 Can I make 40 here? So I have friends who are absolutely convinced we're headed for rampaging, raging inflation. And so some of them are big believers in what Peter Schiff is saying. It's like you've got to get into gold, man. You guys hedged against inflation with lots of gold and gold stocks. And then I have other friends that say, oh, Peter Schiff is a hack. Why is he being put on TV? He's wrong so often. Why does anyone listen to him? Well, guess what? Guess what? The best hedge is against inflation, mate. It's also the best form of insurance for surviving a natural disaster such as an earthquake. And that is have friends, have community, have good relationships with your family. So Lucy Jones, how would you describe Lucy Jones? She's an expert in earthquakes. So she's a seismologist. Right. And so she wrote an op-ed in the LA Times a few months ago saying the best way to, the one thing you can do, the best thing that you can do to survive an earthquake is to know your neighbors. Know their names, have a relationship with them because when the stuff gets real and earthquakes rolled through and buildings are trashed and fires are going up and you're running low on water and food, the best thing you can, best preparation for that sort of emergency situation is to know your neighbors. Know their names, be friends with them and so that you can pitch in together. And so you're not going to be as smart as a wide circle of friends and a community. So whatever's the natural or financial disaster that's heading your way, the best way to survive a disaster is with friends, with community. Right. One thing you need certainly to overcome tough times is energy. And the number one way to get energy is to have positive interactions with other people and the more depth and strength in your relationship with that person, then the more energy you're likely to get. So you want to survive a disaster, you want to survive tough times, you want to hedge against inflation, you want to be prepared for a topsy-turvy world. Well, the best thing to do is have friends, have community, have people that you're interacting with on a daily basis. We should be spending hours a day around other people. We should probably be spending at least like six, seven, eight hours a day around other people. And we should be getting energy from those interactions. I don't understand life with our community. So we're heading into Yom Kippur in about three hours. I'll be heading off to Shul and it's an incredibly energizing experience compared to being on my own because I'm going to see dozens of people that I know tonight. All right. And when I see them, they see me, they're going to light up. It's like 40s in the house. And whether we fist bump or just nod or say hello, it's hugely energizing to be part of a tribe. Right. We all need to belong to a tribe. And you know what else is tribal? Abortion. Right. Look, here's an analogy. They're a primary and secondary emotion. So secondary emotion is like anger. Right. If you're mad, it's covering up and distracting you from, in all likelihood, a feeling of hurt. So let's say, oh, Babylonian Hebrew. Okay. He hasn't returned any of my, I think last three calls. Right. So over the past six or nine months, I think I've called him three times and he's never called me back. So he's texted me back, saying, I'll call you, but he never, ever calls me back. So if I were mad about that, I wouldn't really be mad. Right. That's the secondary emotion. If I was mad, I would be trying to distracting myself from the hood. It's like, oh, you know, why doesn't Babylonian Hebrew want to stay friends with me? Why doesn't he call me back? Why do I feel like a Georgia lover here? What the hell's going on with babs? What am I a chopped liver? And so that, that anger, that would really just be covering up hurt. Right. So anger is a secondary emotion. A primary emotion is hurt and fear. Right. That's a primary emotion. So I often get tight hamstrings. Right. So I can treat that symptom tight hamstrings, but the reason I have tight hamstrings, because I'm standing out with my standing desk and I'm tilting back a little bit. I'm just tilting back a little bit. And if my hamstrings didn't tighten up, I just follow my back. Right. So the reason that we get, you know, extra muscle tightness is because we're out of alignment. So I can treat the symptom. Oh, tight hamstrings. I can do the stretch and I can do this muscular release and I can, you know, get a massage. But that's secondary. The primary thing that's going on is that like 99% of people, I tend to tip back a little bit from my hips. And so if I came forward a little bit from my hips, I'm no longer tipping back, then I'm not going to have the problem with tight hamstrings. So there's an analogy. Oh, so tribal identity comes first. And then all sorts of political and social and cultural positions come after that. So this is how I view the world anyway. There's biology and then biology combined with environment produces culture. Right. So biology, environment, produce culture out of culture comes religion and then politics. Right. So biology, environment, culture, religion, politics, or actually, let me revert, not quite that. There's biology, then there's environment, then there's culture, then there's politics, and then there's religion. Religion today, I think is primarily in the United States is primarily a manifestation of politics rather than politics primarily being a manifestation of religion. So there is a lefty who writes a weekly column for the New York Times that is excellent. It's never cease to be thought provoking. Yeah, the guy's on the left, but he has a lot of thoughtful stuff. Lucky Steve Saylor endorsed. So who am I talking about? Thomas B. Edson, E-D-S-A-L-L. So he writes abortion has never just been about abortion. Right. So as recently as 1984, abortion was not a deeply partisan issue. The difference between in support for a pro-choice position was a mere six percentage point. So 40% of Democrats in 1984 were pro-life, 39% were pro-choice, among Republicans, 33% were pro-choice, 45% were pro-life. Right. By 2020, 73% of Democrats are pro-choice, and the 17% are pro-life, among Republicans, 60% are pro-life, 25% pro-choice. So the difference between 1984 and today is 48 percentage points. And it's not because people's thinking about abortion is incredibly clarified is that abortion has become a tribal signifier, like wearing a mask or not wearing a mask. Okay, among strong partisans, people most likely to vote in election, the difference between Democrats and Republicans on abortion, 59 percentage points. So where do attitudes towards abortion come from? They come from tribal attitudes. Where do tribal attitudes come from? They come from race. Right. Race may not be everything, but it's pretty dug on close for how if you want to understand the world, like understanding race is probably the most useful metric. So whites who score highest on measures of racial resentment and racial grievance, far more likely to support strict limits on abortion. Now, that's counterintuitive because you would think that people who score high on racial resentment and racial grievance would be very supportive of abortion for groups that they don't like. Right. You would think like rationally. And so the HPD crowd, the alt-right crowd, they're all for abortion for groups that they don't particularly care for. So I notice a lot of conservative people will whisper, oh, I think who's the big pro-choice organization, the birth control organization, they'll often make snive comments like, oh, yeah, they're doing great work in the inner city. All right. So that's, you would think that would logically flow. But in the real world, generally speaking, whites who have lots of racial resentment and racial grievance, again, to support strict limits on abortion than compared to whites who score low on these measures. So racial attitudes are linked now with opinions on all sorts of disparate issues such as social welfare, gun control, immigration, climate change. If you're high in racial grievance, you're not going to be particularly concerned about climate change. So this is part of the deep polarization of the electorate, which means we've become more tribal. And this is why we have more straight-ticket voting and we have a declining proportion of swing voters. So the key leaders of the conservative movement in the late 70s and early 80s, such as Richard Vigory, Paul Wyrich, Phyllis Shaffley, Jerry Falwell, they were seeking to expand their base beyond those simply opposed to the civil rights movement. And so they settled on a concerted effort to politicize abortion because that dodged the race issue and it offered the opportunity to unify Catholics and evangelicals. So the chat wants to talk about vaccine passports, right? Health passports, vaccine passports, these are signs of tribal identity. So generally speaking, people on the left or fallen people on the right are generally speaking opposed to them. So the anti-abortion movement has convinced its followers that the positions that their supporters who have limits on abortion take, that these just follow in a deductive way from their moral principles, but they don't, all right? People primarily in America, why is it like America compared to all other western countries, so gung-ho on opposing abortion? Well, flashing neon light, it's not about abortion. It's a tribal signifier. It's a racial attitude. So in 1978, the IRS wanted to impose taxes on churches running segregated private schools, right? So they wanted to tax the white Southerners who were seeking to avoid federally mandated school integration by setting up private schools. So this mobilized, born-again and evangelical Christians, the moral majority. Your death screams Jordan Peterson's bloody hell, crumbs everywhere, binge snacking. There's no binge snacking here, mate. I need my recallers to do these live streams. What if I get a tickle in my throat? What do you expect me to do? So Richard Bigary, Paul Wyrish, Phyllis Schlafly, all these people on the right, they wanted to find one issue that could bring together support for their point of view. So building a new conservative movement around the burning issue of defending the tax advantages of racist schools, that's not going to be a viable strategy on the national stage. Now, stop the tax on segregated schools is not going to inspire broad-based conservative revolution. So they landed upon one surprising word that would supply the key to the political puzzle of the age, abortion. So abortion opponents can be more likely to commit to a patriarchal worldview in which the controller production and female sexuality in general is going to be thought to be central in maintaining traditional norms and to sustain the family, which they feel is under threat from modern secular liberal forces. So abortion is the most intractable issue dividing the two political parties. There's no room to compromise, but it wasn't always this way. So 50 years ago, Southern Baptist Convention passed a decisively liberal resolution on abortion. Something they had been is the religion in which I was raised quite liberal on abortion. So abortion opposition emerged out of a desire to protect segregated schools and to try to create a broad-based conservative movement. Conservatives have a stronger disgust reflex. Abortion is plainly disgusting, says Eliot. Well, abortion has not been a big issue for conservatives prior to the late 1970s. So if it's so disgusting, why weren't conservatives up in arms about abortion? So Paul Wyrick says the religious right did not come together in opposition to the road decision. What got the religious right going was an attempt by the IRS to rescind the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University because of its racial discriminatory policies, which included ban on interracial dating the university maintained until a year 2000. So opposition to abortion is a convenient diversion. It's a godsend to distract from what motivated conservative political activism, the defense of racial segregation in evangelical Christian institutions. There are many politicians who become adamant foes of abortion. This is a substitute for when open racism is unfashionable. They need a more high-minded issue, one that won't compel them to surrender their fundamental political orientation, which is an outgrowth of their tribal orientation. So the beauty of defending a fetus is the fetus demands nothing in return. So it's like low-risk advocacy. So in the middle of the surging black rights, women rights, gay rights, reproductive rights, criminal rights, mentally ill rights, reality of the 1970s, that created a huge conservative reaction that led to two terms for Ronald Reagan to Republicans taking back control of the U.S. Senate in 1980 and a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats who wielded tremendous power in the House. So there's this persistent association in America between views on abortion and ethno-racial exclusion. So for the target populations, in particular evangelical Protestants whom these people like Jerry Fourwell or Paul Wyrich, Richard Vigory, were trying to mobilize, racial animosity and abortion attitudes are related, but in such an indirect way. But what underlies them is an aversion toward the ruling intellectual secular elite. So the people who are pushing the government's role in ensuring equal opportunity and equal rights, racial integration, these are the same people who are pushing permissive abortion laws, such as the highly educated from New England, banking, universities, northern cities, the big coastal cities. So the policy domain may differ, but the heated people are the same. So it's not so much religiosity driving political attitudes, right? So Republicans and Democrats select in or out of religious communities in large part because of their politics. So it's politics driving religion more than religion driving politics. So people prefer to live and be around homogeneous social networks. They want less diverse information about controversial issues such as politics and abortions. So churches stop being places where people with different political viewpoints came together. So religious communities became more like echo chambers populated by like-minded partisans, which is the case now. So there being a whole host of Democrats who've had to liberalize their views on abortion as they eyed the presidency. So Ted Kennedy, Jesse Jackson, Dick Geppard, Al Gore, Dennis Kucinich. So abortion is like a roundabout vehicle to appeal to racial conservatives. So anti-abortion and pro-segregationists are explicit co-travelers. So matters of abortion and matters of traditional family structure are part of strong themes that develop alongside private schools and alongside views of welfare reform and criminal law reform and women's rights, gay rights, etc. But at the center of all these concerns is race. So you've got this synergy in conservative politics aligning ideas about sex, sexuality, religion, and family and race. So there's a historian at Vanderbilt says there are three dimensions to abortion. There's the concern among fundamentalist Christians in the south. So some of them think abortion is wrong. Now that's a tiny part of the support for criminalizing abortion. But the second, the major support for criminalizing abortion is that this is an issue that riles up the electorate. So this is less about policy, it's more about vote harvesting. And then the third area of support is the resonance between state and regional sovereignty. So regional politics in America are still defined by resistance to federal authority. So if the federal government can run any aspect of our regional culture or politics, then they can run it off. So this has been a concern about everything from reconstruction, lynching law, fair employment practices, the Brown decision, busing, prayer in school, abortion. These are just manifestations of this deeper issue of regional autonomy. And in the south, opposition to abortion grows out of tensions between notions of manhood and evangelical attempts to control men. So this is from a history professor. It says there's always been a tension in southern life between ideas of rugged masculinity and expectations of evangelical Christian propriety. So preachers and other parishioners have tried to do their part to rein in the worst excesses of southern manhood, whether it's related to drink or to sex or to violence. So they've waged a war on sin to protect home and hearth and to secure Christian leadership. Now excessive sin in the south has also led to excessive evangelistic fervor. So the greater the sin, the greater the salvation, the greater the masculine indiscretion, the more these were celebrated, then the more you needed an equally aggressive, muscular Christian response. So southern evangelical Christianity has been much more welcoming of rugged masculinity in the south than in the north and on the coast. So for theological, cultural and political reasons, southern evangelical Christians whose prescripts and sentiments pervade southern rural culture in particular, they have increasingly embraced a muscular Christianity that deems protection of home and hearth and the family and liberty. These are things that worth waging with all the force and abandon required. So the enemy from the southern Christian evangelical perspective is effeminate liberalism and secular humanism. So even those leaders who might not be terribly Christlike in their temperamental norm are welcome into the forward if they're willing to fight back against effeminate liberalism and secular humanism. So in a sense, southern evangelical Christians are jettisoned the New Testament for the old, for a way to revive society and they've carved out plenty of room for rampaging politicians who want to impose their will such as Donald Trump to remake the nation in their image. So the swashbuckling southern rural politician enjoys more freedom than ever to play hard, even as he decries the sins of abortion and feminism. As saint and sinner, he's been granted the right and the freedom to lead the family values charged against Washington and a soft liberal elite. So whenever an issue becomes moralized, it becomes more difficult to resolve. And when an issue becomes demoralized, when it's less likely to be seen strictly in terms of right and wrong, it becomes easier to reach a bipartisan consensus. Bye-bye.