glitch? Yeah, I'm assuming

that it's a glitch. Okay, so in order to make that assumption, you'd have to see many instances of his behavior to see, okay. Yeah, yeah.

But unless you have those, I'm not going to assume that it's more than a glitch. Yeah, yeah. He could be senile, yeah. Maybe they need to throw him out the door. I don't know, I guess maybe I have a different but unless you have those... I'm not going to assume that it's more than a glitch. Yeah. He could be senile, yeah. Maybe they need to throw him out the door. I don't know. I guess maybe I have a different concept.

I just want the smartest people around the president of the United States, especially this one. I just want people who are incredibly knowledgeable, incredibly thoughtful, have domain-specific expertise, are kind of consulieres in a way, aren't afraid to say shit that the guy won't like. And I watched that, and I was horrified by that clip.

It was horrifying. But you do slow down in certain ways as you get older. I find exactly the opposite. I'm sharper now than I've ever been. Well, but you know that empirically, most people slow down. There are very few 60- or 70-year-old Jeopardy winners. People are quicker when they're younger. Well, you can 60 or 70 year old Jeopardy winners. People are quicker

when they're younger. Well, you can fix that. That's what I'm saying. You can fix that. But let... I don't know how to fix it. I don't know how to fix it. I want to fix it. The U.S. government can't go bankrupt because we can print our own money. It obviously begs the question, why exactly are we

borrowing in a currency that we print ourselves? I'm waiting for someone to stand up and say, why don't we borrow our own currency in the first place? Like you said, they print the dollar. So why, why does the government even borrow? Well, um, the, uh, so the, I mean, some of some of this stuff gets, some of the language that the, some of the language and concepts are just confusing. I mean, the government definitely prints money and it definitely lends that money, which is why, the government definitely prints money and then it lends that money by selling bonds. No. Is that what they do? No, no, that's not right.

They, they, they, yeah, they sell bonds. Yeah, they sell bonds, right? Since they sell bonds and people buy the bonds and lend them the money. Yeah, so a lot of times, at least to my ear with MMT, the language and the concepts can be kind of unnecessarily confusing, but there is no question that the government

prints money, and then it uses that money to... So... Yeah, I guess I'm just... I can't really talk. I don't get it. I don't know what you're talking about. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Can he play it all?

Go back two seconds. I stepped on it. I stepped on the line. The government... I don't know what they're talking about. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Can he play it all? Go back two seconds. I stepped on it. Stepped on the line. The government, I don't know what they're talking about. Yeah, I guess I'm just, I can't really talk. I don't get it. I don't know what they're talking about. Because it's like the government clearly prints money,

does it all the time, and it clearly borrows. Otherwise, we wouldn't be having this debt and deficit conversation so i don't think there's anything confusing there okay that was that was an snl skit now we can play a scene now we can play a similar clip from boogie nights where mark walberg is trying to get his recording back and i mean i guess i just would want the president truly smart surrounded by the best and the brightest people who aren't afraid to counsel him on things that are not morally fashionable. How can he get to that point in a career and not know that bonds are... He's rich.

He's well-connected. He's charismatic. Who knows? Why do we borrow money when we can print it? Because printing causes inflation, so to avoid that... I mean, I feel like I could have answered that question better than Jared Bernstein. Why do we borrow money when we can print it? Because printing causes inflation, so to avoid that. I mean, I feel like I could have answered that question better than Jared Bernstein. All in favor, say aye. So I think there are multiple things.

I don't think that the answer to the question is as important as his position. His fluency with the concept. Yeah, and the fact that he advises the president. And I do think, you know, a lot of- Also not exactly a spring chicken of cognitive ability. Yeah, well, I don't know that the whole spring, you mentioned the age thing, it's the third time. I'm not sure that's relevant in this sense.

Well, Biden is not- Okay, that's sharp either. Yeah, that's relevant. The cognitive decline is- It's because of his age. But look at Dershowitz. Dershowitz is not sharp either. Yeah, that's relevant. The cognitive decline is. It's because of his age. But look at Dershowitz. Dershowitz is not. Fauci's pretty sharp too.

I'm looking, by the way, at his education. It's Manhattan School of Music and a Columbia University DSW, which is Doctor of Social Work. So why would he be expected to be economically- This is Econ 101, buying and selling bombs. Why is the economic advisor a Doctor of social work in the first place? I don't know.

I mean, wouldn't the economic advisor be like somebody that went to the Sloan School? Yeah, so part of that problem is conservatives have been on for a while, is what Tom Nichols calls the death of expertise. Like there's an inherent distrust of expertise. But there's inherent distrust of expertise because in the same way, in aggregate, there's an inherent distrust of expertise. But there's inherent distrust of expertise because in the same way, in aggregate, there's an inherent distrust of our systems. Our systems have become inherently... Habermas had a 1973 paper.

He called that the legitimation crisis or the legitimacy crisis. Our institutions have a crisis of legitimacy. I personally think that most of them should be burned to the ground. We are out of time. Do you have any thoughts about this whole anti-Semitism? Oh, you were going to tell me,

if you're trying to decide as a voter, whether to vote for Trump or Biden, without telling us who you favor, what would you put on each side of the ledger as pluses for each candidate and minuses for each candidate? Do I have to put pluses? No. You know, I'm not full of my arms because I'm defensive.

Everybody says that to me. I'm full of my arms because I have a brutal shoulder injury. Let's see. What would I put on the plus for Biden? I would put on the plus for Biden? I would put on the plus for Biden. I'm trying to do one piece. I would put on the plus for Biden. I believe that he genuinely, and I do think that this matters.

I don't think he'd sell it as country. I think he genuinely wants to do what's best for the United States. I think that he's a very sincere person, and for me, that accounts for a lot. On the negative, it's the most obvious thing. There's demonstrable cognitive decline. Now, no matter what you think about Joe Biden, you should watch videos of him 20 years ago.

Oh, I've seen that. Holy shit. Even four years ago. Even four years ago. Like, again, independent of what your opinion about Biden is, he was a sharp cookie. Like, clearly. Never anybody's idea of a genius.

No, but he could do a merengue with foreign policy. You know what I mean? Yeah, there's no comparison. Yeah, okay. So, now Trump. The positive about Trump. I have to think hard about that um i think that he would be i i okay let me okay let me think um i think that he one of the most important things i think we need to do as a country is we need to have secure borders. I think we need more legal immigration and zero tolerance for illegal immigration.

So I think he would use me to do the best to secure the border. The second thing is on the con for Trump. I think he's,. I think he's... I just think he's such a divisive figure that I think it's just terrible for our democracy. I think it's terrible for... We need someone who's not going to divide us. We need somebody who is not bombastic,

who's not, I don't know, nasty and vituperative and mean. He's just he's just clearly the wrong person at this time in history for that job to me, to me. What do you think about the if I if I were to make the case to you that, yes, Biden has cognitive decline. Yeah. However, we know exactly the worldview of the team that will surround him. That's terrifying as well. Well, okay, but for better or worse. And the results we're going to get from that team are really no different than the results we would have gotten with a sharp Joe Biden.

Well, you still need somebody in charge who is, as Reagan has said, a decision maker. You still need somebody in charge who, I mean, that's the whole idea of what it means in a participatory democracy. You're voting for someone. You're not voting for their advisors, right? So you need someone to make hard decisions, even if they happen to be politically not fashionable. And maybe his advisors are operating under, you know, legacy or what have you. One thing that we haven't talked about today that, you know,

one of the reasons I'm very interested in the national debt, I'm very interested in the fact that $33 trillion in debt last year, one-third went to pay the interest in debt. Now it's $34 trillion. It's expected to go to $37 trillion. Fifty percent of income tax, again, instead of the $33 trillion, is going to pay it. We're not talking about that.

This should be the number one issue. All this wokeism stuff, women in transports, all this stuff, we can fix that. That's just a temporary blip in a bunch of deranged people. Admittedly, the institutional capture is a problem, but we need to have a very serious conversation about the amount of money we spend, taxes, parity. Presuming that democracies just don't work that way and we will never, ever bite the bullet addressing the debt.

And the way it will be handled is through whatever, however it just manifests itself in a disaster. What will that disaster be? Well, you should find an economist to have that conversation. What do you fear? Well, we'll see the collapse of the dollar. We'll see the dollar no longer being the world's reserve currency. We'll see the lack of petrodollars, so oil won't be traded in dollars. You'll probably see a new currency or the

revaluation of the currency. You'll see people's life savings get wiped out. You'll see- Bitcoin going up. Yeah, that could be a consequence. You'll see Bitcoin, I mean, Balaji has said that Bitcoin will go to 100. You'll see alternative currency baskets. So some of those things depend always on how much debt the other countries, how much they, because it seems like there's a worldwide devaluing of currency going on. Well, yeah. Well, okay.

So you should have, this is outside my domain of expertise. You should have it. I'm going to see Tyler Cowen on Thursday. Oh, okay. Cool. Yeah. Tell him I said hi. Are you friends?

No, I'm just friendly. You know, this is a small world. It's like you either know of everybody or like, you know, Coleman. We were reading, I was just hanging out with Coleman a couple months ago in London. I mean, just, you know, there's only so many people who move in this space. Now, the last question is about the Jews. Yeah. I couldn't get out of a room with three Jews without, and I don't want to know your opinion.

Well, I count four if you count Maxwell behind the computer. Is daddy okay, Max? Yeah, he's good. One of the things I've been struggling with, and I noticed even a contradiction in myself, closer to October 7th, I think it's explainable, closer to October 7th, I was talking more and more, a lot about anti-Semitism.

Yeah. And recently I've been saying, we should stop accusing everybody about anti-semitism yeah and recently i've been saying we should stop accusing everybody of anti-semitism and i yeah and i heard some interview of mine recently where i was talking about all the anti-semitism my contradicting myself and i said what was going on differently i said well back then it was right after the the massacres of october 7th they were ripping down posters people were cheering it this really felt like anti-Semitism. Now I see a bunch of college kids who are watching people being pulled out of rubble in a foreign country

and they're protesting that. And I'm just, I don't have the confidence that people who are seeing that on TV and protesting it are doing it because they hate Jews. So as we get, as there's more and more ugliness, actual ugliness going on, regardless of whether I think these people understand it, I can understand that reaction where I couldn't understand ripping down the posters.

So the posters just seem like much better evidence of anti-Semitism. However, in a world where every half-sophisticated person understands that you have to camouflage all bigotry now. You can't talk about the Jews. That you can still talk about. Well, if they're going to say something anti-Semitic, there are all sorts of phrases. Can I just pause you right now? Yeah, please.

I really don't like that phrase. Which phrase? Well, I really don't like the phrase anti-Semitic. Okay, good. Yeah, if I may, I think you do it in injustice because which phrase well i really don't like the phrase anti-semitic and okay good yeah yeah if i may i think i think you i think you do it an injustice if you don't call it what it is it's jew hatred okay fair enough okay how do you know and this is an issue even they're trying to legislate it yeah how do you know when someone is operating out of Jew hatred and when they're operating out of conscience against a war or a political point of view?

As I said to somebody, if there was no Jew hatred in the world, it wouldn't be unanimity of opinion on the Gaza war. Yeah. I mean, people are inexplicably pro-Putin. I don't know why they are, but it's not some sort of Ukraine hatred. It's true. Right. So it's too simplistic to think there's always some ugly reason, if not for that. I'm just wondering if you have any rule of thumb for when you decide internally, whether you're seeing people who hate the Jews or you're seeing people who shouldn't be accused of that. It's a calumny to call those people Jews.

Calumny is like a horrible insult, for real. Oh my God, how do you take it? Yeah, so that's good. Inject a little levity into this. This is good. I like to think he's projecting. I did have to look up vituperative, by the way. You did?

I will have to admit. It sounds like it's almost like an idea. Yeah, the context got me 90% of the way there, but I just needed that extra little boost. So to be clear, it's an ugliness, and Jew hatred is, in one sense, so if you're not Jewish, you don't care about Jews and you're listening to this,

it's the canary in the coal mine, right? And in another sense, it's absolutely undeniable that I don't want to say what percentage of this is fueled by hatred of Jews, but certainly a large percentage. So Reid and I were in an Uber in London. You know, I have a million things in my head and we're going to film. The guy says,

well, what are you going to film? And we were going to Speaker's Corner, right, Reed? We're going to Speaker's Corner. And the guy starts saying, well, you know, what do you what do you chime in if I'm not getting the story right? Like, you know, what do you think of World War, you know, one who, you know, it's the Jews fault. And like my my eyes popped up. He's like, well, who do you pay your rent to? It's like, you know, you know, it's the Jews' fault. And my eyes popped up. He's like, well, who do you pay your rent to? He's like, you know, it's the Jews. And you know who caused World War II? It's the Jews.

I don't want to tell you the name of the taxi cab driver, but you can imagine very easily what his name was. And so I said to him, I said, okay, so I hope this answers your question directly. Yeah, yeah. So help me understand something, because I'm this answers your question directly. Yeah, yeah. So help me understand something because I'm trying to understand something. You're old enough to know the Colombo thing, right?

And he kept asking me questions, and I said, you know, this is not my area. I don't really know. We're just tourists here. And I said, okay, so I'm curious, so why aren't you upset about other issues? Like, why aren't you upset about the Uyghurs? He said, it's not happening anymore.

I said, okay, so when it was happening, what did you do? Like, were you out there? So what is it about this particular conflict that, now, I can answer that question for you, but there is no question about it if you want to be honest about your problems and the only way to solve a problem is to be honest about it that's also pairing uh uh playing off a fineman the easiest person to fool is yourself vertiginous this is a great word i'm about to use oh Oh, I know. That's like a vertiginous, like a grand scope. Is it truthful or very high, like causes vertigo?

So by metaphor, if something is vertiginous, it's a great ampere. Yeah, so it's something that yields vertigo. So the problem is, I forgot what the context I was going to use the word for. The cab driver yeah yeah so so so there's something particularly insidious about hating someone because of an immutable characteristic and there's something even more i would argue insidious about jew hatred to deny that this plays some role is just you you're just lying. That's just a lie. We also want to preserve everybody's right.

Everybody has a right to protest. In fact, I think protests are great. More protests, the better. So if you want to protest Israel or Hamas or whatever, everybody as an American has the right to do that. I would bet you, I don't know this, but I would bet you that if you went around with a map, and you could easily test this proposition,

if you went around with a map to college campuses and just took out the names of the countries and just put one, two, three, four, five, what happened, you know, Israel was like seven, and then you ask people, okay, fill in the map, I would bet that the vast majority of people could not name three countries in that. They couldn't name Jordan, they couldn't name Lebanon, they name three countries in that. They could name Jordan.

They couldn't name Lebanon. They could name Israel. Maybe they could name Turkey. I don't know. But it is simply lying to yourself and everyone else if you claim that Jew hatred is not uniquely dangerous and uniquely operative in the criticism of Israel. And I'm not saying there are not legitimate criticisms. I don't know that much about it. I'm not saying, but we have to retain the ability to make those criticisms and we have to teach people how to make discerning judgments and to make more informed judgments. But the idea that somehow there's this vast conspiracy of Jews

or the Jews are, you know, you see people carrying these placards, the final solution. OK, that's fucking deranged. Like that's the most fucked up thing imaginable. So you then move from the criticism of. It's not even it's not even a criticism of people. So so ideas, ideas don't deserve dignity. People deserve dignity. So people should be able to criticize any idea they want. but people have intrinsic dignity and they should be treated with dignity. But I do think that Jew hatred is uniquely dangerous and that we need to be honest about it and alerted to it because I can very, very easily see a world in which I do not want to live in. Yeah, I agree with everything you said. It reminds me a little bit of when you referred to Roland Fryer, um, determining that the,

that blacks are more roughed up by the cops. It's true. Yeah. We know that, uh, zooming out and we know that's, um, to some extent racism.

Yeah. On any individual interaction. Yeah. We don't know that. And people, you see a white cop beating up a black guy. You don't know if he does it cause he's black. We don't know if a Chauvin killed uh whatever you know george floyd because he was

and this is always a a kind of a choke point because when somebody says something i don't know many times whether i can say it's anti-semitic i'm reluctant to say it if i don't know but i can zoom out and say, you would not have this level of interest in this number of statements. That's part of it, right? So that's a marker for it, but it doesn't prove it or demonstrate it. Yeah. But I think if you just go back to those, some pretty basic principles is that people deserve dignity. Ideas don't deserve dignity. You should be able to criticize any public policy. You should be able to criticize the IDF

or whatever you want to criticize. And the line to that is pretty straightforward to me. It's a good rule of thumb. And I also think that this is a clarion call. I mean, we reel a clarion call. I don't think I know you well enough to be putting up with that bullshit. No, but I do think that we need to take this seriously because, you know, we can sit around and we can joke, but we've seen historically what's happened. And to say that it's not been pretty would be the most charitable thing you could say about it.

Anything else, Dan? Well, I don't love the no windows, but I guess that's for the lighting. I don't know. In fact, we used to have windows. You could gaze out the window. You'd know if it was light outside. Anything about this topic, Dan? No, I think we pretty much covered it.

All right, Periel, any last words? No, I mean, I agree with Peter. I think that you much covered it. All right, Periel, any last words? No, I mean, I agree with Peter. I think that you are being charitable. I think that it is very, very clear to me when I watch these protests and when I read what the signs say and how people are being treated on campus that anti-Zionism um you know it is i mean good is really a red herring for you want me to

explain what a red herring is there's there's one little nuance about the anti-semitism i don't know if it's a it's a it's actually meaningful but i it's wait wait let me finish people are way too comfortable hating jews i mean i i think in the way that Trump divided the country and made it okay to say things out loud, that at one point you had racist undertones, that even if you did, it was not okay to say those things in public. I think that what we have seen since October 7th

is that a lot of people really hate the Jews, and they're very comfortable to say that out loud. And that there's been an infrastructure in colleges and universities that has supported that. That's right, and it's institutional. Well, intersectionality is a... And it doesn't matter if you're an Armenian or my ancestors were in genocide.

That's all irrelevant. That doesn't matter. Yeah,sectionality is axiomatic. The Jews are wrong in any conflict with anybody who's supposedly dark. But there is one little difference that traditionally on planet Earth, when there was a hateful bigotry,

this is how I'll wrap it up, you would never want your daughter to marry one of those. You don't want your daughter to marry a black those. You don't want your daughter to marry a black person. But a lot of the people that hate Israel now would be perfectly happy marrying somebody Jewish. I don't know if that's true. I'd have to see data on that. I don't know if that's true.

Have you seen data? No, but I just know where the average college kid is coming from who says Israel is a racist state. They have no personal animosity towards somebody Jewish. At least that's my... I don't know if that's true. That's my vibe on many of them. They're just young kids who are caught up in intersectionality and they see... And they're completely uninformed.

Yeah, but this rhetoric is dangerous. This rhetoric is really dangerous. It's all dangerous. It's dangerous. It's dangerous even if it's not Jew hatred. It's dangerous if the Jews become, we've talked about many times, if the Jews become what Afrikaners used to be, embarrassed and shy about holding their heads up high.

Even to this day, I meet somebody German, you can tell they're a little uncomfortable about saying that they're German. Like they're generations away. There's no razzle-dazzle in the world. I ask people all the time on stage, where you're from, the Germans don't seem to have a problem announcing it loudly and clearly.

No, come on. I've witnessed it firsthand, where they're a little uncomfortable. And it's dissipated. There's a half-life to it. But 20, 30 years ago, I'd see it all the time. Jews are going to be more and more, as this continues in Israel,

and there's no end to it as far as I can see. Not, I mean, the war, but the occupation. They're just going to feel less and less comfortable being open about who they are. And this is, I think, going to be the worst damage that this whole conflict is going to do in the long run. I don't know any I don't see any end to it. Tablet magazine published something today that insights from college kids on the ground.

Axios polled twelve hundred and fifty college students across the U.S. to gauge perspectives. Sixty. Excuse me. 58% of college students who participated in or favored protests against Israel who said they would not consider being friends with someone who has marched for Israel. That's different than Jewish, though. That's different than Jewish. Well, I mean, 90-what percent of Jews support Israel? I mean, is it different? I don't know if it's different.

But it's idea-based. We hear now Democrats wouldn't think of marrying a Trump supporter. You should have Alana Newhouse as the... From Tablet. She's a good friend of mine. Okay, we're going to let you go. We all know each other. Everybody, I mean, how many people move in this space?

I mean, the Jews. Which space, precisely, would you qualify your space as? You know, I don't even know anymore. I don't know. The fearless people who want to say what they want to say, that try to interrogate themselves as much as they can to determine their own biases, I think. Once again, could we have the name of that drug that you so much enjoy?

DMT. DMT. DMT, okay. And that's, I guess, not legal, but can be procured. It's, well, in certain states, the state I took it as decriminalized. Okay. Can we all do it and do a podcast together on it?

No. But we could all do it and then come back and compare notes. You could do that. And you promised me it'll have no long-term effects on my... He can't promise that. I can't promise. I would say look up the data. I will look up the data. We want to thank

Max. You know there's a replication crisis. Yes, we haven't talked about that. And we also thank Reed and Jane. There is no such thing as data. Without whom this podcast would not have been possible. Thank you, Reed. Thank you, Jane. Good night, everybody. They're a cute couple. Good night.