01:00 NYT: How Trump’s Allies Are Winning the War Over Disinformation, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/17/us/politics/trump-disinformation-2024-social-media.html
06:00 Mike Benz on Tucker Carlson, https://x.com/TuckerCarlson/status/1758529993280205039
10:00 Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156636
15:00 Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156970
1:10:00 David French Is Wrong (Or Is He?) | Dispatch Podcast w/ Sarah Isgur, Jonah Goldberg, Megan McArdle, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-ygadKXYFw
1:12:00 Kip joins
1:12:20 WP: Viral Olympic B-girl Raygun says the ‘hate’ has been ‘devastating’, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/16/raygun-breakdancing-olympics-online-hate-petition/
1:14:45 Edward Bernays, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
1:35:00 WP: Viral Olympic B-girl Raygun says the ‘hate’ has been ‘devastating’, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/08/16/raygun-breakdancing-olympics-online-hate-petition/
1:42:00 Byron York on the DNC convention
1:43:00 The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156954
1:57:00 Swoooon! Why is Harris Media Coverage Like This? | Mark Halperin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0xCB1J0SOk
2:02:00 My love strategy
2:02:30 Surprising Insights Into Human Psychology – Rory Sutherland (4K), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DaYTvwe0Wo0
2:14:00 Jordan Peterson on the Rise of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump’s Challenge | Mark Halperin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tgy4bsS3tM8
2:15:00 Elliott Blatt joins to talk about sales
2:47:00 Rob Henderson, Richard Hanania on dating, https://www.richardhanania.com/
3:05:00 Uncommon People: The Rise and Fall of The Rock Stars, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=156985
3:22:00 Psychologist JD Haltigan, https://x.com/jdhaltigan,
3:25:00 The Devouring Mother, War, & Human Aggression | J. D. Haltigan, https://x.com/JBPpod/status/1812955313362071665
3:32:45 Curing monotone voice, I Hired A Speech Therapist To Fix My Boring Voice, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLDRQYeYQJg
Transcript: https://lukeford.net/blog/?page_id=157014
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2024/07/26/niall-ferguson-and-j-d-vance/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2018/12/05/niall-ferguson-perils-playing-audience/
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2012/09/12/niall-ferguson-the-john-yoo-line-and-the-paradox-of-influence/
The Age of Creepiness, https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-age-of-creepiness
Podnotes transcript:
Speaker 0: Good day, Mate 40 here. So Bike Bans is the most successful figure to come out of the or ride. He’s come to dominate a discussion of disinformation on a popular level particularly with regard to Republican elites, and he was known in 20 18 as frame game radio, and as Richard Spencer declined in influence, And as the alright, looked like he was falling apart in 20 18. Mike Ben suddenly came on the scene just dominated discussion, developed a huge audience. Alright?
From his background as a corporate tu. He was using the monica frame game radio, and Mike Benz, is superb at the way he frames things. Alright. We all have multiple identities. Alright?
I am an Australian. I am an American. Am a Californian. I’m a los. I am a orthodox judaism.
I come from the seventh day adventist upbringing, my ancestry is irish English. I have several generations of Australian roots. I’m a a writer, a live streamer. I’m an Alexander technique teacher. Alright.
We all have multiple identities. But with regard to his public work, it seems like the most important identity that Mike Van has is as attorney because he doesn’t feel limited by facts. He’s just great at formulating compelling stories. So… The the most successful romance novel, for example, they meet the desires of their audience.
Right? They they satisfy the emotions of their audience by telling their audience a story that they wanted hear. And cr Republicans love a story about media bias and the deep state, right, trading our institutions and censoring and holding down Americans and raping them. Right? Incredibly appealing story for cr republicans.
And even if the the facts out there to support the hypothesis. Right, There are millions of Republicans ready to embrace this theory. So if you go to Google scholar, Right? There… There’s 0 academic interest in Mike Pence.
And if you go to Youtube right now, you scroll and he’s not put on. Tv by the major networks, the mainstream media don’t regard him as an expert in anything. And so those who have expertise in the Internet or in America’s intelligence agencies, Or any of the topics that Mike Pence has become influential and and famous in. Nobody with expertise in these areas regards, Mike Pence as an expert. And so 1 traditional way of understanding expert is that that person who other experts regard as an expert.
And so, Mike Ben has come out of nowhere with his electronic freedom foundation, which seems to be AA1 man operation, and he just has grab the attention of leading Republicans, and he has helped Republicans turned back the misinformation and misinformation complex that has become so influential in the news media. So we have story the New York Times how Trump’s allies winning the war over disinformation. Their claims a censorship of successfully s the effort to filter election lies online. So nobody has been more successful in this area. They’re turning back the misinformation industrial complex, then Mike Ben’s, and he is beloved, alright, by republican leaders.
And Steven Miller has adopted him representative Jim Jordan has adopted him conservative donors have adopted him, Elon Musk has adopted him Mike Pence. Right? New York Times, a former Trump administration official. They previously produced content for social media account frame game radio. The traffic imposed about white ethic displacement.
Well, there is white ethic displacement as there is black ethic displacement in Asian ethic displacement and Latino ethic displacement Alright. All ethnic groups in some in some places get ethnically displaced. More recently, mister Benz originated the false assertion that Taylor Swift was a psychological operation asset for the Pentagon. At I I find it hard to believe that Taylor Swift was a psychological operation asset for the pentagon, but it’s an immediately visceral appealing story for Republicans. They just love this stuff.
So What what has led Mike Pence to be so successful, and I think a large part of it is that he does not allow himself to be limited by the facts. Right? Just like the most winning most successful attorneys simply don’t allow themselves to be limited by the facts. Alright? They they spin a compelling story.
So in August 20 22, an… New organization, the foundation for freedom online person report on his website court department of Homeland censorship power. The Hs sees power over online speech, the group’s founder a literal known former White House official named Mike Be claimed our first firsthand knowledge, how federal officials were coordinating mass censorship of the Internet. Its Of the hard Mister Benz theory was the election integrity partnership a group created in the summer 20 20 to supplement government efforts to combat misinformation about the election that year. And so this project used Stanford Universe, the University of Washington, the National Conference on citizenship, the Atlantic Council’s, digital forensic research lab and Graph, social media analytics, firm at its peak.
There were a hundred and 20 analysts, many of whom were college students, and it tried to spot and to stop the spread of false claims, about the integrity of the 20 20 election. So Mike Benz telling the government was using the partnership to get around the first amendment, outsourcing warfare similar to outsourcing warfare to the private military contractor of Black water and mister Benz foundation for time advertise itself as a project of empower oversight Republican group created by former senate a’s to support whistleblower investigations. Mister Benz had previously lived a dual life. By day, he was a corporate lawyer in New York, his off hours, he toil online in late 20 17 for 6 months of 20 18. Under a social media avatar, frame game radio.
He was on my show half a dozen times. So I I consider Mike Ben’s an not life friend. I’ve had no contact with him since the middle of 20 18, but we all always had friendly relations, and I was impressed with his analysis. It just was so visceral compelling. And under frame game radio who reel against the complete war on pre speech, and he produced racist and anti semitic post, identified himself as a 1 time member of the Western Cha group the proud boys and as a jew, Eddie he blamed Jewish groups where he and others was suspended by social media companies.
Well, Jews have had disproportionate areas of influence in some parts of American life just as Southeast Asians, and Northeast Asians, and West Africans have in their own way you had disproportionate influence in, , various parts of American life. Warning about a looming demographic white genocide frame game event anything pro white is called racist, anything white positive is racist. After Nbc news first reported on frame game radio last 4, mister Ben cord, his frame game account a d radical rationalization project, which he contributed in a limited manner, it was intended he wrote on x. Buy jews to get people who hated jews to stop hating jews. Alright.
That doesn’t ring true to me. Seem to be overwhelmingly a 1 man operation, and there there probably was an element of der radical rationalization, and there was probably also an element of radical rationalization. So here is Mike Benz, Talking with tucker call.
Speaker 1: Defining fact of the United States is freedom of speech. The extent this country is actually exceptional. It’s because we have the first amendment to the bill of rights. We have…
Speaker 0: Billy, is that the extent to which the United States is exceptional. I would say it is a combination of America’s geography and its demography, that primarily accounts for America’s success. And the first amendment in the bill of rights the Us constitution. I understand them it’s primarily a product of America’s unique demography combined with its geography.
Speaker 1: You have freedom of conscience. We can say what we really think. There’s no hate speech the exception to that just because you hate what somebody else thinks, you cannot force that person to be quiet because we’re citizens not slaves. But that right, that foundational rate that makes this country what it is. That right from which all of the rights flow is going away at high speed.
Speaker 0: I forgot. So there was considerable speculation back in 20 18 is Hobbs. What what was Northern Hobbs that he bullied prime game radio. Offline as that he bullied the end of the frame game radio account coming from the the more Neo Nazi far right perspective, I don’t know if that was true, but it was a popular understanding way frame game radio left. So frame game had a particular frame on way dead energy politics.
That he would use in discussions with people like Greg Johnson and people who would to who is right who are more eth nationalist than Grand game was, and his perspective was that, look, you and I are on a similar journey. It’s just that I get off at a different destination on that journey than you do.
Speaker 1: In the face of censorship. Now modern censorship, there’s no resemblance to previous censorship regimes in previous countries in previous eras, our censorship is affected on the basis of fights against disinformation and m information. And the key thing to know about these is if they’re everywhere. And, of course, they have no reference at all to whether what you’re saying is true or not. In other words, you can say something that is factual accurate and consistent with your own conscience, and in previous versions of America at an absolute right to say those things.
But because someone doesn’t like them or because they’re inconvenient to whatever plan the people in power have, they could be denounced as disinformation and you could be stripped of your right to express them, either in person or online. In fact, expressing these things can become a criminal act and is. And it’s important to know by the way, that this is not just the private sector doing this. These efforts are being directed by the Us government which you pay for at least theoretically own it’s your government, but they’re stripping your rights at very high speed. Most people understand this intuitively, but they don’t know how it happens.
How so for
Speaker 0: Is the Us government stripping your rights to freedom of speech is Tucker Carlson talking about the truth here, and it believe that he’s primarily talking about the truth here. He is using a frame, which is emotionally appealing. Just as romance novels provide a tremendous amount of emotional satisfaction. Right? The frames that Tucker Carlson use are also tremendously emotionally satisfying, and he gets to spin such emotionally satisfying stories because Tucker Carlson like Mike Benz like academic Neo Ferguson does not allow his theories to be limited by facts.
Speaker 1: Does sensor censorship happen? What are the mechanics of it? Mike Benz is we can see with some confidence the expert in the world on how this happens, Mike Ben.
Speaker 0: So in truth, Mike Ben is not an expert with regard to facts. He is an expert with regard to framing and providing narratives that give his audience tremendous emotional satisfaction.
Speaker 1: Since had the cyber portfolio at the state department. He’s now executive director of foundation for Freedom online, and we’re gonna…
Speaker 0: No, Mike Ben did not have the cyber portfolio at the state department, but it sure does sound impressive. Right?
Speaker 1: A conversation with him about a very specific kind of censorship. By the way, we can’t recommend strongly enough. If you wanna know how this happens, Mike Ben’s, BENZ is the man to read. But today, we just wanna talk about a specific kind of censorship, and that censorship that ema from the fable military industrial complex.
Speaker 0: Right Mike Pence is the man to read and to follow if you want emotional satisfaction for your right wing prejudices. Right. Nobody will satisfy these needs about the dark delete powers of the deep state more effectively than Mike Pence. So there are great romance nobles who will satisfy your emotional needs for a particular story about Romance and sex Alright. 50 shades of gray will meet your needs for stories about domination and powerful white billionaires, you, holding you down and inflict pain on you that in the end is just incredibly satisfying.
Well, Mike Benz will do something similar
Speaker 1: from our defense industry in the foreign policy establishment in Washington. That’s significant now because we’re on the cusp of a global war, and so you can expect censorship to increase dramatically. And so with that, here is Mike Be, executive director of foundation for Freedom online.
Speaker 0: So there are all sorts of ways that you you can make this argument that censorship has increased dramatically in the United States. You can also simply make a strong argument. That has never been easier to express your opinions online. We have almost as much free speech as 1 could expect from a large social media platform on x Right. You you couldn’t really expect more than you get on x, and you also have considerable free speech on Rumble and on odyssey.
Speaker 1: Thanks mike. Thanks so much for joining us. And I and I just can’t overs overstate your our audience how exhaustive and comprehensive your knowledge.
Speaker 0: So it helps to know what your hero system is. What’s most important to you? Is it success? Is it popularity? Is it influence?
Is it telling the truth? So my conception of myself is that pretty much close to the top of my hero system is telling the truth. And so with the exception of a handful of relationships. Right? I am primarily interested in telling the truth.
I… I regard Mike Pence as a friend even though we’ve had no contact since his frame game radio days, but we’re were on incredibly friendly terms for a few months in 20 18, but there are probably only a dozen people in the world. From whom I would restrict saying what what I believed to be true. I I don’t consciously understand myself as restricting myself from saying any important truths on this show. I do couch them differently than I would in a private conversation, a private conversation That would not be as careful and how I frame things and how I express things.
So with with rare exceptions. Alright, I’m going to say what I believe to be true. I’m gonna be willing to tick off my audience by closest online friends. Alright? I’ve never met for example, Elliot B or gl med in person, but that they’re incredibly important online friends to me, but I would never restrict restrict myself from saying anything that I believe to be true.
To retain the good opinion of Eli platt or gl.
Speaker 1: Is on this topic. It’s almost it’s almost unbelievable. And so if you could just walk us through how the foreign policy establishment…
Speaker 0: There I think is a giveaway what, It’s almost unbelievable. Right, Mike Benz narratives are unbelievable. Right at a rational empirical basis. They are unbelievable. But, Tucker Carlson has just become incredibly cr to any theories that he finds emotionally satisfying.
Tucker Carlson believes that experts believe that Darwin theories of evolution through natural selection, a no longer dominant, no longer holds its sway and no longer respected. Right? This is just an absolutely insane perspective, but Tucker will just buy into any theory that he finds emotionally satisfying.
Speaker 1: And then defense contractors and and dod d and and just a whole cluster the constellation of defense related publicly funded institutions.
Speaker 0: So nobody with expertise in any of the areas that Tucker Castle just talked about with regard Mike Pence is having expertise. Now that doesn’t mean Mike Ben’s is wrong. Do and I think that Mike Pence is often touching on deeper truths, he… He’s touching on important issues, even though the basis for his claims may not stand up on an empirical basis that that there is… A profound truth that he is getting across if you just framed it differently.
It would not be as emotionally satisfying, it would not be as influential, it would not be as successful, but it it would get at truths, that our institutions are dominated by people with a center left hero system. Right The the left. The center left dominates our institutions oc occupy the whole high ground of culture, and Mike Benz has a type of politics that I resonate with,
Speaker 1: strip from us our freedom road speech.
Speaker 2: Sure. , 1 of the easiest ways.
Speaker 0: We haven’t had our freedom of a speech stripped from us, except if you wanna use it in certain non unpopular areas, then You’ll have to deal with something that people have dealt with since our primitive tribal days 10000 years ago, if you go against those with the power to hurt you. They will hurt you. No matter your personal amendment freedoms.
Speaker 2: Is to actually start the story is really with the story of Internet Freedom, and it switched from Internet freedom to Internet censorship because free speech on the Internet was an instrument of state almost from the outset of the privatization of the Internet in 19 91, we quickly discovered through the, efforts of the defense department, the state department and our intelligence services that people were using the Internet to congregate on blogs and forums, and free speech was championed more than anybody by the Pentagon, the state department and are sort of Cia cut out Ng blob architecture, as a way to support dis groups around the world in order to help them overthrow authoritarian governments as they were sort of build. Essentially, the internet internet free speech allowed kind of instant regime change operations, to be able to facilitate the foreign policy establishments state department agenda. Google is a great example of this, Google began as a da grant by
Speaker 0: Okay. Do you think that’s empirical true. Do you think that our defense department, state department government looked at the Internet and its free speech primarily as a very effective tool for overthrow? Foreign governments that violated American sierra system. Right.
I I don’t think that’s true. I think there probably elements of that. That are true. Google is not primarily a development of the Cia. Right?
That’s incredibly provocative, perhaps emotionally appealing for some people framing, but not empirical true.
Speaker 2: Larry Page and Sergey Brand when they were Stanford Phds. And they they got their funding as part of a joint Cia Nsa program to chart how, quote, birds of the feather flock together online through search engine aggregation. And then 1 year later, they launched. Google and then became a military contractor quickly. Thereafter, they got Google Maps by purchasing a Cia satellite software essentially.
And the ability to track to use free speech on the Internet is a way to
Speaker 0: Okay. So nobody with expertise in the history of Google would echo, Mike Pence analysis here. Doesn’t it mean he’s wrong. It’s just worth noting. But he is framing things in incredibly provocative way.
To support a provocative emotionally appealing thesis for his republican audience that nobody who’s grounded in the empirical facts of Google’s history would respect.
Speaker 2: To circumvent state control over media over in places like Central Asia or we’re all around the world was seen as a way to be able to do what used to be done out of Cia station houses or out of em or consulate in a way that that, you was totally turbo charged, and all of the Internet free speech technology was initially created by our national security state. Vpn virtual private networks to hire…
Speaker 0: And does Mike Benz have have any sources to back him up. Well, it it’s fascinating how sources are used to back up this narrative. So there is a new book out by a big opponent of Mike Ben’s, and a focus of Mike Pence. In fact, the Arch villain in Mike Pence worldview is Renee. Der rest used to be with Stanford University, and its disinformation, academic project, So Renee need der arrest 43 years of age.
She’s come out with a new book invisible rulers the people who turn lies into reality. And so this is what she wrote about Mike Pence in her book. So I’m not an expert on the things that Mike Pence is talking about. Right fairly well read for an amateur, but III completely lack expertise here. In all likelihood, you’re not an expert in the things that Mike Pence is talking about, and the things that Renee Rest talks about.
So We have to use some rough heuristic to try to figure out who is telling us more of the truth. If if you’re right wing in your all likelihood, my audience is overwhelmingly right wing. It’s 99 percent male. Mike Ben’s presentation is emotionally appealing. But is it factual?
Is it truthful. So this is what Renee Der rest who… I I think is her politics are center left. That’s what she writes in her new book invisible rulers the people who turn lies into reality. And her book and her public presentation, her narratives are not nearly as emotionally appealing certainly for right winger as Mike Benz narratives.
But are they more accurate? So she right? When attorney turned speech right at Mike Pence. And if attorneys, how how good the the good attorneys, the great attorneys are framing things. Right?
So, historians, I’m thinking you’ve went in particular who got in trouble for the dishonest way that he would frame things and present things in his his works of history right, people who who get in trouble for the way they frame things, journalist Stephen Glass who made up a whole bunch of story. Right. He then went to law school. And historians who got into trouble for the lack of a factual basis for their framing in their works of history, they they then go into law where framing things even against the facts. Is a…
Often a winning formula. So when attorney turned speech writer, Mike Ben set aside on convincing American conservatives that a vast collusion operation had deprived Donald Trump of his rightful victory in 20 20. This is an enormously appealing narrative. For conservatives. If you wanna be successful as an activist as a live streamer, as an online personality.
Alright? You wanna to identify who your audience is and then feed them what they wanna hear. Despite his social media boosting, Mike Ben’s hadn’t actually run cyber at state. So who do you think is telling the truth? Mike Ben, when he says he ran cyber at state or Renee Director who says he hadn’t run cyber at state.
III don’t have enough facts to ad educate, but my sense is that Renee arrested is more accurate, just as my benz narratives is more emotionally appealing to me. He’d been the deputy, assistant secretary for international communications and information policy in the bureau of economic and business affairs for approximately 3 months. Right? So do you really think that a guy who is the deputy, assistant, secretary for international communications and information policy in the bureau of economic and business affairs for approximately 3 months. Do you do you really think that that guy ran cyber at state, And that position followed a year as a speech writer for secretary of housing and urban development, Ben Carson.
But no matter, after leaving government mike ben simply create an eb email address reserve a domain name and embarked upon a, new career as a former cyber cybersecurity expert. So what Makes Mike Pence a cyber cybersecurity expert, essentially the success of the narratives that he presents. The man who’s prior attributable online presence had been scrubbed down to little more than a pepe, the frog Throw pillow ip interest board. But now the head of what he called the foundation for Freedom online. So what do you think comprises the foundation for Freedom online.
I suspect it’s about the same size as that whole group of people behind the der radical rationalization project of frame game radio of which he was just a small part. So Mike Benz seemingly the sole employee of the foundation for Freedom online. He reinvented himself as Mike Ben Cyber on social media, and he said about proclaiming that he was going to expose the crime of the century. So what do you think the odds that Mike Pence has exposed the crime of the century, as opposed to Mike Pence has presented incredibly appealing narratives about a reported crime of the century. So I’m count as skeptical that Mike Pence has exposed the crime of the century count me as believing that he’s been incredibly successful at presenting himself as exposing the crime of the century.
Speaker 2: I your your Ip address, tour the dark web to be able to buy and t, sell goods anonymously. End to end encrypted chats. All these things were created initially as Da projects or as joint Cia Nsa projects to be able to help intelligence backed groups to overthrow governments that were causing a problem to the clinton administration or the Bush administration of the obama administration. And this plan worked magically from about 19 91 until about 2014.
Speaker 0: So you think Jordan Peterson Dennis P, other guru online. You think that they would be nearly as successful if they allowed their theories to be limited to the facts. Right? They would not be nearly as successful? They would not have as much fame.
They would not have as much influence. Right they would not have as much further support if they simply limited their their theories to what is factual true. Same with an entrepreneur, like, Neo york Ferguson. If he limited his theo to to the facts, he would not be nearly as influential. So Mike Ben starts up the foundation for Freedom online.
And the goal, of the foundation for freedom online. He wrote in a convoluted blog post was to expose a vast collusion operation that he claimed had transpired between the government academia media and tech companies. So who do you think is more on the side of the facts. Of Right? This Renee Der skeptical analysis for what Mike Ben’s is presenting.
Right? Just from where I stand, I find Mike Ben’s presentation much more emotionally appealing, but I sense that Renee Analysis is more factual accurate. There had been a plot, Mike Ben’s alleged to create a social media censorship bureau that targeted the speech of millions Americans sick those on the populous right. At the center of this plot, the keeper of an Ai censorship Death star super weapon was the election integrity partnership E. And the Darth Vader n death star analogy.
That was me. Again, so who do you think is more faithful to the facts. Mike Benz presentation of an Ai censorship death super weapon or the more skeptical analysis from Renee Der arrest strikes me that Renee Der rest, more factual accurate, but emotionally and politically I’m far more on the side of Mike Pence. In Mike Be reality, the election integrity partnership was in Ka with the Department of Homeland Security his old employer, the state department, the Federal Bureau of investigation, and Big tac and had con concluded to sense tens of millions of tweets, 22000000 to be precise during our 20 20 election work. So who do you think is factual accurate here Mike Pence and his charge that Rene director and the election integrity partnership had censored 22000000 tweets for Renee directors more skeptical analysis.
Alright? I will side on a factual basis, with Renee, I will side with Mike Benz on an emotional and partisan political basis with Mike Pence. In his more bombastic media appearances, so does bombastic. Does that description. Do you think that is a fair description of Mike Pence commentary.
Alright. I I think that is a fair description of much of his commentary. The number balloon to hundreds of millions or even billions of posts that we’d supposedly nuke from the Internet via some sort of shadowy special access to internal systems of government and tech. So who do you think is accurate here? Mike Pence when he claims that Rene Rest and the election integrity project had nuke billions of social media posts, or you think Renee rest more skeptical analysis is more factual correct.
Right? Again, actually, I got side with Renee Der rest, emotionally, and on a partisan political basis, I I feel the appeal primarily of mike Benz analysis.
Speaker 2: When there began to be an about face on Internet freedom and its utility. Now the high watermark of the sort of Internet free speech moment was the arab spring. In 2011, 2012 when you had this.
Speaker 0: And Chad says, I feel like Ta Acosta would know what the C was up to based on his father’s connections there. I I don’t think so. Yeah. His his father had some connections to the Cia, but Tucker claims about the Cia just frequently seem absurd. I mean, Tucker absolutely convinced that the Cia murdered John F Kennedy.
On what basis, someone with some connection to the Cia told Tucker that the Cia had murdered John Kennedy. The the claim just doesn’t stand up to any analysis. But Tucker is immediately emotionally appealing.
Speaker 2: It’s 1 by 1, all of the adversary governments of the Obama administration, Egypt, Tunisia all began to be toppled in Facebook revolutions and Twitter revolutions. And you had the state.
Speaker 0: Okay. So was it really Facebook and Twitter that toppled these governments or were Facebook and Twitter simply tools like cell phones or or fax machines? Or the ayatollah K rise to power in Iran. Right? That was powered by the popularity of his cassette tapes.
So, technology was an adjunct to the overwhelming popular sentiments of feeling just second tired of their corrupt rulers.
Speaker 2: State department working very closely with the social media companies to be able to keep social media online during those periods. There’s a famous phone call from Google’s Jared Cohen. To Twitter to not do their scheduled maintenance so that this… So that the preferred opposition group in Iran would be able to use Twitter to to to win that election. So it was in free speed
Speaker 0: So how factual you think Mike Pence pronounce are here? Or does he remind you of an attorney? Say a personal injury attorney arguing for his client to had a a slip and fall, on a public street where where he tripped on a break in the pavement that was about 1 inch high and trip fell and broke his knee. And the personal injury attorney recognizes that this with all slip and bulk cases is a matter of shared negligence that the the person who trip and fell, there’s some responsibility for his trip for, but it’s very much in the interest of the plaintiff attorney to places as much of the blame for the trip for , on the defendant so that he can extract as much money as possible, seems like Mike Pence is trying to extract as much to support as possible from his target audience Republicans. So according to Mike Ben’s government actors had told the election integrity project via secret systems what needed to be suppressed, and we had passed these demands onto to big tech companies.
This effort mike be claim to prevent people from seeing entire narratives during the 20 20 election, we had pre censored discussion that predicted the possibility of election fraud. If this sounds like word salad served up by someone in a tin foil hat. That’s because it is. Okay. So who is more accurate here.
Mike Ben’s or Renee Der dressed? So on an empirical basis, I’m gonna side probably 75 25 with Renee Der arrested. When we saw his early post targeting the election integrity projects work in August 20 22, we laughed, his source for this list of crazy allegations was something that we had written ourselves, 292 page final report, describing our work released publicly march 20 21, widely covered by the media and posted publicly to our website for a year and a half before he discovered it. But accuracy wasn’t Mike Be objective storytelling was. So What do you think is Mike Pence primary objective.
Is it accuracy or is it storytelling? Here, I would side 100 percent with Renee Der? Right? His objective is storytelling, same with Tucker Carlson? It’s not necessarily accuracy.
So Mike Be was picking out random phrases and numbers from within our reports pages and then assembling them into a assorted spy thriller. This Renee est analysis strikes me is accurate. Driving this drama was a compelling troop. The man of woman behind the curtain secretly steering world events umber unbeknownst to the powerless targets. Mike Mike Pence long expose.
Where the alternate history of a fantasy world. They included a specific set of villains, real people reduced to advertisers whose lives could be mined further the plot points to generate maximum outrage engagement revenue. So do you think that Mike Pence is primarily acting to create narratives that generate maximum outrage engagement and revenue. Yes. Just like a ben shapiro or Dennis P.
I think this is an accurate analysis. His followers us and subscribers would enjoy the equivalent of a multi season drama. Unlike the Star wars a game of Thrones, the audience could inhabit the universe and help harass the villain online and off. Well, Mike Band has been incredibly successful helping Republicans undo the this disinformation project and the disinformation project was, overwhelmingly aligned against the interest of Republicans. Right?
It wasn’t just about disinformation. It was also often an incredibly partisan project. And so from from what I know, I have more, political support for Republican efforts to reduce the influence of the disinformation project. Than I do with the Rene director’s efforts.
Speaker 2: Speech was an instrument of state from the national security state to begin with all of that architecture, all the Ngos, the relationships between the tech companies and the national security state had been long established. For Freedom. In 20 14, after the coup and Ukraine, there was an unexpected counter coup where Crimea and the Don bass broke away. And they broke away with essentially a military backstop that Nato was highly unprepared for at the time. They had 1 last Hail mary chance, which was the Crimea annexation vote on in in 2014, and when the hearts and mind…
Speaker 0: Okay. Back to Renee Der arrest analysis. Mike Ben confidently presented his fantasy as facts. So does Mike Ben distract Us confident? If you remember his days as frame game radio, did he distract you us confident, I, Mike Ben, like my father, like myself at time.
Get to present our our ideas publicly with 100 percent confidence. Mate mate Ben present himself as a hero drawing heavily on the whistleblower trope to sell it? Does that strike you as an accurate analysis rings true to me. Some right wing media interviews, Mike Ben’s pos as an ex government insider who’d seen terror Abuses in his 3 month tenure at the state Department. In other interviews, he was a concerned citizen, had been investigating the rise of a censorship apparatus for nearly a decade.
And until others, he was a diplomat offended on behalf of supposedly silence global populous leaders like India’s president Modi or a chess champion who’d seen the board several positions out and that and Ai censorship desktop super weapon was about to destroy the first amendment in America. He is great at spinning narratives, and many of them, I have tremendous sympathy with, and I regret that the empirical basis for these narratives often seems to be lacking. Those of us who had worked on election integrity project notice that his sustained effort to get attention, but the attempt to Re con. Right, to reconsider our very public work into some secret conspiracy screamed crank. We thought that no reasonable person would take it seriously, we were wrong.
Well, people will take seriously those narratives that are most appealing even if they lack the factual basis. 1 challenger refute conspiracy theory propaganda is that its authors often present their claims in what is known as a dish gall, A lit of allegations so numerous that the target is temporarily paralyzed, unable to decide what to respond to first. So does this strike you as an accurate analysis of what Mike Pence does. He spills out a lit allegations so numerous that the target is temporarily paralyzed and unable to decide what to respond to first. Right.
That strikes me as an accurate analysis. Takes an extraordinary amount of time to address them point by point since some are based on twisted or d contextualize grains of truth. And so it was with Mike Benz, that strikes me as an accurate analysis. Even though I side on a political and partisan basis with Mike Be work. The election integrity partnership work that Mike Pence fashion into a plot to take place in 20 20 when the government were run by Trump appoint ease.
In Mike Be alternate universe, the government had been in the tank for Joe Biden Well, we do know on the basis of donations that 95 percent of federal employees donated to Joe Biden rather than Donald Trump. So that there is more truth. To White Ben analysis in this area, I think that Renee der rest gives him credit for. There was no secret access to internal systems or data portals. Alright.
These stanford projects had no government funding Although Stanford at the university of Washington did subsequently receive a national Science Foundation Grant to study rapid responses to rumors in late 20 21, so this was a grain of truth that Mike fans twisted to label government funded census, although and to imply that we had been rewarded for helping biden and win. So Republicans have been successful launching warfare fair against these type of projects. And so they’ve almost all shut down because of simply too costly to legally defend their work against Republican past a representative, subpoena and warfare. The soon to be if infamous 22000000 statistics he band about had nothing to do with anything getting censored. It was a figure from a table in our report calculated well after election day, that tally the number of tweets discussing the prominent election rumors we’d studied.
So this simple active edition was sent ref fashioned into evidence of a plot in his alternate reality. Online cranks are a, Dime dozen, but it quickly became clear that the foundation for freedom online, was linked to a broader network of right wing advocacy organizations with ties to a small group of congressional partisan. Alright. Ben’s had a limited understanding of the cyber topics he presented himself as an expert, but with the backing of a partisan machine He was able to step into the role of spokesperson for the grievance that was rewarded with glowing profiles that Bolstered his credibility. Right?
Are 0 glowing profiles of Mike Benz in the mainstream media. But in partisan right wing media, He gets considerable praise.
Speaker 2: Minds so the people of Crimea voted to join the Russian Federation, that was the last straw for the concept of free speech on the Internet and the eyes of nato. As they saw it the fundamental nature of war changed at that moment. And Nato at that point declared something.
Speaker 0: Right. Do you do you think that that was the last straw for Nato perspective on free speech? And do you really believe? That war completely changed in 20 14. Right, these strike me as simply absurd arguments.
Speaker 2: You that they first called the Off Doctrine, which is named after this Russian military. A general, who they claimed made a speech that the fundamental nature of war has changed. You don’t need to win military ski to take over central and Eastern Europe, all you need to do is control the media and the social
Speaker 0: So did you hear about that New Yorker cartoon that shows 1 Russian tank commander talking to another somewhere in Poland, and they’re smoking cigarettes and when Russian says to the other? Well, but we lost the information war. Right? Do you really think that the the nature of war changed in 20 14 due to social media. Right?
Can’t be skeptical. So here’s arrested. An absurd alternate history over overwhelmingly sourced to 1 man proliferate far right outlets influences a media, but thrilled to give Mike Benz claims airtime. Some people on the Internet are saying that Stanford censored tens of millions of your tweets. Some people are saying Stanford rebooted to Cia mind control project.
Steve Bannon and Sebastian Go, John Solomon eagerly had Mike Ben on as a guest, narrative laundering began an old propaganda strategy which claims attributed to seemingly authoritative source appeared 1 small outlet then propagate across a daisy chain of ideological aligned outlets each citing the last. Because something like this, outlet b repeats the business claim, but attributes it to outlet a. Outlet b just reporting on the reporting, outlet c, can then site, outlet b and so on. Few readers will take the time to look at the original source material if they trust the. Outlet rest stating the claim, the repetition gives the impression that the story is important and ensures it remains on the audience mind.
But today, narrative laundering cross propaganda rags is only half the bo game. There’s also the social media rumor mill. Several of the repeat spreader influences described in the election integrity projects report. The pivotal figures who repeatedly helped election rumors go wildly viral, shared the coverage of Mike Pence claims. They refrain our work summarizing their demonstrated massive reach.
As preemptively targeting them suppressing them alleging that we were motivated by an auto anti conservative bias and these allegations went viral. Well, I am pretty sure that members of the Stanford election integrity project were highly unlikely to vote Republican. As a light spread, the ignited harassment from the influence ban. So do the activists in the Stanford election integrity project, they wanted to have an effect on the real world, and their effects were going to be negative for Republicans. Right?
Did they see themselves primarily as objective truth seekers or did they understand themselves as partisan activists. They see themselves as objective truth seekers, but their effects were highly partisan did they think that by participating in public life, they would then be exempt from blow back by those they heard. Right? If you participate in public life? And for the best and the most true of reasons Right?
You heard some people, there will be tremendous blow back against you if you can’t take the heat, then do not participate in public load. If you want to influence public policy. Right? There will be public blow back against you and private blow back against you from those you heard. So don’t play in the public arena if you can’t take the blow back.
Right. So as the lies spread, they ignited harassment from the influence fan. So, yeah, where would you expect that you’d be exempt? From blow back when the net result of your work was negative for conservatives. People who were turned into villains in this alternate history were battered with outrage abuse and threats.
So why would you expect that you could shape public events and then be exempt from harassment. Growing interest from Partisan politicians was setting the stage for harassment from another entity, the political machine. This was not accidental Mike Benz of goals, plainly stated on his blog have a congressional committee armed with Subpoena Power investigate the villains he described in his reports, and he was successful. Right, Republicans in this area out played these left wing academics. Mike Benz caused players a security whistleblower would have real world consequences for me my colleagues?
Why is she surprised that her partisan in effect efforts online would result in consequences. Where would she expect to be free from consequences simply because she views herself as an objective objective truth seeker. Even the people in the world best equipped to understand the mechanics of these cuff claims would have a difficult time ref them, it takes an order of magnitude more effort to debunk Bs, than it does to produce it. Yes. The real world isn’t always kind and fair.
After right wing media picked up, Mike Benz Bs for several weeks in a row, We put up a detailed person on the election integrity partnership blog on 10/05/2022 patiently explaining what he’d got wrong, but the outlets that covered the crank theory were tu. Well. The news media ran with the narrative, that police systemically racist against black people in 20 20. And in 20 14, they sympathetic covered the rise of black lives matter. And as a result, they ignited a substantial decrease in policing in the substantial ups wing in murder and reckless driving that the cost tens of thousands of additional beliefs deaths in the United States between 20 20 and the present day, And even though these narratives were actually false, right, it it didn’t stop them influencing police to back off on policing.
Did not matter to Jack Soviet or Mike Bang and what the cost of their lies was for the people they targeted in spared. Well, does it matter to mainstream media and leftist us academics, what what the cost of their partisan work is to people that they might target in smear? What mattered was keeping fans engaged grieve and subscribe. Yes. Mike Pence and Jack So are sometimes incredibly effective and influential with regard to their activism.
Speaker 2: Social media ecosystem because that’s what controls elections. And if you simply get the right administration into power. They control the military. So it’s infinitely cheaper than conducting a military war to simply conduct an organized political, influence operation over social media and legacy media, an industry had been created that spanned the Pentagon, the the British ministry defense and Brussels into a organized political warfare outfit, essentially, infrastructure that was created initially stationed in Germany and in Central and Eastern Europe, to create psychological buffer zones, basically to create the ability to to have the military work with the social media companies to censor Russian propaganda or to censor domestic right wing populist groups in Europe who are rising in political power at the time because of the migrant crisis. So you had the systematic targeting by our state department by our Ic by the Pentagon of groups like Germany’s A, the alternative for Deutsche Land there and for groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.
Now when Brexit happened in 20 16. It was… That was that was this crisis moment where suddenly, they didn’t have to worry just about Central Eastern Europe anymore, it was coming Westward this idea of Russian.
Speaker 0: So Mike Be is a more effective version of Charles Johnson. Right back to Renee arrest analysis. Mike Be benz, who’d been trying to make Matt Tai notice for week. Seize the opportunity fu praise Matt work for a long embarrassing moment for letting the audience know that was actually he Mike Pence, who had all of the missing pieces of the puzzle. So you believe that Mike Pence has all the missing pieces of the puzzle.
Praise detailing the evil Cab cabal entering right wing speech. I can tell you literally everything. Mike Ben taught Tai, promising him that he would have superpower at the end of the conversation. Nora rambling monologue, Mike Ben’s breath recounted the history so so painstakingly crafted, fixated on me, Renee. I was the puppet master, this vas, Ka cabal with special privilege access to Dhs as 24 7 cyber mission Control in D dhs Fbi powers, my supposed powers came with a secret d privatization of authorizing me to sense a 22000000 tweets bur, dropping the twisted statistic he’d hopped on for months on his blog.
And he ran through the laundry list of conspiracy theories he’d been feeding Right wing media, basking in the audience attention. He enthusiastically up the number of posts we’d sent to hundreds of millions. Wow. Matt Ty Solemn replied. As if you were above Wood speaking to deep road in an underground Dc parking lot.
This is a scale of censorship the world has never experienced before Ben’s ex explained. Few days later, on 03/09/2023, Matt Tai, and Michael Sc. Testified in a public hearing before Jim Jordan and his select some committee on the weapon of the federal government. Under oath and in chaotic written testimony, the 2 witnesses reg Mike Pence claims, the nonsense about millions of tweets and targeting of conservatives, My supposed undisclosed Cia ties or at she had worked as an intern for a few months at the Cia. Roll the rest with the Bs now entered into the congressional record as if they’d uncovered it while sw through Twitter’s files.
The appearance made Mike Benz dream a congressional hearings before a sub committee with subpoena Power, stated a goal in his first blog post, come true.
Speaker 2: Control over hearts and minds. And so… At that was… Brexit was June 20 16, the very next month at the war at the Warsaw conference. Nato formally amended its charter to to expressly commit to hybrid warfare, as there as this new nato capacity.
So they went from, , basically 70 years of of tanks to this explicit capacity building for for censoring tweets if they were deemed to be Russian proxies. And again, it’s not just Russian Propaganda. This was… These were now Brexit groups or groups like Matteo Sal in in Italy or in Greece or in Germany or in in Spain
Speaker 0: So I think Mike Ben is onto something in that elites in power. Don’t wanna lose power, and they will use powers at their disposal to try to maximize their own hero system and their own personal interests. And… Ruling elites in the United States. And in Europe, understand a populous revolution will diminish their power and tarnish their particular hero system.
And so they are going to use tools at their disposal to maximize their own goals and their own interests. Back to the New York Tie here. After Nbc news first reported on his prime game radio persona at last 4, Mike Pence called the account a der revitalization project, which he contributed in a limited manner, But you think that’s truthful? Right. I I don’t.
I think he was overwhelmingly the Man behind frame game radio. It was intended, he wrote an acts by Jews to get people who headed Jews to stop hitting Jews. Toward the end of 20 18, Mike Benz joined the Trump administration so he abandoned, Prime game radio in something like June of 20 18. And then at the end of 20 18, he joined the Trump administration as a speech writer for Ben Carson. His post as frame game radio were discovered by a colleague brought to department management.
As the election between Trump and Biden heated up. Mike Pence joined Stephen Miller speech writing team at the white House, he was there in the early days of the effort to keep mister Trump in power. He was involved in the search for statistical anomalies that could p to show election Fraud. Late November 20 20, Mike Pence was abruptly moved to the state department as a deputy assistant secretary for international communications and information policy. So Mike Pence is incredibly impressive at the way he plays the game.
In that the Trump administration knew of his frame game radio online work and yet kept using his expertise. It’s unclear precisely what he did in this state department role Mister Ben has since claimed that the job which he held for less than 2 months gave him his expertise in cyber policy. That do you believe that that’s true that his position for less than 2 months, gave him expertise in cyber policy. Mike Benz report gained national attention when a conservative website just the news read about in September 20 22. And Mike Benz then came to the attention of, leading Republicans.
Who were happy to enlist his narratives. Mike Benz telling the government was using the partnership to get around the first amendment like outsourcing Warfare to the private military contractor black water. In March 20 23, Mike Benz joined a discussion with Matt, on Twitter, c hosted by Jennifer Lynn Lawrence an organizer organizers of the Trump rally that preceded the ride on January sixth as Matt Ty described his work, mister Ben jumped in, I believe I have all the missing pieces of the puzzle There was a far broader scale of censorship the world has never experienced before he taught T, who made plans to follow up. Played at Sc said the connecting with benz had led to it an Aha moment. The clouds parted in the sunlight burst through the sky.
So I I recognized a year or 2 ago that Sc burger is incredibly cr. I I just… Even though I agree with his politics, I I just… Don’t find him particularly dedicated to truth. So for Sc, the clouds parted when you heard Mike Benz narratives, the sunlight burst through the sky, it was like, oh, my gosh.
This guy is way way a father down the rabbit hole that we even knew the rabbit hole went. Week after that online meeting Tab and Sc appeared on Capitol Hill star witnesses for the select sub committee on the weapon of the federal government, Mister Mike Ben sat behind them, listening as a detailed parts of his central thesis. This was not an imperfect attempt to balance pre speech with democratic rights, but a state sponsored thought policing system. Right. Let’s get a little bit more here from Mike Benz on tucker.
Speaker 2: Team with the V party. And now at the time Nato was publishing white papers saying that the biggest threat nato faces is not actually a military invasion from Russia. It’s losing domestic elections across Europe. In to all these right populous groups who because they were mostly working class movements, were campaigning on cheap Russian energy at a time when the Us was pressuring this energy diversification policy. And so they made the argument after Brexit, Now the entire rules based international order would collapse unless the military took control over media because Brexit would give rise to Brexit in France with Marine Lap penn just sp in Spain with a v party to it’ll exit in in in Italy.
Speaker 0: So do you do you believe him? When Mike Pence realized that the powers that be in Nato came to the conclusion that the military had to take control of news media. Right. I I don’t think that that claim would stand up to a factual analysis.
Speaker 2: To Brexit in Germany to Brexit and Greece, the eu would come apart, so Nato would be killed without a single bullet being being fired. And
Speaker 0: a great comment here from Cal. Why is it that so many people of serious criticism in 1 domain are completely un unchanged in others? Well it’s the same reason that people may be disciplined in their finances, but un in their sex life? Or people may be disciplined in their sex life, but un in their family life Alright. We don’t have moral character that transcend domains.
What we do have usually, is domain specific character. Right? In certain domains, we may be careful in other domains. We may be reckless in other domains. We may be moderately careless, in other domains.
We may be moderately conscientious Right? We we don’t tend to have moral character that extends across all domains. So people might be incredibly careful and conscientious with regard to what they say about, 1 area of public life. And then also reckless with what they say about other areas of public life. Right?
People are a mixed bag.
Speaker 2: And then not only that, now that Nato gone, now there’s no enforcement arm for the international monetary fund, The Imf for the World Bank. So now the financial stakeholders who depend on the battering ram of the National security State would basically be helpless against governments around the world. So from their perspective, if the military did not begin to censor the Internet. Every all of the democratic institutions and infrastructure that gave rise to the modern world after world work 2 would collapse. So you can imagine the me ask later dollar the 20 16 election.
Speaker 1: So you… Well, you just told a remarkable story that never heard anybody explain…
Speaker 0: Do why? Nobody’s ever explained that that story. why? No 1 else has had that remarkable story? Because it’s not factual empirical true.
Speaker 1: As lucid and crisp as you just did. But did anyone at Nato or anyone at the state department, pause Roman and say wait a second. We’ve just identified our new enemy as democracy within our own countries I think that’s what you’re saying. They they feared that the people, the citizens of their own countries would get there.
Speaker 0: Right. You think there is ever a time when people in power did not fear that people in their own countries would seek to reduce their power and their influence? I and to tarnish they particularly hear a system. Right. And I think that’s ever happened
Speaker 3: way.
Speaker 1: And they went to war against that.
Speaker 2: Yes. Now, yeah, there’s a rich history of this dating back to the cold war. , the cold war in Europe was essentially… A a similar a similar struggle for hearts and minds of people, especially in Central and Eastern Europe. Yes.
I Yeah.
Speaker 0: Right. Are you familiar with attorneys and their style of argument documentation before a jury? Right? Attorneys win, not necessarily on the basis of fidelity to facts, but on the basis of how effectively they can sell their narrative and d the narrative of the opposition. So that’s why…
Out of all of Mike Be identities, the identity of attorney seems most applicable to what he’s doing here. Right? He’s framing a particular narrative and d competing narratives. He’s creating incredibly appealing narrative for a certain audience.
Speaker 2: , in these sort of, , Soviet buffer zones, and, starting in 19 48, the National security state was really established then, You, you had the… An 19 47 Act, which established the Central intelligence agency. You had , this this new world order that been created with all these international institutions, and you had the 19 48 Un declaration on human rights, which forbid the territorial act was position by military force. So you can no longer run a traditional military occupation
Speaker 0: So notice that, Ukraine has taken over some of Russian territory and nobody seems to be particularly outraged. Because they understand it happened in the context of Russia invading Ukraine. So 2, Israel sees the go on heights and the West Bank and Gaza as a result of arab nations such as Egypt, Jordan and Syria declaring war on Israel and trying to wipe out the the Jewish state. So when other nations attack you, you fight back and win and take some of their territory, and shouldn’t be outrageous to me. That you impose a price on other nations for invading you.
Speaker 2: Government in the way that that we could in 18 98, For example, when we took the Philippines. Everything had to be done through a sort of political legit randomization process. Whereby there’s some ratification from the hearts and minds of people within the the country, Now often that involves simply public puppet politicians who are groomed to…
Speaker 0: So on a a factual basis, I didn’t trust anything that Mike Ben says. Right? I’m sure sometimes he’s he’s factual correct, But overall, I’m just highly skeptical. But on an emotional basis, a political basis, a partisan basis, , I resonate with what he say. Yeah.
I wanted him to succeed because his politics are pretty similar to mine. So my hero system is, as I perceive it understand it is, I put telling the truth publicly is about the most important value it’s more important than for me activism networking, friendship and success. So if, Mike Ben’s or Dennis P or Ben shapiro or Neil Ferguson, if they allowed their theories to be limited by the facts. Right, they’d have very little influence, but as activists and Guru, these guys are incredibly wildly successful. Andrew Gel, the columbia University statistician said about Neil Ferguson and I think the same analysis applies to guru such as jordan Peterson, Dennis P, and activist, Mike Pence, being willing to stretch the truth, not by flat out lying, but rather by following a general practice of not checking statistical and historical claims, gives Neil ferguson an extra researcher degrees of freedom.
Right? To pursue what he wants to theo about. Academia has what might be called the John Yu line. The point at which nothing you write gets taken seriously and so you might as well become a hack. Because you have no scholar reputation to protect.
Right? That’s Andrew Gill that’s that’s an awesome analysis. Right? The the John eu yu line. He is the attorney who developed the bush administrations policy on Torture and then he moved to the University of California at Berkeley law school, and it’s impossible to take John yu seriously as an academic.
Right? Is someone who’s pursuing facts because he he’s become such a hack, but nothing he says can be taken seriously. And so too with Mike Pence. Nothing he says is can be taken seriously at this point because he’s so willing to stretch the truth, and he could apply the same analysis to Neil Ferguson anderson’s public work over the past 15 years. His Andrew Gel on Neil Ferguson.
New and Neil Ferguson is not a flaming homophobic or a shallow historical deter, Rather he simply mis his audience and through through them some academic F boys style humor that he mistakenly thought that they’d enjoy. So that’s after neil ferguson and said that he can understand John maynard Key policies, on the basis that Kings was a homosexual and therefore, he he didn’t care about the future. So on a factual basis. And so for for academics for experts and for the mainstream media, the success of Mike Ben’s completely def defy understanding. So he he most resembles Guru like Jordan Peterson Dennis Per Ben shapiro an activist like Sc burger and John Yu.
Right? In refusing to allow facts to limit his theories. Alright. Like the best selling Romance na, Mike Pence satisfies the imaginative needs of his audience, Republicans that there some kind of shadowy deep state, holding them down and raping them. Right?
He’s successful because he’s useful meets the needs of his audience and he helps Republicans meet their goals. But he’s a successful activist like a Chris Ru. And Bike Bands has powerful supporters such as Republican Congressman, Jim Jordan. So I find a fascinating. Nobody with any relevant expertise, recognizes me.
No. Mike Pence as possessing any expertise in their field of expertise, that experts are usually those who other experts regard as experts unlike me. Mike Pence has been incredibly influential. So here’s my favorite frame for these kind of discussions. People did not evolve to be gullible.
Right? This deflate hysteria on both sides of the disinformation, media influence academia influence debate. So by contrast with Mike Be frame that his outright days was simply a der radical rationalization project. Richard Hana had a much more convincing explanation. He said, I truly sucked back then.
When I wrote for various outright publications.
Speaker 2: Urging leaders by our state department, but the battle for hearts and minds had been something that we had been giving ourselves a long moral license leash, if you will. Since 19 48, 1 of the Godfather of the Cia, George Ken at, 12 days after we rig the Italian election in…
Speaker 0: So if I’m primarily interested in truth, then it’s a complete waste to type for me to listen to Mike Ben, Dennis Sp Ben shapiro, Jordan Peterson and the like. If I wanna understand influence in how Guru and activist work. Right? Then I have to listen to them through a highly skeptical frame.
Speaker 2: 19 48 by stuffing ballot boxes and working with the mob, we pub published a memo called the inauguration of organized political warfare, where he said, listen.
Speaker 0: No. I loved having brand game radio, aka Mike Benz on my show in 20 18. So I was not as skeptical, and I was not as clear in my thinking in 20 18. So I regard the look forward of… Post post 20 20 as much more clear and and appropriately skeptical in my thinking, and I will give much of the credit to the podcast decoding the guru.
Speaker 2: It’s a mean old world out there. We at the Cia just rigged the Italian election. We had to do it because if if the communist won, maybe the…
Speaker 0: So if I’m primarily interested in truth, I find it unbearable listening to this, Mike Ben’s. Analysis. And so some days, I just simply don’t have the the patience for this kind of nonsense. Right. Is there a sex year woman in politics in Sarah Is?
She… I I just love her work. She’s graduate of Harvard Law school, I believe she’s on a second marriage. She’s mother 2 kids. She’s in her early forties.
She hosts a podcast for the dispatch, and here she’s talking with Jenna Goldberg and Megan Mcconnell. About David French.
Speaker 4: The price gouging is what makes the generators and the ice.
Speaker 0: Alright. This is Megan Mcconnell speaking. And and she’s talking about how Kamala harris has run into the first skeptical media coverage for the first time, she is dipping in the polls. Right? Her margin against Donald Trump has started dropping over the past few days.
So the the elite media for the first time have given her some bad press. And as she is spinning out these price control narratives that seem to make for great politics, but also for bad policies.
Speaker 4: Be in the disaster area, And if you didn’t have price gouging, the prices would be lower on the things you couldn’t buy. Right? But that she’s not actually gonna do anything and as long as it sounds popular, why not? The important thing is to defeat Trump. But in fact, like, Biden tried this over and…
Speaker 0: Okay. Claiming the chat, decoding the guru cranks. So what’s the basis for your analysis?
Speaker 4: Over and over again. And it did not have any measurable impact on people blaming his administration for inflation. Now some of that blame was in fact unfair a lot of it really was just supply chain stuff. It was some of it was money that had built up in bank accounts under Trump all coming out after the pandemic ended, but it
Speaker 0: So Megan Mcconnell is sent a sent right, and she’s a never Trump.
Speaker 4: The end of the day, like, politically, it was not an effective slogan, and I… It signals to me both an un seriousness of an economic policy that wears the hell out of me. But more broadly, it it it sort of signals that she is willing to say dumb things that promise really bad policies on the assumption that she won’t have to do anything about it. And in fact, like that has not always turned out to be true. Sometimes you promise a dumb policy.
And then if you don’t do it, voters get mad, and so you do the dumb policy. And you have… , you’ve have seen this with things like Joe Biden student loan forgiveness, I promise this thing. It is bad policy. So what if I did it in an unconstitutional way and then make courts roll it back so they get blamed instead me.
Right bring…
Speaker 5: That is…
Speaker 0: Back to the show. Kip. What’s what’s going on, man?
Speaker 6: Hey, man. I just wanted to, say, congratulations on Ray gun first and foremost, I don’t know how much you had do… I don’t know if that was exclusively a luke 40 production, but I appreciate what you did there.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I worked with her extensively. Yeah. Work with her extensively on a a break dancing routine.
Speaker 6: Well, I was having lunch yesterday with 51 intelligence experts, and they didn’t think it was Russian disinformation. But they did think it was a loop forward production. So I just, , we’ll put that in our foot… For whatever It’s worth category. I got a cat here who wants to be famous.
But I wanted to like, push back a little bit, I think you were kinda being a little bit tough on bins and guys, like, She burger, both He, by the way. Right? Those are both members of your tribe. Am I right?
Speaker 0: I believe, sir.
Speaker 6: Okay. Well, I was just… I was just… You telling us Renee, the skirts opinion on him is is the same as a Rosie O’donnell given her opinion on, Donald Trump or or Robert Den doing the same. So, I I get I get what you’re saying, but I think we wanna check a couple of different sources for we, , discount him wholeheartedly like that.
I just, , I just… Another thing is I think I think 1 thing that you and I definitely disagree on is I I saw through the course of business how people are are malleable, and you seem to think that they’re so dogg going and rational that is few and far between that can be manipulated am I true and in saying that’s a distinction between us?
Speaker 0: Yeah. That’s a major distinction. I wouldn’t phrase it quite as you did. I would I would argue that people did not evolve to be gullible, and you believe that people did evolve to be gullible.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Well, IIII just going back to the times that Babylon sooner or whatever. I just know that, really, since the time people were put in cities. And they started, like, cove ox, wives, things like that. It just…
It brings out the the worst end people and and, people are very… I I guess early on people found out how, people are, and it’s been going on, , for a long time. So this is nothing new. But what I just wanted to to play for you is is the first 3 opening sentences of Edward Be booked from… 19 28.
Could I do that for you?
Speaker 0: Yes, please.
Speaker 6: Okay. I’m not as technical as you, but I’m not.
Speaker 0: Okay.
Speaker 7: Edward Bernie. Chapter 1, organizing chaos. The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government, which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested largely by men we have never heard of.
This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society. Are invisible governors are in many cases unaware of the identity of their fellow members in the inner cabinet.
Speaker 6: I just wanted to to give you that as as food for thought, let me make sure we’re we’re back on board again. Because people are very malleable. Very malleable. So so I I don’t think I just think that’s an interesting opening for his book in 19 28, propaganda, and that was before the man with the funny mustache made propaganda a bad, word. So, what’s interesting is when you talk to an Edward Be or Carol Qui, any of these, historian types.
They will say it’s a good thing. what I mean? They’re all for it. So… They don’t even…
It… They don’t they don’t even doubt it. They just wanna be on the right side of things when it comes to stuff like that. So do you have any opinion to… Opening senate.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I’ve got a lot of opinions. Per opinion is that he is presenting an emotionally appealing narrative just like, 50 shades of gray that that resonates with many women. Because it it satisfies their feelings. And this is an emotionally appealing narrative because he’s speaking to an above average Iq audience, and he’s giving them a basis for their discussed in feeling of superiority to to the masses who who are so easily malleable.
But let me ask you some questions. So what’s your experience with how easy people are to manipulate. My firsthand real life empirical experience is that that I have found it very difficult to manipulate people against their interests, But no. My my prime story about this is when there was a Luna asylum Near, and these Luna would be released to go for a walk to the candy store, and they’d buy cigarettes and candy. And they’d be listening to the radio as they walk by, and I would try to bargain with them for their radio and I’d offer them my underwear in exchange for their radio.
And these luna never fell for it. Like, even Luna, refused to operate against their interest? What’s your hand experience with persuading people to operate against their interest?
Speaker 6: Well, you do it in a way to where you make it seem that that it that it isn’t that it is in their best interest. So, I guess the best way to answer that is, many, many moons ago, probably in the eighties, Stephen and Covey put out the 7 habits it’s of highly effective people. And they’re all just basic habits, I think like be proactive, begin with the end in mind, seek first to understand, then seek to be understood. Very very simple things. That’s But if you would let…
But I won’t say people like me are programmable because I listened to his tape over and over, and I also got some tapes from the president of the, better business bureau where he was sitting down with someone doing some role playing. And I paid damn close attention to the objections that were coming up in the way they da diffuse, those those objections. And I’m just gonna tell you, Luke. There was a there was a clear. Before I started doing that, I would go see 20 people in the course of a week, trying to sign them up for the Better business bureau, 300 dollars in 10…
It’s an intangible. So you’re having to, you’re having to prove to them that it’s worth the money because it’s an it’s damn sure and intangible. So I was batting about 7 for 20 or 8 for 20. And then all of a sudden after about 2 weeks. I I hated Monday because Monday was what they called appointment setting day.
And I like Tuesday through Friday. That was actually dealing with the people out in the field, but I hated sitting in that office on the phone. So, I asked the the president of the local bureau. What are they… What does she suggest I do.
She told me a b and C, and I did it. I got those tapes from Stephen Covey. I got those role playing and tapes from the people there at the Better business bureau. And I implemented them. And I mean, in my head, I apparently had built a perfect mouse strap because I was I was able to instill value in those people, and I went from going like, 7 out of 28 out of 20.
To to now, I only had to worry about staying around Mondays for half a day because I could set 10 or 12 appointments, and then I could go out and close all 10 or 12 of those appointments, and and, , I’d that’d be about 12 1300 dollars, and that’s all I needed. I was young a young man at at the time. So, it worked because the people had no defense for it. You were taking their defense mechanisms away. So I’m just saying it works.
I don’t know, , on the on the level of Edward Be. , the basic technique is when they got women to to get women to smoke cigarettes. He paid ALAB. So to say what does a cigarette mean to women, and that guy came back and he said it’s a symbol of a male penis. So, all of a sudden, that the tag line was torches of freedom and getting the right flap and taking the right pictures and putting the right headlines in the newspaper, and, , women are buying Virginia slim to this day.
And that was a big… That was a taboo that went all the way back to the Victorian So I’m telling you that Edward Be, not only did he sell for American tobacco. He also was the 1 that formulated the coup to get rid of the Ar bonds regime and Guatemala united fruit company. He was also the same guy. That, Calvin Cup Coolidge apparently was a boring person, but Edward Be set him up with a bunch of movie stars and, ball players and that kind of stuff shaking hands with him.
And all a sudden he became palatable. So I don’t know. Does that answer your question a little bit?
Speaker 0: It it does from where you’re coming from, but it doesn’t really answer my question. My question was what’s your your track record in, convincing people to act against their interest. And I I didn’t hear anything that address that. So how many those people wait. Let me let let let me just finish formulating this.
How many of those people who you persuaded to join this organization would you estimate were acting against their interests?
Speaker 6: Probably most of them because I was building up something, but but it… But it’s lacking in a lot of situations. People don’t know. , there’s no known and unknowns, ? So or, there’s no unknowns.
So, people don’t know… People don’t know what you’re telling them, they’ve got no way just like a this mike ben’s guy, if you if you give us 1 interview on from Ben’s and 1 from from Renee, how how we gonna choose, , so ?
Speaker 0: So why why was it against the interest of most of the people that you sold this to and and how were you able to keep doing something that was against… Like, you were… You if if what you’re saying is true, you were deliberately hurting a lot of people for your own personal gains.
Speaker 6: Yes. I had to… That’s the way that’s the way the West works. Everybody has to chip off of 1 another. And let me give you an example.
Okay. Don’t don’t let this get out, Loop. But 1 of the sale… 1 of the things in my sales pitch was I wanted to get you luke luke forward on board this week because we got a membership directory that’s get ready to go to print. And I know it’s not going to print till Friday, and I need to get you involved because, , Luke…
I’ve looked at… I’ve looked at all of our research numbers and 4 out 4 out 4 out of 5 better business bureau members. If if given the choice, would rather deal with other big… Better business bureau companies, So, from that aspect alone, if we could just convince 1 person, let’s say you’re a jan… If we could just convince 1 company to sign you up, but to use your jan service, it would more than pay for this 300 dollar membership fee.
I wanna get you on board to to let you see the benefit of that. Now I hadn’t had to give that spiel in not 30 something years, but that’s the kind of stuff. You’re you’re in ent value that really isn’t there, and it happens every day on every Tv channel.
Speaker 0: So they were paying 300 dollars and to to what extent did they get value for that? Because they must have seen some value in it. But you you’d know better.
Speaker 6: In reality what they were getting was a sticker to put on the front of their business. And then, gosh. That was pretty much it. They were also whether…
Speaker 0: I know a lot of people who will spend hundreds even thousands of dollars to get a sticker porter on top of their business because Right. They for for reasons that it strike me as possibly completely empirical and true, recognize the value in those stickers.
Speaker 6: Right. I get you. Now and and it wouldn’t… I continue that the market that had had come from in Tennessee, had… That was name recognition for the Better Business Bureau with the area I had went to in North Carolina to sell their services, had absolutely no name recognition.
So that I mean, that was nominal at best as far as a,
Speaker 0: The better business Bureau, you’re saying the Better Business Bureau has no name recognition in in some areas?
Speaker 6: Yeah. I would say it’s market to market. , some of them do a good job about getting their Psa out there and others don’t see it as such a high priority, and and it’s it’s it’s just noticeable. I know that’s boring to actually talk about. But that’s that that’s something that I’m…
That’s about all I know about that.
Speaker 0: I I would think for an average person get going into a shop seeing a sticker better business bureau but that would bring about some sense of reassurance that the business practices in this shop are going to be ethical.
Speaker 6: Maybe it would, but then you… Then you would notice, or at least I noticed most the people who thought that were less reputable businesses. And also, I couldn’t help but notice from the time that I worked at the Better Business Bureau. I think, like, 20 20 ran 2 or 3 exposes on businesses that actually had those Bb stickers on on the door of their business as they were taking the cameras in to expose, , them for their fraud. So…
Yeah, there’s there’s June, like I say,
Speaker 0: So the the less reputable business, it it would even be more in their interest to have those stickers.
Speaker 6: Yes. Those
Speaker 0: would be more in the need of of that kind of reputation.
Speaker 6: Yes. They could use a reputation booth. And that would be the people in general would be the only people that probably needed to be part of the Dead of Business Bureau. But in an a in an area where the better Business Bureau has a lot of a, name recognition, they mistakenly associated with things like the Chamber of commerce. , they think it might boost their, image in town.
And, , it’s just me and you’re talking, it it’s not gonna… , But I would sell that. , I would sell that. If you mentioned it, Of course, I would play it up right after that after you mentioned it. So, the whole thing, It…
It was a big game. And you talk… You… So we were talking out of the customer, but I remember when I was… Let’s just say back when I was sales.
I now view that as kind of a dark art since 2007, and I try to not do that consciously, even if I catch myself doing it, I’ll try to back away. But at 1 point, I remember being frustrated about a a wrong hamburger or order through the drive through, and I had the woman the drive through worker could drive it to my house, , that was about 4 miles away. And that was just a just a couple instances like that where I knew that, boy, that’s strange. , you gotta be a… Special kind of a tricks steer to to get them to get the drive through worker to drive that wrong order to the…
To drive the corrected order to your house. So…
Speaker 0: Well, Well,
Speaker 8: that’s just example.
Speaker 0: Yeah. I I would see that as… I think most people would prefer to drive an order 4 miles then to get fired. And you you probably came across as someone who had the ability to get that worker of fired or to do damage. We’re living in an online world.
You could do some, , far more damage to that store, if if they didn’t meet your needs. So to me, it would probably be in both the entities interest and that individual workers interest, to go to that trouble to avoid you hurting them.
Speaker 6: I don’t know. I don’t know. I just thought it was a little bit beyond the pale. I was surprised that that it ain’t… That they actually did it.
And there’s just been a few instances like that where I just thought it was surprised… Of where I was surprised by what people were willing to do. But 1 thing, you and I I know 1 of your things is really American he. And I think 1 thing you noticed that I pushed back sometime is I keep trying to let on so many… So many levels that I think, in a lot of times, you’re you’re living in a world of what was and maybe not is what he is and I just think that, like, out there in California where you live.
They’ve got they’ve got no real political wheel to even imprison their criminals. Have you noticed that, , since the last couple years, , the the state, basically, told the counties, if you’re so hell bent on put on putting these people behind bars, you can pay for it. , once it became a hundred thousand dollars ahead to put people up in the cli. All of a sudden, there’s no political wheel to do it. Have you noticed that?
Speaker 0: Yes. In California and in New York, there has been a substantial swing against enforcing the law and and punishing criminals. But now there’s a substantial swing back. So there’s a substantial movement in California, even among leading Democrats, to return to stricter enforcement and stricter punishment.
Speaker 6: Right. And 1 of the things you were talking about, we… I I asked you about hot wars, , going to tehran wrong in Moscow. And I think you said, well, that might touch off a nuclear war. But what I was trying to touch on is just the fact that the American Psyche has hit the easy button.
We’ve hit the easy button so much that I don’t I don’t think we’re psychologically built for those news reports coming across. Every night that 16 Americans were killed 16 American service men killed in action and whatever town and another drone strike here. I think in the same way, nobody wants to really put people behind bars, I think we’ve lost the the wheel. , we’ve lost the wheel to do a lot of things, but I’m just trying to give you an example. That’s another example of, I just don’t think I think after 30 days of of here reports of debt Americans, people would not like that, , and and it would be a hard.
I think I think from the inside America would have a hard time fighting a war. That’s what I’m trying to impress upon you. What you think about that? I mean, Well,
Speaker 0: I think Americans would rationally empirical have a hard time accepting considerable numbers of American casualties fighting outside of the United States because it’s it’s… Not necessarily strongly convincing to argue that hundred thousand Americans should die to defend Taiwan. Right? That is not would not be popular with American people. On the other hand, if there was an invasion into the United States by China, I think Americans would be willing to pay the price in American lives to repel that invasion.
Speaker 6: Yeah. Yeah. I I agree with you there. I would just say, , , you’ve been… You’ve been around long enough to know the 1 of the things America exports is culture.
And I don’t know if you’ve noticed that some of these forming former or Soviet Eastern block countries. I don’t know if specifically, like Bulgaria, Romania of those types of countries. They don’t seem to be quick to latch on to the whole global Homo. , I don’t think they They don’t want… They’re willing to, like, not get the money from us to not get the cultural exports, and it’s kinda in that vein, I would I would basically ask you in the past 25, 30 years, can you really name a lot of cultural highlights, ?
Because… Or or… But because because if it’s if it’s Big Macs and white women t in and singing songs about wet pussy cats and stuff like that. What what’s it good for? Can you could you…
Give me give me your impression of the American culture, especially in the last coat quarter century.
Speaker 0: Well, I’d say that many of the world’s best Tv shows have come from America such as the sop or breaking bad. So I think we we tend to make the best Tv. Not just middle brow and low brow but also more high brow, and, the best movies, both Low brow middle brow and high brow, American culture is incredibly influential because it It taps into generic desires. I think that human desires are far more generic than than, differentiated. And so people want sexual excitement, romantic fulfillment.
Material fulfillment, safety. So I I think there’s a great deal of of the generic uniform nature to human desires and American cultural products are simply more successful at meeting those desires, sometimes are the best, sometimes for mixed results and sometimes for the worst.
Speaker 6: Right. Well, I just… , it’s probably mystic in me, but it’s creams d legitimacy. So, , we’ll just leave it there. I I just…
Congratulations again on Ray gun, and it’s I remember when those shrinks had come over from Europe a hundred years ago or so I remember them saying that the American head was black and sexual. And you can tell from Ray that there is neither of that. Over there in and the land down under is there, Luke.
Speaker 0: Well, there’s a very low proportion. Of black people in Australia. So people of West African Descent are incredibly influential in the United States, but there are very few people of African descent in Australia. So, yeah, It’s a it’s a different culture, much lower rates of crime of much higher rates of social cohesion and social trust in Australia.
Speaker 6: She actually actually will close the this. She actually reminded me of the corn ness of Reagan reminded me a Kamala of all people. Probably because you’ve been talking about her so much later, but that’s really all I had. You have a good weekend, buddy.
Speaker 0: Thanks. Great to talk to you, Kip. So if you’re wondering. Hey Care, man. And if you’re wondering who, Ray is here’s an article.
In the…
Speaker 9: This new story was by 8 she has been subjected to. After her unusual moves at the Paris 20 24 competition were mocked online, went viral and sparked a backlash. Gun. Who represented Australia at the breaking world championships in Paris in 20 21 and in seoul in 20 22 and is a university lecturer with research interests in breaking in street dance finished far from the podium at the Olympics, but she won the hearts of many Australians for her efforts. Her signature move dubbed the kangaroo paw, quickly became the subject of countless memes, a parody sketch on the tonight show starring Jimmy Fallon.
And attracted the attention of celebrities, including Singer Adele. Earlier this week, a change dot org petition attacking gun selection, breaking qualifications and role as a university academic went online. A petition the Australian Olympic committee condemned as V, misleading and bullying.
Speaker 0: So Rachel gun did not belong at the Olympics. Alright. Her performance received 0. Scores, right, incredibly low scores. And she should not have participated in the Olympics if she did not wanna deal with the backlash.
Right? She tried to con the system, and then she had to pay a price for that
Speaker 9: in containing numerous false hoods designed to en gender hatred against an athlete. The petition has since been taken down, but not before attracting more than 57000 signatures as of Thursday, according to a cached version of the site gun in a video posted on Instagram late Thursday did not directly mention the petition, but said there was misinformation floating around about her and referred people to the statement from the Ao. She also thanked all the people who have supported me on her journey to Paris 20 24 where breaking made it…
Speaker 0: Right. There was a common saying among journalists that there’s nothing people prefer more than talking about themselves. And there’s nothing people hate more than seeing those words end up in public print. So people want all the advantages for all their choices such as trying to game the system, but then people don’t wanna pay any of the prices, they don’t wanna put up with the backlash for gaming the system.
Speaker 9: Olympic debut adding. I really appreciate the positivity, and I’m glad I was able to bring some joy into your lives.
Speaker 0: Right. Who who does not appreciate the positivity and the joy that I bring into your life. I mean, I’m sure how many rap have had the same attitude that, hey, I’ve gone out there a rape a lot of women, but sometimes in the process of men committing rape, Right? The woman has an orgasm. Now, I would expect that the women universally hate being raped, but I’m sure many Rap go out there and say, yeah, I was raping women, but I gave some of them all orgasm, and I appreciate the positivity.
Speaker 9: I didn’t realize that would also open the door to so much hate, which had…
Speaker 0: Right. How stupid and naive, do you have to be to think that you would not get hate for gaming the system.
Speaker 9: As frankly been pretty devastating. She also requested the media too. Please stop harassing my family, my friends. Everyone…
Speaker 0: Everything we do affects other people. Right? You choose to participate in public live. That is gonna have repercussions. Right?
For your family and for your friends. And you can make all the petitions and you can cry and you can plead, please stop harassing my family and friends, but inevitably, anything you do. Will affect other people who will then respond by putting pressure on your family and friends. Right? Absolute iron law.
So if you don’t want, your family and friends to pay a negative price to your words and behavior, then don’t do things in public that are gonna generate, , avalanche of hatred.
Speaker 9: It’s been through a lot as a result of this.
Speaker 0: Oh. Wave. Right back to Megan Mcconnell here talking with Sarah Is.
Speaker 4: It’s like… That’s actually civic cor. It’s bad policy. It sets people up to believe things that aren’t true, and then and to make plans based on promises that aren’t true, and then they find out they’re not true and it’s bad. Like, this is a really bad way to make policy.
And I would really like it to stop in favor of saying things that make sense.
Speaker 10: Speaking of being greedy, Meghan. Look at you. I do wanna read some of the actual experts on this question So the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco economist found little evidence that price gouging was the main culprit, Aggregate markets, the more relevant measure for overall inflation have stayed essentially flat since the start of the recovery. Rising markup have not been a main driver of the recent surge and subsequent decline inflation during the current recovery. That was from this year, going back to 20 23, Eric Levi in York Magazine, In 20 19, Us industries were roughly as concentrated as they were in 20 22 yet in the former year inflation sat near 2 percent, a low level by historical standards in the latter year by contrast prices rose by 6…
Speaker 0: God if Sarah His girl wasn’t married. I would just love for her to read the the torture to me in perfect Hebrew or… I mean, I’d be happy to have her read the communist manifesto to me. I think she has such a a studying personality and brain.
Speaker 10: 0.5 percent. So why did corporate concentration yield historically low inflation throughout the 20 tens, only to suddenly produce exceptionally high inflation following the pandemic, mat, greed is a constant in the economy, not a variable, and therefore, it doesn’t explain why inflation was so much higher in 20 22 than in 20 19, And our own Scott Lin, he has a a chart because, of course, he does. So you’ll just have to trust me with the church shows, corporate greed E profit was actually a little lower during the 21 22 pandemic recovery than in previous. Recoveries. So jonah, I know this is a weird topic to discuss where politicians use facts that don’t appear to be true to push policy that gets them out of an unfortunate reality about maybe their policies causing inflation because if if the greed of the corporations and the concentration of the industries didn’t cause it, what did?
I’m
Speaker 0: So I remember when I work for Kmart in in Australia. The the the profit margin for groceries. Alright? Was, like, 1 percent. It’s about the lowest profit margin out there.
And so, yeah, Kamala Harris is price gouging price fixing perspectives are probably good politics, but terrible terrible policies. Alright? This is Byron York, pretty fair minded political reporter on the right speaking here on Fox news.
Speaker 11: Thousand have come into that city. I mean, we know the hospitals are are overwhelmed. We’ve seen that the the police precinct inundated. We’ve seen that the city council fights that have erupted in the suburbs surrounding Chicago because some of have been put on trains and sent out to the hospitals the outer suburbs of that city. So they’ve been dealing with this for quite some time and they’re fed up.
I mean, their soccer fields are taken over in the city buyer. I can see you jumping in here. Because to your point, this is a drop in the bucket and they’re complaining about that. This city’s been dealing with this for years. Mh.
Speaker 12: I suspect we’re not gonna hear a lot about those burdens from the podium at the democratic convention, but the fact is those problems are all in fact there. And you will hear, I think Kamala Harris perhaps others in the Biden administration saying, oh, no. The flow of immigrants has slowed dramatically recently, which could lead to the question.
Speaker 0: Oh my god. A u is outraged as I am that he mispronounce the sacred name of comma? Kamala?
Speaker 12: You could have stopped it all along. Anytime you wanted, but, it is… It has been reduced somewhat now, but I I’d… I think the the trust problem. The for voters listening to Kamala Harris saying that she will secure the border after the 4 years of the Biden administration in which whatever her title was, she had a significant role in border policy After all that, it’s hard for anyone to actually believe that she…
Speaker 0: Okay. I I understand the partisan desire to tie Kamala harris to biden an administration. Policies. But how much power and influence a vice president has over public policy. Right.
Approaching 0. So I understand it’s rhetoric and even politically effective to tie Kamala Harris into Biden policies, but she didn’t have any power. She was vice president, vice president with rare exceptions have no power. Right how much power you think Kamala harris has had over border policies, inflation policies. Right?
Approaching 0. So I understand it’s effective and it feels good. But it’s it’s completely divorced from reality. Vice presidents with rare exceptions have no power. I just read an interesting 20 14 book on a topic I never really thought of, is called the rise of writing redefining mass literacy.
So we usually understand literacy in terms of reading. But now a majority of American workers spend much of their workday writing. That writing has always been used for work, production, output earning profit, practicality, record keeping buying and selling. So writing is a product that is increasingly bought and sold. It em invites knowledge information invention, service social relations news is a product of the new economy.
So at the turn of the twentieth century, knowledge workers represented 10 percent of all employees near 2000 knowledge workers estimated to amount to 75 percent of the employed population. So knowledge has become the primary ingredient in what we make do by and sell and writing has become a dominant form of labor as it transforms knowledge into usable shareable form. So the status of writing is a dominant form of labor in the Us economy puts an unusual degree of pressure on people’s writing skills. Their writing literacy is pulled deeply into the manufacturing, processing mining and distributing of information and knowledge. Writing is a time intensive form of labor, that tends to follow people at home.
So people often do their most effective, most precise, most efficient writing when they get out of the office. So rap of the production pressures on writing that they redefining reading. People increasingly read from the posture of the writer from inside the act of writing as they respond to others as a research edit or review other people’s writing or they search for styles or approaches to borrow and use in their own writing. So reading has become increasingly subordinate to the needs of writing. People are doing so much writing and then reading for writing at work that they do much less reading in their spare time.
So normally, what you write belongs to you unless you do it at work, then it belongs entirely to your employer. Right? Your your employer has to pay the price and also earns the benefits of what you write. So in the eyes of the law, the employer is the author of what you write at work. And as individuals workplace writers not allowed to profit individually from their writing.
Even the knowledge they may produce in their heads as a result of the writing they do at work is technically not theirs to benefit from. Workday day, writers are not legally entitled to the first amendment. Have no rights to express their own views through their workplace writing. They can be fired for doing it. They won’t get much support from the courts if they appeal.
According to the Supreme Court, people do not write at work as citizens or even as free beings. They write at work as willingly enlisted corporate voices or you may even understand them as voluntary slaves. I find it useful to understand going to work as you choosing to be a slave for a certain number of hours a week. So you are not individually responsible for what you write at work, Your employer is responsible. So you don’t really mean what you say at work, what you write at work.
So people who write as employees don’t really mean what they say. Their speech rights are essentially ina opera. So this is a lot less romantic understanding of writing and a lot more funeral. Copyright is reserved for taxes that are considered creative or autistic or otherwise promote learning or have some enduring social utility, almost nothing that you write at workforce under these categories. There are 2 exceptions for for teachers and for academics.
They enjoy. A privileged exemption. And by the din of long standing tradition, they retain rights to their own writing and to other intellectual property, even when it’s done on an employer’s premises, So what happens to a citizens voice once it is put into service of work. It becomes somebody else’s rented property. Right?
This is c speech, and it necessarily lose its free speech first amendment protections, because it is no longer self directed. Once a person is employed to say what he does, the speech represents not her or his expression, it represents the expression of an employer, So at a friend who was a free market economist, but the job that she took was to argue for subsidies for her particular group. So almost all the writing that she did as an employee went completely against what she believed in, and this is typical for employees. Right. The first amendment protects a person’s speech to order and create the world in a desire way and to understand and communicate about the word world in a way that you find important Right.
But commercial speech reflects market forces that requires enterprises to focus on profit and this profit orientation is no manifestation of individual freedom or choice. Commercial speech does not represent an attempt to create or affect the world in a way that has any logical or intrinsic connection to anyone’s values or personal wishes. It’s done to make a profit. So speech, created at work receives no first amendment protection, like private employers, the government also controls its employee speech to protect and promote its own interests. Work day, Writers are legally severed economically, ethically and politically from the words they write on the job.
But you’re not really ethically, economically, or politically responsible for what you write on the job. Because you are a manifestation of your employer’s interest. Now, writing, literary writing on your own enjoys considerable prestige. Alright. Writing is associated with creativity, talent, intellect, sen and knowledge and authority.
So writing is usually a desirable skill, a scarce skill, it is respected for its difficulty and for its achievements, particularly when it results in publication. So writers benefit from the cultural prestige of reading. And many forms of reading have been accord high cultural value. And so this value extends to those who can write in these particular forms. So writing quiz high status to the individual who engages in it and is then published.
1 can make a name through writing. You can powerfully engage with literacy and receive all its benefits, you can promote human growth and flourishing. Right? You can be essentially certified as of great status. So writing is often an independent source of social value and power.
And it will tend to enhance the stature of anyone who claims authors ship. So if you wanna become famous, the 2 easiest quickest way to do it are to publish a book, which is prestigious or to give something away, Now the Internet favors a less original and less prestigious form writing. Right? You don’t get nearly as much prestige for writing on a blog or in social media as you would for publishing a book with… An outstanding polish say Harbor Collins.
Right? The Internet is kind of a creation by citation sampling, cutting and pasting and the blurring of the roles of writers and readers. So most of the words that come across you my show not spoken or created by me. Right? Most of the things that I say, most of the things that come across you on this show.
Alright? I’m playing from others, and that’s similar to Internet writing. So writing is wrapped in yearning. Writing is a titanic ambition it is chasing a dream. So young people tend to be aware of the high prestige afforded to the successful writer and the published author, but they are increasingly highly aware of the precarious of the occupation of writer, and the difficulty of making a living as a writer.
But as soon as you determine to make a living as a writer, you start a relationship of dependence. A writing orientation creates awareness toward reading, Right? Reading is much more associated with pacific and conformity. When you write and publish, Alright? You develop a heightened sense of confusion and vulnerability.
Especially with regard to friends and family. It’s a little bit like break dancing at the Olympics. Right? You become vulnerable to mis attribution to parody to a strange to charges of libel self exposure, and you may feel the need for pseudo. There are all sorts of uncomfortable experiences that attached to people who write.
Reading is largely an internal process writing is an external experience. And The effects of writing tend to come back at writers from the outside. We may all sorts of thoughts that when they stay private, they do us no damage. But once we publish them, right, they bring considerable wear and tear to our life, increase trouble and more risk. So public writing risk, social exposure, os, retaliation and legal consequences.
So in the 20 first century, citizens are far more likely to run a foul of the courts, not because they are able to read too little, but because they choose to write too much. Prosecutors and defense attorneys scour the online writing of prospective jurors, prospective employees, logs, Facebook countries, tweets to look for dispositions and biases, many criminal have been overturned in recent years. After jurors were discovered writing online about the jury experiences. So free, personal expression, this associated with social media tends to be in friction with the court’s traditional ways of protecting the rights of defendants, tensions by controlling the speech of jurors. Now you’re probably wondering.
40, What does J Goldberg have to say?
Speaker 13: I’m a little sympathetic, not so the price gouging. That’s all garbage. Right? I mean, it’s it’s it’s… It’s total nonsense.
And…
Speaker 4: My blood pressure just spikes and it’s now. It’s slowly. We’re working its way down.
Speaker 13: I think the Biden spending was bad, and I think it probably contributed to inflation. But I don’t think Biden was to blame for the… For the bulk of the inflation we saw, it was a global phenomenon was it throughout the west, there are defenses that the Biden world could offer. Other than the scape coding grocery stores for raising their prices during a time of supply chain bottlenecks and high inflation. And they’d they would rather not do that.
And I think that’s stupid. And I think that there are ways in which like, there’s all this chatter, again, we’re talking on Thursday about our Harris trying to find ways to separate from Biden. This seems like 1 of these areas where you could have a nuanced separation. But they’re not gonna do that in part because as much as we can sit here and talk about how stupid all of this is, it focus groups really well. And this is 1 of the problems that we have in economics is that…
, as I often say, the free market system is the most cooperative system ever conceived of by humanity for, improving prosperity and reducing poverty. It just doesn’t feel like it. You
Speaker 0: Hi. It is a little segment from Mark Hal show last week on media bias.
Speaker 14: Overt bias. I… When I was still managing the Times newsroom, I I just was in the top jobs when social media became so prevalent, and when the whole trend towards individual news reporters branding themselves became pervasive, and on social media, , many reporters were going way beyond what they would write in their edited news stories, and we’re expressing themselves in a more personal and sometimes partisan way. And I tried my, but I think unsuccessfully to to say you can’t be doing that. Like, when you’re speaking, you’re speaking as a New York time as the New York Times, and it should be the same standard for news stories as you have on your social media feeds, but that…
Speaker 0: So the the things that I’ve said online have… Perhaps, perhaps, cost me, , many possibilities for marriage for relationships for children for mortgage for economic prosperity. Alright. I I’ve paid a substantial price just like anyone else who is as Else outspoken as I am online. And I I think I…
Usually, I’m happily paying the price, but I probably don’t even reckon where they’ll come to terms with the extent of the price that I paid.
Speaker 14: That became a laughable goal. And so I think that… That’s another effect. I mean, the financial effect of social media, we could spend 2 full hours on for sure, and you’re very right to bring it up, but, it changed the the the nature of news organizations and their relationship to their paying audiences for sure. And if you wanted to get the most clicks, Right.
Speaker 0: The the best business model for the New York Times is to provide up eds talking about, , how great the Democrats are and how bad the republicans are. Right? That… That’s why primarily people subscribe to the New York Times.
Speaker 14: From your readers and your audience, you gave them in general, more news that they would tend to feel they…
Speaker 0: Just like, if you listen to right wing talk radio or you support right wing comment? Even just support them with your attention. You you are usually doing it to receive comfort for your own particular system.
Speaker 14: They agreed weather that reflected. Their political outlook.
Speaker 15: But if I say 1 other area of social media I know that’s huge. Yeah. Another 1, I think is the is the feedback mechanism that you get from from social media that never existed before. If you want to , write a letter to the editor or send a letter to your, , local Tv station. , you people would read.
Maybe they would have some feedback, and then there we became emails. All of that was private. The fact that feedback is now public. From my, I interviewed Sharon Wax, who’s was the the founder of the rap. Was at New york Times for a long time, and she’s she told me, and I I think that this is pervasive in the industry that she’s seen reporters change the way they cover a story or not cover story at all for fear of what might happen on social media over their coverage of the story.
And I think that is just a small example of, a way of negative feedback can affect coverage. And even but we positive. Can I coverage when you get it on social media when you’re a journalist,
Speaker 14: Dave, I think that was a factor in the lack of coverage of biden decline? And if you heard about that, you got a social media, like, bounce down. You yeah.
Speaker 16: That’s a terrible that’s a terrible thing. I mean… Keeping these guard up for straight news reporters is really important and and, , protecting them from the mob, but also making sure that they aren’t expressing their biases on a particular story when they’re straight news recorders. I just wanted to, And I say that as a, , columnist comment type. There should be
Speaker 5: anyone he runs in.
Speaker 8: Yeah. I really yeah. It’s really hard. Hard to
Speaker 16: do that because because you do have these…
Speaker 0: Right. That as an employee. You’re very likely to… Have negative feelings about your boss. Right?
But usually, your boss is like you just to trying to do the best they can in difficult circumstances. And so as an employee, you might often think, oh, the bosses have all the power. But then the bosses often feel like that why can’t I get my employees to conform to our policies.
Speaker 16: , these activists, sometimes are we’re cloaked as as journalists, and that’s that’s a problem. I just wanna say 1 thing about local news, because I think my overall… Concern really is with with what’s happened locally. Local news outlets are the lungs of democracy. You can’t have a functioning local democracy with local, ,
Speaker 17: local. You
Speaker 0: think that’s true.
Speaker 16: Transparent parent local election.
Speaker 0: Right. Do you really think that the news media really are the lungs of democracy. I think that overstate the importance of the media.
Speaker 16: Then school board elections. If you don’t have local media and so many thousands of local newspapers. Have closed. So my concerns are really left with the national media where… I think there’s still a lot of really good reporting despite despite some biases that that there shouldn’t be.
But locally, and you can see this a little bit in terms of the news desert that have been created. And those news desert correspond to pulling the show…
Speaker 0: Bet. You love listening to Jonathan Ultra. Okay. What what the heck else do have lined up. Right.
I enjoy listening to Rory Sutherland. Here on Quest. Williamson Martin West show.
Speaker 18: It’s to wife for a house, which appeals to everybody. Right? If , if you marry a supermodel. Right? Basically, then I run off with the tennis coach and take your hanks.
Right? What what you want is someone who’s disproportionately attractive to you. Yeah. Alright? That’s the sort of game’s theo approach of house hunting.
So my my approach to house. I’ll stay.
Speaker 0: This is how I have conducted much of my love life and romantic life. It it usually takes less effort to date a 5 or a 6 or a 7 compared to dating an 8, 9 or 10. And so I’ve often dated women who in ingest pure terms of of locks. Right? Or like, a 5 or a 6, but they were particularly attractive to me because I have my own distinctive love map or template.
And so often women who were not objectively stunning as I got to know them they became highly attractive to me. And and so I would choose women who are not nines or tens. Right I choose women who are just objectively 5 because I I’d have to work less hard to keep them, and I would… I felt a special yearning for them that was not widely popular. So I have consistently used often without consciously knowing it this strategy by Rory Sutherland.
Kathy Sci had wise insight into me that I’m a woman isa, but a terribly lazy woman isa.
Speaker 18: Out dating my wife might be watching this. Okay. It’s to some extent form of… And I’ve often said that a estate agencies would be a lot better if they actually were forced to list the downsides of a property as well as the upsides? Because the shrewd way to choose a house is not say what’s my perfect house?
It’s to say, what do other people hate that I don’t mind.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 18: Okay. So an example in my case we’ll be next to a railway line. Absolute bonus. , I love trains. Right?
They stop at midnight. They don’t keep you awake. I never get a bed before midnight anyway. I’d actually pay extra
Speaker 0: Right. Often we can put out with things that other people find into. Let’s play a little bit more here from Mike Benz.
Speaker 2: This nato think tank. So they represent the political census. Of Nato and in many respects, when when Nato has civil society actions that they want to be coordinated to to synchronize with military action in a region, the Atlanta council essentially is deployed to consensus build and make that political action happen within a region of interest in nato. Now the Atlantic council is 7 Cia directors on its board. A lot of people don’t even know that 7 Cia directors are still alive, load alone all concentration.
Speaker 0: This feels incredibly convincing doesn’t it? The the successful guru, the successful pun it. Learns to say all sorts of things that sound terribly profound and important. And then it’s not terribly sq about whether or not. What he’s saying is actually accurate.
Speaker 2: Rated on on the board of a single organization that’s kind of the heavyweight in the censorship industry. They get annual funding from the Department of Defense, the state department and Cia cutout outs like the National Endowment for democracy. The Atlanta council in January 20 17 moved immediately to pressure European governments to pass censorship laws to create a transatlantic flank tank on free speech in exactly the way that Rick Dang essentially called for to have the Us Mimic European censorship laws. 1 of the ways they did this was by getting Germany to pass something called Next in August 20 17, which was which was which was essentially kicked off the era of of automated censorship in the Us.
Speaker 0: Right, If you wanna believe this, right? It it feels like you were getting profound previously hidden truths.
Speaker 2: What Next required was in less unless social media platforms wanted to pay a 54000000 dollar fine for each instance of speech, each post left up on their platform for more than 48 hours that have been identified as hate speech. They would they would be fined basically into bankruptcy when you aggregate 54000000 over tens of thousands of posts per day. And the the safe haven around that was if they deployed, artificial intelligence based censorship technologies, which had been again created by Da to take on Isis to be able to scan.
Speaker 0: Right. This guy sounds like he really knows what he’s talking about. I mean, wow. I can’t believe. We’re getting these these truths.
Finally, Right, that the veil is being lifted from my eyes.
Speaker 2: In band speech automatically. And this was a… This… , I call these weapons of mass deletion. These are essentially the ability to censor tens of millions of posts.
With just a few lines of code, and the the way this is done is by aggregating, basically, the the field of censorship science fuses together 2 disparate groups of study, if you will. There’s the sort of political and social scientists who are the sort of…
Speaker 0: Wow, this guy’s is talking about science, man. He he’s blinding me with science.
Speaker 2: Thought leaders of what should be censored. And then there are the sort of quan if you will. These are the programmers, The computational data scientists. Computational linguistics. Every university.
There’s over 60 universities now.
Speaker 0: Wow. He’s using big words and he he’s he’s using facts and logic. My god. This is so compelling.
Speaker 2: Oh who get federal government grants, to do this censorship, the censorship work and the censorship preparation work. Where what they do is they create these code books of the language that people use. The same way they did for Ice. They did this for example, with Covid.
Speaker 0: Right, He would speak the same incredibly compelling way. When he was frame game radio. Right? You felt like the veil are being lifted from your eyes. You you now understood what we were up against to try to preserve western civilization.
Speaker 2: They created these these Covid lexicon of what distant groups were saying about Mandy.
Speaker 0: So if you’re on the right, and you are predisposed to the conventional mag world view, this is gonna feel emotionally amazing. Right? This is gonna sound and feel profound. Just as when you listen to Jordan Peterson. Right?
When he says, sounds incredibly profound if you’re already predisposed in that direction.
Speaker 2: It’s about masks about vaccines, about high profile individuals like Tony Fauci. Or or Peter Dash or any of these are these pro protected Vip individuals who’s reputable…
Speaker 0: Wow, these guys are protected. Right? They are protected Vip individuals, the whole social media industrial complex is protecting their reputation. Now on an empirical factual basis, Right, that doesn’t stand up. There’s abundant and a severe criticism of Tony Fauci and Peter, but all across social media all across the Internet, but it feels like you were you were being shared an important truth here.
Speaker 2: Reputation had to be protected online. And they got this code.
Speaker 0: Their their reputation repetitions, Tony Fauci reputation had to be protected online. Right? On an empirical factual basis, that’s total bunk. Right? To Fauci reputation is repeatedly trashed online.
But it feels profound if you’re already predisposed to believe something like this.
Speaker 2: Hooks. They broke things down here.
Speaker 0: Right. This is like not Nazi propaganda in the sense that if you’re already predisposed to hating jews, you’re gonna be given all sorts of reasons to hate Jews. You’re already predisposed to hating our elites. Right? It’s easy.
Or the most human. Impulse to hate people who have more power than you do. Right? Is the craziest quickest, most innate impulse is to have skepticism and negative feelings about people who have more power than you do. And this…
These narratives that Mike Ben’s spins just will be incredibly satisfying for Republicans.
Speaker 2: Into narratives. The Atlanta council, for example, was a part of this… This government funded consortium, something called the viral vitality project, which which mapped 66 different narratives. So that dis we’re talking about around…
Speaker 0: My god. My god. This is how that the deep state walks guys did did you realize this? This is so important. This is almost an unbelievable narrative.
Speaker 2: Covid. Everything from Covid origins to vaccine efficacy, and then they broke the down these 66 claims into all the different factual sub claims. And then they plug these into these essentially machine learning models to be able to have a constant world heat map of what everybody was saying about Covid. And whenever something started to trend,
Speaker 0: My god, did this hidden knowledge? Did what had been kept from us. That there was there was this… These kind of mach nations by the deep state. My god.
I’m outraged. I can’t believe what they’ve been hiding, but now I finally see. My god, I was lost, but now I’m found. Now I finally see the truth. Now I finally understand how the deep state works.
My god. This sounds like you’re getting the real deal. And and when you listen to Jordan Peterson, right, you get the the same same kind of feeling that you’ve been given something that’s incredibly profound that that you are getting depth of insight.
Speaker 19: I’ve worked with… Democrats behind the scenes for for well, I worked with Democrats behind the scenes for 5 years.
Speaker 0: My god, Jordan Peterson, did he’s been working with Democrats behind the scenes for 5 years? What a fair minded guy. So many people I know an Orthodox Judaism isn’t revered, Jordan Peterson. And when I… When they push me for a reaction, I say, well, somebody says it’s profound and a lot of it is insane.
Speaker 19: Trying to pull the party to the middle. I’m very att to the nuances of American politics. And
Speaker 0: so this guy, he also says, I read 200 bucks on global warming. And he’s very att to the nuances of American politics. And everything that he says, Right? He has a deep deep background in because he’s just done so much work. My god, we we should be so grateful that he is sharing this wisdom with us.
Speaker 19: I wouldn’t say that my attempts to work with…
Speaker 0: I mean, look at the way he’s dressing. And, do you think if he was less successful, he would have the confidence to dress this way? Right, he’s really embracing his guru role.
Speaker 19: With democrat message message the messaging apparatus to pull the party in the middle were particularly successful.
Speaker 0: Right. He he is… He very humbly admitting that he hasn’t been successful pulling the democratic potty to the middle. I mean, What Hot? Like, what grand to imagine that he a a right wing thinker ever had the power to pull the democratic party towards the middle.
But if you’re on the right, this feels really good. Right. What what a fair minded guy is just trying to do the best he can for America. And remember he’s deeply att to the nuances of the American political system.
Speaker 19: But it was certainly something I put a lot of time in effort into, and I reached out new democrats in the house and in the senate,
Speaker 0: Right. How much time and effort you really think that he put into shifting the democratic party towards the middle? And how delusional would you have to be? As as Jordan Peterson to think that you ever had that power. Guys, did did I ever share with you?
How much effort I have put into shifting the the democratic party towards the middle I have worked so hard on this for years, and and I have to admit I have failed, and and it hurts me deeply. It hurts me deeply to have to criticize Kamala Harris.
Speaker 19: For a very long period of time through my extensive connection network. Inviting dozens of people to join me on my podcast and almost with
Speaker 8: Right.
Speaker 0: Extensive connection network in the democratic party. Do you really think he has an extensive connection network in the democratic party?
Speaker 19: Without exception. That was meant with rejection. And that was certainly…
Speaker 0: Wow, that’s shocking. Why would Democrats not particularly be interested in working with a right wing flame throw?
Speaker 19: It wasn’t something I experienced on the Republican side. It it’s actually quite a surprise to me. I would say that I found it. Let’s get forward and
Speaker 0: Elliot black onto the show. Elliott. What’s going on, man.
Speaker 8: Laughing. Can you hear what I’m driving.
Speaker 0: Yes, sir.
Speaker 8: Alright. Couple things. I will start with the manipulation and the persuasion that, Kyle kip was talking about. Isn’t the whole art of sales. , it’s meant…
It’s not to men… It’s not to turn you from a note to a yes. I mean, that’s the most obvious example, but usually, it’s along a Spectrum where you’re trying to get somebody who’s a afford to become a 6. Or 6 to become a 4. , The the the influence game is measured on a continuum.
No?
Speaker 0: Yes. I 100 percent agree.
Speaker 8: Okay. So No. I may have told you this before but I used to… I I had a very brief stint and real estate. Ever tell you this?
Speaker 0: I am not sure, but I I feel so special that you get to share that now.
Speaker 8: Okay. So… Yeah. After the first dot crash, there was a little recession in the tech world. So I decided to get into real estate because that’s where that’s where the money was being printed, Bro, ?
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 8: So I was a rental agent. Right? Which means that, , my job was to rent apartments to people seeking apartments. And if I succeeded in this endeavor, I did get, like, a full month rent. Which in Boston which was was considerable.
So it’s a very difficult gain though because the the apartments that brokers get to rent are usually substandard or they’re missing there have, like, a critical flaw they keeps them for being rented easily on craigslist. They need to be sold. They need to be pushed, ? And they would teach you the art of half of selling as as as typically would say the dark art. And 1 of these dark arts was this particular phrasing that they taught you to use, and which was to manipulate people’s innate agreeable against them.
So… You would phrase a question like… Well, that’s not a problem. Is it? Right?
, this this acts major defect is not a problem, question, Mark. Right? This particular sentence construction. Puts the person who’s naturally inclined to be agreeable and forcing them to be dis disagreeable. Right?
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So it’s a way of subtly leading them towards the conclusion that you want them to to draw, which is, , your basic… It’s it’s it’s immoral. It’s it’s unethical. It’s que. , it’s craziness this and inducing.
It’s it’s not a good feeling to do this. But if your livelihood depends on it, you will cut the ethical corners.
Speaker 0: Right. I mean, you may not enjoy sucking cock, but if your livelihood depends on it, you’ll do it.
Speaker 8: Open up that mouth bro. ?
Speaker 0: Yeah.
Speaker 8: So anyway. So here’s the story. So there’s this particular apartment building that’s located at the north… The very northern skirts of of Cambridge, and it’s situated right by a graveyard, a giant graveyard. Right?
Yes. And these apartments… Now what you wanted to live in them. Right? These are always the last apartments to rent.
But when it got to be Crunch time, , which is the beginning of the school year. And all the other apartments are taken up, they got pretty easy to be rent, to rent. ? And so I got this 1 and 1 of his apartments. And I took her up to this apartment, and we looked out at this giant…
Stan graveyard. And I literally did it. I said, well, that’s not really a problem. Isn’t it. See right.
See ready apartment. But I was not cut out for this sales world list because there’s just little giant ethical gray area there. , You’re not exactly ripping people off, but you’re not really working their best either.
Speaker 0: I I’m surprised that someone who is as as generally warm disposed towards people such as yourself didn’t, , find a longer more satisfying. Career in sales, because you’re you’re generally so optimistic about human nature.
Speaker 8: Yeah. But I I don’t… I lack the killer instincts. Right? I don’t have that.
Speaker 19: You got too much
Speaker 8: I have too much… I’m I’m too. I have too much I’m empty. I’m agreeable list, ? And so people like me, but they like to burn my time.
But at the end of the day, you can’t deposit someone’s good feelings in the bank, ?
Speaker 0: Did you have
Speaker 8: a any of these stealing page you have can basically yes to be a assured.
Speaker 0: Did you ever a screw any of these people when you’re showing them the apartments like, plus you physically screwed them, and then you financially screwed them?
Speaker 8: I didn’t have that pleasure. No. No.
Speaker 0: Okay. Before the were instinct. Yeah. You’re not always closing.
Speaker 8: And not I was closing and, . They’ve caused… Everything has consequence. Sometimes the consequences aren’t. Immediately apparent.
? Yeah. Actually, that is how I found my… I found a a girlfriend now. The crazy 1.
Yeah. I she was a client.
Speaker 0: You did. You did. Screw her.
Speaker 8: I actually did. I actually did. So now I think about it. Alright. So listen.
I got to you… So I had 2 stories back to back, involving humor. And sucks. Right. And laughter because you have…
, you sort of truck up this little sub theme if a showed lately.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 8: And so, relate 2 stories. Alright. First 1 happens on Friday. So, about my engine light problem, and my fix is you buy few injector cleaner,
Speaker 0: Yes. Sir.
Speaker 8: I’m always going auto… I’m always going to auto parts stores and buying fuel injector cleaner. So you either go to auto zone, or the other 1. We’ve got the name for the second. And so I went to the other 1, they’re identical.
You. So I buy some fuel injector cleaner. And then when you gotta check out, They always ask you for your phone number. You you you have this experience?
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 8: And it’s say. Right?
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 8: Because you don’t really get it. I saw I saw I said, , , you guys always asked me the phone number, but it doesn’t really get me anything. ? I don’t get a discount. I don’t get a rebate.
I just… Seems like an not unnecessary step. So I’m talking to this guy, This guy’s a butt barrel of the mat. Giant man. He’s, like, 6663 hundred pounds, and he has a perm frown.
what I
Speaker 0: mean? Yes.
Speaker 8: , arresting bitch faces, but he’s got, like, resting perm frown. ? He’s not a happy looking character . And then he says, I appreciate your sense of humor.
Speaker 0: That he is Eastern in Europe, Russia.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Exactly because way of laughing was just to go. So I gotta kick out of that. I thought that was funny. So next day, I got to the farmers market, and there’s this guy, out there, chilling…
He’s running for some, like city counselor or something. And he’s signaling to his constituency that he’s a democrat. Now when he did this us, he’s wearing his t shirt that’s completely fest with damages images of Kamala harris with various laughing poses. , Camel is obviously laughing. Right?
Speaker 0: Yeah. Her
Speaker 8: mouth open, she’s smiling broadly lacey. She’s including joy. Her hey is all about joy, Luke. , that.
Speaker 0: Absolutely.
Speaker 8: So so I I walked my going in. And I said, I felt like making a few comments, but, , shows not to. Walk f by. So on the way and I see him again. And as this time I had to say Man this guy you have to understand, , he’s in high, high danger contracted monkey parks.
Let’s just say that.
Speaker 0: Yes, sir.
Speaker 8: Okay, Bro? So I point out him, and I say, she’s insane. At pointing to his shirt, which I’m also pointing at him was a sort of like an active mild aggression, , pointing at somebody. And I point out a very vigorously. And I think she’s insane.
And he was shot by this a little bit. He kinda win a little bit. And then he left ripped this huge Camel asked tackle. That was his way of dealing with a threat, And I just thought… I don’t know.
I I got a little moment of satisfaction about this knowing that he… , he he felt a little bit of pain, , because we’re, of course, political enemies. So… But the moral is story is people laugh in different ways… Different people have different laughs.
Bro?
Speaker 0: Yeah. I I then agree with Kamala policies, but I sometimes have erotic thoughts about her. How about you?
Speaker 8: Well, you, luke, when she… Once she walks in… She’s got a smile, Luke, but just lights up a room.
Speaker 0: She does beautiful teeth. Beautiful teeth.
Speaker 8: Just lights off a room. Yeah. No. III can. I I can’t do.
Look I can’t even… Her parents error of personally personality just so. So dude. How.
Speaker 0: How would the the girlfriend that you met from your brief sales career? How would she describe you? And how would she reflect on that relationship?
Speaker 8: She would say that I was funny. If you can believe it. She… But she would also call me narcissistic, which which is a projection, , because she was the most narcissistic person you’d ever meet, and she obviously, heard this criticism before, but then she would just turn it around and use it on me.
Speaker 0: Did you… Were you go better than you found her?
Speaker 8: I did, luke.
Speaker 0: How sorry?
Speaker 8: It’s took it took me a year to break up with her because I wanted to do it really gradually, because I honestly thought she was capable of suicide?
Speaker 0: Yeah. So
Speaker 8: I I had to sort of I have to make it scene like it was her decision. You ever been in that situation? Yeah.
Speaker 0: Yeah. How many women have committed suicide to get out of the relationship with you?
Speaker 8: None. Thanks to nice. Beautiful approach to these precarious situations?
Speaker 0: How’s your relationship with curious Gaze progressing?
Speaker 8: Oh, we were telling for a while, and then I haven’t heard from… I haven’t him from, like, a week.
Speaker 0: She toys our emotions. Doesn’t she?
Speaker 8: Yeah. We hadn’t… We had a conversation about… Mutual acquaintance of ours, who has blocked me and Twitter.
Speaker 0: Oh, yes. I know who we’re talking about a longtime time friend of the show who chose to go in a different direction.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So we so He’s that… He’s actually spoken to him, and I was trying to, , I had to do some flu work as to why I was cast out. So I had that was pretty fun.
Speaker 0: What kind of a wise do you think she’d be?
Speaker 8: Pretty good. I would imagine. However, unpredictable.
Speaker 0: Yes.
Speaker 8: Whether that not so that’s necessarily bad, but you gotta be able to roll with that.
Speaker 0: So would you describe her attachment style as secure, insecure or avoid?
Speaker 8: Guess and secure, but I don’t know. I really don’t know.
Speaker 0: I would go with avoid. I think that she needs to create distance whenever she starts to get too too close to someone. She might start to feel overwhelmed or imp upon. So, I’m guessing she’s… I’ve done a lot lot of women with this style that if you ever start admitting feelings for them.
They then run away but if you don’t disrupt any feelings for them, they tend to come back.
Speaker 8: I’m remotely really… I’m familiar with a runaway part.
Speaker 0: Have you had your told curious how you feel?
Speaker 8: Yes.
Speaker 0: That’s great.
Speaker 8: Hey. Hey. I have a… When you drive by a cop, do you feel guilty? You do, like, a little moral inventory every time you drive by a cop?
Speaker 0: It’s 1 of the things that I feel? Yeah.
Speaker 8: Like, are they looking at me? I might doing anything wrong? You feel like you’re best busted.
Speaker 0: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like a cold shower of Rally. Because where there aren’t paths around, I don’t feel as constrained to follow the rules of the road.
Speaker 8: Yeah. And I I try not to make eye contact, but I do log, I’ll if I’m wearing sunglasses, I’ll do, like, a little… If I’ll look at scans. , to see if they’re looking at me, ? So anyway That just happened.
Speaker 0: I thought be impacted to sales.
Speaker 8: what? I had a passing thought this morning about that, like, like, selling real estate, San Francisco would be really lucrative. Really Lucrative if he could do it. I’m sure it’s ferocious competitive. You And he had hell a lot He like he…
Like, I’ve known… I’ve played tenants for the guy, and he had… He spent 2 years on 1 deal, and it finally went through. And he got, like, 200 grand boom all at once. It was commercial real estate.
So I’m thinking… I don’t know. Yes. I had to change careers. As I might consider that, but I wouldn’t do rentals.
That’s for sure.
Speaker 0: How how driver? Yeah. How would you describe Mike Benz fidelity to facts
Speaker 8: Hi , up until this morning, I would’ve have thought they were pretty… He was… Pretty honest dealer. I’m not convinced that he’s not, but, , you raised some good criticism. He was very…
He was very persuasive when he was friend games.
Speaker 0: Yes. It Wow.
Speaker 8: Yeah. So it’s funny at about that arc and then have… There was that With Nor, and I think B fly and maybe someone else or there was a collection of… Loop forward orbiter that met with… They had a string with Bend, and then, , Northern famously freaked out on him.
But, Was that an op? Was it… Was that like a government operation that he was a part of and affecting?
Speaker 0: It it was… He was just a small part of a larger Jewish der radical denuclearization program?
Speaker 8: But was that part of the government was he just acting independently?
Speaker 0: That was an independent Jewish operation to der radical people online according to Mike Pence.
Speaker 8: And that was he was
Speaker 0: just a small part of this bigger operation.
Speaker 8: So when did he enter the Trump administration, was this after that? Yes.
Speaker 0: What… So he he owned in prime game radio in something like June of 20 18. Then he enters the Trump administration in December of 20 18. And then after he enters at a colleague brings his frame game pass to the attention of his superiors, and Mike Pence was able to ride with it, which is an astounding achievement.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Well, yeah. If you look at it, he was der radical his only crime unquote was he was engaging with people with , radical slash un unfavorable reviews. Right? But his actual contributions were, I think, recognize it if I remember them correctly.
Speaker 0: He he he seems to me like the most successful person to have been prominent in the right?
Speaker 8: Yeah. He did. He yeah. He went over some bigger figures too and alright. Like, Jack I think liked in Greg Johnson talked to him.
Speaker 0: Craig Johnson. Yeah. He talked to Guy. It seem like…
Speaker 8: Yeah. Yeah. Wow
Speaker 0: And now he… Now the the major republicans are behind him. I mean, that’s an scam achievement.
Speaker 8: He’s talking to Tucker Carlson and, , I mean, that’s that’s near the top. This this is how it gets. Right?
Speaker 0: Yeah. And he has been after sur mount the revelations about his prime game radio pass, which is quite an achievement.
Speaker 8: Yeah. Alright. Look I’m at my destination. I think I gotta drop now. Yeah.
Speaker 0: Less of us. Leslie. Thanks.
Speaker 8: Alright. Sorry.
Speaker 19: Much less. I found it much more straightforward to speak with Republicans in the United States, and I wouldn’t have necessarily predicted that. , I’m in Northern Alberta. It isn’t necessarily the case that I have a lot in in, common, let’s say, with an evangelical protestant from the southern Us, but it turns out I can talk to people like that. Because the Republicans in my experience aren’t castle culture oriented, and I don’t have to walk on egg angels.
Speaker 0: Well, amazing. He has an easier time talking with people who shared his hero system than people who have a passionate disagreement with his hero system. Who could have imagine that.
Speaker 19: If I go to Washington which I’ve done many, many times. I always have to walk on. We’re Speaking with the democrats accepting private. With the Republicans, I can say whatever I want and some of…
Speaker 0: Right. I’m unlike the rest of us who never have to walk on egg shells where we… Talk with people who have a dia opposed to system.
Speaker 19: Remember happy with what I say with some of it in some of them aren’t. It doesn’t matter we can still talk. So it’s a massive difference and I and I watched vice president, Harris for a very long time and also by administration soul. I’m well informed with regard to you the newest American politics.
Speaker 20: What motivated?
Speaker 0: Yeah. He’s well informed regarding the nuances of American politics. He’s informed with vast realms of the psychology discipline. He is… Remarkably well informed about global warming.
Right? He’s very well informed about everything he speaks about says Jordan.
Speaker 20: And did you to wanna try to contribute to bring the Democratic party of the center?
Speaker 19: Well, I’m I’m not a fan of radical leftist as I know a lot about totalitarian states. I’ve studied the psychological origins of totalitarian totalitarian since
Speaker 0: my god, this guy has such encyclopedia knowledge. And thank God. He’s not hiding his light under a bush. Right. Thank God.
He’s not self ab aggregating or under playing the extent of his vast and deep knowledge.
Speaker 19: I was 13 years old. And it was a main part of my research work. It’s been a central feature of my books, my…
Speaker 0: So on a scale of 1 to 10, how accurate? Lee, do you think he is describing his level of knowledge? Do you think he’s 10 out of 10 in accuracy? Do you think he’s 5 out of 10 in accuracy? So I would give him a score somewhere wear, between 2 out of 10 and 5 out of 10 in accuracy with regard to his depth of knowledge.
Speaker 19: My work. The the fundamental genesis of my work in general and part of the reason that what I’ve done is come to abroad…
Speaker 0: Right. He’s got the same compelling assured disposition of a Mike Pence.
Speaker 19: But public attention is because of the work I’ve done on the psychology of authoritarian and totalitarian states and…
Speaker 0: Now, the the work he’s done on the psychology of authoritarian and totalitarian states, among people with genuine expertise in these areas, how respected, how innovative, how important you think Jordan’s contributions are. So if 10 out of 10 means maximum importance, I would guess that the level of importance of his work in these areas is something like a 1 out of 10, But he speaks as though it’s 10 out of 10 importance. So reminds me Dennis P, whose public relations presents him as an expert in totalitarian in the Middle East in Russia and the Soviet Union. And again, Dennis Presents himself as a 10 out of 10 expert in these areas when in reality, his level of expertise attracts 0 academic attention, like 0 respect from people with expertise in these areas and probably, really, you’re talking about level of expertise 1 or 2 out of 10.
Speaker 19: They obviously exist on the on the right, so insofar as the right wing is defined by, let’s say. Eth no nationalism as in the case of Nazi Germany, but arguably, and perhaps beyond dispute the worst totalitarian systems, sure, we’re radical leftist systems. And no 1 learns about that in Junior high high school. It’s a it’s a secret. I mean, I thought about the stalin purge and miles atrocities in my personality course at the University of Toronto…
Speaker 0: Right. And how innovative and important you think that, his research into these things exist. Right? I I would guess it’s probably 1 out of 10. Right now 1, with genuine expertise in Stalin’s purchase and mao purchase, looks to join Peterson for scholarship.
Speaker 19: I and at Harvard for second year students, and… But because I considered Alexander Soldier and who wrote the best expose on the spelling the system, the most effective they ever pinned won an nobel male prize for it. I considered him an existential psychologist, which is essentially what he was, and most of my students, although they were very educated in very good students Never heard of. Any of the communist atrocities despite the fact that they were top students and Md Education system for 15 years. It’s absolutely 100 percent in inexperienced.
It’s in inexperienced that the left in fact, , in in into my field, in the field of psychology, especially social psychology. The bloody psychology didn’t even admit there was such a thing as left wing authoritarianism until 20 16. It was only right wing, which is so prop preposterous. It’s kind…
Speaker 0: Right. Do do you… What is your confidence? Alright? 10 out of 10.
That he’s correct that psychologists didn’t recognize that there was such a thing as left wing totalitarian until or authoritarianism until 20 16. Right? My level of confidence in the accuracy of that pronounce. Is 0 out of 10. Alright?
What people like Jordan Peterson, Mike Benz, Neil Ferguson and Ben Shapiro, Dennis P have is an absolute confidence in saying things that are just completely fact free
Speaker 19: miracle of will blindness and stupidity. And so
Speaker 8: right.
Speaker 0: Other people in psychology, they just have will, blindness and factual stupidity. When in reality, is sure it seems to me that Jordan Peterson seems to possess at least a normal, if not, a way above normal amount of those characteristics.
Speaker 19: There are a lot of radical leftist in the Democrat in in the Democrats democrat ranks, and the moderates will not draw a line between them and the radicals. So I have many conversations for example, with moderate and well meaning Democrats. Dean Phillips, for example, springs to mine who was absolutely pill by the Democrats when he dared to put his name for it as a presidential candidate, even though that was obviously necessary, he was 1 of the first?
Speaker 0: So how confident are you, 10 out of 10 to 0 out a 10 that, no moderates are willing to speak about the horrors of, left wing authoritarianism. I I’d say probably, I I’d go with a 2 or 3 out of 10 as far as the factual actual empirical truth of Jordan’s allegations.
Speaker 19: Democrats Who realized it. There was something not so right about. Biden in the cognitive department…
Speaker 0: Right. If you’re interested in truth, you’re not gonna be making time to listen to John Peterson or or Dennis P or Ben shapiro or Mike Pence. Right? If your primary criteria is truth. Right?
You’re not gonna look to these guys.
Speaker 19: Department, let’s say. And no. Even even people like Dean would excuse Camelot, for example, for speaking about equity. They’re they’re their their conclusion always was, oh, she didn’t really mean any quality of about them. Even though that’s exactly what you said repeatedly and use graphics to indicate that.
They just mean quality of opportunity. It’s like, no They don’t. They mean equity. They mean any quality of outcome and there’s no clearer marker of an ideology that is
Speaker 0: But you think he you would be as assured in his pronounce if he had not enjoyed so much success. But you can see what success has done to him. But I’m sure he had the same traits. On the other hand, as I rethink what I just said. At Dennis P, for example, was elected his class president for 12 years straight from first grade to twelfth grade, Dennis P was just anointed class president because he had so much presence and Charisma.
Speaker 19: Associated with the kind of radical left that destroys countries, then the doctrine of equality of. So… And people…
Speaker 0: Okay. Let’s get some insights here from Rory.
Speaker 18: Train going past my house. Equally, my children have left school. So the school catch area can be, , some crack heads academy doesn’t bother me. Right because… Okay.
My kids are 22. Right? And the other the third 1, which we a massive bonus to me, I couldn’t believe my parents law once didn’t buy a beautiful Georgian house. Wait for the reason, because he was next to a pub. Right?
I think… Sorry. I’m… Totally confused here. That’s a the best garden in the world.
Right? It’s not sis us. It’s a beer garden. Right? Because it’s a garden, and it’s got beer.
Now I actually used to be who lived next to a pub, and they had such a good relationship with the landlord. They can actually order over the fence. So if they had a barbecue, they could just get, , 4 points of the usual
Speaker 3: buy. Yeah.
Speaker 18: Now to a lot of people being next to a pub is an absolute nightmare, , flight path. Okay? If you’re if you’re completely deaf, going by our place in the heathrow flight path. Not gonna bother you, but it’s gonna bother everyone else. So the other thing about this very regiment mode of choice is that it prevents you from gaming the system?
Yes Now, to be honest, what makes someone initially attractive at first glance and what makes relationship enduring. Okay. And not the same thing. They’re not the same criteria. Therefore, using what you might call first glimpse.
Speaker 0: So another key characteristic of people are incredibly successful at doing what I’m doing. Doing what Rory Sutherland and Jordan Peterson and Dennis P and Ben shapiro do is very little time between thought and speech. Right? The the less delay in articulating what you’re thinking or seeing, the more successful you’re gonna be?
Speaker 18: Limp criteria in a house in an impact. And and
Speaker 0: the more confidence you have that what you’re thinking is valuable. Right, the less delay, there will be between sharing, thinking something and then sharing it.
Speaker 18: Employee in a potential partner. Okay? In if you’re if you’re seriously after a long term relationship, which after you are with a house and you are with an employee, you may or may not be when you’re an an online dating site, that varies. Again The first glimpse criteria are totally unreliable as a guide to long term enjoyment. So this like my wife’s gonna kill me this.
Okay. The kind of person you wanna to marry, right, isn’t something that everybody wants. It’s something the value of which you only discover on repeated familiar on on long term. Mh. So you want what you want is an air fryer girlfriend or a Japanese toilet girlfriend.
Okay? Right? Not a corvette girlfriend. You what I mean? But you want something which actually, the value of fully because over long term exposure that they’re actually technically in economics.
They’re called experience goods. Okay. What’s interesting about an experience good is that it’s something the value of which only becomes apparent with use.
Speaker 0: Good question in the chat. If you’re selling a property that used to be the site for Aztec. Human sacrifice should you declare that? Right? How far back should Mass Motors on a particular piece of property be shared with a potential buyer?
Speaker 18: Sorry. This is terrible using that economic term to refer to relationship.
Speaker 3: It’s not the worst thing people have said about relationships in the Internet this.
Speaker 18: K. You’re probably right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 18: But that is that is fundamentally interesting that what the internet has done, that the 2 things are is that in many cases, the thing it yields up as the first filtration point. Is not a very good proxy to begin with. Mh. But secondly, and this is I think the worst problem. If everybody is using the same first stage filter because everybody’s on tinder or whatever it may be.
Okay? Then, effectively, it’s going to create a totally inefficient market clearing mechanism because demand disproportionately goes towards those people who happen to seen those initial everyone. Those initial proxy criteria.
Speaker 0: So many people when they’re looking for dating advice, they’re not looking for people like Chris Williamson Rory Sutherland to Op pine. What they’re really looking for are the insights of Rob Henderson and Richard Hana.
Speaker 17: Right. And even if it’s even, like, no matter what her politics is or what her sort of social views are, it doesn’t matter because, like, it’s not about her, we don’t care about her life. If she’s making fun of people who do this, the point is that women do this. Right? I mean, that’s point.
It it’s like, what. Right? That’s the only reason the joke, like, if it’s a joke. Makes me sense.
Speaker 21: Like, that’s why there was such a a such session a, a large response to your sharing of that video. And and probably when she posted it on her own profile I got a lot of attention to, which is how about on your…
Speaker 0: Okay. So this is a girl talking about how she wasn’t gonna have sex with this guy, but then it hurt her feelings that he didn’t try to have sex with her.
Speaker 21: Radar. So, , yeah. Yeah. Exactly. That she’s, She’s speaking to something, , like, when I read my subs post, , like, like, a what 1 of my readers and a Middle aged Woman sent me some psychology articles.
I think I I read 1 of them, wait way back in the day, but, like, basically, this idea of token resistance. And when she sent me these articles, She so she’s a journalist. And and she was like, yeah, I agreed with what you wrote. And, like, you may have seen these papers on token resistance that that researchers have looked at. And she sent me, perfectly, sensible, and then it reminded me what you wrote in your post about, the the age divide.
That apparently, you got some different responses that older people were like, yeah, Like, this is, like, a thing that happens. It’s a it’s a common pattern and younger people where were horrified by this. Is that right?
Speaker 17: Yeah. I mean, I… I think I’m just assuming they’re all. I. They were mostly a us.
And like, are there go… Of our old boomers. I just go bed to the big Boomers. Like, anonymous accounts sit
Speaker 0: So I believe Richard Hana hernandez is married to a woman and has kids, Rob Henderson not married no kids.
Speaker 17: Think they’re getting get mad. At girls, for not being straightforward with them. I think we you’re all… I think the older generation doesn’t think like this. I think when you’re that old, like…
Speaker 0: Rob Henderson and Richard Hana have operate 2 of my favorite Twitter accounts.
Speaker 17: Figured you at least figured out a all about the world, not that could was by this. , I think I was profiling a bit because it
Speaker 5: was like, I know the type of a colleague. I know the
Speaker 17: type of reply guys who are at. And these are the type of reply guys who have, like, a sort of opposition sort of right wing view of the world. That our sort of whites are being oppressed, men are being oppressed by women, America first. This is a sort of…
Speaker 0: If you have any kind of identity, you’re gonna have some victim hood complex. Alright? If you… Christian, your you’re Jewish, your your white, your you’re black. Right.
In group identity intensity goes along with an equal victim hood complex. It’s not like it’s just limited to Grip.
Speaker 17: Sienna Humber Ross. Okay. So she is… She’s sort of she’s sort of famous. She has on I b page.
I don’t know that’s a big deal.
Speaker 18: Whoops
Speaker 0: got I, completely completely screwed up my up to here. But anyway, let’s move
Speaker 21: mad. And men are like, hey, that’s just what men like. , like men like and women, but the women who get mad at this are also sort of behaving in in a consistent way with evolutionary psychology. Right? Like, trying to police feel sexual behavior, in to like, sort of artificially inflate the value older women.
Like, they’re they’re acting in their own interest as well. When they get mad at men for doing this. And so it’s just weird, like, I I think like a Spider man meme. Or, like, everyone’s pointing with the finger everyone else. Like, , you’re, , you’re behaving irrational.
you are, But really everyone is kind of behaving the way evolutionary psychology would,
Speaker 20: yeah. Fix.
Speaker 17: Yeah. So, yeah. These guys will laugh at a woman who’s, , 35 or what they can
Speaker 18: consider old and like,
Speaker 21: doesn’t at all.
Speaker 17: Yeah. They they will just, , just, , rub their heads together. Like, yes. You’re gonna dial.
Speaker 0: So what makes Richard interesting is that he seems to be really fairly low in agreeable, Like, he seems to get great delight in in criticizing and mocking Republican conservatives, the Mag crowd.
Speaker 17: Hello They’re so excited about it.
Speaker 0: So if, Mike Benz is not the most successful intellectual and activist to pass out of the right probably the second most successful is Richard Hana. Used to write a lot of outright columns under a pseudo, then that was revealed publicly about a year ago and Richard Hana made. Apology said that does not reflect who I am now. And so the same basic world is still there with Richard Hana. He has just changed it into something that is within the Overt window.
Right? He is ci sized and ci and shape his worldview view to make it much more socially acceptable.
Speaker 17: Right. And if you have like, of, like if you fat acceptance or something like that. They’re gonna laugh at that and say, oh, you want this, , must fight that fat with an attractive. They don’t realize that they, like, okay. But, like, you, a fight foot 2 guy who doesn’t have social skills.
Are, like, in the same position as these fact women who wanna force everyone to be attracted to them. Right? And so, yeah, you could make a safe critique of the Feminist. Like, they… Well, they will…
Like, in many case, just to dismiss sky and loose… As losers or, like, what people wanna sleep with you. That’s your problem. At the same time, they will… Get you you’re right to tackle in order to d cap or or, , say how terrible it is We have these beauty standards it’s site.
Speaker 0: Alright. Richard Hana nun going against the grain once again, let’s get some more complicated
Speaker 21: ground for the long term. And so it’s hard. In different ways. Like, yeah. Like, III think like, 1 1 message for young guys, though is that, like, you don’t…
Like, this is this is true for Romance is true for for jobs for… It’s true for like when you apply to colleges. Like, you don’t remember the rejections and you don’t dwell on them like, , you you apply it at whatever. You apply to 10 colleges. You get into 1 or 2, and, like, you go to college and that’s like your whatever.
Your job. You… , you send your resume out. You go to the interviews blah. You have the job.
No 1 remembers. The interviews you went to and no 1 cares, no 1 knows. You have your job, and that’s the job you have. And I think it’s the same for way to. Like I know it’s like, we were describing.
It’s hard. The rejections are harsh than getting rejected in a job whenever interview you’re getting rejected from a college, but it’s only you. And, like, odds are, be the way that memory works. You’re not even gonna remember those rejections. Yeah.
Like, it’s just not like, I been rejected a. Like III like 20… I let’s see. Like I it was 21. Like, literally, the day I turned 21.
I was going out the bars, like, 5 6 nights a week, with my friends. I live in the house a bunch of guys. And, like, I just try whatever stupid thing. Like, say whatever. And, like, thank god that, like, smartphones they existed, but they weren’t like they are now.
I’m, like, I was like, whatever it was fine.
Speaker 17: Like, I keep get market again. People are gonna because they’ll make people too better. They’re not gonna get their recorded
Speaker 8: a while
Speaker 17: to get out phones. It’s like, off you’ll, like, confirmation public. It’s always like, at the end of the confirmation where the video starts so that they have to just tell you what yeah
Speaker 21: like, that’s true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s so, okay.
Yeah. Yeah you’re not gonna be made into a meme or something. That’s probably right? But, yeah know, like, like, I think that is 1 reason why people are more nervous now is because, like, we live in the sort of pan off Where everyone is being recorded and everyone is being whatever potentially turned into a meme or something, but, yeah. Like, oh, yeah.
Like. So yeah you go out, , talk to people. You’re not gonna remember, Like, I’m, , I don’t remember any of the rejection I had Like, I think most guys don’t. Unless you only do it once or twice Right? Like, that’s the…
There’s almost like a paradox here where if you get rejected twice, you’ll… Those rejections will.
Speaker 0: So, Richard Hana for at least 4 years has been among my top top 20 right wing intellectual, and eventually I wanna do a show devoted to him. But he’s not easy to get a handle on. But it’s not easy to decode Richard Nun. Alright. He’s a man of considerable intelligence and sophistication.
Speaker 21: Work. He worked at Walmart. Not a great job, but he was also a part time swimming coach, and some girl who, like, at the pool that day saw him, and they started talking. And she saw him in that position. Right?
Of, like, being in a leadership Yeah. And struck position not as a guy Walmart Right? And so he had an interesting part time hobby and he… , he I don’t get necessarily, like, intended to meet this girl. But, like, you can find ways to be in social settings where you are able to like, display talent and skill and he grows that way too.
Speaker 17: Yeah. Yeah. I… That’s that’s all. Right.
I mean, I never in. Apps, I tried them a little while. I never had any luck, but I was very good and real life. I think I need that sort of personality. Thing to come through, but other people might have better better luck with them.
You’re right on the social thing. This is why
Speaker 0: So out of a 0 to 10. Right? How how much do you believe Richard Hana when he talks about how very good he was in real life at picking up women. So my my guess is that he he was brilliant. I would I would say perhaps, I have 4 out of 10 confidence and what he just pronounced?
Speaker 17: Like, yeah. You might if you you might be thinking in turn, Like, when you decide what to do with your life. Like, you might be thinking, work from home. It’s like, maybe the best option for like, making money in convenience. But just…
This is like people booked to say. Right. This is what… , you just…
Speaker 0: So, yeah. Hud has a characteristic of these other online guru such as Jordan Peterson. And Mike Ben’s, I think a vast over estimation of his own abilities that seems to shine through again and again and again and again, particularly the less guarded he is.
Speaker 17: So you need to see a lot of people. You you, like, it’s serendipity deputy mean it happens. I mean, people know people who watch, like, the old sex of the City episodes of, like, how the how many people on a daily basis. Yeah. Of it’s, like, the best lesson of, like, life from Sex City.
But just, like, it gives you a sense of, like, what it is to live in a big city and just always be running into people.
Speaker 0: Right. So when I read Han and listen to him I often get the sense that his ego was getting the better of him.
Speaker 18: Now, that strikes me fundamentally as a problem in all 3 of those markets like
Speaker 3: In other news. This episode is brought to you by element. Element is a tasty electrolyte rock
Speaker 18: did a whole routine on this didn’t, which was what was it men can’t go backwards sex sexually. Women can’t go back in lifestyle was I think the Chris
Speaker 3: rock routine. Yeah.
Speaker 18: 1 thing that I think deserves study. Which is interesting is a huge generation of the most successful comedian.
Speaker 0: A, great point in the chat. Richard Tan nun has Bra and Bra helps when picking up women. So where do you think is Richard Hana hernandez body count. So I guess, 30?
Speaker 18: Are also… Amateur, or you… Amateur effectively evolutionary thinkers, aren’t they. Yeah. So if you look at J absolutely fascinated by kind of darwin in evolution and so on, absolutely true of, say, Andrew Sc true of Jimmy Carr, Jimmy Carr actually wrote that c wrote that book with Lucy Graves the naked Shape, which is a absolutely fascinating kind of investigation into the evolutionary origins of comedy.
And I I actually, there a few more than that I mean, , be I think…
Speaker 0: Okay. I I read that book by car. I would certainly not describe it as as fascinating. I would say it’s a a book that has its moments, but, overall, it’s not not a delight to read, you not blown away by its insights.
Speaker 18: And see it, in Dave Chapel, you said it in Chris Rock. A lot of that stuff, there’s a huge influence as there seems to be a significant correlation between interest in kind of evolutionary psychology and comedy.
Speaker 3: Well, ultimately, it tells us why we are the way we are. Right? And that is 1 of the insights to say the thing that everybody knows, but no 1 has named or no 1 dare say. Yeah. Is 1 of the greatest forms of comedy that you can find.
There was something else I remember,
Speaker 18: but also, I suppose it’s all about. I mean, I suppose, , recon contextual industrialization. So comedian are going to be very, very open to different ways of looking at the world because it is to some extent the source, , that contextual flip. Mh. Is at the root of quite a lot
Speaker 3: of direction.
Speaker 18: Mis direction, Exactly. Yeah. But it is fascinating because like music, we have this debate what is the evolutionary function. And 1 of the things that strikes me as odd is that we don’t look at comedy as a source of inspiration for wider problem solving. So I didn’t interfere with Jimmy Carr at Ad week, which was a kind of advertising festival, which…
Speaker 0: So Jimmy Carr is funny at times. But for me, there’s just way too much filth to value. Right. I get 10 parts fill every part of value in Jimmy cars work.
Speaker 18: The way is as you must found. And mean, people like him, for example, the… What you might call brain to mouth speed. Is extraordinary. Isn’t it
Speaker 0: terrifying.
Speaker 18: Does that great phrase in television which is called brain to mouth. And, , Jonathan right.
Speaker 0: Right The more intelligent you are, Right, The quicker. It takes to go from a thought to your mouth, brain to mouth. So people like Dennis Pro ben Shapiro, I think Richard Ana nun Jordan Peterson. I think we… We’re talking about people who generally have an Iq pretty close.
If not above genius level, 01:45 iq.
Speaker 18: Ross or whatever. People like that. A very, very good as interviewers because they can basically form a thought and speak it more or less in parallel. And I found I found that really interesting in terms of, , talking to Jimmy Carr because it’s rather like, , you fancy yourself a bit. There’s was a wonderful thing I saw actually.
And I it was the A299 and east kent, which was 1… … , they sort of hot up ci, which are like the hot hatch with enormous kind of Unnecessarily large tail pipes and a ludicrous large woof Yeah. That takes over the whole of the the boot. And what thanks.
On the a 2, I’d decided to take on a mc f swab. Okay. And I have to say it it was topical to watch. And the guy actually, , acquitted yourself in the first sort of 5 seconds reason. It what’s interesting is those comedy audiences are really fascinating just in terms of their demographic.
Constituency. It’s
Speaker 3: teaching people as sort of a degree of, intellectual humble, being able to cast off the the tension that you have when watching something occur by laughing. I’ve noticed this Preparing for my first live tour, which is happening around the Uk Island in a couple of weeks time. And as a part of this, I did a ton of work in progress shows, and we could feel I could see in the room and feel in the room tension arising. As I’m talking about whatever the thing is that I’m talking about, this section about confidence or this section about regret of this section about whatever. And there was bits where…
Speaker 0: So this is, Chris Williamson, former reality, Tv star in the United Kingdom. Chris has been also substantially influenced by the decoding the Guru podcast. So there are there a podcast with an enormous audience that have very little real world influence, and then they’re at Niche chose. Right? Such as mine and decoding the guru that have an influence entirely disproportionate to the audience size.
I have been reading a terrific book. Right? I cannot praise this book too much if you’re interested in the topic. Right? It’s called uncommon people, the rise and fall of the rock stars.
Right, the book came out in 20 17. Reckless thy name is Rock. The age of the rock style, like the age of the cowboy is passed, like the cowboy, the idea of the Rockstar star lives on in our imaginations. What did we see in them swag, reckless. Sexual charisma damn the torpedo self belief?
Certain way of carrying ourselves good hair, interesting shoes, talent we wish we had, what do we want of them to be larger than life, but also like us to live out their songs to stay young forever. I wonder many didn’t stay the course, and he’s just a little bit from the chapter on Elvis. The girls who shared Elvis Presley release bed knew the drill. That’s to listen for his breathing, which had on occasion seemed to stop in the night. If he got up to go to the bathroom, they should knock on the door after a while and ask if he was alright.
There were members of his personal entourage around the house at all times. Right? The the girls usually did not need to have sex with him because he wasn’t physically capable of sex towards the end. Further staff, including a nurse who who’d work for his personal doctor George Nick nico Po, known toilet doctor Nick lived in ent behind the house. Nonetheless, the women he slept with where his last defense against the thing he feared most.
Loneliness. Since he was a small child, Elvis had hated to sleep alone, once he was famous, no longer needed to if he wasn’t with 1 of his longer term girlfriends, willing women could be brought to him, They would often be referred to him by his memphis friend the Dj George klein. His grace people would bet them before they got to his bedroom. Anyone with 30 fingernails or opinions of her own would not proceed beyond the ground floor, once who met with his approval would in due course be given money to spend on improving their appearance so that it approached his ideal. That meant Big hair, pretty outfits anything that contributed to the impress of virgin freshness and white underwear.
Elvis like women designed with display in mind. Their primary function in his life was to reflect his glory. Nobody took being the king more seriously than the king. August 19 77, his bed was shared with Ginger A. Ginger was a former holder of the miss traffic safety title.
Elvis was 42 Ginger 20. She’d been introduced to press release court initially in the capacity of a first reserve. Once she had passed Must, he told his people to send Linda Thompson, Incumbent girlfriend in the previous few years home. Adam was then promoted from her own bedroom to the master suite. This was the sole area of the court of Elvis where there appeared to be a succession plan.
Then later in the book he talks about Rolling stone magazine, moving to New York City, to be near… It’s real customers, who are the real customers of Rolling stone, The agencies that brought bought color ads for cigarettes drink cars which were aimed at its free spending 30 something readers leadership. And the editorial rolling stone had smart up to provide a more productive environment for these ads. Even like all superstars, elvis alternator between utter certainty and crippling doubt. Spending very little time in the region between the 2 where normal human beings live out their lives.
Among the diminished diminishing number of people who actually cared about Elvis Presley, there was a feeling he was running out of road. Isn’t that a beautiful sentence. There was a feeling he was running out of road. Even when Elvis was dead, Time Magazine didn’t put him on their cover, nor did people. They didn’t think he was big enough.
They felt like he no longer reached into people’s hearts. Elvis was just a rock wasn’t hot anymore. Then the days turned into weeks, and the news programs continued to run footage of distraught, middle aged people talking about what Elvis had meant to them, and then the reality began to sink in. So someone close to me. I think she was more distraught, more emotionally mood.
By the death of Elvis than any other public figure, just like another person quite close to me was more moved by the death of Ingrid Berg than death of any other public figure. Alright. This person close me it was just… Yeah. Completely be sorted with Ingrid Berg.
In 19 63, an American journalist, Michael Braun went to Sun to write about a new music group called the Beatles. As he observed how these 4 men interacted with the world. He began to recognize that their appeal went beyond music, I began suspecting he wrote later that I was in the presence of a new kind of person. And there is just so many insights in this book. It’s fantastic book, called Over the years, Pop music had un introduced many new kinds of people to a white to world from little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis through to Pete Townsend, Jenna Shop to Lou Reed and Bob.
Pop introduced young people to personalities they might never have encountered in any other way. And there’s a section on led Z and its musicians including Robert plan who is rebuilding his family life, which had been shattered not only by the loss of his 5 year old child, rosa by an article his wife had read, in American music magazine, which has suggested that once on the road, her husband was not faithful. So in these days before the death of distance. But what a great insight the days before the death of distance, that really comes with the rise of the Internet. And we have the death of distance.
So back before the rise of the Internet, it was possible for even world famous musicians to be accompanied on tour by a species of road, without their actual wives getting to hear about it. The tabloids weren’t particularly interested in these people. Specialist pressed new discretion was the price they paid for access and the mobile phone in the Internet was still the stuff of science fiction. Further, the dictionary dis disagreeable have not yet being developed. Drug users weren’t said to have substance issues.
Heavy drinkers weren’t yet alcoholic. Rock stars who expected un unaffected access to the bodies of any young women in their orbit went yet deemed to have a problem with male entitlement. For example, it was taken for granted among road that women who wanted to meet the rock stars would have to give head. Another the terrific insight poses are vital in rock. They’re not some optional extra.
Poses are what send at the pulses of young men racing. There was a splendor about led Z swag. Was the ap g of a certain sort of rock dream. None of the hundreds of bands that came after for them and tried to adopt the same swag or anything as convincing. However like everything else in show business, it was a trick based on confidence.
Once Robert plant no longer believed he could get away with it once the essential absurdity of it began to dawn on him. Once he started to believe the things that all those punk were whispering in his ear. Via the letter pages of the music papers once he was no longer cock the magic ebb way after all, he was an old man, but he was 31. So Charisma is when you pull off the seemingly impossible and you get to maintain your or of Christmas as long as you’re able to pull off the seemingly impossible. But once you can no longer pull off the impossible.
Right. You lose the mantle of charisma. Oz Osborne played the wild man on stage, but in the real world, he was as helpless and needy as a small boy. Sharon found this side of him attractive without her, he simply could not function, but together… Together they flourished.
And then there’s an inside, There’s a in the atmosphere around a rock band on tour brings about a certain detachment from the elementary laws of physics and chemistry governing normal life. Even if none of the protagonists are particularly un unfinished or suffering from the need to test the limits of their own mortality, there is a tendency to do the ill advised, which would only rarely arise in everyday life. This was particularly the case in 19 82. When artist didn’t yet employ, people whose primary job was to protect them from themselves. The world in which these people lived and moved was att to extremes.
Nobody was yet suggesting that exercise and abs accidents might be the secret to surviving life on the road, They’re all prone to thinking themselves ind, touring life were sustained by drugs and drink very if few didn’t partake. While these people were moved to go beyond the red line, hang themselves over the pre with predictable consequences. So 1 of the things that held back the Dallas Cowboys from winning more Super Bowl after the Peter of the Dallas Cowboys in 19 78 is that they move from being America’s team to being South America’s team as the use of overuse of Steroids and Cocaine. Steadily took its toll. In June, 19 82, James Honey Scott, the guitar with the pretend was found dead of heart failure due to cocaine intolerance.
This is only days after he agreed that racist pete bond should be fired from the pretend because of his own addiction to heroin, Fond would be found dead in his bath less than a year later. 19 82 seemed short on new rock stars, but it was long on people who wanted to act like rock stars. Rolling stones cover stars for that year were mostly actors. David Letterman, Robin Williams, Mario Hemingway, Matt Dylan and Timothy Hart and Warren beatty. All affecting the casual drag and we mean unlocks of rock stars.
On 03/05/1982 comic, John was found dead in Bun at the Chat Omar, having ingested a speed boil, a Cocktail of Heroin and Cocaine given to him by a rock and roll rod. On 04/30/1982 2, Lester Bangs, the Rock critic, his words were as impressive in print as their author was uni impressive in person. His reviews were a plea for acceptance from musicians and Hips. Wouldn’t spare in the time of day. You like to say that Rock n roll wasn’t so much a music as a way of living your life.
Finished the final draft of the new cord Rock Gamora. His idea of celebrating completion was to take a number of val pills with a strong cold remedy. Never woke up. He was. 33.
So why do rock bands keep breaking up. Bans are like small political parties presenting a united front to the outside world, why while a low level of war is being perpetually waged within a war in which nothing is forgiven or forgotten. Nothing is openly discussed. Any person brave enough to propose a change of direction suffers the fate of being openly der delighted for doing what so clearly needs doing The mock, this is spinal tap captures the imp intercept heighten of tension meaningful side glance, the greet any member apparently seeking the approval of anyone outside the group. Another insight rock relies on the audiences willing suspension disbelief.
Once you are no longer swept along by the power of its grand illusion, once you begin to question the convention twitch it cling once the wires along which it dances are plainly visible, Once you glimpse the desperation of the musician eyes as they see some piece 1 stage business unraveling. Once the amplification fails, and you hear them blocking at each other like any work crisis, then you are seeing the world through the lens of spinal tap. Another good insight into that is it does not improve upon repeated viewing. 19 85 was a year, the scale of rock change the nature of rock. The bigger the show is, the more it is about ritual rather than content.
The rock interview is an artificial interaction is primarily a business transaction entered into by both parties for their mutual commercial benefit. The form dictates that it must mas as a friendly almost flirt audacious exchange of ideas usually takes months of negotiation to set up that it takes place as if it is a chance meeting. It demands a display of outward nonchalant from both interviewer and interview. The interviewer is flushed and excited, but must pretend to be relaxed. The interview is suspicious and guarded but must pretend to be relaxed.
By the mid 19 eighties, the family structures of rock superstars it come to resemble those. Of all powerful sovereign landed our aristocrats of years gone by. Their assessment that they and they alone sat at the top, the pyramid of wealth and power and status. And they looked down from their summit They could see the ranks of their heirs, their heirs, dependence, the long established court who transact their business, the vas and leach men who handled the task beneath their dignity or competence, new mistress and the old ones, always knew far more than they let on. Even the fools and the Whose job at whilst to calm their troubled mind.
The most impression group in society teenage boys ever a touching readiness to believe that somewhere nearby a bunch of young men only slightly older than them, and certainly no more exceptional than they are living a life that is larger louder, more life than any in human history and they are getting paid a fortune for doing so. Golden Rule in rock music is that the more people protest that it is all about the music The more certain it is that it’s all about something else entirely. The thing that mattered most in hard rock was not the rock or the hardness thereof, it was looking the part and guns and roses did. They combined it glamour and danger in just the right proportions. This is the quality that was impossible to con thrive.
And when fashion editors think of a rockstar star, they think of axle rose in 19 87, nobody has ever looked more the part. With the rock musicians, the work is always the last thing that goes because it is the thing that holds their life together. So when setting in the mid 19 eighties, rock and roll start. Steadily heading to rehab to get a handle on their substance addictions. The council has had to deal with a toxic combination of arrogance self basement, performing provided its own high, both in terms of sheer satisfaction and the transformation more…
Transformational effect it had on their status, were not performing, they were prone to feeling that others had detected their inner worthless. When Stevie Nicks was at the Betty Ford center, where she was impatient with Tammy W. Stevie Nicks had to write the words. I am not special. I am dying on a piece of paper.
This was a serious thing to swallow as she reflected. Ringo starr eric Clap were among the first wave of Rockstar stars to change their ways with professional help. They would be joined by hundreds of others till it seemed that wherever you interviewed a rock musician over the age of 40, they would volunteer their stories of how they’d stop using drugs or alcohol. People who in the past were reluctant talker would now hold forth at length with the practices, those accustomed to giving a detached account of their strengths and weaknesses. The conventional press interview became almost an extension of the process of therapy.
Major retrospective features increasingly followed a standard arc. I flew high. I went too far. I crashed. I put myself back together with the help of good woman man manager therapist, and now what I want most of all from my public is forgiveness.
Therapies saved the lives of many rock stars. It also diminish their my mistake. After Madonna, Rockstar stars had no secrets. The technology that would eventually enable all of us to be the stars of our own lives was already on its way. So this book dates the end of Rock stars to 19 95 with the rise of the internet.
People in rock bands could not afford to allow themselves to glimpse the preposterous of what they do. Prince could do anything, terms of all around ability is probably the most accomplished rockstar of them all. If in 19 93, Michael Jackson has still being a member of the Jackson’s. Rather than as a solo performance. A solo performer tended to get in more trouble.
It it’s possible that somebody, Michael Jackson Circle would have taught him that sharing his bed for 13 year old Jordan Chandler was likely to be interpreted, un. Isn’t that great? If Michael Jackson was part of a band, it’s possible that somebody in that circle would have told him that sharing his bed for 13 year old Jordan Chandler was likely to be interpreted un. My god, this author is British and the British have an amazing gift with understatement that that just punches you. In the stomach.
Love this book.
Speaker 19: Don’t understand this. Equity. Oh it’s harmless. It’s not bloody well harmless.
Speaker 20: Besides steve phyllis are other democrats you’ve talked to or or or study who you’d say are constructive parts of and how useful…
Speaker 0: And he cannot name anyone.
Speaker 20: Like to see the Democrat party we’re into society?
Speaker 19: I think it’s ind that the majority of people in the yep on the democrat side are basic moderates. But the thing about the more liberal thinkers, let’s say, the more progressive thinkers that they have a very difficult time. Drawing distinctions and putting up borders. And so they won’t admit to the presence of the radicals within their ranks, and they excused them consistently, and I would say that’s universal. I mean, even when I talked to Rf because I did a an interview with Rf.
Speaker 0: So I not only had my adderall when I got up this morning about 6AM. 1 of the rare times I’ve had 2 cups of coffee. Right? Normally, I have 1 cup of coffee on on a Sunday, this morning at 2 cups. So I’d still…
Of buzzing.
Speaker 19: And he’s a pretty forthright character. I asked all the democrats. I ever talked. I was asked the same question. When does the left go too far.
And Rf response to that is that I don’t wanna run that kind of devices campaign and the response universally from all the other Democrats I asked that question too was some variant of hand waving. They’d asked me, what I’d say, well, for me, 1 of the dividing lines is equity If you start talking about equity. Although you might not even know it. You’re possessed by a a radical it. That’s anti private property, anti free market, which which basically means anti free exchange.
It’s not capitalism just that, , that’s a demanded word capitalism. It’s basically a marxist… It’s it’s basically a marxist concept. Capitalism is free exchange, And that means you get the own things and invest your money and and benefit has a consequence of your own labor and well in your capital for that matter. The equity makes a complete mock of that.
So and people don’t understand that. They’re not interested, not interested. Naive I would say they’re naive. I asked Dean phillips, for example why he was a democrat. And he gave me a story about his grandmother.
Dan Hub Humphrey back in 19 65. So it’s like, fair enough dean, and I can understand that, but it’s not 19 65. It’s not even too…
Speaker 0: No. I normally don’t drink coffee, except for Sunday mornings. And whether I go so long on Sunday mornings, I wanna keep riding the buzz until I hit exhaustion. Because I I don’t look like, walking around buzzed. Right, if it’s not being harness and channel in in a productive world changing manner.
Speaker 19: 2015. Seriously, like this… The world is not what it was 40 years ago, and the democrat party is not what it was either. And so
Speaker 20: I wanna gains I’m gonna ask you that Donald Trump booker. I wanna ask you that the best president and I’ll ask my colleagues to put up a tweet of yours which I think summarizes a position. Now, again, the language of this is is negative. I think that’s a fair use of to word to be clear. But this is your point of view about her.
And it’s gonna be a little hard to read. Ahead I and take that full and take doctor Peterson and me dance to so everybody can see it. There you go. So… Yeah.
Remote provoked provoked, turn the tables on achieving her response. Lai ally lai Joy Joy, narcissist, manipulation, or excellence. She’s a master of casting and deception. So let’s focus on narcissistic manipulation. What do you mean when you say that she’s involved in narcissistic manipulation.
Speaker 0: So Mark Hal used to be the political director of Abc news. And I think he he is a master at coming across from a centrist perspective.
Speaker 19: It isn’t just her. Her advisor cloud as well. Well, there’s a psychologist Jake…
Speaker 0: Right. This is a far better interview than you’d would get from someone who’s on the right, usually.
Speaker 19: Holt who’s making much of this on Twitter. He’s 1 of the few psychologist that’s willing to… Use his clinical acumen to analyze the current pathology of the political situation. So there is a cluster of personality disorders known as Cluster b, and that includes history on narcissistic?
Speaker 0: So who is the psychologist that he just referenced,
Speaker 19: borderline line and anti social, the anti social personality types are generally male. The other 3 categories are generally generally female. And the the typical behavior of someone who manifest, though that complex of traits is to provoke continually to provoke…
Speaker 0: He mentioned Jd DHA. Anyone have have a link
Speaker 19: argument on 1 grounds, let’s say for a self serving reason and to push that and push that and push that continually until they evo a response of some sort from their target. As to be unbelievably persistent and manipulative about that. And then when the person responds to act ag grieve and victim to pretend that the discussion had absolutely nothing to do with that to accuse the person who’s now defending themselves or reacting of, like, weirdness, let’s say, which is obviously what the… Camel or the Harris Walls campaign is doing. And then to pretend that the whole discussion was about something else all along and that those…
The people that were targeted are just being strange to even imagine that that might have been the case. Look, it isn’t the conservatives or the classic liberals who have made race and diversity and equity and inc. The central topic of discussion for the last 10 years. It is 100 percent, the liberal progressive types and all of their, all of their media aco, all educated,
Speaker 0: Okay. I wanna get back to Rory Sutherland.
Speaker 3: You needed a laugh, almost kind of like how a dog shakes its coat when it’s wet. And needs to just cast it off.
Speaker 18: Yeah yeah. So here… Here’s an interesting analogy. Okay? In terms of being right versus solving the problem.
Okay? Now if you want to win arguments or if you want to win the respect of a peer group who hold a particular set of political views. What tends to happen is you get into a virtue spiral. I think that’s what it’s called in the book, Purity spiral. Purity.
Thank you. Purity spiral. You become am absolute. And then because conflict is inherently interesting, an argument is inherently interesting. So if we hear outside some people having an ami conversation, we won’t even bother yet up.
If we hear a fight starting to break up or 2 people shouting at each other, we’ll have our noses press to the window to see what’s happening. And journalists and newspapers and media know this. So they focus on those areas, whether it’s the greatest polarization, which means you’re focusing on the part of the problem, which is most difficult to solve. So the example I give because, I’m gonna move away from politics because when you mention politics, everything suddenly drives people to this polarization, I… I try…
I aspire to be the most left wing person on the alt outright. Okay? Which is which is which is… I find the conversation of the outright. Yeah.
Inherently interesting, but I try not to become part of it, and occasionally, , I write for the spectator, but I, I’m… I occasionally writes about the virtue of Henry George or the insights of Karl Marx just to shake the whole thing up… Mh. Brilliant.
Speaker 0: Alright. Jordan mentioned this psychologist, Jd, Hall, who I’ve not heard of before. Let’s give him… Give him a shot.
Speaker 22: A generation growing up in the way they are with sort of an undeniable, I guess, less of an ability to regulate their emotions than previous generations. See how much of it is due to their in airborne temperament. How much of it is due to being differences in how they were reared, but also how much of is due to differences in the larger cultural mil and how that’s influencing their decision.
Speaker 0: So psychologists seem to be about But in a 20 to 1 on the left compared to the right. This is a rare conservative psychologist, Jd d hall.
Speaker 22: Perhaps consciously to regulate or not regulate their emotions.
Speaker 0: Okay. Let’s possible forward. Through the funny music. Right? Join us.
Speaker 19: Thank, doctor Alta. Thanks for joining me today.
Speaker 22: Very pleasure.
Speaker 0: Jordan has presence. Does he? He has a charisma.
Speaker 22: Meet you Jordan here on our call, and it it was a a very pleasure to see you here in Pittsburgh and great to meet you as well here.
Speaker 19: Let’s start by talking Right.
Speaker 0: You compared the charisma question of Jordan. Compared to Jd Hall. Right? Jordan is like a 10 out of 10. Jd is what 2 out of 10?
Speaker 19: About? Who you are and what you do? Just want why don’t we walk you… Why don’t you walk everybody through your… Well, let’s let’s go into your graduate education we’ll start there and walk people through.
And so they get a sense of what you do, but also what position you’re in at the moment and why?
Speaker 22: Sure. So my… My academic trajectory was… My my graduate academic trajectory started really after I did some, residential treatment work and upstate New York here in the states, and then I did my Phd in developmental looks psych at the University of Miami in Florida. And I was really interested in that time in attachment theory and the adviser I work with there was doing some early early stage autism work, so I kinda looked at attachment the context of early risk for autism.
And then subsequent to Miami, I did a couple of post stocks, 1 of which at the University of illinois was with an advisor who was fairly prominent in the attachment literature. And I trained on things like, , measures that are kind of conventional for of the attachment developmental tradition, like the adult attachment interview in the strange situation. I can discuss those later, but I did that.
Speaker 0: Yeah. So couple of insightful comments in the chat from Carl complaining here about, Jd. H, the kermit, the frog voice Ruins. I had a problem for almost my entire life of monitor and voice. And when I I finally went to get help for this from a voice teacher back in 20 18.
She told me you got come at the frog voice. So that analysis brings particularly true with me. Alright? I I also have come at the frog voice. I remember, there was a Tv show that wanted an expert to talk about the porn industry, but they didn’t wanna use me.
Because they thought I was too stiff. You think a hot man would be excellent in that position, but they used my my friend, Kevin Vlad instead.
Speaker 22: And then I kinda kept doing post stocks and and trying to find the tenure track position. And and academia and psychology, and it was just so difficult. Ended up going to the University of Ottawa to to do another post doc, and that’s when kind of things sort of transitioned. I was there for 2 years to talk talk some courses and at the end of the day, was recruited down to other the center for addiction mental Health in Toronto which I’m sure you’re familiar with, and that’s where I got my appointment at Yu and psychiatry and was there from about 20 16 to 20 23, and that appointment ended, and that was kinda right around the time. 20 16, 20 23 when things were getting a little woke in the academy, and, , I was getting increasingly uncomfortable with some of the research and and how it was being conducted and what we were able to say about mental health in early development and came back to to Pittsburgh, which is where I’m here today and and really trying to stay involved in academia in any way that I can and get through this period of what I consider to be woke and insanity for lack of a better term and working some odd, , odd in jobs, blue collar jobs at a local deli to kinda make it while continuing to write about some of this stuff and to use my platform, to speak about some of these issues like the the gender stuff and and other things that I’ve researched in my career.
Speaker 19: Okay. Good. Well, that’s great g for the mills. So why don’t we start by having…
Speaker 0: So Jordan and more successful public speakers like Richard Spencer that have wonderful mel allotted quality to to their voice. It it starts here and then it starts moving up and down and then it’ll come down. There’s a melody to the way they speak. But for Jd d H and how I was for almost all of my life. My voice was just stuck in in my larynx.
Alright? It was just kermit at the frog voice.
Speaker 19: Kevin you explained to everybody. Well, 2 things. Why don’t you tell them?
Speaker 0: Right. So he needs to move the point at which he projects from like, further up in his his voice box. So Instead of speaking from the back his throat. He needs to move that resonance point as high as possible. So right now, I am speaking, and how I’ve been speaking since taking these voice lessons in 20 18 from as higher point in my my throat as possible.
And so that requires more energy, but I more than effortlessly project my voice it when the resonance point is as high as possible and where is that point is?
Speaker 8: Mh. Mh. Mh. Mh.
Speaker 0: That point there, where you’re making that.
Speaker 8: Mh. Mh.
Speaker 0: That’s where you wanna be speaking from. Right? And it requires more energy you gotta be directing yourself up, but then you can more effortlessly project your voice.
Speaker 19: What developmental psychology is, broadly speaking, who the masters are in the field and what attracted you to it, and then zoom in a little bit more particularly on attachment theory.
Speaker 22: Sure. So developmental psychology is more less the study of of development across the lifespan from from the cradle to the grave, which was 1 of the earlier terms that John Bowl the the sort of origin of attachment theory came up with. So across birth to to death. And we look at how, individuals develop, how they develop their cognitive skills, how they develop their emotional capacities, in particular, , the earliest stages of life and infancy how the relationship with parents impacts that, the development of of language, the development of, , a, theory of mind, for example, and other other things. And some of the earlier, stuff that happens in adolescence, the crisis of identity is another big 1.
And then in in aging, which is not really my focus. I was always early infancy to to middle childhood, but in aging, you study there’s similar things that fond of mental faculties, emotional capacities and old age and and so forth. I guess some of the big names that listeners might be aware of. And…
Speaker 0: So back in 20 18, when I was stuck with this kind of come at the frog voice. Fond Right. I looked up. Monitor voice because I kept being told at a monitor voice. I looked that up on Youtube.
It was the
Speaker 5: just a super mono voice. It might not come off that way in some videos because I edit out of all the pauses and gaps. I never thought that it.
Speaker 0: This is the first result that came up when I went on to Youtube looked up monitor voice.
Speaker 8: It should
Speaker 5: be improved this month. I am going to speak to a speech therapist of to fix my boring voice. In the past, I’ve lost 40 pounds. I’ve gone to hair transplant, and this is the most life changing video I’ve ever made at buzzfeed. And you will
Speaker 8: see why
Speaker 5: I wanna my biggest insecurities that I don’t talk about. I’m very nervous because what if I can’t change with all that said. Let’s jump into it. Let’s go meet our speech therapist. My name is Amy.
I work on people who wanna improve their speech singing to… Acting to presenting. It’s not about the…
Speaker 0: She is a fantastic voice coach.
Speaker 5: Speed. You don’t need to speak facts. If you stop. And you think exactly what you wanna say your point can come across much more point. I noticed…
Use your hands a lot. A lot. We talk about what’s called the power box, which is right here. Politicians doing this, you want them fl all the way because then your ideas are fl. But if you have it right here, what you need to do is we try.
This this your exclamation point. What other things do you think I could improve on potentially potentially, and you left it right there. I didn’t know if you were done with your sentence or not versus if you would have said, so what other things would you like me to work on? I would have gotten the clue like, now it’s my turn to top. So especially for an interviewer?
Another thing let’s work on.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I got. Because you keep looking up at my flashy lights, and it makes me wanna be like, what’s up it something… It’s something there is very vulnerable for both of us. But vulnerability is what makes for good content, good conversation, good dialogue. I’m really nervous because at the very end of the month.
I’m giving a speech in front of over 500 universities. Students. I really wanna dig deep and apply everything I’ll learn to give the most…
Speaker 0: Right. This is a voice coach, and Amy Chapman who was speaking there.
Speaker 5: Inspiring and on a speech I’ve ever given. 1 of the things I did is go out and talk to coworkers that I have. Asked him what they first thought of me when they first met me. At the first couple times that I met you. Yeah.
I thought you didn’t like me because you’re anyways. Before I got to know you,
Speaker 2: I was afraid of you because I always thought you were angry.
Speaker 0: Baked since your mouth, I don’t know what you’re feeling? Like, are you mad? Are you frustrated. Are you…
Speaker 5: Very man. You’re going I love. I like on. I do wanna learn to garden because I think that’s a really good skill. Great.
Don’t drag. Out the last words either. Can just take your finger, touch your thigh. I started studying video color. That’s it.
Ken and I will go to dinner her or something. And I was, oh my god. That was so good. Caleb will be like, That’s pretty good. You always say stuff is pretty good when it’s excellent.
What is it gonna take for you to be born back cuisine. I really need a wash my. Are because it’s really dirty. I want you to get that across
Speaker 8: for me. No no. Now at work.
Speaker 5: I really need to wash my car because it’s so dirty. So when I took your words out, you use every other part of language to get your point across.
Speaker 21: Yeah.
Speaker 5: The other parts of language are intonation are stress. How am I with compliments? It still does vary your.
Speaker 20: I said you’re making loss
Speaker 0: Okay. Excellent buzzfeed video there. I hired a speech therapist to fix my boring voice. Let’s get a little bit more here from Rory
Speaker 18: Mark by the way. Okay. Right? I mean, the… I I think I think the actual the the the way I’d put it is the diagnosis is fascinating, and the prescription is terrible.
Speaker 8: Correct.
Speaker 18: Okay. Correct. No. Okay. That the perfectly exe employer of where this problem goes wrong, and this is very difficult if you’re working in advertising and marketing because quite often, you’re not criticizing the intentional or the aspiration of the person.
You’re merely saying that the way you’re going about this isn’t working very well. Okay? So yes, , nearly all the aspirations of, say the diversity and inclusion movement, are those which we should all generally support. And I don’t want to ever get into that kind of weird. , I, a weird thing where you start getting angry about trigger warnings because if you give it about 10 minutes thought, you realize the trigger warnings although way they’re a bit funny, and it’s a bit weird when Netflix says may contain nicotine use.
Okay, which, , never put anybody off gate to the cinema at 19 to 46. , Imagine if you had to do that Casablanca Lange warning nicotine use. It’s a bit weird. Okay? But it’s a great idea.
Okay? Some people may be deeply upset by certain forms of content, and you should at least given them the opportunity to kind of opt out or to avoid it. I don’t, , yeah. Okay. We we can debate what is triggering, but nonetheless, it’s broadly speaking.
Speaker 0: Alright. I think that should do it for today. It’s just starting to feel the first intonation of some fatigue. The caffeine buzz is wearing off. I’ll talk to you later.
Bye bye.