Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 251: What A Fool Believes (feat. Amber Rollo and Rax King)

Episode Date: June 2, 2022

Amber Rollo (@ambercrollo) and Rax King (@RaxKingIsDead) from the podcast Low Culture Boil stop by to chat about recent developments in Whitesburg flag discourse, and then we get into a lengthy discussion about political phenotypes and how low-knowledge people need to get sent to Jupiter to get more stupider Buy Rax's book: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/669783/tacky-by-rax-king/ Support Low Culture Boil on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lowcultureboil And of course you can support us on Patreon at: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

I don't know why it tells you it's recording, but I'm glad that they... I hate her. Yeah. I hate that lady. Favorite voice. Yes. I like that they started doing that, though.

It's like, hey, no one's being recorded without their consent, as if they weren't already recording every conversation we ever had. Exactly. I mean, but there is a little thing that pops up on your screen when you're on this end

that's like, okay, I'm okay with being recorded, or leave the meeting. Those are your two options. Oh, wow. That's not consent. Wow. Goodbye. Sorry, guys.

I'm out. No. Shit. How are you guys doing? Pretty good. I'm doing good. I went and watched Top Gun by myself myself y'all ever just go to the movies like by yourself during the day yes it's the best time that's the best way to do it you

got the run of the place it's great and so i was reminded of the time because jennifer connelly's in it right and i was that why i'm seeing her everywhere right now i think so i think that's why she's like back in the consciousness and i was at a wedding one time that jennifer connelly was at bill richardson's daughter anna terrence's was her roommate in college and so she came to whitesburg for the wedding oh she did come to like she came to our small town like our tiny tiny town here all the time like you would see like these people that were just a little out of place, and you're like, oh, wait, that's the chick from Blood Diamond. I'm happy to be seeing her all over my timeline again, but it just seemed so coordinated.

I didn't understand why everybody suddenly got into Jennifer Connelly again. Tom Cruise went back and made it right is what happened. That's right. Not to spoil the flick for you, but I remember distinctly being at the Presbyterian Church in Wattsburg, and they had an open bar at that wedding, and I had to go to the bathroom, and what I did in there wasn't cute.

And I remember coming out with meat sweats and a purple mouth from drinking too much Pinot Grigio and opening the door and seeing the woman that GQ magazine once said that her eyes are one of the 50 best things about being a man, just staring at me with those eyes like, you okay, buddy? Yes, I am, Jennifer Connell. Yeah.

So, yeah, so y'all are calling in to small-town America from... What's the opposite of small-town America? We don't have, like, a sort of signifier for the city. Coastal elite. Yeah, there is coastal elite. Yeah, you're right. Or Jews. You could just call us Jews. Cut to the city. Coastal elite. Yeah, there is coastal elite. Or Jews. You could just call us Jews.

You just cut to the chase. It's only true for me, but you could say that. So, yeah, if you want to use coastal elites, that's up to you. I feel like at this point, people tried to use it ironically, but

I don't know. We need a new name, I feel like. We need a new signifier or moniker for what we call urban America, right? Something that is stand in opposition to small-town America. We have names for the individual city. We have the Big Apple versus small- individual City like we have the Big Apple

Versus Small Town America We have the Big Apple not New York They should call all Urban America the Big Apple If you're in Seattle Cincinnati baby the Big Apple But no So we have the ladies from

Low Culture Boil On the show with us today. One of you is calling in from New York, Rex. Is that correct? That's me. And one of you is calling in from the other side of the... Los Angeles. Los Angeles.

That's right. And it says Matt on my screen right now. My name is Amber Rollo. right now um my name is amber rollo uh but i had to use matt's setup today because mine keeps on like fucking up and taking out parts of my recording silencing me really uh i'm being shadow banned by my own zoom it's that built-in software that built-in silencing women software exactly so i had to put matt yeah i had to put the male version on. Yeah, that makes sense. That's very confusing for me. I don't really know who I'm talking to right now. Right, same.

Same. I don't recall having a podcast with this Matt person. Yeah, I didn't consent to be recorded alongside Matt. That's not where I'm at today. Well, then leave meeting, Rex. Leave meeting, yeah. It's time to leave meeting well in our town the past few weeks i don't know really the last month or so um downtown like main street in our small town has a telephone poles lining the sidewalk just like any small town america you

know you you in the distance there's like a mountain and there's american flags and everything and and there's america there's usually american flags all over the light posts in our downtown but about a month ago they changed them out with a different flag. Very controversial. Buckle up. Very controversial. This caused a very big controversy on local Facebook and in our local newspaper for comment sections.

The paper of record. Right. The mountain eagle of Whitesburg, Kentucky. They put these new flags in them that had a diagonal line going down it, diagonally, obviously. And on the bottom was the United States flag, as you would imagine. We're in the United States. But in the top part, they put the Ukrainian flag.

And this really, it caused a huge stir. Not everybody was on board with it. Our new mayor, she's kind of, I don't know, she's kind of liberal. I don't know how you would describe her. Not so much liberal. She just, she's like a wine mom. That's literally it. She's literally a wine mom.

She's a wine mom. Yeah, it's pretty cool. I mean, it can be kind of fun to have a wine mom as mayor. Has anybody ever had that? I don't think so She's like the day ends at three Everything's in a little curlicue font Yeah

I mean it's a kind of It's kind of like a cliche Archetype in American society But they're not really In positions of power and I think that's fucked up obviously. Well except in their MLMs I feel like they tend to get pretty high up and like selling

leggings and whatnot. Right. Like political power. That's true that's true that is the traditionally dominated by wine mom That's their sphere. That's their politics I think. Right. Or like sex cults like nexium was that a wine mom thing that was kind of i mean there were wine moms involved i watched

one of the like seven documentaries i don't know why there's so many documentaries about nexium there's a lot was that jared leto's outfit or not sexy name it's not Jared Leto's, but it's Leto-like. He's got a different sex cult, he does. His is NXIVM, but they wear all white, and also Jared Leto's involved. I do have to credit this sex cult, because as someone who suffers from heartburn, you can experience real social isolation and taboo

from having to take the common indigestion drug, Nexium. But this sex cult normalized the term so that, like, I don't have to feel embarrassed about it anymore. It's just like, Nexium? Nobody's, no. Now when you say you've got to go do some Nexium, people just think you mean sex cult activities. So it's better. You're right. You see, there is, I mean to to tie that bow together there is always that awkward situation when you're staying with a

girl for the first time and you're just laying there in bed just trying not to fart on her for like yeah or if your arm's asleep and you just don't want to move it and it's just like very very uncomfortable experience, to be honest with you. Yeah. As a fellow man, I can say that I have had that same experience as well. Ah, that's Matt. There he goes.

That's just Matt for you. Classic Matt. That's swordsman. Okay, so back to this flagpole situation yes is it i need to understand how this is set up because is it a diagonal cut out version of the american flag like it's just like part of the american flag and part of the ukrainian flag or do they have them each separately the full thing in each corner with like what like black space behind it now it's all part of one single piece of cloth but they put like it's like they cut in half like diagonally so that like the top quadrant

is the ukrainian flag and the bottom is the american flag i mean it's pretty ugly it's very ugly very very ugly that's not does not work to get the whole point of a flag is to is to fly one color like no one flies two colors on their fucking flag like the whole ever since medieval times you had your banner and one fucking thing was on it you can't put two things on

a fucking flag you could put two flags you could put two flags on one pole you could put two flags in one pole right the whole setup is very friendly to just such a situation. It's such a big pole that you have. Plenty of space you can utilize. So much real estate. Yeah.

Right. We actually had a flagpole in my front yard when I was a kid. We had like a giant American flag. Hell yeah. In our front yard. That sounds embarrassing if you're a kid just to have like a military grade flag flying in your home super embarrassing you see them like off the interstate and shit in dallas like flip like flags the size of football fields like holy

fuck and you're like what stadium is that and it's just some guy's compound. And it's just the Rallo house. My dad volunteered for us to be the polling place for our neighborhood, and we lived in a little suburb, so people would come and vote in our garage. And he was really into it. I love that. So he was like, you know what? I'm going all the way. I'm going to put a giant. It was, oh, my God, it was so big.

It was so embarrassing. And then, okay, this is a little bit dark, so I'm going all the way. I'm going to put a giant. It was, oh my God, it was so big. It was so embarrassing. And then, okay, this is a little bit dark, so I'm so sorry. But when my mom passed away, he lowered the flag to half mass. That's very sweet. It's very sweet, but it seems so. I don't think that's what that's for. It seems so. Exactly.

Right, right. It's not not what it's for, but i do feel like if there's a general coming through your house to like offer his sympathies or whatever he is gonna look askance like he he is basically saying that like your mother was of national security importance like that's how important and powerful she was in his life that's why to me it's kind of sweet it's like it is sweet it's very it's sweet there's i do feel like you're probably on a list somewhere not like the highest priority list probably right right there's a whole there's a whole website where it'll tell you if what level your flag should be at and why um if you want to and why guy died

has died uh and what level that means you're supposed to put it out when you're supposed to put it back up i learned this driving across the country because i kept on seeing flags down and i was like what who the fuck yeah i can't tell you who it was for but there's a website there's like flag code and surely our fucking flags were out of code. There's no fucking way. Oh, absolutely. I could imagine it causing quite a stir if it got into the wrong hands. If I just sent it to some group in Kansas who was really, really insane about enforcing flag code,

they're like, fuck that. My question is whose protocols which nation's protocols do you use if like but you know like if the flag hits the ground you're supposed to burn it or whatever right yeah do you defer to the ukrainians or do you go american on that oh shit great see it raises a real conundrum it raises all kinds of legal questions legal like if someone makes a diaper out of the flag what do you do right it's like that's so germane to our interest we were just talking about when larry flint made a diaper out of the american flag that's true from the podcast proud kentucky and

larry flint yeah that's right wow i didn't know that He's a hillbilly. He's from... Where's he from? I think he's from Salyersville. MacGuffin County? He's from MacGuffin County. Yeah, Salyersville. Yeah, MacGuffin. At the time that he was born, it was the poorest county in the country. That's in the hills. And continues to hold

that mantle. Still. Yeah. Named so for Brian MacGuffuffin which i learned this recently that he was so when the civil war kicked off kentucky was split on the question of secession versus staying in the union and brian mcguffin famously said we can't turn our back on our sister southern states while the state legislature said no we're going to stay in the union but we're going to keep the slavery part so they reached uh you know an accord on that and we just declared neutrality so you declared neutrality yeah kentucky just watched that's a common it's a

everybody says oh kentucky is in the union no we just kind of waited to see which who was winning the most cowardly position possible yeah the most cowardly position possible switzerlandish yeah right uh okay but the flag i'm so sorry is that sounds very ugly and also american the american flag is already one of the ugliest flags that just. Just ugliest shit to begin with. Ukraine isn't any hot shakes either, I'll say it. It's an ugly flag. At least it's symmetrical. Okay, our flag is like nonsense. What is going on in that upper left corner? Yeah, absolute postmodern bullshit.

You're right. The dumbass stars and the colors are ugly. Yeah, it is fucking bullshit. Don't care for it. Where you want to be is Barbados. Yeah. Is that a good flag? We got the goddamn Trident on there.

That's cool as hell. Oh, I like that. Pretty badass. I mean, I like the Mexican flag. That's beautiful to me. The eagle is very cool. I think, what other? I like Canada.

Canada's got a leaf. Oh my God, the Canadian flag. I like the leaf. Hell yeah. Good flag. Simple, elegant, symmetrical, beautiful I like Canada. Canada's got a leaf. Oh my God, a Canadian flag. I like the leaf. Hell yeah. Good flag. Simple, elegant, symmetrical, beautiful. Love it.

Effective. Honestly, the Maryland flag, the one that people from Maryland are so annoying about, I do get it. It's pretty cool. Is it like someone stepping on a king's neck or something? Yes. Yeah.

That is pretty tight. Virginia too. It's got the woman with her titties out stepping on the crowd. Oh, yeah, that one's cool. That's very cool. Extremely cool. Titties out Virginia. Yeah, love it.

States do that. I feel like states put graphics on their flags, whereas you don't ever see a country with a very elaborate flag like that, I don't feel like. I'd like to see that. I feel like more countries should put their coolest legends as their flag. I agree. I absolutely agree. Like the British flag should just be a photograph of King Arthur.

They're not going to do that for me. They never listen to my letters suggesting how they should handle matters of state. They never listen to my letters suggesting how they should handle matters of state. Been trying for years. Yeah. Hey, Britain, it's me again. Ten more ideas that are going to rock your shit. Just got a couple more I'm going to throw at you there.

Take them or leave them. Just stick it in a file. Yeah. throw at you there take them or leave them file yeah yeah like germany trying to make a flag would be a very awkward situation everybody's everybody's looking at him like huh so what are you gonna do national history national history 1939 nope no no no no no and then it's just like in the end it's just the mercedes logo or something that's pretty cool that's pretty great they made some nice cars germany they kind of made up for it with the other stuff but some nice cars i mean i don't know i don't know they made up for it almost they sure gave it a college try anyways. They tried so hard to undo all the goodwill of inventing the Mercedes-Benz.

I will say this about the Germans. It's not like in the South where it's like you have like Nathan Bedford Forrest Elementary School. You know what I mean? There's no Joseph Mingle of middle school floating around. You got to give them a little credit for that i love that it would be a middle school that's like the worst age of humans 10 to 13 that's a bunch of little mangalas to begin with you're right absolutely um so to round the flag story out, I just noticed yesterday that they replaced all the flags with American flags. So that means some hard conversations had to have been had, I think.

Someone had some hard conversations. And they're learning and doing better i think and trying to do better um but i mean it's such a wine mom idea to begin with to be like you know have a glass of wine what if we mash these two flags together because of togetherness like that's right it's the kind of project you come up with when you're a middle-aged lady i like it you're right you just put it on a pillow you know right right right line the street with pillows people are what the fuck no if i don't know if i i believe that some conversations were had i feel like maybe someone just quietly someone just quietly was like she forget

yeah yeah i have never known a wine mom to forget about a craft project though that's that's a misguided line of thinking if that's what happened it is it is funny because it's like i don't know y'all's familiarity with eastern k, but not really known for our Slav diaspora, you know? So, yeah. That makes sense. It was kind of an ill-fated project to begin with. But in any case. She tried.

She tried. She tried something. And honestly, like, I think in today's day and age where i get on twitter today and the first news i see is that netflix is no longer paying for so-called expensive vanity projects like the irishman and And I think that in a world that's trying to stifle creativity, someone taking a risk like that with Main Street and how our town looks, I think that deserves recognition and honor.

Yeah. That was like her, the Irishman. That was her Irishman. That was her Robert Dets and nero vanity project she had she had two hits she she came on the scene strong when she did the instagram butterfly wings on the wall she did do that yeah i didn't love it i wasn't crazy about it either but i was willing to i was willing to walk it i was okay let's see what she's got for an encore and then for the encore she hung the umbrellas umbrellas there's like these umbrellas she did this thing where she's like strung so in between our city hall and our drug court

she strung some like fishing wire i guess and hung all these umbrellas so that it looks and then and then like the umbrellas are lit umbrellas so that it looks... And then the umbrellas are lit from above, right? So that it looks like green and blue. You could take an Instagram photo there and have your meal kicking out. It's true. It's like it's a good idea, but like maybe

not in drug court. Right next to the drug court was an interesting creative choice she's like these people are gonna be high off of their balls they are gonna love my umbrella love it yeah installation uh this instagram installation okay so she's trying to bring tourism to your town she's trying to bring she's trying to bring tourism to your town. She's trying to bring tourism. The third trick she had up her sleeve was a total curveball.

I mean, you know, that was like, you know, like an author writing. That would have been like if F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote something crazy after The Great Gats, you know, out of left field. Like we're talking a curveball, right? And I applaud it she got she got like her first two like i mean you could see if you read into it these uh these like little installations you could see it being a little bit political like the angel wings were about like remembering our fallen uh fellow citizens or something and the umbrellas were about the rain coming down on on people going to drug court but the umbrellas were turned upside down which is decidedly post-modern it is post-modern to have the upside down i didn't know that i was thinking

yeah i was with amber i was like maybe what she's saying is that like you know drug court is your safe haven from the rain that's yeah and then she's like you know what they're not getting it they're not getting my political message i'm going i have to be more overt balls to the wall let's stitch some fucking flags together more explicit enough with the subtext she's going straight to the point it's hilarious there was uh our our biggest flag incident well it's not even an incident there's there's this place so we've kind of close to the virginia tennessee borders and when you cross over into tennessee there's this big flag in this guy's yard, and it has the American flag, the Israeli flag, the Confederate flag. Briefly, he had the Filipino flag up there. I don't know, pro Duterte maybe?

I don't know. Basically, it was literally a Nazi. It was a Nazi lived there who hadn't quite realized yet that they were a Nazi they were you could see them working towards it in real time they're like America the Confederacy Israel and then the Philippines

and perhaps the most fascist of all the University of Tennessee you're right that yeah that is the honestly the gateway drug for fascism university of tennessee knoxville you know when i was staying in flags maybe sorry when i was staying in uh i was staying in knoxville for like a month i was doing a writer's residency on a farm and i like went out for a walk one day and passed this guy's home and and he had a mashup flag, which was the Confederate flag mashed up with the Ethiopian flag. And I have never been more confused.

What is your viewpoint, sir? What is your stance? What are you trying to communicate to me? That's got me genuinely flummoxed. It had me flummoxed that's it had me flummoxed yeah i kept walking by like every day for the rest of my residency thinking like maybe he'll be outside and i can put my mind to rest because i i think about this every day of my life now it's it's never gonna go away it could be it could be a you know because like i don't know it could be like a sort of like middle class

you know moderately wealthy i would assume probably a pretty nice house was it a pretty nice house no no it was uh it wasn't like a shithole or anything but it there were some of the signs of like hillbilly activity like a bunch of parts out in the yard and whatnot right right right right all right yeah god that's yeah it's a puzzler well here's the thing you know how like there were like a lot of confederates that went to like paraguay and like places like that like after the war and like it seems like it would probably be uh buttheads with their mission to go to ethiopia if it was like yeah you know there's black people all over ethiopia sort of like yeah yeah i don't know if they've heard about who mostly lives in ethiopia i feel like they're not gonna like it once they get there yeah it's like oh yeah i think

uh i think it's not what you're bargaining for yeah that's it's a very different ethiopia than whatever you had in your head from the Bible or whatever. The white Bible. This was a mistake. I think this guy accidentally got the wrong flag. Egg on his face. It would be funny if that was the case. And this guy, your average Joe America, he doesn't know who lives in Ethiopia.

And he is, yes, he is an unreconstructed Confederate, hates black people, and goes to Ethiopia. And he has a great awakening. He has a spiritual rebirth and comes back to America and, you know, tries to lead the fight against civil, in the civil rights struggle in the 1960s i think that would be it make a great movie or he becomes like a highly selassie like rasta type guy that's what i was assuming yeah that would be an interesting conversion right i would watch that movie i feel like it would have a really good montage i feel like there's a fish out of water kind of scenario maybe it was that guy. Maybe this guy did have that journey and he likes to keep up

both flags as like a sign that he will talk to anybody about his journey and growth and he tries to convert others into his mindset. Like, I hated him. I hated him. Then I went to Ethiopia. I was like you. I to i was like you i was just like

like no i'm not like you boys i know what you're thinking i i'm just curious to know what the fuck what was it that i hated so damn much i googled the flag of ethiopia like six times because I kept thinking I must be looking at it wrong. This has to be not that. It doesn't make any fucking sense. I am still upset about it because it doesn't make sense. I need it to make sense. Right.

Well, I mean, like, didn't Mussolini invade Ethiopia? Maybe there's something there. Maybe this guy he's a Mussolini fan right right that's true that's kind of obscure though very obscure you want to answer for that Rallo or no

I'm not oh god that means I'm German this is not helping oh shit well so on that note there's an article in the New York Times that I told Tom I wanted to read

with you all if you're down it'll have it'll well I mean it's me answering for yeah Italian War it'll It'll have Well I mean it's me answering for Yeah my genes Italian war crimes It'll have there's a connection here

The connection is the idea of genes We're going to be reading Something in the New York Times about genetics That you know it's going to be good If it's in the New York Times and it's about genetics It's 100% Going to be full of really smart stuff. I love nothing more than when the paper of record does race science.

And they do a surprising amount of it. They knock it out of the park every time. They are the leading innovators of race science these days. They are. It is connected as well because there is a picture of the American flag on the article. That's like the first picture. Right yeah right right um the article is in the new york times it's called how much do your genes shape your politics um and no not not your blue jeans but those two. So stupid.

All right. This is by Thomas Edsel. The oldest guy ever looking at this picture. This is the oldest man. This guy gets a syndicated column in every small town newspaper. I just remember seeing his name a lot in our like news local newspaper here but also growing up in my town like i feel like he's a pretty he's not he's not banging out heaters like he used to like i think his glory days were like the 90s and 2000s but i

think he's still just plugging away he got good taste in our way it's got to be tough if you have to generate a new opinion like once or twice a week. I don't think I have that many opinions every week. Oh, I know. So at a certain point, you gotta get to this point of like, I don't know, do your genetics give you bad politics? Like, that's just

where he's at. Let's just try it out. Let's try it on for size. Just throwing it at the wall, seeing what sticks. This does not stick for me this sucks so much um old that this old of a man should not be able to not be allowed to have this opinion um because right like you're too old to decide if it's your genes like you've already just gone through a life yeah yeah that That ship has sailed, sir. You're right. No sense in coming to your revelations now.

You're right. After a certain age, you should not be able to weigh in on genetic issues. But a lot of this article is weird because obviously it's in the opinion section but a lot of this article he fucking takes like block quotes out like entire like copy and paste from like books and like reports and stuff so i don't know if i'm gonna he had a deadline and he was not ready for it exactly he's just pasting in quotes at random. Right, right. Like, yes, like a 21-year-old on Adderall, like the night before, just like... The guy who should be writing this article, actually. Right, right, right.

Actually, yeah. All right, I'm going to start here. Partisan polarization remains the dominant, seemingly unalterable condition of American politics. Pew Research declared in November 2021, a year after a presidential election that drew the most voters in American history. Republicans and Democrats agree on very little, and when they do, it is often in the shared beliefs that they have little in common. If anything, this holds even truer today. In The Law of Group Polarization, Cass

Sunstein of Harvard Law School. But didn't Cass Sunstein work in the Obama administration? Isn't he like a kind of Obama guy? Yeah, that's like when you describe Harvard as a college in Boston. Like everyone knows what you're talking about. Don't bury the lead. Right. Right. The name of this paper is very strange, too.

The Law of Group Polarization. It's a very bold thing to say that it's a law. You know what I'm saying? It's a law of thermodynamics or something. This is the law of group polarization. This is why there is polarization. It's like as a science. It's very strange.

It's just sociology man it's it's not real anything is anything right right right i'm trying to like on the fly trying to figure out who the fuck cast sunstein is he was he was like uh the one of the regulatory guys in the Obama administration. That's what I thought. He also sounds like he might have been one of Meyer Lansky's right-hand men in Las Vegas in the 50s.

That's a little bit tough. Yeah. He wrote a book called The World According to Star Wars and Nudge. Are you fucking kidding me? That's the guy we're consulting on this opinion column? the world according to Star Wars and nudge. Are you fucking kidding me? No, I'm not. That's the guy we're consulting on this opinion column? No, you're right.

Amber, it's a book about the Star Wars franchise. It's not like about Star Wars, the Reagan things. A guy wrote the law of group polarization about genes also wrote a book about fucking Star Wars. That's what I'm saying. It's sociology. Anything is anything. Genes is Star Wars.

You're right. Doesn't matter. You're right. Just making shit up. Call it a law. Who cares? He was the administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Right.

In Obama's administration. So whatever that means. Right. I mean, yeah, i guess what i'm trying to determine it's like how many bodies does this guy have on him you know what i mean like how much blood is on his hands like if he works in the administration like anybody who goes anywhere near like a governmental administration has some degree of blood on their hands so like you know how much does this guy have probably like a decent amount right like he's not like kissinger level but he's obviously he's not like low-level

epa bureaucrat either you know but what is what is that office that he was see i've already forgotten the name of it because it was the most boring assembly of words i've ever heard the office of information and regulatory affairs um it is i oh my god it's so much it's just boring it's just one right after the other if he would have been doing a good job we wouldn't have the problem today we have with misinformation that's true it is that's right we would not have fake news if it were for this man you're right i think his job was to like intake information and then he decides whether it's correct or not and then he publishes all those articles where when you google something like how to cook burgers and you click on the first thing the whole page is like what is a

hamburger he's a grill? You're right. What is the reason for that? He hand draws all the wiki hows, you know, about like how to give a cat medicine and stuff. That's his doing. Actually, he does have quite a bit of blood on his hands because this department reviews draft rules. Ah.

Ah. Okay. Yeah. All right, Cass. It looks like it's in the office of management and budget which that's the if i remember correctly like the regulatory agency that they were going to put near a tandem in charge of that would have been um so uh so let's so let's see so a pretty good amount of blood on his hands then. All right. That's good to know.

Of Harvard Law School, Kaf Sunstein of Harvard Law School and a pretty good amount of blood on his hands from working in the Obama administration argues that people who are opposed to the minimum wage are likely, after talking to each other, to be still more opposed. People who tend to support gun control

are likely, after discussion, to support gun control with considerable enthusiasm. Sunstein continues, This general phenomenon, group polarization, has many implications for economic, political, and legal institutions. It helps to explain extremism, radicalization, cultural shifts in the behavior of political parties and religious organizations. It is closely connected to current concerns about the behavior of political parties and religious organizations it is closely

connected to current concerns about the consequences of the internet it also helps account for feuds ethnic antagonism and tribalism what is driving these traits ethnic antagonism ethnic antagonism is that racism that's just saying slurs to black people and jews online right that's what's being described there right i think where he's going with this is that if you say slurs it's because you're genetically predisposed to do so it's not your fault i was born this way that song but about ethnic antagonism and a little bigoted boy here's that song and he's like wow cast sunstein thank you um what is what is driving these trends the topic of nature versus nurture in political attitude formation is highly controversial to say the least with social scientists as a rule reluctant

to venture into hereditary and waters nonetheless the topic nonetheless the topic continues to interest researchers you always got to be on the lookout for researchers you know what I mean people who are just people who are described as researchers like what are you man are you an academic a writer you're a researcher I'm not convinced those people are real I feel like he just wanted to make up some person to

kind of shoehorn his opinion column into they're always doing shit like that they are you're right if you read this like start to finish it's so full of hedging everything every other sentence is like often or nearly or a little or somebody else said not me it's just like either put your balls into it or shut the fuck up don't make me read your opinion column you're right not even your opinion it's researchers you're right it's research you just made them up you don't even describe any of them except cast sunstein the star wars book the star wars right the researchers part

is just kind of a buffer in case he's accused of uh you know igniting uh what do you call it ethnic tensions or whatever ethnic antagonism antagonism so he's like well listen i'm just reporting the news here. It's these researchers that are the racists. That's right. Yeah, it's just a scapegoat. Yeah. Listen to this.

This is a side tangent, but I can't let this go. This is very strange. Cass Sunstein also read a book called Nudge. It's called Nudge, Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The book draws on research in psychology and behavioral economics to defend libertarian paternalism and active engineering of choice architecture. The book also popularized the concept of nudge theory. A nudge, according to Thaler and Sunstein, is any form of choice architecture that alters people's behavior in a predictable way without restricting options or significantly changing their economic incentives to count as a mere nudge the intervention must require minimal intervention and must be cheap it's it's like it's like they've tried to use sociology as you're saying earlier rex to like engineer a way to change people's minds is that

basically what this is going for that That's what it sounded like. I mean, even that whole description of that book is all hedging. It's not like, here's something concrete you can do to achieve your ends. It's all like, a nudge, the smallest amount of whatever. Yeah, see, he's trying to do his best Malcolm Gladwell there. It's, yeah.

Tip and point, you know, it's little echoes of that. Stop trying to make nudge happen nudge ain't happening cast what it is what it is i clicked as soon as i opened up the summary thing these are evolutionary psychologists like i i don't really know a whole lot about them but these are the infamous evolutionary psychologists, people that think that like certain behaviors of humans are the way they are because they developed like on the Savannah, I guess. Right. Yeah.

And it, you know, and therefore you can't be mad at me for wanting to bang teenagers is where it always goes. Every time. It's never more than six steps away. Honestly, every time. You're so fucking right.

And that explains why like Steven Pinker was like so tight with Epstein because like they really were trying to. And I'm sure Cass Sunstein was too. All these. Oh, I'm sure he was. Damn. I'm about to just sit here Googling Cass Sunstein, Epstein playing like a lunatic. Yeah. So, yes, this is like this book is in the genre of like evolutionary psychology it attempts to explain human nature but it's doing

it in a way like you're right they're hedging they're not telling you what their intentions are or why they're doing it they're just just stating it scientifically. Like, oh, this is human nature and you know this by X amount of shot. He's like, at first, you know, Roman Polanski seems abhorrent, but when you really parse it apart... When you consider the man on the Savannah Plain,

he wasn't thinking about Roman Polanski. He was something of a Polanski himself, Batman. Right. No, you're right. These books, I've read a couple of them because i hate myself and don't value my time or energy and they you know most of most books of this genre end with some kind of call to action like even if the writer is not himself telling you to do something there's a a general conclusion that tells you the way things should be. These books never have that. It's always either we have to go back

or just trailing off awkwardly because the guy doesn't want to be the one saying, and that's why I want to bang teenagers. Right, right, right. That's why women should get paid less. You don't want to be the one with that opinion. Right. You farm it off onto researchers and then you just kind of trail off and that's your book right and it's the same

with like race science like with yeah the bell curve and everything too it feels very much like these are the kinds of people which is very crazy that cast sunstein wrote a book about this but i guess it makes sense these are the kind of people who would go on rogan in in a lot of ways i don't know it reminds me of like i think maybe cast sunstein might actually be alpha masculinity rags he's the guy making all those posts like how do you approach sexuality if you look at it. Alpha Masculinity was the guy who wrote the women should not ride horses post. That's absurd.

Because it's too sexual. Because they're just coming. They're just up there coming and coming. All the time. And they shouldn't do that. Look at them. They're having too much fun i posted picture after picture of hot lady on horses the maxim ladies on horses this is what

it looks like look out for look out for the beast i live in lexi to kentucky the horse capital of the world so every time i go somewhere i always see like you know like horse girls that are like stealing the get up and everything and time, I'm just gonna be like, Let's see what you're doing. No, you should do that to the horse. The horse is... Yeah, I probably shouldn't be doing that to anyone.

Okay, so, sorry about the cast-unseen detour. Just an interesting guy. Nonetheless, the topic continues to interest researchers, and there is a fairly constant stream of papers by credible and often esteemed scholars who have increasingly weighed in to argue that political behavior demonstrates both biological underpinnings and environmental influences.

Which ones? Which esteemed scholars? Be plain. What's going on say something he can only name five the next paragraph he names the five researchers in academia who are willing to be this stupid and crazy and that's it that's right you're right they wrote a paper what is the paper from 2011 it's called linking genetics and political attitudes reconceptualizing political ideology they write that the evidence is now clear that certain phobias preferences and behaviors are innate phobias maybe but could phobias maybe but could humans be born with political predispositions, particularly predispositions concerning the specific context-dependent

individual issues analyzed in the behavioral genetics work? Research in political science is beginning to take seriously that this is indeed the case. A small but growing literature in the discipline has found consistent evidence that political attitudes and behaviors are at least partially hereditable,

and other studies have reported correlations between specific genes and political phenotypes. Anybody want to take a swing? Small but growing, huh? Yeah. So five researchers? Growing to six? Okay.

We found some brave men and women really ready to challenge the stigma of sex with teenagers is what this really like why even write this i mean if the if the case is that we just are born the way that we are and we're gonna have the the ideas that we already have then why write a paper about it you can't change anything question yeah if that's really the case, then what good does it do to point that out to the tens of people who will ever read this paper? Right. Unless if you want to have sex with children, which is...

He's getting there, yeah. Right, right. Don't get there. Give it a second. It's political phenotypes now, but we're gonna get into skull shapes and then... I know, I can't wait. I've been waiting for the skull shapes where is that gonna happen he does use the term uh low knowledge and i does that mean stupid people because that's a crazy thing to say about anybody you're right i mean he he like goes another paragraph just to say that like look there's a lot of data we're not just making this up um i feel like a lot of things is not data right this guy i know he's my data he lives down

the street and he's fucking crazy right and he's who i consulted for this paper my dad in them my dad in them um they uh so anyways he's talking about these researchers um he says they go on to argue that the results show that quote political knowledge facilitates the expression of genetic predispositions in mass politics um low and yeah here's the quote you just referenced. They conclude, low-knowledge citizens. Excuse me. What is a low-knowledge citizen? That's just stupid people. Yeah, that's dumb dummies. That's one of the funniest fucking terms I've ever heard in my life.

Why bring citizenship into it? Yeah, right? Why does they have to be citizens? They pay taxes and they're dumb as shit. That whole sentence is crazy. Low-knowledge citizens may inherit genetic ideological predispositions like their high-knowledge peers.

So smart people. That is insane. What do those terms mean? Yeah, their high- peers so smart people that is insane what do those terms mean yeah they're high knowledge peers low knowledge and high knowledge like that anybody would look at society it is crazed it is crazed that someone would look out at society and the dichotomy that they see is high knowledge and low knowledge. We've got to have them get more knowledge and everything will bounce out. Or less, maybe. Maybe the high knowledge ones.

Give the high knowledge people less knowledge. You're right. Give them lobotomies and give the low knowledge people some books and then everyone meets in the middle and it's going to be a great society. The high knowledge need to go to jupiter to get more stupider and the low knowledge need to go to college to get more knowledge that's right

and then we'll just meet and everybody'll just be of average intelligence so and then we'll make a flag that has a high knowledge diagonal with low knowledge and we'll all be united everybody's subservient oh no no i know it should be on the bottom i guess that'll be it seems only fair right god damn it low knowledge need to go to college um i think that is another thing that you're working at here, though, Tom. You're right. They are kind of hitting at the divide between those with and without college degrees.

In a way. I don't know. Maybe this. That's what I thought. But then just say people who have such and such degree, people who don't. Right? What was wrong with that? College graduates, non-college graduates.

Yeah, you're right, Rex. It's like he was trying to dance around like somebody stupid and ended up being more insulting than if he was just a moron. I'm talking about morons. Yeah. These cold, smudged reprobates. Yeah, it's cold, smudged reprobates. Oh, fuck. Political knowledge is a key binding element for that political development.

Merging two important and related but isolated fields. Okay, blah, blah, blah. Scholars in the field of politics and hereditability are generally in agreement about the partial hereditability are generally in agreement hereditability are generally in agreement about the partial hereditability of political ideology in this specific but this is a self-determining thing like scholars in the field of politics and hereditability what type of people go into that field of study one's looking for that link you're right you're exactly right and then they develop a methodology to prove themselves correct. Like, see? Yeah.

And then they call themselves high-knowledge citizens, and that's their whole career. Those people, they think they're high-knowledge. They're actually some low-knowledge. These citizens are low-knowledge as fuck. Take my friend Alan Dershowitz, for example. He's high knowledge oh there's a percentage coming

there's a statistic and it sounds deeply made up you're right twin studies they love twin studies twin studies show that political ideology is about 40 percent heritable how do you figure how can you say that 40 i don't know that feels like one of those things you can't really put a number to but they did anyway Are they saying that, like, twins are more likely to have the same set of beliefs?

Yes, it does seem like that's what they're saying, but I'm sorry. Twins generally grow up together, I guess, unless that they only studied twins that didn't grow up together. They, like, got adopted into different... Oh, parent trap situation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parent trap twins. How many parent trap twins twins sets of twins are both are separated like republican and democrat that's the question right and they say about

40 of the time they are which means absolutely nothing to me there are so many other factors there's so much going on in the life of a twin right yeah can you have a twin that's high knowledge and one that's low knowledge whoever comes out last is the low knowledge it's like uh it's really interesting i think he is like trying to do something with that high law knowledge low knowledge thing he's like uh saying that part you're not born with like you're not born he's like you do acquire knowledge it's not like you're just born stupid right but uh speak for yourself but this guy clearly was so i don't know um okay in separate work examining the liberal-conservative ideological spectrum in world terms, communism to fascism, not Democrats and Republicans.

Okay, what does that mean? I don't understand what that means. In separate work examining... He's saying the spectrum is way wider than Democrats to Republicans. I see. He's saying, like... Okay. They found that 60% of overall

liberal conservative ideology is genetically influenced. They stress the dangers of misinterpreting their data. Like this guy's doing now? Yeah. Or seeing the dangers. Do not write a fucking

offensive. In the wrong hands. You called it this is like making the ring of power or something and then being like but don't wear it like the yeah yeah the ring of power of political academia yeah that's right uh-huh he does he does quote their email like i think emailed, or he may have emailed them, and then they emailed him back, and they were like, don't misinterpret this.

And, I mean, I guess that's why he quoted them at length. Then it says, how does this affect polarization? The problem is that different people solve it differently, and it would be one thing if everyone only solved it for themselves, but that is not how it works. People want everyone else to solve it the same way they do pro-life pro-choice etc so you ask why it doesn't converge to universality over time like vision um all healthy people have two eyes well likely because we need both tendencies in a population to survive think of sex here so he's

saying like evolutionarily the the concepts conservative and progressive like developed and we need them in the population. Is that what he's saying? So we need conservatives. Yeah. That's what he said. So we need conservatives to compete and fight and defend against other people, animals, climate, etc. And we need liberals to cooperate and build houses and so on. If you only have one side, you would end up with a lot of annihilation.

Holy fuck! Everybody plays their part, baby. You need conservatives are hunters and liberals are gatherers and you need them both. That's so fucking stupid. This is such a poorly written thing he didn't even write it he just pasted quotes from an email into it and called it a day in fairness at 80 yeah i'll probably be doing worse that's true yeah they should let him retire so that he doesn't have to keep totally you know

determining high knowledge and low knowledge right right yeah make him a low knowledge put him back out to pasture with the rest of us low knowledge people you've worked them too hard yeah in the high knowledge you put too much knowledge in there there's too much knowledge in there citizen send him to jupiter that's right right you need to send him to jupiter to get more stupider. He needs it. Oh, shit. Anyways, in integrating genetics into the study of electoral behavior, political scientists at Penn State make the case that contemporary political issues can mirror prompts or situations encountered by human beings in the distant past.

Okay, like, that's the thing where i get off board like things things like oh no child knowledge i'm with it this is the one this is a bridge too far it's like when you say the distant past like yes things from your childhood and like your father's childhood and maybe your grandfather's childhood but that's a stretch but the distant past like like that that influences how we operate the fucking political maze the political world evo psych baby everything every decision that we make was actually already made by some jerk off 30 000 years ago who did not live in this country yet we are just coasting it is evo side

you're right it's just it's complete i mean they can say whatever they want because obviously we can't interview the cavemen so it's like how the fuck do we know how they're you know what i mean like as far as i know cavemen's whole deal was like dying super young and eating mammoths and drawing dicks on the wall like kind of same as us actually you were a man like by the age of 12 you could kill a bear and like skin it and shit by like 13 you know what i mean like yeah and then you were writing your first op-ed for the new york times at like 14 yeah you're right then you died of something weird at 27 yeah um modern day ideological issues surrounding sexual freedoms mores and parenting are reflected in the prehistoric... Oh, okay. There's the section. Okay, there it is. There it is. Every time. He buried it at the end.

He just slammed it right in there. You got it. He's like, this is about racism. This is about politics. Yeah. He didn't even give it its own sentence. He just stuck it in between some commas and hoped people weren't going to notice.

That's right. You're right. He just looked around and slid in there. Yeah. Into the last edit before anyone could tell him not to. Yeah. Modern day ideological issues surrounding sexual freedoms, morals, and parenting are reflected in the prehistoric need for access to mates

and to ensure the survival of offspring. Access to mates, sir. You did not have to phrase it that way. You didn't have to write that in the New York Times. You could have said that any other way. Access to mates. Yo, are we going to have some access to mates this weekend, dog? Going out to the club trying to access some bitches yeah yeah yeah that's uh uh in modern

parlance what he's saying is uh yeah that's uh the same as having 10 11 bitches this is what he's trying to get uh policy views on immigration are a little different than the primal need to recognize and protect against unknown unlike potentially dangerous others codified laws policing and punishment are akin to dealing with mores violators in hunter-gatherer societies so now they're saying the hunter-gatherers had cops like give me a fucking break true no one believes that be correct nobody thinks that you wouldn't believe it but our forebears had cops and child brides. And that's just the way. That is man's natural. Not true.

Everyone died as a child. There was no child. I mean. You couldn't have a child bride. It wasn't a child bride. It was just brides. It was a bride. Right, right, right.

Yeah, it's true. a child bride it was just brides it was a bride yeah that's true i was reading a book about a medieval history that makes the case that like you know because medieval jokes everybody kind of thinks of fart jokes and like sex humor toilet humor that's kind of the medieval vibe and the author's like because everyone in medieval society was like 19 years old. People were just dying before they grew out of fart humor. That makes total sense. Yeah, I mean like, and people threw their shit out their windows and stuff too.

That's gotta lend itself to some pretty fucked up humor. People thought that disease was caused by like ghosts and the planets and shit. We don't have to do the stuff those guys did. We learned all kinds of other stuff to do instead. Right, yeah.

We have antibiotics now. I don't have to be a hunter-gatherer to go to the store. Yeah, we figured out ways. Taxes and social welfare programs essentially revolve around questions of the best way to share resources for group living. Foreign policy and military are matters of protecting ones in group and defending

against potential outgroups. Nope. That's not true. That's just not true. That's not what foreign policy is for me. Not the U.S. Army. That's not what this army is up to. This army is like massacring brown people. Right.

No, but you don't understand the reason we have to have the pentagon is because the cave cavemen had in group out group it's crazy they had the cave pentagon they had cave Langley cavemen had an elaborate nat sex state if you can believe

they had cave nato and shit cave un they gave drones yeah yeah that's right that's right uh glitter actually they did yeah yeah caveman like made glitter they had glitter they like made glitter out of like uh like shiny crystals and stuff they would grind them down and like make glitter to put on their skin as like decoration um so i would like this guy to think about that and maybe make an article about how we should all wear more sparkly stuff um i agree it would be just as intelligent as this premise yeah and more fun it's not more you are right. There is more science.

It feels like there's more scientific data to support the fact that we love just like glitterly scintillating. You know what I mean? Like just to be dazzled. Yeah, shiny shit. We love to be dazzled. If you're concerned about the number

of available mates, maybe just, you know, adorn yourself a little bit. Adorn yourself. Exactly. If you're worried about access to mates, sparkle. That's right. just you know they overplay their hand because it's like yes there are things that we did probably develop yes like an attraction to sparkling things or the Sun or you know what i mean but like trying to explain immigration policy i think that's too far it's they were playing their hand separation yeah you can't i love this branch of evo psych

where the whole like the conclusion is always everything is exactly the same as it was tens of thousands of years ago because it's just not right it's not the same why would you ever waste your time trying to say that the u.s army plays some purpose that was set out for it 30 000 years ago like that's a waste of your life go outside i don't know why would you get why would you have a keto diet or whatever a freaking uh don't fucking get me started. Primal diet. It's all under the same umbrella, right? Yeah, it's the same shit.

I used to date a guy who did paleo. It was the paleo diet. Those guys smell like shit because they're just housing meat all day long. They're eating raw dairy and shit. You're skinny and you smell like ass. This is all science for the wealthy i mean literally there's a there's a guy i did an episode about this guy that wrote this book called james susman who argued that like we

evolved to only work eight hours a day which is like yeah that sounds i mean obviously we don't we shouldn't work at all like we shouldn't be fucking working at all especially now with all the shit we have now but like where he was coming at it was from like someone who is like elon musk who has gotten everything in life and like you know they should only be working out eight hours a day like basically like the rich and wealthy and i feel like this kind of science is it's the same shit it appeals to like a specific class of individual. I think that's right. I think that there's this type of rich guy, specifically,

who has a comfortable enough life that he just has to go looking for shit to do to make it complicated. He has to go looking for strange diets and super unpleasant workouts because he just doesn't get a daily dose of unpleasantness like the rest of us do. It's why they're all into ayahuasca and shit too, probably. It's why they drink it.

And like the Twitter guy when he was like brewing his own water or whatever. Yeah. No, I think like Elon Musk, anyone that wealthy isn't working at all. That's not working. I'm sorry. Whatever you do is a hobby because you don't need to survive. That's not working. I'm sorry. Whatever you do is a hobby

because you don't need to survive. It's all decision. This is all, everything is like, whatever you find the most fun is what you're doing. And then that's on you. Yeah, if you could never go broke again,

it's not work at that point. Yeah. Yeah. You're just playing. You're having play time. Yeah. Oh, damn. There is a kind of like meta polling thing in this story.

It's kind of interesting. Using data from two nationally representative surveys of a total of 1,200 respondents conducted by YouGov, the three found first that genetic attributions are actually more likely to be made by liberals, not conservatives. So like the liberals are more likely. I don't know. This may be wrong. I don't know. Maybe if it's right, it's funny because it's the liberals are more likely to kind of tout this line than the conservatives are saying that, like, it's an issue of genetics.

Why could that possibly be? why could that possibly be i cannot think of a reason that like i can see conservatives doing it and like kind of doing it in that somewhat shamefaced but not really phrenology way that they have but what is to be gained by being just a nice liberal white lady or whatever responding to a survey like yeah i think that my politics are genetic and I'm not a racist. What are you doing? What are you doing that you answer the phone and take this survey? I think it's this. I think it's this might be wrong.

But my read on it is that conservatives are probably more likely to be religious and religious people. Religious conservative people are less likely to believe in something called genetics. So that's why the liberals don't believe in something called genetics. So like, that's why the liberals, they don't believe in evolution at all. So they can't believe in evolutionary psychology. Right, right. I think that it's,

it might be boiled down. I don't know. I bet that's at least partly right. Yeah. Very interesting. Oy vey. They, they did stress that genetic attributions do not

correlate with unseemly racial attitudes unseemly racial attitudes do you mean racism oh from the makers of high knowledge low knowledge and what was the other one that he used uh

oh uh uh ethnic um antagonism from the studio that brought you ethnic antagonism comes on seemingly racial attitudes. To be fair, a lot of these terms, I think most of them have come from the shit that he's quoted. So like the scientists are using, I mean, they're using these words. Yeah, they're fucked up scientists. That's why he quoted them.

That's why he's only quoting them because he thinks the same shit, but he doesn't want to be the guy getting torn a new asshole over his use of the phrase unseemly racial attitude they wander it through other people researchers said it researchers did this covering his tracks you're right hey it's smart it's smart it's i do that all the time on this show it's high knowledge of him honestly he's being very high knowledge yeah very high knowledge of him, honestly. He's being very high knowledge, yeah. Very high knowledge of him. I'm a little low-knowledge plebeian.

I would just say what I think like a dumbass, but this guy has found a better racket. Political orientation seems to be significantly heritable. There have been quite a few behavioral genetic twin studies looking at this, and they've largely triangulated on estimates of roughly 40 60 percent of the population level variants and ideology being attributable genetic influence that still leaves plenty of room for i mean okay to like hear these guys out for just a second like okay um i do i i do find it interesting it's it is a difficult question right i guess if you're like a a political radical or anything like that even approaching it it's like well why do i see the

world my way and why did what other people see the world that they see it you know what i mean like for example like me and my brothers all grew up in the same household but we all have kind of like different political views here and there. They diverge here and there. So, like, how much of that is genetics, if any? Is any of it genetics, or is it largely? And if it's not, then what is it? Is it because our specific, is it because, like, I experienced this thing in seventh grade and he experienced a different, you know what I mean?

seventh grade and he experienced a different you know what i mean like i know me personally i think it comes down to more obviously like the environment and you know different contingencies and shit that happen in your life that play you're the oldest though too so like maybe your parents weren't so good at parenting at that point but my parents were 22 when they had me so they were they were fucking children so you know what i? So like there is that stuff too. They would have been dead five years if they would be. Yeah, if they were cavemen. Yeah.

Right. I feel like there's this real effort to let contextual factors off the hook. Like not so much in the research itself, but in this kind of open-ended pussyfooting asking of questions like, how much of this okay well there's no social safety net and people are miserable and and immiserated actively by their conditions of life and they make no money and they have no free time and so any of those factors could contribute to radicalization in one direction

or the other but you don't really have to tackle it from that perspective if you're able to find this way out. Right, yeah. And I feel like in a very real way, that's what this is. It's a way out for people who are grappling with questions like that and find that the contextual stuff is too big to address.

Yeah, there is like a, I mean, that's, I completely agree. It does seem like this is an opinion piece that's trying to make the argument. It's, and we talked earlier about how it's not really making that much of an argument for anything because it's like, you can't do anything. But that is the argument that it's making. It's like, you can't do anything. This is the way things are. So we shouldn't make any changes.

We shouldn't move, like, solve any of the problems that we have but like nate like you're talking about like terence like nature versus nurture is the thing that we've like talked about for forever um and of course it's part of the discussion but as he even says at the beginning of this piece he's like uh there's a lot of people who are reluctant to talk about this and like go into this sort of research and uh he doesn't ever talk about like yeah why maybe maybe don't maybe it's not a fruitful avenue to go down maybe like who cares maybe there are other things that we could talk about why it's a yeah it's a conversation stopper i think is what he's doing what a depressing notion to think that we've you know have come up with antibiotics and all these like languages and

everything else that we've done and to think that we should be bound by some immutable urges that we have just fresh out of the primordial ooze you know what i mean that's just what that's just what governs us and that's just the way it is it is you're it's a big part of like enlightenment philosophy too like enlightenment era philosophy when individualism was i think first on the rise in western societies that's around the time you've got all these philosophers trying to make a case one way or the other of like what is human nature underneath it all is there something like immutably human underneath all the trappings of society or if you strip all that stuff away are we just animals like any other animals and it's a question that's worth asking

but you and i do think it becomes dangerous when you put it into context like this yeah that's exactly what that song is exactly what that song is yeah i love bloodhound um bloodhound gang are some of our foremost philosophers yeah yeah um it's interesting like reading these people's language and stuff like it's very obvious very academic right right and it well it's it's also kind of like psychopathic in a way that like is they're not self-aware about it and they you know you read stuff like this and you're like okay i understand now why it was a predominant conspiracy theory on the right that like covid that vaccines were a hoax that vaccines were out to kill like

eliminate half the population because like in a way they were getting at a truth which is that the liberals really would prefer it if you just wipe them out like genocidally if they were all just to die because like then you wouldn't have to deal with the contradiction of a democracy in like an advanced capitalist country which produces all this fucked up shit like they it produces you know what i'm saying i don't know i don't know it's just uh now liberals are very into that even like when they're joking around into that kind of yeah eugenicist line of thinking like if you believe such and such conservative opinion you shouldn't be allowed to breathe right

right right right right yeah and like that's a that's a joke usually when you hear people say it but it's also like do you understand the implications of that offhanded remark you just made like that's true yeah right they kind of mean it though a little yeah no they do i think that's right yeah definitely they do um or like you know we should just let texas secede we should just let texas Texas and Florida go because who needs them? Yeah, yeah. It's just more of the same. Because they can't fix the-

Two of the three richest states in the country. We wouldn't even know it at all. Well, they can't address any- I mean, obviously it's been said millions of times, but right. They can't address any of the material issues or concerns here. And so this is their way around it. As you said earlier, Rex,

like this is their way out of that. And it does have like some really fucked up implications. You know, I'm trying to see though, if they, did they provide any like counter argument in this essay, like about why this might not be oh that's why it got published as an opinion piece you don't have to do that he only has to do that if it's in the real section

i have to say i'm disappointed because i didn't look at this going in into this and i was kind of hoping that he would just go by ethnic group and talk about the inherent behaviors. Or what did he call them? Unseemly behaviors or whatever. Unseemly racial attitudes. Yeah, unseemly racial attitudes. It's not that different from that Kevin Williamson. Do you know who Kevin Williamson is?

He's this guy that used to write for the National Review. is he's this guy that used to write for the new republic or the new republic the national review and he wrote an article that was very popular around the like 2012 election i think called the big the great white ghetto is that what it was called tom it was about apple yeah it was it was about 2015 it was like right before the trump election that's what it was it was about appalachian like poor whites and um it's just fascinating to to read that side by side with this it's like there's not there's no distance the liberals are just all all it is is Kevin Williams saying yeah fucking eradicate him and and the liberals are saying like I don't know you think we can get so sad but maybe it needs to be done. Right, right, right. Yeah, that's right. Did we get away with that? Yeah.

All right, if you say so. All right. I feel like if, like, conservatives want to eradicate their enemies, but they know that that's evil and they just don't care. Right. And liberals want to eradicate their enemies because they think that's the only way to achieve a good society, which is scary. Yeah.

Yeah, it's pretty insane um i'm just trying to i'm just gonna skip to the end here uh um the nature versus nurture argument will be resolved anytime soon certainly not in this article definitely not if that's what you came here because you didn't talk about nurture at all that one percent of nurture was in this article but yeah or ever really but the light shed okay but the light shed by researchers from each perspective incrementally eliminates the whole of our complex human repertoire, someone has been studying his SAT words. Look at this guy. Repertory. You old sailor.

Age 80. Picking up Kaplan's guide. Keep it sharp. Yeah. I will say, I think I know why this is so heavily cited and why it's not actually written at all. It's because journalists and podcasters too, actually,

have been getting in a lot of trouble lately for like filtering arguments that they've read in research papers without really citing them properly into their articles or into their podcasts. We talked about that in our last Patreon episode.

I think he's just trying to stay out of that kind of trouble, maybe. It's so fucking stupid. It's so stupid. Honestly, not to be a huge dick, but I don't love hearing academics complain about stuff because I have real problems

and I don't get paid to go to school. You came to the right place. We were just talking about this new sort of genre of tweet from whoever PhD where it's like, oh, I talked to this journalist and they didn't cite my contributions to this or something like that. And the article would be about, what was the one last week, Terrence, about France anditi or something it was about hey it was the new york times article um

series of articles about haiti yeah and it's you know this huge fucking discourse about like attribution i remember yeah which i mean to be clear it is super fucked up for a journalist to just like read something and try and pass it off as his own without any kind of attribution, they shouldn't do that. But at the same time you write for these publications that nobody gets to read. Like,

have you tried to use fucking J store ever in your life? I don't think it's possible. You have $7,000. Then I'll let you in here. J store for like five days. Also like the kind of absurdity of it is played out in the fact that like if you read what those because i read those articles and if you read what they're saying it's like how again it's another example of how everything is meta commentary it's like

how was the thing we were more mad about was the article rather than the content of the article like that what it's outlining is fucking insane but there's no outrage about that so i mean because i mean obviously i guess the answer right it's all like i was the first person to uncover how fucked up the situation is and the new york times just reports on it i don't know if you were like really upset about that conflict or like thinks there should be outrage you would just be happy that the conversation got out there into a wider audience. Not not that focused on getting credit. I just feel like in the battle between writers, of which I am one, and academics, nobody wins because whoever wins, every normal person loses. Shut the fuck up, both of us.

Shut the fuck up, both of us. Shut the fuck up, me. Like, why am I talking on a podcast instead of sitting quietly in a corner just thinking about my life? Well, that's a good... Actually, that's the perfect place to end said podcast. Yeah, shut the fuck up, all of us. I'm just sitting in a corner. shut the fuck up I'm gonna sit in the corner thanks though for

coming sitting down with us reading this shitty article a lot of fun thank you so much thank you for having us this was really fun thank you do you have anything you want to plug any patreons perhaps any books

anything like that we have Rax and i have a podcast together that they brought it up at the beginning it's called low culture boil and it's uh it's if you like chillbillies we have a lot of similar overlap tom reached out to me to be on the podcast because we had done an episode on pizza hut that was very fun. So I sent him the Pizza Hut perfume that they have. It's great. This is the kind of scintillating

content that you can hope for when you come to patreon.com slash lowcultureboil. It's called Pizza Hut Perfume and low knowledge. It's a very low knowledge podcast. Rax is a book. I do have a book.

You go for it. You plug the book. Oh, okay. It's called Tacky. You could buy it. It's pretty good. It got a good review in this New York Times publication that I've just been slandering for the past hour. It got an amazing review

in the New York Times. This guy fucking loved you. I know. I mean, I'm adorable. It's really, really good. Taki's amazing. I say take that money that you were gonna maybe spend on a subscription to the New York

Times and buy that many copies of my book instead. And give them away to people. Every month. Just keep on buying. Every month. Yeah, that's right. You think you're done.

You're not. This is a lifetime situation. Subscribe to Tech. That's it. All right. Well, thanks. Thanks, yeah. That's it.

All right. Well, thanks. Thanks, Sha. We'll have to have you on next time we hit either Evo Psych, low-knowledge individuals. We got a lot of stuff to draw from. So we'd love to have you all back on. Absolutely. So, Rex, Amber, thank you so much.

And go check out the Trillbillies Patreon, please.a-t-r-e-o-n.com slash trailbilly workers party uh you know the deal five dollars a month and you got all kinds of content over there uh thanks for listening this week we'll see you next time Believe, do you see? The wise man has the power To reason away