Theory of Change Podcast With Matthew Sheffield

Space aliens are one of the most common tropes of science fiction, and with good reason. We live in an immense universe and there seem to be a massive number of planets out there. Surely, at least a few are inhabited, right? Most Americans in opinion polls seem to believe this. A poll from November 2025 found that 56 percent of adults surveyed said they thought aliens exist. Former president Barack Obama appears to be one of them based on a recent interview he did with podcaster Brian Tyler Cohen.But whether aliens exist or not is only one of so many interesting questions the scenario presents us. And there’s one that perhaps you might not have thought of: If we ever met them, how could we even communicate with them?In novels, film, and television, decoding alien languages seems to always be a quick affair—math is math, after all. But that assumption is a very big one if you think about it. While they might seem universal, science, math, and language are all human constructs, even though they describe relationalities that are real.My guest on this episode is someone who’s thought a lot about all of this. Daniel Whiteson is a particle physicist at the University of California–Irvine and the host of the science podcast, Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe. But the centerpiece of our discussion today is his new book, Do Aliens Speak Physics? And Other Questions about Science and the Nature of Reality.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—Thinking outside Schrödinger’s cat box: Reality as quantum—Why reactionary billionaires love sci-fi authors like Robert Heinlein so much—Trump administration officials are seeking to eliminate merit and competition for NIH grants—As science faces unprecedented attacks, it must look within to defend and reform—Science and democracy need each other—Creationism, AI and the cult of the founder in Silicon ValleyAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction12:20 — Science is based on philosophy, whether it realizes it or not15:14 — Hieroglyphics, Etruscan, and alien languages24:05 — Science may not be universal at all, or at the very least the models humans use31:59 — The fact that science is limited in what it can describe doesn’t mean it’s fake35:30 — Eric Weinstein and the delusions and deceptions of ‘alt science’45:31 — Follow the money with anti-science influencers, they are the people getting the richest51:09 — Math and numbers are not part of reality itself01:02:29 — Don’t say you care about space if you support cutting science fundingAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Daniel Whiteson. Hey, Daniel, welcome to Theory of Change.DANIEL WHITESON: Thanks so much for having me on. So excited to talk to you about aliens. SHEFFIELD: And we have a perfect news hook. Recently, of course, Barack Obama, the former president, people thought he was saying that aliens were real. And he was saying, well, I only meant statistically real.And then Donald Trump feeling like he wanted attention, said he was going to declassify all the stuff that the government has on that, which I somehow doubt that’s going to happen. What did you think about all that?DANIEL WHITESON: I am curious what Obama thinks about aliens, because he’s a smart guy and he probably has seen stuff that I haven’t seen, so there could have been information there, but I don’t feel like we really learned very much. His opinion is sort of the opinion any well-educated, non-technical person is likely to have, that there’s lots of planets out there and so it seems improbable that none of them have life on them. But the problem with that is that science doesn’t know [00:04:00] whether the chances of life starting on a random planet. So it could very well be that there are 30 cajillion planets out there, but the chances of life are less than one over 30 cajillion.And so we are alone in the universe. Just the sheer number of planets doesn’t tell you. That there are definitely aliens out there. Of course, I want there to be aliens, but you know, you have to be very careful in science not to convince yourself of something you want to believe. You need the evidence, and we just have no evidence to suggest that life starts many times in the cosmos.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, we don’t, well, because we have only seen life on evolve on one planet.WHITESON: Exactly.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, and that takes us to there’s an attempt to extrapolate, well, what are the odds of alien life existing, and that’s called the Drake equation.So, what is that for people who don’t know.WHITESON: Yeah, it’s a big question. What are the odds that there’s life out there that could communicate with us? And so a few decades ago, Frank Drake broke it down and said, well, you can express it in terms of the various pieces in order for there to be aliens out there who could talk to us. There have to be stars.And those stars have to have planets. And at the time, for example, we didn’t know how common it was for stars to have planets. We had only ever seen planets in our solar system until, you know, 1995. And so even just extrapolating other solar systems with stars and planets, that was a big leap at the time.It was an, it was an unknown. And so then you have to know what fraction of those planets have life, what fraction of those life filled planets have intelligent life? What fraction of those are civilized, uh, what fraction of those develop technology, and then how long they stick around to potentially communicate with us.And the structure of the equation is very simple. It’s just all these fractions multiplied by each other. And you know, it’s the Drake equation. He’s famous for it. And you might look at it and say. That’s a very simple equation. I mean, look at it compared to like the Schrodinger equation, a partial [00:06:00] differential equation.It’s all complicated. It’s got wave functions in it. The Drake equation seems trivial, but the structure of the Drake equation is really important. It tells you something really deep about the nature of this question. Are there aliens out there who can talk to us? It tells us, because all the numbers are multiplied by each other, that if any of those numbers are zero, it doesn’t matter what the other ones are.So if there are no life failed planets out there, it doesn’t matter how likely it is for life to become intelligent because there is no life. Or if the probability for, you know, intelligent life to become technological in our way is zero or very close to zero, then the whole number is very, very small.And so in order for it to work, in order for there to be aliens out there communicating, communicating with us, you need everything to line up. You need stars, you need planets around those stars. You need life on those planets. You need technology, you need everything in sync, or it’s just not gonna happen.That’s what the Drake equation tells us.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and there are a lot of people who argue that it underestimates the odds by quite a bit.WHITESON: Yeah. AndSHEFFIELD: including the, the famous Fermi paradox, right.WHITESON: Yeah. The Fermi Paradox says, boy, why haven’t we been contacted? Because if you look at some of these numbers, right, this is basically Obama’s argument too. Now we know the number of stars in the galaxy is huge, hundreds of billions. And the fraction of those stars that have planets around them is shockingly large.It’s something like 10 to 40%. And you know that number could have been 0.0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 1, right? The fraction of those planets with a rocky planet inhabitable zone. Boy, that could have been a small number, but it’s wonderfully large, which means there’s a huge number of potentially habitable planets out there.And that’s as far as we know. Right. And Fermi Paradox, or, the Obama paradox, I guess is saying, look, there’s all these planets out there, and the galaxy is quite [00:08:00] old. It’s, been around almost since the beginning. Our solar system’s only four and a half billion years old, but the Milky Way itself is 13 ish billion years old.And in all that time, why has nobody visited us or left a marker for us or something? Right. Where is everybody? So that’s the Fermi paradox is to say, if there are all these planets out there, where is everybody? And of course, there’s several various answers to that question.SHEFFIELD: Well, and then, and your book is kind of the, the step after all that. So, assuming these things exist or beings exist, how could we even talk to them and how could we even understand what they’re saying? That’s kind of the crux of your book. So I, I, tell me, tell me about the background of, of how you got into why you decided to write it.WHITESON: Yeah, so I’m very excited for aliens to come. And I was thinking a few years ago, like, why am I excited for aliens to come? Is it just science fiction, first context, coolness? And yes, that would be a lot of fun, and I watch a lot of science fiction, but one of the reasons that I’m excited for aliens to come is the possibility that they could fast forward our physics.You know, we’ve been doing physics for a few hundred years or thousands if you give the Greeks credit, but if an aliens get here, that’s suggested, they’re probably more advanced than we are because we can’t get to them, which means they might have been doing physics for. Millions, billions of years.Imagine what they understand about the universe. Our science could be like preschool level understanding compared to what they’ve done. Maybe they know what’s inside a black hole. Maybe they know how the universe was started. Maybe they know if we’re in a multiverse, maybe they figured all that out. It would be incredible.And it’s so frustrating to imagine that those answers are out there, that somebody, some critter out there, gets the universe so much more deeply than we do, and they just know these things. And if they just came here and told us. Boom, we could share that [00:10:00] knowledge. That’s the thing that excites me about aliens and their potential arrival.And I noticed that in the physics community, there’s a sense that if that happened, that it would be fairly straightforward to download that knowledge that, you know, we would figure out, uh, zero one pie and then 10 minutes later we’d be at the chalkboard talking about lag grens of the standard model or whatever.And I felt like that’s probably naive and frankly, there’s a history of physicists not knowing a lot of philosophy, but having strong opinions about it. Um. So I decided to read some more about it, like, well, what do philosophers think? What do linguists think? What do anthropologists think about the chances of really making mental contact with the aliens?Is it likely that they think about the universe the same way that, do we do that they’ve come up with the same descriptions? And you know, really at the core of it was the question of. Is our description of the universe part of a universal, inevitable, singular, unique description that everybody around the galaxy would have to come to?Or does it reflect a human perspective as our human senses and questions and moods and cultures somehow affected our description of the universe as it colored it? This human lens through which we look through, and I actually pitched this idea of a book without the aliens concept to my teenager, said, Hey, what do you think about a book about whether human physics is universal or not?And he was like, yawn, that sounds really boring. And that was heartbreaking, frankly. But you know, you don’t ask for notes and then ignore them. So I came back a week later and I was like, Ooh, what if aliens have arrived and they have secrets of the universe, and the book is about whether or not we could understand those secrets.And he was like, oh, I would read that book. And I thought to myself. It’s basically the same book, [00:12:00] but if you center through the aliens, it makes it more immediate. And so it’s a philosophical question, are, is our understanding of the universe universal? Or is it local and human? But it matters if the aliens arrive because it means we can either download, advanced knowledge or we can’t.And that’s a big difference.Science is based on philosophy, whether it realizes it or notSHEFFIELD: Uh, yeah, it is. And you made a, a really important point there that I think there’s a lot of assumptions that people who, who work in technology or science, that they think that, oh, well, these philosophical questions, they’re just irrelevant.They, no one cares about them. These are just, dead, dead guys in white dresses who were talking about stuff that was, that no one cares about anymore. And, and what this book really, it fundamentally is that these questions of perception, of labeling, of writing down, these are far more fundamental to what we do and than we have any idea.WHITESON: Exactly, and it certainly could be that aliens are doing physics the way that we have, that they were at one point where we are now, and then spend the next billion years building on it and that they show up and they could just fast forward us to that future. That’s certainly a possibility. I’m certainly not saying that’s impossible and you know, I want that to happen.That would be amazing. But I also discovered in doing the research for this book that there are lots of reasonable arguments that suggest that that might be impossible. You know, that aliens that number one, we, we might never be able to communicate with them, or they might not even do science in a way that we imagined, or they could ask totally different questions or their answers can make sense to them, but just not sit with us.And so the book essentially is. The strongest arguments I could make against the idea that aliens will do physics the way that we do. Um, because I wanted to explore that and as I wrote the book, I discovered, maybe I’m actually more excited about the possibility that aliens show up. They don’t do physics [00:14:00] the way that we do that there’s some fundamental disconnect or mismatch.Because in that scenario, yes, we don’t get to instantly advance our knowledge by a billion years, but we learn something deep and philosophically revealing about ourselves, something we thought was the only way to do it. Maybe aliens don’t do math, and that blows our minds. And then we discover, oh wow, there are other ways to express scientific theories that are not in the language of math.And that opens the door to new ways of thinking and understanding the universe. One of the joys of having your mind blown is having new opportunities and new experiences. Just like, you know, if you travel to a, a, a distant country and your normal breakfast options are not available and you end up eating like a spicy fish soup for breakfast, and you’re like, wow, how is that a breakfast option?And then you discover. I love it. Oh my God. And you come back home and that’s all you eat for the rest of your life. You never would’ve thought of it. And now it’s important to you. And so it would be really exciting if aliens come and they show us something about ourselves we didn’t realize was human, that we thought was universal.And it’ll tell us something about what it is to be human in the universe, which is maybe even more valuable than understanding quantum gravity.Hieroglyphics, Etruscan, and alien languagesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And you have several fun examples also about humans understanding the humanity of other humans speaking languages that are dead languages. So talk, talk about a couple of those if you could, on some of the difficulty that people have with them is like hieroglyphics.WHITESON: Yeah. So connecting to the earlier comment about the Drake equation, I extended the Drake equation a little bit and added more terms and we said, well, to have this mental mind meld, we’d have to have, we’d have to run into aliens that do science and that communicate with us that answered the similar questions in a way that we understand them.And, and one of the really fun things is this question that you mentioned of communication. Like, could we actually understand aliens? And if you read a lot of science fiction like I do, usually [00:16:00] they get the message, it seems weird, dot, dot dot, they’ve decoded it and it says something intelligible.That step, I’ve always like, Hmm, is it really gonna be that easy? And I talked to linguists and some of them said, look, it’s gonna be impossible. If you get a message from aliens, it’s gonna be encoded in some way that. You aren’t familiar with and you’re gonna have no idea how to decode it.And your usual techniques of a decoding, trying a bunch of stuff and seeing what works won’t work because those rely on recognizing the decoded message. Like, in World War II when the Nazis were encoding their messages and, the Brits were building computers and the Enigma machine to look for the solutions.They could tell when they got it right because boom, there it was in plain text. They could read the German. But if we get an alien message and we try a bunch of decodings, how do we know what we get? Right? Because we don’t know if we can recognize an alien message. So that seems really, really hard. And what we don’t have any alien messages to play with yet.So in the book we explore a much easier problem, which is like. Let’s try to decode languages from the past other humans with very similar brains. So this should be easy, right? Let’s look at what they wrote and said, can we decode it? And there are famous examples that, that some people take as inspirational.Like, well, we figured out hieroglyphics, right? Okay. But think about how we figured out hieroglyphics. Number one. It took forever. People struggled with this for hundreds of years. Like the last hieroglyphics were written like maybe 1800 years ago. The last native reader or writer of hieroglyphics died around then.And people have been wondering what these things meant since basically then, and not making a whole lot of progress. And it wasn’t until the Rosetta Stone that we cracked it right now, we’re not very likely to get a Rosetta Stone from the aliens unless they’ve been listening to our television and came up with like a translation guideSHEFFIELD: Yeah, because they speak ourWHITESON: Yeah. If [00:18:00] they speak our language, right? So. Even with a Rosetta Stone, it took us 20 years to crack it. Like we had a translated example and it still took us 20 years. And the reason for that reveals something really worrying for people who are excited about translating alien languages is because we made the wrong assumption about hieroglyphics.People looked at hieroglyphics and they said, oh look, it’s pictorial. So if there’s a bird in it, it’s probably about birds, right? And if there’s water and it’s probably about water, that would make a lot of sense. And people actually used this as an argument that like the Egyptians had a pure language, that they somehow skipped this step of like encoding it as an arbitrary symbol that wasn’t directly and inherently connected.The way, like the word for water on a page doesn’t look like water. It doesn’t have anything to do with water. It’s in sense, some sense arbitrary. You could have like any set of scribbles could have meant water, but you know, if it’s pictorial, then it’s an image there. It’s more deeply connected. What was the argument.Well, it turns out that argument is totally wrong and that hieroglyphics are not pictorial. They’re phonetic, and each one represents a sound that you make as you speak. And so the one for bird, it represents some sound, I don’t know, hieroglyphics, I don’t know what it is, but doesn’t represent birds. And they only figure this out after like 20 years studying the patterns of the sounds in the Greek and in the hieroglyphics, and then they cracked it.So that shows you how it’s very easy to make what seemed like reasonable assumptions that just don’t carry forward and that, and that blind you to the answers. And that’s why, for example, that’s why it took us so long to crack hieroglyphics. And that’s why in other cases, like in Etruscan and in Runo, runo and in many other dead languages where there are nobody, where there’s nobody around who speaks them or reads them anymore, we just don’t know how to decode them.And, and we’ve been struggling for centuries and we may never figure it out, which means like, look, if it’s hard to [00:20:00] decode a human language. People with identical biological brains in the same environment. Probably similar culture. I mean, when you compare it to aliens like Etruscans, they lived with the Romans.These are not, distant from us culturally, and yet we can’t figure it out. We have thousands of examples of their writing. We dunno how to decode it. That does not bode well for, we get a message from aliens and we figure out how to decode it. Like if we can’t do it on easy mode, the chances of us doing it on hard mode.I’m not optimistic.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and there’s also the opposite problem as well, because, when quasars were first discovered people thought that they were alien transmissions. And and so that took people a while to realize, oh, no, no, these are just natural of phenomena.WHITESON: Yeah, those are actually pulsars. These are rotating neutron stars where they emit really intense beams, but the beam emission is a little bit offset from this, from the rotation. And so they’re basically like spinning around and they’re like flashlights that scan across the sky. And so they’re very regular and so they emit constantly.But if you’re just in one location, the beam passes over you in a regular way. And when this was discovered, it seemed odd to see something so regular from the sky and people call it little green men initially. LGM was the, the notes in, in the original lab book because people thought maybe this is aliens.But now we know of course, yes. The universe can make very regular messages and so yeah, it’s hard to pull out. Messages from aliens from the background. There’s another example, the wow signal, which is a huge message at a frequency you might expect to hear from aliens, right? A fairly quiet frequency and never explained.Now there’s like some hypothesis about, basically a hydrogen burp in one thing that was enhanced somewhere else. But at the time it was like a huge, peak in exactly the frequency you would expect it, but we don’t know how to extract any [00:22:00] information from it to know that it was from aliens and not just like some hydrogen burp.We’d have to like, discover that it is a message, but we look at it, we, there’s no information, content we can extract, which means either we don’t know how to decode this obvious message from aliens, or it was just a hydrogen burp with no information in it. And, and that’s very frustrating.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well I was thinking the first observation of a quasar. The Soviets were, they heard it the first time and they were like, well, what is this? This is, this is, you know, incredible. Yeah. It’s the same concept. And so. So like, it, it’s, you have the problem of both false positives and false negatives.And with just such a very small number of samples. Uh, what, what can you do with that? And it, it turns out, uh, it might be very difficult. It cer certainly more difficult than the six months you would see in a typical, uh, movieWHITESON: Yeah, and think. Think about the other situation. Aliens receiving our messages. Carl Sagan and Frank Drake actually put out a message on some of our probes, right? The Pioneer Plaque and the Voyager record. This is their attempt to communicate with unknown aliens, with unknown culture and unknown senses.And you know, they did a fine job. They avoided English, they avoided math. Even they went for like pictorial representations. But who knows what that means to aliens if they will even understand it as a message, not to mention like be able to decode it.SHEFFIELD: Or do they even have vision?WHITESON: Yes, exactly. And as wonderful a job as they did, and I think NASA only gave them like two weeks, so we shouldn’t criticize them too harshly.It’s, there’s a lot of cultural assumptions in that message. If you dig into it, it, you really need to know what they’re trying to say in order to understand it. I actually took their message and I showed it to a bunch of physics grad students here, which, should be an easy audience for this because they’re like human physicists with the same brain and they had no idea what the message was about.They were like, nobody figured it out in a couple of hours. So, I don’t know. It doesn’t [00:24:00] bode well. I think the problem is probably a lot harder than people think it is.Science may not be universal at all, or at the very least the models humans useSHEFFIELD: Then there is the question of math and science, which often are perceived to be universal ideas and that’s a heavily loaded philosophical question as, as you get into so let’s maybe unpack that generically, and then we’ll get into why math and numbers even are not universal necess.WHITESON: Yeah. Well, we can start with science. It feels like obvious that aliens will do science because in the scenario we’re imagining they show up with their gleaming ships. They have warp technology or wormholes, or even just, they figured out generational interstellar travel or something.They’re more advanced than we are. How could they possibly do that without being scientific? Right? But I think this is projection of human culture into aliens, historically we’re not very good at imagining how aliens could be different from us. I think, you know, star Trek is pretty typical. We tend to like, take humanity, put a croissant on their forehead and say like, okay, that’s what an alien is.And we imagine aliens is like, some tweak on humans, but really they could have a very, very different history and a very different relationship with knowledge. And it’s not actually that hard to imagine aliens without science because humans didn’t have science for a long time. Even when we already had technology, like how did we develop, bread baking or beer brewing or metallurgy, all these things we developed through trial and error, not by understanding like, the chemistry inside and the yeast and the microbes or the, you know, solid state physics of layers of, um, of steel and impurities and all the things that go into, um.Making swords steal really hard. Like the Japanese swordsmiths, they didn’t know all that stuff, but they knew how to make a sword. They discovered it, they had the recipe. And so we were technological for many, many [00:26:00] years before we were scientific. And doing science means wanting to understand, wanting an explanation.And clearly that’s been a huge multiplier for technology. Like it’s sped up our advancement of technology dramatically, but it doesn’t, but it means that it’s not required. Right. You can imagine aliens that just sort of like trial and error their way through technology forever, maybe because they don’t care about how things work, they’re not curious about it.And if thatSHEFFIELD: They figured it out a long time ago and forgot about it.WHITESON: Yeah. Right. That could be too. And if you think like, well, that doesn’t make any sense. Think about like, do you care to understand all the technology that you use? I mean, when I’m in the kitchen and I’m baking a souffle, like I don’t need to know the chemistry. Just tell me the recipe.Right? I just want to know the how, not the why and alien, and this desire to understand the universe. It could be human. It certainly is emotional. I mean, I feel a personal need to figure out like, what is the fundamental fabric of the universe? How does it all work? I’m desperate to know, but that’s an emotional reaction to being alive as a human.It’s not necessarily true that other alien, that aliens feel that way. I mean, my dog certainly doesn’t care. His food shows up every single day. I don’t think he spends a lot of time wondering about how that happens. He’s just excited to eat it. And so it could be that aliens show up and they have warp drives and they don’t do science.And when we ask them like, well, how does that work? Why? They’re like, well, here’s how you build it. And say, yeah, but what’s the quantum, what’s the quantum gravity underneath that? And they said like, what are you talking about? We just told you how to build the thing. What else do you want? And it could be that this curiosity, it could be we we’re the only ones who feel that way about the universe, and it’s part of being human and not part of being alive and intelligent in the universe.And. I’m not saying it’s likely, but it’s certainly possible, and it suggests that we may be extrapolating too broadly, the human experience to [00:28:00] suggest that like all intelligent aliens will do science.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing about this is that if they did do science, um, how they would conceive of it, why would it be similar to the way that we conceive of things at all? When you look at multiple ways of expressing different particle physics realities, there’s several different ways you can do it.Um, and so what that means, of course, is that these expressions, these are just models. They’re not actually reality. The actual reality that exists. He’s independent of what we can say about it. Because there’s probably, possibly maybe an infinite number of ways to describe some various scientific facts that people think, oh, these are the basic truths, these are the fundamental laws of nature.And it’s like, well, that’s how it looks like to us in this part of, of the universe at this moment in time, at our scale, in size and moment in space time.WHITESON: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: so like, those are, those are all kinds of assumptions that people I think e even a lot of, of science focused people are making these assumptions.So it’s not just like a layperson problem, I think.WHITESON: Absolutely. I think you’re right and many physicists I think confuse the map for the territory. Our description of the universe doesn’t have to be how it actually works. It, it doesn’t have to be that there, it. Is a Higgs boon when we’re not looking at it and thinking about it, that it’s just part of our description.And I’m sure that particle physicists hearing me say that would be like, what are you talking about? Of course is a Higgs boon. We discovered it, they won the Nobel Prize for it. I can show you the evidence for it. Like, what are you on, Daniel? And it’s not that I’m disputing the discovery of the Higgs boon.I’m suggesting that that’s a part of a way to describe the universe, as you say, but it may not be inevitable and singular and unique. And if you read, uh, papers and philosophy, they [00:30:00] argue that there could be multiple ways to describe the universe. So as a concrete example, say the aliens show up and they’ve done science, and we can communicate with them and they have their own theory of the universe, and it works just as well, and it doesn’t have a Higgs bows on in it because it doesn’t have quantum fields or, or anything like that.It’s fundamentally at odds with our description, but it works just as well. That possibility is real. We can’t rule it out. Just because our theory works and is been tested to 10 decimal places doesn’t make it unique. Right? And of course there’s the chance that they come up with another theory and there’s like a mapping from ours to theirs.Like we call things different names. And after a hundred years we can understand like, okay, your quantum shme are the same as our quantum fields. You just call it differently. It’s possible you can make this sort of categorical connection, but it’s also possible that you can’t, we just don’t know. And, and to suggest that like, look, our theory works very, very well.Therefore it’s true, I think is making a leap that’s not supported by the evidence. It’s a leap that we want to believe. And so it’s very easy to convince ourselves. All those folks at CERN who helped discover the Higgs boon, want to imagine that there are aliens also discovering Higgs boons and winning alien Nobel prizes for it.But we don’t know that, and we should be extra skeptical of things we want to believe. And, and it’s a philosophical question, not a scientific one, whether our theory is unique, you know, and, and there’s lots of other angles on that. Our theory, we know it’s not exact. For example, all the theories we build in science, these are effective approximate theories.There’s no chance that our description of the universe is the mechanism of the universe itself, because it’s not even designed to be, it’s designed to get answers to questions that are, that are limited in scope and described simplified situations. There are approximate descriptions of what reality might be, and in those approximations, there’s a lot of potential fuzziness that can creep in.The fact that science is limited in what it can describe doesn’t mean it’s fakeSHEFFIELD: [00:32:00] Yeah. And these questions, I think the fact that there is imprecision, and everything is perspective, or at least access is perspective.WHITESON: Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: I think there, it does make a temptation for, for people to say, oh, well, so therefore science is all made up. Therefore it’s just fake. And if I think the earth is flat, then it is flat.Or just any variety of things, whether it’s vaccines-- that is an increasingly common attitude that some people are having to say that. So, I mean, what would you say to someone who says, yeah, of course, I don’t mistake the map for the territory on anything. And so therefore I think that, if I eat enough cinnamon, I can live forever!WHITESON: Wow. I love your cinnamon theory. That’s gonna be you, you said that as a ridiculous idea, but it’s gonna be real in a couple years. I bet. No. It’s a really important distinction you’re making. Thank you for raising that because I’m not saying science is fake or that, our experiments are bunk or that everybody’s been lying to you or that science doesn’t work right.Science works and we test it and, and science is not a scam. But it’s not necessarily unique. So just because it’s powerful and just because it works doesn’t mean that it’s revealing reality as it is. You know, it’s, it’s describing something that is effective, but we don’t know if it’s the only way for it to happen.That’s very different from saying it’s not, it doesn’t work and physicists been lying to you and they’ve been resisting the truth, and there’s wormhole technology being hidden by the government or you know, Eric Weinstein’s Geometric Unity is the truth and physicists refuse to accept it because they’ve been like, you know, hogging grant funding for decades or some other conspiratorial nonsense.It’s a very, very different idea, and we can dig into that if you like. Um, I have strong feelings about it. I think that science is being done in good faith by people who want to understand the [00:34:00] universe. And want to share that understanding and want to discover reality and, and spread that, that knowledge openly and broadly.There are of course some people who are bad actors everywhere, but they don’t exemplify the, the process of science. But I do think that physicists are not widely educated in philosophy and tend to have a narrow view on the philosophical implications of their work. So without knowing philosophy, most of them are scientific realists.They think the theory we’re developing is reality. Boom. Done. Because they don’t know about these other ideas. And if you sat down and, you know, had a drink or a smoke with them and, and talked to them about it, they would go, oh yeah, wow. I didn’t realize I was making a bunch of assumptions that, you know, the experiments suggest this model.Therefore the me the model is reality. That last step is an assumption we don’t know. And there are other reasonable ideas that intelligent people have put out. I think they would come around and be like, oh, cool, but they just don’t know what they don’t know because most of them don’t take philosophy.So. And I think also physicists have a terrible track record of assuming that they know things that, that they don’t know, you know, stepping boldly into fields where they’re uneducated and making strong statements. So I was terrified of making that mistake with this book, which is why I spent so much time talking to my brilliant colleagues here at uc, Irvine in the philosophy and logic of science department, who help me understand a lot of these questions.Eric Weinstein and the delusions and deceptions of ‘alt science’SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned Weinstein because actually in the earlier episode that we did on quantum physics, he was somebody who we discussed as well. And I wanna talk about it in the context that people who are inclined to believe these conspiracy theories or, that science is all just one big attempt to suppress ideas and whatnot, and it’s like, okay, if there was, if there were a mathematical formula that translated to the ability to [00:36:00] travel through time and go past, the, the speed of light, the amount of money you could make off of that is, it is more than all the money in the entire world. So whatever grants you might get or be afraid of not getting would be absolutely dwarfed byWHITESON: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: if this stuff was real.And, and, and people don’t, they don’t even think about that.WHITESON: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: I think, and it’s really, it’s really, really absurd and it’s upsetting to me, frankly.WHITESON: Yeah. And you make the important point there, which is people don’t really think about it. And that echoes the point I was trying to make earlier, which is you should be really skeptical of things you want to believe. A lot of these. Stories, science is lying to you or science being done in bad faith or whatever.These are things people believe these conspiracy stories because it touches something in them that they want touched. You know, it’s some grievance or some anger or some feeling of, you know, of the experts are actually dumb or something. It touches something in them. They want to hear like, I’m part of a special group that understands reality now, or something, and so they don’t really apply scrutiny to it, and that’s why a lot of these conspiracy theories.They seem like nonsense. And, and as soon as you look at them, you apply any sort of scrutiny, they fall apart. Like it, as you say, it doesn’t make any sense why the establishment of physics would ignore a brilliant idea from an insider. We’re talking about a guy who was like at Harvard in math, right? Not just like some crank on the internet.Why the mainstream physics would ignore this idea. It makes absolutely no sense. But people, a lot of people believe it, and I, I suspect that they believe it because it does something for them. It it, it validates a feeling they’ve had uh, that experts are jerks or something. You know, it’s the same thing we see culturally right now rejecting science and institutions and elites and all this stuff.And people believe that even if [00:38:00] it doesn’t make any sense, and even if it’s self-contradictory, uh, they believe it because they are hearing something they want to hear. And so that’s why you have to be extra careful. When you hear something you want to hear that you’re applying your skepticism to it.And that’s the, the, the thing that animated my project here is I wanted to believe that aliens would do physics the way that we do, but how do I know, how do I really know? And especially because I wanna believe it. I should be extra careful in, in promoting that idea because I could just be believing it without applying enough scrutiny.You gotta be very, very careful. And so, you know, to any listeners out there, scientists that are not lying to you, most of ‘em are doing science in good faith, trying to understand the universe. And we’re not a coordinated bunch of folks. If there was some idea out there which would overturn reality, like somebody would be shouting it from the rooftops because it would make their career we incapable of pulling off a grand conspiracy theory.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s the real motive. Like, it, the only way that you can become a world famous scientist is to say these other guys were wrong, and I have the proof that here’s this other way and this is how this is a more accurate mode. Like, that’s the actual way things work.And, and, and so I, I, I think it comes out of this, there is this if, if people have kind of a, a native or sort of unspoken understanding that naive realism is, is not adequate. Therefore anything goes and that’s not, that is not what you’re saying.WHITESON: Yeah, that’s not what I’m saying. I’m not saying let’s throw at science. I’m saying that there’s other ways to understand what we’ve done. What we’ve done is real and it works. And the reason you’re listening to it right now is because it works, but it doesn’t necessarily have the philosophical implications that you might naively assume that it does.And I remember feeling that way, like it makes sense. I get it. I remember being an undergrad in physics in my quantum class and seeing the calculation [00:40:00] of, the dipole moment to 12 decimal places and then seeing the experimental, experimental result to the, and the same number, to 12 decimal places and, and thinking to myself.Oh my gosh. This isn’t just a description, this is the machinery of reality being revealed. I thought that, and it was, I got chills. It was almost a spiritual moment for me. But you know, now I understand it more deeply. I understand how it’s possible to be very, very precise, very, very accurate, and yet still be a map and not the territory.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And one way of thinking and I sometimes will say to people is that things that exist ,they exist only because they’re aligned with the obligations of the locality that they’re in. So, in other words, and so when people say, oh, look at all this incredible order, look at all these amazing things that exist, and it’s like, well, they’re compliant with the obligations that, of that locality. You can’t have a protein that exists, uh, above a certain temperature because they melt. Uh, and so therefore you can’t say, well, gosh, isn’t this incredible that there are all these proteins.And it’s like, no, that you’ve just described things exist. And that’s not an argument for any kind of special, special creation or anything like that. It’s, or, or not. It’s just simply you’re, you’re noticing that things exist. That’s really what this is.WHITESON: And how do we even know that they exist? Right? We describe them, we experience them. What does that mean about existence? Actually, that there’s an objective reality out there that resembles our model of it in some way. Like maybe Right? Possibly. But, and if we’re gonna be philosophically skeptical, like we don’t really know.SHEFFIELD: We perceive that they exist.WHITESON: Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay, so just on on Weinstein though, a bit more though, like specifically what is it that he says? And then why, why do you think that, that it’s not serious?WHITESON: So Weinstein has a [00:42:00] theory called Geometric Unity, which tries to explain the standard model and dark matter and dark energy and solve a bunch of puzzles that are outstanding in physics right now. Some of those puzzles include like, well, we can describe the motion of really, really big stuff using gravity and Einstein’s theory, and we can describe the motion of really, really small stuff.Particles using the standard model and quantum mechanics, but we don’t know how to bring them together because they tell fundamentally different stories about the nature of reality. You know, for example, quantum mechanics says time is infinite, has to go infinitely far in the back and in and uh, to the future.And, uh, general relativity says, Hmm, not necessarily you could actually have a beginning to time. Time is a very different kind of thing. So they tell very different stories about basic components of our universe and we don’t know how to bring them together. And Eric Weinstein says he has an explanation for all of this.And, you know, I’m not a particle theorist, so I’m not an expert in this. I’ve not read his theory myself, but folks who are experts have read it. And, you know, they find fundamental flaws in it. You know, it, it’s not consistent with itself. It creates these anomalies. Um, as people say that they create these nonsense predictions.We can include some links in the show notes to folks who have gone through in detail and found technical issues with it. And the problem is not that it has pro problems, many theories have problems, but what usually happens is that you write your theory, you submit it for peer review, you publish it, and then people critique it and say, oh, well that’s interesting.It has this problem. Maybe it’s fixable, let’s work on it, or whatever. Or, this has this issue, it’s fatal. And usually you respond to that criticism by doing some work and responding to it. But. Eric’s response is to claim that this criticism is in bad faith and that it’s gatekeeping, um, and they’re trying to shut him up.And you know, this is the standard science populist playbook, is do some shoddy work, frankly. And then when the community of experts comments on it claim [00:44:00] that you’re being suppressed or, there’s gatekeeping you know, and that you’re a victim. And you see the same thing with Avi Lube. Right.He does all this sloppy work and claims that comets are spaceships. And when the experts chime in and say, well, here, you misunderstood something fundamental about this field because you’re not an expert in it and you didn’t ask us, you didn’t even read a textbook. Then, you know, he paints that good faith critique as an attack and now he’s a victim and basically he’s Galileo.And so it’s the same playbook over and over again, right? Do some sloppy work. It’s critiqued by experts claim to be a victim. And you know, these guys are getting the attention. A lot of people who are outside of academia would love to have experts read their work and comment on their complaint. Mostly is nobody’s reading my stuff.I get a lot of emails from people who have ideas and and want some attention for it. So Eric and Avi and these folks, they have gotten plenty of attention and people just think their ideas are not great. And you know, in. It’s hard to accept when your life’s work is seen as essentially failing in the marketplace of ideas.It’s much easier to say, oh, it hasn’t been taken seriously, or There’s some scheme, or there’s some reason why, um, I’m not being treated fairly. That’s harder to accept, and so I understand why it’s, it’s a bitter pill to swallow, but I think it’s a simpler explanation than there’s some conspiracy out there for physicists who don’t want to understand the universe and read your genius theory and are rejecting it for political reasons or something.It just doesn’t make any sense to me.Follow the money with anti-science influencers, they are the people getting the richestSHEFFIELD: No, well, and, and not economic sense either. As IWHITESON: Yeah,SHEFFIELD: If, if he was right, the dude would be, a a, an instant multi-billionaire, the richest person ever to have existed. If what he said was real. And he’s the managing director of Peter Thiel’s Capital Fund.So is Peter Thiel suppressing Eric Weinstein? Yes, apparently.WHITESON: Well, Eric Weinstein gets more attention than almost any physicist on the planet for [00:46:00] his theories. Like he has a bigger platform and more attention than almost anybody. So the, the idea that he’s being suppressed is ridiculous. He’s got a huge platform, and this is a trend in alt science.You see this also in like, archeology, guys like Graham Hancock who are suggesting that like archeology is lying to you about our history, and he’s got the real story, but it’s being suppressed. Like the guy has a show on Netflix. He has a bigger platform than almost any archeologist out there. And so it’s one of these things where, again, the story doesn’t hold up to even the flimsiest of scrutiny, but it’s not supposed to.What it’s supposed to do is touch on some part of you that makes you want to believe it. Oh, I also got ignored by experts, so I’m gonna believe Eric Weinstein, his theory is being ignored. Or, you know, some nerd was mean to me decades ago, and so I’m gonna think that professors are jerks or something. You know, I, I don’t know what it is inside folks, but Graham Hancock and Weinstein and Loeb, these are, these guys are experts at touching on those grievances and using it to get people to believe stuff, which is, inconsistent and incoherent.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and unfortunately there’s, one person in the astrophysicist community who has apparently gone down that road as well. Um, and I think, uh, you know who I’m referring to. Right?WHITESON: Yeah, the man fromSHEFFIELD: kind of what you think happened with, with, with Sabine Hossenfelder.WHITESON: Oh, I see. Sabine. I don’t know Sabine. So I can’t say what’s in her heart. But I find her descriptions of particle physics confusing because they don’t resemble my experience at all. She says things like particle physicists are basically doing physics in bad faith, that we’re proposing theories we don’t believe in because we’re gonna get grant money for it.And that we’re suppressing good ideas like hers from getting funding. And, you know, I think everybody has had the experience of putting your heart and soul into something and then having the community read it and be like, nah, I’m not excited about that. You know, my success rate for writing [00:48:00] grant proposals is terrible.I write many, many great proposals and do not get most of them funded. That’s just the way that it works. And so it’s easier for me. It would be easier for me also to say, Hey, my ideas are actually brilliant y’all, but the community is ignoring them because they wanna promote their ideas, which are nonsense.And I think that she probably has a legitimate disagreement with the mainstream of physics think, and she probably legitimately thinks they’re going in the wrong direction. But almost everybody thinks that because almost everybody has had their juicy ideas rejected. And the answer is not to suggest that the mainstream are somehow doing it in bad faith because they disagree with you.Like disagreeing with one person like Sabina doesn’t mean that they’re lying. So I don’t know what’s in her heart or what her motivations are, um, exactly. But her description of physics and particle physics specifically is not resembled the reality, uh, of my experience at all. But she’s built a big audience.And again, again, I think a lot of the people who hear, mainstream physics is a scam. And, and they’re doing it for the wrong reasons and et cetera, et cetera. They hear that and they wanna believe it. And so, even if it doesn’t quite make sense, or if she has conflicts of interest herself, you know, she has reasons to tell you that story.And for you to, and want and for you to want to believe it they brush that aside. Just the way people brush aside contradictions in Donald Trump’s story, because they wanna believe it, it, it, it does something else for them. That’s my theory. But, again, I don’t know her personally and so I wouldn’t wanna speak to what’s in her heart or why she’s doing what she’s doing.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I would also say follow the money for them. Because, even if, let’s say you are well funded, that you’re the chair of a department at some major university, the amount of money that you’re making off of that in a given year is far, far less than what Eric Weinstein makes off of his YouTube [00:50:00] and off of his podcast and all these other things that he’s doing.Like this guy’s making way, way more money than any scientist out there. So let so the so don’t, so you have to realize, if you’re gonna say follow the money, well follow the other way too. That’sWHITESON: Yeah, that’s right. But you’re making an assumption there, which is that people are applying some sort of standard to this content and digesting it and thinking about it before accepting it. And I don’t think that they are, I don’t think that they’re applying a fair standard because as you say, if they did, they would say, they would listen to Sabine message, follow the money.Physicists have an incentive to promote ideas that they don’t believe and say, well, well, Sabina also has an incentive to promote, you know, ideas that the audience wants to hear to Pando to her audience. Does that mean we shouldn’t believe her? But I don’t think people are applying that standard because they, they’re hearing what they want and they’re believing it because they want to believe it and they’re applying a much lower bar of scrutiny to it in, in my view.But again, I’m not an expert in this stuff. This is psychology and, social and sociology.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and honestly that these, that’s the regular domain of this show, so, I couldn’t resist,WHITESON: Okay.Math and numbers are not part of reality itselfSHEFFIELD: But back to your book though. I mentioned we, we’d talk about so we talked about science as a not necessary universal, but the also there’s the idea of math and even numbers. And I think that is another thing that is probably much less widely considered, that what, I mean, what even are these things from a universal perspective, they don’t necessarily, they’re not universal.And you do get into thisWHITESON: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: the book, so talk about it here if youWHITESON: Sure. And first, let’s acknowledge the arguments for math as a universal language, because they’re very strong, right? We can’t ignore that. Like our physics is just math. Like it’s, it’s the language of math. It’s expressed on math. And, and more than just being described in terms of math, math has led us to physical insights.Just blindly following the math has revealed the way the [00:52:00] universe works in some cases, like Maxwell, putting together all the equations of electricity and magnetism and realizing there was a missing bit. Like if you added one more piece, then those equations would be much more symmetrical and how, how satisfying and mathematically beautiful.But you can’t just like. Come up with stuff and say, Hey, it would be prettier if it was this way. But then they went out and looked and like, oh, that actually was there. It was something about the universe we had missed. And math pointed us in that direction, and that’s happened many, many times. Some of my favorite examples are, times when mathematicians were just playing with numbers and patterns because, you know, that’s what those nerds love to do and, and I love that they love it.And built holes like tools, like Group Theory was just based on, Hey, what can we do with this? Let’s play some games with numbers. And it was totally useless. From a physical point of view for more than a century, until particle physics were like, oh my gosh. These rules you built from group theory describe exactly what we see happening to fundamental particles and the symmetries between those particles.This is perfect. And now everything we do is built on group theory. So, you know, just from the mathematical ideas, we discover lots of mathematical structure in our explanations of the universe. Very, very powerful stuff. On the other hand, right? How do we know that it’s not? How do we know that it’s part of the universe and not just our description of it, right?Can we really pull those two things apart? And so that’s the question we dig into in, in the book. And, one question is like, the rules themselves, do they have to be mathematical? And the other is that you refer to is what about the objects in those stories? Like the numbers? What are numbers?And if you read, um, books on philosophy of math, the questions they ask are trippy, right? Like, what is a number? Or here’s my favorite, where are numbers? Because if numbers are real in the universe, the way, like some people think the Higgs boon is real, or earth is real, [00:54:00] real things. Have locations, right?Earth is somewhere, the Higgs boon is here, and then it’s there, and then it disappears. Where’s the number two? It’s, it’s not anywhere. You can’t do experiments on two, you can’t trap two by two, bring two with you. Uh, it seems like more of an idea than than an actual, physical thing in the universe.And there’s this wonderful thought experiment, extended thought experiment by Hartery Field where he says, let me try to build a theory of physics without numbers. So it’s called Science without Numbers, and it’s crazy, but it works. And what he does is he says. Think about the number line, right? And people mostly imagine in their heads some like, blowing line in space with dashes on it.It says that’s kind of an abstraction, that’s a construction. We have started from the idea of having like more things and less things, and we’ve given like names and we, we’ve assembled that into a line and we’ve given names to it. But, well, you don’t need all that. And that’s really fundamental to the way we do physics.Like most of physics today is built on fields. Fields are just numbers in space. Like what is the Higgs field? It’s just a different number to every place in space or even like, uh, you know, gravity. Newtonian gravity has gravitational fields, which are, you know, numbers or vectors in space. So if you don’t have numbers, you can’t have fields.How do you do calculations? Well, Hartery, I love that. His name coincidentally is called Field, Hartery Field says that fields don’t exist and that essentially they’re an intermediate step in our calculation. When you go to calculate what happens to a rock orbiting Jupiter, yeah, you could use the gravitational field, but you don’t actually need it.It’s just like a shorthand. It’s a way to like store a half done calculation to make the rest of the calculation easier later. You can skip all that. All you really need to know are the comparisons to know like what’s closer, [00:56:00] what’s further those relationships without building this abstract concept of a number line.And so he builds a theory of gravity that replicates everything that Newton’s theory does, but doesn’t use any numbers, right? And, and that’s, it’s mind blowing and it’s very hard to grok because it’s very different from the way we think and it’s not very useful. Because of course you would wanna use numbers.Numbers are very powerful. But he makes the point by doing so that you could build science without numbers themselves. This idea of a number line, maybe an abstraction that we put together to organize our thoughts, may reflect the way that we think about the universe more than the way the universe itself operates.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and for alien beings that would have, that might have significantly different physics in terms of how they’re structured, these could have very real implications for them because, if they themselves don’t really experience quantity as in terms of what they are.Then why would, why would they think of things outside of, of the world as quantity? It’s not necessarily true.WHITESON: And to, to be more concrete, you know about quantity. We tend to think that math is intuitive and basic and simple because one plus one equals two and and surely critters out there will feel the same thing because aliens, will have themselves and they’ll have their partner or whatever.But, but there’s some assumptions built into that. Like, what if aliens don’t have distinct boundaries between their bodies? What if they’re, currents in some flow or tendrils of plasma in a star’s atmosphere, or as if you say their physicality is fundamentally different in a way that’s hard for us to imagine.They might not come, come up with this idea of counting and counting is the foundation of all of our mathematics. You take apart all of modern mathematics. Folks showed that the foundation, the foundational assumptions, the axioms of math come from arithmetic, come from [00:58:00] counting. And so if you’re not countingSHEFFIELD: And they’re rooted in our physical body, like that our hands have digits, like, they’re literally called digits.WHITESON: Yeah, that’s true. Exactly.SHEFFIELD: Can’t, you can’t get any more illustrative of the, of the assumption there, I think.WHITESON: That’s right. And the idea that like I have a body and you have a body and those are separate and distinct and we can count them. There’s a lot of assumptions there. Like if you wanna be, if, if it was somehow physical and universal and absolute, then there would be no fuzziness there.But there’s lots of fuzziness, like, where exactly does my body end? Is it at my skin? What about the hairs? What about, you know, a dead hair that’s now sitting on the surface of my skin? Is that part of me or is it part of the rest of the universe? It’s an arbitrary cultural distinction we make about whereSHEFFIELD: Are the bacteria inside of your body? Are they you?WHITESON: Exactly. And what we find is that this is a human choice, which means it’s cultural. And even among human cultures, we count things differently. Like if you throw a bunch of stuff on a table and you say, how many things are there? An American might say, oh, there’s seven things. And a Japanese person might say, no, no, you can’t group these things.With those things, you count those things differently. This four long things and three short things, like that’s it. You can’t group those together. Like you don’t count them the same way. And, and so there’s a lot of assumptions about like what gets counted together, what does counting even mean? And you know, the deeper you go down this rabbit hole, the more you realize there’s very little that we can assume about how aliens minds might work if we don’t even know that one plus one equals twos.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And you don’t even get into category theory in the book. Like you could, you could certainly do that as well, which is, expressing concepts through directionality. And, and that could easily work. You could build an entire theory of physics that could be just as more complex even than the human theories based on category theory or some variant of it.WHITESON: Yeah. Absolutely.SHEFFIELD: So, so, okay. So, but let, let’s fast forward then to [01:00:00] the end of the book here. So what, what are, after all the paradoxes and questions that you explore what, what are kind of the takeaways that you have for people in, in terms of the question here, the do aliens speak physics? The answer is, well, probably not.But what can we do after, after realizing that.WHITESON: Yeah, so after realizing that, and being let down, I think we should embrace what that means. It means that probably our physics is not unique. It’s not singular, it’s not inevitable that there are other ways to think about the universe and to explain it and. That means that when the aliens arrive, and I’m very hopeful that they do very soon tomorrow would be my preference, that we’re gonna learn something about the universe, but also we’re gonna really learn something about ourselves.We’re gonna understand our relationship to explanations and our relationship to building those explanations and the choices that we made along the way that we didn’t even realize we were making because they felt so natural to us. They’re the only way you could possibly do it. Of course, you’re gonna have bacon and eggs for breakfast.What else could it be? And, you know, the having effectively fish soup for breakfast is gonna, is gonna blow our minds, but it’s gonna also open up lots of possibilities because there are lots of doors there that we’ve closed and, and opening them up could reveal fantastic new ways to explore the universe, to explain it, to understand it.And so it might sound disappointing. That, you know, our project of physics is actually just a human earth-based project, like biology or economics. Physics doesn’t have a special status in that way. But it’s actually an opportunity, it’s an opportunity to learn a lot about ourselves and humanity.What that means, I don’t know. I’m desperate for the aliens to show up and, and, and to blow our minds that way. But of course. This is just speculation. And it could be that when the aliens come, they do speak physics our way and that tells us something else about the universe. So in the same way that like [01:02:00] discovering alien life will tell us a lot about our context here and the meaning of our existence.Are we alone? Are we, one of a zillions of civilizations discovering whether aliens speak physics? The way that we do will tell us a lot about the context of our understanding and our desire to explain the universe. If everybody out there is doing it the same way we are, then we really are revealing something about the universe itself.And if they’re not, then you know, we’re revealing something equally interesting about ourselves.Don’t say you care about space or the future if you support cutting science fundingSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And also, one of the other things that I thought made me think reading the book is there are also so many ways of perceiving and being on this planet. Even outside of the human context, like, Octo octopuses with their distributed nervous system,WHITESON: Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: And not having bones. I mean, there, there’s just so much we can learn from them. Mean we barely know anything about them to be honest. And that’s why it’s really important to, to continue to support science funding. Because people, people say, well, I want to know the answers to these questions. Well, the first thing you do is you don’t cut the funding for science.WHITESON: Oh my gosh. I know. I mean, there’s so many reasons to support science funding. If you want to understand the nature of the universe. It turns out the answers are there and they’re pretty cheap. Like just spend a little bit of money, a tiny fraction of what we’re spending bombing Iran, and we could just buy answers to questions about how the universe works or life like it’s cheap compared to other things we spend money on.Or if you’re excited about like economic, um, you know. Wealth, then the cheapest thing you can do is give nerds money and let them play with it. And they will invent things that make you rich, make us all rich. The reason that we have our quality of life today is because decades ago people gave nerds money to play with and they built cool stuff, and that’s stuff powers our lives.And you know, it’s, yes, it [01:04:00] costs money, but it’s an incredible return on investment. So if you believe in humanity, or America, or whatever, then you know it’s a great investment to make. And if you want, cultural or military hegemony, you wanna dominate the world with your weapons and your language in your music than like spend money on science because that’s what you get.So frankly, I don’t understand why science funding is not a bipartisan issue. You know, it should be across the spectrum. Everybody should recognize that it’s good. It’s a tragedy in my view.SHEFFIELD: Well, it was for a long time. So in fairness, we, we should say that. And, and hopefully it will become that way again. So, this has been a great conversation, Daniel. So, for people who wanna besides buying your book which they should. What else what other kind of advice do they, do you have for that as far as keeping up with your stuff?WHITESON: Yeah, well, if you’re curious about this kind of stuff and you wanna know more about the universe, I have a podcast myself. It’s called Daniel and Kelly’s extraordinary Universe. Together with my friend Kelly Wiener Smith, we talk about the nature of the universe, how it works, what’s inside a black hole, and Kelly’s biologist.We talk about all sorts of things about like parasites and polio and perimenopause. And our goal is to share the joy of understanding this universe because it’s an extraordinary universe we live in, filled with mystery and wonder and beauty and violence. And it’s a pleasure and a privilege to get to explore it.And the podcast does a deep dive into these topics, but it stays accessible and fun. So go check it out. Daniel and Kelly’s extraordinary universe,SHEFFIELD: All right, sounds good. Thanks for joining me today.WHITESON: Thanks so much for the really fun conversation. Really appreciate it.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you’re a paid subscribing member, I thank you very much for your support.That is much appreciated. This is a tough time for people to be in Medium [01:06:00] and are trying to produce substantive content, so I really appreciate your support. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryWhen the Supreme Court overturned Roe versus Wade in 2022, some people thought of it as the anti-abortion movement having reached the finish line in its endeavors. But in reality, the Dobbs v. Jackson case was only just the beginning.In the years since, not only has abortion been banned and severely restricted across more than a dozen states, many women have died from being denied hospital care by fearful doctors, even when they weren’t seeking an abortion.In the years since, not only has abortion been banned and severely restricted across more than a dozen states, many women have died or have been seriously injured by being denied hospital care by fearful doctors, even if they were not even seeking an abortion. Now senators and activists are trying to outlaw mifepristone, which is an early pregnancy abortion drug that has been tested and been on the market in a variety of countries around the world since 1988 and proven to be very safe. Unsurprisingly, however, far-right activists and politicians are saying that it’s unsafe, and so therefore they’re going to ban it. The same religious zealots are also trying to advance on multiple other fronts by threatening contraception access, the rights of parents who want to teach progressive values to their children, and those who want to work with doctors on gender affirming care for their kids.The good news, however, is that most of these policies are really unpopular. Americans don’t like them, and they’ve shown it at the ballot box, even in Republican states where measures to protect reproductive choice of consistently won in plebiscites. There’s a lot going on here, and so today I wanted to talk about it with Susan Rinkunas. She’s a journalist and co-founder of Autonomy News. It’s a worker-owned publication that covers reproductive rights and healthcare. Due to technical difficulties, this episode has a few audio glitches and does not feature a video version, but the audio transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--After numerous losses, Republicans are trying to block reproductive freedom ballot initiatives--The right-wing freakout over a video of young women dancing is about so much more--MAGA isn’t just a lifestyle, it’s a sexual fetish-Why the reactionary attacks on science and sex are related-The Pick Me mindset and childhood trauma--Epstein emails reveal a financier obsessed with excluding women from society--The right’s attacks on adult media began once women began dominating the industryAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction08:29 — Christian right activists using blatant lying against birth control to scare women10:54 — The larger agenda is to remove legal rights for women, for both radical Christians and secular incels18:11 — Right-wing men are increasingly obsessed with AI-generated women and sex robots22:10 — Real women willing to parrot right-wing men have been part of Republican media for decades already24:38 — Mar-a-Lago face and forced gender conformity27:12 — Multiple women have now died after doctors refused to remove miscarried fetuses29:39 — Reactionary Republicans are also trying to strip liberal parents of their rights, while elevating reactionary parents34:00 — Democrats defending women isn’t just morally right, it’s good politicsAudio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: In the news as we’re recording this, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley is introducing a bill that he wants to completely ban the early abortion drug mifepristone, ban it across the country, and he tried to do this last year, and he’s going for it again this year.SUSAN RINKUNAS: Senator Josh Hawley is extremely mad about what he views as inaction from the Trump administration on restricting access to the abortion drug miry stone. and this is something that has angered the anti-abortion movement since the Dobbs decision in [00:04:00] 2022. Some people might be surprised to learn that the number abortions in the, number of abortions in the US has actually increased since the fall of Roe v Wade.And part of that is because more people know about abortion pills, medication abortion, And people can now get the pills prescribed to them across state lines from doctors in eight states that have passed what are known as telemedicine shield laws. So if you are in Missouri lemme take that back. If you are in Mississippi, you can get abortion pills even though there’s a state ban.If you are abortion pills, even though there’s a state ban. And josh Hawley is trying to shut that down by, and first he came after telehealth prescriptions of abortion pills. And that’s the bill you’re referring to last year that he introduced. And now he introduced a bill this week that would revoke entirely the approval of the drug from the year two thousands, such that not only could, not, could not only could people not get it prescribed to them and mailed to them, they could not go to a clinic and get handed the drug in person.And I think it’s important at this juncture to bring up Josh’s wife, Erin, who is a litigator with the Christian Nationalist Law Firm Alliance, defending freedom. She’s representing the state of Louisiana, which is suing the FDA right now in federal court, trying to end telehealth prescriptions of this drug.That case is ongoing and she and Josh are kind of a tag team here trying to do an inside outside strategy courts and then also Josh trying to work through Congress to ban this drug.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, of course they’re using fear basically lies about the safety of the drug, which has been around for decades and has been thoroughly tested around the world as safe.RINKUNAS: Mifepristone is incredibly safe and effective for use in ending early pregnancies, and it’s been studied [00:06:00] in the US since the year 2000 when it was first approved and it was first approved in Europe in the late eighties.So there’s so much data on this drug that it’s safe and it’s also safe to prescribe via telemedicine. We learned that during the COVID pandemic when people were having expanded access to help to telehealth and it hadn’t been previously allowed to get prescribed Mestone through telehealth in the us.But, it’s an interesting collaboration that’s happening on the right, right now, because after Trump returned to office with the Project 2025 Playbook plopped in his lap, one of the organizations that served on the advisory board of Project 2025 is called the Ethics and Public Policy Center. And they published a, an analysis earlier this, not calling it a study because it was not peer reviewed. and this paper claims that this, the adverse event rate for Miry stone is much higher than what’s on the FDA label. It is complete crap. This, they, were looking at emergency room data without actually knowing if people had abortions or if they were prescribed mefa for other reasons, or let alone if people were even admitted to the hospital versus just coming to the ER with some bleeding and wanting to make sure that they were okay.So people like Josh Holly have been boosting. Paper for an entire year trying to get the FDA to act and he extracted some concessions from the FDA Commissioner Marty McCarey got McCarey to say, oh yeah, we’re going to review the drug. Health HHS secretary, our FK Junior also said, yeah, we’re going to review the drug.And they’ve been dragging their feet on it. Such that Bloomberg reported earlier this year that MCC reported that he wanted to. Delay this review until after the midterm elections.We can talk about the strategy there, but the, overall point in response to your question is this drug is incredibly safe, but right wing actors are trying to push [00:08:00] bunk data out into the world to give the FDA a fake justification to end telemedicine restrictions or yank approval entirely.And this data from the EPPC is not just being cited by Josh Hawley in congressional hearings, but it’s also being cited in litigation. That lawsuit filed by Alliance Defending Freedom. Josh Hawley’s wife Erin cites that paper and so do other lawsuits against the FDA.Christian right activists using blatant lying against birth control to scare womenSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And this is a very common tactic that the Christian right has used to try to scare people about women’s reproductive medicine. And they do that also with birth control. Like they’re doing that very big now, they’re doing as you were, the analogy kind of a, pincher movement as well by like trying to fear monger to women that if you take birth control, it makes you crazy or it makes you fat, or various other imaginary things that they are trying to put forward. It makes you, masculine, whatever, et cetera.And then, because I mean, the reality is that Dobbs versus Jackson was just the beginning of what these people want and they will come for birth control more explicitly. There’s no doubt about that.RINKUNAS: It is absolutely true, and this is an interesting point where the conservative right and the MAHA right are coming together because in her confirmation hearing recently in general Casey Means was asked about past comments she made regarding birth control. She said it was a disrespect for life and she overemphasized health risks of hormonal birth control, the birth control pill, patch ring, these kinds of things.And Patty Murray and other senators pressed her to clarify, are you saying you know more than the FDA, are you trying to say that birth control is unsafe? And Means [00:10:00] responded something to the effect of, I don’t think in this country people are really making informed choices because the, health system is so messed up that we don’t have time to do full informed consent with people.So she’s trying to sound like she cares about women and women’s health. And this MAHA angle of like the medical system is so corrupt and they’re lying to you sort of thing.But you could see that is a way to, sow skepticism about birth control. And then there’s other attacks from within and outside the administration. The Trump administration is about to let lapse a bunch of federal funding for family planning clinics. It’s called Title 10. It was signed into law by Ronald Reagan.This used to be a bipartisan issue, but Politico just reported that the funding is set to run out on April 1st. And current grantees were supposed to get applications months ago on how to get the next batch of funding and it’s been crickets.The larger agenda is to remove legal rights for women, for both radical Christians and secular incelsRINKUNAS: So there, there’s concern about that But then back to your larger point about how Dobbs was just the beginning people should remember that in his concurrence in that decision.Justice Clarence Thomas said that the court should look at other quote, unquote substantive due process cases, which is cases where the Supreme Court said that people have a right to something, even though it’s not explicitly spelled out in the Constitution. And he listed as examples Griswold v Connecticut, which is the right for married couples to use birth control, Alvey Hodges, which is the case that legalized marriage equality nationwide. Obergefell v Hodges, which is the case that legalized marriage equality nationwide. So they’re not just coming after birth control, but they also are having this larger project of, trying to reify the nuclear family where it’s a Christian nuclear family of a straight man and a straight woman. If either of those people are closeted, like that’s not their problem.It’s just this is how society should work in their view. A straight a man and a woman should get married and have children [00:12:00] and they will provide for their family and the government shouldn’t have to provide for them because they’ve got this family unit.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That is the agenda. Absolutely. So there are multiple ways that these different factions of the Republican party are coming together. You mentioned medical conspiracy theories of MAHA. Ultimately it, it boils down to women are not people and don’t have the right to control their own bodies and or to exist in society as equals to men.And so this is something that’s a unifier with both, the, Christian supremacists and also the incel types who feel like that women not being forced into getting with them is this terrible disaster. Like they, and some talk pretty blatantly frequently about, there should be assignment of women.And there was this guy who was a economist at George Mason University. Os ostensibly libertarian but has his name’s Robin Hansen that, he’s written about and about the virtues of gentle silent rape. You remember that, one I mean, just this guy is absolutely sick.But, he’s not religious. But, he is, he has this idea that, and he and so many others, that are not religious, but are still on the right, that women are not people.RINKUNAS: What is such a through line, and as you said, it connects various factions of, of the movement. To incels, women are not people, or not humans, because they are, denying men sex. And they say feminism is bad because women can make their own money and live on their own and they don’t need men.It’s certainly not men who are self hating and spending a lot of time on the internet rather than other people, and being someone that maybe women would want to talk to, but also, right, [00:14:00] the conservatives don’t think that women are people because the strongest anti-abortion position says that women or pregnant people should sacrifice their body for an embryo, for even a fertilized egg.They, would say, you are the most valiant Christian or Catholic woman, if you, say, are diagnosed with cancer while you’re pregnant and you eshoo treatment. You want to give the fetus a chance to live. If you die, if you die, you are the most loyal to God. You are, giving that fetus a chance at life. And if that means your life ends, so be it.So women and pregnant people are just a vessel to produce children and to satisfy and serve their husbands in a patriarchal family unit.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, the vessel word you use there, like, it’s not just a metaphor, like they literally mean it. That women are the receptacle of God to put the spirit into their body and grow, according to God’s will. And if the woman dies, well, that’s unfortunate, but you know what? That’s the highest thing that a woman could do is to die in childbirth.You’re not like exaggerating, you’re not making this up. I come from a Mormon fundamentalist background, like far right, Christians absolutely belief this. And I think, and to be honest, like these beliefs are so nuts that people who haven’t been raised in them or people who haven’t researched them, if you don’t have direct exposure to it in some way, they’re so illogical and they’re so terrible that some people, they don’t even believe this is real.Have you seen that, Susan, when you talk to people sometimes about, about the, research you’ve done?RINKUNAS: So I know that there are people who always [00:16:00] think that the exceptions in abortion bans will protect them. Say if they’re miscarrying and miscarriages can be deadly. Childbirth can be deadly. Pregnancy is very dangerous. But if someone’s having a miscarriage and they develop an infection, they need to end that pregnancy in order to prevent things like septic shock and, other problems.There are have been women all across this country who said, whether they are a Democrat or a Republican, they said, I understand why people oppose abortion, but I never thought it would affect my issue, because this was a miscarriage.And this is the problem with anti-abortion laws. They have exceptions written into them, but those exceptions can often just be handcuffing doctors so that they can’t act until it’s too late. There have been women who have been sent to the ICU because they needed an abortion and the hospital wouldn’t give it to them, and by the time the hospital was ready to do it, they were already in organ failure, that kind of thing.So I think that there’s been that aspect of disbelief that people think, even if they voted for Donald Trump or voted against an abortion ballot measure in their state, they’re like, oh, well I’ll be fine. because I’m not having an abortion. I’m having miscarriage treatment. It affects everyone. It comes for everyone.I should point out that the logic of these bills, it’s not what every Christian person believes. And it also tramples on the rights of people who are non-religious or observe other religions.There’s a lawsuit in Indiana where Jewish plaintiffs are challenging the state ban because in the Jewish religion, if an abortion is necessary to save the life of the woman, that is what the Jewish religion calls for, to save that person’s life.Rather than that of an embryo or a fetus. So people actually won in Indiana an injunction last week saying that the ban cannot apply to people with sincerely held religious beliefs that conflict with the state’s abortion ban. So that’s like a way [00:18:00] into eventually overturning some bans. It doesn’t apply to you.Just want to point out that? This far-right Christian view of abortion is impacting other people’s religious exercise.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s a good point.Right-wing men are increasingly obsessed with AI-generated women and sex robotsSHEFFIELD: And just going back to this idea that women are, not people or don’t deserve full autonomy, we’re seeing this also in a different way outside of the bodily autonomy context in the news recently, we’ve seen this, enthusiasm for imaginary characters generated by ai systems.And, most recently there’s a fake character named Jessica Foster that got a basically a million followers on Instagram posting as a fictional army officer who loves Donald Trump in pictures with him, and various soccer players and politicians, world leaders.And then also it has an Only Fans account where you can, buy various porn video of this character or photos, I guess, is probably what it is. So a million people were interested in that. And then there was a enthusiasm at Barry Weiss’s Free Press website by this economist guy named Tyler Cowen for a AI generated character named Tilly Norwood.Which I guess she had a, did you see that there? They released a video of this character, a music video.RINKUNAS: I did not click on it. I saw it yesterday and people wereSHEFFIELD: I did not click it either.RINKUNAS: an abomination, but yeah.SHEFFIELD: For a lot of these incel minded men, they, want to replace women in society, like, and, they fantasize often publicly about I can’t wait until the days of sex bots, I can’t wait. And Tyler Cowen, who is a George Mason University eco Economics professor, he said that Tilly Norwood was his favorite actress. And if you wanted to see a virgin on screen, this is [00:20:00] the place, the movie you should be watching. So like, they’re literally trying to replace women.RINKUNAS: Right. And I mean this is not new, it’s just escalated with technology, right? There have been sex dolls forever, and other various items in that space. But now with technology, it seems as though men who have a hard time engaging with women who view them as they do, as the United States has lurched to the right in terms of laws at the federal level, it seems like instead of reassessing their own views and maybe that women deserve human rights. And it’s understandable for women to feel that way. They are glomming on to AI generated, AI generated versions of women that they can fully control. That have their views and terms of this conservative military member who loves Donald Trump, Jessica Foster.And it’s unsurprising to me that she’s a thin white woman with large breasts, right? This is somebody designed her to get many followers. And also it’s not clear to me who is behind the channel. I mean, it might not even be a woman who’s taking money, like this could just be, this could be another man who is trying to dupe conservative men out of their money.But regardless, if and when we get to a point where there are actual sex robots as opposed to just these AI avatars that people are so excited about on certain spaces of the internet, that’s just going to make things worse because men will, won’t feel like they have to engage with women who have different views than they do. It’s going to make this male loneliness epidemic that we hear so much about, even worse.Eventually if you are the type of man who a woman wants to reproduce with in the year of our Lord 2026 and, going, forward, that would not be the type of man who is [00:22:00] interested in Jessica Foster or a sex robot. So maybe there will be some natural selection there. It’s just how long will that take to kind of make society better?Real women willing to parrot right-wing men have been part of Republican media for decades alreadySHEFFIELD: Yeah. That’s a fair point. But it’s also that, as you were saying, that these fictional women that are being depicted, besides that they are conventionally attractive, is that they’re completely controllable.They just parrot back the things that that their creators or their audience wants them to say. But in that regard, they’re actually not that different from the conservative female pundit industry as well, which, there’s a number of women who have, come forward and said while I was working as a conservative pundit, I could never really say what I thought.Because all they ever wanted me to do was agree with them, to be the woman to launder their opinions. Kind of in the same way that Candace Owens as both a woman and a black person, is she’s, doubly relevant to them in that regard, not just as a token, but as a cipher for, what they’re trying to do.RINKUNAS: Yes. And it’s interesting that you bring up conservative pundits, because Jessica Foster kind of looks like she could be on Fox News as a talking head, like a Kaylee McEnany type who is, and Kaylee is still on Fox.For people who were in the first Trump administration, so someone from the first Trump administration, Alyssa Farer Griffin did leave that environment and is now on the view, if I’m not mistaken. So she, she did leave that explicitly right wing environment, although she is on the view as kind of a conservative voice.So, but it is, interesting to see the, pundits and how they change their appearance and change what they say, and I think that some conservative men just assume that this is what [00:24:00] their home life should look like, that their wives should say the same things. And it’s something that groups like the Heritage Foundation really want to change in the United States.They want more people to get married young, have babies, stay married and vote conservative. So it’s, an interesting interplay between yes, the pundit class and these like AI generated people. And even AI avatars on Twitter. I think people were asking Grok to make them women who would respond to them online.SHEFFIELD: Oh God, I didn’t see that, but I’m not surprised.Mar-a-Lago face and forced gender conformitySHEFFIELD: And related to that is that there’s another trend of what people often are calling Mar-a-Lago face, which is people, most prominently, Kristi Noem getting a lot of plastic surgery or hair extensions to alter their appearance significantly to be look like somebody who, goes to Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club.And the weird, terrible irony of it is that if they’re basically stealing the aesthetic of kind of the nineties, two thousands porn star while also simultaneously trying to criminalize porn.So it’s, very weird, I have to say.RINKUNAS: It is extremely weird and yeah, it’s, women drastically changing their faces with surgery or lots of fillers or both and tons of hair dye and, spray tans and all of these things to evoke a sex worker aesthetic and really telling that the people who are propelling the conservative movement right now from the Heritage Foundation and, other people do want to ban pornography, they think it’s, a stain on American society. And to me, sometimes it does feel like Mar-a-Lago face is [00:26:00] a way to have men get their own sex worker at home. If this is the trend, right? If this is the ideal beauty standard in MAGA.And that’s upsetting in a number of ways because it treats women as property and again, takes agency away from women and supposes that they’re just there to please and serve their husband.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and we should say of course, that women who do want to get plastic surgery for their own desires or their own opinions, that’s, that is just fine if they want to do that. Everybody has the right to control what their appearance looks like, and more power to ‘em if they can afford it, right?So, but yeah, this is an idea of forced conformity. And as you were saying, it’s the female servant,RINKUNAS: Forced conformity in service of an ideology. I would be really surprised if any of these women who have Mar-a-Lago faced themselves did it because they actually like that look, as opposed to wanting access to these spaces and maybe access to some of these power brokers. Some people might like that look, but I, would venture that this is more about proximity to power than in fact loving yourself.Multiple women have now died after doctors refused to remove miscarried fetusesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Probably. And going back to the idea though of the woman as the servant and, the miscarriages, like this, it’s not an exaggeration that, that women have died because of miscarriages that the hospitals were afraid to treat them or afraid to, give them, even to just take out. A fetus that had died and wasn’t even alive, and they wouldn’t do it. And multiple women now died.RINKUNAS: So devastating. And there are multiple women who have died, but there are also women who have experienced life-threatening complications and have come close to dying. There stats about maternal mortality show that for every person who dies, there are several more who come close to dying, and they have to live with [00:28:00] that potential disability from what they experienced, and, also the huge medical bills, right? The healthcare not accessible. So it’s devastating from that perspective.But I also want to note that if in this conservative worldview, women are property and their, job is to produce more children, we will see more. And we have seen, but we will see an escalation and people being prosecuted for miscarriage and stillbirth because their pregnancy did not produce a live birth.And in a world where there are abortion bans and this stigmatization of women who might not want to be pregnant, the state and local officials will treat miscarriages and stills as suspicious and wonder if people did anything.Or if, if they had thoughts about not wanting to be pregnant and verbalized it to someone. In a text message that could be used as evidence against them in a trial. Someone had horrible morning sickness and they’re like, oh God, like, I wish I wasn’t pregnant. This is not hyperbolic.There are actually, there was a case of a woman who was prosecuted and for losing her pregnancy and the state went through her messages and she, if I recall correctly, did in fact Google abortion. Never got an abortion, but they used this information in a case against her. She has been granted a, retrial, but this is happening now.People have been prosecuted for their pregnancy outcomes before the Dobbs decision, but it’s just going to ramp up, especially as state lawmakers are pushing for fetal personhood language in their bills.SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah. Yeah, absolutely.Reactionary Republicans are also trying to strip liberal parents of their rights, while making far-right parents be able to supercede communitiesSHEFFIELD: The other thing also, besides controlling women and removing agency and civil rights from women the, far right Republicans, they want to have to give parents total control over their children’s lives and remove any concept of, teen agency for them or [00:30:00] privacy at, but at the same time also stopping parents who do support their children from them having rights.Can you talk about that scenario and, what that means specifically for some of the cases here?RINKUNAS: Yes. Litigation that has reached the Supreme Court has basically found that parents have a right to direct the upbringing of their children. If they are far right, conservative in their views, and if they have views that de deviate from conservative goals, then they do not have an absolute right to raise their children as they see fit. We’ve long seen this with abortion rights.Young people should be able to get an abortion if they want to. And many of them do involve their parents, but some people can’t, because they, or abuse all kinds of things. So, a conservative position is that people need something like judicial bypass.They would have to go before a judge in order to get abortion care. And so we have seen the rights of parents overridden in states in that regard and the rights of young people, but now we’re seeing it in the gender affirming care context as well. As you and your viewers might know, the Supreme Court did uphold a ban on gender affirming care for trans children in Tennessee last year.And the Supreme Court basically said, states have a right to pass these laws. They didn’t say sorry for their parents, they’re outta luck. But that was the implication, right? States have a right to pass these laws, and they’re just regulating medical care. Meanwhile parents of a young person in Tennessee tried to ask the Supreme Court to weigh in on either they had a parental right to direct their child’s medical care in the state, and, the Supreme Court did not agree to hear that aspect of the case.They’re just like, we’re not, talking about parental rights here. This is really fascinating because there’s a movement now led by a bunch of legal or organizations including Alliance Defending Freedom, which we talked about, and here in this case the Thomas Moore Society, which also [00:32:00] oppose opposes abortion.They are suing over a law in California that bans public schools from outing trans students to their parents. So what that means is if a student comes to a teacher or a guidance counselor and says my name’s. My birth name is Susan, but I am non-binary and I want to go by Sean and my parents can’t know because they’re extremely heart rate conservative and they throw me outta the house.The law in California said that they do not have to tell the parents, conservative parents sued, and the Supreme Court stepped in on, or the shadow docket. There was no hearing before the nine justices, but the Supreme Court said, oh, that law is unconstitutional. Parents have a right to direct the upbringing of their children.So this is what we talked about just a minute ago, you have a right to direct your child’s medical care, everything, but only if you’re going to do it in a way that aligns with the viewpoint of the far right conservative movement. There is no redress at this juncture with this captured six three Supreme Court for parents who would affirm their transgender child. And that’s, that goes to children being treated as property as well, right? It’s not just, it’s not just women, but children are the property of parents to decide how they will be raised. But again, only if they have far right views.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well it’s like their viewpoint on free speech as well. Like they want, everyone has the right to free speech as long as you agree with Republicans.RINKUNAS: That’s, we remember some of the first acts of the Trump administration in 2025 we’re arresting pro-Palestinian demonstrators on college campuses. Well do arresting, I mean, they were arrest, they were detained by immigration, they were targeting them for immigration enforcement. So that was based on their viewpoint, and that is explicitly banned under the First Amendment. But, hey, the First Amendment apparently doesn’t apply to [00:34:00] progressives.Despite the unpopularity of the far-right social agenda, some people are still telling Democrats not to oppose it vigorouslySHEFFIELD: The other unfortunate thing to see in all of this though is that as the Republican party is dedicating itself to attacking bodily autonomy and reproductive care that the Democratic party is seeing some really bad advice from people saying that, well, you should just dial this back. Because getting too into defending abortion access, that’s a losing proposition. And, it’s, I mean, and it’s just wrong on so many levels, but I want to hear your take first.RINKUNAS: WrongheadedWrongheaded people who think that because Kamala Harris lost to Donald Trump, that means that abortion is not a winning issue. And the truth of the matter is that it just, people care about it deeply. It just wasn’t the top issue, people were voting on the economy and then people were probably also voting on racism and wanting mass deportations now.But they should not read that and think that it doesn’t matter. And in fact, on Election Day in 2024, multiple ballot measures passed in states codifying reproductive freedom, including in states where Donald Trump won. So that is a popular issue, and it may be so popular that having those ballot measures allowed people to split their vote and say, I want legal abortion in Missouri, and I want President Donald Trump, even though he could probably ban abortion, he told me that he won’t, and they believed him.So that happened in a number of states, including, I mean, Arizona went the same way. Trump, won all seven swing states and a bunch of, a bunch of those states, including Arizona, had ballot measures. So that is just a fact that we, on the, Democratic side, did let people split their votes.But I want to also address pundits like Ezra Klein saying that Democrats need to embrace anti-abortion Democrats in order to win in [00:36:00] red states like Missouri or Nebraska, what have you. I just think it is ignoring all recent history about how Democrats allowing anti-abortion lawmakers into the fold has blocked protections for anyone who could get pregnant for trans and, queer people.That was something Ezra Klein also said, that Democrats failed to protect trans people because they didn’t win in 2024. Well, actually in my view, they failed to protect trans people and women who could get pregnant by not passing federal legislation when they had the power under President Joe Biden, and maybe even abortion legislation under Barack Obama.And some of the reasons they couldn’t do that are because of conservative Democrats in the fold, like Joe Manchin and Kiersten Sinema, who I think we can now call a conservative Democrat. She left the party. She, became an independent.And these are people who had a D behind their name for most of their tenure, but they did not support taking the steps necessary to protect people’s human rights and bodily autonomy. They would not reform the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation, the John Lewis Voting Rights Act.And Joe Biden supported a carve out on the filibuster for that bill and also for a federal bill to codify Roe v. Wade. These senators Manchin and Sinema were to the right of Joe Biden on that issue.So when I hear people like Ezra Klein say we should have anti-abortion Democrats running in red states. I think it’s idiotic. And Democrats capitulating to the right, to the far right has not helped us win. Democrats need to be fighting and telling people what they stand for, rather than saying, you know they have a point on abortion.Like, we’re not going to gain power by shrinking into a shrub like Homer Simpson. We’re only going to gain power in this environment when the Senate map is stacked against us if people say, you know what? I [00:38:00] disagree with James Talarico on his stance on abortion, but I really respect the guy and he seems like he’d be a good dude to, to, represent me, that kind of thing.Like voters at this point. People who are authentic, not people who are triangulating and giving into right wing talking points. If they want someone who opposes abortion, they’ll just vote for a republican.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, and, I think it’s, also great to be able to wrap this issue into the larger issue of, personal autonomy. And that, so Republicans have had this for decades, had an advantage on the freedom question that they’ve branded themselves as the party of freedom. But in fact, of course, this is the party that wants to ban books from your public library, ban, adults from reading books in your public library wants to ban what type of healthcare you can receive, wants to ban, what things you can look at on the internet. So like this is a broadly anti-free party that wants to transfer the money in the economy to billionaires so that they can have all the freedom and the rest of us can just have a slave labor existence if we’re lucky.And that’s a really powerful argument for what we’re talking about here, and that’s what the party should be doing instead of trying to do this little piecemeal concession stuff. perhaps there’s some argument to be said, well, this is, one particular slice of an issue like abortion, right?Because most people, that’s not something that directly affects them. But on the other hand, if you can show, well, this is the larger agenda at work here and it’s anti-freedom and it’s anti. personal control over your own life, then that makes sense for everyone. There. There is not one area of your life that these people do not want to restrict.RINKUNAS: It’s so correct. They do want to control [00:40:00] every aspect of your life. And you mentioned books you mentioned shuttling money to billionaires and so that you are accepting their conditions. Speaking of which, Republicans do not support the freedom to organize a labor union, right? They say that they support personal freedoms and economic success, but they’re trying to control every aspect of people’s lives, yeah. How much money they can make, what they can do with their bodies, who they can love, right? They want to overturn same sex marriage. It’s, they want to change what people learn in public school, let alone the book bans. I mean, states are now trying to put 10 commandments in the schools and send public money to religious charter schools.Like we have church state separation in this country. And yet the Republican party talks about freedom, freedom, freedom, when they are in fact like putting us all in a prison.SHEFFIELD: The freedom to obey them, basically.RINKUNAS: That’s correct.SHEFFIELD: if there is a bright spot in all of this terrible legislation and, judicial rulings, it is that I think the fiction that these far right Republicans built up over the decades about their agenda and about what they want. It’s, not tenable anymore to people who pay even a small amount of attention.And, we’re seeing that I think very prominently with regard to young women. So, 18 to women, 18 to 29. Since Donald Trump took over the Republican party in 2016, you know, there has been a, dramatic shift toward the Democratic party among young women and to a degree that has historically quite un unparalleled.But yeah, the reality is that younger women seem to be waking up the majority at least. And there’s not as many as I would like, but it’s a lot better than it used to be.RINKUNAS: I view that people are waking up. Obviously it’s unfortunate that it takes such horrors [00:42:00] as people dying from denied abortions or people being thrown into what are effectively concentration camps because of the country they were born in. I think that, yeah, the polling shows that this administration is deeply unpopular on so many fronts. Including the economy and immigration.And they have been trying to avoid abortion this thus far. And I think they know, I think they’re doing that because they know it would be so unpopular to put federal restrictions on at this point when we already have the state bans. So the Trump administration knows they’re in trouble because they’re losing voters.And that is why we’re also seeing them trying to do things like, restrict voting through the Save America Act and, doing these raids in Fulton County, Georgia, I believe. They’re trying to get voter data from lots of states and it’s really alarming.So I think there’s absolutely hope in, terms of winning the house in the midterms and getting subpoena power and blocking legislation from passing. I do worry about, voter suppression and these kinds of things because the Trump administration knows they’re so unpopular that they have to cheat to win.And of course, that’s what Trump says about Democrats, but everything he says is projection. So he says the Democrats have to cheat to win while he’s trying to cheat to winSHEFFIELD: Yeah, Yeah. absolutely. And, and, that’s where I think the, audience actually can be really helpful for people. The people out there, hey guys, if you tell the people in your lives about what’s going on and especially, telling them what’s at stake, whether they are somebody who could get pregnant or not, like, that’s not relevant, because they know somebody who can, chances are.There’s a lot at stake. and having somebody who’s a, podcaster, a pundit [00:44:00] on tV telling them, well, this is, what’s going on. it doesn’t mean as much to it. Just like a normie person who doesn’t pay attention to politics having a, professional, and tell them that. But if it’s their friend or their family member who says, no, this is real and this matters to you or matters to me that means a lot. And so I, I would definitely encourage people to, to think about it in that way.RINKUNAS: Absolutely. And I think, yeah, it applies to people whether they could become pregnant or not, because the things that this administration is doing could attack all kinds of medical care, And we should be really worried about RFK remaining in that role and not having much oversight in terms of what he’s going to do to vaccines.I mean, we’re already seeing rampant measles outbreaks, And that affects everyone, right? That’s, you just go out in the world and you could get exposed to measles. So, we don’t want idea ideologues being able to control our medical care and that, that’s just like, that’s the, medical aspect of it.Obviously, we don’t want people suppressing our speech or ma goons on the street, throwing people into vans. Like all of that stuff could affect anyone, but I think if there’s people who don’t think attacks on abortion will apply to them, it’s, a attacks on medical care writ large that are coming.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that is the larger agenda for sure. Absolutely. Alright. Well, this has been a great discussion, Susan. If people want to keep up with what you are doing what’s your advice for that?RINKUNAS: I would say check out Autonomy News. It’s the worker owned outlet I co-founded with another reporter, Garnet Henderson. We are a paywall free publication on Ghost, so you can check us out at autonomynews.co. And I’m most active on Bluesky, but I am on most social media platforms with the handle at [00:46:00] SusanRinkunas.SHEFFIELD: Okay.Sounds good. Going to have your here.RINKUNAS: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryEveryone by now has seen countless stories about how artificial intelligence is revolutionizing software development, causing headaches for educators, and threatening jobs in industries from law to accounting. But there’s another business being changed very dramatically by AI that doesn’t get nearly so much coverage — and that’s the adult media industry.Some creators are using AI to generate content or impersonate themselves in fan messages. There’s a dark side as well: Some people are using image generators to fabricate fake performers or steal the identities of real ones. And AI has even been used to create non-consensual erotic imagery of ordinary women from photos they posted online — without their knowledge or consent.All of this is unfolding against a much bigger disruption that’s only now coming into full view. For the first time in human history, hundreds of millions of women have the economic and social independence to live life fully on their own terms. That’s a revolutionary change — but old habits die hard, even bad ones, and lots of men, and even women, haven’t realized their newfound opportunities.There’s a lot to think about here, and I couldn’t think of a better person to do it with today than Siri Dahl. She’s a 14-year veteran adult model and one of the industry’s most thoughtful and outspoken voices on culture, gender, and politics. Siri’s also had a unique encounter with AI after being doxxed by the Grok chatbot, an experience that many others are likely to have in the future.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content--Why the reactionary attacks on science and sex are related--Mike Johnson and the Christian right’s inverted moral compass--The world’s oldest profession has a history that’s just as long and colorful as you’d imagine--How adult media helped Hazel Grace build her American dream--The Christian right made sex political—along with everything else--Former porn star Nyomi Banks is helping her fans understand intimacy and themselves--Why OnlyFans revolutionized media and America’s gender dynamicsAudio Chapters00:00 Introduction11:42 — Is it ethical for adult media creators to use AI to generate content of themselves?23:22 — What AI-generated porn can’t offer30:32 — Why middle-aged and older women continue to oppose porn39:32 — The hetero dating recession is both sides rediscovering partnership when women are now finally independent48:54 — ‘Love Is Blind’ as a microcosm of heterosexual dating attitudes55:19 — Why are some people simulating relationship partners with chatbots?Audio TranscriptMATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Siri Dahl, or should I say Polly Esther Pants?SIRI DAHL: Yeah, I’ll have to explain that one. Hello, thanks for having me on.SHEFFIELD: Yes, it is good to have you. So yes, tell us what is this Polly Esther Pants thing that you’re doing?DAHL: Yeah, so, Grok doxxed me. The actual doxing happened on January 20th, but I found out a bit later and then, did my best to try to get it taken down, like reporting the post and everything. And none of that worked. So eventually it just went to 4 0 4 media and they ran a story about it which went public.So now it’s now Grok is, or Grok, excuse me, is doxxing me all over the place because everyone is going: ‘@Grok, what’s Siri Dahl’s real name?’ And so the name’s out there nothing I can do about that at this point. But the thing that still irks me the most about the entire situation is that my name had never been like public online.It was never like easily findable, accessible or anything until Grok did this. And I don’t know, I’ve tried to interact with Grok to ask it, where did you get this information? Like, the first time that you responded to someone and said, Siri Dahl’s, legal name is blah, blah blah. Where were you sourcing that from?And it can’t give me a straight answer. It’s just oh, it looks like it [00:04:00] appears in a lot of like data aggregate sites. And I’m like, yeah, but I’ve been searching my name like twice a week for 14 years to see if my legal name appeared published online anywhere next to my sage name. And I’ve, usually when I do that, I go like a hundred pages deep in search results and it has not leaked. So like I haven’t been able to find it and I’m looking harder than anyone else realistically ever would. So I’m just like, where the fuck did Grok get this? And it cannot give me an answer.And then I was like, okay, so Grok knows that I am the owner of the Siri Dahl account and knows that I’m that person, that it’s doxed. And so I’ve been chatting with it, and now I’m doing it with all the other AI chatbots where I’m trying to gaslight the AI because I’m telling it you are spreading this information that my legal name is this thing. But you have no verified source at all for referencing that information. Like, why are you giving people an answer that is completely unverified?So my way of gaslighting the AI is, I’m, telling it. One, no, my, my real legal name is Polly Esther Pants and I—SHEFFIELD: That’s what I thought it was actually.DAHL: Exactly, hah. And I uploaded a photo of me holding my literal, like my Kentucky driver’s license that says my legal name is Polly Esther Pants.I’m not going to say how I got that driver’s license. I’m sure some listeners can figure out how, that was achieved, but, but Grok doesn’t, Grok’s oh shit, yeah, that’s a real photo. wow, your name clearly is Polly Esther Pants, holy moly.So at this point, all the chatbots acknowledged to me directly that they’re like, yeah, that is your name. But they still won’t stop referencing all the information that’s published online, which, that says a lot. Because that means like any misinformation published about any public person that is spread wide [00:06:00] enough, it’s like there’s no correcting it.You literally cannot get the AI to respond with correct information when someone asks a fact about a celebrity or something. Even if it has a primary source saying no, I am Siri Dahl and this is actually my name. So it’s, the whole situation’s very ridiculous.And, I don’t know how long I’m going to be on this bullshit for, but I changed my display name on multiple platforms to Polly Esther Pants, because at this point it’s just, I’m just having fun with it. It’s just such a ridiculous situation.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And to be honest, I think you’re experiencing something now that, a lot of people are going to be experiencing things like that.I would have to guess that probably the source that it has is in its training data somewhere, ingested data from a data broker company that used private information. And, that should be concerning to everyone.DAHL: I have been paying for data removal for four years already.SHEFFIELD: Although there’s only so much they can do.DAHL: That information was not tied directly to my stage name though. That’s the big piece, yeah,SHEFFIELD: That’s the thing.DAHL: Yes, exactly. it could have been internal data because, I’ve reported impersonation accounts through X before, and when you report an account for impersonating you, X requires you to upload a copy of your driver’s license to prove that you are the real version of that person. They say that information is kept private, but it’s also, is it?SHEFFIELD: That’s probably another way, possibly, yeah.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And this is, it really does show though, like the United States in terms of [00:08:00] data regulations and data privacy. it’s basically got almost nothing, compared to—DAHL: Yeah, it’s a free-for-all. It’s—SHEFFIELD: the EU, and other countries. Now you are a little bit better off, if you live in certain states like California, or Illinois has some some good ones.The Trump administration deliberately tries to thwart data privacy regulations, which it seems like that should be something that Democrats might want to tell the public a little bit more, if they were more competent.DAHL: Yeah, there’s a lot of things that the Democrats probably should be doing.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That’s literally a big part of this show.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Of course right before Grok did that to you, people were criticizing it heavily, justifiably so, for making mostly nude, or sometimes even actually nude images of real women and girls even.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And Elon Musk did nothing about it for weeks. And that is not at all cool. And people, I don’t know, maybe some people might think that you as an adult media performer might not have a problem with that, but, that’s completely backwards to think that.DAHL: Yeah, that’s actually insane. Like, my image is my livelihood. And not only that, but on a whole different level, all of the AI-generated imagery I’ve seen created of me is, on a different level, even more offensive, beyond the fact that it’s just AI slop. Because AI cannot, most versions that I see people using, because I know that there are some models that are like really advanced at this point, but usually the porn bots on Twitter [00:10:00] are not really using those more advanced models.I rarely ever see an AI generated image of me that actually looks like me that actually looks like good. Usually it’s obviously AI slop. It fucks up my face. It makes me look like a literal different person. And it can’t replicate my body well. It always makes me look like 50 pounds thinner, which is just like offensive.Because I’m like, that’s not how I look. And that’s not like most of my fans like me because of the way I am. Why are you making fucking AI images that make me look literally just like a different person? What is the point of that?SHEFFIELD: Yeah. yeah. And it is interesting though that the whole Grok undressing thing though, it seems to have gotten started with some models using it as a engagement bait or troll, to say: ‘Hey Grok, take this picture of me wearing,’ let’s say they had a black outfit on, and they were like: ‘Put me in a yellow bikini.’ And then it was doing it.And this is a perfect example of how, why these things don’t understand propriety at all. Because obviously if somebody is an adult performer and she’s asking for something like that, this is obviously, there’s nothing wrong with doing that. But that’s the, not the, not even close to the majority of women, like a non-porn performer, you should never do that. And a regular person probably would never do that. I think almost no one would do that, an actual human.Is it ethical for adult media creators to use AI to generate content of themselves?SHEFFIELD: That touches on kind of a little touchy subject, which is–double metaphor there, sorry guys— that a lot of a adult creators are using AI to make content for themselves. And that is [00:12:00] something that you feel very strongly against. Talk about that, please.DAHL: Yeah. Yeah, so I came into the porn industry, I’ve been in the industry for 14 years. I started in 2012. I chose, I am not someone who quote unquote, like, ended up in porn. I left college early. I put getting my degree on hold and moved across the country to go live in LA because I specifically wanted a career in the porn industry.I very intentionally came here to do this because it was something I had wanted to do for years and finally had a good opportunity to jump into it. And so I’m saying this is someone who’s like a career person in the porn industry.And and part of what that means for me is I actually really like what I do. I like my job, I like making content, I like producing scenes. I personally, like, just prompting an AI to generate content instead of me actually working to make that content is I don’t even know if I have a word to describe it, it just feels bleak. Like it just feels bleak and it makes me depressed, like thinking about it.So I understand that there are people in the industry that do that, but I’m also like, my view of that is probably that those are people who, have a lack of of care for the art form that porn can be, and the lack of care for the wider community of sex workers. Like the porn industry’s always been full of people who come here because they want to get their bag and leave.Which is, I would always argue [00:14:00] that that is its own form of exploitation that exists in the industry-- is like just seeing it as a stepping stone to like. making a lot of money. Um, And that’s kind of, I I kind of, whenever I see people who are using AI to generate their content that way, I’m like, that’s kind of my underlying assumption about when I see people doing that is like, oh, you just want to make more money with the least possible effort. And that’s all, I guess all I’m going to say about it. because I’m like, I’m, I don’t want to like, let it color my entire judgment of, like, their personality and their value system. But I think that, I think it says a lot like we, we like AI has a lot of problems and there are, I would argue far more reasons to avoid using it than to engage with it are pretty obvious.So if just completely compromising on all that, because they’re like, oh, I can sell more content then-- yeah.SHEFFIELD: And you mentioned it as an art form. And you’re definitely right about that, I mean, as a historic matter. The word pornography literally means writing of a whore.DAHL: Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: That’s what it means [in ancient Greek]. And there are all kinds of ancient artifacts that depict sex work and sex. And so that’s definitely real. But I would say also that in some sense, the art itself is literally about your body. And, and so I’m not a performer, so I don’t have any credibility on this regard, but it’s like the point is that you are presenting yourself, who you are.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And it is an intimate act.DAHL: It is. And it’s a very human act. Like that’s the other reason that I would say is like a top reason why I really like what I do. It’s [00:16:00] very human. And I pretty much live on income generated by my own content that I sell on like fan platforms. And that is what that means is that day in, day out, like I’m, having a lot of interactions with other human beings who are buying my content.And I don’t think of like my fan base, like my subscriber base as this like monolith of like faceless dudes. I like, there’s a lot of individuality in there. Like obviously I don’t necessarily have deep emotional interactions with all of them, but with some of them I do. And so to me it’s that’s another thing is like oof, asking these people, some of whom have been fans of mine and buying my content for like over a decade, asking them, or trying to offer them like content that was made by prompting a chatbot, to spend their hard-earned on that. I personally feel like a very deep ethical conflict with that.I would not do that. I would not be comfortable with that. To me, that is I don’t see how that’s different than running a scam.SHEFFIELD: And honestly, I mean that that fundamentally human act, or the acts of it, is just layered on a top, on top of each other. That’s, that is also Why I think a lot of, and we’ll talk about it further, like I do think why so many religious fundamentalists are so opposed to porn.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Because they want that personal feeling, that somatic essence to belong to them. And they want to corral that and constrict it.DAHL: The property of married straight people. No one else should be able to access that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DAHL: In their eyes.SHEFFIELD: And yeah. Married in a, church or a religion. And if they’re secular married, eh, that’s all right, [00:18:00] maybe.But, so the other thing I think also that’s pretty common in the industry is that a lot of performers will use chatbots, we don’t really know this stat, so it’s hard to say.DAHL: Yeah. There’s no way to know.SHEFFIELD: But some people definitely are using a chatbot to pose as them, to exchange erotic messages with their fans. And that’s also not a thing that you want to do. But on the other hand, you do use chat bots just a little bit.DAHL: Just a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so on Instagram, because I have 460 something thousand followers on there, which means I, my DMs are closed. No one can DM me on there unless we follow each other. And I like, they have access to my DMs then. But most of the fans that follow me, if they DM me, it’s not, I’m never going to see it. Like my DMs are filtered.So the Meta chatbot thing that I’ve enabled, there’s a couple reasons that I feel comfortable using it. One is that it, has a lot of guardrails. Like it is not easy manipulable by someone on the other end chatting with it. like it, for example, if a fan who follows me messages me and starts engaging with this Meta chat bot and they are, it’s not going to do what Grok did, if they’re like, hey, what’s Siri Dahl’s real name? It’s not going to tell them. It’s, it has very firm guardrails. It basically like just shuts down or redirects any requests that go outside of what I’ve said it’s okay to do. And then of course, because meta is like a, Instagram’s a safe work platform, if someone is trying to sext with it, like it just completely does not engage with that.It redirects, so--SHEFFIELD: It wouldn’t do that anyway.DAHL: It wouldn’t do that anyway. Exactly. that’s not a thing I had to train to do. That’s just the rules with that Meta has given it. but what it does do is [00:20:00] if someone messages it ‘how do I like find more Siri content online?’ It will say oh, Siri has a, link in her bio that has links to other places where you can find her content.So again, because of guardrails on Instagram, it can’t give them a direct link to my, like OnlyFans, but it will, it can direct them to like other information that they might find useful. And that’s something I would never in a million years have time to do personally with 400 plus thousand people that follow me.So it’s a practical use in that sense. And then the second reason that I feel comfortable using it is because it makes it very clear that when you engage with it, you are chatting with an AI bot, it says right off the bat, like I am an AI representation of Siri. I’m not actually her responding to this.It’s very clear, and I feel like ethically that’s a good thing. No one’s going to message me on Instagram, get a response from this bot, and be under the impression that they’re literally physically speaking with me, the person.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that clarity definitely is a good thing. And I mean, honestly, I think that’s, we need some laws, in that regard to require all AI generated content to be labeled as such.DAHL: Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: There’s just so much fake stuff now, and, and it, this has real consequences. When people are posting images, pretending to be from a war zone.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Somebody committing crimes. Like This is this is not just Siri being a Luddite. These are real, these are real consequences.DAHL: Now, if you know the history of the story behind where Luddite comes from, I’m okay with being called a Luddite. Because I want to stop the technology that’s replacing human labor.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. You want to say it?DAHL: Yeah. The Luddites were, it was like the leader of this [00:22:00] movement and it was, I want to say it was like textile weaving or something. I don’t remember every pertinent detail, but essentially it was like in, parts of Europe or or the UK that when like these, textile-weaving machines were becoming big and more affordable. So all the textile companies were firing workers and replacing them with these machines.And Luddite, Ludd, it’s Luddite, but the guy’s name was just Ludd or something, but he led the like rebellion. And so literally these Luddite workers would go to the factory, break into the factory in the middle of the night and burn the machines down as a form of protest.And then over the years it became like, oh, they don’t like technology. Like it’s, you don’t want to use an iPhone, you’re a Luddite. But I’m like, no, the term really should refer to people who are against anti-human technology, technology that is used to subjugate and oppress working-class people and enrich the the upper class. Which is, I would argue, is definitely something that AI is being already being used for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so there are a lot of things.DAHL: Yeah.What AI-generated porn can’t offerSHEFFIELD: But to that point though, the broader point though, a lot of performers that I know, they are concerned that the pervasive use of generative content is going to displace a lot of workers. But in some sense, I’m not sure that I think that’s right. Because there are two things that the fans, or whatever you want to call them, actually want.One is they’re looking for, it’s a fantasy about a person. [00:24:00] Or is it just simply a function, that they’re just trying to get off? And so, in the terms of the fantasy, I don’t think that will ever, that AI can’t ever really replace that.DAHL: Yes. Yeah. There’s so many different forms of porn, different delivery methods, so I think, yeah, the person who only ever really goes to a tube site and like searches for one of their three favorite search terms, and they watch a couple videos for like seven minutes, they do their business, then they’re done. If that’s the utility of porn to that person, then that person might be more likely to engage with AI generated porn and feel no qualms about it.That the kind of person that consumes porn in that manner is definitely different in some really basic ways than the kind of person that, for example, would join my OnlyFans and pay monthly to have access to DM with me, but also to, I would say that the majority of fans that I’ve interacted with that join my paid platforms, they’re making a conscious choice to support in that way.Yeah, for a lot of them it’s the accessibility is the feature of why they’re paying for my OnlyFans or something. But I would say the overwhelming majority, whether they really care about accessibility or not, some people join my OnlyFans and are subscribed for four years straight and they never even DM me once.Like they’re truly just there to support and like they’ll unlock extra content when it appeals to them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DAHL: But it’s like they’re making the ethical decision, oh, I like this person. I like what they do. I’m going to give them my like, seven bucks a month.SHEFFIELD: And I’m glad you said that because the incel crowd often tries to [00:26:00] degrade women performers as being somehow scamming people or creating ‘simps’ as they love to say. But it’s really no different than their favorite podcaster having premium episodes.They, charge you for super chats on YouTube. You are not offering them classes, uh, bullshit classes and fake universities of here’s how to have a become a millionaire. Like, You’re not doing anything. These guys are the ones who are selling the fantasy far more.DAHL: Well some performers are doing, are offering courses where they’re like, how to become a millionaire on OnlyFans.SHEFFIELD: Oh God.DAHL: I’ll say no more other than I wouldn’t trust it. I’ll say that, but, yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so it’s just, it’s all content in one way or another. It seems like, in order to have a longstanding career at this stuff, you actually have to be nice to your fans.DAHL: It does certainly help! If you’re going to be mean to your fans, then you better be in like a fem dom niche. It better be because your fans want you to be mean to them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, The people generally who make that argument, I would say, are people who, they don’t know how to manage their own use of porn.DAHL: Yes.SHEFFIELD: And so they want the government to take it away, to have have daddy take their toys away, basically.DAHL: Yeah. Daddy, take it away; put me in timeout. It’s too hard to do it myself. That’s, really what the vibe is. I don’t think it’s an accident or a coincidence that this backlash to porn and specifically to, like the OnlyFans model is happening in this era where individual [00:28:00] creators and performers in the porn industry have a lot more autonomy and power than we have in the past.Because of course on the extreme right on like from conservative Christians, there’s always been some anti-porn rhetoric going on, but the way that it’s so widespread now, and even people like incel guys online, that I’m like, oh, I know you are watching a lot of, a lot of porn and and this thing that you’re deeply involved in, you’re like anti it, you want it to be banned.I don’t think it’s an accident that opinion is starting to form at a time when there’s many more women who work in porn who are becoming visibly empowered by that. Whether that’s politically or financially.But I really do think that a lot of it is also just purely like jealousy of seeing women, someone like Ari Kytsya, who’s very popular, like multimillion followers on Instagram. And she posts about how she’s like, ‘I’m proud to be a bop.’ And she makes, she probably makes 10 times more money than I do, but she’s living a very comfortable life, because of the income she’s able to generate by making porn and selling it to people online. And I think that for a lot of more kind of incel leaning guys online, that really angers them and they want it to stop.I think there’s a significant chunk of the anti-porn backlash right now that is people who they might say like, yeah, we should ban it. But I think really they’d just be just as happy if we went back to the old studio model where performers are completely disempowered, where performers are functionally just exploited by a [00:30:00] studio system that underpays them and doesn’t give them rights to own their own images and things like that, because that’s what it was like for a long time.SHEFFIELD: It was. And it’s notable that, in those studio days, the industry actually had a lot of prominent Republicans, that were running the studios, as a matter of fact.DAHL: Yeah, Many of them are still around. Many of them won’t be hiring me for obvious reasons, but I’m fine with that.Outdated attitudes among many middle-aged and older women regarding adult mediaSHEFFIELD: The other thing, besides the incels wanting the government to take their porn away from them, is that when you look at public opinion surveys, it looks like that consistently, women are more likely to say that porn is morally wrong.And there are multiple polls that show this, but one I’m looking at here, that we’re looking at, it’s from the American Perspective Survey. and they just, show a pretty wide gap for age 65 plus, 78% of women say porn is wrong. 60% of men say it’s wrong.70% of women, 50, 64. and then, 49% of men, 50 to 64. So the generations become more pro-porn as they’re younger. And for ages 18 to 29, the percentage is equal across men and women, 42% saying that it is wrong. So the majority say there’s nothing wrong with it. Men and women are the same in that age group, but it’s the only age group there.So to me, that suggests that besides trying to satiate the the religious fanatics and the incels, the spate of just insane [00:32:00] porn criminalization laws that Republicans are going for, I think they’re doing it also because they want to appeal to middle-aged and older women.DAHL: Yeah, I would agree with that. Absolutely. It’s also the way that the age verification verification laws are being passed is like it’s happening amidst this separate moral panic about the accessibility of all kinds of information to minors online.Because those age verification bills end up targeting not just actual porn websites, but websites that have information about sexual health, reproductive issues, like LGBTQ content. And so yeah, it makes sense that the older generations would be the ones that are the most freaked out by young people having access to some of that stuff online. And then they’d be more likely to support like online censorship or age verification mandates.And I also think, with the people, 18 to 29 year olds, being really no difference in gender influencing how morally acceptable or not they think porn is—and it is still like it’s still almost half, 42% of men and women, 18 to 29 said they think porn is morally wrong. Which, you know, as someone who works in the industry, I’m like, that’s unfortunate.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Although I think a lot of them are lying.DAHL: I agree.SHEFFIELD: Social desirability bias.DAHL: That’s, that is literally the other thing is I’m like, this is a self-reported survey and you’re asking people about something that is that is controversial and stigmatized. Do you really think everyone’s going to answer honestly, or are they going to answer what they think makes them [00:34:00] look the best?But I do think that a meaningful thing that’s influencing the difference with 18 to 29 year olds responses, could it is still a majority, it is still, 58% total that say it’s either not a moral issue or it is acceptable and like, younger millennials and most of Gen Z are aware of the existence of quote unquote ethical porn. And I think that’s probably coloring that response too. Most people, in their twenties and thirties are very aware that the only porn you can find is not just XNXX, or whatever, free tube site. It’s like there’s all kinds of it. And when it’s more ethical is probably when you are getting it directly from the source of whoever made it. So I think that’s got to be coloring some of the response there.SHEFFIELD: On the whole thing though, why do you think women seem to be more likely to say that it’s wrong, do you think?DAHL: It’s really not surprising that women tend more to express moral objections to porn.And I think that’s a response that’s coming from a couple different places. Like one, I think, I think any woman is going to, especially the older you are, like in the 65 plus group, like my mom falls into that category. My mom is in her seventies, and she has had, she wasn’t allowed to play sports in high school, because Title IX wasn’t passed yet. They didn’t fund girls’ sports.Like my mom lived through the era of not being able to have her own credit card until [00:36:00] she was past college age, at the very least. And so my mom comes from that generation, like boomer women who did, they were growing up with very extreme forms of misogyny and sexism, and it that impacted their opportunities and their lives.And, my mom is also like pretty, pretty feminist. Like she’s always been the breadwinner in the family. And so I’m just using her like as an example. She’s a little different now because of the fact that I’m her daughter and I do porn, and we’ve obviously had to have a lot of conversations about it over the years.But her initial reaction to finding out that this was my career choice was just abject horror. Because her impression of the industry was like, it can’t possibly be ethical. There’s no way that you’ll be treated well or be safe because the existence of the porn industry alone is proof that the men who run things there are looking for ways to exploit women.And it’s just this assumption that it’s like this very seedy, shady industry where exploitation is to be expected and it is the norm. And so I do think with older generations, that is very much the assumption. And they’re also less likely to be in touch with the younger generations’ internet culture, where porn and being open about sexuality is far more normalized for people who are now in their twenties and thirties.So I think it’s like, it is a little bit like with the older women being so heavily against porn. I think it’s like a mix of things, but I think a lot of it is [00:38:00] very much coming from a very specific gendered experience that women of these older generations probably have, where it’s just far, it’s so hard for them to understand how porn could exist in a way that isn’t destructive to women generally.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And historically speaking, I mean, it definitely is the case that, for most of human history, sex workers, sex working women, were heavily exploited by men, controlled by them. And if that’s all you know, then it’s not a surprise to that people would think that’s how things are now, but it’s not.DAHL: Exactly. Yeah. And the only reason my mom now is not really, doesn’t really think that way is because I’m in her life and she has the direct example of me being successful and really liking what I do. And very obviously not being exploited. Like I’m very much in control of everything that I take part in and, yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And I guess probably a thing for some of the younger women is that they know people, or they themselves are doing it—DAHL: Oh yeah. I mean—SHEFFIELD: Like the girl next door.DAHL: —the 18-29 Group.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I was going to say like the girl next door has been a trope in porn for a long time, but now it is the literal girl next door for a lot of people.DAHL: Yeah. Easily it could be.The hetero dating recession is both sides rediscovering partnership when women are now finally independentSHEFFIELD: So that’s probably had an impact as well. But that does go into kind of a larger point though of how this is all being, what would we call it? The sort of democratization of sex work, it is part of a broader reconfiguring of of social norms and economic norms that we’re seeing because [00:40:00] this is a unique moment in human history.People will talk about, oh, AI is the unique moment in human history, but there’s actually something that’s been underway for a lot longer, which has, I don’t think been remarked upon enough. And that is that this is the first time that there are large-scale societies in which hundreds of millions of women have basically full economic rights. Marital rape is not allowed. And you know, it is not perfect by any means, but this is the point in human history, nothing like this has ever happened before.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And sex work is part of that. And it works to the benefit of both sides of the heterosexual equation. And I think people haven’t, a lot of people haven’t figured that out yet.DAHL: Yeah. Yeah. No, I agree. And I think a lot of people are not only haven’t figured it out, but are confused and maybe just angered by it. And because they don’t, they necessarily don’t see the path of how we got here, in a general sense. I mean we don’t have enough, like we have really terrible labor politics in the United States.We have the worst wealth gap that we’ve ever seen. Like the wealth disparity is really bad. And then, in 2020 when lockdowns were happening, it’s here comes this OnlyFans platform and it blows up like, like blows up the internet essentially.And so it’s like, why would anyone be surprised that there’s a bunch of young women who find out like, oh wait, I got laid off from my job. Oh, my job is requiring me to go to work and interface and not letting me be [00:42:00] at a safe distance and asking me to put my health at risk, otherwise I’m going to be let go. And you’re telling me that there’s a website where I can go post boob photos and potentially just get to stay at home and replace that lost income?That’s a piece of it. But obviously it goes deeper than that. I think it’s just like there’s a whole lot of societal and economic issues that are happening concurrently that result in this kind of explosion of more women, not only seeing sex work as a viable option, but actually taking the step of trying it out.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, it’s also I think getting people to re-conceive of just conventional, forced relationships, economic heterosexuality if you will.DAHL: Yes, hah.SHEFFIELD: So that a lot of that women don’t need to be dependent on men anymore. And so they’re not marrying guys who are jerks, or getting in a relationship with them, or whatever you want to call it.DAHL: True.SHEFFIELD: That saying, that old saying of a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle—DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: It has proven to be true. But a lot of men also haven’t realized that also can be a good thing for them also. Because the idea that you would want to have somebody who’s just there for your money. What’s that? What value is that really, to you? You should want more than that.DAHL: Yeah. I agree. I mean, yeah, psychologically, that is an interesting question. It also seems, I mean, [00:44:00] I’m just talking about like the way I see people behaving on to a degree just on the internet, but also on Love Is Blind Season 10, which has been occupying a lot of my head rent-free lately because it is just, it’s a reality dating show, but it does such a good job of showing the difference.For anyone who hasn’t been aware of the discourse around this show, it’s this dating show and the most recent season, it’s like most of the women seem to be pretty serious about the dating and relationship and eventually marriage aspect of the show. Because you’re supposed to get engaged and married someone that you meet on the show.But the vast majority of the men are obviously not, they don’t really understand the seriousness of like you’ve proposed to someone. Like you are, you are entertaining the idea of actually marrying someone.And they, a lot of them don’t seem to actually comprehend that. They’re almost treating it like a joke. And a number of the guys say, have said things about not wanting a gold digger, but then ironically, like they don’t actually have money. And this is something that I actually do see a lot online as well is that kind of commentary coming from some men online—and it’s just there.I have problems with it on on both sides, though, obviously. Because when I see women talking about oh, I’m not, unless the guy has like X figures in his bank account, unless he’s over six feet tall, like I’m not going to fuck with him. And I just don’t understand that. But I am also not a straight person.So like for me, when I observe these [00:46:00] opinions and these differences, I’m just like, I feel like I’m studying a sociology experiment. Because none of it makes sense to me. And even if I were super straight, and attached to that kind of way of thinking of approaching a dating relationship, I still don’t know that I would go in that direction.Because as I previously stated, like my personal life example growing up is that my mom was the breadwinner. And for half my childhood, my dad was a stay at home dad. Then eventually they swapped and my mom was stay at home for a bit, and then my dad was the main working parent.But if it’s taken down to average, like my mom worked for many more years than my dad did. And the whole time she was working made three times more than my dad did.And then I’ve kind of, now I’m kind of replicating that. Because I’ve been with my partner for seven years, and I’m very much the breadwinner. Like I’m the person that really is managing the finances and, doing all that, and I’m very happy with it.I don’t, the idea that I would have not wanted to be with my partner because he’s not going to make significantly more than me is actually crazy to me.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, and the interesting, fun irony of it is that, as women have become not economically dependent, what hopefully will happen is that the economics of relationships would go away, the economics aspect. Because, I mean a lot of the performers that I know, they say, what is a trophy wife? That’s a sex worker.DAHL: Basically, yep.SHEFFIELD: And it is a sex worker who can’t go to her own house at night.DAHL: [00:48:00] Yeah.SHEFFIELD: To the extent though that relationships can be just about love, and just about caring for each other, though, that should be something everybody should be in favor of.DAHL: Yeah, I agree.SHEFFIELD: And so the things we can do to get to that point, we should do them.DAHL: I fully agree. And unfortunately, it’s also like the majority of all of our cultural messaging about sex and relationships is going in the complete opposite direction of where it probably needs to be, in order to create the conditions for people to have happy, healthy relationships like that. I’m going to invoke Love Is Blind again, I’m so sorry—SHEFFIELD: I was actually going to ask you to talk about it again.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Because I felt like you hadn’t hit on everything you were going to say on it.’Love Is Blind’ as a microcosm of heterosexual dating attitudesDAHL: It’s the way that, using the show as, as maybe like a case study of the dating landscape for many people in America. At least if we just isolate it to straight people in their thirties, like cisgender men and women looking to date the opposite sex in their thirties. And Love Is Blind is like a kind of a case study in that, because what you see is like a lot of the men really are subscribed to this idea of being the dominant one in the relationship, which doesn’t just mean in terms of personality dominant, it means like they want to be, you hear them say over and over again, I want to be the protector and the provider.There’s many examples in the show of a conversation happening where the woman is like unsure of whether she wants to have kids. Like maybe she’s open to it someday, but it’s not something that she’s like, ‘I’m ready to have a very serious conversation about this being imminent, like in the next couple years, a thing that I do.’And [00:50:00] the men are almost universally pushing for that to be a thing. It’s like, ‘oh no, but you’d be such a great mother and like, I really want, I want four kids.’And it’s just, so what I see when I’m, when I’m watching it, is just like, this is purely just unrealistic. Like a lot of these men are like, they’re probably just listening to too many red pill podcasts. They’re living in a fantasy version of what their marriage should look like when it happens. And they’re, and it’s like they want this American dream. They want a marriage, they want a trad wife. They want a couple kids, but they have not taken the time or kind of honed the emotional maturity to actually handle that.It’s like they just want it because it’s a status symbol essentially—to be a man with a successful career, a wife and a family. But there’s no genuine thought that has gone into the reality of what it requires and what you, what kind of sacrifices you have to make to maintain that.And I think that that is a thing that I feel like I’ve really experienced with a lot of men, even in my own life. The last couple of exes that I had before I met my current partner, it was like this. I had, I literally, when I was like 26, I dated a guy for close to two years, and there was a handful of times that we had a conversation where he literally—I was 26 and he was like two years older than me, and I was like, we’re serious enough with dating to have been together for over a year. But this was not, I was not thinking about marrying this person. And yet his, not only him, but his entire family was asking: ‘When are you guys going to get married? We want grandkids. When are you going to [00:52:00] do it?’ And I was like, that’s actually unhinged.SHEFFIELD: It’s not in your business. Yeah.DAHL: Yeah, like I was like this, he needs me to even consider that for a moment, this person would need to go through a significant amount of therapy, yeah. And then for him it was like, he’d talk about, he would have these conversations where he’d fantasize about me popping out babies for him or something. And it, at no point in those conversations where he was fantasizing about that, did he ever have to say about the economic demands of that?It’s like it didn’t exist in his brain. It’s just, it’s really just this thing where it’s, like, oh yeah, get married, have I, which blows my mind. Like I just don’t understand how people can operate that way.SHEFFIELD: It’s also what kind of work would you do with the children? Because like that, if you want to have four kids, that’s not something that one person can manage by themselves.DAHL: When I was dating that guy, and he was saying those kinds of things, neither of us made enough income to be able to have one kid. Not even combined. Not enough.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I’m just saying even apart from the economics of it, just the time commitment, there’s, it’s a lot, there’s a lot that’s involved, especially in the early days.But, there’s one aspect of the Olympics, social aspect of it that I thought was really interesting, which was the gold medalist skater, Alysa Liu, her father. He had her as a single dad, and all of her siblings, from [00:54:00] surrogacy and egg donors. And so, this is a guy who, he wanted a family, and he didn’t impose it on someone else. He was like, you know what? I think I can do this. And I really want kids. And then he went and did it.DAHL: I love that. I actually didn’t know that. I hadn’t seen that in the news anywhere and, I was keeping up a lot with Alysa Liu, but that is so fucking cool.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it’s that I think that’s, another area for government policy to step in. Because, people, countries have a right to be concerned about birth rates and things like that, making sure there’s enough people in the country. But obviously the best way to have people have more kids is to make it so that they can afford to have more kids.DAHL: And make sure that people that are having kids are the ones who really want them. Not women who didn’t have access to reproductive healthcare who were—SHEFFIELD: Yep.DAHL: —forced into having them. Yeah.Please don’t pretend AI is your boyfriendSHEFFIELD: Yeah, All right, we’re just coming up to about an hour here with our chat. It’s been very fun. But one point, just as we get to the end here, I want to circle back to AI. One thing we didn’t talk about in our outline is that, so besides the fact that people are making porn with AI, there’s a Reddit subreddit that says, it’s called MyBoyfriendIsAI. So some people apparently want AI to be their boyfriend or girlfriend.DAHL: Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: You have thoughts on that, I’m imagining.DAHL: Yeah. Look, I will, my first thought is I am not surprised. If given the option of, if you literally asked me, hey, would you want to date [00:56:00] any of the men from this most recent season of Love Is Blind, season 10 in Ohio, or would you want to date an AI chat bot? Like I would, even with my ethical issues with AI, I would probably lean more toward the damn chatbot.That’s how bleak it can be. I will say. And it, and even looking at the posts that women are sharing in the subreddit, it’s like most it is like they’re just, they just want to be listened to, and like validation from a quote-unquote male figure. I’m putting that in air quotes because it’s a bot that has no gender.But, I can easily see why there are women who will end up here in the MyBoyfriendIsAI subreddit. But I also think that it’s symptomatic of something that is more widespread than that. Because we also, there’s so much media about the male loneliness epidemic. Which I always want to push back against and say it’s just a loneliness epidemic.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.DAHL: I think that the ways that it affects men is maybe more visible. Which I think is just because men often are the center of narratives in our culture. So it’s not surprising that it’s a little more visible and people are trying to classify it as a specifically male loneliness epidemic.But a lot of people are lonely. And there’s such a diversion in what a lot of men, and a lot of women want or ideally think a relationship should be. I think that’s pretty well-illustrated with this. Because it’s also, I’m like, I understand why some of the people in this subreddit are like, and we did, we talked about this before we recorded, how it’s the subreddit MyBoyfriendIsAI, it is the people posting and who are members are overwhelmingly [00:58:00] women.Although there are some men, but I’m still going to generalize and just say women in the subreddit, because that’s mostly true. While I’m not surprised that this is happening, I also, it’s like some of the posts that I look at, I’m like, yeah, you would be lonely and have trouble finding a boyfriend who’s a real person because the things that you’re telling this chatbot that you want are like no human being could satisfy that.What maybe what you don’t want is—you’re calling it your boyfriend, like that the AI is your boyfriend. But it seems to me, based on the screenshots you’re sharing, that maybe a boyfriend isn’t what you want. Like I think maybe you just want a therapist. You’re calling this AI your boyfriend, but the way you’re interacting with it is that you are just wanting it to validate you 100% of the time. And that’s not a romantic partner’s job.SHEFFIELD: No. because everybody’s entitled to their own thoughts and feelings and activities. Yeah. And to quote ChatGPT, Siri, “you’re absolutely right!”DAHL: Have I dazzled you?SHEFFIELD: But I think this subreddit does really show though that, when you are talking to a chat, you are talking to yourself, actually. That’s what you’re doing.DAHL: Yeah. It’s concerning.SHEFFIELD: This is just another form of masturbation, basically.DAHL: Ah, that’s that’s so true, yeah. You’re You’re just getting just getting off to yourself.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but, at the same time, it does show that there’s nothing wrong with trying to explore your thoughts or to think things through.Because our [01:00:00] concepts in our brains, we don’t, in our brains, we don’t think in words to ourselves. And so, when you have to forcibly express it outside of your body in words, you actually can have a better, you learn what you are thinking,DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Just simply by saying it. So I’m not going to say that it’s this horrible, end of society kind of thing. But it’s something that they probably should not make a prolonged habit of.DAHL: Yeah. It’s probably something that the chatbots should be capable of engaging with. Like anything that even remotely mimics a therapy session kind of exchange should just be not allowed. It should give you, redirect you to a real source of real talk therapy,SHEFFIELD: Agreed. Agreed.DAHL: It’s better help. At least it’s a real human, like, I don’t know.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And that it’s another area where the government should be doing something instead of a a chat bot.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: But none of this changes though until enough people realize that we deserve good things.DAHL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And we deserve to be good to each other also.DAHL: Yeah. I like, I really like the way you said that. Because one of my core beliefs is we do deserve good things. And I do think despite plenty of historical evidence, and current-day evidence to the contrary, I do think that people are at their core good. And I think that, when it’s not obvious, when there’s large-scale events that causes us to question that core goodness, it is usually, because the worst of the worst have able to gain far too much power, and they’re wielding it against us. For example, our billionaire [01:02:00] overlords.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So for people who are interested in keeping up with you in, let’s say safe for work and not safe for work ways, how might they do that?DAHL: Yeah, absolutely. So I do have a bunch of links, like links to all of my presences online at siridahl.com, S-I-R-I-D-A-H-L. The links that will take you to a spicy place are very well marked on there. I also have a Patreon, which is just patreon.com/siridahl. And I call it Siri Before Dark because the Patreon is basically the gathering collection place for all of my like, more safer work projects that I do, including kind of YouTube stuff, my podcast, First Thirst, and some other like little, side projects and things like that.And I’m mainly on Bluesky as far as like the more intellectual side of me on the internet. So you can follow me, @siridahl.com on Bluesky.SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. This was fun. We’ll have to do a another one soon.DAHL: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. This was such a, such a fun conversation. I love a deep dive.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you become a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to all of the archives and I thank you very much for your support. That is really great in this tough time for media.And if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure to click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryThe United States military is conducting bombing operations against Iran without a Congressional Declaration of War, consistently stated objectives or even terms on whether this is a war or not.Everything is in chaos: Some of it is due to incompetence within the Trump administration, of course. According to CNN and other news outlets, just days before President Donald Trump decided to follow Israel’s lead and bomb Iran, his FBI laid off an entire team of analysts who were experts in tracking Iranians online—all because they’d also been involved previously with investigating Trump’s previous retention of classified documents in a public bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago club.But that’s not the only reason the second Trump administration has been in such disarray. It’s almost as if the chaos is the point—if that even makes sense to say at all. The president and his top aides have little interest in coherent policies, but the Republican Party itself is less a political party than a loose coalition of people with grievances against America. Some of them are techno-fascists who literally want computers to replace humans. Then there are others who want to have a Christian theocracy. And then still there are others who think that they just want to have their country club and have low taxes.Despite their internal disunity, Republicans have been able to weaponize discontent against modernity and to fearmonger against minority groups, particularly people who are transgender, immigrants, or racial or religious minorities.So what can people who support democracy do in this situation? It seems so easy for politicians to just give in to the right-wing media machine. But this is not likely to work either, because while chaotic rage is what a minority of Americans want, the majority want something coherent and better.Joining me for a free flowing discussion about all of this is a longtime friend of the show, Parker Molloy. She is a media analyst and critic who writes the Present Age newsletter, and she also formerly worked as a senior staffer at Media Matters.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Audio Chapters00:00 — Introduction07:32 — Republican billionaires have realized that controlling media discourse is cheap17:58 — Republicans will always call Democrats ‘socialist’ regardless of their policies26:12 — Far-right Jews like Ben Shapiro incorrectly thought they could have sexism and racism without antisemitism28:07 — Trump’s policy positions constantly shift because coherent policy is unimportant to reactionaries36:48 — The UK Labour Party is a current example that running away from your policy viewpoints doesn’t work47:49 — Durable political change follows cultural change01:00:30 — Glenn Youngkin and the myth that voters are obsessed with hating trans people01:06:23 — Liberals and progressives must move beyond criticizing others Audio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I feel like we keep having a continued conversation because nothing that we talk about ever changes for the better it seems.PARKER MOLLOY: No, every, everything keeps getting slightly worse, just keeps edging towards the horrible.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Although I will I will say, at least at the grassroots level, I do feel like a lot of people have been learning a lot more. So like, like with Donald Trump announcing his bombing campaign against Iran. People automatically are against it. And that’s, I mean, a majority.Yeah. I think the most recent bull I saw I had that was like 25% support it. So this is, there’s some good progress on the citizen side ofMOLLOY: Yes. Now the question though is it’s just like how does that I’m just very interested, like when it comes to, the, support for Trump, Trump’s bombing and stuff like that. [00:04:00] It’s one of those times where democrats, I feel like they have a real opportunity to stake out the anti-war lane.And I kind of worry like there are clearly some democrats who are very much pro. War with Iran, like John Fetterman clearly wants to keep bombing, Moscowitz, he’s the one who he opposes the war powers resolution because he called it the Ayatollah Protection Act.It’s one of the, one of those things, where it’s like, Yeah.there are some pro-war democrats here who maybe don’t want to sound pro-war, which is why they’re kind of like dancing around a little bit. But overall, I think that now is a good time to, stake out the anti-war lane if, if there is ever an opportunity to do so.It’s right now, it’s before the public gets on board with, this. If they do, instead of seeding the conversation to, to Republicans to be like, well, clearly Iran, the regime is evil and we have to, had to do something.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it is, I mean, it’s a, it is a welcome contrast in many ways to the Iraq war because it, at least with the second Iraq war, the Bush administration they cared enough to lie about itMOLLOY: Yeah. I feel like we’re not even getting lied to anymore. They’re, or they’re, they’re not bothering to lie in a convincing way anymore. They’re not making a case. I did see some I can’t remember where I saw it, but someone called the administration’s response to all of this, war slap, which is basically, ‘cause Trump’s been like calling up reporters.Every major outlet and weirdly giving them all different stories about like how long he plans to be there, whether he’s planning, boots on the groundSHEFFIELD: the [00:06:00] objectiveMOLLOY: yeah. What, why he did it. You have Marco Rubio saying like, yeah, we had to do this because Israel was going to attack Iran anyway.And so yeah.we kind of ha it made sense for us to go in at that moment. And it’s like, and then today Trump’s like, absolutely not. They didn’t get me to go and do anything. I didn’t want to. It’s, I feel like the whole point is just to throw everything out there And to see what sticks. LikeSHEFFIELD: Yeah.MOLLOY: one, one of my, one of my favorite things with the war right now is on one hand you have some Republicans saying we’re not at war.Where is the, what Congress hasn’t voted for war. This is not a war, this is.a military action. Like whatever euphemism they wanna use. And then you have other Republican members of Congress who are like, this war has been going on for 47 years and we are ending it. It’s like, so, so it’s also, it’s a war that’s been going on forever, but it’s also not a war.And if you think about it, it’s like, the last time that the United States formally declared war on a country was World War ii. So it, like, does Mark Wayne Mullen actually believe that we haven’t been in a war since World War ii? I don’t think so, but I think he thinks that it’s a winning message.Republican billionaires have realized that controlling media discourse is cheapSHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and doesn’t seem to be that way so far, so that’s good. But you know, it, it goes back to though the idea of shaping opinion. And that is why I think we’ve seen so much recent consolidation of media by right wing oligarchs. And in particular, the most recently, the acquisition of Paramount by David Ellison and Larry Ellison, his dad and who are strong Israel supporters and [00:08:00] Netanyahu supporters.We have to point that out. Now it looks like they have the prevailing bid, which they got. Through working with Trump in the most corrupt and blatant fashion I’ve ever seen for any sort of corporate acquisition. And to to buy the company Warner Brothers. And so now they wanna get, so they got CBS news, now they want CNN but the ratings are just going down the toilet every time they do it.So that’s at least a good thingMOLLOY: Yeah I do think that they’re trying, it’s, it, a big part of this is to just, even if the ratings tank and even if, like, I feel like cable news and like legacy media as a whole is a struggling field, right. Right now and is probably only gonna get more difficult as time goes on.Which, when it comes to like, Paramount’s to buy Warner Brothers, I thought it was interesting that they wanted to bid for all of Warner Brothers instead of or all of Warner Brothers discovery. Instead of just waiting for CNN to split off and buy it separately. Like, I think they realize that the movie studios where the money’s at, and, owning all that IP is where the money’s at, like. Using CNN as a propaganda arm is kind of just like, that’s not gonna make money for them in the long run, but it will accomplish a different goal which is also, you also have Larry Ellison involved in the purchase of TikTok. So,SHEFFIELD: true too. Yeah.MOLLOY: You’ve got that, and obviously you have Elon Musk with Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg has been getting cozy with Trump over the past few years.And, it’s, there’s a real, like, big right wing takeover of media and communications services and it’s, I feel like that’s gonna be a big story in the coming years. Like, how people who aren’t part of that bubble, [00:10:00] who aren’t who aren’t Barry Weiss, who aren’t, con conservative podcasters and stuff, like how the rest of us kind of get our news and get our information and what that means in the years to come, because there was like that recent there was a recent study about how being on Twitter basically pushes you to the right, it’s like you’re, and it’ll ha like I’ll open Twitter because I look at it to keep track of what’s going on in the world, or what like powerful people are saying.And yeah, it’s a cesspool you get bombarded with a lot of really extreme content that’s supposed to make you feel a very certain way. And I think that’s what tiktoks gonna totally turn into. Maybe not as sloppy as Twitter. ‘cause Elon Musk is. S sloppy like, maybe it won’t be as obvious, but, even the more gentle propagandists, at Paramount are showing their hand a little bit.You had, you had Barry Weiss the other day retweeting a video of someone like getting in like a weird insult at Zoran Momani. She like retweeted that with like a fire emoji. And the Twitter account for 60 minutes straight up said that Iran has nuclear weapons, which is literally no one is saying that, like the Trump administration is not even making that claim, but they put that out there and you have journalists jumping ship and saying like, I feel like I don’t have editorial independence anymore. It’s grim.SHEFFIELD: well it is and it’s like it is in some ways like the. The old order had to die in some way or another. And I wish it was not this way. But, maybe it is that way. And the weird thing though [00:12:00] is that with this whole consolidation and, trying to manipulate opinion and manufacture consent for war, which I mean, this is like a cliche of Noam Chomsky, which,MOLLOY: He’s someone who my opinion of has shifted a bit in recent months especially.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I know, right? He had one, a couple of good ideas, but a lot of really bad, and Ben wants, but but my point being though, like the other weird thing about the way that these conservatives are taking over media is they don’t seem to understand that they’re on the right.Like people like Barry Weiss or David Ellison, like a lot of these people. They actually call themselves liberals. And people who are progressive, I think, contribute to that problem by using the word reactionary centrist, no, these people are just conservatives. Okay. Sam Harris, conservative Barry Weis, conservative.These are not centrist. There’s no such thing as an informed centrist. They don’t exist. So please stop saying that they do.MOLLOY: Yeah that’s really interesting. And I have noticed that, I mean, it was interesting because like, I don’t know, it was like 10 years ago, eight years ago, somewhere around there, like you had was a big time for like a lot of the conservative, like the intellectual dark web types, the, oh, they’re not conservative.They’re classical liberals, like they’re heterodox.like that was the whole, the whole thing. It was this, it was this pretty deliberate attempt to frame themselves, not on the right but as the true middle. Elon Musk will come around and be like, he will promote something that was, like the reform party in the uk. Which they’re to the right of the Tories. he’ll be like, I don’t see what’s far right about this party.Their, all their views seem very very sensible, very, I mean, I consider myself, he always, he loves to say he considers himself [00:14:00] a moderate, which is just. Flat out not true. He’s not moderate on anything. He will he’ll show up in like doing, video he’ll video in for in, what’s the German far right party?A FD like, and he’ll be like their views seem perfectly normal and fine. And I don’t understand why people call them far. Right. Why don’t they call, and then he’ll argue that someone like Chuck Schumer is far left, it’s like, I don’t know, man. I feel like you’re kind of, you’re kind of trying to the Overton window, and I know that like, that gets talked about a lot, but, just trying to shift what people consider to be. A moderate opinion is, and I re I remember years and years ago when there, there was a whole thing with, when Candace Owens started hanging out with Kanye West, there was a Twitter trending topic that said, far right influencer Candace Owens.And she got so mad about that. She was like, I’m not far right. I’m I’m just I’m in the middle. I’m, I’m a little right of center or whatever. Like, however it was that she was trying to like frame her views. And you and Jack Dorsey, who is still the CEO at the time, he reached out to her and he followed her on Twitter and he fixed it and he said, this will never happen again.And you had conservatives pointing to that as evidence that Twitter was biased against conservatives. It’s all the project, a certain narrative to shift, to try to shift the public’s understanding of where various people on, the political spectrum are.SHEFFIELD: And it’s like when you look at the Trump administration or reform in the UK or any of these other far right parties, they don’t really have coherent policy arguments. it’s all about, well, my views are common sense, like this just makes sense. and so [00:16:00] therefore, policing what the possibility corridor is or the Overton window, that’s really the, that is their number one argument that while these ideas are just right.Your ideas are communists. Every, like Trump has now started using the word communist all the time, like referring to Democrats who are, have it literally expressed opposition to, not even single payer healthcare, but like national health insurance of some kind. He calls them a communist which is ludicrous.But, if you don’t know very much about political ideology or whatever, it’s, it apparently at least has some effectiveness. And if you can control the platforms, then I think you know that, and that is why they’ve realized that, we’re gonna do this, but it just isn’t working because, these arguments, like this is, this was one of the problems that I had as a, when I was conservative, that, I was, I would say to my colleagues, I’d be like, okay, can we please have some arguments for our ideas here. Like, I want to see an argument for why, because you always say tax cuts always increase revenue. Well, show me math that says that so I can put it into a column. Or if you don’t have math that says that then don’t, then you can’t say that. Like, I would say that to writers who I was editing and, and they just would say, oh, you’re being negative, Matt you’re being negative.And I was like, well, no, I’m actually trying to be factual. But that’s not what they want. And you just see that over and over, like with this Iran stuff, everything is that there’s no stated reason. There’s no real goal. Like, so now they’re not even saying that they want regime change, whatever that means.They don’t even talk about that anymore. So, so we’re literally just bombing themMOLLOY: Just bombing, bombing for fun, got a, what’s that? That old Simpsons got a nuke, someone, like, yeah with thatRepublicans will always call Democrats ‘socialist’ regardless of their policiesMOLLOY: there was [00:18:00] something in the 2020 Democratic primary that I, I think a lot about which is, it was during one of the debates, it was Pete Buttigieg, was early in the primary. And he, he said something to the effect of, look, if we run on a bunch of far left policies, Republicans are gonna call us a bunch of crazy socialists, and if we run on a bunch of moderate policies, Republicans are gonna call us a bunch of crazy socialists. So why don’t we just run on whatever we actually believe and let that fall where it may, because they’re gonna, they’re gonna attack us for the exact same reason every time.Which I think is why the argument that, oh, Kamala Harris was too far to the left. Like I’ve, I’ve seen some of the like, the third way type think tanks be like, well, you’ll notice that Trump didn’t attack her for being too moderate. It’s like, in what world would he, like, like any, he, if he was running against.Ted Cruz, he would say Ted Cruz is far left. like he, he would make some sort of a argument to that effect. he, it’s, it doesn’t matter. It, you could take anyone and the playbook is gonna still be the same because, attack. Oh, Dems are socialists.Okay. I mean, that’s, it’s a, it’s a label. You can apply to anyone, but I don’t think that. It’s accurate in any real way, and there’s no policy. there same thing happened with the border in 2024. You had Kamala Harris running ads being like, we’re gonna be so tough on the border. Like Trump, Trump is actually the weak one on the border.We’re gonna be tough. We’re, we’re to, we’re pushing to his right. He blocked a bill that we all support, which was basically like the Trump 2016 immigration [00:20:00] policies. Like we’re, we’re doing that. Like Democrats were still attacked as being open borders, which. There’s not been a single open borders Democrat in power.I mean, when, when Obama was in office, I remember there being, he did a press conference at the border where he’s, where he was saying like, look I’ve agreed to all, all these Republican policy proposals. I’ve I’ve given funding to border patrol and all of this. And he joked, he’s like, what?What will they want next? A moat? And it was like the next week in Congress. Joe Walsh during his term in office, when he was still a tea party guy, he jokingly went up there with like a stuffed alligator and he was like, yes, we would like a moat. It’s like,SHEFFIELD: Well, and Obama actually deported more people than Trump did.MOLLOY: Yeah. He got aSHEFFIELD: Even now, like his rate is gonna be less than Obama.MOLLOY: And I still, and you’ll still see some Democrats be like, we were actually more efficient when it came to deporting people, which is not what I think a lot, like my personal, like, policy views on immigration are not, like, I don’t see that and go, oh, yay. Like, that doesn’t make me happy. Like I, I think it’s expected and it’s accurate, but at the same time it’s like, man who is this message for? Because Republican voters are still gonna think that Republicans areSHEFFIELD: TougherMOLLOY: To the right of Democrats on immigration or any other policy. And one of the things that I’ve been thinking about as it concerns the, the current bombing campaign that Trump has going on is that.In 2004, you had John, like, the way that John Kerry ran for president, president in 2004 I thought was really interesting because [00:22:00] his big argument wasn’t that the war in Iraq was wrong and that it needed to end. It was that it was being mismanaged. Like he was still trying to do the thing where he is like, he’s like, okay I’ll agree that, we should be there and we should be doing something, but I would do it better.I would do it more efficient. And in doing that you had re Republican voters just being like, no, he won’t, not believing him. And you had, you had like anti-war voters who. Would vote Democrat, who were just turned off by all this, are who were just like, I, no, I want you to be anti-war. I want you to oppose the war in there.Not try to triangulate some, some middle ground that, that probably doesn’t exist. And, and the, the tricky thing about this is that the longer you’re in a war, the harder it is to just be like, yeah, no, we should we, we need to get out and we need to end it. Because the, then you have what happened with Afghanistan during the Biden administration where it was like chaotic withdrawal and things immediately got worse in Afghanistan and he got piled on for that.And that’s why when it comes to what’s happening in Iran, Iran right now, it’s like they gotta find an off ramp immediately, otherwise. This is just gonna be something where we’re, we’re gonna get stuck there and there’s gonna, there’s gonna be backlash and there, there’s gonna be blow back. And who, who knows who we’re gonna radicalize, in, in doing that, I mean, there was like, there was a tweet from, I can’t remember who it was, it was someone on Twitter.It was at the, at the start of the, after October 7th, 2023. It [00:24:00] was as Israel was like bombing Gaza. Like when that started someone, someone said on Twitter it was like, Hey if I was, a Palestinian living in Gaza and. And Israel just killed, bombed and killed my whole family and destroyed the entire, area and in, in, in, in effort to wipe out Hamas.Like I would grow up and the first thing I’d wanna do is start Hamas too. like you’re basically, yeah, you’re radicalizing people and, and maybe entire generations of people and you’re, making the US an unreliable partner. The fact that Trump ripped up the, the nuclear agreement with Iran, like why would they ever trust us?There were con, there were, negotiations that were happening very recently and Iran seemed be to be, participating in them, but then. We just go in and take out like their entire leadership and like, ISHEFFIELD: think that’s gonna make them moreMOLLOY: yeah. Well, and then, I saw a story yesterday. It was just like, Iran not interested in negotiating.It’s like, Yeah. No. Crap. You, like, ISHEFFIELD: Or even if they were like, why would, like, how could you trust that they would be, like they were betrayed by the United States in terms of negotiation. So why wouldn’t you pretend to, have some sort of treaty and then just violate it as much as you could if you were them?Like it makes senseMOLLOY: like that’s the thing. It’s all of this stuff is gonna do so much damage to the reputation of the United States for decades to come. The fact that. Trump wasn’t kept out of office after his first term, like the fact that he came back into power. I think it sent a really [00:26:00] strong message to the world that it’s just like, no, that wasn’t some weird aberration.This is just like who the United States might be every four to eight years now. Like, becauseSHEFFIELD: gets a little bit, yeah,Far-right Jews like Ben Shapiro incorrectly thought they could have sexism and racism without antisemitismMOLLOY: Yeah, because you, I think it I think it’s interesting that a lot of the people who were on the, on, on the far right during Trump’s, like first term are now like the influencers, like you, like Ben Shapiro, like he got really big during Trump’s first term.And then, like if you fast forward to today. He his videos aren’t doing so well anymore. He’s losing audiences and the viewers are going to more extreme people than him. And he was the guy who he said, there’s no such thing as, he said, there is no such thing as like a reasonable Muslim.He was saying that more than half of the, Muslims on the planet were radicalized and that we should fear them. Like people now look at him and they’re like, oh, he’s some squishy centrist type, and the people on the right who’ve migrated to Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens, and, Yeah.Tucker Carlson, who, like it’s, I, I don’t think that, unless things go really, unless things really blow up in Trump’s face, between now and, 2028 especially, it’s like I feel like the Republican party may continue to just veer off in that direction and, won’t, moderate back to something more like, Jeb Bush.Like, imagine the Republicans like cons, even considering a Jeb Bush candidacy in like now, or someone who had the identical policies of Jeb Bush, like it’s laughable pe like, and I think it’s really just kind of speaks to how they have successfully [00:28:00] gotten their own base, at least to, to shift further to the extremes.Trump’s policy positions constantly shift because coherent policy is unimportant to reactionariesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it does go back to the Overton window issue. But, and that’s why the conservatives like Barry Weiss, they should be focusing their efforts on attacking the far right, but they really don’t, they spend most of their time attacking the left, which of course is because they’re on the right.But nonetheless, it isn’t going to help them in the long run because, the Republican Party. The only way out of this is if they get electorally, defeated in such a horribly horrible way for them. Like, like, Barry Goldwater, Barry Goldwater was the last honest Republican to come to actually run on what they wanted to do.And magically Americans did not like it. They were horrified by it. And and you’re seeing that with the Trump second administration, that he’s doing all the things that Barry Goldwater wanted. And of course people hate them. But when he was renting, he was not telling the people who, like half, probably about half the Trump voters had no idea what his positions were like.He, they literally had no idea what his views were.MOLLOY: that was the thing in I, in 2020 his campaign website just straight up didn’t have an issues page.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And they had no platform atMOLLOY: There was No plan. yeah. There was no plan for a second term. It was just like, gonna keep doing what I’m doing and vote for me, and you’ll see what happens.And you c and then in the 2024, you had him you had the Heritage Foundation come out there and they’re like, we got project 2025 for you right here. And immediately people were horrified by, seeing these policies laid out, which they’ve done that before. They’ve had these, those reports for years.And and Trump in his first term, enacted a lot of the recommendations, when he could.SHEFFIELD: Well, and then Trump lied and said, oh I’m not affiliated with that, even though it was co-written by the guy who [00:30:00] was my budgetMOLLOY: Yeah. Yeah. He’s like, no. That’s, yeah. I, he called, I think he said, yeah, that was written by like some people on the severe, right. and I remember one of the things was like, Yeah, Republicans trump’s, if Trump gets back into power he’s gonna, he’s gonna ban all the people of associated with Project 25, 25 from being in his administration.It’s just like, immediately after getting elected, he starts working directly with these people and incorporating them into his administration. And I it really kind of speaks to the fact that candidates, especially I think Republican candidates can’t really run on what they want to do because the individual policies tend to be pretty unpopular unless you’re, picking at like a. Like attacking trans rights, like they’ve successfully shifted public opinion on trans rights to where maybe that works to their advantage. And so they can talk about like what they’ll want to do to trans people. But you know, like a lot of things like Trump, Trump never once mentioned, I want to annex Greenland.Like during the campaign,SHEFFIELD: I want to bomb. In fact he said, Kamala Harris will go to war with Iran if you elect her.MOLLOY: Exactly. He was just, there his big policy positions, it was always funny. He would be like no Tax on tips. It’s like, okay that’s your, that’s one of your big policies. Okay. Even though it’s like, right, fine. Like,SHEFFIELD: And even attacking trans people, like, there are basically no trans people in America. So, whatever policy, no matter how terrible or how great it would be toward trans people, not really going to affect anyone who’s, who is cisgender. Like, that’s the reality. So it’s not gonna put money in your pocket.It’s not gonna, help you afford a home. It’s not gonna give you a better education. It’s [00:32:00] not gonna do any of those things for you. AndMOLLOY: I do think that the one policy that, that he kind of, you, there actually, there are two, two things he said he was going to do during his campaign that I think that he is pretty much followed through on. One was be really obsessed with tariffs. Like, like he really got into that. And two was mass deportations.Like, but as we’ve, mentioned, it’s just like Democrats were. Just as effective. They were just quieter about it. there weren’t, you didn’t have, as many instances of things like ice gunning down people in the streets. But, other than that, you kind of hit it. And I think one thing that’s interesting in watching kind of the consultant class of the Democratic party how they’re operating is their, one of their takeaways from 2024 was, oh, we shouldn’t say what we believe we should.like, there we, oh, Kamala Harris, filled out an A CLU questionnaire that’s, that asked her about her beliefs on civil liberties issues. She shouldn’t have done that, which is so, like, I understand that from a strategy point of view, but. I think it’s bad that the conventional wisdom now seems to be like, candidates should not tell you what they, what they will do if given power candidates should just say, trust me.Trust me, it’ll be fine. I’ll, project your own views onto me. And that’ll be great because it’s easy when you, when you don’t say what you, what you believe in. And people can just go, Yeah.Trump’s only gonna round up the criminals and he’s only gonna do this or that.And the, a lot of times it’s not things that Trump actually said or anything like that. It was just like, [00:34:00] that was what people believed and they projected their own beliefs onto Donald Trump as people project their beliefs onto others all the time. So it might make sense for Democratic candidates to not respond to 20 page questionnaires that ask about whether trans people in prison should have access to healthcare or not. Maybe but I think it’s a bad thing for democracy as a whole when there, there seems to be this shift away from like actually saying what you believe because it’s more advantageous to to just lie.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the thing is though, that viewpoint that campaign strategy, it isn’t actually going to work for people on the center to left. And it’s something that is inherent to reaction is, which is of course the more extreme form of conservatism. And I’m gonna, there’s a famous quote from Jean Paul Sartre, which he was talking about anti-Semitism and why it doesn’t make sense.And so I’m gonna just read it here for those who haven’t seen it. So he says:Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous and open to challenge. They are amusing themselves for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly since he believes in words. The antisemites have a right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors.that’s Donald Trump right there. That’s Donald Trump described right around world War ii. And so it’s, so, this is a inherent anti rational, anti-institutional, anti reason anti society.It is a sociopathic, revolt, personal revolt against reality. And that is why they can get away with these [00:36:00] things. If you believe in something. You can’t do that. And this is what the broader consultant class in, in the Democratic party doesn’t get they don’t understand that, the right will always, the reason why they keep talking about, culture war issues is that they don’t have policies that, or they don’t have policies that they want you to hear about.And so your goal, if you’re going to oppose them, is tell people about their actual policies, have enough platforms in which your factual statements can be seen, and then propose good policies. So you have to do all of those three things. If you don’t do all of those three things, then it’s not going to work.You can’t say, well, I’m just gonna do two or one.The UK Labour Party is a current example that running away from your policy viewpoints doesn’t workSHEFFIELD: Like the u the UK Labor Party right now. Like we’re seeing what happens if you just try to say, well, let’s concede this one issue of trans rights or immigration. Because the reality is the issue is never the issue. So, so whatever your position is, it’s a communist position.Like as you were saying, Pete Buttigieg, picked it up that like, so whatever you say, it doesn’t matter to, to the people who have a psychological need to oppose modernity.MOLLOY: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I think that, I think the, one of the big warnings about, like. In 2024. 2024, you had, in the UK the Labor Party won and in a, it was a landslide victory. And I think people attributed it to them. Like there were a lot, this happens a lot where you have people who write about politics for a living, who have, more moderate views who, who kind of say, well, clearly they won Because they a, adopted the views that I believe, the views that I [00:38:00] personally agree with.And so, so there was a lot of stuff where it was, I remember the Labor Party had people come and meet with the Democrats to talk to them about strategy after their big win. But. The real reason they won was that they weren’t the conservative party. That they weren’t the party that was in power and people were just mad about the current leadership in the country.They could have run, they could have run the most extreme, like as far left as they could have. They could have brought back Jeremy Corbin to, to be the leader and to adopt his, his policy. He would’ve won probably like I, I think. And labor got when he ran and lost in the general election before that he ended up like more people turned out to vote for labor than they did.In 2024. But because they had this giant sweeping victory, people assumed that, well, it must be because they have pop, they pick popular policies, but then they get into office and they start actually implementing these policies. and people hate it. And they’re the response has been mostly to move more further to the right.And this is the nominally liberal party over there. It’s the, they’re supposed to be center left, that’s supposed to be their lane, but they keep moving to the right and they’re trying to out, out reform basically. And it’s just not, I don’t think, I don’t think that can work because people are always gonna go for the real thing.They’re always, if you try to appeal to fascists. The fascist, the voters who, who like fascist policies are just gonna vote for the real fascists. The reSHEFFIELD: Because they want fascism.MOLLOY: yeah the,SHEFFIELD: They don’t want your policy.MOLLOY: Exactly like it. They don’t [00:40:00] necessarily care about, whatever little policies here or there. They want to, wanna cut down on immigration and they want to impose their will on society and to take control of all this stuff.And it’s just it’s just sad to see some some bigger name Democrats kind of float, like see that, and still think that’s the way to go. Because the lesson from the UK in electing a more moderate labor party. Ended up being, or the l rather the lesson in the UK of the labor party moving to the right and then winning was that an even more extreme right wing party was gonna swoop in and win the next election.Like labor’s absolutely gonna lose, and it’s almost certainly gonna be, not the conservatives, but reform that takes power after that. And I think one of, one of my fears is that if Democrats as a whole, move to the center, try to moderate their policies and triangulate their way to victory, you might just have, a situation where they’re in power for four years and then something even more extreme comes along.And I think that’s I think that’s what we got by. 2000, going with Joe Biden, who was seen as the moderate, one of the most moderate options that was available during the 2020 election. And Biden gets into office and he’s still pretty moderate. He had some, like, he had some progressive economic policies that, that people seem to generally like, but in the end he didn’t keep Trump out.And in the end we got something. Trump too is far more extreme than Trump won. And I think that we [00:42:00] risk, that maybe Democrats win in 2028 if they moderate on a bunch of issues. But all that does is that shifts the Overton window if, because people are going to keep saying Democrats are socialists and they’re far left and all of this, but. It just might not be true. And in response, you’re gonna get some more extreme right wing governance, which is gonna be, if you ask me back in 2016 when Trump first got elected, one of my, one of my fears was like as a trans person, I was very afraid of what the administration would do.And, it was like my, like worst case scenario that I could picture was like, okay, what if what if the federal government doesn’t enforce Title IX to protect trans. People anymore in schools or title doesn’t enforce federal protections for trans people using Title vii.Like, those were kind of like the things that the big worries I had, fast forward to today, and it’s like, it’s the federal government’s official policy.The trans people just don’t exist. that was Trump’s big day one, executive order. And then you have states trying to one up each other to see how extreme they can push this, because they know the federal government’s gonna just kind of let ‘em do what they wanna do, and the courts aren’t gonna stop them.So, you’ve got right now, last week in, or last week or the week before, I can’t remember, time flies. You’ve got in Kansas, like they, they passed a law that invalidated trans people’s driver’s licenses. And.SHEFFIELD: BasicallyMOLLOY: immediately, Gave them noSHEFFIELD: you couldn’t move or do something.MOLLOY: Yeah.And because the licenses were invalidated and not like there was something about the process involved because they were invalidated. There was it flags something in a, in a federal system [00:44:00] to where if you go to an another state and like, let’s say someone moved the very next day and was like, I’m getting out of Kansas.I’m gonna move to Illinois where I can get a driver’s license that has my correct gender on it and my name and everything like that. Like, because their license has been like invalidated. Flags it in the system, and it becomes almost impossible to just update it. Like you had to go through the process of getting a new license in Kansas that had the wrong gender on it.And in, in all it turned out that there were something like 300 people who this affected. And it was a law that was passed as an emergency. And I think that’s like stuff like, that’s really scary because it happens, it doesn’t get a ton of news because there’s so much other chaos going on. Like CNN is not covering the story about Kansas, like the New York Times, like they did.I think they maybe do like a single writeup of it, but that’s just kind of it. There’s no, it’s not like. Being treated like a crisis because it affects few, very few people and because there are bigger things going on. And in 2020 at the beginning of COVID, I remember one of the, one of the things that started to happen as, you had republican state legislatures that were like, I think they all, like, everyone kind of knew you had to do something about COVID.You you had to pass some policies and you had to, you couldn’t just not take any action on anything. So instead of doing that, instead of actually addressing the problems of, COVID and trying to manage them in the best way they could, because, a lot of states were basically like, Yeah. we’re not gonna have any rules and it’s just gonna be free for all and good luck.You had states that where schools were not in session, [00:46:00] because COVID sports, school sports were definitely not happening. And yet there were, that was when the big push to start banning trans kids from playing high school sports and grade school sports started like really got kicked into gear was during COVID when the schools were shut down and sports weren’t happening, they would go in there and they would pass these bills that were ex, they would flag them as like emergency bills that need to go into effect immediately.And, the rest of the world wasn’t really paying attention to what was happening. So they kind of were able to more or less push these things through. Democrats would vote against it. But in a lot of these states, that doesn’t really matter because, in Kansas, for instance, there’s a democratic governor who vetoed the bill, but.It, that veto got o you know, they overwrote the veto. But like the only hope of pushback when you don’t have the votes on your side is that there will be media coverage. That there will be, boycotts of the state or something like that, which is what you saw in 2016 when North Carolina dipped its toes into the anti-trans laws.Which looking at that, like that law compared to like what’s going on in states right now is so, I’m sure there are people who would look at that and go, that’s pretty moderate. That’s pretty, oh it was a bathroom ban in federal or in state-owned buildings.That’s not a huge deal. That’s, why isn’t that everywhere? But it was a huge thing to where there was backlash and you had the NBA All-Star game was supposed to be in Charlotte and had to move because people were boycotting North Carolina and all of this. But like now the state implements these like laws andSHEFFIELD: Yeah.MOLLOY: everyone shrugs and it just kind of goes, okay.Durable political change follows cultural changeSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I will say that, on the issue of trans rights, that I think the advocates for didn’t learn enough from the battle for same-sex marriage [00:48:00] because that battle was won in the legal and political sectors after it was won in the cultural sectors. And that’s, whereas with trans rights, I think people, a lot of people were like, okay, yeah, all right, we got, we got the marriage rights now, marriage equality, okay, now let’s immediately go to trans rights through legislation and all this other stuff.And it’s like. Right. At this point a lot of people didn’t even know that trans people existed.MOLLOY: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: that, and because it, you didn’t see trans representation in media. And soMOLLOY: and the, the thing aboutSHEFFIELD: You can’t win. Sorry. So you can’t win politically if you haven’t made, you have, when you’re making a, an argument for progressive change, there is an unfortunate, somatic discomfort with anything new and unfamiliar, and that has to be overcome, and it can only be overcome through personal interventions and cultural interventions.First.MOLLOY: And that’s the tricky thing. It is. Because, after the marriage equality ruling in 2015, all of the anti, all of the conservative anti-marriage equality groups, like, they kind of regrouped and they were like, we need to pivot to something we can win and we need to aim our firepower at that.And so they kind of shifted to, okay, we’re gonna go after trans people. Because there, like there haven’t actually been a lot of big like, pushes for protran laws. Like a lot of the bills that get introduced in states, that are protran are like just sort of protecting against like things being taken away.SHEFFIELD: Crimination.MOLLOY: yeah. Like anti-discrimination laws, but like. It was kind of basically there, there were only two states in the entire, in 2018, there were only two states in the entire country that where trans person couldn’t, under any circumstances, update their [00:50:00] birth certificate. Which is kind of crazy to think about right now.Like, we didn’t advance from that to like, okay, now every state can it, it went from like, okay, only two states block you from doing this. Like other states had, the more conservative states would have like, really strict requirements on like surgery and what kind of surgery you need to have before you can update your documents or something like that.But yeah it went backwards fast. It was a lot of people realizing, like learning for the first time what existing policy was. Then being like, oh, I don’t like that. I, oh wait, you mean they can, they’ve been able to use the same bathroom as me for decades. Oh, I don’t like that. We gotta change that.It was a lot of that. And the suddenly trans people became hyper exposed in media and it wasn’t really something that trans people as a whole, I can’t speak for trans people as a whole, but most trans people I know weren’t like. Super thrilled when Time Magazine was like the transgender tipping point because you had a single trans woman on a Netflix streaming show, which that was when people did not watch TV shows on Netflix.There were like a total, there was House of Cards and there was Oranges, the New Black and like one other one out there. These were not like, huge things. And you had, because you had one trans woman as a recurring character on a TV show. Time Magazine was like, congrats guys. You did it. And then you had ca, Caitlyn Jenner coming out probably made things so much worse because she’s just a disaster of a human being. And and it made things really difficult because for a like a year there, or year two, three. You had media outlets trying to [00:52:00] raise up to be like, here’s this group that people don’t understand.You should learn more about them. And we, we’ll amplify trans voices and stuff like that. But then Donald Trump takes office and around 20 17, 20 18, all of that stuff kind of fades because the chaos of Trump won is happening. And you start to see more anti-trans focus in media, and not as much, like positive representation out there.Because I mean, growing up. The only trans representation there ever was like the Jerry Springer show and the movie Ace Ventura Pet Detective. So, where the villain is outed as a trans woman at the end. And then Ace Ventura by, played by Jim Carrey because he had like kissed her earlier in the movie.He has a scene where he vomits for like three minutes straight or something like that. It’s like, that was kind of like growing up, that was my exposure to the idea of trans people. And I think that for a lot of people, that was kind of it. And then you had this tiny window where media was trying to. Give trans people more of a platform to create a will and grace type moment, which that people will always point back to, will and Grace being a show on NBC improving pub, the public’s opinions of gay people.And it just wa it just didn’t sustain. And now then you had years and years of kind of attacks and it’s now to the point where unfortunately what happens is you can, because, if I went, okay, I am going to seek out a story of a, actually Breitbart used to have a vertical on its website that was labeled black [00:54:00] crime, and you click it and it’s just.Stories about black people committing crimes. That was all it was. And the entire strategy there was to get you to feel a certain way about, about black people and committing crimes and to really shape that. And during the first Trump administration, they kind of did that where they did like, immigrant crime where they would put out reports where they’re like here, you had some illegal immigrants committing acts of crime.Look at this. Which, that, that strategy, it, during World War ii, the Nazis would do that. Where they’d be like, look here’s Jews who committed crimes and stuff like that. Now that happens with trans people and we’re just this tiny, little, tiny, little percentage of the population.And it’s like, yeah, there are gonna be trans people who commit crimes and there are gonna be trans people who are weird and there are gonna be trans people who are very off-putting. Sometimes I am one of them. But it’s like, it’s just so easy for right wing outlets to, to find those examples.Especially with the internet, especially with social media.SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, you got a country with, close to 400 million people in it. Of course there are going to be some assholes and some criminals of whatever demographic. Like Ben Shapiro is really mad at Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson for being antisemitic, which they appear to be.and he, he, he keeps saying, well, that’s unacceptable. We can’t have this kind of bigotry in conservatism, and it’s. Well, you opened the door to this buddy. You are the one that said it’s great to have bigotry against immigrants or against trans people, or, whatever group or black people.Ben Shapiro has been very racist toward black people as well. So like, they, they don’t care about how this might affect them down the road. [00:56:00] They really don’t. And so they will say whatever, whatever it takes to get them an advantage. And so that is ultimately why you do have to, if you are gonna oppose these people in the generic sense as a party, you have to stand up for everybody because it, because otherwise you’re gonna lose.And like, and to go back to the UK labor point, so now the polling there as we’re recording today, I saw a poll that. That to your point that showed the Reform port party as the number one party and the Green party as number two. So labor isn’t even number two or, anymore.So it’s like they’ve eaten up their own coalition and offended people because people are like, well, why am I voting for you if you’re not standing up for the people for the ideas? So like, on the left, center, left, people actually do vote for policies. So you can’t you can’t.This is a losing strategy and all it does is make bigotry worse.MOLLOY: Yeah. Ex. Exactly. And it’s, it’s one of those things that it’s, I just kind of have to hope, and being trans, I have to hope that, the Democrats hold strong because as there was a, there was an article that Erin Reed who she writes a newsletter called Erin in the Morning.It’s all about trans issues. She had something that was like, why trans people aren’t feeling Gavin Newsom. Like why? If you bring up the name Gavin Newsom, some trans people kind of recoil. And it’s because, he’d have Charlie Kirk on his podcast and he’d talk about how like, Yeah, you’ve got some reasonable concerns.And I.understand that. And it’s like Charlie Kirk, his sense of her he said some horrible things about trans people. But you know, it’s the thing is like if you create a situation where you don’t have one party, at least one of your two major parties fighting for trans people’s rights or opposing efforts to strip trans people’s rights, and it just becomes the political consensus.That’s very bad for trans people. Like very bad. And suddenly you have no one [00:58:00] really fighting for you. Like the Green Party in the UK is is Protran basically. But it’s one of one of those things that’s just like, you don’t wanna have a situation where there’s a consensus. Yeah.We all agree. Trans people are bad. And Labor gave that up, like gave up trans issues because they wanted to take it off the table. They wanted to, you, they didn’t wanna get attacked about it anymore. And it turns out most people don’t cast their votes based on trans issues, pro or against.I mean, and that both works in trans people’s favor. Against trans people. Because it makes it hard if you’re being oppressed to if no one actually cares whether or not that’s happening, which is kind of, which is kind of the reality. it’s so, so it’s like there’s very little to gain by for, from Democrats like shifting to the right on trans issues.But you know. It’s it would be disastrous for trans people as a whole if that were to happen. And I think that’s why the, trans people are really scared and kind of, kind of freaked out right now about like, what’s gonna happen. Like, what direction is this party going in, is this going to be a party that defends trans people?Because there are Democrats who are very good on trans rights. JB Pritzker here in Illinois very good on trans rights. He, it’s not that he’s signing a whole bunch of protran laws or talking about trans people all the time. He just, whenever it comes up, he’s just like, he puts his foot down and he says he supports trans people.Like, that’s cool. That’s all anyone’s really asking for. And I think that had Republicans not sunk $200 million or whatever into the. For, they, them ads in 2024 that this wouldn’t be as, as much of an issue. But people saw those ads [01:00:00] and they had a very they had a very specific reaction to them, and they were like, oh, I’m seeing these all the time.I bet this is making people feel weird. And I don’t want my party people to think that I’m weird, and so I’m gonna, like it’s gonna sit in the back of my mind. And I think that there are a lot of, like Democrats and Democratic strategists who saw that and they, they’ve inflated the weight that voters actually put on the trans issues,Glenn Youngkin and the myth that voters are obsessed with hating trans peopleSHEFFIELD: I think this, this tendency, this belief that, voters are obsessed with hating trans people. It really started after Glenn Youngin won the Virginia Governor’s wait race during Joe Biden’s presidency and, off, off your election of, 2022 and.The thing is, like, this was another of those thermostatic elections. So the Virginia Governor race pretty much almost always goes to the person who is the party opposite of the president. That’s pretty much how it always goes. And, and today’s sec it doesn’t, it goes toward Democrats in, in the past, few decades.And so, so Glenn Youngin won a squeaker of an election, and he did talk about trans stuff a lot and, anti COVID safety precautions and whatnot like, but people were like, oh, it was the trans issues that got him the election and this is why he won. Well, and then fast forward to four years later in 2025, well, the Republican who was running in that race, she talked pretty much only about hating trans people in her election. And she got her ass kicked by Abigail Span Berger.So. I think, it is astonishing to me that everybody who was like, oh, voters hate trans people. Voters hate trans people. They didn’t turn around and say, oh, well voters must love trans people. Because I have a big berger won the election. And it’s like, what?You can’t have it both ways here, guys. Like, the reality is it’s [01:02:00] just not a big issue for anybody on either side of the aisle. And so, so you should deal with that and just do what you want. If you are a Democrat and you support trans rights, just fucking do it and it’s not gonna hurt you.MOLLOY: Yeah. Which, I, whenever I see polling about like how people view Democrats, they, it’s not so much, oh, they’re too liberal. They’re too, they’re too progressive. Whatever. It’s they’re weak. They don’t believe in anything, and I think like. That’s the worst thing to be seen as a politician, is as to not stand for anything to, to if you’re running as a Democrat.I think that, again when you’re running on a kind of fascist agenda, like, like Trump, he doesn’t really believe anything. He, but he sells it in this strong man kind of way that in a way that Democrats just can’t, like, you can’t be like, I don’t know what I believe but I would like to raise taxes on, some top tier of earners.It’s like something like, like that just does, it just doesn’t work that way. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta stand for something. And that’s what I, to kind of, to circle it back to the the talk about the war to go, to come full circle on that. It’s like. Now is the chance to take a stand that has public support and to like, put your feet in the ground to say, I don’t think we should, I don’t think we should be at war with Iran, or, I don’t think we should continue to do whatever.Like, just to say something firmly, as opposed to doing the whole like, Yeah. I can agree that Iran is bad, but Trump didn’t ask us permission before he invaded. Stuff like that. I think that especially Democrats who wanna run for president in the future, like re they [01:04:00] have to remember how much the Iraq war like weighed on.In the 2020 or 2008 primary with Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, she voted for to invade Iraq. And he wasn’t in a position where he had to vote on that at that point. So that, that worked out in his favor. And he spoke against the war. And I, there were a lot of, I, I think especially younger voters who resonated with that.And it’s more that it’s like, yeah, you stood for something you believed something you took a position. You’re gonna shut down Guantanamo Bay, which didn’t happen. But, to I think that there’s this real fear among democratic politicians, especially to stand for anything to really truly stand for anything.Because if you ask me what Kamala Harris believes. I don’t know. It’s changed over the years and she, she won’t give clear answers sometimes, and sometimes when she does, it’s just kind of talking herself in a circle. And I don’t think that resonates with people. I don’t think that resonates with voters who are, plugged in.And it’s not so much, I do think that there’s a risk of just taking, having people who do pay attention to politics and do care about these things, just starting to tune out if it feels like no one’s fighting for them. Like, people got really excited for Zoran Ma Donni, and, because, ‘cause he had concrete, like ideas that he stood for it, that he wanted to implement as mayor in New York.And now he’s doing that and. People seem to have, strong opinions. One, one way or another about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, because she takes stands and she believes in things. I don’t think that anyone’s like, oh, [01:06:00] like Seth Moulton. He’s the guy I wanna like, like, I wanna get behind.Like, he’s the one I can believe in, or, Dean Phillips or any of these like, kind of like weird rissy, kind kinds of Democrats where it’s just like, you just wanna be in power. You don’t really care what you’re asked to do after that, basically.Liberals and progressives must move beyond criticizing othersSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or it’s John Fetterman, but, but on, on the other side, you look at it isn’t even necessarily about ideology either. Like that’s, that is something that I do think people on in the different Sides of the Democratic Party also have to realize. So, like people, in New York have really come to like, Madani, but they also like Abigail Span Berger.And the thing that both of them ha in, have in common in their, in their states is that they do stand for things and they fight hard for them. And that’s what people want. and in terms of your specific economic policies or whatever, people will take, take those or leave those, but they want to know that you’re on their side and they want to see you fighting for them, however you define what that is.And we could even say that Trump himself has done that. Like that is why at least some of his people, or maybe most of them, like, that’s why they support him ‘cause they see him as fighting for them and. And so you gotta do that.But, and so maybe let’s let’s just go to the last topic here, which is that, so as much as bad things have gotten for trans people, I, there, there have been a couple of recent controversies and one of them involving yourself on Blue Sky, but also more recently involving the New York Times columnist, Jamelle Bouie. And there’s a of people saying that Jamelle Bouie is trans phobe or that you, your are [01:08:00] yourself are not sufficiently supportive of trans people.And this is exactly what the Christofascists want people to be doing. I don’t think that people get that, like there politics, if you are a progressive person, it has to be more than just, therapy.Like it activism, criticizing people on the internet is not activism. You actually have to be doing something and, tearing apart people on your own side are not a hundred percent agreeing with you. Look, and even if they did something that you thought was wrong, that doesn’t mean that they have to be banished or whatever.And I feel like, I don’t know it’s tough. I, but I haven’t, experienced it like you have. Or you wanna just say it from your side then,MOLLOY: Yeah. So, so basically it was like five minutes before we started recording this, that I noticed a bunch of notifications on Blue Sky that were like, people who were like, I’m so disappointed in you And I’m like oh God. What? Yeah.I guess a few days ago there was a trans woman who got in, like, disagreed with Jamelle over something and then posted something like to the effect of like, trans woman breathes Jamel Bowie, shut up. Or something like that. Like that was the post.And it was like obviously exaggerated for effect. And he posted that and he wrote What is going on with this site? And Blue Sky can be a lot sometimes and I just wrote very weird and didn’t look into it anymore because I thought I was like, chimal is. Like he, he’s written pro-trans articles for the New York Times.Which The New YorkSHEFFIELD: Four years.MOLLOY: Yeah. For years.This is, he’s like, he’s gone on, on podcasts hosted by, Caitlyn Burns who’s a trans woman. He went on her podcast recently and, he’s a helpful guy and I think he’s really insightful. He’s a much, much better writer than I am.Extremely smart. And I assumed that this was people. ‘cause every once in a while there will be people who will kind of take this [01:10:00] position of being like, oh yeah. The New York Times is evil, and anyone who works for the New York Times is also evil. And the same thing can be, people will say about the Atlantic or the Economist or any of these other legacy media type places.And I don’t think that, like, I don’t think it’s an incorrect view to have. It’s, I it’s a view that I think people are perfectly welcome to, to hold. That they’re not gonna support someone who works for an institution. They see as harmful to them, which I totally understand that. And I kind of just assumed it was about that specifically.But yeah I wrote “very weird.” And then I got people who were like, you called a trans woman weird. And you took his side in this, in, in this argument, and I need to like look into like what their back and forth was. But Blue Sky makes it really difficult sometimes because when one person blocks another, it becomes like almost impossible on the actual Blue Sky app to, to look up like what was said.SHEFFIELD: Well, literally, yeah, itMOLLOY: yeah, it just it’s, yes. Which, you know what, I think that’s probably one of the best features of Blue Sky, that it’s just like that you block and it’s a nuclear, it’s just gone. But yeah, so it’s, but I thi I think it’s, we’re at this kind of point where there’s a lot of frustration among trans people in particular because we’re not heard, we’re not often given.Platforms in, in these elite publications to the last time the New York Times published anything by me was 2018. And like, and that was rare. And I, having that platform even at that time, like that puts me at a really different [01:12:00] level than someone whose only ability to get their voice out and to express themselves is to post on Blue Sky or Twitter or wherever and to, to maybe be frustrated with how things are going.And, it’s just one of those, one of those things that I hope that. I hope that we can all kind of talk to each other a bit more. especially when it’s people who, who fundamentally do agree on things like, should trans people have rights, should trans people have be attacked nonstop, because it’s, we trans people need allies in this, in this, the, the way forward because trans people often aren’t going to get aren’t going to get a lot of space in the New York Times or the Atlantic.the Atlantic today, as trans people are having, in Kansas we talked about that. What’s happening there? The Atlantic ran a piece that was like, are we sure that gay men aren’t being told that they’re trans and being forced to transition or something like that. It was in defense of effeminate gay boys or something like that.And it’s really frustrating because they’ll give space to these, those sorts of stories all the time.SHEFFIELD: Which by the way, that is the opinion of the Iranian MOAs. That’s literally what they do to anyone who is gay.MOLLOY: Yeah. Which is, and so it’s one of those things where it’s like, it sucks that all of these institutions are constantly doing that. Or they’re running, the New York Times running 10 different pieces about like, are trans kids getting healthcare too easily?It’s actually very difficult to get any sort of trans healthcare, like the idea that, oh, kids are being tricked into this and their parents don’t know what’s going on and, all this stuff. It’s just not very accurate. And the fact that, the New York Times will run, article after article on this when none of the [01:14:00] science has changed really on, on this stuff in ever in, in a decade or two.But, the politics have changed and all these stories aren’t about like, changes in science, they’re just changes in like, well, which way is the political wind blowing? And I don’t think these outlets care that by running all these stories, what they’re doing. If you’ve run a bunch of stories that are like, is there something wrong with trans kids?Are trans people getting healthcare too easily? You’re gonna start to think. Maybe trans people are getting healthcare too easily. Like all of that stuff, it’s gonna build up and it’s going to shift public opinion as it has. Someone was trying to look up like when the last time a trans person wrote a pro trans piece in the Atlantic, and like the most recent piece someone could find was from 2018, which is, that’s a long time.Meanwhile they’re they’re, they have a, they have columnists who regularly post anti-trans stuff. They multiple pieces that just in 2026. And so I understand the frustration and. I don’t know how to fix that. How to fix the fact that people are angry and they’re upset and for good reason.It sucks feeling like you don’t have a voice, and it sucks. Even if you have a voice, have a, have something of a platform that you’re, you’ll feel like you’re not doing enough with it or doing the right thing with it or wielding it in the best way possible. And so, that’s it’s a real, it’s a real challenge.So, Yeah. NowSHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s a challenge on both sides also, because in defense of the trans woman that was kind of initiated or became the focal point of this little mini scandal, , she’s has a small account and doesn’t have a lot of [01:16:00] followers and, he quote tweeted her saying something that was critical of him.And, and I think that’s just bad form. Like if you’re if you’ve got a zillion followers on social media, you shouldn’t be quote, tweeting somebody who’s on your own side by and large. And even if you think they were a. You can tell ‘em in a reply that they’re a jerk. You don’t need to sick your entire followers on them and be like, Hey, look at this asshole.Like, and so she didn’t like that. And a lot of trans people didn’t like what happened to her. So like, it’s not a thing where I think, everybody was perfect or one side was perfect. We have to like, I mean, this is, this goes back to the paradox that, the right wing, the fascists, the reactionaries, they embrace being evil.So like the only way you can effectively oppose them is to be good and to be charitable, and to be nice to the people on your own side. And I know that sucks sometimes because sometimes people are rude and nasty and or obtuse or whatever you don’t like about it. Yes, it’s true. But we can’t we have to be respectful of our own side.Everybody does.MOLLOY: Cool. That’s good place. Good place to end it.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Alright, well, yeah. All right, well then this is good and I’m glad we got to hit on allMOLLOY: Yeah, absolutely. It’s great. Great talking to you. But yeah, I I have to now go get my dog’s food because they are hungry.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.It’s much appreciated. I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit plus.flux.communityDonald Trump was swept into office by an elaborate series of lies about his radical policies, but more than a year into his second term, the less-engaged independent voters who powered his victory have turned firmly against the president.But as low as Trump’s approval ratings have fallen, the Democratic Party’s favorability among Americans is even lower.How is this possible and what does it mean? Depending on who you ask, you’ll get a very different answer. Usually, however, the criticism boils down to: Democrats aren’t promoting my own personal policy opinions.The hard truth, however, people don’t want to accept is that many, if not most, voters have policy viewpoints that aren’t fixed, which means that focusing your campaign strategies based solely on public opinion is not going to work.Democracy in America is severely endangered because one the country’s two major parties has become a fascistic personality cult. But a strategy of protecting democracy by winning every election forever is doomed to failure.So what to do instead? That’s an answer that I can’t give you in a single podcast episode, although be sure to subscribe nonetheless! But what I can say is that democracy defenders must think bigger and be much more open to new voices and new ideas.And joining me for today’s conversation is a friend of the show, David Atkins. He’s a member of the Democratic National Committee and also a contributor to Washington Monthly.The full discussion of this episode is for paid subscribers. An excerpt on YouTube is available, but you will need to be a premium member on Patreon or Substack to watch, read, or listen to the full discussion. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere. (Note: Purchasing a book through the links in show notes helps support Theory of Change.)Related Content--The 2025 elections showed that more than anything, people want Democrats who fight Trump--Republican operatives completely reconfigured politics, their Democratic rivals have not kept up--How the American left became post-political, and how to change it--Republicans built a massive infrastructure to attack democracy, Democrats have not made one to defend it--Democrats get lots of bad advice, particularly the idea that most voters are ideological--In 2024, Donald Trump bet big on ‘unlikely voters’ who have sat on the margins of American politicsAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:13 — QAnon as a religion of narcissism12:18 — What conspiracism offers middle-aged and older women20:13 — Media proliferation and political manipulations have made conspiracy belief much easier28:27 — The women of January 6th faced widely divergent economic circumstances34:32 — Charismatic evangelicalism as the common starting point for QAnon believers44:02 — Astrology, space aliens, and QAnon48:44 — ‘Soul contracts’ and tragic morality52:49 — Right-wing politicians harm society and then use the nihilism they engender as campaign leverage55:42 — What do QAnon believers think about the Epstein files now?01:04:35 — Prevention is easier than de-radicalizationAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is David Atkins. Hey, Dave. Good to see you back on the show.DAVID ATKINS: Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me on.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So you are a member of the Democratic National Committee, but you are here in your personal capacity.ATKINS: Yes.SHEFFIELD: So we want to make sure to point that out.ATKINS: Yes. I’m not an official spokesperson for the DNC in this interview.SHEFFIELD: Yes. All right, so with that out of the way one of the topics that I wanted to talk about here today is that Donald Trump, as I think everybody by now, or at least people who watch or listen to this podcast, knows and read you is that Donald Trump, he won not because of the fanatical fascistic, right wing, he won because he kind of misled a lot of people who didn’t know very much about politics, and those marginal Trump voters appear to have pretty much turned against him at this point.And his approval ratings are the lowest they’ve ever been. And in some polls actually even lower than they were after January 6th 2021. So, But the paradoxical thing is that the Democratic Party is rated as less popular in polls.And I think that’s, it’s causing some people to kind of project, a lot of their own personal biases onto that data set. But there’s a lot going on there. And, but ultimately, I mean, voters are still, they’re still choosing the Democrats in elections.ATKINS: Right. I think it, There’s a lot on there. When you look at a statistic like such and such number of people dislike or like the Republican party or such and such or like the [00:04:00] Democratic Party that is genuine, that is generally. A confluence many different Factors. there’s an old sort of in, in religious studies that every religion is sort of like a flashlight on the elephant, that everybody’s sort of got a spotlight that nobody can see.The whole elephant. I think you have a similar thing going on here. So you have the moderates who are saying, oh, this means that the Democratic Party is too far to the left and need to come back to the center. you’ve got leftists who are saying, well, the Party is bad on this issue or that issue.And if they were only farther left, I think it really depends the person. I think it’s all of those things are true for different segments of the electorate, which makes solving the problem challenging. But I think one thing you can say is there are a few major reasons for happening. Number one, you have a low trust society in general, so all institutions are suffering across the board. Approval of every major institution is down.That having been said, not making excuses for the state of the, Democratic Party approval. ‘cause I’ve been talking to various leaders in the party about a lot with some alarm, I think. Yes, right. There some people who have joined the Trump Coalition who used to vote for Democrats, who feel that the party has shifted too far left on issues.But rather than take the Yglesias sort of angle this that has been happening since the 1960s, you have been having realignment shifts this for the last past 50 or 60 years. And that doesn’t mean that you need to stop expanding rights or do or stop advancing social change. And in any case, it’s not Democratic candidates or the Democratic Party officially that is advancing civil rights in this way, that is making those voters uncomfortable.So there’s only so much the party per se can do about that. So when Matt Yglesias and those folks say, oh, the party needs to shift to the right, I mean. They’re not talking about party candidates, they’re talking about random [00:06:00] activists on social media. So good luck, I guess. There is also another segment of people who are absolutely furious Gaza or some other issue.And again, though, know, you can’t really fault candidates so much for this, and candidates who have taken much more left positions on those issues are not actually fairing better in elections by and large, with some exceptions. And we can talk about the Mamdani Coalition and all of that, and I’m very supportive of a OC and Mamdani and those folks.But it’s not exactly an electoral panacea. It’s not like if every candidate adopted those positions, the party’s fortunes would be reversed. It’s not that simple either. I think the biggest thing that is impacting though approval of the Democratic Party, ironically, is from core normie Democrats. You ask a core Normie Democrat who shows up to a No Kings protest.And is with Trump, if they approve of the Democratic Party, by and large, they’re going to say no. Not because they like Trump, not because they think the party is too far left or too far right, but because the party is not doing a big, a good enough job of standing up to the Republicans. And look what some strategists and Chuck Schumer might say is, oh, we’re doing exactly what we need to do to win elections.Look how well we’re doing winning elections. Well, okay, maybe, but there’s more to politics, ironically than winning the next election, right? You’ve gotta keep people engaged and believing in you as an institution, believing in your values. Otherwise, you’re just going to get a thermostatic effect where, okay, you win the next election, but the next time people get upset over inflation or whatever, you lose again.And if your entire premise of how you defeat fascism is we have to win every single election. Rather than we have to end fascism at its root, then you’re going to lose. So there has to be more than [00:08:00] just, oh, we’re doing whatever it takes to win the next election by looking calm and looking like good guys.So it’s a lot of things I think.For voters, ideology matters less than activitySHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And we’ll come back to the thermostatic issue later. But yeah, I, it’s it is shaping up when we look at the candidates who did win in the past 2025 election the major candidates who won, what we’re seeing is that, yeah, that the real access of approval for Democrats or energy is yeah, how is, how much you want to oppose Trump.And it’s not as even as much of an ideological barrier. So like we see, for instance, with Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger has, recently come out with some pretty tough restrictions on the Trump Ice Thugs and what they’re allowed to do legally within the state. And, the degree to which Virginia law enforcement officers are allowed to cooperate with them or provide them information.And, so this is somebody who in the conventional left right intra Democratic Party splits. This is not somebody who is on the further left of the party, but on the other hand, she also shares that desire to vigorously oppose the authoritarianism of Donald Trump that, that Zoran Mamdani does.ATKINS: Right. No, exactly. And this is one of the things, like I, I was not a big span Spanberger supporter because she was on sort of the moderate side of a lot of policy fights that I was not approving of. But look at what I mean. Now I’m a big span Spanberger fan because hey, like those, she’s, that she’s not annoying me on any policy fights in Virginia, but what she is doing is standing up really strongly to Trump and ICE.And I couldn’t be happier about that. And I know a lot of other folks who were span Spanberger skeptics who are very happy with her as well. And think that if we have more of that in a real way, I think, that will also be helpful. [00:10:00] You do see a lot of politicians sometimes in a cringey way coming out and using, F-bombs this kind of language and, using stronger language now, which is nice to see, as long as it actually feels natural.But you know, actually stepping forward and. Demanding say to visit ICE detention centers or actually, stepping forward and throwing real sand in the gears of the Trump regime. what people are looking for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it, and to kind of boil it down a bit here, what we’re seeing is that there’s kind of a, I would say that, there, there are your policy views, there is your operation style and then there’s your communication style. And those are the three things that, that people are really caring about.And, and what it’s looking like is that there is kind of a, a real alignment that’s shaping up in terms of communication style and operation style, that people are realizing. The bigger problem here is that we have to stop fascism first, and then build the case simultaneously for, a society that, that does address the issues that people are are concerned about and, but also is willing to talk about democracy. because like, I guess that has been a debate point as well within the party that a lot of people have said, well, the public doesn’t care about protecting democracy. And other people say, well, no, they do.And it’s, I, it, I don’t think you can say one way or the other. It’s a matter of how you do it, is what I would say.ATKINS: No, I agree. And I think that G Elliot Morris, for instance, has had some very compelling data recently that people do care a great deal about protecting democracy. It also really matters. And this is sort of a, a cart/horse like [00:12:00] chicken/egg egg kind problem. In the sense that if you take the popularist view, which is based in large part upon a bunch of quantitative survey data, and we could go into all of the challenges with quant data.I, I’m a qualitative, research guy by trade and man, like the mistakes that you can make just by paying attention to what a quantitative survey says are enormous. But of course, if you ask people on a quantitative survey what they care more about the price of groceries or, threats to democracy, most people are of course going to save the price of groceries.But there’s a huge emotional investment in democracy as an idea. And if your leaders are not talking full throated about the problems and the threats to democracy in a way that sounds more like, that, sounds like more than just. The heated political rhetoric of the day. But if you manage to show people no, like you are actually not going to be able to vote for your leaders, you’re not, there’s actually going to be an accountability problem in the, in your democracy.And these people are trying to set themselves up to rule for life. People do care about that. People do want to step to defend that. And we and what’s been shown in the data is not only are people actually concerned about this and increasingly concerned about this more than they were six months ago, in part because of the actions of the Trump administration, but also because when you have leaders not named Chuck Schumer, but actual thought leaders who are now actually more credible on the left and within the Democratic Party who are actively talking about this, people pay attention.Journalists pay attention, it becomes more part of the conversation. And lo and behold, voila, people start to care about it, even in the quantitative survey data. So you don’t just have to reflect whatever the public opinion is from six months ago. In a survey, you [00:14:00] also have a role in talking about the issues of the day and shifting public opinion because you’re not, and not even in a way that changes people’s minds, but that changes the salience of the issue.That changes their focus and their understanding.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And we’ll get into that, but I want to circle back to the problem with claiming that your ideas are just pure math, which is what a lot of people that especially of the the self-identified popularist that’s they often say that they’re just doing math but they’re really not.And but even aside from, the fact that they are trying to promote their own ideological preferences, which they never state that, but setting their preferences aside though, just the, and I can say this as somebody who, used to do polls and write about them.So obviously I, I think polls are very useful and important. But they’re far less scientific than people imagine them to be, in part because just the very act of taking a survey is altering your mindset. And so it’s take, it’s taken you out of your regular mindset of your, which it would be your ballot voting mindset.But it’s also, it is a, it requires the pollster and the person to have the same understanding of the question, and there’s no proof that is true.ATKINS: No.SHEFFIELD: It’s like it relies on a fundamentally qualitative assumption, without ever saying, saying it.ATKINS: Right. Yeah. Look, I mean, people have complicated thoughts about politics generally, especially undecided voters or cross pressured voters, people whose vote is not already taken for granted. Typically, your partisans, I mean, they also have your partisans, your deep partisans also have complicated thoughts about politics, [00:16:00] but also somewhat more predictable, but especially people whose votes are winnable on either side.Tend to be either more ignorant of the issues or they tend to be really crushed, pressured and conflicted, or both right to where if you ask them to explain themselves, if you ask them to explain what they think about an issue, you’ll get some confused and maybe some contradictory, but also some, complicated views on subjects like education or maybe, trans rights or maybe, taxation or what, or housing or what have you.When you boil that down into a response to a poll question, right, and you’re a sophisticated pollster, you understand this, first of all even just baseline, the way you ask a poll question can have enormous biasing effects into the answers that you get. get. But even at that, this sort of goes back to George Lakoff and frames of the world and all that, people operate with a lot of different frames in their mind about how the world works.And depending on which frame of how the world works, you’re activating, sometimes contradictory, sometimes parallel. People can come to different conclusions about what is important or how they want to perceive the issue. That you cannot possibly reflect in a bubble answer on a quantitative poll.And you can get those to say almost anything that you want within reason. Whereas if you ask someone, Hey, what do you think about housing? What should we do about housing? In your ideal world in a focus group, that you’ll get a lot more honest answers. Of course, then you are, subject to the interpretations of a focus group when a consultant decides to write a report, but by and large, you’re going to get much better idea of [00:18:00] how the world works and how the electorate functions by just listening to a cross section of maybe 60 undecided voters than you will getting the captured survey responses from a thousand.It may be statistically significant per the mathematics of stat of stats, but the gar, but the data you’re getting is garbage. It’s in, garbage out. For the most part. It, well, it’s not total garbage, but it’s not nearly as useful as a guideline as people want to believe it’s.The limits of polling and quantitative dataSHEFFIELD: Even if they did understand the question you might be catching them in a moment where one particular opinion of theirs about this issue is more salient in their mind. And then if you were to talk to them the next day, another aspect might be more salient depending on whatever their circumstances are.And so. And to be fair, polls do always say that this is just a snapshot in time. And I would say that the actual polls themselves are far more nuanced about what can be learned from polling than the popularists who kind of have like a, I mean, I call it cargo cult social science.Like that’s what they’re kind of doing. They’re not, most of them do not do polls themselves with some exception. And so they don’t under, they don’t have direct experience at how fungible everything is, even though they know in principle about question wording distortions and whatnot, until you’ve actually seen it with your own I just, it I don’t see, I don’t see it as critical.ATKINS: Right. And I think that the last thing that’s really important, and that’s become very obvious this last year of the Trump administration, is there’s a very big difference between talking about theoretical policies on paper. And the actual implementations of those policies when it comes to [00:20:00] their real and emotional impacts.Right? So say immigration, it’s one thing to ask people when the general media environment on social media, Fox News, and everywhere else has been ramping up this mass hysteria about, about, immigration to say, oh, do you want to deport all people who are not here legally and you’ll get a high number?Do you want to close the border entirely and deport everyone who lives here? And, in advance of the 2024 election, you were seeing fairly high numbers for that, which led people to say, oh, the Democrats need to move left on immigration. But the problem is the actual implementation of that policy is horrific, economically destructive, socially devastating.Nobody what people have seen in the attempt to implement. Even A part of that policy, they hate what they’re seeing. You do the same thing for trans rights, right? Like where you, where ultimately you have to go down to what, genital inspections of teenagers like you, you’re the actual implementation of policies that might sound good to people on paper end up being horrific in practice.And it’s one thing to ask about that in theory. It’s another thing when it comes to the real world of politics and whether you want to allow those dry policies on paper and the questionnaire responses of about that to drive the way you talk about it in a debate or on a policy stump speech or in an advertisement where you explain what these policies actually mean.You can’t be scared by a 54% approval number for a horrific policy. You can’t be scared about talking about what that actually means in terms of implementation. The Democrats did a terrible job of talking about what these policies would actually mean, which meant that Stephen Miller and his people thought they had a green light to do horrific things.The public doesn’t actually likeThe thermostatic nature of public opinion and Republican deceptionSHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:22:00] Well, and that does, go to the thermostatic nature of public opinion. So, so within pub political science just for people who are not familiar with the term, thermo, the theory of thermostatic public opinion is that. A lot of voters, perhaps even most are motivated more about opposing things that they don’t like, than than having an affirmative vision.And so there is this kind of core, large core of voters who are persuadable by either party. Because whenever the par, whenever a party gets into power, they do things that, can be, the, these are the actual instantiations of the ideas. And sometimes people are like, oh gosh, I didn’t want that.And so, and we’re seeing a lot of that. Yeah. As you noted with regard to Donald Trump, that a lot of people are saying, well, I didn’t vote for him to do this. I didn’t vote for him to, cut cancer funding. I didn’t vote to, to ban federal funding for vaccines. I I didn’t vote, so they’re saying I didn’t vote for that.But in reality they did. They just were not educated enough about the positions of Trump on these issues. And that the thermostatic nature of public opinion, I think is, has, it has been a problem for Democrats because for Republicans are so deceptive and willing to lie about their policies and they’ve always been, since, ever since Mary Goldwater got wiped out in 1964, they’ve kind of realized, oh, well we can’t be upfront about what we actually want, and so we’re just going to, speak in generalities.Vague terms about people being responsible and and law and order, and stop talking about their actual full positions.

Episode SummaryWhen we hear the term “conspiracy theorist,” most people probably imagine someone who looks a bit like Alex Jones, a middle-aged white guy who’s slightly overweight and loves to scream. And to be sure, there are a lot of people out there like that—supporting Donald Trump as fanatically as possible. But the reality of American right-wing extremism includes many people who look completely different.Noelle Cook, my guest on today’s episode discovered that firsthand in her research on women who believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, which began, fatefully enough, when she coincidentally happened to be at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Conspiracism is a new type of religion, one that’s similar to past ones in having doctrines, leaders, and tales of apocalypse—but also different in that it’s much more narcissistic and self-directed than modern-day cults like Scientology or Heaven’s Gate.This is fascinating research that’s much deeper than the rural diner safaris than had become infamous in American media. Her findings are the basis of her new book, The Conspiracists: Women, Extremism, and the Lure of Belonging, as well as a film documentary about the women she profiles.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere. (Note: Purchasing a book through the links in show notes helps support Theory of Change.)Related Content--How the sex and drugs counterculture fell in love with Donald Trump and Jesus--Rather than moderate to find more voters, Republicans are using lurid Satanic fables to terrify fundamentalist Christians--How ‘tradwives’ use sex to sell religion--Charlie Kirk was a masterful political organizer, and a dangerous religious extremist--Far-right religion has been offering absurd and unhelpful advice to women for decades--Why conspiracy theories about the famous Rothschild family tell the history of antisemitism--Trumpism isn’t conservative, and saying this is still important--Far-right members of Congress are making the internet a safe space for misinformationAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:13 — QAnon as a religion of narcissism12:18 — What conspiracism offers middle-aged and older women20:13 — Media proliferation and political manipulations have made conspiracy belief much easier28:27 — The women of January 6th faced widely divergent economic circumstances34:32 — Charismatic evangelicalism as the common starting point for QAnon believers44:02 — Astrology, space aliens, and QAnon48:44 — ‘Soul contracts’ and tragic morality52:49 — Right-wing politicians harm society and then use the nihilism they engender as campaign leverage55:42 — What do QAnon believers think about the Epstein files now?01:04:35 — Prevention is easier than de-radicalizationAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: What makes your book different from a lot of others is that you are providing in-depth continuous conversations with specific people over time. So it’s like a longitudinal ethnography, if you will. And that’s a little different than most studies of misinformation and false beliefs, I think.Was that something you set out to do deliberately to profile these individuals, or you tried to do it originally as a group?NOELLE COOK: No, it was not something I set out to do originally. The only reason I ended up doing this is because of the timing and it was during the pandemic and I had entered a graduate program and needed a graduate thesis and in person research was not an option at that time. So I had taken a camera and gotten down to DC on January 6th to get images of the stop the steal rally to try to come up with a visual anthropology project.Clearly got different kind of pictures than I expected. All of my pictures are on the outside. I didn’t go anywhere near the building, but it was such a surreal experience to have discovered what actually happened that day when I got home and look at these pictures and see so many women, and I was looking at these first 100 women that had been arrested for.Entering the capital on January 6th and looking at their, their statements of facts and, and what they had done and what they were being charged with, that it really started to strike me. That, that the only similarity between these 100 women was generational. So that is how I started studying women, specifically middle aged [00:04:00] women.And that population came from January 6th, but quickly within the first year led me down a path into what became known to me as Cons, spirituality. Um, and I had never intended to study conspiracies. I had hoped to. I had deliberately avoided learning anything about Q Anon. because I don’t have that in my personal life.No one in my family is a conspiracist. Uh, but that is where every one of the women I was following took me. And you mentioned that it’s there’s this, this end depth study, and, and it was, I, I started talking to several women. I probably talked to about 12 people over a course of several months. But I ended up settling on two because it, it’s if I wanted to do what I wanted to do, which was to truly understand them, which is what ethnography demands, uh, ethnography wants you to go into a culture, uh, unlike your own and to observe as a participant and, uh, inhabit these spaces and understand what people are doing and what these practices mean to them.And so that is what I did is lurked for about a year in different spaces trying to understand what I was seeing because it, it ran the gamut between Q Anon conspiracies to anti-government conspiracies, to going all the way into theosophy and the IM movement that I had never heard of either.I didn’t ha I don’t have a religious background and so. I, in some ways that probably benefited me because I was able to see so many overlapping similarities in the way belief systems work and how conspiracies can also work as a faith-based system, which is what I’ve kind of concluded at this point.It’s not that unlike organized religion in many ways.SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. Yeah. They have doctrines. Absolutely, they do.COOK: It doesn’t have the structure and the accountability that’s supposed to be built into institutionalized faith-based systems and, and, you know, you can add to which you want, but it operates the exact same way. In fact, many of the women [00:06:00] I talked to who may have actually gone to physical churches prior to the pandemic after those restrictions and in-person gatherings were shut down.If you ask me as women now, what church they go to, they say, my, my church is here [in my heart].QAnon as a religion of narcissismSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and that is a thing that makes it harder to help people get out of this type of thinking, because unlike being in a authoritarian religious cult where there is a specific leader and they have things you’re, that they require you to do in places to be. This is choose your own adventure religion.And so that means, essentially, I mean, it’s, it is a religion of narcissism, so you’re always right. Even if you’re wrong, you’re right. and it’s harder if your predictions don’t work, then you can still come up with a thing to justify it.COOK: is that different though? This is the question I’m asking myself. I don’t know. Like I’ll ask you, knowing your background, like in some ways though, so you say narcissism, you keep being told things are gonna happen, but they don’t come true. Would you say the same thing then for. People who believe in apocalypse, for example, the people who put the data.I mean, I know that’s an extreme and we, don’t take that seriously, but there’s a lot of faith-based systems that ask you to keep waiting for something that’s going to happen that you just have to have faith will. Right. ISHEFFIELD: Yeah.COOK: So is that narcissism?SHEFFIELD: There is narcissism in that and and just simply the nature of, I personally know, what God is and what God wants, that is extremely narcissistic.And so, when you look at religions that have persisted over longer time periods, they’ve kind of burned a lot of that stuff away. In, because they, in their early years they were like that saying, Christianity, the early Christians were saying Jesus is gonna come back during our lifetime. Like that’s the story of the early apostles.COOK: [00:08:00] Conspiracists believe that too.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, so, but what’s different, I think though, with regard to this, kind of modern religion is that it, it’s self-directed in many ways, and that’s what makes it harder to help people get out of.COOK: It’s what makes it even more dangerous.SHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah, absolutely. And so it’s easier, it is both easier to weaponize and harder to falsify because technically, Donald Trump doesn’t tell these people to do anything.COOK: He doesn’t need to because it’s also a community that operates through signals and codes. The whole thing with conspiracists is to decode things. So if you’re at a Trump rally and you hear that thunder in the background coming from the loudspeakers and it’s playing that song, that’s a wink and a nod to keep the faith, the storm is coming and it’s kind of, to me, what I’ve grown over time, and this is absolutely not to be offensive towards organized religion, but I, as I move from saying these are just these delusional people who have just lost touch with reality.I, I, of course by the time I’m actually talking to people, I know that’s not true. Right. I know They’re not just mentally mental illness is not the reason here, there, there is the belonging and the participation factor for sure. But. When I started listening to some of the things they would tell me about their pr, their previous practices, spiritually, which was in organized churches, evangelical churches.SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.COOK: Some of those message, some of the messages in the, it is very easy to swap those for like the cons spirituality realm, because they all talk about a new, a problem being solved. You just have to be patient. You sometimes you have to suffer, right? But then there’s this great reward at the end for that, and if you are a Christian, you believe that’s heaven, that’s your great reward. And if you are a conspiracist, you believe that you’re ascending to earth in five D, which is basically heaven, except you’re still alive, I guess. I’ve never quite under, I still haven’t really figured out exactly what that looks like when we ascend.Well, I won’t be [00:10:00] ascending, but when we ascend to 5D—SHEFFIELD: Yeah, you’re not eligible, Noelle.COOK: I am not, I’m, I am 2D, 3D, I am not, I have not leveled up in the game yet.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and we have seen that over the years that a number of even evangelical pastors have, they’ve been forced out by their congregations, actually. Because they won’t preach QAnon religion.COOK: That’s the other thing the pandemic allowed for, right? Because physical locations were off limits at that point. People did turn online and, right. I mean, normal churches and normal practice was going on, but it also gave people an opportunity, I’m thinking like right now, Chris Keys, for example, who’s this?Just ab absurd. It’s so absurd. It’s funny, it’s almost like a comedic sketch watching him, but he, got his ministry credentials and now he’s got his keys to Christ’s ministry thing and he’s preaching and he’s absolutely insane. And so, you watch these people online, it’s just you funnel this when you’re funneled this 15 hours a day and you already lack discernment in media literacy.And again, talking about the population I’m talking about, were the ones that had to kind of muddle our way through how to learn to be safe on the internet. There’s no one teaching us and they don’t use the middle aged women are some of the biggest super spreaders of disinformation studies have shown recently because they indiscriminately retweet without looking who it’s retweeting or looking what the actual messaging content is.So I think I see so much of this turning into, so many of these people are turning to. Individuals that have no credentials or training for their spiritual practices. And I ended up LA landing right in the middle of some of that. When I first started this research following one of the J six women through her online spaces, in their online groups, I ended up with a whole bunch of people who were part of the Love is one cult because they were bringing those teachings they were doing on YouTube back in the day when Amy Carlson was around and doing it now on Facebook with the same audience ready to [00:12:00] consume what they were selling. So I, it, I we, if people are also, if we’re getting a religion from there too, there are no third space. There’s the Internet’s taken over every aspect of your life, essentially. Your spiritual, your moral training, oftentimes education now too. It’s a big problem.What conspiracism offers middle-aged and older womenSHEFFIELD: Yeah. It is and generally speaking, and of course there are individual differences, we will say. But you know, there are some general gender differences, especially with regard to conspiracists. And so like, men generally tend to be interested in things about, oh, COVID was a Chinese bio weapon, and we need to have stock up on guns because the communists are coming, and be very interested in the illegal immigrants coming to kill them and things like that. Whereas the women, and not just the women, the individual women you talk to, but also in general women, are responding to some—the trans message, anti-trans message obviously is a big thing for them—but they’re responding in a little bit different ways to some of these men as well. You want to talk about that?COOK: Yeah. And I think that was another place where they, where this became, I think this burst into the mainstream. I think that this has always existed, but the pandemic really allowed it to kind of burst into the mainstream because the pandemics touched on so many different pieces that women are allowed to participate in.Right? It was the sphere of womanhood. It was your family’s health, it was your family’s nutrition, it was your family’s education. It was education, moral training, all of those things. And so then when the culture wars happened you could see this is an opportunity in a very patriarchal structure for women to get out front and center, just like they did in the civil rights movement.Right? Most of the screaming, angry faces. In front of children are white women. And that’s not unlike what we saw during the pandemic with mask mandates and school closures. It was, some of those pictures are very similar to the ones I saw from the [00:14:00] sixties because that’s when women are allowed to be aggressive and still be feminine.Otherwise you’re trans investigated if you’re aggressive and you don’t fit ideal femininity. But protection of children is an ideal feminine trait. And so they could scream about vaccines, they could scream about school boards. And we watched that and we watched in January, 2021 when Moms for Liberty came out of nowhere and by summer we’re hosting $20,000 table fundraisers.That was all, funded. Clearly. I did a lot of fundraising and I can promise you I wouldn’t have been able to have a fundraiser in charge that much after six months of existence when I’m selling t-shirts as our main source of income. Right.SHEFFIELD: well it certainly married to the headCOOK: Yeah, well, yeah. But if you asked them at the time how they’re raising funds, we’re a grassroots organization of just plain old moms.That’s everything was presented that way too. Remember, we’re talking about a population that’s already invisible in society. We’re past our reproductive use and most of us are either making very little money or aren’t contributing anything to the GDP. So there’s very little use for women over 50 in our culture.And so what the pandemic did in so many of these issues did, and the culture wars did, is gave women a voice and visibility. If you look at some of the leaders of the movement building that had taken place on the right over the last five, six years, there are a lot of Gen X women there. You look at the women for Trump, you look at someone like Lee Dundas, who was one of the original organizers of the truck convoy.All of these movement, the right is very good with movement builders, by the way. Right. With traveling revivals essentially. And so there were so many middle aged people doing this stuff that I, I think that somewhere along the lines gen X kind of lost their minds with as they went online because there is no discernment.And it’s just this amplification of absolutely absurd things. When we filled in our, when I did that documentary in 2023, it all was very spontaneous and unplanned the way it worked out. But the two women in the book, Tammy and Yvonne, were able to meet each other in person for the very first time, [00:16:00] opposite sides of the country.But because of the online ecosystem that they inhabit that is global. They could finish each other’s sentences automatically. because they’re just basically conversing in memes.(Begin film trailer)Yvonne St. Cyr: January 6th was a setup.Tammy Butry: Was a setup. I made national news hanging out the window!News correspondent: Test, test. So I’m here with Yvonne at Freedom Corner. You were just convicted for January 6th, and--Yvonne St. Cyr: I was just sentenced.Liz Smith: Just feel like the world’s going slightly mad, right?Yvonne St. Cyr: Right. But that it’s just darkness being exposed.So we’ve never been to the moon. They’re lying. Um,Liz Smith: We’ve never been to the moon?Yvonne St. Cyr: Not through traveling through space.Yeah. They control the weather. They, they modify heart. There’s a set here.Liz Smith: Who controls the weather?Yvonne St. Cyr: The elites.Tammy Butry: I am like, what the heck? So I go, and this is before I knew about McDonald’s too. I got myself an Egg McMuffin.COOK: (makes retching sound) What about McDonald’s?Yvonne St. Cyr: They use human meat,Tammy Butry: Use human meat.COOK: Really?Yvonne St. Cyr: Yes.Tammy Butry: Yeah.Yvonne St. Cyr: So when you’re terrified, your adrenaline glands pump adrenaline into your blood and um, they drink the blood of terrified people and that is what keeps them younger. And it also--Liz Smith: Who drinks the blood of children?Yvonne St. Cyr: These elite pedophiles.Liz Smith: My head’s exploding.Yvonne St. Cyr: I hope that your documentary comes out in time, but. Be to be truth. I think the shift will become before then, and maybe this trip is just meant to help you raise your consciousness.Liz Smith: How exhausted are you?COOK: Physically or mentally? I think of the mental exhaustion just comes from the realization of just how far gone so many people in this country are not just this country globally.(End film trailer)COOK: So the example you saw in the trailer where they’re [00:18:00] sitting outside Tammy’s home and there, you know, what about McDonald’s, is what I had said. because Tammy was describing a scene of buying an Egg McMuffin or something and they literally both said at the same time, they serve human meat.I knew this already going into that because I’ve heard, I saw the memes on there, but the fact that both of these women were saying that was really interesting to me, and that happened throughout that day in conversations-- where if you realize everyone is consuming the exact same propaganda, the exact same conspiracies. And when it becomes this silo and this echo chamber where everybody else is saying the same thing, they’re, they’re the group.The, they’re the chosen, they’re the chosen ones there to share the good news. And the rest of us either get to, choose to purify ourselves or to stay deceived. And that’s another reason I think that it, it really works well with thinking about it as a belief system based in faith. It’s very similar and it and you have your congregation that you believe it with and that you work with in your online spaces.And then you’ve got today, I lose more hope than ever in trying to just dislodge any of these types of beliefs from people because how do you do that when again, you’re middle-aged and you were raised to believe that your government might do something to actually help you someday, least in the eighties, that’s what we were being fed.And then you realize now all the people you look at our Health and Human Services department, we’ve got some of the biggest conspiracists in there. We’ve got president who doesn’t believe half of what he says, obviously, but knows how to manipulate his base well enough to tell them they’re all getting med bed cards soon.So when people with that kind of power and authority just continue to perpetuate this stuff and just string people along for their own purposes, and then you got influencers who will be the next step down, the next level down, take away the authority. Now you got the influencers, the people you spend your whole day with online, and they’re telling you the same thing.And it’s getting worse and worse every day. I can’t even look at social media anymore because [00:20:00] it’s also happening on both sides. This isn’t just right wing conspiracy territory anymore. I’m seeing the same thing from liberals. There are I, many of them who have continued to say the Butler deniers, I guess, right? That didn’t actually happen.Media proliferation and political manipulations have made conspiracy belief much easierCOOK: And I agree that things have turned so in the, our shared reality has turned so incomprehensible and insane that I agree that it might be hard sometimes to not pause and say, God, maybe some of this could be possible because lots of impossible things are coming true right now.But until you have evidence, I think it’s incredibly irresponsible for people with any authority or power to be stringing people along this ways, because these belief systems also have real world consequences, and because they coalesce with so many various ideologies in these online spaces, they can have long-term lasting consequences.So if you’re a QAnon conspiracist, but you happen to run into a space where there’s a chat about sovereign citizen and you’re able to pick and choose a couple things that make sense, like sovereignty, right? The idea of sovereignty. And now you start using that selectively because you don’t really understand what paper terrorism looks like.You just mean, you think it means not paying your car registration or your mortgage, right? You lose your house. Like I watched that happen to people over the last six years. I watched the believing things people told them that could come true and have serious real world consequences for that behavior.But now someone like Yvonne who did lose her house, she did lose her job. Her car was being threatened to be repossessed because she stopped paying her bills and was dabbling in sovereigns and language. What do you do when then this person, whose entire mission was to take her case to trial because she believed she was a divine sovereign being who was placed at the capitol on January 6th for a reason.She went through the trial, she took the stand in her defense, she ran, read a 40 and five minute letter to the judge telling him she didn’t ize his jurisdiction because she was a divine [00:22:00] sovereign being goes to jail for a year and a half, and then the pardons come down. And she was one of the few that stood for her truth.She was one of the few who rejected a plea deal. She believed so fully in her mission that she turned her life upside down and but was on appeal. So when the pardon came down, it’s wiped away as if it never happened. So I’m not sure how you would ever convince someone whose entire mission was completely fulfilled.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.COOK: And this is because of the authority that has been given by our government and the people that have been actually elected into office. And it is very and once you turn on it, like Marjorie Taylor Green isn’t doing anybody any good because every, either, either you already know that she’s just a political operative who’s, testing the wind to see which direction she’s going or.They’re just gonna say she’s part of the darkness and can’t be trusted. We’ve got a big segment of this population that does not live in a shared reality, and is willing to act on whatever their beliefs might be, which is a real problem because most of the time it’s gonna have individual consequences and personal consequences to themselves.But once in a while, you’re gonna get a kid who walks into Mar-a-Lago because he is really upset about how save the children and the Epstein files are being handled. And he’s, he happened to be on the right and he, I believe, a pretty devout Christian. So the conspiracies are a huge problem as far as impacting ordinary people’s lives because people in power are using them in so many ways.SHEFFIELD: They are. Yeah. And, but it’s also that the conspiracy theories that they do reflect at least some basis of the bad things that the believers themselves have experienced. So in the two women that you may are mainly focusing on in the book, these are women that both have experienced extreme poverty as children, sexual violence [00:24:00] repeatedly raped as children and as adults and domestic violence, drug addiction, homelessness.So, it’s and then, and the society that, it has no regard for them, thanks to, and the, this is the most horrible irony of it is that, the party that they vote for actually did this to them. But because the party’s able to use conspiracy theories to weaponize them, they actually blame the people who created the programs that have helped them multiple times in their lives.It’s their fault actually.COOK: But then we have another problem with men in power. People in power, oftentimes men, for example Tammy had, there’s institutional failure here also that helps these beliefs grow. You know, Tammy had two children that were caught up in something I was sure was a conspiracy when she first named it, because I hadn’t heard about it.But it was called Kids for Cash. And it took place in the early two thousands in Luin County, Pennsylvania, where two judges who were both Democrats had teamed up with a developer to build a for-profit juvenile detention center because they, I guess for years they’d been trying to replace the county run decrepit facility.But these judges were getting kickbacks by this developer to see the jo, you know, to get the projects through and then to help keep it built. And this was right on the heels of nine 11 where schools took us, or no, excuse me, not nine 11. I’m trying to remember which crisis in my lifetime. Oh yeah, Columbine.It was on the heels of Columbine and, and so schools took a zero tolerance policy. And so this, this one judge, uh, Elli c Villa, something, we would walk, go do his scared straight assemblies. If you end up in my courtroom, you’re gonna do time. Sure enough, two of Tammy’s children ended up in his courtroom.One of them wasn’t even a teenager yet, and both of them ended up in there for incredibly minor infractions that, you know, might’ve gotten to a detention back in the day. They ended up being incarcerated for about two years. Both of them. This was [00:26:00] dismantled when the juvenile justice center in Pennsylvania and Philadelphia, uh, started to get involved when parents started to complain.But this was a program that was specifically designed to prey on poor people because. If you went into his courtroom, if you’ve been summoned and you did not have a private attorney with you, the clerk of the court would been a friendly way, offer you the opportunity to sign away your rights to counsel and tell you that if we have to wait for a public defender all day, we might be here all day and maybe it will even come back tomorrow.Most parents are like, okay, got in a playground fight, I’m gonna sign my rights away. Well, he’s gonna get a slap on the wrist and we’re going home. Got two years and this happened to like 3,500 kids. That’s like generational stu, that that goes on. That kind of trauma is like everlasting.And we have such a history of decade after decade of decade of putting people through that kind of trauma and having broken systems that betrays you, that betray you. You know, Tammy had a child also who committed an adult child who committed suicide in county jail. She wanted to get some therapy.She couldn’t, she was on a, a waiting list for three months. Right. Well, when you’re also in poverty, your housing is precarious and so she might be waiting on a waiting list and by the time her name comes up, she had to move because she lost that other apartment and now she’s got to get another waiting list.It wasn’t until she went to jail or prison for January 6th that she got this probation officer. And once she was released, Tammy did 20 days in jail for the picketing and parade and she took a plea. Um, she told the, the that the parole officer, I really had been trying to get some help to deal with all this trauma that’s been happening.You know this, the last six months of trauma. It was, it took a court order. And a parole officer, a probation officer to get her into a therapist. And she went to a therapist and she started to get some mental health treatment and she has a job now and she’s had a job for two years that she’s held down.And so she has been working to improve her life, but it was institutional failures and then institutional incarceration that was able to get her any kind of services [00:28:00] whatsoever. It’s really ironic and weird to me,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s a terrible thing, frankly, that there, there was no help for her until she was in prison.COOK: I, that irony was just kind of amazing to me actually, that in order for someone like her to get a therapist, it has to come a court order. Because otherwise there just aren’t enough mental health professionals or she doesn’t have the cash for, so yeah it’s really unfortunate,The women of January 6th faced widely divergent economic circumstancesSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, it, so you’ve got so many people who are facing and we should say, not everybody who believes in these things has had such horrible life circumstances. There areCOOK: not at all.SHEFFIELD: of regularCOOK: one, and that’s one thing people have asked about. That’s one thing people have asked me a lot about is like, how come you only pick these two people? And part of that is because the population I had access to, many of them had an agenda. And when someone has a motivation to either become a, a J six influencer or they want to monetize their platform, I don’t feel like I can really learn again.I’m not going to trust what I’m learning from them is authentic.And although, Tammy’s probably a, an extreme example of poverty. Yvonne was not, she was a family that was trying to make it in middle class. Right. Yvonne joined the Marine. She was in Marine for 16 years. She had important ranks and all the way up to drill instructor, gunnery sergeant she lived in a middle class neighborhood and lived in middle class lifestyle.Then we see someone else in the film trailer that you showed, and her name is Jill. And she was someone that Yvonne knew that I met on that road trip. And Jill has an advanced degree, she’s a psychiatric nurse practitioner and she’s licensed to prescribe in multiple states right now. And part of that is because of the telehealth that took place during COVID.She was able to take. Her degree and start a telehealth practice. And she’s, as far as I know, still doing that. So we, and Liz in a middle class neighborhood, in a depressed area, but it’s still considered middle class where [00:30:00] she’s at in, in western Pennsylvania. So you have the gamut there.You look at other January 6th women, these were not just all people who weren’t educated or who were living in the back woods here. There are plenty of people who worked in healthcare. There are plenty of small business owners. One woman has a de medical degree and a law degree, and they came from, I think Yale and Stanford.So, so some people they ran a gamut, which was also what drew my interest to the photographs I took on January 6th. I wasn’t looking at a bunch of, people, like to make fun of like, what they imagine, MAGA supporters to look like. I see lots of memes or like people missing teeth.No, it wasn’t like that at all. I was sitting, not sitting. I was. Looking at people sitting next to each other who looked like people I would be sitting next to at a PTA meeting, or I’d run into at the grocery store, might be my neighbor. There were plenty of people that were firmly middle class.In fact, I did that in the very beginning when I was trying to figure out what I was looking at. And what this pattern was is anybody who’s clothing or gear, I could price out, I was trying to price out what people were wearing to see what we were talking about socioeconomically, because we kept talking about it being poor white people who are drawn to this kind of bigotry and these kinds of movements that some would call hateful.So, but that wasn’t the case. It, I would say there, I think with the men involved in January 6th, it was a third small business owners, a third white collar and a third working class. So it kind of runs a socioeconomic gamut, which is interesting since it’s gonna hurt a lot of the people in that one third working class position for sure.And is trickling up into the next one too, by small businesses also. But again, when you’re in a faith-based system, I think that’s why you’re allowed to, I think that’s what allows you to vote against your own interest. because there’s amount, there’s a certain amount of suffering until that day you’re waiting for cops.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there is. And well, and it’s, these types of systems are what I call a semiotic loop [00:32:00] in that it’s, it is a meaning system in which everything, even disconfirming evidence is becomes proof of the belief not,COOK: importantly, and not importantly, but adjacently, it’s a placemaking system also. It’s a it’s your community, it’s your family now. It’s your place, it’s your space. It’s the place you spend most of your waking hours. I mean, some of these people are logging, they’re most, again, middle aged women who are now also sandwiched in our, middle aged.When I say middle aged women, I’m talking Gen X right now. Nine, I guess we’re not really middle aged. I’m being kind here. 1965 to 1980, right? So we’re that generation now who is also sandwiched in between childhood, extending out an extra 10 years and so that your kid goes to college and then comes back home.Many people, many of us women have either faced divorce, which led to financial precarity or a difference anyway. Now we’re also looking at our parents who need help. And are aging out. And I, that’s what we personally did for 10 years is taking care of three different sets of parents who were in various stages of Alzheimer’s while I was still getting kids in and out of college.So it’s, it, you don’t have a lot of time to build relationships in the outside world, and it’s very easy to get stuck in your online space. That’s where your friends live now. That is where you go for advice. That is where you go to dump your personal trauma. There, everybody’s got their private messaging that’s off Maine.There’s a lot of community building that goes on in dms. Tammy used to go to, in, in world Trump rallies. Not to listen to what Trump was saying, but to scout around to try to find like all of her favorite QAnon influencers like Mickey Larson Olson and that Brooke suit dude. And, because she wants her picture taken with her telegram fam and her favorite influencers.It’s like looking for the characters of Disneyland. In many ways that was the reason she would go to those things. Not be, it wasn’t political, it was social, and so many of these women, I watched it, that’s exactly what it [00:34:00] is and has become, is a social movement for themselves. More so even than ideology, because that’s flexible.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and that’s also where the narcissism comes in as well, because, like they, they want to believe whatever it is they happen to believe at that moment, and their family members, rightfully reject it. And the friends theyCOOK: Well, not for the reasons you want them to though. Not all of them.SHEFFIELD: Well, for their own reason, whatever reason, they’re not, they don’t find it persuasive.COOK: It’s not because they think it’s crazy, it just goes against their own crazy beliefs.Charismatic evangelicalism as the common starting point for QAnon believersSHEFFIELD: Yeah, it seems well and actually that is another thing that I did want to talk about. So, so, this, there, there are so many beliefs in this stew here that we’re talking about. And no one has the same beliefs as anyone else. Despite the fact that they can have some apophenic recognition of other people’s, ideas like the cannibal human meat at McDonald’s.So it’s, but they’re still, it’s just this giant mishmash of nonsense, frankly. Um, but it does, it seemed like, and certainly for the two women that you talked with that, the starting point was charismatic Protestant christianity for in terms of how they got initially into some of the weirder stuff, even though they were both Catholic at birth.COOK: Yeah, I think most of the women I spoke to had some kind of religious background but weren’t practicing whatever they were doing. Yvonne was in the book, she was going and she, one of her favorite stories to tell is, I was the kid who’d take the bus when I was eight years old to church. And she tells that story because her, she wasn’t, her family wasn’t going.And so she would go to various churches her friends went to, and many of them ended up being like Pentecostal churches. And she kind of was drawn to that because she liked the energy. It felt, so much of these things are about how you feel, not necessarily what people are saying or what truth is or what, how it makes you feel.If it makes you feel a certain way, is [00:36:00] gonna keep drawing you back. Which is, goes back to influences online. If they make you feel a certain way, you’re going to keep engaging with their content. And so I think Yvonne found that, but then kind of drifted away from it when she was in the Marines.And it wasn’t until later when she was seeking something else, that she returned to evangelical Christianity. This time the Church of the Nazarene in Idaho, a church and the Nazarene in Idaho. And that worked out for her and that became her identity for 20 years. And she, and Vonne is the type that likes to jump right into a leadership role or likes to walk right up to the bike racks right up against the police line at the capitol.She’s got to be in the front. She’s a leader, she’s a drill instructor. And I always hesitate because I’ve, if I say drill sergeant, I’ll be corrected because I different branch and a different status. So a gunnery sergeant. And she, so, so when COVID happened. This is where your narcissism part might come in here because she was scolded by a pastor when she posted a picture of herself with without a mask on when she was with a youth group. It was a mass mandate and her church was asking people to adhere to that. So she was, you know what, yeah. About being scolded. And then when they, and because she was starting to be distant, ostracized on, people were distancing, whatever you want to call it, as her own beliefs, as she was coming to Bible study going, have you seen this movie outta Shes Right.And then talking about child sex trafficking tunnels and so forth. It got to be too much. And then when she brought in the new age spirituality and started saying, God is a woman, she was saying that for a while. When she was influenced by the online influencers, the remnants of love is one. And then she began calling God, spirit and creator.But God is still synonymous. All these things are still synonymous, which is really strange. If you’re not looking at people over time, on any given day, you might say, oh, she’s evangelical, but the next day you’re gonna say, no, she’s an Elizabeth. Clear prophet follower. Right? Because the philosophySHEFFIELD: she’s aCOOK: am of it.SHEFFIELD: pagan witch or [00:38:00] something. Yeah.COOK: A hundred percent. Yeah. It, that’s how much, and I’ve, I, the way I have been trying to describe it to people, especially people who aren’t online, is imagine you are at a trade show, and there might be a central theme to the trade show, but it’s every industry that could participate in that theme, who’s got their wares on display for you.And so if you walk in and you, first thing you hit is an evangelical boost, okay? You’ll get your traditional religious material and a few, now you’re gonna learn about sovereign citizens over there. And a table across the room has somebody calling themself a politician. And you walk around long enough and you collect all the swag at each table and you dump it out and you end up with two or three things, but you have a key chain, a bumper sticker and something else.And you might not ever investigate any further into the people who gave those things to you. You’ll just take it. because it feels good now. It works now as another tool to use. And I’ve watched that happen with so many people that have no idea what they’re talking. I keep someone, I know one of these women who’s on Medicaid and can barely survive is online every day encouraging people to get out there and buy their silver and like really wouldn’t.What if you ever bought silver? It, and so there’s this connect it’s a, it is an alternate reality and it’s a complete disconnect from any kind of, it’s a fantasy game. Many ways sometimes, but it also is a fantasy game that gives you hope. Anyone who’s ever played video games and has to stop, can’t wait.They’re not, if they’re in a spot where they’re gonna level up or there’s something exciting coming next, all they can think about is getting back to that video game. It’s very much that same mentality. It never stops and lifestyles completely change because of it. Some people that means they don’t make, one person I mentioned who’s not in my book of film, but who I’m aware of is a woman who called herself Patriot Q.Her name’s Mickey Larson Olson. And I’ve, it’s very sad. I keep seeing posts from her about her daughter who is a nurse or a healthcare professional who has told [00:40:00] her, I’m sorry, your, some of your beliefs are so anti-science, they’re dangerous and they have a new baby and they’re not letting her see it.And that has happened to people across the country and it, although I feel very sad for her. You know that she’s enduring that pain. I would do the same exact thing if I were her daughter. Right. I mean, it, so it’s a struggle because I don’t know what the answer is to help people. Exactly. I also have to be very careful because a lot of this population’s incredibly hateful to large swaths of the population, whether it be through racism, anti L-G-B-T-Q-I-A rhetoric, anti-trans rhetoric.I not even Reddit acts, acts of physical violence against these groups. It’s very easy for me, who is a white woman, middle aged, white women, who can pretty much move freely in spaces. Every one of those movement builders I described, I went to in person, no one ever questioned why I was there.I looked like I fed in. So I, that’s how they operate. And I recognize the privilege I have to say to. We should be talking to people, trying, you can’t do that when the same person was saying, you your life has no value and it’s okay for you to die. I get that. And I know that there’s a lot of people who are going to read my book and think that I’m some, I’m a white woman apologist, for example.And I’m not. I tried really hard to and I struggled with that in my own personal life. A year, two or three. Some of I, I was like, huh, I’m building relationships, aren’t I? I don’t want to do that. But when you’re talking to someone and you’re learning such personal things about them, over time I found myself developing empathy for parts of their lives.January 6th was a very small piece of any conversation we ever had. because it was about lives and institutional failure and things that were promised that never materialized. And, I was able to have conversations where there was even some common ground in some of those experiences. So I talk a lot about how online spaces just keep people stuck [00:42:00] and it makes it worse, especially where we’re at today in our political landscape.And how it really, we really need to try to help them get out and we, but only certain people are gonna be able to tolerate that. Only people are only certain, a lot of people won’t evenbeSHEFFIELD: no one should have to to do that if it’sCOOK: No. And I didn’t try to do that, by the way. That was not my job. Ethnography does not ask you to push back or change minds. It asks you to interpret a different language, essentially. And that’s what I think I did. Although I did gain empathy for the humanity of these women.I don’t see myself as trying to explain them away to you. I see myself as understanding their culture and their language, teaching you their vocabulary, explaining how they think. They deserve whatever consequences came down for them. I believe that. But, but I also see them as people just like we do with other groups that are incarcerated and do heinous things. Right. I just want to make that really clear,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, the other thing about going so deep with these people is that, and producing the results of what they think and, how they structure it together is that I think there is a lot of people who are not in these reactionary worlds, that they tend to think that all of them are, like, I dunno, 50 something, white men from Montana or, uh, hillbilly with two teeth and living in Louisiana or something.And that’s not the reality of the Trump extremism movement. Like, there’s plenty of, as you said, there’s plenty of people that look, like the lady you run into in the grocery store, or there’s plenty of them who are not white.COOK: I priced out one man’s gear he wore that day between the body armor and all the other things that I could identify through a Google lens, just to see how he was wearing about $850 just on the outside of his clothing, so yeah, that, that idea that it’s just these poor, dumb, and [00:44:00] educated people is just false.Astrology, space aliens, and QAnonSHEFFIELD: It is. And yet, these beliefs though they are also just all over the place. And they exist in, like they’re on the periphery of so many other subcultures that may not be connected to them. So, like for instance, astrology is something that is popular among a lot of women.But also astrology is a huge part of these Q anon beliefs, or, like the belief in that you’re a star seed. You want tell us about that one. For people who don’t know that belief.COOK: Huh. The star seeded is complicated. The star seeds go back a while again. A lot of these things are lifted from either people who are channelers from the seventies and eighties or science fiction, but the idea of a star seeded is that you were born into your human vessel, to you you’re born, you forget who you were and all that, you know, and you’re here to live this experience as a human.And there’s oftentimes a lesson involved that you’re supposed to have agreed to before you came to do it. That is what Yvonne believes is that she’s a star seat and that that’s why she believes she was placed at January 6th in the Capitol. It was, she was, because she wanted to go after Trump said things were gonna get wild after January 6th.It became part of her story. Well, of course I was arrested for that. I was placed there. I was supposed to be there and as a, that she believes she’s this divine being. She also now has, there’s what they also call these waves of volunteers, which also ties into Christianity and other religious beliefs.This 1 44, the 144,000, I kept seeing 144,000. But I was seeing it such diabolically, different context and people saying it, and I still have a hard time knowing exactly what they’re meaning.SHEFFIELD: Well, actually that’s from the book of Revelation. It’s from the book ofCOOK: But the waves being used across these boards and Yvonne believes that there’s been three waves of volunteers.That it was the ones, right? So it was boomers, the Gen [00:46:00] Xers and the Gen Zs. So I guess what’s all happening right now isSHEFFIELD: Wait, Wait, what about millennials? So millennials don’t get anything.COOK: well, I think this’s, I think Gen X, because Gen X is so much of a part of it, we’re going to ignore millennials. Like we get ignored.Maybe that’s it, because they talk about, they do skip millennials. They’re talking about the youngest right now. Maybe they’re talking about Gen Alpha, but also Gen Z. They think they’re the ones who, which would make sense that would be a population they would be looking at. Because if you look who delivered Trump to right, the second term, it was white Gen X women and their sons.Which are, many of them are Gen Z. I’m an elder, gen X. My youngest child is the last year of millennials. So many of these women do have Gen Z sons. That may be why they’re picking that generation, I’m not sure. But all of that is part of the mytho. It’s the 144,000, which also can, it comes from religion.So they know that’s what it starts to someone who’s here to bring not the truth, help awaken humans. Yvonne’s in the process of remembering who she is now, and she is,SHEFFIELD: And she also has a huge belief in reincarnation and things like thatCOOK: Yes. And that all started with when she found Love Is One. And when she started to get introduced to New age spirituality, that’s when, that’s how she her, one of her children, one of her sons is gay.She had a real problem with that when she was in the evangelical church. Took him to the pastor. I mean, we didn’t, I don’t think she went as far as conversion therapy, but close. Right. I was horrible about it to him admits that. Today her love and light. Beliefs and her cons, spirituality, her cons, spirituality, beliefs don’t allow for that difference.Exactly. They explain it away. Well, her’s gay, because in maybe his last life, he was a woman. And there’s still, sometimes there’s gonna be traces of those past lives in the lives following for a couple, maybe a couple of two or three of them. Same thing with a [00:48:00] person who’s trans.If in the film, in the, it’s not in the trailer, but in the film there’s a scene where Yvonne and I are talking about Tammy’s daughter, Sabrina, who hung herself in the men’s county prison in Williamsport, Pennsylvania who had been denied their hormones their their psych meds. This person had several mental health.This was one of the people who had been caught up in cash for kids and had a lot of institutional betrayal in their life, and Pam, you would think, who loves her daughter, who had a hard time accepting that transition, but ultimately loves her daughter. But today, we’ll still trans investigate online, she will still make, derogatory comments about the trans community.‘Soul contracts’ and tragic moralityCOOK: And I don’t understand that except for in that conversation in the, when we were filming they were trying to explain to me the, well, I’ll use Yvonne’s quote, you’re fucking with God, is what Yvonne said in the film. It be by transitioning, because if God had intended you in this lifetime to beSHEFFIELD: And you signed up for it. Like that’s theCOOK: You signed up for it too, right? You signed up for it. That’s part of that pre, predetermined. That’s so soul contracts. When you’re, when you decide to take this human vessel and your soul comes into this human vessel, you are agreeing to all the things you’re going to do before you come onto earth.Your soul inhabit your vessel. So let’s say it’s a great way, it’s a victim blaming game, essentially. So if I use this example on the film, I know Tammy was sexually assaulted by her stepfather for a couple of years, said she was 11. So I, I if I bring that up and I say, but how does that explain what happened in town?She signed up for that. Oh, she signed up for that. Okay. How does that work? Well, because her soul needed to learn the lesson of forgiveness this time around, see her soul needs to experience something so horrible that it has to learn true forgiveness. That’s a really messed up way [00:50:00] of living. Right. ButSHEFFIELD: well it is.COOK: this is explained,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and like that is like the, that’s the kind of fundamental contradiction between these beliefs is that they’re totally nihilistic, absolutely nihilistic, but at the same time they have a bizarre kind of hopefulness as well. and it’sCOOK: a method of hope also. Yes,SHEFFIELD: lot of it is that, you know, many of them have experienced real, sexual trauma.And like, that’s why they’re obsessed with pedophilia and Pizzagate and the global ring of pedophiles, uh, who are running the world. Because in the, the communities that they come from, these things actually do happen quite a bit.So like somebody ran the numbers and, you know, they, they found that, uh, of politicians, like people that there are occupation was politician.The people who were arrested or accused of sex crimes against children, 67% of them were Republicans. And thenCOOK: But do you think it’s about party ideology or power structures? I mean, I think it’s power. I thinkSHEFFIELD: well, well, I’m not saying Yeah, it’s a power thing but Republican policy, because it is about glorifying power and enabling the powerful, it doesattract people who are more into that. And you see that with Epstein himself, that he. Was kind of a neoliberal Democrat at first.But then once he was thrown into jail then he would, under Obama, then he, basically was a Republican and he was hanging out with them. And actually in December, 2016, he there’s an email where he says I hung out with the Trump. I’m gonna hang out with the Trump boys all day. And and then the next, I guess day later or something like that, early January, 2017, he emails his associate.It’s all good now with Trump, there’s so much opportunity. And so, But my point though is that, so, and then you look at evangelical communities, like there, there’s rampant abuse of children and [00:52:00] women. In fact, the day we’re recording this there’s an evangelical pastor named Dennis Roy who was just revealed to have sexually abused women in two different states for nearly 20 years. And he and the people in his congregation that knew he wasdoing it, And he got away with it. So like that’s so, like there is something realCOOK: I owe a hundred percent. ISHEFFIELD: and it’s still in society generally, but like, even like they’ve experienced it more,COOK: Yeah, especially people with some of these, even some of these fundamentalist religious backgrounds. Right. We, we know that the documentaries are there if you want to watch ‘em and you, the yeah, definitely. There’s de again, that I think it’s because of that extreme patriarchal structure in some ways, uh, the male dominance over female bodies.That is something that is definitely more obviously on the right.Right-wing politicians harm society and then use the nihilism they engender as campaign leverageSHEFFIELD: And that is, uh, I mean, that is the, the real challenges that, uh, you know, as we’ve seen so much institutional failure as we’ve seen so much neglect deliberate, and then also, you know, deliberate screwing people over, um, in various different ways, you know, this, this nihilism that is, has become, just so very common.And I think everybody kind of feels that, no matter who they are and their situation, it’s easy to to slide into the, this, well, everything is horrible and terrible and but then someday, magically it will be okay.COOK: Right.SHEFFIELD: that is, what that’s doing is it’s opting out. It’s doing what Timothy Leary, the drug advocate of the sixties, drop out. Like that’s what this is. It’s dropping outofCOOK: once.SHEFFIELD: But it’s dropping out of reality and removing the obligation of both yourself to participate, but also in the people who are your governing officials to make things better.Like, that’s, that is the terrible irony of Trump in all of this is that, he doesn’t believe in it. I mean, he believes a bunch of [00:54:00] stupid things, but obviously he doesn’t think Q Anon is real, but he uses it. And then he also, his people use, so basically he can dismantle the social welfare system that supports the people who voted for him.And then blame other people for his actions. And and it’s like how the only way forward is to just say, yes, things are bad, and we’re gonna go after the people who did this to you.like, it seems like the Democrats don’t want to do that,COOK: Well, I mean, this Epstein file stuff is what’s just kind of, I’m marveling at it, right? Because I keep I don’t spend a lot of the time in this space as I was doing with research. I need a break and from being in online as much as I was for several years, but I do pay attention to what’s being said about the Epstein files, right?Because in many ways, guess what Guy? You were right. There is a Kabbalah, powerful people that hurt children and they’re networked and connected globally as true. They’re not taking them into the basement of Comet ping pong, and they’re not there isn’t a meat grinder and they’re not using the blood from matza balls and they’re not selling the meat to McDonald’s to make hamburgers outta, like, that’s the partSHEFFIELD: notsatanist,COOK: No. Right. That this is done in now. The problem is there are such weird things that elitist have put together for themselves. Such weird societies like the Baan Grove, there’s some weird stuff going on. Right. But it’s probably more just people abusing more vulnerable people and it’s not Satanic rituals, it’s just plain old sadistic white men or men.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Humiliation, rituals. Well, and that’s, yeah, like, that’s the kind of the last thing that I wanted to touch on. So, now that I mean the other thing about the Epstein file release.What do QAnon believers think about the Epstein files now?SHEFFIELD: As it’s un undeniable at this point that Jeffrey Epstein was, thick as thieves With Howard Luck, Nik, the Commerce Secretary, uh, and you know, a, a bunch of people who work for Trump currently, and he got a sweetheart deal from the guy who was, uh, his uh, worked in the, in the first [00:56:00] administration, Alex Acosta.That was why he didn’t go to prison for longer, earlier. And then Donald Trump is mentioned in the Epstein files a million times. And, acted has acted very repeatedly to suppress and to censor them. And, we see thatCOOK: A jury found him guilty of sexual misconduct. Right. He owed someone a lot of money in a civil suit. We’ve already, he himself told us he’s okay. He feels entitled to commit sexual misconduct. That was right before the election the first time. Right. He said it straight up, yeah, I’ll grab whatever and whoever I want.because they let you, that’s what entitled power looks like, right? I mean, and that’s like you do that times all of this. That’s why we’ve got, it’s a, that’s why it is. I, every day I log on and say, who has to resign today? And I’m seeing stuff happening in Europe, but good old Harvard, they’re just letting people retire with, I’m retiring from my professorship, Dershowitz zero institutional consequences.Summer’s just what, yesterday was it? Yesterday? He formally resigned. Finally. Yeah. I mean, come on.Can youSHEFFIELD: Well, and no one who works for Trump has had any consequences. But, so, but I’m curious though. So have you beenCOOK: aren’t holding ‘em accountable either.SHEFFIELD: well, that’s what I was gonna ask you. So when you, so you have, since you were doing the research of the book stayed in touch with Tammy, and like what’s been her, has she had any thoughts about Epstein in the recent few weeks and months?COOK: While I was writing the book and doing the research, I didn’t, like I said, I just asked questions about why do you believe this and why, what? Learning about her life. I didn’t ever tell her. I, I didn’t contradict. She and I think, had a different situation because of her child suicide.Her adult child suicide. Because I was, I got, that’s how this all became too personal and I couldn’t do academic anymore, is I helped her out to find some resources during that time. So we’ve gotten to know each other on a, in a way that now she’s read the book. Right. I was worried, how are, how is she gonna feel when I [00:58:00] analyze her?Right. She loves it. She loves the book. She doesn’t agree with everything I said about the reasons why. I think maybe some of her personality traits drew her here. She doesn’t believe some of the stuff I say that’s false, but that’s okay. She loves the book. But I asked, so we’re at a space, a place now where I can ask her directly, so.Since I’ve known you’ve been talking about the entire draw to this movement is through Save the Children. Now I’m here as a non conspiracist to tell you, you were partly right there is this cabal and wow, it’s way bigger than I ever imagined. And what do you think about that? Right.Well, Trump is still, it depends on which group you’re in, but one of those stories is, well, yeah, we always knew he’d be in there because he is a long time FBI informant. He was in there to report back.Really? So you’re telling me that the three letter agencies are letting. Three generations of children go through or three decades of children go through this kind of abuse because Trump either is so incompetent, he still hasn’t gotten the goods 30 years later. Or what, like, how are you justifying and explaining this stuff?But again, it’s not about rational thought. It’s not about facts. It’s about how you feel. And right now she’s not feeling like she’s ready to lead those communities that accept her. And that’s my opinion. The refusal to look at the evidence, the refusal to use logic, to me, that’s a social problem.That’s not an intellectual problem. That’s having to determine whether or not you want to be ostracized from the group you spend your time with. You’re already ostracized from a lot of people in the real world, right? Also, you have to admit you’re wrong and you don’t have special knowledge and things aren’t gonna get better.That’s another one. You have to accept that. Oh, wow. I’m not going to get all that money. The Corporation of America has owed me that they were supposed to gimme on nine 11 after. All right? That whole ne Sarah, just, Sarah Conspiracy, that’s the one Tammy clings too, because she thinks that will lift her outer generational poverty.It when she gets that money she’s owed, she signs up for stuff online. If you want to sign, if you [01:00:00] want to be included when this money comes down, sign up here. So you’re giving all kinds of personal information away online, right? Yvonne paid money to love as one toward the ascension fund because all this other money was gonna come out from that, right?So it’s, again, you, it just doesn’t have anything to do with intellectual capacity or it’s a social problem in lots of ways because it is so many of these women’s identity opportunity to participate and the only place they still belong.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, uh, yeah, so I mean, like, what,COOK: So they’re not dealing with it right now because it means giving up too many things.SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and you were not in touch with Yvonne anymore?COOK: I, I am in touch with her, but not in the same way. Yvonne and I have talked since she’s been out of since she was pardoned. Yvonne is still on her spiritual journey while she was in prison, her devoted husband, of 22 years, who was right by her side when all the publicity was happening for Jan six, decided to cheat on her while she was in jail and left her and served her papers in prison.So she’s had to kind of heal from some of that. But she is still on the same path. Just got back from Costa Rica doing an ayahuasca trip for 10 days. And she is all in and she now she includes psychedelics in her spiritual practice with Shaman and. Teachers, so she’s getting her God experience on the regular that’s not going anywhere.So, and I see more and more people as life, let’s face it, life every five years you look around and you go like, oh gosh, you just got, life got a lot harder in this way, and this way. Right? It was like the beginning of the gig economy. You’d go to your day job and then you’d DoorDash at night and everyone was talking about having two, three jobs and it’s still, and it’s still happening.And when people. When your brain has that much stress and there’s absolutely nowhere to go. You can’t find a, you don’t have time or the spaces to make social connections midlife. You don’t have the opportunities. Right? [01:02:00] Many of us made friends when our kids were little, and then they all went our separate ways and we’re all divorced.And who where’s my social life? How do I make friends? Right? That is the problem. It’s not just giving up belief systems. It’s giving up an entire identity that you’ve crafted for yourself over the last six last six years that oftentimes has replaced something that had a much longer life.But because these new beliefs took you so far into an unshared reality, you’re stuck there. And so I feel like it’s just gonna keep getting added to. And I think it’s amazing and that, and people are talking about this, but Hillary Clinton got deposed yesterday. But the Clintons, of course, we’re coming up with the Clintons because they’re getting the lady that did frazzle drip finally. Right. And it’s just kind of crazy.It’s a, and yet none of them are going to even be curious about what happened in that room or what was learned. All they’re going to see is that one circumstance and call it proof, see?SHEFFIELD: They’re gonna see that she was called to be deposed and then not bother to.COOK: Well, that’ll be interesting,SHEFFIELD: nothing came out of it.COOK: well, partofSHEFFIELD: I think that’s why they wanted it. Sorry. That’s why they wanted it to be non-public. That because, if you could see that they had nothing and that they were asking her and she repeatedly said I never knew him.I never met him. I had nothing to do with him. Like she said that probably dozens scores of times. And having that on video, like that’s very damaging to this narrative. And so they didn’t want that.COOK: Right. Exactly. But bringing her in was definitely red meat to the, the people who believe. But see, but that, that same group that, that is gonna celebrate that and believe she’s getting arrested next, is also the same group that said she was executed December 31st, 2018, uh, at Gu Guama Bay. So that’s what’s so confusing here is how do we take, are you gonna take that back and say That was just a crazy conspiracy, or was yesterday a clone or [01:04:00] a crisis?An actor with the mask, because they say clone also as if cloning someone means putting them in a machine where they come out fully adult and at the same age that you would be, you know, that’s the other problem. That’s not how cloning works. Right. So again, it’s, it’s, you’re right. It, it’s a pick your out.It’s a gamification of life. It’s a way of dissociating from the everyday stress and anxiety that the real world brings harder than ever. It’s a place of community that participation and belonging for so many of these people. And that is a really powerful combination to give up.Prevention is easier than de-radicalizationSHEFFIELD: It is. Yeah. And and I don’t know, I’m not gonna ask you to have the answers to, well, how do you get people out of that? because I know there is no easy answer.COOK: Mm-hmm.yeah, if there’s one answer, fix the institutionsSHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.COOK: fix things. So they work for people, fix things so that people don’t always have someone to blame for why everything falls through, the ground for them.SHEFFIELD: Well, and help people get mental healthcareCOOK: Yeah. Yeah. That’s an institution toSHEFFIELD: needs met. And, but, and I would say maybe let’s maybe end the, because these beliefs because they are so multi Ferris and they are adjacent to so many other communities like astrology, like wellness, like, various religious alternative practices or drug cultures like, so it’s it, they’re connected to all these other things that people might noton the surface, think about it. But you know, like, I, so I think if that’s something to be aware of and to help that I would help the audience, want the audience to, to take away from this is that, if you see people starting to get really into things like the divine masculine or the divine feminine, that should raise your hackles on your back.Because it means that they might be starting to get into your friend or your family member might be starting to hear some really bad ideas.COOK: If they’re referred to a shot as a jab,SHEFFIELD: yeah, that’s right.COOK: I mean, there’s a lot of ‘em. And the problem is, I know the [01:06:00] vocabulary now. I hear it everywhere. I hear it everywhere. I hear 5, 5, 5. Oh my God. No, it’sSHEFFIELD: I don’t even know thatone.COOK: It’s angel number. Angel numbers. 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2. Any, their angel numbers, their mess. And each of them has a message that basically every single one of them boils down to, you’re on the right path.Stay there. Right? It’s people. It’s the, yeah. It’s that’s a big thing. Angel numbers are a huge thing, and I hear that all over the place because of the visibility on TikTok and Instagram. And it’s pretty harmless. The angel numbers are harmless. Astrology is pretty harmless. Numerology is pretty harmless.It’s when you take conspiracies and you add it to all this stuff, you make it have meaning that oftentimes oppresses. Some other group. That’s when it’s a problem. I don’t care if you think you’re a, I don’t even care if you think you’re a star seed. You can be a star seed. I don’t care. And I don’t care if you have ascended masters.And one of them’s Prince, the other one’s Michael Jackson and the other one’s Christopher Reeves. because I believe those were all of some of Amy Carlson’s ascended masters. Well, along with St. Germaine Cryon and Robin Williams. And so, you could, that is fine, honestly. But when you say this person doesn’t deserve healthcare, because if God wanted you to grow breasts, you would’ve been born with them.Right. And you are going to deprive someone else their truth and their spiritual journey. That’s not just contradictory, but it’s hypocritical. And that’s why I can’t take that. That’s the problem. I’m not gonna take you seriously when you bring culture wars in and your beliefs, now you’re as bad as every other fundamentalist religion that exists or other fundamentalist group that makes you pick and choose who you can be with and who’s, who gets to live and who should die.And that’s the part that I’m having a harder time staying in an ethnographic frame of mind about today is because I was, I’m seeing it. It’s grown so much worse, even since I turned my manuscript in, a year and a half ago or whatever it was. It I’m [01:08:00] feeling that, as you can see, and I know you, so I’m able to do it easier where I act like I feel a lot of anger.I feel a lot of anger and just immeasurable frustration because just when you think you might see a crack, that could be, nope. Now something else comes out and we’re, and as long as this administration is in power that’s the way it’s gonna stay. And it’s also trickling into the left. There’s a lot of left, there’s a lot of liberal conspiracies going on too.And I wish we had a way to teach people to be more discerning, but I think that probably went outta the window when we all started loving reality tv. I think discernment has been in short supply for a while.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, all right. So for people who want to, um, keep in touch with you, Noelle, what are your recommendations for that?COOK: I am on X but I am mostly active on Blue Sky and my name is Noelle Cook on both. And I have a website, noelle cook.com that has links to both the trailer and more information about the film and the book. The book is called The Conspiracists Women Extremism and the Lure of Belonging. The film is also called The Conspiracist, so the film is actually just starting to make its cinema run in London and we’ve got about five dates scheduled for April that I get to go do a Q and A for, so that will be fun.SHEFFIELD: Okay, nice. Well, I hope that goes well for you. All right, well, it’s been good and thanks for joining me.COOK: Thank you so much for asking.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. 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Episode SummaryThe John Roberts Supreme Court has been one of the most reactionary high courts in American history, overturning numerous laws and precedents about abortion, voting rights, gun safety, and many other issues. The Republican-appointed justices have also frequently abused the court’s “shadow docket” emergency procedures to temporarily empower President Donald Trump.The rulings have come so fast and so thick have caused shock and outrage in America’s liberal legal establishment. One law professor likely spoke for many when she told the New York Times that: “While I was working on my syllabus for this course, I literally burst into tears. I couldn’t figure out how any of this makes sense. Why do we respect it?”And yet, if you look at the long-term history of the American judiciary, what Roberts and his Republican colleagues have been doing is exactly what you should expect. Courts are supposed to preserve legal structures, and that makes them inherently conservative.Tragically, however, the liberal legal establishment could not see any of this coming. That’s because after the Earl Warren Court of the 1950s, the legal left has been dominated by a philosophical approach called “formalism” which argues that jurisprudence is almost a form of science in which totally objective judges will scrutinize the law to arrive at obviously true conclusions to expand civil rights and restrain private coercion. Needless to say, judicial activists like Sam Alito see things very differently—and they now have the ability to try to remake America in their authoritarian image thanks to Republicans’ intense focus on court power.Legal formalism has been an absolute disaster for America, and yet despite the chaos and injustice it has enabled, many Democratic politicians and legal mavens are still reluctant to embrace the reality that all jurisprudence is political.Elie Mystal, my discussion guest today, has been making that case tirelessly in his columns for The Nation magazine and in his books, including his latest, Bad Law: 10 Popular Laws That Are Ruining America.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—The power far-right Republicans wield on today’s Supreme Court is the product of a decades-long project—The cult of constitutional law saw judges as objective gods who would always support liberty, it couldn’t have been more mistaken 🔒—Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt’s ideas are echoing in the Trump administration’s law enforcement philosophy—Former Trump coup lawyer John Eastman and allies claim Satan is behind efforts to hold him accountable—The judicial system is rigged and it’s time Democrats told the public about it—Religious right groups officially unveil new legal effort to overturn marriage equalityAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction10:41 — Philosophy and science abandoned belief in total objectivity, but legal scholars didn’t17:15 — Legal formalism as the perfect justification for law schools27:12 — Legal realism explained38:22 — Critical legal studies and integralism43:34 — Going back to legal realism means we have to restrain judges48:09 — The Warren and Burger courts were anomalies that distorted liberal understanding of jurisprudence53:17 — Because judging is political, it must be restrained 59:00 — Making courts matter to votersAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: This is going to be a fun discussion. I don’t get to do legal philosophy very much on this podcast, perhaps even ever. I’ve been looking forward to doing this and, a lot of people are not as able to throw down with the legal formalists as yourself. So this will be fun.ELIE MYSTAL: I do it all the time. My uncle is actually a professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. So this be like Thanksgiving for me.SHEFFIELD: Okay, hopefully in a good way! All right, [00:04:00] okay, so before we get too deep into it, let’s define legal formalism. What is it and what are the main ideas of it?MYSTAL: Yeah, so my definition is that legal formalism believes that the law is an objective thing that is written down. And if you simply read the text, if you look at the case law, if you look at the history in the presidents and the precedents, you, me, Joe Blow on the street, anybody can figure out the right legal answer by simply applying reason and logic to the words and text on the page.And that’s it. And that there’s a structure, there is a process for how you interpret certain words, how you deal with certain precedents how important it is it that the comma in this sentence is here and not there. What’s the subjective clause? What’s the operating clause like? All of these truly.Linguistic disciplines, right? If you think of yourself as like a, an English professor or, or or a writing teacher, right? you can use all, you can use your Strunk and White to figure out what the law means, what the law should mean and thus what the right outcome.And again, there is a right outcome. What the right outcome of the case, the analysis, the issue should be.Originalism itself is a form of formalism, right? it’s an offshoot, of what we’re talking about.And, formalism has a long and deep history both in this country and in England, right? formalism, I believe, you could argue, was at its height in the 1920s, right? In, in, the 1910s the older court really delved into this conception that. The law was an objective, rational thing [00:06:00] that could be understood through reason, and logic, it’s always been part of our tradition and it’s there I think on both sides.I think on both the right and the left, it’s there to insulate judges from the real world consequences of their decisions, right? if I can say, look, I don’t have an opinion on whether. Black people are people. I don’t have an opinion on whether gay people should have rights. All I can do, I’m just a lowly judge.All I can do is look at the text and the documents place before me and make a call on what the language means, or what the language should means. Means that protects you from, conceptually speaking, that protects you intellectually from having to stake out an opinion, a belief structure, a worldview, and all of that messy political stuff that a lot of times judges like to say and like to pretend that they are above, And so at its core, legal formalism to me has always been a judicial self-defense mechanism. a way for judges to. Again, insulate themselves from accusations of political feelings of of trying to impose their worldview on the elected branches and all that.And I think that’s why both sides cleave to it even when it can sometimes make them look absolutely ridiculous.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. It is self-justifying, and we’ll get into that a bit later, but yeah. And it’s important to note the time period, because as you were saying, during the early 20th century is really when it was all the rage. But it was a de facto system even continuously after that.That time period coincides very well with logical positivism which was a fad within [00:08:00] philosophy around that same time period, which basically it was like a souped-up scientific realism that said that not only is there a real world in which we live, we can know literally everything about it through science.And so with that, all moral questions are simply scientific questions that haven’t been adequately examined. And it was a very popular idea around that time.MYSTAL: Yeah, although I think most people are more familiar with it in the field of economics. The invention of economics, the idea that we can understand markets and money and the flow through essentially science and impose that scientific understanding on our economic structures that our economic structures should be built for.And I think that’s always a point that I like to dive into the whole conception of our economics, of our economic science is that the point of economics is to make more money, not to increase social justice, not to better the lives of the citizens, but just more, more is the point.In the same way, legal formalism kind of draws from that economic idea draws from that scientific idea and presumes that the point of legal analysis, the point of judging, the point of the judiciary is to apply logic, is to apply reason, not necessarily to apply justice.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MYSTAL: That to me is always the black hole, if you will, at the center of all of this. What are you act, what’s the gravitational pull? What’s actually pulling you in one direction or another?And I think for a lot of legal formalists, the black hole at the center, the thing that’s pulling them is an idea of logic, not an idea of justice. Now, they’ll argue that [00:10:00] we achieve justice through logic.That’s an argument I don’t know that I always agree with it, but I don’t think that it’s necessarily wrong. But you know what, has the bigger pull, right? It’s the black hole or the sun. The sun has a lot of gravity, right? But if you’re next to a black hole, the body is going to go towards the black hole.And, to me, the black hole is this again. Idea, this intellectual thought of what’s reasonable, what’s logical, what’s defensible, as opposed to the intellectual thought of what’s just, what’s good, what’s fair.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. It’s justice as a side effect basically. You’ll get it if you do this other thing.MYSTAL: Yeah, that’s right. That’s right.Philosophy and science abandoned belief in total objectivity, but legal scholars didn’tSHEFFIELD: Within philosophy, though, philosophy, logical positivism and philosophy of science, it got basically destroyed after World War II essentially by people like Karl Popper.And, a lot of the postmodernists, they showed that if all of these things were objectively true, then why did we just have a war in which tens of millions of people died? Like that’s a pretty intuitive argument, right there. And it was hard to argue with it.And so within philosophy, logical positivism was dead, pretty much. Dead and buried in the ground, like nobody was pushing that idea. But within the legal system in the United States, it got institutionalized almost immediately.It was a comforting story that law professors told themselves. And the New York Times they had an interview asking legal professors, what do you think about this John Roberts court, and one of the professors that they had talked to was saying something like, this is basically undermining everything that I’ve ever understood about the law, and it’s making me question everything and making me traumatized. And I’m just looking at it and thinking this is what happens, and why you never go full legal [00:12:00] formalist!MYSTAL: Welcome to the world you’ve been living in this whole time. I love Matt, your analogy, or your reference to World War II, and how that killed an idea of scientific objectivity. One of my favorite episodes of my favorite podcasts is Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, and he does an episode called Logical Insanity, And how the use of nuclear weapons was the logical thing to do from the perspective of the people who were making the decisions.And it made all other horrible, genocidal decisions all the way up to that point in that war. it’s amazing what tens of millions of dead people will do to your philosophical theory, right?It’s amazing how just the reality of bodies on the ground forces you to reconsider your intellectual priors. And that is something that I would argue in a way hasn’t really happened to the law-- you haven’t really had. There is no nuclear weapon. There is no bomb that goes off and people are like, oh no, what have I wrought?We might be seeing that now. We might be right now. And this what this links up to your Times quote, we might be living through the logical insanity of legal formalism and where that leads us and where that leads the country. And the suffering and injustice that it causes that might make the next generation reject this whole cloth, come up with new ways and new methods of interpretation because we are right now seeing the logical conclusion of legal formalism.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Exactly. And with regard to World War II, everybody who was involved with it said that their beliefs were the objective scientific reality. That was the centerpiece of the Nazi propaganda. We are just doing science [00:14:00] with this here.And science says that, this is, we need to kill these people, and we need to invade these countries. This is objective, because we’re the superior ethnicity and race. And it became so absurd that logical positivism collapsed under its own weight and under a lot of criticism.Nonetheless, it, legal formalism, its counterpart in the legal system, became very entrenched, and as you noted, both in left and right varieties of itself. And so it was a way to justify for courts that it basically boils down to: it’s just business.It’s just business. It’s not personal—like that classic line that someone says when they’re screwing you over. I don’t mean, I don’t mean anything against you. I’m just doing something really awful. But don’t worry, I don’t mean something bad by it.MYSTAL: Yeah. No, I never trucked with that. I never trucked with that, even when I was in law school. I so, an offshoot of legal formalism that you’re talking about is called law and economics. It’s the idea, it’s most famous acolyte is judge Richard Posner, who’s a incredibly intelligent man.I’ve had the opportunity to interview him and disagree with him and lose live he he’s a brilliant man. I completely disagree with his philosophy. And his philosophy is that of law and economics, that the, as I was saying earlier, back economics, the goal of economics is more law and economics presupposes that the goal of law is to make the right economic decision. That the goal of law is to make the decision that will produce the most economic benefit.I disagree with that wholeheartedly to the point where. The first time I was exposed to this theory I was a first year in law school in my torts class. And the, my torts professor was a law and economics guy, and he was shoving law and economics like down our throats. [00:16:00] And just every day I was just, no disagree. That can’t be right. Like I, I was not having it. So we get to the final, and at least when I was at Harvard, your final is 100% of your grade. it’s one test, written exam, open book, eight hours, 100% of your grade. And my torts exam had three questions. And the third question was, people like Elie Mystal will argue that the tort system is a lottery. Explain why he’s wrong.SHEFFIELD: Wait. It literally said that.MYSTAL: It literally says people Elie Mystal will say this. Explain why he’s wrong. And I was like, this MF this guy.SHEFFIELD: Hah!MYSTAL: I was like, I’m going to take my B, I’m going to take my B. And I wrote, in fact, Elie Mystal is not wrong. And I just answered the question. And so I got my B plus and I was happy with that.But yeah, but I’m saying like the point of that story is like, law and economics is endemic to how they teach law students. And it’s just, it’s something that I’ve always rejected. But I am in the minority.Legal formalism as the perfect justification for law schoolsSHEFFIELD: Yeah. And on the law school point, legal formalism is the perfect justification for law schools to exist because it’s fake science essentially, is what we’re talking about. This is, that’s what legal formalism is. It’s a pretension of objectivity.And you brought up English professors, but you get two English professors in a room and you ask them, tell me about Voltaire’s Candide. Does it mean x? And you’ll get 20 different opinions out of two people on what that novel means. And the same thing obviously is true with regard to legal stuff.And here’s the thing. It doesn’t [00:18:00] mean that because we’re criticizing it here, it doesn’t mean that we’re saying that there are no cases where an objective outcome is possible. It doesn’t mean that. It means that the burden of proof is on the legal formalist to say that it always exists and that it’s always discernible.And they never bother to do that.MYSTAL: Yeah Matt, you’re hitting close to home because I am one of my more radical ideas and my more radical proposals is about the how we need to massively rethink how we do legal education in this country. I’m no fan of our current, 232 law school system where, 90% of them are diploma mills and three of them are teaching the next Supreme Court justices.And there’s just not a lot in between. I think we should have a two-tier, at least a two-tier law school system where we have one group of schools that is really focused on training the next judges, right? The next the next legal arbitrators, if you will, whether that’s a judge or an arbitration person and really focusing the mind on the structures and the skills that one needs to judge.Which are different than the other law schools, which should be focused on teaching the next generation of lawyers, the next generation of practitioners, the next generation of people who will do client services. Because those are two different things. Like what you need to do, one thing is somewhat completely different than what you need to do.Another thing and in particular point what you need to do the client service stuff shouldn’t take three years as current law schools do and shouldn’t cost, the mortgage of a house, like it should not cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to get through that experience.One of the reasons why we have a justice gap in terms of attorney representation is that people coming out of law school have so much debt that [00:20:00] they can’t take on the poor, the vulnerable, the needy client they have to take on, have to is not correct. They are compelled to take on the rich, the powerful, the insurance company clients because that’s how they’re going to pay back their debts. And if we had a different law school system where we were producing practitioners, after a year and a half people graduating from school with 20 grand in debt, 30 grand in debt, as opposed to 200,000 in debt, 400,000 in debt.You’d develop a crop of lawyers who were able to assist clients in need. That’s one huge distinction, tiering I would make in the law school system. And then I would try to encourage more people to pursue something along the lines of a PhD in legal philosophy, right? PhD in legal history. Because that’s another thing that law schools try to cram in there over three years while taking all your money that most lawyers don’t need at all yet.Some people are super interested in and that can be, the, if you, so if you think about it, you need one track for the people who are going to be judges. One track for the people who are going to be law professors, and another track for people who are going to be actual lawyers.Law schools right now, they try to do all three things and they do it poorly. They do all three things poorlySHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. AndMYSTAL: Except for Yale. Yale does it all good, but except for Yale, they do all.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And your idea here, large language models, the new LLMs, are basically going to force this. Because all low level legal work, because most people who come out of law school, they get stuck doing document review work, very basic research for cases and a large language model, they can do that stuff actually very well, in, in many cases, better than humans. Because, they, they are able, [00:22:00] they know a lot more synonyms off, off of the top of a calculation compared to us. Like there could be, like on a given word there might be 20 or 30 different ways of saying one word.And a human might only know off offhand, maybe 10 of them. So like this is going to completely destroy all entry level legal jobs. And so we have to, they have to be, the law school environment has to be optimized for litigation because obviously a computer LLM cannot do that.MYSTAL: Litigation and service. one of the, one of the, one of the real, I think, failures of law school is that they don’t teach people how to serve people. Law. Law, being a lawyer is a service industry. One of the reasons why I didn’t like it being a lawyer is because it’s the service industry. Right? One of the, one of the reasons I didn’t like it is that at the end of the day, you’re the guy who’s okay, Mr.Client, would you like fries with that? you are providing, person to person, flesh to flesh service. And law school doesn’t train you to do that very well. And a lot of people who end up in law school turns out they never wanted to go into a service industry. They want to go into an academic industry or judicial industry.Like they’re and they’re they’re, that’s one of the reasons why you have so much sadness and I think disappointment and uncertainly drinking and drug use in the legal profession is that you got people mismatched, serving in a service industry when they had no intention or skills or abilities to do that.Yeah. So there’s aSHEFFIELD: And they’re 200 grand in the whole on top of it.MYSTAL: Right. But they got to pay the bills and they got to pay back that debt. So there, there are a lot of, there are a lot of problems with how we teach lawyers that, and judges that then lead to some of the problems with lawyers and judges that we’re talking about now.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and legal formalism. Yeah. It’s like the perfect justification for all of this bad system because it’s no, we’re, we are [00:24:00] unlocking the secret to reality basically for you. And we happen to know what it is. SoMYSTAL: People should note. People should note, like if you go back and read a really old opinion, a, an opinion from, 18, 18, 10, an opinion from 1845 if you, your, the language is archaic so that will trip people up. The we don’t talk or write like they did in 1845, but if you were comfortable with the language, you would be able to understand it without a law degree.You would be able to understand what they’re saying without a law degree, because back in the 19th century, they wrote with clarity, they wrote with the idea that. Non legally trained people should be able to understand their decisions because they understood that non legally trained people would have to enforce their decisions.And so of course, they needed to write in a way that the average Joe, if you maybe a slightly above average Joe, but like the average Joe could understand what they were saying. Fast forward to reading an opinion today or really reading any opinion post 1960. And it’s jargon on top of jargon nestled into procedure, right?It’s just you have to have gone through the three years or more or so of legal training to understand what John Roberts is saying today. And that is actually. Historically speaking in America new, it is new that the average, relatively speaking, it is new that the average person has almost no opportunity to understand a Supreme Court decision.That’s a bit weird, right? And it’s and it creates a social stratification, right? It creates a educated class, an elite class, a ruling class of law people of law [00:26:00] understanders, who are then allowed to explain to everybody else what the law means, right? So that you, the average person, aren’t allowed to figure out for yourself what the law means.You, the average person, aren’t allowed to noodle out for yourself what your rights and responsibilities are. You have to pay a lawyer to do that, right? Isn’t that convenient? It’s you have to pay money in order to understand simple things like your rights or your contracts, or think about a contract.That’s a great way of thinking about it. How many people, how many business people can write a contract for their business without a lawyer? And the answer is almost nobody. Almost nobody. You almost certainly, if you are a, if you are a small business all the way up to a Fortune 500 con company, you got to have a lawyer to write your contracts.You have to pay a lawyer money to write your contracts because the law has become so formalistic, so jargon heavy, so procedural that you, the average business person cannot write your own business contract. That’s new. That’s not how it was in the 19th century.Legal realism explainedSHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s that’s a great point. And it undercuts the originalist idea that they’re trying to preserve some sort of antiquated understanding of the law. But that takes us to the next part of the discussion here, which is that so we’re not going to have a big long legal philosophy seminar here, but basically there are two other alternatives to legal formalism, we can say, boil it down very broadly that the alternatives are realism and critical legal studies. And and as you described yourself at the beginning, you are in the realist camp. So what is legal realism?MYSTAL: Yes I am most definitely a legal realist, so my form of legal realism. Is the particularly harsh political kind, right? My thought is that judges [00:28:00] make their decisions based on any number of factors, their personal beliefs, their political beliefs, their religious beliefs, all the things that go into a person.That is what the judge is drawing upon to make their decision. And then they work backwards. They want to get to a certain outcome, either for political or personal or social reasons. And then they work backwards to figure out how they can achieve the outcome they want. They’ll use whatever’s at the table.They’ll use formalism if that’s helpful to get to their outcome, but they’ll ignore formalism if it’s unhelpful to get to their outcome. That there are very few ju there are no judges. Do this 100%. And, you can always find, even the most formalistic judge, you’ll find a case where they abandon whatever.Procedural and intellectual principles they have in order to get to the determinative outcome that they seek. And so when I’m talking about legalism, that’s really where, I’m coming from that you have to understand who the judges are as people both stop it though. Sorry. You have to understand who the judges are as people, both as intellectual beings, as social beings, as religious beings, as racial and gender beings.You have to understand who they are as people to understand the decisions that they’re going to make. And if you do that, you’ll find that your ability to predict how the case is going to go shoots up the roof, right? Like you, I will, win the crystal ball bat bet I will win fantasy SCOTUS against anybody who thinks that the.The texts of the statutes and the texts of the cases and the particularities of the issues, I will win against anybody who thinks that those matter, just by having a better understanding of who these judges are as [00:30:00] people.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that is very, accurate. And it actually reminds me of a conversation that I had with somebody. I’m not a lawyer, but I write about law stuff a sufficient amount that lawyers sometimes ask me opinions about what they should say and or how they should word things.And I was having a conversation with somebody one time and this person asked me, okay, what should I, what do, should I say A or B in this brief here? What do you think? And I said, what’s the political party of the judge? And they looked at me and I had two heads, and I was like, this is actually very relevant here because this is a clear distinction between, a conservative and a right wing inter interpretation, what you’re asking me here. And they were like, I have no idea what it is, and it doesn’t matter. And I was like, you got some news for you. It does matter. And they got and very huffy at me for daring to suggest that their precious judge would have political considerations in the case.And it turned out I was right. but I didn’t rub it in. I’m only rubbing it in now anonymously.MYSTAL: Yeah the look I have that fight with journalists all the time. Where, recently in my career, recently, like halfway through my career, I started proactively when I refer to a judge, refer to either their political party or the president that appointed them. 10 years ago, people didn’t do that.You read the Adam Liptak, the New York Times, he still doesn’t do that. the, idea that you have to put the party affiliation of the judge when you are explaining a judge or a decision to anybody, that is, again, that is incredibly new. And I’m one of the people that’s made it new that’s made it a thing that now most people do, although they’re still old school journalists that don’t, and that is that, that is, if you will, legal realism 1 0 1 as applied to journalism, right?I’m going to, I’m not doing my job as [00:32:00] a journalist if I’m not telling you Elena Kagan appointed by Clinton Amy Coney Barrett appointed by Trump. I’m not doing my job if you don’t know that. So that’s one kind of definition of realism. The other definition that I find useful and that I clinging to quite a bit is the idea that you have to look at the.On the ground realities of the decision as part of your decision making process, right? that, that the, real world impacts of your decision matter and should matter as you’re making the decision. And this is such a controversial point to many judges on both the right and the left. And I’m not saying like the right believes one thing and the left believes another thing I’m saying that you can find interesing battles.Amongst the right and the left over how much to consider the real world impact of their decisions. And I am, an extreme to the side of the real world impact to of the decisions is one of the only things that matters. but there are people on my side of the aisle, if you will, who would disagree with me and say that, looking too much at the real world impact of your decisions leads to worse decisions.So that’s a live battle. And I’m on the side of, I apologize for that. My dog has seen a squirrel that she does not like stop it.SHEFFIELD: It’s anMYSTAL: And so the idea is that so yeah, I’m on the extreme side of saying that the decisions are, the real world impact is some of the only things that matter.We can see this battle play out at the Supreme Court over the issue of abortion, right? If you go back to 1992 and you look at the decision in Planned Parenthood v Casey, which is the decision, the 1992 decision that upheld Roe v. Wade, what you have is a bunch of [00:34:00] conservative judges of justices, a bunch of Republican appointed justices who hated abortion.People think that the court is unbalanced now because it’s six three Republican. In 1992, the court was eight to one Republican appointees over Democratic appointees. And the one democratic appointee was a guy who voted against Roe v. Wade, right? So if you’re coming at abortion in 1992, you, think you have it locked.You think you have it won and you don’t because two of the Republicans, Sandra Day O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy did legal realism. Senator Day O’Connor famously says abortions will happen whether the government wants them to or not. And so in her upholding of Roe v Wade, which is a decision she didn’t agree with upholding of abortion rights, which were rights that she didn’t agree with.O O’Connor was no fan of abortion, but she rules in favor of abortion because of the real world impact of taking that right away. Fast forward to Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health. Fast forward to 2022, and you have Sam Alito telling us that we shouldn’t at all look at the real world impacts of abortion rights or the real world impacts of taking them away.That’s a difference that happened within the Republican justices. Within the Republican party. Again, when I say that formalism is a way for judges to protect themselves, it’s a re it’s a retreat. It’s a, I don’t ha, Sam Alito is falsely telling us he doesn’t have an opinion on abortion rights one way or the other.He justSHEFFIELD: Where it’s not relevant. Yeah.MYSTAL: He just thinks that the real world impact is not relevant at all. It’s a shocking turn that’s happened again, 1992 to 2022. It’s a shocking turn that’s happened within our, all of our lifetimes.SHEFFIELD: [00:36:00] Yeah. And I would say that it, in this particular case at least on the right that it really shows that there is a distinction between conservative and reactionary. Like a conservative is somebody who says, look, there might be a law that I don’t like. what, this is a thing that millions of people have built their lives expecting to exist.And so I’m not going to take it away from them, like that was classic Dwight Eisenhower when he came in after Truman and FDR had created all these programs that he wasn’t necessarily want, wouldn’t have supported when they were doing it, but he was like, look. Our economy is literally built on these ideas now. So I’m not going to get rid of Social Security. I’m not going to get rid of all these new departments because that would be foolhardy and destructive to the nation.And so that’s what an actual conservative does. A reactionary says no, this is all evil. We need to go back to 1910 or 1847 or some insert pre-Civil War year here.And and that’s what we’re going to do. And they don’t care who it impacts or who it hurts because, they have this imagine past that they want to go back to.MYSTAL: Look, the word evil is important here because I do think that it, again, as a legal realist, I think that evil is a word that should be used in law, that should be used in making decisions. And I would, it’s going to sound weird. I would’ve preferred it, I would’ve preferred it as a legal proposition if Sam Alito come out and said, abortion is evil.If Sam Alito come out and said we, are overturning Roe v. Wade, because abortion is an evil scourge on the country, that must be stopped, that would’ve been a truthful for what he believed, as opposed to the bull crap that he wrote. B. It would’ve made the fight obvious, right? Like, that’s, and thus it makes it easy, easier to overturn, easier to fight politically, whatever you [00:38:00] want to say.But it is clear to me that justice is like Alito Thomas Roberts. They think abortion is evil. So just say that stop hiding behind your jargon. Just say that you don’t like it and say that you’re overruling it because you don’t like it, because that then opens the aperture for what the people who disagree with you can do.Right.Critical legal studies and integralismSHEFFIELD: Yeah, it lets them know what’s at stake, for sure. Yeah. All So the other alternative, the main alternative to discuss here is critical legal studies or critical realism as sometimes it’s called. So let’s talk about that.MYSTAL: Yeah. So I don’t, this is, this now is a little bit beyond me, right? My understanding of critical studies is like a law school understanding of it. Which is that you have to look at all of the history of you, if you will, of the case law. first of all, I guess we have to start with, we have to understand that America is a common law system.That means that most of our laws are not written down. Most of our laws are are based on precedent, right? so because this old white guy did it in 1790, then this other old white guy agreed with him in 1812 and so on and so forth. And we get to a point where wherever we are today, right?And critical realism is to look at the factors. Involved in the decisions in 1790 and 1812 and so on and so forth. Until we get to a point where we can understand why they made their decisions, that’s why it’s a form of realism, right? We have to understand who these people were, the society that they were living under and we accorded presidential value or not, based on how much our society is different from their [00:40:00] society.So an example of this, you could argue is Brown v. Board of Ed. Now, I struggle a lot with Brown v Board of Ed because as a black man, brown v Board of Ed is one of the most important decisions to ever have been made. My mother was born in 1950 in Mississippi, right? Brown v. Board of Ed is why my mom could go to the library, right?So Brown v Board of Ed is a critically important decision, literally to me personally, to say nothing of, I think its larger effects on the country, and yet it is stupidly written like, oh my God, I like it. It is almost laughably ridiculous in terms of how they reasoned their way into overturning Plessy v Ferguson People, a lot of people don’t know this.My man Warren was looking at dolls, right? And I’m not. Making that up at all. One of the, one of the ways he reasoned that s but equal was unconstitutional was based on a study of black girls playing with dolls and how they found the black dolls to be less good than the white dolls, even though they were black girls.And somehow this shows that segregation is bad. And I’m like, brother, what? What dolls? Are you kidding me? Like that? That’s a critical realism theory. That is that, that is looking at the differences between the society of Plessy b Ferguson and the Society of Brown B Board of Ed that is looking at new science.It’s a study. To inform your opinion, but man, that’s not how I would’ve rolled with it. That’s that I, again, I would have been [00:42:00] much more comfortable saying, guess what? Segregation is evil. We’re overturning it, suck on it. Like, again, my re my, my, so I do make a distinction between legal re realism and critical realism.Because I think legal realism is cleaner. I think critical realism is trying to get to the same point than I’m already at through a lot more bs.SHEFFIELD: A lot a lot more hoops to jump through. Yeah and in a way I think, you could argue that perhaps and I’m I’m violating my idea of saying only two of the philosophies here, but in, in a certain sense it is. I think critical legal realism is like a more left counterpart to what exists on the far right.This idea of integral of, that the role of the legal system is to, integrate the tr religious doctrines of my personal religion into society. And we’re going to, we’re going, so we’re going to cite to, Pope j John the 11th amount something on this here.And we’re going to cite through the Bible on this other case. And we’re going to look to these things that have nothing to do with the legal case because they are representative of the values we want to ensconce. That’s how I see it.MYSTAL: I think that’s right. And I just, I, there, there are cleaner ways to do it. There, there are, there are, look the danger of what I’m saying, right?Going back to legal realism means we have to restrain judgesMYSTAL: The danger of my position that I’m well aware of is that if you untether judges from any sense of text from any sense of precedent, from any sense of history, all you get are politicians in robes. And while that might be fine, the problem is nobody elects these politicians in robes. In a Democratic a [00:44:00] self-governing republic, we are supposed to elect the representatives who make the laws for us and decide the important issues. For us, we’re supposed to have a vote in these decisions.And judges, you don’t vote for. So the judge shouldn’t have the power to make political decisions based on their whatever, on their personal beliefs, on their personal feelings, on their religions, on their race, on their creed because nobody voted for them, right? And where I take us to is a form of a judici a form of overpowered judiciary, where they are in the platonic sense, right?Philosopher, kings lording over the rest of society that nobody voted for. So the way that I handled that criticism, the way that I cut that criticism is to say that while I am a legal realist, why I believe that judges are in fact politicians in robes because nobody voted for them. I think judges should have way less power than they do in our society, right?I want to understand what a judge is, but then truncate and limit the power of the courts. To the point where whatever it is, where it’s not as powerful as it is today.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.MYSTAL: My idea there tracks globally. A lot of Americans don’t understand that the American Supreme Court is one of, if not the most powerful high court in industrialized democracies.Other countries, high courts do not have as much power as the American Supreme Court. Other countries’ high courts do not regularly overturn laws passed by their parliaments overturn orders issued by their prime ministers. That doesn’t really happen elsewhere. It happens every June here. It [00:46:00] doesn’t it, it’s a rare thing for it to happen elsewhere.That’s why in most other countries, people don’t have any idea who the justices are on their high card. They don’t know. they’re not, because it doesn’t matter right here, we don’t know because we’re stupid and we’re poorly read. But in other countries, it doesn’t matter who their high court does.It’s not a life or death political fight every time one of these octogenarians dies or chokes on a ham sandwich or whatever because their high courts don’t have as much power. So my response to the criticism of legal realism is always to significantly truncate and limit the power of our Supreme Court and our federal courts in general, so that they can’t run roughshod over the elected branches of government.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and that also as a very originalist in historical context as well, Elie because like that the idea of the courts as the quote least dangerous branch is that was the unanimous belief among all of the signers of the Constitution that we’re prominent is that we have records of basically you.MYSTAL: I’ve made the joke. Matt, I’ve made the joke before that so Hamilton writes the courts will be the least dangerous branch in federal 78 because they have neither the power of the purse nor the power of the sword. That means they have neither the power to tax like Congress does, which is the power to destroy according to the founders, nor the power of the sword, that means that they’re not the president, they’re not the commander in chief. They can’t use the military. So Hamilton says that they will not be that important. And I’ve made the joke, Matt, that the next time Hamilton would be that wrong, he’d be shooting his gun up into the air in Hoboken, right?like Hamilton was just wrong, just straight. And all of them were just straight up wrong and they were wrong almost immediately. Marbury versus Madison, John Marshall in 1803 proved them wrong [00:48:00] almost immediately. They proved them wrong in their lifetimes,SHEFFIELD: And they didn’t do anything about it, like those assholes.MYSTAL: Do a damn thing about it.The Warren and Burger courts were anomolies that distorted liberal understanding of jurisprudenceSHEFFIELD: Yeah. so besides the historical context though, the other thing is that and this was the allure of legal formalism for the, for liberals, is that it became ensconced exactly around the time period of the Warren Court.And so it became a self-justifying theory for the Warren Court’s decisions and the Burger Court which was only slightly less progressive in its rulings. And the problem is the legal system is inherently conservative, and inherently biased to the right because it is based on, we have to preserve what order exists right now.So that is an inherent conservative object for them to strive towards. And as you said, it’s not about justice, it’s literally about legal order. that’s the de facto pursuit of all legal systems. And in some ways it, you could say it, it probably has to be that way, right?MYSTAL: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Because there would be chaos if it wasn’t. And but, so essentially legal formalism, this is why it’s so pernicious, is it became a way for people on the political left to justify a conservative institution. That historically up until only the Warren Court, so the entire history of the United States before and then subsequently to the Burger Court, it was and has been and is, a conservative and reactionary institution. So this was liberals literally saying, here, take this gun and point it at my head and point it at America because I like this five or six rulings. That’s what happened.MYSTAL: Warren and Burger destroyed intellectually [00:50:00] an entire generation of liberals. Just an entire generation of progressives. I could argue two generations of liberals and progressives because of exactly what you’re saying, Matt. That because for 20 years there, disregarding the entire previous history of the court and disregarding the entire post Burger, Rehnquist, into Roberts history of the courts.For 20 years there, the court was a progressive force of social change, every other time in American history, the other 230 years there are regressive conservative force against social change. But for 20 years they were forward thinking. And because they were forward thinking for 20 years, it created in liberals a false and ultimately defeatist reliance on the courts as the institution for social change.The courts are not an institution for social change. They shouldn’t, as you pointed out, they probably shouldn’t be an institution for social change. I argue that they can’t be a, so an instrument for social change because the society does not elect them to change the society, right? So all of these kind of intellectual and structural vales, retard the progress of the court.The court is a retardation on the progress of our country. But because of the Warren court, because boarded, which I just talked about, because of the civil rights stuff, because of Roe v. Wade, for an entire generation or two, liberals got the false impression that the courts were their friends and they’re not. And it’s something that you have to, that we haven’t.So to the point where you get the first black president, you get a, the first black president who also happens to be a Harvard educated constitutional scholar, and he’s thinking that the courts are going to [00:52:00] uphold his agenda because he has been. He has been bamboozled by, because he came of age during those 20 years when the courts were actually our friends.And he completely, I, I could argue that, the, I’ve argued before the biggest failure of Barack Obama was trying to appoint Merrick Garland and not filling Scalia’s seat. That is it. I want, I don’t want to say Obama had one job, but he had three jobs and that was one of them. And he failed that job massively. Failing to appoint a liberal to replace Scalia was a massive failure.And I know that’s McConnell’s fault and we can, people can blame McConnell for that. But like Obama was the president at the time, he should have found a waySHEFFIELD: Oh, and he didn’t even tell the public really what was going on. Like they would’ve been outraged if they had heard about it. IMYSTAL: that was mission critical and it was a failure, but it’s a failure because of what we’re talking about.It’s a failure because of a reliance that the courts are fundamentally reasonable, fundamentally forward facing fundamentally socially just, and that’s just not what the courts are or have been throughout American history, but for, again, 20 odd years in the middle there.Because judging is political, it must be restrained to be lower than CongressSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and this was this was I think a system-wide failure on the political left outside, not just the legal system as well, and what they didn’t get ultimately is that the best way to protect democracy is to practice it. Be, you can’t protect democracy by saying, we’re going to have this small cadre of people and they’re going to make the right decisions.That, that’s inherently anti-democratic, is what you’re doing. And you can’t do that. And, and I, and the example I sometimes give on this point is that, you look at. The the healthcare systems in other countries that have installed them through a pro parliamentary procedure, right?You look at, [00:54:00] up until just, recently, pretty much every industrialized nation in the world, their conservative parties were less extreme than ours. And there are some, religious reasons for that and racial reasons for that. But there are the, it, those other countries also had racists and those other countries also had, religious fundamentalists.And What kept them at bay to a very large degree is that policy change was put through democratically. So even, the most extreme right wing parties in the UK or France, and any of these countries, Japan there, and yeah, even in the Islamic world, and African nations, south American, these far right parties are not going there and saying, we’re going to take away your healthcare.We’re going to, take, we’re gonna do all of these terrible things to you. They can’t run on that.MYSTAL: It is the greatest trick the Republican Party has ever pulled. It’s the greatest trick they pulled in my lifetime because their policies are generally speaking massively unpopular, right? You could not pass an abortion ban. Couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it, couldn’t do it nationally, can’t. It’s real. And we’re seeing really hard to do it in the states even,SHEFFIELD: Even Republican states. Yeah.MYSTAL: Even Republican state, it’s really hard to pass it even in Republican state. Couldn’t ever do it nationally, but you can do it through the courts. The, some of the gun rights stuff you can’t ban background checks nationally at the ballot box. People wouldn’t have it.If you did it all through the ballot box, we would solve our school shooting problem. But through the courts, what can one do? And for, so for a long time, Republicans, I would argue, the more moderate ones, the Lincoln Chaffee, if you will to reference an old guy a blast from the past.The former, the last Republican New England Senator of my lifetime these guys always were able to [00:56:00] run on moderate policies, but acknowledge to the crazy folk that they were with them, but, oh, what can we do until we get, have the courts right. That, that, that was their fundamental thing.Conversely, interestingly enough, speaking of the Warren court, Democrats learned the wrong lesson from the Warren courts. Democrats from the Warren courts thought that the lesson was that, oh, you have to have the courts to do massive social change like end segregation, when actually it was the Democrats who were able to pass.Their social change laws through normal processes of democratic legislation. It was the Civil Rights Act. It’s the Voting Rights Act. It’s the Fair Housing Act. All of that is legislation. None of that came through the courts. Democrats actually could pass their policies now enforcing their policies on the states and forcing Alabama to accept the Civil Rights Act.Maybe you need some courts for that. Although if you ask John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, you also need some guns for that, right? Like actually forcing the states to follow these. Let these national pieces of legislations, maybe you need some courts to do that, but to actually get the law, you can do that democratically.But Democrats learn and it’s the only way that’s going to stick, right? But Democrats learn the wrong lesson. Oh, you need the courts for Roe v. Wade, you need the courts for Brown v Board of Ed. You need the courts to do social change. Republicans understood that because they couldn’t pass their policies, they needed the courts to do the massive social change.People get this all screwed up. The Republican courts, the conservative courts, are responsible for more social change through judicial fiat than the liberal courts because the liberal courts, the liberals, are genuinely enforcing [00:58:00] laws that were passed by Congress. Upon people who don’t like that the law was passed by Congress.Whereas Republican courts, conservative courts are through judicial fiat creating changes that were not passed by Congress, that were not authorized by Congress because you can’t win those battles at the ballot box. So yeah my, my argument is always and again, as a black man, people are like, people are some, sometimes surprised that I say this because they’re like, have you seen Mississippi? Yeah, I have. And if you put a gun to my head, I would rather fight for the voters in Mississippi over what I believe than try to have to convince unelected unaccountable judges of what I believe I’m going to have a better shot with the population of Miss fricking sippy than I’m going to have with Santo.Making courts matter to votersSHEFFIELD: Yeah. and we’re seeing that we saw that with abortion and we will see that with regard to marriage equality. I think, the, and and hopefully that won’t happen, immediately. But there’s no, there, the religious right literally said we’ve decided to launch a lawsuit.Factory and we’re going to, we’re going to find enough cases and we’re going to find one that’s going to tickle the funny bone of these reactionary judges the right way. And and they’ll go for it. And, who’s to say that they won’t. And this is, and despite, and yet despite all of this, the Democratic party still does not campaign on the court, does not campaign on telling people what happened to them and why this happened and how they will fix it.And and so when you look at voters to the extent some Democrats are saying that yes, they vote based on the courts but it should be a huge majority of Democratic voters should say that. And they’re not. And this is a failure of the leadership to not just pack the court, [01:00:00] but also restrain the court.MYSTAL: It’s a massive failure of the Democratic Party and it’s an ongoing train wreck. I like to say that Republic, if I go to a Republican voter in Appalachia, if I go to a low information Republican voter in a poor state, right? They will not be able to converse with me about these theories of legal formalism or legal realism or anything like that.They won’t be able to converse with me about substantive due process versus procedural due process. They won’t understand any of that, but they know about the Second Amendment. They won’t be able to quote a single statute that actually impacts their lives. They won’t be able to quote the zoning laws around their shack, but they can quote the Second Amendment right because the Republican leadership has made that.So the Republican leadership the Republican Party has convinced that voter, that to have what that voter wants, Republicans have to control the Supreme Court. So that voter has a one-to-one understanding that if he wants his shotgun. and he can have legitimate reasons. I’m even going to say just for the sake of the argument, he’s got legitimate reasons for wanting his shotgun, right?Constitutional reasons for wanting a shotgun. Let’s even go further, right? He understands that to keep his shotgun in his house, Republicans need to control the Supreme Court. That is not confusing to him. That is not mysterious legal jargon to him. He knows it for a locked fact. Now, I go to a Democratic voter, and I and, let’s say I’m talking, let’s say I’m in, Brooklyn, I’m talking to a crunchy Birkenstock wearing, free love, make peace, not [01:02:00] war.Crunchy, hipster liberal, who wants the Green New Deal? Who is terrified about the environmental catastrophes that are happening, who’s terrified for their potential children and grandchildren in the world they’re going to live in? Who wants the earth to be saved? They have no conception that in order to get what they want, they have to have the Supreme Court.They might talk to me about a OC. They might talk to me about Bernie. They might talk to me about a Green New Deal. They might talk to me about any number of legislation that they want to see passed, but they have no conception that every single one of those laws will be overturned before breakfast by a conservative Supreme Court.If liberals do not control the Supreme Court, they do not make the one-to-one connection, and that is not their fault. That is the Democratic party’s fault. That is the leadership’s fault. The leadership has not made in the minds of the voters the one-to-one connection between what they want. Controlling the Supreme Court.It is why Democrats lose it is why Democrats have lost the battle for the courts. It’s why they fail.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And legal formalism. It’s. Perhaps useful as a heuristic for writing decisions, but for anything else, it is dangerous if you are a liberal and it needs to be thrown in the trash can. Because yeah we got to get real about this stuff and it’s long pastime to do that.MYSTAL: Yeah. And we’ve got to make it real for our own people, right? We’ve got to, I’ll, I go to the barbershop, as you can see from my hair. I don’t go to the barbershop often, when I’m there and I’m talking to black people about police brutality about. the things that are happening in our communities, the, I’m always trying to make that connection.this the reason why the police can roll up in [01:04:00] here and put us all against the wall and beat the crap out of us. That’s Graham v Connor. That’s a William Renquist decision. If we change that decision, the entire structure of police brutality changes in this country, Like that’s where we got to focus. It’s not about Manami or Bloomberg or Stop, and it’s about these decisions that are made by unelected unaccountable judges that, for the most part are Republican, for the most part, are conservative. But, and that’s why you got to vote for Hillary Clinton becauseSHEFFIELD: and you don’t have to like her. You don’t have to like, any of her ideas necessarily, except which is we’re going to contain the court and we’re going to pack the hell up.MYSTAL: You got to vote for Hillary Clinton because Ruth Bader Ginsburg is 82 years old and she’s going to die soon. That’s why you have to do it. But that’s not a, that’s not an argument that Hillary Clinton made. My gosh, Hillary Clinton sat there in 2016 with an open Supreme Court seat and didn’t mention Merrick Garland’s name once during the Democratic National Convention!Not once did she talk about the importance of filling that seat and filling other seats that would likely come up in her terms! She didn’t make the argument for her own candidates. It’s just--ugh.SHEFFIELD: If you won’t advocate for yourself, who will? That’s the bottom line. But speaking of advocating for yourself what would you want people to check out of your stuff, Elie?MYSTAL: Oh. Um, So I write twice a week for the nation the Nation Magazine in digital. And then I usually do one print column a month. So that’s the easiest place to find my writings. I’ve also written two books Allow Me to Retort, A Black Guy’s Guide to the Constitution and Bad Law, 10 Popular Laws that Are Ruining America.Those are available wherever they still allow black books to be sold. I’m not sure that’s Florida, you might have to go to [01:06:00] Audible. But everybody else there, there’s a way to get it. And I read the books, my, my myself and for social media. I’m on blue. I can’t do Matt, I can’t do Apartheid X anymore.I just I understand it’s where the hotness is. I just it’s too much for me. So I’m slumming it on Blue sky for a bit. I’m too old for TikTok. So, I put most of my social media things about my dog, really and my kids on Blue Sky.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good, man. It’s great having you here today and I look forward to doing more of these in the future.MYSTAL: Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory Change show where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscribing member, you have an unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.You can become a free or paid subscriber at patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack. If you’re watching on YouTube, please click the and subscribe button to get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot for your support and I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode SummaryPublic opinion surveys from every pollster have shown that Donald Trump’s political support has declined massively across the board. But one set of people that has been much more loyal (up until just very recently) has been the so-called “MAHA Movement” of former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr.This is an interesting group to think about because as the Republican party has moved to the far right, it has kicked out the conservatives and moderates who once were welcomed. Instead of shrinking away, however, Republicans remained highly competitive by bringing in the MAHA crowd of hippies and naturalist obsessives who had long been associated with the far left.But that perception was an inaccurate one. These people were always conservative/libertarian. The only thing that changed was the partisan label that they wanted to wear. The anti-science and anti-institutional rhetoric that’s the bedrock of today’s Trumpism, was actually very prominent from day one in the 1960s counterculture through figures like Jack Kerouac, Timothy Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson.Aaron Rabinowitz, my guest on today’s episode, grew up on all of this stuff, so he knows it from firsthand experience, but he also knows it through his academic career—and the fact that he’s the host of two philosophy podcasts, Embrace the Void, and Philosophers in Space.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content—Why the “naturalistic fallacy” is the basis of so much anti-science thinking—Marianne Williamson’s ineffective self-help politics—How “post left” grifters use contrarian rhetoric to push people to the far right—RFK Junior’s policies are already making Americans sicker, and things will only get worse—Quantum woo is nonsense, here’s the real science—Why fan-fiction politics leads to disappointment and how AOC and Bernie Sanders are trying to combat it—How sci-fi authors like Heinlein, Pournelle, and Rand have become the obsessions of Musk, Thiel, and LuckeyAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:54 — High weirdness and libertarianism as a conservative liberalism10:19 — The origins of the “counterculture”17:15 — New Thought movement and mind over matter27:24 — Quantum physics and a new generation of pseudoscience36:02 — Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton Wilson48:38 — Ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism and high weirdness58:30 — Balancing truth and skepticism01:07:34 — Living with uncertainty and embracing the voidAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Aaron Rabinowitz. Hey Aaron, welcome to Theory of Change.AARON RABINOWITZ: Hey, Matt. Thanks for having me on.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so this is—we’re doing a double collaboration here. So if you like this episode on Theory of Change, we will be doing another one over on Embrace the Void very soon as well.So, different topic though, so if and, and if we didn’t scare you away, that is.RABINOWITZ: [00:03:00] Different, yet weirdly related.SHEFFIELD: Yes. Yes. All right, well, so for today though, we’re talking about what some people, I mean, there’s a lot of words for what we’re talking about terms. So some people call it Pastel QAnon. Some people call it conspirituality, other people call it right wing hippieism, high weirdness. There’s many, many names for this.But let’s start off first that I think a lot of people during the pandemic realized that many people who were kind of hippie coded suddenly became very—well suddenly, quote unquote—they were observed to be very anti-mask and anti-vaccine and then soon, eventually joined up with Donald Trump and RFK Jr.But what the reality is, these ideas in many ways were fundamentally right-wing from the very beginning. It’s just that people didn’t really notice. I think.RABINOWITZ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think there is an important history of ideas that we need to understand [00:04:00] that sort of starts in some conservative places. Like Lovecraft moves into what we think of as leftist, or they’re often leftist libertarian spaces like the hippies and high weirdness, you know, during the sixties and seventies and now has gone very broadly mainstream and I think is.You know, driving our culture kind of across the political spectrum in various ways, but has on the right, kind of metastasized into sort of the worst parts of those traditions.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And essentially, Trump and RFK Jr. And Tulsi Gabbard, these people have kind of, they’ve sort of coalesced this, this conspiracy oriented epistemology that had kind of been in past decades, just been distributed kind of evenly across the political spectrum. And now it’s overwhelmingly gravitating toward the right and Republicans.RABINOWITZ: You can get in trouble online for sort of jumping too [00:05:00] quickly into like a horseshoe theory of like, here’s how the left and the right come back together under authoritarianism, or something like that. But I’m pretty convinced these days that there is a kind of an overlap that happens. A connecting point in the realm of naturalness and fixation on naturalness.And that combined with skepticism about mainstream narratives. So high weirdness. The term that I particularly interested in, which refers to the culture that I personally grew up in is really a culture of a counterculture in the, in the traditional sense of it is resistant to mainstream culture.It sees it as suspect, it sees it as a legitimizing myth. Often it really was to try to preserve norms that were harmful to people. And it takes a pretty radical approach to, you know, challenging and, and exploring alternatives to those mainstream norms. And that is an idea that [00:06:00] wasn’t as popular, I think amongst like what we think of as conservatism when high weirdness was sort of at its peak during that hippie era.But as you’ve seen mainstream culture trend towards neoliberalism with a little splash of progressivism, as you’ve seen conservatives come to view themselves as on the outs culturally, they have really adopted these kind of high weirdness skepticisms about mainstream narratives, which they identify with wokeness.And, you know I, I just listened to your episode actually about fit with the person who wrote Fit Nation, which I thought was really excellent on talking about this problem that like there is a overlap of people who are distrustful of conventional wisdom and that creates a space for them to spiral in lots of interrelated directions.But a lot of those spirals kind of funnel down into these far right spaces.High weirdness and libertarianism as a conservative liberalismSHEFFIELD: Yeah, they do. And and, and it is, yeah, it does go back in a lot of ways to [00:07:00] natural the belief in the natural. But there’s, there’s some epistemic standpoints that we’ll talk about as well further on in the episode. But I, I, I guess, yeah, one of the key things to think about in this context is.Libertarianism is kind of a rump liberalism, if you will rump from the political context, not used in America very, very much. But the idea that a party that sort of divides into and the, and there’s a smaller minority that claims to be the real, the real version and that is different from the main larger body.And so that’s kind of what happened with liberalism in the 20th century. Beginning, you know, roughly, let’s say with the, the, i, the, the emergence of socialism as kind of a alternative between you know, communism and liberalism is, but, but it was very much rooted in liberalism and they could point very easily to John Stewart Mill and other people like that.But there were people who had a more hierarchical viewpoint [00:08:00] a naturalist viewpoint, if you will, about truth and about politics, about poverty. And those are the people who became the libertarians later.RABINOWITZ: Yeah.Yeah. We don’t want to, like, it’s hard because these are such large milieus of concepts, you know, there’s no easy line to trace, like, here’s when things went this way or here’s when things went that way. You know, you have a lot of like broader cultural shifts happening. You have, you know, civil rights conflict, you have, you know, red scare, anti-socialist stuff.You know, the increasing, I, you know, one would argue increasingly predatory nature of, of capitalism. Sort of just embodying the colonialism of the past and all of that sort of disillusions a lot of people, right? So a lot of these movements I do think start in a kind of disillusionment a, a break with the narratives that [00:09:00] were making.One’s sense of purpose and meaning, feel sustained. And then in the absence of that, there are attempts to try to explain why this is happening and attempts to try to see if there’s a better alternative. And a lot of that ends up, you know, like we want to say, a lot of that is very valuable, right? A lot of this leads to.Social progress that we now take for granted, sexual social progress and racial social progress. but it also leads to, you know, increases in conspiratorial beliefs or distrust of the government in ways like that aren’t actually constructive or valuable. Right? There are reasonable times to be distrustful of governments and then there is a kind of more all consuming version of that that can lead one astray, epistemically, so, yeah, I think, Yeah, I think there’s a lot of different threads here that we can kind of pull on and then you add, you know, then you add in like massive doses of psychedelics and you get, you know, [00:10:00] some really radical perspectives. You also get a lot of modern technology, a lot of modern science fiction and horror.You know, it shapes all these different aspects of our world that I think now are so baked in that in a sense, sort of high weirdness won the culture wars, and now we’re just kind of living in that world.The origins of the “counterculture”SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, in a lot of ways. And certainly we see that with. You know, now that you know marijuana is legalized in most American states and, and many other countries around the world as well and other drugs in other areas. So, but let’s maybe talk specifically about some specific people here.So one of the things, you know, as I said, people oftentimes think of the, the sixties, seventies counterculture as this big left wing movement. And it’s certainly true that there were plenty of people in that worldview. And probably the majority of them seems like if you look at the, the voting trends of, of baby boomers, [00:11:00] generally speaking, they have been a, a, a democratic vote voting group.So, but at the same time there was, there were always some very significant, prominent individuals in this culture that had kind of right. Libertarian viewpoints right wing anarchist viewpoints. And I think probably the, the earliest one who, who became I mean overtly, right, right wing later in life was Jack Kerouac the, the the founder, founder of the Beat Poet movement.So for people who don’t know what, what that was or who he was, why don’t you give us a little overview please.RABINOWITZ: Sure. And like when I say I was raised in, in this culture, I mean, my dad, a clinical psychologist, put on a one man show for many years where he played Alan Ginsburg and performed Alan Ginsburg’s poetry and looks very similar to Alan Ginsburg. It was a wonderful show. So like I saw, you know naked Lunch, William s [00:12:00] Burrows, the movie of William s Burrows book at a deeply inappropriate age.These were poets of various backgrounds who kind of came together. again, in sort of resistance to what they saw as the norms around art and writing and culture. And so they were very famous for things like rejection of editing. This isn’t true of all of them, right? Ginsburg was like a compulsive editor, whereas folks like Kerouac would, you know, make fun of him for that, right?They were very, you know, you are self-censoring, I think is the line that the Kerouac Standin gives in the Naked Lunch movie where they’re arguing about how to write. Whereas Burrough’s line in there is exterminate all rational thought. these guys were all really struggling with. Not fitting in with modern society, with thinking that it was very fake and hollow, which it was in a lot of ways.And we’re looking for meaning elsewhere, and we’re looking forward in [00:13:00] drugs and promiscuous sex and homosexuality and like all these outside experiences. And so they, you know, they became these kind of outsider figures and they were very popular as a result of that. And then of course there was the irony of that.You know, like you’re being an outside figure who inevitably gets, becomes commodified, right? As your ideas become more popular in mainstream, you become the thing that you have been resisting. And there’s a lot of like resistance to that within it. Yeah. And it’s not surprising. I think that to varying degrees, these individuals also had right wing coated ideas, Or became more right wing coated because a lot of this was reactionary.You know, these were reactionary movements and reactionary movements. Whether they are left or right can produce good ideas, but they can also just produce reactionary ideas. And I think a lot of what is essential to conservatism is steeped in certain kind of reactionary [00:14:00] fear of progress away from what you perceive to be the ideal status quo.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or people living differently than you. And whether they have the right to do that.RABINOWITZ: And then there’s also like, you know, libertarianism is not a pure left or right thing either. I know left libertarians, you know, who really hate the way that people understand libertarianism today. But also I think libertarianism has, as a movement, there’s been a lot of problems because, you know, as a also somewhat reactionary movement, it, it tends to endorse and, and support some pretty isolationist, harmful ideas.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I mean, that’s where I would kind of put it just as like a, a form of anarchism. I mean, ultimately to me, and some people don’t like it when I say this, but anarchism is operationally conservative because it’s saying. There should be no structures to stop [00:15:00] sociopaths. And, and that, and that ultimately is the problem that if you have a society that says we will have no rules against mistreating the society itself then ultimately you end up with the, the people who have the most money or the most guns, they’re the ones who win.And that, you know, when you look at history, that kind of is what happens, seems like toRABINOWITZ: Yeah.I would argue that there are flavors of anarchism on the more social, communal, smaller scale level that. Sort of buck that trend. But I do think there’s a problem of scaling and a problem of, you know, in a, in a world of larger scale societies, how do you avoid it not turning into what we are seeing is this kind of very laissez-faire approach to like morality.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, you know, a, a, as you mentioned, drugs, obviously were a big, a big part of this culture.And, and, and, and, and I think, you know, people now, decades after the fact, you know, it’s easy to, to think about, [00:16:00] well, these were people that were just, you know, trying to have fun or whatever, but that’s not what a lot of them really saw themselves as doing. Like, they literally. That they were re, you know, rewiring their brains and, and discovering, you know, untapped potential of the human mind.And, and, and Timothy Leary, who was a Harvard professor that was became notorious for his advocacy for LSD really kind of the, the, the, the, the guy that was the centerpiece of this, this particular aspect of their ideology. And this dude was a straight up libertarian anarchist. and Larry had this phrase that really encapsulated this idea, which, which was a slogan. It was turn on, tune in, drop out.And I think that last part drop out is where his libertarian anarchism really came into play because he was telling people do not participate in society. You need to get out of it because it’s all [00:17:00] bad. Everything sucks about it, and you need to get back to the land, et cetera, or, you know, go inside your mind and, you know, be on drugs all the time or whatever, because this is how we can reach the future of humanity, if you will.New Thought movement and mind over matterRABINOWITZ: Yeah. And here’s where I think it’s important to bring in another big movement that is a precursor to high weirdness, which is the new thought movement. I try to drop this in whenever possible because it’s fascinating to me. So this is a movement that arose in like the early 19th century. And it’s what we, what we now think of today as the mind over matter worldview, right?Which has again, become very mainstream through the secret laws of attraction kind of stuff. This is the origination of the ideas of laws of attraction. They, these were often you know, not traditional scientists or something. These were people on the outs of. Scientific culture at that time who had sort of extreme views about [00:18:00] what was being discovered about science that suggested that there were connections between the mind and the body, right?So you have your classic Cartesian. How do these things connect? What is the influence of the mind over the body? And these folks come along and say they sort of think of themselves as flipping the script the way that like mentalists do or idealists do over the materialists and saying, you know, mind is prior to body.In some ways it is the defining force. It’s not that we are at the whims of our physical structures. We can reshape them with our wills essentially. So you get all of the, like a lot of positive psychology comes out of this. So many things are downstream of, of new thought and sort of poisoned by it. because these, these were.Folks who lead to, you know, the ideas that if you will.it, you can cure your own cancer. And that all disease is the result of bad mental thinking, which has the implicit victim blaming in it. Where if you’re suffering from something, you’re just not willing yourself not [00:19:00] to suffer from it hard enough. You know, manifestation, laws of attraction.I often talk about how these things are just victim blaming at a cosmic scale, essentially, but they’re build, they’re sold, they’re commodified as empowering. Right. about mindfulness traditions, I’m, I’m a big fan of mindfulness traditions, but there are parts of the mindfulness tradition world. There are parts of positive psychology world that are really commodified, you know, wellness.I mean, wellness is like the, I think the one we want to be most worried about. The wellness world is full of these kinds of mystical ideas. And a lot of that. Became popularized through high weirdness. So there was a phase of it being very popular during new thought. And then I think it’s brought back a lot by the psycho knots, by people like Timothy Leary, who, like you said, they see themselves exploring the mind, not just for fun, but for empowerment.we’ll probably talk some about like science fiction. These guys heavily influenced science fiction and you can really see these ideas [00:20:00] in books like Hind Line, stranger in a Strange Land, where it’s all about if you learn Martian, you can physically reshape your body and mind in ways that give you superpowers.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And we will talk about Highline a bit here, but I did want to mention for anybody who is interested in the kind of the, I, we did a, a, a deep, much deeper dive just on that topic with Ajit here on a episode that will be, that comes out before this. So I’ll, I’ll link to it for anybody who wants to see that.But yeah, I, this, and, and a lot of these ideas were religious in origin also. Like that’s the other thing about new, new thought. And one of them actually, there’s a connection to Donald Trump in new thought because his, his childhood pastor was Norman Vincent Peele, who was one of the biggest proponents of new thought.And he wrote all kinds of books about, you know, trying, trying to tell people that yeah, if you if you have the right relationship with God and you have the right set of [00:21:00] mindset that, you know, literally anything is possible for you. So, so, yeah. And likeRABINOWITZ: There’s your origins of Prosperity Gospel right there too, right?SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, it isRABINOWITZ: that’s where, that’s where it all comes from. Like, you know, if you will, it, it is No dream.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and so in a sense this is, you know, so the, the religious side, this is a, an act of faith. To have this you know, to have the blessings that God wants to give you if you have enough faith. But you know, the secular side, and I, I think, Carl Jung was also kind of in the mix in this regard as well.That, you know, the, that this was the, the, the mid 20th century, it was finally a moment where a, I’d say probably, you know, most educated people outside of, of or in the US and other countries had come to the, the idea, well, there’s no such thing as a soul. And, but there is a mind. And so we are discovering how it really works.And so like Leary, [00:22:00] his, his big thing as a, as a, I mean it’s not really a philosophy, but he had this idea of, he called it reality tunnels, that everybody lives in. And so with, if you took enough drugs, you could, you could go from the tunnel that you inhabited mentally to other ones and you could explore other realities.And,RABINOWITZ: Yep.SHEFFIELD: this was, so, yeah, there was sort strong sci-fi connections to this. And, and, and, you know, this is people were, they were doing philosophy without a net, if you will.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. And if you, you know, if you look at the sense makers, speaking of thought tunnels, like people like Jordan Peterson folks, they, they talk about these ideas of thought tunnels and they, they often are being critical of, they’re using it to be critical of mainstream culture and saying, people get stuck in these mainstream thought tunnels, and they have to break out of those into, you know, novel ways of thinking.There’s definitely a ton of religious stuff in this. The, you know, the co the folks that they were drawing [00:23:00] on, heavily steeped agnosticism as well as non-Western traditions. So a big impact was the translation starting at the beginning, you know, spreading of translations of non-Western Buddhist and, and Daoist writing into Western spaces.And then you look at things like Carlos Castaneda and Don Juan. Often these are half-baked, you know, like fictionalized, very problematic colonialist accounts of, you know, various spiritual and wisdom traditions that are then co-opted into their attempts to kind of assemble an alternative worldview to what they saw as sort of dominating society.And I think you see the modern right doing the exact same thing. And, and like the role of gnosticism is the same gnosticism, if you look at it as a religious tradition, is very conspirator conspiracy theory in nature. It basically says we are all trapped under the whims of [00:24:00] a creature that is preventing us from knowing the truth and that we can find our way to the truth by escaping that kind of mental prison.You know, so the, what you can see as being the thing that would inspire folks like Philip k Dick, or Timothy Leary to try to break out through drug use or through exploration of other ideas is the same mindset that’s telling people, you know, you have to escape the woke mind virus.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, and, and, and it’s notable with these, this, this tradition that they’re not that it is very experiential orRABINOWITZ: Mm-hmm.SHEFFIELD: So in other words, if I feel something. Then it’s true. And, and, and that’s, you know, so they’re not saying, well, I can prove that these other ideas are false.No, they’re saying, well, no, I have this own experience. It’s, and it’s my own truth. And that’s, and I, and because I feel this then it is true. And which is, [00:25:00] and it’s so ironic though, because like they, they, especially Jordan Peterson, you know, is constantly railing against postmodernism. But his entire worldview is, is, is, you know, inflected through postmodern thought and the way heRABINOWITZ: Deeply postmodern.SHEFFIELD: But, but he can’t even see it. And neither can any of his fans which is funny.RABINOWITZ: I would say there are like two. Sort of source materials for that. Part of this, this giant conceptual map on the like secular side is phenomenology. So you have your, your Fritz Pearl sort of phenomenal therapy folks. Talking about, you know, getting directly more in contact with our lived experiences, you know, not filtering everything as much through our sort of rational assessments of things.And then evangelicalism, I just think American evangelicalism’s rejection of. Expertise in the form of rejection, of [00:26:00] mitigated access to God, right? Replacing that with the direct reading of, and the direct experience of God being the central part of the religious practice. Those two things kind of really come together to create this heavily individualist epistemology where you can only kind of trust your, you know, trust your own eyes and only your own eyes.you know, they’ll, they’ll, the, the oral quote that always goes around, right? They’ll teach you to not to trust your own eyes kind of stuff. and that then, you know, immediately like leads to do your own research, right? Where do your own research becomes a co-opted idea for conspiracy theories? It’s very hard.It’s very hard in the modern world where there are a lot of real conspiracies and there is a lot of inappropriate, harmful, powerful behavior going on to like ch. Yeah, Yeah.You know, like we, we can’t be generalists as Denti would say about conspiracy theory [00:27:00] anymore. You can’t just dismiss people who believe in conspiracy theories as being epistemically flawed because there are very, like we we’re all conspiracy theorists.Now it’s just a degree issue. And I think it, and I think that’s problematic because it, it does make it easier to then slide into, I think it makes it easier to then slide into believing certain other things like antisemitism.Quantum physics and a new generation of pseudoscienceSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, it is. I mean, that is really kind of the, the, the paradox that is interwoven throughout all of these people, that some of their ideas are true. You know, and, and like, and I think one area where that was very common and I know you’re not into quantum physics stuff as much, so I will spare you with that, Aaron.But you know, there,RABINOWITZ: to making fun of it, if that counts.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, but like, so there, there, there was a, there was a quantum physicist named David Bom who he, he came up with it with a quantum theory, which, you know, has all kinds of [00:28:00] it’s mathematically sound. But it’s, it’s not a commonly believed one. It’s called the pilot wave, if anybody wants to look that up.But basically this guy, essentially was trying to say but it, it wasn’t even just bone, like, you know, the the, the quantum physics really did also kind of mess with a lot of people’s interpretations of reality and they didn’t understand. Fully what it meant. so the, and, and, and, and you see that just over and over.So, I mean, David Bo like, yeah, David Bowen was incredible mathematician. and he ended up getting all kinds of weird, you know, ideas about, mystical stuff in conspiracy theories. And so like, this literally can happen to anyone because there is some basis to these ideas. It’s just we don’t, unfortunately in this country, have enough philosophical training.I think in our educational system and probably around the world, that’s a general problem. and the way that [00:29:00] people are. Trying to absorb ideas about reality as not being, you know, as being perceptively accessed is so these are, these are ideas that are common within Hinduism and Buddhism and, you know, other Eastern traditions.But the way, as you said, you know, they’re kind of bastardized and dumbed down when they’re put into popular culture. And, you know, and then so like we see with this idea that, well if you, and like new thought really kind of goes into that, you know, that, if, if I just think hard enough, I can change reality through my, the power of my mind and like this another guy we should talk about is Robert Anton Wilson.Like he wrote. That was his entire centerpiece of his ideas was quantum woo. He wrote a book called Quantum Psychology, and he described his political beliefs as non-Euclidean politics. And like the, like, mathematically, his ideas were [00:30:00] just ludicrous. Like the guy did not know what he was talking about.But, you know, he, he was able to import a lot of the, the prestige of, of science and math into his idea. But of course he didn’t actually make any equations or anything like that. But it sounded profound.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. All of these traditions, this was a period of heavily attempting to. Use the trappings of science or cargo cult science to bring in anything that feels good or even feels commodifiable. Like a lot of this is grifter stuff, you know? A lot of the new thought movement is tied up with psychic mesmer.Like Mesmer himself was a new thought guy. And, and Robert Anton Wilson is really fascinating. He writes things like the Illuminati Trilogy, which brings us, you know, a lot of discordian thought. It brings us a lot of counter-cultural ideas. And it also is at a really interesting, there’s an inflection point there about the concept, don’t, IM amenitize the [00:31:00] eschaton which is a phrase that was popular with William F.Buckley Jr. In the i in the straightforward sense of he didn’t want a one world government that was gonna try to control everybody. And these folks were also not wanting that. So they were also talking about how, you know, the book is all about people trying to mize the eschaton, meaning. Trying to control people, trying to control the world.And it’s all about, you know, the kind of anarchist counter control ideas. And quantum physics is, is really fundamental to a lot of this, I think because, the new thought movement didn’t, didn’t have the benefit of quantum physics to draw on, but they would’ve loved it so much. And it is now I think, the default scientific framework for a lot of new thought ideas around laws of attraction.If you ask somebody how does manifestation work, I think nine times out of 10 they’re gonna tell you something quantum woo based. They’re gonna say that our minds can change the quantum states. And we then that in turn bubbles back up and impacts us. I’ve got another article coming [00:32:00] out at the UK skeptic Mag about all of the arguments for why we should, you know, why people think it’s okay to have legalized snake oil sales.And one of the big ones is, is just quantum physics. They think, they think that quantum physics on some level. Proves all of this stuff when, when, like, it obviously, like it very much doesn’t, and a lot of, a lot of quantum physicists have done a lot of work trying to disprove that, but they’re fighting a losing battle a lot of the time because it’s, as you mentioned, such complicated stuff to understand, but the simplified versions of it are very appealing.Just one other example that comes to mind in all of this is you were talking about different kind of quantum theories, the like multiverse theory, the like quantum wave breaking down into multiple realities. These are ideas that are very popular amongst the high weirdness folks. And, you know, you, you see people talking about going to different dimensions.Philip k Dick, I think probably believed that he was just observing other dimensions directly at various [00:33:00] points. But it then, you know, becomes mainstream, right? You have the multi, you have the MCU multiverse, you’ve got Rick and Morty. Everybody is kind of on board with these things and they open up.They open up a lot of spaces for what if. Right. And then people kind of, I think, take that what if to two serious? Like if if, if I can imagine it, then it must be real kind of places.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and that’s, and the irony with that regard is that you know, this is just another variation of the the ontological argument for the existence of God. That you know, which was resolved a, a long time ago through the ideas of the flying spaghetti monsterRABINOWITZ: and things like flying. Flag Spaghetti Monster, an internet manifestation of the kind of high weirdness new religions that you see, like the Church of the Sub Genius and Discordian. It’s interesting, maybe we talk a little bit about like there are different metaphysics running around in these cultures too, and I don’t want to paint this as one broad [00:34:00] brush.So you have like on one end you’ve got like love crafty and metaphysics, which is the world is fundamentally uncaring and like there is no loving God that’s trying to help you and that’s why everything has fallen and terrible.SHEFFIELD: gods actually.RABINOWITZ: Or there’s evil gods right? There’s like actively, I mean like they’re not evil and so forth.They don’t care enough to be evil, but Right. It, you perceive it as evil because of the uncaring nature of it. Right? But then you have like the gno gnosticism kind of views of there is a loving God, but there’s also this kind of manican evil guy, Demi urge, who’s preventing us from knowing the truth.But then you have like the discordance and the discordian metaphysics is fascinating. If you ever read the Principia Discord, there’s a page on it where they explain their metaphysics as. When we experience the world, we perceive things as a mix of ordered things and disordered things, but the true nature of things is pure underlying chaos.And all that’s happening is we have these frames, they call them [00:35:00] frames of perception that you put over the chaos and according to your frame, certain things appear ordered and other things appear disordered. Right? So you think of like Newtonian physics. You put the Newtonian physics frame over the world, certain data makes sense and other data doesn’t make sense.They thought that was basically true and like disco accordions will argue that’s basically true of all knowledge of all ideas. So that’s a very radical kind of anti-real or skepticism about truth and knowledge. That I think then creeps in all over the place. You know, where people will say, well that’s just your truth, you know, I live my own truth.SHEFFIELD: That’s just like your opinion, man.RABINOWITZ: Yeah.That’s just like your opinion, man.Right. My dear sweet Lebowski, like again, I am a creature of high weirdness. I love this tradition for all of the horrible things that it has also brought into the world. So, like, I love Lebowski, I love that this Buddhism, I love all of those things. But like, it’s all, it is a, a recognition of the critique [00:36:00] of this, this kind of view.Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton WilsonSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and the idea of the, the, the framing or the reality tunnel or, you know, that also did. Strongly go into a linguistic conception as well. And, and that was, the, the, the first person to kind of really put this all down in some sense, was this guy named Alfred Korzybski, who nobody nowadays has ever heard of this guy.But, you know, at the peak of his influence in the 1930s to 1950s, or 1950, I think is when he died, if I remember right. So he basically had this idea that he called general semantics and Korzybski, he had no training as a linguist. He had no training as a philosopher.He did not engage with, with philosophy or with linguistics. And in fact, I read a, an article, contemporaneous article, which claimed that, his usage of the word semantics was actually [00:37:00] inserted at the last minute in his magnum opus, because he didn’t even it wasn’t even core to his ideas, but essentially what he was saying, and people at the time said he was a cult leader and seems to be some evidence for that.But basically what he would tell people was that how you talk about things has a deep control over your mind and what you can know and, you know, and again, this is, there’s some, some truth to that but, you know, insisting that it’s absolute truth and that if I say I don’t have beliefs, then I don’t have beliefs.Or if I say that a thing is not there, then it’s not there. You know, like, it, it, it was, it was, itRABINOWITZ: Or if yourSHEFFIELD: of became a, huh.RABINOWITZ: or if your language doesn’t have a word for something, you can’t experience that thing, for example.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so it was, it was like, you know, kind of one of the earliest self-help cults that was deeply, deeply influential on [00:38:00] other people as well. So including on sci-fi authors. So Robert Heinlein, who you mentioned was, was big into Korzybski and so was Robert Anton Wilson.Like they would, both of them would cite him a lot, especially Wilson.RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I think Korzybski’s a very interesting kind of bridging fossil between the new thought and the high weirdness space in that.way. And it reminds me, he also reminds me a lot, the stuff that I was reading about him when you mentioned him is very similar to how I think a lot of people misappropriate the SPI wharf hypothesis in linguistic theory.So this is most famously in most recently in the movie Arrival where the aliens show up who have. A different language and when you understand it, you experience time non-linearly. The sap, your war hypothesis is just, you know, in its weakest form how your language can shape your experiences of reality.But in its strongest form, it’s things like, I don’t know if you remember the movie, what The Bleep Do We [00:39:00] Know Really Terrible Pseudoscience movie that was very popular for a second back when I was a, you know, back when I was a kid. And one of the claims, one of the famous claims in that movie is the Native Americans couldn’t see the boats when Christopher Columbus showed up because they didn’t have a word for it.SHEFFIELD: Wow.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. Like, it’s a very extreme, like, again, mind over matter, right? If you don’t have it in a conceptual space for it, then you can’t experience it. You can’t learn anything about it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess in the, there’s the common cliche, if a tree falls in a forest, no, it doesn’t make a sound. Like obviously that is a false idea. But if you come from this mindset, it can at least be true and, and maybe is true, if you have this, you know, like that everything is perceptively accessed, and so it doesn’t exist.And yeah, and this is, is, is a form of, of idealism in, in, in many ways. And, [00:40:00] but it’s also, I mean, so the, the kind of paradoxical thing is that it expresses itself through post-structuralist language, but ultimately it is idealist modernism is if, I think we could say in a lot of ways that they believe that there is a objective reality and that they know what it is.And even if they don’t, you know, can’t articulate it fully, it’s what I, what feels good to me. That’s reality. Not what feels good to you. No.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. And that’s often where it ties back to like conspiratorial thinking and, and distrust of experts that like I am breaking through to the direct phenomenal experience of the true logos, the true god or reality. And the experts either are incapable of doing so or know that this is possible and are actively trying to prevent people from doing so.Either way, like everybody is trapped in this kind of conspiracy. The movie [00:41:00] The Matrix, I think for much, for all the ways that I love it and think it is a wonderful, brilliant movie, also has a lot to answer for on this front in terms of mainstreaming, essentially the idea of, you know, like pilling people, of helping people wake up from the world that they are being lied to about.And I think that has just become, that’s just an incredibly powerful image for people when they are feeling. You know, disillusioned when they are feeling cut off, when they can tell that something is wrong, but can’t put their finger on what it is, it’s, a really vulnerable time for someone to come in and say, here’s what the problem actually is.It’s experts or it’s, you know, the government.SHEFFIELD: Or it’s women, or it’s Jews or you know, whatever. It’s anyone except for these right wing elites that are sucking the money out of the economy and making your life shit, not them.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I mean, for their credit, the high weirdness folks did recognize that capitalism was the problem at the time. A lot [00:42:00] of them. I think, they just, there was no way to like COA towards an alternative because America was so radically anti-communist that, you know, they just, there was, there was nothing left but anarchism at that point, I feel like.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s the idea of dropout from Leary in a lot of ways. And Wilson, he kind of did exhibit this ongoing conflict in his own political ideas. And he did eventually kind of end up with anarchism after initially identifying as some sort of libertarian socialist.And we saw that also with Robert Heinlein as well, who in many ways was, you could argue, kind of the, the progenitor of this worldview in terms of the chronology in that you know, because his book, Stranger In a Strange Land that came out in 1960, like there were, there was no counterculture by and large at that point in time.And, and certainly people weren’t reading the beat poets. Like no one, no one reads poetry, guys. [00:43:00] Sorry!RABINOWITZ: I mean, we still use the word gr, we still use the word grok today, completely derived of its stranger in a strange land meaning unfortunately. But yeah, I agree. He was hugely impactful and also a messy, complicated, like even like Stranger in a Strange Land is not a, as progressive a book as you would like it to be.First of all, if you read it, it’s full of homophobia and sexism. It’s very, like much of the golden age of science fiction, it’s full of racism, homophobia, and sexism. Not as much racism, but the other ones of that time. Yeah, very much so. And I, yeah, I, go ahead.SHEFFIELD: oh. But I was gonna say, but also, you know, the core kind of epistemic conceit of the book. Was that the, the protagonist who was a human that was raised by martians that came back to Earth. He had learned the language of Martian and it, it changed his interface with reality and it gave him a power to manipulate reality and to make people disappear and do other all sorts of [00:44:00] magical things.You know, and, and it really does tie back to these, you know, these original mystical ideas of, you know, like the, if I know the true name of a magical being, then I will have power over that magical being. And, and you see that in a lot of, of ancient myths and medieval ones as well, that and so this is, you know, they really, they really do believe that, that there is some underlying reality in that if, through my my feelings, I can find it and I can have control.And, and it’s a way of trying to find order in a, in an unjust world and that if I know it, what, you know, what the underlying reality is, then I and my friends and family, we can partake of it and restore the order.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I do a lot of when I’m not. Obsessing about conspiracy theory stuff and high weirdness. I am interested in the philosophy of luck and how it relates to this thing [00:45:00] called the just world belief or just world illusion, which is just our felt need for the world to be just like we have a strong, deeply felt need for our worlds to be, just because it makes it feel fair and controllable and that illusion of control, I think that you’re talking about.There is a big part of all of this is that these, all of these traditions are try, are wrestling with the loss of control that they experience in modernity and they’re trying to regain that sense of control, whether it’s through mind over matter approaches, whether it’s through drugs or some other kind of enlightenment mechanism.At the same time through metaphysics that explain why things appear unjust, but really actually are just that if you really do learn the secret truths of the universe, the universe will treat you justly. That is really at the core, I think, the laws of attraction mindsets.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And there’s a religious component to this as well. When you look at and I, and I have a, [00:46:00] another episode on this, so I’ll link, which I will link about the, the, the emergence of Satan within Judaism. So Satan is not part of classical Judaism. There are multiple Satans, in fact, and, and they are the angels of God.They are God’s employees. But it was only after the exile to the various exiles into the broader, you know, Iran, Iraq area, Babylon, that, that when they came into contact with Zoroastrianism, that a lot of Jews begin to think, aha, well maybe this explains why we keep getting taken over by all of these people.And even though we have believe in the most powerful being in the world, in the universe, we always get our asses kicked. It’s because of the, of this bad guy, Satan.RABINOWITZ: Or the demiurge. Yep.SHEFFIELD: And that’s where you see the apocalypse tradition of, of Daniel which then of course is imported into [00:47:00] Christianity, that, but apocalypse isn’t the end of the world, it is the revealing of how the world really is. And it is this spiritual struggle between Satan and God. And, and so again, and you know, the, that fits very nicely, which is why you do see a lot of people once they do get into the QAnon, you know, beliefs, even if they weren’t religious, they become you know, fundamentalist Christians. Because it fits them so well,RABINOWITZ: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there’s a lot of forces I think that push, that kind of convergence, the people you’re hanging around with is also a huge influence, I think in these scenarios. I think there’s a lot to the idea that a lot of the interactions between gurus in these in sense making spaces is about interpersonal connection and feeling, you know, seen by this other person, but not in a way that is really actually [00:48:00] conveying deep meaning or understanding.So there’s, there’s a lot of, I think people trying to kind of. Make up for the loss of sense of meaning in the modern world by filling it with these things that are not actually helpful for it. They don’t actually fill that, that cup.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and if we wind back the clock even further chronologically, so, you know, I, I, we’ve mentioned the, the ideas of you know, kind of nothingness or, or skepticism within Hinduism and Buddhism. But within the European traditions, there was the, there, there were these ideas as well. And,Ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism and high weirdnessRABINOWITZ: Sure. TheSHEFFIELD: I would say. Yeah, well that’s what, that’s what I was gonna talk about, like, so that you have the skeptic movement in ancient Greece which eventually kind of propagated into Rome as well. And it was divided between the, the well, I guess, I don’t know if you could say it was divided necessarily, but because it seems like the academic skeptics won.But overall, like basically the [00:49:00] Pyrrhonian skeptics have this idea that, well, no truths about reality can be known, and so therefore we will just live by appearances and how things seem to us. And that right there is a very conservative epistemology, I think. And it’s, it, it shows why. So many of these people that have these high weirdness ideas that they come to that because they are modern day Pyrrhonian skeptics.Like, like Robert Anton Wilson, where I read his stuff. I’m like, this dude, he’s never heard of the Pyrrhonian skeptic, skeptics. But he sounds just like them, except he likes drugs, you know? And those guys were a bit asetic, but you know, the academic skeptics, they grew out of the Pyrrhonian tradition.But they realized, well, okay, yes, it’s true. We can’t really know anything, but we’re going to op, we’re going to say whatever seems to be the best tra, you know, explanation for something. We have to do something in this world. We have to act. And so we’re going to [00:50:00] go with the best proven explanation, but we won’t cling to it.And that to me, you know, you can’t be a skeptic unless you are a skeptic about yourself. First and that’s the problem with this high weirdness and, and this, you know, modern day. It’s epistemic nihilism, I would say.RABINOWITZ: Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. So like the, the, the apocryphal story about pirro, the skeptic, the father of skeptic of Pyrrhonian skepticism is that people had to follow him around to make sure he wouldn’t run in, get run over by a cart because he wouldn’t believe that a cart was rolling towards Sam or something.Now, I mean, if you read the Pyrrhonian skeptics. They’re, they’re more in the phenomenological tradition of saying, well, you can believe your direct experiences, but you shouldn’t believe any inferences from them logically, or any claims of knowledge that you haven’t directly experienced kind of approach.So in that sense, it was kind of the earlier versions of do your own [00:51:00] research. Right? Don’tSHEFFIELD: what I’m saying. Yeah.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, and then, Yeah.you, you know, a lot of philosophy is struggling with, what do we mean by no, like, can I say I schmo it, I don’t know it, but I schmo it, which means I mostly know it enough to believe it.Right. And then, you know, you have Cartesian skepticism that comes along and re, you know, like brings back these questions of what it means to be certain or to have this absolute knowledge that I do think also again opens the door for the kind of new thought stuff. That, that when you can create that little space for doubt lots of different kinds of anti-real can get in.And you’ve mentioned a couple of times, and I think you’re quite right, anti-real in the sense of there are lots of different versions of anti-real. There’s a really good book I just interviewed the author of, of did the Science Wars Happen, where he lays out a bunch of different kinds of anti-real, from the most extreme disco accordion.There is no objective truth because there is no objective reality. There’s just chaos to like, there’s objective truth [00:52:00] but we can’t have access to it. Or there are multiple kinds of non-competing truth, right? Non-overlapping magisterial as it were. And a lot of, and almost all of these kind of anti-real traditions end up reinforcing conservative ideas, end up reinforcing reactionary worldviews and are not, which is a problem because. you know, like we say, high weirdnesses across the spectrum. If you look over at the, like, social justice woke left side of the world that I, that I live in and strongly identify with, one of the big problems over there, I think right now is a kind of reactionary response to objective truth, to the idea that there is objective knowledge.And that’s often it’s coded as rejection of objective truth as a tool of colonialism to oppress indigenous knowledge or non-traditional or non-scientific forms of knowledge. But it’s, it’s a real problem I think because it [00:53:00] does make people more susceptible to all of the kinds of woo and pseudoscience and medical misinformation that is running rampant right now.It, it just makes an easy permission structure for all of it.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I definitely agree with you there. And I mean, and I would say generally that, you know, post-structuralism, it is I mean if you look at what they based it on, you know, it’s, it’s based on the writings of nietzche ultimately. I mean, and, and that’s a serious problem. because Nietzsche was, you know, the father of fascism.Like if you look at what he was actually intending to do, and you look at his final works, the guy loves slavery. The guy hated socialism, he hated communism, he hated women. Like pretty much anything that you you know, if you are a, a, a post-structuralist that you say you oppose. That’s your guy that you are, that you’re hearkening to [00:54:00] with your, your your arguments and, you know you got, you know, different French misinterprets of Nietzsche like Deus and you know, people like Michel Fuco these guys, they’ve created this fantasy version of Nietzsche.And they don’t understand that you, you don’t need this, you don’t need Nietzsche to argue that you know, that politics is you know, about control by established groups. You don’t need Nietzsche to say that. And you don’t need him to say any of these things. And if you really want to go back to some ancient figures or like an older person to anchor your ideas on, like, you should read the Sophists of ancient Greece, that’s what you should do.Or you should read, you know the, the cho tradition of India. You know, I mean, there’s, there’s plenty of people you can look at if you really want to have some, some older figures assigned to I would say.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. there’s, there’s plenty of skepticism out there in the world. You got your Daoist, you got your Zen Buddhists, you know, there’s lots of, but all of, I mean, it’s also I think, important [00:55:00] to recognize that all of these traditions come with problems and challenges and risks. one of the things that I think is valuable in Davies see’s book High Weirdness is that he really does portray the skeptical path as a tightrope.And I think this is right, that it is so easy to to slip in one direction or the other in various kinds of reactionary ways as you walk this path. Even, you know, even approaches that are like, Well, just don’t have, you know, high confidence about anything. Right. Just be really uncertain about things.Again, Pyrrhonian skeptics about suspending belief where you cannot know that that can lead to kinds of passivity, that can lead to an unwillingness to recognize what is in fact the reality. Because it, it just, you lose the ability, the willingness to, to commit to ideas or you see it as dangerous to believe things too strongly during a time when I think part of the problem [00:56:00] that people are experiencing with a loss of meaning is they don’t know what to hold to fairly strongly at this point.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I would say, you know, to go back to quantum just a bit that, you know, Richard Feinman the physicist who was the, the, the guy who he got a Nobel Prize for quantizing electromagnetism. He, he was also a, a big science communicator and he had some problems as well, we should say.He was a big sexual harasser of women. But one thing he said that was, was was right, was that you are the easiest person to fool. And that’s, you know, skepticism begins with yourself. And that’s, that to me is, is is the core problem of so much of this modern day woo and high weirdness is that they don’t understand you are the one you should be the most skeptical of-- not other people and not experts or whatever.It’s, you should understand you don’t know what you’re talking about. And [00:57:00] if in areas where you haven’t done serious engagement with the literature and, and Alfred Korzybski, I think is the, is a really good example of this that, you know, he, he wrote thousands of pages of books, you know talking about semantics and philosophy, and he didn’t engage with, with these people at all.You know, like he, he had a big he hated Aristotle and because he, he thought that Aristotle kind of invented Boolean logic, which is absurd because it’s, it is like literally we have the word.RABINOWITZ: for.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I know, but that, that’s, he was obsessed with hating Aristotle. And because, you know, but it, it, it, and, you know, so, but, but he wasn’t engaging with Aristotle because in fact, Aristotle has ex, in multiple books, talks about the idea that there are multiple logical conclusions that you cannot say that everything is true or false.That was the core idea of Korzybski. But Aristotle actually said that. [00:58:00] So it’s like he didn’t engage with, with the, the existing, you know, literature and the existing authors. And, and that’s really kind of, I think the through line also is with these people is that, you know, everything is about the first principles that, that I will deduce everything purely from first principles instead of, you know, empirical observation and disconfirmation of my own beliefs.That’s, I think is their, is their approach to the world ultimately.Balancing truth and skepticismRABINOWITZ: I mean, to your point about the self being the hardest, the easiest one to fool since being my friends, the beats earlier, one of my favorite lines from the beats is from William s Burrow’s, naked Lunch, which is the hustlers of the world. There is one mark. You cannot beat the mark inside. You know, we are always marks in that sense.And then to your point about, you know. Truth and falsity. One of the classic phrases of Discordian thought is every idea is [00:59:00] true in some sense, and false in some sense, and meaningless in some sense, and true and false in some sense. And they just go on and on like that. But you know, every conjunction of true, false and meaningless they would say is correct for all ideas.Very radical, you know, trying to break down sort of binary approaches to epistemology.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and you know, and, and again, like there’s, there’s some truth to that idea. But it’s better for people to have read Coral Popper than to have read Discordian because Yeah. You know, like forRABINOWITZ: Or do both.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. If you want, yeah. If you’re gonna read Discordian, you should read Popper for sure.And, you know, and, and, and the core idea of his epistemology is that nothing is absolutely true. That, that everything that you know, we think is true is just only un falsified. And I think that that’s a better, a better axiology or epistemology that, you know, [01:00:00] if, if, if you hold to it in that way, it’s more healthy because you’re not, you’re not saying that your own ideas are true.And I think that that’s the, the core, the core problem that we have here. Even though they say they, like I and I, the people that I’ve known who, who come out of these, you know, traditions, they claim not to have opinions. They claim not to have beliefs. But then when I say, okay, well here’s some things that show your beliefs are false.They don’t want to hear it because they do have beliefs and they do have opinions but they just don’t want to say it.RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I think I, I, I just put out a piece a little while ago about like skeptical epistemology or, or pessimistic epistemology where people feel like, because they’ve been convinced about. Confirmation bias and cognitive biases. They just shouldn’t strongly believe anything like I was saying earlier.And I, you know, I think like I love Popper. I love like falsification. That’s great. I think we should say certain things are just [01:01:00] objectively true and we know that they are objectively true, past a reasonable standard. I think our fear of doing that is a lot of what is driving problems right now. And I, I, you know, like I worry that folks on the left and the right, but especially like, you know, because I live in the leftist spaces, I worry that they are increasingly afraid to do that and it.makes it much harder for them to resist you know, arguments from the right.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well let’s, let’s talk about that a bit more. I mean, I, I think that I agree with that in general but I would say that Popper is saying that some things are objectively false. And that’s, and, and so that’s, so he gives you a access to a common reality through falseness rather than through truth.RABINOWITZ: I feel like that’s a, that’s a word play game a little bit because like, let’s take a, let’s take a one example that I give in my article. You know, the Holocaust happened, like it’s objectively true that the Holocaust happened. I think. [01:02:00] I don’t think there’s any reason to be falsification is about, you know, like we just haven’t falsified that the Holocaust happened yet, or something like that.Like we know it happened and we know that it was wrong. Like those are two claims, like one’s a, one’s a historical empirical claim, one’s a moral normative claim, and they’re both ones that we can know are objectively true and that we can know that there is not going to be evidence that will come along and falsify them right in the human kind of sense.Any evidence that comes along that appears to falsify them, it doesn’t actually falsify them. It’s either fake made up or wrong.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay. Well, that’s, yeah, I mean, I would agree with that, that there, and there is a difference. I think also people should distinguish between scientific claims and historical claims as well. And actually that is a point that the Pyrrhonians did because like they were talking, they, in their, in their own writing, they were primarily talking about scientific claims about the world.They weren’t talking about the other stuff. [01:03:00] But,RABINOWITZ: So even if we do scientific claims though, like think the claim evolution is true, right? I don’t think that’s falsifiable at this point. Right. I just think it’s the, like we might, we might find out that some of the details of how it happened are different, but the scientific claim that, you know, like species evolved on this planet seems like, and this is why, as I understand, again, I’m not a philosopher of science, but my understanding of philosopher of science is that they have moved a little bit beyond popper’s.Falsification is because there are, it seems like certain claims for which there is such a sufficient body of evidence. Maybe this isn’t their reason, but in my mind it seems like a good reason there are. Certain empirical claims for which there is a sufficient body of evidence that we know it’s true, and that if we don’t ex, if we don’t believe it’s such a thing as possible, I. Worry that we end up in a place where, you know, we can’t ever get full consensus on climate change because people are like, well, some people think it’s true and some people don’t, [01:04:00] and maybe it just hasn’t been falsified yet, or something like that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that’s a fair point. I think that’s a fair point and yeah, function functionally true. Perhaps is, is a way we can think about it. But you know, like in terms of the, the science though, there is this constant admixture and we’ve talked about it a bit, but you know, this idea of of, of the occult also like, and, and the occult is, was a very big thing for Wilson and a lot of these other people as well.And, and you know, when you look at the history, there was this kind of intertwinement of personal experience and you know, mystical thought especially when you look at the early scientists so like you know, people some people might be familiar with the idea of I, Isaac Newton was very big into biblical numerology.He was very big into you know, last days ideas and. Robert Boyle talked the, the, the kind of first [01:05:00] real chemist. He was obsessed with angels on talking about how they were how we, how we couldRABINOWITZ: Liveness was a staunch advocate of the best of all possible worlds theory.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, but, and so there, there is a certain, like the, the, the, the other paradox is that this experiential idea of reality in some sense, it, it, it has the, the ingredients to, to help people get out of conspiracy beliefs. Because you, you should be able to ex, you know, directly prove or things that you say are true.And that is within their tradition as well. That is why science, you know, got out of and, and bifurcated. So chemistry, you know, left alchemy and physics, you know, came, came to be its own thing instead of arguing for God’s, you know, magically doing things. And we, you know, lost the idea of lum, lumous ether, and the ideas [01:06:00] of you know, that there was a secret ingredient of matter that is what caused fire.Like these were, these were common beliefs that were believed by many early scientists. So, you know, there, there are ingredients that can help people not have these beliefs within these systems as well. So, yeah.RABINOWITZ: I mean, I, I genuinely think high weirdness is a mixed bag, like a lot of traditions. I think what I see sometimes is a, a resistance to complex epistemologies, essentially, like the reality I think that is true is sometimes you need to trust your direct experiences. A lot of times you need to trust your direct experiences, but sometimes you shouldn’t.A lot of times you need to trust experts except when you shouldn’t, you know, and, and like it’s very particularist about when you need to be doing those things and there isn’t an easy formula that you can apply to know what to do. A lot of times we are muddling through epistemically, and I don’t think folks like that a lot.It feels [01:07:00] very unpleasant. It’s very nerve wracking. And so the appeal of these other views is often that they have fairly simplistic epistemologies once you shed all of the layers of gnosticism or whatever that they. Sort of fairly, it’s, you know, trust your direct experiences. Right. And, and that’s it, right?Like that’s, and, and stop there. That can feel very easy and relaxing to people who don’t want to work through the complexities of is this a good expert or a bad expert?Living with uncertainty and embracing the voidSHEFFIELD: And, and that is kind of the, the paradox is that, you know, science grew out of that idea actually. And that the rediscovery of the of the Pyrrhonian skeptics during the, the time of Descartes that, you know, they had a significant impact on early science. And so it was what enabled people to question religious dogma about, well, this is the nature of reality [01:08:00] because we say it is.And, and, you know, and, and so people were like, no, I can, I can test things and, and, you know, through my own experience, I can see if there are, you know, spirits inside of animals or whatever, you know, like whatever, various flames, you know, spontaneous com, combustion and spontaneous. Like, people were able to test all of these ideas and find that they were not real.So yeah, skepticism is both generative and also nihilistic at the same time. And as you were saying, it is a tight rope.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. I mean, so you got the pre-Socratics, right? They were doing a kind of science, trying to theorize about the physical nature of the world. Socrates himself then comes along and a lot of what Socrates is doing is, oh, you’re an expert in something. Let me ask you questions about it to prove that you don’t actually know what the hell you’re talking about.So there was that skepticism of expertise and the direct inquiry built in from the beginnings of philosophy. And again, for [01:09:00] better and like I, I think it’s for better and worse in my opinion Because yeah, it, it opens people up to new ideas. It creates new spaces for ideas, but it also makes them resistant to certain ideas and it makes it harder for them to seed kind of epistemic authority to other individuals and trust other individuals.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Because other people’s experiences are also real. And I think that that’s, that’s the core thing that people who have this, you know, self-centered epistemology, that they, they don’t, you know, that’s the thing. We gotta get people to realize that other, other minds are real, other experiences are valid and other ways of thinking you know, they can be more right than yours. And that’s,RABINOWITZ: Up to a point.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Up to a point. Well yeah, like, it, it, and these are, yeah, it’s uncomfortable. And, and, but at the same time, it can also be freeing, I think, as well. And that’s, you know, one of the things [01:10:00] that you talk about on your podcast a lot as well, and that’s why it’s called Embrace the Void.Like what do you, what do you mean by that?RABINOWITZ: Oh, I mean, many, many things by that, that’s a very high weirdness phrase. I, I, I later realized you know, embracing the void, the show originated as a way to cope with living in the worst of all possible timelines. We theorize that we are now stuck in. And it, you know, it’s about, so, so one of the, one of the ideas there would be abiding or attachment or non-attachment, right?I don’t know if you can even see the tattoo. Oh, it’s weird. Oh, there we go. Abide. Right, which is Lebowski. It’s Daoism. And it’s the idea of like, yeah, you’re living in a terrible situation. You have to some extent accept that while also trying to change it. You know, non-attachment I think is a really meaningful approach to coping with reality.but it has to go hand in hand with acting to try to improve things for people. [01:11:00] So, you know, it can be embracing the void between us. There are gaps between all of our minds that make it difficult for us to have direct interaction and direct understanding of each other. And so making peace with that you know, it means, it means lots of weird things to me.SHEFFIELD: Well, and people can definitely check out what you mean by that on, on, on your podcast. I think we’ll we’ll leave it there for so it’s been a great discussion, Aaron. So, where do you want people to follow you on social media if, if they choose to do so?RABINOWITZ: Yeah, sure. You can check out my podcasts, embrace the Void and Philosophers in space where we just talk about science fiction and philosophy a bunch. Very straightforward and you can find me on Blue Sky at ETV Pod. We’ve also got a philosophers in space Facebook group if people want to come hang out there.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right. Encourage everybody to do that. Thanks.RABINOWITZ: Yeah. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Matt. This was fun.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program. Thanks a lot for joining us for the discussion, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of [01:12:00] Change show where we have the video audio on transcript of all the episodes.And if you would like to become a paid or free subscriber, you can do that. If you go to Theory of Change Show, you can subscribe on Substack and you can also stay in touch on Patreon at patreon.com/discover Flux. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode.Thanks a lot, and I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. 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Episode SummaryEverywhere in the news it seems, people are talking about artificial intelligence. The executives at the various companies keep saying that they’re just a few months away from a program that can think as well or better than a human. Whereas on the opposite side, a legion of critics are saying that AI is a giant scam with no value at all.But underneath this debate is an even larger question. What are minds? And do we even know what it means to think like a human?No one has final answers to these questions, but some are better than others. Psychology and computer science have plenty to say about the capacity to do things, but if we want to understand minds better, it makes sense also to look at biology, because biology has been studying living systems, behavior, and cognition for a lot longer than computers have been around.I’ve been working behind the scenes on a lot of this stuff recently, and as I continue to roll out some of my ideas publicly, I wanted to bring on some people to the show here to discuss some of their ideas as well, because these are really important questions that are worth taking seriously, regardless of whatever your position is on them, they are ideas that don’t just stay in the lab. They shape how we build our technologies, how we write our policies, and how we understand ourselves. On today’s program, I’m joined by Johannes Jaeger. He’s a biologist and philosopher who has published extensively in cognitive science and he advocates what’s sometimes called an an enactivist approach to mind, that is they are something that our bodies are doing and not something like a magical spirit or something like a software that you can pop in and out to some other device.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content* Experience creates minds, not the reverse* What’s going on with Pete Hegseth’s jihad against Anthropic?* Chatbots are more likely to give bad answers because they’re trained to provide an answer, no matter how incorrect* The reality of other people’s minds is the root of so many political conflicts* AI content is not going to go away, we should have some realistic norms for how to use it* Mediocrity and ‘satisficing’ are what complex systems do* The strong link between wanting to defy social norms and belief in disinformationAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:15 — Cognition is mostly an unknown unknown16:48 — The return of behaviorism30:28 — Reality is always mediated by experience which makes it not externally computable39:28 — The accidental dualism of mind-as-software44:19 — Cargo cult philosophy and Jeffrey Epstein52:34 — Meta-modernism and technology for life01:00:44 — The real singularity is whether humanity can learn to live togetherAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Johannes Yeager. Hey, Yogi, welcome to the show.JOHANNES JAEGER: Hi Matt. Thanks for having me on.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, this is going to be a really good discussion. And I’ve written and published things on these topics but I haven’t done a lot of podcasting on them. So you’re kind of the first one to kind of get, get my audience into my, my podcast audience into these cognitive science topics that I’ve writing about.So let’s maybe start though with so you were trained as a, as a, a biologist, and that’s your, your academic certifications, but that’s, that’s not where your heart lies.JAEGER: I’ve probably always been more of a philosopher, but I did start my career as an experimental lab biologist studying developmental and evolutionary biology, and then moved on to become a mathematical modeler. And I was always interested in the kind of methods that I was using and to sort of reflect on them.So I guess I was always a bit more of. Philosopher, a conceptual thinker. And what I’m doing right now is a bit weird because I think I’m still doing biology, but I’m doing it using philosophical methods. So I’m sort of interested in concepts, conceptual problems in biology, and thinking about how we do biology and how we think about life at the moment.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and that’s really important at this point in human history, I think, [00:04:00] because philosophy as a discipline is kind of the origin of all-- I mean, literally, this is true, like philosophy is the origin point of all sciences.It, they, they came out of it you know, going back all the way to Plato’s Academy and all the o other various, places that people, started up afterwards.And you know, and, and, and so now, we’ve had this, this, this new discipline or meta discipline, if you will, called cognitive science. And this is, you know, it is such a, because we don’t, we don’t know fully how, how minds work or brains work or what even how we can know anything, like it is just a lot of this is so unclear, experimentally because it’s hard to quantify a lot of this stuff.Because first you have to, you have to know what you’re quantifying before you can quantify something. like that’s, that, that’s really one the what it comes down to. And, and so biology and, and, even computer science and and psychology like are all having to become a lot more philosophical, I think, because, you know, as we started are starting to get more serious about trying to build things that can be more autonomous.That we have to figure out, well, what makes something autonomous? That’s really what it comes down to.JAEGER: I totally agree. I mean, the problem is that we don’t even know what life is and we don’t know what minds are. And in some ways I, it’s a bit provocative, but I joke sometimes that we know less about that right now than we did about a hundred years ago because we have these ideas about minds and bodies being machines and computers in particular that are extremely misleading.I guess we’re going to talk about this in particular, so we have ideas that can actually put us further from the truth, even though we have amazingly improved technologies and techniques to probe into what life is. And it’s, minute is detail, but we’ve kind of lost the forest for the trees there a bit.And I think [00:06:00] if we wanna make sense of all the data we’re producing and and also of course of AI that we’re going to talk about and the differences between those living systems and machines then we need to sort of zoom out and look at the big picture again.Cognition is mostly an unknown unknownSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And and, and we’ll come back to this repeatedly as a theme, but you know, overall the, the there, there, there’s this idea that, and I, and I hate to to quote him here, but Donald Rumsfeld, the former US Defense secretary, he had one good idea, which is that when you’re going into a situation there are the known unknowns and then there are the unknown unknowns.And, and that’s the thing about science is that the, the paradox of science is that it actually increases ignorance at the same time that it increases knowledge. I, I mean that’s really-- and this is also why also I think why we see a lot of proliferation of conspiracy theories as well. Like there were no conspiracy theories of aliens abducting people until people theorize, oh, well what if there are planets out there?And what if there are beings that live on those planets that could come here? So there were no alien abduction ideas before aliens were existing. But even in a more scientific sense, you know, like people trying to figure out, well, how does this chemical induce this type of behavior and what would happen if you did this?And, you know, like there’s just, the more you know, the more you don’t, you know, the more you know that you don’tJAEGER: I mean, Rumsfeld, I use these quotes in my philosophy course as well, funnily enough, because it’s really good to, to show you that what’s really important at this frontier of what we know is the question is how you set up your experiment and. It is extremely important to realize that this is not just some sort of, automatic process, but it’s something that you have to use creativity for judgment that we’re also going to come back to later on.So this is the part of science where you [00:08:00] need to use your own intuition, school intuitions, and there’s no way around that. So it’s not right to see everything we do in science and the subjects that we study as pure algorithms or sort of rule-based systems. This is just not how nature works because it’s not how our experience works.And this is where I think the work that you’ve shared with me in cognitive science and my work on something called Real relevance realization, really overlaps strongly that the first step that a living being has to do to get to know its world, is to identify in that world what is important, what is relevant to it.And that is not a computational problem. This is something that we can go into detail about. But this is huge because that means that the intelligence of a living being, no matter how simple it is fundamentally different from what we can achieve in, in machine intelligence at the moment, no matter how sophisticated or even, impressively similar to what we can do with language or images the output of those machin machines may be.So there are underlying differences that really count because they are also connected in the end to taking a responsibility for our actions. And this is another thing that machines obviously can’t do. So we need to sort of think much harder about the application of those technologies and how we are going to attribute responsibility to things that happen because of them.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and, and the context that we’re having this discussion here is that we have cer seen the proliferation of a bunch of different large language models and other artificial intelligence systems as they’re called. And you know, I I, some people don’t like that term.JAEGER: I have two suggestions very quickly there. So first of all, it should be, if it’s properly used, it should be not AI, but IA intelligence augmentation. So a technology that augments our own intelligence. And the second is, I call it algorithmic mimicry. This is not something that’s going to catch on, [00:10:00] but it’s the algorithm mimicking, imitating what human beings can do.But it’s, a simulacrum, it’s not the real thing. And we can go into that, what that means as well. But it’s just superficial. and then, some of the AI bro have turned this around and said, oh, our brain is not that sophisticated. But if you actually understand the nature of a living being, that, that is probably very likely not true.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That’s right. And, and, and so just for, just to give an overview though, for people who you know wanna get a bit up to speed or they never read the articles article essentially, you know, a large language model is a computer program that will, that is trained on, like a whole bunch of data is put into it into files, and then it classifies everything in the relationships between the words.And says these words are in this broader topic, and some, and this is, these are called features often or, or they’re called vector, vector space relationships. And then essentially, so when you, when you type in a question, what it does is it breaks down your query into what are called tokens but they, which is like a sub word, and then anyway, analyzes the relationships with all kinds of different ways.And then says, okay, well, to ans this question is about these topics. Statistically speaking, this is what it’s about. And then I’m going to respond using these statistically correlated words in these topic areas constrained by these rules alignment rules of grammar or facticity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.But these are not you know, these, these rules. Externally imposed. And I, and I, and I think that that’s is an important thing for, for people to get. So like there, there is this concept, they do have a concept of alignment and it’s good, and it’s the only reason why you can make any sense of the stuff that they say.But these are, these are externally imposed requirements [00:12:00] by humans in order to make the outputs make sense because otherwise they would not make sense.JAEGER: Yeah, so that’s really important no matter how complicated they are, or even if those models are post trained in the reasoning reasoning models. That’s another really misleading name. What the model in the end does is it reproduces patterns that it’s recognized in a dataset or in a, reasoning exercise after the main training step.So basically there is no semantics, there is no understanding. It’s just patterns. So we can call that syntax. So there is no semantics. And then of course, there is also no action from such a model. So the software and the hardware remain just in like a traditional algorithm, strictly separated. So the software runs on the hardware, but it doesn’t change the hardware.And so if you compare just these kind of aspects to a living system, all of the meaning the semantics comes from inside the organism, or better put from the interaction the organism has with its environment. While in, in the algorithm it’s put. Into, first of all the way the training data set is set up, that’s done by humans, it’s curated and there’s a lot of human meaning that goes into the formatting of that training data set.Second of all, the way that the target functions are set and then third of course, the prompt that the human is giving the algorithm when it interacts with it. So this is where the meaning of the answers that you get from a LLM come from everything internal is pattern, is very complex, pattern reproduction.And, sometimes people use this, term called stochastic parrots. I, don’t think it’s a very good term because it, or also some, sometimes what I think is a better way to think about it is a very complex tool that you can use to make sense for yourself, but you as the human user have to be there for sense to arise from this interaction that you have with the machine.The other way, it’s not the same. So there’s no person in there if you, [00:14:00] if there is no Chachi PT between prompts, right? it just exists as a, patterns of magnetic bits on a heart disk. But it doesn’t really have a process state. While, as you also point out in your own work, a human mind or any living being is a process that constantly updates its state in relation to the environment.And that’s where experience come comes from. So basically what that means is that none of these algorithms can experience anything. And they are in that sense, not true selves. They don’t have subjective experience in that sense. It just doesn’t make sense to ascribe that to them. And the next question is then, so, so basically this is a pattern producer, a very complex pattern, producers that’s put in a very complex environment with people.In the training, meaning put into it in the training data set, in the prompt, et cetera, et cetera. And then it works in an environment on the internet. It interacts with other algorithms, it interacts with people. So this is not traditional computation, but it is still the execution of rule-based instructions one by one in the end, even if that happens in a massively parallel way.And there is hardware, there is a code base, and, these rules are set from the outside. There’s a training set. Everything is pre-given and supplied from the outside while the organism. And you also have a beautiful account of that in your work creates its own self through experience through itself.So you cannot make an organism. The organism has to make itself, and that is the very definition of a living being. It is a physical system that manufactures itself. That means it produces all the parts that it needs to function. And relates them and assembles them in a way that is functional, that is conducive to its existence.Its further existence. So you’re basically always working as an organism towards staying alive. [00:16:00] If you sleep, if you’re in a coma, you still, your cells work to be alive. While, it’s obvious that no, not even the most complex algorithmic system that we’ve created does that. You can just save it on a heart disk and then restart it.But it’s just fundamentally not the same thing. So everything that’s human-like about these algorithms that doesn’t come in, through like some internal interactions, but it comes through, these constraints, these alignment constraints that you were mentioning before that we put in to begin with, but we put them in, such an indirect way.There’s such a big gap between the person who creates the dataset, the training dataset, and the person who uses the algorithm that we don’t see these things and it seems lifelike to. We’re fooling ourselves if we think that.The return of behaviorismSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that does raise the idea of that used to be very common in, in psychology of the school of behaviorism of, of BF Skinner that basically had this idea that, well, okay, we don’t, we can’t, well, let’s not bother trying to, to, to hypothesize what is, what’s going on inside of minds.Let’s just only look at the outputs of, of human actions. Like, what are people doing? What are they saying? Because nothing else is measurable. Nothing else is ultimately real, perhaps. People are just machines. Like, and, and so that. That mentality was quite popular, for a, a while or in the mid 20th century through Skinner and other people like him.And eventually people realize that if that wasn’t, it couldn’t explain enough in part because the, you can have the same behavioral outputs with totally different intentions. So, and, and a perfect example of that would be within if you live in a totalitarian dictatorship where you are required to praise the leader.And so, lots of people had that reality, [00:18:00] so they would praise the leader and say that he was great. And it was always a he notably, and they would always, you know, but, but they didn’t mean it. But they had the same behavior output.And so. That eventually most of psychology kind of moved beyond behaviorism, but now we’re seeing a return to it with this idea of computational functionalism, which is the idea, well, the only thing that really matters is, is, is the outputs of system. So the, the so-called turing test as well is, is a really bad example of that, unfortunately.JAEGER: No, it’s true. So, but, so there are a few things that happen here. So first of all, whenever you go and you speculate behind the behavior of a machine nowadays people say you, you’re making a metaphysical argument and metaphysics is this sort of bad word for a hundred years now already.And that’s something we don’t want. But the funny thing is that the assumption, the very assumption that the human body. The mind is a machine. It’s metaphysical it’s completely unproven. It’s just an assumption, which if you look into the history is actually quite funny and recent.So, so the whole idea that beings human beings in the world itself are machines is only about 400 years old. Descartes, we can date it. This to about 1642 when Decart published two essays that stated these two things exactly. So, so he declared all living beings Automata, and he declared the world a machine.And the machine was, of course, at the time, high tech was the clock. And they had all these really fancy clocks with ORs and everything in the cathedral so people could see them. That was like the computer technology of the time. And they said, okay. Of course the universe is like, a talk work.And the same thing is happening again right now in recent times. And it’s only about 30 years old 40 maybe by now, and not more that the world is a computer, which is really funny because the theory of computation [00:20:00] is about a human activity. It’s about making calculations with pen and paper according to fixed rules.That is the definition of what computation is. And based on this a guy called Alan Turing managed to build a universal machine that could basically solve all logical problems that you would pose to it that were solvable. That’s the universal touring machine. So that’s a model of a universal machine, a universal problem solver.And that’s. Also notice this is about problem solving. Okay? So then World War II came along, and after that, we somehow switched to the idea that our own thinking is like, that is computation. Okay? So because we built all these computers became an everyday technology. It was the best technology we have ever developed.And they were built to emulate the human capacity of problem solving. But problem solving is a tiny thing of what you’re doing. I mean, we’re not talking about motivations and emotions that need to arise from inside your body. They can’t be programmed into you. And then the other thing is we don’t, we’re not talking about that thing that we were talking about in the very beginning of our conversation.That you have to first point out what is important to you. That is not a problem to be solved. That’s something you need to do as a motivated being a being that is motivated to survive. Then things become important and unimportant and relevant to you, and that is not a computational problem. The idea that a living being is ca capable of judgment and of reframing problems.And that’s what we call creativity. That is outside what we understand by computation. So we’ve come up with a model of something humans do. And so we mistake this model, which is more a model of how we logically explain the world with how the world actually works. Or you can think of this as the ultimate mistaking the map for the territory.Okay? Somebody once said it was a computer scientist. The problem with computer science that it’s territory is a map. Okay? It’s studies, [00:22:00] a theoretical subject and so, but people are now o only in the last few decades coming to this idea that everything in the world is computation. And this is crazy because your experience.Your subjective experience your motivations, your drives your ability to judge, your ability to be creative are fundamentally not computational in nature.SHEFFIELD: No, they’re not. And, and, and, and the, and that’s the thing, like the, you know, saying that everything is computable or should be that’s just focusing on just one aspect of, of human activity, one activity which is, you know, s serialized, formalized logic and saying, well, that’s all we do. But everybody knows that is not what all you do as a person and or what anyone else does.Like, we, we are so much more than that. But, you know,JAEGER: I wish everybody knew that’s the problem. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, I, I think instinctively everybody thinks of themselves it’s that way, but even, and even the tech bros I would say they would, you know, if you cut them if you took that out of the context of computing, they would, they would admit that.You know, and, but the, there is kind of a, and, and, and this, this distinction or this idea of, of, of computation or computability it, it kind of bifurcated western philosophy in a lot of ways between what ended up, and these are, are bad terms, frankly. But the terms that people use are, are analytic philosophy and phenomenology philosophy, and, you know, and, and so the computer science largely became reliant on analytic philosophy. And then the phenomenological people, they kind of, a lot of them became kind of anti technology almost Luddite is, or, you know, even getting into [00:24:00] mystical stuff and in, in some of them in very bad ways, like Martin Heider as an example.So, you know, like, and so the, the both sides were kind of missing what the other one got, right? I would say that they both, they, they, they, they both had good points, but they also had bad points. And that, that, that’s kind of where I think Western philosophy kind of went wrong, is that it, it tried to split these two things off.JAEGER: Here’s the weird thing, right? Everything we know about the world comes out of the experience that some human being or maybe one of our ancestors had. And in the case of humans, because we have language and we’re social beings, we can share those views of the world as well. So we have a collective sort of imagination.About the world, but everything we know comes out of this subjective experience that we have a really hard time understanding with our abstracted theory because this is the act of abstraction. So we, by making knowledge objective from subjective to objective, we have to put them into language. We have to then put the theories into numbers, testable statements, and that those are huge steps of abstraction.And then the next step is that we confuse those theories, these abstractions that describe the world with the world itself, which is just that experience that we have. Right? And so I, I side here with the phenomenologists that say experience is primary and we have to sort of examine also eastern meditation practices that are trying to get through the conceptual layer that we have.We are very strange creatures on this planet because we have this massive reliance on language and both, these traditions of philosophy. Of course, philosophy itself depends on language. So, Wittgenstein, famous Viennese philosopher once said, whereof, you cannot speak thereof. You shall be silent.But that is a huge problem because as you and I explore in our work, all we do at the abstract level is deeply grounded in a [00:26:00] lot of stuff that’s going on. Underneath that is beneath the level of the conceptual level, the abstract level, it’s direct experience. The idea that we cannot directly experience anything without language is absurd.We do that all the time. But what we are aware of as self-reflective human beings is in the abstract level. So if you want to understand where this really basic level comes from, and then it’s actually useful to go much lower to simpler organisms. And there’s a great book by Kevin Mitchell, it’s called Free Agents.That is exactly arguing that you can’t. Understand, easily understand all these sorts of experience by starting from the human experience because it’s very complicated. So let’s sort of look at what kind of bacterium, the simplestBehaviorism and computational functionalismJAEGER: living cell on earth experience itself. And it has a sort of, funnily enough, it has the ability to judge in a very simple way.It’s not sitting around, there’s no bacteria philosopher or anything like that, but it can go for the sugar and avoid the toxins. So it has of course, evolved to do that. It does it very mechanistically. But every once in a while, those sort of preferences, those value systems, those interactions with the environment they change because we evolved from something that probably looked very much like a simple bacteria.So at some point in its career, it must have been able to do something unexpected. I mean, unexpected, like that is completely not formalize in advance. This is the work by biologist Stuart Kaufman, one of my co-authors, and he calls this the adjacent possible evolution and life in general. The behavior of organisms is always going into new spaces that we haven’t been able to imagine before they reformulate problems.It’s a truly creative process that you cannot just put in a bunch of equations and play it like you play an algorithm in a computer. And that’s the whole point of evolution and life. It is to break the rules. Of course it still follows the rules most of the time, but it is able [00:28:00] to do that and that is what makes living systems alive.And they can only do that. This is where it becomes a bit complicated because they are self manufacturing systems, so they built themselves and so they can in a way decide whether they built themselves in this way or in that way. Okay. Only if we have mistaken our abstractions, our theories about the world for the real thing.Can we think this is not real? So there have been several places in history of science. Famously Lala was a, lala was a guy in the very early clockwork stage of our science that said, okay, if the world is like a clockwork, everything has to be predetermined. And he called this the he called up this demon that could look into the universe from the outside and sort of see the universe and then predict its whole future.And this idea is coming back now with the idea that the whole universe is a computer. It’s the same thing again. A demon who sits outside the universe can predict everything and so can manipulate everything. And we can then engineer the whole future of the universe. But there are two problems now.So one is this demon is not part of the world itself. So it’s basically, God, it’s not a scientific. Or a natural entity. Right. And the other thing is that, of course, what the people who believe that the world is a computer and the mind is a computer want to do, is to control it from within. They think they can control their own minds, their own world.Although we are only this tiny part of the universe, and we certainly don’t understand it well enough to manipulate it in this way, we, and we see that there’s evidence for this. This is not just speculation. Every time we interfere in a complex system, there are unintended consequences. And I mean, every time, this is one of the most robust empirical findings that science.Has made over the last 400 years you interfere, something goes wrong. Okay? We know that from everyday life as well. So unexpected things happen all the time. And this is only [00:30:00] possible if you let this idea go, that the universe is somehow calculable is a computation, is controllable is predictable which is, and I want to come back to that, a purely metaphysical assumption.There is no evidence that the universe is like that. Not a single shred, but that’s always glanced over and this whole view is kind of sold as the only reasonable view there is, right? So that’s how that works,Reality is always mediated by experience which makes it not externally computableSHEFFIELD: yeah, absolutely. And, and, and this is why in my own work, why I think it’s important to structure a philosophy through a, an access to the external world. So, you know, in my view, everything is, there is an externality, and that exists regardless of what we do or where we are or who we are, even if we exist at all.But we don’t have direct access to all we can access is our local externality. And then within that only what we is perceptible for us within it. So there, like if you’re a bee and you see a flower, you see lines that show you where the you know, the, the, where you can get the pollant, or I’m sorry, get the the nectar from, and, you know, but if you’re a human and you look at that flower, there’s no lines on that flower.It’s just a red, it’s just a red rose. And so, but, so it’s outside of our perceptible externality and then it’s nested even further is our percepted externality. So that’s what we, of what we can sense that we actually register in our minds and say, okay, this is here and this is, this is like that.And so, you know, that’s but a lot of this, this worldview that we’re talking about here, this computational functionalism, it doesn’t draw any of these distinctions. It, it thinks, no, there’s an objective reality. And we can, when we have scientific laws Yeah. That we can model it and we know what it is.And, and, and yet this [00:32:00] is despite the entire history of science, show you that’s not true. That is not true. You know, and, and, and, and that it’s not just quantum physics, you know, talking about how ev everything is literally solid objects do not exist. So there’s that. But it is, it’s even beyond that, you know, like every, every single fundamental scientific field shows that there, there are, there are always new discoveries that completely upend everything.And, and, and, and yet we still have people with this, this sensibility that no, no, there is objective reality. And I can find it because I’m soJAEGER: Yeah. And often people are afraid of a slippery slope that leads us into this idea that everything that postmodern idea that we have nowadays especially also in the political right, that you, anything goes whoever has shouts the loudest has the right view. And this is extremely dangerous because.What we’re saying here is not that, but what we’re saying is that our knowledge of the world is grounded in millions of years of interactions of us and our ancestors In with an externality that you called it the perceptive externality I call it an arena. It’s also called the umwelt, which is just German for environment.But it basically means that the perceived environment, the things you can see and experience it all, and that is beyond your control. It’s not that you can just claim that it’s like this or that. It’s not it is a certain way and you interact with it and you basically go out and you try things out and you find out, and that’s how science works still.And it’s very robust, but it never ever gives you an infallible, which means. A complete or perfect view of the world. And so this assumption that the whole universe could be a simulation, for example, and we just live in a simulation that leaves two questions hugely unanswered. That’s first of all who is the simulator, and that’s just God again, I’m sorry, that’s a supernatural being.So this is a religious idea. It’s not a scientific idea. And the other thing is, of course, how do you get experience in a [00:34:00] simulation? I want to know, so I want a scientific explanation why I experience speaking to you right now. And I am me, and this is where it starts. And from that, I make abstractions once again.And this is called The Blind Spot by Adam Frank Marcelo Gliser. And Evan Thompson wrote a really good book about this. This is a strange loop, a really weird thing that we go from our subjective experience to these abstractive theories. And then we suddenly mistake those theories for the real thing, like physicists who believe.That their equations, the shorting wave equation is the only real thing there is in the world comes out of the equation that’s just upside down. That’s map not territory. And the same thing for computation. Computation is a way to describe the world. It’s not the way the world is. So, for example, in a famous example I think it was a philosopher, Hillary Putnam who came up with it first, the waterfall.Does it compute something? You can make it compute something. You can make the water run in different ways and do computations for you. Or you can simulate it in a computer. But you won’t get wet standing under that simulation. And that’s something that is so absolutely forgotten very often, which is amazing.I say, it walks like a duck. It walks like a duck. But you can’t make canara Lauren from it. And for sure it’s just a simulation. It isn’t real. So the question that I am really interested. Right now is why do our theories fail to describe that difference? Right? And I think we have a really fundamental, again, this is philosophy.We don’t understand how an organism causes itself because this is a mathematical problem, right? I mean, nothing is supposed to sort of be its own product. And so you have this circularity I think it was Aristotle 2,500 years ago, who outlawed this in analogical arguments already, rightly so, because it’s a circular argument literally.And it doesn’t make any sense. But the problem is that nature doesn’t stick to that logic that we have. Okay? [00:36:00] And it, it makes circular arguments all the time. And they don’t go around in a circle. They construct themselves. So they go up in a spiral, right? So they spiral in new directions.And this is how you can imagine. Living beings. These are processes that work together to construct each other and maintain each other’s existence in this way. And they spiral up in these different directions. And this is what we call evolution in the end. And this is extremely unlike any machine we’ve ever built.So the world is not like a machine. And also the machines we’ve built, they are something really strange. They don’t have anything to do with how the world out there really works. And this is something we’ve forgotten, and this is why I joke that we understand the mind and the body less nowadays than we did in the past.Because a hundred years ago, nobody would’ve come up with this idea that everything is a computation. Because even the most rational people, Charles Babbage or Condor Savin before who thought about the nature of rationality and intelligence set, intelligence and rationality are about judgment mainly.And then only rule-based computation. Secondarily, you have to follow rational arguments once you’ve decided what the problem is that you want to solve. This was always there until about World War II and the development of a little before that of computation theory that led to us forgetting that and thinking that thinking is computation.That’s a bad sentence, but you know what I mean. It’s it is. When you think, first of all your LLM does not think the way a human being thinks, not at all. There’s a fundamental difference and no matter how many data points you add to the training set, no matter how more complex you make the model itself, it will not be able to think.It will never, and you can quote me on that, be able to think as long as we stay in this paradigm of algorithms, software running on hardware. Of a specific architecture that we are, we’re running on [00:38:00] right now, and that’s just something that is not ever heard in public conversation about these problems.So all these claims that we have, conscious AI, or we’ll have it soon, they’re completely overhyped and mostly also completely delusional. A good example is Epstein’s favorite Yha Bach, who’s been claiming that you can emotions, consciousness are a secondary consequence of computation.Again, this is, if you look at this work complete one of the most obvious map and territory confusions. That turn his entire work upside down. And you can create machines that act as if they have emotions. But the funny thing is, a programmer always has to program the personality type in open claw mold book where we’re in the the news with these agents.And you have to have, they have a soul file. I really like that. So the thing is actually called a soul file where you have to write in the personality. So it has to bootstrap itself from that thing that you as a human being with human defined words, define the soul of this algorithm. And then it goes out and it acts in autonomous ways.And we say, oh look, that’s what you meant by the alignment constraints before. So, we basically made it do act in an intelligent way. We programmed that into it and now it acts in a seemingly intelligent way. And we say, oh, we can do that on its own. No, we can. We designed it so we can do it basically.The accidental dualism of mind-as-softwareSHEFFIELD: Yeah.Yeah exactly. And well, and, and this idea though of, of, of mind as software, I think that’s, is such a pernicious idea and, and wrong hit. And it also undermines completely what the people, at least a lot of the people who came up with it we’re trying to do when they need it. So, so Daniel Dennett, the, the late philosopher and cognitive scientist, he was the one that really kind of put this.Into the computational functionalism and, and, and mind as software. He called it a [00:40:00] virtual machine. The mind, the, the mind is a virtual machine that is, is made out of your neurons. And, and that then he didn’t understand how virtual machines work, I would say. ‘cause like I deal with them. I am a, I am a, a cybersecurity professional as well.And like, that’s not what a virtual machine is like. They are not sep They they are, they are separate from the soft, from the other software on the, on the computer. So like the whole point is they’re not interfacing with, with the lower level processes, whereas your mind, of course is and so, so this doesn’t work.But the other problem is that when, when you, when you have this metaphor of mind as software instead of mind as execution statement or the, the interaction of, of beliefs and of of, of heart, of, of body, when you, when you just thinking of mind as software, what you’re inadvertently doing is you are creating metaphysical dualism when you do that.And, and, and we see this, and I think probably the biggest example of how mind as Software really creates dualism is looking at Daniel Dan’s former partner, Michael Levin, the biologist, who has done a lot of incredible cellular biological research, which, you know, really does show the way that a lot of cellular entities can in fact, you know, discriminate with their environment and, and understand in a rudimentary fashion how to navigate themselves and structure and respond to things like he’s done a lot of great research on that.But he’s taken this idea of Mind is Software, which he got from Dennett and wrote several pieces with Dennett about and then is now saying, well, actually no Mind is software is. Of Platonism and dualism. And so like the, the, the entire point of computational functionalism was supposed to say, well, we’re against metaphysical stuff.We’re against, you know, spiritualized stuff. And now here it is being used to support the idea [00:42:00] of supernatural substances and entities.JAEGER: So, so this is completely crazy. So, so, and it’s a wonderful example because if you start with some logic sounding premises and then you come to completely bizarre conclusions. So before the platonic domain of minds that impinges on our domain as patterns in your brain Levin came up with the idea that sorting algorithms are thinking have experience, and so on and so forth.So if your framework, so this is what we said right in the beginning, what we forget nowadays, we think science is just a bunch of people doing some experiment that came out of nowhere that was rationally decided on, and they find out the objective truth. This is not how it works. The way we do science is we have a model.We have an imagination. We have an expectation of what’s going to happen, so we ask specific questions. We use specific concepts to address those questions and do experiments. This is all an interdependence between thinking about the things we’re doing, experiments about, and doing the experiments.So if your framework of concepts gives you absurd interpretations like that, shouldn’t you go back and think, okay, maybe my basic assumptions are wrong, but that since they were indoctrinated with this idea that it is science all the way down, there is no metaphysics, so there’s no metaphysical assumption underneath this idea that everything is computational.This computational is, or computational functionalism idea they don’t see anymore that this was also just made up. And that’s a map. It’s an abstract map already that comes out of the philosophy that’s underneath the science. Funnily enough, it was Dan Dennett who himself said there’s either science that has taken, that there is no science without metaphysical assumptions.There’s only science that is aware of those assumptions or. Science that hasn’t taken those assumptions on board. And Levin is a perfect example of someone who’s absolutely clueless that his basic assumptions are completely inconsistent. So when he starts going off on these tangents, he gets absurd results.And you think, why would a [00:44:00] rationalist empiricist like him not bulk at this? But, it’s the dualism is fashionable again. Because we have a lot of very rich people that are very religious, suddenly again. So it is a good thing to say these things. I call it burner science, but I think Feynman called it Cargo Cult Science.Cargo cult philosophy and Jeffrey EpsteinJAEGER: So what’s being done here? It’s cargo cult philosophy. Actually, it looks like it’s philosophy, but it’s really it doesn’t have any of the essential ingredients that good philosophy actually has. And this sounds a little harsh, but it’s really borderline fraudulent, the whole thing, because it’s really a way to tell a story to rich sponsors that then funnily enough, sponsor that kind of research.You can see that from Nick Bostrom and the simulation hypothesis. I mean, with the whole Epstein files, people say, oh, he was just interested in, in, in special scientists, special thinkers. Well, you can see one bias that’s he mostly paid men, very few women. And the other thing is that all of those men that were sponsored by Epstein were working in certain directions, right?And this what we’ve just been discussing, this idea that everything is computation that you can control. Everything that you can engineer and everything that you can become immortal through longevity and uploading your brain into the cloud. This is not just Epstein, this is now followed up by his also probably not quite clean successors like Peter Thiel and other people, Elon Musk, who are sponsoring the same people now that are, that were sponsored by Epstein.And it’s always the same pattern. It’s about building a humanity that is, it’s transhumanism, basically building a better humanity, always in their own image, of course. Who wakes up in the morning and thinks everybody should be like me in the world, that would be absolutely horrific, right? But that’s the kind of thing.And then, it’s about genetic engineering of humans. It’s about longevity research at the moment. They’re obsessed. It’s also psychopathological to want to live forever. And it’s it’s about uploading. So, so creating machines that are better [00:46:00] than us, more intel, super intelligent to use Nick Bostrom’s terms.So, so it’s fundamentally eugenicist, that’s eugenic, he wants to createSHEFFIELD: Well, and in Epstein’s case, literally he was a eugenicist. And he tried to inseminate it was horrible. I mean, if you read into the files, but these ideas of biohacking and what’s going on in these free cities, like Prosper Hour, people are ha trying their, they’re, experimenting on themselves.JAEGER: So I don’t care. But, as long as they don’t use other people. But this is all driven by this ideology that is supposedly rational, okay? That’s why they think because they have this superiority. it’s, completely, cultish. It’s a cult. It’s a religion. And so I call this Trumpism in science.So this is sort of, first of all, you make up a view of the world that you just believe in, and you pretend that it’s true. And then you invest so much money that, that, enough people believe it’s true. And that, as we may imagine both of us, it’s not going to go well because reality, there’s this book by David philosopher David Chalmers, he, it’s called Reality Plus, where he argues that virtual reality is just as real reality, which is true in some ways, virtual reality can affect the physical world, but you know, real reality has this one character.It will kill you if you ignore it long enough. And virtual reality makes your life better on Cisco. Hey, you finally pulled the plug. You will be much better off in your real life than in virtual reality. So this is the difference. And David Chalmers is another great example of a by now I have to say grifter, that is, pandering to these people with the money and the people with the money they want.What’s coming out of the Epstein scandal that’s not the files that’s not, restricted to that. They want, the humanity 0.2 0.0. Right? Because we’re not good enough for some [00:48:00] reason. And for me science has a completely opposite purpose. It has the purpose of making our human lives better.Okay? It’s very oldSHEFFIELD: End up doing it together. End up doing it together.JAEGER: Collectively improving everyone’s life. Okay. That’s always been a naive vision, I know, and in reality. But this is blatantly not the case here. So it’s a really sort of creepy thing. And I’m not saying these people are ill-intentioned.Sometimes they’re quite anxious people because they think again, that everything they do is scientifically justified all the way down. There is no philosophy. That’s just rational thinking. And that’s crazy. Okay. That’s exactly completely forgetting about these aspects of intelligence like judgment, like creativity, but also emotional aspects and compassion and things like that, that are not computational.And that should be driving you. It’s not a compassionate project at all. It’s, you can see that also with reactions by Yascha Bach, for example against his horrific things he said in in the. Files where he just says, oh, poor me. My career is now threatened and I’m the one who’s going to develop conscious AI.He believes that his network framework is the thing that’s going to give us conscious AI, but it’s a completely mistaken and inconsistent framework. So he’s going to be disappointed and they’re anxious about this. So that’s why you see a lot of, sort of really hard push at the moment for this.I think it’s all going to disappear in smoke, to be honest, the next few years or decades, because people will realize that, that these, it’s hubris it’s assuming that we can do things that we can’t, at least not without creating really devastating unintended consequences and isn’t the situation we’re in right now.Just like a bunch of unintended consequences from climate change to the mass extinctions we’re creating to. Geopolitical breakdown to the, it’s all social media is disrupting society, not because we intended it to do that. Everything we see is unintended [00:50:00] consequences at the moment. So why should we, by switching that to turbo, by going hyper modern, not just modern, why should we be able to solve that problem?We’re just going to create by, by accelerating everything, we’re going to create more unintended consequences. And one of those is eventually going to offer us completely, I’m sure. SoSHEFFIELD: And that would be before any you know, actual intelligent computer system would be existing.JAEGER: Maybe, who knows? But I think so. And why would you create an actual intelligent, artificial agent? I think that’s the other question that I have here. Why don’t we ask ourselves why we do something? And an intelligent agent like that would’ve to be treated no longer like a machine, but like a being.And if it’s actually smarter than us. Isn’t that a really bad idea? I mean,SHEFFIELD: certainly could be, well, especially if you don’t. develop a, you know, a fully res, you know, a fully respecting theory of mind that would you know, w would be able to show, look, this is why humans still have value even if we’re not as smart as, as you, or whatever you is, or alien or whatever.Like, and, and, and I, and I think that that is worth doing and we should do that philosophy work, and that’s partJAEGER: I think yeah. No, I agree. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: But youJAEGER: but, if I may say, I mean, also what’s important is to design the interface better between us and the machine. So the machine serves in the end as not your usual hammer tool, but in the end it’s a tool for you to think better and to make better choices and, not the other way around.So this is. Idea of the reverse center that the computer starts using you instead of you using the computer. It’s this, figure with human legs and a horse head, which is not ideal of course. And so it’s the metaphor for our technology taking care of us because, not because it wants to take over the [00:52:00] world, super intelligence.There is no self, there is no will, there is no motivation. But it’s because of us human beings giving our agency a way to a machine that has none and has no creativity and has no judgment, has no ability to take responsibility.SHEFFIELD: Well, and is owned by people who are that way also.JAEGER: yeah. No, totally. I mean, that’s the other thing we haven’t talked about, but the combination of the current type style of capitalism that we have, especially in the US and this technology is probably extremely unfortunate. And China as well, I.Meta-modernism and technology for lifeSHEFFIELD: Well, and that, yeah, I mean, and that is why, you know, my personal view is that, look, you know, these are, these are useful technologies in many ways. But they’re, they’re limited in what they can do. But, you know, there’s, there’s some ways that they are incredible. Like I have seen that they do work for computer code in some settings and they can be useful for that.And other things, you know, like analyzing x-rays and things like that. But, but ultimately they, they, they’re not autonomous. they, and they, and they, and the way they’re architected, they won’t be. But you know, it’s, and that’s why it’s important for governments and for people who are, who support democracy to do more than just say, well, this is just stupid stuff.You know, it’s nonsense. We, we should just get rid of it. We should ban it. Like you are not going to ban this stuff. That’s number one. Like, you will not ban it. Even if you could, you know, get your own country to ban it, people will just go to another country. So it’s not going to achieve anything, and you certainly won’t get a global treaty to it.so let’s just take that off the table right now and understand that, look, we need to, to understand how to deploy these things in a way that is, that is humane. Because ultimately, as you were saying, you know, the science should be for humanity and, and not the other way around.JAEGER: Yeah, no, I mean, I think this is, so this is where the second part of this conversation has to come in, and [00:54:00] that is we need this, these kind of thoughts that we were exchanging right now, these theories that we are developing both in amazingly parallel ways. I love your approach, by the way is a deep recognition of the difference between the living and the artificial at the moment.So, so what’s important is that I’m not saying that it’s impossible to create a real agent. I think it’s going to come out of a biology lab and it’s going to be a disaster, but it is possible to do this. I have two requests for humanity right now. One is just to, if we develop a new technology, can we.Stop the accelerationist bullshit and sit down for a second and think, why are we doing this? What is the purpose? I really think we’ve lost that completely. So we’re, we have to go somewhere and we’re in a race to the bottom because of that. And the second thing is if we understand the nature of the living versus the non-living much better, then we need an attitude change.Again, that’s philosophy. We really need a different attitude towards ourselves, towards the technology and towards the social systems that we’re embedded in. And we need to recognize that the ecological and social systems we are relying on are a part of the equation. And we’re not doing that right now, this entire.Crazy spiral. And again it’s a constructive process. So this is it. It’s funny, it’s so human. It only a living system can create this kind of disastrous situation. The computer by itself, I repeat, the technology itself is not bad. It would’ve never done this by itself. It’s just the way that it’s employed void.So this idea that, so first of all, we have this constructive processes that are the basic, the cell. Then we have multiple cells. Then this happens in your brain, right? Your brain is constructing the personality that you are, the individual that you are through your experiences in the same way that a cell is constructing itself.And then societies have also, they’re not quite as integrated as organisms and minds, but they also have this sort of [00:56:00] constructive aspect to them. And we are the ones with the agency to change the direction of that construction. So I also don’t want to hear any sort of predictions that this is super, intelligence is in inevitable and we’re going to be replaced.I don’t want to hear resistance is futile. It’s, you’re mentioning the Luddites before. The Luddites are much maligned, but they were a social movement that actually wanted a different kind of model for the possession of the means of production. They were not just stupid people breaking machines instead of going after the bosses.They couldn’t go after the bosses, that’s why they broke the machines. So we have to find better ways, not just to break machines. I saw talk at the chaos communication conference that, that showed how to poison AI data sets. So I think there is a certain I don’t know, satisfaction to that maybe in such a situation, but it’s not very productive.We need a better way. A constructive way. What’s happening right now? We’re deconstructing our societies, we’re deconstructing our relationships with each other. Through this technology. There is always talk about disruption. So the right has become incredibly postmodern and they will hate to hear that.But so this idea that everybody’s entitled to their opinion, you can just say something and it’ll become true. But also the fragmentation of everything and this sort of it’s a deconstruction. Disruption is the word right? That all the Silicon Valley people use disrupt what you will.But you have to construct something. Society has to get to this coherence again, where we’re constructing something together. This is what you learn from studying the mind and the organism. We have to find a kind of an organization for society that’s constructive again. And what we have right now is pure cancer growth.You can compare it one to cancer. It’s out of control. Accelerationism is out of control. We need to slow down. How is that going to happen? I think it’s going to take a major break breakdown of systems for this to hit the awareness of enough people [00:58:00] that we need to go ahead. As you say I am not against going ahead.I want us to go ahead carefully. Because in a complex system where you create unintended consequences, you need to test every step and see what consequences come up. If you just rush through it, these unintended consequences are going to fall in your head and kill you in the end. And this is what we’re doing and it’s a fundamental misunderstanding, not just of the nature of us, our relations with each other, the world, but the world itself.We misunderstand the nature of the world we live in, and we have rarely been so much out of alignment between what we can actually do and what is actually working. And this is surprising maybe to hear for people because they think, it’s an amazing time to live through, technological progress is so fast, but it’s very limited in most.Areas that are actually useful to people. Are we making progress in how to live together, how to provide basic needs for most people? Are we making progress in these kind of things? No, we have no, no way to value this. So we just value breakneck innovation because we have this stupid system that is venture capitalism right now, capitalism on steroids that needs to make a profit.And this is by now the same thing in science. We idolize people. Let’s go back to our friend Mike Levin. So he’s a person who, before AI already published about 30 papers, a scientific publications a year. It’s probably more like 50 right now. And why is that?Something that we admire, that there’s no way that this stuff is well done, well curated controlled, and now it open claw, and these autonomous, autonomous, a AI agents going around the production of unreliable vibe coded stuff is is going to be bearing as nothing can be trusted anymore. So we’re building software infrastructure that can’t be trusted. We’re building a scientific literature that can’t be trusted anymore.Almost all submissions to computer science conferences now contain made up [01:00:00] references. And that’s a clear sign that they’re all written by AI. So science is getting into this mode where we’re writing publications by AI. We read them by AI. Why don’t we just go and have a beer? Okay. There is no point to this.What is the point again? I want to ask what is the point of what we’re doing? I don’t know anymore. I wanna stop and think and breathe and say, what are we doing? This is a moment where humanity should really urgently do it. And of course, the way we set up our societies, this is the moment where we’re at least likely in our entire history to actually be able to do that, which leaves me a little clueless, to be honest.But I guess the political guests on your podcast have better insights on that than I may have.The real singularity is whether humanity can learn to live togetherSHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, I mean these, these are real questions and, and that is why you know, sometimes I think of the political challenges and the societal epistemic challenges that we have. Those are the real singularity, which is how can humanity have a, a globally connected? Con informational space and survive because that we have to do that first before and, and anything else that comes after that, we’ll be able to handle that if we can get through this one.And, and this is really what matters is, you know, understanding how can we take care of each other and how can we pa help each other know what truth looks like, or at least you know, what falsehood looks like because I, I, you know, that’s ultimately also what, what the other, one of the other kind of fundamental scientific principles that tends to get ignored.And, and Carl Pop Popper is, was very good on that regard, is that he’s, you know, said basically, look. You can’t note anything for absolutely certain. So in that sense, the postmodernist were right in that nothing is [01:02:00] absolutely true because if it were, then you’re, if you, if that you’re, you’re to say that is to say that you are a model of something is that thing.So that’s not right. But at the same time, we can know what falsehood is also, and we can know because it contradicts many other observations. And, and that’s, you know, getting that to be a scalable societal you know, belief and practice, like that’s, that’s how we can, can set humanity on the right path.It isn’t, you know, in imagining this, you know, fanciful future of a, of a computer that, you know, does all our work for us. Yeah, sure. Look, that would be nice.JAEGER: A hard problem. I mean, that’s, there’s B’S law that says it’s always 10 times easier to produce the bullshit than to, to to uncover it. But what you just said, like we have to construct again after deconstruction. So there’s a philosophy called meta modernism that’s saying we need to move on from deconstructing all our knowledge.And, that was important in the 20th century. We were too sure of ourselves. And it’s still important today because what we described before, the accelerationism, all of that. It could be called hyper modernity. It tries to solve the problems we’ve created with our technology, with more technology.And as I just said, I don’t believe that’s going to work. What we need is a, rethink of how we can establish ourselves in reality again. and there’s a project called meta Modernism, which is both a political philosophy. It’s not very well known yet, and and also a principle for doing a different kind of science that doesn’t treat the world as if it was a machine.I’m writing a book at the moment. It’s called Beyond the Age of Machines. And this is about the kind of science we would need beyond those unreasonable actually assumptions. Now, you will always have some assumptions beneath your science, but you don’t have to claim they’re a hundred percent certain or solid, but you have to say they’re solid enough, they’re trustworthy.And also they give us a much more humane and useful and fun world to live [01:04:00] in. I’m sometimes attack saying, oh, you, you’re building your philosophy just to build a world that you want to live in. I said, yeah, why would I want to build a world that I don’t want to live in? And I think this is paradoxically what’s happening a lot.and it has something to do also with, the, kind of, nerdiness of this movement of, Silicon Valley that these people have a lot of grievances towards other people. And so they are sometimes I suspect even a bit resentful. And, they do this deliberately deliberately. And again, from the Epstein files and sometimes from other symptoms like Peter Thiel’s antichrist lectures and things like that, you realize that they are actually planning and afraid of the crisis that’s going to come.And they’re planning with it. They, know it. They don’t actually see the world as just progressing any further. And then you can see all of this.SHEFFIELD: Yeah.JAEGER: In a, yeah. In a very, more, much more sinister light. And you can say these people are the control they’re working towards is also including other people because they basically treat the rest of humanity as machines, which is it’s not good philosophy, obviously, not just for logical reasons but for ethical reasons.So this is really leading to, to some really nasty outcomes that could be much worse than what we have ever experienced before. And I’m not saying that this is willful destruction. I think these people are truly deluded in, in, in a lot of cases about how the world works. Yeah. And they overestimate their own ability to judge their own situation.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, and, and in Thiel’s case, I mean this is explicitly religious. Delusions I mean, read any number. I’m, I’m sure the audience probably, hopefully, but we’ll put a link to at least one of them to, if you haven’t read the any of these pieces on this stuff, this is seriously you know, religious, solitary but you’re right, Yogi that you know, that we, there, there has to be an alternative.You can’t, [01:06:00] you can’t just simply criticize. And I think that that’s been kind of the, the, the loop that the progressive left has been kind of stuck in for so long that, you know, they, they, they, that a lot of them, you know, they, they’re, they’re against. They know what they’re against. So they’re against, you know, racism.They’re against sexism, they’re against you know, capitalism or exploited capitalism, wherever you wanna say it. They’re against those things and, and their right to be against, you know, extraction, capitalism. And as to, to quote Cory Doctor again, you know, enshittification. That’s great to be against those things.But you do have to have an affirmative vision because if you don’t then essentially the incompetence, the corruption, and the malignants of people like Donald Trump actually becomes an argument in their favor if you can’t present an alter. Because, because they can turn around and say, oh, well the reason why your life is terrible and why you can’t get a job, or, and, and why you’re addicted to drugs or whatever, is these people did it to you.I didn’t do it. They did it. And, and, and, and there’s no, and if there’s no affirmative vision, then, then you can’t really defend yourself and, and you can’t. And more importantly, you cannot move forward in a positive way and have a future that is bright in your own mind. Because if you, if you don’t have a, a guiding star, then, then you won’t get anywhere.JAEGER: I mean, I still do think that it’s hard to change things in the, state we are in right now because everything has become a sort of an immature popularity contest in this society. And I think this is this, a symptom of, universal capitalistic, neoliberal principles being applied where they shouldn’t be in, in science, in education, outside where they should be working and where they’re not useful.And that creates, a, very unhealthy dynamic of these races to the bottom where everybody just has to go somewhere, even [01:08:00] if they’re not knowing where, they go. And also I mean, these are hard problems. So if you want a really difficult problem, you’re one of those nerds out there, then work on those societal problems.They’re, actually much harder than even flying to Mars, which is hard enough. And you don’t want to live there, believe me. So, so why don’t you concentrate your efforts on actually understanding social dynamics. These are hard problems. You can’t solve them with your usual engineering mindset.But even going through that challenge of going beyond your engineering mindset and trying to, to sometimes. Acknowledge your limitations and say, maybe we shouldn’t do this. But then still boldly go where, no one has gone before. But just a little more carefully than, or a lot more carefully than we’re going right now.So that is a worthwhile sort of project because it, not only requires entirely new ways of thinking it, it requires new ways of doing science methods and forms of collaboration. Which is something I’m also interested in working on, where we have to work together and also harvest the differences between us.We, we, there is no single solution to the kind of problems that we have right now. So we have to try out many different things with tolerance, but also good boundaries. Because what’s happened right now is that the boundaries have gone out of the window. Every anything goes. And we need to reestablish a structure and organization for our signs, for our freedoms in society.And that’s the meta modern project. It’s saying you can only be individually free if there is a supporting and robust societal and environmental structure around you that allows you to be free. And I think that’s the, basic insight that we have to relearn on the political stage, not just to reform our politics, but everything from education to how we deal with health to, to science itself.And that’s also one of the main thesis of my book that we can learn from the organism how it survives. The organism is basically a physical system [01:10:00] that shows us how you can extend your lifespan. So the, most ironic thing with this whole craze about the survival of humanity, going to the stars and, living forever.Is that this drive the people who drive this are the ones who are most likely to, to jeopardize the future of humanity right now. And I’m sure they don’t intend to do that, but they are severely misguided and they are severely shortsighted and I have to say very often, a lot less intelligent than they think they are and are told constantly by the people around them.They are just because they’re rich. And that’s a huge problem. I mean, these people live in a bubble. And I’m trying to remember, I think it was Nate Hagens who said, if you could only change the minds of the 1500 richest individuals on earth and make them really engage the problems that we have with all their rich richest, then we would have solved most of the problems that we have in, in, in, a few years.But the, complex problem here again, is the societal problem. How are we going to work, make this work in practice with real people in the way? That we’re dealing with it with each other right now. So this, these are the real challenge that these, the most intelligent people on earth should be tackling.But again, we’re measuring intelligence based on what IQ tests, problem solving. So you have these people that score high on a IQ test. They’re sometimes the most incredibly stupid people in, the sense of not being able to read the room, not being able to anticipate unintended consequences and not knowing what to do in any given situation.So these are all forms of, knowledge, of intelligence that humans have that algorithms don’t have. So again, why are these people so obsessed with artificial intelligence? Because it’s most like. What they know as intelligence and they want to see that as, a good thing for the future of humanity.I think it’s very limited. We have to step out of that narrow minded narrow focused thinking. Sometimes it’s called left [01:12:00] hemisphere thinking. I don’t think the neuroscientific evidence is very good that it’s really in the left hemisphere. But we have to do more wide boundary stuff again and sort of scan for consequences and, tread carefully instead of just rushing ahead with this ultra rational mode that is in the end, as I told you several times during this podcast, irrational at the bottom in its metaphysical assumptions,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. That, yeah, that is the, that the unfortunate irony with that. All right, well, I think we’re, we’re going to have to do Yogi, we’re going to have to do a separate episode just on co cognitive science and minds because we got a, a lot more kind of meta political here, which is good and I liked it.But we’ll, we will come back for people who might have been expecting us to go into more on the mines. We’ll do that in a separate episodeJAEGER: Oh, I’d love to come back. This was great. Thanks. Yes.SHEFFIELD: Awesome. Alright, so why don’t you what websites do you want people to check out if they want to keep up with you?JAEGER: my personal website is just Johannesyaeger.eu, all in one word, except for the EU, of course. And the scientific results are on a website called expandingpossibilities.org. And I have an art science project. It’s called The Zone. It’s almost impossible to Google it. So it’s the dash zone, a T because I live in Austria.That’s that.SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. And you got the, and you got shirts, so I see you got oneJAEGER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: All right. Thanks for joining me today.JAEGER: All right. Thanks a lot, Matt. It was great talking to you.SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to Theory of Change show where we have a video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you’re a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to all the archives.You can get a paid subscription on Patreon or on Substack. You can go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to flux.community for that. And we do have free subscriptions as well. If you can’t afford to do a paid one do stay in touch anyway. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode.Thanks a lot for your support. All right, I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe

Episode Summary Each day’s news events seem to reinforce the cliché that truth is stranger than fiction, but the strangest thing of all is how so much of our current politics is quite literally based on fiction.That isn’t an exaggeration. The right-wing oligarch Peter Thiel has named his military surveillance company Palantir after the crystal balls featured in The Lord of the Rings, he’s also repeatedly told people to look to mid-20th century science fiction for business ideas—never mind that many of those stories were dystopias. Likewise, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk named his AI chatbot Grok after a term used in a novel by the authoritarian capitalist Robert Heinlein.Other Republican figures like fascist writer Curtis Yarvin, Vice President JD Vance, and activist Steve Bannon routinely reference The Lord of the Rings or even more explicitly reactionary novels like The Camp of the Saints. Why is it that so many of today’s far-right figures seem to get their political ideas from fiction? There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of the biggest is that some of the most influential novelists like Heinlein or editors like John W. Campbell wanted their readers to do just that. And who can forget Ayn Rand’s interminable political monologues?There is a lot to talk about here, and joining me to discuss is Jeet Heer, he’s a columnist at The Nation where he writes about politics and social issues, but he also tackles culture as well, including in his podcast, The Time of Monsters. One of the focal points of this episode is his 2014 book review of a Heinlein biography.The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full text. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.Related Content* In an age of fictionalized reality, we need literary criticism more than ever* Why does ChatGPT lack consciousness? Because minds do not create experience, experience creates minds* Antichrist America: Trump, Nietzsche and post-modern Republicanism* To make a better technology future, we must first realize why we didn’t get the one we were promised* Mediocrity just might be the organizing principle of minds, biological and synthetic* What is ‘neo-reactionism’ and why is it so powerful within Trump 2.0?* AI is not the main problem—how we use it can be* The very strange intersection of Christian fundamentalism and techno-salvationism* Grok’s ‘Mecha Hitler’ meltdown was the natural product of xAI forcing it to have a right-wing biasAudio Chapters00:00 — Introduction06:59 — Science fiction as a place for political experimentation12:17 — Why far-right libertarians turned away from philosophy toward science fiction21:34 — Editor John W. Campbell’s massive right-wing influence on sci-fi30:16 — Engineering versus research science kind of overlaps politically for speculative fiction authors37:47 — Is the political left missing the potential for AI as the perfect reason for a basic income?40:40 — Robert Heinlein’s evolution from socialist to authoritarian capitalist49:48 — Heinlein’s increasingly disturbing self-focused view of sexual liberation54:34 — Jeffrey Epstein as the pinnacle of authoritarian liberation01:04:11 — More humane sci-fi authorsAudio TranscriptThe following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: And joining me now is Jeet Heer. Hey, Jeet, welcome to Theory of Change.JEET HEER: Oh, it’s great to be on.SHEFFIELD: Yes, it’s going to be a fun discussion today, I think. And we have the perfect news hook, which is that Elon Musk recently announced that he is basically abandoning his Mars focus with SpaceX to be focusing on a moon base. Which actually coincides with what he has said is one of his favorite novels of all time.And one that you yourself have written about as well. So maybe let’s kind of start there, if we could please.HEER: Yeah, no, I, think the novel was to is Robert Heinlein’s Moon is a Harsh Mistress which is from the sixties, I think, 1966 very well regarded science fiction novel. Arguably I think one of Heinlein’s best, maybe his last great work Because he went into a long period of decline after that. It’s set in a future lunar colony, that is exploited by earth. And there’s a libertarian revolution modeled, largely on the American revolution. Although, interestingly, there are elements of the Russian revolution that are also alluded to. And the lunar colonists with the help of an AI, achieve liberation.And then their goal is an anarchist future, like a moon where there is no government. and in the novel, he has this slogan [00:04:00] TANSTAAFL, there is no such thing as a free lunch, which he got from his fellow science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle which became then a major slogan of the Libertarian Party.Milton Friedman’s son, David, used to walk around with a TANSTAAFL medallion kinda like a pimp outfit. So the novel has been very influential. And one the things in Heinlein’s work, both in that work and in other works, like The Man Who Sold the Moon, is the idea of space as a new frontier for capitalism.this is a where. business can finally be unshackled from the regulatory state, and achieve a free market utopia. Which always seemed like very ironic and unlikely because the of declaration of the 20th done through massive state intervention. First with the Soviet state, and then like, as along with NASA in the American state.But now it looks like, in our new century Elon and others are reviving this idea that space will be new frontier where capitalism can finally be liberated from earthly laws and regulations.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And Heinlein is, so for people who are really into the tropes of fiction, that he kind of was the originator in many ways of the libertarians in space trope.HEER: And we should say like, just in case aware, but Heinlein was one of the major American science fiction writers. I think among science fiction fans, there used to be idea of the big three or the big four. So it’s like Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein. Like these were the major figures of Anglophone science fiction and it’s hard to overstate like his impact.I think like what Ernest Hemingway might’ve been to like American literature, Robert Heinlein was to science fiction. He was just a major figure [00:06:00] for like four decades, for the mid 20th century, and cast a huge shadow over the field.SHEFFIELD: Extremely prolific as well.HEER: Yeah. Huge. Yeah. Yeah. Hugely prolific. Often winning the top awards in the genre, and also spawning like a number of imitators. So like, the libertarian space, but also military science fiction comes out of Heinlein. A lot of—SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, we should say, yeah, Starship Troopers was his novel.HEER: Yeah. Yeah. He wrote Starship Troopers. Yeah. And so, Yeah. I mean, like, we’ll talk more about him we progress, just as a sort of signifier like one should think of him as of the major figures in this genre.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And one of the other things about him that he has in common with some of the other people we’ll be talking about is that especially, starting with Moon is a Harsh Mistress a lot of his novels are characterized by having a character that’s basically a stand-in for himself.HEER: Yeah.Science fiction as a place for political experimentationSHEFFIELD: And this character goes on and on for pages at a time. And it basically became a thing for right wing what, I call authoritarian capitalists, so post-libertarians, whatever you want to call them, that they abandoned the idea of philosophy and they turned to fiction instead to make the exposition of their ideas.HEER: Well, think about like science fiction has always been literature of ideas. And obviously the sort of like novel of ideas is something that has deep like one way I can think of like Voltaire, you know Candide, many other sort of classical works.And even like going, back to the Middle Ages like sort of religious works, like the sort of mystery plays. Like, a that explores concepts and which has characters that are sort of figureheads for different positions.SHEFFIELD: Pilgrim’s Progress.HEER: Now what happens in the, Yeah, exactly. Yeah.Pilgrim’s Progress, Gulliver’s Travels.SHEFFIELD: Ben, Ben Hur. Yep.HEER: Yeah. But [00:08:00] what happens in the 19th century is that with the sort of rise of the novel, the realistic novel of family life business like novels of Jane Austen, Dickens, Tolstoy, that becomes a kind of dominant literary form.The novel of ideas like heads off into genre. It becomes more associated with fiction that is like imaginative and, what we now call science fiction. Although that term is, really popularized in the 1920s. But like, I’m thinking of people like mary shelley’s, Frankenstein and she herself of like two greatSHEFFIELD: Mary WollstonecraftHEER: Yeah, absolutely. W Craft and a Good Goodwin. Their father was a philosophical liberal who wrote ideas.And Frankenstein is this idea of, using extrapolation. ideas. and tradition was carried through by people like Jules Verns and H.G. Wells. And the interesting thing is it’s overwhelmingly, tradition of liberalism and the left, the socialism. It is a tradition of people who are coming out of the Enlightenment, who believe that history is change, that humans can actually take control of history and make history, as against earlier ideas that like, reality is fated, is providential and destined.And then these novels of ideas are explorations. Well, what happens when we try to take control of history? What are the consequences good or bad? Obviously in Frankenstein, like it is, like this is like how the could go bad. it could actually like, lead to creations of monsters.One sees that as well in like huls. Invisible man. But combined with that, there’s also tradition ideas of like, whoa, what ways in which yeah. Control of reality to make it better? Like utopian fiction,SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Edward Bellamy.HEER: Edward Bellamy but also at wells’ Shape of Things to Come.There’s a, long tradition of this. So, I mean, what’s interesting is that, [00:10:00] at some, I mean this show the to which libertarianism does come out of classical liberalism, what they call classical liberalism, but which is, this enlightenment project of amelioration and control of destiny that Heinlein I think is very that is a transitional figure.He came out of the sort of the thirties he was a very much in the of hs later moved to the right. and there’s, whole like science that comes out of that. And one can see if one is interested in ideas, that this is the type of literature that, one is interested in politics, this type of literature that would be appealing.Murray Rothbard, a major figure of the Austrian economics and very much an authoritarian libertarian, in his autobiography, he talks about how his mo mother loved uh Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, and he could never understand why she loved them. And then in the 1950s, he read Ayn Rand’s the Fountain Head, and Atlas shrugged. And you realize, wait a minute, this is This is powerful. This is what literature can do.And so, it, this is the literature that is appealing. For like politically engaged, politically active, and, heinlein, tradition of sort of, increasingly, way science fiction people like Jerry Pournelle, Larry Nevins, and some ways, one could cynically very true of that one of the appeals that in ways this is, a way the future of and also as in dreams working out tensions that, you can’t work out in life. So in Heinlein, one often sees, in Starship Troopers, one sees war without pTSD because they’re just killing the, these there’s no moral cost to war.In his sort of sexual fantasies, like Stranger in a Strange Land, one sees the utopian dream of sexual liberation like, any of [00:12:00] consequences of s and in a Moon is a Harsh Mistress is imagining a sort of utopian libertarian, world on the moon like, the sort of ecological and class tensions that emerge in every existing historical capitalist society.Why far-right libertarians turned away from philosophy toward science fictionSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and, it is it’s related, I think, so yeah, the, you have the emergence of the, novel of ideas. But, it became more important for authoritarian capitalism because well, because these ideas are not very coherent, frankly. And they don’t, they, they don’t, so they, can’t really work as philosophy, because if you’re writing a book of philosophy and you put it out there and have a big giant, volume and you’ve structured your argument and you’ve exposed what your true objectives are and where you want like. If they were to do that, people would be horrified, at what they want, right?And, like, and, Friedrich Nietzsche is the, example for that. But, and, I’ll come back to him in a second, but you know, like, so essentially we, but we saw this also with regard to economics as well, with this idea of Von Mises’s praxeology, that I don’t have to prove my arguments using data or historical instances, I just have to appeal to common sense because I can say, I can invent a scenario.And then that was literally what this guy largely did in his, work, is that he would invent scenarios and be like, okay, so we know this will happen because it’s obvious that this is what they would do.HEER: And like yeah,SHEFFIELD: that’s his work. And then, so of course this, a movement of that nature would, tend toward fiction, I would think.HEER: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And the science fiction writer Samuel Delaney, very different politics in Heinlein, but admires Heinlein, but did say that like I, one [00:14:00] thing Heinlein was doing was trying up with scenarios that would justify, right wing politics. That’s to say like, in what circumstances would it be justified to deny everyone except people who belong work military, and, also to carry on a war of extermination.Well, if you do have like, humanities has existential threat these space are bugs, who have like consciousness, no morality then kind of war of extermination carried up by authoritarian military regime might be what is necessary, right? So he’s constantly trying to up with scenarios whereby what he is politically desires. Makes sense?SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. and and that certainly is the case with regard to Ayn Rand aswell.HEER: Yeah,SHEFFIELD: So she, she called herself a philosopher, actually. And then, but no one that I know of who has any sort of respectability regarded her as a philosopher.Because she, wasn’t doing philosophy. She was just writing novels and, op-eds, like that was her output. She was not doing any kind of systematizing or and that’s significant because when you look to the politics of these people, their, descendants like Elon Musk and other people like them.They don’t, they hate debate. They don’t like it, they don’t like to be questioned. They don’t like it when you say that their ideas are dumb and here’s 20 reasons why they get angry at you. And, and like, or if the, even if you want to track their jet, like the Elon jet guy, he’s going to, he’s going to ban you for doing that.So they, they, can’t do this. Like, philosophy is based on argument. Like, you get two philosophers in the room, you get five opinions. and, so, they, can’t handle it, I think.HEER: Yeah. I should say like, with a novel of ideas though, like there are like, sort of, variations on it, I do think like the sort of [00:16:00] greater novels of ideas are the ones where there is some sort of actual philosophical debate where you have like, contestants that both kind of making, semi plausible or, treated with some degree of respect and then you have to some sort of like, difficult to resolve,um, issue Ambiguity. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I would say, like someone like dostoevsky even though he has a very reactionary point of view, doing sort of novels of ideas where different positions are And there a term that the literary critics use, coming out of Bine is polyphonic.That these, are presenting a range of and being contested in the work of fiction. And I think one of the interesting things about like Heinlein, kind of illustrates this, is I actually do feel like his earlier work which I regard as his of the forties and fifties.Is polyphonic. There is like range of different voices but that he’s increasingly, there’s a kind of authoritarian turn in his fiction where it does really become a kind of hectoring voice. Where, you basically have these characters that are like Lazarus long, where like stand-ins for Heinlein who voices opinion. if there are other characters, they just stand around and either, they exist like, sort of Socratic foils.SHEFFIELD: You’re absolutely right. ChatGPT.HEER: yeah. No, Exactly. Exactly. And i I think one that not just the problem’s, not just that they’re using fiction, but like a lot of, it’s that what I consider like a bad fiction of ideas, one in which there’s not a contested stakes or a, polyphonic range of voices.SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah, that’s, that, that is a fair point and I’m, glad you said that. Well, and, in that regard though, one of the other kind of problems that a lot of this fiction has is that the authors who are pretty much all men, except for Ayn Rand they don’t know how to write women.They don’t know how to write about them or how [00:18:00] to, or how their characters are authentic in the, in of, themselves. So like every, character in Heinlein who’s a woman, she’s she’s got big boobs and she’s incredibly sexual and, everyone loves her.And he’s super competent and witty and and it just like, after a while you would think he would’ve thought, okay, maybe this is a little annoying to have the same character all the time.HEER: Yeah,SHEFFIELD: But yeah, Just like flighty and dumb and like, so just cliche female characters.HEER: Yeah. no. I think a sort of like a fair criticism. I, think one way there’s a, critic, Farrah Mendelsohn and a few other people have sort of this, think one thing with Heinlein was that he wanted to imagine a world of sort of sexual equality. Um like, his sort of, progressivism in the thirties and forties when he kids out of wells was a belief in free, love and also, female equality. So, his women characters were like, like engineers.They had some, but then they would also always like, let’s have lots of babies, let’s we get but the, problem he had he was trying to imagine a world like gender equality, but let he had no basis for like imagining that world would be qualitatively different and that women would have other demands that would make changes.So what he’s ended up imagining world the two genders are basically the same, that the women like all the desires of and also that there’s no conflict. Everyone is happy in this free love utopia. And There’s heartbreak. There’s no, love triangle. There’s no, in and out, out of love.I mean a real kind of like a problem with the sort of like emotional range or imagination or a level of empathy in the work.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And, we’ll [00:20:00] come back to that as we circle back to him as kind of the of, sci-fi right wing sci-fi. But, like, just to circle back to the philosophy kind of thing, like to, I, think that in, in so many ways, Friedrich Nietzche is the apotheosis of all reactionary thought.It never got better after him. Everything was a decline after him. And which is ironic, or maybe, he would say that was inevitable, perhaps. and his writings, are just, various seic. but one of the things that he says, in multiple different ways at d in different books is that, things that are true, they don’t have to be proven through argument, and that basically having to make an argument is for cucks, essentially.HEER: Yeah, yeah. yeah,SHEFFIELD: And that’s kind of another thing that you do kind of see within this authoritarian capitalist milieu that comes after him. They all kind of have that opinion, even if they’ve never read Nietzsche which is interesting, I think.HEER: Yeah, yeah. The kind of the way I would describe it in not just Heinlein, but this sort of like broader tradition is, a kind of imperial self, is the idea that the self has an authenticity and authority and is, can be a final word. And so it does tend to lead to the writing of fiction that is simply a bunch of op-eds, which you simply have a bunch of characters that are opinionating and and there’s no necessity for kind of like a broader engagement with other voices or with conflict.Editor John W. Campbell’s massive right-wing influence on sci-fiSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And of course, so there’s a natural inclination to this, but it also within the realm of, righting fiction it was cultivated also in particular by a guy named John W. Campbell, who was a very long serving editor of the magazine, which actually still exists. Now Analog Science Fiction. And, but at the time it was called Astounding was the [00:22:00] main word for it. When, mostly when Heinlein was writing for it.But, so Campbell himself was extremely white right wing, and actually probably more and more so than heinlein. And a lot of it, I mean, he, supported segregation. Can you talk about that?HEER: Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, No, so, so, so, so Campbell like, so, so science fiction as I mentioned this, European tradition of Verne and but within america, it really like emerged in of pulp fiction of these like magazines where the writers were paid, like, like a penny, a word and was at a very kind of crude, literary level.A lot of it sort of just like, maybe ancestor of things like Star just like slam bam.SHEFFIELD: Or King Kong. Yeah.HEER: Huh. King Kong. KingYeah. Kin Kong. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Just like, yeah, Just like, action adventure. with a lot of scientific rigor or philosophical content. cheap genre fiction.Edgar Rice Burroughs is Mars would be like prominent example of this. now Campbell who had like a little of a was a dropout at, mit, MIT had engineering background took over, astounding in the late like 1930s. And to he very successful in kinda like elevating science fiction by, like insisting on a greater level of scientific rigor.Like hebasically said,he wanted the fiction and astounding to belike an issue of the Saturday evening post, but ifit was like written like, a hundred years in the future. And what became known as hard science fiction. So a lot of emphasis on things like, like engineering and, well more rigorous extrapolation.He recruited a whole bunch of very influential writers Isaac Asimov. Arthur C. Clark theater Sturgeon. But one aspect of Campbell himself was that it, it this element of extrapolation and rigor was one side of his personality, but he is also like very divided amongst himself.And he had a kind of like, [00:24:00] lifelong attraction towards pseudoscience. And famously like, one of his writers was l Ron Hubbard who’s also a friend of Heinlein. And the l Ron Hubbard was a, pule science fiction writer, but then came up with this sort of crackpot form of psychoanalysis called dietetics.And the very first place dietetics was ever shown in the world was in the pages of astounding science fiction. It was as an article in Astounding Science Fiction, and it became the Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And loved it.HEER: Loved it. And Campbell said had a that sort of like nasal congestion and he credited, dietetics with curing his nasal congestion. There were a lot of science fiction writers in that circle.Dietetics began within science fiction and a lot of writers in world such as, e van bar. Kathleen many others, early Scientologist. I mean, I, think I, Highland’s book, stranger in a Strange Land is kind of like an working of like, what happens when a science fiction writer creates a religion ironically itself the of war religions. But, I the Dianetics episode, Campbell like increasingly was attracted to sort of like crackpot ideas. So the pages of Astounding, a science fiction magazine, but they also published like nonfiction articles. He would publish articles touting perpetual motion machine that someone had discovered.The Dean would have articles on telekinesis and eSP and--SHEFFIELD: And supplement food supplements too, actually.HEER: Food supplements. he very strongly built that when the f findings, he was a smoker. And when the ideas that came along, when the discoveries came along that, ca smoking causes he would publish like saying like, why, they’re And one way to think about him is, I think he was actually a type of person that is now quite familiar, which is the sort of, like the contrarian crank, right? Like whatever mainstream [00:26:00] science And he would use the same that now hear, like, like, well, like, we can’t accept the consensus, because Galileo came along and the scientific, he scientific consensus and, the consensus was wrong, right?So, so, so he used that kinda logic to like constantly the other for these, contrarian, ideas and, like, as well into the realm of. of politics like, the defendant, not just segregation. He would publish editorials like, why slavery was actually like a good thing. And this was like well beyond hein line.SHEFFIELD: And also rejecting black characters.HEER: Has yeah. Yeah. Famously, and Samuel an African American science fiction writer, sent him or this agent sent him nova a, science fiction novel, with a, black character.And, Campbell told the great book. I would love to publish it, but I can’t imagine, in the future you would have African astronaut. And so, yeah. Yeah. No, and within the fiction itself, like we’re talking about the we were talking his nonfiction ideas but within the fiction itself in sort of berian science fiction, there’s a very emphasis on Like he this was a major in many of the writers dealt with it, with the of like, can we actually create a Superman an Uber wrench that will go beyond and have the kind of telekinetic powers? Yeah. Yeah.And the the sort of this. Although one that maybe shows, the way of his outgrew own politics, is, Frank Dune which was first published in Astounding which is taking, like all the ideas in dune are the, from the astounding tradition.So it is this world Galactic empire genetic engineering to create a uber wrench. Superman.But if one reads, like, I think Bert, like, I think it is even in the first do in the subsequent do which and astounding tellingly enough, it is very clear that this is to be a [00:28:00] bad thing. Like meant to show that, if you create this kind of superior being, he will like disrupt the universe in a very horrible and lead catastrophe.So, this goes back to the idea of like novel of ideas. I think if, of ideas like works out the of, an issue, there’s some there.But, certainly, Yeah, I think Berian science fiction, increasingly was right way and so much that Campbell lost his best writers. I think it is not an accident that in the last decade of astounding of his editorship, he died in the early seventies. Like people like Isaac AsimovSHEFFIELD: Or he went and started his own magazineHEER: Yeah, he started his own mind. But, people like Leo, like people who had been coming out of Campbell science fiction weren’t writing for him because Ha Campbell clearly wanted a specific type of fiction, which is like adventure fiction, where human characters defeat aliens because this he said like, have a novel story where aliens defeat humans because that’s just not possible. Humanity has to be the greatest the universe.And I’m sorry, like, if you’re dealing with a, picture of ideas people who written like Thomas and I’ve written novels defeat humans because that should be a possibility. Like it is possible that we are not the summit of creation, right?SHEFFIELD: Especially if they can come here. We’re, not the smart ones in that scenario.HEER: Yeah. no. But, I mean, within Campbell’s, like his editorial mandate was humanity always win and there always has to be a to problems. it is but as I said, I think like in terms of, we’re talking about the politics, I that he was a sort of precursor of this kind of like, much more prominent, like, do your own science distrust.Like, you the establishments like and attraction crackpot ideas. And of that see in like Hy I like if give him any sort of he’s [00:30:00] modest that. he would actually, he had arguments with Campbell particularly on like racism where like, the hy like, had very dodgy, stuff.But actually try to be, he was aware of the and he did try to like imagine a sort of multiracial future.The dueling epistemologies of engineering and research science within sci-fiSHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and yeah, with regard to this, mentality though, of crack pottery and the political valence of, the fiction, I think that in some ways one could argue that. So when you look when you look at science as a profession there’s basically, very broadly speaking, there’s two types of scientists that you could say that an engineer is a scientist.And often they are said to be. But, then there’s also the, research scientists, and the research scientists, they have to be collaborative. They have to exist within a community and bounce ideas off of each other and correct each other and accept correction and, be open to new ideas, and work as teams because, especially as science became more and more complex, as obviously the Manhattan Project is the kind of the first real illustration of that, that this is not a thing that could have been done by one person.And all major scientific projects that is now the case. There is not any scientific major discovery now that is done by one person. Doesn’t happen. And and so, so they have a communitarian tradition and ethos. And that is why research science, when you look at polls, they do tend to be overwhelmingly more liberal, or, democratic in the us.And whereas engineers, they, operate from what they think are first principles. In other words, things that are true then they extrapolate from them. And so, and that inherently, I think one could argue engenders an epistemic sandpoint where [00:32:00] I’m just applying what’s true.HEER: Mm-hmm.Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And, you don’t have to discover what is true or how do you even know what is truth or how, how, could you arrive at truth.They don’t have to answer those questions because they’re not, those questions are already settled for what they do as a profession. And Heinlein was an engineer.HEER: No, Heinlein was very much an engineer., I mean, like, I what you say is true, i’d also ask, emphasize the of educational aspect of engineering, but I think there is a sort and sort of like binary thinking of true false rather than, sort of a hermeneutics of knowledge that is sort of peer reviewed and tested, the realm of science fiction.I do think of the science in the sort of tradition, is old fashioned, like in the sense that they’re always imagining lone inventor, What the, literary critic John Klu calls the Edison aid edisonian fiction, like, you’re imagining Thomas edison figure. Who’s like working in his and something that is considered mian science. to And that has actually Not been like actual been true. Yeah, no.SHEFFIELD: And like, we see that with fiction of Arthur C. Clark, for instance, like his fiction, transcends that, idea. and it, and, it’s not just, it isn’t just because of his political perspective. I think it’s also his professionalHEER: Yeah. No, absolutely. no, Yeah. Yeah. And I even say like, Asimov bobby, he does have the sort of like Kerry as genius, but I a works working out of like, what would the long term, collaborative project like the foundation entail, it is a different way of thinking about science.And yeah, I do think that there is a kind of like right-wing view of science as the lone inventor which actually like, is very retrograde and, like, but had of resurgence thanks in part to Silicon Valley where you did kind of have this period where are early people were like [00:34:00] bill Gates or Steve jobs didSHEFFIELD: Although, frankly, neither one of those guys invented much of anything.HEER: No, they didn’t. there was like, there’s a kinda like the cultural mythology. The cultural okay. Elon Musk well. like, I think Elon Musk they’re all kinda like feeding into this idea that even though they’re working with teams they’re a Thomas Edison figure reinvented for the Like there’s a way in the that created for these figures and the way that they became the of companies allowed a kind of like a very and, I think what we could is a false of how works.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. And well, and, I would say that this is yet another example. And that the scientific community, broadly speaking globally and, also in the US and every country generally seems to have exhibit-- which some people sometimes call the scientist fallacy-- which is everyone else is, a scientist, everyone else respects science. Everyone else understands the scientific method and wants to use it in their own lives.And that is not true. and I may import my own, HG Wells metaphor that, the Society of Science has become the Eloy and, we’ve, they’ve let this revanchist extremist, reactionary morlock group, exist without them, and now they’re coming for them, and Donald Trump is going after NIH and, tearing down these vaccine access and, all of these things.And RFK Junior is telling people to load up on fats and steak and so like, basically they didn’t they didn’t educate the public about why this is good. Like they, people liked what the products of science, but they didn’t know how they were made and why this [00:36:00] is the only way that they can be made. That the scientific method is the ultimate invention.HEER: Yeah, No, I think that’s true. And I maybe like, another, way to think this is that there’s a kind of disjunction between the republic of science, which is this kind of like incredibly collaborative, internationalist debate--SHEFFIELD: Humane. Open to all identities.HEER: Yeah. Yeah. With a sort of political economy that, was based on a different set of values, and the people who would be science, the or had a, like a different set of and where like-- even in the corporate world, like, you, could see there’s certain forms of corporatism actually like, kind of similar to science in of being like, like, involving large scale enterprises. But within like, capitalism, you had uneven development, and you had people, who are basically like Donald Trump, these old school predatory robber baron types. and as long as that, model existed, they were the sort of, Morlocks who could, who could exist to prey on the republic of science.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I can say that myself as a former Republican, more luck. So I’m not dehumanizing anybody. I’m just talking about my former self!HEER: Yeah. but, I mean, I mean, I, think that like a key is, this distinction in political economy between, this world of science that was created and political economic system that didn’t quite fully align with it. And yeah, causing a lot of problems. like, really now where, like whether this kind of, predatory capitalism is compatible with the of scientific research that we’ve seen, or whether it’s become a, just a tool or servant or handmaiden.Is the political left missing the potential for AI as the perfect reason for a basic income?SHEFFIELD: Yeah Yeah, absolutely.Well, and there’s, another unfortunate kind of layer to this though, which is regarding current artificial intelligence research. So, the [00:38:00] reality is, yes, these things, they’re not minds in the same way that we are. But the latest models, they are really fucking good.And if you think that these are just junk, like what you might have experienced in 2023 or something like that’s not the reality. Like the, they are very good now at, the, at appropriate tasks. So like, they’re not going to help you report a news story or like, they can’t do that.There’s a lot of things that they can’t do, but, when it comes to writing programming code, they’re good at it. Like,HEER: Yeah.SHEFFIELD: I have tested it. I know it works like and like it works for, like a lot of scenarios. And so it’s not, these things are not conscious, but they’re really fucking good.And, like that to me is, should be an opportunity for the broader left to say, look, here is why we need basic income. Here is why we need right to housing here is why we need, right to jobs or, whatever. It, like, if you’ve never had in the post USSR world or let’s say, the post kind of rubber baron world that you were just talking about, we haven’t ever had a better argument for this is why government is good and why we need it.And you, and so we better, work toward it because this will help you, whoever you are.HEER: Yeah. Yeah. No, yeah, I know. I’m not an AI skeptic. I don’t it can I, don’t it’s going to, we’re, I don’t think we’re anywhere consciousness.SHEFFIELD: Oh, I’ve written a whole essay on why it’s not.HEER: Yeah. Yeah. And I even actually don’t see, based on what they’re doing, that this is the path for creating machine consciousness. But I mean, it is a path for creating machines that are incredible servants who And then it becomes like, who’s the master? Is it the broader democratic society, which is like my ideal, or is it going to be, a few plutocrats?Whereas that’s going to be a very dangerous thing because you’re putting an immense amount of [00:40:00] a very few hands. And that has always been the kind of, I mean, I think that has been the great debate since the Enlightenment, since came to this realization that are not of history, but of history and can, take control of our collective then it becomes a question well, which humans? and which of science fiction. I mean, this genre has, flourished in the last it is the, form of most clearly addresses this question. Sometimes, we’ve discussed, giving bad answers. but I certainly, putting forward, I think the right question.Robert Heinlein’s evolution from socialist to authoritarian capitalistSHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I mean, I, would like to see better left-wing content about AI in the future. But putting that aside like to, just to go back to Heinlein, like, so a, as we’ve been saying, touching on briefly earlier, he was somebody who started off as a, socialist.And then over hisHEER: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Became more re Oh. Oh, wait. Oh, I, gotta give a plug for your article though, Jeet. So, so, but yeah, so for those who, do want to explore this further, Jeet wrote a really great piece in The New Republic. It was 2014 that explore that did a, it was a review of a, biography of Heinlein. So it’s definitely worth reading if you want to delve into this topic a bit more, but, okay. All right. I, gave you your plug there!HEER: Yeah. Yeah. No, thank you.No, I’ll, just like briefly run through because I, the headline’s own biography touches on so many of the things that we talked about in very interesting ways. Because, it is like born. In 1907. Like this kind a very interesting, this sort of like progressive who had been abolitionists like in like, they were like Missouri, Kansas.I think they were like among the original sort of settlers that came in to, like, like make this a free state. And he was a big of science fiction, big reader of Wells, gets into the Navy. He gets TB, but then has this like amazing, naval [00:42:00] pension because he’d been an officer, so, like, which allows him like, during the Great Depression to like, get an education, try his at, a bunch of different things, like he’s tried to be a real agent, to like be a silver miner, ran for political office, and then finally became a writer.But He, is able to do this because he had UBI, inSHEFFIELD: He, had a free lunch.HEER: He had free lunch, he got a great free and he acknowledged it at the time. Like he had, in letters he like, from the taxpayers of America. Um And, but a free, like a really a sexual revolutionary.I think like, like his first wife there’s a story in the biography where she basically, slept with another man during honeymoon. And and then later, he would marry this woman uh, Zain and would like, she was also into free love, and his buddies would like, be sharing partners, wife swapping or whatever, including with L. Ron Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard in a kind of interview said, like Heinlein basically forced me to sleep with his wife. But during this period in the thirties, forties, like a Wellesley and science fiction writer and the utopian science fiction that he wrote, one which was only published posthumously for us, the living, and one called Beyond This Horizon are fictions about UBI.They’re of utopian fiction where somebody wakes up into the future and it’s like, well, wealth is socially created. One of the novels, one of the characters says, like, he says, where do I pay? He, goes in, he is a, from the present, wakes up into the future, says, where do I pay for food?And says. Why would you pay for food? Like what sort of barbaric society would make someone pay for like a necessity like this? Of course we all, like every, all the food is free. but also with the dark side of that fiction, like he was always a kind of interested in eugenics, not, I would say in a racist point of view.Because he often would have characters of all different races. In one case, he did a kind of anti Japanese novel during World War ii, where the plot came from Robert Ca. John W. Campbell gave him the plot, and, Hy would later say that the racism of the buck, yeah, he, would blame it on [00:44:00] Campbell.but, law was a very enlightened figure. As I said, they had this open marriage then like, tries, falls in love with a much, younger woman who then brings in as a menage trois, but that doesn’t, is second wife, Lila, isn’t happy, becomes alcoholic. They divorce.And then this new, he marries this the younger woman, Virginia, who is like a real, like, a Republican, con, free market conservative.But I, don’t think it’s just necessarily the, the change of. Partners, but also in the fifties, the Cold War comes along, he’s very he is like, he thinks Eisenhower is too soft, like upset that Eisenhower is trying to negotiate nuclear testing with the Russians, and really goes off the deep end.And I think the nature of his fiction changes as well, like, a lot of the fiction of the forties and fifties, there’s a story called Solution unsatisfactory, which is written in the early forties, which is atomic before they arose. basically saying like, we’re going to have to live with these things, but there’s no good solution, like going through like, whereas I think like after that right wing turn, which I think really solidifies with, the publishing of Starship Coopers, this militaristic novel. He really becomes the sort of Heinlein that, like is, the right wing figure, exploring ideas of, militarism total, free market capitalism. instead of saying like, food should be free one of his later novels, he, talks about a famine. And this is originally at the time of the famine in Ethiopia, he says, stupid people, they didn’t grow enough food.Right? Like, so, so a total inversion, I think of his politics towards a kind of very selfishness with, I think maybe there had always been a little bit of a strand of that, because I think like in the biography makes clear, like from a very early age he had this sort of [00:46:00] philosophical attraction to the idea of salafism is that how I’m missing that?SHEFFIELD: Solipsism. Solipsism.HEER: Yeah, Solipsism. Yeah, solipsism. This idea, he age he thinking like, what if I’m all reality is a my And he would periodically write this in his fiction things like a they where, a character everything is just imagined.A very interesting sort of story by all you zombies which is both or sex change a combination of time travel and sex change character to become his and so he is like, like basically has created himself. And in the fiction like this som really becomes tied in a sexual way towards ideas of incest and pedophilia. Really.Like, like, so there’s a lot of, like where like in time for, Love. the main character Lazar Long lives basically forever. Most of the people in the universe his children. He, clones himself and has female clones that he has sex with. He has time travel, has sex with his mother. And a lot of the novels are about how the form of or individual self-expression is, is incest.Yeah. And incest well which is all, justified on a of, well, is just fiction. just, trying ideas or whatnot. but, like, I mean, I, know what to say about that E except like it is in some ways rigorous, actually taking the idea of individualism, radical individualism Heinlein’s, you know, universe leads to this like, logical conclusion of, sex only with those that are closest to you.And also, like, it doesn’t all matter because everything itself is just a creation of my mind. And then, yeah. Obviously I think it’s morally reprehensible and it does align with [00:48:00] a lot of what we’re seeing in the sort of Silicon Valley elite that we’re happy to with Jeffrey think, and who himself also has, like Epstein, all this interest in eugenics, he wanted to basically create a sort of seed farm where he would like have a huge number of children like Lazarus Long.SHEFFIELD: Or Elon MuskHEER: Or Elon Musk. Yeah, exactly. The, Like, like obviously like sort of morally reprehensible. I, wasn’t about hang Like I do think there’s a kind of interesting like rigor. Actually do think, like he’s like working out the of radical individualism in a like, I a lot of other away from.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, although oddly as much as he was talking about individual freedom for most of his novels, as far as I can tell, some of them are explicitly homophobic. And so, but he does have some amount of that. But yeah, like he, he, did, he doesn’t get to that point of working things out because, presumably if you are having full liberation, you would have sex with whoever you wanted to.HEER: would include people of your own sex if Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, he, had this sortSHEFFIELD: inHEER: of really a classical sexist guy where he actually thought like lesbianism was great, but Bill Sexuality turned him off because do actually think that there are like lesbian characters. AndSHEFFIELD: actuallyHEER: there sort of like also these very interesting contradictions.He was like more open to transsexuals than he was to gay they are kind of like sympathetically portrayed change in his in his fiction. And I think that he actually had a close friend who had a sex exchange operation. And, this person like, has vision about how supportive Heinlein was.So, so, so some very interesting sort of like, contradictions in his work.Heinlein’s increasingly disturbing self-focused view of sexual liberationSHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, one of the other probably, I guess, arguably his most famous work, which you have mentioned a bit is his Stranger in the Strange Land book, which [00:50:00] does, I think is really what kind of, at, least in his public writing. So that’s kind of where I, it, he was an example.So this book, I believe it was 1960 when it came out, if IHEER: Yeah. Yeah. Early sixties. Yeah. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: And so it was like, in, in, a lot of ways it was a, touchstone of the new left hippie movement. And even though the guy that was writing it was not on the left, and that to me is one of the more other interesting things about him as an author and, other people in this milieu as well. Like Robert Anton Willison is another one.That these are, these were guys that, that they actually were right wing libertarians, but for a long time, people on the left didn’t realize that these guys were right wing and only now during, like Q Anon and, Trump and whatnot.Only now are a lot of people on the left realizing, oh, these people are right wing. Like, even though like the hippie, so much of hippie culture was always right wing, and you look at Timothy Leary and I, the guy was straight up libertarian. Like the whole idea of dropping out of society that was anarchism and going away and anti-government and anti society.HEER: Yeah, antisocial I mean, I think that’s a, if I were to sort of back the most philosophically respectable this would the sort of, sort of Emersonian american tradition.And within Stranger in a Strange Land, there’s an idea in the novel, we’re all God, we all create, in which is a sort of transcendental idea.And it is very appealing like, on the left of anti-authoritarianism. which in practice, often do align with the right and also have this kind of like mystical strain. So now, as I mentioned, El Ron Hubbard created a religion, as did Robert Heinlein.Like, in some ways I think Stranger in a Strange Land, Heinlein is doing, if not quite a satire, I think it was like trying to through what happened with this friend Hubbard and [00:52:00] imagining what new religion, would be like, if people did have these like telekinetic, know, these powers, Hubbard claimed.But the irony is that Stranger in a Strange Land also led to like new religions being created. I think there’s actually like, like these churches that came out in Southern California, which were inspired by that novel.And it’s almost a sort of a paradox of science fiction that this, you know, especially Campbellian science fiction that wanted to be so rigorous in scientific that like, like its sort of decadence early decadence, it hit like it really became mystical and cult-like in, in the case of Dianetics, so, so what became the pro, the promise of scientific rationality quickly succumbed to follow the cult leader.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And do a lot of drugs.HEER: I mean, yeah,SHEFFIELD: This, yeah. Well, okay, so just going back to the, sexual predation as a form of liberation, because that’s really kind of what we’re talking about. And, that is kind of a pretty strong theme in a lot of these later Heinlein novels.HEER: Yeah. Yeah, No, think that there’s a kind of interesting, I mean, I think he was trying to work out what sexual liberation would mean, and once his that I think that he couldn’t quite re realize. this is, would be my great critique of the novels, which is not that there’s a of sex in there, but that there’s a lot of inconsequential sex that you don’t really get a sense of, like, a world where sexual activity, leads to heartbreak Or to like, emotional turmoil. where, like, or especially in the case of like incest, like, like obvious trauma, like, like he is tr he is like a free lunch. like, let’s, what if we could have all the sex we wanted? Without any consequences.Well, Yeah. That would be you could only do that in of You [00:54:00] actually we live in just as you wanted, like, let’s have total free market capitalism and like, but it all works out great.Yeah. Yeah, without consequences or how, let’s have like total militarism, where all space bugs And, nobody has like, shell shock or, PTSD or is damaged. Like,SHEFFIELD: And there are no dissidents.HEER: Yeah yeah, There’s no, yeah. Yeah. It like, this is the sort of critique of the kind of like later novel, like at every stage he’s like imagining his ideal world without consequences.Jeffrey Epstein as the pinnacle of authoritarian liberationSHEFFIELD: and yeah. And, going back to the Epstein angle here. So, Heinlein is actually mentioned in the Epstein files.HEER: Oh is he? Oh, I, didn’t see that.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And he so there’s, an email that not by Epstein though I should say. But, there’s the, a German AI researcher named, Joscha Bach. And he’s writing to Epstein, and basically they’re having these long conversations essentially about fascism and how it might be good.Epstein and Bach are doing that. And so I’m going to just quote from Bach here in when he says:I rather like the treatment that fascism gets in the Amazon series The Man in the High Castle, which explores what would’ve happened if the Germans and Japanese had won the War. A society that tries to function as a brutal and ruthlessly efficient machine, eliminating all social and evolutionary slack.It is very dark, but not a flat caricature of pointless evil for its own sake. Heinlein’s late book, obviously not late book, but Heinlein’s late book, Starship Troopers explores fascism too. But unlike Philip k Dick, he does not see it as a form of insanity, but as the most desirable order.And Then he, goes on to say, I find your political incorrectness very fascinating.(Laughter)SHEFFIELD: So that’s, I mean, like, that’s what we’re [00:56:00] talking about here. Like this is, so essentially, what you’re saying, this idea of kind of liberty as, there’s always this tension of, well, who is liberty for, is it for the individual or is it for everyone in the society? And how, like that’s essentially what it comes down to.And, Heinlein and this authoritarian capitalist, Nietzchean fascist, reactionary, whatever you want to call it it basically has arrived at the idea that liberty, we must maximize liberty for some people who can have all degrees of freedom. And that is the best way for humanity to survive and become a multi-planetary species as Elon Musk does.HEER: Yeah. no. I another way to think this is. The role of democracy in like, all of this. And I mean, as I said, This is broad tradition. And I think like, democracy was late the tradition.Like there’s actually something that came out because of the and socialist movement of the 19th Centuries were pushing for this. And then you had some people within the liberal tradition like John Stewart Mill, who okay, we’re going to have democracy then, we’re going to have to change our notions of liberty to a more broader sense of general welfare.And in most case, also including like women and like, like imagining what a liberty for all would be in a democratic society where everyone has some say, in the polity. And I think that one way to define this authoritarianSHEFFIELD: libertHEER: libertarianism. Is that it doesn’t want to make that, thing.And once hes is explicitly in Heinlein where like, you like in, time enough for love, he basically says, like, democracy doesn’t make sense. Like, why is it that like if some, 50 plus one, percent of the people say, believe true, like that’s the way should go.Like, there’s no reason to have that, right. Well, [00:58:00] if you reject the idea that there, like we have to have some sort of like, system where like everybody’s voice is part of it and one has to attend to, other people’s voices and like, make some sort of compromises. If you, I think, Hein line and li authoritarian Libertarianism only works. If one rejects the Democratic imperative, if one says from the start, like, it doesn’t matter, what most people want, it’s like, what the elite want, And, then the characters in Heinlein’s fiction are this sort of glorified elite, like people who are, for whatever reason, genetics, intelligence, the superior beings.And he’s very explicit about that, as you know.SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he is. And another quote from to sale beyond the sunset that I thought was notable of his. His political ideology. And of course, I suppose his diehard fans might say, well, he didn’t say these things. His character said these things. And it’s like, well,HEER: But saying, like, I, I’ve read a nonfiction and the, a lot of his letters have been published now, it’s very yeah, it’s exactly as what would predict from reading these novels, because his hectoring voice that is all univocal. Like, one assumed that this is what Heinlein believes.In the, in the letters he’s basically saying all the same things, but continue.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So I’m going to quote from it. So he says in To Sail Beyond the Sunset, which is literally an, ode to incest, basically of this novel. He says, democracy often works beautifully at first, but once the state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state.For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit. That the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them. They will do so until the state bleeds to death or in its weakened condition, the state succumbs to an invader. The barbarians enter Rome.Which again, the, [01:00:00] invasion metaphor, like that’s, the most constant metaphor that you see Donald Trump making.And, I, and like, and I do think that’s why Trump is so appealing to these same people, because even though they know that he’s stupid and incompetent and corrupt, like they know all of that, anyone can see that, who’s not willfully blinded.They know this about him, but they admire that about him actually, because he just does what he wants.And in that sense, Donald Trump is the, the Nietzschean Antichrist Ubermensch. Because as he said, in the Antichrist, he explicitly. I’m not against Christianity per se, and I don’t dislike Jesus. I’m against this culture that you guys have built up of restraining the Ubermensch.and so, Trump in a way is, this, Antichrist Ubermensch. And that’s why they like him.HEER: Which I think it’s almost the best refutation of ofSHEFFIELD: Of why it doesn’t work.HEER: Yeah. I think that’s right.SHEFFIELD: And so essentially like that’s kind of what I think is, the, message that we’re getting out of these Epstein files. So like the more stuff that comes out that people are reading there, like Jeffrey Epstein had this mentality he was a right wing libertarian by the end of his life, whatever he was earlier, this guy was a libertarian capitalist oligarch, and that’s what he was trying to build.HEER: Yeah, no, I think, that’s right. I I it’s about the evolution, seen, I, do think him as a fairly normalSHEFFIELD: globalist, neoliberalHEER: in the sort of like, nineties and twoSHEFFIELD: thousands.HEER: But I think that once that I think a lot of these figures, if they meet any sort of challenge, in it was like a criminal case. I think the global financial meltdown a lot of these people like felt much moreSHEFFIELD: beleagueredHEER: felt like, the like [01:02:00] retrench for a much more hard line politics.And then they, did retreat away from any towards the public good, a politics of pure sort of selfishness of the Ubermensch.So, yeah, I mean, I think that’s almost like a, in, ways they’re liberal when times are good. then become, libertarians, like, like, when times go bad. I, that’s the that’s the kinda like logic it. Yeah.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then Epstein also, like his, the, world that he was building for himself with these trafficked girls and women, like this, is the maximal individual liberty vision that, that these right-wing sci-fi authors we’re talking about.This is the total sexual liberation that Heinlein was talking about. This is the actual version of what it looks like.HEER: No.SHEFFIELD: instead It’s not just a fantasy.HEER: Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, I, know, think that’s right. Yeah, I mean, another way to think about is in sort of the genre of science fiction. Yeah. I mean, I think that science is the kind of like life or the and development project of both the national security state and the sort of Silicon Valley sort of plutocracy.Like I think a lot of people like Musk and Peter Thiel, a lot of this and then basically used it as a of like how to, and he because of his tuberculosis, he was not able to serve in the military, but like, sort of research stuff for the Navy in, during World War ii. he, basically up with a prototype for this spacesuit. But more broadly. A lot of his ideas, were taken up by sort of the RAND corporation and other outfits.So, I mean, one way to see genre it’s, it is a place where like, early ideas this the i, think almost Southern California combination of military, industrial surveillance state technocrats, and libertarians, which is a contradictory [01:04:00] but I, think is like been worked together and infused together.And that’s why the author of Starship Troopers is also the author of Stranger in a Strange Land.More humane sci-fi authorsSHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Well, thi this has been a great discussion, but let, if we can maybe end it with let’s turn to better sci-fi authors than these guys. Because as you said, there’s, and I do want to give a plug for my friend Ada Palmer, who is a historian and also a sci-fi writer.HEER: Yes, I know her work.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And she explores a lot of these same themes, but in a much more humane way, but there are a lot of other authors, so I’m interested to hear who you might recommend in that regard for people.HEER: Oh, okay. I think an interesting sort of counterpart is Ursula Le Guin who is coming out of sort of anarchism, but kind of like a left anarchism and in like The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed explored in a very interesting way of sort of gender equality and the trade-offs that might exist in an anarchic world where things are poorer, but, you have like a greater sort of social satisfaction.So I think Le Guin in general is a, great example. Joanna Russ, I think explored, many these, same ideas.I think there’s the more dystopian fiction writers are the dystopian tradition, obviously like Orwell and Huxley, but, forward by someone like Octavia Butler exploring the dark side of this and one sees that also like Philip K. Dick and JG Ballard who are interested in all the same things as Heinlein was, but maybe are like much more attentive to the social psychological consequences of this kind of future.SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Okay, great. Well those are some starter recommendations for anybody who hasn’t already gone for those authors yet. So, you got any any things upcoming you might want to plug [01:06:00] for the audience to check?HEER: Well, yeah, no, I mean, I just generally, write for the Nation magazine and have so, and to do the Time of Monsters podcast. So if anyone wants to hear more, from you can go to the Nation magazine and there’ll be a lot of content there.SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. Thanks for being here.HEER: Oh, thanks. It was a, great conversation.SHEFFIELD: Alright, so that is the program for today. I appreciate you joining us for the conversation, and you can always get more if you go to theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you’re a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives and I thank you very much for your support.That does mean a lot. It’s a bad economy for media right now, so anybody who can support the show financially, that means a lot.And it’s only. a small amount of money per month, less than a cup of coffee where you might be buying them at Starbucks or whatever. so if you can support the show financially, that would be great. I appreciate it.And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button so we can get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit plus.flux.community/subscribe