The Joe Rogan Experience - #1456 - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: April 9, 2020

Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society", and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic. His new book “Giving the Devil His Due: Reflections of a Scientific Humanist” is available now.

Okay, here we go. Three, two, one, boom, and we're live. Mr. Shermer, how are you, sir? I'm fine, thank you. I'm still breathing. It's good to see you again. We were just saying before we got started that the last time we saw each other was we went to dinner about six weeks ago, and you're thinking that that might be the end of that kind of stuff.

That was my last time I've been in a restaurant, actually. And, well, you know, I think restaurants, of course, will reopen. But I think the kind of social distancing we're seeing now, it's not going to go all the way back to the way it used to be. I think we may quit shaking hands and hugging to the extent that we used to, although I don't think we'll ever go all the way to, say, the Japanese model of social distancing. But I think there'll be modifications like that. The other thing I've been thinking about is the change of remote, say, meetings and education. I mean, I'm in the studio here in Santa Barbara where I've been recording lectures for my Chapman University class, Skepticism 101.

And I just upload them and share them with the students and then they watch them and then I send them a quiz. They take the quiz, they send them back. Now, that's not a complete replacement of a brick and mortar building with a small class seminar discussion, say, but it does adequately replace a lot of traditional education that you don't really need to be in a classroom for. Do you think that this is preparing us for the ultimate where we embrace the symbiotic relationship that we have with computers and become one with the machine? I mean, it seems like we're becoming closer and closer to some sort of an electronic community. It's weird. Yeah, I think it was happening slowly already, and this is kind of a jumpstarting.

I mean, already tech companies like Zoom are having to ramp up their game because the systems are crashing because pretty much everybody's doing Zoom meetings now. And then they have to adjust to Zoom bombing because, of course, there's people like that out there that just want to screw with you. And then I was also thinking about things like theaters. Why do we need to go to theaters anymore? I mean, I love watching a movie on a big screen, but the screens we have at home now, big television screens, super high def, why not just watch movies at home? Well, I don't think we're going to have much of a choice. I was reading an article this morning about AMC theaters. They might have to go under because of this. Really? Yeah.

Wow. It's not good. I mean, you got to think, these companies are accustomed to having a certain amount of money come in every month, and they never, no one anticipated anything like this, where all businesses are just going to shut down. Gyms. I mean, how many gyms are going to go under? How many yoga studios?

I mean, it's a strange and trying time for people who have small businesses, for sure. Yeah, one of my cycling buddies owns the La Cunada Theater Complex, and of course rents out the space to different retailers, including the theater managers. And anyway, he was telling me that, you know, they normally pay $93,000 a month in rent, but you know, they bring in like seven and a half million dollars a year or something. So it all balances out, but they just told him we're not going to make our rent this month. So he has to go to his mortgage company, you know, the bank that where he gets pays off his mortgage and said, I can't pay you this month because these guys can't pay me. And okay. So

multiply that by, you know, 10 million or a hundred million or something. And that's kind of what we've been going through. Yeah, and I don't really understand the economics of this stimulus package of how they're going to be able to distribute it and sort of balance people out. It seems like it's just a small bandaid on a very large wound.

Yeah, well, of course, the government can't just print money indefinitely. Then we're going to get huge inflation and that could be catastrophic. So this conversation that people have been wanting to have, but they get hammered every time they bring it up, I think at some point we're going to have to have in the next few weeks, is the economic tradeoff and costs to people's lives compared to what we're doing with social isolation to save people's lives. And at the moment, we're in the mode of there's no dollar amount you can put on a human life. Therefore, total social isolation, no matter what it does to the economy, is what we're going to do now.

Well, but at some point, you know, there's an economic calculation, like how many people are going to die, say, in the next year if we never open the economy? Of course, we will. But, you know, at what point do you do that? The supply chain dries up. You can't get not just toilet paper, but food supplies start to dry up. And then you get social unrest. And there's risks there, too. And the idea of putting a dollar figure on a human life is repulsive to most of us, I think, intuitively in this context. But in fact, we do it all the time. In terms of like an automobile company has to pay off the family

of somebody who died in their car. Well, there are people who do those calculations, like what's the value of a human life? And the figure is, well, the high end figure is about $10 million. And after 9-11, the families got paid off, I think it was $250,000 a person times the $3,000 something. And, you know, so it sounds so cold. Like, who does those calculations? Well, statisticians do that sort of thing. And attorneys and accountants work on that. And judges and juries have to face it.

And, you know, that's kind of a normal part of other aspects of life that we're not used to thinking about. Most of us don't think about it. But, you know, at some point, that's the kind of calculation we're going to have to do for what we're in now. Do you think that there's another way to do this? There's been some talk of isolating the people that are high risk, isolating the people with underlying conditions, people that are elderly, things of that nature? Do you think that that's a way that they can move forward? Yeah, for sure.

But again, people, we have this egalitarian mode, that doesn't sound right. Sounds like a death panel. Some group of government agents are going to tell us who's going to live and who's going to die. And that feels like we're sliding into conspiracy mongering. But in fact, that is what you have to do is a kind of a triage. And, you know, South Korea has been pretty good about this. You know, testing everybody.

They jumped on it right away. They did that track and trace. You know, they got it right down to, I think it was the 31st patient they found who had gone to two church services, and then she was in a car accident and taken to the hospital, and that's when it spread from there. That one day, I think it was in late February when that happened, and they just jumped all over it. Total deaths in South Korea, I think it's like just a couple hundred compared to most other countries so there's a way it is and they've been you know super careful about isolating people and targeting the people that most need the tests and so on and you know that's just the kind of thing

i think we have to do what do you think about what's going on in germany because germany is very fascinating right it's i mean so many of these european countries particularly italy are experiencing this very high death rate. But Germany, I mean, they must have exemplary health care. They must be doing something right or be robust and healthy individuals. Is it a genetic thing, you think? Is it a health care thing? Because they have a very low death rate.

I think they have a high, tight culture, a very tight culture. That is when my wife is from Cologne, Germany, so i know this from personal experience but also their studies um michelle gelfand does these studies on loose and tight cultures and that germany is a very tight culture that is to say very law and order law abiding and you know when the german government says all right this is what we're going to do people do it uh and americans are not that we're much looser culture more more freedom oriented and if the government says you can't go to the beach like well the hell with it and Americans are not that. We're a much looser culture, more freedom-oriented, and if the government says you can't go to the beach, like, well, to hell with it.

I'm going to the beach anyway. Germans don't do that. And they do have a really good health care system, and they jump right on it, and I think that's one explanation. You know, we've seen yesterday this rise in deaths of African Americans versus, you know, white Americans, and having to do with income,

but, of course, money is just a proxy for something else, which has to do with the quality of the health care they get, the food that they eat, how healthy and exercise prone they are or not, diabetes, obesity, these sorts of things. Down the line, when you're attacked by a virus like that can have an effect on your immune system and therefore the response to the disease. So I think those are the kinds of cohorts we're going to have to target to save lives. And I think countries like South Korea and Germany have been doing that pretty well without pushback. Yeah, I'm hoping – my best hope out of this is that it's a wake-up call for people that don't take care of their bodies. The people that get through this, like you dodge the bullet, now let's clean that diet up, let's get you moving, let's start some exercise on a regular weekly basis, get some nutrients into your system, eliminate all this sugar and bullshit that people

eat, and take care of your body and take care of your immune system. Let's pump everything back up to sustainable levels. And I mean, that very well could be the difference between people who contract this virus and survive versus people who contract this virus and don't. Absolutely. I mean, how could it not hurt to be healthy, fit and have a good immune system? Even if for some reason we can't find the exact connection to this particular virus, just as a global thing, even if you do all that, and it turns out there's no connection to this particular virus, it's still a good thing to do. Yeah. You've been cycling, right? I know you're a cycler, and so you were actually

riding your bike today, right? Yeah, this morning. Actually, this is really funny, this kind of world we live in. There's no more group rides, of course. Yeah, this morning, actually, this is really funny, this kind of world we live in. There's no more group rides, of course. And all the big tours, like the Tour de France, have been canceled. So there I'm riding along this morning, and I see up ahead of me T.J. Van Garderen, who's the top American pro right now. And apparently he lives over in the kind of Santa Ynez Valley area. And here he is cycling along in Santa Barbara by himself. So I'm chasing along to see how long I can stay up with this guy.

And, of course, he's much younger and faster than me. But all of a sudden, he just stops. And he picks something up from the ground. So I pull up, and he holds up a $5 bill. And he goes, look, I found $5. I'm like, man, it's the little things in life that just kind of make your day. He was happy with the $5, and I got to say hi to the great TJ Van Gardner. And so that was kind of funny. That's awesome. I don't follow professional

cycling, but I can understand your enthusiasm if he's the top guy. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it was. So, yeah. So I think, you know, just working out every day, I mean, you mentioned every week, I think people need to work out every day. Yeah, for sure. And I find the more you work out, you know, you don't have to eat as much because your body becomes more efficient at processing fuel. So I have less desire to eat. Really? Yeah.

Not me, baby. When I work out, oh, my God, I get so hungry. Yeah, I don't know. I've been doing that after you were promoting that, the daily fast, you know, don't eat from dinner time. And I try to make it to like 11 or 12. And if I work out in the morning, if I go for a couple-hour bike ride, I can make it because you're doing something. You have to be active because if you're sitting around, then you're going to get hungry. I do that.

Yeah, I do intermittent fasting. I try to do 16 hours. You know, the only time I don't do that is when I have explosive work that I'm doing in the morning, like if I'm doing Muay Thai or something like that that that requires like a lot of, then I'll just have a couple of pieces of fruit, but I keep it pretty light. But other than that, I try to do 16 hours. I'm doing a, I do a 16 hour non-feeding phase and then just eat in the other time. And your body gets accustomed to it. It's not hard. It's not hard to do because it's just, it becomes normal. The other thing I did that I've been recommending to people that are not into cycling or something like that is I got these wrist and ankle weights just at the local sporting goods store.

But you can order them on Amazon. Just five pounds each wrist, five pounds each ankle. And just walk briskly. I just take my dog to the local park. And we just go up this hill and down, up and down this hill with these weights. And you don't have to run. You know, I know people don't like running. I don't like running all that much.

But with the weights, you get, you know, extra upper body and it works the big muscles of your legs. You know, without – I know a lot of people hate running. So, you know, it's like you don't have to run. Just walk. Just get the heart rate up. Work the big muscles. And, you know, circulate the blood and all the bodily fluids and so on. And that's just good for general health.

And I do think that has to help for response to the coronavirus. Again, these populations that are more targeted, you know, there's a lot of obesity and diabetes and some of these other secondary, you know, these preconditions, as they call them. And, you know, there's this peculiar thing we're all doing now. Like what I've done for years is you look in the obits and you say, OK, well, this guy, he was older than me or he had this or he had that doesn't apply to me. You know, we all do that with the coronavirus. OK. Oh, that person was older. They had this precondition and so on. You're hoping you're hoping that somehow I'm going to dodge this bullet because of that. It may not be. But it's all a game of probabilities of just stacking the odds in our favor.

Who knows if that will make a difference for you or me personally. But on average, it's got to make a difference. It's such a strange virus, isn't it, in terms of the way so many people are asymptomatic? virus, isn't it, in terms of the way so many people are asymptomatic? Yeah, so this idea that it came to America what, January 28th or something in Seattle, I have a feeling it's going to turn out to have been earlier, like in December. I was just reading this Nature paper on the origins of the virus. They were sort of debunking the myth that it was a creation of a

bioweapons lab in in china there is that conspiracy theory which is not completely crazy because of course there are there are bio weapon labs that do this kind of stuff there was that one in russia a few decades ago where they had a leakage um but but it looked like i've read this article twice i don't understand it because this isn't what i do but you know they they really show that it very, very likely made the leap from probably bats. You know, bats are mammals. Bats are very respiratory. They're very social. You know, there's this cave in Texas where there's like 20 million bats that live in this cave. I mean, they're just pressed in. It's like the same population of Mexico City. And they come out

at night and so on. And, you know, these wet markets in Wuhan, China, it's not that wet markets by themselves are bad, but, you know, say you have dead fish, it's a wet market, but live animals and particularly mammals like bats, then it's easy to make that leap. So, you know, the coronavirus, it's, you know, it's a, they call it a novel coronavirus for a reason. It's novel. You mean there's other coronaviruses around? Yeah, common cold is a coronavirus. And, you know, so there's, I have a feeling, Joe, we're going to have this virus with us permanently. I mean, this is what Fauci has been saying, that it's not going to just go away and then we're done. I think we're going to have probably a mutated, a more modest strain of it forever. And we'll just have to get our flu shots for that one every year and just kind of mitigate it that way.

Yeah. Have you been paying attention to these potential remedies like hydroxychloroquine mixed with Z-Pax and zinc? What are your thoughts on that? I took it for two days. Did you? Yeah, I did, yeah. Well, a couple, I don't know, maybe a month ago now,

my doc, who's also a good friend and a fellow cyclist, he's the guy that did my neck surgery. You know, I had a fusion on my neck after I had a bad bike crash last year. And so he's a good friend. And so he just texts me out of the blue and goes, hey, have you heard about this hydroxychloroquine? No, I never heard of it. Oh, yeah, the, you know, the malaria drug. Okay, all right. So now he works at a big hospital in L.A., Huntington Hospital.

And so I can understand why he was doing it as a precautionary thing, as a prophylactic against it. And there's some evidence, anecdotal. Anyway, so he wrote me a script, and I tried it for two days. It's pretty toxic. If you follow the prescription exactly, the chances of having bad side effects are pretty low. So when Trump says, you know, what have you got to lose? Of course, nothing is risk free. But if you follow the exact prescription, then the chances of having bad effects are pretty low.

Unlike that guy in Arizona that found it in his fish tank cleaner. It was some fish antifungal chemical, and he drank it and died. Okay, you know, you can't do that kind of stuff. But that would apply to any kind of medication, right? Anyway, so I tried it for two days, and, you know, I didn't feel good. You know, I work out, and then I came back one day, and my wife says, you know, you stink like a toxin, like poison.

I'm like, ooh, okay, yeah. That's not good. Well, you're not supposed to take it unless you get in contact, right? Or are you thinking that you could have been in contact? Well, you know, I don't know. Again, it could be that lots of us have it. That's the weird part, right? The I don't know.

Symptom-free. The I don't know. The I don't know. That's what keeps people up at night. You're lying in bed you're like what about that guy he was close to me what about this what about that what if someone someone at the grocery stores got it and i touched the cart two of my cycling buddies had really bad colds in december dry cough fever you know all the symptoms and they're now saying

huh i wonder if i had it in in December. And the reason this is important to know is because that would increase the size of the denominator of the equation where you have the number of deaths divided by the number of people that got it. And it's that bottom number we just don't know because the testing has just been ramped up. So there might be lots of people that had it in January and February and they got better. We just don't know. Or they were symptom free and they didn't know they had it. Or maybe even earlier, say December. That Nature paper I referenced, they trace it back.

I don't know how they do this genetically with mutations or whatever, but to say mid November in China. So, you know, people were coming from China to the United States throughout November and December, so it's entirely possible it's been here longer. And therefore the death rate is not nearly as catastrophic as it seems like it could be.

Is there a way to test whether or not you've had it for antibodies? I think there's a test now. I don't think it's in the United States. Where was this? Maybe it was South Korea. Just a pinprick. And they can tell if you've already had it based on the antibodies in your blood that would only be there if you had the coronavirus. I think it I think it was South Korea that was doing that.

And that absolutely has to be done because we have to know what the number is. Yeah. And and also, if you've had it and you have the antibodies in your blood, then you can donate your blood and give it to somebody. And then that would be something like a vaccine. Yeah, that's all very promising. You know, it's really interesting, too, because this has become such a hot political topic. You know, there's so many people that are angry at Trump, but they were angry at Trump back when he was closing the travel from China, which turned out to be a great idea.

And Donald Trump Jr. tweeted today a compilation of CNN and all these other different networks giving out bad information way back in January. Bad information saying this is going to be fine. Don't worry. It's not as deadly as the flu. You should worry about the flu. Don't change your plans. Don't do anything.'s not as deadly as the flu. You should worry about the flu. Don't change your plans. Don't do anything. So a lot of people got this wrong. But so many people are trying to make this a political point right now. And it's really, it's so useless. It's pointing fingers

and everything at this point in time. It's like what they need to concentrate on now is just getting masks, getting PPE equipment, keeping people healthy if they can, and then educating people on how to keep your immune system strong. And let's, you know, let's try to, let's try to get people to understand the consequences of not taking care of your body. This has to be the worst job in the world, President. I mean, no matter what, no matter what you do, everyone's going to, half the people are going to hate are gonna hate you who would want that job i don't know because it doesn't even pay that well compared to other professions at the top end of other professions you know there's a lot of articles now about um how autocrats around the world have been taking advantage of the of the pandemic to increase their power and just welch civil liberties in Hungary and Turkey, even Israel, China, of course, Putin in Russia, and so on.

And Trump usually gets lumped in there. Like he's an autocrat like Oban and Erdogan and Netanyahu and so forth. Okay. So then – so had he closed – let's say – do the counterfactual. Let's say he closed the borders in late January or early February or something like this. I mean, just clamp down on all travel and so on. He would have been totally accused of being an autocrat. He wants to be a dictator and look what he's doing. Okay. So he doesn't do that. And then he's accused of

not doing enough when it looks like we should have done more. And then the other day when he said, well, I'm not going to tell all the governors what to do. I'm going to honor states' rights for now. And, of course, he gets hammered for that. But that's actually what he's supposed to do. That's not what an autocrat would do. An autocrat would say, yeah, I'm telling everybody what to do. Right, exactly.

not what an autocrat would do. An autocrat would say, yeah, I'm telling everybody what to do. Right. Exactly. Exactly. You know, I think maybe we should, you know, drop all the polarization politically, rally around the president, even if you hate him. Just look what happened after 9-11. I mean, Bush was pretty hated by the left. And most liberals came around and said, all right, you know what, we're going to support this guy at least for a few months until, you know, we figure out what's going on here. And most of the liberal Democratic congressmen and senators voted for the war and, you know, for the invasion of Afghanistan, and including Iraq, including Hillary, right? So, you know, maybe we ought to do that. I know people just can't stand Trump. And just the idea like saying something nice or supportive or not being critical seems hard to do. But maybe this is way worse than 9-11.

Yeah. And what you're saying is totally correct. It seems like the polarization is even worse, though, than when it was in 2001. It seems like it just keeps ramping up. And Trump is such a naturally polarizing figure that it's gotten, you know, the left versus right has gotten so extreme right now. It's almost impossible for rational discourse. And this is one of the reasons why it's a good time now to talk about your book, Given the Devil is Due. I was just showing this graph of the people that self-identify as centrist versus now, which is more polarized. You have this two-humped camel here, and that's from 1994, 2004, and then close to today. When did that shift?

Is that a Trump shift? No, no, no, no, no. That little dip in the middle? About 2000 – well, really under Obama. about 2008, the polarization got worse and worse. I mean, we can speculate why, but that's pretty much when it happened. But around 2004, 2005, and it gets ramped up. So just pollsters asking people, you know, how do you self-identify? You know, centrist, far left, far right, strong Republican, strong Democrat, whatever. And so that middle ground has been shrinking.

The centers have been shrinking, and the polls have been increasing. So more and more people are polarized. Now, conservative talk radio and television or MSNBC, whatever, you want to accuse the media. But in general, I think we've just been more polarized in the sense of not just saying, well, I disagree with you, I think you're wrong, but that you're evil, you're immoral, you know, this is, you know, the worst thing that's ever happened to us, and so on. This kind of ramping up of the catastrophism, you know, it's not healthy. No, no, it's not. You know, another thing I

wanted to talk to you about, Michael, is there's an article today in The Atlantic, which is really interesting. It's about technology. It's contact tracking technology. And there's a real concern about this stuff. First of all, the idea is great that this could free America from quarantine. So this is always the risk, right? The risk is just give up a little bit of your civil liberties, give up a little bit of your freedom and uh we're going to keep you safe and you know it brings you to the old benjamin franklin quote you know he who would give up liberty for freedom deserves neither neither or liberty for safety um i'm sure i fucked up that quote but this this technology is very interesting because

they're using it in south korea and they're using it in South Korea and they're using it in Singapore. And the title of the article in The Atlantic is The Technology That Could Free America from Quarantine. And it's out today. And they bring up this conundrum. I mean, nobody wants to give up civil liberties and civil liberties lost are rarely regained. And this is the real concern here, that if you do allow people to track who you're in contact with and make sure that, okay, you're testing negative and you're in contact with people that also test negative, so you're okay. You're okay to travel now.

This is a very weird thing, and it gets us into a very gray area. How do you feel about this? I feel about it this way. In general, I'm against that sort of thing. I like the idea of privacy and that I do have a right to not be tracked. And, you know, you can't have cameras in my home or my yard and so on. In general, I think across the board, that's a good principle. And it follows the constitution

i think there are times say national emergency like this of course there's always the risk that you know any autocrat can declare a national emergency grab the power never give it back and i mentioned examples of this before in turkey say uh but the difference here i think is you know we do have a constitution we do have states rights we do have courts that litigate these sorts of things. I could see a reasonable measure being taken for, let's say, we're going to do the following for six months until we see what happens with this pandemic, and then once that's over, then we're going to revert back. Now, let's say the governor or the president says, well, I'm not going back. Well, you have courts then we and you sue the state or you sue the federal government for violations of civil liberties and then you can get them back

right but that's never happened we've never gotten back like what happened to nsa when edward snowden revealed how much tracking is actually going on i mean that's never been yeah reversed i know i know yeah i know it was very i watched that show you show when you had him on, and oh boy, that was pretty disturbing. Very disturbing, and what was also disturbing was that now it's been proven that the Obama administration lied. They lied about what, you know, it was just metadata, there was no concern. It was not just metadata. They were able to read people's emails. Right.

Yes, and, you know, this program was started under Bush. And so supposedly when Obama became president, it's like, you know, the transparent president. So we're going to stop doing that. Well, that's not the case. So here's a good argument for, you know, WikiLeaks and the Pentagon Papers that I recognize as valuable, that we wouldn't have known that without Snowden or the Pentagon Papers. And, you know, it's good to know what, you know, what your government is up to. And, you know, in our mutual favorite subjects of conspiracy theories, you know, we didn't know about a lot of the things Kennedy was doing and Johnson, you know, all the way back to Eisenhower lying about the Vietnam War, for example, until

the Pentagon Papers came out. And then in the 90s, the Church Committee on Conspiracies from the 70s, a lot of those documents were released, and there was that business about the Operation Northwoods, where Kennedy administration people brought to him this idea of a false flag operation over Cuba, make it look like the Russians were harassing our aircraft or our airports as an excuse to invading Cuba or assassinating Castro and so on. It's like, you know, like when you had Alex Jones on, he talks about false flag operations. And most of us skeptics go, oh, that's a bunch of nonsense. And then you read these documents that are revealed in these released secret documents. Like, wow, OK, so we did do that.

Not just that, signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vetoed by Kennedy was like, what the hell are you doing? And then finds himself dead less than a year later. Right. And then all the shenanigans of American intelligence agents manipulating elections in South American democracies. In the model of, well, he may be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch. Yeah. Right. So we'd rather support the fascist dictator rather than the communist dictator. It's like,

what are we doing doing that anyway? Right. Well, that's what we do. It's like, wait a minute. Does the public know about this? Did Congress approve this? No. OK. So, you know, this is one reason people believe conspiracy theories is because a lot of them are true. Okay. So, you know, this is one reason people believe conspiracy theories is because a lot of them are true. Not all of them. But I point to with you, with the Epstein case, like you were one of the first people, I mean, as a literally, you're a professional skeptic. And you looked at some of the evidence, you're like, oh, well, you know what? This might be a conspiracy. And I said, when Michael Shermer thinks it might be a conspiracy, it's probably a goddamn conspiracy. There's been enough of them.

I'm still not sure about that one because after I posted something about the two cameras broke or whatever, somebody wrote me from that prison saying, oh, those cameras are always breaking. It's a little convenient, though, that he winds up strangling himself in a way that Michael Batten, the famous autopsy doctor, says is completely inconsistent with hanging. And much more consistent with someone strangling you, including the actual area where he was hanging from, supposedly. Like, it's consistent with someone strangling you from behind, not consistent with you hanging by your own weight. Yeah, after Weinstein got his conviction, I thought, oh boy, they better have a real suicide watch on this guy. Because he surely has a black book just as big as Epstein's. Oh, I'm sure.

Well, I think what he's got is probably more incriminating to him though you know I think what he's got is probably hey I had sex with all these starlets and turned them into big celebrities and this and I bet he probably doesn't want that out especially at this stage of the game nothing I don't think anything he's got is gonna make him look good and I think with the thing with Epstein is he knew way too much about too many powerful people. There's just so many connections that could be made with that guy. And to this day, people are asking questions that people like Bill Gates don't want to answer or Prince Andrew or any of these people. They're like, you know, I don't want to talk about this.

Yeah. I didn't hear the one about Gates, but Prince Andrew, of course. Gates apparently flew on the Lolita Express four years after he was convicted. Oh, okay. Wow. All right. According to the Daily Mirror or whatever the fuck it was. I would ask Jamie to look that up, but I've got his computer right now. Go get it on your iPad. Find out if it's true, if Bill Gates flew on the Lolita Express. Because that's what I was reading today. People were trying to ask Bill Gates, but it's so can't count on them, then who's regulating

the independents? Who's regulating these websites? Who's regulating these people that are just, you know, so-called independent journalists that are just tweeting things and finding things and putting things up on their websites? It's so hard to tell who's telling the truth and who's not. And who's right? When I was working on Giving the Devil His Due, this was kind of a challenge to me because I feel like there's so much fake news, real fake news, and just bogus theories, particularly in to take, silver derivative pills that were supposed to fight the coronavirus or whatever. So a lot of that stuff is dangerous to have out there.

But as a civil libertarian, I feel like, well, but I'm a free speech fundamentalist. I really believe people, short of just lying about somebody or giving away the nuclear codes or something like that, just let a thousand flowers bloom and just see what – just shine sunlight on all of them and see which ones rise to the top because they're supported by evidence there's a risk to that that is to say you know people will take bad information and they'll go shoot up a pizzeria or something like that or not now these you know this conspiracy theory about 5g related to the coronavirus that is to say the theory is that 5G is causing people to feel ill, to take ill, and that the government made up, the corporations made up this story about the coronavirus as a distraction from 5G. Okay, this is nonsense. That's so criminally stupid. Do you know who Lil Duvall is?

No. Of course not. He's a hilarious comedian who also has a great Instagram page. And he put something up today. He retweeted something that says, if 184 countries have Corona and only five countries have 5G towers, why the fuck would you dummies, why the fuck would you idiots think that 5G towers are causing COVID-19? It's such a great thing. And so many people are like, oh, yeah, oh, well. And then I literally heard someone say, well, maybe the 5G causes the coronavirus, and then they spread it to other countries. I'm like, oh, God, you don't even understand viruses. Yes. Well, part of the problem, of course, that was accused with 4G and 3G and cell phones back in the late 90s and early 2000s. There was the scare about holding the phone up to your ear, and we all started doing that, and that this is maybe causing brain tumors. And, of course, you can find anecdotes. This guy spent a lot of time on his cell phone, and he got a brain tumor over here on his left temporal lobe or whatever.

The problem is, well, what about the hundreds of millions of people that hold their cell phones up? And they never got brain cancer. And then there's the physical aspects of it. The energy from the cell phone itself or even these 5G towers is not strong enough to break chemical bonds like DNA to cause mutations in cells to then become cancerous. There's not a physical mechanism, A, and B, the counterexamples that you always have to,

what about the countries that don't have 5G? Yeah. What about all the people that use these things or live near cell phone towers? They didn't get cancer. So you have to look at all the different options, and our focus tends to be on the one cell. So I always use this heuristic for my class of teaching skepticism is a two-by-two matrix where you have four cells. So I did this with this – there's this documentary film coming out about horror films that are haunted or cursed. Horror films that are cursed. So like, you know, which is the one where the actors died in the helicopter accident? Oh, the Twilight Zone, the movie.

And, you know, The Exorcist and these other films where bad things happen to the actors that are in horror films. Okay. The problem with that is you're only focusing on one cell, that is horror films that are cursed. Then there's horror films that are not cursed, nothing bad happened to the actors in those. And then there's non-horror films, regular films, in which bad things happened to the actors. And then non-horror films that are not cursed. So when we just focus on the one cell, it's easy to find examples that fit it.

But something like The Shining, which is a super horror scary film, nothing bad happened to the actors. Or just take some other film like The Godfather, whatever, that's not a horror film and nothing bad happened to the actors and so on. So when you look at all the different options, this is just a way to think about any particular claim that then there's really nothing left to explain because you're just you're just plucking out anecdotes. Well, people love coincidences. They really, really love coincidences. They're fun because they love to believe in spiritual connections and they love to believe in clairvoyance and they love to believe in haunted things. Jamie pulled up the article. It's actually in the sun. It says, Bill Gates breaks silence on Epstein admitting he made a mistake in judgment by meeting with the pedo tycoon, it says. So there's a whole story about it. Who knows? But he is quoted

in there. Yeah. I don't know. I know't know. then maybe you go down that road a little bit and then you start hearing these rumors about his personal life and you're like well yeah but the money's good for the lab and yeah you know somewhere down the line it becomes obvious it was a bad thing and it but it's too late you already went down that road so that you know it's hard to judge people after the fact and the hindsight bias you know we look back and go how could anybody have ever had any association with them it's like yeah but that's you know we know we know stuff now that maybe not everybody knew the extent of it back years ago. Now, this book that you wrote, Giving the Devil His Due, the idea is talking to people whose opinions you disagree with and that there's a lot of value in that. Why did you write that and what were you trying to get out of this?

Well, in general, I've been kind of a civil libertarian most of my life in that respect. But to be honest, I was kind of inspired after the episode we did of your podcast with Graham Hancock. And I've since gotten to know him. And I thought, you know, I was not really fair to that guy. I really didn't give him a fair shake. And there's value in people like him who challenge the mainstream. Now, it's not that outsiders can't make contributions, they can. And we generally tend to be skeptical of outsiders because they're mostly wrong most of the time. But so are scientists wrong about most of their hypotheses. So I do think if you apply the principles of free speech, as originally laid out by John Stuart Mill in 1859, his book on liberty, where he said, okay, look, you might be completely right, but by listening

to somebody else, it strengthens your own arguments. So like, for example, I have my mostly pro-choice students watch Ben Shapiro videos defending the pro-life position on abortion, because if they can't articulate his position, his arguments, and then debunk them, then their pro-life choice position is not all that strong. That's the first one. Second one, you might be partially right and partially wrong, and by listening to somebody you disagree with, you improve your arguments. Or you might be completely wrong, and then you've had an opportunity to change your mind.

But more importantly still, if you silence people, you refuse to listen to them, then what happens when you take up a contrary position? You come up with some idea that goes against the grain and the norms or worse laws are in place to silence you. Now you've just given up your opportunity to be heard because you've previously endorsed the idea of silencing people. And I don't just mean legally, like passing laws, although that's disturbing enough. Like in many countries, like Canada, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, France, Australia, New Zealand, it's illegal to deny the Holocaust. By which I mean, if you say, well, I think one million Jews died, not six million, therefore I don't think the gas chambers were used the way we think they were, therefore I

don't think the Nazis had an intentional plan to exterminate European Jewry. Okay, that's now illegal to say that. And now I've debunked all those claims. I think they're completely wrong. And even if the people who claim it are themselves anti-Semites, you know, I know it's in somebody's harder minds, but you know, let's assume the worst just for the sake of our argument. I would still defend their right to say it because let's say by analogy, you know, I'm in the middle of a debate about how many Native Americans died since Columbus came here. And now the figure is, you know, I don't know, 90 million, 70 million, 50 million, you know, it's debatable. But let's say I'm a historian and I say, I think it was 10 million. And I think it was mostly by germs, not by guns and steel.

Am I a Holocaust denier? And therefore I should be silenced or worse, jailed for my illegal hate speech, you know? And so this is why I wrote a letter to the judge in David Irving's case in Austria. David Irving's a notorious Austria, David Irving's notorious Holocaust denier in England. So he flew to Vienna from London to give a speech at one of these kind of far right groups in a hotel somewhere. And he got flagged at the airport.

You know, they scan the passport and boom, he's arrested. And he was put on trial and convicted and sent to jail. He didn't even speak. He was just going to speak. So that essentially is a thought crime. And so even though I completely disagree with their arguments, and maybe I don't even want to like these guys because of their attitudes about Jews, I don't like that, but still I would defend them.

So I would apply that to pretty much anybody who's out there like that, because that's the only way we can really improve how we think about things to understand the truth about the real world, is to listen to people that disagree with you. Those are the ones that the Second Amendment or the First Amendment free speech in general is for. I agree with that, but can I give you the counter-argument? The counter-argument, particularly online, is that people develop these bubbles. They develop these bubbles where everyone agrees with your perspective. You isolate or self-isolate in these bubbles. That you can indoctrinate young impressionable people into hateful or racist or ideologically disturbing ideas by finding them isolated in these thought bubbles. If they get onto particular message boards or a particular website where they subscribe to a YouTube channel or some video channel, then they all meet up in the comments

and they agree with each other, but they're all wrong. But they can find confirmation bias in these large groups of people that are also wrong, and they feed off of each other. What do you think about that? It does happen, for sure. And my first response is to encourage people to get out of their bubble. So if you read the New York Times, you should read the Wall Street Journal and vice versa. Now, of course, that doesn't apply to most people online. But there's new research now since the 2016 election by a number of political scientists and cognitive scientists, nicely summarized in Hugo Mercier's book called Not Born Yesterday. called Not Born Yesterday. And he shows that those Facebook and online bubbles against Hillary, say, or for Trump or vice versa, probably had next to no effect on the actual election. That is to say, if you believe that Hillary Clinton was running a pedophile ring out of a pizzeria,

whether I convince you that that's not true, you're very likely not going to vote for Hillary no matter what. Somebody that believes that is already so far down the rabbit hole, say, down the spectrum of where they are politically, they're never going to switch positions. And even the idea of just sort of slightly negative stories about Hillary or slightly negative stories about Trump that might nudge people. It doesn't look like it had much effect at all. In fact, Hugo shows that most political advertising is a complete waste of money. It does nothing. It doesn't change people's votes. All it does is reinforce to your team, say in the primaries, that you're the best candidate. So it might work for that.

But in terms of getting Republicans to vote, say centrists or Republicans to vote Democrat, the advertising probably have no, no effect at all. And the same thing with corporate advertising and things like that probably doesn't really work. And so I've been thinking about this with the Nazis, because I've written a lot about that, you know, how do you the problem to explain is how do you convert an entire nation of people from this, cultured, educated, intelligent, Western civilization-leading culture into Nazis that are willing to exterminate Jews and other people. And the answer, I think, is now you don't. You have to. You don't have to. Most of them didn't endorse the Nazi ideology.

They're like some of the economic policies in the 30s that got Germany out of the Depression. Hitler built the Autobahn and all that stuff, trains ran on time, whatnot. But the exterminationist ideology that the Nazis had, most Germans did not go that far. Now, anti-Semitism was rampant in Europe, including Germany and Poland and Russia especially. But most of the people that held anti-Semitic views about Jews were not exterminationists. They didn't think the Jews should be hauled out and sent to camps and exterminated. That was very much a Hitlerian thing. So I've now gotten to the point where I think no Hitler, no Holocaust, probably even no Hitler, no World War II.

Most German people did not want war. They were begging him to stop after he annexed Austria, for example. It's like, that's enough. At some point, these other countries are going to go to else thinks something, but they don't. And then the punishment of dissenters, anyone who dissents, who speaks out either in the press or just privately, we're going to jail them, silence them, censor them, send them off to camps or whatever. So the KL system in Germany and the Gulag system in Soviet Stalinist Russia silenced people who would have dissented that would tell the rest of us who think everybody else thinks this is the way everybody believes, but they don't. We'll never know because we don't hear those voices. They're silenced. So with those two things, pluralistic ignorance and the punishment of dissenters, you have this nazi ideology or stalinist ideology

hover in midair even though no one really believes it and it's just think of like north korea where when kim jong-un's father died kim jong-il and you know you saw those videos of people just weeping in the streets for days on end you know mostly these women it's like who actually believes that they feel this way well we don't don't believe it. They are obviously faking. Does the regime believe that they are, you know, in mourning over the loss of the dear leader? No, because they maintain the concentration camp system and they lock everybody up who descends even a little bit. That tells us they don't actually believe people feel that way about their regime. They didn't care if people believed.

They just wanted compliance, right? They wanted to make sure that people, I mean, they had a long period of time where they forced people to mourn. They wanted them to weep in the streets, and they jailed people for as much as six months for not mourning enough. That's crazy. Yeah, it's horrific. But that's how you run a dictatorship, right? Under fear. There's a story where Stalin gave a speech and then got a standing ovation that went on for like three minutes and then six minutes and eight minutes, nine minutes, ten minutes, eleven minutes.

Everybody's going, oh, crap, please, somebody sit down. Finally, some apparatchik sat down. And he was promptly arrested the next day and sent off to the gulag. Really? Yeah. Wow. 11 minutes, not enough. Now, it's not just him they want to silence, of course.

It's a signal. Of course. This is what happens if you don't maintain this charade. We all know it's a charade. Isn't that, that is an issue with social media, right? I mean, there's people that are writing hateful things on social media, but then there's people that are writing things that are just disagreeable. And when they get silenced, this is oftentimes something that sends a signal to other people to not say disagreeable things, not say questionable things, not say things that that is contrary to the orthodoxy. things, not say things that is contrary to the orthodoxy. Right.

That's right. So even though we don't have censorship laws like other countries we've been discussing, there is this self-censorship that happens out of fear of being canceled in the so-called cancel culture or just squelched by the language police, the politically correct police. So when I ask a show of hands of my students every semester, how many of you self-censor? That is, you want to say something, but you don't on abortion or immigration or any kind of politically charged issue. They all raise their hand. Oh, yeah. I would never say something, not just in class, but, you know, in the dorm rooms or just wherever students are gathering.

That's the chilling effect. That's what I. So giving the devil his due is, you devil his due is pushing back against that, that I know you don't want to give your devil, your devil, the devil is whoever you disagree with. I know you don't want to. I don't want to either. But we have to for our own safety's sake.

If I want to be heard and I want you to take me seriously and listen to what I have to say, I have to respond in kind. I have to practice the principle of reciprocity or interchangeable perspectives. I have to see it from your perspective. Well, he wants to have his voice in kind. I have to practice the principle of kind of reciprocity or interchangeable perspectives. I have to see it from your perspective. Well, he wants to have his voice, so do I. And so as a principle, it doesn't feel intuitive. Like, no, I don't want to give everybody a voice. But you know what?

I'm going to override that impulse and do it anyway, if nothing else, selfishly, for my own safety's sake. So my other case chapter in the book besides Graham Hancock is Jordan Peterson. Now, you know, after I saw him on your show and then I saw him getting hammered in the media, especially, you know, online, I mean, just viciously attacked. It's like, God, who is this guy? Anyway, then I met him and got to know him a little bit. It's like, he's not at all like what these people are saying. He's a wonderful guy.

He's the most misrepresented person I've ever met in my life. Willfully, willingly misrepresented. They do it on purpose. They know what they're doing. They want to paint him out with just a series of very quick, easy-to-use adjectives that turn him into a monster. And they don't have anything to back that up. Anything. And it's really strange.

It's so disturbing, but it's a very strange left-wing characteristic. And again, this is coming from someone who's on the left, but it is a left-wing characteristic. This need to misrepresent someone, paint them in a straw man fashion as some sort of an evil person so that you can dismiss everything they say that is uncomfortable or that is contrary to your accepted ideology, the ideology that you subscribe to and that you're defending and that you've identified with. And I think this is a real problem. A real problem that we're having is that people identify with their ideas. If their ideas fall apart, somehow or another, they're falling apart. They are a part of the ideas. They're not just a person who has a thought and they can, like if you and I disagreed

on something, I would hope that we could just talk about these ideas as if they are separate from us. But oftentimes that's not the case. Oftentimes people, they so identify with those ideas that when those ideas are challenged, they are challenged. They get emotional. They get angry. And they will lie.

They will willfully misrepresent you in order to strengthen their position. And this is a terrible, terrible thing that I see. And I see it so much from my side. I see so much of this from the left. And it's so discouraging. And it's so infuriating. And this is one of the things that I love about the concept of your book. And I love about this idea that we need open discourse and discussion. And I think we're dealing with a couple of things here. And one of the things I think we're dealing with is the limited kind of communication that's available through social media. It's very limited.

You know, writing something in text, as someone responds in text, we're missing on so much nuance. We're missing so much of what it means to interact with someone socially. If you and I are sitting across from each other, person to person, if I say something insulting to you, I have to see you get upset. I have to feel it. I have to look at you. I have to feel like, what kind of an asshole am I that I said that to you? Like, why did I hurt your feelings? Like, there's all these things that happen when people are interacting with each other socially, looking at each other in the eye, these cues, these, this is what made us human. This is what, I mean, this is what found community.

I mean, this is one of the basic tenets of rational discourse is the ability to communicate with each other in a comprehensive way, in a nuanced way. And so much of that is eliminated entirely when you put things to 140 or 280 characters. Yeah. Yeah, I'll occasionally get really nasty letters. Somebody will email me and, I mean, really nasty, like, you're a piece of shit, you fucking million, just on and on like this.

And sometimes I'll write them back and go, hey, are you having a hard day? Because I didn't mean to be offensive. I was just trying to make this point. And they always write back, oh, my God, I'm so sorry. I didn't know anybody who's going to respond. Oh, wow. Yeah. No, I take it back. That's such that what you're just saying is so common. I hear that from so many people that are in the public eye that say something back to someone who says something rude to them.

And the person's sort of like, well, I didn't mean it because it's just a shitty way to communicate. Sending someone an email or writing a blog about someone or tweeting some nasty shit about someone. It's a terrible way to communicate. It's such a one way, you know, it's a, it's a very limited way to communicate and it's far inferior to actual person-to-person communication. So my chapter on Jordan, you know, I present his views, and they go, here's where I agree with him, here's where I disagree with him. And to his credit, I sent him a copy of the chapter, and I said, would you blurb my book? And he did. He wrote me that nice long blurb, and he says, this is a rather difficult book for me to blurb, and he says, this is a rather difficult

book for me to blurb, given that an entire chapter is devoted to criticizing my claims about pragmatic truth vis-a-vis scientific truth. However, and then he says nice things about it. So to his credit, this guy disagrees with me, but dang it, at least he's willing to talk to me. He's a great guy people just don't know him they just don't know him i i love that guy and i've had people say you know like what kind of a piece of shit are you for platforming people like jordan peterson i'm like my god if you went to dinner with him just sit down at dinner with him and me and you would realize what a great guy he is he's a a great person. He really is a very great person. He's just misrepresented. And he's become this lightning

rod for hate from the left. And, you know, I mean, I don't even think he's really right wing. I mean, he thinks of himself as a classical liberal, which is a very weird definition. I mean, he's more of a centrist than anything but he's not right wing no no definitely not the problem you identified though or just a moment ago was that if people identify with their beliefs that is that the the specific um say political platforms like on immigration abortion you know civil rights whatever. Those are sort of secondary to the deeper core moral values that people hold. I define myself as a liberal. I define myself as a conservative, Republican, whatever. And so when you attack one little thing here, well, you know, I agree with you on this and this and this, but on the abortion thing, I think you're wrong and here's why.

The impulse is, well, but if I give up on that one, then I'm going to lose all these other ones, and then I've given up my identity. Right? So, like, when I used to debate creationists, intelligent design theorists, and so on, you know, I could tell that if I give people a choice, like, you have to choose between Jesus and Darwin for your life. You know, they're not picking Darwin, okay? Because, you know, this sort of belief in their, you in their Christian dogmas about Jesus, that is their core being. Who cares about Darwin and whoever this scientist was? But if I say, keep Jesus, keep your whole religion, I don't care what you believe, but the science is really good on this, and here's why you should follow the facts, and you don't have to give up anything for it, then it's like, oh, okay, I'll listen. to give up anything for it. And it's like, oh, okay, I'll listen. Right. So, and like with more recently with climate change, you know, most people, most of us don't know much about climate

science. It's a technical science. The models are super complex. People send me these papers. I don't really understand them, you know, but, but if you self-identify say as a conservative, then climate change is just a proxy for something else. Like, I believe in free markets and free enterprise, and I'm pro-business, and those guys over there, you know, they want to attack that. Now, unfortunately, Al Gore's success with his film and books and so forth then affiliated climate science with a left-wing liberal cause. Therefore, conservatives have to go against it. Even though neither side knows all that much about climate science,

it's become something else that you identify yourself as. So we have to take that out of the formula. Keep your worldview that you define yourself as. Don't give up that. But just follow the facts on these specific issues. Yeah, the polarization is the thing, right? If you are on one side, you have to subscribe to the whole menu of ideas. And if you're left-wing, you can't really be pro-life.

And if you're right-wing, you're supposed to have a certain amount of skepticism about climate change. Right. to have a certain amount of skepticism about climate change. Right. So when somebody publicly signals where they stand on, say, climate change, what they're really saying is, look, I am publicly declaring my commitment to my team. Yes. Yes, that's a problem, right? That's a problem.

The virtue signaling, the saying, I have loyalty to this position because of this is my tribe. That's right. And so a lot of cognitive science studies of reasoning shows that we generally don't reason toward finding the truth, but defending positions that are part of our team ideology or sort of collective whole. And in this case, we've been talking about left and right, but there's religious or economic ideologies and so on that are part of that. And so even if you don't know anything about it, it's a virtue signal that I'm in that team. And, you know, okay, fine. We're all on teams. That's fine. Defend your team. But, you know, what I try to do in the book is disentangle the specific issues.

Let's just take them one by one. Like why can't I be personally against abortion? I don't want to do that. And I recognize, say, Ben Shapiro's arguments for the rights of the fetus. But I also think we have conflicting moral values there, the rights of a woman and the history of the way women have been treated. And men have always tried to lord it over women's reproductive choices historically. And this has always led to bad things like infanticide and back alley abortions and so on. So I got to err on one side or the

other. You know, I recognize and acknowledge your arguments are really good, Ben, or whoever is a pro-lifer, but I still hold this position. I think there's a lot of progress that can be made socially to kind of reduce the tension when you say, I acknowledge your position, I understand it, you know, steelmanning the argument. And then the person on the other side feels like, well, at least this guy's listening to me. Yeah. Well, I think that is the best topic when it comes to that, because when get to – particularly when you get to late-term abortions, boy, that's a very hard thing to defend morally and ethically. And it's also – one of the things about the abortion topic is that it's so uniquely human in that it's such a messy topic. It's not – there's not like, here's a clear one.

Don't murder people, right? Don't just go up to people and murder. And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, that's clean. That's a clean subject. Abortion is not that clean. Like, when is it okay? Is it okay when the fetus is not a fetus, when it's just a bundle of cells? Most people are like, yeah it's not it's not really

anything then well it will become a person though when when do we decide well that's such a messy subject and it's such a human subject and i like you i am on the side of pro-choice and i think that it is the woman's choice to decide whether or not she wants to keep the baby. But I also recognize that at a certain point in time, that choice becomes very different. The choice becomes very different when it's a six-month-old fetus. Like, what are we saying there? If you are just, I am pro-choice, period. Okay. Are you pro-choice up until the day of birth?

Like, when do you back it off? When do you back it off? And it is a subject that people do not want to breach. They don't want to touch it. And particularly people on the left, when it comes to deciding when it's okay and when it's not okay, because they feel like this is angling towards an elimination of a woman's right to choose. And it angles towards this very difficult conversation where you recognize that there is a difference between someone who's seven months pregnant and someone who's seven days pregnant. There's a very, very big difference.

And if we can't acknowledge that, then we're being tribal. We're being ideologically driven. sticking to our position because we feel like if we concede that this is a complex issue, then we open up the door to possibly losing a woman's right to choose and losing these reproductive rights. Yeah, I think part of the problem also is that we tend to dichotomize most moral issues as right or wrong, good or evil. And the problem is that the law has to draw the line somewhere. We have to have a law to get along and so forth. So we have to say the drinking age is this instead of that, or the driving age is this. The point at which you can have abortion is right here.

But most of life is much more on a spectrum, a continuum. So here I make the distinction in the book between binary thinking and continuous thinking. Most moral issues are on a continuum, here i make the distinction in the book between binary thinking and continuous thinking most moral issues are on a continuum you know like immigration you know it's like close the borders what don't let anybody in ever well no no we gotta let some in okay then we should open the borders you mean you want to just open the borders up and let everybody in no no no i'm not saying everybody okay where do you draw the line? It's another messy human subject. Yeah, yeah. But if you think of it like, well, it's a continuum instead of a binary choice. And whatever answer, it's not just right or wrong, good or evil.

There's different places to set the dial. And here, the comparative method of looking at what different countries do as experiments, thinking of those as experiments. Like Japan has a very tight – they've slid it way down here. They let almost nobody in. Australia is a little looser but tighter than us and so on. And you can kind of look at the consequences of letting this many people in or that many people and see what it does. Of course, all countries are different. Some are more diverse.

Some are more homogeneous. You have to account for that and on and on. So here, I think, you know, instead of thinking of it in these kind of polarized black and white, you know, it's either this or that. And if you're on this side, then you're on the bad side. You know, that's not helpful. So instead of binary thinking, continuous thinking, abortion, certainly you just articulated it perfectly. I i mean seven days oh come on you know it's it's just a bundle of cells but now it looks like you know by 20 weeks or so feel pain you know the some consciousness comes online you know around 24 weeks 25 weeks you know at some point you got to draw the line somewhere around there now scientists of course they don't

want to put lines anywhere it's a it's a day by week, day by day, even hour by hour, the development of the connectome that creates thought and so on. There's no good place, but we have to have a line somewhere. So the law has to do that. But that then forces us into that binary thinking, which is not helpful. And it creates this, this is like the line in the sand, this polarization line between these two sides. And I think that so much of what people subscribe to when they do choose an ideology, once they choose an ideology, they have this conglomeration of ideas that they adopt. And they adopt in order to be accepted by the tribe. And this is also a very unique aspect of human communication and civilization, that we have to adhere to the principles and the ideologies of that tribe. So you just take on all these thoughts.

And it's one of the real problems with only having two choices in this country when it comes to politics and when it comes to just styles of life, you know. And there's so many people that take great relish in switching teams too, which is interesting, right? It's like, I was a liberal my whole life. And then one day I woke up and realized I was being a moron, you know, and now I'm a pro second amendment, pro Trump, MAGA, make America great, keep America great. It's interesting because those are sometimes the most the most passionate supporters of the new side, whether they're they're newly liberal or newly conservative or, you know, some of the people that are the most interesting to talk to are people that used being a fool, and like, oh my God. It's the same thing. It's with almost every style of living, you can find a contrary style that people find appealing.

There's people that used to be atheists that become Muslims, and they wear the hijab, and they fully adhere to the Quran. It's really, really interesting. Because I've spent a lot of time watching religious scholars online talk. And watching them preach. And as a person who's very agnostic, when I watch that, it's appealing to me. There's a certain aspect of the confidence that they have when they're talking about what God wants or what Allah has in store for you when you die or what you should do because it's written in this particular religious text. The confidence that they have when they describe these things is very alluring, even to me. things is very alluring, even to me. It's not like I'm going to join, but I'm sitting there in front of my computer and I'm recognizing, oh, I see the appeal here. Like, it's not that it's working on me, but it's attractive to me. I see it. I see how this works on people. And I find it incredibly fascinating. And I think it has to have some sort of an evolutionary reason. There's some sort of an evolutionary benefit that adhering and being accepting of the morals and the ethics and the ideology of the tribe, that's how you stay alive. That's how you find other like-minded people that stick with you.

how you find other like-minded people that stick with you yeah i'm glad you do that because that's really the only way to figure out why people believe whatever it is they believe yeah you know so monitor your blood pressure when i say this see it from hitler's perspective what well he had a perspective you know well his perspective was fueled by meth and testosterone shots and you shots and cocaine. His Dr. Morell probably fucked him up pretty good. Oh, my God. I mean, the stories of Hitler and Hitler's use of recreational drugs in order to fuel his escapades. Yeah, there was that book about that a couple years ago.

I like that. But just in general, I mean, a good Hitler biography like by Ian Kershaw, the definitive biography, it's two massive volumes, each are like 600 pages long. I mean, it really gives you insight what he was thinking, why he did what he did, why the people responded the way they did, and so on. But we should be able to do that without somebody saying, how can you take Hitler's perspective? Because I just want to understand why evil happens. I mean, my friend and colleague Roy Baumeister wrote that great book on evil, in which he actually went and interviewed serial killers and rapists in prison and said, you know, why'd you do it? And, you

know, he discovered that they all had this perspective, like, well, this is why I did it. I had a crappy childhood, or, you know, I felt that, you know, that it was totally justified, I had a crappy childhood or I felt that it was totally justified. That guy dissed me or she cheated on me. They all had justifications. And it was kind of interesting to see the rationalizations behind their arguments. Now, from the victim's perspective, the perpetrator is just pure evil. He did it because he enjoys the suffering of other people.

Now, there are some psychopaths or sadists that do that, but they're very small in number, very tiny percentage of the population. Most people in prison that are killers, they did it for moralistic reasons. You know, he took my parking spot, so I, you know, we got in a fight and then I killed him. Or, you know, this guy slept with my girlfriend, and so I had to do something and defend my honor, and one thing led to another, and here I am in prison. They almost all have good moralistic reasoning. So the problem is not that we don't have enough morality. Actually, we have too much morality, too much moralizing about other people that are harming us. So back to the free speech issue, the moment you say we're going to create a category called hate speech. Okay, what goes in that bin?

Right. Well, you know, so I document in the opening page that this really begins in the United States in 1919 with the Schenck versus the United States decision by the United States Supreme Court to uphold this conviction of this guy named Schenck, who was head of the Socialist Party in Philadelphia in 1918, he was distributing flyers to draft age men telling them that the conscription is equivalent of slavery because the 14th Amendment protects your right to bodily autonomy. And when the government says, we're drafting you into the military and we're sending you to Europe, this case for the European Great War, you know, we now own your body for the next four years. Okay, so this is what, and so here's the famous lines from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Schenck versus the United States, that we're all familiar with. The most stringent protection of free speech

would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic the question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that congress has a right right to prevent it is a question of proximity and degree so clear and present danger okay so we you you might say okay so somebody incites uh a group to riot and cause violence or something like that so that's going to be called hate speech but but but note what what he considered at the time a clear and present danger protesters of the draft and their argument their argument is pretty reasonable you pretty reasonable. You can disagree with it and say, no, I think in times of national crisis, we have to abolish, set aside the 14th Amendment

and conscript young men into the army and send them off to war to potentially die. That's our right to do it to protect our nation. But we should be able to debate that. But the moment that happened in 1919, then category creep or category expansion happened where more and more things got put into the bin of clear and present danger. So you're now doing something that I consider to be a clear and present danger, a threat to our nation, our state or our community or whatever. So that category just got bigger and bigger. And then so back to why liberals used to defend free speech and now it's more conservatives doing it and liberals are in favor of censorship begins with this idea of something like in the 60s where we began to become sensitive to the words we use to describe other people.

So the N-word to describe African-Americans, obviously, the one we'd all agree with. Yeah, that's bad. We shouldn't do that. Okay, what about the C-word to describe women or called Jews kikes or Vietnamese call them gooks or whatever? Yeah, yeah, those are all hate speech. So the bin starts getting larger and larger. Then all of a sudden you end up with these lists of microaggressions. I reprint one in the book from UCLA, the entire University of California system in 2014 issued this long list of things you can't say, like, where are you from? Or, wow, you're good at math, to someone who's not Asian. Or, wow, you speak English so well.

These are now considered hate speech, that they could trigger people's feelings of being hurt. And that is a form of clear and present danger to the sort of serenity of our community. And all of a sudden, this category is now huge. Is where are you from really on that list? Yeah, it is. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

My wife gets this all the time because she's from Germany and she speaks perfect English. She has no accent. And people go, wow, I can't believe you speak English so well. Or, wow, I can't believe you're not from America or something like that. And instead of being offended, she just says, thank you. I paid attention in school. But it's just bizarre that where are you from would be considered a microaggression. It's just we can't make things so sensitive. And this is one of the things that I hope comes out of this horrible tragedy that we're experiencing,

is that people realize what actually is important. And we spend much less time concentrating on stuff that's not really important because there's no real problems you know the the one of the problems with society being so good and and this is arguably the best time ever in human history and pinker points to that with statistics and gets criticized like harshly criticized by people on the left that say no it's it's not. It's the best time for white men. And then they'll start going crazy about all the things that are wrong in the world. And he's saying like, yeah, no one's denying the things that are wrong in the world. There's always been things wrong in the world. There are less things wrong in the world today than ever before. And

one of the reasons why people can get upset about these things that many people consider to be not that significant, like asking someone, where are you from? It's because there's no war. There's no real thing on our beaches. There's no real horrible tragedy that's taking place every day in our communities. I had a friend, my friend Shuki was from Israel and I went over his house and they would be playing bongos and laughing and dancing and singing. And I'm like, I go, why are Israelis that come to America? Like, why are you guys so fun? Like, it's so, they like laughing and singing. And he goes, you know, in his crazy accent, he was like, hey, where I'm from, he goes, you could die any day. He goes, so when you're alive, it's party, party, party.

And that was his take on things. He just wanted a party. You know, he was a really fun, loving guy because he'd experienced some tragedy and because he'd experienced this horrific condition in the Middle East. Whereas here in America, when things get better, we find more shit that's not that important to complain about. I think in a way it's a sign of moral progress in as much as it used to be people would protest really horrific inequalities and prejudices and bigotry against african-americans and so on well we've improved so much on that and i and i wish the left would take more credit for that because the liberals were drivers of the civil rights movement

so when they now say you know things are as bad as they've ever been or worse than they've ever been for for african-americans and so on they In a way, they're saying, you know, our immediate ancestors who supported these civil liberties, they had no effect at all. Martin Luther King, he didn't do anything because, look, things are just as bad as they were in King's time. That's kind of conceding that there's been no progress and therefore there's no point in trying. Well, it's also this is statistically foolish

because it's inaccurate you know i mean but we should reinforce the positive rather of course yes right right so but when you see like a campus eruption at yale over you know the halloween costumes business with nicholas christakis um you know i mean that you know we all looked at that and went oh my god this is ridiculous but in a way it's a sign of progress like students in the 60s used to you know protest the vietnam war or you know the way blacks were treated in the south those are you know those are really legitimate things to complain about and protest about but there there aren't as many of those around anymore for students to get all riled up about and they still have those moral impulses

like i want to promote what's right and i want to against evil, and I'm all fired up here with my moral module dialed up to 11, and I'm going to go out on the streets. What am I going to protest? Those Halloween costumes. You know, people, that's cultural appropriation, and so on. Remember, there was a, I tell the story in a book about this Taco Tuesday at Cal State Fullerton. I was invited to give a speech there years ago about protecting free speech over this issue that caused the campus to just erupt in protest about Taco Tuesday. It's like Taco Tuesday. Yeah, that's cultural appropriation. The Mexican community is being appropriated by these whites eating tacos.

We're in Southern California. Where is there no tacos? I mean this is – this is our food. is being appropriated by these whites eating tacos. Like, we're in Southern California. Where is there no tacos? I mean, this is our food. You know the guy who tried to patent Taco Tuesday? LeBron James. LeBron James. Didn't he, Jamie?

Isn't that what happened? Yeah, he talks about Taco Tuesday on his Instagram. I was on his Instagram, and he's like, you know what today is? And then he shows his talk taco Tuesday, you know, like, okay, what is he allowed to do it? I mean, the whole thing is preposterous. It's delicious food. You know, it's not like we're saying that, you know, white people created it or anything like that. I mean, and cultural appropriation is so ridiculous in so many ways, but one of the most ridiculous ways it is, is that it prevents people from enjoying some amazing aspects of the diverse

cultures that we all coexist with, especially here in America. I mean, this is such a legitimate melting pot. I think it's amazing that you can go to all these different places and that, you know, there's a guy, I'm trying to remember his name. Rick Bayless, I believe his name is. And he's a famous Mexican chef. But he's not Mexican. But he cooks Mexican food. And he loves Mexican cuisine.

He takes all these trips to Mexico to learn with the Mexican masters. And he has a famous restaurant in Chicago where he has a full, authentic Mexican menu. And people are furious at him because here he is, this white guy, selling Mexican food. Like, what do you expect him to do? Like, do you have to be born in a certain patch of dirt to enjoy a style of food? And don't you think that he is actually boosting the signal and letting people know that there's some amazing things that come out of Mexico? This is an homage to Mexican cuisine. He's not trying to claim it. You know, hey, this was invented in Chicago.

You know, this is not really Mexican. No, he's saying this is from Mexico. He talks openly about the various parts of the country of Mexico where this style of cooking came from and how it emanates from the traditional ingredients. And he cooks them in traditional ways. And it's fantastic, like really widely praised restaurant with amazing food. And this guy gets shit on for it. It's crazy. There's none of these perverse reversals because it used to be like in the 19th century, It's crazy. no, no, no, all cultures are equal, and culture is a whole blend of different migrations and people mixing,

and that's what makes culture rich. It's fluid and changing and so on. And now, all of a sudden, liberals are saying, no, no, there's a pure, correct culture that only the people born there can adopt those cultural features. That's the complete opposite of what liberals used to argue. Starting with anthropologists saying, no, no, no, this crazy idea that whites have, whites supremacists have, and if you are a European culture, it's a bunch of nonsense. Europeans are just as amalgamated with lots of different cultures as anybody else. There is no real European culture. Yeah, it's a weird time.

And again, I connect this to the fact that we didn't have as many real problems as we used to. And when you talk about Yale with Nick Christakis, I think there's this thing that kids do when they're coming of age. They're separated from their parents, and they want to establish that so many of these older people were wrong about the way life is. And they're wrong, and we're going to show them what's right. And we have a new way of living. We have a new way of thinking and we want this campus to be safe. We want safe spaces. And a lot of it is about taking control of their environment and enforcing their ideology and creating something that's in a lot of ways is very ego driven because they're trying to show that they're making a change in the environment around them. And they have good intentions while they're doing

it. It's just their brains haven't fully formed yet and they don't have a lot of life experience. And this pattern shows itself over and over and over again. It's a constantly repeating pattern where these kids go into college and become self-righteous and then try to impose their viewpoints on the older people. It's very, very common. And it has these psychological building blocks to it that you can kind of see why they're doing this. Yeah. I mean, if you want a safe space, go to a college campus. These are about the safest environment you could be in in all of America, which itself is safer than it's ever been. At Chapman University, we have a safe space group.

And so I went to one of their meetings once just to see what it was all about. This is mostly LGBTQ people that, you know, were kind of concerned about being insulted or assaulted. about being insulted or assaulted. And so anyway, so I said, well, how many incidences have there been on this very white, very pleasant campus here in Orange County? Well, we don't have any numbers because we're not allowed to ask and keep track of how many incidences there are. Now, the police can do this, but this safe space group or the administration can't do that.

So well, then how do you know it's worse than it was, say, five years ago or it's the same or it's better? Well, we don't know. And then I said, OK, give me some examples. What are we talking about here? What's the issues? And like one of them was, for example, a gay couple where I think it was two guys walking along a sidewalk. And now Chapman's is in the middle of the city of Orange. So it's ringed with houses and just the regular city.

So some guy in a pickup truck drove by and said something like fucking faggots. And I said, OK, yeah, that guy's a dick. He's an asshole. So what are you going to do now? I mean, are you going to give the power to that guy in the pickup truck in which now you see yourself as a victim? Now, technically, yeah, you as a victim now technically yeah you're a victim of a sort of a hate crime or whatever you know he said something nasty but then what you know why not just say fuck off asshole or don't say anything or just ignore it and just move on with your life because there will always be assholes yeah there are there are fewer assholes than there used to be as i like to say conservatives are more liberal now than liberals were in the

1950s. We've all had our consciousness raised. The moral sphere has expanded and so on. That's a very good point, the way you just said that. Conservatives are more liberal today than liberals were in the 1950s. Socially, just think about that. I mean, it used to be where even most liberals were against gay marriage, say, for example, until 2011. Really, the switch began, and then 2015, it changed completely with the Supreme Court decision.

But if you look at interracial marriage, that was illegal until 1967, and pretty much most Americans, including liberals, were against it. Now, conservatives are all in—no one objects to interracial marriage by conservatives. They've all shifted in that liberal direction. And I think the gay marriage thing, I think that's pretty much fallen off the radar of anybody's discussions after the Kate Baker incident in Colorado. I think nobody's really talking about that anymore. Gay marriage, it's like the Seinfeld episode. Yeah, whatever, dude, who cares? I mean, not that there's anything wrong with that. It's become's become kind of just a seinfeld level joke now um and i think pollsters won't even ask that question anymore you know are you in favor or against gay marriage uh in a couple

more years it'll just fall off our social radar well not totally though remember when pete buddha judge was uh running for president before he had dropped out there was this one woman that found out that he was married to a man and she tried to take back her vote oh no I didn't hear about oh it's a crazy video it's a crazy video to watch this this you know I pity her that first of all I pity her that she cares that she she cares and that she's developed this ideology or she's been subjected to this ideology that she thinks there's something wrong with two gay people that are married. But she was like, no way. I am not. There's no way. And she was trying to take her vote back.

She didn't know. She's like, I didn't know he was gay. And she was upset by it. Yeah. They're out there. They're out there. There's a few of them out there i would say this would be in my category of there's always going to be a few assholes driving around in their pickup truck saying fucking vegas and you know what do you do about it again just you know you can't give those kind of people that power over you well this i feel pity for them it's it's

sad it's sad that someone would care it really is sad that you would care about someone's sexual preference or any of those things right and as a comedian it's it's a real pain in the ass because you can't even make fun of gay people you can't make fun of anything that gay people do that's legitimately funny because it'd be considered hateful but all all people are funny like people are funny and you should be able to make fun of all of us we're all we're so silly we're the weirdest thing on this planet is as far as i can see in terms of like how complex we are and how silly and some gay people are funny they do they do funny things but if you make fun of them it's a it's in our world today. It's considered homophobic. I just think that's – it's so crazy coming from a person who's not even remotely homophobic.

I've been called homophobic because I've made fun of certain things that gay people do that I think are silly. Again, a perverse reversal the way it used to be. Liberals were always in favor of comedians poking at the power structure and the prejudices of our time. Well, the thing is, it's punching down now. The idea is that you're punching down on people that are maligned and, you know, people that are, they find themselves in a position in society where many people on the left consider them a protected class. But my position is we're all okay.

Everyone's fine. But we all have our own idiosyncrasies and our own behavior patterns and our old things that are pretty fucking funny. There's a lot of humor to it. But with love, that all of this is with love, that even making fun of Boys Town and how raucous it is on a Saturday night, it doesn't mean you hate gay people. It's an observation.

I mean, it's a fucking fantastic place to be if you're a young gay guy looking to get laid. But it's a hilarious place to be if you're a straight person driving through. It doesn't mean you hate anyone. And the problem is that those people, like the guy in the pickup truck yelling the slurs to make people feel bad, those people still exist. That's the problem is that those people, like the guy in the pickup truck yelling the slurs to make people feel bad, those people still exist. That's the problem. Yeah. But my point is not as many.

Not as many. Much better. Much better. Yeah. And the denial of that, it seems silly. Yeah, exactly. Because it denies that we made moral progress. That people like Dr. King and the other civil rights leaders didn't have any effect.

And that's not, first of all, it's wrong. They did have an effect. We've made a lot of progress. But also, the effect I worry about is that it's going to tell younger people today, don't bother trying because nothing ever changes. Right. Yeah, there's definitely some of that. You know, it would be great if all of the hate went away. It would be great if all of the hate went away. It would be great if there was no prejudice, no racism, no sexism, no homophobia, none of those things. But one of the things about when you see someone acting foolish in a way that is discriminatory, one of the things about it is you recognize that this is a pattern of behavior that human beings can fall into. And it's some of the worst aspects of tribal behavior. And recognizing the folly of others

is very beneficial to your own personal growth. You can realize how, if you're there, when you see someone yell out a hateful slur to a gay couple, you can, it's terrible that it happens, but you can experience how stupid that person has to be and how sad it is that those people exist and recognize that, oh, okay, this is what it's like to be these people. This is what it's like. And this, it's like when you see people making mistakes and doing terrible things and doing dumb things, the good thing about it is you can learn from other people's foolish thoughts. Yeah, well, research shows that when you know somebody, say, who's gay, you're less likely to be homophobic, just the exposure to them. And so part of the effect of the cause of moral

progress is this bottom up. Now, sometimes you have to pass laws to get people to change, like to abolish slavery in the United States. We needed a war and 750,000 people died about that. And, you know, sometimes you have to send in the federal troops, like I think it was Eisenhower did that to desegregate Alabama schools that were segregated. And you remember the governor said, you know, segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. And I forget who was president at the time. He said, no, you're segregating and we're sending the, you're integrating your schools and we're sending in federal troops, men with guns to make sure you do it. Okay. Sometimes you have to do that. But most of the change happens from the bottom up of just oppressed peoples saying, you know what? Stop

that. Don't do that. I don't like it when you say that, you know, and it began with the N word and just kept expanding. So there's a logic to where we ended up today, where you have this big bin of, you know, microaggressions and so on. But there was a logic to it, like just saying, it's hurtful to do that. And most of the effects have been good. They've been positive. Just, you know, when Ellen comes out on her TV show, that's just a little thing there. Or when South Park, you know, makes fun of all different religions, you know, that gets perspective on things. Humor is good. Television scripts, movie scripts, the way characters talk. Richard Dawkins makes this

point about you could pinpoint to the decade when a novel was written based on the words that are used to describe Jews, blacks, and women. But no one said, okay, we're going to pass laws to say you can't use these words to describe Jews, blacks, and women. We all just change the way we talk about other people in a way that's more liberal, that's more all-encompassing, that's more egalitarian in that sense. And it's not clear how exactly that happened, just incrementally, little bit by bit. It's like trying to figure out when a word started to be used. It's really hard. 9-11 or gays. I remember in the late 90s, there was a couple of atheists that wanted to quit using the word atheists and call us the brights. We are the brights.

Thank God that didn't stick. Yeah, it was pretty obvious what the, you know, what the antonym to the brights were. The people that believe in God, they're the dims. Right. Okay, so the dims are not going to be fond of that. Yeah, oh my God. So that never took off. By trying to change language by fiat from the top down,

okay, here's the new rule, we're all going to use this word. That doesn't work. It's just expanding our consciousness, expanding the moral sphere, just including more people in your honorary circle of friends and family members or honorary family members or people that you will treat with respect, that has been happening just tiny bits every day, a little bit here and there. And over the decades, you see it when you look back at the numbers like Steve Binker does.

But it's hard to pinpoint the day that that happened. Do you know who Daryl davis is yes the la sheriff right no no no no uh no he is uh this man right here he's a a blues musician and he has uh yeah he's converted over 200 kkk members and naz. That guy, yes. He's amazing. I talked to him on the podcast. He's an amazing guy. It all came from him doing a show and talking to a guy

who said, I've never had a drink with a black man before. He's like, how is that possible? The guy said, I'm in the KKK. He thought the guy was joking. Then the guy pulls out his card. Then he's like what and so he tells this guy hey here's my phone number um uh when i'm in town again i'll be in town again let's sit down and have a conversation so the guy comes to see him again when he's in town he strikes up a friendship with this guy and four months later this guy hands him his robe and he says,

I'm leaving. I'm leaving. And this guy was like a grand wizard of the KKK. He said, I'm stepping down. And he's had that effect on 200 people and done it on a person to person basis. Cause he's such, first of all, he's an incredibly articulate guy. He's very intelligent and probably more articulate and intelligent to the people that he's talking to who consider themselves superior so they talked to him over a long period of time and they realized like this guy is so well read and he's so fucking smart like i'm dumber than him and i'm a white guy what is wrong so they eventually wind up giving up on their racism and they're friends with him now and they it was more important to them to be

friends with him and to continue their friendship with him than it was for them to stay in the kkk and he's had you know these guys who are like henchmen for the kkk quit give it up and become his friend and he he brought in all these robes that these guys have given him, including Nazi flags that they gave him and the bands they wear around their sleeves and Nazi uniforms. And it's amazing. But it's that one-on-one thing that you were talking about. You're less likely to be homophobic if you know a gay person and you like them. You're like, well, that's crazy. They're just people. You're less likely to be racist if you know a gay person and you like them you're like well that's crazy they're just people you're less likely to be racist if you're around black people and you meet them and you you get to know them and you're like well we'll just we're just people we're just people who look

different that's it right that's it that's right isn't that that movie kk clan or uh what the spike lee movie isn't it about this guy davis oh i, I don't know. I was trying to remember. I don't think so. Or maybe it was somebody else. Yeah, I don't think so. Maybe it was a different example. Yeah, I don't think there's a movie made about him. I mean, there should be.

He's just doing it like old school, door to door. I mean, he's really doing it. You know, what is that term when someone does it from the bottom up? I mean, that's really what he's doing. Grassroots? Yeah, grassroots. Thank you. That's really what he's doing, like grassroots converting people that were racist to realize the error of their ways.

There is some evidence, still preliminary, that reading novels makes you better at mind reading. That is, reading the minds of other people. What's called theory of mind. That is, you can put yourself in somebody else's shoes and see the world through their eyes. And the idea is that by reading novels, you transport your point of view into the character that you're identifying with in the novel, and then you see the world through their eyes. And so the way this is tested is they measure the kinds of things that people read, or they actually have them read passages, like from a Jane Austen novel. And then they take this eye test, this test where you look at just a block of eyes, like I would show you a picture

of just this, where you can kind of see the way the corner of my eyes is squinting or not or whatever, what the emotions are. And they have like six different emotions. And then you have to guess what the emotion is of this picture you're looking at. They have hundreds of them you go through. And anyway, the correlation was that people that read a lot of novels or that kind of fiction that has that interchangeable perspective are better at mind reading. They're better at reading emotions in the eyes. Anyway, a lot of this hasn't been replicated yet, but it's kind of new.

But still the idea is that the rise of the novel since the Enlightenment in which just common people become more literate, and literacy rates were going up over the centuries. It used to be like 10% of the population was literate. Now it's, you know, 99%, whatever. So there's a curve going up there. So as people start reading more and then they start reading novels, uh, they start taking the perspective of others. So, you know, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin was the first time most whites had ever read anything about what it was like to be a slave and they were horrified like oh my god i had no idea that this is what it's like and abraham lincoln famously

said when he met her so you're the little woman that started this great war you know in a in a way that that's right because you know a lot of people's i've never met a black i have no idea what a slave even is if you're in the north now i see why this is so abhorrent right and uh you know back to to this idea of hate speech the again once you go down that road this is the argument i i make in the book is that in the 1850s there were southern congressmen who fought against northern abolitionists coming down to give speeches in the South or publish articles in newspapers in the South or get books published and distributed in the South that were pro-abolitionists. Their argument was, this could lead to slave revolts and riots and violence,

therefore we have to silence that. They didn't use the word hate speech, but that's what today it would be called. Abolitionist speech to abolish slavery is hate speech? That's insane, right? And the same thing in the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s, there were people in the South that said, you know, when Malcolm X comes down here or Martin Luther King comes down here and they give a speech, this is not good. This is, to use the Supreme Court Justice's words, a clear and present danger to the peaceful nature of our society. We have to silence them.

Yeah, that's a similar conversation I had with a friend who's very progressive. There was a thing that was going on for a while where people were saying, punch Nazis. And what I think they were really saying is they were sort of, And what I think they were really saying is they were sort of they were proclaiming their connection to this progressive ideology, proclaiming it so much so that, hey, man, I'm willing to fucking draw blood. I'm willing to punch Nazis. And so I was saying that this is a dangerous thing. And they said, well, why do you think it's dangerous? And they said, well, why do you think it's dangerous? I said, well, first of all, what if they punch you back? Then you've got a real fucking problem. You're espousing violence.

That's always a bad idea. And second of all, I've heard a lot of people called Nazis that I don't think are really Nazis. Like Ben Shapiro. He's Jewish. And I've seen people call him Nazis. I've seen it written. I'm like, who's... He's wearing a yarmulke yes and people people still call him a nazi so the point is like who is to decide who is a nazi if you're saying like there's a guy and he's he's running the gas chamber at a concentration camp and he's he's relishing the fact that he's gonna put these jews to death

that's a nazi yeah, punch that guy. Okay, yeah. But that's not what you're talking about. You're using this word in this very sort of flippant way. And it becomes very dangerous to just say punch Nazis because you're just deciding people are Nazis who are definitely not Nazis. And a lot of them are actually jewish which is patently insane i think that meme started after somebody punched richard spencer on the sidewalk he was out giving one of his little uh white supremacist speech and somebody

punched him now i have to admit you know people like richard spencer jared taylor you know these are just assholes and you know there's videos of them taunting African-Americans that are out singing, you know, We Shall Overcome. And these guys are there laughing at them and kind of up in their faces. You know, and emotionally, I feel like I would just like to punch that motherfucker because that is wrong. But this is why we can't go down that road, because the whole point of a civilized society is we can't just have people punching each other. What we need to do is put that guy on a vacation with Daryl Davis. That's right. Really?

Make him so he can't go anywhere. He's got to hang out with Daryl for many days at a time. And by the end of it, hopefully he would get it. Hopefully he's not so, as we were talking about earlier, he's not so connected with those ideas that those ideas are him. We've got to be, as a society, more flexible in the way we hang on to ideas. And I think that's something that needs to be taught to people because there's sort of a built-in reaction that we have to defend our ideas. And when you're young and you're learning how to debate things and you're learning how to argue

things, the sting of losing is very personal. And so you sort of built in these, people build in these defense mechanisms into their personality, into their vernacular, into the way they communicate, where you do think of your ideas as a part of you. But if you really care about you, you should care about objective truth, and you should care about recognizing when an idea that you're holding on to sucks. If you are valuable, if you care about yourself you should recognize when an idea that you're you're clinging to is not a good one yeah yeah there was that documentary film about white supremacists by that um muslim woman i forget the name of the film and her name i'm sorry but um she's basically hanging out with um i think it was richard spencer, Jared Taylor, and a few of the others, particularly after Charlottesville. And they're talking to her. You could tell they really like

her. First of all, she's an attractive woman. So you see these guys are like, oh boy, this attractive woman's paying attention to me. And so she's very disarming in this way. And she says, well, just tell me what you believe. So they articulate all their beliefs about why brown people are inferior to white people and so on. And she's like, you know, I'm brown. They're like, oh, this doesn't apply to you. Oh, I see. OK, why not? Well, because, you know, I know you like.

Right. Yeah, I think there was a line in there where he said, well, I know you. So these things don't apply to you. It's like, right. OK, therein lies the problem. We just don't know these other people. Okay, so we stereotype them, and that's part of our cognition, stereotyping. It's a perfectly normal thing.

We stereotype all kinds of things. We put them into bins, cognitive bins, so we can keep track of them and distinguish them from others. Unfortunately, we do that with people. and distinguish them from others. Unfortunately, we do that with people. Yeah, and it's a normal thing that people have done since the beginning of time to sort of recognize who's in your tribe and who's not. Back when we were these little groups of 50 people and we'd get invaded by another group of 50 people,

and you had to be loyal to your group. Yeah. My friend Jared Diamond tells a story of, you know, he goes to Papua new guinea every year to to go birding and then now he's been doing anthropology work as well but back in the day he said they would go out birding and he'd have one of his papua new guinean hunter gatherers with him on some hiking trail somewhere and they're got their binoculars and so on and they encounter some stranger from another tribe and jared's like hey let's go talk to that guy

and his buddy is like are you out of your mind we could be killed we don't know who that guy is and in Papua New Guinea you might be eaten as well that's right not just killed so uh you know but but the point of Jared's story is that that's the environment in which we evolved there's a there's a kind of a logic to xenophobia like other people are dangerous. You know, like my favorite line from A Few Good Men, where Jack Nicholson is schooling the Tom Cruise character, you know, about, you know, you can't handle the truth. What's the truth? The truth is, we live in a world with walls, and on those walls are men with guns. And you want me

on that wall. You need me on that wall. And when you're at parties, enjoying your freedom, I'm on the wall, right? And I remember seeing that thing and, yeah, that's actually true. That's a very good description of the way we evolved. It's a very walled-up tribal environment that we evolved these moral emotions. So there's a logic to xenophobia that we've been pushing back against by saying, okay, let's increase our sphere of who we count as a member of our tribe. We've been getting better at that, but we're pushing back against those natural impulses. Like, it's a little risky to do that. We have to be careful about that.

So autocrats tend to jump on that and go, well, you know, immigrants are dangerous people, or brown people are dangerous, or white supremacists do that. And so that's a long history we're pushing back against. Well, these ideologies that people subscribe to, I saw a lot of them evaporate when this lockdown took place because a lot of my friends that are anti-gun were asking me how to

get a gun like what do you do how do you get a gun but you want a gun my wife says i should get a gun a friend of mine who says his wife is always like you're never getting a gun do you we're not having a gun in this house the moment the shit hit, she goes, we got to get a gun. And he was laughing. He's like, she told me to get a gun. You believe this? And he grew up in the South, so he's used to being around guns. But this is when people realize there's a reason why people are preppers.

Some of them are insane. Yeah, but it's also, hey, if the fucking grid goes down, there's no power, you should have at least a certain amount of food to sustain you for a little while. It's a good idea. It's a good idea to have a method of filtrating water. It's a good idea. of questions from people on how do you get into hunting? How do you get into hunting? It's a complex question. It's a long road. It's not an easy thing to learn how to hunt, but from people that never had any interest in it before, but now they realize like, hey, I went to the grocery store today and there's no fucking meat. I want meat. What do I do for food? Oh, there's animals roaming around. That's what, okay, how do you get these animals? Like, what are you doing? And it's, you know, you realize why people hold on to certain beliefs that some people find distasteful.

Yeah, there's a certain logic to hoarding. Even if no one wants to do it, again, it's like this pluralistic ignorance problem. Everybody thinks that everybody else wants to do this, but of course they want to do that. The solution is you just put limits. It's like hunting licenses and you have a limit to how many you can shoot and so on. And lots of industries have adopted that to solve the tragedy of the commons problem. My local Vaughn solved it by saying you can only buy one packet of toilet paper per shopper per day. That's it. And I think everybody was kind of glad about that.

Like, okay, good. Now, there's toilet paper on the shelves. I don't have to worry about hoarding. I don't have to worry about that asshole taking two and I get none. Yeah. And, you know, and really it's, even if you buy, say, well, we're just selfish creatures. Yeah, we are. That's right.

But we're all, but we also want to do the right thing. well, we're just selfish creatures. Yeah, we are. That's right. But we also want to do the right thing. But we need some kind of norms and laws and customs or whatever in place to kind of attenuate the inner demons and accentuate the better angels, and that everybody can see that. And then they feel better about like, okay, I'm just going to buy one and I'm not going to hoard or whatever. Now, you mentioned the South. There's interesting research, Richard Nisbet and his colleagues on the culture of honor that's more common in the South than in the North. And that in a culture of honor, you solve your own problems. You don't turn to authorities or the state. OK, and kind of in general, on average, also in the South, particularly in African-American communities, law enforcement and the judicial system has not been very fair. So you can't really trust them. So you do kind of have to take the law into your own hands.

Therefore, there's more guns, more gun violence in the South. There's kind of a logic to it. And that, so Nisbet did these famous experiments that are kind of amusing now, where he'd have subjects come in and fill out a form for some fake experiment they were doing. And then you have to walk down the hall and give the form to the person in that room at the end of the hall. Where in the hallway, there's like a bank of lockers or filing cabinets or something. And there's somebody working there and pulling out the door or whatever. And as the person walks by, this person working there, who's just a shill for the experiment, kind of leans back and bumps into this person and says, asshole. So the question is, what does this person do now?

So anyway, they do all follow up surveys and they drew blood and all this stuff. People from the students from the north were like, you know, whatever. I don't you know, I don't care. They would apologize to the guy that said asshole. People from the south, they're like that motherfucker called me an asshole you know and they were mad and then when they drew the blood their stress hormones were higher testosterone was higher and so anyway his theory is that the south uh that kind of democracy came late to the southern united states the rule of law uh and the idea that the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, which is how government is defined.

And therefore, Southerners had to kind of take the law into their own hands. That is to say, you know, we're going to develop a culture of honor and we're going to take care of matters ourselves. Because everybody wants justice. Everybody wants right to be done and wrong to be punished. That's normal. And if the state's not doing it, if the state says, we're going to do that, so you don't have to do it, so we're going to disarm the citizenry and we're going to take care of that through a court system and a police system and so on. But if they're not doing it or they're doing it unjustly and some communities like African-American communities are treated differently, then of course they're going to push back. So that's why there's more gun sales and more homicides in the South and in the North.

And anyway, I just thought of that when you mentioned that. It's a very interesting subject. So your book comes out when? Is it out now? Tomorrow. Comes out tomorrow. Tomorrow's officially, but you can actually order it. I just checked on Amazon this morning.

It's like, oh, it's already for sale. Okay. So tomorrow will actually be today because this is going to be released tomorrow. And it's called Give the Devil His. So that tomorrow will actually be today because this is going to be released tomorrow. So, uh, and it's called give the devil his due. Give me the devil. His due.

The devil has due. Yes. So the little, the little chess piece there is our, our, our director. The little devil there. Yeah.

Excellent. All right. Well, I always enjoy talking to you, Michael. I really appreciate you. And hopefully next time I see you, we can actually have dinner together again.

We will give you a big studio next time. That's right. All right. We'll be back to that. All right, man. Take care. Thank you. All right. Bye. Bye. Bye again. We will do. And I'll give you a big hug. We'll do it in the studio next time. That's right. All right. Hopefully we'll be back to that. All right. All right, man. Take care. Thank you. All right.

Bye. Bye-bye. Bye, everybody. Bye-bye.