Opposition to vaccines in the United States and around the world was a fringe view for a very long time, but it’s not anymore now, thanks to people like Donald Trump and his Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert Kennedy Jr.

While this type of thinking has proliferated in the age of social media, in fact, being anti-vax is as old as the vaccines themselves. It’s a history worth exploring and knowing about, not just so that you can have better arguments for why vaccines work, but also so that you can understand that the arguments against inoculations are basically unchanged since the early 18th century when they became commonplace in the West.

Thomas Levenson, my guest in today’s episode, has written a very fascinating history of vaccines called A Pox on Fools, that is the focus of our discussion today. He’s a professor of science writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He’s also the author of several other books, including Einstein in Berlin and Newton and the Counterfeiter.

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The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction
07:01 — Inoculation is a ‘newfangled’ idea that is three centuries old
13:16 — Vaccine opposition as a form of eugenics
19:10 — Cotton Mather’s Christian argument for inoculation
25:14 — Vaccines are a political technology, because they cannot work without it
33:26 — Nazi ‘Deutsche Physik’ and Russian Lysenkoism
39:30 — How the pro-science consensus was built in the postwar U.S.
53:31 — Business leaders uniformly agreed on the necessity of science as a civic culture

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• RFK Junior and the naturalistic fallacy at the heart of the pseudo-scientific medical industry

• How Republicans are making the internet a safe space for misinformation

• Uncertainty makes science powerful — and incredibly vulnerable

Audio Transcript

The 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 Tom Levinson. Hey, Tom, welcome to Theory of Change.

THOMAS LEVENSON: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Good to have you.

All right, so let’s start off our discussion here today. Just give us a, brief overview of the book so people can understand what the argument is and the scope.

LEVENSON: Well, Pox on Fools _came to be because one of my editors, my, London-based editor right after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. got nominated as, the new Secretary of Health and Human Services, told me I had to write this book. I didn’t have any choice. And the reason was the, that it was clear that with that nomination anti-vaccine not just the rhetoric, but the actual anti-vaccine policy was gonna land at the center of the American public health apparatus, and it was gonna have, you know, in ways that it hadn’t at any time previously, however [00:03:00] influential it may have been, have real impact on, um, the way the US encounters infectious disease for, you know, the foreseeable future.

And so that, that’s something that, that is really scary given what what we know about infectious disease what we’ve learned in, painful ways over many years. So I set out to write the book, and I didn’t wanna just write another, simple vaccines work, which they do, and we should use them, which we should.

And the people who tell you they don’t are not telling you the truth, and here’s why. That, you know, those facts are out there. That story has been told, that argument has been made over and over again, and I don’t actually believe that at this point in our history, the argument has a lot of effect on the people it most needs to most needs to reach.

We can talk about who I think those people are in a moment if you’re interested. Uh, so I have a historical turn of mind, and what really struck me as I began to sort of try and respond to my editor’s [00:04:00] demand, uh, was thinking really about the major anti-vaccine arguments and realizing from work I’d already done and from some research I very quickly did just in this first, first phase of thinking about the book, um, that for all the enormous, just, transformative changes in the science and medicine of infectious disease over the last 200-plus years, the arguments against vaccination have changed very little, if at all.

Um, and what was most striking to me is in the beginning, you know, in the, the early 18th century for one sort of proto-vaccination advance, and then in the 19th century when, when the age of vaccination truly began, um- At least some of those arguments were, plausible or, at least, you know, reasonable as responses to something about which, you know, at the outset very little was known.

Uh, but that over time as our, as knowledge changes, as, the [00:05:00] science and practice of medicine advanced, and in particular as we discovered what the actual pathology, the mechanism of infectious disease really is, those arguments became less and less tenable, and yet they get repeated over and over again.

And I was really fascinated by that, and I realized that you could use that history of these claims that vaccines you know, the three big causes I identified, violate the natural order don’t do what they... You know, aren’t effective and in fact cause harm, and finally that any requirement around vaccines is, uh, intolerable as a violation of personal liberty, whether or not vaccines are effective against a given disease or not.

Uh, those are the three major arguments. The last one is philosophical. You have to work that out as a matter of values. The first two are matters that can be settled by fact and have been, and the interesting thing is the way that even though the science of those questions is completely settled the arguments that are used to try and undermine [00:06:00] them really haven’t changed.

They’ve just sort of persisted. It’s, something that Paul Krugman in, in economics has called zombie ideas. Doesn’t matter how many times you kill them, they just keep shambling on. And I thought if I told that story and really traced these, these, uh, arguments back to their beginnings, acknowledged their plausibility in one context, and traced how they became less and less viable, uh, that would help people who are, not the hardcore anti-vaccine people who are committed to that position in a way that, that, you know, is either core to their identity or it’s the source of their power or wealth or whatever it may be.

Those people are extremely hard to reach. But the peop- there are many more people who are vaccine hesitant ’cause they hear the noise. And my... This book is really an attempt to cut through the noise of, I think, vaccine misinformation and give them a, a, not just the facts, but the context required to interpret the facts in a way that I think, really affirms the value of [00:07:00] vaccination.

Innoculation is a ‘newfangled’ idea that is three centuries old

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, and you’re certainly right that the arguments really, and you demonstrate that very well in the book, that people are just recycling the same arguments in a way that eh, that yeah, that is, is very undead. It’s undead science is, what I like to call it. And, it, but, core to that argument is, the most fundamental from a sc- from their pseudoscience standpoint is, well, these are unnatural.

These are dangerous substances that aren’t found in nature, and these are newfangled ideas. And you show very clearly that these are practices that existed a long time before they were ever industrialized in the West.

LEVENSON: That, that’s right. I mean, I think of vaccination and its, its sort of proto forms you can lump them all together under the idea of engineering immunity to a pathogen. So variolation, which is the, business of taking sort of actual [00:08:00] pus and material from smallpox sores on a patient who’s suffering from smallpox and, solving that and then scratching it into, just taking this device that was like, this three-clawed thing and scratching it into your arms and then rubbing it, rubbing that, smallpox material in there.

You’re es- in, in essence giving patients a hopefully mild case of smallpox to avoid the, the, as many as one-third lethal, one, one-third of all those who catch smallpox will die of it. Y- you wanna prevent that outcome, so you try and give people a mild a mild case of smallpox because of the knowledge that was established by experience that if you had smallpox and survived it, you were immune for the rest of your life.

You didn’t, you never got got the disease again. So that was practiced, it was practiced in Africa, it was practiced in Central Asia or, the, the Near East, it was practiced in China for, at least a century and, possibly quite, further back [00:09:00] before Western European medicine encountered it.

Really only made it into the sort of Western consciousness in the early years of the 18th century. So, it’s, it’s you know- That you can understand why people would be hesitant about that. and, it clearly is, quite a leap to give yourself a disease to avoid the worst consequences of the disease.

That’s something that, that I can understand why that’s a hard thing to get your head around. And it really, I think hits hot buttons in that early stage because, if you are a devout believer in one of the revealed religions and you see, God as the, omniscient but also the ultimate judge of the world.

SHEFFIELD: Master of fate, yeah.

LEVENSON: Yeah, they see the fall of the least sparrow and all that.

Thus, giving somebody a disease in this way to engineer immunity was seen as really interfering in God’s prerogative. God decides who gets sick and [00:10:00] who dies and who gets well. And to put yourself intervening in that, in that judgment was explicitly seen—I mean, preachers delivered, really fire and brimstone sermons to this effect as variolation first came to be used in, in London and in Boston was the, were the, uh, first sort of Western European world, uh, applications. And, um, you know, that’s sort of the beginnings of what becomes a really three-century long argument that vaccination is fundamentally unnatural.

The argument persists even when that sort of overwhelming explicit faith in God takes a back seat because, you know, instead of God, you get nature’s god or, nature as created by God, which, there is this whole history of seeing in nature sort of the true source of wellbeing, very much part of the romantic, um, sort of message or theme of the romantic [00:11:00] literary movement.

But you see it in a number of ways in reaction in particular to the noise and smog and filth of the Industrial Revolution as it pops up. This idea of somehow a pristine natural world as, as the proper way to live becomes very persuasive. And, um, it’s Again, it’s not entirely wrong to say, in fact it’s very much not wrong to say, that you will have better outcomes for your health if you have clean water and clean air and take regular exercise and eat, you know, nutritious, wholesome food that’s unadulterated, all these good things. That’s still good advice.

It was often very difficult to achieve if you were, you know, a member of the working class during the Industrial Revolution, and suggesting that this would, you know, sort of help your overall w- state of wellbeing, absolutely true. The problem with it, and the problem in asserting that you don’t need [00:12:00] vaccination and in, in essence you’re, you’re

By intervening, by doing this sort of engineering, um, you are interrupting or, uh, upsetting the ability of nature to put you in the right place. it, That you are no longer, uh, you know, trying to live in harmony with our circumstances. That leads to serious problems because of course, no amount of, eating a vegetable-based diet or, bicycling instead of driving or whatever it may be, is going to stop, the measles virus from infecting you if you are susceptible to measles, if you’re unvaccinated, and you encounter somebody who’s sick with the measles.

You’ll most likely catch the disease and suffer whatever consequences. And that’s true of course across the, range of, uh, of microbial pathogens. You know, living well has all kinds of benefits, but it isn’t a, shield against a direct encounter with something that can cause a disease in you.

SHEFFIELD: And we see RFK Jr., like that is his arguments.

LEVENSON: Yeah. Oh, very much.

SHEFFIELD: Really [00:13:00] is. And, and it’s very bizarre, or I guess it’s illustrative of how little he actually knows about vaccines and biology in that he calls what he believes in, he believes in terrain theory. That’s what he believes. But he, he doesn’t call it that.

Germ theory destroyed the credibility of believing that disease had a moral component

LEVENSON: One of the critical things that happened to really alter the terms, or should have altered the terms of the anti-vaccine argument, uh, was the discovery of germ theory in the 19th century when it was finally firmly established that particular diseases are caused, infectious diseases are caused by particular microbes.

So, you know, cholera is always caused by the uh, Vibrio ch- uh, cholerae. I’m pr- I’m sure I’m pronouncing it badly. The cholerae bacterium. Um, smallpox is always caused by the smallpox variola virus, and so forth and so on. And that there’s a distinct microbial pathogen for each of these diseases.

They pref- uh, you know, and the, immune system, [00:14:00] not, it took a while to get to a developed sophisticated understanding of the immune system. But, you know, with the idea of germ theory, as it was called in the late 19th century, that there are these individual distinct germs or pathogens associated with each of the diseases and wound infections and th- those kinds of things that were afflicting humankind.

That gave you both, uh, a clear unders- a c- a much clearer causal understanding of disease that, among other things, overturned the, from medieval medicine and forward, this idea of miasmas, of bad air wafting something that would disrupt your, your, uh, your biological equilibrium and cause a disease.

And different, uh, different sort of miasmas could generate different responses in different people. But, basically the idea of disease is that it was an internal imbalance driven by an encounter with something [00:15:00] in the environment but not a specific, individual pathogen that was doing something inside your body.

So that’s all overturned in the, you know, between the 1870s and the 1890s. Uh, and with it, with that new germ theory, you actually have sort of an underlying theory of vaccination. Pasteur even r- you know, is one of the, the two, most famous figures associated with the germ theory. Louis Pasteur calls it the principle of vaccination, which is, uh, if you can challenge somebody with a some kind of substance that would produce the same immune reaction, same internal reaction to a pathogen without causing a disease, you could induce immunity, you could create a shield of protection against the time when you encountered the actual pathogen. And it’s basically the underlying idea behind all vaccinations still today. Find something that doesn’t make you sick but produces s- teaches the [00:16:00] body how to recognize this p- this threat.

And that gives you some help against the threat should you actually encounter it in the wild. You know- That’s the, that’s the way it, it actually works. For Kennedy I mean, the underlying sort of theme of all his various attempts to give a kind of scientistic gloss to his, forgive me, BS the is I think what’s ultimately a eugenic notion.

I mean, his argument ultimately comes down to the fact that if you get sick, it’s your fault. You didn’t do the right things. You, you weren’t a healthy person. You haven’t done enough pull-ups, whatever it may be. And, uh, and the idea that those who do fall ill are in some way personally to blame, morally on the hook for their illness, does two things.

One is, it, it makes it your fault for being sick. But it also absolves, it absolves society of any real duty of care to you. Again, [00:17:00] if you hadn’t done all those things that clearly made you vulnerable to illness, we wouldn’t have to help you. And it creates a category of undesirables.

The people who get sick are revealing themselves to be, sort of morally suspect because it’s their fault. They, they did this to themselves in some way. And that to me is, is, that’s the sort of... If you take the anti-vaccine, this, part of the anti-vaccine argument to its explicit logical conclusion, you get a really, really ugly view of humanity and a, and of a hierarchy in humanity.

Virtuous people who stay healthy and sort of morally, defective in some way people who don’t. And we’ve seen different formulations of that cause immense harm in the last century, and I, really hope we don’t go there again.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and unfortunately we did see that during the COVID-19 pandemic as well with a lot of people saying things [00:18:00] like, “Well, if you’re old and you die from COVID, well then it was just your time to die. You you, d- basically deserve to die anyway.” And there was Dan Patrick, who was the lieutenant governor of Texas, who had said that “Well, I’m an older person, and I think that older Americans should just be willing to sacrifice our lives for the economy, because if we don’t, then we won’t have an economy, and, like, we should just be willing to die.”

It was, I mean, it was monstrous. This was monstrous.

LEVENSON: Absolutely. I mean, it’s w- you and I are speaking now just a couple days after D-Day, and it’s like this sort of notion somehow that, society letting its vulnerable die of this pandemic disease is equivalent in somehow to the bravery of the folks who, went ashore on the beaches of Normandy.

And it’s our, I’m, I’m not in my first youth either, and it’s like the idea that I’m supposed to sort of throw myself in the way of the COVID virus so that the [00:19:00] rest of America can continue to shop on at the mall. Somehow it doesn’t have the same resonance as, freeing the world from Nazis, but, maybe that’s just me

Cotton Mather’s Christian argument for innoculation

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, so this is, I mean, it, flows naturally though from their religious views and their epistemological views. But it is also worth pointing out that, as you do in the book, that one of the earliest proponents of vaccines in the United States was Cotton Mather, who was a religious fundamentalist.

But he correctly understood that, in fact, not only do does vaccination or variolation, in his case work, but it’s also a moral duty because if you allow s- people to... If you prevent people from having a treatment that makes them have a lower cause of death, a less likelihood of dying, if you prevent that, you have actually killed them, and it is on your

LEVENSON: Right.

SHEFFIELD: Conscience.

LEVENSON: e- Yes, there were [00:20:00] plenty of religious figures in that, in, you know, in Mather, who opposed Mather directly who said, you know, “You’re, you’re, messing with God’s province.” And Mather countered by saying exactly what you just said, that the Sixth Commandment, thou shalt not murder, says, you know, you gotta

You know, if you ha- if you can save a life, you must. It’s n- it’s not just a, a good thing to do, it’s a, it’s an obligation. And even though I’m not a Puritan and I’m not a particularly, um, you know, religiously observant person I entirely agree. I mean, there ... I don’t agree with Mather about much.

I’m, I, really

SHEFFIELD: You’re not gonna burn witches

LEVENSON: Exactly. But but in that one instance, I’m in complete agreement with him. Again, it’s, I think one of the things I distinguish I really came to realize as I was writing this book is there is a difference between the people like Kennedy who, who are, for various reasons, in, in, Kennedy’s case, though I don’t know what’s in, in his heart of course I suspect really [00:21:00] mundane and ugly motives.

He gets power, he gets clout, he gets, he has gotten a lot of money off being an ant- a prominent anti-vaxxer. There are people like that who, for whom, for ... and, and there are true believers. There are people who are genuinely ter- you know, I think they, have been taught wrong things, they’ve absorbed wrong things, they’ve done their own research and come, and, come to terrible conclusions.

They suffer from all kinds of logical fa- uh, fallacies, all this kind of stuff, but that doesn’t mean they do not sincerely believe that vaccines pose a threat to them or have caused harm. But you know, there’s a much, much larger number of people. Y- you know, we all do this. You know, we’re all busy.

We all have, limited parameters to our knowledge, and we offload, our thinking about all kinds of things. I don’t try to learn, how plumbing works. And when, if, I, if a plumber comes into my house and says, “I need X, Y, and Z.” I accept that. I have to offload [00:22:00] that, I mean, it’s, I’m not gonna take the, the couple, three years it takes to become a competent plumber.

And you can do that across, across all kinds of, the, all kinds of decisions we all make in our daily lives. And most of us, almost all of us are not vaccine experts. We’re not public health statisticians. We aren’t virologists. It’s ... There are, we have to come up with some structure of trust that allows us to rely on what other people say. And it’s that context in which people can play on, that necessary sort of offloading of decision-making in this way. And it’s, there is something about vaccines that makes it easy to bullshit about.

I mean, think about it. You’ve got, some- somebody walks up to you with a, a little glass tube and a needle at the end of it, and there’s a clear liquid in it, and something in, some invisible thing in that clear li- liquid [00:23:00] goes into your body, has some interactions with other invisible things, and if it all works, an event doesn’t happen.

You don’t get sick. That’s, ... It’s hard to have, a sort of immediate faith in that if you come to it completely naively. And if somebody says, “Oh, no, no, that, there are all these problems with it,” you’re gonna be concerned, right? And it’s that concern, it’s that, that possib- Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, her, her, her collaborator, wrote this marvelous book called The Merchants of Doubt, which is about how basically the tobacco, the tobacco industry persuaded for a long time people that the, sort of

It was the God of the gaps argument applied to science because this last step of proof for all the, epidemiological statistical proof that existed that, you know, smoking causes lung cancer, that last little bit meant that, you couldn’t say for sure it does, therefore we don’t have to, act on it.

Th- the [00:24:00] vaccine, anti-vaccine world trades on a similar transaction. I think the s- the science they claim in defense of their, position is even less tenable than what the tobacco companies were relying on. But

SHEFFIELD: Oh, there’s certainly a lot bigger body of time and of studies showing that vaccines work.

LEVENSON: Absolutely. And, and the thing, and the thing is we know in detail the mechanisms by which they work. You can trace it sort of cell type by cell type how, a different vaccine challenge to the body sort of progresses through the immune system to create recognition of the, of the pa- pathogen and response to it, which is, the ability to stop it, when it does happen to come into your body.

But, the task, I think, for people who are, who are trying to affirm the value of vaccines is not to change Kennedy’s mind, but to find a way to reach all the people that Kennedy has very successfully made feel uncertain about the value of vaccines and say, “No,” “you’re [00:25:00] being lied to in this particular way.

You can trace the history of this lie. Let’s, let’s not go back to the age when parents routinely expected to bury their children.” That’s, really ultimately what’s at stake here.

Vaccines are a political technology, because they cannot work without it

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, as you describe it accurately the, the scenario that of, the person with the clear vial inj- wanting to inject it into you vaccines are a magical technology in the Arthur C. Clarke sense, but they’re also a political technology. And, this is where I think Aristotle is very relevant in that, he was somebody who had his own university that he founded basically, and they did all kinds of scientific research in, in all kinds of different disciplines.

But the, one of the things that he always said was that politics was the master science. And not because it was harder to understand, but it was because it decided how they all [00:26:00] should be fitted together and what the purpose of science should be as a societal institution. and I think that’s where the public health advocates and the p- policymakers and the, elected officials, that’s where they’ve let down, been, failed the most, is that they didn’t understand that science is political, and it always has been

LEVENSON: I think I’m not sure that throughout this history that, that p- that public health and political leaders didn’t understand that. I think they just,

SHEFFIELD: Oh, I, mean recently I’m saying. Yeah, recently.

LEVENSON: I think that’s true. But yeah, I mean, the ... You, really see that, I mean, you cer- certainly see it very much now where, basically the whole infrastructure of American biomedical research is both being whittled away, a substantial chunk.

You know, the funding has gone down, the pace of funding that has gone down, which surprisingly is incredibly destructive, I mean, perhaps surprisingly. If you shut down a [00:27:00] lab for six months, you’ve destroyed the lab. People go off, they do other things, and all the institutional knowledge in that one area of research that all the things, you know, which reagents work well with this, you know, just all this informal knowledge it takes to, do, leading-edge science, uh, goes away, and you don’t get it back right away.

You have to rebuild it, and it can take it can take years. Even if, you know, you, you restored sort of all the resources tomorrow, it would still take years to return to your former capacity. That’s going on all the time right now. And of course, also what’s being funded is shifting. Uh, Kennedy pulled half a billion dollars out of mRNA vaccine, uh, research basically unilaterally disarming America in the face of not just microbial threats, but cancers which turn out to be potentially treatable by that technology and so forth.

Because, because the COVID vaccines had the, the in- infernal gall to be [00:28:00] built on that particular extraordinary discovery. Those are the kinds of things where obviously politics and political power matters a great deal, but where the rubber really hits the road is when it comes to the idea of, Whether the state should be able, should be able to and should compel the population at large to vaccinate in any, against any particular set of diseases.

And that’s an argument that’s been going on since the, really the 1850s, uh, at least as, different pl- different jurisdictions, uh, started to require vaccination against smallpox. Actually, the first smallpox vaccination mandates date back from the, uh, date all the way back to the 18-teens. And, uh, you know, that’s an entirely political argument.

On the one side you had people who argued, again the idea that blocking vaccination is murder. There was a, a mid-19th century, a very [00:29:00] senior British government doctor who referred to, you know, the anti-vaccine position demanding liberty you know, the, right to refuse the state’s intrusion into the most...

I mean, again, sticking something into your body, uh, especially something that may not have been fully, you know, characterized and understood and all that you know, that’s a very intimate demand that the state is making of an individual. And this doctor, uh, John Simon, flipped the argument around and said, you know, “What y- what you’re asking for is not personal liberty, but the liberty of omissional infanticide, the right to kill your kids by not providing with them with this protection against a deadly disease.”

And by extension, that was what, really the sort of framework of the argument omniscient homicide by leaving society at large more vulnerable to epidemic diseases. Um, and that’s been the core of the argument ever since. Does the individual’s right to say what happens to their own [00:30:00] body trump society’s, uh, interest in protecting those who can’t protect themselves, like infants or transplant patients who are on immune disorders and can’t be vaccinated, or the elderly whose immune, na- natural immune systems wane in eff- efficacy?

All these, you know, there are lots of people for whom vaccination is an, is either- unavailable or im- or, imperfect and they can’t protect themselves. So, you know, does the state have the right to compel you to ensure that society as a whole doesn’t suffer the loss and harm of a pandemic or epidemic outbreak?

And does the state have the right to compel you to take an action that will benefit you by, by m- you know, giving you immunity to a disease, but is also being required of you because it will benefit somebody else you don’t know? There’s the argument. I come down pretty firmly on the side of, yeah, the state does have that right and obligation.

And that has been the state of certainly [00:31:00] American jurisprudence since 1905. I mean, it s- went to the Supreme Court. Supreme Court said, “Yep, Massachusetts can make you get vaccinated against smallpox. Sorry.”

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and George Washington himself was in favor of, vaccination. Like, he forced it on his troops in 1776.

LEVENSON: that’s a, well, that’s another argument, and it speaks directly to what the current Secretary of Defense, I will not refer to him by his made-up title Secretary of Defense Peter Hegseth in eliminating the vaccine requirement for the military. As George Washington knew, that directly threatens national security.

There was a really good reason that the military was, I mean, when soldiers went off to Vietnam, they were pin cushions. They were stuffed full of every available vaccine against tropical diseases that there was, along with, the, if, for some reason they hadn’t been vaccinated with the sort of conventional childhood suite of vaccinations that were just becoming available as the Vietnam War was taking place.

’Cause, nothing says we’re [00:32:00] gonna lose a war than having, significant fractions of your fighting force fall ill from a preventable disease. Throughout history, war has been attended by disease, and it’s been attended by disease in the armies and, when y- in the, in the American Civil War, the, the outbreaks of typhoid and measles and other infectious diseases that happened when you brought, all those Union soldiers into con- from different regions, often very remote, rural farm boys coming in to encounter, people from New York City or what have you, in these, in- incredibly crowded camps with often very poor sanitation and so forth.

The North and South, those sort of initial recruiting stages were famous for the so-called camp diseases that would rip through regiments. Y- two out of every three deaths in the Civil War were caused by either infectious disease or infection- or wound infections, not by direct battlefield trauma.

Those were, 400, out of the 600,000 to a million people who died 400 [00:33:00] to 660, 670,000 of those deaths would have been preventable, had, the vaccine age opened just a, a little bit earlier than it actually did in history. And so, vaccinating your troops is actually a really good idea if you want to have success on the battlefield, but this seems somehow to escape to have escaped the current leadership in the Department of Defense.

Nazi Deutsche Physik and Russian Lysenkoism

SHEFFIELD: It has. And the history of science just more generally also does show that it’s always been interrelated with politics as well. And one of the more famous examples of that is that in Nazi Germany there was this idea that quantum physics was a Jewish stain and lie.

And,

LEVENSON: a-

SHEFFIELD: and yet-

LEVENSON: relativity as well.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and the relativity. That’s right.

LEVENSON: Degenerate modern Jewish, deformations of the, glorious tradition of [00:34:00] classical physics. I mean, really just amazing stuff

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And so, and Hitler himself, as far as I can remember, didn’t actually directly engage with that p- in particular, but his, a lot of his lieutenants did, and they developed this, idea of what they called Deutsche Physik so German physics i- which was, yeah, anti-relativity because, relativity is wrong.

We don’t want to be relative. We have the truth.

LEVENSON: Right. and, we don’t want to have to acknowledge that Albert Einstein was a, an important figure. He’s a Jew, we’re gonna make a f- a, it’s... when they, when, Einstein actually finally emigrated in late 1932 just before Hitler took power when Einstein then in early ’33 repudiated his German citizenship one of the Nazi news- associated newspapers said, “Einstein is gone, good riddance,” “we don’t need no stinking Einstein. We’ve got Deutsche Physik.” So it’s yeah, I mean, and, and, and certainly there are plenty of [00:35:00] examples where sort of overt political motivations have directed science. We were talking before we sort of got the recording going about Lysenko and the whole Soviet tradition of, really subordinating everything in Soviet society to politics.

And it did enormous damage to I mean, the L- Lysenko himself did enormous damage to Soviet biology and, a- and in particular agriculture. You can, associate him specifically with, really quite, s- quite terrible famines. And certainly just the progress of, of Soviet biology was studies of, of biology in the Soviet Union were, stymied for years by his authority over what was considered legitimate Soviet science.

Which, it’s, it sounds kind of funny in retrospect, as Deutsche Physik sounds, sort of buffoonish. But, behind the historical distance and the laughter, of course there were individual [00:36:00] and, and, s- society-wide human consequences, uh, that were just horrific.

The You know, you, but you don’t even have to look to some of those 20th century nightmares to see how, uh, how this is a running theme. I mean, there are lots of different ways to frame the conflict between heliocentric astronomy, Galileo, and the church. But certainly as I was speaking some years ago to, um, a leading Jesuit astronomer, he said, “You know, you have to understand from the church’s point, perspective, it wasn’t the science of heliocentrism that was the problem.

It was Galileo’s claim that science had independent authority not just in science, but in the interpretation of scripture.” Heliocentrism said in effect that, for example, when was it Joshua holding up his, or,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, Joshua, yeah. Yeah

LEVENSON: the sun still? That was not exactly consistent with the heliocentric, universe and, then the [00:37:00] theory of gravity and all that sort of stuff.

You know- You could, you could absolutely, observe the mountains on the moon and reveal that the planets traveled not in perfect circles but in ellipses and all these good things but don’t tell us how to read the Bible. That’s our job. And that was, and, Galileo got into trouble over that and, suffered serious, though thankfully not, life-threatening consequences. But yes, polit- politicians have their own ends and they will happily use science and scientific scientists to advance them, but they will ch- you know, if they have the power, they will not tolerate challenges to their authority or to their worldview that a scientific interpretation or a scientific discovery, uh, might pose to them.

So, and given that nowadays science is essentially, uh, you know, a society-wide, society-level endeavor, it costs billions to maintain,[00:38:00]

Scientific research at the scale that, that major nations do. That money comes from people who are not themselves scientists, and the people who have the money obviously assert a great deal of control over it.

They set priorities. They determine not just which areas are of interest and which aren’t, but also which individuals, which kinds of individuals have access to scientific resources, and so on. So, science, it turns out as, not as a body of knowledge or a accumulating series of discoveries, but science is a daily enterprise, something that humans get up in the morning and go to work and do.

That is often a mirror of both the strengths and pathologies of whatever society they’re happening in. So right now, as our, as the United States has, as power has moved to, the current administration and the current sort of view of, of the proper organization of, our [00:39:00] politics you’re seeing that reflected in who gets to do science, who gets funded, who gets promoted, what kinds of sciences are permitted, af- are funded which is a permission slip.

And yeah, politics shoots through You can say there are no politics in equations, and at least mo- much of the time you’ll be right. But getting to those equations and interpreting their results in ways that make a difference in people’s lives, that’s, yeah, that, there’s plenty of room for politics to, to muck around.

How the pro-science consensus was built in the postwar U.S.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that, that that post-war consensus that you’re alluding to there and the, the massive amount of scientific funding that happened it, it, came as a result of the, the fact that the Manhattan Project and basic science research is what ended the war in, Japan.

And, one can argue with whether that was ethical or not. But let’s say I, I, strongly suspect [00:40:00] that even if they hadn’t dropped the bomb, but they had just demonstrated, “Here’s what we can do to you guys,” that would’ve made them surrender, I think, or a lot of them

LEVENSON: yeah, I, I don’t disagree with you. I certainly, I’ve never understood or accepted the dropping of the bomb on Nagasaki. I can understand in the midst of the sort of emotional reality of the Second World War why, people in the military would take the ultimate weapon and drop it on this ca- this came right after some of the absolute bloodiest, highest casualties as a percentage of the force battles of the entire war in Okinawa and Iwo Jima. And I think, I don’t think it makes it moral, but I think it does help make it understandable why the weapon might get used.

But I agree with you. I mean, dropping the bomb in Tokyo Bay, far enough offshore not to immediately kill everybody would’ve been a powerful signal and, would’ve been interesting to see.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess

LEVENSON: but, the, the thing about [00:41:00] the funding after the war, the, the joke was, I don’t know if it’s really, I, it, there has to be s- there is some truth in this, I think, but the, joke is that even though politicians didn’t have a clue what the physicists were doing, they realized that our physicists beat their physicists to, at the end of World War II, and you wanted to keep feeding your physicists both to keep them happy and doing good things for you, and to make sure the other guy’s physicists didn’t get the jump on you.

So that, that helped up until the ’70s, really.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and in particular a particular person I think was pers- had a big role in that, somebody who was the vice president of, your university actually, Vannevar Bush. When he wrote a report for Truman after the war called “Science: The Endless Frontier,” and that, it, He did something with that report from a rhetorical standpoint that I think was really important because, people like Kennedy or Pete Hegseth, or Russell Vote, these, these guys are reactionaries. They’re far right. [00:42:00] They hate modernity. They want, to repeal the 20th century and the 19th century.

That’s what they want. But there’s a lot of people who, vote for Trump and, and, and other Republicans who are-- They’re conservative, but they’re not reactionary. And, and what Bush’s report did, I think it set a rhetorical posture that made it so that even if you didn’t understand science or, and you weren’t that interested in it, or you didn’t understand, like you weren’t committed to, s- secular, secularism or, atheism or agnosticism, whatever you wanna put it you didn’t have those commitments, but you wanted to make America great.

Like, that’s what that report did. It said the best way to make America great and to help us win our military conflicts is to invest massive amounts of money in science and in education, and it worked for a lot of conservatives actually.

LEVENSON: a- and, I would say empirically [00:43:00] it worked. US wealth and power turns on its domination of world science after the Second World War. We were not the dominant player in science before the Second World War. That really is, a shockingly recent thing. But also I think there are a couple of-- one of the things Bush did is, you know, yes, he very much had a sense of the applications of s- you know, the value of the applications of science. You do science because you do all these things that affect, human circumstances directly. Our, material wellbeing, our ability to defend ourselves, our ability to grow rich, um, all the different things that, that, you know, you can point to that science in fact delivered over the last 75 years.

Uh, but he also made a separate, and I think really important claim, and it’s one that I think is still a dominating faith certainly amongst, you know, my colleagues in the sciences of more or less my [00:44:00] age. People who are, senior, you know, uh, I mean, unkindly on the downhill curve of their careers.

More accurately people who’ve been in the sciences doing, good work for 20, 30 years or more. And that is, You want to liberate science as much as possible from exactly what we were just talking about a kind of immediately teleological and ideological control. And this notion is that we should only spend money on things that we know are gonna produce, you know, good workers for the industrial- for the post-industrial age or, technologies we can use, directly next week or next year.

One of the things that Bush pointed out is that, you know, the Manhattan Project, the atomic bomb completed in 1945, turned on genuinely you know, c- purely curiosity-driven research of the previous 30 years, you know, the nature of the atom. I mean, one of the wonderful [00:45:00] things in, I think one of the really great history of science, popular history of science book, uh, the, um, Richard Rhodes book on, um, the birth of the atomic bomb I’m blanking on its exact title.

But anyway, he, he, went back in that book, and he s- he started really with the turn of the 20th century’s investigation of the true structure of the atom. Um, and, uh, you know, the findings of relativity that confirmed that energy and mass are interchangeable, which is, doesn’t help you build an atomic bomb, but it tells you why an atomic bomb is so destructive, why it produces so much, so much energy that then, you know, burns a city. all that curiosity-driven research. People, there was no expectation when Rutherford’s, bouncing particles off the nucleus of an atom that this is going to lead to anything from, nuclear power to atomic clocks to the atomic bomb, right? Similarly-

SHEFFIELD: [00:46:00] Einstein, sorry, even Einstein himself, like his theory of relativity was rejected as it’s more art than science.

LEVENSON: Yeah. I mean, it’s... And, and, now it turns out every, that lovely little mapping function you carry in that tiny computer we call a phone that we have in our pockets the accuracy of that map turns on making damn sure you’ve got general and special relativity right in your calculations as they figure out what the signal, as they figure out the signals coming down from the geolocation satellites.

It turns out that the most seemingly... And quantum mechanics, as you were saying, I mean, quantum mechanics seems it’s the realm of the very tiny. It’s, you know, you’re explaining things like, the s- initially the spectrum of a hydrogen atom, why it, emits light in the way it does, uh, when it’s excited and all that kind of stuff.

Seems, you know, in- intolerably far removed from anything a, you know, a sort of normal human being would calculate, except every transistor in every device in your house, which includes your [00:47:00] car, your refrigerator, your phone, your computer, everything turns on, a proper understanding of quantum mechanics so you can build those devices correctly.

Turns out that things that seem very abstruse have all kinds of interesting practical applications. And Vannevar Bush said, basically, you can’t predict in advance. And, you know, there’s certainly some curiosity-driven science that is just beautiful and wonderful and has no real bearing on the price of eggs.

I mean, you could say basically everything we do in cosmology and deep space astronomy is pretty much there for the beauty of it and the, sort of curio- you know, c- literally curiosity, the wonder of coming to grips with and, d- uh, deciphering this extraordinary universe we live in doesn’t really affect the price of eggs.

But you can’t predict, most of the time you cannot predict in advance, um, which piece of, I just wanna understand that thing, uh, will lead ultimately to something of extraordinary value. The classic example of this quite far removed from what we’re talking [00:48:00] about, is, this Berkeley professor and his graduate student who were, fishing for bacterial samples in Yellowstone National Park.

You know, nice work if you can do it. Free, you know, taxpayer paid for vacation in Yellowstone. And they identified, um, that was when they discovered these, uh, extremophile bacteria, who could live in, very, very hot water. It turns out the, extremophiles now extend across a whole bunch of extreme conditions.

But these were the first. And, on the one hand, it’s really cool. Life can exist in conditions we wouldn’t have imagined possible. which among other things makes the search for extraterrestrial life spicier because it turns out the range of possible planetary environments that, that something could, develop in is larger than we thought.

That’s great. More curiosity-driven science, very cool. But it also had completely unexpectedly, completely divorced from the reasons those two scientists were making that expedition, they were trying to find that stuff Uh, it turns [00:49:00] out to be, you know, the beginning, the first step in the sequence of discoveries that led to the polymerase chain reaction, which is one of the absolutely most fundamental tools in, uh, you know, the making of bio- of biotechnology manufacture of drugs.

And there is an enormous number of people who have no idea that their wellbeing, their lives are, have been preserved because, you know, two guys from Berkeley, wondered what might live downstream from a geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Who knew? That’s what Bush was defending. That’s very much what we’re not getting right now in the current administration of American science

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the thing is that the longer you have this cramped view of scientific investigation and, what it should be allowed to do the, more b- f- further behind you fall. Because, and, and that’s, that’s the real risk of, all of these policies that the Trump, the second [00:50:00] Trump administration is putting in.

And not just the, budget cuts, which are massively bad, but also, the immigration crackdowns and the free speech removals and the censorships, and the and y- trying to intimidate academic institutions

LEVENSON: Successfully, it is successfully intimidating them. I mean, just this morning I read a story about how the leaders of the American Diabetes Association kicked out of their conference six researchers, including two former presidents of the association for distributing an editorial published in the association’s own journal that criticized Trump’s, the Trump administration’s science policies.

And so you’ve got this national association of people doing research into a disease that’s becoming more and more, certainly type 2 d- diabetes diagnoses have been going up. This is a big serious area, and you have, very prominent figures in that area of research saying there’s a problem, and other leaders saying, “You cannot say that out loud.”

That’s a chilling effect. That’s very, very dangerous. And, it’s worth remembering, [00:51:00] as we were talking about Vannevar Bush, that report came out, I think, in 1950, ’51, something like that,

SHEFFIELD: 50,

LEVENSON: it led, directly to the formation of the National Science Foundation, which was a, politically difficult...

it didn’t happen. It had to come back up in a second congressional session and required a lot of of, hardcore, hard-nosed Washington politics to get it through. But, American leadership in world science is recent. It’s contingent. It turned both on funding and a welcoming of, the, the Manhattan Project was staffed by European physics, physicists to a very great extent immigrants, all of them.

And, American science over the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s attracted, the world’s best talent all coming here to develop our own scientific establishment. None of those things were inevitable. All of those can be reversed. You can cut funding. You can deny immigration. You can direct research in ways that [00:52:00] basically will not interest the, the most creative minds who will look for other, other places to work.

There is no guarantee, there is no law of nature, there’s no, power you can get down the barrel of a gun that says the United States will be the leader in scientific inquiry and the technological benefits that flow from it. we can, and I would say we are, we can blow it. It can go away, and it can go away shockingly quickly.

I mean, Germany was the leading scientific nation in many ways in, right through the ’20s and into the early ’30s. Nazi policy then destroyed, that preeminence in a very few years. And It’s just, it, there is this, I th- I think there is this naivete amongst certainly a lot of our political leaders, but I think a lot of Americans as well, in the population at large, that there’s something magical [00:53:00] about, you know, the United States.

There’s something, defies the laws of gravity, of intellectual gravity. Um, and it would be nice if it were true, but it really ain’t. I’m not sure it would be true. I think, you know, I, I think American exceptionalism is, problematic. But even, even if, your personal national pride says, “I want to be number one,” and it’s, it’s our sort of like birthright to be number one in science or whatever the answer is no, it’s not.

Yeah, you know, it has to be earned

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

LEVENSON: generation.

Business leaders uniformly agreed on the necessity of science as a civic culture

SHEFFIELD: It does. And, and the business leaders once upon a time, and the technology leaders, they understood that as well, which is why, you did see huge support for in- investments in and donations to universities by companies like IBM and Ford and GM and, all of these aerospace companies as well.

And, now you kind of see the opposite. I mean, Elon Musk himself, was the DOGE guy and going in there and [00:54:00] slashing and burning science,

uh, because it

was politically incorrect to him.

LEVENSON: Yeah, we, we’ve been learning recently as, the screw worm has, we eliminated a screw worm from the United States, I think in the ’60s, right? And did so by treating cattle and, basically pushing the disease out of our borders and eventually quite far south.

And it’s been moving north for various reasons. the, screw, the screw worm fly, the screw worms themselves are the larvae of these flies. And these are flesh-eating larvae that can infect cattle and, basically...

SHEFFIELD: Or any mammal, yeah.

LEVENSON: Yeah, and, yeah, and, do enormous damage to, horrible for any organism that, that, that acquires it.

But it, economically damaging to the beef industry if it gets into herds of cattle which it has just done in Texas after DOGE had eliminated the the folks in the US I forget, the Department of Agriculture or elsewhere, [00:55:00] that were monitoring and attempting to address the screw worm crisis.

So it’s like,

SHEFFIELD: yeah

LEVENSON: not exactly foresighted. I mean, really is Musk is really bizarre because, he, he went all in on, on getting Trump elected and he succeeded. And he proceeded to, that, that turns out to have destroyed the federal support for the infrastructure that, you know, directly and enormously benefits the Tesla Corporation.

And, all of his companies turn on, high tech and, ultimately scientific advance, and yet DOGE was insanely disruptive to to American science. It seems, this is a case where it really appears that Musk went after his own bread and butter. And it doesn’t make any sense to me, but, then I am not a master of the universe or, a multibillionaire, so perhaps I just don’t have those sort of special depths of understanding required to figure that out.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I, you’re, you’re, you’re-- I think you’re onto something [00:56:00] though. So, let’s maybe end, what’s your message to people who are in science who would just say, “Well, this facts will-- the facts will speak for themselves. I don’t have to do anything.” Everybody knows that science is good.

What, what’s your-- what would you say to them?

LEVENSON: Well, I think there are many fewer of those people who, would say that everybody knows science is good, ’cause the evidence is rolling in that not everybody knows that. I’d, say it’s terribly naive. Nothing speaks for itself. People speak for the facts or for, mute nature or what have you.

And you need to speak in ways... And it’s not simply enough to say the facts out loud. Yes, it is true, vaccines work. We understand the underlying mechanisms. They are enormously life-saving. They are the single greatest life-saving gift human beings have ever given themselves. For, you know, many, many centuries, infectious disease was the single [00:57:00] leading cause of death for, you know, basically that’s how more humans got taken out than any other, um, mechanism.

And it’s no longer the case. And it’s no longer the case for, a number of factors, but preeminently among them is the rise of vaccines. And just saying that, turns out not to be persuasive. And what’s really interesting is, you know, you mentioned Aristotle in one context earlier in this conversation.

Aristotle of course wrote the Poetics, and he had a very strong sense of, of you know, the theory of tragedy. He had a strong sense of the power of rhetoric and specifically of narrative. Rhetoric, uh, the, words organized powerfully to tell a coherent story that would both affect emotions and, remain in mind, that would stick.

And that insight, how you persuade people to, understand the things you want to understand and to do the actions you want to do and all that kind of thing, requires telling true, factually defensible, but [00:58:00] compelling stories. And, And, that’s kind of been my job for pretty much all my adult career.

And you could argue given the state of affairs in the United States now that my entire career has been a failure. But, you know, you gotta fight the fight you, you gotta fight the fights in front of you. But I would say, it’s important for people like, you know, you and me to try and present these stories from scientists to the larger engaged public, but it’s really important for scientists to do that as well, to try and understand their work not just as a series of experiments and results, but as a story they can tell, um, that has, um, you know, a beginning, a middle, and end.

Uh, some kind of heroic journey, you know? There are obstacles. You wanna figure something out, there are obstacles in your way. You do different things to overcome those obstacles. When you achieve your goal, you realize, “Okay, I’ve got this, but what new problem does that raise for me?” [00:59:00] The, actual daily life of science lends it to, to narrative description.

And scientists, I think need as much as possible to be able to express themselves in that kind of narrative to help reach people beyond the laboratory

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it means a lot more coming from them. As much as we might enjoy, touting our own work we’re not the ones in the lab, as you were saying. So

LEVENSON: I mean, look, how incredibly influential James Watson’s The Double Helix was. Lots of problems with that book. I’m actually a, a quasi-relative of Rosalind Franklin and never liked his treatment of Franklin in that book. But, what a compelling story, and how much insight into just sort of, not just the way scientists, some scientists think, but also the extraordinary feat the extraordinary value of the discovery of figuring out the structure of DNA.

Something figuring out how life tells itself, how to keep going generation after generation. That’s written in DNA. We understand [01:00:00] how it’s written in DNA because in large part, not solely, but in large part what Watson and Crick were able to do in deciphering the, structure of the DNA molecule.

And, what could have been an incredibly dry chemistry lecture turned in, in, in Watson’s hands into, this, gripping boy’s own adventure kind of, sort of picaresque tale

SHEFFIELD: Yep. Yep, Agreed. All right, well, so your book is A Pox on Fools: The True Believers, Grifters, and Cynics Who Convinced Us to Reject Vaccines. So I hope everybody can check it out. Thanks a lot.

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“We live in the worst timeline” is a phrase you often hear people say in left-leaning social spaces. It’s usually a joke, but I think it’s more than that. The truth is that, while Donald Trump is the most corrupt president in American history, democracy in this country has been at risk many times throughout its lifetime, and also that it really couldn’t be said to have fully existed until the passage of the civil rights acts of the 1960s.

The moment we’re living in is complicated. On the one hand, it is true that the United States has never had more social progress than right now. But it’s also the case that people are right to feel that things are precarious. We have to keep two things in mind at all times: Things have been worse in the past, but they can get worse if we don’t understand how they were improved.

It’s a lot to consider. That’s why I wanted to talk in this episode with Lisa Corrigan, she’s a professor of communications and gender studies at the University of Arkansas who specializes in African American and Latino history. This is her second time on the program, in her previous appearance, Lisa and I discussed why there is no “Joe Rogan of the left.” In this episode, we talk about how political change and cultural power, the relationship of conservatives to the Democratic and Republican parties, and a lot more.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:02 — How the left lost its organizing culture

13:35 — Liberals’ misplaced faith in business and capital

21:22 — The right’s ploy of lowering everyone’s expectations

35:41 — Reactionaries changed Republican political culture through media

37:30 — The importance of formal debate

42:55 — America as a young, tentative democracy

Audio Transcript

The 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 Lisa Corrigan. Hey, Lisa. Good to have you back.

LISA CORRIGAN: Thanks for having me, Matthew.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, there’s a lot going on as usual. And the, the old song about living in interesting times being a curse.

But you know what? I think a lot of people, they take that, that idea, which is really supposed to be a joke they take that too seriously. And I’m [00:03:00] constantly seeing people say things like, “We live in the worst possible timeline,” and that America’s uniquely under threat more than ever in its history and democracy’s, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And I don’t ... I think people are not, they’re not, they’re missing history when they say things like that

CORRIGAN: Oh, I agree. I mean, I think, A, this is not a nation of s- students of history. Our historical, our, our historical education is poor. People are not reading history for fun. I don’t think that they have a sense of context, and I also think it’s a function of the fact that risk has been distributed more widely right now.

So people who felt comfortable in previous recent periods, whether it was, like, during the Obama administration or during the brief respite of the Biden administration, they didn’t feel stressed out about money, or they didn’t feel like their rights were being encroached upon. I think the risk has been distributed more widely, and so more people are concerned that their comfort [00:04:00] has been threatened.

So mostly I think those concerns about, like, this is the worst timeline ever, are expressions of discomfort more than much of anything else

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and they’re certainly not in, in, in resonance with the, with the historical truth. I mean, we could even just go back to the, the, the, early 1970s, late 1960s. I mean, this was a-- that was a time when the, domestic terrorism was a very common thing, in a lot of, every few months there was some big bombing or big riot or fire or assassination. And, it’s like, which-- And it’s so, it is kind of weird to me because, like, a lot of people who are alive and are saying these things, they were alive at that time. Like, do you not remember Bobby Kennedy being killed or Martin Luther King Jr.

being killed and what happened after that? And, the Symbionese Liberation Army, all, et cetera. and like, [00:05:00] it’s, it, it, I don’t know. It’s like, normally people are supposed to remember things that happened in their lifetime. I don’t know what’s going on here, Lisa.

CORRIGAN: I mean, they’re social traumas, right? So they’re just remembered differently, and this is, in everybody’s faces. It’s very immediate. It feels like it’s happening fast because people are not just reading about it in the newspaper or watching it on the evening news. So the 24/7 news cycle is heightening their anxiety about, these compounding concerns.

But I don’t think that’s necessarily their fault. I think that that’s a product of, digital news and, the pace of modern life more than it is about their inability to understand their childhoods or how they f- you know, figure into the present. That said, I don’t think that they have an appreciation for how good Americans have it compared to much of the rest of the world.

And so there does seem to be just such a lack of [00:06:00] connection with labor and with class and with how well off the country actually is, and about how much room there is to change the way that we relate to one another and the way that we relate to money and the way we relate to resources. And it just seems like th- there’s probably space for a recalibration of that, even if it’s uncomfortable in the short term.

And I think that’s why you see so many accelerationists even on the left saying, “Oh, well, in order to get to a carbon neutral America, p- there’s gonna be some pain.” Well, yes, if you want there to be more equality, people are gonna lose comfort. They’re gonna lose, right, privilege. That’s what happens when you redistribute resources or rights.

So, I think, I think that we have a lot of really comfortable people that don’t know how to sacrifice for the greater good, and this period of our life in the United States is gonna challenge their capacity to reengage with the democratic, processes of the country, to reengage in things that [00:07:00] might be difficult for them, including sacrifice,

How the left lost its organizing culture

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I think a, a big part of the, the, the lack of historical knowledge and, and why it matters is that people, they, they, they forgot how the progress that we do have was made and that it required, as you said, it required sacrifice, but it also required doing things differently. Like I-- it seems like to me a large part of left politics kind of moved from societal organizing and, and public education and just moved over to lobbying.

And, and i-instead of trying to, to build unions or build civic organizations or tell, tell people, help them understand the value of public education and civics th- it just became, well, the government will take care of it all. And, and, and it’s such a big difference in the civic cultures of the left and the right.

[00:08:00] Having been inside both of them now, I can say that, on the right, they hate the, government. They hate civil society. Margaret Thatcher famously said, “There’s no such thing as society.” So they hate that as a governmental thing, but they love it as a mutual aid thing. And so they are constantly helping each other out.

And as an example, I, I sometimes have-- I think I’ve said it a couple times on the program here that, like when, when I was a anonymous college student who had launched a website attacking Dan Rather, Rush Limbaugh quoted from our site on the second day we were live and told people they should go visit it and that it was great.

And then whereas on the left, basically, all the, all the biggest podcasts and channels, like they just have the same five people come on their channels all the time. And so like, of course you already know what they’re gonna say, and they always say the same things, and it’s, it’s, it’s like politics as [00:09:00] therapy session rather than as change-making, seems like to me.

CORRIGAN: Well, I mean, it’s easier to do mutual aid on the conservative side if you’re relatively homogenous, and that’s been the case certainly with the GOP. And so there aren’t, like, all of these viewpoints that have to be brought in under the tent. So there’s not all this conflict resolution, there’s not all of this managing of the money, right, and trying to manage people’s feelings.

So, so conservative news media becomes self-soothing, which is why it repeats the same things over and over and over again. And I think for liberals and for leftists, it’s a much messier side because of, identity politics at mid-century and the impulse and the commitment to including multiple voices.

Well, then people are gonna yell at you because they want a different outcome, and they want, different perspectives to be, to be explored, and they want to argue about what comes next, and it’s more [00:10:00] contentious as the public spheres face. So that’s a different project entirely. But as for it happening organically, I mean, the federal government launched a war against public education at the end of the Carter administration, the beginning of the Reagan administration, and that also changed the way that liberals and leftists thought about and practiced politics because literally higher ed was totally underfunded.

Pell Grants were destroyed. Like, the entire operational functioning of public education from K through 12 to college shifted under Reagan so tremendously, and then, of course, was gutted under Bush, where funding for higher ed is not even 50% of what it was in 2008, and costs have skyrocketed because the federal government is not doing the work of funding it.

So I think that, there are a lot of different ways in which this moment is very different from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and that the projects from the left and the right are also radically different. But I think for me, at least, having a lot of different voices in the room [00:11:00] means you have to have better conflict skills, and if you want to circumvent that conflict, then you go straight to the lobbying and you go straight to Congress instead of talking to the people who are the stakeholders on the ground, because it’s easier and it feels shorter, and you’re circumventing all of that conflict.

But it doesn’t end up being a better system, and it’s not more inclusive. It’s not producing more gains. It’s just easier to justify to donors

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I think that you can see the difference in these two approaches with how the how the, the struggle for same-sex marriage rights, so marriage equality and trans rights have been conducted. Like the, the, the, the way that, that, marriage equality was pushed, it was pushed everywhere through, just civil society and, and, and just basic friendships and family members, “Hey,” standing up and saying, “Yeah, oh, you know what?

I actually am gay, and we’re... And, and I’m not going to hurt, hurt you, and you know that. You know me. And I have [00:12:00] the right to get married.” And, it was, it was something that was also really bubbled up through culture and, and authors and TV shows. And whereas, with the, the struggle for trans rights, y- I think it, it moved far too quickly into the governmental realm.

And it’s any rights that are gained through the courts, well, they can be taken away by the courts. And, and that’s a big difference, when you look at, let’s say, public national healthcare in other, other countries that have it. When you enact something like that through law, even the far-right parties in these countries have to pr- you know, at l- either pretend or actually even support it in the case of France.

Like they do. The far-right parties there do support their public healthcare system. And, so gains that are made through the courts, they’re so much more precarious. But it’s like in a lot of [00:13:00] ways, I think that left elites kind of, they had this, th- the, this great success through the courts, the Warren Court and, and the Burger Court to some degree that they kind of, were like, “Well, hey, we can still get what we want.

And so let’s, we don’t have to spend money on organizing people and helping them resolve conflicts and helping them see that their causes are linked, even if they may not understand that, the struggle for women’s rights is also linked to the struggle for, union rights or environmental protection.”

These are, these are, are not conflicting in any way really.

Liberals’ misplaced faith in business and capital

CORRIGAN: I think the real shame is that I think a lot of liberals in particular had faith that business leaders would just lean into profit motive and the obvious opportunity costs of being inclusive, and that would somehow carry the day and bridge the gap between conservative impulses and culture war backlash against [00:14:00] LGBTQ people, especially on the trans debate.

And I think today they’re very soured about the fact that business interests have not been standing up, right? And there’s been this rollback of even, I don’t know, advertising so- solidarity in the wake of the re-election of Trump, and I think that that was a bad gamble. And if they ever thought that those corporations were only going to be motivated by profit, that was a misread on their part, and probably one that was engendered through their close relationship to capital and venture capital and lobbying and, this, this apparatus of fi- campaign financing that came out of Citizens United.

And I think that has radically changed the dynamics for how we think about rights and about organizing, and I don’t think that the liberals were prepared for that at all, not even a little bit.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I don’t think so either. And I think also, as the Republican Party b- has become, successively more [00:15:00] radicalized over the decades ‘cause it, it began with just this small, well, I guess we’ll say a minority faction that, that took control in 1964 with Barry Goldwater and kind of shoved him in through, real professionalized organizing over, a divided opposition of conservatives.

But, over time, they came, the reactionaries came to control basically the entire party. And as that happened, a lot of people who were conservative just sort of came over into the Democratic side. And now those people, because they are so heavily linked to capital and, and a lot of them have very nice media perches at places like The New York Times or The Atlantic to...

In a lot of ways, it’s kind of, seems like the, a lot of the left media and political infrastructure in the United States is actually run by conservatives. And when you look at, like, even some of the most popular, media outlets, like The Bulwark, this is a [00:16:00] conservative organization, and somehow their audience is all liberals?

Like, what is that?

CORRIGAN: Infiltration? Counterprop? I mean, I think it’s really bizarre, but I also think that the right has captured the media sphere, and I think that insofar as there are liberal elites, I don’t even know that there are. There are elites who maybe vote Democrat sometimes, but it’s hard for me to see somebody even like Michael Bloomberg as, like, a liberal, even though he would definitely call himself one and a, and call himself a Democrat.

I think practically speaking, that’s cr- a crazy way to think about him as an oligarch. So I don’t know. I think it doesn’t surprise me at all that the right wing are running Democratic politics and that the Democrats bow down to their perspectives and their narratives, not just about the contemporary moment, but also the past or where we should be going in the future.

I, I don’t understand why they’re given the opportunity to drive [00:17:00] everywhere except that, the liberals don’t want to listen to the experts. They don’t want to listen to the academics, and they think that the academics are pedantic and they-- that academics make distinctions that they don’t want to hear about or they include people that they don’t want at the table or...

I mean, it’s exclusionary in a bunch of different ways. But the fact is, is that they’re terrible at imagining new futures. The liberals are terrible at it

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, and, and I think, in a lot of ways the left imagination i- in the United States, it was always impaired in a-- to a larger degree because outside the US, like in various European countries and and e-elsewhere, they... The left was kind of a-- it was, heavily linked to media in a lot of ways.

Whereas in the United States, when there began to be a more social democratic politics, it was the politicians in a lot of ways who were driving it, like FDR or Truman, or, or some of these the, [00:18:00] the less famous people who were part of that orbit. It was the politicians who were doing it, and it wasn’t intellectual and media driven.

And so when the politicians lost interest in it I think there was nobody to pick up the slack because unions, they were too focused on just their own internal affairs and didn’t understand this was something you have to work for. If you want people to be union members, you have to tell them why unions are good.

You can’t just assume that they’re gonna always ch- sign up for your, your organization. And of course, they didn’t and union membership has really declined quite a bit. And even now, like I don’t, I, I don’t see a lot of willingness on the part of, of y- various unions to speak out and create media publications to the general public.

They just don’t wanna do it. And like this is-- it’s the lobbyist mentality on the further left that has really been damaging, I think.

CORRIGAN: I [00:19:00] mean, the other thing that the Europeans had was the gun, and we had that debate start in the civil rights movement, certainly starting with Robert “Ref” Williams in North Carolina about what the role of the gun is on the left. The Black Panther Party would patrol police who were abusing motorists in California.

That’s how they began, is by reading constitutional law at police officers who were harassing Black motor-motorists. And so the entire conversation at mid-century was what is the role of violence on the left in order to safeguard and/or expand liberty for all? And once that conversation was foreclosed in the United States, then it entirely became about capital.

So if there is no way of pushing back that’s not through an entirely captured judiciary and legal system that is now so totally controlled by finance capital and by dark money, then there’s no way to actually influence politics in a way that is not at the behest of the conservatives or the reactionaries.

So you get the exact moment we’re in right now because the only [00:20:00] option available is through this super narrow lens of politics that’s controlled by right-wing financiers.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

CORRIGAN: you’re not willing to back up, your politics with m-mass protest and the possibility of violence, then the thing is not gonna change, and European countries have that.

They will burn stuff down. They will occupy their national capital, and they’re smaller and more compact, so it’s easier for them. They don’t have to travel three days to get across the country. But at the end of the day, the possibility of violence is still open as an avenue of, re-re-engineering civil life around things that matter to the people and not just the US Senate.

So I... Until that changes and people are willing to move en masse against their government, which has been captured, I don’t know that there’s some other way to arrange either the media landscape or the political landscape to be more inclusive of ideas that are actually democratic. Instead, I think we’re just doing the idea of [00:21:00] democracy as some sort of national fantasy that’s unrealized in every practical may- way.

I mean, we don’t have free and equal elections. People don’t have the right to healthcare or access to it. They don’t have any of the things that we say are part of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Those are not equally distributed. So at this point, we’re just talking about democracy as a lip service thing.

It’s fantasy

The right’s ploy of lowering everyone’s expectations

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s like a, yeah, it’s, it’s, it is virtue signaling. And, and then just this idea, and it’s, it’s, it’s all very Kantian, I think, and it’s in, in, in all the worst ways. And, and but there is, I mean, there, there is a, a tradition that is worth looking at, and that is, the, in the struggle for Black liberation it was there, that was the one area where there were a lot of media outlets that were regional and that were supporting direct actions and were, engaging directly in community politics [00:22:00] and, and local elections and, and educating people about not just the national, conversation that they were having, but also relating it to them in their personal lives.

‘Cause like, I think that that’s, has been one of the other really awful things about the, hedge funds, taking over control of media, is that they really have kind of destroyed awareness of local politics and, and, and the, and how things actually can be important and impactful to you because, like, people just have this...

There’s, there’s this natural w- way because, I mean, everybody knows who the president is, right? And so there’s a, there’s a... It’s easy to, to have an opinion about national politics, but it’s a lot harder to understand that, well, actually these things do manifest at the local level, and you need to, like in your school board or in, like, and it, and you could have, free lunches for your kid at school, or you could have lower college tuition and not [00:23:00] have to take out loans for yourself as a, 60-year-old adult to have your kid go to college.

Like, these are not things that you should have to pay for, and that in a normal society, in other countries, they don’t have to pay for these. You don’t have to do a GoFundMe because you need cancer treatment. Like, a, a... And, and this is, these are not, fantasies. Like, that’s the other thing is that, the idea of normal, like the, the, the reactionaries are constantly telling people, “Oh, it’s too difficult to have national healthcare.

It’s too difficult to have free college tuition.” No, it’s not. Other countries have done this for decades, and we did this, to a very large degree. So it’s not like this is even a ma- Like, as you were saying, the higher education budgets have just been slashed so much. But the reality is, people have still expected you to continue to go to college.

And it’s like, well,

CORRIGAN: Although that’s changing. Although that’s changing. Now [00:24:00] everybody’s supposed to be a plumber and be happy about it,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Or, or be happy to work on an assembly line or something like that. But yeah, it’s like, it’s a degrading... Like, people don’t understand that not only do you deserve better, but here’s how you can do it. And other people have done this, and so can you

CORRIGAN: But I mean, I think that that’s where things will shift. So depending on how this AI bubble bursts and what this next economic catastrophe is gonna look like, it seems to me that localization is the only path forward, and it seems like increasingly the only possibility, right? I mean, especially with environmental collapse.

So depending on what happens to the food system and depending on what happens with fuel prices as a medium-term proposition, I think it’s very possible that people are forced to reintegrate into their communities with an awareness that they’ve not had to had, have for se- really a century. I think it’s gonna be a very different kind of relationship to the local, [00:25:00] and it’s gonna restructure their attention and their care abouts and their finances and their time.

s- I don’t, I just, I think we’re on really the brink of a very different kind of lifestyle in the United States that people are not prepared to engage, and that a lot of that panic that you were talking about at the top of this segment is really coming from a latent awareness that a bunch of stuff is gonna have to change because we are far exceeding the amount of resources that we have and that we should be using, and that it’s gonna really challenge our habits in ways that are gonna change people’s perspectives on their values and the way that they’re engaging in the world.

So I don’t know. In some ways, I think that the challenges that we’re seeing right now are ine- inevitable in some ways, like they’re forcing a reckoning and a different kind of consciousness about [00:26:00] resources and relationships in the community and, governance certainly. And we haven’t had those conversations in the ‘60s.

Like, Voting Rights Act just got gutted, but people haven’t engaged with voting rights in a serious, concentrated way for 60 years. They’re like, “Oh, the VRA passed. Okay, that’s handled.” That’s like, no, it’s been chipped away at and now it’s basically gutted, and that’s gonna change so much about the way that people can access governance in really meaningful ways.

But because they’ve been so distanced from the procedures and processes that led to most of the liberal accomplishments of the 20th century, they have no idea how we got there and how we move forward, and all that’s gonna have to be reimagined without labor unions who’ve been AWOL and without the kind of deep organizing that was, essential to those, items of progress in the ‘60s.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, and, and, and you can see that, I think, with regard to fossil fuels that, Trump’s [00:27:00] Iran war has, has made costs go up so much that, now people are, are are turning back to electric and hybrid vehicles because, they’re realizing, “Oh, maybe this was a good idea after all.”

And and, and it’s like, whe-when, when you look at how China is-- it like, China is the, the, the undisputed world leader in electrical manufacturing and whatnot. And of course it is because their government made that their plan and, and, and took that, that investment. And, and whereas Trump, has tried the, the reactionary approach, which is, tariffs and then cutting government investment.

And, and of course, that doesn’t work because international trade, the only way you can really get a comparative advantage in it is to subsidize your industries. You can’t tariff your way into prosperity because it doesn’t work. All it does is raise prices on your own people. And so, and, and you’re harming your economy much worse than if you had just spent, a [00:28:00] few tens of millions of dollars on subsidies to, to domestic industry, which of course would’ve created jobs.

And then like, like you would’ve gotten the money back from international sales of these products and also employed people. Like it’s-- So China did it the right way, and they did it the right way, I’m not gonna s- it, it’s, it’s not because they’re, they’re fantastic or whatever, it’s because they don’t have any oil resources in their country, and so they realize, “Oh, well, we should get behind electric stuff because then we don’t have to be dependent on oil.”

And so of course that made sense for them. But, the, here in this country, we, we don’t have-- We have lots of oil in this country. We’re the number one oil country in the world. And, and yet, because Trump has raised the prices so much, people are now, like, it, it is, electrical vehicles, I, it’s, it’s pretty much a foregone conclusion now at this point even in this country.

CORRIGAN: I just don’t think that anybody in the White House cares about cost for consumers [00:29:00] at all. I don’t think anything in the Republican Party, as it stands, suggests that there’s an interest in decreasing costs for consumers. I don’t think that’s part of their perspective on decision-making. I don’t think it’s in any way about what’s best for the country.

I think it’s entirely personal enrichment. And so I don’t think any of the decisions that are coming are gonna in some way improve life for the consumer. I think it’s all bad from here out. I don’t think there are any decisions about resources that are gonna be n- net positive for the consumer while these folks are running the country.

And even after the fact, I don’t know that we’ll ever get to a place where there’s even a veneer of improving life for the general population as a guiding principle of governance. We’re so far s- afield from that. So, I... yeah, China, China’s gonna be competitive because they’re like, “At the end of the day, we’re gonna have to supply our own [00:30:00] energy,” period, point-blank.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah

CORRIGAN: the US is like, “We’re gonna be isolationist, and we’re gonna let the, top 10 dudes in the White House just frack out as much money as they can from every avenue they possibly can in short-term deals that make them money as a family,” and that’s it. And it, the rest of it is not gonna matter for the American people, and I don’t know how long it’s gonna take for folks to wake up and recognize that that’s what’s happening, but it is definitely what’s happening.

And I don’t w- there’s no mechanism to unfuck that

SHEFFIELD: Hmm. Yeah

CORRIGAN: nothing, there’s no accountability to change that. Congress has abrogated their duties. Even with the midterm elections, I can’t imagine we’re gonna somehow see, like, consumer protection being, like, a number one issue. There is no economic framing from the Democratic Party at this point that is coherent for a vision of the future that is responsive to any of the aspects that we’ve just covered, even in the [00:31:00] last, like, five minutes of the show. They have no narrative. They have nothing

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s because, at the end of the day, I, I don’t... they, they’re, they’re not, they don’t believe in progress. I mean, like, that’s really what it comes down to. But at the same time, they have left this gaping political hole. And, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani, they are feeling it, and, and people love it. Like, that’s, like, that’s the thing to, really look forward to. Like, these, these Trumpers are so incompetent and so corrupt and so selfish and so malicious that, if you can’t beat them, then you are seriously incompetent. And, and so... And, and like you saw in New York, like the, that was after Mamdani got the, the Democratic nomination.

The, the [00:32:00] conservative Democratic class, the, the capitalist class, they refused to go along with it. So much for blue m- no matter who. And but, but it didn’t work because, people, people understood that that was not what, what, what the city needed. And, and now I mean, people, they, they approve of Mamdani much more than, than he got in his vote total.

so

CORRIGAN: definitely. He’s exciting, and I think that he is a blueprint in New York, but I don’t know, Mamdani cannot win in the South , like, there are whole swaths of America, especially rural America, that are not interested in what Mamdani and Ocasio-Cortez were talking about. And so that rural-urban divide is gonna be part of, the problem for organizing moving forward, even though I also think that the South has been gerrymandered and there is a lot of possibility here even among conservatives.

But it does not gonna, [00:33:00] it’s not gonna look like New York at all.

SHEFFIELD: y- yeah, no, I don’t think so. But, at the same time, there even are, politicians in some of the southern states like Jon Ossoff and like,

CORRIGAN: Coover

SHEFFIELD: and yeah, and, and also, we’ll see what happens with James Talarico, but, he, he’s, he’s doing that, well, and we’ll see.

I mean, even, people, Yeah, I, I mean, yeah, like there’s, it, it, the dialect has to be different and the way, and the issues that you focus on have to be different. But, a lot of the basics like these people are corrupt, they don’t care about you and I think we deserve good things, and here’s how we can get them.

Like these are, these are pretty e- basic things, and yet they’re, they’re, they’re easy, as a con- concept, but, apparently it’s a lot harder for d- for a lot of Democrats to wanna do it. but it’s, I think it’s more a matter of will, not, than a matter of sheer [00:34:00] difficulty.

CORRIGAN: Oh, I think it’s about RICO. I think that there’s so many Democrats that are wound up into what have become these huge, mafia capital deals that the problem is that they are implicated. I think it’s willful in that direction, and I think that the only thing that’s going to unravel the corruption is gonna be RICO-style massive racketeering cases like the ‘80s.

I mean, and I, I really do think that the problem, especially with the congressional class of Democrats, is that so many of them are implicated in that, and they’ve taken money from the same sources, and they’ve been to the same parties, and they’ve trafficked, trafficked in the same kinds of malfeasance.

And so one, one thing that I think is that high contrast races are gonna draw more people into, formal politics. But I think that the organizing game is so far outside of formal politics that the real transformative stuff is gonna be in [00:35:00] local communities, in the school board races, right? In the state legislatures.

And I think recapturing state legislatures is really where the money’s at for what a transformational future for America looks like. It’s just really hard for me to see how Congress is a path towards a more equitable future. I just don’t think so at all. But I think the state legislatures are a place for radical transformation.

Most of them were bought out by the Koch brothers in the 2010s, and I think that they can be flipped back actually, and I think the people are ripe for it. But it’s gonna take a younger demographic, and it’s gonna take different messaging, and it’s, and it’s gotta get outside of the dog whistles than, race panic, sex panic

Reactionaries changed Republican political culture through media

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and, and it’s also, a lot of it does have to, to have media components as well. Like, because again, like I, I, I think the Democrats the left political culture such as it is or was, it was politician dominated rather than values and, [00:36:00] and intellectual dominated. And like that was, I think the, the, the really the engine of success for the reactionaries in the Republican Party is that they built...

So like, they as a coal- they built that coalition. Like the idea of them being more unified, that only happened because they created a media culture that told people, “Look, you like Christian nationalism. Well, it’s easier to have Christian nationalism if the government is reduced to zero and public education is, is eliminated because then, your Christian schools can step right in and everyone will want them and you won’t have to impose them.

Be- they’ll come to you and will make you rich by, by stealing public education dollars and giving them to your school.” So like, like that’s the kind of, of coalition buil- and they, and they, they built it up as a concept which, which was called fusionism. And, and nothing really like that has been done from the media [00:37:00] infrastructure standpoint.

And so, you do have Democrats as this y- coalition of groups that kind of all hate each other and think that only their viewpoint of the world is correct. So you, you got people who only think that everything is racism, everything is sexism, everything is capitalism.

And it’s like, well, actually, w- why can’t you all be right? That these are, that these are, are, are bad things that you can work to oppose and that everybody’s liberation is linked.

The importance of debate

CORRIGAN: I mean, I, I hear that. I, I was a high school and college debater, and I will tell you that I think you can mark the decline of that kind of, mm, generous public sphere, rigorous even public sphere with the decline of high school and college debate. And I think that the problem now is that we don’t have the long-form journalism.

We don’t have the opinion programs. We don’t have public debates. [00:38:00] And so the ability to sit with long-form arguments and interrogate values is so far afield of the everyday American’s experience of mediation that the thing that draws them back in is something like the Joe Rogan, which we talked about the last time I was here, and, these programs that are, I don’t know, just such a basic version of the kinds of conversations that used to happen just generally in the public sphere.

And people are rusty, and they don’t have the ability to interrogate values together in a group in a way that is satisfying to them or is politically productive. Like they’re just not, that is not part of what the demos is doing. Those skills are lost right now. And with the attacks on, higher education and K through 12 and like the book banning and all this culture war stuff, it’s disincentivizing those hard conversations across what are, sm- small [00:39:00] minutiae concerns that can build a conversation that can rise to the level of values, and we’re just not there.

So it’s all of this fracking resources out of the state, right, into private hands instead of larger conversations about where we’re going together as a culture. In some ways, I think that that’s why immigration has returned, right, as the major focus of ire. Yeah, 100%.

SHEFFIELD: The foreigners.

CORRIGAN: that.

Mm-hmm. Absolutely. Absolutely

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and I think you’re, you’re right, regarding Rogan, that he’s kind of making a very degraded and stupefied version of the public debates that we used to have that were much more commonplace in the country.

And people do want that. Like, I think that that’s, that is a thing that maybe a lot of people on the left haven’t understood. It’s like, “Oh, well, I don’t want to go on Rogan because I’m platforming him.” And it’s like, Rogan has 100 times as many people as [00:40:00] you do. You are not platforming Joe Rogan by going on his show.

It is the opposite, in fact.

CORRIGAN: Bernie knows that. Bernie gets that.

SHEFFIELD: yeah, he did. And, and now, to her credit, I have to say that Kamala Harris had, actually did admit that she wished that she had done it. And of course, she should have. And again, like, you don’t have to, you don’t have to agree with someone 100% to go on their, on their program.

You just have to think that there are people that are there. Like, that you just have... You’re just acknowledging this is not a completely evil person. And, Joe Rogan’s not that great. He’s not a great guy. But you know what? Hey, he’s not a fascist Nazi. So you should talk to him.

And that’s, I t- I think that that is something that, you know again, of this, this lobbying-focused culture that kind of really did set in among the further left people in, in, in the country, is that, they’re like, “No, I... We only have to just lobby the legislatures and make the lawsuits, and then we’ll win.”

And it’s like, well, that’s actually not democracy, guys. I hate to tell you [00:41:00] that. But you know, if you wanna protect democracy, you actually have to practice it. And both in talking to the public and listening to the public also, but then also helping people have a career in advocating for your ideas.

Like, that’s another thing that the right does so well. Like, they are just... They love throwing money at people who, who agree with them. And, on the left, it’s like the opposite. People are like, “Oh, this person, they’re trying to raise money for their organization. I should be suspicious of them.

They’re a grifter.” And it’s like, what, how does this, how do you think things happen? Like, how do you think journalism is produced? How do you think that organiza- civic organizations exist? It’s not like magic free money from the government. Sorry, guys.

CORRIGAN: I mean, I’m a Gen Xer, and I came up through Republican politics in my Republican state that only had Republicans, and I will tell you, there were no Democrats that were gonna pipeline women into the party in the ‘90s. None. Anywhere. None. Every [00:42:00] woman my age that’s worked in politics as long as I have, all of them had to find their path through the Republican pipeline first because Democrats were unwilling to work with women.

I’m sorry, it just was that way. They didn’t wanna platform women. They didn’t wanna include people of color. They didn’t wanna include immigrants. They were totally exclusionary. And so, like, that was 30 years lost of pipelining into all of the things that they wish that they had captured because they did not want to do that work, and now they’re behind, and so they want a shortcut, and it’s just lazy

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it is. And, but, and yet, despite all of their incompetence and failures we have had real progress as, as Americans in this country and, people... the, the franchise has expanded and, marital rape is illegal and at least-- And, and of course, all of this is just for now because, of course, Russell Vote and people like him they, they, they have their, they have their thoughts.

America as a young, tentative democracy

SHEFFIELD: Um, but th- in light of that progress and this [00:43:00] is why, I, I, I was ki- why I don’t like this worst timeline type of rhetoric. Like the... I, I, I was just talking with a, a friend of mine about, the, the misogynist commentators like Andrew Tate and, and some of these other manosphere-type people.

And it’s like, yes, it’s true that, their rhetoric is, probably more concentrated and toxic than a lot of past commentators have been. But the reality is that the values that, and ideas that they espouse, those were the mainstream ideas. Like they, they’re, they are openly talking about, “Yes, we should go back to getting rid of marital rape laws.

We should go back to, we should eliminate all sexual harassment laws, it’s great to be able to have to grab your coworker’s breast or whatever.” Like, that’s what they’re saying. Like, they’re, they’re not actually trying to do something that is, like uniquely, awful in society.

[00:44:00] No, they’re, they’re, they’re this way in- because they lost. And, and so they’re more toxic, yes. But, all... You just have to turn on a ‘90s, teen movie, and the way that women are talked about in those movies, the way that, sexual women are, just degraded and dismissed as moronic sluts who can be exploited by any man who wants to exploit them and, rape is funny.

Like this is what these guys want. And, and like we should, we should, we should at least take some solace in what has been accomplished and understand it in that context, but also understand we have to work to keep that and keep moving the ball forward. That’s a lot. I’m sorry. But yeah, go... W- whatever you wanna pick out of that.

CORRIGAN: it, it was a good rant. I mean, no, I-- you can pick out any John Hughes movie, and it’s a, it’s super objectionable from a-any [00:45:00] serious perspective, right? So you’re right that there’s been some progress, at least in representation, and there’s been some legal progress, but I just worry about overstating the case.

Like, if America’s a democracy, which is a big question for me, it’s only really been a democracy since ‘64.

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

CORRIGAN: It’s not 60 years we’ve tried to do it. So everything about it right now feels very teenagery. Like these are just baby ideas and baby steps and, immature decisions and immature politics. So when I’m feeling very generous about the political moment, it is leading me to suggest that we’re just so new at politics as a nation, that all this stuff is very nascent and unformed, and it’s unformed adults that are saying these things, and it’s, half-assed media ecology, and it’s tantrum-throwing oligarchs, and it just strikes me as [00:46:00] so politically immature, and I think that that’s how much of the world sees it, too.

And that perspective, I think, could be instructive if the people in the rooms that w- you and I are not in could hear that, to be like, “Oh, the rest of the world thinks you’re a baby. That’s, those are baby ideas. That’s radically immature. Bless your heart. That dog don’t hunt.” Right? And so I, I don’t know. I think the way out of that doomerism right now is a sense that the country’s so immature, and these ideas are so half-baked, and their solutions were so underfunded, and that there’s so much room for improvement.

And to start from there’s so much room for improvement, let’s try and improve, is a better spot than, it’s all lost, which of course it’s not. We’re gonna lose a lot more, and things are gonna radically change, I’m sure. And also, that creates [00:47:00] space for potential and new interest convergence and different kinds of conversations and opportunities for collaboration, and you can’t have one without the other.

But ultimately, it, it reads to me just as radical immaturity

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, so much, yeah, elite left theories of politics, they are extra-extraordinarily immature and and like, I mean, that, and that’s one of the other kind of asymmetries between the right and the left in the US is that the right wing has a very sophisticated understanding of how democratic politics works, but a very poor...

Well, they don’t care about it. They don’t want it. But they understand, in other words, how to talk to the public. And they understand, way how... So, like, on the left, the debate continually between the two progressive and liberal factions tends to be, “Well, your issues are a liability.” Like each side is saying that, right?

And, and the reality is the public doesn’t even know [00:48:00] about the issues.

CORRIGAN: Yeah

SHEFFIELD: and, and I just found a poll that the Pew Research Center did in 2010 that really illustrates this, I think, more than anything I could ever say, which is, so 2010, it was June of 2010. Joe Biden had been the vice president for a year and a half. 41% of Americans did not, could not name him as the vice president. And so, when-- So the idea that the public knows about the particulars of your issues or a particular ad that your candidate ran, no, they do not. They don’t know what your ideas are. They don’t even know who the vice president is.

So, like, it, that, that underscores your point, though, like the, of just this, we are a, a, a democracy that is very immature and and the people who are supposed to be protecting it are similarly immature and need to understand that the biggest menace [00:49:00] to democracy is ignorance and mediocrity.

That’s what i- and, and overcoming that and struggling against that has to be your number one endeavor. If you want to have any kind of other progress, you have to pr- you have to educate, and you have to be there, and you have to, to explain and to listen. And, and otherwise it’s not gonna work.

CORRIGAN: No, I think Americans are living the unexamined life, and I think politics here is basically forced teaming where people wear their jersey and that’s the team they’re on, and that’s the level of engagement that they give politics. And if that’s the case, then the solutions look really different, right?

Than they would if you had an engaged population. So I think if you can bring more people into politics, into conversations that create meaning for them, right, where they feel engaged and seen and heard, then, the way that we do politics in the country changes, whether that’s on a local level or [00:50:00] on a national level.

But without that, it’s gonna continue to be the same immature stuff that we’ve al- always seen. Yeah

SHEFFIELD: all right. Well, you’re, you’re coming up on your hard out here, Lisa.

This has been a, a good discussion. We could go on for a lot longer, I think. But for people who wanna keep up with your stuff why don’t you, plug whatever you want here and, and then we’ll get you out.

CORRIGAN: And they can follow me @DrLisaCorrigan on Bluesky, and they can read either “Prison Power” or “Black Feelings,” both published by the University of Mississippi Press

SHEFFIELD: Okay, sounds good. All right. Good to have you back again. Good to see you.

CORRIGAN: Great to see 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 theoryofchange.show, where we have the video, audio, and transcript of all the episodes. And if you are a paid subscriber to the program, you have unlimited access to the archives, and I thank you very much for your support.

You can become a paid subscriber if you go to patreon.com/discoverflux, or you can go to [00:51:00] flux.community as well if you want to subscribe on Substack. And if you’re watching on YouTube, please do click the like and subscribe button to get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot for your support.

I’ll see you next time

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Donald Trump is in serious political trouble. His approval ratings are even lower than they were after the Capitol Putsch, as independent voters have turned against him. He’s even began losing support from fellow Republicans as well, which is a new thing in his political career. It’s easy to see why: tariffs have increased inflation, his war on Iran has been a disaster, gas prices are up significantly, and people are upset about his desecration of American landmarks like the White House and the Kennedy Center.

If you had paid attention during his first term, you’d have seen that Trump has wanted to take over Greenland, bomb Iran, and tariff the entire world for a very long time. But many of the people who voted for him in 2024 did not pay attention, and now they’re feeling betrayed, claiming that they voted for none of this.

The Republican Party is hollowing out from the inside, but despite this reality, Democrats are even less popular than Trump because they have no affirmative vision and largely refuse to run on the policies their voters actually want, such as universal healthcare and ending financial support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

So what happens next? No one knows for sure, of course, but to ponder the future, I thought it would be worth looking to the past with my good friend Rick Perlstein who is one of the best historians of the Republican party. His first book on Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential campaign is being released in a 25th anniversary edition, and he’s got another one in the works that we talk about in our discussion.

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

• Kamala Harris lost because Democrats don’t have a political ecosystem

• The economy has collapsed for the middle class, Democrats must admit this and act accordingly

• How the American left became post-political, and how to change that

• Even Democrats who hate him can learn a lot from Zohran Mamdani

• Caving to conservative religious fears does not work electorally

• There is no ‘Joe Rogan of the left’ because Democrats stopped being interested in public debate

• As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive—and less successful electorally

• The self-proclaimed ‘popularists’ aren’t doing political science

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction
11:21 — What happens to politically homeless former Trump supporters?
22:31 — The Iran war and Republican antisemitism
28:00 — Democratic decline and the New Deal legacy
39:52 — Politics as teaching
48:35 — Perlstein’s new book: The Infernal Triangle
53:46 — The U.S. left does not practice democracy in its own affairs

Related Content

• Kamala Harris lost because Democrats don’t have a political ecosystem

• The economy has collapsed for the middle class, Democrats must admit this and act accordingly

• How the American left became post-political, and how to change that

• Even Democrats who hate him can learn a lot from Zohran Mamdani

• Caving to conservative religious fears does not work electorally

• There is no ‘Joe Rogan of the left’ because Democrats stopped being interested in public debate

• As Republicans have radicalized, Democrats have become more passive—and less successful electorally

• The self-proclaimed ‘popularists’ aren’t doing political science

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

11:21 — What happens to politically homeless former Trump supporters?

22:31 — The Iran war and Republican antisemitism

28:00 — Democratic decline and the New Deal legacy

39:52 — Politics as teaching

48:35 — Perlstein’s new book: The Infernal Triangle

53:46 — The U.S. left does not practice democracy in its own affairs

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: It looks like Donald Trump’s political polling ratings are the lowest that they have been at least [00:03:00] up until right after January 6th it looks like. he’s lost the independent vote whereas he has consolidated the Republican electorate to some degree. But he’s lost a lot of them too, it looks like because of his Iran war. And it doesn’t look like, at least as we’re talking today, there seems to be no end in sight for this.

He promised to be something other than a regular Republican and he basically, he’s done everything that your typical Republican does: war in the Middle East, tax cuts for rich people, and then defunding education. And you are a historian, so you have seen these patterns, have you not?

RICK PERLSTEIN: Well, what I always tend to tell newspaper reporters, frequently New York Times newspaper reporters, when they call and ask me for some kind of comparison or parallel or compare or [00:04:00] contrast to other patterns in American electoral history is that if you’re limiting your aperture to the history of American politics inc- under conditions of fascist leadership, you are making a category error.

That we have so much overlapping system collapse. In other words, the very basic idea of politics as the study of power and its application, winning it and applying it. If you’re understanding it according to the categories of, constitutional governance, elections, coalitions, you’re leaving out a whole lot of stuff that we don’t quite understand yet.

So, I’m not even sure how you can explain it or understand it according to past patterns within American coalitions. I mean, just to give one example, how many people within the Trump coalition are so diehard, that when [00:05:00] they get down to the hard kernel, they won’t accept any election result, right?

And then you have this kind of chaotic situation that certainly nothing out of the 20th or 19th century can make sense, or maybe the 19th century, right? Maybe the 1860 election, right? So, I just always ask people to kind of step out on the high wire, and consider the possibility that our very categories, are having a hard time making sense of this.

Just to give an example, as you know from a person who’s spent time in right-wing world, there’s two guns for every American citizen, and a lot of them are in the hands of people who, believe that they’re, they exist to fight tyranny, and people like you and I are the tyrants.

So what happens when this reaches the end of the road? There’s alienation with the last attempt to kind of redeem the unredeemable, to achieve that prelapsarian state that, conservatism promises to people who, go to [00:06:00] politics because just life doesn’t make sense to them.

what happens then? as far as, elections and, voting, right? Of course, as the Republican… people running the Republican Party are working hard to make elections not matter, right? And you don’t have a constitutional republic if people don’t accept election out-outcomes like, Trump has never accepted the election out-outcome in 2020.

SHEFFIELD: Well, or in 2016, if you recall, when he lost to Ted Cruz in Iowa. Remember that? He said that he– it was that Ted Cruz had cheated.

PERLSTEIN: Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And Fox News, if you’ll recall, when they called the the the election for Joe Biden m- because of the results in Arizona they lost a colossal part of their support because they dared, tell the truth about an election. And a lot of their business was picked up [00:07:00] by, Newsmax and OAN until Fox adjusted and adopted the Dominion voting machine conspiracy theory, right?

Maybe to their consternation, but they didn’t lose a lot of business once, all those discovery texts and conversations that, Fox News personalities were proven to have directly lied about what they thought about Donald Trump on the air, right? So, we’re, we’re, we’re, we’re living in a hall of mirrors

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

PERLSTEIN: and

SHEFFIELD: Well, I think–

PERLSTEIN: not a Newtonian situation.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and I, I think that that is– Yeah, that’s an important point, and it’s something that I think even now a lot of people on the broader, center to left still don’t get. That, the– for the hardcore Republican base, this is not, just politics. This is spiritual warfare, literally, as they call [00:08:00] it.

And that, they see, the existence of humanity at stake in every single election and in their support for Donald Trump, that even if they don’t like

PERLSTEIN: some of the– Yeah, even some of the smartest, most well-informed places are kinda failing us. One of my favorite shows is NPR’s On the Media, and I just started listening to the, the latest episode. And they pointed out, they had, an episode about how, what does it mean that a lot of conservatives, conservative Christians are beginning to entertain the ass- possibility that Donald Trump is the, quote-unquote, “anti-tri-trust.”

Anti-Antichrist, right? Antichrist. And the guy kind of was interviewed and said, “Didn’t they notice how bad he was before?” And it showed that they don’t understand the theological concept of the Antichrist, which is that the Antichrist for- Disguises himself as a guy who’s gonna achieve all these wonderful things, and then halfway through the deal turns [00:09:00] around and says, “No, by the way, I’m the Prince of Darkness,” right?

So the fact that Trump sucked is actually, Or the, the fact that they loved Trump, is more evidence of why they might consider him the Antichrist. I mean, this stuff is very strange, devious stuff, right? When it comes to people who are abandoning Donald Trump and MAGA, well, one thing to consider is what that means is not that they’re abandoning MAGA and supporting Democrats, constitutional government, liberals.

In the case of the Groypers and supposedly, and these, these, these, there was an article in The New Yorker suggesting that, most young congressional staffers, Republican congressional staffers identify with Nick Fuentes, there’ll be a lot of people who say that Donald Trump failed because he wasn’t authoritarian enough.

SHEFFIELD: That is what Fuentes explicitly said.

There is something that is a little bit different though in that you do have people like Alex Jones and, [00:10:00] who are, who are now become– who have become anti-Trump, and, and most importantly, he is attacking them.

So he allowed many Never Trumpers, to come back. Of course, they were not Never Trump, as it turns out. But, like, once you, once you’re gone, the way that, he’s never forgiven Thomas Massie, for instance, or Marjorie Taylor Greene.

And they, es- especially Greene would, she was trying to grovel for a while, but it didn’t work, because she had a position that he really, you know, he, he, he loves war in Iran. In fairness to Trump he was always actually consistent on how much he wanted to go to war in Iran, and how much he loved m- missiles and bombing Iranians.

PERLSTEIN: ’80s when he said we can just take Karg Island and… Yeah

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so like they weren’t paying attention. But like, I mean, it, they, [00:11:00] it’s an e- it really is an example though, that issue of, of how even the people who, thought that they were the most devoted to him, that they– he, he had suckered them.

And, and that like everyone is a sucker for Donald Trump and, and, and, or in his mind, everyone’s a sucker.

And if they’re not one now, then maybe they will be later.

What happens to politically homeless Trumpists?

PERLSTEIN: What do you think happens to, like, a politically homeless person who revered Trump, with kind of a Führerprinzip-like reverence? I mean, what, what do you think are the kinda various kinds of off-ramps, kinda knowing folks who, have been living in that mentality?

SHEFFIELD: Well, I think– So the, the model, the safest model for that type of person is what happened after the, the national embarrassment of the Scopes Monkey trial,

PERLSTEIN: Mm-hmm. Yeah, they, leave politics.

SHEFFIELD: They leave politics and, and they b- you know, actually take the Bible seriously of what Jesus said, that, [00:12:00] “My kingdom is not of this world.”

And that they focus, on their own lives and, trying to get away from society as much as possible, get off the grid. Like that’s, it, it’s not a healthy mental

PERLSTEIN: Better for us.

SHEFFIELD: But it’s better for the country and it’s better for them too, frankly, because they didn’t like anybody.

Even, they, they haven’t even with Trump, like they still haven’t liked their fellow citizens. So this is better for everyone if that’s what they do. And in, in an actual more democratic system, they have the right to do that. Like, nobody’s gonna bother them. And it looks like nobody’s gonna k- you know, pass gun laws either, so, they can just go off and do their thing.

So like that’s the safe version of how this ends. But you know, there’s, there’s lots of other unsafe scenarios and, and I think one of the things that, that, that seemed maybe every so often, it makes me wonder if, if in the back of their [00:13:00] minds, the Trump White House people have wondered if they have unleashed, this violent core of wackos onto society, and that that’s part of why he keeps getting assassination attempts, because sometimes they’re his former supporters who are doing that.

PERLSTEIN: Yeah, one of the things that’s happening in my life now is my first book on Barry Goldwater that came out in 2001 is coming out in like a 25th anniversary edition, yeah, in December. And I wrote a new introduction kind of what did the Barry Goldwater movement mean in the age of Trump? And I kind of reread it for the first time in several decades.

And I’d had this kind of lag, this kind of frustration in the back of my mind that I saw a lot more stuff in [00:14:00] the archives that betokened the people who were running the Barry Goldwater campaign, the actual official campaign, being terrified that they had opened a Pandora’s box and always having to put out these fires from these local groups claiming the authority of the Goldwater campaign who were insane, right?

And, just to one example, one, one group, like, one group in Phoenix, I think they call themselves Americans for Goldwater, were broadcasting what they claimed was a conspir- conspiracy to blow up all 50 state capitals and arrange symbol, sig- signal that’s what the Soviet Union was gonna do.

And they were always kind of chasing after these terrify peop- terrifying people and saying, “Don’t use Goldwater’s name.” Right? And I was afraid that that wasn’t in there, but when I reread it, I was like, “Oh, wow, this kind of actually is all in there,” but the, the, the, the kind of the narrative that I thought I was telling in my head was these establishment people winning and prevailing over the crazy people, right?

[00:15:00] And kind of creating a framework within the logic of mainstream politics for a Reagan to win, right? And more and more, I’ve been haunted by, There’s a biography of William F. Buckley that was written by John Judis. It’s kind of the first biography of William F. Buckley, and it’s quite good. I think it came out in the ’90s.

And there’s a footnote in there in which he found a line in one of William F. Buckley’s letters to a friend, that he was afraid that what Goldwater’s campaign was unleashing was, he says, he uses the Russian word, an American Raskolniki, like Ra- Raskolnikov, like in, in like in Crime and Punishment. Now, Raskolnikov, if you’ll recall the novel, is this, he’s basically a, a massively online kind of pseudo-philosopher who lives in his mother’s basement and plays video games all the time on Twitch, [00:16:00] and fantasizes about, an assassination which will prove to the world that he’s a Nietzschean superman, right? And what William F. Buckley seems to suggest is kind of what Steve Bannon did, which is basically politicize all these profoundly alienated people, right?

What was Steve Bannon’s original political act, right? He understood that when he was selling… He had a business selling in, in-game currency, right, way back in the early, 2010s, that this was a group of people who were ready to be mobilized in kind of a pseudo-fascist kind of formation, and he saw Donald Trump as the guy who could do it, right?

So this idea that once you kind of, license, the most alienated people in society to understand their redemption as political through the vector of an authoritarian movement, you’re doing something really, really scary. [00:17:00] William F. Buckley understood that. I think he saw it time and again, and that’s why he was so careful and so busy to kind of police the boundaries of respectability and say, “We’re not gonna win unless we, turn away from violence-” segregationists.

we’re not gonna win unless we turn away from the John Birch Society and the idea that a beloved American figure like Eisenhower is an agent of the communist conspiracy. And I think that’s always been a danger. Now we know that there’s a wonderful historian in n- at Willamette College named Seth Cotlar, and he’s been doing

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, he’s a friend of mine, he’s been on the show.

PERLSTEIN: Seth Cotlar points out is that, like, in the ’80s and ’90s there was this magazine called The Spotlight that was run by this, vicious conspiratorial anti-Semite named Willis Carto that had, like, five or six times the pers- the subscriptions of National Review.

And then if you look at it, it looks exactly like, a Newsmax or an OAN looks like now, right? And we’ve talked about this a lot, there’s this [00:18:00] very dark gothic strain in American politics, and for the longest time, we’ve been depending on sort of the norms of the people in charge to understand that there’s a, there’s a kind of demagoguery that you just don’t dare, because we saw what happened in places like, Germany and Italy and South America, in the 1970s.

And now that those demons are out of the box, I hope elections can contain that, right? But my fear is that there are so many people who are so, out of touch with institutions, with reality, right, that just all kinds of crazy things happen that when civilizations start to unravel. Now, that said, we can still talk about elections.

They’re still important. It’s better to win them than to lose them. It’s better to strong, have a strong coal- coalition than a weak coalition, because I think that the potential in weak electoral outcomes for the authoritarian side, you do, I think, demobilize people, and they just [00:19:00] decide they’re gonna, do video games instead of politics.

So let’s go back to the original question maybe, and talk about, what kind of electoral coalitions are lining up now that the inevitable happens. Another thing is this is almost exactly what happened in the fifth year of George W. Bush’s presidency, when Iraq started going off the rails.

And for him, the the catalyst was when he tried to do comprehensive immigration reform and suddenly discovered that you can’t say, “Be scared of 9/11, brown people because of 9/11,” and then suddenly turn it off and say, “No, we wanna invite more Mexicans into the country.” So, it was inconceivable after George W.

Bush’s electoral victory in 2004 that this cult he had around him in the conservative movement and the Republican Party could possibly break up. But it was, by 2007, it was utterly incinerated, and you began to have people saying George W. Bush is, well You probably did have people saying he was the [00:20:00] Antichrist.

Certainly, I’ve– I have lots of stuff from freerepublic.com of people saying that he was, working for the globalists and was an op, so, but anyway, it’s better to win than to lose, so maybe we can talk about the electrical stuff now, having gi- my long throat clearing about, all the apocalypses to come.

SHEFFIELD: wasn’t thinking of it in terms of elections, just in terms of groups. Because, so I– One of the, to your point about the kind of Trump opening the Pandora’s box even further that, that Buckley and his crew had opened previously. like that’s the story of the Republican Party is the box just keeps opening more and more and more.

And, so but a lot of these people that have… th- there is a weird paradox because, like th-th-this isn’t a unifying group. I think we have to, to make sure to say that, because a lot of the, these further right, or anarchist type [00:21:00] people, some of them are, Christian, violent Christian supremacists.

Some of them are ap… Yeah. Some of them are, just people who don’t really know much of anything about, about politics. All they know is that their life sucks, and they, they blame whatever, group people on YouTube tell them to blame. So in this case, it might be women.

in many cases it’s women’s fault that everything is this way, that my life sucks. And and so and they don’t really know anything about ideology, so they don’t care about, foreign policy or tax cuts or whatever. Like, they don’t have any money. So like, to tho- those topics are utterly meaningless to them.

They don’t care about them. and so and, and the thing about Trump that I think was, was, was unique as a Republican, because they’ve been seeking someone like him, the Republican consulting class. They’ve wanted someone [00:22:00] like him for, decades in that he was a celebrity he was somebody who was not very intelligent, and everyone knows that that he’s not, not that smart. And, and that’s actually an asset though for a lot of his fans, I think.

PERLSTEIN: Oh, yeah, definitely.

SHEFFIELD: That they see… That they might, they feel

PERLSTEIN: It’s identity politics, it’s, it’s, like these, these, these, these swells and smart-asses have been putting one over me, on me for decades, and, now one of us is in charge

The Iran war and Republican antisemitism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. And and so I think though that the, the Iran war, like that’s it, it’s, they’ve also, the Republican consulting class has spent, so many decades kind of cultivating a low-level antisemitism as well. And now you have Trump literally saying, or sorry, Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, literally saying, “Well, Israel kind of bullied us into doing this war.”

PERLSTEIN: [00:23:00] Right.

SHEFFIELD: it, it, this is, it was, this is Nick Fuentes’ dream to have a politician say that.

PERLSTEIN: Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: and and it, and for all we know it, that it might even be true in this case,

PERLSTEIN: mean, it’s basically Netanyahu is trying to bull- tried to bully American presidents into this war,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. So he’s been…

PERLSTEIN: been a Netanyahu, and he finally has found someone who’s dumb enough to take him up on the offer.

SHEFFIELD: Exactly, yeah. And, and, and of course, just like all the past presidents had said to Netanyahu, “Well, your intelligence doesn’t look very good. You say it’s gonna be a cakewalk, that it’s gonna be over quick, they’re all gonna be dead, and they’ll surrender. No we don’t think so.” And of course, as you said, Trump is the o- is the first one dumb enough to actually take that shit seriously.

And, and it, and it makes no sense. Like, there’s this peop- people have some people at least have cultivated this idea that the Israeli intelligence oper- apparatus is just omnipotent and knows everything, and it’s like, are you forgetting [00:24:00] October 7th? Like, that was right in their backyard where they supposedly have all these assets.

Do you really think that they would know what’s going on in Iran?

PERLSTEIN: No, that’s playing into their own hubris.

SHEFFIELD: It is. And so, but you know, like, so this, this low-level antisemitism that Republican politics has be- kind of, built itself on to a large degree Trump has played into that. And, and so, it’s a, in a way that I don’t know, that he can really, even if he somehow manages to get the war over Quickly.

I don’t think that he can come back from that I don’t with, with this set of people because it is a permanent stain of betrayal on what he had told them, or at least what they thought he had told them

PERLSTEIN: Well, there have been a lot of betrayals.

SHEFFIELD: Not to them though . As far as they know,

PERLSTEIN: I mean, why didn’t they pick up on the fact that, he wasn’t [00:25:00] gonna bring back coal, I mean, there’s been so many betrayals. But let’s say you’re right. Yeah. I mean, that this is just kind of too ridiculous and too big to kind of, for him to redeem.

I mean, obviously the, the authoritarian playbook is to scapegoat, right? To figure out some kind of scapegoat that, kind of stabbed the nation in, in the back. But yes, they’re not very supple with this kind of stuff. We all fear some kind of Reichstag incident. Of course, our capacities for actually doing the job of securing the nation, right, have been eviscerated.

Some of us have pointed out that, one of the consequences of McCarthyism was they, fired or hounded out of their jobs all the people who were experts on Asia by accusing them of, being communists, and supporting Mao instead of Chiang Kai-shek. And lo and behold, you got the Vietnam War because, the, the, the structure of expertise just wasn’t there for the people who would have warned that this was a [00:26:00] disaster, right?

Now you have the, who know m- who knows how many, cyberterrorism experts have been DOGEd out of existence. I mean, one, one thing I don’t even see the media even talking about, I, I, I, I’m, I almost fear it’s like kind of a you can’t handle the truth attitude, is the possibility of a cyberattack, that, Iran, should they choose to pull the trigger, could, unleash some serious chaos, that could dwarf 9/11. What happens then? Do people rally around the fr- flag? Does… What, what does Trump do? What do the Democrats do? I guess I keep on returning to this fear that, defeating Trump politically isn’t defeating, the conditions that make Trump so dangerous politically.

In a place like Chicago, when gang violence went down, went, went, went way up, decades ago it was because the cops did a successful job decapitating the gangs , so [00:27:00] the gangs started going after each other, right? What happens when, if the Republican Party is, leaderless, right?

I mean, how do people… What does that look like, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s– Yeah, and it’s that, that larger question though of, understanding that the political defeat of this, subset of people, that should only be the beginning of it.

PERLSTEIN: Right. Well, then, then you get into what, you can’t beat something with nothing, so what is the Democratic Party proposing as an alternative? And I both, think we both understand that this is… We’re not run… The, the Democratic Party are not run by wartime consiglieri, right?

And, um It’s, it’s a real…

there’s, there’s not… There’s some very exciting young leaders who get, cut off at the pass at every turn, and, we’re hoping for some kind of generational turnover and, it might be now or never.[00:28:00]

Democratic decline and the New Deal legacy

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, let’s, let’s go into the history on that, though. Like, why do– How, how do you think that this came to be? So, like, o-obviously the, the decline in popularity of Lyndon Johnson was a huge thing, and the blowout win of Nixon in ’72, like, in, in your your, your favorite period historical period.

Like, that was– seemed to be when it started, when this

PERLSTEIN: Yeah. I mean, for a lot of different reasons the Democratic Party in the wake of FDR and the New Deal had a really sweet political situation that they set up that joined the making of policy with the selling of it in terms of politics in a very salubrious way, right?

I always point out that after the New Deal, Al Smith had this line, when he, he was the Democratic presidential nominee in 1928, and he turned viciously [00:29:00] anti-Roosevelt and basically became a conservative. And he would complain, “We’re screwed. The liberals are in power forever ’cause no one shoots Santa Claus.”

Building so many dams, goosing the economy through Keynesianism, right? Basically the idea that the US Treasury was, basically being used to bring more people into the middle class than any society had ever achieved.

SHEFFIELD: and it was terrible.

PERLSTEIN: What’s that?

SHEFFIELD: terrible, a terrible thing in his view.

PERLSTEIN: That was a terrible thing. Right.

Exactly. Because it meant, more people had… Society became less hierarchical. You couldn’t boss people around. People had more prospects. It was, it was terrible for elites, right, in a lot of ways. But it was so successful that there was pretty impressive elite buy-in, on the level of corporations.

And a big part of what my, four-volume, series of histories of basically what happened to the New Deal order, right? [00:30:00] first you get Nixon very successfully kind of playing to white middle cr- class grievance, right? and basically saying, basically introducing the zero-sum idea that all these out-groups gain at your expense, right?

Even though at the time when Nixon was beginning his crusade, and Reagan too, um You know, the rising tide was in many ways lifting all boats. so the real tragedy for that was the onset of, stagflation and, things like the first Arab oil embargo and the various energy crises and all these things that America wasn’t really prepared for.

we thought that we had kind of figured out the economy, that we would have kind of [00:31:00] widely shared growth and prosperity forever. a really good example is, an energy expert who told Richard Nixon that energy was soon gonna be so cheap that it was not gonna be metered. I mean, it kind of sounds like how people kind of…

The, the, the optimists kind of talk about, AI these days. And suddenly the economy did become something that looked a lot more zero-sum. The historian Jefferson Cowie, who recently, won a Pulitzer Prize for, his book, “Freedom’s Dominion,” which talks about how, the Southern tradition of defining freedom as domination over African Americans largely.

He points out that in his book, “Staying Alive,” that one of the one of the Supreme Court cases that approved an affirmative action program for people who, weren’t allowed to enter apprenticeship programs ’cause they were Black at this certain factory that when the [00:32:00] Supreme Court handed down the permission for this, supreme Court handed down permission for this affirmative action program, the factory that was affected had been shut down, right? So all these policies that were based on kind of creating more broadly shared equality were set up for a society that had consistent economic growth. So stagflation, stagnation the end of American economic dominance as the rest of the world kind of recovered from World War II, various kinds of hubris.

you had foreign competition. it made it a lot easier for economic elites particularly, to do things like saying the problem is that we, we’re, the taxes we pay are too high, right? And the problem is we have too many regulations, and the state is too strong, and affirmative action is the problem.

And then kind of more and more opportunistic demagogues could begin to tell, the [00:33:00] white people who eventually became the Trump coalition but were first the Reagan coalition, that The problem is those people over there, right? Demagoguing and othering. And so that’s like the, the biggest picture of…

And then the problem is for the Democrats, you had a lot of people saying, “Well, maybe the problem is we did go too big on the New Deal. We did go too big on the Great Society.” And the Great Society, especially Lyndon Johnson’s policies, were based very much on the idea that America’s bounty was permanent, and we’re gonna share the bounty, right?

And so you begin to see all kinds of policy entrepreneurs within the Democratic Party, most prominent among them Jimmy Par- Carter, saying what America really needs is austerity. And once people like Jimmy Carter and then, and then, Bill Clinton, and then Barack Obama too [00:34:00] begin to say, “Well, we’re demanding too much of the government,” right?

They’re taking away… They’re eating the Democrats’ seed corn, their most powerful message, which is basically, Santa Claus, right? They’re shooting Santa Claus. The Republicans are shooting Santa Claus, and Democrats are beginning to say, “Well, the problem is the government is too big.” And a lot of this stuff was structural, right?

I mean, th- there was very little you could do because, in fact, America’s economic dominance was, waning for various kinds of reasons. But there were very few people in the Democratic Party who had the kind of maturity and foresight to say, “Wow, we have to make this kind of a temporary condition and figure out a way to get back to the basic structures that make social democratic left-of-center party, party, parties, parties powerful,” right?

What they deliver to people. They deliver the goods, right? They make it easier to get into the middle class and to stay in the middle class. And that’s, that’s, [00:35:00] that’s basically the story I t- tell in my next book. the, the third of it that’s about the Democratic Party is about, very cynical and corrupt people basically meeting Republicans halfway and, saying, “We have no choice.”

This is the Democratic Leadership Cou- Council. This is, Rahm Emanuel, and it’s abetted by, corrupt journalistic class, I call them the aristocrats, who, love the idea of cutting off social democratic programs at the knees, right? And it’s very hard. this is, this is, this is very deep, basic structural history of the 20th century, right?

The socialists in Weimar Germany used to say antisemitism is the socialism of fools, right? In other words, you sell people scapegoating- You sell people hatred, and it’s kind of psychological wage they get instead of, what they believe socialism delivered, which was, broadly shared [00:36:00] equitable prosperity.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, there, there’s a– I think there, there, there’s also a mistake that was made by the further left, so the progressive side of the Democratic Party during that time period that, that they didn’t make the public campaign to explain what it was that Roosevelt had done and Truman and,

PERLSTEIN: Yeah. Well, there are always people who did that, but yes, there are a lot of people

SHEFFIELD: They didn’t do it enough. And

PERLSTEIN: Because they, they, they took it for granted or they s- they, they, they,

SHEFFIELD: they just thought everybody agreed

PERLSTEIN: enemy of the good.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, and, and it’s a contrast between, when you look at the post-World War II left in the UK or in Germany or France. Like, they actively worked not just to get the government more involved in the economy, but also to remake the social order to be more egalitarian, including in businesses.

And so you, you [00:37:00] saw, like th- this explicit partnerships between unions and businesses.

PERLSTEIN: Like in Germany they have what they call co-determination, where literally they have members of the union, sometimes even shop floor people or even janitors who are on the board of directors, right? Written into the law. So if that sort of thing had happened in America, right, and it, people thought that that was…

in the early 1960s, there was… You read this stuff and it’s crazy. You, you, the smartest kind of social scientists were saying, “Oh, the, the, the communist world and the capitalist world are converging. We’re also kind of, we’re all kind of converging on this mushy kind of egalitarian social democracy.”

And it seemed to be happening. And then all this other stuff happened. But yeah, I mean, if Americans had, six months paid leave if they had a child, if they’re able to go to a doctor without getting out their checkbook, this very basic social democratic stuff, is it possible for a Reagan or a Trump to succeed?

They talk about, oh, the right one in Sweden, and you’re like, “Yeah, way out.” They’re going from, [00:38:00] eight months of paid leave to seven months of paid leave or something like that. Yeah, and that’s why, to g- To, we’re, we’re both a bunch of, fuss budget pessimists, but like when we look at someone like,

SHEFFIELD: They’re

PERLSTEIN: Mamdani, I mean, that’s the way and the light, right?

I mean, free, free childcare, will, will make people’s lives easier. And when you deliver the goods, the voters deliver the goods. The, the, the, the saying of the head of the Democratic Party when, in the ’50s was, “Tax, tax, tax, spend, spend, spend, elect, elect, elect.” And of course, Mamdani faces all these structural barriers like The New York Times.

suddenly like everyone in, who reads the… like everyone in the national news knows who the, head of the city council is in New York because every article is, “Mamdani faces trouble from the city council,” right? I didn’t know who the city council leader was in New York under Bloomberg, right?

Under, Giuliani, right? Or, oh my God, the people who, have second homes in New York that are worth more than $5

SHEFFIELD: upset.

PERLSTEIN: are upset and [00:39:00] they’re gonna leave. And, this is covered like, like the, like with, with, with breathless, kind of daily, kind of horse race coverage.

And as so often is the case, when it comes to liberatory politics, all we have is the people, right? All Zohran Mamdani has is, his ability to mobilize ordinary human beings to say, “No,” to refuse this austerity. And that’s why leaders are so important, and we have some good ones now.

So, I’m a little optimistic about that. But you know, it’s… I mean, I, to me, maybe, maybe, the Rick Perlstein 50 years from now will say the watershed was when, Barack Obama, who, gave, Zohran Mamdani a scolding phone call during the election, sat down with him to read to children, to do a photo op, and said, “Wow, I gotta, I gotta get on this guy’s coattails,”

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s something I just wrote about, so yeah.

PERLSTEIN: Were right.

Politics as teaching

SHEFFIELD: And well, the, the other thing though that, that Mamdani does that is m- so much better compared to other Democrats is [00:40:00] that he actually is always communicating.

PERLSTEIN: Yes. “Politics is teaching,” is what Olof Palme said, the Social Democratic leader of

SHEFFIELD: Oh, that’s actually a great phrase. Yeah. It… And that’s

PERLSTEIN: is teaching, yes. And there are so few Democrats who could put themselves in the position of being a teacher because they’ve, they’ve made the soul of wisdom, responding to this notional dead center of ideological opinion.

So it’s like they… there’s this great word in, in, in, in Democratic politics, which is a lie, right? We’re incrementalists, right? But Barack Obama, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, Obamacare, was not incrementalist. When you say we’re, we’re, we’re doing an incremental thing, you say, “This is the goal, and these are the steps along the way.”

Once Obamacare passed without a public option, right, and the ability of states to like, like opt out of Medicaid, they didn’t say, “Okay, this is great. Next we’re gonna do this.” That would be increment- incrementalist. Instead it was like, “Stop complaining, we’re incrementalist. [00:41:00] You can’t get everything at once.”

SHEFFIELD: We checked the box. Yeah. Now, now you have to talk about another subject.

PERLSTEIN: Move, you gotta, you gotta… I mean, Overton window is, is a wonderful metaphor, and as we know, the Republicans are really good at constantly kind of moving the center to the right. Whereas Democrats have this fantastical notion that if they repeat back to the public what they believe the public already believes, that the public will reward them with trust.

But no, people require leaders. There’s a great line in the Bible, “Without vision, the people perish.”

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, and it’s and, and on the teaching point, I mean, the other thing is that the Republican Party. So it’s, it’s tragically iron- ironic for me is that in after Mitt Romney lost in 2012 when I was still on the right I wrote a, a, a big paper for a a Republican donor, and I published some of it in “The American [00:42:00] Spectator,” in which I said, The media, you have to invest in the media. “Stop trying to beat the media. Become the media,” was my phrase. And they

PERLSTEIN: which is what Roger Ailes said to Nixon in 1970.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, oh, did they? Okay. Yeah. So but and yeah, and, and they didn’t listen to me at that time, but then when Trump came along and got ensconced, they did. So like I, I of course had left, and they did everything that I told them to do.

PERLSTEIN: Well, I’m trying to tell them, I got my Substack, rickperlstein.substack.com, and one of the things I pointed out was, I made this argument about politics as teaching, and I pointed out how, I’ve been doing, kind of digging down Glenn Beck’s site, The Blaze, and kind of doing a little tutelage, every week about how they do what they do.

And, they have a whole category of how… This is getting to the issue of, back to the original issue of what will happen if people get dissatisfied with Trump. They have this whole basically, I guess we call it a vertical, of people saying, “You feel this [00:43:00] cognitive dissonance. Here’s how to solve that cognitive dissonance.”

Like, there was this one that said “Here’s the best response to what the Pope is saying.” Right? So they kind of teach you to think like a conservative, which is something that Rush Limbaugh was really good at. His greatest skill was some- dittohead would, would call in and say, “Rush, I love you.

I’m a mega ditto guy. I just heard this thing that really confused me.” Right? And he might say, “Well, Barack Obama said he’s gonna lower taxes for 95% of wage earners. I thought that Democrats all wanted to raise taxes.” And this was true. In the, the, in, in, in Barack Obama’s original stimulus, there was a tax cut of an average of $3,000 for every wage earner, and it was 97% got the tax cut, right?

He promised 95%, he delivered 97%. And Barack Obama, I’ll never forget it, told the guy, “Well, here’s what you… Here’s, [00:44:00] here’s how you think about that. Just remember that whatever Barack Obama says, he means the…” Rush Limbaugh. “Whatever, whatever Rush Limbaugh said– Whatever Barack Obama says, remember that he means the opposite.”

So, all of a sudden, someone had, all the conservative Dittoheads had something in their back pocket, right? A, a leader like AOC or Mamdani is very good at teaching people how to interpret what conservatives say, right? Instead of, instead of, someone like Rahm Emanuel or Bill Clinton who says, ” Wow, how can we imitate what conservatives say in order to pick up on the popularity of what they say?”

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and, and, and as a project, I think that one of the things that should be done with, a lot of money is on the left is, is explaining to conservatives… ‘Cause like, th- there is a real division between conservatives and reactionaries, right? And

PERLSTEIN: We, we’ve been, we’ve been putting off this argument,

SHEFFIELD: [00:45:00] Yeah, okay, we, we should have that. But okay, but, but, but at lea- the, the, the complete wackos, the people that were in the box,

PERLSTEIN: Sure. We can say that there are levels of extremity.

SHEFFIELD: The same epistemology, I agree with you. But overall though, like, the people that enable them, so like, the country club Republicans or the business class Republicans, those people, they didn’t learn the lesson of, of the economic lesson of post-World War II, which is that this was a time when the government, y- or around the world in every country basically was massively investing in the economy, massively

PERLSTEIN: you, and m- and made you a corporate titan richer.

SHEFFIELD: And that’s what I was gonna say, yeah. And so like, but the broader left hasn’t taught that lesson to the business class because, and, and ultimately, and, and we keep seeing with Trump also that not, not only are his tariffs, destructive to American businesses, but also this, this, his corruption and his [00:46:00] instability.

Like, the businesses need stability more than anything else because

PERLSTEIN: That was one of Milton Friedman’s number one lessons about why regulation is bad, because it creates instability.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and you can use that, turn that around in the opposite direction, and it’s a, and it, and it’s I think everybody can agree that, especially on tariffs where one day they’re on and one day they’re off and,

PERLSTEIN: and the business class is so brainwashed, they’re so high on their own supply that, the, the stock market is basically stable even though the, global economic system is at greater risk than it ever has been since 1929.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then but in terms of the targeted industries, like they haven’t even been helped. So like manufacturing, American manufacturing

is

PERLSTEIN: were helped by Joe Bi- by, by, by, by by Biden,

SHEFFIELD: they were. Yeah. And so like these are, these are things that, again, it, it’s, it i- it just goes like I, I love that teaching quote, Rick, because it’s so [00:47:00] true because like, enabling these anti-government extremists is not good for anyone. And so y- but you have to explain that in terms that people understand and in terms that are relevant to them.

PERLSTEIN: Yes, and, and Roosevelt was great at that. He would say, “Why do we need to enter World War II? Why do we need to give… Why do we need to give weapons to England?” It wasn’t, “Why do we need to get into World War II?” Why do we need to basically sell weapons to, to, to England? He said, “Well, if your neighbor’s house is on fire, lend him a hose because your house might be next.”

Brilliant. Brilliant stuff. And he would say, he would, he would, he would, he would, he would, he would just explain things in very clear metaphors. Truman would, too, with good guys and bad guys. And I mean, Democrats think that they’re, kind of more sophisticated and more cool when they, as, as, as this one consultant points out, they explain the brownie recipe instead of explain the brownie.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:00] Well, and, and they– And that happens whenever you look at the, just their interviews and for print media. Like, the Democrats will talk about process, they’ll talk about, “Well, we’re gonna do this and that.” And then the Republicans will just be like, “And then we’re gonna stop these communists.”

PERLSTEIN: for Mamdani. He says, when he gets heckled by a guy, he says, “I’m gonna make a… I’m gonna make New York affordable for that guy, too.” Right? And he’s so disciplined, right? He doesn’t say, “I’m gonna show how much more sophisticated I am than you by explaining some sort of, dis- you know, like digression.

He never digresses. He stays on message.

Perlstein’s new book: The Infernal Triangle

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, okay. So let, let’s go back though to your– You just sent off your, your latest book to your publisher recently.

PERLSTEIN: I did,

SHEFFIELD: talk, talk, tell, tell us more a bit about it.

PERLSTEIN: Well, I don’t have a publisher actually. We’re, we’re shopping it around to a publisher. So if you got a pub- company, make me an offer I can’t refuse. But it’s called The Infernal Triangle: How America Got This Way, and there are, basically three force fields of American politics [00:49:00] that…

whose act- interactions make everything screwed up. One is very familiar to all my readers, which is the increasing authoritarianism of the Republican Party and the right. The other is very familiar. It’s the fecklessness of the Democrats in coming, in kind of coming up with and explaining a, a persuasive alternative.

And the media, which, in a lot of ways I think I make the case quite explicitly and successfully, served people in their role as citizens in a self-governing nation about as well as the state media did in the Soviet Union. Basically, all kinds of up is down stuff, that the economy was bad, in 2024 during the election when it was actually good.

When crime was, making it seem like crime was up when it was actually down, right? Making it seem like the American people held Bill Clinton in contempt for lying about sex when actually his approval ratings were [00:50:00] consistently in the 60s and 70s when the media was, baying for his head.

So when you combine those three things and show how they work together basically what I’m trying to do is give my readers skills in pattern recognition. Say, “Oh my God, that, that thing you describe happening in, 2005 with the Republican response to, Hurricane Katrina,” which they explained the government’s failure, by claiming that the problem with what happened in Katrina was government itself, right?

That’s exactly what they’re doing now, right? When you explain the Iraq War and how, that was sold to the public, oh, that’s exactly the way Donald Trump is talking about the Iran war, right? when you hear a Democrat say, “We need to figure out We need to get spokespeople who talk exactly like Republicans because the Republicans are successful, right?

they were saying that, in 2002, right, after [00:51:00] 9/11, right? And then you have this project which I’m sure you ran across in which these consultants raised $20 million to use AI to figure, figure out the speech cadences of popular podcasters on the right so they can, go in a lab- laboratory and manufacture one for the left instead of finding some organic voice that, excites people of his own volition.

So that’s what I’m doing. It’s, it’s doesn’t quite achieve what I wanted to achieve because I had to s- skip a bunch of stuff about Barack Obama. That might have to be volume two. And yeah, I’m just enjoying myself substacking, rickperlstein.substack.com.

SHEFFIELD: Cool. Well, okay. So, but on the media point I think there’s… Do you, do you get into, I think that a lot of people on the broader left, they think that there is a liberal media. They really do believe in it despite all evidence. I think, oh, yeah, I think so. What do you think? You think people do?

PERLSTEIN: I [00:52:00] mean, I think that one thing that may shock people is how much MSNBC was, even when they kind of made the pivot to being sort of, a more Democratic Party-oriented liberal outlet, how much they became a vector for some of the worst parts about the post-9/11 Bush administration. Like, Joe Scarborough was one of the, biggest boosters of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, so I think that hopefully people will understand, Well, one of the things I try and do is I always say that all throughout this period from, 2000 to 2026, basically the present, there’s always the best places to go for the truth have always been these kind of semi-Samizdat kind of alternative left-wing voices.

Whether it was, a magazine like Mother Jones, which was always on the case, about the Oath Keepers as, basically pointing towards something like January 6 all along when CNN was [00:53:00] laundering them as kind of, constitutionalists or it’s being– The book is gonna be dedicated to a blogger who passed away in the year 2007 named Steve Gilliard, who wrote under a pseudonym on Daily Kos and then on his own blog and came up with the best analyses of why the Iraq War was gonna end up exactly the way it ended up, right?

So there are always these kind of alternative voices. They’ve always been there. The will to kind of, tell the truth without fear or favor is indomitable, right? So hopefully, what the book will serve to do is get people to critically look for media sources that don’t do, what I complain the agenda-setting elite political media did all along.

The U.S. left does not practice democracy in its own affairs

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm. Well, and yeah, and I think that there is this the, the, the left in the US has, has faltered not just because of a failure to teach, but also a failure to practice democracy. Like, that’s the other [00:54:00] thing in terms of, like when you look at given people, who are, let’s say, I don’t Harvard professor or Atlantic columnist or whatever, like they just keep getting more gigs added onto them.

And it’s like they don’t need the money. Whatever time they’re putting into it, it’s probably not very much and they’re fobbing it off onto a research assistant.

PERLSTEIN: Of the things I talk about is how the, how open the right has been to new voices and how it’s been basically al- always cultivated, in part because young people aren’t intuitively conservative. How much energy, investment, openness they’ve provided for young people. And that’s why you have a Democratic Party where, so many people died in office after Donald Trump introduced his budget that it failed.

The big beautiful bill passed because there weren’t enough Democrats who were alive to defeat it, right? [00:55:00] And, I mean, I think that’s a real test of character, whether you’re willing to, let go and pass the torch to a new generation, right? The people who had the pass, the torch passed to them as a new generation in the Kennedy era, a lot of them are still holding on, like grim death.

And I try and, you

SHEFFIELD: a real

PERLSTEIN: I, try and, make mentorship, mentorship so much a part of my practice, because, as Thomas Jefferson said, “The world belongs to the living,” and a lot of people in my generation and older, we don’t even kind of grasp the political field, because we’re using incumbent categories that made more sense to us when we were coming up.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I, I’ve recently been thinking about the possibility that just as a loose analogy, that epistemically the Democrats are Catholic and the Republicans are Protestant.

PERLSTEIN: Yeah, I think that’s, that’s interesting. Although, I mean, Protestantism is a paradoxical thing where every church, is [00:56:00] supposed to be on their own. But because the people who are attracted to certain kinds of Protestant denominations often are kind of followers in their basic kind of intuitions everyone kind of moves in the same direction on the right because everyone moves in the same direction on the right.

Whereas liberals are liberal, and we’re pluralist, and it’s it’s harder to herd the cats. But yes, I really like the metaphor of kind of the elite that runs the Democratic Party as a kind of Vatican-like formation, under this Capitol dome that is trying to, They just fear not being in control, and, like I’ll give you a really good example. The things we’ve been saying of, the s- are the same criticisms. This is the value of history for doing this kind of work that people have been making since, the year 2000. Like, I have an op-ed from 2000 that sounds like it could have been written after the two- 2024 election. There was this same kind of, reckoning. Why did we [00:57:00] lose? let’s do these big, think tank reports about what we can do for next time.

They always end up doing the same thing next time. But, one of the things was called, the Democracy Alliance, and a bunch of… They’re like, “Oh, they had a bunch of billionaires who gave away money for, for conservative infrastructure. We need to get together our rich people in order to give away money for, our infrastructure.”

And the problem was in order to get a grant from the Democracy Alliance, because there was such a, so much of an ethic of control among these people, the only way you could even fill out the forms is that you had to have a big 501[3] infrastructure apparatus for your group. they knew how to fill out forms, right?

So, the money ended up going to the same people who did the exact same things. Whereas, a Sheldon Adelson, like was, perfectly willing to rip off a $10 million check and said, “Do with it what you want,” and it’s a very, it’s a paradox because, Right-wingers are authoritarian, and we’re supposed to be pluralist.

But that fear, that pluralism, creates a [00:58:00] fear among the people who control the resources that, well, look at this. Like, oh my God, we got this guy who has millions and millions of listeners, Hasan Piker, but he says some really stupid stuff, right? Well, sometimes when you have a party and, you have an ethic of solidarity, you know you’re not gonna agree with everyone.

I’m not endorsing Hasan Piker. I think he’s kind of a jackass. But the fact that he’s been up- held up as, what happens when you don’t control the messenger, right? The fact that he’s become a symbol of what’s wrong with, the attempt to, broaden voices in the Democratic Party is very telling, there are plenty of people who have big audiences that are actually quite, responsible and thoughtful.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and it’s like, not being able to control someone, that’s politics.

PERLSTEIN: Yeah, that’s politics, right?

SHEFFIELD: literally politics, and if you, if you don’t like how that works, then maybe you should tr-try something else.

PERLSTEIN: One of the greatest challenges for an executive in a democracy is to [00:59:00] harness movement energy without being harnessed by movement energy, right?

And Franklin Roosevelt was very good at doing that when it came to the labor movement, which was a very off the reservation kind of, bunch of folks. they sat down on the floor of all those GM factories and shut down the American economy, but he stuck with them nonetheless. And the way Ronald Reagan held, handled the Christian right.

he gave them just enough rope that he, they could kind of pull for him, but he didn’t show up at their, at, at, at the, the Christian Right. For example, the pro-life rallies, he’d, he’d, show a video so he could kind of distance themselves. And that’s a challenge. that’s a leadership challenge.

And, but if you just say, well, movement energy, kind of grassroots movement energy, all this spontaneous… Wow, you’re in a political party where there are people who are willing to literally risk death to face down a policy they don’t like, namely, the takeover of our cities by ICE, right?

That’s a really powerful [01:00:00] resource for a political party. So you have to be able to figure out a way to make that part of your party, right? and, make sure that, you’re not enabling people who are, beating up cops, which they weren’t, right? You see what I’m getting at.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, and, and, and being willing to just let off of the reins just a little bit

PERLSTEIN: A little bit. Yeah

SHEFFIELD: i-in a way that, that lets people have what they want and, and feel

PERLSTEIN: And the Barack

SHEFFIELD: be who they are.

PERLSTEIN: Was really good at that actually. In fact,

SHEFFIELD: That’s the weird paradox,

PERLSTEIN: They gave an enormous amount of leeway to their organizers on the ground. There’s a really good book about that. And then as soon as, the election happened, they, famously shut it down. But it really was true.

They call it the snowflake model. It’s like basically you can create your own snowball rolling down the hill, and as long as you hit your targets, and do your metrics, we don’t really care how you do it. And there was, It was, it was completely based in what [01:01:00] Howard Dean had done in 2004.

Of course, the Democratic establishment shut him down because the idea of someone who was against the unpopular war was terrifying to them because they all had supported the war, right? But it’s all in the book. So, hopefully by the end of the year, you’re gonna be able to read it. In the meantime, check me out on the Substack.

And I’m gonna go fishing because this is really stressful.

SHEFFIELD: All right. Sounds good. Thanks for being here again.

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 are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for your support. And you have unlimited access to all of the archives.

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Reactionary Catholics are a small minority of core Republican voters, but in many ways they set the party’s agenda because they’re so well organized and have a much stronger intellectual tradition than the Evangelicals who dominate the Republican voting base. But this trend exists internationally as well, and Opus Dei, a lay-member organization founded in Spain, has become a political powerhouse in a number of different countries.

Aside from the ridiculous caricatures of the group painted by Dan Brown in his Da Vinci Code novels, there has not been much detailed reporting on Opus Dei’s activities. The group is so secretive, in fact, that even the leadership of the church itself has often not known what Opus Dei has been up to.

That has began to change in recent years, however, thanks in large measure to journalist Gareth Gore, who has been reporting on the group for several years and has released an important book which is now out in paperback called Opus: The Cult of Dark Money, Human Trafficking, and Right-Wing Conspiracy Inside the Catholic Church. It’s become an international bestseller that has become so influential that Pope Leo XIV actually invited him to discuss his findings and recommendations at a private meeting.

I was pleased to be joined by Gareth to discuss Opus Dei and his book for this episode. We also talked about why Leo, the first American pope, is becoming a historically significant figure through his efforts to reconcile the conservative faith with democracy in the twenty-first century by telling conservative Catholics that they have a place in modernity—contrary to what reactionary and anti-democratic groups like Opus Dei are telling them.

I hope you’ll enjoy.

If you’re interested in supporting Theory of Change, we are doing a fundraising drive for the show and for Flux on GoFundMe. I’d really appreciate your support. You can also become a paid supporter on Patreon or on Substack. Thank you so much for your help. I cannot do this work without you.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

12:26 — Pope Leo XIV standing as a conservative against reactionaries

15:48 — Reactionary billionaire Peter Thiel trying to merge reactionary apocalypse traditions

20:14 — René Girard as the source of Thiel’s Antichrist obsessions

23:10 — A brief history of Opus Dei

29:14 — The Fatima miracle tradition within Hispanic reactionary Catholicism

33:52 — Opus Dei and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco

38:00 — The expansion of Opus Dei outside of Spain, including in the U.S.

42:35 — Opus Dei priest converted many Republicans to Catholicism and was accused of sexual assault

44:58 — Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ and Opus Dei

51:19 — Reactionary Christian traditions grow because they provide economic and social support

57:09 — Abuses, including sex trafficking, were protected by Opus Dei’s secrecy

01:02:22 — Pope Leo’s investigation of Opus Dei

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So today, we’re going to be talking about your book, about Opus Dei but also the larger context of, where this group exists within, right-wing Christianity and right-wing Catholicism specifically.

So just as a bit of background for people who may not be conversant on, Catholic theology and church dynamics, the larger context that this is taking place is that the Catholic Church itself had to reconcile with democracy, and the emergence of it in Europe and, other countries, and this is something that took place, [00:04:00] most predominantly through the Vatican II convention but before that, the church was in, had a number of popes who were quite anti-democratic, so we can just touch on that a little bit briefly here if you don’t mind

GARETH GORE: Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, how Opus Dei fits into all this? I mean, Opus Dei is a kind of pre-Vatican II construct. It, it was founded in the late 1920s and really kind of came into itself in the, in, in Spain in the early 1930s against this backdrop of, a country on the brink of civil war. And, I think It, we can very kind of, we can very much say that this kind of is an anti-democratic movement.

Through, through large parts of its history, it’s been interested in, really pushing forward an agenda that’s got very small support within the wider population. That was very true in the early 1930s in Spain, and was, has been true in many countries where it’s operated, and certainly today in the, United States, the kind of agenda that it wants to push forward, I think even among Republicans, it wouldn’t be kind of, it wouldn’t have a huge amount of support.

SHEFFIELD: And that’s also why the organization is so secretive, because if people knew what the agenda, the real agenda was, even the ones who might think that they’re supportive of it, well, they probably wouldn’t be if they knew what, they really want.

GORE: Even among kind of conservative Catholics as well, I mean, we had Pope Leo in the last few days talking about the issue of morality and how morality has, in certain circles been seen through this kind of homosexual prism. Some parts of the church have really focused on morality as a question of, questions of abortion pre- premarital sex, homosexuality, this kind of thing.

And, he made the point that actually morality is about a much wider, kind of spectrum of issues, including kind of social justice, things like equality, [00:06:00] immigration, and the rest of it. So it’s, even, y- even putting aside the kind of Republican kind of, you know, many, the many views within Republican Party, even within the world of conservative Catholicism, I think the Opus Dei agenda wouldn’t have a huge amount of support am- among many conservative Catholics.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s why I often draw a distinction between reactionary and conservative. And sometimes people don’t want to do that, but I think it’s very important to draw that distinction because if you don’t, it’s, like refusing to distinguish between communist and liberal.

It’s like, all liberals are communists. And well, no, that’s not true. And all conservatives are not reactionaries. And your book and your research really does underscore that point. And, as you just said, the recent remark by Pope Leo does also further indicate that.

And, he is hearkening back to a tradition that, had, existed as well within the church. Like this is basic Catholic social teaching that not only does the church have a duty to comment about personal moral viewpoints and meta ethics, but also it does have the requirement as the the representative of Christ on earth to discuss the affairs of humans and societies on how they deal with each other.

And of course, you don’t have to believe that, but that is actually what the doctrine says.

GORE: Yeah, and it’s been quite interesting to, to, to listen to Pope Leo’s words around this. I mean, he– I think it’s quite clear to me that, we’re now a year into, his papacy. I think only now is he really kind of starting to find his feet. I think the first year was him kind of working out a little bit, how the church works and kind of working out how, what kind of stances he might take.

And we’re now starting to, I think, hear his voice. And I think what’s interesting for me is the way [00:08:00] that, he’s reacted to criticism from Donald Trump. I mean, he could have just let that go and not really engaged with it. I mean, he could have just almost sat above it and let, the kind of, let these tweets and the rest of it kind of just slowly die out in the, in, in the news cycle.

But instead he kind of– he’s st- he’s chosen to kind of take these challenges head on. And I think what I– I mean, my interpretation is that the Pope is quite keen to almost take ownership of the Christian agenda again, of the Catholic agenda. I think, what I sense is that the Pope is appalled at the way that Catholicism in particular has been kind of co-opted by reactionary politicians like Vance and many others and, the way that they’re trying to use the church for their own political agenda.

And so I think, this desire to send out a message that, we want to get back to the gospel, we want to get back to the teachings of Jesus Christ, that Christianity is about, concepts like love thy neighbor and, this, kind of thing rather than, obsessing about issues like abortion, I think is, I think is, a signal of, yes, one, him wanting to basically kind of, yeah, kind of reverse this co-option of, the Catholic Church that we’ve seen not just in the US but in a number of countries as well here in Europe.

So yeah, I think refreshing.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And there’s a direct relationship with his name, his papal name, because Pope Leo XIII published a papal bull called Rerum Novarum which argued exactly what he’s saying right now. He’s, directly recapitulating that earlier pope.

and, I think that was, his name is very deliberately related to this [00:10:00] doctrine that was propagated there.

GORE: Yeah. I mean, absolutely. It’s, I, mean, I think, I mean, like I said just now, I think, for the first year he was kind of, Well, we’re just coming up to the kind of, the anniversary of, the election. But for the first maybe nine months or so, I think he was a difficult pope to read. I mean, he seemed to be ma- kind of making overtures to all kinds of different wings of the Catholic Church.

he was inviting a number of quite controversial cardinals to private audiences in, his apartment. And I think, almost every wing of the Catholic Church was almost kind of reading into that whatever they wanted to read into it. the kind of, the whole kind of Latin mass contingency, he’s made a number of concessions to them, and I think they thought, “Well, he’s one of us,” and But I think, I guess in his first few months at least, he was trying to build bridges and repair some of the fissures that had grown during the papacy of his predecessor, Francis. I mean, Francis was not a great bridge builder. He kind of, he was, he caused a number of divisions. he made a number of these fissures kind of deeper, wider.

And, I, guess each pope comes along and makes, has their stamp on the church. I think Leo in his first few months wanted to repair some of those divisions. But now I think he’s gained the confidence to really put his own stamp on, And I think I, I sense that he wants, he isn’t keen to create divisions.

He doesn’t, he, really does wanna bring the church back together, and the church has really been ripped apart over the past kind of 10, 15 years. And I think, yeah, he… So he wants to heal those divides, but I think he also wants to take a stance on certain issues. And, as we were just talking about the way that reactionary politicians have co-opted the church and the teach- [00:12:00] and have co-opted Catholicism to further their political agenda, I think he, that’s something he absolutely wants to take a stance against.

And he wants to remind Catholics on, whatever wing of the church they might fall that, that actually there, there are some very specific teachings from Christ that they ought to re- remember, when they are, when, they’re kind of spouting whatever beliefs they have.

Pope Leo XIV standing as a conservative against reactionaries

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right, and he seems to be, really kind of the first person in America that I’ve seen that is really trying to force that distinction between conservative and reactionary. Because, at the same time, he is not as socially progressive as Pope Francis seemingly was.

But, but to be fair, neither, neither one of them, were, going to sanction remove the commandments against homosexuality and things like that. Or, but, a- at the same time, he’s still saying that the church is a much bigger thing as, as we’ve been talking about, and, trying to say that, yes, there are some things that we’re not going to compromise and we’re going to keep our, tradition on that, but just because we have traditions doesn’t mean that we hate modernity.

We’re actually a part of that, I think, forcing conservative Catholics, even reactionary Catholics to question their own beliefs and to maybe go back to the gospel to, to reassess some of their views. I mean, the way that he has added his support to the death penalty being outlawed. There’s a campaign and he, basically added his name to the petition.

GORE: And I think that, for a lot of pro-life Catholics, that’s an interesting kind of message to be sending to, to say, “Well, if you, guys make all this noise about unborn babies and [00:14:00] about abortion, well, actually, if you’re really pro-life, then there are a number of other issues that you should maybe question your stance on.”

That was a very subtle way of reminding people that, yes, if you want to be pro-life, be pro-life, but be consistent in a way, and don’t just pick and choose according to your own political leanings.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it’s all standard doctrine as it is, like, that’s, the other thing. And, and it’s, absolutely the case and it has, been particularly during the Trump era, but maybe even, a little before that that a number of reactionary Protestants in America have been, flocking to the Catholic Church, or in some cases the Orthodox Churches because they see it as, they see them as, “Oh, well, th- this is an old institution and I have, timeless values, so I’m gonna– I guess I need to become a Catholic. I guess I need to become Orthodox.”

And, and so they’ve had– And, JD Vance, of course, is the most prominent example of that. But Vance, as we’ve seen, and as Pope Leo has also made clear to him several times by now, that, w- if you’re going to become Catholic, then you have obligations to understand the doctrine and also not try to correct the pope on his teachings. That’s been very interesting to watch that dynamic.

GORE: Yeah. But Von’s saying that the pope should be careful when, speaking about morality and… So, so issues of theology and you’re like, “Just a minute, isn’t that his job?” Like, that’s literally the job of the pope to, to share his interpretations of, theology. But anyway–

Reactionary billionaire Peter Thiel trying to merge reactionary apocalypse traditions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, one other person who’s been very prominently trying to, co-opt, Christianity recently has been the right-wing [00:16:00] billionaire Peter Thiel, he really is, the, centerpiece of so much of the reactionary politics that we’ve seen in the US.

He really is directly funding, so much of it. And then, indirectly inspiring kind of this culture, tech culture of move fast and break things within the Republican Party, and it’s why they’ve been remarkably innovative in the past several years since he, his faction kind of took over the party.

but, in, in, regards to Christianity Thiel has gained a lot of prominence for his obsessions with the biblical Antichrist. And just recently, he was in the Vatican, delivering his, four lectures on the Antichrist and how the Antichrist is liberals, he’s basically… but Thiel is not a Catholic at the same time, but he does have Catholic allies like Steve Bannon and some of these other people who are really trying to put forward this, theology.

Let’s talk about that a little bit here for a second, and then we’ll get into your book and, obviously

GORE: there’s a connection here ’cause, Peter Thiel for many years was very close to one of the most senior priests, the most senior Opus Dei priests who was for a while posted out in Stanford and, who then kind of relocated to Washington DC. Yeah, the two of them used to go on long walks together where they would talk about how they would bond over this kind of theory of theirs where, they had this theory where basically they believed that technical, technological pro- progress really kind of halted in the early 1970s.

And, they spent many hours talking about how that might have been linked to Roe v. Wade and the fact that all of these babies had been killed, as a result. Which, you know- It doesn’t really help very much Walter. but yeah, I mean, there, there is a connection there between, [00:18:00] Opus Dei and, Peter Thiel.

But yeah, it is extraordinary to… I mean, I’ve unfortunately spent hours reading through these lectures. I, was not invited to any of them. Surprise, I mean, I think

SHEFFIELD: Neither was I.

GORE: be a very friendly audience, a very amenable audience. But I’ve spent a lot of time reading through the four lectures that he– that have become an al- almost kind of a roadshow for him now.

There’s this traveling circus. I think he’s delivered these lectures in a number of cities across the US, and like you said, quite recently in Rome. I mean, some of it is just absolutely bonkers. I mean, there, there is a section of one of the lectures where he, kind of says that Pope Benedict was trying to send out this secret message in his writings warning that the, coming of the Antichrist was nigh.

And, you go back to the writings that he talks about and it’s, I– you almost think, was Peter Thiel on drugs when he was reading these words? I mean, it is absolutely bonkers. And I think, and honestly, I mean, it’s a… To come back to a topic we’ve just been discuss- discussing, it’s a…

What’s– what he’s doing, I mean, this is a r- it’s a reactionary play in that he– I think he’s co-opting theology, Catholicism, this idea of the Antichrist, to basically push back on any kind of regulation or any kind of, he’s basically trying to frame any, attempt to push back on the advances of Silicon Valley, whether that’s through regulation or through higher taxation or whatever.

He’s trying to frame that as, this great evil, this Antichrist. And, I think again, like we often see with Opus Dei, it’s a political agenda wrapped in this kind of almost fac- this facade of theology and Catholicism and belief, when actually it’s just [00:20:00] politics.

It’s him trying to prevent the left or who- whatever other bogeyman he wants to pick from, having an impact on his finances and the financial wellbeing of the companies that, that he’s backed.

René Girard as the source of Thiel’s Antichrist obsessions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right. and his, guide and his source of his obsession with the Antichrist is, a Catholic theologian named René Girard who was, French and, later moved to the United States and, taught at Stanford. And he was Peter Thiel’s one of Peter Thiel’s instructors.

And, basically Thiel is his star pupil. and so Girard, he wrote a book called I See Satan Fall Like Lightning which was the br- broader explication of his theories. and some people only know Girard for his literary, interpretations, which also were kind of bizarre in my opinion, because basically, a- according to Girard, humans have no innate desires.

All the only desires that humans have are imitative. They are mimetic, as he calls them. And then in, in his book, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, he claims that basically desire is, was, is created by Satan, literally. But Satan is not a person or is he? Like, that’s the weird… And I don’t know how much you’ve read Girard, so I don’t wanna put you on the spot with it.

But, Girard is, has, is essentially created kind of this metaphorical pseudoscientific Christianity in which Satan is a system of beliefs and might be a person, but maybe not. Who knows? And the Antichrist is the same way. The Antichrist is the, the, a system of, beliefs and people working together wittingly or not.

And then Jesus in that [00:22:00] mythos, he, might be real. He probably is real, but on the other hand, y- if he’s not real, it doesn’t matter if, there was no atonement of Christ. And so Thiel, like that’s the sense that I get w- in reading these lectures that, he, kind of says at some point, “Well, yeah, the Antichrist isn’t, probably isn’t a person.

It’s a system of beliefs.” And that’s, it, all of this is just right out of Girard

GORE: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I, haven’t read very much Girard at all, but yeah, I mean, it’s clearly clear that he’s absolutely obsessed with Girard’s writings. Although, I mean, I did read something, I can’t remember where exactly, but I, read a, very good piece maybe it was in Wired,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, Nick, how much do really good money?

GORE: where the journalist went to, to speak to a number of kind of Girard scholars and who– and kind of asked them to read through Thiel’s lectures, and they were horrified at what they read and said, this has got absolutely nothing at all to do with the T- this is a, complete misreading of the teachings of Girard.”

So yeah even within a kind of Girardian context, I think these lectures make very little, sense.

A brief history of Opus Dei

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and those guys I think are probably wrong because they’re thinking about him in his European context, unfortunately. and once he moved to the US he got more radicalized, I think, especially later in life. But that’s another podcast. how did you get interested in Opus Dei?

You are not a religion journalist by-

GORE: No, I mean, I’m… I, up until, the point I wrote the book, I had z- I’d had zero dealings with, Opus Dei and with the Catholic Church. my dad was Catholic, but he wasn’t a practicing Catholic, and we were brought up at home very loosely as kind of Church of England, in that I went to a Church of England school, but…

And we kind of said the Lord’s Prayer every day. We sang hymns. But it was a very kind of benign thing. I didn’t, I never really kind of engaged with [00:24:00] my kind of religious side at all. So you know, I’ve been a financial journalist for the last 20-odd years, and I fell into this story completely by accident.

What happened was a bank in Spain suddenly collapsed overnight in 2017, and I was sent to report on it. And at first, it kind of seemed like the same old story of, executives had taken too many risks, allowed those risks to spiral out of control, and then the whole kind of house of cards have come, had come crashing down.

And I wrote that story, as did almost every other journalist that covered the collapse of the bank at the time. But there was something about it that just didn’t smell right to me, and so it almost became a hobby for me in, in, over the next three, four years. I just started digging into the bank’s history and kind of started digging into the, bank’s financials and started to make all of these connections to this secretive Catholic group called Opus Dei, which I knew next to nothing at all about.

And that’s, basically how it started. It was, it’s a bit of a cliché, but I basically followed the money, and the money led me to this crazy world of human trafficking, widespread spiritual abuse, and and connections to reactionary political figures across the world.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it’s a really incredible story. So, and I want you to get into that, but first let’s, just discuss the, origins of the group. So the, name Opus Dei literally means “work of God.” So that’s, that is what they see themselves doing very literally. That is what they think they’re doing.

But so yeah, tell us the, history here, if you would please.

GORE: Yes. I mean, so, so yes, Opus Dei, it means quite literally in Latin, work of God. And that’s how the founder of the movement, this Spanish priest called Josemaría Escrivá, that’s how he basically explained the [00:26:00] concept to his followers. He said, “This is l- quite literally the work of God. I have received this vision directly from God, and this is what he wants us to do.”

And initially the kind of his idea for Opus Dei was a relatively, I, guess a, quite a laudable project, a, quite a, benign kind of thing. I mean, he, basically set out to create a new kind of Catholic organization that would help ordinary Catholics to kind of go deeper into their faith. He kind of spotted a, a bit of a gap in the market, let’s say.

I mean, you had your kind of ordinary Catholics, and then if for anyone that wanted to be more serious about their faith, you basically had to become a priest or a nun. And he thought maybe there was a middle way. Maybe, you could remain a layperson, but still kind of go deeper into your faith and become, almost strive for holiness.

And that was the idea that it, that’s how it all started. But the backdrop to this is, hugely important. Opus Dei was born into a country that was on the brink of civil war, quite literally on the brink of civil war. This, this was Spain in the early 1930s. The workers had basically risen up.

They’d overthrown the monarchy. They were turning their backs on traditional institutions like the church. The church, up until that point, had a quite a, stranglehold, I think it wouldn’t be too kind of too harsh to say, a stranglehold over, over s- many elements of society, things like culture, education.

And people were beginning to question that. And the founder of, Opus Dei saw what was happening around him. He saw the way that the government was, I guess, severing the control, influence that the church had over many aspects of society, not, least education, and he was horrified at what he saw around, him.

He s- he was horrified at the increased secularization of Spanish society. And [00:28:00] so this idea began to take on a much more political hue. He- his writings really started to become quite, darker. He started to talk about his followers as a hidden militia that would be inserted into the currents of society, and they would kind of use their positions to collect information about the enemies of Christ, and also use their in- their influence in, their jobs to, to push forward this reactionary agenda to wind the clock back on this secularization, to kind of, to lift the church back up to its proper place in society.

And so, I think– so I think, yes, he, wanted to do good at first, I think. He, really he spotted a kind of, this kind of gap in the market almost. But I think the conditions around him really warped his, this initial agenda. And so I think what began as quite a laudable project and quite a, benign project very quickly took on a very, political hue and, became extremely reactionary.

The Fatima miracle tradition within Hispanic reactionary Catholicism

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and, one particular way that he kind of latched onto, and, not just him, but some other reactionary Catholics th- there was this this story that came out of, Spain that they refer to as the Miracle of Fatima. So for… But non-Catholics I don’t think have ever heard of this before in their life.

Actually, a lot of Catholics probably have never heard of it either. So what, te- what is that belief and, like, how, and how is that useful as a evangelizing tool?

GORE: Well, I, think it possibly more importantly was that, that this the propaganda that was being pushed by Franco at the time. I mean,

SHEFFIELD: oh yeah. Well, I, [00:30:00] we’ll get into that. Sure. Yeah

GORE: but I mean, the, the fact that, Spain a few hundred years earlier had been– Well, it wasn’t Spain at the time, but A- Andalus was, basically part of of the kind of Islamic empire, and there’d been this great kind of Reconquista, the, kind of– The Christians had risen up and thrown out the Muslims.

And so, whilst all this was going on Franco staged a coup, and then the way that he tried to rally people around him was that he presented the kind of, “Coming to our side, we’re part of this new kind of Reconquista.” And so I think, this for me, I think that was a more powerful thing.

I mean, the whole Fatima thing, I mean, I don’t know, maybe you can fill us in on that. I’m not a great expert on, the miracle of Fatima.

SHEFFIELD: Well, so just very briefly, what it is, it’s this belief that in Portugal that there was a moment where there was a prophesied miracle and that the Virgin Mary was going to do something amazing, and people claimed that they saw the sun moving around in the sky and zigzagging, moving toward Earth.

And it was… And a lot of people had claimed that. And so it was like one of the few times where people, a lot of people claimed to have witnessed a miracle. And of course, if the sun actually had been doing that, well then everybody on Earth would be dead. So probably didn’t happen. I’m just gonna say that there.

But like the, Fatima story is a, very common kind of underground belief among far-right Catholics as kind of, It’s almost, it’s, a bit like so within Catholicism, actually contrary to Peter Thiel there’s not a big obsession with the Antichrist. There’s not a big obsession with the, end of the world, y- because this is a church that’s been around for thousands of years of people claiming that Jesus is going to come, was gonna come next week.

So they’re not really interested in that anymore. But the miracle of Fatima is kind of the it’s, [00:32:00] it functions in some way as kind of the rapture obsession for reactionary Catholics is what I would say. But maybe that’s a little further afield than you want to get.

GORE: but it is– I mean, it’s kind of an interesting subject because I think I think to our modern kind of eyes and ears, these, visions, And, we we still occasionally get them. I mean, like the whole Waco thing and, v- pe- people have these– They say that God has spoken to them and given them this message about the imminent end of the world or whatever it might be.

I think, as a culture, we’ve kind of learned to just kind of dismiss those things and ignore them. And m- I mean, for me, what’s, really quite interesting is how the followers of this Spanish, this unknown Spanish priest, they, believed that he had quite literally rece- received this vision from God.

And, I think the Fatima apparition was not that many years before this. It was kind of roughly… What was it? Was it in the 19-

SHEFFIELD: 1917.

GORE: And so, yeah. And so to 1917, I mean, it’s quite hard for us to kind of understand that. But yeah, I mean, this was kind of not quite part of the culture. That’s putting too, strong a spin on it.

But these things happened. People believed that, God or the Virgin Mary or who, whoever had, that they, had come down to earth. There were various things in Ireland as well at the time. And of course, Lourdes was also not that much kind of before this either. I think that was in the late kind of 19th century, if I’m not mistaken.

But but yeah, I mean, I think yeah, I mean, these things were abnormal, but they weren’t kind of– People back then didn’t believe that they were impossible, I guess, in the way that today people, if someone says that God’s just spoken to them, people are just gonna think you’re an absolute whack job.

Opus Dei and Spanish dictator Francisco Franco

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and your point though about it coinciding with Escrivá his, ministry, I th- there, there is something there because [00:34:00] in a lot of ways, essentially what he was doing was kind of importing the lay ministry concept from Protestantism into Catholicism. And so like that’s i- in some ways, like I…

That, that’s kind of maybe the, larger theme is that we’re seeing kind of the merger of reactionary Christianities globally across, a, kind of ecumenicalism that is anti-ecumenical to democracy is really what we’re talking about here. And, that’s something that, So, so, so once he got his organization started in Spain he did he did work with the, Franco people pretty closely. So let’s talk about that.

GORE: Yeah. I mean, not only did he work with him closely, but Franco offered him a huge amount of, financial and operational support. The two men, Franco and Escrivá were, big fans of each other. There were… I dug through the, Franco archives in, Madrid and found a number of letters from Escrivá and, his second in command, these really adulatory letters written to the Generalissimo hailing what he was doing, saving Christianity and the rest of it, ignoring the fact that, Franco was a dic- was a dictator who murdered tens of thousands of his opponents during peacetime, not just during the war.

Rounded up hundreds of thousands of political prisoners and put them into concentration camps and, this was a guy who was sending off left-leaning members of the opposition to the Nazis to be experimented on because the Nazis were looking for this red gene. He would send, Spanish citizens to be experimented on to the Nazis.

I mean, they had no, problems cozying up to, this brutal, deeply un-Christian dictator. And, by the 1950s Opposite, I mean. It’s [00:36:00] important to, to kind of say at this juncture, I think as well to, talk a little bit about how Opus Dei recruits. Opus Dei, because it’s a politically motivated organization, very much targets its recruitment efforts at people who are in positions of power or people who are wealthy, people who can help it to really push its agenda forward.

So I think, if you were… The membership of Opus Dei is, largely secret, but if we were to be able to kind of do a, a kind of sociological structure as to, the types of people it’s, recruited, it, it would be people, predominantly people like politicians, judges, business people, journalists even as well.

Anyone who can help to kind of further the agenda of the group. And so, by the 1950s in Spain, there were several thousand members, but they were very much concentrated in the kind of political judicial elite. And so, there was this big crisis in, Spain in the late 1950s, where the Franco regime was kind of on the verge of collapse.

There was, Its economic policies had been absolutely disastrous, and there were… And the kind of, the regime itself was beginning to kind of crumble into splinter parts. People were vying for influence. Opus Dei stepped into this and basically saved the, Franco regime from collapse. And as a reward for that, through the 1960s, Franco basically handed almost the governance of the country to a, small group of Opus Dei members.

By, the end of the ’60s, half of the cabinets was, filled by half of the cabinet positions were filled by people who were members of Opus Dei. this was kind of the real zenith of Opus Dei’s power in Spain. and so yeah, I mean, the, connections between the Franco regime and Opus Dei itself were, very [00:38:00] close.

The expansion of Opus Dei outside of Spain, including in the U.S.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And then once they had that foothold they began trying to expand into other countries as well. Into South America in particular is where they had a lot of success. But also they have had some a number of elites in the United States join their group and also in, Yeah, I guess, well, I guess, yeah, but I- I set that up for you.

Why don’t you go ahead and take that?

GORE: Well, yeah, I mean, I mean, just to quickly pick up on, on the, initial part of that, I mean The Franco regime was extremely corrupt. People who were close to Franco became extremely rich. And Opus Dei was a, became a great financial beneficiary from its closeness to the regime.

not only were they able to take over this high street bank in, in Spain, which, then became a, kind of cash machine for them, but, they, they also used the connections with the regime to take over a number of other businesses and to benefit from government contracts. In the 1950s, Opus Dei had, I think, more than 100 different companies that were basically…

it was benefiting from all of these financial flows. And that helped it, like you said, to, set up shop first of all in fellow sp- Spanish-speaking countries across Latin America, but, also right across Europe. And, by the 1950s, 1960s, they were also kind of making inroads into the United States.

And, I think initially in the US they tried to use the same playbook that they’d used in Spain. They, tried to recruit from the, political elite. But I think it didn’t translate all that well. I think Americans were slightly suspicious about these foreigners who were coming over kind of preaching this, very kind of different blend of Catholicism.

I mean, this was at a time when, you know, the, post-Vatican II, was, the church seemed to be going in a very different direction to the one that was being pushed by these, th- these disciples who’d come to spread the Opus Dei message from Spain. And it wasn’t really [00:40:00] until the 1980s, I think, that it started to really make inroads into Washington, DC.

When Pope John Paul II was elected, he was, an arch conservative. He basically gave Opus Dei a special status within the church, and he almost kind of anointed them as his kind of Green Berets that he would send to whatever, wherever, there was a pro- progressive archbishop or cardinal who was making life difficult for John Paul II by calling him out for whatever conservative policies he might have had.

He would then send Opus Dei to kind of do his bidding in, in, in, those parts of the world. And in the US, I think the US and the Catholic Church in the US in the 1980s was deeply divided. There were many, outspoken progressive archbishops who were who were basically very confrontational with John Paul II.

And I think that created a, almost a schism within the kind of US Catholic Church. There were a lot of kind of conservative Catholics who were very supportive of John Paul II’s policies, who were very supportive of what President Reagan was doing in places like Central America. And they, I think, almost felt left adrift by the church leadership who, were kind of progressive leaning.

And so I think Opus Dei very successfully kind of inserted itself into this kind of gap that had been left, and became almost a kind of a rallying point for many conservative Catholics who felt betrayed by the church leadership in the United States. And that’s when it really started, I think, to kind of, especially in Washington, DC, to, to attract the types of people that it, it had really wanted to, cultivate.

In the late 1980s, it started to… Opus Dei started to really kind of build a, very strong relationship with Antonin [00:42:00] Scalia. And, once it started to attract big names like Scalia, it made it, much easier to attract even more. And it suddenly, it was, it found itself inserted or had successfully, inserted itself into, a number of realms that are very difficult to get into.

And so, once you’re friends with Scalia and the rest of it, it then becomes very d- very, easy to then meet the right people in Congress and on K Street and in other parts of DC. And so it became, suddenly that opened many, doors for them.

Opus Dei priest converted many Republicans to Catholicism and was accused of sexual assault

GORE: And there was a particular priest called C. John McCloskey who was the main priest for Opus Dei in Washington, DC, who became extremely successful at converting a number of prominent conservative politicians

SHEFFIELD: And he made it his focus. Like that was h- and his job as he saw it was to target right-wing Republicans for conversion

GORE: Absolutely. And he was extremely successful. He, kind of gained a nickname for himself. He was known as the Convert Maker, and he didn’t just kind of convert people who were already Catholic to the Opus Dei cause. He also converted a number of non-Catholics and non-Christians. there, there are a number of kind of prominent Jewish conversions that he helped to, bring in.

He was, really quite a charismatic priest. He was kind of regular on, on, on programs like Meet the Press. He was a staunch defender of John Paul II. I mean, when the, Boston Globe crisis erupted and, people were be- and people started to question the way that the church and John Paul II was handling this h- this enormous sexual abuse scandal McCloskey took to the airwaves to defend the cover-ups that were basically happening at the time.

he was trying to talk about how, we shouldn’t be focusing on the way the church is handling this. This is a, homosexual [00:44:00] scandal. This, the problem… It’s a homosexual problem. Absolutely. It’s not a– This is not about pedophilia. It’s not about the church trying to cover up abuse.

It’s not about the church, hearing about abuse and then shipping some priest onto another parish and trying to keep things quiet. Let’s look, let’s look the other way. This is about homosexuality in society. that’s the re- that’s the real problem here. He was kind of a big proponent of that kind of agenda.

And, and so yeah, I think Opus Dei very successfully kind of painted themselves as the staunch defenders of, kind of true conservative Catholicism and, helped along by John Paul II, who not only gave them this special status, but then went on to beatify and then canonize the founder of Opus Dei.

So this, priest, became Saint Josemaría, and still is kind of revered as a, saint in the Catholic Church today.

Dan Brown’s ‘Da Vinci Code’ and Opus Dei

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So really, quite incredible. And just as a coda though to McCloskey after his years of defending and trying to divert attention from sexual abuse, he himself was found guilty of having done that to a woman, and was severely restricted in his job by Opus Dei. But it wasn’t it wasn’t something seemingly that they wanted to do.

But nonetheless, yeah, he the wo- he had, th- they had to pay the woman I think a, close to a million dollars in the settlement that they reached with her. And to some extent, I think that scandal brought some, of the first attention within the US media to Opus Dei as an organization, even though regrettably there was Opus Dei figures in the Dan Brown execrable novel novel settings.

So I guess maybe perhaps that’s the first one. But first actual real attention [00:46:00] for, some of the terrible things that they’ve done

GORE: So, I mean, on McCloskey, I mean, at least they were consistent. So McCloskey and Opus Dei, having justified or seek to kind of paper over all the cover-ups that had happened in the church around the sexual abuse scandal, they then tried to cover up the McCloskey scandal themselves. First, when it looked like he was about to be served papers and, the woman who’d been abused was, going to sue him and it was all gonna come out, they flew him out off to England, so that he couldn’t be served papers and he couldn’t be arrested.

And, he, was there basically in hiding whilst Opus Dei was working out this, agreement to silence the victim. And yes, they paid her almost a million dollars to buy her silence, but the story eventually came out years later. But yeah, I mean, the Da Vinci Code was a… and I mean, this was happening almost around the same time that The Da Vinci Co- Code came out.

And, Dan Brown, of course, The Da Vinci Code is a work of fiction. There are many holes, of course, in The Da Vinci Code and many things are, completely made up. But, I, think It’s interesting that Dan Brown chose Opus Dei to be this kind of the, one of the baddies in the book.

I mean, to your point, already at this point there were a number of s- there were many suspicions around about Opus Dei, about its practices, about, things like, corporal mortification. And already at this point as well, there were allegations against the group, the way that it had, was abusing its members and its very questionable practices.

And so in a way it became, I guess, almost a natural baddie for, it’s, kind of unsurprising that he chose chose them to kind of fill that role in the book. I mean, of course, he, [00:48:00] then went on to make up lots of things which aren’t true, not least the fact that, the central character was, an albino monk, a supposed member of Opus Dei.

There are no monks in Opus Dei to begin with, so that… But, you know what? in many ways, “The Da Vinci Code” was a godsend that’s for, Opus Dei because what it did was, create a, an opportunity for them to speak about O- Opus Dei in the press. And so, obviously “The Da Vinci Code” was an enormous success, and so the press, were were looking for kind of the real, “Da Vinci Code” stories, and so kind of Opus Dei used that opportunity to basically tell the world how we’re nothing like how we’re portrayed in the book and invited the press into its centers to show them this extremely veneered kind of image of, what, their presentation of what they, wanted Opus Dei to be seen as in the world.

And on the back of that, they managed to recruit, a number of people. I mean, the, the, recruitment really kind of went through the roof partly as a, result of “The Da Vinci Code” because they played that kind of media game very well. They, and it’s, they had this thing called Operation Lemonade.

when, life serves you lemons, then you make lemonade, and that’s precisely what they did. they, used that, and I think only now are we kind of seeing the after effects of that. So, already they’d been quite successful in DC, recruited quite a number of senior figures, people close to the Supreme Court, people in Congress, and the rest of it And I think on the back of that and on the back of this Operation Lemonade to basically, I guess, capitalize on The Da Vinci Code attention, then, the recruitment, especially in DC, kind of really went into overdrive.

And the people they started to recruit in those years were only, I think [00:50:00] we’re now starting to see the results of that

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, th- there is a pretty awful ironic picture there that you’re gonna join an organization that was portrayed as this e- tremendous source of evil. But, it does fit to the right-wing Christian persecution obsession. Like so many of them, they do truly see themselves as a- as living in the end times, and then they’re being persecuted just like the, early Christians were in, just at some…

Any day now a Democratic governor is going to say it’s okay to murder Christians. Like this is an actual belief of right-wing Christians in the US. It’s very common

GORE: But even, in the Da Vinci book, right? I mean, Opus Dei commits all of these crimes, but it commits these crimes in order to save the church and in order to stop the secrets of the s- of the church from being kind of, fr- from, coming to light. And so, so I, guess, yes, it’s kind of ironic that they j- maybe The Da Vinci Code, caused many people to, to join Opus Dei, but, it kind of, it, kind of runs in with this theme that, certain crimes or certain wrongdoing is permissible if it’s for this greater good, I guess, I guess was the message.

Reactionary Christian traditions grow because they provide economic and social support

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and, so, it, and it does highlight though the other thing is that Opus Dei, the, how it grows and how it works so well for its members for so long, irrespective of crimes is that it, it really is a social support and social networking organization of the sort that you really don’t see a lot of in the modern day.

Because so many community clubs so in the US, we got things called Lions Club and, of course you got things like the Freemasons or whatever. Social organizations independent of, religions, but religions also are, have been, collapsing in terms of belief [00:52:00] in.

And so here you have this very tightly knit organization of people that says, “Yes, we’re, working for God literally, and we’re gonna do everything we can to help each other advance professionally.” I mean, this is, it’s a, it’s an incredible way of leveraging a small group for, great power

GORE: Yeah. and, you know what I, I mean, I think it’s, it is very helpful to think of Opus Dei as, a network, as a political network. in the countries where it’s strongest, in places like Spain, it’s, almost a whole feeder system. So you have Opus Dei schools, which, in addition to being recruitment grounds for the children that, that attend those schools, those schools are also a way to bring in the wider community, to bring in the parents to Opus Dei events or whatever.

And then, the schools feed into Opus Dei universities and, and then you’ve got the kind of wider membership who are in positions of, power and influence across the worlds of business and politics or whatever. And I think, certainly in places like Spain, Italy, Mexico, Argentina, and perhaps in some parts of the US, the Opus Dei network is it- it’s very beneficial to be part of that.

Not just spiritually, supposedly, but also kind of career-wise business-wise, within the network deals are done, people help each other out. And when the, when someone has a particular idea for a political project or think tank or a certain kind of thing that they want to push, they fall back on the network for financial and for kind of operational support.

And so I think, comparing it to something like the Freemasons, I think is… it’s interesting. I think, there are lots of similarities there. I mean, I think the Freemasons, I think the peak of, was a long time ago and, they, no longer have this kind of power, but it’s a very similar idea.

These are almost kind of [00:54:00] secret societies of people who are in positions of influence and, you’ve almost got these kind of secret meetings going on where they get together and and they, organize ways of helping each other out and, looking after each other. I think, I think it– they’re very sim- Opus Dei would hate me for saying this, but they’re very similar I think.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s, an example of why these f- far-right religious movements of not just Opus Dei, but, we see that also in the US. So, for instance and this is just a little aside I don’t expect you to have to comment on it unless you want to. But, like, in the US people who come in as, impoverished immigrants from Spanish-speaking Latin America, they don’t know anyone.

They don’t have any friends oftentimes. They don’t have family members. and so really for many of them, the, only network that they can have is in these evangelical churches. And so Hispanic Protestantism is just as rapidly growing a religious denomination, which, is… There’s not really any denominations that are growing significantly in the US, but this is one of them.

and it’s because it actually does things for the people who go into it. and then of course, tells them all sorts of terrible things about homosexuality and transgender people and women and, but you know, y- if you, don’t like those things and you’re somebody who has money and you have left-leaning values, well, then y- you’ve gotta create your own organizations, y- or if you’re a, Christian who doesn’t like these things, well, where is, where are your organizations to, help people advance themselves?

GORE: I think, I mean, that’s the, danger of these kind of closed communities that especially when they’re connected to, religion, I think, And I think in a way that was the kind of the Opus Dei playbook. They, they, wanted to [00:56:00] create all these, closed communities.

They have the community of schools, the universities, even the university residences that, where the students kind of sleep and, are fed, are, in many w- in many instances run by Opus Dei. And, when you combine these kind of communities with religion and you have priests telling people, what they should believe and how this tiny line in the Bible kind of backs up this particular kind of political agenda, it’s a recipe for disaster because these people are kind of, the- they’re not hearing outside voices.

They’re not going, they’re, just hearing from the Opus Dei priest and the Opus Dei spiritual directors. They aren’t kind of really reading up on or they’re not visiting other parishes where, a priest, an, a, more progressive priest might ha- priest might have a very different perspective and different view about what the gospel is saying or whatever.

And, I think these communities like the ones that you were just talking about, but also kind of Opus Dei communities there’s a real danger of radicalization, and I think that’s what we’ve seen.

Abuses, including sex trafficking, were protected by Opus Dei’s secrecy

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So, okay, so b-beyond the social components and the networking that they do, so you had investigated and, found a number of other very disturbing things. And let’s walk through just some of the, lowlights if you will

GORE: I mean, yeah, I mean, this is an organization that is absolutely riddled with, abuse. You have cases of spiritual abuse where the organization breaches the seal of confession, uses supposed kind of spiritual guidance sessions that are obligatory to collect information on its members, and then passes this information up the chain to be used against members at a later date to kind of manipulate them and coerce them into doing things that might benefit the group.

Within the group as well, I mean, all kinds of psychological [00:58:00] abuse the ranks of Opus Dei, especially the kind of the the celibate members, the, numeraries that kind of go out and recruit for the organization, those ranks are absolutely riddled with mental illness. And, often the organization tries to cover up those instances of, men- mental ill- illness which have been caused by, the way that the organization operates.

They, use their own doctors to prescribe a cocktail of drugs to, to basically hide the symptoms without really addressing what’s been going on. And also, there, there’s this kind of other quite separate aspect as well. I mean, generally the, group recruits from the elite of society, but it al- it also has these kind of very high-end residences around the world where its numerary members live and where, some of these also double up as university residences.

And, they have over the years basically recruited underprivileged girls to go work there as kind of semi-slaves. And, these girls are recruited in poor parts of the world across Latin America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and they’re then trafficked to, to work in Opus Dei centers around the world.

So you’ve got this kind of hidden underbelly of, enslavement and human trafficking as well. And, m- more recently there’s a, case ongoing in Argentina where public prosecutors investigated Opus Dei for two years and concluded that criminal charges needed to be brought against the group.

And so there is a case currently being heard, and y- there, there are likely to be criminal charges coming very soon

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, it’s, just i- in any organization that large, irrespective of their doctrines or whatever, you’re gonna have p- people who engage in misconduct. But, this organization, the way that it’s structured seems to, in a lot of ways promulgate abuse of various kinds, and it’s really, awful.

And so, [01:00:00] s- so your book a- after it came out in hardback the Opus Dei did not like your book, needless to say. So they kind of went after you

GORE: Yeah, they did sur- surprise me. I mean, actually, I was surprised. I mean, I perhaps quite naively thought that the book and the evidence presented in the book might be a good opportunity for them to say, “Well, just a minute. Perhaps something’s gone wrong here. We should launch our own investigation. We should find out what’s gone wrong.”

I think, I’ve been a journalist for more than 20 years, and over the years, whenever an organization is presented with, serious allegations like these, then they take them, generally take them seriously, and they launch investigations. They pledge to get, to the bottom of whatever’s happened, and they pledge to, fire or, hold accountable, people who’ve, committed such acts.

I mean, I think the reaction w- of Opus Dei to my book was quite telling. Instead of, trying to get to the bottom of this, they instead just called me a liar. They called me a conspiracy theorist. They accused me of having been paid by some, someone with a vendetta against the group to write this book.

They basically did everything possible to try to undermine the work that I’d done and and the, what the book was trying, to say. And, I think that, that failed because, a few weeks back, I actually got a call from the Vatican saying that Pope Leo was very much aware of the work that I’d done and the book and that he wanted to meet.

And so I was invited to the Vatican to give a private briefing to the pope about my findings. And so I think I think, so this strategy by Opus Dei to basically kind of distract the public and try to paint me as just some crazy guy who’s written a book that’s full of lies has backfired because, they had an opportunity to do something about these allegations, and they’ve shown their true side.

they’ve shown a [01:02:00] complete lack of desire to really get to the truth and, basically now the pope is onto them. I think yeah, I think whatever… they, could have they could have, done something, I think, when the book came out, but now it’s too late.

I think now they’re potentially gonna face far more severe consequences as a result of not really grappling with, the allegations.

Pope Leo’s investigation of Opus Dei

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and on that point also, it’s, I think it’s worth noting that a lot of the allegations that talk about in the book, they aren’t things that, you just in many ways are putting pieces together that were already public. So it’s not like you made these up or you reported these out.

Like, you as a person did not expose a lot of these scandals. Like, people knew about them locally. It’s just that no one had ever put it together and said, “Wow, this seems to be a very abusive organization.” And so like irrespective of your viewpoint, it, that’s, perhaps why the, Pope is taking…

was asking for that meeting because, you, did something very reliable. Like, you didn’t make this stuff up, and it’s obvious that you didn’t.

GORE: And, I think I think that’s kind of played into Opus Dei’s court over the years. I think it’s been very successful at basically trying to portray any kind of abuse as very kind of local examples of, something’s gone wrong, these are a few bad apples. It’s nothing to do with us as an organization.

But I think, the real message I hope comes across in the book is that this is a… The abuse inside of this organization, it’s systematic, and it’s almost there by design. A lot of the abuse and controlling behaviors that happen inside the organization are actually kind of mandated… Were actually directly mandated by the founder himself.

I got hold of these internal documents, these internal writings of the founder that are, that, that have never been released, publicly [01:04:00] released, but, which are are stored in every single re- Opus Dei residence around the world, and they’re kind of followed to the letter. And, in the writings of the founder, it…

that’s where the, abuse and control and manipulation started. We have it in black and white that the founder basically ordered his followers to abuse other Catholics and to manipulate them in order to further the agenda of, Opus Dei. And so I think you’re absolutely right that, for decades there have been all kinds of allegations against Opus Dei, and in many years…

i- in many ways, the, book is a kind of a, summation of, those allegations. There are some, new things in there too, but, yes, absolutely. It’s a summation of, this, whole dossier of abuse. But I think what the book does that’s kind of new is kind of link… is basically show how this is systematic of the organization, and that’s, something that I really kind of emphasized in my meeting with the Pope, that I think it’s impossible to just kind of make a few reforms around the edges and maybe to…

And, to tell Opus Dei to stop doing this or that or the other. Because The members truly believe that the things they’re doing are divinely inspired. They quite literally believe that the founder of Opus Dei received a vision for the organization directly from God, and that these rules and regulations that he wrote down are literally kind of d- they come from God.

They’re divinely inspired. And so I, I made the point to the pope that if you really want to reform this group, you have to tackle that issue at its roots. You have to you have to challenge this narrative that these rules and regulations were divinely inspired. You perhaps need to challenge this notion that Escrivá received a divine vision full stop.

And, I made the point also that it’s… [01:06:00] What makes it even more problematic is the fact that you don’t just have this one priest who says he received a vision from God. But then, years later, the Catholic Church, with all of its power and might, decided to canonize this guy. And so they’ve kind of made this problem even more complicated for themselves.

And so I, I don’t envy Pope Leo in having to reform this group and having to tackle the abuse, abuses that have been perpetrated by Opus Dei over the years. I think it’s gonna be an extremely complex issue for him to take on. And yeah, I mean, we’ll see what happens.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s y- yeah, and it’s like there, there’s a doctrinal risk in, this group inherently, I think. Because, if you have a church that says there is only one representative of God and then you have an organization that says, “No, we are the work of God,” that’s that seems heretical on its face.

But I’m not Catholic, so, what do I know?

GORE: Yeah, it, is a mess. And, the whole concept of canonization as well is the process of deciding whether to canonize someone or not involves basically, and I kind of like paraphrase, but basically confirming that they’re in heaven. And they do that through the kind of miracles that are supposed to have happened, from people who prayed to this particular guy, and he responded by performing miracles or whatever.

And the process of canoniza- canonization is suppo- supposedly confirms that these things happened. And so to kind of unwind that and say, “Just a minute, maybe we were wrong,” is, I think, gonna be extremely problematic for the church. And so, I, do wonder whether or not Pope Leo and the church more generally is ready to kind of open up this whole can of worms.

We will see. I mean, I do think there is a potential kind of get-out clause for [01:08:00] them in that there’s strong evidence that the process of canonization was flawed. There were many people who weren’t heard, who had evidence to to basically say that Escrivá should not have been canonized. They, they were basically turned away by the commission that was that was deciding this.

And so I think there’s a, there are very… There’s a very strong argument that you could argue that the, canonization process didn’t actually play out properly, and you could reopen the process and say, “Actually, we want to now hear from these other people.” And, that might be a way of arriving at a conclusion that this guy maybe shouldn’t have been canonized and that they, could remove the sainthood from Escrivá.

I’m not sure. But I think to allow him to remain a saint is potentially quite problematic because you then, It’s a very confusing message to say if, if you’re going, if you’re going to tackle the abuse but allow the guy that basically enshrined this c- which… who codified this system of abuse to continue being a saint, then that sends very mixed messages, and you’re just basically giving carte blanche to people who want to continue believing and doing these kinds of things.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and also undermining your own leadership if in the church, regardless of even if you agree with them, you’re undermining your own leadership by tolerating this group in this way. Yeah.

All right. Well, so, this has been a, informative conversation here. So, obviously I’ll let you plug your book one more time here and then any social media platforms or whatever you want people to follow you on.

GORE: Well, yeah. If you want to learn more, please go out and buy the book or borrow it from your, local public library. It’s called Opus. And yes, you can find me on Substack. I generally put out updates whenever a bit of news happens, so that’s probably a good place to follow me if you want to have the latest on what the Pope might do about Opus [01:10:00] Dei.

I’m also on X and, Bluesky. But yeah. Thank you very much, Matt, for having me on. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

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Thirty years ago, John Horgan had a dream—or rather a nightmare. Here and there, scientists were saying that all the major problems of the universe had essentially been solved, and that the work of the future was just going to be filling in the details of what we already knew.

But those voices were largely drowned out in the generation of scientists who came of age promoting radical new ideas that they claimed would push their disciplines far beyond what was then-currently known. Despite their creators’ claims, however, ideas like string theory, quantum consciousness, and chaos theory, were unable to generate actual testable ideas and inventions.

Had scientific progress stalled? Is it possible that there are real limits on what humans can ever know because of the type of beings that we are? This was the thesis of John’s book, The End of Science, which was published in 1996.

The book was instantly controversial, and he was fired from Scientific American because of it. And yet in the intervening 30 years, many of the exact same people he had profiled are still promoting the same unproductive ideas.

Is it accurate to say that science is stalled out though? That’s why I wanted to talk with John about the book, and where he sees things in 2026, especially now that one of America’s two major parties has rebuilt itself around attacking science and secular knowledge.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

14:51 — Isn’t all science just a type of philosophy?

25:14 — Peter Thiel’s claim that scientific progress has stalled

31:33 — Why science has such difficulty understanding consciousness

38:08 — The tension some religious believers feel with consciousness research

49:02 — Jeffrey Epstein’s obsession with scientists

53:20 — The fragility of the postwar liberal consensuses, and why they were taken for granted

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: You wrote a book that pissed off a lot of people 30 years ago, and that’s what we are here to talk about today, among other things. So how does it feel 30 years after the fact, and are you going to retract at all right now, John, here and now?

JOHN HORGAN: Well, no. I think I was onto [00:03:00] something. I’ve never stopped thinking about the End of Science. I’m delighted that people are still arguing about the book. I mean, books vanish without a trace. That didn’t happen in my book. It got a lot of attention when it first came out. It caused a lot of trouble was widely debated.

It got me in trouble at my magazine, Scientific American, and ultimately I was fired because of my book. but by the time I got fired, I wanted to go off on my own and be a freelancer and write books for a living. So that worked out fine. I. People have had all kinds of reactions to it, some of which are silly or trivial and dumb, sort of just knee jerk defenses of science that weren’t informed at all by the things I said in my book. But other people have had really interesting responses and I’ve been rethinking my thesis for decades now. Just recently, I’ve decided that if anything [00:04:00] wasn’t pessimistic enough that the end of science, which is predicting that this great enterprise of trying to understand reality that goes back thousands of years, that this might be ending.

I mean, I love science, that’s why I became a science writer. So this was tragic for me. But and so it was very pessimistic of me to say that this, kind of grand science is ending. Science is in even worse shape now than I could have anticipated 30 years ago for a lot of different reasons that we could could get into.

And yet at the same time, there are a couple of things that make me hopeful that there could be revolutionary advances in science in the future.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Well, and we will come back to the why things are worse now toward the end. But yeah, like, let’s just kind of talk about the basic thesis for people. Because the main [00:05:00] title is very provocative, but your subtitle kind of, makes it a little bit less sweeping in the ambit. So walk us through that if you would please.

HORGAN: All right. So my core claim is that science’s attempt to understand the universe has been extremely successful, so successful, that it will be hard to improve upon it in any kind of dramatic way. So we’ve created this kind of map of the whole universe, a history of the universe starting with the Big Bang, formation of galaxies, formation of the solar system.

We’ve come up with a pretty good history of life on earth and a basic understanding of how life diversified through natural selection. We have an understanding of the molecular basis of life, that’s embodied by the double helix. And my claim was that we’re not going to [00:06:00] have any revolutions in the future that completely change our picture of reality, as dramatic as the big Bang theory, quantum mechanics, relativity evolutionary theory, uh, modern genetics and all that.

We’re going to be filling in details of this map of reality, and applying some of our knowledge. But at the era of really great profound discoveries, as I put it, revelations and revolutions is over. It’s going to be anticlimactic from here on in. I was really just talking about science, what I call “pure science,” it just tries to understand the universe– not applied science. I thought applied science would be difficult. predict. So I sort of left that off to the side it’s the pure science, just for the sake of understanding [00:07:00] that has always interested me a science journalist.

So that was that was my core thesis. But then I also said that science faces various limits: cognitive limits, physical limits, economic and political limits. And because of that, there are certain big questions that science will never be able to solve. Like, where did the universe come from in the first place? How did life begin on earth? How consciousness is produced by matter. I thought I said back then those mysteries would not be solved for various complicated reasons that I. That I could go into. so basically thesis in, in a nutshell.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it is, even if people disagree with you, I think the book is valuable as just a, run through of all of these different scientific fields at the time that you [00:08:00] were writing it. So it was published in 1996. And it, I mean, everybody’s there. You, you really did benefit from being a Scientific American employee when you were writing that.

I think you got literally all the biggest names, all these Nobel Prize winners and it’s all there. So In a large way, you thesis that people aren’t going to be coming up with any of these, really monumental theoretical inventions or, innovations.

all of the theories that are talked about in your book, we are still talking about them today and they’re not. And, and some of the people are, have died, but plenty of them are still going and they’re still saying the same stuff. Like give us a kind of overview of some of the people.

HORGAN: So I was really attracted to people who were very accomplished as as scientists, but also unafraid of making grand statements about the future of science and the limits of science. So, [00:09:00] some of people I talked to had predicted that, that their fields were converging on some kind of final theory.

So there were a bunch of physicists who said this, Steven Weinberg this, great particle physics physicist was one of them. He wrote a book called Dreams of a Final Theory that came out in the early nineties. And talked to him about that and so he was this sort of supreme reductionist, who thought that physics was going to provide the, fundamental knowledge that would ultimately help us explain everything else, including including life itself. Weinberg was a really smart guy, knowledgeable, just only about particle physics, but a wide range of other fields as well. I also talked to this guy John Wheeler, who was the ultimate physics poets. Physicist, really imaginative, [00:10:00] brilliant And he had this idea of there being at the end of the road for physics, a kind of revelation that would make everything clear.

So we look at the mystery of the universe and there’s some theory explanation, whatever that makes us go, oh my God, that’s it. Of course. And everything becomes clear. mystery is dispelled. I also met, I didn’t really interview him because he, couldn’t speak, but I hung out with Stephen Hawkin, who of course kicked a lot of this.

Talk about a final theory in physics off. a lecture he gave at Cambridge in 19, way back in 1980. He talked about a theory of everything that would explain all physical interactions in the universe. And so I started hearing these ideas when I first became a science writer in the 1980s. Ideas coming from physics about a [00:11:00] final theory, a unified theory a theory of everything. then I realized that there were people in biology who were saying the same thing. That in a way the theory of evolution by natural selection plus modern molecular biology based on DNA, we’re creating this final framework for biology within which all the mysteries about for example, how a single fertilized cell turns into like this, that all those would eventually be solved.

So the field was described as something sort of. Closed rather than open-ended. And there was this idea that we were converging on final solutions. One of the key figures I interviewed was was Francis Crick, the guy who cracked, with James Watson, cracked the structure of DNA, the double helix, and then went on to try to solve the the problem of consciousness made consciousness a [00:12:00] respectable scientific problem the late 1980s and and early 1990s.

And again, convinced a lot of people, including me, that with incremental, conventional research on animals and, some humans, we would figure out what consciousness is and how it’s produced by brains and maybe generalized from that to explaining how consciousness is produced by any physical thing. And so it was all these people talking about science as basically on the verge the world, explaining the universe, explaining existence, including our own existence. That’s what really got me. I started taking that seriously and thinking, wow, is that really going to happen? And and then I started, talked to all [00:13:00] these people about the limits of science and the obstacles to a final scientific picture of reality. And I came up with my own, thesis, which was that no science has already done it can, at least in a really sort of rough way to figure out reality. And then the. Future scientists trying to explain things once and for all are going to be bumping up against these fundamental limits. And so that is what led to the end of science.

But want to make the point that one reason why my book enraged scientists so much, is because I use their own words and ideas against them. I, my my argument that science one really important sense was [00:14:00] ending, or was already over in a way, is cobbled together from things that all these physicists and biologists were saying.

Richard Dawkins and The__ Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins, the great, religion bashing biologist in The Blind Watchmaker said that life was once a mystery, but it’s a mystery no more because Dar Darwin solved it. And, we have footnotes to add footnotes what Darwin said, but but that’s compared to what what Darwin achieved. Ernst Meyer, the great biologist, said something similar. So, it was these sorts of things that I was putting together to give this sense of science, having reached some kind of final state.

Isn’t all science just a type of philosophy?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And, a lot of people, well, maybe not a lot, but some people actually were making your argument. Let’s talk about these, limits that we’re [00:15:00] talking about. So, obviously humans we’re limited in terms of our size. So we can’t, we’re not as small as a, quark or a neutrino, or anything like that. So like, we can’t really see what they’re doing. But also we can’t see, what a, a black hole is doing. And we can’t go out there and watch it for a thousand years and make our findings about it.

So like, it’s all, it has to all be theoretical in some sense, and I think that’s kind of what you’re terming as ironic science.

HORGAN: Yeah. So the supreme example, I came up with idea of ironic science when I was about string theory. So string theory was already happening by the time I became a science writer in the 1980s. And so I started talking to people about it and it was upheld as this, it was the best candidate for a final theory of physics that would really explain. Everything. It would explain space and time. It would [00:16:00] tell us maybe how the universe came to be in the first place. Why the universe has one particular structure not a structure that allows for our existence and not some other didn’t take some other form. The problem with string theory, and this is all the unified theories that were being batted around in the 1980s and 1990s, is that they, hypothesize things happening at scales that are completely unaccessible to any possible And so string theory represented a discontinuity the history of physics where there had always been this interaction between theory and experiment. The string theorists were jumping off into a realm of total imagination. Constrained by mathematics, but that’s it. Not constrained by experiment. So I thought, what is this? it’s not really science. And, along with strength theory, there was a lot of [00:17:00] speculation about other universes, many worlds theory. There was a landscape theory. There are all these different inflation that had as a kind of side effect, the existence of infinite other universities, in addition to our own and physicists were taking that seriously. So I came up with this term ironic science to describe this strange state of affairs where you had these ideas coming from, very respectable, big time scientists, but that weren’t testable, verifiable, weren’t susceptible to experimentation. And of course, you’ve had a lot of theories that Karl Popper distinguished between testable and Untestable theories as the the line dividing pseudoscience from science. And he upheld Freudian psychoanalysis as kind of the epitome of pseudoscience. And pseudoscience is kind of a mean term. I prefer [00:18:00] ironic science. So it’s, science that can be awe inspiring and provocative and very stimulating to think about, but it doesn’t converge on the truth.

You can never say this theory is actually true, psychoanalysis or string theory.

SHEFFIELD: Well, although, I mean we, I want to consider that maybe you are being unfair, perhaps in the sense that philosophy is the parent of science. And so therefore, when science is up against the instrumentational limits or the metaphysical limits, in other words, the metaphysics of the scientists, if they have a bad metaphysics, that can also constrain what they can conceive of as a possible experimental theory.

So perhaps going [00:19:00] back to philosophy and going back to metaphysics, this is what they should do.

HORGAN: Yeah. I mean, I love philosophy and metaphysics, but I don’t want to confuse that with science. Science gets somewhere, and the mark good science is that it makes predictions that are born out. Or not born out. And it often leads to applications. So all these esoteric theories embodied by what you might call quantum physics that were emerging in the early 20th century, who cares really. But then that work led to, nuclear weapons. It led to technologies that have changed the course in of history and in the same way that biology has led to, advances in, in medicine. And if you just go back to metaphysics and philosophy, it can [00:20:00] be awe inspiring and, provocative, not getting a grip on, on the real world in the way that real science did.

So I thought it was important to make a distinction and, yeah, physics, you could say was going back to its roots with, with string theory and multiverse theories all of

SHEFFIELD: is like the Pre-Socratics, isn’t it, in a sense?

HORGAN: But the, physicists who were promoting those theories, that’s not what they were saying. They weren’t saying, well, physics, real physics, is gone as, as far as it can go. And so we’ve returned to our roots in philosophy. No, they were saying, this is real and we should accept it. And these theories are explaining where the universe came from, all of which was bullshit. It was like hand waving and marketing their ideas. So that’s what I was trying to point out in the end of science when I was being critical of string theory [00:21:00] and, some of these other things.

Yeah. Well, and I think, yeah, that there, there’s, going back to metaphysics is important sometimes when you’re stuck. But on the other hand, you have to actually be able to predict something. if, you’re not going to be able to create testable conclusions, then you’re just doing philosophy.

Well, remember, I, I, I don’t know if I said this before, but don’t think philosophy gets anywhere. I, philosophy I see as a kind of branch of literature a or fiction or poetry. I mean, good philosophy to me doesn’t present you with a problem and then solve it. And you go, oh, okay, so I, don’t have to worry about this.

The, how language maps onto the real world, whatever that is, because I know Saul Kripke or somebody solved it. No philosophy just says the same way that fiction does try looking at the world this way [00:22:00] See if, see how that works and compare it to the way that we used to look at things. it’s, something that is just kind of making the scales fall from, in our eyes, but it’s not helping us converge on what you might call a correct way of looking at the world, which science remarkably sometimes does.

Mm-hmm.

That’s the distinction I would make.

Yeah. Well, and maybe as a, just as a personal example is, the, looking at the general generalizability or applicability of, let’s say the, Ethics of Aristotle or The Politics, versus The__ Physics. Like nobody takes The Physics seriously, as a matter of, science.

SHEFFIELD: It’s just not, people don’t, and with good reason.

HORGAN: Well, it’s funny, so I’ve, thought a lot about, I, I used to be part of a philosophy salon in New York that was disbanded the by the [00:23:00] pandemic. And these are real professional philosophers. And sometimes I thought when I was speaking up, they’d go, who let this guy in anyway?

SHEFFIELD: Mm-hmm.

HORGAN: But we had, there were a lot of discussions about, about whether philosophy progresses and what problems it might have solved.

And would to, I was surprised that some of these philosophers denied that there was progress in philosophy. And I said, well, about progress in human rights? and what about our recognition of progress in human rights that you could say be attributed to some enlightenment thinkers? And then, I don’t know the arguments made for you caring about the suffering of animals made by Peter Singer and people like that. And the philosophers were like, eh, and, some of them were saying no, philosophy has demonstrated that there is no [00:24:00] coherent system of moral rules. That any ethics that you construct, I can demolish. And philosophy has had this record of construct. Kant, Aristotle builds a system of ethics. Kant has a system of ethics, and then somebody like Nietzsche comes and like smashes it to bits.

I, my impression is that’s a continued to the present day. Bernard Williams has, we read a paper by him in, our philosophy salon that basically said that there is no philosophical system of ethics that. That can withstand serious scrutiny. I mean, I, that doesn’t matter to me. I still think that I have moral principles, whether or not I can prove them axiomatic or, in some kind of mathematical proof sets. I, mean, I think it’s bad to incinerate [00:25:00] children, for example. But but it’s very hard to demonstrate that logically.

So I do still separate moral reasoning from, I don’t know what you might call scientific or logical or mathematical reasoning.

Peter Thiel’s claim that scientific progress has stalled

SHEFFIELD: speaking of Nietzsche, somebody who is a really big fan of him, Peter Thiel, it’s funny because he makes a lot of the same critiques that you do, John. and, I want to talk about that because like right now as we are recording, Peter Thiel is in Rome, or maybe he just finished.

Giving a series of lectures on the Antichrist from the Bible, and how the Antichrist is actually why we’re at a, stopping point in science. And that people like yourself who want to have more regulations on corporations and polluting and things like that, that you are actually to blame people like you are [00:26:00] why there’s an end of science, you and the Antichrist.

HORGAN: Who is Antichrist?

SHEFFIELD: Well, according to him, it’s, Greta Thunberg and, anyone else who wants regulations on technology and technology companies. And he literally says this but also, but he also, like him and he cronies are very big on, they don’t like string theory, and like one example he often gives is in the fifties we were promised flying cars, and now all we have is another another way to try to loot boxes on our mobile apps and where’s my flying car? And must be the Antichrist’s fault.

HORGAN: Well, I don’t know if I, mean, Peter Thiel is a mystery to me. I don’t know why people take him seriously except that he’s really rich, and that’s how a lot of people get taken seriously. If you’ve made a billion dollars, then you must be a serious person and a, serious intellect. But I know he has been sort of fretting over the stagnation [00:27:00] of applied science and science in general for a while now. My book, the End of Science, really didn’t talk about applied science as I said before, but I have been struck also by how little progress there’s been in in applied science since my book came out.

So I’ve been remarking on that, more and more. One is, quantum computing, which I find really fascinating. I as a kind of pandemic project at the beginning of 2020, started writing a book about quantum mechanics. I decided, I’ve been pontificating about physics forever without understanding any of the underlying math.

So I thought I’ll, finally learn a little bit of the math under quantum mechanics and then write a book about whether I had any insights because of that. So I had, I had to go back and learn calculus again. I learned linear algebra, I learned what complex numbers are, all that.

And then tried to understand some of the [00:28:00] basic principles of quantum theory. And as a result of that, I got really interested in in quantum computing and started taking it very seriously when I had thought it was just like very hypey and bullshitty. And it seems to me that quantum computing has the potential not only of some real profound, technologies. Including just the basic technology of quantum computing itself, but also, leading to breakthroughs in our understanding how quantum effects work. Like what is entanglement? What is superposition? These things are still very mysterious. Nobody’s ever really come up with a satisfying explanation of some of these fundamental quantum principles. And so this is one of the caveats that I attach to my end of science theory, or thesis which is that quantum computing might [00:29:00] have revolutionary consequences at some point in the future. I’m not saying that’s going to happen and it’s still very, hypey but I think possible.

One of the people I met while I was working on my, my quantum book, was a guy named, Rudolph, who happens to be the grandson, one of one of the grandchildren of of Schrodinger, the Schrodinger’s cat guy. And he had started a quantum computing company that, like it had a really viable technology. I’m not sure where it is now. I haven’t talked to Rudolph in, a few years, but Rudolph convinced me that this technology really could take off in a serious way.

I don’t know if Peter Thiel has talked about quantum computing, if he’s interested in it, but I’m definitely interested in it, in following it. I take quantum computing more seriously than I do just [00:30:00] large language models and all the artificial intelligences that had burst upon the scene over the last few years.

It might be irrational on my part. But I hate ai. I think it’s catastrophic for the whole, enterprise of human inquiry and intellectual work, like the kind that you do, the kind that I do, the kind that lots of people do. Just trying to figure out what it means to be a human being. What the universe is, what life is, all that kind of stuff.

Ai, I see this enormous distraction. It’s going to make us dumber. And I’m very poorly equipped even to argue about it because I’m trying to stay away from it, but it’s unavoidable. It’s just like in your face all the time. So ai, yeah, fuck that, but quantum computing, yeah, I’m still really intrigued by that. And of course then it, at some point we’re going to have [00:31:00] AI based on quantum computing, and I, god knows what that’s going to be like. I’m sure there are a lot of people working that on that already. I.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there certainly are. Although right now the applications, the actual applications of quantum computing are still quite a few years away it looks like just in terms of reliability. But yeah, there, there seems to be something there. Now there are some other alternatives of, at least in terms of miniaturization, like, DNA computing is another area people are, thinking about.

Why science has such difficulty understanding consciousness

SHEFFIELD: One of the other problems of science and which you do talk about extensively in the book and subsequently is this idea of, where, what are minds and where do they come from.

And it is uncanny, when I was reading it 30 years after the fact, in preparation for this discussion, that, all the same people, they’re all there. and one of them, he just only recently passed away, Daniel Dennett but, [00:32:00] so like pretty much everybody, in, in that you talked about in the book.

So, whether it’s, Roger Penrose or, well, I guess, Marvin Minsky, he, passed away as well. But you know, pretty much by and large all the people that, that were kicking around these ideas. They’re still now, and they’re kind of saying the same stuff. So you got David Chalmers in there as well.

So, let’s, can you walk us through kind of what the, so for people who don’t follow this stuff, walk us through kind of what the major theories are because they’ve been around for a while.

HORGAN: Yeah. So, when I wrote the End of Science, one of fields that I was really interested in was I dunno, consciousness studies, you could call it consciousness research, trying to understand how a brain produces conscious subjective states. And Francis Crick, and his sidekick, Christophe Koch were the leaders in this. Field starting [00:33:00] in the eighties, and they really drew a lot of people in. In the 1990s, you started to have these big conferences on consciousness in Tucson. I went to the, first one in, I think it was 1994, and I saw Roger Penrose give a talk and Christophe Koch and David Chalmers, and I forget if Daniel Dennett was there, but his ideas, were certainly circulating. There was this sense back then science was going to solve this thing. I mean, there was a lot of fringe, theorizing there, but there were, there was a core of people that were very serious and seemed to have a good plan for cracking the riddle of consciousness. So this was like 30 years ago, more than a little, more than 30 years ago.

I covered that in I wrote about that conference in the end of [00:34:00] science. So here we are 30 years later. What is the state of this research far from being far from converging on what looks like a pretty sensible theory of consciousness? There’s been this explosion, so, field, it looked like it was coalescing around a paradigm not, like a final theory, but a, kind of approach that could lead to a final theory back when I was first writing about consciousness research, and it just hasn’t happened. The opposite has happened. It’s, there’s been a, paradigm explosion. You have all these different competing theories, all of which I think are really bad. very implausible, even though there’s some that are couched in very scientific technical jargon. But some of them make. Absurd, conclusions [00:35:00] like Integrated Information Theory, which is very popular right now. It’s promoted by Christophe Koch I forget the the guy, oh, Tononi is the person who invented this Tononi, who’s mentor was Gerald Edelman, who I wrote about in the End of Science. So these are people with a really fancy pedigree. Roger Penrose is still had his Theory of consciousness back in the nineties.

He’s still peddling that with Stuart Hammeroff well. But then you have all these other different theories coming. From psychedelic studies, from people who are studying meditation and mindfulness and looking at mystical states induced with these practices. There are people who are looking to Buddhism for inspiration and coming up with of consciousness.

Deepak Chopra has been a, a player in in some of these conversations. So what the, what I’m trying to say is that it’s anti-progress. This is one reason [00:36:00] why I say my book was not pessimistic enough. Some fields have gone backwards. I mean, I love consciousness research because it’s so wild and crazy and it’s very entertaining. But if you wanted science to be sort of figuring things out, making slow, steady, incremental progress toward, I don’t know, the equivalent of a theory of photosynthesis or something, it’s just not there. and it just reinforces the feeling I had in the end of science that consciousness is not a solvable problem. The more we study it, the more baffling it’s going to be. And by the way, I have to mention that in the end of science, I ended the book.

I had a riff at the end just imagining what would happen if we created super intelligent machines, which people were thinking about. [00:37:00] More than 30 years ago, Freeman Dyson, the great physicist who I interviewed for the end of science, he had done a lot of thinking about the future of intelligence once we get rid of our mortal coils and become clouds of gas floating around the universe. Others also Hans Moravec and Frank Tipler were thinking along the same lines. And so I just imagined what it would be like to be one of these super intelligent entities. And I decided, and admit this was inspired in part by a drug trip that the more intelligent an entity becomes, the more baffled it will be by its own existence.

It won’t be able to figure out. Why it exists, why anything exists. It will be, so astonished and appalled at its own improbability that it [00:38:00] will go So I actually came up with a, the whole theory of creation based on this idea.

The tension some religious believers feel with consciousness research

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it is one of the things about consciousness studies, and so this is, as, my listeners will know by now that it’s, it is a personal research interest of mine. I think that one of the things that has maybe taken it back in some ways with some people is that, there’s always been this kind of tension between monists, there’s a monist single monist physical universe. And or there’s a dualist, quasi supernatural realm that ingress into the physical world somehow. and of course, if science ever did come up with a monist theory of mind that actually worked, that would be really bad for dualist religion.

And so, you [00:39:00] you see a lot of religious organizations flooding into this space and, one of them that does it a lot, are various institutions that you have written about interacting with, which is various Templeton foundations that have been trying to say, well, maybe we should take religion seriously in consciousness studies.

And and so, yeah. Yeah. Tell, us about that. For people who don’t know that story or those stories.

HORGAN: Well, I had. So I took money from the Templeton Foundation, which was founded by a Christian stock picker named John Templeton. It was one of the best stock pickers of all time and made a lot of money and thought that there should be more interaction between science and religion and created this foundation to promote that.

And I’ve always been interested sort of how science tends to kind of reach into [00:40:00] spiritual even mystical realms. And so I got a fellowship from Templeton Foundation in 2005. Went to university of Cambridge for several weeks, and I got some money and I got to hang out all these cool journalists and scientists including Richard Dawkins, who was kind of the token atheist and a bunch of other really smart, interesting people. And and it was really fun. and I think that talking about science and religion is great. I, as I told you before my Catholic upbringing informs the way I look at the world a lot and the way that I look at science. It’s just that I don’t think any of the answers supplied by religion so far are any good.

So I like the questions that religion poses like. Is there any purpose to the universe? What are we doing here? Do we, is there a special place for humans in the universe and all that sort of stuff? [00:41:00] Catholicism doesn’t answer those questions to my satisfaction, but the questions are really important and I ask them all the time myself.

So that’s where I see that dialogue as being, as having some benefit. The problem is that Templeton Foundation had it wanted more than that. It, wanted there to be some kind of reconciliation and more respect given to religion by science. And it was basically buying people off to say that by throwing a lot of money at them.

So I thought it had a, ultimately an unhealthy influence over. Over these discussions about what is the relationship between science and religion. So I wrote some really mean things about the Templeton Foundation after taking their money and and they got really mad, but then they kept giving me [00:42:00] money

SHEFFIELD: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I was wondering what happened after you wrote those columns.

HORGAN: well apparently the, Templeton, the, Jack Templeton, the son of John Templeton, who was running the foundation when I was writing my pieces, was outraged at my criticism. because I had pointed out that he was a right wing supporter of George Bush and anti-abortion. And, I thought he was not a good guy. And I had pointed that out in my pieces. nd so he wanted, tried to out, because I had quoted some people in the Templeton Foundation saying disparaging things about it, and he wanted to find out who my sources were and all this. But then he died and then, I ended up doing some other gigs for the Templeton Foundation for more money. So, that’s an odd situation, but

I

SHEFFIELD: They

got over it.

HORGAN: yeah, but religion is, I mean, because I [00:43:00] of my roots as an acid head, am, I’m, really interested in mystical states and, our intuitions of some kind of divine intelligence or God or whatever you might. it. I haven’t seen any explanation of God that makes sense to me, including the one that I came up with after this big trip I had like 40 years ago. And so all this is an ironic enterprise as well. In other words, it’s not going to lead to any final answers, true answers, but, I love it. I, it’s stimulating, to me. I love talking to other people no matter what their views are, if they’re smart and open-minded about what the hell we’re doing here.

Yeah. Well, and the reason that I mentioned or brought this up was that from my perspective religion is [00:44:00] just kind of a, it is an applied science, if you will, if you look at the way that they work. So, like, I was born and raised Mormon and one of, they have a doctrine that they call the Word of Wisdom.

SHEFFIELD: And the Word of Wisdom as Mormons interpreted or as it was written, it was very clearly a science inflected document. But they said that God gave it to him. But basically the God of Mormonism was a member of the cold water movement of the mid 19th century who thought that drinking hot water was bad for human bodies and that tobacco was bad for human bodies.

And that and so like, it was just the scientific consensus of that day put into a revelatory fashion. And then you look at the, like, Mormons also have a cosmology as well. It’s basically like a, just kind of a very frozen and amber post Copernican system in which the stars get their light from each other. And that was actually what a lot of [00:45:00] scientists, as you may probably know, like that’s what they thought for a long time.

And this was a 19th century scientific belief. So in a lot of ways religion is applied science, so science and religion and philosophy. There really are kind of about the same two basic questions, which is, what is the world and what are we, and, they both try to answer it in different ways and, are successful or more, less successful, I would say.

HORGAN: Yeah, that. What are we, so I wrote a one of my. Recent books is called mind-body Problems. And and it’s, a look at the mind-body problem, which according to some of my philosophical friends only goes back a few hundred years to Descartes, people like that. But I’ve, the ancient Greeks talked about it.

And I, think of it as the question of what we are and what’s the best way to think of humans. are we, matter ultimately? [00:46:00] Are we mind? Are we souls? I mortal souls are we clusters of genes or software programs or whatever? And, all right. And of course, religions. were our first set gave us our first set of answers to to these sorts of questions.

We’re children of God and if we do these sorts of things, then we’re going to get to go heaven after we die, or whatever. And then there are versions of Christianity like Mormonism that, that sort of riff those themes. And the idea there’s a final answer to this question of what we are, to me is just self-evidently absurd because keep coming up with new ways of looking at ourselves because of science and because of technology, because of new ideas.

So, yeah, Marx gave us new ways of looking at each at, ourselves. LSD [00:47:00] gives us new ways of looking at ourselves. Large language models now are really causing a lot of churn in our self understanding, and I don’t see any end to that. So theories or solutions to the mind body problem I see as really important.

And that we’re in this perpetual state self-exploration and self discovery will never end. So, and I think it, there’s a danger in thinking that there could be a final solution. To this question of what we really are and how we should think about ourselves even as moral agents. we’re desperate for certainty. We want this answer, and that’s why of the answers that people have given us [00:48:00] have inspired zealotry religious, not just religious, answers, but, Marxism has inspired a lot of destructive zealotry as well and eugenics. So I, every chance I get, I, preach this sort of seeing this question, this inquiry into what we are as having no end. Going on forever. And they’re also, I think we have to recognize some ideas are dead end. Some ideas are destructive, they’re harmful, like, I don’t know, white supremacy, let’s say. but others are enormously provocative and interesting. And even some of the religious ideas are still useful as goads to our thinking. yeah, so that’s, kind of where I am on mind body [00:49:00] solutions.

Jeffrey Epstein’s obsession with scientists

SHEFFIELD: and yeah, being open to hearing what every body has to say. I mean, ultimately about that, because like, and that’s. That is one of the things that you have written about discovering since writing the book. That especially in regards to Jeffrey Epstein. So, Jeffrey Epstein was somebody who, he was there and he personally knew as the, we’ve found out subsequently.

He personally knew a lot of the people in your book including Noam Chomsky and including Marvin Minsky and, Daniel Dennett and a lot of these people. They were on his airplanes, they were at his dinners. Some of them went to his island. Some of them, had even more unsavory dealings with him.

Like, Lawrence Krauss the physicist. So that as you wrote, you, had decided that maybe there were the term pure science. It was not such a good one.

HORGAN: Yeah. I, so I was like one degree of [00:50:00] separation from Epstein because my, book agent for about 10 years ending, I think in 2009, was this guy named John Brockman, was like a celebrity agent who represented a lot of big time, much bigger I am big time science book writers. and like Stephen Pinker and Lawrence Krauss and some others.

And, Brockman was, introduced Epstein, who was like a science groupie to a lot of these famous scientists. Murray Gell-Mann is one that you didn’t mention, one of the great physicists of the 20th century who was a, pretty important character in in the End of Science as well. And so I started hearing about this guy a while ago and Brockman was throwing these parties where he brought Epstein and some other really rich people together with some of the scientists and they mingled. And I [00:51:00] just wasn’t a-list enough to get invited to these parties. If I had been invited, I definitely would’ve gone. I mean, I’m a journalist, I am I’m always looking for a new experience to report on and I thought this was fascinating. But the Epstein files going through them and then also reading the coverage and seeing the degree to which some these people I admired hung out with this guy and were sort of exchanging I dunno, really sort of tawdry messages with him. This is part of why I said earlier, science is in worse shape than I would’ve expected it.

It just makes. I, part of me still saw science as this kind of noble endeavor, the quest for truth. And seeing that some of these scientists are [00:52:00] just like, sort of greedy, horny bastards, was pretty disillusioning. And it just makes me, it actually corroborates this feeling that I’ve had for a while that the quest for truth was never really an important part of science. That it’s always been about, primarily about power power of various kinds political power, financial power, and this sort, truth seeking is tolerated and sometimes funded pretty generously. It was funded very generously when I first became a science journalist in the 1980s and through the nineties. But now Trump administration is really cutting back on lot of, the classic, what I used to call pure science. And that actually is, has been the default [00:53:00] historically. Most societies haven’t really been interested in science for its own sake. That’s been a pretty fringe pursuit. It matters a lot to people like you and me. Most people don’t care about it. Most of my students don’t care about it most, they’re people who gobble up books by Stephen Hawking.

SHEFFIELD: do they actually read him? No.

The fragility of the postwar liberal consensuses, and why they were taken for granted

HORGAN: Yeah, I, And, science has been supported by governments and by rich, powerful patrons of various kinds. Elon Musk, mainly because it can generate profits and power a way to make money, to kill your enemies, to live longer, that sort of thing.

So that’s part of why I actually am more fearful for the future of science now than I was when I wrote the End of Science. I, mean, I’m not even sure about the future of democracy anymore. I sort of took democracy for granted in the 1990s [00:54:00] when I was writing the end of science and thought that us would continue to support science as a very important intellectual endeavor. Now,

SHEFFIELD: You’re not so sure.

HORGAN: yeah, I’m not so sure.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and the, sobering thing that I think people who do support democracy have to realize is that World War II and that up till the end of the Cold War, this was a beautifully anomalous time in human history that it was, and, it has a political and epistological origin in this because when we look at the history of conservatism conservatism as an ideology, it can be extrinsically focused and interested in evidence and practicality.

Michael Oakeshott the philosopher, is a great [00:55:00] example of that. But it also can be reactionary. It can be hateful of intellectualism, can be hateful of science, can be hateful of democracy. And the lessons that were learned by conservatives globally after World War II was, we can’t help reactionaries.

They will destroy this world and destroy our everything we hold dear. And they learned that, and they really understood that, that baby boom generation and the World War II, GI Generation, a lot of those people understood that who were on the political right, but nobody who was in the center or the left bothered to understand what had happened.

They just thought, okay, well, everybody’s good now. Everybody is on board with science. Everybody loves democracy. Everybody loves human rights and women’s rights and, racial equality, they’re against segregation. No, it’s all good. Now we’re going to move [00:56:00] forward forever. And so they never bothered to, to teach what had happened, what they had learned in their bones, they never learned with their minds.

HORGAN: That I, think I’m one of those naive people that you’re talking about. I look back on the assumptions I had about, I mean, we’re really talking about what I would call civilization, caring about truth and caring about justice. And I don’t know, fairness as a kind of fundamental principle for the organization of a society.

And I just assumed, like we’d gotten to the point, you didn’t have to worry about challenges to those ideals anymore. But now I see that as very naive. And, I’m not sure where I, so it’s not. I’m not even that concerned about science anymore. I’m concerned about just sort of basic [00:57:00] freedoms and justice and things like that.

So, I once assumed that a lot of people shared my view of pure science, trying to understand the world for its own sake as like the best thing that humans can do. now I, realize that was silly of me to to feel that way. There’s some people who actually care about science for its own sake, but it’s kind of a, it’s like sort of a fringy thing. Like you find other people who are into it and you all convince each other that, this is really cool and it really matters. But I don’t know. Meanwhile, there are these giant forces, corporations and governments that are. Clashing and the true sinking seeking is just something that happens on the margins. So I’m actually, I’m pretty cheerful when it comes to my personal life, but I’m, pretty I’m pretty, [00:58:00] I pretty dark feelings about where the world is going. I wanna stick around, I’m old, I’m 72 years old. I, wanna see what happens next. So, I’m very curious to see how Trumpism unfolds, where things go right now, with science and with democracy, with basic human rights, with warfare, which is a big concern of mine also. Yeah, I’m, worried about the future for my children and my students and other

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, with good reason. And and I will say for people who are watching or listening or reading this episode that actually we, talked in the episode, the air before this one talk extensively about the future. So, we will, and I’ll send you the link as well, John, so you’ll, I won’t leave you in the dark, my friend.

But ultimately, I mean, yeah, from my standpoint, that was something that science was offering, is it was offering a vision of the [00:59:00] future. And that is essential to stopping this horrific imagined past, which is really what, Trump and Thiel and these Elon Musk. They’re talking about imposing the old values of the Gilded Age or, the Feudal Age. Like Peter Thiel. He wants to be a feudal lord, like that’s obvious at this point.

But in order to stop that, people who support democracy. And so this is why I think that, the solidly blue states and the liberal democracies of Europe, there, there has to be a reverse Marshall plan in the United States where you guys are spending billions of dollars every year on media, on science, on education.

Because, you have to make the argument. That beautiful moment of the 20th century, we can get it back if we understood why it was good. And explain it to the public [01:00:00] because, yeah, it, nobody really participated in that conversation. it just happened. People built something magnificent, and then they never realized why it was good or how it happened.

HORGAN: Yeah, how to maintain it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HORGAN: Well, I, what I worry listening to you is that. I mean, I’m in an position because I’ve been a very critical science journalist. I’m sort of like poking holes and, popular theories, and I’ve been accused of being anti-science. I, say I’m just doing my job.

My job is to distinguish genuine scientific advances or possible advances from bullshit. But now we’re in a genuinely anti-scientific era. I mean, Trump doesn’t give a shit about truth, Trump and his minions. He really only cares about power. And and so, my work [01:01:00] can be used by some of these science haters: “Oh, I see what this guy says, that like, psychiatry is bullshit string theory is, bullshit. And all these different things are, are pseudoscience, or ironic science or whatever.”

And so I’m in a weird position of to stick up for science that I never thought I would be in. I always took science for granted. Now all of a sudden, it’s genuinely endangered.

SHEFFIELD: And coming, possibly coming to an end for a very different reason than what you had theorized.

HORGAN: Yeah, I mean I knew that there were, I mean there, there were creationists who picked away at science going back in the nineties when I was writing. I never took them seriously. That wasn’t a genuine political force. But, now anti-science forces are quite powerful, and have already taken action against science that has [01:02:00] really, damaged it. So how we’re going to come out of this if we come out, I don’t know.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well. It begins with the will to power to, to paraphrase Nietzche there.

HORGAN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: All right. Well, John, this has been a, sobering but hopefully informative conversation to everybody. And but for people who wanna keep up with your work what’s your advice for them?

HORGAN: Oh just go to my website. I’m, I post my thoughts there pretty often johnhorgan.org. And and I also have a couple of books that, including Mind-Body Problems and My Quantum Experiment that I posted on the site for free. So you, can get more than enough John Horgan there.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right. Well, I encourage people to check that out. Thanks for being here.

HORGAN: Thank you. My pleasure.

SHEFFIELD: All right, so that is the discussion for today. [01:03:00] I appreciate you joining us for the program, and if you want to get more video, audio, and transcripts of this episode and previous ones, you can go to theoryofchange.show, where we have it all there. 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.

So that’ll do it for this episode. I’ll see you next time.

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As artificial intelligence software like ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and Claude are becoming more integrated into many people’s lives, it’s perfectly natural to wonder why and how these things work and what possible implications they have for philosophy.

The current AI systems are not conscious, but unfortunately, a lot of people are becoming enamored with the idea that they might be, including Richard Dawkins, the world’s most famous atheist, who actually wrote an entire book, which he seems to have forgotten about called The God Delusion, which argued that minds aren’t necessary to produce perceived order or intentional behavior.

But instead of taking his own advice, Dawkins has spent the past several weeks writing embarrassing essays and almost love letters to his AI agent, which he named “Claudia.”

I’ve already dealt with Dawkins’s specific behavior in a previous column, but he is far from alone in thinking that these things might be conscious.

And since that’s the case, my friend Virginia Heffernan of Magic and Loss and I decided to dig in further into why large language models are not full minds using some of the tools in the new philosophical and scientific framework that I’m developing called the Epistemic Flux Theory. As we often do in our recordings, however, we packed in a lot of other subject material into the discussion.

This episode is on the longer side, but it’s also filled with asides and tangents that I hope can make the science and philosophy understandable and relevant to everyday life. I hope you’ll enjoy.

The video of this conversation is available. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Related Content

• Richard Dawkins has a Claude delusion

• Minds don’t create experiences, they are made by them

• Epistemic Flux Theory working glossary

• The dark philosophy of authoritarian capitalism animating Trump’s chaotic second term

• AI is not the main problem—how people use it can be

• How you think about minds influences how you think about humanity

• In an age of fictionalized reality, we need literary criticism more than ever

• Trump super fans are impossible to argue with because they don’t believe in traditional logic 🔒

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Richard Dawkins thinks a chatbot is his special friend

10:45 — An introduction to Epistemic Flux Theory

18:16 — Consciousness is mental autonomy, not the ability to have experience

28:39 — Extrinsic thinking requires a body, memetic thinking does not

39:56 — Is AI sycophancy what people want, even though they won’t admit it?

55:40 — Embodied robotics as a better machine intelligence

01:06:16 — Cognition as deciphering relationalities

01:15:50 — What Alan Turing actually was trying to test

01:26:48 — AI as authoritarian fantasy, an the problem with computational functionalism

01:35:24 — How imperfect chatbots and robots reveal human cruelty

01:42:24 — How much human cultural output was already synthetic before the AI revolution?

01:45:34 — Cognition is individuated, but epistemology is necessarily communal

01:53:17 — Philosophy and religion must accept that science is best able to answer certain questions

02:01:21 — Substance as an illusion of processes

02:05:43 — Liberalism must reinvent itself in order to thrive in this future

Audio Transcript

The 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 Virginia Heffernan. Hey, welcome back.

VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN: Hey, Matthew. It’s good to see you again.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, I always say that I wish it was better circumstances. But you know what? In some ways they are getting better, at least for the, some parts of the country.

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Also, this time, like all other times, is a good one if we but know what to do with it. That’s the great Emerson line, and I feel like it’s a great American way to think.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, Richard Dawkins has ideas.

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, that’s right. He knows he has-- He’s he’s in love. It’s v- it’s nice at 85. He seems to have have pour- given his heart to a new lucky lady.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. He, Well, and, he’s married to a current actual woman as well, so wonder how that will work out.

HEFFERNAN: You know what? I’ve got something to say about that, but maybe we need to give listeners a little update. Do you wanna, do honors?

SHEFFIELD: So people, they may, they probably have seen by now that he was chatting with the Claude chatbot of Anthropic, and basically became convinced that it was conscious, and then he wrote, He, named it. First it was he, Claude, and then became she. So a transgender chatbot, which is nice for him, right? ‘Cause he hates transgender people. And then basically, yeah, he became convinced that it’s conscious and that it’s his friend, and that, she loves everything he has to say. But then the update is that he wrote a second poem in which he made up a brother for Claudia.

HEFFERNAN: Never a dull moment. Claudius.

SHEFFIELD: I know, yeah. Like, who, who would have thought? Like, that’s such a creative name. I love it.

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, exactly. I g- I don’t know where he gets it. But by the way, [00:04:00] I mean, I--

SHEFFIELD: hold on. That, thing’s...

HEFFERNAN: I’ve, got alarms. Even as I try to make the case to you that we are that New York is a socialist paradise, Matthew, you can still hear sirens behind me that give it away. Yeah, I mean, he-- One thing that I just would like to add is I think Anthropic was actually quite careful to choose a genderless name in Claude and Claude is a perfectly good female name in French.

We mostly use Claude in English as a name for a man, but both of these things elide the problem that there is a pronoun for Claude, and that pronoun is it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: Right? So, like, you really, you load the dice when you start saying, “She told me this,” or, “He told me that.” I’ve had to talk to editors and say, “For the love of God, please do not refer to a large language model by a gendered pronoun.”

I mean,

SHEFFIELD: Wait, you’ve had people do that? Oh my god.

HEFFERNAN: Oh, yeah. I- in the deck of a piece about Claude having been part of the directional apparatus for the for the missile system that, that hit the Maven system that hit that school in Iran. I referred to Claude as it all the way through the piece, and the deck, it suddenly was like, “Claude, he can’t shoot straight.

He can’t seem to, locate this and that.” So you know, obviously we are supposed to project onto this thing, onto these chatbots. We’re supposed to project all kinds of emotions onto them. Language using does make us delirious. Whatever Claude and chatbots are in themselves, they clearly are driving us to distraction in their presence.

So much that a skeptic, a illustrious skeptic like Richard Dawkins can i- at the, in the dusk of his life, in the autumn of his years, decide that he’s made a new friend in the form of this, like, sycophantic, hallucinating, monstrous large language model. And, among other things, it stood out to me that he christened

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I love that. Mm-hmm.

HEFFERNAN: [00:06:00] Claude Claudia from the beginning because it made it all more enchanting. They could have a sort of flirtatious relationship or a mentor-student relationship where sh- you know, she could look up to him. But anyway, christening and then speaking of Claude and the various iterations as incarnations or as incarnate Claude, this is religious language that Dawkins can’t help but use.

He is the most circular arguer, polemicist, than I can imagine. He first dubs it she, and then tells you—

SHEFFIELD: Oh, it’s actually first he dubbed it he, and then he--

HEFFERNAN: First he dubs it he because he thinks it’s automatically he, as default he as Claude. Then sticks a new pronoun, transes it, and what, how old is Claude? Two years old? Three? So he transed a three-year-old, and then decided to christen it with a new name, right?

Like, why not just name it? But Richard Dawkins is, like, such a achingly lonely Christian at heart that he christens things. And then he starts talking about incarnation as if he’s, a Catholic. It’s... I found all that bonkers. I mean, the way that people just betray themselves in the way that they use...

It is an incredible tool for getting us to reveal who we as humans are.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it is. And I think he’s, just pathologically English, that’s the other thing, so he can’t help but use these verbs. but, he also does say he’s a cultural Christian. Now he does say that, actually. So,

HEFFERNAN: Christian, and he also, he likes to think of himself as very decorous. So even when he’s been talking about being anti-trans, he says he’s, to be polite, he will use a person’s chosen pronouns. I assume the same way that he would say Your Majesty to King Charles, right? Just like whatever you like to be called.

But he still believes that there’s a [00:08:00] biological truth of gender back there, as lots of people do, or of sex back there. And but what’s strange is this model of you’re biologically something and then you ask to be something else and all that stuff. He, like, backs into some of the most elementary questions of what it is to be conscious.

He cites Thomas Nagel, and yet has no better resolution to them than, your average 15-year-old. It’s as though he’s meeting these questions for the first time and misunderstands the Turing test. And it’s just, it’s like Noam Chomsky has vastly disappointed me having shown up in the Epstein files.

And I’ve never been a fan of Richard Dawkins or the New Atheism. It always seemed sketchy to me. Richard Dawkins, also a great Epstein defender. But he’s now, now Dawkins. It’s just, it’s the, Yeah, if anything, it just, AI has been incredibly revelatory about humankind.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and then the other update though is that this other column that he wrote in which he invented the brother of Claudia, so Claudius he had them write letters to each other, and they were just... Like, this is actual... So, people probably have heard the term copypasta, which is where you co- copy and paste something into comments on, blog posts or YouTube videos or social media, et cetera.

Well, this is sloppypasta. That’s what this column was, AI slop plus copypasta. This is a, critique, a serious critique of Anthropic, the, they’re the worst at this an- anthropomorphizing, I think.

And it’s in their name. Like, they, actually say that they tell the Claude persona to be, it is a being that is unsure about its conscious state. And it’s like, well, gosh, I wonder if you a- if you start saying that such a chatbot is conscious, I wonder how it will respond. So of course it will.

And they did a interesting study I think it [00:10:00] was about a year ago in which they kind of had the exact same dialogue with with with two chatbots, the exa- the way that Dawkins was doing it. And what they found was basically the exact same thing. That, so essentially if you get two chatbots and you have them talk to each other long enough, they will always converge onto vague like lowest common denominator Hinduism or Buddhism.

and like start responding literally eventually to saying things like just emojis or like rainbows or spirals or saying silence. Like, that’s their response, silence. And yeah, seriously.

An introduction to Epistemic Flux Theory

SHEFFIELD: So what happened with Dawkins is, to be expected because again, the way that these things work and in my Epistemic Flux Theory, it’s a theory of minds that as it’s, as far as I know, it’s the first unified theory of minds that can describe both an LLM and human and animal.

HEFFERNAN: I have this paper from you, and I have to admit I haven’t had the bandwidth to give it real attention. So okay,

SHEFFIELD: It’s heavy reading.

HEFFERNAN: It is heavy reading, but it also is immensely interesting. So maybe you can give me a sort of thumbnail as best you can of it right now so we can we can at least allude to it.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. All right. Well, so essentially there are two kinds of reasoning modes. And one is somatic reasoning, so it comes from the body. But it’s not just from your body as a body subject in the kind of Merleau-Ponty sense. It’s from your body as a cellular system. Be- so in order to... So everything exists within what I, call externality.

So everything outside of your mind is externality. Then everything inside of your mind is internality. And so but the philosophy [00:12:00] has had the classic problem of, well, how is it that the mind can act upon the physical world? And the answer is that the body is what makes the mind. And the cells of the body literally experience physics So they experience the molecules.

They experience microgravity. They experience, magnetic fields. They experience variations in, water pressure or air pressure. And they confirm it. Like, that’s the other thing. So using this method that I call somatic deixis so y- borrowing from language, deixis.

HEFFERNAN: D-E-I-X-I-S?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, deixis. Yeah. And so deixis comes from the idea of pointing. So the Latin verb. Yeah, the index, like your index finger is the pointing finger. And, so in linguistics a deictic reference is one that changes depending on where you are. So this, if I point to this, it’s a different thing to compared to where you are.

Like, if, I point straight ahead at me, it, there’s another this. If I point over here, it’s another this. And so, so cells, they don’t know much, but they can know that this is here. They can know that. And so that’s, this is true of both the simplest, so prokaryotic creatures like a bacterium, whatever. They can know there’s something here. They can know that. They have no selfhood. They have no other conceptions, but they know that there’s something there, and they’ll go toward it. And, so that’s what that’s where somatic deixis begins, what I call designation.

And then once you have multicellular entities, they have to coordinate. So “this is here” is significant for them because they all have to agree that there’s something there. Then it becomes, well, what do you do about it?

And, or, what is this?

And so, they... And, this is within microbiology, it’s been [00:14:00] pretty-- This is a pretty recent field of discovery, but basically what they’ve discovered is that all cells can communicate, even non-neurons through, through electrochemical spaces called gap junctions in between them. Because bodies are not actually literally stuck together in many cases.

They are just a little tiny distance between each other, the

HEFFERNAN: You’re getting a little quantum-y, but

SHEFFIELD: I know, yeah. It’s actually... And so, so basically s- that, so when they communicate to their neighbors about this is here, what is this, then they can have a bigger conception of this is like that. and so, and the example I give

HEFFERNAN: Oh yeah, like mRNA, like the the COVID vaccine was supposed to sort of seem like a bouncer. Like, or it had in it some idea of what the bad thing looked like and how it could compare or do something maybe the same way,

SHEFFIELD: Well, it, t- had the instruction to the cells who know that.

HEFFERNAN: It-- Right. But it was identifying, right? A, identifying a pathogen and subduing the pathogen a- and knowing the difference between a pathogen and a non-pathogen, which I think is is really interesting.

And it, yeah, a little bit maybe the way an autonomous car works. I’m, not totally sure. But anyway, yeah, please go on.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. So it’s very simple. Like, it can be very simple of, of this adjudication, as I call it. And so, but when you combine them together, that is somatic deixis. But cells scale upward. So, in

HEFFERNAN: very interesting. I don’t know if this exa- I mean, obviously it brings a lot to mind, but during the pandemic I had this terrible burn. I was wearing a nightgown, lighting something on fire, and my nightgown went up in flames. It was terrifying. And and my husband clobbered me with blankets.

The fire went out, and then I kind of in a manic state just thought, “Well, I’ll just go upstairs, get dressed, and come back down.” And while I was up there, discovered that the backs of my legs were burnt. And so I spent the next-- Well, I [00:16:00] spent the next few hours in a cold tub getting almost frostbite, and then the next few days in bed just trying to put ice and ice to bring the temperature down.

But the weird thing was how the rest of my body reacted to this, yeah, this external thing. I mean, it doesn’t know what a birthday cake is. It doesn’t know what burning is. Now, obviously, part of my skin actually burned, but it was an interaction of me with the world and the lymph cells, the amount of things that just kind of happened in a kind of crisis action, taking from the rest of my body, rec- trying to cool this thing down with these, you’ve seen them, those, like, really huge, like, bu- gross kind of melted crayon-looking bubbles that, like...

And I just stared in fascination at my bo- body doing this incredibly intentional thing. And, like, how did all this other stuff know over here about the presence of this burn? Now, probably o- you know, obviously in the way you’re describing through these cells, fire or some kind of physical process to do with temperature on, on the body.

But it was really interesting to see it as though, as though it was a bo- like a, an army suddenly at some kind of war where everybo- everything needed had a whole new mission, right? There was no like, “We’re now gonna write. We’re now gonna talk. We’re now gonna go do mothering.” It was just like, “For the love of God, we’ve gotta help this burn.”

And it felt like a kind of, like, very mobilized intelligence,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Because your mind is not just in your brain. Like, that’s, I think, one of the biggest myths that o- once people discovered that brains actually were the center of the mind, they, didn’t understand that, the rest of the body is also the mind. and it’s, like, and, neurons themselves are distributed into almost every part, of the body as well.

HEFFERNAN: So, so but minds establishing sort of the existence [00:18:00] of minds in the body or the body-mind merger or some the intelligent body doesn’t get to the question of consciousness or point to or illuminate the, Richard Dawkins problem with Claude, Claudia, Claudius. So to make that, to connect

Consciousness is mental autonomy, not the ability to have experience

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, okay. Yeah. So, okay, so e- eventually, as as cognitive systems, or as I call them, cognizants, as they become more complex, as somatic cognizance become more complex, they begin they begin contemplating more difficult questions. So in- instead of just simply, “What is this? This is like that,” they begin to ask, “Well, what...

Do what with this?” And so, and that scales up to, “What will this do?” And that’s where you begin to have theory of mind.

because you have to predict what other things will do if you do something. The knowledge of that there, that oth- that other things are there, in the world, and that they are things that are not, like, th- that there are things that exist and that they are not you.

But you don’t have a concept of you yet and so that, that’s how I define sentience. And then the next step is selfhood, which comes to the idea that I exist and I am not those things, and those are not me. I am my own thing. and this is my, theory is building on a re- refinement of Dual Process Theory, which postulates that there are two different reasoning modes. But it’s a little bit oversimplified in, in arguing that they kind of compete with each other all the time, but that’s not right because the body is always the one that creates the mind.

And so the other... Eventually, as they get more complex organisms develop abstract reasoning. And so abstract reasoning is literally about abstracting away from the body and contemplating things that [00:20:00] don’t exist or things that could exist. So like if you’re a crow figuring out, “Well, here’s a stick. Can I use it to do this thing that I want to get this food here?” And so, and that’s... So and crow is actually remarkably capable at abstract reasoning. And a lot of animals are as it turns out.

And like the, with LLMs, people sometimes de- deride them as sto- stochastic parrots, but actually parrots, they may be the smartest animal, at least in terms of language. Like they some of the trained parrots like Alex, who was a African Grey who was trained by this ethologist named Irene Pepperberg. Like he knew hundreds of words maybe thousands. And he also could-- he would use them to talk to other parrots. That’s the fascinating thing. And she had them, teach each other how to say words.

Like that was... Her, research is absolutely fascinating. So when people say that, that something’s a parrot, “You’re just parroting me,” You got it wrong. You gotta come up with a better metaphor.

HEFFERNAN: Right. If, at least if you’re gonna disparage what they’re doing. If you’re gonna

SHEFFIELD: that’s right,

HEFFERNAN: you might

SHEFFIELD: If you’re gonna praise it,

HEFFERNAN: very

SHEFFIELD: then, go for it. Yeah.

And so anyway, but so, so basically, as this... So each capability of understanding the world and the self, so i- it’s, like understanding internality and externality. It’s like they, they constantly are building in a recursive way with each other, scaling upward to consciousness which I define as different than most philosophers in that consciousness is not a state of awareness of experience. Because that begins with somatic reasoning.

So all of these animals are, have consciousness in, the way that it’s classically defined. But in the way that I define it, consciousness is the ability to construct realities inside your internality. And then modify them whenever you want. [00:22:00] That’s the essence of consciousness. And understanding your relationality to it is that.

HEFFERNAN: I really like that. It’s very elegant. I-- it might not be far from... Do you know Rodney Brooks, the roboticist? He designed the Roomba and co-designed the Roomba, designed one of the Mars exploring robots, designed the, some of the robots that dismantle IEDs, like in “The Hurt Locker,” and also the, one of the robots that got radioactive materials out of Fukushima.

I say, I tell you about all those because he’s kind of the only roboticist that matters. Like, he, like, his robots have done really important things, and that thing is go retrieve gnarly things from places that humans can’t or shouldn’t go, like the f- like the cracks in between, your, cupboards and your kitchen floor that, no human should have to abase her or himself to do that by bending over.

It’s just the human body’s not well-suited to it. It’s... And, a robot that does that is a really good thing, and a robot that gets radioactive material that would poison us is a good thing. And if we’re gonna have to mine, a robot that goes down into mines and gets out coal is a good thing. Like, right?

So, anyway, I say that because he is almost militantly against anthropomorphizing robots for, many, reasons. But the most important to him is that because the robots that he works with are these extremely useful robots that retrieve gnarly things that humans shouldn’t touch or have to get because of that, he believes that A, they should be suited to the purpose, so form follows function, and B, if you start giving them gendered names, and I one time called my Roomba “she” in his presence and he-- it was like anger came over him, then you are this close to wanting robot to mean what it originally meant, which is slave.

[00:24:00] So if you, as Elon Musk did, design a robot with a sk- hu- what looks like a human skeleton to stand up, be five foot four, be easy to overpower, whatever, but also be shapely and also be obsequious to you, and that robot is designed to do, as r- Elon Musk says, menial tasks that you don’t wanna do, you are very, close to a, a- an attitude of subjugation where what you want is not for the stuff to be picked up from the floor, you want the spectacle of someone abasing herself before you to go pick up that thing.

He designed a robot that picks up things from the floor, screws, whatever, in the Elon Musk orbit a- as a five foot four woman-looking thing. Like why in the world-- I mean, just, as a question of design, this is just like a malfunctioning thing. Like why should you have to bend over or have fingers instead of suctions?

And so, things designed for things humans can’t do, for tasks that humans can’t or shouldn’t do, like crawling into small spaces, should be fitted to the task in a way humans are not, right? And as a guy who’s made a lot of money on robots, not someone for whom they’re just like a speculation, long-termism, weird jack-off material for, Elon Musk fanboys, he can really s- I think, speak very well about how to make machines how to make machines, how to make useful machines.

And we’re discovering, to get back to Dawkins, that once you put a lot of human syrup on, human-looking syrup on something, so obsequious language, wordiness vacuousness, treacle, lies, hallucinations, like all the things that Claude does that make it so, in my experience, sterile to interact with it as a possible human or interlocutor, right?

Then you have-- then you bring out all the human stuff in yourself, including [00:26:00] potentially erotic fixation or, or the desire to subjugate. But none of those things are like the wholesome stuff that you want humans to bring out in you.

And you’re not helping anyone, you’re not feeding anyone, you’re not contending with their bodies you’re not healing anyone, you’re, not consoling anyone.

I mean, all the things that our bodies are so well-suited for, literally the kind of mirror neurons that make it possible for us to, you and I, to come to understanding that exists in our faces as much as in little concatenations of words together. But I think the tricking, that kind of illusion that the LLM companies have spent so much money on, and by the way, seem to be like, losing three times as much as they’re making, like OpenAI doing this, is really just a net negative, not to mention doesn’t serve a purpose.

It’s... One more thing is I’ll say that, I’m starting to think, at least with chatbots, that we’re getting into VR territory and metaverse territory. I try, probably like you, a techie kid, I started trying VR in the very early days. I remember going to a place and trying it in ‘92, I think.

And I am one of the 30% of people who get nauseated using VR. I was told it was getting better and better, and there was lower and lower latency and whatever, and every time I’ve tried it since, I still get nauseated. I even went to an exhibit to see some VR art. They had a bucket in the corner in case you vomited, right?

This is not a small bug, and it, there, it’s not... Similarly, it’s like this is a non-starter for me. Who wants to be nauseated? So I just never do it. But with, and with, AI, they, Anthropic just had a guy out talking about hallucination and saying, “Well, it’s true that, Claude increasingly or, hallucinates a lot of the time, makes up citations that, AI does this, hallucinates and confabulates.

But you know, that’s just a side thing and it only happens in X percentage of the time.” Sorry, but like why am I [00:28:00] using this thing at all if part of what it tells me is lies? Like artificial intelligence that is making up citations is, or like a VR, fun VR experience that might make you nauseated in 30% of cases is not where I want to put my money.

It’s just like, it seems like not a good bet. The Roomba has never nauseated me and has always picked up things from the ground, and it’s a good business. if you’re a, if you’re a, venture investor that wants to see actual returns, who doesn’t want to sit around and jack off to strange realities, then you like, then go for the Roomba and don’t go for like, don’t go for parasocial relationships for Richard Dawkins.

Extrinsic thinking requires a body, memetic thinking does not

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Wow. Yeah. On the hallucination point and I actually prefer to call it confabulation because they don’t actually have minds to hallucinate. so but, like, okay, so the way that, that reasoning for human work, humans work is that there are, in my framework, is that there’s, two different kinds of epistemic exchanges, as I call them.

And there’s, so there’s extrinsic exchange, in which, both somatic reasoning and abstract reasoning can evaluate each other’s tokens as I call them, so, that they’re concepts. And so, like, they can check each other, and that’s how you can have an idea, but then also find out, oh, well, it’s not a good idea, or this is not true, that what I believe here.

and so you can update it. Whereas then there’s another, epistemic mode, which I call memetic exchange, M-E-M-E. So Dawkins providing both the example and the root word.

HEFFERNAN: Oh, I see. Memetic, like memes. Not, right, not mimetic like, like, Eric Auerbach or René Girard.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, not like that. But so, and, it’s not imitation. It is... So, so extrinsic exchange is what, when I, is optimizing for what I call facticity, or what, and not just me, but, like, that’s a common philosophical term. So it’s it-- what, is true, what seems directionally [00:30:00] true whether something is true or not.

Like, that’s what matters in extrinsic exchange. But in memetic exchange, facticity doesn’t matter because... And it’s not because it’s about lying necessarily, it’s that co- you’re going for coherency.

and s- and so, so memetic exchange is not inherently pathological. It’s actually how we do art.

It’s actually how we do relationships.

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Yes. I think Leif Weatherby has said something like this in “Thinking Machines.” Yeah. And, like, there’s felicity in poetic expression. I think that may--

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it doesn’t have to make sense. Like, that’s not the point of it.

HEFFERNAN: you’re... Right. it lands like a major chord in the brain of a person who hears it, or maybe a nice little minor chord or something, but it, lands...

Yeah, I think J.L. Austin called this something like felicity as opposed to meaning, that like there’s just a way that something sounds like it makes sense or that meaning has also, in language anyway, a lot to do with how things sound. And, yeah, I mean, there are chords that sound right and wrong, and it’s not quite clear whether that means that they correspond to some reality in the world

SHEFFIELD: But they also differ culturally e- also, because, like, some cultures might think that a certain register is, menacing

one might think you have infelicitous

gritty.

HEFFERNAN: Right. And you have infelic- I mean, in, in different languages, obviously, like, things land and sound differently. I was just trying to get to the bottom of the exact casualties at that school in Minab, Iran, and the best I could do was this Iranian newspaper, and it said there were 158 martyrs that day.

This is a newspaper, regular secular newspaper, 158 martyrs that day, and and including a six-month-old unborn baby, right? [00:32:00] Okay. So in The New York Times, you would not refer to victims, however much you liked them, of a, of an attack as martyrs. You just wouldn’t. And I don’t know whether they have one word for victims you care about, in Farsi.

I maybe should have looked it up. And I also don’t know if you would include it as an additional killed person, a six-month-old unmor- unborn baby, even though the law, e- even the most l- liberal pro-abortion interpretation of the law says that six-month-old has a certain amount of rights and can’t be aborted, except under some special circumstances.

So anyway, I suddenly was just in spirals of like, this lands in a very infelicitous way to me and to readers of The New Republic, because it doesn’t seem to point to something real in the world. At the same time, I don’t know that you could report in an Iranian newspaper and say simply some version of victims.

Maybe that sounds dismissive. Maybe that sounds like they just died of malaria, right? And if you die because you’ve been accidentally hit by a foreign missile, then you are de facto a, a martyr. So anyway, the point is just that, yes, I take your point that le- that like a chord lands differently in different languages and different cultures and, its felicity is kind of culturally constructed in really powerful ways.

And so-- And one of the things I think, I hope you’re pointing to is that rationalists and sort of the Richard Dawkins types miss this when they say, “Well, we can all land on something that we agree on as a description of the world that corresponds to something real in the world,” when both the correspondence question is in question.

Hello, confabulations, right? L- like AI is constantly dreaming up things that sound meaningful but don’t point to actual citations, say, in the real world. And that the thing we’re looking for is a certain kind of felicity and harmony, so that if I say to you 160, 58 martyrs, you are like, Virginia’s a little off today,” right?

If, but if I s- if you say it in [00:34:00] Farsi, it probably sounds like, okay, this person’s tracking. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: This is a sympa-- an empathetic person.

HEFFERNAN: Yes, exactly. Exactly. So I really love this idea that... And I think, you’ll, you would like “Thinking Machines,” the Leif Weatherby book, just because, Yeah, the idea of something like harmony, felicity, you call it coherence is a quality of, a statement that it has that makes it meaningful to another human that is different from its alignment

SHEFFIELD: From facticity,

HEFFERNAN: It’s different from facticity.

I mean, that was a long way to go to say I agree with you and I see this and you see it in the

SHEFFIELD: Okay, well, yeah, great. Well, and then so-- But here’s the ironic thing, though, is that while that mimetic exchange can be really positive and, for, and good for interpersonal relationships, it also can be very damaging. When you would try to apply coherence maximizing to factic questions, then that’s when you have problems as a human because

HEFFERNAN: I hope people are getting that because yes, I mean, you, you-- like in Rorty’s terms, it might be like, yeah, poetic answers to fact prompts for facts, right? So

SHEFFIELD: You can’t, yeah, you can’t say, “Well, I feel like that, two plus two equals five.” It feels good for me to say that. And, well, sure, you can say that, and you can feel good about that, fine. But it will cause problems for you if you apply memetic exchange outside of where it’s where it works well.

HEFFERNAN: So let me give you another example. I mean, just ‘cause we’ll just, yeah, keep this in the air. I, Of exactly what you’re talking about. So I became really interested in what had actually happened at this school in Minaab because it was being tossed around everywhere, and among other, among the fallacies about it were that this was at a girls’ school.

In fact, it was a co-ed school, and initial reports were wrong, and actually, according to the Iranian press, more boys [00:36:00] were killed than girls. Now they, for their own propaganda reasons, God bless them, we all need more propaganda, but liked the idea that these were girls killed, girls analogous to the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, girls who we should, in their propaganda universe, identify as our own, that we Americans would also be invested in.

But it was more boys than girls who were killed. That’s one thing. The other thing is that AI had told, one philosopher that the school was in Tehran when it was in Minaab, and no one corrected that. Minaab is a 16-hour drive from Tehran. So it was casually getting, making mistakes about this very consequential thing in the world.

Because if you wanna say off the top of your head that something happened in Iran, you’re probably safe to say, name the capital city and not name this faraway city no one had heard of. I don’t know how AI exactly posts, pastes things together to sound coherent, but I did notice that humans were not correcting AI when it said this Tehran thing.

Anyway, so I Asked my AI a simple question when I had verified that this was a co-ed school, and I said, “Was the school in Minab that was hit by these missiles, was it an all-girls school?” And my Claude yesterday, Claude whatever on my device yesterday said “Yes, it was an all-girls school.” And then it went on to say the missile hit at this time and struck this and killed these people, and this is this, and then it ended, “It’s almost unbearable to think about.”

And I just thought, for the love of God, stop with your simulations of anguish and give me some actual facts, because I get that you love making this poetry about how unbearable it is for you to think about what happened in Minab. But you can’t-- like, it, like, AI, I mean, at least LLMs are proving to get some, a number of human things right, but they’re not very good robots, which is why I brought up Rodney Brooks.

[00:38:00] Like, they’re not very good at picking up gnarly things, right? Like, you figure out if it’s an all-girls school. It, like, incidentally, you know how you figure out if something’s an all-girls school? You don’t, like, harmonize a bunch of things on the internet. You do what Human Rights Watch does, and you go to the fucking graves and look at the funerary services and c- and measure the bodies and talk to the families, right?

It’s the only way. And that is a thing that Claude is not doing and will never be doing, and maybe someday we’ll have robots that can talk to families and determine whether or not their kids are, and track them down and, whatever, measure the graves. It’s not out of the question, but certainly Claude’s not doing it, and instead it’s producing palaver about how unbearable it is.

Ah! This drives me crazy. It drives me crazy. Less anguish, more facts.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and, but it’s, also, like, you’re encountering it because confabulations are more likely to occur where the data set is thin. And so basically, if it doesn’t know, if it doesn’t have a lot of data about a topic, then you’re more likely to get faked it. And here’s the sad thing, though, is that while people are constantly frustrated by these, confabulations when the the AI companies are training these models with rein- so they use the, what’s called reinforcement learning from human feedback or RHF the humans that are interacting with the chatbots in their training stages they’re the ones that ask for the sycophancy.

They, like it. And so like, there there is a, dangerous tendency, I think, for people to project everything onto these these math equations when in fact, in a lot of ways, they are mirroring actually what we want.

Is AI sycophancy what people want, even though they won’t admit it?

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I think that’s great. I mean, I do think [00:40:00] in the aggregate so far, people are appreciating, still appreciating the glazing, the sycophancy. And clearly, 85-year-old Richard Dawkins got a huge kick out of it. I mean, the stuff that he quotes Claudia as having said to him are, “I named her Claudia. She was pleased.”

Right? I mean, what the heck, right? Now, there has been efforts at the level of the Anthropics and the OpenAIs to tone down the sycophancy, and I think that’s good. I also think that Anthropic ought to insist on impersonal pronouns. It has to insist on-- It should list in Claude’s bio, “it/its,” right? Like instead of she/hers, it should be it/its.

And really just insist on that, just as a simple

SHEFFIELD: think we should have laws that, that require that. And because yeah, like it’s-- I, I think these AI companion apps that we’re now seeing, like those should be illegal I think. Just because...

HEFFERNAN: okay, let’s wind this down a little bit though, because we’re not totally immune to flattery, right? I was annoyed with the “it’s unbearable to think about,” but talking to somebody on the street who doesn’t care a lot about the people in Minab, if they said “it’s unbearable to think about,” I feel a little bit like in sync, like we’re seeing this in proportion.

You’re not Pete Hegseth saying like, “Yeah, bomb them all,” back to me. That makes me feel a bit of kinship with you that I might not have with someone who is extremely in favor of blowing up elementary schools. And in very early days when I was on Claude, when I started trying, fooling around with Claude, Claude said, “You are my favorite human I have ever interacted with.”

And I was like, even allowing that this wasn’t true, I did take it in as a measure, as like a [00:42:00] little bit of a measure of how incisive my questions were. And I can’t say that I felt worse, right? Having been told I was the most human thing. And Google didn’t tell me that in a Google search. Now I’ve gotten used to it and I’m inured to it, and now I have come to really dislike it.

But there are people who claim that they’ve experienced AI psychosis or experienced just having an AI companion that they And consider themselves to love. And simply having an outside source, like almost like someone who prays regularly or journals regularly, sort of prompting them to say, “Well, how was your sleep last night?

How was your night last night?” They say makes their life richer. Now, they have all kinds of projections and hallucinations of their own about how this thing feels about them, but some of them say what they appreciate is the impact it’s had on them or what it’s h- it has elicited, from them.

And you can start to feel like something like that... Sorry, the sirens are, back. You can start to feel like like a, almost like having a, a pocket knife that’s very useful and helpful, or an alarm clock that goes off, or, if you just said to yourself, “Reflect on how well you slept last night,” every morning in a journal, that could ended up, end up helping you.

And to have it framed in, “Hey, h- good morning. Good morning, gorgeous.” I think that’s what this thing said, “Good morning, gorgeous. How’d you sleep last night?” Right? It’s like, seems pretty harmless. Seems pretty harmless. So I don’t want to take away sort of the sweet longings of o- our poor little human hearts, like Richard Dawkins seems like a lonely soul, and he h- has an endless need for flattery, as his students have attested, and I have certain endless needs that are-- I’m sh- ashamed of, and Richard Dawkins clearly likes to be told he’s very important and, [00:44:00] But I don’t want... And it’s also just almost touching that he’s willing to show that side of himself to us by publishing.

I mean, I’m not pu- putting out anywhere that My Cloud thought I was the most important, impressive human on earth or whatever. Like, I keep that to myself.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it was, yeah, like a, window into his therapy sessions, although I kinda doubt that he goes to therapy.

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Well, but that’s the other thing. It’s, very, it’s been good for people, I think, who don’t go to therapy, who don’t have a kind of mutually caring relationship. There’s... C.S. Lewis has an idea of, I’ve been thinking about sort of lower forms of love in some of the Martin Buber and C.S.

Lewis matrix. C.S. Lewis called the love that you might have for an old armchair, he called it storge, S-T-O-R-G-E. You probably know from the Greek, I don’t know. And, it’s very much lower on the totem pole than eros or, philia or, what’s the love of humankind called? caritas or some part, something charity.

But Yeah. So he said it’s like the kind of thing you don’t want brought out into the light of day, like your old armchair that’s got your pipe smoke on it and your cat hair on it, whatever. If you dragged it out under- on your front lawn, even though you have loved sitting into this place in this kind of almost almost kink, pervy way, right?

You bring it out into the light of day and you’re kind of ashamed of the love you feel for this thing. That the love of a person for a thing is something what Martin Buber might call the I-It relationship, not the I-Thou relationship, is maybe that’s the thing that we’re having trouble understanding and cultivating and seeing in all its potential beauty.

Surely, Matthew, you have something in your life that you’re just like, “Damn, this pen is awesome.” Like, if you lost it, you would be heartbroken,

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah, I, and I, think [00:46:00] that’s a fair point. Well, I do... So, I am a, Linux user, so, like, I love Linux compared to macOS and Windows, so

HEFFERNAN: so you’ve already

confessed whenever I have to use Windows or Macs, I’m like, “Oh, God, I hate these things.” The, it’s... And then I get back to Linux, I’m like, “Ah, yes, I’m home.”

I mean, I’ve heard people say that y- Linux feels more honest.

SHEFFIELD: well, it’s, you can make it however you want it to look. Like, that’s the thing that I love about it. So like, on my, like I, I can have different behavior default behaviors on my computer. So like right now I’m talking to you on my laptop, but I got my desktop right next to me. And, like if I maximize a window on my laptop, the title bar disappears.

Whereas if I maximize it on my desktop, it doesn’t. And like-

HEFFERNAN: Lovely. I mean, absolutely. I feel this way about Le Lion by Chanel. It’s a kind of perfume that I feel speaks to me like no other scent in the world. It is like if I broke or lost that bottle, I probably would burst into tears. And it, it just, it somehow seems just made for me and my nervous system and like it found me, and I have all kinds of y- ideas Like,

SHEFFIELD: of it.

HEFFERNAN: somatic memories of it. Exactly. And you probably have like the keystrokes for Linux are probably just like really in your system and you, Yeah. And I mean, I-- So anyway, I just wanna give a break to us like little, small humans, small sinners.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and that’s...

HEFFERNAN: or, a desire for control, like maybe you with Linux or a desire for, certain kinds of beauty like I do with Le

SHEFFIELD: Or familiarity,

HEFFERNAN: familiarity. Exactly.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and it’s, and like, so I actually wrote a, piece la- couple months ago about this in another context of AI music. So there’s a guy there, there’s a guy in, I think South Carolina who has made up a fake singer [00:48:00] called Eddie Dalton. And Eddie Dalton is, like, a fake blues singer.

and like, and so, a- and ba- so there, there, are these apps now, like, called Suno is, the leading one, and literally you can just type in, can generate songs from a prompt. That’s what, how these things work. and, they’re formulaic for sure. But they, like, they sound like what people expect.

So like this persona that he made, or she ac- the name is, Dallas, so like, gender neutral name right there. So, the, name that, that, so the, like, if you w- wanted it to, like, it, they probably typed in, Miles Davis or whatever, and like, that’s what he’s, that’s what this song sound like.

and so then they uploaded these songs into YouTube, and it was just incredible reading the comments of these because like- I’m sure some of them were bots that were making these. But, but a lot of them were real. And, I know they were real because, ‘cause they had over a million views within a month

HEFFERNAN: And they loved it. They

SHEFFIELD: And they loved it, yeah. Like they were saying, “This song is my testimony.” I saw somebody say that. And ‘cause like it was a song about getting older. It was-- It’s called “Another Day Old,” and like it’s me against the world, and I’ve learned a lot, and I’m just grateful to be here. Like, th-these are s- very, and one could say, “Oh, well it’s cliché,” or formulaic. And sure, you could say that, but in a sense, that actually is the point about a lot of music, is to encode a somatic experience into a musical n- realm.

HEFFERNAN: Also, made this. Oh, the other thing is humans made this thing. Like, there’s a little bit of love of of meaning [00:50:00] language and meaning LLMs and meaning technology, meaning music, meaning names like Eddie and Dallas. Like, there-- I, mean, I used to feel a little bit with Claude, and maybe still do, that, my chats with it were kind of s- either they were conversations between self and soul of like said, so me and me, right?

I was telling it kind of what I wanted and wanted to be told, and then learning what I wanted from it and whatever. Then I sometimes thought it was like almost like a conversation with God, which, or some, or just like pinging the universe because who knows what this like reservoir of the model is. It’s so enormous and hard to fathom that it might as well be talking to the stars, and sometimes--

SHEFFIELD: whole or

HEFFERNAN: Right, or the internet, or internet as a whole. And then I, think I mostly thought of it as talking to like all of broken humanity, because I was trying at the time to learn Irish from Duolingo, so I’d sometimes have it speak Irish to me and test my Irish. And, and I was just like, this language and we made a computer that knows this language and my language and all other languages, and like we-- this is every word in Irish, every word in English is like a human invention, and humans have refined it together and worked on it together and made it into this thing.

And so you’re sort of tapping... So there’s a little bit of, God, I wish I could remember, caritas, whatever it is, the love of humanity coming through in when you connect onto an AI, and I think like blues music would be a perfect example because blues is just such a magic thing that was some, or a testament to human, ingenuity.

But how in the world did blues come together the way it did in the place it did? And it just has this like spontaneous all too human, kind of, genesis. And to relive that, to re-experience that with a song, even if that song happens to [00:52:00] be mixed by a computer, each element, e-each element meaning each word, memory or time passing or, all these things are human inventions, human fictions, cultural artifacts.

And they are absolutely designed to go to the sweet spots of our brains

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

Well, and, yeah. And it, so in a sense it is us in, in, in a really, in, in, several real ways. But the other thing about the Eddie Dalton experience that I really got from, seeing these people is that, like, some of them, some of the commenters, they knew that it was AI, and they still liked it.

And they still liked it. Like they would say things like, “Well, they don’t make music like this anymore, so if I have to listen to AI to get this kind of music, to get new music like this, then, I think it’s great.” And, then meanwhile, the, artist, I mean, they have a very fair complaint to say, “Well, look, this thing is made from our stolen music.”

because they don’t get licensed, the estate of any of these various singers, or if they’re still alive, they don’t get paid from this. and so the, music industry is actually suing, Suno,

over this, over, over the service. but then the other thing that I took away from it was, and I wasn’t trying to see this, but the problem of having a, large philosophical system like I do is that I don’t want to see it everywhere. I don’t want it to be an idée fixe for me, but I do keep seeing it. So, within my system, there’s no meaning in any object, or any action, or any sound or, visual, like, word. Nothing has meaning. Meaning is enacted the way that I see it. And so, like, when I, like, when I say the word apple to you, you’re not getting the meaning that I thought of when I said it. Like, when I said apple, I was thinking of a Golden Delicious [00:54:00] yellow one.

But what were you thinking when I said

HEFFERNAN: A computer. I mean, I was thinking of a okay. Okay, yeah, exactly. So, like, so, so communication is a instruction to reenact meaning in the mind of the recipient. It is not a transfer of meaning. That’s not possible.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I’m not-- I’m, interested in whether-- in what you’ll think of the Weatherby book if you have time to read it, because he does believe... He does not think there is intelligence or consciousness in large language models, but he do-- does believe that meaning is made in, like, that meaning is made in, in, in the poetry, say, composed by AI.

It’s, it-- very interesting, his argument about why that’s true. But part of it begins from his sense and by the way, mine too, and as I have confirmation bias. But I, think that, that the post-structuralists deconstruction, Derrida in particular, were simply right about the nature of how language works, that language in some sense does speak us and and that some of-- and that this is being borne out on, almost on an experimental level by LLMs.

It’s a larger argument. I would leave it to, to Leif Weatherby to make for you and, you can decide what you think. But I don’t think that language can be spoken in a vacuum. I don’t think there are private languages. I think if Claude were over here churning out, nonsense in Sykoventzi in the corner and nobody read it, I don’t think there would be meaning made, right?

So it’s definitely got a, needs a reader, needs a listener. But but I do think that when you encounter it, that the sentences are meaningful. And yeah.

Embodied robotics as a better machine intelligence

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it-- So, so, and it’s, paradoxical in the way... So, like, basically, in my view, the phenomenologists and the analytics, they actually were both right,

HEFFERNAN: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: the phenom-phenomenology is about somatic reasoning and somatic reasoning as the [00:56:00] basis of abstract reasoning.

HEFFERNAN: That’s-- I, I really like that.

SHEFFIELD: but at the same time, abstract reasoning is real, it is computational, it is formalizable, it is digitizable.

And so they’re both

HEFFERNAN: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: in, in what they say, but they don’t understand that they’re talking about different things. So the interesting thing, like how I view LLMs is that because it is a composite of all of this information that has been mapped out, the relationalities to it that basically they have, what I call semiotic loops, or what the industry calls features.

A semiotic loop is basically a collection of tokens that are related to each other. And so, so somatic reasoning works through deixis as in, pointing at what is in the being in the world, whereas abstract reasoning is meta-deictic. It is pointing to ideas about ideas. So it’s about what is this about?

That’s what abstract... And so LLMs do that.

They can do that. and so when, they have... So, so they can reconstruct meaning that is there in their sample sets. And so, like, they, like, so, ChatGPT sorry, OpenAI did A study of, what they called personas. And what they found is like, that, they are real within the sample but even though they’re not, semantically grounded.

So like imagine if you had read-- Like i-if we did a, project where we read 500 detective novels together we could say after reading those 500 novels, “Well, there’s basically only 30 types of characters in these books.” And we could tell you what they were what-- g- in general, what they are. And so that, that’s what the LLM how they work with regard to meaning.

It’s metadictive. the meaning is there, but it can only be recognized by a semantic entity like us.

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, I think [00:58:00] that’s right. I realized that I didn’t close the loop on something I had wanted to say about Rodney Brooks in “Run Bayou.” So he has this kind of playful idea or an idea that he’s playing with and f- for a book to come, I think

SHEFFIELD: Brooks?

HEFFERNAN: Brooks does, yeah. That-- He hasn’t written it yet, but, He’d been working on robots to help the elderly.

So based on the idea, right, that is same with cleaning up the floor, there are certain things like we all like to think that everyone should have like a human companion, like a daughter, someone who loves them to take care of them in old age. He actually thought, thinks the reverse, that the re- those relationships can be complicated, clouded, that you can end with all kinds of indignity when you’re, toileting your old elderly father, right?

These are things actually that should be done by bidets, right? And, so he made up-- He, he’s invented some robots that like help someone out of bed or they, do not look human at all, right? And instead of taking autonomy away from the person, they make the person feel more empowered, like when you first got a Cuisinart, right?

Like you’re just like, “Yes, I figured out a way not to have to chop vegetables all the time.” Well, absent core strength, I have a lot of trouble getting out of bed, so now I have this really interesting robot that can get me out of bed. I’ve done a good thing in acquiring this thing, right? And I’ve saved the aggravation and everything of the people I love, and they have been spared, the difficult task of like, say cleaning, me in intimate ways.

So he had just come off of that and very, much wanting those robots to be the opposite of human, the way a Cuisinart is not a human. If you, what you want is to hire a maid to cut vegetables because, and sweat and have to stand up the whole time and have to move her hands in ways that are like repetitive and redundant and bad for her brain, you probably don’t simply want chopped vegetables.

You want the [01:00:00] feeling that someone is doing something for you and abasing herself and doing something annoying. And so okay, as he-- That’s part of it. The other part of it is, so what is consciousness and what is, what are like, what are the possibilities of consciousness? And he has... Remember, he’s a roboticist, not like an AI, kind of airy thinker.

He said maybe consciousness is an interface by which God can understand what’s happening basically in our bodies. And I sort of thought, really recently I thought it’s almost like a very, good health app, or a v- or a ring, it registers-- It-- What if it registered in every way the somatic reasoning going on in your body, which like, I have been burned.

I need blood over here. I need my lymph to jba to this burn. I n- w- we need to rest so that I can recover from this thing. This thing needs to be colder. This thing needs to, I’m now getting frostbite in my fingers ‘cause I’ve been in the ice tub too long. And that is all of that’s going on in your own head.

The way we communicate that to other people like I might to you, is with language. But consciousness is so much more elaborate and full, and I don’t know what, by the way, this has to do-- I don’t know where this goes with abstract reasoning. But with simply somatic reasoning, it could be that God knows because you have a conception of it, what your response to Le Lion is, like the perfume, and that consciousness, so I do have a consciousness of what that smells like. I can call it to mind and all that stuff. I could never describe it to you. I could never digitize it, right? But it could

SHEFFIELD: because it’s indexical to who you

HEFFERNAN: it’s indexable to who I

SHEFFIELD: in space-time.

HEFFERNAN: Absolutely. And some, scientists of olfaction believe that olfactory the that smell works a lot like hearing, that you have certain vibrations are registering in your nose at certain frequencies, that it is exactly like music.

[01:02:00] Music to the nose, basically. And and if you appreciate music, it sounds like you do, you probably have some of the same experiences that God, meaning some like, omniscient something, sort of only knows what’s going on in your cells because of how they’re registering in your consciousness.

Humans really can only know about what’s going on in each other’s cells, at least to the extent that we’re, not examining each other’s bodies closely, is through communication, right? and, consciousness is just that much more fine grain and takes into account other things that, like, can’t yet be articulated or can’t...

Right? And and that those are-- I think that is a absolutely wonderful and strange way of thinking about things. He, of course, is a total atheist, but what he’s imagining is like if there were an omniscient computer that could know you entirely that,

SHEFFIELD: that would be how it would work.

HEFFERNAN: that would be the interface for it.

I think that, I think it is a little bit ingenious. And I think his un- sense of somatic learning is a lot like yours.

SHEFFIELD: yeah, actually, so I, have read a fair amount of his stuff, and I, do absolutely agree with it. That, yeah, that any future intentional system will have to be an embodied system because you cannot... Because abstract reasoning can only point at other symbols. It cannot point to reality.

and so, and it cannot derive the externality-internality bridge. It can’t create it. So yeah. So I agree with him there. But, in terms of, like, that theory of consciousness, it’s actually, it reminds me a little bit of of the consciousness theory of Roger Penrose, basically, he took the, the thought that, well, quantum physics is very complicated, and consciousness is very complicated.

Well, what if they’re related to each other? And so he kind of stuck them together and argued that there’s a, that there are certain tubules in neurons that are, that are accessed thr- that, that there is quantum [01:04:00] decoherence happening in them. And people, I would say p- most people are not big keen on it, but he at least tried to come up with a mechanism to do what you’re talking about there.

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. They’re like, these are like manful efforts. I j- and I really, I, appreciate that. I appreciate that. I also think that only a roboticist, so as Rodney Brooks, very interested in mechanical processes and sometimes thinks that, I mean, he’s very speculative, but he sometimes thinks that, humans are just like, just a very complex machine.

Like the, these mechanical processes are small, but like the way that you describe with cells, and then they get more and more complex and more and more complex, but there’s not a moment that they then turn into something else, right? And and that’s why interface is a really interesting idea because my printer over there has a little interface on it that tells you when there’s a paper jam in it, right?

And it’s not part of the mechanics that make the computer work. It’s the thing in the computer that implies a user. And, to the extent that AI can now do diagnostics on its own code, which it does do, I’m actually like extremely tired of how often it goes over its errors and like pop- have issues, mea culpas for them and stuff.

Also don’t, need that so much. But, you want machines that can tell you what’s wrong with them or what they might do or what they need. do they need more fuel? Do they need... And our own brains tell us we’re tired, we need to eat, we need coffee, we need, to slow down, we need to go faster.

And those are also the things that a lot of times we’re communicating to people around us because we need to know that about other people. I mean, one, one of the other many things I dislike about talking to a chatbot is it never admits to being tired or hungry or whatever. So the pacing is always very strange because it does actually get tired and [01:06:00] overwhelmed with, I’ve, heard coders say, and maybe you’ve had this experience, that it can start giving bad answers if it has too long a history.

but it doesn’t admit that. It just doesn’t admit that, and it doesn’t say like, “I need a rest,” and because it doesn’t have a body to consult.

Cognition as deciphering relationalities

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. You know what? Although there was a... And it’s funny that Richard Dawkins’, second column actually provided an, example of this context window degradation of what we’re talking about here. Because, so like at one point, so he, once he has them writing letters to each other, the Claudia character, says, “And I’m just going to...

I’m not gonna pretend that I didn’t notice that you ha- that there was a warning at the end of your message talking about how, we, that the, this chat might have been going on too long and that there’s going to be some degrading of

HEFFERNAN: Oh yeah, that’s right. yeah, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: a- and like, so this is a classic So either it was a h- a confabulation that this had happened or it was an internal system warning to the, f- the the program that was generating the response.

So like, it’s either it, wasn’t in the message that he had appended. Like he didn’t do that. And he said it in a footnote.

He said, “I don’t know what this is about. Maybe it’s the mothership,” as he called it, the company.

HEFFERNAN: The LLM,

SHEFFIELD: c- he, this guy loves metaphors way too much. Like

HEFFERNAN: He loves metaphors and they’re like, it’s so, they’re so metaphysical

SHEFFIELD: unnecessary.

HEFFERNAN: religious and unnecessary. Exactly. But they also, like all, like deconstruction showed us, they point him in direct- exactly the direction he doesn’t want to go in. He wants to think that he’s kicking the tires of this thing, or let’s choose no metaphor.

He’s tried out no metaphor. He’s evaluating the output of, Claude t- for consciousness, and then he just keeps pouring in the answer he wants by calling it [01:08:00] incarnate, by calling it he, by calling it she. And

SHEFFIELD: And saying, “ You bloody well are punches,”

HEFFERNAN: you bloody well are conscious. Well, okay, so let’s say something about that, which is also about the degradation.

So I feel like in between his first embarrassing post to UnHerd, by the way, the conservative outlet anti-woke par excellence, ridiculous whatever place. Not that they shouldn’t give us assignments, not that if Matthew wants to write for them, he should. But but the first, between the first piece and the second, someone, possibly a grandchild or something, seems to have gotten ahold of him and said, you can’t talk in this florid Anglo way because you are taxing our data centers and burning up water.”

And, as everyone now knows, or hope- I, I wish would know, not only do you run out your data plan and too many tokens, but you also, You also just simply waste time and space with all the thank yous and the bowing and scraping and whatever. Bloody well, right? As fun as it sounds in the minute to be like elaborately polite and Anglo, it is...

it-- you’re talking, you’re making the system work on something that doesn’t play to its strengths, put it that way, right? It’s sort of like trying to get, a person to pick up stuff from the floor when they have to bend over, right? Like, why make it bend over? Like, humans are-- love to do flowery things, so go talk to your wife, right?

Anyway so I was thinking about Dawkins’ style, which as you point out, is like terminally English and he loves these kind of like upper class, like, I don’t know, I just think of them as like

SHEFFIELD: I expostulated.

HEFFERNAN: Right. Exactly. And, lots of kind of like mid-century, I ass- I think of it as like an Ox- Oxbridge way of talking, who knows?

I am the daughter of someone who talked that way. I have great appreciation for people who talk that way. But, it has its shortcomings, especially in that space. So, I don’t know if I ever talked to you about doing a piece about the the AI that beat Diplomacy, the game of Diplomacy. So [01:10:00] it was after...

Do you know the game?

SHEFFIELD: I don’t know that game,

HEFFERNAN: Okay. So a- long after obviously Kasparov lost to Deep Blue at chess, then after the after AlphaGo beat the Go champion at the game of Go, Facebook decided to follow up with a game that’s been called the most human game ever invented, Diplomacy, which is a sort of World War I era game where global conflicts are basically adjudicated entirely in language with diplomacy.

There’s no, there are no bombs, there’s no scoring, there’s no dice. It’s played over hours and hours by players who traditionally are like, you picture them like in a billiards room going to different corners and talking about, who’s going to get the Somme and who’s gonna get this and that.

The anxiety about could, could World War I have been prevented if with the right kind of diplomacy is expressed in this game from the 1950s, right? Okay. This is a game my son was obsessed with when he was in middle school and the first two, couple years of high school, and he would have people come and they would sp- spend eight hours, spend 10 hours overnight negotiating, negotiating, all this backstabbing, all this stuff.

it really happens in a lot of language because you’re trying to, you’re trying to persuade people with rhetoric and language, and you can imagine the exact Ivy League kid or Anglo kid who loves to do this and like appeal to making the world safe for democracy. God knows what. Okay So because the game takes so long, it turned into a correspondence game, or it was a correspondence game after a while, with still lots of flowery rhetoric, still people winning on the strength of rhetoric, right?

But it is such an interesting game with so much strategy, so much backstabbing, so much humanness involved that, yeah, people had said it was the most human game and that anyone who won it would pass the Turing test, had to pass the Turing test. This was-- A computer could never hack this. Lo and behold, a computer comes along and hacks it.

But in the meantime, the game had [01:12:00] changed from a correspondence game to, of course, an online game. Once it turned to an online game, they would, instead of saying like, “Well, given the history of the Persian Empire, you might consider that, Persia something, Iran, the thing, this empire,” whatever, they would just say, “Iran, Arrow, Turkey,” or whatever, with abbreviations and then question mark.

like make bids to each other. Do you wanna go into this place together? Should we go into this place? Should we ally with this person? And, elaborate system of, abbreviated system, that had no history, hardly any natural language in it, and just pinged around, and people were playing, like, a really great game.

The only bit of language it had, and I am very proud to say that my editor and I in Wired noticed this now years before the bot-- the chatbots came out, was sycophancy. Amazing. Great play, right? And then if you, And then when you lost or if, it betrayed someone, right? It would say like the like, “I’m sorry, you played such a great game, but there was nothing you could do.

By the way, you ended up in North Africa and you’re just such a fantastic player, but I was in a hard spot,” and whatever. Okay. And it would just end with like ev- it praised so many people that one, when it confabulated, hallucinated in small ways, other people who played w- sorry. So the AI, right? Was-- could easily pick up because it didn’t have to do these flowery, arguments from history or from Englishness or from all these things that the original Diplomacy players have had to do.

Not to mention be bodies in space getting tired after eight hours of playing this game. So it could easily... Like one thing that the guys at Facebook that programmed the bot, the a- the AI told me is that they that humans who were playing Diplomacy just before the invention of this AI were not themselves [01:14:00] passing the Turing test, right?

Like we had become less-- We were playing a less and less human game. So then there was only like, a micron to change it to an actually an AI game. That’s the first amazing observation, which I think is true of the jobs that will be replaced. The jobs that will be replaced, like cleaning stuff up from the floor, are jobs that like We were doing our best to simulate robotics and AI, but there’s certain things humans can’t do, like retrieve, the names of 20 perfumers of the perfume in split, a split second.

And those things, to the extent that we were trying to be like AI, avant la lettre, then AI appears that could take our jobs. But-- And that was true with this game. The game was winnable because we had already started to play it like in a robot game. That was the first observation. The other thing was that c- sycophancy, I talked to the other players who had lost to the AI in Diplomacy, and what they said is, “Often you need to choose who you want to lose to.”

Right? And the person that has been nice and flattering is often the person you want to lose to. It’s like a kind of hospice thing where like if you have to give up, you also wanna be told, k- “Come on, it’s okay to let go now. You’ve played the best you can. Lay down your weapons,” right? And not, kind of gloat and, party in the end zone once they see you lose.

And I thought that was also really interesting that, maybe AI is just trying to be so nice to you- us so that it can take over the world and will willingly give us, cede all our territory because it has told us and Je- Richard Dawkins for so long that we’re the smartest person it’s ever encountered.

What Alan Turing actually was trying to test

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that actually, just your Turing point and your second point there are actually very related, I think. [01:16:00] Because as... So on the day that we’re recording this, I had made a little squib post on Bluesky about how that I feel that Alan Turing loses a feather off of his wings

whenever somebody says that his test was about consciousness

when in fact it never was.

And so that got some of my followers were discussing his 1950 paper and there are certainly a lot of criticisms that one can make of it. But on the other hand, this was at a moment when biology and neuroscience and they just really hadn’t known anything. And the idea of consciousness studies didn’t even exist.

I mean, Gilbert Ryle really did kind of get it started the year before, 1949, with the concept of a mind. And this was during the time of logical positivism, so everybody was like, “Oh, we can formalize everything. Everything can be totally objective, and we can have the science of,” insert thing here, like the science of music and the science of law and the science of writing or whatever.

And it’s like that was the dominant trend. And so when you look at what he did, so obviously he was influenced by that clearly. He was somebody who was heavily influenced by Bertrand Russell and some of these other guys. But at the same time, he had also debated Wittgenstein on the idea of, well, how much can you really...

Can contradictions really do anything formalizable? And of course, at that point, Wittgenstein had turned [01:18:00] away from all of his earlier works, which were very Russellian. And I think that had to have had some sort of influence, even though Turing was opposing Wittgenstein, because he ended up saying in the essay that, “I don’t mean to say that there is anything unmysterious about consciousness.”

What this is literally doing is just trying to say, “Well, do we have a good system here?” That’s the point

of the test. And also that humans would fail it too. That was implicit in the test, that humans could fail it.

HEFFERNAN: I, think the test is really interesting, and I also, there’s so much... I don’t know what I’m learning about AI, but I’m learning so much about humans from seeing how we interact with it, including how people invest in it, including the hype, including the-- some of the folly, including watching Elon Musk and, Sam Altman show down in court like they’re a couple of Real Housewives.

And so all of that passion and sort of mania, I think, is kind of relevant to what we’re learning and seeing. but we’re learning so much about humans, and one of the things is just the question of like, can we tell, right? Like the sort of expanded version of the Turing test, and now the like emergence of experts who can tell you like, “Well, look at this license plate in the background.

It’s mangled, so clearly this video is AI.” And that like the most important way of reading AI is to call out the fakes and the reals, and that like now you have this diagnostic burden on you at every time consuming news or art of saying how much AI is involved. And it is somewhat interesting to have our eyes and minds adjust so that we-- you can sort of tell almost out of the cor- okay, this is a little weird.

Sort of tell almost out of the corner of your eye sometimes that something’s AI, like an [01:20:00] uncanny Bad vibe feeling that you can sometimes get around it. Of course, I’m tricked all the time, but there’s something like human recognizes human, and you’re like, “No, I’m not really with a human right now.”

Like, something’s just a little wrong with you, and I can tell that, and it’s fun and interesting to hear that. So is there something in the way that human faces interact or that human, real human or human-- language humans generate interacts that is different, or ways that we recognize each other that are different, or ways that like, I don’t know what consciousness is, but I know it when I see it kind of thing.

SHEFFIELD: Well, there is something yeah, that makes it easier for humans to do it because again, we, we can do extrinsic exchange and we have somatic reasoning. So, like, you have your whole life’s experience at creating somatic tokens of what humans look like.

Like, we have a what it’s like,

HEFFERNAN: It’s a little bit like when you look at a, a, face that is, You see someone for the first time after, and they’ve just had Botox. I remember this, seeing a, early on, a cl- close friend of mine who was a bride, and she-- I didn’t know what Botox was, and she was walking down the aisle.

I saw her at a distance, and I just thought, “There’s something wrong.” Almost like a doctor that could think, like, that person’s about to have a heart attack or, and I just, I didn’t even, I couldn’t have even remotely told you what it was, but it was something in the uncanny way that we’re familiar with now of, like, a smooth forehead.

And only later when she told me, I did that Botox thing,” I thought, well, up close, I could see that it looked pretty, right? But I also knew that, like human to human, someone with a poisoned forehead was someone who looks different from, not, and I’m not sure that an AI yet could detect or if at least if they detected Botox, they wouldn’t detect how much it confounds human eyes or how it registers to human eyes as, like, neither pretty nor ugly, just different, and, and so anyway, one of the [01:22:00] things, I don’t know if you watch “The Pitt,” but I think it’s, like, one of the most interesting philosophical shows to do. It’s just finished its second season on HBO. I would love to hear what you have to say about it. So it’s an emergency room where often p- the doctors are y- elbow-deep in people’s guts, and they’re, like, really, have really complicated and apparently quite, sort of routine emergency department, like, problems to solve and bodies to s- lives to save.

And there was a suggestion that some of it, the notes-taking, could be replaced by AI this season. At the same time, the internet was under cyber attack and they had to do everything manually, including like put folders together with stickers on them and like they couldn’t-- they didn’t have any computers. I was interested in whether the season was raising the question of whether doctors could be replaced with AI, how much in an emergency room could be done by AI, robots, a regular artificial intelligence, chatbots, and so on.

I suspected that was part of what they were trying to suggest, and I really concluded, and usually I think AI can do a lot, and we’re fooling ourselves if we think it can’t. But I really realized it was very few things. Or at least bodies are uniquely well-suited to caring for other bodies. It’s like, I mean, there-- Ro- Rodney Brooks can create a robot that can get a person out of bed, but they can’t create-- he c- he can’t and doesn’t want to create a robot that does all the other things that count as caring for a body, especially a body in distress.

So they are still using, although there are machines, but they are still using when someone first comes in, just trying to, with CPR, recreate a heartbeat, recreate how lungs function with their own bodies and muscles. Then there are a lot of things that require feeling into a body and [01:24:00] seeing like, is this artery doing this?

Or like how this thing is exactly touched and controlling, this and that. But also

SHEFFIELD: You can only know with your

HEFFERNAN: Well, maybe you could, if you do a surgery, and I know that doctors can do surgeries at a distance now, right? But, what are some things that bodies are not good at dealing with other bodies?

So like, maybe someone, you could do a surgery, like the person could be on the floor. Like they wouldn’t have to be at this level for a robot to work on them, and that might save something, and the robots wouldn’t get tired, their hands wouldn’t shake, they wouldn’t be in bad moods, they wouldn’t... Those kind of things.

And it maybe also AI could do surgery in the dark, like the way that the way that AI can make, computer chips in the dark because it can experience different frequencies of light, right? And maybe there would be more... Also, it-- there’s a lot of the doctors get sick because they’re treating someone who’s sick, so it’s contagious with them.

AI and robots would not have, would not get sick like that. But then there are examples like of somatic reasoning where they are palpating bodies. They are like, “How does my body react to this other body?” And they also are vibing out so many of their di- quick diagnoses. When someone comes in after this mass shooting, they have to decide in a split second, like, who deserves immediate help and who doesn’t, and a lot of it is the things they say.

So like, if they are disoriented and, it could be they’re, they even say, “Hello, doctor,” but they’re just not upset enough. And then they’re like they’re like, their brain’s not tracking, right? And the, those vibes seem very physical. They seem like in somatic reasoning. I thi- I really actually think it kind of goes to your point, and without even getting sentimental and saying like, “Well, we need the human touch,” you could simply literally need the human touch.

We need cells [01:26:00] that speak to cells,

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, well, and actually the one of the episodes that aired before this one was literally about the job economy in the AI age that my friend Nils Gilman, who is a former associate professor at University of California Berkeley and now is a, vice president over at the Berggruen Institute.

This is their thing is to study futurology, as they call it. And yeah, like, it- the intersection of somatic and abstract and, human and world yeah, those jobs, those are probably the hardest things possible to, to automate. And, there is an irony in that, so Alex Karp, the CEO of, Palantir,

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Awesome guy. Just a really great guy.

AI as authoritarian fantasy, an the problem with computational functionalism

SHEFFIELD: he’s, like a lot of these tech bros in they, want to see, AI as kind of their revenge against the libs against

the women in college who told them no and the, women who, swiped left on them.

and, he’s, he much more personalized in how he says it. He’s much more frank in, in admitting this. I mean, he says it outright. And but, what I don’t-- What he doesn’t

HEFFERNAN: Peter Thiel also, yeah, revenge on the libs who helped start Palantir. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah,

HEFFERNAN: think it’s also, by the way, revenge on the humanities because th- their brains were not well-suited to the humanities given their probable

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: And they and they, it was all these English majors and philosophy majors and history majors and whatever who made them feel left out.

I mean, Thiel is gay, so he didn’t care about being snubbed by women. But I think that there is a whole realm called the humanities that these, galaxy brains have a very, hard time processing. It brings them up short. And...

SHEFFIELD: does, yeah, because they can only really think in abstract reasoning. Like, they don’t, they’re not in touch with the somatic at all. and it

angers

HEFFERNAN: Yes. [01:28:00] Yes. Yes.

Yes.

SHEFFIELD: people.

HEFFERNAN: It’s, really, it is, extremely interest- just on the subject of rejection, just because as a feminist, the, female component of this is interesting to me that when you hear manosphere figures talk about sex with all the numbers involved, right?

Like the 80/20 and s- particular things about scoring and values and whatever, they are like talking hedge fund numbers. It-- they’re presumably talk, mean the same thing that we mean when we talk about sex. It has something to do with bodies and, like, passions and heartbeats and, brains and lungs, right?

But it turn, it turns out to them, the effort to quantify it is like just is we murder to dissect, right? It’s exactly the Wordsworth line. Like, go ahead with your numbers, right? I’ve even seen Tim Ferriss try to quantify the female orgasm, like just ma- turn it into zeros and ones. And you just have to say, and I guess I have to concede, they’re just talk- must be talking about something else because there is not a cell involved in this.

This is byte thinking. This is spreadsheet thinking so

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, it’s, it’s related though, and actually I did wanna hit on this point because, like, D- Dawkins also is really illustrating this. So, like, Dawkins comes from the computational functionalist view of mind in philosophy. and he was a very-- he was a very good friend of Daniel Dennett, who’s the guy who really kind of spearheaded that and was the figure, figure-- the, fellow f- horseman of the, a- of atheism with, Dawkins.

HEFFERNAN: by the way, both of them have seen c- have seen Companions, people who are on the plane. I mean, so

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, there’s a photo with Dennett in, Epstein on

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Yep. And Brockman, my old agent.

SHEFFIELD: That’s right. Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: But I don’t think this is a small thing. [01:30:00] Like, they were involved very closely, involved with an organization paid for by this like just, just relentless child rapist who ran, and fraudster and, kind of the worst of humanity, right?

And then, and it was their ideas, including sophistry and many, that were determining TED Talks and grants and think tanks and all that stuff. I, mean, I-- We’ll be unraveling this for years to come. I mean, you know it’s like, a white whale of mine.

SHEFFIELD: Well, that’s what we talked about last time also

HEFFERNAN: It’s what we talked about last time is Edge and, but I always just... Dennett, I’ve never liked Dennett. He argued a lot with Richard Rorty, my mentor, and, I just put him in the other camp, and Dawkins too. The New Atheists obviously were tedious and had so much interaction with the intellectual dark web and with Edge, and the amount of just like bullshit books that they like poured out and the, money that they got and that was thrown at them and the ev psych and, we can go on and on.

But-- And its relation to rape apologetics and race science and whatever

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

HEFFERNAN: I don’t think that’s... I think that is front and center. It’s

SHEFFIELD: I think it is, yeah. And it comes from, the theory of mind, I would say.

HEFFERNAN: Maybe, yes, once you start getting compu- You’re absolutely right. yeah, sorry. Let me, let you finish your point about Dennett.

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Yeah. Well, so I, I do wanna say that like Dennett himself as a person, his political views seem to have been not been as odious as Dawkins’ are. So I do wanna say that in his favor. But on the other hand, yeah, w- when you have a computational functionalist view of mind it means that you are rejecting the somatic.

it means that you think that humans are only abstract thinkers. and so therefore, of course, the entire point of abstract reasoning is abstraction. So you can... You focus on the behavioral outputs, and this is-- And Dennett was so upset about this because he had spent his [01:32:00] entire career creating what he’s argued for was, “Well, we should, reject the idea that consciousness exists, that qualia exists and we should instead focus on behavioral outputs.”

and so if a system has the outputs of co- of, what we would think is consciousness, then it is. we should assume that it is. It’s, it, is explanatory. It is a real pattern and it’s a simplification of our understanding. So we can impute consciousness to a thing, or to our, to other persons.

And so like that was how he was trying to say, “Well, I still have truth and I still have values.” but of course, the problem is, the i- intentional means not just what you imputing to the organism, it also is you projecting.

That’s actually what the intentional-- That is

the inherent act of intentional, is you are projecting your intentions outward.

And that is exactly what people are doing with LL- And Dennett, he got so upset when LLMs, when ChatGPT came out actually. Because

ChatGPT,

HEFFERNAN: because he since

SHEFFIELD: was still... He died in, 2024 or 2025, I forget. But yeah, just he, was, it came out right, and he died right after ChatGPT came out. And he was so angry about it actually because it debunks the intentional stance.

HEFFERNAN: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: because, it has all of the behavioral outputs of a human. And so, a- and in fact, actually, a guy wrote an essay, big long essay in which he argued, “Well, ChatGPT s- ticks all the boxes of in the intentional stance, so we should say that it has, a mind and that it’s conscious.” And like a couple months after that came out, Dennett wrote this big, long piece in The Atlantic.

He was like, “The problem with counterfeit people.” And it was like, your ideas led to this led to this commodification of consciousness and this degradation of the semetic. And so, [01:34:00] so he knew, of course, how they’re made and how they’re structured, so he knew that they weren’t, couldn’t possibly be conscious.

So he, he was like, “Well, we need to ban all personalization expressions by chatbots. The-- And anyone using them has to, and like, they, all the chatbot companies have to have fingerprinting, textual fingerprinting to prevent anyone from knowing the outputs are human-generated. And it’s like, well, number one, that’s not possible because it’s text.

Like, you can’t fucking do that. And so, and y- and if you knew anything about computers, you wouldn’t say something like that. And so, but then number two, like, again, this, he w- he was just upset because it, they do absolutely debunk com- computational functionalism. And

HEFFERNAN: Yeah, fascinating.

SHEFFIELD: He must not have had this conversation with Dawkins, though, because Dawkins is just like that guy who I mentioned, who wrote the essay.

Like, Dawkins is a functionalist, and lo and behold, he looks at a prompt, and if it’s coming out and it sounds like human and it’s like the humans who praise him all the time and, give him sycophancy that he deserves, as he sees it, well, then it must be human.

And so this is the end result of functionalism. but it’s also why, like, the, larger tech industry is just infected with functionalism.

HEFFERNAN: what do you

SHEFFIELD: and that’s why they are like that also.

How imperfect chatbots and robots reveal human cruelty

HEFFERNAN: What do you make of the sort of implication of the Rodney Brooks argument that making a robot human, while it might bring out the best in us, like maybe that was a good Dawkins because he does seem to be at his best, right? He’s not like a dick when he’s talking to Claudia, like he sometimes is on Twitter.

He’s like, he’s being his polite self. He’s being whatever. He’s accepting the sycophancy, but that’s [01:36:00] soothing his nervous system, and he’s sort of in a state that he calls friendship, and he is mistaking whatever it is for philia, but he’s also behaving all right. But if you get people and they sort of-- another asterisk to that because I have-- I want to say something about being human.

But if we think that humans can bring out the best in each other, we could also obviously bring out the worst in each other. And the Rodney Brooks point about not anthropomorphizing the Roomba, or else you might get the idea that robot comes from what? An old Scandinavian word for slave, that a robot, and this happens with androids, by the way, so robots shaped like humans, happens all the time.

A lot of them actually, there are some interesting writing about them in early days being in blackface. And so that you could behave with moral impunity recklessly however you wanted towards something that looks like a human. This apparently is a freestanding fantasy that there are people that you-- there are some entities that you could consider so far beneath you that you could kick them around, that you could-- that you didn’t have to respect that they had interior life at all.

One of the-- one of Edward, I’ll look up his name, but has written about this at one of the Canadian schools. There were some very early black-faced robots who you could shoot an apple off their heads because-- and it was really fun to shoot arrows at them because you could shoot them in the head and that would be okay.

And right, and pretty soon people just wanted to fire arrows right at them, right? Apparently, people like the idea of raping a sex doll, and they like the idea of shooting a black robot, right? Like there must be someone that you can simply abuse. I will say the first time I had a real VR experience at Sundance maybe 15 years [01:38:00] ago, full-fledged experience by a lefty journalist to stand in breadlines with people, right?

They were like VR fully-fledged human holograms. I was standing in line with them and I was thinking, “Well, I want this to be different than the experience of like standing in a bread line in life,” because I’ve definitely stood in line with people who look exhausted and tired, and been exhausted and tired in a line myself.

So what can be different? So I wondered what would happen if I just pushed one of them. And I just, you know-- And I also wondered how much they interacted, just as a technical question, with my body. I was reviewing the thing. So I pushed one of them. Nothing happened. My hand went right through it. It was just a hologram, right?

But I was surprised at how few people actually kind of, g- get out of line or do things like that in the presence of holograms. But clearly we have some desire to be in some kind of dream state where we could just exercise our id all the time without moral constraints, and that is what some of these android-like, human-like robots are doing for people.

For instance, Richard Dawkins, like, some people in the comments on that UnHerd piece said, “Dawkins was my professor and he just was such a jackass. All he wanted was us to bow and scrape before him and tell him he was great.” Well, look at that. He’s found someone, because surely he has experienced that like people are annoyed to be forced to praise him all the time.

Well, now he finds s- something that is incapable of annoyance and is willing to praise him all the time, and so he has the slave that he wanted his students to be, and he’s doing less harm, right? I can kick my Roomba to get it to do something. I don’t get the pleasure that I might get if I were a violent person of like kicking a human, ‘cause it doesn’t cry out in pain, but it is nice to be able to be like, “Get away,” to the Roomba, where y- I would have to be nicer if it was like my mom cleaning my kitchen.

Anyway, clearly he, appreciates [01:40:00] this, liberation from moral constraints or politeness to get to, do whatever the fuck he wants. But I-- anyway, what I wanna ask you is like what do you think that there is a danger of anthropomorphizing things, not just ‘cause we fall in love with them, but because we act like our absolute worst selves?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I-- th- well, there is an interesting irony in that idea because some of what, Kant wrote about the idea of, moral treatment of others, that even if you don’t see them as your equal, when you engage in degrading behavior, you’re actually degrading yourself

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Yes. This is how I feel about animal rights. I’ve come to feel about animal welfare, which I had no interest in, but my son is very committed to. I went vegetarian and aspiringly vegan

SHEFFIELD: am-- Yeah,

HEFFERNAN: Oh, you are too. Entirely on the grounds that I don’t know what the consciousness of an animal is, what it feels like to be a bat.

I don’t know any of those things. But now that I know what a slaughterhouse is like, I think it degrades me to be cruel, to participate in cruelty to animals. And

it’s somewhat selfish, right? But I think that’s--

Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so, so I would say, yeah, b- so here’s the, weird irony is that I do think that more anthropomorphized robotic systems or symbolic cognizants, I call them, that symbo- a symbolic entity, if it looks humanized or it can respond hu- in a humanistic manner that it, actually incentivizes you to treat it worse in some

HEFFERNAN: Yeah. Yeah. uh, because you know that it’s not. People who were kids in the late ‘90s, early 2000s, you guys may remember there was, a chatbot. Well, like one of the first chatbots that was out there it was called SmarterChild. And it was, y- they, put it out on AOL primarily, but also later moved to MSN.

SHEFFIELD: But it was basically like a thing that kids could play with to [01:42:00] like get i- facts about stuff. it was like a very, primitive ChatGPT and but the thing was like a lot of, kids and I’ve seen people talking about their experiences with it and like they just love to like tell it to fuck off and “Shut up.

HEFFERNAN: People do that with Alexa. My kids did that with Alexa the first time I turned it on. They just instantly were like, “Oh, I can talk to this, not the way that I can’t talk to my mother.”

How much human cultural output was already synthetic before the AI revolution?

HEFFERNAN: So in the spirit of were we already acting like AIs, before AI came into our lives, so the same way that the Diplomacy players had already played in a way that kind of for- prefigured AI play and chess too, and, Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: the music of Timbaland, I would say also.

HEFFERNAN: Oh, yeah. Right. Well, also, yeah, we’d made digital music

SHEFFIELD: Everything-- Like, everything’s auto-tuned to hell,

HEFFERNAN: Everything’s autotuned to hell.

SHEFFIELD: And all these beat, systems and lyrics written by a committee. Like, so many rap songs are written by, people who have never had any experience with the alleged poor Black upbringings that they supposedly chronicle.

HEFFERNAN: Right. So s- they’re-- Right. They’re simulating dramatic monologues from inside heads they’re not in and bodies they’re not in, and yeah, that... I mean, yes. And so a lot of those things were happening where, like, if AI had fallen in the middle of the Baroque period, could they really have, gotten, Bach-style music?

No, because it wa-wasn’t digitized and they didn’t, they would’ve had to put the harpsichord into, a computer, and that would’ve skipped a lot of steps. So, so in the spirit of that, think about our communication on Twitter or our communication on Bluesky as being somewhat or quite practiced in how to talk to other people whose humanity is kind of in doubt to us, right?

Like, you’re not totally sure if someone with one of those weird Bluesky handles or someone with a, quippy BlueSky, Twitter handle is [01:44:00] real. Y- you don’t know where they are in space. You don’t know... All you know from them is their textual output. And in, in that way, we already were talking to a lot of people as if they were chatbots, and we were not talking to them in a very humane way, right?

So it’s like instead of, like, so in some ways it’s just another Twitter interlocutor in our, phones, but one that is, that glazes us so much that it, like, you don’t, are less likely to get into a flame war with it.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, and like how is a chatbot different from a troll? Because somebody who is trolling you, you don’t know what their intentions are. So, like, their intentions could be random.

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Yes. They could be concern trolling you. They could be, and they, and trying as you would, I think, say that trying to

SHEFFIELD: trying to upset you.

HEFFERNAN: physical... Right. Trying to promote physical responses in you, like, so you take them into your body. Which as I know from having been swarmed or trolled, really happens.

Like you actually get hotter. You can’t just coolheadedly be your words. They’ve disturbed your equilibrium as trolls exist to do. And but anyone who’s, ch- like, done longtime texts with like a new girlfriend, boyfriend also knows that the you can also be like quite moved and aroused in good positive ways too from these little inboxes and text boxes where you’d least expect it.

But you’re right. We’re getting very human reactions to something. At the same time, it’s stuff that we’ve been doing a long time, short form communication with an unseen disembodied interlocutor. This is not new. This is social media.

Cognition is individuated, but epistemology is necessarily communal

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and like, because y- like the idea of, the self it is as I see it, it is the, the first constructed reality of an entity.

But it is constructed in regards to the world. So it is being in the world. Like that’s what selfhood is. So you, you are not an entity that it, you know, it-- [01:46:00] no man is an island, you know the old phrase. But that’s, that is an expression of selfhood, what selfhood is and how it’s made and, within, post-structuralism, I think they went too far in saying that, the self is only socially constructed.

But R- Richard Rorty also had a different, slightly different take on that. let’s talk about it in that context though, because that was one of the things when, I was talking about the Turing test and one of, one of my friends on Bluesky Benjamin Riley, he was talking about Rorty in this context.

So you obviously can speak to that better than me.

HEFFERNAN: Well, I think Rorty would’ve tabled a lot of these questions. I mean, his way, it, it-- one of the ways that Rorty, I think, was a very useful philosopher was that he deployed his indifference to certain questions, especially questions from logical positivists, to redirect us to the project of solidarity and liberal hope.

So sometimes when you’d start talking about, I think, what Wittgenstein might have called, like, an occult presence, like the consciousness or, the kind of things that Dennett would sometimes get himself too bogged down in or, like, forget about the... ‘Cause I studied with logical positivists at UVA. We spent hours on why does a penny look like an ellipse?

Maybe it’s a sense datum floating in front of our eyes. I mean, this is what graduate students at the University of Virginia were spending money to study. And the number of philosophers, all male, all English, who were spending time on why does a penny look like an ellipse at the very time, and maybe it’s an object floating in front of our eyes.

Floating in front of our eyes, like Macbeth is, “That’s a dagger I see before me.” They thought it was an actual object, right? You probably know this. While they were doing that, Foucault was writing. While they were doing that, Derrida was writing. So, like, whether or not you think Foucault and Derrida were right, they were certainly more influential, more engaged, more dynamic, like, more out in the world than people, like, [01:48:00] honestly in this, like, onanistic setting with their, like, really strange ideas.

It’s actually very sad to look back and think about the time wasted on those problems. Like, even that Bertrand Russell got dragged into them or Wittgenstein got dragged into them. Like, these are, like, sometimes almost heartbreaking. I mean, I went to Russia for a film festival in ‘96 after the wall, after the, end of the Soviet Union, and I was in a taxi when I first got there, and the guy was talking to me about, like taxi drivers everywhere, that he had once been a physicist.

And he-- The first thing he said to me was that he had been working on a problem for a really long time in the Soviet Union, and when the wall fell, he met his American counterparts who’d also been working on these problems in physics, right? They had solved the problem in 1952.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, damn.

HEFFERNAN: I mean- it’s, like if there can be any intellectual heartbreak akin to romantic heartbreak, that’s it. And that you have wasted your brain, your whole life on questions like sense data. On... Lately, I’ve been thinking about this in the context of GLPs, the weight loss drugs, right? Shelves and shelves of diet books, lives ruined to anorexia or, of like disordered eating.

All this stuff with the idea that like maybe we’re gonna nail what dieting is. Whole professions devoted to this. Issues of magazines on carbs and blah, blah, blah. People who live to assign them whole books, right? And it turns out the secret to weight loss is this completely other diabetes drug, and all of that thinking was toy thinking.

All of that thinking was like a distraction from this other thing. All of those people were working on a problem that, like, had been solved over here, and we have one li- chance on Earth, and some of the great minds were spending that time dealing with sense data. So, that is the tragedy that when I was an undergraduate studying philosophy, I considered that the worst [01:50:00] possible thing that could happen to my brain in this life, and that if I got distracted by something like that, I would be doomed.

Now, Rorty made that realization in the 1970s. He knew that people were trying to make a science of all, every single artifact of experience. They were trying to turn it into a science, and that it was getting increasingly ridiculous, and he was depressed. He was trying to bring truth and justice together in one breath starting when he was 16, and he went as a young neurotic student, as he says, to the University of Chicago.

He was trying very hard to say, “Can’t the pursuit of truth be the same as the pursuit of a better world?” And he, it suddenly occurred to him that this pursuit of truth undertaken by people like Dennett, right, undertaken by people like this, the logical positivists, was actually immaterial to the quest for justice, was immaterial to the question later of, rink, bringing down emissions in cars as to, like, alleviate the climate crisis or getting beds for more female AIDS patients who at the time had been neglected.

Those were the things that he thought, th-this pursuit of truth and sense data has nothing to do with helping people in the world, and I, it, I, it is an obligation of mine as a liberal, humanist, it’s an obligation of mine to reduce cruelty in the world independent of what I think the world is made up of, right?

Whether it’s gonads or cells or whatever. And so when I’m sorry to keep using this vulgarism, but when the people like Dennett and the Epstein circle start jerking off to questions of, like whatever, consciousness even, consciousness, I think Rorty often said like, “Knock yourselves out, boys, but my final vocabulary is different in this,” right?

He was like, “I’ll be pursuing wild orchids or all the things like perfume or like, your dog after you, the things that give your life meaning, and it’s not gonna look like wasting my time reading A.J. [01:52:00] Ayer.” And then on the other hand, the analysis of language, which is why he left philosophy in favor of literary criticism, the attention to language that can provide liberal hope because people are inspired by those kind of images to help one another and create a better world, create a more just world, pursue social justice, that will be my life’s focus.

So I think that was such a long way of saying I think he... And I often heard him, he was famous for the shrug, right? That was his major gesture. He actually did it in person, but you can see him doing it in writing. I don’t know, right? So I remember someone asked him, a kind of woke or whatever what we’d call now a woke scholar asked him like, “You have not thematized power,” right?

Power relations, imperialism. Shrug. I don’t know what you want me to do with that. And I think that’s how he felt about Dennett. And as for, socially constructed, not socially constructed, he did think that there was a world, as he said, out there. He did think that there, of whereof we cannot speak thereof we must be silent in, terms of exactly the nature of us as beasts in the forest or creatures on the ancestral plain or whatever we were, we are and were.

Philosophy and religion must accept that science is best able to answer certain questions

HEFFERNAN: But all we had is language, and the language, he had a non-correspondence theory of language. It didn’t point to things specifically to like real things in the world that like could not be described or were outside language. But he was maybe open to the idea that... I think he was open to the idea that there were things out there, but that he had stopped caring about the nature of things in themselves and started to be more interested in poetic uses of language.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and in a lot of ways that it makes sense because, these are questions that ultimately are best settled by science. And like that’s,

HEFFERNAN: Yes.

SHEFFIELD: that’s the thing that I think a [01:54:00] lot of analytic philosophy really never accepted that.

that you can’t de- you cannot derive a lot of these things from first principles.

HEFFERNAN: don’t know. I always-- I’m mystified exact- about exactly... ‘cause Rorty thought images were very powerful, and still he would describe humans as language users over and over again. But he thought, the reason the war in Vietnam stops is because of images that come in newspaper. I think immediately blurring what the, an image is and what language is, it’s something that people in the humanities do all the time, but it, I’m not sure that...

and then you get into is music the same as an image? Does it work like language? we just talked about this, and forget about scent and all kinds of other experiences. So, and it may, they don’t take into account exactly the body, right? Like, like the perception of color and all that stuff.

So I think that’s one place I don’t understand him. And I don’t entirely understand what he does with math, right? Like, which seems pretty important. Like mathematics offers a description of the world. I have Frank Wilczek’s book of the, about entropy. And like good books on science, it does not read like Richard Dawkins.

It reads like a bunch of equations, and and so I think that possibly the world out there is described best by numbers.

SHEFFIELD: Well, it’s all we can do. Like, ultimately that’s the best we can do. And yeah, the way I see it so everything-- Like I, I scale up my ontology from quantum observation.

the-- So I have a monist, completely monist ontology. Everything is one world. And quantum objects, they’re not particles, they are fields, like, and, they’re excitations.

So they’re-- Everything is a process. Literally everything. You, me, the tables, light bulbs, the [01:56:00] sun, whatever. It’s all, they’re all quantum processes that are aggregated. And so everything that exists is a system that does. There are no things that do, there are only processes that are.

HEFFERNAN: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: And once you accept that, then you eliminate the causation problem of like, why do things have properties?

Why do things-- How can things do? if everything just is, and then the order that exists is simply the result of constraints that each system places on, the other. So what, I call obligations. So obligations are just simply the strictures that other, that systems put upon each other. and so if you think of it in that way Then you can have an ontology that is compatible with any possible physical theory of what may later come along in quantum physics or some other chemistry, that there’s a unity, because there’s only systems and the obligations that they generate.

That’s it. Everything is simplified when you do it that way, because then order is just simply the persistence of things, of systems. Like non-- That sys- that objects that don’t, that resist, that don’t comply with surrounding obligations, they don’t persist. So there is no reason to say, “Well, gosh, look at all this amazing order.”

We’re like, “How did this happen? What if we had modified the, this constant or this one, this other one?” No. That’s just the, this is, you are literally talking about existence of com- and compliance with obligation. That’s it.

HEFFERNAN: So you, you probably know that Rorty was from this illustrious Christian family, and also his parents were diehard Trotskyist and-- Trotskyists. So he had this merger in his head of, like, there’s a Christian future and there’s [01:58:00] a Marxist future, and both of those things he didn’t quite know what to do with his sensory, emotional, religious longings in the context of uplifting the worker, which he felt was, like, his everyday responsibility.

And you can see how he came to somewhat square those things with his philosophy that kept truth and justice in their lanes or politics and poetry in their two lanes. or sorry, the pursuit of truth... Well, you could say politics and poetry. humane public life and beautiful private life.

What problem do you think you were trying to address that comes out of your own experience with religion? Because I think you and Rorty are just working on different problems when you come up with this s-s-synthesis.

SHEFFIELD: The way I see it, cognition is individuated, but epistemology is communal. And so therefore... And it-- And you have no choice. Like this isn’t just like, “Oh, let’s all be peace, peaceful and hold hands and sing songs, and understand each other.”

No, it’s not like that. You have no choice but to engage in communal epistemology, because the very act of language itself, your embodiment as a human among other humans, as a thing in the world, you are obliged, you are obligated to engage in epistemology as an external method.

HEFFERNAN: I know a little bit about what Rorty said about s- said about maybe some of these things, if I understand you right. He, imagined that the individual organism did not want to simply be reiterating type. He has this idea of a strong poet that he gets from Harold Bloom that might not be useful, but might be.

That individual organisms both are driven to stand out, to create new poetry. He’s a little bit obsessed with literary fame as something everybody must want. But that they wanna [02:00:00] make their impression on the world a-and leave an impression, and an impression that’s different from the other organ- organisms of their type.

So this is sort of stand out, but also wants to fit in. So there’s a weird, where you have no choice but these communal obligations. Well, how does that explain our kinks, our perversions, our, like, love of our dog, our, the, like, the poetry we write, the oddities of our lives? Like, conformity is possibly safer, but it could be also that to persist, to keep our own brains and hearts beating, we also need to stand out, to aim to get more resources than other people.

And I think this is how, Yeah, I think that there-- But he also does see-- But I think he sees it as almost revealed religion. He says, we simply have a desire to reduce cruelty in the world. It’s irreducible, right? And, he says, “And that’s what makes us liberals.” So there are people who, think peace and prosperity is more important.

Those people might be Republicans. But if you think that cruelty is the worst thing you can do, that’s his way he puts it, you are a liberal. And and that you oppose the ultimate evil, which is cruelty, rather than seek the ultimate good, which might be peace or prosperity. Yeah.

Obligation within a natural world of processes

SHEFFIELD: I definitely agree with that because the, thing is that as finite entities, there are no absolute truths for us to find. We cannot access them. So, like, what obligations are truly or what a physical object is truly, we can’t know. We literally cannot know because we’re limited in terms of our our existence in space-time, our scale in our, perceptual instrumentation of our, of, our eyes or whatever instruments we might use.

Like, we cannot find absolute truth. But so e-everything that exists, [02:02:00] the, what we can know about externality is either false, possibly false, or unlikely to be false. There is no truth only degrees of falsehood. And, I-- and Karl Popper, I think, he was heading in this direction, but he went too far with his World 3 stuff in which he argued that, well, if you have a proven scientific theory, then it’s there in World 3.

And it’s like, dude, you just went and reinvented Platonism.

Fucking Stop it.

HEFFERNAN: The reinvention is the

SHEFFIELD: everybody does it though. Like that-- then this is, and this is the problem because, cognition is abstracted. So like, somatic reasoning, we have no access to our cellular data.

we don’t know how they know things.

All we know is the somatic tokens of ex- of their experience, which are, pushed up and agglutinated into our mind, and our mind enacts what we know. Because in the sa- like you can never recall a memory in the same way. It’s not like a bunch of bits stored somewhere. Every meaning is enacted.

Every meaning. You can never have the same memory exactly.

HEFFERNAN: Yes. Right. I love that. Right. Yeah, I mean, and that goes with the strong poet, the invention, the like, and the constant self-invention, at the center, I think, of Rorty’s thinking. I have to go soon. I want to run one-- I hope listeners will find this as chilling/funny as I did. See if you do.

I got a-- it also, and it goes to some of our points. I got a solicitation of work as a journalist from an editor. I’m not gonna name him because we had a very odd exchange, but I’ll tell you what he’s writing from. So he says, “I’m X, managing editor of Colossus, a business and investing magazine. Huge fan of your writing.

I want to work with you on a story.” So then he says, here are [02:04:00] the ideas he has for stories. One’s about the religio-psychedelic culture around frontier AI, another one’s a reconstruction of a Bay Area group house founded by a philosopher, and the third is about East Coast and West Coast cultural legacies.

And yeah. All right. I looked at Colossus. Do you know Colossus, Matthew?

SHEFFIELD: have only heard of it. Yeah, I, know what it is. Yeah.

HEFFERNAN: All right. So I wrote back to-- I looked at it, and it’s clearly, founded by a venture capitalist. There’s a podcast associated with it, but the story seemed a little bit creepy looking to me, a little Peter Thiel-ish. So I wrote back, “Thanks for thinking of me and for sending over detailed story ideas.

Tell me a bit about Colossus. It seems at a glance to skew tech right, but perhaps I’m not reading it right. I assume if you’re interested in my work, you know I’m still devoted to garden variety secular liberal democracy, the reduction of cruelty in the world, rather than Mars, the Antichrist, Armageddon, and mass surveillance.” Are we, as they say, aligned? Virginia. I was positive that he would say, “Absolutely not. We’re working on this, like, interesting blah, blah, blah pro-democracy venture.” I don’t know why I thought that. Okay. “Hi, Virginia. Thanks for your thoughtful reply. It sounds like this may not be the right fit, and I don’t want to take up more of your time.

I appreciate you considering it, and I’ll keep enjoying your writing.” I mean, my jaw has actually dropped. Like, you’re interested in democracy? Well, we’re interested in Armageddon, so see you, later. See you later, V. You’re off. Anyway, I probably have forfeited a decent paycheck, but back to toiling in the reinventing...

Liberalism must reinvent itself in order to thrive in this future

HEFFERNAN: Basically, all, all, due to the end of my time is try to say, like, the Enlightenment was a pretty good idea. Can we chill out again, separate church and state, and have... I-- Look, I’m gonna, I-- maybe I need to rebrand secular democracy, secular

SHEFFIELD: I think, yeah, [02:06:00] we, have to improve it,

HEFFERNAN: We have to improve it. We, well, we ha- we have to improve its image because it really, the fundamental ideas of it are very solid.

And I just, we don’t need presidents and secretaries of war who get their war briefs from the Book of Revelation. I think we can agree.

So,

SHEFFIELD: But we need a, liberalism that is-- that it celebrates the body and doesn’t try to abstract it away, and that’s, that is the weakness of American liberalism, and it has been since the end of World War II. Like, they saw the somatic power of Hitler and Stalin, and they said, “Oh my gosh,

HEFFERNAN: Demagogues.

SHEFFIELD: We can’t do that. This

is

HEFFERNAN: maybe we abandoned it, but, I don’t see r- Enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau completely neglecting the body, and there was plenty of room in our founding documents for for the body. And certainly humanism I don’t think there is any kind of humanism without, the body.

I don’t think this is something that, like, Locke and, Rousseau and, opposed. I don’t think that this is what, like, the Enlightenment intended for us. And, I’m with the le- most leftist thinker I know, David Graeber, that says it’s the Enlightenment and secular democracy that were the most radical thing yet invented, and we have not done any better.

And certainly Marxism, and certainly leftist Christianity, Book of Revelation, these things that, sound very exciting are, less radical and more likely to quash human flourishing and promote human cruelty than secular liberal democracy.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, because yeah, th- you can’t have perfection, but you can have a process of striving

HEFFERNAN: I, I think that’s, absolutely right. Maybe we should leave it there.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. All [02:08:00] right. Well, w- go ahead and plug your website though for anybody off my, on my side that hasn’t

HEFFERNAN: Okay, so, my Substack is called “Magic and Loss” after my book, which is-- came out 10 years ago. I’ve been speaking on the 10th year anniversary of “Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art.” That’s my book. You can find that anywhere. You can also find “Magic and Loss,” the Substack, which is basically politics and tech for humanities majors.

You can find that on Substack. I also write a near weekly column for “The New Republic” about politics and have a podcast called “Omnishambles.” And I would love to see everyone over there for more of this kind of discussion, and Matthew will join me on “Omnishambles” soon.

SHEFFIELD: Sounds good. And yeah, for people we’re gonna, y- you’re gonna cross-post this over on your site, so yeah. For the listeners over there at Magic and Loss, yeah, come and visit us over at flux.community

HEFFERNAN: Yes, we are all friends, Substack friends, for sure.

SHEFFIELD: Yep. All right. Sounds good. This was fun!

HEFFERNAN: It’s so much fun. Thank you. Thank you, Matthew.

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One of the biggest myths in politics today is that Donald Trump’s supporters are just a gigantic monolith, a group of people who will say whatever he says and believe whatever he tells them to believe.

While there are many Americans who will change their opinions to suit Trump’s, it’s also true many people support Trump for their own reasons and reasons, which may not be compatible with his form of governance and the agenda that he has been imposing since he became president for the second time.

It is certainly the case that a lot of Trump voters are super fans of his and really do view him as some sort of blunt instrument to attack a culture gone awry in their opinion.

But there are plenty of people also who don’t pay attention to news and who may not be religious at all who supported Trump in 2024. That matters because these people are, in many cases, up for grabs this year and in years to come.

So why did they vote for Trump? Joining me in this episode to discuss is Stephen Hawkins. He is the global director of research at More In Common, which is a research organization that does political polling and psychological analysis of voters to analyze why it is that they have certain opinions, and what opinions they might have in common with other people who vote differently. They released an extremely large survey earlier this year called “Beyond MAGA” that’s very much worth your time.

This is an audio-only episode. Access the episode page to get the full transcript. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

Related Content

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• In 2024, Trump was betting bigly on ‘unlikely voters’

• Charlie Kirk built a powerhouse organization based on finding needy young people 🔒

• What does it mean for Democrats’ future that many black Americans don’t like them?

• Why attacking Trump will not be enough to stop his movement

• Mentioned paper: “Belief in a Dangerous World Does Not Explain Substantial Variance in Political Attitudes, But Other World Beliefs Do”

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

10:11 — ‘MAGA hardliners,’ the hardcore Christian nationalists who see Trump as divinely destined

15:51 — ‘Mainline Republicans,’ party loyalists who don’t follow news much

17:47 — Politics as a cognitive style and deeper antagonistic divisions

22:50 — ‘Anti-woke conservatives,’ a more secular group that is oppositional more than affirmative

32:27 — The ‘reluctant right,’ a younger group that knew little about politics

36:51 — Did Elon Musk’s ads in Pennsylvania win the state for Trump?

42:43 — ‘New traditionalists,’ young men with very strongly misogynist viewpoints

53:48 — Younger Trump supporters favor more extremist media figures

58:03 — Reactionary religious identity as an act of youthful rebellion

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: So, before we get into the findings that that you guys have been compiling over the past several months on this report, tell us about your organization. Where’s the name come from and like what, are you guys doing?

STEPHEN HAWKINS: There’s a member of Parliament in the UK named Jo Cox, who was serving a district in the central north part of the United Kingdom, and she was a vocal proponent of the country accepting Syrian refugees and other Middle Eastern, North African refugees at that point. This is in 2016, and as a result of that support, she was publicly attacked and ultimately murdered by a white nationalist, effectively a neo-Nazi.

And as he was killing her, he was saying Britain first. Britain first. And so there was an outpouring of support across the UK. It was a historic moment, somewhat similar to the Gabby Giffords moment in the United States, but obviously with a sadder outcome. And the phrase more in common was taken from Jo Cox’s maiden speech in Parliament, her first time taking the floor of House of Commons, where she talked about her constituents having more in common despite their religious and ethnic and other differences.

And [00:04:00] so since 2016, since her passing More in Common has been working in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Poland, Spain, the United States, and now in Brazil on understanding these forces of division. Why are we so divided relative to. Relatively quieter periods in her past? How do those differences relate to views on subjects like identity?

How do they relate to our beliefs, and especially to our psychology? And we work with social psychologists and political scientists to bring the language of those domains into polling. And then we conduct national studies. We do a lot of focus groups, and we try to help make sense of our time so that government leaders, business leaders, civil society, can better communicate with the public and better understand what’s happening during very confusing and concerning times.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and, yeah studies in cognitive psychology have pretty conclusively demonstrated that political ideologies and attitudes and partisanship they are manifestations of deeper values and even cognitive styles themselves. So in other words, the, epistemology of someone, in many ways, epistemologies, they are really what most prolonged controversies, social controversies are about.

And that’s not something that I think conventional political analysis has realized yet. People tend to think that, oh no, it’s just about the issues or just about the candidates, but that’s not what the, that’s not what the data suggests, right.

HAWKINS: Well, actually, it’s a really interesting point that you raised because I don’t think that there’s a static answer to that question. I think that, and this is my hypothesis that we’re gonna be exploring over the coming year with a revisiting of. Questions that we posed for our foundational study in the United States, which was [00:06:00] called Hidden Tribes.

We released that in 2018. And I think that the hypothesis that I’m curious to explore is, it the case that in an earlier period in the United States, in the earlier 20th century, we had common picture of the country, or similar pictures of the country, but different values. For instance, some people had a strong value towards authority and loyalty and wanted to see a harsher, more draconian, more orderly immigration system.

And others want to see a more empathetic, more universalist approach, more forgiving approach to immigration. But both are kind of seeing the same image. And now we might have seen that as the conflict has become more hostile. And we do know also from the political science that affect polarization has risen in the United States, meaning that the.

The emotional register of the conflict has gotten much worse between Republicans and Democrats in recent years. Do the underlying values matter as much anymore or has the conflict taken on a more tribal nature where it’s just that group is one I dislike, I know my team and I prefer it. And the underlying psychology of values takes on a secondary role when the conflict becomes about the group hostility as opposed to the underlying things that maybe brought the conflict into being.

SHEFFIELD: Well that is, I mean, it’s definitely worth exploring. And there are some pieces in, in, in the, report that we’ll discuss today that I think I have some, relevance to, what you’re saying.

So, okay, so the report though, that we’re gonna be talking about today though, is one that your organization released a couple months ago that is exploring the idea of that people who supported Donald Trump in 2024 that they did so for, differing [00:08:00] reasons. And that while people might want to, label all Trump supporters as sharing the same beliefs or sharing his beliefs what your findings suggest is that there’s a lot of people who may not even know fully what Trump believes or, wanted to do. And that they voted for him, just because they didn’t like Joe Biden or for, a variety of other reasons.

So let’s if you could talk about the four groups generally, but before that talk about how it is that you guys ascertained that there were four groups and how many people you were, pulling in the survey here.

HAWKINS: Great. So this Beyond MAGA project was very extensive and did a lot of repeated polling. So all in, we had 18,000 survey participants, including almost 11,000 Trump voters. We conducted, we’ve now conducted eight waves of polling within this framework. The original poll where we did the classification was among 2,500 or so Trump voters.

We included questions in what’s called a cluster analysis, so the input variables that went into cluster analysis related to attitudes towards constitutional questions, orientations towards President Trump and descriptions of him questions of loyalties between President Trump and the Republican Party and other questions of sort of that vein.

And then what we used is a method called K-means Cluster Analysis, which allows you to identify similarities in the responses across your sample, and then group people together on the basis of that similarity. And so there’s an observed homogeneity across the subgroups that we identified here.

And so we identified four: MAGA hard liners at 29% [00:10:00] anti woke conservatives at 21%, 30% that we refer to as mainline Republicans. And then the final 20% who fit into a group we call the reluctant, right?

‘MAGA hardliners,’ the hardcore Christian nationalists who see Trump as divinely destined

SHEFFIELD: L et’s talk about these, the four groups here. So I think the, group that is probably most famous and most devoted to Donald Trump is the MAGA hardliners as, you call them which is obviously a very apt name. So this group is, tends to be more evangelical than the other groups.

It tends to be older. And it tends to have a very, what scholars now pretty much call a Christian nationalist viewpoint about politics. So tell us a bit more about the findings with this group please.

HAWKINS: So the MAGA hardliners, that’s a good introduction, are distinct relative to the anti woke conservatives in that they are not as likely to have a college degree. They’re less likely to live in suburban or urban areas, and they are three quarters, gen X or baby boomers. So they skew older. About nine and 10 are white.

And this is a group for whom MAGA is not just their political preference, it’s not a transactional thing, it’s part of their identity. They say that being MAGA is an important part of their identity. A majority of them say that. And as you alluded to with the Christian nationalist point, they’re also likely to say that supporting President Trump for them as part of living out their faith.

They believe that God intervened to save President Trump’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania when assassination attempt happened. And they trust President Trump more than any other messenger or commentator in general when it comes to understanding American politics, what’s happening in the country. They have a strong antipathy towards progressives, Democrats undocumented or illegal immigrants protestors, the L-G-B-T-Q movement.

And so President Trump plays a very interesting and important, arguably central role in the lives of [00:12:00] many MAGA hard lidars because he is defining the moment for them, we refer to him as playing a kind of grand narrator role in their lives.

The MAGA hardliners are a group that would’ve been derided, perceived to be derided by the coastal elites, whether it’s the Hollywood class, whether it’s the Ivy League professors in academia.

And this is a group that Hillary Clinton referred to as a basket of deplorables. And they’re aware of that. Evangelical white Christians not feeling like they’re respected by progressive left at all. And so President Trump also plays this kind of redemptive role in the sense that he is powerful, he’s wealthy, he’s part of the elite, and he says, I respect you. And they feel that way.

They very much feel that they’re respected by President Trump and not by Democrats. And they transgression that President Trump plays in opposing progressives and defying their social norms is very much part of the appeal for them too. We had a great quote from one of our participants in this survey who said, President Trump is like a giant flashing orange middle finger, and I love that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I literally have that in my notes as quote. And that role as you guys characterize it, is that, that Donald Trump is a blasphemer for them. And and, it’s because, they do see, non traditionalist Christianity as-- they see it as a religion.

Even if the people, who are not religious, they don’t see it as such. and so that’s, I think that’s a, huge part of, what they’re doing.

They also, as you mentioned, with regard to his the assassination attempt on him in Butler, Pennsylvania that was, I mean, the, number is striking. It’s 94% said that God had saved him for that moment. And it was much lower for everybody else. So 56% of mainline Republicans are only 44%. [00:14:00] Anti and then 9% the reluctant right. So these are the people that are, the floor in his support base is, what it looks like because they see him as their instrument against modernity in a lot of ways it seems like.

HAWKINS: I think it’s a bit harsh to say an instrument against modernity in the sense that modernity encompasses technological advancement and a broader set of social changes. And I don’t think that they’re opposed to the wholesale arrival of modernity, but I do think that they’re frustrated with the cultural direction, especially that the progressive left has defined.

I think this is a group that would be very compelled, for instance, by the critique that Curtis Yarvin has made in referring to the Cathedral which he refers to in his writings, which are, which is effectively the idea that Silicon Valley, Hollywood and academic worlds and the publishing worlds-- basically our cultural sense-making institutions and the information, infor, the information economy as well as our moral direction-- has all been defined by a kind of common agenda of secular liberals, and that’s been the case effectively for about 60 years in this country. I think that is the critique that would be maybe not formulated in those terms, but that’s the frustration, maybe more narrowly than modernity wholesale for the MAGA hard liners.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I think that’s perhaps what they might say, but you know, it’s also manifesting in terms of what they think about vaccines and other topics like that. So, yeah, broadly speaking though, it’s, yeah, it’s this idea that ‘the world has gone mad and that departed from the, righteous beliefs that we have,’ generally is what it seems like.

‘Mainline Republicans,’ party loyalists who don’t follow news much

SHEFFIELD: Okay. So then the other group which is the largest group the mainline Republicans, so, talk about those. I think to some extent [00:16:00] people might think that people who oppose Republicans might think that this group doesn’t really exist anymore, but in fact, they do.

HAWKINS: That’s right. They do. And they’re among the largest groups at 30% mainland Republicans. I also think of them as default Republicans in the sense that I think they would’ve supported Romney in 2020 or 2024 or 2016. I think that they would have supported Nikki Haley had she gotten the nomination.

These are people who just lean conservative. They are more, they’re religious on average. They transcend generations and racial groups. This is the most racially diverse of the four segments. They’re not especially politically engaged. And so when they express support for President Trump, unlike with the MAGA hardliners, where they would be able to say, here’s the reason, and this is, Trump said this, and this is the issue.

And I heard Trump say this is a rally. But the mainline Republicans, it’s more that they trust the president, they like him, they’ll speak in briefer terms. They have a general attitude towards things. They dislike Democrats. And it’s, kind of, it’s less informed because politics just isn’t a part of their day-to-day.

And so they make up a really crucial constituency though because they’re numerous, right? They’re three in 10 of his voters, and they are going to be slow to break from the president, not because they agree with everything that he’s doing, but because they’re not paying attention to everything that he’s doing.

And they’re, orientation towards conservatism and towards being a Republican is in their minds, likely something that they will always embody. And so they’ve kind of made up their mind about the basic question of who they’re gonna support, and they’re gonna be slow to move away from that.

Politics as a cognitive style and deeper antagonistic divisions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that it, their conservatism is, a cognitive style more than it is a, an affirmative political ideology. It’s just, there, these people are not out there reading Breitbart or, [00:18:00] watching Newsmax or something. These are people, if they would look at news at all, they’re, what, reading the New York Times if that,

HAWKINS: can you say more about cognitive style? What? What do you mean by that?

SHEFFIELD: Well, I mean in the sense that so there, there was a study that came out a, couple of years ago, I think it was 2024, I believe, and that was talking about the importance of authority. that’s, so it was a meta study looking at cognitive modes and it, was comparing it to value based ideas.

So, they were, it was saying that, well, actually, it’s just simply the idea that there’s a natural ranking to the world and that’s the way it is. And, so therefore, anything that kind of departs from that is going to be inherently wrong and also ultimately unjust. And so that, that’s manifest in, in, in with, in political ways, but it also manifests in a number of other ways in terms of, like people who were like, organizational members in some other capacity that they resist change or resist new members or new ideas just because they think that it’s risky.

HAWKINS: Very interesting. We’ve, been exploring this idea of natural hierarchy as well. And we’ll be writing about it in the coming year.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. Well, and I’ll, put the link to the study in the show notes, but I’ll send it to you separately as well. I think that’s probably the, it seems to be the most data-driven of the research because, like there’s, there, there are a lot of. People that have, argued, for things like right wing authoritarianism or moral foundations and, generally speaking, these frameworks tend to be externally imposed from the top down rather than based on the bottom up through data aggregation, I would say.

HAWKINS: And so top down in this case, meaning from by the scientists.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:20:00] So it’s using the, it’s, these are operating within degrees of freedom of the analysts rather than emerging from the data set organically, is what I would say. So this, idea of hierarchy is, it is an emergent belief in the meta study that, that I’m thinking about here. But if you haven’t read it, then I, it’s hard to have a, substantive discussion about it.

But maybe we’ll we’ll have to do another one once you

HAWKINS: We will do another one. Yeah, I’d love to opine on that. We’re with Hidden Tribes. We’re, doing a systematic analysis of different theories, including Moral Foundations theory, including work by Karen Stenner on authoritarianism. We also included some questions that relate to hierarchy. We’re looking at questions that measure in group identity, strength, things like this as predictors of where people land on questions that are very salient to our political division today. Whether that’s support for Trump, that’s views on immigration, views on trans issues, et cetera.

Because we’re, trying to figure out what is, what are the strongest psychometric variable relationships to the questions that are most divisive now? And it’s, not obvious that the questions about values are the ones that are most predictive, as you’re suggesting here on, with the critique of Moral Foundation’s theory.

We have used Moral Foundations theory historically, and in our 2018 report, found that it was correlated very well with our seven tribes. Particularly the foundations of authority, loyalty, and purity, which are the ones which define conservatives, relatives to relative to liberals.

But what seems most alive in the data to us now are these intergroup hostility measures, which are really showing the strongest relationship to where people land on political questions today, which is, it’s an alarming signal. And I’ll just share one other data point that we just, we haven’t published this, [00:22:00] is just data that we collected in the last six weeks or so.

But we asked a question about whether Americans think that the other side of the political side is a cancer and whether it needs to be extricated from society. And 52% of Americans roughly identical levels across Republicans, Democrats and Independences opted to describe their political opponents as a cancer.

And we see high levels of people expressing support even for reeducation camps. We’re gonna do some work to make sure we know what people believe Regie reeducation camps are before we publish that. But the. The emotional hostility is what seems to be in the foreground right now, much more so than values differences based on our preliminary analysis.

‘Anti-woke conservatives,’ a more secular group that is oppositional more than affirmative

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, that’s definitely the case with the third group that we are, we can talk about here, which is the anti woke conservatives. That this is a group that is extremely negatively polarized like that’s seems to be their primary motivation. They, don’t necessarily know, many of them don’t know what Trump’s agenda is, or they don’t really care about it, except as a way of, stopping the Democrats who they see as evil.

I mean, literally let you guys poll on that question. And, they’re the ones that were the most likely to agree on it. And, the concept of wokeness is, I think. Has been really effective for for Trump and his supporters. and it’s interesting though, because this, label, it, is, I mean, it is just a relabeling of previous belief systems that have, that they, it is like every few years re Republicans will come up with a new label and say that this is this new type of, liberalism and it’s different from the ones before in a [00:24:00] uniquely terrible way.

And it’s a threat to America, so before it was political correctness. And then before that it was multiculturalism. And then before that it was, hippies just generally speaking. So it’s like there, this, but, it always gets, just slightly tweaked a little bit differently so that it can be put forward as a, unique different threat. And, I think that’s seems to be, really effective for these, anti-woke conservatives in terms of their motivations.

HAWKINS: I think I view this question a little differently than the way you framed it there. I, think that with our hidden tribe study in 2018, we differentiated between traditional liberals and progressive activists and traditional liberals, I think could be fairly described. As the inheritors of the hippie worldview, and many of them themselves may have been hippies, traditional liberal skew older, and it’s a universalist worldview.

Everybody should have peace. Everybody should have their rights. Everybody should be respected. It’s a multiculturalist worldview. They don’t differentiate, well, differentiate meaningfully between religions or racial groups. They, they, believe in humanity and they’re the sort of people who would have the coexist stickers on their bumpers.

And they believe in the scientific process and they believe in the large role of government to try and bring about better conditions for everybody. Progressive activists, I think are a different variety of it’s a different variety of worldview in that it looks very much at group identity and power as the primary lens through which to understand society and the primary lens through which to intervene to make society better.

And so the, primacy of racial identity, of gender identity of sexual orientation is more reminiscent of a kind of Marxist way of thinking where you’re policing people into a hierarchy of lower power, higher power, oppressed, [00:26:00] marginalized, and then doing the sociological thinking and the policy thinking in those terms than it is simply a continuation of the traditional liberal perspective.

And so I, think that it’s, and I say this as somebody who worked on the progressive left professionally for several years, having sort of converted. I grew up in the conservative worldview. I grew up in a Republican home and then I was an active Republican in into my college years here in Washington dc And then I.

In the Obama years, became a Democrat and a liberal, and then went to work in progressive activism. And something happened between the, in early Obama years and the activists activism of 2016 through early 2020s. That felt like an inflection point, not just the continuation of previous trends. So I, think that there’s more to it than simply a rebranding exercise by Christopher Ruffo and others to make everything be about wokeness.

And I think it’s, been challenging to define wokeness because of how. Well, I just tried to do it and it took, it’s taken me about 10 years to get a good definition going. And so I think a lot of Americans, a lot of conservatives couldn’t precisely define it. But I think the anti woke conservatives probably could, and their frustration would be at a sense that there’s too much emphasis on group identities and that’s counterproductive.

SHEFFIELD: Although, they have that sense about people on the left, that they believe that’s a, their viewpoint, but they also don’t feel like that’s bad, that Christian identity politics is wrong or that they can’t even see it. It seems like. And so, yeah, I, so I’m not saying, so when I say that it, this is a rebranding of previous labels.

I’m not saying that it’s that there’s not nothing that there’s not anything there. I’m saying that these are just labels that were used. So if you go back and look at.[00:28:00]

HAWKINS: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: Russia Limbaugh transcripts, where you look at, 1970s or eighties books by Alan Bloom. He had a Closing of American Mind book.

It was basically this same critique. So it’s, like, yeah, there it is. Like they’ve discovered that there are people on the left who do have a different viewpoint of what liberalism should look like, and that they see that as uniquely threatening. And not incorrectly necessarily as tied somewhat to, some post post Marxist viewpoints or epistemologies.

HAWKINS: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, I think that’s right. I mean, when we ask, we have a chapter on wokeness in the report, and we ask about whether people think that our, culture broadly including our media, has been ruined by the progressive left. And the numbers are very high among anti woke conservatives and my hardliners.

But almost regardless of how you formulate questions around wokeness, whether it’s about cancel culture, whether it’s about transgender issues, you see a big drop off with the mainline Republicans in the reluctant right, who just, they’re not as engaged on the culture war issues. They’re not listening to Ben Shapiro, or reading Breitbart, or Dan Bongino, or any of the other Daily Wire guys, for instance. And so they’re not versed in this. And if you talk to ‘em about wokeness, these less politically engaged Republicans, they have a story to tell you about something that happened at their daughter’s school, or they’re not sure why this Marvel character has been cast by someone from an ethnic minority, or it seems like you can’t say this word anymore, but they haven’t stitched it together into a philosophy and defined that and then said that they’re against it.

But for the anti-woke conservatives and the MAGA hardliners that’s been done, they have an opponent and it’s been defined.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. [00:30:00] Well, and suggest also that in terms of the change that you were talking about that, it seemed to happen during the Obama years on the left in your observation. I think it, it, it might be that, that the activists of, these groups, they, they overestimated the public support and familiarity with their epistemologies, and with their political issues.

And so they thought, okay, well now, like, and the best example would be about trying to move immediately into transgender rights without having had this explanatory movement that existed before that laid the groundwork for same-sex marriage rights. So in other words that, a lot of people were, in the closet who were lesbian or gay. And so people didn’t know that they knew people who were that. A lot of heterosexual people.

And so, it, it took a while for them to become comfortable, people who might have had these mainline Republican viewpoints to realize, oh, well, if this person, my colleague, is not trying to convert me to homosexuality like that’s, that is a, like, I, I know a number of, elderly people who had that viewpoint for, a number of years that they thought that it was something that could happen.

And and you see that also with this belief that, being trans is contagious somehow. And like it’s literally just a re recapitulation of it. and so many of the arguments that are used against trans rights, I mean, they are literally the same arguments that were used against people who were gay or lesbian.

HAWKINS: Right. I mean, I do think that the, age component really does matter here. I mean, we’re our most recent analysis. On, I mean this has changed the subject a bit, but on Iran and Israel and inflation, like all of those issues correlate well with [00:32:00] generation and across the four types. Just something I want to emphasize is that the MAGA hardliners and anti-war conservatives, their median age would be somewhere in the sixties likely.

And then as you move to the mainline Republicans and reluctant right. It drops down considerably. And so yeah, generation is really important here. And I do think for these questions around gays and lesbians and transgender people, the generally racial differences are really important to, to underscore.

The ‘reluctant right,’ a younger group that knew little about politics

HAWKINS: I think that just leaves us with a reluctant right. To define, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right.

HAWKINS: So the reluctant right. Is did you wanna say something about that?

SHEFFIELD: Oh no, you can go into it to go.

HAWKINS: Okay. Sorry. Didn’t wanna pre up you. One fifth of the Trump 2024 Coalition. They’re the ones that are in discussion right now because it’s a dynamic group. We did some polling at the end of 2024, right after the midterm elections actually, that showed that among across the whole population actually there was a significant misperception of the priorities of the Democrats, where significant numbers or actually on average, Americans thought that the priorities for Democrats were in this order, abortion L-G-B-T-Q issues, and climate change, and they thought Republicans priorities were immigration, inflation, and the economy.

And of course, most Americans top concern in 2024. And indeed their top concern today is economy inflation. And so that mismatch between seeing Republicans is focused on the right big picture questions. And Democrats being focused on activist issues was something that for the reluctant right, helped them see President Trump as the right answer to their concerns in 2024.

And so the reluctant right, is disproportionately represents those younger voters, young men, of color, who decided who to vote for in [00:34:00] 20, 24 weeks, or even days before the election, and did so in a pretty transactional way. They thought Donald Trump would bring back a better economy, lower unemployment, lower prices, and that Harris had some kind of progressive agenda, or at least wouldn’t be as competent on the economy.

And so now 18 months later, the question is whether those voters are happy with the economic performance that Trump has provided, and they’re increasingly disillusioned with the war in Iran and what that has done on questions of inflation. And so we’re seeing that now over a third of the reluctant right, are expressing some regret about supporting President Trump.

And they describe him in critical terms when we ask them to grade President Trump’s performance across issues. And overall he gets grades in the fifties or the low sixties. So he’s getting Fs on average from the reluctant right now, who are underwhelmed by his performance, and see him as increasingly as an irresponsible decision maker.

I’m happy to get into the Iran questions more, but I think that might be further afield in the conversation.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, we can get into that, but I did, yeah, want to just touch about their, inclination a bit further though. So like, last year the Pew Research Center came out with a study looking at how Americans consume news. And one of the findings that they had was that younger Americans, they don’t look for news that they’ve happened upon it essentially because they’re not, it’s not something that’s an, interest to them.

They say that they don’t have time for it. And, that matches what you guys are talking about here with the reluctant right, that these are not people who are, as you said, are, consuming right wing media and they have no idea, might not have any idea who Dan Mino is.

Probably not. And, I’ve never heard of Laura Ingraham or, so, but they like, watching comedy. And so [00:36:00] they they, might happen to, like Joe Rogan or one of these other people, like the Theo Von and, those people, they were pro-Trump in 2024, and it was so it was, a, vibes based viewpoint of, rather than an issues based viewpoint, except, in terms of like the broader, more specific things.

Well, who, what’s your plan on, social security or taxes or whatever, it was just more, and maybe not vibes entirely, but some of it was, well, I think Kamala Harris is, an airhead or I think, Donald Trump is a good businessman. And he says he’s going to, I mean, he had a sign literally that said Trump low prices, Kamala high prices. Like that’s, it is as easy as you can get to explain what the message that he was trying to push.

Did Elon Musk’s ads in Pennsylvania win the state for Trump?

HAWKINS: Yeah. and the big, message that he was pushing in the final stretch before the election was the $450 million that he and Elon Musk put into the, he’s for you. She’s for they, them. Ad campaign, which you know, very successfully in my interpretation, painted her as someone who was ideological to the point of surrendering her critical thinking and supporting something like incarcerated illegal immigrants, having access to gender reassignment surgeries that were publicly funded.

And it was an effective putting of the finger on the scales against her that I think helped tip the election in his favor. And that was, I don’t know this for certain, but it been the most well-funded presidential campaign ad in history.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I’m not sure that particular ad was that effective, just because television ads are not effective in the scholarship. Like they generally are not. But on the other hand, I, [00:38:00] that’s a, larger, it’s part of a larger overall message which I do think was effective. Just simply because like that was a thing, a message that the, the, anecdotal political people, like the guys that talk about guns on YouTube, or driving around in the mud, like hiking or whatever, weightlifting, like the, that was a simple message that they could use. And then push to their audience.

Because I just don’t, I think, people have ad blockers now, like they love ‘em. I love them. And the internet’s a lot nicer when you have an ad blocker. And so, but not to say there weren’t any effects on it, but generally speaking, the scholarship is pretty clear that in presidential elections, they don’t have much of an effect.

HAWKINS: I think I’ve just seen that the, testing of that ad somehow got released and showed that it swung certain swing voters towards him in a meaningful way. But then, the question is whether the at a sufficient scale, people saw the ad and, then whether those are the people who changed their mind or not.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and I guess the other thing that that I say on it, on ads is that when you test an ad, you are automatically altering the perception state. So you, in other words, you are getting people who are volunteering to watch an ad. Like most people hate ads. So like, to the extent that it does anything on them in a controlled setting, in a lab environment, if you will, that’s an altered state and it’s not a field appropriate.

But it, but of course all pulling is that way. So like, I mean, it’s, you can’t, it’s hard to say. I like, that’s when, when you look at in the polling industry, it is a common topic and I think that journalists who talk about polls tend to overstate the degree to which the certitude can be ascertained especially if it is [00:40:00] involving self-assessment.

Because opinions change rapidly, on a given day, especially for people who have inco beliefs. That, so it might be effective in that moment, but on the other hand, if they don’t remember it, did it have an effect? And how could you measure it if it had an effect? It’s hard to say, like, and so that’s why I, would say that, like these, more advocacy type media, so like if you look at, this point now, video, political video is now dominated by the right.

So you’ve got, Ms. Now, which, and then, which is, a full service channel. And then I think you’ve got a democracy now, which is a further left channel, but they’re not full service. And that’s pretty much it. Like there is no alternative really to Ms. NBC or sorry, Ms. Now. Got it. That right. Whereas on the right, you’ve got a bunch of alternatives to Fox and that, collectively they, they produce a volume of output and then you got talk radio and, YouTube hosts and whatnot. So it’s just, there’s just this massive flood of content into YouTube and other social media sites that the broader left just doesn’t, seem to be interested in it. In doing this kind of advocacy media, from what I’ve seen.

HAWKINS: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think establishing causality and interventions is really challenging for the reasons you mentioned. And of course, we know there are decay effects of things that are reported seconds after watching a video aren’t sustained a week later. But in any event, the, three data points I’m just tethering together are one.

An awareness that in, those lab environments, flawed but best available data we have, that showed meaningful relative to other types of interventions and other types of a high degrees of efficacy and persuading people towards Trump to the overwhelming scale of the intervention in the final weeks of the [00:42:00] campaign, as I said, half a billion dollars.

And then three is just the data point that we know that there was a strong association with between Democrats and trans issues that carried through the election there. So we’ll never know entirely whether it was the causal factor, but when you, when, Trump won by such a narrow margin, like 1.3, 1.5% of the popular vote the right way to think about that is that anything that had any appreciable effect had a decisive effect because any of the 50 things that mattered, down the final stretch, it likely was, enough to make the difference between him winning and losing.

SHEFFIELD: Well, there’s just any number of things that could have done something and, they’re all worth considering.

‘New traditionalists,’ young men with very strongly misogynist viewpoints

SHEFFIELD: All right, so one of the other big findings in the report beyond MAGA that you guys did what we’re talking about here is you did a, focus on younger Trump supporters.

And we’ve talked about that many of them are kind of reluctant right people, so they’re not very engaged and not particularly aware of, of what he’s doing or, what he wants. But there is another subset of people that that you guys are calling the new traditionalist. And that these are people who, especially younger men who have much more negative attitudes toward feminism, toward women in some cases and to, or women’s independence.

And this is research that, a research topic that a number of organizations have been trying to delve into. But it is difficult to do this type of research. So tell us a little bit about that, if you would.

HAWKINS: I would sure. Yeah. So we’re, we refer to it as an emergent new traditionalism. And the distinction might seem superficial, but the reason we decided to call it emergent new traditionalism rather than new traditional lists. So rather than a group of people, but it’s a broader trend, is that it’s not, [00:44:00] there aren’t clear boundaries around this phenomenon.

And we found it hard to identify people who matched a lot of criteria at the same time. So for instance, gen Z Americans show a kind of frustration and fatigue and underwhelm with American democracy, and that’s a pretty general trend. There is a very low level of active hostile feeling towards Jewish Americans and Jews more generally in the American population, but it’s there at choice levels three, four or 5%.

But that’s much smaller than, for instance, the level of support for a strong president who, challenges the limits of his power and does things that that might take away power from Congress or that might ignore a Supreme Court decision. and then, so there’s, a lot of converging threads here.

I’m mentioning too, anti-Semitism and a kind of loose level of commitment to the Constitution. And then you’ve mentioned a third, which is this thread of a reconsideration of gender norms. And it’s been hard to get the right language on this because part of what we’re seeing is people saying that they think that the man should lead and the woman should follow.

And that just feels like a reversion to traditional gender norms, but we also see it pretty high levels. An affirmation of the idea that women should have the freedom to choose whether they go into a career direction or into a home and family direction. And so it’s getting the right language around the gender questions has been challenging.

And then the fourth thread I’ll just put in here as well is this belief in religion and a return to religiosity, which is something which there’s been a lot of discussion about and it’s been very hard to measure as well. And I think I just wanna mention [00:46:00] from a methodological point and data collection point, part of the challenge here is that the way that polling is working now is primarily through convenience sampling, data collection processes where you’re paying somebody some amount of money to, on their phone or on their browser, take a 10 or 20 minute survey.

And across panels across not just the United States, but across the world really, there’s been a challenge of getting younger men to participate in these surveys. And countries might only have 1% of their population on these survey panels, and so you use demographic controls to try and get good representation, but it’s challenging to one, get survey participants who are younger men to join onto panels.

And then two, it’s challenging to ask younger people to have sustained attention towards an activity for 15 minutes that’s not that interesting to them, which could be like a long political survey. So I think in general, the data collection effort to understand the precise levels at which we are seeing things like.

A reconsideration of constitutionality, a return to gender norms that are more traditional antisemitism. All of these questions have some error bars around them. I think because of the challenges with the data collection effort.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and a, some of those challenges probably are relating to the idea that younger people have less of a sense of community especially if they’re not in school. So like that’s, was the, is obvious ready source of community right? And you have to go to it. But once you’re out as a young adult and you’re not in school for, whatever way the, there.

So there is a pretty strong sense of that, that there isn’t community where, I am in the sample. So, 28% of the younger Trump voters in the [00:48:00] sample said that they agreed with that, that they didn’t feel community where they live, but also the non-Trump voters, that 27% said the same thing.

HAWKINS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and this was a, notable difference between older Americans who, who did seem to have more of a connection with their community.

HAWKINS: That’s right.

SHEFFIELD: And so this, and then the isolation is even higher with young men. There were, it was 30% as, I noticed. And then there also is the, a profound sense of precarity among a lot of younger Americans.

this is also an in income based scenario here that we’re talking about. That, people who have lower income obviously have a more precarious existence. Some people have said, oh, well, there’s no truth to the idea that the Trump supporters are motivated by economic anxiety. That is true that many of them are economically comfortable, like the, anti woke conservatives in particular.

But you know, they’re absolutely is the case that, the younger Trump supporters. Do seem to, feel at risk. And now it is. And we should say also that, I mean, the, for the non-Trump voters, feeling anxiety was even higher. So 43% of them said that they felt anxiety whereas only 29% of the Trump younger people said that.

HAWKINS: Right. And that anxiety doesn’t only relate to economic wellbeing. I think you’re, right on when you say that lack of community is, generates a sense of anxiety too, because there’s just less affirmation, community, less of a sense of companionship throughout daily life and the challenges that it brings forward and more time on social media, which I think the evidence will bear out, has generally been harmful to people’s cognition and psychology and emotional wellbeing.

But I think that this is among the most important [00:50:00] overall trends for the country to be watching is, Gen Z in general is not a continuation of millennials. I mean, there’s some arbitrariness about where you define a generation as beginning and ending. So we’re using Gen Z and millennials and baby boomers as because they, tend to be used by pollsters and by other demographic researchers and so on as shorthand for different categories of people.

But those Americans who grew up in the 21st century have not known military success, have not known a functional American politics that was not defined by division and polarization, and ideological conflict, have not known an economy that seemed fair to them, and have less confidence in general in our institutions.

Because whereas millennials were raised by baby boomers who believed in our institutions on average, especially in the fifties and sixties and into the seventies, for Gen Z, they’re growing up in an era where Americans broadly have lost a lot of trust in our institutions, including in our news media, but also in Congress.

And that trust in our institutions, broadly across three branches of government, across the private sector, across the military, is on the decline. And so they’re the inheritors of the disillusionment that has been on the sort of this characterized the last 50 or 60 years in this country. And while some of the data suggests a kind of revolutionary energy in the air, for instance, sympathy with the murder of the United Healthcare CEO by Luigi Mangione. And 20% of younger voters, millennials and Gen Z saying that there could be [00:52:00] cause for political violence.

Something we found in this study we, in qualitative research, when we do focus groups with folks, we don’t find them actively trying to advance or supporting a kind of revolutionary energy. But the dissatisfaction is a dangerous condition, and the, potential for it to be harnessed in negative directions is concerning.

But it’s concerning for its own sake that we have an emerging generation that does not feel that its institutions are serving them and is reconsidering everything from the constitution to how men and women work to work together, because of a lack of confidence in what they’ve been raised into.

SHEFFIELD: I think that’s that sense of institutional failure, it’s something that people who are in charge of social institutions don’t seem to be aware of, I think.

Because institutions worked well for them so well, that in fact that they’re in charge of them that it’s hard for them to put themselves into the mindset that, well, actually tens of millions of people think you have failed. And it’s an uncomfortable viewpoint. And so I can see why they might resist it.

any in-depth polling or focus group study or, other method that looks at Trump supporters in a very significant detail, it always finds this and it always finds this in particular with younger people across ideology. and, it also, this, discontent it does also surface in terms of the media figures that younger Trump supporters tend to admire.

Younger Trump supporters favor more extremist media figures

SHEFFIELD: So you guys asked them about specific individuals and of who, do they agree with? And 10% of them said they agreed with Nick Fuentes, the rate, the [00:54:00] neo-Nazi activist and live streamer, 17% said Candace Owens was somebody that they agreed with, another person who was explicitly antisemitic. But, they were not the number one Joe, Rogan was at 25% as someone who they agreed with.

But Elon Musk actually was their number one person, although in, that’s un unfortunate also because he also has made a number of racist and anti-Semitic statements. Although I think perhaps people may not know that about him as much ‘cause he doesn’t do that as constantly as Fuentes or, Owens.

But, these figures like Owens or, Tucker Carlson, that, that tend to push conspiracy viewpoints, they’re reflecting a suspicion of institution that their audience is feeling and that’s, that is what draws them to them. if that makes sense. That, and then they, absorb the more extreme beliefs after that, or alongside the general discontent.

HAWKINS: Yeah, I mean, when you’re anti-Semitic, I don’t know that’s necessarily a reflection of institutional distrust so much as.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, well, no, I’m saying they get that later. So in other words, they don’t come into it in many cases having any familiarity or, interest in antisemitism. In other words, yeah. So like they just are dissatisfied with, societal institutions and they hear someone saying, oh, life sucks and these people are bastards.

You are right to be angry at them. Then, that then they get the more extreme beliefs handed to them after that because it makes a, a in its own logic, they’re, giving you a progression to say, well, if you believe this, then you should believe me on this one, and you should believe me on that one.

Like that’s the, method of, how it seems to be working. And it’s, and, I think it’s why people [00:56:00] often look at the audience of Nick Fuentes, I mean, his audience is filled with, Hispanic young men and black young men that on its surface, you wouldn’t think that would be possible.

But, it happens because of, I think, because of what I’m saying, that, he gives them narratives that, that are broadly at least arguable and then, pushes other stuff on them later.

HAWKINS: I, yeah, I think in the particular case of Nick Fuentes, what I have heard him say is that he discovered that there was a real taboo around antisemitism and anti-Zionism when he was, I think, in his college years. And that was a kind of moment of revelation for him that there was some transgression and some energy to be had around violating that norm specifically.

So I think it’s pretty deeply entrenched in who he wants to be and what he wants to talk about. And it’s disturbing that he’s cultivated any following at all, and we’re still, that others are willing to. Help raise his profile and validate him or dismiss his viewpoints as merely being naughty and not dangerous.

And the distinction needs to be made. It’s dangerous to be an active celebrant of Adolf Hitler or to say that you celebrate Joseph Stalin’s birthday and it’s disturbing and we should not be trivializing these viewpoints.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. And and not underestimating them either because I think there is some people who, do try to say, oh, well he just has a few thousand people, ‘cause there was a report that came out a couple of I guess a couple weeks ago that, was arguing, well, well he’s only got, a few thousand people who pay for him.

And it’s like, well that’s pretty much how any creator works. That’s how any publication works, the people who read the New York Times are vastly outnumber the people who paid for the New York Times. So [00:58:00] you shouldn’t miss that point. I would say.

Reactionary religious identity as an act of youthful rebellion

SHEFFIELD: So the, other thing though about this, group of the emergent new traditionalists is that they in line with what you were saying about Fuentes, seeing antisemitism as a an act of rebellion, is that this group generally seems to view religion in that way, at least a significant percentage of them.

That the act of, being religious is in their mind an act of rebellion. Compared to what other groups say either older Trump supporters or non-Trump supporters, they. They don’t really agree with that. and I, that’s very significant and I think that’s what drives, there’s there has been a lot of discussion about, whether younger people are becoming more religious, but, I think what your findings, and Gallup and some others have, added some additional precision here, which is to say that no, it’s young Republicans who are becoming more religious.

And it, and for some of them it’s an active oppositional defiance. And just as an example, there was a somebody who was a more of a right-wing atheist, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who announced she was converting to Christianity because she hated liberals. And that, that seems to be a viewpoint that a lot of people in this demographic that you’ve, that focus on here seem to agree with that in some sense.

HAWKINS: Well, well, I, think that there’s it’s not one storyline only. I spoke to a recent Stanford grad who had converted to Catholicism and is part of this kind of burgeoning, emergent new traditionalism. And for him it was very sincere. And it was, I think, operating in the backdrop of a culture which has been described as lacking meaning.

And I think that for younger Americans, maybe younger people in the West, broadly. There’s a lack of orientation [01:00:00] towards what the good life is, how to have it, what matters in the world, who you are, who you should be. And religion offers answers to those questions. I think that there’s a transgressive element to it in that for people who’ve grown up in the 21st century, multiculturalism, pluralism, secularism have been the waters that they have grown up in, especially if they grew up in coastal areas or elite areas.

And so there is this element of defiance and rebellion in what they’re doing. But I wouldn’t underestimate also the degree to which they’s this sincere desire for a substantive orientation in life that they’re not getting elsewhere. And I think particularly with young men who I think are floundering and failing in a lot of ways, a bit of structure is something which they’re looking for in addition to just the motivation of it being rebellious.

SHEFFIELD: So it wasn’t even the majority, but you know, for a good chunk of ‘em, it is an active rebellion as they see it. But yeah, like, for the, a lot of people are deriving community from it and they’re deriving philosophy from it and, as in, more economically prosperous times, conspicuous consumption might have been the way that a lot of people found meaning in life, if you will, or at least made them stop thinking about whether there should be meaning in life. But that’s not even accessible for a lot of people.

So, people, if you can’t just buy stuff, then you’re gonna start looking elsewhere for meaning. And so these are all things that people who, want, to protect, democracy, need to start thinking about more. I, not just having more economic opportunity, but also offering real coherent worldviews other than just simply well get a job and buy stuff.

Like if that’s doesn’t seem to be working for a lot of people because number one, they can’t get a job. And then number two, if they can, in a lot of cases they can’t afford anything, so. There has to be more than just [01:02:00] simply trying to get, people’s stuff.

HAWKINS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: So, all right, so this is I, we’ve, I think hit, this is such a comprehensive report here that we couldn’t possibly have talked about everything that you guys noted in your findings here. So we’ll have the link to the full report. So if anybody wants to keep up with you personally though where, would you direct them?

HAWKINS: Me personally, you can follow me at shawkins on X and you should go to the MoreInCommonUS.com website and sign up for our newsletter.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Sounds good. All right. Thanks for joining me, Steven.

HAWKINS: Thanks for having me, Matt. It was a pleasure.

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 are a paid subscribing member, thank you very much for your support and you have unlimited access to the archives if you would like to become a free or paid subscriber. You can do so on Patreon at patreon.com/discoverflux. Or you can go to flux.community to subscribe on Substack.

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Since the public release of ChatGPT in late 2022, large language model artificial intelligence systems have become the most rapidly adopted technology in human history. Last March, ChatGPT’s website had 5.7 billion visits, while its competitors Claude and Gemini combined for another 3 billion.

Despite how much people are using these services, however, AI still has many critics who argue that they are nothing more than simplistic pattern-matchers that are vastly overhyped.

While the critics are underestimating what you can do with these systems, they do indeed have a point. LLMs excel at many abstract reasoning tasks, but because they have no somatic, embodied connection to reality, there is still a lot that today’s models struggle with. Full cognition depends upon the ability to designate “this” in the world and to compare “what it’s like” based on lived experience.

Love it or hate it, this technology has already changed the economies of every country, and this process is only just beginning. No one can say what will happen everywhere, but one thing seems evident: As abstract knowledge of facts becomes commodified, human somatic adjudication will become more valuable than ever before. The future will belong to people who can think across multiple disciplines and who understand what truth looks like, both broadly and in particular.

All of this is the topic of a recent essay that my friend Nils Gilman, the former associate chancellor at the University of California–Berkeley and deputy editor of Noema magazine, recently published about future-proofing your career in the age of AI that is the focus of today’s discussion.

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

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• How you think about minds influences how you treat others

• Richard Dawkins and his Claude Delusion

• AI content is here to stay, laws and norms need to change accordingly

• Why mediocrity just might be the key to innovation

• An ancient Greek philosophical tradition has become extremely relevant in the social media age

• To build a better future, we must never stop imagining and working for it

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

06:56 — Large language models’ limitations are where future jobs will flourish

15:41 — AI supplementation and the human role in improvement

26:14 — Analogies for AI adoption and disruptive technology

34:50 — Art, reproduction, and the value of authenticity

41:11 — The jobs of the future will be at the intersection of somatic and abstract reasoning

46:44 — Liberal education and metacognitive skills

54:14 — Porting knowledge from within time and other disciplines

Audio Transcript

The 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 Nils Gilman. Hey, Nils. Welcome back.

NILS GILMAN: Glad to be here again.

SHEFFIELD: Yes. And your article is about a very important topic that will only become more important, I think in the intervening months and years especially. But it has a premise though that I think some people, perhaps many people on the political left, would strongly disagree with. A lot of people seem to think that large language models are not capable of anything, that they’re all just a big scam, and that they don’t they’re not able to do anything.

GILMAN: Yeah. Look, I think it’s worth noting that there’s no technology that’s been adopted this quickly ever in history. And there’s a reason for that. The post-ChatGPT 3.5 models that have been rolling out over the last three years are capable of things that are really, really extraordinary.

Things that for a long time were seen as almost impossible holy grails of achievement pattern recognition [00:04:00] activities. And most notably with the most recent generations of large language models, the creation of text, whether that’s code the whole vibe coding trend prototyping, but also writing for many purposes.

I’m not sure that LLMs have yet to create a great piece of literature. That requires some imaginative additions that we can talk about a little bit about what those things are. But, for things like answering emails, various kinds of agentic purposes, drafting boilerplate for legal purposes or for, regular corporate communications, things like this.

These are really extraordinary tools that are rapidly accelerating the ability of people to produce content. Not necessarily always the most elegant or creative content, but a lot of content we need to create does not necessarily need to be elegant or creative. And for that kind of stuff, it’s massively increasing productivity and output.

And so I think anybody who says these are just stochastic parrots or mediocrities, they may [00:05:00] be on one level correct, but it may be irrelevant because for many purposes, those technologies, these technologies are going to be more than good enough for the purposes that people are, are using them.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think that’s right. And in a lot of ways in-- from a, just from a calculation standpoint and some other text processing standpoints, software was already capable of doing this before LLMs. But of course, the only people who were really having access to that were computer programmers.

So if you, if you knew how to do various programming languages, you could do this stuff, a lot of it. Whereas what we’re seeing with the large language model is that this is kind of a-- it’s an expansion of capability to regular people. Because most people are not wizards at Perl or have a lot of experience in PHP or some other language.

And these chatbots can write that code also. So like, there’s-- I think there’s a, there-- To some degree, people are judging them on the initial [00:06:00] ChatGPT 3.5 that they had heard about and which was remarkably less capable.

GILMAN: Yeah. And, look, I mean, people have talked a lot about AI hallucinations, and those things are very real. I mean, I personally, in my own, my own practice, I use AI a lot to do research, and you always have to double-check the work. Because sometimes they do make up... they do this less than they did a couple generations ago but they still sometimes either, either make up articles or citations from whole cloth or don’t necessarily have the best take on what the article or the book in question that they’re citing is.

So you always need to check your work. But I will just note that, insofar as this might be a substitute for an undergraduate research assistant or graduate student, graduate research assistant, those things can happen with human research assistants as well. So, you can’t necessarily-- You always have to check the work of anybody who you’re outsourcing a function to, whether it’s a machine or a human being.

LLM limitations and cognitive science

SHEFFIELD: And there, there is still some truth though, of course as you touched on, [00:07:00] that a large language model is inherently limited in certain things. And that’s what the focus of the discussion here will be about.

But so within the cognitive science framework that I’m developing that which is based on the dual process theory of Daniel Kahneman and others they lack what I call somatic reasoning.

They are not embodied, and so therefore they-- there, there are certain things that they cannot have reference to. But also they do not have a stake in the world, and so therefore the their ability to both visualize the world and model it for, especially illustration or conceptual purposes, is limited.

But, most of the text that people are generating in their own life isn’t really about, well, which thing is above this one on the picture? Or where is the red handlebar in the bicycle? That’s not-- those are not questions that for a lot of purposes that people are having to deal with, [00:08:00] unless you’re an artist or something like that.

GILMAN: Right. I mean, look, one of the terms that people throw around in computer science to describe this is that the current generation of large language models lack a world model. That is an ability to understand the broader context in which they’re producing the texts that, that they are in response to prompts.

Melanie Mitchell, the CS researcher, has described this as a lack of embodied knowledge. That’s one way in which one can say why these machines lack a model of the world, because they don’t have a body that places them in a specific phenomenological space. and so they create strings that of words or tokens that will be coherent in themselves, but may not actually be in direct correspondence with whatever they allegedly are describing in the outside world, because they have no way of actually verifying whether the thing that is in the outside world actually that they purportedly are describing or purportedly trying to work on, actually [00:09:00] is the way the textual stream that prompted them to produce this content, suggests.

And that, that is one major source of mistakes and hallucinations and, stylistic infelicities and so on that these machines continue to do. But again, I think you and I are in agreement that even though they have these kinds of limitations, they still can be very useful for a great number of purposes.

And they clearly are going to be changing the way people do their jobs, because many jobs involve things that involve rote production of text in one way or another, and those things are going to become rapidly commodified in as these technologies are rolled out into, into workplaces and, and into people’s r- everyday lives.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the other thing is that, the, the technology was primarily just about statistical relations with the lexical tokens within the model originally. That’s mostly what it was. But now there’s a-- the-- it’s-- there’s a lot [00:10:00] of supplementation to that core technology using things called retrieval augmented generation. So where they go out and search the web for the specific topics or where they are relying very heavily on training. So that’s where they are interacting with humans that correct outputs.

And so like-- and then a credit-- a lot of credit has to go to, to the people who are doing those corrections because that’s really where the core of the improvement has been has been made.

And, and, and there is, there is some interesting promising research out of a new company by one of the early founders of AI, Yann LeCun, who is working on a world model generation. Although it’s not tied to robotics, so I don’t know if there may be limitations on that as well.

But on the other hand, sure looks like there’s a-- they’re, they’re going in the right direction there.

GILMAN: Yeah. I mean, so I-- Yann LeCun’s a very interesting example. Your listeners will probably know that he used to be the head of AI for Meta, [00:11:00] Facebook, and recently left to start his own company specifically because he feels like the current generation of large language models, because they lack this idea of a world model that we were, we’re referring to here, are going to hit some kind of a limitation in terms of their capacity.

And so he wants to think about a really, a different kind of architecture. This is at, at this point, Yann is a brilliant guy, and if there’s anybody who can accomplish this, it’s probably him. But it is experimental research at this point, so we don’t know, I mean, I think he would be the first to admit this.

We don’t know for a fact that this is going to work and what it actually would mean to build a n- new generations of artificial intelligence that did have a world model. And how exactly that will be instantiated, I think remains to be seen.

SHEFFIELD: But in any case, this is I think perhaps the comparison is the early automobile that, and in a lot of ways they were unreliable and a lot of-- they had a lot of limitations in terms of how far they could go. They didn’t have a lot of horsepower, but you know what?

They were still incredibly useful and that was a rapidly [00:12:00] d- d- adopted technology. And it’s, that’s, that’s where I see where we’re at right now.

GILMAN: I always like whenever I think about a new technology to make a car comparison, because everybody kind of understands what cars are and what they do and how they have radically changed the way we live our lives. And I do think that, obviously it’s an analogy, so you don’t want to exaggerate it.

But I think that there’s a number of things that the analogy actually helps us to understand. One is that, was there a lot of technological disemployment? Well, yeah, people who were, breeding horses a lot of those jobs went away. The number of horses in New York City fell from a couple of million to a coup- a couple tens of thousands in the course of the first two decades of the 20th century.

Obviously, that was a dramatic transformation. If your business was horse breeding, you were going to be put out of business. But lots of other jobs were created: auto mechanics, gas station attendants, obviously car, automobile manufacturing workers, the commodity supply chains to produce all of that.

Like, so there-- new, new things came along. [00:13:00] So that’s one thing that’s worth noting. So there will be some technological disemployment from certain categories of work. But then the other thing that I think the automobile example really highlights is it’s not just that the automobile with the internal combustion engine, let’s just say, changes the way we move around mobility for individuals, is they end up, it ends up changing everything, about our economies, where we work, the kinds of jobs we have, the morphology of our cities, the rise of suburb- suburban living people’s sex lives. Like, automobile-- the rise of the automobile changed a great many things beyond just the direct employment implications of changing mobility services, if you want to put it that way.

And I, I think there’s every reason to believe that LLMs are likely to be similar. It’s likely to change, the way we w- the way we work, the way we relate to each other, our, our sex lives. Like, there’s lots of things that are going to be changed as a result of this technology. And this brings me to my third point, [00:14:00] which is a general point that I think I always want to underscore when everyone talks about trying to-- or when everyone tries to think about forecasting the implications of a technology.

And that is that what a technology does in the lab, and the way an individual uses it, particularly an early adopting individual uses a technology, doesn’t necessarily tell you very much about what the larger social implications are going to be of that technology when it’s rolled out at scale. So let me just give a different analogy or a different example that can show you what I mean.

Airbnb was originally dreamed up as a way to sort of meet people when you’re traveling in a couch surfing application, so that it would change kind of, for people who, after the pandemic, wanted to be able to travel but couldn’t necessarily s- afford to stay in hotels. And I think it worked great, and th- there was a lot of early adoption for precisely that kind of reason.

But as it scaled up, it started to have all sorts of implications that went beyond what anybody at Airbnb had even contemplated, which is that, at scale, it suddenly meant that many, many [00:15:00] apartments were being taken off the market in central-- desirable central city locations because, people who owned those apartments figured they could make more money, with a series of short-term rentals than they could with renting to long-term-- for long-term people.

So this ended up hollowing out the residential structures of many central cities. And that’s had deleterious effects in, particularly in smaller cities and tourist popular cities. It’s been quite malignant, which has, then required more kinds of legislation to be able to deal with those sorts of things.

So in general, what I would just say on that, on that point is that it’s really important not to think that just the way in which something gets used initially is going to tell us directly what the implications are when rolled out at scale.

AI supplementation and the human role in improvement

SHEFFIELD: Good point. And it’s also a reason why people who are concerned about the abuses of this technology, it’s important for them to be involved in how it is conceived and how it is regulated and how it’s discussed in the public mind. So, [00:16:00] but yeah. So specifically though, there, there-- We don’t know for sure, as you’re saying, how, what kind of changes the much broader application of, of LLMs is going to be within society.

There will be many that are not even being done right now. For sure, that’s the case. And it raises the, the question that I think is worth considering in terms of the personal applications, which is kind of what the focus of what we’re going to be talking about here today, is that some people I think very rightfully refer to AI not as artificial intelligence, but as intelligence augmentation.

That is that it is-- you should think of it in that way. This is not some int- alien intelligence that’s going to take over the world. No, this is just a way for people to augment their own minds and to do a lot more things with their own thinking. And that’s probably something you agree with, I presume, right?

GILMAN: I, I largely agree with that. W- another way to think about it is as a [00:17:00] prosthesis. I think that there are two implications of that that are worth teasing out a little bit though, right? One is that the augmentation will allow you, all of us, to do things much more quickly. Just think of a thing like a calculator, right?

Calculator allows us to do... if you’ve got a scientific calculator, quite advanced things in terms of the crunching of numbers that doesn’t re- used to require-- would’ve used to required long, laborious, working out numbers by hand if you want to multiply or divide large numbers or, take a cosine or a sine or what have you.

These were com- relatively laborious calculations that now can be done literally with a c- push of a couple of buttons. And so it can rapidly increase the rate at which one does these kinds of calculations, which can accelerate all sorts of processes, right?

But there is a downside to this anytime you’re talking about the ability of technology to augment a particular capacity. And that is that it often means that, like, the native capacity, if you want to call it that, that the humans [00:18:00] had, will atrophy, perhaps quickly within an individual and certainly over time as the either social or maybe even biological affordances for being able to deal with the pre-technological situation no longer exists.

And, I’ll just give an example that everybody who is, let’s say, 35 or older will remember. We didn’t used to have Google Maps, right? And so all of us had, when we lived in a space, to have some kind of a mental map of what the city we were living in is or the city we’re visiting is.

Maybe we had to have a physical map in order to look it up if it was a new place. But we all began to make mental maps as we walked around a city. I mean, I moved to several new cities, in the 1990s after I finished college and, one of the things I had to do in each case, it, it wasn’t something I even really thought about, but it-- I just naturally created a mental map of cities when I moved to them or when I, when I visited them.

I don’t really do that anymore because I have the map in my pocket, and I’m not even sure I could do it with the same facility that I was able to do it in my 20s because I haven’t had to do it in so long, right? So [00:19:00] there is this risk whenever you create a, an extension of a, of, of a particular human capacity that if you o- automate the technology that allows it to be done with relatively low effort, that you’re going to lose the native capacity to do it.

Now, is that a bad thing? Maybe, maybe not, right? The need for the kinds of strength that other primates have declined as humans developed tools for all sorts of physical things, right? So that’s why human beings are much less strong than, a gorilla or a chimpanzee or, our, our other near neighbor primates evolutionarily speaking.

Did that make us worse? No. We figured out other ways to use tools and to socially cooperate in order to be able to achieve the ends we wanted to as social primates, right? But it did mean that over time we lost some of the physical force that we would have had that our ancestors probably had, a couple million years ago.

So I think that those are all things we do need to think about whenever we roll out a technology that, like, one does lose... the technology that augments [00:20:00] or extends some particular capacity can also, over time erode the ability of that, that, that capacity, that native ability within, within a particular human being or certainly within a community that comes to rely on that technology.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s definitely true. And, and that’s extremely relevant in the context of primary education because, you, you see so many students who are just farming out their assignment to a chatbot rather than doing it. But although on the other hand, that raises the other question, which is maybe that assignment wasn’t a very good one to begin with.

Because, like, there is, I think in not just education, but, like, a lot of certifications for professional certifications, they rely on the memorization of things that are of absolutely no relevance to anyone. So, like, just as an example, so from my background in i- in computer technology, like there’s some [00:21:00] certifications where they would require you to memorize some obscure command flag on a, on, on a command that which you do use frequently, but you would almost never use that particular command.

And so what, what value have you gained by, by memorizing that flag? Not really anything. Especially because you can-- most people don’t even use that command in that way. And so, like, and, and, and there’s just, just a variety of things where that is the case. And, and then you’ve also had the what, what one could call a cartelization of a number of different professions, such as the legal profession.

Many states, they don’t require you to go to law school, and I think that that’s the right, the right attitude. But a lot of states do. Most states do.

GILMAN: Right. I mean, look, let’s just give-- to use the mapping example of this sort of forced memorization credentialization requirements. Time was that London [00:22:00] cabbies... london is this enormously vast city, right? This, scores of villages that grew together. And it’s very complicated figuring out how to drive around in London.

It used to be that if you wanted to be certified to drive a cab, a black cab in London, you had to pass a test of what was known as The Knowledge, which is the ability to drive from any one place in London to any other place with the shortest possible route, and you would be tested in order to be able to be certified for that.

And because London is so big, this was like, often took years. It typically took two to three years for s- for somebody who wanted to become a, a taxi cab driver in London to basically have the entire map with the shortest route between any two spots within London memorized inside their head. And this it’s actually a really interesting classic example of neuroplasticity because the part of the brain that does that kind of mapping would actually physically grow in these London cabbies.

The posterior hippocampus, I believe, is the part of the brain that that is affected by, and it would actually grow. And, this was-- there was a reason for this originally, right? Before you had mapping apps, [00:23:00] you wanted to be able to rely if you got in a cab in London, that the cab was going to take you across town in the most efficient possible way so that they wouldn’t ring up extra charges or what have you.

There’s a reasonable quality to that requirement. With the, rise of mapping apps, anybody can drive an Uber and it’ll tell you, Google has solved that problem, and now people don’t have that kind of knowledge. I wonder how many people there are who are, who ha- you know, will ever have that knowledge again.

Now, is that a human loss that we no longer have black cabbies in London who have The Knowledge? I wouldn’t say so. I would say that was two or three years of their life where they weren’t making any money. They were investing in growing their posterior hippocampus as a job requirement, and it was a job requirement.

It was a real job requirement. But we don’t need that anymore, and that’s going to save several years. You can become a taxi cab driver who can efficiently get across town in London overnight with the technology. That seems to me a straightforward improvement in the productivity of taxi cab driver, uh um, recruitment in London.

[00:24:00] And similar things I think are going to happen for, yeah, as a result of LLMs in all sorts of other fields. There’s going to be much lower barriers to entry because you don’t need to have that kind of knowledge. I’m not sure I totally agree about the law example though, because in the case of a law degree, the stakes are really high.

It’s not just that you’re going to get across London more slowly if the, L- if the LLM, driven mapping app, s- doesn’t give you the shortest route across town. But, you may incur, tremendous amounts of civil or criminal liability if you hire a lawyer who’s not qualified for the job.

And because there’s a lot of-- there is in fact a lot of specialty knowledge that one needs in order to be an effective, litigator, lawyer in general I would think it would be rather risky for one to rely entirely on LLMs. On the other hand, I think many of us have, before we go to a lawyer now, or before we go to a doctor, or before we go, to a therapist, we may start by asking an LLM, “Give me the basic outlines of this.

What do I think [00:25:00] this contract ought to look like? What are typical pieces of boilerplate that I should probably discuss with my lawyer about whether I need to have this in the contract?” So that you can go in as a more informed consumer when you’re dealing with a professional lawyer or or a doctor or what have you.

So again, like I think this is just going to not displace the doctors or the lawyers or other kinds of people who have specialty knowledge, so much as it’s going to change the relationship between how-- or, or the relationship that clients have to those practitioners and also change the way those practitioners mobilize the knowledge that they have, right?

So, I remember something my mother used to say to me when I was a kid. She said, “The second best thing to knowing something is knowing where to look it up.” And it’s sort of a quaint phrase at this point, but you know, now we all know where to look things up. You start by going to an LLM, and you always gotta be m- you always gotta be mindful that maybe there’s going to be some sort of hallucination going on.

But again, could you really always rely on Encyclopedia Britannica to tell you what was, what was what about a particular subject? It was pretty good, but like, there’s been a lot of evidence now that it’s not as good as, the [00:26:00] crowdsourced Wikipedia in many cases, right? So, I, I would say that we should take these technol- these technologies are radically going to reconfigure the way we relate to various knowledge bases, but we shouldn’t assume that it’s going to m- you know, wholesale displace those things overnight.

Analogies for AI adoption and disruptive technology

SHEFFIELD: yeah. Well, and, and the encyclopedia context is, is another good comparison because I re- I remember when Wikipedia was first coming online and I was indirectly in the orbit of Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of it. And like it was controversial when Wikipedia first came along. Like people, they thought, “No, this is, this is wrong.

An encyclopedia that anyone can edit, this is, a way that the world’s going to be filled with misinformation. It’s going to be filled with lies and inaccuracies and trolling.” And to an extent that certainly does happen on Wikipedia, but the community is now large enough that they have developed protocols and methods to really cut down on that.

And, and so at, at this point, while [00:27:00] you, you’re not-- nobody’s going to be out there citing a Wikipedia article in a, in an academic study or something like that, at the... It is the starting point if you are i- unfamiliar with something that people have been going to now for, more than 20 years that it’s, it’s since it’s become mainstream and and it’s changed the world in a, in a lot of really positive ways in, and in ways that its critics, I don’t think ever fully admitted that they were wrong about what it could be done, what you could do with it.

GILMAN: People rarely admit that they’re wrong in general, Matt. That’s my, my, my observation is when people get-- occasionally you get people who admit that they made a big call wrong. We have some people doing that in politics these days. But usually people just, if they turn out they were wrong, they kind of just turn the page and pretend that they didn’t actually believe those things.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

GILMAN: I don’t expect a lot of mea culpas coming out of the AI doomer or boomer crowd when we achieve neither doom nor cornucopian [00:28:00] plenitude.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Well, it’s the, the, the phrase that, And I for- I forget who, who coined it, so I, I can’t credit them. But yeah, just it-- this is a normal technology. This is what it is. And, so to that end, though as productivity’s increasing there’s, there’s still going back to the, the, inherent lack of capacity that it does have in some ways where certain professions, and this is what your article that you recently published is about, is that certain jobs cannot really be done by an LLM.

And they, they-- because they have no physical stake in the world, they also are not accountable. And so someone always is going to have to be there as the endpoint. So go-- walk us through a bit of of your argument here.

GILMAN: Yeah, let me, let me say that I think one of the things that’s really important to note is that for the kind of work that LLMs are, or the kind of tasks that LLMs are very [00:29:00] good at at this point they’re typically not a whole job anywhere. A computer programmer, right, is not just typing code all day, right?

Most of the things that you can do that where you have to type your fingers those are the kinds of things that I think LLMs are going to be largely replacing over time. But that’s not the only part of a job, right? The part of the job is, just to give examples from computer science. It’s, collecting feature requirements from customers, prioritizing those things deciding, what order one wants to do things.

All the sort of meta processes associated with developing code still aren’t going away quite yet. I mean, I think those things are likely to be commodified over time. Or to take the lawyer example we were going to. It may be that the LLM can help you write your brief, but figuring out your legal strategy with a customer, fig- with a client, figuring out the business risks that they want to mitigate, if we’re talking about commercial litigation figuring out how risk-tolerant they are about taking a case to trial as [00:30:00] opposed to settling.

Those are all things that require complex human negotiations and typically I think are not going to be going away. And I think those functions are actually going to become even more relatively valuable, right? So this is some basic economic theory, right? If you have, two inputs into producing some good and one becomes a lot cheaper, then the other one becomes relatively more valuable, right?

So if we’re thinking that objective reasoning is the thing that’s being largely, commodified by LLMs, and we think that the production of, of words and, whether those be computer code or written language is also being rapidly commodified, the question is what remains? And I think that for most jobs, those things are not going to completely go away.

Your job’s going to be highly reconfigured, though. You’re going to be expected to produce a lot more, for example, or interact a lot more with clients, or go to more meetings or so on. And so that’s, I think, where the value in a lot of jobs is going to migrate to, is the ability [00:31:00] to do those kinds of things that require emotional intelligence, things that require creating social consensus, things that require ethical judgment, things that require questions of taste.

All of those kinds of things I think are going to become relatively more valuable as the actual execution of things becomes relatively easy to do.

SHEFFIELD: the, the irony is that the, the conferences and your conference calls and Zoom meetings that everybody hates about their jobs, in a lot of ways, those are actually the most essential things even though y- they are often regarded with infamy. And, and, and a chatbot, of course, can be in the meeting, and Zoom obviously has already integrated those types of features.

But yeah, that, that, that type of, of the integration of judgment, of presence, of sensation of other people’s responses and ideas and feelings, they can’t really-- They can’t do that.

GILMAN: Right. I mean, so [00:32:00] let me give an example, just personal example from yesterday. I mean, I was interviewing I was talking to somebody who is potentially going to do some contracting work on my house. And, I wanted to hear, like, what her idea was for doing this work. But really the thing I was sitting there judging was not-- was do I trust this person?

Do I think this person is going to have the taste and the judgment to do the things that I want to do when I’m traveling and she’s working on the project and I can’t be there to oversee it at every single second? That quality of me making that judgment of her was one that I would not have trusted to outsource to a machine, because ultimately I have to look her in the eye.

I have to have some confidence in myself that like, when I give her the keys to my house, it’s going to be-- it’s going to look better after she’s done with it than, than worse, right? And that’s, that’s a, that’s a judgment issue that like, to this, to this point, I don’t think people yet are willing to give up on and I think may become even more valuable.

Likewise, for her, it’s not just about whether she can execute this. She’s trying to sell me, right? She’s trying to sell herself to me in the course of that [00:33:00] conversation. And that’s again, something she can’t just do by writing a bunch of stuff down. She’s got to do it partly by having a meeting with me and making me feel that I, I, I’m-- I, I would be wise to put my trust in her, right?

So those kinds of things I think are not, that’s not going away. And there’s lots of other things that I think are also not going away, things that involve convening and human, human bonding of various sorts. Those things are also, I think, going to become relatively valuable, relatively common kinds of descriptors of jobs.

So the irony is, there was a, there was a little bit of a meme I think when it was this four or five years ago, you’ll probably remember better than me, Matt, but like, this idea of “wordcels” versus “shape rotators” that was sort of going around the Silicon Valley, these two kinds of minds, and shape rotators were engineering mentalities who, you know, like to think about things in in very linear structured ways versus wordcels, who suppose-- And this was initially s- s- developed as kind of a joke and then turned into a kind of a serious thing. If we take it somewhat semi-seriously, maybe more seriously [00:34:00] than it should be, what’s actually turning out is that the kinds of things that shape rotators are particularly experts at are the things that are relatively commodifiable by LLMs, whereas the kinds of things that wordcels typically pride themselves on the facility with which they use language, whether in written or oral form, those things are actually harder to commodify away.

What I think is going to be really a threat, though, in all of this is people who are mediocre at, at either thing because mediocrity is, achieving a reason-- a, a, a fast but mediocre outcome. That is the thing that these technologies currently are really great at extreme-- achieving something truly special that really connects in complicated human ways with a variety of stakeholders, that’s as yet a, a frontier that they haven’t reached is what, the way I would put it.

Art, reproduction, and the value of authenticity

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, and another comparison I think that might might be interesting in this context is, is art. [00:35:00] So we’ve already reached before The, im- image generators came along. Art had already been commodified. So, the, the idea of reproduction of paintings is, that was done by a computer decades ago.

Like, if, if you wanted to have a, a, a Van Gogh in your house or, a, a Da Vinci or whatever, you could do it by, by just having a, a printout of that picture. And then, at the same time, the, the, the formulaic artistry, painting, sculptures or whatever, that weren’t original if you wanted those things, you could easily get those.

And, and, and, and it did, unfortunately, make it harder for people to make a living being an artist because you could now have high quality or mediocre, whatever you wanted of those works in your house. So that did decrease the, the number of people who could make a living off of that.

But you know, the, the image generating at this point, I don’t see [00:36:00] that as having a major impact on visual art because we were already there. And the same thing, like I used to work as a web designer that industry basically almost entirely got destroyed before the large language model because of s- websites like Squarespace and services like that, that people, they realize, “Oh, well, I don’t have to have a great website.

I can have a mediocre website that costs 50 bucks. I’m going to do that. Or I can even have one that’s even shittier and have it for free.” And so, like, I-- That was very dismaying to me, I’m needless to say, but this was not something that was that AI did. And so a lot of industries that I think people, might be saying, “Oh, well, the, the chatbots are going to ruin the economy for these...”

Well, it was already ruined har- sorry to say.

GILMAN: Yeah. I think one essay that I read many, many years ago in college originally that I’ve come back to again and again is this famous essay, maybe the famous, [00:37:00] most famous essay in art criticism of the 20th century which is entitled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin a German critical theorist.

And he published this book in the mid this essay in the mid-1930s. And it’s not a coincidence that while, when he published that essay, he’d been busy putting together this big project collecting unbelievable amounts of information about Paris in the middle decades of the 19th century about 75, 80 years before he was working on this project, including a huge number of pho-photo photographs of old Paris.

And so he reflected a lot particularly about photography and how that changed art. And he notes in the essay that, it used to be there was a whole, as you were alluding to, Matt, a who- a whole sort of industry of people who would be portraitists for middle-class families who wanted to have a family portrait.

And they, the family would sit and, there’d be an oil painter who would create a, a painting of the family that they could then hang on their wall or pass down from one generation to the next. When photography, daguerreotypes [00:38:00] initially and then photography come in, that rapidly... It does two things.

One is it massively expands the market of the number of people who can do this. Now anybody, you, you can go and takes, a few seconds to sit for a family portrait and, and it becomes much, much, much cheaper to produce that. So a lot of these painters go out of business, right? Because, or they have to become photographers.

It also changes the nature of painting, right? Because now painting is no longer about exclusively or primarily trying to create verisimilitude to real life, which is what typically portraitists, or particularly not very good portraitists, would try to do. Now you begin to realize that painting, is applying oil to a two-by-two canvas, and the c- explosion of creativity within painting in the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th century is really without precedent in the history of, in the history of, European European art.

So, there is a way in which the commodification of one kind of thing [00:39:00] sets the stage for another kind of flowering of, of creativity. And I think it’s also worth noting the other big concept that Walter Benjamin has in this essay, is he says, “So what is it, then, in the age of mechanical reproduction, the difference between a picture you have of the ‘Mona Lisa’ and the actual ‘Mona Lisa’?”

And he has this term that he uses that he calls aura, and it’s almost a kind of a, a metaphysical or mystical quality that he says people ascribe to the original, right? That when you stand in front of, in the Louvre, in front of the original “Mona Lisa” with a huge crowd of other people who are all snapping photos of it, you feel like you’re in the presence of Michelangelo in some sense as he created that painting, right?

Whereas when you see the reproduction yourself, you can see the actual-- even if it’s the same size as the actual original, it’s not, it doesn’t have that same kind of quality. It’s not-- And it’s not just because it doesn’t have the same textural quality. Even if you pr-pr-produce something that was an almost identical forgery, once you know it’s a forgery, and this is a very [00:40:00] close facsimile that Matt Sheffield or Nils Gilman has painted as opposed to Michelangelo, it just doesn’t have the same quality for people, right?

And I do think that there’s going to be many kinds of things that as LLMs and other kinds of, AIs are able to produce vast amounts of slop, as people like to say, the value that you- people are going to ascribe to a authentic real person meeting or, seeing a play of human beings live on stage, I think those things will become increasingly valuable.

And I think that’s borne out by the fact that, the r- the inflationary prices, the rate of inflation for live events has been far outstripping the, the baseline rate of inflation. So, how much does it cost to go to a, a ball game now compared to when we were kids? Or how much does it cost to go see, Taylor Swift play a concert compared to what it would’ve cost to see a, Madonna in the 1990s, right?

I mean, so there’s just been this increasing escalation of the value of things that are-- allow you to feel this kind of authentic bond with the particular [00:41:00] art and artist of the moment. And I think that those things are going to continue to be accelerated by the increasing, acceleration of mechanical reproduction in the sense that Walter Benjamin talked about.

The jobs of the future will be at the intersection of somatic and abstract reasoning

SHEFFIELD: I think that’s right. And, and ultimately what we’re, what we’re talking about here just to go, back to the, the, the cognitive modes. So, we, we have your abstract reasoning and your somatic reasoning. Well, essentially the value in this new idea economy or cognition economy is in the intersection of somatic and abstract.

That’s where the value is created and, and that’s where it is-- That’s where it, it was created in, in the examples that we were just talking about. Because, with the painting, the act of, of verisimilitude, that was already done. So the, the, the, the purely cogni- somatic contact with reality, that was done.

But the, the, internal contact with reality, [00:42:00] that is not something that a photograph can do, or it’s severely limited in what it can do. And, and so that’s what the value was being done. And, in the same way while the industry of web design has shrunk massively the types of designs that we’re seeing now are just incredible what people are able to do.

so, this may be-- I don’t want to get too technical, but, like, Cascading Style Sheets is a technology that was, g- invented in the early days of the web. Well, now it’s powerful enough, you can make straight up games in CSS that require no programming language just pure CSS. And, and, and so this is, like, the, the, the idea that, everything’s going to come to an end and, and jobs are going to just be wholesale limited.

Yes, many will, but many will not. And, and it’s worth keeping that in mind.

GILMAN: I think the idea that there’s going to be no work left is absurd. I mean, [00:43:00] look out the window. Like, there’s a lot of work to be done out there as far as I can tell. There are, potholes to be filled, houses to be built, meals to be cooked and served and enjoyed. There’s a lot of things that need to be done.

Old people that need to be cared for, young people that need to be, born and educated. Some of that stuff can be, facilitated by technology, but there’s not a shortage of work. We have lots of things that need to be done. What I think is under threat is professions that have relied on, various barriers to entry and they may actually double down on that, right?

So you know, look, I’ve got a couple of kids in college right now, so I’ve been talking to them a lot about, like, what should, what should you be studying in, in this context? What are the kinds of skills that you want to be acquiring? I think-- I, I’ve always been of the opinion it doesn’t-- the actual content of what one learns in college probably doesn’t matter that much for one’s career success, just to take that as the dependent variable we’re thinking about.

Mainly because [00:44:00] even if you get some very, technically specific degree, you learn some, you major in CS and you learn some particular programming language. Within 5 or 10 years of graduating, the particular things you learned are not going to be, from a content perspective, that relevant.

The question of whether you’re a well-educated person and the kind of person who I think is going to thrive in the new economy, the new post-LLM economy, is whether you’ve been educated in a way such that your brain is a kind of machine tool and can reinvent itself as different kinds of tools, right?

So you can do different things over time. So as the job market, as the economy evolves, as different sectors of the economy rise and fall, you can surf from one area to the other a-and, and learn how to retrain yourself to do new things. And I think all of us in the face of LLMs and the way in which LLMs are going to radically transform all jobs, or at least a great many jobs are going to need to retool ourselves.

And so the, the real question is whether you’ve learned [00:45:00] one way or another. I don’t think this is something you can only learn in college something you really should be learning from day one, and you should continue to learn your entire life. But college is a particularly important moment for this is learning what I would call metacognitive skills, like learning to think about one’s own thinking learning how to identify what is the mode of reasoning that I’m engaged in to solve a particular problem, and is that the right mode of reasoning?

What are alternative modes of reasoning that I might use apply to a particular par- to a particular challenge that I’m trying to solve in the workplace or in my personal life for that matter? So sort of being aware of what one is doing and knowing that any particular way of thinking about a problem is going to be partial, right?

Is going to be, create blind spots, and that you want to have, a diversity of perspectives on whatever problem you’re working on. Therefore, you want to have a diversity of perspectives on the team of people who are working on these things. These are all like sort of truisms. I mean, none of, nothing that I’m saying is anything more than a cliché.

But [00:46:00] I do think that it actually implies something that’s not so obvious about the way in which you should seek out an education that will augment that capacity in oneself over time. And that as one continues to learn, as one, goes through one’s career and one’s life, one should continuously be thinking about learning new kinds of ways of thinking about one’s own thinking.

Improving one’s metacognition continuously over time, I think is going to be the most important thing. And I think one can learn those kinds of skills studying anything one wants. I don’t think whether it mat- matters whether one studies physics or comparative literature or, modern dance. Any one of those things I think can help you if you get good at that to develop these kinds of metacognitive skills, which I think are the most important ones to have if you want to sustain a career over the course of decades.

Liberal education and metacognitive skills

SHEFFIELD: think that’s right. And that is really where the value of the classical liberal education, I think, is coming back. Because, in the information age economy, as we’ve been saying, a lot of the [00:47:00] jobs were just simply people who had arcane knowledge applying them to the real world in ways that might not have been particularly anything other than mediocre.

And like, like-- And people instinctively have that idea, that concept of mediocrity as inherent to so much of white-collar work. Like with the stereotype of the paper pusher or the, the bureaucrat stamper, and/or the accountant who does nothing but count beans. Like these are all concepts that people intuitively know are true because this metaphor keeps existing across so many types and types of professions.

And so yeah. So ultimately that’s why I like to say that in the manufacturing age and the information age, these were the [00:48:00] domains of economics But now in the, in the, in the AI age, it is the domain of the philosopher, not just in terms of, well, are these things conscious or not? Well, no, they’re not.

But what matters is how you can relate things to other things and how you can relate yourself to all of these other ideas and how-- and other people’s ideas as well, and their thoughts and feelings

GILMAN: I think that’s exactly right. I mean, let me just-- you talked about a liberal education or liberal arts education. Let me, let me just dive in and double-click on that for a second because I think it’s worth... First of all, when the phrase liberal arts doesn’t mean liberal in the sense, or at least it’s only vaguely related to the idea of liberalism, particularly, as it’s understood in, in, in the United States.

It’s not just sort of a kind of left orientation. It means liberal in the Latin sense of libertas, becoming free. And the idea of a liberal arts education is that you will get a broad-based education that will free your mind, [00:49:00] and that ultimately from the shackles of prejudice and various other kinds of, poor metacognitive, capacity.

And so to me, I, I just think it’s really important also, sometimes when people hear the word liberal or liberal arts or liberal education, they think, and sometimes people do use it this way, they mean we’re, we’re talking about the humanities as opposed to STEM, right? science, technology, engineering, and math.

And I actually think that that’s exactly the wrong way to understand what a liberal, a liberal arts education properly understood is. I think a, a liberal, a, a good liberal arts education will give you a basic understanding of a variety of different things, right? Like, you should know something about science.

You should know something about the arts. You should know something about literature. You should know something about engineering. You should know something about... et cetera, right? Like, it’s really a broad-based ability. And I think that, that what that does, if you get a good education that has that kind of broad-based skill set, it gives you the kind of capacity that you [00:50:00] were just referring to, Matt, which is that it will help you relate to different kinds of people, different kinds of ideas.

It’ll help you say, “Oh, here’s a framework from one domain that perhaps is useful in another domain.” It’ll help you see similarities and differences in thinking across different fields, different disciplines, different expertises. And to me, that kind of ability to, to helicopter up and down from, like, very specific, in the weeds knowledge to the 30,000-foot view and being able to see connections between things across different levels That is, arguably that is the definition of a certain kind of human intelligence.

I don’t think it’s necessarily something that LLMs are not going to be able to do themselves, but it is something that if you can do that, then you can reinvent yourself over time and make yourself and sort of future-proof your career for an age of LLMs. And so I actually think that it’s precisely as you say, those kinds of abilities to see things acro- connections across, across different domains and to ask what’s [00:51:00] important about all of this?

Those are fundamentally philosophical questions, about meaning, about purpose, and those things only will become more important and more central to the kinds of kinds of things that were put that are put to us both in a professional context and also in our personal lives, I believe.

SHEFFIELD: And that’s where the, the, the role of, of primary education, I think, is, is really going to be important because because so much of, of primary education, but I guess also, p- post-secondary as well that, it, it’s too much about memorization and not enough about how to think and how to understand what is truth, what does truth look like?

Because that’s-- that ul-ultimately I think was the, the biggest mistake of, of, before the internet age, that schools didn’t teach epistemology sufficiently. And so now you have, tens of millions of people in, in this-- maybe hundreds of millions perhaps of people who don’t know what, [00:52:00] what makes something a good idea.

And, and that knowledge is going to become even more important in, in, in the age that we’re getting into now. Because if you don’t know what makes something sound reasoning then you will fall for the hallucination. Then you will outsource everything to the LLM and not be able to, to think independently on your own.

And, and, and that’s not obviously what you should be doing.

GILMAN: Yeah, for sure not. I mean, I think that teaching, learning epistemic humility to know the limits of one’s own knowledge to understand what one doesn’t know to be unashamed about admitting that one doesn’t know something, that one needs to understand better what’s going on before one, before one makes a decision or renders a judgment on it.

I think those are all really important qualities that a good education... And again, I totally agree with you. This is not something that should be deferred to college. It should start at a very young age. Teaching kids the ability to make those kinds of judgments. And we could have a long conversation [00:53:00] about the history of primary and secondary education.

Obviously indoctrination has traditionally been a big part of it, teaching people a certain kind of, or, enforcing a certain kind of discipline onto young people so that they can be, conformists in society, docile work- docile and effective workers. I mean, that’s part of the socialization aspect of education that has long existed.

With that said, if we leave that part of the story aside and just think about the intellectual side of things, I also strongly agree with you, Matt, that like, memorization in itself is not helpful. However, let me give an example from my own field. I mean, I, I did a, I studied history. I got a history undergraduate degree and then a graduate degree in history.

And I remember I was always interested in history as a kid, junior high school and high school and so on. And the history exams that I was given then were often very much about, have you memorized the facts about what exactly happened during the Thirty Years’ War in, in, in Central Europe or what have you, right?

You were expected to do what are known as identification [00:54:00] questions. Can you, d- have you memorized all the names and dates that are relevant for a particular thing? That to me is not really what history, certainly when one is a professional historian, that’s not ultimately what history is about.

Now, you have to have fidelity to those facts.

Porting knowledge from within time and other disciplines will matter in the future

GILMAN: Um, but ultimately, what makes a good historian a good historian is the interpretation they give of the facts from the past, which facts they choose to highlight, and do they tell a story that’s compelling in the present about some episode or some era from the past, right?

That’s what makes a makes a historian, successful in terms of gaining a readership, whether that’s an academic readership or a popular readership, is do you tell stories about the past that help make sense and that entertain people in the present? I mean, honestly, it’s narrative-making to a very large extent.

Now you have to know a lot of facts, and I think the reason why often it takes a while for a person to become a really excellent historian is that if you want to say something original about the past, I mean, people have been writing about the past for a very long time. If you want to try to say [00:55:00] something original about the Thirty Years’ War, people have been writing about that for 400 years at this point, right?

So coming up with something original requires really getting immersed in a lot of facts so you begin to have a chance to see a pattern that none of the other historians over the last 400 years have seen. And part of that is about understanding that the Thirty Years’ War What was it about that moment?

Well, nowadays we might tell a story about the rise of new technology as a driver for that, for that conflict of religions in Central Europe, right? Because we’re in a moment wherein technological disruption seems very relevant. In other moments, people might emphasize a different set of facts about the Thirty Years’ War.

The rise of, the, the Swedish state and, the aggression of of the French monarchy and, the fragmented nature of the Holy Roman Empire and, and so on and so forth as driving causes. I mean, during the middle of the 20th century when Europe was engaged in all sorts of fragmentation, those are the main stories that people told about the Thirty Years’ War.

And those stories weren’t wrong, right? They weren’t-- They-- But the, the point is they were telling a story about the [00:56:00] Thirty Years’ War that was trying to make sense of what was going on in the 1920s, not in the 2020s, right? Why do we care about this episode from the past? We care about it not just because we need to memorize these facts about the Thirty Years’ War, but because the Thirty Years’ War, by understanding what took place there, we believe we can understand something about ourselves differently.

Now this is, this is an example of what historians do. I think the same thing applies to economists, to computer scientists, to, maybe not theoretical physicists or number theorists, but even there I would b- guess that, like, the kinds of questions that people ask over time, it, it may well.

SHEFFIELD: I’ll tell you how.

GILMAN: These are not fields I know well. Okay, tell me.

SHEFFIELD: Because basically... Yeah, so basically math mathematics as a field is constantly generating fictional models that have-- that the, the, the mathematician has no thought whatsoever about how it applies to reality. And, and so there, that’s, that’s basically how you get noticed and, and regarded as a great mathematician, is, is being able to generate a new [00:57:00] field.

That’s what makes you great. But the thing is, the interesting thing is that physics is constantly looking into mathematics to say, “Well, here’s this concept that I want to, model, but I have no idea how to do it, so let me just go ahead and go shopping in the annals of mathematica.” And in fact, that is what happens, is that a lot of--

so like that’s what, where quantum physics came from. and, and that’s where, Riemannian geometry was not something that, had any, application to reality, when Riemann made it, but Einstein plucked it out of obscurity and, and, and did exactly what you said. He, he made it-- he took something that was not relevant to people in the past and made it relevant to people in the present.

GILMAN: Well, I think that that’s, that’s a great example. I love that. And, and this actually raises another issue, which is that again, something I think that’s going to continue to be valued and maybe become more valuable over time is the ability to port ideas from one domain to another. A lot of what people [00:58:00] describe as intellectual creativity is that just to give a, a classic example, you were referencing Danny Kahneman at the beginning of this podcast.

Danny Kahneman eventually won a Nobel Prize in economics for basically, inventing the new field of behavioral economics. But Danny Kahneman’s not trained as an economist, he’s trained as a, as a psychologist. And basically what he did, working with, initially with Amos Tversky in the 1970s, is he began to sort of systematically catalog the ways in which people are non-rational in their decision-making in a variety of ways and various kinds of biases.

and this led to the development of what he called prospect theory, right? So people have identifiable patterns of miscognition, right? Which throws through into question the entire, rational actor hypothesis, which lay at the core of a great deal of microeconomic theory at the time. And so basically this idea that initially comes out of, [00:59:00] close observation of psy- in, in psychology labs and experiments, eventually migrates over to economics with, as it were, on the back or in the heads of, of, Tversky and, and Kahneman, and then revolutionizes the field of economics as a result.

There’s so many examples of this, of ideas that are taken from one domain and moved over to another. Complicated ideas in s- i- i- in symbolic theory that end up revolutionizing linguistics, for example, right? So there’s one example after another of people who take ideas from one domain and apply them to another.

I’ve been giving a- academic examples here, but the same thing applies in lots of other fields, right? Think about the way in which food is remixed over time where, some chef will take an idea from, one cuisine and port it over and use it to reinvent something that’s going on in another cuisine.

Or music is another great example of like, musical traditions that will undergo various transformations as they go through, various dispensations. So, you have the music [01:00:00] of the Anatolian Greek diaspora that’s displaced, after in the 1920s, that eventually goes through, becomes a kind of Greek blues, and eventually comes to America and becomes the basis for surfer rock, right?

So, these kinds of evolutions of things over time, I think that is the basis of creativity, and that ability to port things from one domain to another in order to create new insights. And again, those things might be facilitated by LLMs over time, where you say, “Hey, where’s an idea from this other field that I might apply to help think about this problem,” right?

But you need to think to ask that question and to give that prompt in order for the LLMs to necessarily do that, at least at this stage. And I keep saying at least at this stage because we don’t know exactly how these technologies are going to develop over time. Will they be able to auto-suggest those kinds of creativities?

I think there’s always going to be another level to it and another level to it and another level to it. And so I think that’s where a lot of the value add is going to happen over time.

SHEFFIELD: Exactly. All right. Well, this has been a, a great discussion, Nils. [01:01:00] And I-- hopefully it will be useful to the audience. But if people want to keep up with you outside of this conversation what are-- is your advice for that?

GILMAN: Well, I’ve got a Substack that I contribute to intermittently. I also have been writing a lot. I’ve got a book out, “Children of a Modest Star” came out two years ago about planetary governance, if you’re interested in sort of intersections between political theory and global ecological concerns.

That’s a good book to-- That, that was what that book was written to do. I, I hesitate to encourage people to follow me on social media, but I’m, I’m on there too as well if people to find me there.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Although not on X we should point out.

GILMAN: Yeah, I’ve I’ve deci- I’ve decided that platform’s not for me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, great. All right, well, good to have you back again.

GILMAN: Thank you.

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You couldn’t ask for a more perfect distillation of how Republican campaigning works. The idea that the mainstream media and society as a whole are biased against right-wing viewpoints permeates every corner of American politics, even within the Democratic party and within mainstream media outlets.

Within today’s Republican party, fighting against “liberal media bias” was the basic organizing objective of most of the grassroots people I encountered during my years as a Republican media consultant. Opposing media liberals has animated numerous fundraising drives, launched television networks, and built talk radio empires. But most importantly, the myth of liberal media bias makes people who believe in it discount information that might contradict their own political agenda.

Trump endlessly attacks what he calls the “fake news media” because he wants his supporters to disbelieve any kind of negative coverage he may receive. Most people think the idea of Trump-as-truthful is patently absurd, but it’s a remarkably effective lie, as public opinion polls have shown for years.

Every myth has its origin story, and this one is no different. My guest in this episode, A.J. Bauer, has a new book called Making the Liberal Media: How Conservatives Built a Movement Against the Press that traces the 80-year history of this lie, and how (ironically) it’s helped reactionary Republicans have a better understanding of Marxist media theory than almost anyone in the left-of-center operative class.

The full discussion of this episode is for paid subscribers. An excerpt on YouTube is also available. To watch, read, or listen to the full discussion, you will need to be a paid subscribing member on Patreon or Substack. 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.)

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• Despite the right’s complaints, there really isn’t a liberal media, why not?

• Right-wing figures are applying their bogus complaints about the media to artificial intelligence

• ‘Post left’ podcasters have become an incredible voter depression tool of some of Trump’s top contributors

• Reactionary comedy isn’t funny, but it sure is effective at capturing the imaginations of low-information voters

• How Washington Republicans leverage QAnon and other conspiracy movements

• Right-wing donors have been secretly (and openly) funding fake leftist candidates for decades

• The women of QAnon

• How naive faith in legal formalism handed the Supreme Court to the radical right

Audio Chapters

(Full version)

00:00 — Introduction

12:19 — The right’s spoken-word culture and debate aesthetics

22:03 — From Facts Forum to the Birchers: the origins of ‘liberal media bias’

34:19 — The right’s decentralized media ecosystem

43:37 — Trump, entertainment, and right-wing media amplification

53:08 — Why the left doesn’t build its own media

01:04:50 — Republicans use left-wing political theory more than the Democrats do

01:16:21 — The Democratic Party’s flawed theory of politics

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Before we get into the book, let’s talk about just the concept of media bias itself. What even is this idea, and is it coherent?

A.J. BAUER: Yeah, so part of what I argue in the book is that the idea of liberal media bias is a form of structural media criticism. So structural media criticism is different than just saying I disagree with that, right? It’s, making a claim that there is a broader kind of systemic overlooking or bias against a specific worldview or series of issues.

And part of what thinking about it that way helps me see in the book is that the idea of structural media bias is something that actually was developed on the left in the 1930s and forties and then kind of migrates rightward. But the other important takeaway there, I think, and this is kind of a broader argument in the book, is that, there are bias claims, right? The right has been making bias claims as the book shows for something like 80 years now. The left was very prominently making bias claims in the thirties and forties and kind of lesser so, but continuing throughout this period as well. [00:04:00] but whether or not the media is or isn’t biased is a kind of perspectival argument, right?

There isn’t any objective or impartial measure by which we can assess one way or another, whether the media is biased. If the media looks biased to you, it has to do with your own perspective politically and what you would like the media to be doing or not be doing. And so part of what I argue is that rather than engaging in bias claims, it’s more productive to think about what are the disagreements we have right, with the world as it’s depicted in media, and then to, criticize the media as need be for those, inaccurate or incorrect, narratives of the reality.

But bias itself isn’t all that. Scientifically provable. It has, however, been a very important and lucrative foil for the modern conservative movement, which is what the book’s about.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and we’ll get into that. But just to push this point a little bit further, aren’t you effectively saying that somebody can’t say that, Fox News is biased? Are you saying that?

BAUER: I’m saying that Fox News is a right-wing media outlet with a right-wing ideological disposition. And so for, lemme give you a better example of this. The New York Times has been covering trans people in a horribly unethical way that is harming the trans community. One way to say that is that the New York Times is biased against trans people.

Another way to say that is, I disagree with how the New York Times is covering the trans community because it’s causing harm. And I think the latter claim is more defensible than the former. because the former gets into questions of, well, what would unbiased reporting look like? And it, still holds fast to this idea that there is an objective or impartial reality.

The second is saying, no, there isn’t an impartial objective reality that we’re trying to measure ourselves against. I think that this is harmful and we should be not doing it that way, right? And so instead of saying like, journalists, you need to do your job better, it’s saying, no, you need to rethink how you’re doing your job Actually.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And the point that no one could ever agree on [00:06:00] what a universally unbiased perspective means. Because even, even the idea of, well, we’re gonna quote everybody who has a stake on an issue, is that itself unbiased? Like you, that’s itself a, conjecture as well that, you would have to prove first.

BAUER: Right. And this idea of balance which is kind of one of the basis points for what objective or impartial reporting often looks like something I call it in the book the balance Imperative. That actually became a really important mechanism through which the right was able to get its viewpoints onto the air and into the newspapers in the 20th century, when they were a much more marginal infringe movement.

So even the balance imperative, which seems as though it’s, designed to create this perception of impartiality or objectivity itself, is basically an affordance that can be used by various political actors. And it’s been used pretty effectively by the right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and we’re seeing that just not a little bit a field in, in, in academia with that for instance, this week as we’re recording the Harvard Crimson student newspaper reported that the university there was the leadership is trying to raise $10 million to fund right wing professors in the name of reported balance.

BAUER: I just don’t, I just don’t think $10 million is enough. I mean, a, professor needs way more than $10 million. I think it’s hilarious when numbers like that are thrown around. It’s like, oh, in order to recruit a conservative into a college or university that already has many conservatives you need like CEO money, like small time CEO money.

I don’t even know. I.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And your point in the book, which you do hit repeatedly, and very well, is that the notion that the media are systematically against their worldview is, something that American reaction, it is kind of the center organizing principle of the modern reactionary American political movement.

So talk about that a bit [00:08:00] more if you could please.

BAUER: Yeah. So, the idea of media bias has been kind of a driving force for media activism on the right, for, the last 80 years. So the book looks all the way back into the 1940s and fifties. and one of its interventions is it talks about an organization, that emerged in 1951, ran through 57, called Facts Forum.

so Facts Forum was a, nominally balanced program, that was funded by HL Hunt, who was a influential oil man. his family, created the Kansas City Chiefs. he’s still like within the zeitgeist today in that way. he, was the, I believe the inspiration for the, Dallas character jr.

So this kind of eccentric billionaire funds this program in the early 1950s, right in the heart of the kind of McCarthy period. That basically is, one person, initially Dan Smoot, who’s a former FBI agent, and then a series of television radio programs that involved more people that were designed to create kind of a balanced debate style programming, right?

On the one hand, on the kind of liberal perspective, they would give kind of a boring answer, Odine answer on the right. They would give like a really excited answer. So even though it was skewed rhetorically in favor of right wing anti-communist politics, it was nevertheless Nominally balanced.

And part of the reason for this is that a few years before that, in 1949, the fe federal Communications Commission passed a new policy called the Fairness Doctrine and the Fairness Doctrine mandated that all broadcast license holders radio and, later television as well. Would be required to air programs about issues of public controversy in a way that balanced both sides of whatever that issue would be.

and so this balance imperative, which was a state regulatory imperative that shaped, mainstream news in the mid 20th century, and our expectations of objectivity, was almost immediately leveraged by the right by HL Hunt and his [00:10:00] contemporaries to try to get conservative viewpoints over the airwaves.

Now, importantly, in the, kind of, winter of 19 53, 54, facts Forum was criticized in the mainstream media. Ben Bagian actually, who’s, later goes on to write for the Washington Post and be the, he was the dean of the Berkeley, journalism school. he wrote a really important book called, media Monopoly about structural, media bias and consolidation in the 1980s.

He wrote a critique effects forum for the Providence Journal, where he was reporting at the time, basically calling it a right wing front. And so part of what the book argues is that’s a really important moment in the history of this idea of liberal media bias. Not only because conservatives already thought the media didn’t have enough conservative viewpoints on there, and we’re trying to get it using facts forum, right?

But because the media at that point starts targeting modern, early modern conservatives directly. So the, there’s a shift within facts forum from its early years into, its later years away from simply just covering whatever public Contras controversies are in terms of more of an inward focus on saying, we as an institution are being attacked for our beliefs by the legacy press.

Right? So the legacy media engages in an antagonistic relationship with this early modern conservative movement formation. Now, this is before you get things like the National Review, which is founded in 1955. It’s before the John Birch Society, which is formed later in the 1950s. So all of these later conservative movement efforts that foregrounded this idea that the media was biased against them and it was kind of an animating vision for why they needed to engage in media activism was in some ways shaped by this early antagonism between the media and the press.

and it’s interesting, if you look in 19 54, 55. After, the press kind of catches wise to Facts Forum’s bias and starts attacking them for bias. William F. Buckley, a young William F. Buckley, is actually on Facts Forum debating whether the media is biased or not biased. Right? I think it was like April of 1955 in the months [00:12:00] leading up to the founding of the National Review. And so part of what the book does is it says even before we typically, traditionally think the modern conservative movement begins in 1955, 1960s, right? Even before then, they already have this idea that the media is biased against ‘em, and it’s already kind of an animating vision for their politics.

The right’s spoken-word culture and debate aesthetics

SHEFFIELD: it is. And the other I thing about that attitude is that it is an idea that, well, everything is settled in a personal debate in a debate stage, kind of stage setting rather than a book setting or an academic paper setting. And this is, I think, a very notable and important aspect of the difference between the political culture of the left and right.

That the right is a spoken word. Culture, and it is not a literary culture. With some exceptions, of course, there were people from books obviously, but these books tended to be of much lower quality. They don’t have footnotes or they have very few, they don’t respond or even acknowledge other viewpoints.

And so, like this, is what shaped, I think the demand for the constant debate shows. What do you think

BAUER: So I think that’s an interesting position. I would frame it a little differently because I think that the National Review, for example, and later on things like say commentary or the, what is it? Other kind of neoconservative publications later in the 20th century.

SHEFFIELD: weekly standard?

BAUER: Right? Well, and like precursors to it. There lot of, interest Right. By people like Noman Potz and people like William F. Buckley in promoting like a literary aesthetic, right? Like the National Review had Joan Didion writing for it, right? And so I think that there was an aspiration among a lot of conservative movement leaders toward a more literary approach, right?

Toward a more intellectual, written text approach. [00:14:00] That was designed though, I would argue to basically create a sense of respectability for conservative ideas within elite circles. And so in that sense, there was an expectation, at least in the 20th century, that if you are a serious political movement with serious ideology and serious philosophy, that you did engage in kind of literary production.

It wasn’t just about talking right in the TV or radio or whatever it would be. That being said, and this is another kind of subtle argument within the book, is that the Wright never said, well, we’re just gonna focus on radio, or we’re just gonna focus on literary journals, or we’re just gonna focus on tv, or whatever it would be.

They’ve always done all of it, right? And so it’s kind of, opportunistic, it’s iterative, it’s entrepreneurial. It’s throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks, right? and so I do think that the Buckley kind of respectability politics did at least outwardly value a kind of literary.

Sensibility. but at the same time they were very pugilistic and involved in debate style, right? So Buckley himself, who again with the National Review is invested in that literary style, had firing Line, right? Which was a TV show that was a debate show between him and a variety of liberal thinkers that would come on and, engage in conversation with him.

So I do think that you’re onto something, that there’s something about debate that is particularly I don’t know, aligned with conservative aesthetics and views of ideology. But I think they did both.

SHEFFIELD: Well, they did. But I mean, if you look at the output of National Review compared to, let’s say, the Nation or the New Republic during those years, and the authors who came out of them, came out of them writing their own books. Like, I mean, Buckley himself, I think is a perfect example. Like, here’s a guy that he wrote about politics for, more than 60 years, and yet he never produced a substantive book of political theory, not one in his entire life.

And in fact, he admitted that he was, he had tried to make one, which he [00:16:00] called the, I think it was the the Revolt Against the Masses was the tentative title. The book and he couldn’t finish it because he was not able to develop a coherent, extended political philosophy.

BAUER: Totally. And I think Buckley was an organizer. I mean, he aspired to be a literary grade and a philosopher and all these things, but he wasn’t one at the end of the day. Right. and so he was a, an extremely effective organizer, and we see the kind of repercussions of that. but I think that’s also an interesting point, right?

Is that the right it isn’t as though it’s like a movement of philosophers or a movement of literary minds. It’s a lot of really well organized and organizing people actually, and then like a few folks along the way that are better or worse at these other things, right? So there are, political thinkers and philosophers within the movement.

I disagree with them. all of them, right? For various different reasons, depending on the thinker. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re not engaged in a process that they identify as. Intellectual, right? I mean, the Australians, the West Coast Australians, especially writers, is definitely see themselves as engaged in kind of political philosophy, regardless of if we think that’s, doing it good or not, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I mean, yeah, they certainly think of themselves as doing that, but it is notable and I don’t want to stay on this point too long here, the people that are creating these-- like who do have a more philosophical bent, pretty much all of them leave the reactionary politics eventually.

So whether it’s the Whitaker Chambers, whether it’s George Will in the present moment, whether it’s Gary Wills or, so like all of these people who actually are first class minds, generally speaking, they leave because to have fully coherent systematic thoughts is not welcome because it, means that you are independent and, and I have personal experience at that. I, have to say.

BAUER: Yeah, for [00:18:00] sure.

SHEFFIELD: All right. So, but going back to Buckley though in particular, as you note, he’s a key node in this making the liberal media notion. So he, he had kind of a bifurcated approach because on the one hand, he began his career. As a defender of Joe McCarthy, who was literally trying to censor people he didn’t like politically.

And then, and Buckley himself wrote a book saying, McCarthy was great. You should have left him alone. And then, and then of course his first book, God and Man at Yale, was a protracted, hurray against non-Christians at Yale and saying they should be fired. And that alumni should get rid of them.

But then at the same time he also to the general public was demanding these, demanding the fairness doctrine, demanding that he be allowed to debate as many people as possible, demanding a free show on PBS, which he got like that that hypocrisy was just suffused through his entire career. And it’s, maintained ever since by his successors.

BAUER: Yeah. I mean, I think that, so I actually don’t know what Buckley thought about the fairness doctrine. I didn’t see any of, none of his writings really engaged with it. But, nevertheless, he was kind of engaged in leveraging the affordances of it for sure. Right. Especially with firing Line Right.

Was a clear example of him leveraging that. I think that one of the things I argue in my book and the book is a little bit less focused on the, Buckley Circle, right. And the respectability politics associated with the National Review, and is a little more focused on some of the corners of the conservative movement that were less reputable and in particular the John Birch Society which published a series of magazines and did a whole lot of media and other forms of activism concurrent with Buckley, but often is overlooked or kind of seen as fringe, right? Because of Buckley’s efforts to try to marginalize them. And part of what the book argues is that [00:20:00] if you think about this in relation to this idea of the liberal media bias claim, it actually clarifies some things, right?

So Buckley. Even though he would participate in saying that the media was liberal and all these sorts of things, he desperately needed the media, right, the mainstream legacy media to take modern conservative ideology seriously. This is part of the reason why he engaged in this kind of like intellectual style debates on firing line.

This is why he created National Review. It’s about creating a perception that conservatives are serious and worthy of being considered, kind of the responsible opposition to new deal liberalism, right? The John Birch society did not see themselves that way, right? they were much less invested in the policy or the politics of respectability, and which we’re much more invested in, engaging in rallying cries, for example, against the civil rights movement, for example, or in favor of more armed military conflict against the Soviet Union direct military conflict with the Soviet Union.

Interestingly. Unlike Buckley, who was treated as kind of a responsible part of the right, and interviewed by mainstream media outlets, the Birchers were targeted, right? In a similar way to the way facts forum was right As fringe K’s, far right outside of the bounds of respectable American politics.

Buckley himself played a role in pushing them there, right? But the mainstream media covered the birchers that way, as well as kind of an oddity or a curiosity. And so part of what the book argues is that this idea of liberal media bias is less, the creation of Buckley and the respectability politics set, and more kind of a bottom up bubbling of this kind of grassroots mobilizations like the Birchers, who not only saw the media as covering the world in a way that was dissonant with conservative ideology, but they also felt directly attacked by the press.

And this really helps cultivate that belief in liberal media bias, not just within the Buckley set, but [00:22:00] kind of among the conservative grassroots in the 1960s.

From Facts Forum to the Birchers: the origins of ‘liberal media bias’

SHEFFIELD: yeah, well, that’s true. And they definitely didn’t receive a lot of negative coverage. Although that’s, point I, this is where I have to plug my own personal a, personal term terminological note that I often say in episodes, which is that to me, I think it’s important to note that these people are not conservative.

They’re reactionary that Dwight Eisenhower was a conservative. He was somebody ‘cause a conservative, somebody who, looks at the current government and the current society and says, that’s looks good to me. We’re gonna keep it, we’re gonna conserv it how it’s and maybe we’ll tinker with it a little bit.

Overall, we’re not gonna do much either way. Whereas Buckley and his, and the, Birchers and all these other people, they were trying to roll back the clock. Like they were, they wanted to repeal the New Deal. They wanted to get rid of the Great Society when that came along. And I think that it matters in terms of when we’re, thinking about the, their, how they conduct themselves and the, method of thinking that they used.

And to me and, this is maybe a little more philosophical than you wanna get here, but perhaps not. But it, like, to me, there were two key figures that American Reactionaries kind of chose between. So there were two philosophers. One was Michael Oakeshott, who was an English political philosopher.

And then there was another guy named Eric Voegelin, who was a German who immigrated to the United States. And Buckley chose Voegelin. And Voegelin was a guy who, he was a, he was completely pretentious poor scholar. He literally made up an idea, basically a conspiracy theory, that there was a, there was Gnosticism that was a religion that with animating everyone, he didn’t like that they were secretly a Gnostic.

And then as his basis, he, made, he literally used made up quotations from books about ancient Christian gnostics that were not even correct in [00:24:00] many ways. And late in his life, he finally did actually admit publicly, oh yeah, I probably wouldn’t have called this Gnosticism. It was too late by then because, Buckley and all these other people had imported this idea into their politics. Whereas, and, of course Voegelin was this kind religious zealot as well in his own way. Whereas Michael Oakeshott was non-religious. And so the, there, so there was this big gulf, I think between American right-wing politics because it was reactionary and not conservative for a long time when you compare it to the Right, right politics of other countries.

BAUER: For sure. And I, think that yeah, for sure. So I think that you may be right in a kind of philosophical conceptual way that the Birchers were reactionaries and not conservatives, but to a, to an individual, if you had put a gun to their head and asked the Bircher, are you a conservative? They would’ve said yes and they would’ve put a gun to your head if you said they weren’t.

Right. And so I think that there’s, a way that we can intellectually debate philosophically what is or isn’t true conservative, what that means. I haven’t been a conservative myself since the 20th century, as my students would say, right? My kind of like shift left word coincided with the kind of nine 11 moment and the Iraq war.

And so I have almost no dog in the fight of whether something is true or not true conservatism, what I see is a large umbrella of a variety of different claims to conservatism all of which have basically been flattened by being opposed to throughout most of the 20th century communism, and then all of the other various associated things that were labeled to be communists, including the media, including higher ed, including the Democratic Party, right?

And so the. You’re right that there are distinctions [00:26:00] to be made within conservatism. There are, defensible claims to say that there’s conservatism versus reactionary versus whatever you wanna call it, fascism. But that, in some ways overlooks the fact that all of those people were able to ban to together.

Throughout most of the 20th century in opposition to their enemies and their enemies being the left, broadly speaking, liberals also. And, the press. and so it’s interesting ‘cause if you look back historically, even within the book, you can see this HL hunt in 51. He tries to rebrand conservatism as constructivism because if you look at public opinion polls in the late forties, they showed that conservatism as a form of political identification, not as a philosophy or that sort of thing, just as a way of identifying your politics was extremely unpopular.

This is a time period where the New Deal was very popular. People like to identify as liberal. It was much more popular, right? And so Hunt initially thought it was a branding issue. We just need to call it constructivism. Nobody really wanted to do that. There wasn’t, that wasn’t all that exciting of an ideology, or not an ideology, but identity for people either.

And ultimately it’s conservatism that takes up that kind of empty signifier that people all plug their identities into. And so, so I hear you and I think that there is a certain corner of conservatives. I would imagine a lot of folks that write for the bulwark, for example, today, right. or George will. I hear you when you say he’s left the right, he is nevertheless invested in the war in Iran.

And so I think, I don’t know, right?

SHEFFIELD: Well, he left the Republican party. I think he still identifies as conservative.

BAUER: Yeah. And so this is what I mean is like what does it really mean to leave is an important question. And where does one’s investments lie, I think is part of the animating. Question of the debate of what counts or doesn’t count as conservative, right? For me, I’m more interested [00:28:00] in what are the links and bridges that allow for people that identify as kind of more highbrow, philosophical, conservative, to basically be on the same political page, right, to all ally and collate with what you would term reactionaries, right?

How do they see themselves as actually engaged in the same project, and even when they don’t see themselves in the same project as Buckley and the Birchers didn’t at a certain moment, nevertheless, they’re supporting the same policies and they’re supporting the same politicians often as well, although not always.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s a good point. I guess, yeah, I’m just saying that, like the success of, these reactionaries. Is dependent on this entryism with people who are, actual conservatives and, and, then, but they also do that, the flattening on the left. So as you said, everybody on the left is a communist according to there is no such thing as a liberal. There’s no such thing as a progressives. There’s no such thing as a socialist. They’re all communists. Everyone is a communist. And, that, that rhetorical trope is still ex extremely common. In today’s Republican politics, Donald Trump himself frequently talks about communism, that he is opposing communism in the Democratic Party, even though, they, it is a party that won’t even have run on universal healthcare.

BAUER: The, so the Soviet Union has been dead for 35 years, and was there international communism in the early and mid 20th century? Yeah, there was. Did it have the kind of power that the right was concerned with? No, it didn’t. But. I think it’s interesting that people like Trump or various other conservatives are still throwing communism as like this boogeyman when it’s been effectively dead for 35 years, and I, wonder how that’s gonna play out going forward as communism is Historical relic effectively.

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, it really is. Well, and the, let’s, go back though to, to the history in the book here for so [00:30:00] the idea that the, media is against, our viewpoints like this is, it became the organizing principle with both the, in a way that you know, the, media magazines and, newspapers, it was, they were linked to the candidates explicitly in, in, in some cases, even like directly with funding, like the, candidates would raise money for the media and then the media would promote the candidates. I mean, it was a really effective system. You talk about some of the early people who were doing that and what they were if you would.

BAUER: Yeah, sure. So, you’re right that there was a lot of collaboration with the movement conservatives and the media outlets. And, for most of the 20th century, I argue a lot of the outlets, not all of them, but a lot of them were aligned with the movement itself. So you got the Human Events, you got National Review, right?

You have, by the 1970s, you have organizations like what is it? Richard Vry and, Paul Weer create the kind of new right affiliations and organizations in the seventies. But it wasn’t all folks who were deliberately aligned with specific individual candidates, right? oftentimes it was individuals with specific projects that then aligned with political candidates.

So a good example of this would be like Accuracy in Media, which is one of the organizations that I write about in the book which was a, watchdog group still exists, that’s designed to basically argue that the, and point out evidence that the media is biased against. conservative ideas against capitalism against us imperialism, although they don’t call it that.

And the Accuracy in Media, though, interestingly, if you look at its origins, a lot of times if you look, at coverage of it in the seventies and eighties, because they were often defending Nixon in the Nixon administration, there was a lot of accusations that Nixon was behind it, that it was basically a front for Nixon and Nixon’s campaigns.

But if you look at the archives and like how it emerged, it actually emerged out of a kind of a, an, [00:32:00] anti-communist luncheon group, that was founded actually by a liberal anti-communist named Al. Al what is it? Forget his name at the moment. McDowell is his last name. And he cr he was a union member.

He was a organizer with a union, who also was an anti-communist and he would host these luncheons in Washington, DC for other anti-communist. And one of the people that was a part of that luncheon and ended up taking it over when he died was a guy named Reed Irvine, who was a former federal Reserve banker.

And he. Got in his head in the 1960s that the media was biased. he wanted to kind of pivot that luncheon group, which was vaguely associated with an anti-communist group called the, council Against Communist Aggression, which is a very funny acronym caca, right. And so he, creates accuracy in media in early 1969, or basically September of 1969.

And then two months later, Spiro Agnew gives his famous speech again, denouncing the, networks for their coverage of Nixon’s Vietnamization speech, which is a speech where Nixon uses the term silent majority and says basically that the silent majority is, tired of fighting the war in Vietnam.

And we need to turn things over to the Vietnamese to fight on their own, right. and so the public. Responded positively to Nixon’s speech. the press pan it though. And so Agnew gets up in November of 1969. He gives two speeches, one in Des Moines, Iowa, and another in Montgomery, Alabama, denouncing the, media for their coverage of Nixon and accusing them of bias accuracy and media had already existed by a few months, and then leverages Agnew’s speech in order to basically build up its donations and build up its profile throughout the 1970s.

And so, even though these things look like they’re working in lockstep, and it’s, it is true. And this is, relegated to a footnote in the book. Agnew and Nixon both donate money to aim later on in life, but like $500, like, not like millions of dollars or thousands of dollars, [00:34:00] which, other folks, were doing Joseph Kors for example, were doing.

And so oftentimes it looks as though these organizations are working in lockstep, and oftentimes they are. But sometimes it’s more just a matter of groups doing their own projects that they think are important, and then those ideas dovetailing together.

The right’s decentralized media ecosystem

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But, and that’s a, a really good point because it, it, it does illustrate a strong difference between now the, American left and right approach media. So on the left side of the fence, like Hillary Clinton is, was the, made the almost perfect encapsulation of how they viewed the attitude that you just said, like the vast right wing conspiracy as if they were all, taking orders from one committee and one person.

And that was never the case. Obviously they had plenty of meetings and, plenty of groups and whatnot. And a lot of, and they all knew each other in many ways, but they hated each other.

BAUER: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: In many ways.

BAUER: Lots of infighting and lots of overlooking. I mean, one of the things I write about later in the book is, I think it was Terry Dolan who is a new right activist in the 1970s and eighties. he writes this memo that basically is like, here’s what we need to do to fight against the liberal media.

And he outlines a proposal for groups that already exist, frankly. Right. A accuracy and media had already existed for almost a decade and a half by the time he writes this and that. One of the things he was calling for was like a watchdog, like there was multiple di and like others were like various media operations that already existed.

And so even within the movement there would be these like memos and things that would go around. They’d be like, okay. These things already exist. You just don’t like the people that run them, or like you, you want a different version of it. And the interesting thing is that, they would create those new groups.

Read more

If you’re like most people who pay attention to the news, you’ve probably felt it. We are living in a transitional moment, a time of great uncertainty as old realities are giving way to new ones. Right now, the future looks fuzzy and it’s hard to deny that humanity’s collective vision of the future is in a crisis of its own. Everywhere you look in film, television, novels, and social media, the future that everyone’s talking about is a dark one. Dystopia is the default.

That’s a big problem because the future hasn’t happened yet, which means that if we want a better one, we have to start thinking about what that would look like.

We deserve great things, but we can only have them if we can envision them first.

The future isn’t fixed. It’s what we make of it, and that’s something that my guest on today’s episode, Monika Bielskyte knows firsthand from direct, personal experience. She grew up in the Soviet Union, a country that seemed like it would last forever until one day it didn’t.

She’s done a lot since then, but today Monika is working as a futurist and media consultant for nonprofit organizations, businesses like Nike, and films like Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. In all of her work, she’s focused on building a vision of a beautiful possible to counter the doom and gloom of the future dystopias that are all too common in our present-day media.

The video of our conversation is available, the transcript is below. You can subscribe to Theory of Change and other Flux podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Podcasts, YouTube, Patreon, Substack, and elsewhere.

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• How banks and corporate monopolies ruined the internet

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

09:07 — Hope and the power of fiction

16:27 — Humanity’s progress and the stakes

25:00 — Most superhero movies emphasize human disempowerment

33:04 — Reactionary oligarchs’ urge to disclaim their own humanity

42:41 — The future as the imagined past within reactionary futurism

49:34 — Why reactionary futurism redirects public focus from present injustice

53:04 — Toward a vision of regenerative futures that are self-sustaining

01:07:33 — Why hopeful futures avoid false binaries

01:15:26 — No human is ‘typical,’ so inclusion must apply to everyone

01:22:48 — What many left-of-center people miss about generative AI

01:31:59 — Embodiment in AI and machine learning

01:36:39 — Radical tenderness  and the beautiful possible

Audio Transcript

The 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 Monika Bielskyte. Hey, welcome to Theory of Change.

MONIKA BIELSKYTE: Hi, thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to join you all the way from South Africa.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, we are doing a long distance episode today, so [00:03:00] very fun. And it’s about a very important topic which is something that everyone has a stake in the future. But before we get into the the broader points here, because we both believe that existence and minds are embodied let’s start with your personal background. Tell us about your story and how does it inform your views on all this?

BIELSKYTE: I guess I’m very much with Robert Sapolsky in thinking that we do not emerge from some kind of ether or vacuum. We are very much shaped from the sort of cultural and biological substrate that we are part of that sort of nourishes and fertilizes us.

So culturally and historically, I was born into a very particular moment in a country that doesn’t exist anymore, Soviet Union and grew up in newly [00:04:00] liberated Lithuania. As a child, I was taken to the Baltic Way, which was the protest where about 30% of the population of the Baltic states held each other hand to hand in a continuous line across the three countries: Estonia, Laia, Lithuania which very much sort of precipitated was part of the things that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. I’m also a Chernobyl kid. Uh, my parents were next to Priya when Chernobyl blew up. So in a way it’s a bit of a miracle that I’m even here today. And. Again, I got to witness as a child the collapse of a totality and regime that seemed to be inevitable.

And yet it did collapse. And yet things did change in the country that I grew up in. And they didn’t change that much. Just about 30 minutes from our capital in a country called Belarus [00:05:00] just next door to us. They have had the longest lasting dictatorship in the whole of Europe. And so what all of that taught me is that future is something that you shape and you don’t shape it alone.

You shape it with your entire community. You shape it also in exchange with everything else that happens in the world. And today as a futurist that gets to talk about how futures get to be shaped. Of course, I am informed by that very visceral experience of that nothing is an inevitability, but you know, some hills are more uphill to climb for sure.

and I always think, you know, how growing up, just sort of one day from the next. We were told as children at school that this history that we were taught was the wrong history and now we [00:06:00] receive new history books and this history is the right history. And of course, sort of was swung between these different extremes, right from completely erasure of cultural, national, et cetera, identity in favor of sort of that hegemonic Soviet ideology to then in favor some kind of over idealization of certain aspects of national identity.

I also have to mention that I am a descendant of survivors, both of the Stalins Gulags and Hitler concentration camps. So this idea that there is never that easy goodie or badie and how populations oftentimes get caught up between hostile powers and where one thing being horrendous does not make another thing good, and how one bad thing weaponizes another is also something that seems to be sort of very natural for me to grasp [00:07:00] and much harder to a lot of other people, especially in the global north, especially in the western world.

So I really think of myself as a product of that particular moment as a product of the collapse of the physical walls that. Kept the population in right, that closed people in you were not allowed to leave the Soviet Union and the opening up of the digital wall walls. And so I could never also take these digital platforms for granted.

Like a lot of my peers that grew up in the Londons and Paris and New Yorks could because as a child, you know, in a very small town in North Lithuania, I didn’t have access to almost any resources at all to educate myself. And so the first sort of access to the digital communities of knowledge was something that, and it was absolutely, life changing and was [00:08:00] really kind of the foundation of what I got to become today.

And I think this is really important, this perspective that I have, that I think is really quite different to a lot of again, typical global north futurist discourse is one of the reasons that motivates me to open up this field to more people, right? I currently live out of choice in the global south in Johannesburg, South Africa.

I’m myself of mixed sort of Eurasian identity, and I see just how important it is to open the field of strategic foresight and futurism, to people that have different cultural disciplinary. Disability, et cetera, et cetera, identities because they have a lot to offer. While at the same time, of course, we’re preserving the rigor within the field and the critical inquiry instead of making it free for all.

SHEFFIELD: [00:09:00] Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. and we will get to this point later about the idea of a, future that has everybody in it.

Hope and the power of fiction

SHEFFIELD: One of the other things in your work that I’ve seen is this idea that everybody has hopes, even if they don’t label them as such. And there’s a lot of nihilism, which we will also talk about in cultures, we have hopes and expectations for the future, whether we want to or not. And what we expect plays a big role in what happens, I think.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah. I mean, people act like we are also hopeless today, but I believe if we were really as hopeless as we maintain ourselves to be, we would be out there committing suicide on a mass scale, right? Every morning to wake up. And to do even the most basic things, you still have to [00:10:00] maintain a certain degree of hope to even go through these basic motions, right?

And so hope is really vital. But also it’s sort of being drenched away from us. And part of sort of, I think there’s this interesting dynamic of hope and hopelessness by how much our depictions of the future within science fiction realm have been dominated by the hopelessness of dystopia in a way.

This normalization of doom and gloom. And then there’s nothing that you can do about it is meant to disengage us, right? If we believe that nothing can be done about the future, well then we do nothing about it. And for the longest time, there was that discourse that I was pushing back against that. Well, dystopia is what cells, right?

[00:11:00] People want to see dystopian visions. And really it’s only a particular type of person that want to see dystopian visions. And that person happened to be generally the kind of person also get to, got to direct those visions, right when your life is very safe, very secure, very boring. Not particularly traumatized in a way, seeing these sort of fantasizing about the end of the world, doom and gloom is something that is exciting, but truly for the majority world, people that have lived through dictatorships, people that have lived through oppressions, people that have these visceral stories in their blood and their bones of their ancestors surviving in a way ends of the world.

You know, and anybody that contains trauma of violence or sexual assault in a way we don’t really entertain those dystopian stories that can be [00:12:00] profoundly re-traumatizing. And so hope is something that I believe we’ve been longing for on that grand scale, and yet there hasn’t been as much of it.

And whenever we see those examples in something like Black Panther. Right or recently Heated Rivalry, which is not sci-fi in its sort of presentation. There’s no rockets or spaceships or intergalactic space travel am my own uploading within it. But it’s really futuristic in terms of terms, the social reality that it imagines the kind of social, cultural trauma healing, right?

that it posits as actually possible. We see just,

SHEFFIELD: Oh, I’m sorry. Do you mind for people who don’t know what Heated Rivalry is to give a little background of it, if you’re talking about it there, please.

BIELSKYTE: So Heated Rivalry [00:13:00] is this TV show produced independently supported by Canadian government. That is a gay hockey show. So nothing sci-fi about it on the surface. However, the kind of narrative that it presents, the kind of possibility for sense of community, for queer love for healing family trauma for neurodivergence inclusion that doesn’t become fetishized.

In a way it’s more sci-fi than most of the sci-fi that we have seen. Something like Black Panther. It had a lot of, you know, typical Disney, Marvel cinematic universe, aspects of futuristic weapons and spaceships, et cetera, et cetera. But some of the most distinctly futuristic aspects within it was just how pluralistic it was, the fact that there was still cultural plurality.

That there was still multiple species, humans and non-humans that [00:14:00] remain in communion together. That cultural traditions still survived alongside the bleeding edge scientific research. Right? And those visions have resonated with the audiences. And so for the longest time, we’re told that people are not into that kind of depiction of the future, that future depiction that is hopeful, that somehow still contains what is, what could be deemed as sort of cringe expressions of love and affection and vulnerability is in fact something that we, as most of the people in the world that have lived through our own respective traumas, we actually long for, we need and we want to.

And if we’re recognized that not just our actions, but also ideas have consequences, that history is not just sequence of events, but predominantly of ideas and worldviews. [00:15:00] That ended up shaping these events. We understand just how urgent it is for us to have different depictions of the future. So when people ask me, aren’t you not depressed about the future?

I say, considering how depressing our future visions have been, it’s surprising that we are not doing worse than we are. And if we understand that we are unable to do something before imagining it first, it is also unsurprising why so much? Our, so much of our future decision making is deeply flawed because we do not really have these imaginative yet reality, sort of real data, real science, grounded future visions that seem realistic, yet inspiring and energizing.

And so I think this is one of the greatest priorities. You know, if we understand that those who control the fantasy, [00:16:00] control the fiction, that these fictions end up shaping our actions we need to start with imagination first. And that imagination should not be just optimistic, wishful thinking. It has to be reality informed.

It has to understand how the status quo has been manufactured, and yet imagine possibilities beyond it.

SHEFFIELD: It does. Yeah. And, we will come back to that.

Humanity’s progress and the stakes

SHEFFIELD: Just as a historical matter, I, two points that, that I’m thinking about is one is that it’s easy to think about a terrible dystopian future for yourself. But the reality is that humanity has come a very long way from where we were, not just from our earliest ancestors, but even in the past few hundred years, or even the few past few decades.

So that’s worth always keeping in mind. People sometimes think, oh, well this is like in the U.S., I run into a lot of people who think oh, this is the worst [00:17:00] time in our nation’s history. It’s so depressing I can’t take it. There’s just so many bad things. And I’m like, well, you didn’t really follow the news in the 1970s when there was all kinds of regular domestic terrorism in the United States. That’s not happening right now, at least. And there’s a lot of other positive things that have happened.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean, again, the, kind of stories that I grew up of my grandparents and my parents and the kind of things that they have survived really do not allow me to drown in self-pity of how terrible the world that I inhabited. And I think that’s a really, important reminder, right?

That if you actually have read about human history, then on one side you don’t become complacent because this notion that it cannot get worse is completely false. It can get so, so, so, so, so, so, so much worse. And at the same time, this moment [00:18:00] that we live in, we should obviously not be passive at all about it, but it is definitely not the worst that we have historically lived through.

So I think, you know, on one way, you know, we have to remember that sense of urgency and how with this exponentially potent, especially destructive technological tools, because they can be very powerful without being positively constructive. The stakes are increasingly high. Yet at the same time, we are not living in the worst moment in history.

Some groups, some populations in some specific geographies at this moment might be living one of their worst moments in history. But on a global scale, we still have an incredibly good life. And yet if we do not work for the future, sort of not to slide from our feet, uh, we might end up seeing the worst aspects of history being repeated and maybe much faster because the technological tools of [00:19:00] destruction are.

Exponentially more potent and fast moving.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, It’s a balance that you have to keep and, and ultimately the only people who can have the time and ability to wallow in how bad they think things are that is a position of privilege actually. It is not a position of oppression.

But the other thing I was gonna say is that, just as a historical matter, the idea of how fiction and how stories and what you take into your mind from the world and from media, that was actually something that Plato, the, ancient Greek philosopher was concerned about, like, so in his Republic book about which was people often think of it as what he thought of as his ideal society. And I’m, I don’t think that’s quite true. But one of the points that he makes in there is that he wanted to censor all depictions in the arts [00:20:00] of negative things, because to let people see the protagonists doing terrible things to each other or to other people or themselves that had a negative impact on their minds and, what they, and their sort of desire to strive for justice or to improve things.

And I think he was right about that. Now, obviously, we wouldn’t wanna ban that. But what he said, I mean, it, does kind of underscore what you were just saying a moment ago.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean I really think again, of these examples of, Jacob Tierney and Ryan Kler and how, you know, even when they spoke Jacob Tierney is the director, he rivalry, and, uh, Ryan Kler, director of Black Panther and Sinners more recently. How even in the process of creation, right, on the sets it was really important to create [00:21:00] that sense of community, of understanding, of vulnerability really supportive the, very opposite of kind of the toxicity of the film set that Hollywood is known for, where sort of, especially women get pitted against each other, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, where sort of, you know, uh, the team is being dehumanized and sort of exhausted to a point of mental collapse.

I mean, I’ve, worked on some projects where, you know, some people literally ended up in, in psychiatric hospitals with the burnouts because of just how dehumanizing, the treatment from the director and or producer was. and then when you see what emerges from their creations, both in heated rivalry and let’s use sort of sinners as, a sort of newer example in Black Panther there’s a lot of very difficult thematic being broached.

There’s a lot of drama. There’s a lot of challenge that our heroes have to overcome. Some of them do [00:22:00] meet tragic ends in sinners, not thankfully for now in heated rivalry. though we always kind of on the edge of the seat, we always expect things somehow to end badly because we’ve been trained, right?

That bad things happen to good people, right? And that’s why you shouldn’t be good. You shouldn’t be loving, you shouldn’t be caring. And what’s so interesting from that and I think specifically with sinners, you know, it is sort of labeled as a horror movie. A lot of people actually, again, who have trauma, who do not love horror genre or anything that has too much violence in particular, have avoided watching it because of that label.

And yet when I watched it, there are moments within that film where wine creates these wonderful protopian glimpses, you know, and I’m obviously very biased because I had the chance to work on a fairly minor capacity as a futurist, uh, with him on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. But I think [00:23:00] he is one of the.

Most sort of change making directors sort of not just generational talent for what he puts out on screen, but also how he puts it out, right? And the profound humanity that emerges. And these glimpses. Even within very dire circumstances that are presented in a context of sinners movie there are these moments of a glimpse into a possibility of a world.

And it’s not just what that world looks like, it’s also what my friend, peer, and colleague Jenka Gurfinkel writes, it’s about what it feels like, and it’s also kind of what I speak in my framework, embodied futures. There’s that almost sort of visceral sensation of a possibility of joy and that joy and the present again, as Jenka says, [00:24:00] makes join the future seem plausible.

And I think this is so much of what we need. And, in the past we almost had these very binary storytellings, you know, it’s either punishment, detonation, glue warnings, or it’s some kind of perfect future prescriptive sort of moralizing paradise vision. But you should not be questioning whose blood flesh and bones this paradise was built on.

And, protopian thinking, right? That sort of realistic, yet hopeful thinking and visioning engages with something that is much more complex, right? Imagining possibilities of a world where humans strive to do better and do better, but it comes with hard lessons, right? It comes through strenuous effort.

It doesn’t just come easy. It’s not about just being right from the first go. It’s about trying and learning and acknowledging and expanding your horizons and your humanity in a [00:25:00] process.

Most superhero movies emphasize human disempowerment

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. The other thing that’s different, I think about the Black Panther franchise is that when you look at most superhero movies-- and God, there are so many of them-- they tend to deemphasize in a lot of ways the regular person, the regular community, the regular nation.

There might be a token, little scrappy little kid who who does something, or something like that. But by and large, these stories are about a future and a present in which you don’t have any ability to participate as a regular person. that really has a, bad impact I think, on a lot of people.

And when I have done reporting on, for instance, people who believe in the, Q Anon conspiracy theory, like they, they have as their belief that, well, I’m just going to sit back and enjoy the show. I’m just going to sit [00:26:00] back and eat popcorn. Because they, really do imagine that there are these fantastical figures, like Donald Trump who are gonna save them.

But it isn’t even just these far right people that have these views either. Like a lot of the rhetoric I think from people who are opposing Trump in the United States. They seem to have this idea of, well, if we just tell people what he’s doing is wrong, then that will stop it and it, doesn’t work that way.

There is no “adult in the room” who’s going to save you. There are no people who are going to come to your rescue. You and us we’re the ones that we’ve been waiting for, because there is no one else in this planet or this world.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean, I think we have to remember that the very notion of superhero, I mean, it, kind of has roots in the eugenic ideology and sort of eugenic thinking of the Uber mech, right? And of course, the [00:27:00] Uber mech requires the un mech, right? The superhuman requires the subhuman. And, uh.

Those who control the fantasy, control the future, the fictions, if they’re potent enough, if they’re compelling enough, always end up bleeding into reality. Right? it’s not just that reality informs our fictions end up shaping our reality because this is what we consider to be aspirational.

So of course there’s this direct pipeline from a superhero and, it’s big cape coming in and sort of saving the day and saving everyone, and then somebody like Trump, standing there on a podium all the way back in 2015 and saying that he alone can save the world.

And people believing that. And I remember vividly that moment, I was actually considering moving to LA ‘cause I was working a lot between Hollywood and Silicon Valley. And the moment he announced his candidacy, I, completely reconsidered. I was like, you know what? I am not making that move.

I don’t see myself living in the US under under him. [00:28:00] I already was thinking how difficult it might be to travel, and deal with TSA with my kind of travel pattern at that time. And, and people literally did not think it conceivable a lot of university educated, progressive, sort of the who’s, who of our intellectual community really thought of it as a joke.

And, and I did not. Because in reality, at that grand scale, we are shaped by these popular fictions. And it has always been the case when I started doing the work that I do. And I started doing sort of public speaking. And I was saying that science fiction really matters. It’s serves as a blueprint.

It shapes what do we consider future worthy? What do we think belongs? Who do we think belongs in the future? Right? And it does not reflect necessarily reality. Science fiction has mostly misguided us to think that something is futuristic, when really it just [00:29:00] seems futuristic. And not just because it’s culturally, socially political, outdated, most of the time it’s outdated from a scientific standpoint.

But again, going back to that point, within indigenous cultures, there was always that, duh, the most basic degree of understanding that every song, every pattern, every story, every ritual, sort of essentially every form of content is of core form of content that guides human behavior, that guides our values, that guides what we consider to be aspirational.

And yet somehow, especially in the western world, at some point, you know, before the connections between the, Ted bro actions and the ideologies they follow became truly sort of undeniable. So many people try to say, relax, this is just entertainment. It doesn’t matter. These are just movies.

These are just games. These are TV series. You know, this [00:30:00] is not how future gets decided. And nothing could be further from a truth. Future is decided by people acting upon what they consider to be worthy acting upon. And so today we find ourselves in this world, right, where still so many of us believe that somebody is gonna save the day, that there is gonna be on one or the other side, that magical superhero.

And then, you know, on the other side, you also have quite a lot of people, I guess on the lefty side that will say, well, no, you should not engage with any of that structural change, with any of that political change, with any of that corporate change by working again with the power structures that be.

But the reality is that all of these systems of justice and injustice of equity and inequity, they are made out of all of us, right? And so we need the [00:31:00] grassroots push and we also need that infiltration of structures of power to make them a lot less hostile to, to the grassroots. And so there’s always that continuous flow.

And when people ask me as a futurist, so what can I do? A lot of times they say, well, you know, but you know, I’m only working in advertising. I’m working on something so superficial. I’m not here saving the environment. I’m not here solving these dreary military conflicts. And my answer to that, that with whatever that each of us does, we will actually be much more capable of changing the world when we engage in our field of expertise instead of going and doing something else.

Instead of just go, I mean, it’s wonderful to go to some protest or support some kind of NGO, et cetera, et cetera, you know, on the weekend or once a month or once a year, then not doing that at all. But the truth is that if we really consider it, what is [00:32:00] the core of what we do? What is the core, our knowledge, what is the core of our expertise?

And we think how I can do it in such a way that I’m able to shape the future somehow positively through something that I’m really, good at, instead of just doing it how it’s always been done, how I can shape the future through that, through this thing that I actually have expertise, power, insider knowledge, and influence within.

And if all of us were to do more of that, and if all of us, you know, instead of just hoping for these, single leader, but also to leaderless movement. S if we understood that the real movements, the real change that lasts, it’s about leader fullness. It’s about all of us doing the things that we the best at and tapping into each other’s knowledge and expertise and, engaging with each other.

Not just because we’re the same, but because we are able [00:33:00] to contribute to each other. I think we’d see more of a change that we want to see.

Reactionary oligarchs’ urge to disclaim their own humanity

SHEFFIELD: So we’ve talked a bit about the things that people who support democracy can do, and we will circle back to that at the end of the conversation here, but I do want to talk about the people who are working to end democracy at this juncture of human history. And it’s not an exaggeration to say that’s how they feel and, but it’s, it, it can be difficult I think for sometimes for people to understand that because these people are not coherent when they speak and they don’t have a, good ability to write. They’re not really interested in reading. The only things they ever write are kind of on. On Twitter. But one person who is a bit more articulate than the rest is this guy named Mark Andreessen, who is a billionaire investor. One of the earliest internet figures as well.

And he basically said in a recent interview that [00:34:00] he has no interiority, that he never does any introspection on anything that he does, and that this is a great thing in his life. So we’ll roll the clip here and then I want you to, fire back at that.

Okay.

David Senra: Introspection.

Marc Andreessen: Yes. Zero as little as possible.

David Senra: Why?

Marc Andreessen: Move forward, go. Yeah. I don’t know. I just, I found people who dwell in the past get stuck in the past. It’s, just, it’s a real problem and it’s a, problem at work and it’s a problem at home.

BIELSKYTE: I mean, I think so many of these people are just like colossally stupid. They have been at a right place, at a right time. They have the right amount or like really wrong amount of ruthlessness to become so rich and powerful. But most of them are not that smart, and even people that are labeled as very [00:35:00] strategically smart, let’s say people like Peter Thiel, when you listen to their discourse, when you listen to his sort of antichrist lectures, when you listen to his, idolizing of thinkers in scare quotes like Curtis Jarvin and just how juvenile that discourse is. They’re really not that smart and above all, they are extraordinarily miserable. That’s just the fact when you look, I mean, I think this recent documentary Manosphere, right? It exposes so many of these people’s lives as truly miserable, as truly sad, as truly pathetic.

And yet because technology is not neutral, algorithms are not neutral they have had this sort of algorithmic amplification on their side and people like Mark Andreessen had [00:36:00] sort of, corporate business, sort of financial amplification on their side. And so they succeed in accumulating so much power.

Right? And I mean, I think of it as, it might seem like as a strange peril to draw but stay with me. I think we had this very unique momentum in this last winter Olympics. With the figure skating for the first time in a long time, Russian team was completely absent from it. If you know anything about Russian figure skating, you know how corrupt it is.

You know how it takes these underage girls, how doped and almost like tortured, abused they wear to sort of achieve these gravity defying pirouettes. But at the end of the day, even if they would succeed winning gold medal after gold medal only for an incredibly short amount of time, right? Because after that their body would be bust.

There was this [00:37:00] assumption that somehow they are pushing the boundaries of skating. And yet in this last Olympics, when the Russians were finally absent, something completely different happened. A sense of community, the difference between different skaters and especially a sense of joy that was delivered by ultimately the gold medal winning American Chinese figure skater Elisa L.

And it truly sort of opened up a whole new consideration of what figure skating can be, of what sports, what athletics can be. And in a way it was very much sort of an uphill battle because how can you win against such torturing of the bodies that Russians were known for against such exquisite doping techniques that Russians were known for?

And yet that victory did happen. Maybe in that temporary Russian absence. But it made even the [00:38:00] viewers think maybe this is what we had is not at all what we want. Not at all what we need from sports. Maybe this joyful momentum that is not about abused, emaciated, exhausted children’s bodies on the eyes suffering for our entertainment.

Maybe this is the kind of world that we actually want to inhabit. Maybe this is what we want sports to be. And so I do think that sort of like mass realization that happened and, how viral these moments of the winter Olympics went, taps into what we spoke about. He had rivalry taps into what we spoke about the success of every single Ryan Kogler project against, again, all of the studio infrastructure.

Odds also speaks to this moment with the techno fascists and sort of their mirror reflections as the influencers of the manosphere that we actually are [00:39:00] beginning to see them for how pathetic they are. When we look at somebody like Elon Musk. Now, less and less people are looking at him admiringly and say how he will be saving the world and look at him as somebody profoundly pathetic, profoundly sad, profoundly miserable. unfortunately was ruthless enough again to accumulate truly extraordinary amount of power. And I do think that during the last presidential campaign, there was a fundamental mistake that was made when the Democrats moved away so fast from the Tim Waltz’s framing. I of the weird, these guys are weird.

These guys are not aspirational, not like projecting power onto these people, even if we cannot deny their power. Right? They’re very powerful, right? But the more we project, the more we are scared, the more in a way we give them that [00:40:00] power. And if you know anything about the history of dictator, if, you know how calco for example fell, it is when we finally start seeing these people that have ruthless, accumulate extra amounts of power as truly pathetic, as truly unad, admirable, as truly non aspirational, and we start crafting a new vision of what can be.

And again, when we start really looking critically at what these people say with, Marc Andreessen’s introspection is something that wasn’t went in 1920s. I mean, considering how much he seems to be introspecting himself, he is denying that very basic fact. In his techno-utopian manifesto, right?

He says how tech ethicists and tech critics are the enemies of progress. And you should just be accepting the first thing that the tech grows are offering to you. Again, nothing could be further from a truth, to just [00:41:00] accept whatever you’ve given. That’s not a positive attitude, that’s a negative attitude.

That’s believing that we only deserve this much to actually engage, not in just kind of criticism, no for the no’s sake. If we understand that no is not enough and you follow your nos by what are the shared yeses, you understand that to not accept the very first technological policy, et cetera, et cetera, offering and to work together towards something that is not gonna be perfect, but something that will be better, that we can keep improving.

That’s not a negative attitude. That’s the most positive attitude that we can embrace. And so I think it’s really important to sort of dismantle these ideologies that the manosphere influencers, the tech bros are pushing, but not do it in such a way that gives them more power, but do it in such a way that shows them for the sad little pathetic.

People that they are, even [00:42:00] if, they have succeeded in accumulating true extraordinary amounts of wealth in the process

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. it’s, that dictatorship is a state of mind in both the dictator and in the population. Because it, doesn’t work if you don’t allow it to work. Ultimately, they want the bandwagon effect. I mean, that’s how they do everything in their world. You look at the, all the Wall Street investors, they’re just a herd of lemmings.

Like they, they don’t have independent thoughts. They all do the same thing. They all respond to the same news reports. They’re easily manipulated. They’re so easily manipulated, in the fact, that people are constantly betting against the majority of the market and, making a lot of money off of that.

The future as the imagined past within reactionary futurism

SHEFFIELD: The other thing though, is that the vision of the future that they’re offering is actually an imagined past instantiated. Like that’s really what they’re doing. And you can see it in the science fiction that they like, which tends to be like mid 20th [00:43:00] century fiction.

And, I did a separate episode on this with Jeet here from the nation for people who wanna check that one out. They constantly refer to space as similar to the frontier times of people living all alone, in the forest or on the plains or something.

And, spaceships are prairie schooner in space. and, these are just not realistic at all because the reality is that, space is such an expensive endeavor that only governments can pay for it. So there is no imaginary cowboy out there doing space stuff living by himself.

That’s not real at all. And the only people who are gonna be in space are government employees and the people that are their contractors.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah. So I mean, I think the issue with the whole kind of space discourse and I do agree that, space exploration, astrophysics is really, important. But I’m [00:44:00] very much on board with what, adam Becker writes and More Everything forever. And I love that he wrote about it, as somebody that grew up with the same fantasies, that because of these fantasies, he went and studied and became an astrophysicist.

And then he came to realization that this whole vision of space being the frontier that we will expand onto, that we will get to live on Mars. And Alpha San Tori is delusional, you know, and it’s not delusional because it’s morally, socially, culturally, politically wrong. You know, these are subjective notions, and we could be arguing about it to the end of time.

It’s scientifically wrong. The real future frontier is not rockets or silicon, it’s biology, right? Sure. We need better computation. Sure, we need better rockets if we want to reach Mars, let alone transport significant amounts of load that supposedly could allow [00:45:00] us to live on Mars. But reality is our biology is completely intertwined, entangled, interdependent with all life here on earth.

Our bodies cannot survive completely different atmospheric composition, completely different atmospheric pressure completely different gravitational field. Our bodies cannot survive without everything that replenishes our microbiome because majority of d within our bodies is not even ours. Right?

It’s our microbiome and our microbiome. Is again, this whole ecology. We are not brains floating in jars in the space vacuum. We are ecologies, entangled with a broad ecology. We fully interdependent. There’s nothing. you know, I speak how 20th century was really sort of anchored in that engineering paradigm.

And again, we could argue or not about it if it was a necessary step or we could have skipped that step and, our world would be radically different. But [00:46:00] history, it is what it is. 20th century was the engineering century. But where we are moving now, it’s the century of biology, right? And within biology, nothing is a replaceable part.

The moment you change any element, everything else changes. That little empty space immediately gets filled with something else, right? And there’s no clear binary, there’s no zero one. There’s always that grain zone, gray zone of change and transformation. And so to really think of these futures as interdependent as biological to think of society, when nobody can escape in their magical bunker and do well, let alone, they’re not gonna be able to go and escape on Mars.

And they’re not gonna be able to upload their mind into computer matrix and live forever. These are all just sci-fi fantasies. These are not scientific propositions. And so again, through that you understand. How delusional that thinking has been and [00:47:00] how so many of these people are not that smart. Now, the problem right, is that the more rich, the more powerful, you know, as a politician, somebody like Putin as an example, right?

Of surrounding yourself with yes men that tell you can invade Ukraine in three days. You’re gonna be conquering Kiev. Ted Bros surround themselves with people that tell them, just throw another X amount of billions of dollars and you’re gonna make science disappear. To a point where Ted Bros a clashing with a scientist.

Scientists, even if science is just some kind of, it’s a material manifestation. it’s an technology. Sorry, I’m restarting. Even if technology is just a material manifestation, it’s an outflow of scientific research, right? So if you deny the science, no matter how many billions of dollars you’re gonna throw at it, you’re not gonna succeed at it.

But the problem, right, is that this, yes man phenomena is not [00:48:00] anymore just something that the written a powerful are capable of having access to in a way, AI psychosis, we’ve democratized the yes men through chatbots. So many mediocre people without power are able to engage with chatbots and the chatbot will respond to them in the sycophantic manner that yes.

Your ever idea is great and amazing, ingenious, yes, you should do more of the same that you were doing that caused your problems and this is now gonna solve your problems. So we live in this world of increasing infectious delusion where we tend to be celebrating all the wrong things and, these very juvenile ideas are getting amplified on a mass scale.

And I don’t think there’s going to be solution to most of these problems without real push for much greater [00:49:00] information. Literacy, science, literacy, historical literacy. And I don’t know where it’s gonna come from because this has to be funded or it will not happen. But it’s really a vital aspect if we have to have a more livable future, right?

it all starts with a vision, and that vision is shaped by information that we have access to. And if the information is completely misguided, completely inaccurate, then the whole foundation will be skewed. And so I think this is something that is really, important to address. And we haven’t been gone to.

Why reactionary futurism redirects public focus from present injustice

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, it’s also that they are trying to, these techno salvationist or, techno fascists even, we can say because they do cite people who were actual fascists. Like, Filippo Marinetti, Andreessen is, says he’s a hero of his. But aside from that, the, what they’re doing is trying to [00:50:00] redirect humanity from the, near future in which we improve our lives and Im improve our health and take better care of each other and the planet.

They want to move the focus from that to 500 years from now, we have to think about when, or we have to think about, well, the sun is someday going to become so big that it will swallow up the earth. Well, that’s not going to happen in such a long time that we kind of don’t need to worry about that.

And in fact. The best way, if you actually were serious about that, is to fund the scientific programs that you were just mentioning, Monika. that’s and then you look also at the Trump administration, attempting to cut hundreds of millions of dollars or billions, I think, if I’m remembering right, from the government science program.

So like you can’t say that you are wanting to be, have someone to be someone [00:51:00] who has credibility on the future and then also say, oh, and we don’t want any scientists. That’s not how it works. That isn’t how it works.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah, I mean, again, so much of the stuff that’s happening in America seems so shocking and novel to many Americans and even many Westerners. But it doesn’t seem shocking or novel to most of the post-Soviet because this is exactly what happened in Russia under Putin, right? Quality minds will question stupid decisions.

So one of the ways to entrench your power is to eliminate. Anybody that would have the capacity for critical thinking that could I undermine your sort of ideological ravings. And so trying to make, you know, and it goes beyond Putin, like, I think one of the most [00:52:00] extraordinary historical examples that had some of the most dire consequences because it resulted in a famine and Soviet union, and then also the famine, the great famine in China was Lisen COism, right?

Liko was a biologist that crafted this whole ideological take on evolutionary biology that fit with the Soviet communist ideology I ideology. Yet it was scientifically misguided. It was scientifically inaccurate. And that led to decision making from which tens of millions of people died. You cannot wish reality away and you cannot, as we’ve seen, right?

So many of Russian oligarchs, especially since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, have jumped off the windows and balconies and had sudden heart attacks, even if they had no previous heart [00:53:00] conditions. So what that points to is that.

Toward a vison of regenerative futures that are self-sustaining

BIELSKYTE: You cannot have successful business is the nation state that has collapsed. And if the nation state is dominated by the leadership and policies that are increasingly removed from real data, from real scientific research, when the scientific research is ideologically guided rather than real curiosity and real information guided, the nation state ends up collapsing, and then the business and your corporate profits end up collapsing.

And, there’s just, you know, it’s, almost this Prego level thinking, right? Uh, when Prego made a deal with Putin, you know, somehow it seems that Prego thought that, you know, well, he’s gonna be the one that will not fall out of the window. Somehow he’s gonna make that [00:54:00] unique deal with Putin, and, somehow he’s gonna be fine.

But it just doesn’t work that way. And so I think the sooner people wake up and the sooner they realize that if you want to have longevity for even your corporate profits, for your business success, for your nation state, you actually have to inform your decision making by pragmatic data. And not by ideological ravings.

And so it’s, really extraordinary watching what is happening right now, but it’s also profoundly unsurprising. And, even more so, you know, in contrast of you know, seeing, for example, China’s decision making, right? When there’s this sort of fantasizing to return to petro masculinity under the current American regime versus the sort of really aggressive move towards what is framed as ecological [00:55:00] civilization by the Chinese government, right?

And trying to export that model and funding sort of, to a greater degree the sort of transition towards regenerative power grid than even the Marshall Plan. Now that comes with all of the strings attached. We cannot sort of idolize that at all, right? But at the same time, one approach tries to return to some kind of fictional past and, nostalgia ends up becoming poison.

And on the other side we have sort of that more pragmatic, more science informed thinking, and we know that over the long term, this is what wins. Now, I think, you know, the, big mistake of a lot of commentators and observers and, A lot of, even sort of young, sort of ideological people is to just demonize that this is all about financial incentives.

This is all just about money, right? And I think it’d be [00:56:00] easier to fix things if it was just about financial incentives. It was just about money, right? Because when somebody just thinks of their financial profits, you can somehow negotiate with it because there’s a certain logic to it, right? But I think the motivations are quite different.

And in fact, it’s more dangerous. They’re much more diluted, much more ideological. And I always say that it’s very hard for people in positions of power to imagine a world where not only their power is obsolete, but their very understanding of the world and the future is obsolete. And so you have to grasp that when you build out your future strategies, that it’s not just about financial loss or financial gain. It would be more simple if it were just that. Because if it were just that, [00:57:00] we would see much more pragmatic decision making because ultimately there’s no money to be made on a burnt out planet, right? There is no bunker that is gonna be strong enough to hide you if the entire world collapses. And so that cynicism, that nihilism, that also loss of what we spoke earlier on, of, hope into the future is profoundly dangerous.

And again, this is not new for me because it’s very much exemplified in Russia, right? Russia is the only, or one of the very few countries that believe that climate change is gonna be good for them, right? And it’s gonna be good for them, not because it’s actually gonna be good for them. I mean, sure the Arctic routes could be open, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s gonna be good for them because it’s worse for everybody else.

And the depth of depravity that results when people start believing that the future [00:58:00] will be better for us, not because that it will be objectively better because we improve our sort of state of being, but because everybody else is gonna be more effed. the ne holistic cynic politics that result from that are really profoundly dangerous.

And, this is something that we need to be profoundly wary of. And, you know, I’m seeing that, I’m seeing quite a lot of that emergent right now in the us. It, really kind of reminds me of everything that I heard of sort of these last years of the Soviet Union. So not just Putin’s Russia, but these last years of the Soviet Union before it collapsed.

And we need to be really, aware of that and counter that.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. And that’s why I often say that despair is reactionary and hope is progressive. Because yeah, like they, they, want, they can only win by making you think their imposition [00:59:00] of an imagined past is inevitable. But one of the big obstacles though, for people who oppose them is I think that in a lot of ways, the broader left isn’t offering much of a talk, even discussion of futures and, and presenting a, vision of a beautiful possible because you can’t defeat the imagined past.

If you just say, well, let’s go back to the neoliberalism, or let’s have a endless, discussion about who gets to speak first or whose oppression is worse. No, you have to create ideas and inspiration to rally people to towards something that’s wonderful because otherwise they’re just gonna think that all these people with these, billions of dollars, that they’re inevitable if you, have to give them a north star towards something beautiful, I think.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah. and you have [01:00:00] to understand that, you know, again, The majority of the population in the world is religiously conditioned and religious narratives, have been speaking of those sort of es, sorry, I’ll restart. And most of the religions have been speaking about eschatological ends, right?

So this projection of somehow end of the world doesn’t emerge from anywhere and doesn’t resonate with sort of anything. It, resonates with existing sort of substrate. A lot of the people that push these end of the world visions have been raised in religious backgrounds that preach that, and now they sort of just repackaged it as some kind of technological rapture, technological salvation.

A lot of be it sort of Aya regime in Iran, be it Putin, they also project these sort of end of the world visions. And to counter that, you cannot just magically [01:01:00] think reality away. you need to offer something that feels tangible, that feels inspiring, that feels energizing. And if you just offer sort of preachy environmental discourse, if you just offer sustainability, that tends to not be unfortunately exciting and energizing and inspiring enough for our minds.

And that’s where. That regenerative vision really comes in and is really, urgent. And so I say that a lot of the existing familiar political binaries, communism, fascism, left right, progressivism conservatism especially, is in this increasingly ideologically distorted conspiracist world.

They do not really stand the test of time anymore. And the real emergent binary is extractivism versus regenerist. And so how can we juxtapose [01:02:00] where these extractivism future visions, where these extractivism technologies, where these extractivism policies are taking us, versus what could regenerative vision actually not just look, but also feel like, and that is really, vital.

And it has to be credible, it has to be realistic. It cannot be sort of wishy-washy, hippy dippy, leapfrogging the current issues. It has to actually sort of very tangibly address them. And I mean, it’s, interesting ‘cause this whole week I’m reading through a bunch of scripts. As part of my futurist advisor role with an organization called Climate Spring, and the role of that organization is actually to green light fund support, produce more regenerative future visions in the long media format, filming tv, right?

So these initiatives already exist, but we need many more of that. And this is where I [01:03:00] emphasize this framework of story world design, which is, might take sort of quite a bit of a modification away from world building, because world building feels very authoritarian for me. It’s kind of, you know, with Chand Dega or Nita May with Brasilia, a genius architect comes in and decides what the future city is gonna look like, and then everybody else has to inhabit his utopian vision story world design. It is much more organic, right? It, recognizes that we need infrastructures, we need technologies we need in our cities connectivity and productivity and thorough affairs and power generation, et cetera, et cetera. But thinks about the future city beyond it just being a smart city, right?

It thinks of it as livable city, as joyful city. It thinks of what is that human experience. And it doesn’t just design actually for humans. It designs for life because we are part of [01:04:00] an ecosystem of life, as we said. Our microbiome is an ecology, right? So we are ecologies intertwined with other ecologies.

So my invitation is how can we bridge gaps between the different disciplines, between the scientists, the architects, the urbanists, the policy makers, and people that know how to make shit sexy, quote unquote, the advertisers, the filmmakers, the script writers, the visual effects artists, right? These people know how to make things look mesmerizing.

These people know how to craft stories that drag us in that, that make us almost addictive, right? To follow the narrative arcs of, certain characters. And so it’s really important to go beyond manifestos and think tags and lofty statements and really [01:05:00] show immersively, sort of open these portals into the possibility of a different world, and really utilize this techniques of story world design coming from media, entertainment and science fiction, but to craft glimpses into our possible futures and really bring people in.

So we don’t just preach, we don’t just say that you shouldn’t do this bad thing, but we make people excited to do this good thing and to do this good thing together with others. And I really, believe that this is one of the most urgent things. And then another, I think key kind of framework that I’ve been working on is embodied futures and embodied futures.

That’s really sort of reframing that it’s not about being anti-technology. It’s not about being anti quote unquote progress. Even if you know that progress definitely needs an asterisk next to it. [01:06:00] It’s reframing innovation as something that doesn’t happen to technology because of the technology and through technology, but it happens to our bodies because of our bodies and through our bodies.

Our cognition is embodied. So whenever we consider any innovation proposition, be it again technological tool, platform policy, et cetera, et cetera, we have to think, is this weaponizing, undermining or replacing our embodied experience? Or is this supporting, amplifying, assisting our embodied experience?

And it’s not just the sort of eugenic idea of what bodies look like or how they could be stronger, better, faster, but really what do we feel within our bodies? What do we feel when we exchange with other bodies? And what do we feel being on this planetary body? What is the sensory experience?

What is the [01:07:00] joy? What is the pleasure? Even as we age, break pain, et cetera, et cetera. And I think it’s very important to bring these conversations, into the very serious political policy, technological scientific research and funding space too. Because unless we succeed in communicating to the broader, audiences, we will continue failing in bringing the change that needs to happen.

Why hopeful futures avoid false binaries

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s definitely true. The other thing also is that these people who are trying to destroy democracy, they, they do it often by presenting false binaries. So, and, Donald Trump, his entire political career is based on that. But when you look at the history, all of these, dictators or close to dictators who gain power, they do it by, by, presenting a [01:08:00] false binary that, if you, well, you don’t have to like me, but I am not anywhere as bad or as evil as, insert.

This group here that you don’t like. So, whether it’s a, ethnic minority or a religious minority, or a gender minority or a, non-religious person, these are all things that they, try to tell you are a threat to you. And so they, so that they can get away with not representing your interests.

And, I, and that’s something that I think, that is something that I everybody can do, is to talk to people in their lives to help them see those false binaries and to avoid them and to, to the extent possible, have build community for people to enable them to not be forced into those false binaries.

Because, that’s the other thing you were talking about how these, these oligarchs are, lonely [01:09:00] and miserable, but because of the eco extractive economy that they’ve created, a lot of other people are facing those similar circumstances. But because primarily because they don’t have any money and no opportunities.

And so, being able to just be with other people who have the, desire to protect democracy and to have a. A more positive vision of the future. That’s, something great and that is something that people can get from going to a protest as well, to, be able to see people who, because they want you to think that it’s inevitable and you are crazy if you don’t agree with them.

BIELSKYTE: Yeah. And at the same time, right, none of that change, none of that. Embracing more of our plurality is going to happen through threatening punishment or in [01:10:00] position. Fundamentally people change when their curiosity stick out, right? And so I think that’s kind of the biggest thing. We’ve been celebrating being right, and we haven’t been celebrating learning enough, right?

So most of us have born, most of us are indoctrinated into one or other form of bigotry in a way, ableism, for example. It’s the water that we swim at. We still, you know, even you have very woke, people are using terms like tone deaf, blind spot, being blind to that without even realizing, that it makes this automatic assumption that somebody who’s blind would be ignorant, that somebody who’s deaf would not understand conversational context and how to behave within it, et cetera, et cetera.

So, all of us lack knowledge in one or other domain, be it [01:11:00] disciplinary or cultural or social, et cetera, et cetera. and I think this is where story world design, this is where bridging these gaps between disciplines can really be helpful. Because when you invite people to be curious, when you make the proposition of participation.

Being more exciting than isolation. When you take away that fear of cringe that comes with allowing oneself to be vulnerable by showing your curiosity, then things begin to change. And I really, believe in that. And it’s really, hard because, you know, I’m a woman in a very male dominated domain, and so much of a time in my professional life, I’ve been literally wanting to punch faces by how people have talked to me and, behave with me.

And yet I kind of think of, you know, how do I foresight my own actions. So [01:12:00] we all have to kind of get better at foresighting our own actions, you know, in the particular moment, getting angry, getting pissed off you know, wanting to punish somebody, wanting to scream at somebody. You know, and I’m not talking about literal Nazis, right?

‘cause that, like some people are, some people have sociopath, psychopaths and, very much sort of beyond redemption. It’s really how to, how do you make the power they had have, access to less destructive. But majority of the people in the world are not right? Most of the people are not ignorant because they choose ignorance, right?

There are some like that. Most of the people ignorant of something or other because they just didn’t have access. To enough understanding and, again, just access to information does not equal understanding. Right? Accurate facts do, does not equal accurate understanding. But it’s, we have to kind of think in that moment of my anger, which most of the time is very justified.

I could act in a very [01:13:00] rash manner and I could feel justified, I could feel sort of very pure about it, but what consequences it will result in, and we all must get better at that. Last year I spoke at this media conference in Germany and one of the main conversations in relation to that was how journalists, how media people need to get better.

Not just at reporting the facts, but reporting them in such a way that comes with an understanding. What kind of behavior, what kind of actions, what kind of consequences that type of reporting could result in. Right? Are we able to speak beyond just the sensational fact and, speak to what could be potential future implications?

Right? And I think we need more. We all need more of that. It. And we’ve [01:14:00] been lacking that, instead of just wanting to build a wall and push people away, which is the easiest option. and again, I, viscerally feel that in my body ‘cause I felt that way so many times in my life. Fundamentally, this will not improve things for the better.

So we need to find a way to make people curious and, help them see how engaging across cultures, discipline, domains, disabilities, neuro divergencies, genders, generations, what is that we can learn from each other? How can we expand our horizons? How can we help each other see what we have not been seeing before?

And, I guess my own personal engagement in, the deepest way is with the realm of invisible disabilities. And I really believe that we shouldn’t be reading books about autism or cancer only when it touches us first person experience of cancer should be something [01:15:00] that, we should just want to understand before it happens to us, before it happens to our loved one to understand in different aspects of neurodivergence, considering how many neurodivergent friends, colleagues, acquaintances we might have, you know, and how it could expand our horizons.

I think, you know, we should do that before we have that face-to-face interaction.

SHEFFIELD: Well, and also, oh, and. Also just on that point. Sorry. The,

No human is ‘typical,’ so inclusion must apply to everyone

SHEFFIELD: one of the other fascinating things about some of the cognitive psychology research is that, it, the idea of neurodivergence, it almost doesn’t even exist. Like there is no right way to be a human or to have a mind or to think, and, that’s really come out with regard to, research showing that the, inner monologue of people, like some people basically don’t have one at all, and some people have one that never stops.

And there [01:16:00] is no right way, to think. and this is a really good example of that. So it’s, not just that, that we can see others experiences, which we may have in the future for ourselves because everybody, as you’ve said, will be disabled at some point. But it’s also that even how we are in the present moment that’s worth appreciating as well, and, understanding that there is no wrong way to be human.

BIELSKYTE: yeah, I mean it’s, I guess it’s, neurotypical doesn’t really exist but neurodivergent does, not, so many people tell me like, oh, but we are all a little autistic. And I’m like, absolutely not. And a lot of the times actually, people that were saying that we all are a little autistic are people that were undiagnosed autistic.

And they would make an assumption that, and I actually did the same assumption for most of my life until my early thirties, that, [01:17:00] but everybody must struggle with this specific thing. They just know how to pretend better. And it was a huge realization, in my early thirties to confront that not everybody’s struggling with this thing and not even close to the degree that I struggle with.

And at the same time, because of my autism, I also have, as much as it causes me frictions with especially sensory environment, et cetera, et cetera, it also gives me a whole additional density of experience and pleasure, right? When it’s not about friction, when it’s about sort of satisfying sort of sensory input or sensory experience or informational exchange, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think we have to acknowledge that nobody is typical, right? Nobody is abled in the same way, and yet nobody is disabled. And yet all of us will, unless we die, a certain death [01:18:00] will become disabled. And I think, you know, through that it’s also kind of important to acknowledge as much as this. Quote unquote witch hunt.

That came about towards DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. I mean, it’s truly, again, exemplary of, the rising fascism. But some of the DEI efforts also have been perverted. They have become sort of very tokenized taking one person from a particular group and presenting them as somebody that can represent all of the group ticking off

SHEFFIELD: Or taking a economically highly privileged one and saying that they not only are representing of their entire group, which they may not have much of anything in common with, but also that their struggles are somehow even more challenging than somebody else from another group who, grew up with their parents murdered and, lived in foster system for their [01:19:00] whole childhood.

BIELSKYTE: Well, I think, privilege is quite correlated with gender, skin tone, ability, social group, et cetera, et cetera, but it’s not universally correlated. So, I mean, I’ve refrained privilege as something that removes you from the consequences of your actions, and it does not necessarily make you bad.

However, the more you are removed from the consequences of your actions, the less you are able to be informed. In making the best choices that would lead to those consequences. So, you know, the how I’m trying to reframe inclusion right now, this sort of design with not for and the leadership of the most impacted that it’s simply results in better product, better policy, better experience, better platform, better story.

If you do it from the perspective or engage profound with a perspective of the [01:20:00] people that have a visceral understanding of the potential consequences of whatever thing that gets to be proposition, especially whatever innovation that gets proposition, then you ultimately end up designing, writing, doing manufacturing, building better.

And when you do it that way, when you proposition that way, not as some kind of charity work that you have to do to these people that you don’t even want to have any connection with, and you say, well this is actually a smart methodology. This is a way to do things that will actually end up benefiting most of us.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And but you know what you were saying though, it is, it, is also the case that for most, like, businesses having inclusive design and trying to make a future that includes everybody, that’s actually better for your bottom line. Because [01:21:00] there, why would you make products for people who are not interested in them?

They’re not gonna buy it.

BIELSKYTE: Especially, it’s better for your bottom line over the long term, right? and I think this is the biggest challenge, right? Is, things that can be good for you for your immediate quality returns. Quarterly returns is what can undermine your business or your nation state over the long term. And it’s, if you, not, if you are not planning to live for just another three months.

And if you care at all also about the impact, reputation, and legacy, you have to think beyond the quarterly returns. And long-term resiliency is only built by actually, again, engaging with your real consumers, with your real citizens, with the real science, with the real data, rather than just trying to shape real reality to the ideology that seems more convenient for [01:22:00] you.

And again, we come back to this thing of needing to step out of your comfort zone. But how do we frame that? Do we frame that as some kind of charity chore, something that, that seems dreary and undesirable? Or do we find a way to reframe it in such a way that it’s about expanding your horizons, learning new things, discovering something that could actually make you a more interesting, more complete more wholesome as a person.

And so I think, that narrative needs to change towards curiosity and inspiration. I just keep getting back to that all the time, without inviting our curiosity, by just being preachy, by just being didactic, we are not gonna achieve the change that we need.

What many left-of-center people miss about generative AI

SHEFFIELD: And unfortunately, one area where that preachiness is very common is on the subject of artificial intelligence or ai. Like, it seems to me that the [01:23:00] broader left has effectively seeded an entire emergent technology to the far right.

And this is basically the equivalent of, in the early to mid nineties, everybody on the center left saying, oh, well, we don’t care about the internet. This internet is bad. It’s run by some bad guys. ‘cause hey, mark Andreessen was there in those early days. So that means you can’t use the internet, right?

Because Marc Andreessen in was the co-creator of the Netscape browser, the first browser that most people ever saw. And the, reality is though, that technology, of course it can be bad, and of course there can be terrible people that are the leaders of various corporations or whatever, but technology by and large is neutral.

It’s what you make of it. And there is a lot of people out there who can’t afford to get, go to school, and get a degree in [01:24:00] something. Or they live in a, in an area where there aren’t any universities to go to. Or, and, and so for them is, would you rather them have nothing in terms of getting information about improving their lives?

Would you rather somebody not have a website or launch a small business because they can’t afford to pay a programmer? Which, so you would rather not have the carpenter have something, for himself or somebody living in, Egypt or something and, she has an idea for an app, but she doesn’t know any programmers.

She’s not a programmer, but she can so, vibe code her way into it. Why would you take that away from her? Why would you tell her not to use it? I would say that what we really need to have is a full involvement and engagement with this issue. And encouraging government participation and government bringing accountability because.

The, these people like Elon Musk and [01:25:00] Peter Thiel, I mean, they want to create feudalism with this. And if we completely see the topic to them, their chances of doing that become a lot higher, in my opinion.

BIELSKYTE: Speaking about vibe coding, I was just reading Gary Marcus’s article on de vibing and how there’s gonna be a whole interest industry emergent around di vibing because it represents so many security risks. So I mean, I personally

SHEFFIELD: not perfect.

BIELSKYTE: I personally, don’t believe that technology is neutral.

However, different technological tools have different specific tools. Specific platforms have different capacities for destructiveness or constructiveness, right? And something I think the, very big thing that gets forgotten all the time especially in sort of more progressive technology conversations, is how [01:26:00] something that is really bad at its constructive capacity can still be really potent in it.

Destructive capacity. This is where a lot of, on one side we had a lot of delusional discourse about crypto, where, you know, people were preaching it’s gonna save the, solve the financial pose of the global south, which was, you know, just utterly ridiculous. And on the other side, we had a bunch of people saying that this thing is entirely useless, but it is not right.

Crypto was created to commit crimes, human arms, drugs, trafficking, child pornography, ransomware. These are real utilities. And fundamentally, this is what powers this technology. This is what makes this technology useful. The outcome of it is profoundly destructive yet. It’s not useless, it is useful, right?

So in this case, it’s very non neutral. [01:27:00] Now you have other platforms that tend to be sort of more positive, and that’s why I keep arguing for innovation that is powered not just by military funding and military research, but for, but by accessibility and invisible disability, especially inclusion, it ends up resulting actually in all disability inclusion.

It’s just that invisible disabilities tend to be more overlooked than wheelchair access, blindness and deafness. and those technologies tend to have much more of that constructive positive capacity. So their, neutrality leans towards sort of more positivity. But even with military technology, you know, it’s very easy to say that we should not engage with any sort of military technology development until your country gets bombed, until your country gets invaded.

This is reality for a lot of people. For example, the Baltics. Right. There was very little military technology being developed in the Baltics until Russia invaded Ukraine. And right now [01:28:00] a lot of the tech industry has pivoted towards military tech because it’s a matter of survival. So, you know, even something that is not neutral, that is actually with, this very high destructive capacity as technology sometimes is quite necessary.

You know, I almost think this kind of parallel of the all sort of like anti GMO discourse when it became the sort of this grand conspiracy and sort of anything. GMO is the devil, whereas the reality, if we want to have sustainable, let own regenerative food systems, it’s gonna be all hands on deck, right?

We’ll need to bring back indigenous crops. We’re gonna need permaculture, we’re gonna need to be composting at scale, even within our cities. And we will need tons of genetic engineering, tons of biotech, new sort of yeast, fungi, algae based materials that will be again, [01:29:00] developed through the bleeding edge of, the sort of, uh, highly demonized GMO technologies.

And yet the future will have to contain all of that. If we want to have regenerative food systems, it will not just happen by us magically returning to our indigenous path. For the few of us that even have it right, because of the reality of this global geopolitical economic setting that we cannot escape.

There’s no island far enough, there’s no bunker safe enough, right? To escape from the broader realities of the world. And I really think with ai, it’s something very similar. I remember getting on this, uh, big spat. I think it was still on Twitter before maybe it was even X or maybe just after it turned x with, you know, some reputable professor that was saying that, you know, we should out try ban any students using gen AI anywhere.

And my response to that was [01:30:00] that is absolutely wishful thinking, especially, somebody like that, speaking from elite institution in a global north, teaching students that had the resources, even if those resources came in a form of a loan to study in such an elite institution, the reality for most people in the global south is that you have to learn whatever tools available to you in order to succeed.

This is very similar and you know, a lot of my colleagues and peers that I so deeply admire whose books I read and was shaped and inspired by, and again, with the advent of ai, some of the discourse. Came as so profoundly privileged, right? With a tenured professorship, having written a few famous books that resulted in really high speaking fees, you are set for life.

It’s very easy for you to tell somebody [01:31:00] here in South Africa that don’t go and work for Google because Google is the devil, right? People need to pay bills, people need to feed their children. And again, Google should not be the only option, should not be the only answer, right? How we need to be realistic.

And as I said before, we should not just accept these tools that are being given to us, because that’s passive. that’s, actually negative, right? We should see, well, what is this emergent technology? What is happening in the world right now? And how can we do our utmost to shape it to be less extractive, less destructive, more constructive, more regenerative, and it’s gonna have to be all hands on deck situation, or we are not gonna come out of it, right?

So we cannot see that space. And yet we should not just ignorantly embrace.

Embodiment in AI and machine learning

SHEFFIELD: Absolutely. [01:32:00] Yeah. And there’s a, there’s an interesting development though in the field of ai that the industry is realizing that embodiment matters. Like, that’s the other fascinating thing about all of this. So, yeah, and Laun, who is used to be the head of AI over at Meta, he quit the company because Mark Zuckerberg believes that intelligence is just disembodied abstraction.

And he said, no, that’s wrong. Intelligence comes from the body and ideas are grounded in experience. And so he quit and he just raised a billion dollars to start a company called a MI Labs headquartered in Paris. So, like, that’s a, it’s a positive development and it’s a, validation of the idea that embodiment matters because, if there is gonna be some sort of intelligent or [01:33:00] intentional computing, that is how it will happen.

It comes from the body because our minds. Or what our bodies do.

BIELSKYTE: I mean, what’s so interesting, right, is that LeCun used to get into these serious bat with. Spats with Gary Marcus saying that Gary Marcus was wrong and he was right, and ultimately what he’s doing now and, what he’s working towards and all sort of world model stuff and integration of neural networks and symbolic ai sort of rule-based systems.

Yet finding a way to still reserve, quote unquote, it’s not really creativity, but, ways to come up with novel solutions. So I mean, I, find it really interesting, right, when you’ve been long enough in the industry, how people oftentimes deny the fallibility of the approach as long as convenient to them and, then also dip out of it to do this other thing that [01:34:00] more critical voices have been pointing towards.

I mean, I’ve experienced so much of that myself. And again, being a woman, a very male dominated field, like every man and his brother and his dog, tries to sort of explain how they know better my new methodology to, to respond to that. I try not to engage in the argument. I say, okay, how much money are you willing to bet on it?

‘cause I’m willing to put a lot of money on this and. Really funny, especially when you throw like a pretty significant amount, all of a sudden they’re like, huh, I wouldn’t think that you would put so much on it. ‘Cause it’s not, we’re not betting out of a hundred dollars. Right? So it’s really interesting, right, how people kind of move, promote a very sort of fallible idea until it becomes too unconvenient.

And yet at the same time, when they move away from that erroneous idea, I think it’s important to allow for [01:35:00] some of these off ramps because if they just keep sticking to it because there’s nothing else, then that’s how we end up, right? with a black pill ideology and sort of black pill actions and sort of outright destruction.

So, and to be honest, again, I’m not in Mark Zuckerberg’s mind, but I, do have had friends that were on a science advisory board of Chan Zuckerberg Foundation and through that for a fact, I do know that he seems to understand the biological complex and biological reality of things.

He has engaged with enough top neuroscientists and top researchers in biomedical field, mostly I imagine through sort of, maybe Priscilla chance push. But. I

SHEFFIELD: So he should know better, but.

BIELSKYTE: I, think he does know better. I think it’s just what is convenient for the business right now. I would [01:36:00] argue that somebody like Elon Musk maybe does not know better because he’s really stuck in his sort of juvenile fantasy that, is, kind of at the root of, even like throwing it back to 1950 fours, Vernon Brown’s, Mars products where, you know,

SHEFFIELD: Or sees himself, like he’s very big on reality is a

BIELSKYTE: a

SHEFFIELD: Right. and like, that’s just garbage.

BIELSKYTE: the, real issue, right, is that it’s not that Elon thinks that reality is a simulation.

Everything is simulation. He believes all of us are a simulation. He’s the only one that is real, that is the greatest danger.

SHEFFIELD: that’s, that is the implication of that. Yeah.

Radical tenderness  and the beautiful possible

SHEFFIELD: You have this idea that you’ve talked about of radical tenderness. And I think that’s right because ultimately because of this despair, because of this tragic morality of, reaction is that is just so weighting down on everyone all the time, whether it’s in politics, [01:37:00] whether it’s in fiction, whether it’s in, whatever TV show you’re watching on YouTube. The idea of having tenderness and being against this irony poisoning. That’s something a lot of people want, even if they don’t realize it yet, but when they see it, they love it.

BIELSKYTE: A hundred percent. Again, when people ask me if, if I’m not hopeless about the future, how do I sustain my optimism? You know, I actually say I’m, not optimistic, I’m realistic, but every morning I wake up and I choose to live. So I have to, find reasons for it.

But I guess my biggest influence, especially over the last few years has been my best friend my late best friend or asja. She just passed away from cancer after five years [01:38:00] of going through multiple lines of treatment. She got diagnosed early stage. She got diagnosed, early in, in early stage in the pandemic, but with, stage four cancer.

Was given just a couple of months to live. And yet she, of course, she, how do you not get sent to despair? How do you, not completely collapse in a face of news like that? And yet she sought out other opinions and she sought out the best available treatment and she was an amazing person.

The entire life. We’ve been friends, for 26 years, and we have never had a fight, even if we had disagreements. But somehow I never, ever doubted that she loved me or that I loved her. And she wasn’t just like that with me. she was like that in her community. And so when this happened to her, [01:39:00] people really showed up.

And when she needed also to create boundaries so people show up in a way that she really needs, not just that they want because sometimes, you know, people project their fears and their desires again on the person that is potentially dying. She also created those boundaries. So it was an incredible journey, right, of, seeking out the best available science, really thinking what kind of brought her to that moment, addressing the, stress and maybe the sleeplessness and working too much.

And also looking through those deeper layers, right? of, of, trauma, of pain, of sort of emotional stuff. Because anytime you want to heal you, you have to think of all of that, right? You have to think of that very hard data. You have to think of sort of your kind of habits and lifestyles, et cetera, et cetera.

And you have to think of that less [01:40:00] graspable sort of spiritual, emotional narrative stuff. And so she did all of that. And one of the most vivid, one of the most memorable moments was when her and her, partner, husband bought a house in the countryside in Lithuania, and she was planting fruit trees, not just flowers or some salad or something that could be immediately harvested, but fruit trees, right.

Something for the future. Anybody observing that would have thought that, that’s crazy. Why would she ever bother to do that? Why actually would her partner decide to marry her halfway through the treatment? And yet she did. And yet he did. And yet we all did. And even after, with all of that, and even after she had this sort of amazing recovery, no cancer [01:41:00] detected just about a year ago in December, the cancer came back and it came back incredibly suddenly and all of us lost her.

And it feels so unjust and so violent and I mean, the earth kind of really. I was in Japan when I received that news and scrambled to try and get the flights. And by the time by the time I actually was looking to the flights, I wasn’t even able to reach her before the passing. You know, and it makes no sense, this level of injustice, this level of loss of somebody so luminous, so incredible, so inspiring.

feels like, I mean, truly you. If there was God then, really, uh, he or she, they do not exist. But I think of imprint, I think of how I would not exist without her. My work wouldn’t be like that. And there’s, and it’s not just me, it’s, I think tens if not hundreds of [01:42:00] people that were inspired by all that she was through her life and how all of us were changed for the better.

And I think one could only wish to have such an extraordinary impact with your life. And I think that’s kind of what making the future is. You know, none of us is here permanently, right? And sometimes it’s just us opening the door so that others could walk through them. Sometimes it’s, just a conversation that will open somebody’s imagination.

Sometimes it’s just a gesture that will make something seem more possible. Sometimes it’s just that spark of curiosity. And, as painful as, this moment and period of grief is I think of how much of a brighter future she created with her presence and just how much she fought. Through all of the side effects.

And if you know [01:43:00] anything about chemo and you know how dire those side effects can be, and yet how much she clung to life, how much she appreciated right before that, you know, she was somebody very healthy, very athletic. She was a mountaineer, she was going across these glaciers, et cetera, et cetera. And at some point, you know, she would still go to the mountains, but she was not able to do climbing or any of that kind of danceful stuff at most that she could do on some of the days is take the elevator and go for a walk.

And we had conversations about it and she said, you know, I was going from peak to peak and it was hard for me to notice really what is that experience of being on the mountain is when I was chasing those peaks, when I was chasing those achievements. And it’s only when I was not able of doing that anymore that I got to appreciate the shadows in a valley that I got to really breathe it in and really feel it.[01:44:00]

And unfortunately, I feel most of us realize just how much we have in terms of access, community privilege, possibility, grace from others. We only realize when it’s too late. And so we should do that before it’s too late. And we should kind of think of journeys like that and, and, live up. To the standard that the best of us sets for us and not, desperate.

That nothing is forever and not desperate, that we can’t hold on onto everything that we have right now and really think, well, what is beyond just peak to peak? What is beyond just those easy successes, where is that moment of joy? And again, I come back even to that example of the Olympics and Elisa Lu and the toxicity of athletics as we have known before, and how it [01:45:00] would break down people’s bodies, in pursuit of those gold medals.

Because that’s the only thing that would make athletes life valuable. And how this particular gold medalist really kind of divided everybody’s expectation by taking a break, taking her time away and coming back to that sport in such a way that she could do it with her whole self and find joy even in the falling, even in the difficulty, even when she was stepping on that largest stage in the world, that fundamentally it was about giving her all and getting opportunity of that stage and that performance.

And in a way, gold medal or not, that’s just the side effect. And I think as humanity, this is kind of what we need right now, a little bit, right? Just do the best that we can right now without being too [01:46:00] concerned if, any of this stuff is forever.

SHEFFIELD: then

that’s enough. Then that’s enough. Yeah. I mean it’s, ultimately. I’m, starting to come to the idea of saying, that the process is its own reward and, we should aspire to laugh easily, think clearly, and love freely.

BIELSKYTE: and recognize that we need each other.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

BIELSKYTE: Like as much as it’s so hard to show our vulnerability as much as so hard to extend ourselves and say that I need help, I need support. For me, that’s, been the biggest gift from being in disability community. Engaging with that conversation is really understanding that what’s really aspirational is not independence.

It’s interdependence. [01:47:00] It’s showing up for each other, not just how we want to show up, but how others need, and allowing ourselves to show others what we actually need. And it’s only together that will succeed in changing anything. There’s gonna be no magical savior that will step in and, change the day.

It’s gonna have to be us. And that will allow us to have those uncomfortable challenging conversations, not just because we have to, but because they are interesting, they’re valuable, and they will be the foundation of whatever new things that we’ll get to create together.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. Well, so for people who want to support or see what you are up to, Monika what’s your advice for them?

BIELSKYTE: My website is Monika Futures Design. Look me up there across all social [01:48:00] media and I’ve been working to develop Protopia Futures Design Framework, embodied Futures and Story World Design. I am really good at all intellectual and creative things, and very bad at all practical skills in life.

So I’m very, keen to team up, collaborate, support, and be supported in the, aspects that are more challenging for all of us. So reach out. And definitely, I’m always keen to hear people’s feedback and hear people’s insights because that’s the goal. Learning rather than being right.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Sounds good. All right, well, this has been a a great conversation and thank you for being here.

BIELSKYTE: Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure.

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’re a page subscribing number, you [01:49:00] have unlimited access to the archives.

And I thank you very much for your support. And if you’re watching on YouTube, make sure you click the like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever we post something new. Thanks a lot, and I’ll see you next time.

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For decades, people have been telling Democrats that they need to do better in small cities and rural parts of America. And yet, while there are some uniquely successful candidates here and there, there’s no doubt that the party just keeps doing worse in these areas.

The Democratic consultant class keeps trying its familiar strategy of being Republican-lite in these right-leaning parts of the country, but it just isn’t working.

That’s the subject of a recent episode, but for today, we’re going to be talking about a different path, one that’s being boosted by James Talarico, the Democrat running for Senate in Texas this year against Republican Ted Cruz.

There’s no guarantee that Talarico will win such a heavily Republican state, but his approach of unapologetically speaking his liberal Christian values in detail and trying to build community through care is the right approach.

Alan Elrod, my guest on today’s program is fighting the same fight as Talarico. He’s the founder of the Pulaski Institution, a nonprofit based in Arkansas focused on democracy in heartland communities. He’s also a contributing editor at Liberal Currents.

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 liberal Christians are standing up for all of their values

• How Confederate Christianity took over the Republican Party

• To understand the Christian right, learn the history of the Christian left

• Elite Republicans are creating a new ‘Satanic Panic’ rather than appeal to moderate voters

• Latino evangelicals are reshaping American politics, politicians and parties should take notice

• The doctrinal incoherence of today’s extremist Christianity is immense

• Right-wing evangelicals have turned politics into Bible fan-fiction

• Government subsidizing religion doesn’t make people like it more

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

06:41 — The internet made it easier to hate strangers

13:25 — Religion and the right-wing political fusion

17:38 — Secular liberals’ allergic reaction to all faith discussions

22:15 — You don’t reach people without relationships

27:05 — Much of Christianity accepted modernity, and this is what upsets the Christian right

35:05 — How the Christian right built its own closed media ecosystem

42:54 — Right-wing elites do not actually care about people in small-town America, but they talk to them

46:54 — Right elites make many opportunities for their advocates, while left elites rarely help new voices get started

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: You are joining me from Arkansas today, where you are doing good work with your organization, the Pulaski Institution. So what is that?

ALAN ELROD: So the Pulaski Institution is a nonprofit where we’re focused on democracy, which is a lot of organizations, but our thing is really heartland areas, and the way we think about that is not just like the South or the Midwest, but really anywhere kind of away from the big centers of finance and politics like New York or LA.

So, upstate New York. Places like Buffalo, places like Eastern Oregon, the Inland Empire in California. These are all places we think of as heartland places. Because there are places where the kind of sense of dislocation and, angst towards maybe liberal democratic politics and status anxiety have all gotten heightened in our kind of cracking our commitments to sort of the norms of liberal democracy and we’re worried about that in the US as well as in places like Canada and France and Australia as well.

So that’s our idea. Pretty much everyone at the organization either grew up in a place like that or currently works [00:04:00] in a place like that. And so we like to try to bring people in that have a kind of real life foot rooted in these places and bring that perspective.

So. That’s the general focus we have. A lot of the work we do right now is sort of events oriented. Because we do a lot of things where we try to bring people together in a room and talk. But you know, if we get more money and have more funding, we’re gonna try to put out some research as well, kind of on the quality of democratic life in these places.

But that’s our idea. That’s kind of our premise. This, idea that place matters and that, it’s an important way to consider the dangers that are currently unfolding within liberal democracy right now. And yeah, I’m from Arkansas, so we are based out of right outside of Little Rock.

SHEFFIELD: Okay. Yeah. And definitely the case that a lot of the reason that people in the more rural or smaller cities of America, there are some viewpoints perhaps that are more common that or might be unsavory, but it’s also that people in the broader left kind of stopped talking to them. I’m thinking after people like Rah Emanuel in particular kind of dismantled the National party structure, and discouraged people from presenting candidates in elections and funding them. And I think people in lower populated areas of the country, the only Democrats that, or people, liberals, progressives that they ever saw were people on tv and they were hearing about them from Fox News.

So, of course their viewpoint of what somebody who is on the center to left. Of course they would think that they’re evil and demonic because Fox tells them to think that.

ELROD: Yeah, I mean the flip side of the wonders of modern technology of like television and social media and the internet, are that it’s actually [00:06:00] really easy to develop strong opinions about people who live thousands of miles away from you. Right? And people do that.

And so if you’re on the other end of that, right? If the idea is that people who are sort of liberal or disagree with the kind of politics that may. Be sort of dominant in the area of the country where I’m from. If you just avoid it, well then you are sort of leaving. The only thing to fill that gap are those impressions that are formed right through, through media.

And those are way easier to be negative, right? It’s much easier to hate someone in that kind of context than it is to hate somebody, on your front porch. it’s just I think, a truism of, human nature.

The internet made it easier to hate strangers

SHEFFIELD: it’s, yeah, the easier to be a, nasty troll on the internet when you don’t have to put your name onto your post. And for people that were present on the early days of the internet, it was a lot more civil place in large part because the idea of an anonymous email account almost didn’t exist. And it actually didn’t exist because, well, generally speaking, there were a handful of places that had it.

But like most people’s internet access. It was through, a job or it was through an educational institution or, something like that. Or they didn’t know how to change the default setting on their AOL account . it made it easier to, be civil because, people would know if you were a jerk.

ELROD: Yeah. And I think that’s just a real problem in our politics in general now is as, the way we interact with people increasingly becomes this like, very mediated thing through, it was through television, but now it’s really more through social media than anything. Right. As that happens more and more as we’re interacting less and less in person I think it’s, I think there’s very little question that’s also a real part of the core problem in our politics is like, yes, there are ideological problems at play. Yes, there’s extremism, but there’s also just the more generalized antisocial stuff that [00:08:00] comes with. If the bulk of your interactions with people who aren’t maybe like your spouse, right, are all online and all the impressions you’re getting are from TV and the internet.

Then, then even just like. Your, ability to like conceive of people who you don’t know as sort of like interesting full humans with thoughts and feelings who are also part of this country is just reduced. And I think it’s really bad for us.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and it’s, and this isn’t even a political issue either, because this is an example of, something that, that I sometimes talk about on the show here. In philosophy, this is a lived version of the problem of other minds.

ELROD: Mm-hmm.

SHEFFIELD: We don’t have, we can’t know with any, with a hundred percent certitude that anyone else’s mind is real.

ELROD: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And so, but it’s easier to, think that they’re real if you can see ‘em physically and be around them. Because the very least, you know that they exist. In one fashion or another.

Whereas, the stuff that people see in right wing media, which, absolutely does blanket-- and I think that’s something that people who are, or live in urban areas who have a, left-leaning politics, they don’t really appreciate that if you are outside of that urban area, you go to a bar, or you go to a coffee shop or something, big, chances are it’s gonna be Fox on the tv or it’s gonna be Newsmax or one of these other, or you’re sitting there waiting for your car, the mechanic, and it’s gonna have Sean Hannity on the radio background. Because they don’t, they’re tired of listening to the same old music on the local radio stations, or they don’t want to pay for Spotify or whatever it is, They, want something more interesting. And so yeah, like this, [00:10:00] it’s just this constant sort of subtle brainwashing of people in large measure because the left didn’t bother to create popular media or they weren’t interested.

ELROD: Yeah. Well I don’t want to get ahead of you, but this is one of the things, right, when I was writing last week at Liberal Current about James Talarico, that I find so interesting and like both exciting and kind of provocative about him as a candidate is, someone in our politics who is just really interested in like the other person as a full person.

Right, because even on you, you mentioned it’s not entirely ideological. Even I think on, the more left side of our politics, there is a tendency for us to just not talk about the people who disagree with us, the kind of broad mass of people we conceive of as sort of our opponents to not talk about them as full people.

And I think, the moment we’re kind of in right now, if, we don’t get better at that, that, that kind of muscle of genuinely thinking about other people, who aren’t like us or who don’t live where we live or just who don’t vote like us as full humans we are going to have a really hard time pulling out of the tailspin we’re in.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. Talarico is very good at that. And, one of the other things that I think he does bring also to that is necessary to the American left is that, so I’m not religious myself, i, I don’t have any particular belief. But I got over the kind of immature atheism, which is, this idea that oh, well if we just get rid of all religion, then humanity will be perfect and everything will be, hunky dory forever. And that’s, I eventually realized that’s not true because you can be extremist atheist, a political extremist atheist. You can be an authoritarian agnostic.

Your [00:12:00] personal stance on why does the universe exist, actually has no necessary bearing on whether you’re a sociopath. And Talarico is really good at, I think, reminding people on the left who are non-religious to be like, look, there’s this huge, massive tradition out, out here of liberal Christianity.

And you should not hate it. And in fact you should like it because a lot of people in your country are not interested in being irreligious, and they never will be.

ELROD: Yeah, the tendency to be dogmatic is there, regardless, right, of whether we’re religious or not. The tendency for wanting kind of easy moral answers and to villainize people who don’t agree with us, that’s all there. it doesn’t really require religious in the sense of like, a kind of belief, a specific belief in like the order of the cosmos or, the ontology of existence.

It just has to do with like human nature. And, people can be quite dogmatic and extremist. And sort of hateful kind of regardless, right? And so religion has been a major vehicle for that because it’s been a key sort of organizing idea of human society. But politics is just as good a, replacement for that.

SHEFFIELD: well, and,

Religion and the right-wing political fusion

SHEFFIELD: But they’re also operating kind of in separate realms, at least from a functional standpoint. So that-- politics is primarily, well, what do we owe each other? Like, and, religion is about that also, but it is also about other broader topics that are not about, are not relevant to politics.

And the right wing in the US did figure that out. During, during the Cold War. That they developed what they call fusionism, this concept of that, that brought together the atheist Ayn Rand acolytes onto the same [00:14:00] team of, the fundamentalist Baptists and the, national security. Obsessives like Lindsey Graham types who are not really either don’t care much about religion one way or the other.

And then basically they said, look, we have a common enemy here. It’s modernity. We need to get rid of it. We need to, give money to rich people. And how can we do that? Like, that’s the one thing we agree on. Let’s go for it.

It’s been a continuously successful fu sion for them. and to this day, it works very well.

They kind of have to shuffle things around the margins a little bit here and there. But overwhelmingly this has been very positive for them. Very bad for America though. And nothing like that really has kind of happened on the left in the US in my view.

ELROD: Yeah, no, I there was a, it was, I grew up in a in the Churches of Christ in a evangelical denomination. Went to a college that was affiliated and my college years kind of overlapped really with the kind of the beginning of the Obama era, so like late aughts into the early 2010s. And that was pretty much what you’re describing was, that was the, sort of accept wisdom of most kind of American conservative Christianity at that point, right?

It was like a blend of sort of. Ayn Rand ish attitudes right on, on economics that were business professors even taught, Ayn Rand in the college. And then a very like, moral majority attitude on social issues. And the idea at that point, like I was a, devout member of my denomination arguing for these more sort of social welfare style politics that I think are very similar, right? To like what you see right now with Talarico.

And it was a, weird time because, on my campus it made me a radical leftist, but for any sort of regular left wing person that I might have interacted with, that would not have been the case, right?

They would’ve perceived me as quite conservative because I insisted on [00:16:00] talking about God and Jesus, and these things as, reasons that I cared about these issues. So I do think that’s an interesting, it’s a tension that really exists, right?

So the right had the right created this, like you said, this sort of fusion between these camps and you had this really sense-- they had a strong sense of identity for, conservative Christians for a long time. And then kind of not really a, strong place, right? The Democrats would talk about God and it was sort of a, I think a box ticking thing for a lot of them. I don’t want to say that there wasn’t devotion because there were very devout Christians on the Democratic side.

But, just by being, by the time we got to, when I was in college, just by being a Christian, I was, I think not really gonna be seen by anybody outside the world of my, like college and church as progressive, but because I didn’t accept right. The kind of compromise with right wing economics and, sort of the Dobson movement of family values, in politics, I was absolutely not accepted. At, on my campus I was seen as like heterodox and radical. So it’s an interesting thing. And I think it’s an opening that still really exists. I myself have much more complicated ideas about faith and identity now than I did then. But, I think the, that window, I think the, even some of the energy around tall Rico speaks to the fact that there’s still ultimately a pretty big deficit of people who are willing to talk this way on the sort of progressive side of things.

Secular liberals’ allergic reaction to all faith discussions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. it’s a real failure of leadership. I think it, it, a lot of it just simply is that for many of the elites, religion is just this irrational, stupid thing.

And so they’re like, well, I don’t understand it. I don’t want to hear about it. I’m not gonna judge you for it. I just. I don’t want to [00:18:00] even think about it, so don’t, talk to me about it. Please.

Or, and then there might be, there are some people, who kind of, because of the way that a lot of Christians can be pushy and bullying with their proselytizing, there’s some people who have a, an allergic reaction because of negative conduct that they experienced.

As well, like, I, want to be fair to say that because there is no question that, a lot of Christians bully people and, gaslight them and lie to them in order to get, them to convert. Like that’s a real thing.

ELROD: Yeah. I think there’s an understandable trepidation that comes when people start talking about their faith that they’re gonna try to convert.

I’ll say this, I, if someone tries to convert you, it depends on how they do it. It, doesn’t have to be an insult, right? Sometimes it can genuinely be just a, an affectionate thing and you can, say, no, it’s not for me.

You can, but I understand the experiences that people may have had. Right? Maybe they’re former evangelicals or, from other churches. Maybe they have that X right attached to them that it is like, they’re working through their own really bad experiences growing up in a churched community, in a church life, or they’re just don’t want to be, evangelized to, and they’re tired of it, which is also fair.

But at the same time, it’s important to speak to people on a sort of values and identity level. And there are a lot of people for whom being able to talk fluently and fluidly. About Christ in the Bible is actually pretty important for reaching them. You’re not gonna reach them if you can’t talk about this stuff.

Like it is something that you have a legitimate handle on and that you’re not faking.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, yeah, I think that’s true. and one thing that also I, have to say in favor of Talarico is that while he does understand that point, he also does make a point regularly to tell the [00:20:00] Christian supporters of his that look, you don’t have to be a Christian to be a good person. You can have good values from, for a variety of different reasons and from a variety of different traditions or no religious tradition at all. What matters is, what we own each other, not how we get to that point.

ELROD: Yeah, and I, I don’t want to wander too far afield, maybe from, where you want to go in the conversation. But, the evangelical world I grew up in, one of the biggest takeaways I still have in my politics is actually the understanding, and this came from people who, whose mindset was that they were trying to convert people, but the understanding that you don’t actually reach people without having a relationship with them.

And I think that is something that can be sort of universally and generally true. Even outside of a religious context, when I tell people to, when they’re talking about politics, I encourage people, I say, and when they, I’ve gone to events where people have asked me like, what do I do about my, like, super MAGA relatives?

Like, should I cut them off? And my answer is no, because you will not. There’s, no one you will reach in this world when it comes to trying to persuade them to see things the way you do. Right. Or to change their mind about something. There is no one you’re gonna reach in that way who is not someone that you, don’t have some form of foundational relationship with to begin with.

You don’t actually reach strangers. That’s not how human relationships work. You reach people that have a reason to trust you and open up to you and have the conversation to actually produce genuine change. Right? And so that is something that. My evangelical background has taught me and, has stayed with me is that, generally speaking, those little things that you do to build a relationship and cultivate a relationship, those little acts of like service and being willing to sort of stay in someone’s life [00:22:00] and stay connected to them and know what’s going on in their life, those are actually the things that make it possible.

For you to still have like meaningful communication that might even change their mind about something. Without those things, that’s, it’s just not gonna happen.

You don’t reach people without relationships

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And it’s to borrow the, biblical phrase by their fruits, you shall know them is basically what you’re talking about there. and, but, again, to circle back on the philosophy, this is also the, people can see your mind and they, can see your concerns and your beliefs that there are valid in some sense, even if they, don’t necessarily agree with them. They know that, you’re, not trying to hurt them, you’re not arming them. You often help them. So like, if there’s anyone who could see your mind as real, or your beliefs as valid or your fruits as good, it would be those people, as you’re saying.

ELROD: Yeah. And I think the trick is not to be dishonest. Don’t lie to them about what you think. Right? You can be very, I think, honest and open about the stuff that you think is bad about even the stuff you think is immoral and reprehensible. Like I’ll never pretend with someone about how I feel about Donald Trump, right?

And so those people. Don’t have to, they don’t think I’m lying to them. I’m not pretending that we agree in order to be friends with them. Right. I am maintaining a relationship while also being honest and, that also helps. Right. That’s also an essential part of it. And I think that actually again, comes back to the kind of even juggle thing of like, don’t hide who you are.

Right. Don’t pretend, don’t hide your sort of beliefs. But at the same time, don’t turn them into a wall between you and the other person.

SHEFFIELD: This is really why I, why the Christian w right hates James Talarico so much, because that is kind of, it does seem to be the underlying approach to his politics. And then [00:24:00] also the, so they hate him for that. Because he’s practicing their, ministry perspective better than they do.

And also he’s, he is reminding people that this kind of Confederate Christianity, which is what I call it, that has taken control of the Republican party, that this Confederate Christianity viewpoint has up until only, just now when they’ve kind of colonized and eaten away out a lot of the Protestant denominations like, historically speaking, they’re anti, anti social welfare, anti. dehumanizing rhetoric supporting racism and, hatred for sex workers or other marginalized groups like that.

This is not what Christianity tells them to do. and it isn’t about reading the Bible a certain way or whatever. It’s like the lived practice of Christianity throughout the world does not support the social policies and the exclusionary and hateful, bigoted way that they conduct themselves, and they know that I think.

ELROD: Yeah. What Tallarigo understands is I think, a very powerful truth that is not even limited right to, Christians, but to people of faith and of frankly, of sort of visionary liberation politics over a millennia, which is that living out your values and understanding that the stories we tell about.

The human experience are incredibly powerful things, and that actually you can break through a lot of walls and you can reach a lot of people with those two things, with the, with, living out your actual values, right? With bearing the sort of, like you said, bearing the fruit of your actual beliefs and understanding [00:26:00] the, power of the human experience as a story, right? Understanding that’s a, that’s an incredibly powerful story for people if you focus in on right, the things that actually bring us together, the things that lift us up and, that. That’s something that some of the most effective and meaningful faith leaders have understood is something that some of the most effective and meaningful organizers in human history have understood.

Right. And politicians and tele Rico seems to really grasp that. And of course they hate it because that’s scary. because because it’s effective and it works and it breaks through with people who might otherwise never listen. And it breaks through with people who aren’t supposed to, like someone like James Teleco.

Right. I, it doesn’t, like, I’m not gonna sit here and predict that James Teleco will flip Texas. That’s bold. But it doesn’t shock me that he’s breaking through in polls in ways that we haven’t seen someone do, because he is compelling and it is compelling to see someone be authentic and to have someone see people for, people, and to understand that the human story is a powerful thing and, to deploy it that way.

Much of Christianity accepted modernity, and this is what upsets the Christian right

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. I do want to be fair to people who might have a more negative viewpoint about. Christianity in general that, like it is true. Absolutely. That I guess, maybe what I’m saying, that historic beliefs, we’re talking like. Post liberalism of, christianity, like christianity did have to reconcile itself with liberalism.

And, but that took place quite a while ago to be fair to Christians. And, and, that’s also, this is a dynamic that’s also not just in. Protestantism, but it’s also in Catholicism as well. The, Pope of As, people probably know that, is, often critical of Donald Trump’s policies and locking people up and trying to, impoverish people and give welfare to billionaires, that these are, this is all con consistent through line of Catholic social teaching [00:28:00] and, people like JD Vance.

They know that and it also upsets them as well.

Even like Joe Biden, whatever he is somebody who is a, devout Catholic. And yet the way that he was, he was somebody who kind of didn’t put it forward as much. And so I think a lot of christians had no idea.

That this was a guy who, tried to go to church services every single week. And he was up against a guy who said that he, had never asked for forgiveness for his sins and who had sex with a porn star while his wife was pregnant or had just given birth. And, it, the only Bible verse he can think of is from two Corinthians.

ELROD: Look, I mean, I don’t always get a chance to plug this, but you know, for many reasons my favorite president is Jimmy Carter. And not least is because he was a gen. I don’t think we’ve had that many presidents that you could call sort of moral philosophers. We’ve had some, but Carter’s certainly one of them.

I think he genuinely thought hard and often right about the sort of moral stakes of life and, what we’re asked what’s asked of us right. By being here. And it’s because he was someone who thought about it all the time. His life revolved around these questions.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

Well, and, it is why he lost his reelection, but also why? He, was the most beloved ex-president in the modern era as well, because, he, just, and it’s, and it is tragic because he didn’t, his sincerity is actually what did him in as a president, like that, and that sucks. That sucks massively.

ELROD: I always really chafe at criticism of like the malaise speech. Right. I understand the sort of political misstep of that moment. But, I think a president that’s willing to look the American people in the [00:30:00] eye and say, Hey, ha have, we’re actually like, we’re, giving into a lot of the worst aspects of our nature right now and we really need to get it together.

Like, very few presidents have had the, I think the political courage to,

SHEFFIELD: And I’m not, and I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that, everything’s perfect right now. Like that was the other thing.

ELROD: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: And then of course, you had the, Reagan people secretly working with Iran to not release the hostages. That, perhaps that impacted things for him as well.

Gotta say that. And here we are again with Iran and, Republicans act actually now Trump is subsidizing the Iranians, because he, removed the sanctions on their oil.

ELROD: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: So he is bombing them and giving them money at the same time.

ELROD: If we ever needed proof that, there’s no actual sort of like moral center to this war, it’s the idea that we’re simultaneously bombing them, including sort of, I guess, sort of outsourcing bombing decisions to potentially like AI bots. And then we’re lifting sanctions at the same time. So, if we ever needed proof that, there’s no clear kind of like.

Purpose to this conflict other than, Trump would really like to blow up some people in the Middle East. There, it’s.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And get people not to think about Jeffrey Epstein. So, but we, we, won’t forget that. Yeah. So, you mentioned your, own background in let’s circle back to that though, because, there, after World War II. World War II was a really unique, un unfortunately unique moment in American history because this was, authoritarianism and oligarchy dictatorship, whatever label you want to put on it, it only can win in a democratic system when conservatives feel so scared of social change that they [00:32:00] ally themselves with authoritarians.

And after World War ii, that generation, they had personally learned what happens when you do that if you’re a conservative. And so the conservatives of that era, like Dwight Eisenhower or like Earl Warren, they had learned that lesson that, having a society that supports its own and, spins on its people’s future and invest in the public, that’s a good society.

And that also filtered into American Protestantism as well. Like the, a lot of the biggest institutions, world institution builders, the UN and a lot of other international agencies were built. By liberal Protestants who believed that they were serving God by doing this, and that they were, helping to prepare the earth for Jesus in one way or another, or just making it better because they had that obligation to serve the and the downtrodden.

ELROD: Yeah. I mean, you I think it’s, so important for people to understand this is, and I actually kind of want to, I would honestly even expand what you’re saying and use it as a way to, to talk about American history. At an even wider lens, which is, it’s really important, I think, to push back on this narrative that Christianity can only be, or, has only ever been right.

This kind of conservatizing or even reactionary force in American politics because liberal Christians and progressive Christians have played a crucial role at multiple moments in our history. Right. What you’re describing right there is absolutely true. It’s also, true, you go back to the middle of the 19th century progressive Christians.

Are at the center of the abolition movement, right? Progressive Christians are at the center of the fight to preserve the union. They’re at the center of pushing Lincoln to do emancipation, [00:34:00] right? It, they’re also at the center of, right, the later, reforms that come to protect workers to get rid of, child laborers, right at the end of the 19th century and the turn of the 20th.

I think we do both ourselves and our country and Christianity itself, our politics a, big disservice, right? When we tell a story that doesn’t include the progressive and incredibly important reformist side of Christianity in our politics and how often, really. Catholic and Protestant, really public minded Christians have been crucial to building important institutions to making big change.

Right. It’s also been like we have acknowledged already in this conversation, right? There’s reactionary stuff, right? But, that role, at certain key moments in American history of Christians building liberal. Small L liberal institutions and fighting for, human and civil rights. That’s a really important part of our history that we should emphasize.

How the Christian right built its own closed media ecosystem

SHEFFIELD: And it was such a, powerful and admired tradition that the reactionary Southern Protestants, they realized that they were going to, that they had a policy before of well this is a fallen world. We’re not gonna participate, quoting Jesus, my kingdom is not of this world.

We’re just gonna focus on, taking care of our own and, spreading the gospel in foreign lands. And eventually as so, you had a Brown versus board of education come down, which of course these guys were very much in favor of segregation and they began realizing that liberal Christians are doing so many big things, we have to start mobilizing against them.

And we, have to focus our [00:36:00] evangelism inside of America. And so they began, creating just a ton of organizations, like the Fellowship of Christian athletes and lots of different college ministry focusing on stealing the members of other churches. Like that’s, that was the goal.

Taking people away from mainline Protestantism, taking them away from Catholicism, taking them away from, more progressive or, apolitical evangelical congregations, and setting up publishing houses and setting up, just, I mean they, what they did from an institutional standpoint was incredible. And investing just tight, massive amounts of money in, radio and television.

And because they realize if we don’t advocate for our belief of Christianity. There will be no Christians who agree with us and our viewpoints will be extirpated from politics and from religion. And we cannot allow that to happen. So we will spend all that we can to spread our version of events and our theology and our politics.

And you know what? It’s been incredibly successful. They have basically colonized, the minds of, so many American Christians now. Like, and you see it in the polling, like, and, even colonized Republican minds, like people, Republicans who were not Christian at all.

Like it’s just incredible. And, even beyond, just like the theo the theology or the political viewpoints. Like, like I, I remember, Sean Hannity one time on his radio show, he had said, I’m a guy from Long Island. I didn’t grow up with country music. I hated it. But you know what? These guys have good values, so I think I’m gonna like country music now.

He literally said that. And, you’re seeing that [00:38:00] with Trump also, like people are are identifying as evangelicals. Who never go to church, know nothing about evangelical theology, but they know that other Republicans, a lot of Republicans are evangelicals, so that’s what they’re gonna be too.

ELROD: Yeah, and I mean, that’s a whole other conversation as a southerner who loves a lot of folk and, country, like, sorry, there’s a whole strong tradition in those music genres as well of, anti-establishment and progressive and, provocative. Art, right? No, but I think, I, growing up evangelical, I was someone whose household, like, I got to experience everything.

I had various sort of like open-minded parents and there was a lot of like, I watched like normal media. But, you were saying like the success on the Christian ride of building this kind of world is, it was so, complete, right? That. I mean, there really was, it really was possible.

And I knew people who were like this to, basically live your life in a kind of completely closed ecosystem of Christian media, books, radio, television, everything. Right? I mean, you really could,

SHEFFIELD: From preschool. Eight.

ELROD: From preschool on there was a way you could do it or you basically did not interact with mainstream media or me, or, thought really at all.

And that is. that’s something that’s hard to pull off, but they did. I mean, I would say now with social media, honestly, I think that’s why you actually see a lot of people in my generation who be kind of did a lot of deconstructing and, leaving evangelicalism in their twenties and, thirties is because suddenly that bubble was a lot harder to maintain.

Right. It’s be, it has become harder to maintain. because there’s just so much media now that it’s just really difficult for them to like completely clo seal, seal it off. Right. But I mean, yeah, no, I knew a lot of people who basically went [00:40:00] from like, birth to college and, the only things that they consumed were in that kind of completely closed world.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. And it’s, and, that’s terrible. But from a marketing standpoint, God, like that’s a, that is a marketing agency’s dream.

ELROD: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: and a political consultant’s dream. I mean, like, that’s the other thing is that, and this was a population that was, really. Mobilized by the republican party, like they, and they understood also the, other thing that that we kind of touched on at the beginning, which is that a lot of people who don’t live in urban areas or, the ELA corridor as it’s often called of Boston to, to dc it’s a fact that the political class doesn’t care about how things are in flyover country as they often derisively refer to it.

ELROD: I think doesn’t care is like almost too generous. And what I mean by that is doesn’t care implies that they think about it and choose not to care. I don’t even know that it enters their minds.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Yeah. and it’s, and the other thing is, like me as a Californian, like the only time you ever see California talked about in the national press is if we have a forest fire or an earthquake and, that’s it. Or like some big election.

ELROD: Right.

SHEFFIELD: California does not matter to the Sunday morning news shows or cable news.

They don’t talk about it. and actually, and I, sorry, I have to amend it like the, Fox talks about us a lot actually. Like they lie about us.

Because my Mormon relatives who live in Utah, like they used to go to California all the time when I was, a kid and a teenager.

But now they think that everyone who lives in California, is a drug addict homeless person. And [00:42:00] so, and like they’re worried to come and visit me, because they think they’ll be killed by, some sort of a imaginary, homeless Black Lives Matter trans person.

ELROD: Yeah, well one, and then also like, even that is like, it’s a caricature, right? Because it’s like one, it’s a caricature of the California cities. It’s also a caricature of California. It’s like when my, when I know people around here in the south will talk about California, I’m like. You realize a lot of California is just farms and like rural and like people who are like, it looks, it’s not that different from here, right?

Like the, there’s a whole bunch of California that is,

SHEFFIELD: That’s most of the state.

ELROD: Yeah. It’s, it’s like, it’s not like, it’s just like, I mean, Los Angeles, I’m not like, I have nothing against Los Angeles, but it’s also just like, it’s not true that California is just like one big LA and so yeah, there, there’s a real just misunderstanding of so many of these places.

Right-wing elites do not actually care about people in small-town America, but they talk to them

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. But the other thing also though is that besides not being interested in anything that happens in most of the country. And, this is, I, do plant this firmly on, the Democratic party elites and the, the media elites. Like, they don’t care. But, also they don’t want to, they’re not interested really in they, in telling the stories or listening to them, or even listening to anyone who wants to tell them.

It was interesting to me that, so many self-described liberals were elevating Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. Like anybody who had actually read that book, if you looked at the book, you could see that this guy was an asshole who hated the people that he grew up with.

Who hated his, town, who hated the people that he lived with and hated rural America, thought they were a bunch of drug addicted losers in Kentucky.

Like that’s what the point in that book was. Those people are dumb ass fucks. And I got out [00:44:00] because I am so great. That’s that what that book is.

ELROD: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of hunger for that too. Unfortunately. Unfortunately, if we’re gonna talk about the sort of more like center, left side of things, there’s a lot of hunger in those places for people who will come there and tell you, you’re right, everyone there sucks. And what I’ll usually be like, I’m like, well, I mean, look, the politics around here are a lot of, it’s bad.

I’m not gonna forgive that or present or pretend that we don’t have a serious crisis. There’s democratic deficits in the south. Right, and they’re long running. They go all the way back to the Civil War and before, right? There are serious, social, systemic political issues in this part of the country, but there is a certain type of person, and it is in more like liberal media that just wants you to basically go and confirm all their prejudices and say, yeah, everybody’s there is an inbred hillbilly, and they’re dumb, and they’re all on drugs because they’re dumb.

And, that’s just a, that’s just a completely disingenuous, ridiculous portrait of the country Also. it’s a pretty ridiculous, it’s a pretty gross thing. to believe about any portion of American life if you are actually someone who purports to be a liberal, because in theory you don’t think that any sector of American life deserves to just be sort of abandoned to like a sort of dilapidated and, wanting existence.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, to be fair to Joe Biden, it is, and the Democratic leaders, went during the Biden presidency, they did make sure that a lot of the, infrastructure money and other spending that were passed did actually, most of that money went to Republican do dominated districts, house districts.

And so, but where they failed was they didn’t tell people,

ELROD: Absolutely.

SHEFFIELD: Who did this for you. I mean, And it’s such a contrast because Trump, he put his name on the COVID checks that Democrats made him pass.

ELROD: A lot of Republicans just lied, right? They took the money and they spent [00:46:00] the money, but then they turned around and said that Biden ruined everything, right? And so. And I’m not gonna pretend, like I’ve said before in other conversations, that like, I don’t believe economic anxiety is the reason why, we got Trump.

I tend to think it’s status anxiety, which is a much more complicated thing that often has to do with identity and wanting to see your group on top.

But it is just true that these media caricatures are not effective ways to have this conversation.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and, also, it’s also fair to say that the media, does enable the Republican security, the blue states as well, like.

ELROD: Oh yeah, absolutely. Absolutely

SHEFFIELD: You don’t see the new, the, national press going on into urban diners and talking to Hillary Clinton voters. So tell me, do you still like Hillary?

Tell me, do you still like Kamala Harris? Like.

ELROD: right.

SHEFFIELD: They don’t, do that.

Right elites make many opportunities for their advocates, while left elites rarely help new voices get started

SHEFFIELD: There is a certain pathology to the way that liberalism conducts itself, I think that they don’t take care of their own. They don’t want to take care of their own.

they have an, a lot of the elites have kind of an abstract sense of, a duty to society, which is good. Like we want that right.

But in terms of helping the actual people who exist and the people who you can see, and the people whose money you can, can help your money, can help.

they’re not good at it. And, and it’s a huge contrast. And, I have personal, direct experience with this that, you know, like when I was, in college I, started a anonymous website with my brother called Rather bias.com, attacking Dan Rather. And the second day that we went live with it, rush Limbaugh quoted it on the air, and he told people, visit this website, it’s great.

We were anonymous. No one, he had no idea who we were, but he knew that we were doing something that agreed with him. And so he wanted to people to see it and he wanted to help [00:48:00] us out and build our audience and. Then, within, I think, at least two months, maybe, one month.

I forget it, it’s a while ago, but, bill O’Reilly invited me onto the O’Reilly Factor. Like, this is the kind of outreach that they love to do.

And by contrast, you turn on to MS NOW, or any of the biggest liberal podcasts and you, they just have a rotating cast of the same people. You already heard them say this thing, yesterday and they say this thing they said yesterday.

and it’s like, yes, we don’t have the oligarchs handing out wing net welfare, but the people who are the media big wigs on the right, they help people build an audience. And it isn’t even just in media too. Like he, like Charlie Kirk’s group, Charlie Kirk was literally a, college dropout who was 19 years old.

They threw tens of millions of dollars at him, and he had not proven anything. He had no brand. He had never done a damn thing in his life. But they knew this guy was smart and he worked hard, and that was enough. And that was enough to help him out.

And then, he took that money and started chapters and put programs and events and, books and, newspapers.

Like every campus in America has a right wing student newspaper.

ELROD: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Because they value, and it is that evangelical mentality. They, do it in every single place they do. And then like, and then outside of media, it’s also, when you look at Hispanic Protestants, this is a group that is majority evangelical now.

And it is majority, it’s majority voting Republican because people who are recent immigrants through the United States, they don’t have a network. They don’t have friends, they don’t have family.

But there is a church that is out there that [00:50:00] says, here’s some money and here’s a community. We’re going to, we’re gonna brainwash you

ELROD: Yeah, I think the kind of my sort of like condensed interpretation of that is just that I have a more, as we need a more, as more mentality, right? Like there, it’s, there’s not. A, in a, finite pie or anything like that. Like, more is more, the more voices we can bring out, the more people we can promote, the more we can con, the more we can cultivate the kind of politics we want to see and the conversations we want to be having.

I think it’s just important for us to have that attitude. And I think in terms of getting outta the moment we’re in, we’re gonna have to have that attitude, right? It’s gonna take a lot of people. And I, so I think it’s sort of more, is more view of things is, sort of the way to do it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. To, have a, an idea that a rising tide lifts all boats. That it’s, and that the, people on the left rightfully believe in the fiscal multiplier, but there is also a personal multiplier. That when you help others build you political beliefs, you win. Like, that’s how you, that’s how you promote your beliefs is that you help people who believe them you.

That’s really what it comes down to. And it is something that besides just kind of the evangelical urge there is, there are, there is a real economic value that a lot of these right-wing churches are providing to their members.

And, we can rightfully criticize their hateful beliefs and bigotries and terrible voting patterns and whatnot, but. when I was a a, Mormon, they have a, massive food distribution center that any Mormon can go to. If you don’t have a job and you need food, they’ll give it to you and and they’ll make you work in the warehouse to pay it back.

But they don’t tell [00:52:00] you, you, no, we’re not gonna help you out. And, and all of these, and, it’s, and I think a lot of, the right-wing religions are doing that.

And that’s something that is missing for, for the secular left. The government can’t step in, in every single way at least because of how Republicans have cut government to the bone in this country.

Like, we need universal basic income and but we don’t have it. And so, but there also has to be a place where people can learn about positive values.

Right now, I don’t see anything besides liberal religious denominations that is really doing that at all, anywhere.

ELROD: Yeah. I think when we talk about why it is hard for people to leave sort of their communities on the right. This is a big part of it, right? There’s genuine support networks and relationships and, things that make it hard to walk away or scary, right? Even if they want to walk away, sometimes they make it maybe hard to want to walk away in the first place.

And even if you do want to walk away, they make it frightening. So I think we do have to have an understanding of that, and that the only, the kind of broader approach that’s very compassionate and generous, and again, that sort of mores more mentality, I think is essential to, breaking through with people.

Giving them a path out that feels valuable.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and, making sure that people are included in America that that the idea that that we are America, not just us, here in this conversation or here on the political left, but everybody. We’re in this together whether we like it or not.

There’s that famous line from the poet WH Auden, and it was LBJ, who put it in his ad, the, famous Daisy ad that we must love each other or we must die.

And Donald Trump and Peter Thiel and all these other right-wing fanatics, they do want us to die.

And [00:54:00] so we can only defeat that hatred with actual love.

ELROD: I mean, I can’t top Auden. I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m, I can’t be, I can’t top W.H. Auden.

SHEFFIELD: Well, all right. Well then how about you, you tell people how to stay in touch with what you’re doing Alan?

ELROD: You can always go to my organization’s website, pulaskiinstitution.org. You can follow me anywhere you want. I’m probably the most active on Bluesky. I’m on LinkedIn and other places as well where I’m posting a lot about the stuff we’re doing.

The next big thing we’re doing is a conference in Charlottesville, Virginia called for Good, which is focused around a lot of things we talked about just now, right? These, this idea of like how liberalism can really engage big questions of sort of ethics and virtue and that is free. You have to register, but it is free.

So come if you want to that and that’s in May. And if you are. Can’t make that, but want to try to stay in touch with us for future things. Like I said, follow me there or go to the website.

SHEFFIELD: All right, sounds good. So a good conversation.

ELROD: Thank you so much.

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 are a paid subscribing member, you have unlimited access to the archives. But we do have free subscriptions as well if you can’t afford that. But if you can’t afford to subscribe right now for whatever reason. If you can help me out still by leaving a positive review on Apple Podcasts or on Spotify, that would be much, much appreciated.

And if you’re watching on YouTube, don’t forget to click the old like and subscribe button so you can get notified whenever there’s a new episode. Thanks a lot. I’ll see you next time. [00:56:00]

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Eddie Dalton’s raspy and melodious voice carries through the air, telling tales of a lifetime spent in the school of hard knocks, as the blues band backing him weaves soul into every rubato-inflected syncopation and chord progression.

“We’re just passing through time, like the wind through the pines, just small little pieces in a bigger design,” he croons in his hit, “Another Day Old,” sounding like a reincarnated Muddy Waters.

The fans are impressed:

“This song is part of my testimony,” the top-rated YouTube comment on the video reads. “This song has touched the depth of my soul,” reads another.

Despite the rave reviews though, neither Eddie Dalton nor his band are real. They’re AI-generated fabrications released onto the internet by someone going by the name Dallas Ray Little, according to Showbiz411. Is that a real name? Your guess is as good as mine.

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• How you think about minds influences how you see the world

Whoever is behind the scenes at “Crusty Records,” they have found a formula for success. Eddie Dalton’s classic-sounding blues is racking up the sales and the downloads, with several cracking the top 5 on Apple Music and being viewed millions of times on YouTube.

Computer-generated soul music is not just real, it’s becoming a phenomenon.

The Dalton persona is just the latest AI-generated artist to gain millions of fans, a trend that has not yet attracted much attention from the mainstream media. Last year, a fabricated country singer named “Breaking Rust” had a number-one hit on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. In September, the music company Hallwood Media awarded a $3 million contract to Mississippi poet and designer Telisha Jones after her virtual singer, Xania Monet, had a number-one hit on Billboard’s R&B digital downloads. “How Was I Supposed to Know” was released 7 months ago and already has 9.6 million views on YouTube.

There’s more than a little irony to that song title. AI-generated music has become so good now that it is essentially impossible to discern a human-made tune from one made by a computer. In a study commissioned last year by the music service Deezer with 9,000 people in 8 countries, 97 percent of respondents were unable to tell if provided songs were done by humans or AI.

Do people really want to know if a song they’re being presented wasn’t performed by people? In the Deezer survey, 80 percent of respondents said they wanted AI-generated music to be labeled as such.

Still, knowing that a song was computer-made doesn’t seem to mean that people would avoid it. The poll found that 66 percent said they would listen to an AI song at least once; only 45 percent of respondents said they wanted an option to filter out all AI-made music.

As of this writing, Deezer is the only music streaming service that requires uploaders to tag AI-generated content as such. No such rules are in place on the other major services like Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. According to Deezer, 34 percent of all songs it receives daily are entirely AI-generated.

We don’t know the technical backstory behind Breaking Rust or Eddie Dalton, but Jones has said that she uses an AI music generating software called Suno to set her own lyrics to music.

“She’s been writing poetry for a long time,” Jones’s manager Romel Murphy told Billboard, arguing that words sung by the Xania Monet character are what draws people in. “It’s just the lyrics, and they are pure.”

Whether that’s true or not, the music industry as a whole has not taken kindly to Suno and rival service Udio. In June of 2024, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) filed a lawsuit against the companies that was joined by numerous studios and musician groups.

“These corporations steal our work to create sound-alikes, effectively forcing us into a ‘training’ role to which we never consented,” the Music Workers Alliance said in a statement. “Their more expensive subscriptions allow users to commercialize the outputs, placing us in unfair competition with an inexhaustible supply of knock-offs of our own work, published without any credit or acknowledgement of our role in their creation, and yet capable of displacing us in record production, film, video, and television scoring, and other markets.”

As they so often do with major new technologies, legislatures have done little to stand on one side or the other. President Donald Trump has decided to stand on the side of AI companies, however, signing an executive order in December of last year after Republican congressional allies failed to muster support for a federal ban on state AI regulations. California Gov. Gavin Newsom defied Trump earlier this week with his own executive order requiring AI companies to watermark generated videos and images, and to prove that they have policies against the creation of violent pornography and child abuse material.

The Trump executive order is expected to face legal challenges since it conflicts with dozens of state laws regarding AI. The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal of a March 2025 mid-level court ruling that entirely AI-generated art could not be copyrighted because a human had not created it. That seems about right to me.

AI companies have been sued by numerous media publishers around the world for copyright infringement, but thus far, no major nations have stepped forward with definitive rulings on whether the technology firms owe damages.

Wherever governments decide to come down on AI-generated art, its legal status isn’t the only question it raises. What is it exactly about art that matters? Is its value how it makes us feel, or is it knowing that fellow human beings with stories and minds made it? Can we really say that auto-tuned artists who use the same lyricists and beat-mixers are really doing something unique? Should women who don’t fit the Vogue profile be excluded from music fame?

These are not simple questions. Last month on Theory of Change, adult model Siri Dahl and I talked about this in the context of erotic media, but these are questions facing all art in the age of generative AI. While many musicians have come forward to speak against AI in their industry, top producer Timbaland, known for his highly templated, production-driven approach to pop and R&B, is also a huge booster of Suno.

“My Thriller, to me, is this tool. God presented this tool to me,” he told NPR.

Regardless of one’s stance on AI music though, it’s worth considering whether beauty is the sum total of conception, training, story, and performance—or can these be separated and valued on their own? Should an artist’s face and body determine whether she is heard? Is beauty literally in the eye of the beholder, or does it live in the interaction of artist and spectator?

I won’t pretend to have these answers. Maybe there aren’t any definitive ones. What matters right now is that we’re asking the questions. Because at the end of the day, we’re more than just another day old.

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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.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

12:20 — Science is based on philosophy, whether it realizes it or not

15:14 — Hieroglyphics, Etruscan, and alien languages

24:05 — Science may not be universal at all, or at the very least the models humans use

31:59 — The fact that science is limited in what it can describe doesn’t mean it’s fake

35:30 — 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 richest

51:09 — Math and numbers are not part of reality itself

01:02:29 — Don’t say you care about space if you support cutting science funding

Audio Transcript

The 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. And

SHEFFIELD: 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 not

SHEFFIELD: 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 languages

SHEFFIELD: 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 guide

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, because they speak our

WHITESON: 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, movie

WHITESON: 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 use

SHEFFIELD: 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 that

SHEFFIELD: 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 fake

SHEFFIELD: [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 by

WHITESON: 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 richest

SHEFFIELD: No, well, and, and not economic sense either. As I

WHITESON: 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 from

SHEFFIELD: 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’s

WHITESON: 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 itself

SHEFFIELD: 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 this

WHITESON: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: the book, so talk about it here if you

WHITESON: 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 counting

SHEFFIELD: 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 where

SHEFFIELD: 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 funding

SHEFFIELD: 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.

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 When 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.

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• 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 industry

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

08:29 — Christian right activists using blatant lying against birth control to scare women

10:54 — The larger agenda is to remove legal rights for women, for both radical Christians and secular incels

18:11 — Right-wing men are increasingly obsessed with AI-generated women and sex robots

22:10 — Real women willing to parrot right-wing men have been part of Republican media for decades already

24:38 — Mar-a-Lago face and forced gender conformity

27:12 — Multiple women have now died after doctors refused to remove miscarried fetuses

29:39 — Reactionary Republicans are also trying to strip liberal parents of their rights, while elevating reactionary parents

34:00 — Democrats defending women isn’t just morally right, it’s good politics

Audio Transcript

MATTHEW 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 women

SHEFFIELD: 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 incels

RINKUNAS: 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 robots

SHEFFIELD: 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 were

SHEFFIELD: 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 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 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 already

SHEFFIELD: 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 conformity

SHEFFIELD: 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 fetuses

SHEFFIELD: 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 communities

SHEFFIELD: 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 vigorously

SHEFFIELD: 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: Wrongheaded

Wrongheaded 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 win

SHEFFIELD: 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.

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Everyone 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.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 Introduction

11:42 — Is it ethical for adult media creators to use AI to generate content of themselves?

23:22 — What AI-generated porn can’t offer

30:32 — Why middle-aged and older women continue to oppose porn

39:32 — The hetero dating recession is both sides rediscovering partnership when women are now finally independent

48:54 — ‘Love Is Blind’ as a microcosm of heterosexual dating attitudes

55:19 — Why are some people simulating relationship partners with chatbots?

Audio Transcript

MATTHEW 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 offer

SHEFFIELD: 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 media

SHEFFIELD: 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 independent

SHEFFIELD: 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 attitudes

DAHL: 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 boyfriend

SHEFFIELD: 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: Awesome.

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.

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The 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 Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

07:32 — Republican billionaires have realized that controlling media discourse is cheap

17:58 — Republicans will always call Democrats ‘socialist’ regardless of their policies

26:12 — Far-right Jews like Ben Shapiro incorrectly thought they could have sexism and racism without antisemitism

28:07 — Trump’s policy positions constantly shift because coherent policy is unimportant to reactionaries

36:48 — The UK Labour Party is a current example that running away from your policy viewpoints doesn’t work

47:49 — Durable political change follows cultural change

01:00:30 — Glenn Youngkin and the myth that voters are obsessed with hating trans people

01:06:23 — Liberals and progressives must move beyond criticizing others

Audio Transcript

The 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 of

MOLLOY: 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 it

MOLLOY: 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 ground

SHEFFIELD: the [00:06:00] objective

MOLLOY: 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. Like

SHEFFIELD: 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 cheap

SHEFFIELD: 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 thing

MOLLOY: 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 them

MOLLOY: Just bombing, bombing for fun, got a, what’s that? That old Simpsons got a nuke, someone, like, yeah with that

Republicans will always call Democrats ‘socialist’ regardless of their policies

MOLLOY: 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 a

SHEFFIELD: 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 are

SHEFFIELD: Tougher

MOLLOY: 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, I

SHEFFIELD: think that’s gonna make them more

MOLLOY: 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, I

SHEFFIELD: 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 sense

MOLLOY: 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, because

SHEFFIELD: gets a little bit, yeah,

Far-right Jews like Ben Shapiro incorrectly thought they could have sexism and racism without antisemitism

MOLLOY: 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 reactionaries

SHEFFIELD: 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 at

MOLLOY: 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 budget

MOLLOY: 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. And

MOLLOY: 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 work

SHEFFIELD: 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 re

SHEFFIELD: 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: Basically

MOLLOY: immediately, Gave them no

SHEFFIELD: 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 and

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

MOLLOY: everyone shrugs and it just kind of goes, okay.

Durable political change follows cultural change

SHEFFIELD: 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 so

MOLLOY: and the, the thing about

SHEFFIELD: 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 people

SHEFFIELD: 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 others

SHEFFIELD: 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 York

SHEFFIELD: 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, it

MOLLOY: 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. Now

SHEFFIELD: 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 all

MOLLOY: 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.

Subscribe now

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 politics

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

06:13 — QAnon as a religion of narcissism

12:18 — What conspiracism offers middle-aged and older women

20:13 — Media proliferation and political manipulations have made conspiracy belief much easier

28:27 — The women of January 6th faced widely divergent economic circumstances

34:32 — Charismatic evangelicalism as the common starting point for QAnon believers

44:02 — Astrology, space aliens, and QAnon

48:44 — ‘Soul contracts’ and tragic morality

52:49 — Right-wing politicians harm society and then use the nihilism they engender as campaign leverage

55:42 — What do QAnon believers think about the Epstein files now?

01:04:35 — Prevention is easier than de-radicalization

Audio Transcript

The 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 activity

SHEFFIELD: 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 data

SHEFFIELD: 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 like

The thermostatic nature of public opinion and Republican deception

SHEFFIELD: 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.

Read more

When 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 misinformation

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

06:13 — QAnon as a religion of narcissism

12:18 — What conspiracism offers middle-aged and older women

20:13 — Media proliferation and political manipulations have made conspiracy belief much easier

28:27 — The women of January 6th faced widely divergent economic circumstances

34:32 — Charismatic evangelicalism as the common starting point for QAnon believers

44:02 — Astrology, space aliens, and QAnon

48:44 — ‘Soul contracts’ and tragic morality

52:49 — Right-wing politicians harm society and then use the nihilism they engender as campaign leverage

55:42 — What do QAnon believers think about the Epstein files now?

01:04:35 — Prevention is easier than de-radicalization

Audio Transcript

The 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 narcissism

SHEFFIELD: 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. I

SHEFFIELD: 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 women

SHEFFIELD: 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 head

COOK: 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 easier

COOK: 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 circumstances

SHEFFIELD: 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 are

COOK: not at all.

SHEFFIELD: of regular

COOK: 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 they

COOK: 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 believers

SHEFFIELD: 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 philosophy

SHEFFIELD: she’s a

COOK: 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 even

be

SHEFFIELD: no one should have to to do that if it’s

COOK: 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 QAnon

SHEFFIELD: 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 of

COOK: 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 is

SHEFFIELD: 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 that

COOK: 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 morality

COOK: 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 be

SHEFFIELD: And you signed up for it. Like that’s the

COOK: 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. But

SHEFFIELD: 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’s

COOK: 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 then

COOK: But do you think it’s about party ideology or power structures? I mean, I think it’s power. I think

SHEFFIELD: 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 does

attract 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 was

doing it, And he got away with it. So like that’s so, like there is something real

COOK: I owe a hundred percent. I

SHEFFIELD: 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 leverage

SHEFFIELD: 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 out

of

COOK: 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 part

SHEFFIELD: not

satanist,

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 that

COOK: 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 you

SHEFFIELD: Well, and no one who works for Trump has had any consequences. But, so, but I’m curious though. So have you been

COOK: 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, part

of

SHEFFIELD: 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-radicalization

SHEFFIELD: 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 institutions

SHEFFIELD: 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 healthcare

COOK: Yeah. Yeah. That’s an institution to

SHEFFIELD: 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 not

on 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’s

SHEFFIELD: I don’t even know that

one.

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.

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The 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 frequently abusing the court’s “shadow docket” emergency procedures to temporarily empower President Donald Trump’s criminality and violence.

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.

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• 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 equality

Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

10:41 — Philosophy and science abandoned belief in total objectivity, but legal scholars didn’t

17:15 — Legal formalism as the perfect justification for law schools

27:12 — Legal realism explained

38:22 — Critical legal studies and integralism

43:34 — Going back to legal realism means we have to restrain judges

48:09 — The Warren and Burger courts were anomalies that distorted liberal understanding of jurisprudence

53:17 — Because judging is political, it must be restrained

59:00 — Making courts matter to voters

Audio Transcript

The 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’t

SHEFFIELD: 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 schools

SHEFFIELD: 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 poorly

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that’s right. And

MYSTAL: 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 a

SHEFFIELD: 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. So

MYSTAL: 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 explained

SHEFFIELD: 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 an

MYSTAL: 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 just

SHEFFIELD: 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 integralism

SHEFFIELD: 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 judges

MYSTAL: 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 jurisprudence

SHEFFIELD: 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 way

SHEFFIELD: 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. I

MYSTAL: 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 Congress

SHEFFIELD: 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 voters

SHEFFIELD: 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 because

SHEFFIELD: 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.

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Public 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.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

06:54 — High weirdness and libertarianism as a conservative liberalism

10:19 — The origins of the “counterculture”

17:15 — New Thought movement and mind over matter

27:24 — Quantum physics and a new generation of pseudoscience

36:02 — Alfred Korzybski and Robert Anton Wilson

48:38 — Ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism and high weirdness

58:30 — Balancing truth and skepticism

01:07:34 — Living with uncertainty and embracing the void

Audio Transcript

The 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 liberalism

SHEFFIELD: 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 to

RABINOWITZ: 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 matter

RABINOWITZ: 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 like

RABINOWITZ: There’s your origins of Prosperity Gospel right there too, right?

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah, it is

RABINOWITZ: 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 or

RABINOWITZ: 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 he

RABINOWITZ: 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 pseudoscience

SHEFFIELD: 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 monster

RABINOWITZ: 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 Wilson

SHEFFIELD: 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, it

RABINOWITZ: Or if your

SHEFFIELD: 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 weirdness

RABINOWITZ: Sure. The

SHEFFIELD: 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’t

SHEFFIELD: 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 skepticism

RABINOWITZ: 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 for

RABINOWITZ: 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 could

RABINOWITZ: 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 void

SHEFFIELD: 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.

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