 What's the theme there? The theme there is that for him, for his worldview, it has to be the case that grassroots working class movement, as exemplified by Jeremy Corbyn, can basically do no wrong. And if they don't win general elections, then it's because of lies, media manipulation, false class consciousness, or something like that. Right, I mean, this is the same sort of rhetoric that's used by Trump supporters and people all over the political spectrum. Right, in the United Kingdom, a major TV news presenter has been socially ostracized because, what, he was paying off and having sexual relationships with the young men who worked for him? Does he what Douglas Murray has to say? He's getting clogged up by these sorts of cake gate, speed gate, everything's a damn gate. And everyone thinks it's so original when they put gate after anything. And what would the government be concentrating on? What might it be achieving? If the answer is not much more, then there's even more trouble that we're in than I thought. But my belief is that we just are horribly misdirecting our energies. And yes, there's doubt because scandals going on, there always are. And there are scandals that are of significance. I mean, you've mentioned Northern Ireland, the state knife controversies come back up again. I don't think that outside of Northern Ireland, one in 1,000 households know anything about that. Maybe they don't need to. But it would probably be a more intelligent scandal to look at than Gordon the Gopher's former sofa mate scandal. I think that, but as I say, the main thing isn't, you know, where are the scandals? It's a very post-watergate thing that journalists think that their job is to find all the scandals that exist, expose them, and then win all of the awards. It's a very post-watergate way of doing journalism. Sometimes there are scandals, then they should be exposed. But the whole politics, the whole country isn't just a set of scandals waiting to be uncovered. Right, the biggest problems we face are not scandals. The biggest problems we face are the results of laws and directions given by elites, such as to not have police do their job, such as to pull people over for reckless driving and for not punishing violent criminals, right? This has all been done with the full consent of the law. There is some fundamental failure of the media in this. But the fundamental failure of the media is a fundamental failure of government. It's a reflection of that, which is the fact that government seems not to be able to do in Britain any of the things that we need it to do. There is some fundamental failure of the media in this. We are risking throwing Philip Schofield under the bus. Now, I do think what he did was wrong. He knows what he did was wrong. He was clearly in a position of power. And I think the biggest issue is his connections in getting this young one at his job at ITV, because it was clearly that's what got him to that position. So we know this was a young person who was enamored by Philip Schofield. And that power dynamic was very toxic. However, we have to remember that at some point, there's going to be a situation of vultures circling the prey here. He has come out. He has said he was wrong, and he lied, and all of that. I think we have to remember that he's still a human being. And this kind of bullying that took out Caroline Flack. Now, his mental health must be under enormous amounts of strain, because while he was wrong, he's lost so much. He's lost the credibility that he's built over a 30-year career. He's no longer hosting that water, which named Escaped Knee. He's been dropped by the Princess Trust. Exactly. The Princess Trust, he's been dropped by. And the runner has also won the brunt of this. He's had his privacy invaded in so many different ways. I think enough is enough. This public inquiry is not necessary. This is not the BBC. And I think it's highlighted what happens when you have inappropriate relationships at work. OK, here's a philosopher is accused of inappropriate relationships at work. She left her husband for a student. So there's this idea now that's quite popular that if there's any disparity in status or any disparity in hierarchy, then somebody starting a love relationship with somebody who's lower than them on a side as hierarchy is inherently exploitative. That there's something immoral about. And I've seen this even no matter how long that relationship lasts, no matter how much people are happy together, no matter how somebody would in hindsight say, I didn't see anything exploitative about this meeting. And because you're a woman, it's complicated, because people don't usually see the woman in the higher status position. And that was something that I saw all over the place. I'm just curious if you think that that's contentless service worth responding to. So I think it is more specific than a high low status. I think if I had gotten together with someone who was lower status than a tenured professor, which is a lot of people, people wouldn't have been so upset about it. So this is Agnes Callard. She's an academic philosopher. In 2011, she divorced her husband, fellow University of Chicago professor, Ben Callard. She began seeing Arnold Brooks, who was a graduate student at the time, after a year of dating, they married. She has two children with her first husband, Ben Callard, one with Arnold Brooks. And she lives with both her current husband and her ex-husband. And she was diagnosed with autism in her 30s. And her longest book is called Aspiration, the Agency of Becoming. I think it's specifically that the person was a student and that they were a student in my own class. So I do think it's not just status, but it's power. And so there's the idea that I was in a position of power over him and that you shouldn't have romantic relationships in that kind of context. And as a general rule, I think that's probably a good rule of thumb. But as I explained on Twitter, because this is a somewhat fraught situation, the university has a whole bunch of regulations for how to do it. And I followed all those rules, including not starting a relationship with him while he was my student. That is, he was officially, his work was transferred over to somebody else, et cetera. And I think that if we're thinking about this in a broader perspective of what do we want to encourage as a culture, I guess I think if everybody did what I did when they were in romantic relationships with students, namely, announce the relationship to officials at the university immediately, get out of the supervisory role, create a track record such that where I had to do this over and over again, it would be very well known, because they'd all be announced. I think we wouldn't really have any problems with faculty student relationships. So I think that that is all of the problem cases. And I know many of them are kept secret. They're people who don't talk about it. And so they can't be monitored or regulated. And the abuses are unknown because they're secret. OK, so this is Agnes Calla talking with Diana Fleischmann, who's in a polyamorous relationship with who's that Jeffrey guy psychologist? Diana Fleischmann's a psychologist. Jeffrey Miller, I believe. Yeah, I think that most of the time somebody in a position of power is a man. And most of the time, they're heterosexual relationships with men in a position of power and women in a position of less power or a subservient kind of role. And we don't have to talk about evolutionary psychology that much. I do have a question about that at some point, because I know that you talk to Robin a lot. But in some sense, it's unusual for somebody in a position of power to want to be in a serious relationship with somebody in a position of less power than they are, rather than somebody usually people in positions of power. I mean, one of the whole reasons that people are motivated to attain power is to have multiple relationships, to have singular, serious romantic relationships, right? And so that's what you're saying is the problem comes from. Right. I also should say that, as reported in the piece, this was very much not private, like it was not in the New Yorker originally, but it was something I announced to the university and I even gave a talk about it to the university community. And there wasn't much outrage. And it was well known within philosophical circles because of course gossip spread. And many of the people who were very, very outraged by it on Twitter 11 years later were not outraged by it at the time when it occurred, which is like puzzling phenomenon, right? Why didn't you object to this back when, you know, he actually was, had just been my student or whatever, rather than like 10 years later when we're married and he is a faculty member. And I think, so this is part, why didn't take the reaction that seriously is that those people had like 10 years to come to me and object and say, hey, I think there's a problem here. And, but they didn't until this piece came out. And I think it's just, it's the word test effect again. It's like the piece they found confronting, sort of upsetting, more personal than they wanted it to be. And they were looking like, where in this can we find something, you know, to make a more objection to it and they fastened on something. But that very thing is not something that actually upset them when it showed up in their lives, sort of approximately. Okay, that's from Aporia Magazine. Like a lot of interesting material on Aporia Magazine. They also have YouTube channel. They interviewed Steve Saylor about a week ago. All right, back to this David Brooks piece in the Atlantic. America was awash in morally formative institutions. Its founding fathers had a low view of human nature. Yeah, all political movements on the right have a skeptical view of human nature. They designed the constitution to mitigate it. So if such flawed self-centered creatures were going to govern themselves and be decent with one another, they were going to need some training. So for roughly 150 years after the founding, Americans were obsessed with moral education. So major difference here between the left and the right is in their view of human nature. Or right wing politics begins with a negative perspective on human nature. The left takes a much more positive view. David Brooks makes some good points in this article including these two paragraphs. These various approaches to moral formation shared two premises. The first was that training the heart and body is more important than training the reasoning brain. Yeah, you're only going to have substantial moral change if it takes place within relationships, within a community, right? Some moral skills can be taught the way academic subjects are imparted through books and lectures, but we learned most of the virtues through the repetition of many small habits and practices or within a coherent moral culture, a community of common values for a tribe. And concepts like justice and right and wrong are not matters of personal taste. An objective moral order exists in human beings are creatures who are bitchily seen against that order. So this is a traditional right wing perspective that there is an objective moral order outside of oneself. This is not a left wing perspective. So David Brooks says, emphasizing moral formation means focusing on an important question. What is life for and teaching people how to bear up under difficulties? So what you need here is a hero system. And it's a hero system that teaches people what life is really all about. It's a symbolic action system, right? You learn it from your synagogue, your church, your community, your family, your extended family, right? What acts are heroic and which are villainous, right? You get a structure of statuses and roles, right? All communities are hierarchical. You get customs and rules of behavior. All designed to serve as a vehicle for heroism in this world. So each script is unique. Each culture has a different hero system. But each cultural system cuts out roles for earthly heroics, right? So it doesn't matter if your cultural hero system is based in belief in God, belief in the transcendent powers of your people. It doesn't matter if it's secular, religious, primitive, scientific, civilized. It's still a mythical hero system that people will serve to earn a feeling of value that they are special, that they are ultimately useful to the universe and a system of unshakable meaning. And people earn this feeling by carving out a place in nature within their community by building edifices that reflect their values. A temple, a cathedral, a totem pole, a skyscraper, a family that lasts for many generations. So men tries to create something of lasting worth and meaning that will outlive and outshine death and decay. And that's what gives people a feeling that they count. So imagine a person who extends beyond himself, right? That the people are kind of like an amoeba, that they push their pseudopods out to a wife, to a car, a flag, a crushed flower, in a secret book. And you get this huge invisible amoeba that spreads out over the landscape with boundaries far from its own center. And if you tear and burn the flag, or if you find and destroy some sacred flower in a book, and the amoeba screams with soul-searing pain, right? We extend the pseudopods of ourselves to things that we hold dear, right? To your house, right? People often get vitally upset by a piece of wallpaper that bulges by a shelf that doesn't join a light fixture that isn't right. Often people will break into violent arguments or crying over a panel that doesn't match. Interior decorators will reveal that many people have novice breakdowns when they are redecorating. You can see a grown and silver-tempered Italian crying in the street in his mother's arms over a small dent in the bumper of his Ferrari, right? Because we extend meaning and purpose outside of ourselves, right? It's not just a scratch on a Ferrari, right? People feel it as something that's very dear and dear to themselves, right? Here's Aaron McLaugh, English literature professor, talking about 400 years of quarantine, talking in particular about a review of a book called Florence Under Siege, Surviving Plague in an Early Modern City, talking about the city of Florence in January 1631, responding to a plague outbreak. And this conversation took place in 2020 during the initial COVID lockdown. You have to be for them hoping they'd recover. They did have, they did use medicines, like sort of different concoctions, various concussions and cordials and things like that. And there was actually a great confidence in Florence that medicine worked and that doctors knew what they were doing. And that wasn't always true in other cities. So in Venice and Milan, there was a great suspicion about kind of charlatans and fake doctors. But in Florence, there seems to have been a kind of great confidence in public health. Which must have helped with enforcing the quarantine as well, that if the people trust the sunny thad and they're more likely to do what they ask. And do we know why that is, why the Florentines were more a single authority or is it, or if doctors or it's just? It's really, I mean, it's really hard to know. I mean, in Milan, in the same epidemic, there were absolutely rampant rumors about what they called the untorei, these kind of mysterious anointers who were said to kind of go around churches and swirl infection into the stoops that contained holy water or they smear infection onto doorways and church pews. And those, you know, became kind of part of this really like classic understanding of what the plague was like in the 17th century. But there was really very little of that in Florence. There was one doctor who was said to be either Neapolitan or Sicilian, so sort of suspiciously, suspicious. Okay, so Diane Fleischman is in a relationship, not married to Jeffrey Miller, a psychology professor who's into polyamory. His website is primalpoly.com and here's his wife, evolutionary psychologist, Diana S. Fleischman. Justly foreign, who was accused of poisoning, poisoning his patients with rotten chickens and things like that, but that seems to really have been the only case of that. Okay, but one of the things that we've seen in some of the more unfortunate responses to COVID-19 from the Trump administration, but also from the people in the street, that there's racist ideas that it's somehow, that it's a foreign disease, that it's come from China and that was there, I mean, you've mentioned the prejudice against Neapolitan and Sicilians, but was there any other prejudice against groups who were suspected of having brought it into the city or were they more rational about that? I think there are lots of prejudices, one that is actually continuous with the Black Death, the 14th century plague is suspicion and prejudice against Jews. They were some of the first to be kind of fully locked up and quarantined. They thought that perhaps their black hat sort of festered, petrified action, festered contagion, and that was a kind of very common response in Italy at the time. So I love this discussion in that they just take it for granted that there's no reason ever to be concerned or fearful about outsiders and the idea that strangers, out-group members might introduce a plague is just unacceptable. To be suspicious of Jews, another population who were marginalized were prostitutes or sex workers, sex was thought to generate access heat in the body. Yeah, why would people stigmatize sex workers during a time of plague? I mean, promiscuous sex is a, an incubator for all sorts of illnesses, it seems to me a fairly adaptive response. Which if your kind of medical understanding is based on humoral theory would make you more vulnerable to infection, to disease. And of course there's also a kind of moral contagion idea there too. So prostitutes were also, yeah, marginalized during plague epidemics. And then I think the poor were a kind of broad category, which is something I was kind of interested in the piece too, that. Well, I would think that different groups would have different levels of sanitary practices. And generally speaking, all things being equal, I would expect richer groups to be more sanitary in their practices than poorer ones. There's this really interesting tension between the rhetoric against the poor on the part of the government, which often, you know, sees the poor as both vulnerable, but also as sort of essentially irresponsible not. Well, if you're poor, you have fewer options, right? You're in more desperate straits. So it would be understandable that other people would regard them as less responsible because the poor have less ability to be responsible when they're in survival at that stake. So if minded, even their bodies were thought to be more kind of corruptible. So one of the physicians in Florence at the time, Alessandro Regi has a theory that the poor sort of fester plague in their bodies in a way that nobles don't. But then on the other hand, they also looked after them and they had this kind of extensive welfare program and food provisioning as we spoke about. So there's a kind of really interesting tension there between both blaming the poor and also looking out for them, which I... Yeah, I mean, that's how the world works. People are complicated, right? People can fear a group and have disgust for a group and simultaneously make provision for the group. Back to what the heck is going on with Noam Chomsky. Why does his rhetoric sound so tropian? Or is this not rhetoric that is common among dissidents whether they're on the left or the right? It is also funny to refer to the Guardian as the so-called left. I know that there's a common referring especially amongst the leftist side, you know, the so-called left wing guardian. But like the guardians, it's pretty lefty. The real left. That's like the real IRA, right? It's a splinter group. It's true. It's all in the eye of the beholder and I guess it's the corporate left. So let me play another clip which highlights the way he sees this issue. The parliamentary party, the Blareroid parliamentary party did not want to see, in fact, they said it. We have the documents in the labor file that we do not want to lose our party, the party that we own to this effort to develop a popular-based party working for working people in the poor. We don't want to lose our party to that. No, that's not what they said. That's not what they said. They did not want to do what Jeremy Paul said. You could read it in the labor file. They did not say they did not want to govern but they wanted to act for the poor. What they said was they did not want to lose their party. So a man on the track record of tolerating anti-Semitism in the labor party and taking anti-West positions including one to give Russia the benefit of the souls we poisonings was one of the big things that they protested on. There's no anti-West position. I do appreciate the British-pundit style of interviewing because it contrasts quite distinctly with Lex Friedman's for example, or the chicanometry people, right? Yeah, but Nob Chomsky, it's so Trumpian, this kind of rhetoric, right? This is a little burst from Dennis Prager on his show last week. It puts transgender and gender non-conforming students in, quote, danger of imminent, irreparable harm. Wow. Talking about school districts in California that mandate the parents be notified if their children in public schools change genders. Wouldn't the parents know anyway? By potentially outing them at home before they're ready according to the lawsuit. Really, you're in danger of imminent, irreparable harm. Maybe you're in danger of imminent, irreparable harm when you fall into the hands of so many sick, so-called therapists who say to the eight-year-old, oh, you think you're a boy? You are. The profession of psychology and the profession of psychiatry have been so denuded of excellence and truth as to become a farce. Most psychiatrists and most psychologists are frauds to their profession. Yeah, but okay, I think that's somewhat of an overstatement. But what about talk show hosts? I mean, couldn't you make all these same arguments about talk show hosts such as Dennis Prager? So I largely agree with Dennis Prager's analysis here, but I think he is overstating it and I think his analysis would equally apply to people such as himself. I've always known this. This is not new. How many psychiatrists announced in 1964? Was that two generations ago? That Barry Goldwater was mentally ill? The profession of psychiatry for reasons I do not know since in its core it can be terrific. It's a profession that's highly subjective because there aren't blood tests, right? There aren't concrete tests to determine psychiatric illnesses. So it's a profession that is largely revolves around achieving billing through insurance companies. And so making diagnoses that insurance companies will pay for and providing medication that is supplied by pharmaceutical companies, right? So meeting economic incentives has created the psychiatric profession as we know it. The profession of psychiatry apparently breeds a particularly narcissistic fool, arrogant fools. Does not the profession of pundit also do exactly the same thing? How many fools are not arrogant? What percentage of fools are arrogant? Well, I won't go off on that tangent. This is quite a story and it will persuade virtually no one to stop voting Democrat because there is nothing they can do to persuade people. Okay, overheated rhetoric there from Dennis Prager. Let's get back to analysis analyzing Norm Chomsky. Yeah. Whether or not you agree with Matt Charlie's response, I think it's better that he presents the, you know, like a kind of, no, no, it's like this because you can also hear Chomsky respond then to the critique. The UK is famous, isn't it, for its competitive journalists. They don't do these softball interviews. So what's the background there? Like what's the bigger picture in your eyes, Chris? You know UK politics and what's the reason of it is. Yeah, so he just, he doesn't like Keir Starmer. And Corbyn was a more far left member of the party who had for quite a long time been a kind of dad fly on the fringes, but then became the leader of the party which gave a lot of power to groups in labor that had been marginalized for one reason or another. And then they didn't win to elections. Corbyn is not the leader. The new leader is a kind of moderate left wing, what they regard as a neo-Blairite type. And so predictably Chomsky doesn't like him and thinks it's a coup of sorts to please them. Right, this is similar rhetoric, similar thinking to Christian Nationalists, right? People on the very opposite side of the political spectrum who also believe that a, you know, institutional neoliberal elite is trying to thwart the will of the people. Real party of the people that was being built with a defying conservative party-like version thereof. And the part which is sort of interesting is that there's these endless reports linking back and forth about anti-Semitism in the labor party and accusations that it's been oversold or that it's being under-recognized, depending on how you look at it. But I think what is pretty much non-debatable wherever you fall is that it's been a topic that has been used on both sides, right? It's been used as an opportunistic attack as well as it's been denied, you know, it's been painted as just a smear. And there are actual grievances, there are actual reports, but there are also reports showing that various factions are weaponizing it or accusing it of being weaponized. So the anti-Semitism is real. There were real concerns. I mean, I just, Nob Chomsky, in these clips, he sounds like the Mypilla guy. Does those ads that are ubiquitous in right-wing media? Turns with reactions directed at Corbyn and Corbyn's wing from the Jewish community. But it also was a handy thing to use as a delegitimizing issue. So, you know, yeah. Nob Chomsky in these clips, he sounds like Mike Lindell of Mypilla. Yes, the difference between how I might look at these things and how Chomsky would is, without knowing the intricacies of UK politics is that this is all pretty normal in parliamentary democracies, like Australia and the UK, right? You've got your center parties, they have their different factions. Our liberal party's got a right faction and a left faction, and our labor party's got a right faction, a left faction and other factions too, I'm sure. And when, you know, these different factions, sometimes one has control, sometimes the other has control. If they're not doing particularly well in the polls, if there's some scandals or, you know, difficult things going on, then they get knocked over and the other group gets in and gets to run the show for a while. So it all seems like, like, pretty much a popular point. Yeah, but that's not how Chomsky looks at it, right? It's, it's, there's a plot, essentially. There's the mechanisms of neoliberalism coming into play to get rid of the people's choice and what the people want. Yeah, and for example, in the way that he presents Corbyn, it's not just that he's a person with a particular political agenda. It's that he's a very good person with a very important political goal that... Right, thinking of our institutions, it's been almost 22 years since 9-11. There have been no new airline hijackings of which I'm aware. So maybe, maybe our institutions are doing a pretty good job here, right? Would you have thought on September 12th or for the first year after 9-11 that we'd go another 22 years without a major hijacking? It would have led to great outcomes if it hadn't been for it. So for example, you can read it and it'll do zero. Is Japan a poorer country? No, it's not. The British press has chosen to mostly suppress it and marginalize it, but that's a problem for the British press. Right, the British press, they're marginalizing the good people around Jeremy Corbyn, just like Trump has believed that the American press trying to marginalize the make America a great again movement. Corbyn has since been virtually kicked out of the Labor Party his effort to try to develop a popular-based party, participatory party that would serve the interests of working people in the poor was smashed by the British establishment to scandal, okay? But there's nothing to do with these other things that we're talking about. Yeah, so he got that much. He was just trying to solve the issue for the poor and the working class people and the establishment couldn't have that. So they destroyed him in his efforts and now he's marginalized. It is not what you said, which is standard political horse-jacking proposition. Well, I guess his sympathy for Corbyn is understandable. They share a lot of similar kind of anti-imperialist, anti-war in general kind of views. Corbyn is against pretty much every military intervention in recent history, including in Libya and Syria. Yeah, I see here has even called for NATO to be disbanded. So, you know, it's not a totally mainstream stance even for a Labor Party leader, right? No, no, much ink has been spilled on Jeremy Corbyn and where he stands, but he is well known for his opposition to the Iraq war and criticism of Israel, not particularly surprising. These are not unheard of positions on the left and particularly not through the more progressive wing of the left, especially the criticisms of Israel. It's interesting how the hard left and hard right positions kind of dovetail there because, you know, like withdrawing from NATO and skepticism towards those sort of multilateral agreements is something you also see on the right in America and in the UK. Slightly different motivations, but I guess it ends up at the same place. Well, yeah, there are interesting overlaps. So, for example, Corbyn was, I think, credibly accused of not campaigning very effectively against Brexit for different reasons than the right wing concerns about immigration. He also had concerns about stronger partnerships with Europe that primarily revolved around opposition to neoliberal globalization. But actually, that somewhat distinguishes a little bit from Chomsky, because when Chomsky was talking about the EU in the interview, he said this. And there's no sign of any benefit from leaving the EU. Do you think that was a sensible decision by Britain to do that? I thought at the time that it was a very serious error, both harmful to Britain, harmful to Europe, in a way beneficial to the United States, because under Brexit, Britain becomes even more subject to US domination than it was before. But I thought it was a terrible mistake. And I think the record since basically confirms that. Good, yes, I agree. Correct, and there is a clip of him summing up Keir Starmer for you. I actually don't think he gets much wrong here, but this is him discussing Starmer. Well, so far, there are people like Will Hutton, for example, who think that Keir Starmer has all sorts of fine plans for social reform and so on. I don't see any evidence of it. All he's been doing so far is purifying the Labour Party of any activist elements and putting it onto more central control, eliminating people like Corbyn, of course, Crystal recently and others who work for a constituent-based party dealing with the constituency, Labour constituency. So it seems to me he'll probably move towards a Blair Wright-style parliamentary, a late parliamentary party that's really... Well, Keir Starmer seems a technocrat. He seems pretty effective. He seems to be moving towards the centre. He's got to be an overwhelming favourite to be Britain's next prime minister. Regarding leaving the European Union, I was quite supportive of Brexit when it happened, but now I have to admit that overwhelmingly, it seems like it's a negative thing for Great Britain. Its economy is suffering. There's no good news on the horizon for Great Britain's economy. I'd have to say, from what I know now, leaving the European Union was a disaster for Great Britain. That used to be cool. That's about right to you, Chris. Well, it's got a negative spin on it, but he is correct that we discussed whichever faction is in power tends to want to show up its support and marginalise the elements that might disrupt that, which Corbyn also attempted to do when he was in the leadership position. But he is also right that in general, dramatic reform efforts, I wait to see evidence of that. But again, I think that's pretty common in centre-left parties that nobody's really happy with what they do. They make too many concessions and too many promises, and then everybody's fed up with them. But as long as they get power for a little while, I'll confess for that because the Conservatives have been in power for a long time in the UK. Generally, centre-parties are pretty much focused on winning elections and adjusting their policy to suit. I guess that's something where I'm just trying to identify what, if anything, is wrong with Chomsky in our view, because he's a lefty with opinions. And a lot of what he's talking about here is just giving his political opinions and I think almost all political opinions are valid in a way. But I guess my issue with... So I remember when COVID broke out. Just before COVID broke out, I'd been wearing a face mask because I was doing a lot of cleaning and shredding and I just didn't want to breathe in the fumes. And so people around me said, oh, you know, you were early with face masks and face masks did just make certain amount of common sense to me early on in COVID. And I remember the overwhelming elite media consensus about face masks with regard to COVID for about the first month, for a March, right? It was overwhelmingly that they are useless and people would mock me for wearing a face mask, right? The dominant left wing media public health consensus was there's no need to wear face masks. It's likely to spread around the entire world. A lot of people are going to get it, potentially most of the world's population are going to get it, which sounds terrible, but most of the people who get coronavirus will not die from it. It's got about a 2% fatality rate and the way that we all need to deal with it, although it is a new threat, we've never seen this virus before, it's actually very old fashioned ways of protecting ourselves. You do all the things that you do to protect yourself from getting a cold or from getting the flu. We don't have to do anything outrageous. We don't need to change our lives drastically at an individual level. You just need to be more vigilant about washing your hands, make sure you don't develop patterns or you don't touch your face. That's the way that we tend to give ourselves colds in the flu. So at an individual level, there's no reason to panic, but it's a serious thing. I saw somewhere they said, don't sneeze or cough on people. I go, were we doing that exactly? Were people doing that? New Year's resolutions? I'm gonna stop coughing on people. I really am. People are not getting invited back to parties, but I've seen a lot of the masks around the city. Is that a...? That's probably not a thing. I mean, you're seeing it, but it's probably not that smart. Surgeon General actually put out a statement which was like, you guys, stop buying masks. Oh yeah, I saw that. If you are sick, if you have respiratory symptoms, that's people are wearing a mask in that circumstance because you're trying to avoid giving it to other people. But in terms of being a healthy person and trying to avoid getting infected, that's probably not that rational. So that was the dominant left-wing media public health consensus for about a month and then it changed 180 degrees. I think I've always felt that for respiratory illness, wearing a mask possibly provides some level of protection for yourself and common sense suggests to me that it would reduce transmission somewhat, so modestly. And I noticed that there are various parts of the United States that are masking up again due to a new wave of COVID and I think that's probably a good idea. So I am, in general, pro-mask, you can do it too much. There's no need to wear a mask if you're walking around outside. I would have videos deleted from YouTube because I would say that if you're just walking around outside, I don't see any benefit to wearing a mask and YouTube would delete those videos as a violation of their terms of service, but if you are stuck in enclosed space with other people, then, in certain circumstances, it would seem to me a modestly helpful measure to wear a mask. 40, is it true you lost half your audience because of COVID? Probably something like that. I certainly seem to disagree with 90% of the people in the chat in that I took COVID seriously and I thought that the public health advice was decent to good and that our elites and our major institutions did a better than expected job. I pro-wearing mask when you're around other people in enclosed circumstances and COVID is rampant. I am okay with the shutting of the schools. I don't have a super strong opinion, but if we hadn't shut the schools and everyone would have caught COVID as it is, we had 2,000 children under 18 die of COVID and tens of thousands have to be hospitalized because of COVID. So I don't think shutting the schools for a year until everyone got vaccinated was a bad idea. Certainly support vaccination. So in general, pretty much side with the establishment and with most public health with regard to COVID. So there were various parts of public health and politicians who would decry various vaccinations because there was a tiny percentage of people who would get an enlarged heart, which was just a temporary symptom in almost four cases. So public health of course wasn't perfect and they have to put out a message that will be understandable to people throughout the IQ spectrum. So they had to dumb it down and they couldn't, they didn't feel like they could put out a message that was realistic to threats, but they had to often overstate threats and overstate the effectiveness of what they were recommending, such as mass social distancing and vaccines to try to shake people up to get people to do what they regarded as the right thing. But overall, I think the establishment did a better than average job. 40 should wear a mask until the end of time to prove he is pro-social. No, what's pro-social depends on a certain context. If you are in an enclosed area with other people and you have a respiratory illness or there's a respiratory illness going around, in that context, wearing a mask seems to me a good idea. There's a mask help if I'm driving alone in my car. It doesn't help you not get COVID and it doesn't help you not transmit COVID. What it does do is it signals that you're a virtuous person who cares about taking public health measures to reduce the spread of COVID. It's virtue signaling, but unlike pretty much everyone I know on the right, I regard virtue signaling as a good thing. In nature, animals are signaling all the time. We are signaling. I wear a yarmulke. I am signaling my commitment to orthodox Judaism. I see virtue signaling as a good thing. I washed out my groceries at the start. Then I realized it was a nothing burger for those who are not 70 plus. Well, it wasn't a nothing burger. You had 2,000 kids under 18 who died from it. Councilor's people in their 20s, 30s, 40s. 50s died from it. Still the average age of death was around 70, but according to the most comprehensive academic survey we have that the average COVID death took 16 years of expected life. So it was a very significant illness. We could all use a bigger heart. Well, the heart swelling symptom was almost always temporary and overall the damage from taking the COVID vaccine paled in comparison to the damage of not taking the COVID vaccine. Yeah, I wear my yarmulke in the shower to signal my virtue, but no one would see what I wear in the shower so there's no virtual signaling going on. I don't think I was ever washing my groceries, but I remember many people who did. I remember even 18 months into COVID, there was still all these signs about the importance of hand washing to reduce the spread of COVID and obviously that was bogus. It was a respiratory virus that would spread through the air, not so much through hands. With him is in that misrepresenting points of fact and creating a narrative around a very sort of one-eyed view of things that have happened. I mean, that's probably the point at which I'd criticise him for, not so much just for being a hard lefty per se. Yeah, yeah. Let's move to him talking about Ukraine. Let's see if we can slot any similar such issues or perhaps good things. So he talked about this quite a bit and it does come up in two of the interviews that we've covered. This one probably goes a bit long, but in any case, let's hear it. You mentioned the war with Ukraine. Let's turn our attention to that. Certainly in the UK, the left, actually under people like Jeremy Corbyn, argued that it wasn't Russia that was the enemy, it was the US that was destabilising the world and then Russia invades a sovereign... And Luke Kraft in the chat says, are family members who slept in their masks? Well, if it gave your family members a sense of agency that they were doing something, that they had able to exert some control over this threat, then the psychological payoff from what they did may well have been worth it. We do all sorts of things to try to feel like we're more in control of a chaotic world around us. Democratic country right on its border, starting a conflict which has claimed tens of thousands of innocent lives. Does that not make clear who the real threat to the world is? It's not the US, it's the left as argument. Horatius says, people believe anything the government tells them, shows that the power is all that matters, not truth. That's not true. People will not believe anything the government tells them. All right? People did not evolve to be gullible, right? There are all sorts of things that the government tells people that they don't believe, particularly in the United States. There's probably more suspicion of the government in the United States than in any other first world country of which I'm aware. Good for a long time. It's Vladimir Putin's Russia. Well, the invasion of Ukraine is plainly a war crime. You can't put it in the same category as greater war crimes, but it's a major one according to the official, the only evidence that we have, solid evidence is United Nations estimates and a gun estimates and so on. They estimate about 8,000 civilians killed. That's a lot of people with the United States and Britain do overnight. It's presumably an underestimate. So let's say it's... And the chat says, people will submit to power, they will kiss the king. They will submit to power when it's in their interest to do so. They will fight the power when it's in their interest to do so. It all depends on the situation. People revolt when it's in their interest to do so. People bend the knee when it's in their interest to do so. What determines whether people kiss the ring or kiss the king, ignore the king, right? It depends on the situation. The situation is king. The king is not king. The situation is king. So in certain circumstances, believing the government, acquiescing to power is in your best interest. In other circumstances, disbelieving the government and fighting the power is the best thing to do. Twice that much. That would put it at the level of the US backed invasion, Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which killed about maybe 20,000 people. I suppose it's off by a factor of 10. That is, the casualty rate is really 10 times as high as is claimed. Well, that would put it in the category of Ronald Reagan's terrorist atrocities and he'll solve the door, roughly on the order of 80,000. So it's here, of course, Iraq is just another dimension. So it's serious, terrible crime. And the chat says people will not rebel until the power goes off. People are cattle. Well, your primary meaning of hope's in life should come from your family, your extended family. There's no reason to rebel. In current circumstances, whether in Great Britain, Australia, Canada, United States, there's no reason to rebel in a way that breaks the law and puts your well-being in danger. Who would you rebel against and what would you rebel for? Hundreds of thousands of businesses bankrupt and out of business because of lockdowns destroyed countless lives for nothing. No, we know pretty definitively that lockdown saved lives. Now, in every case, lockdown warranted was every method used in lockdowns appropriate. There was there plenty of government overreach. Did they lock down the wrong things? Such as in Southern California, they locked down beaches and public parks and hiking, all right, very things that you want people doing, right? You want people getting out there and moving around. That's the best thing possible during influenza epidemic. And so, yeah, there were mistakes made. But overall, lockdowns until we had widespread use of vaccines were the best thing to do. And social distancing is a very old technique that's been used to deal with plagues for thousands and thousands of years, right? Why have we used social distancing with regard to plagues for thousands of years because it works, right? We didn't implement social distancing out of nowhere because there was no precedent for it. Like social distancing helped in dealing with the Black Death and social distancing has helped with dealing with COVID as well. You can understand why the global south does not take very seriously the eloquent protestations of Western countries about this unique episode in history. They've been victims of far more. Maybe the Russians will go on their level, maybe. Ah, right. So he agrees it was a war crime to invade Russia. That's positive, right? Anything else? Well, it seems a bit equivocal, I suppose, about the question of who's responsible for the conflict. Well, he's often accused of engaging in water-biodism that focuses on America and the West's crimes over and above any other countries. And while you regard that as water-biodism or an accurate accounting, I think it is fair to say that's quite clearly on display there. You can present that as he's appropriately contextualizing the scale of the conflict and highlighting that the Western nations are not science in any sense of the word. But it does sound a little bit like downplaying the scale of the conflict. And basically, if somebody mentions conflict, then you immediately cite other conflicts. It is like a way to point the attention elsewhere, right? Yeah. It can't be denied that it did begin by saying it is a war crime, right? Just perhaps a lesser war crime than what the U.S. and other countries have done. So a bit more on this. Certainly from left-wing politics of the UK, this challenge to create equivalence at anti-West position... Unequivocally. ...become equivalents. You are drawing equivalents. You're saying that you've literally just drawn equivalents with the number of deaths in various places. Explain to people listening to this why what you're not saying is because Ronald Reagan did this or George Bush did that, that doesn't make what Vladimir Putin's done all right, does it? I said it's a major crime, but there's no equivalence that following the party line might give figures no equivalence. Maybe the casualty toll is 10 times as high as is estimated. Well, that would make it like Reagan's crimes in El Salvador. It's not equivalent. Okay, let's look at this Michael Hildzik column in the Los Angeles Times came out, August 29, said early months of COVID pandemic before vaccines became widely available, lockdowns worked, combined with other non-pharmaceutical interventions, NPIs, but that's not Richard Spencer's former organization. Masking and social distancing slowed the spread of disease, saved millions of people from falling ill, landing in the hospital and dying. Absent these measures, hospitals which were already overrun with patients in dire conditions would have been worse. Studies from as early as mid-2021 validated these findings. Latest evidence comes from the Royal Society, Britain's 360 year old Academy of Sciences known for its painstaking objective research report. The society released this months, studied the effect of non-pharmaceutical interventions in Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Korea during the first 18 months of the pandemic. Evidence shows unequivocally that lockdowns and other social approaches provide powerful, effective and prolonged reductions in virus transmissions. These steps are most effective if undertaking when disease transmission is low. So the idea that it was virtuous to reopen schools in the heat of the pandemic is based on a bunch of myths beloved by conservative politicians. There's a myth that school closings and the shift to remote teaching was almost entirely responsible for the decline in test scores. The evidence for that is murky. About 360,000 American children lost a primary, a secondary caregiver to COVID. Nearly 300,000 American children were orphaned by the loss of one or two parents. What brought COVID into most households in a shocking number of cases, it was children. Well, then 70% of households began with the child bringing the virus into the home. And the transmission rate fell during school breaks that underscores the role of kindergarten through 12 classrooms in spreading the coronavirus. So children were important viral vectors in households during the pandemic. You can't have an effective social distancing if you allow schools to remain open. There's another myth perpetuated by many people on the right that children were largely immune to COVID and that if they contracted COVID, their symptoms were mild or nonexistent. You know that more than 2,300 children have died from COVID. What would have happened if schools remained open without any mitigation measures? Nearly all children would have gotten COVID as would everyone they live with and almost all school employees. So this is Dr. Jonathan Howard writing here, it was closing schools an obvious and colossal mistake. Maybe it was a mistake to close schools. However, those who make this claim should honestly grapple with what would have happened had nothing being done rather than indulge in an absurd fantasy that everything would have been fine. So what would have happened if all schools had stayed open? All children would have gotten COVID as would virtually everyone they live with and almost all school employees, right? The virus spread rapidly in schools. So how would the unmitigated spread of COVID affected children, none of whom were vaccinated? Right, in the US over 2,300 kids have died from COVID and this number would have been far higher. Had 60 to 70 million unvaccinated children contracted the virus over several months time in 2020, right? Thousands more children would have died without these mitigation methods. Death is not the only bad outcome from COVID. In the real world, around 150,000 children were hospitalized with COVID. Some needed mechanical ventilation in the ICU. Many suffered neurological complications. Sometimes they needed amputations, sometimes they had strokes. Now, the vaccine has drastically lowered the risk of these rare but grave outcomes. But many more thousands of children would have been hospitalized and developed severe complications if the schools had remained open. Many pediatric hospitals were already deluged during the Delta and Omicron waves. They would not have had the resources to treat sick children and tens of millions of sick children contracted COVID in a short time, particularly considering many healthcare workers were sick with COVID at the start of the pandemic. Many healthcare workers would have contracted COVID either from their jobs or from their own children had no mitigation methods being taken. So over 300,000 American children became orphaned by COVID. New York City, 1 in 200 children lost a parent in the first two years. Not all children experienced COVID as something light, not all bounced back immediately. Many children felt too sick to attend school. During the Omicron wave, 30% of New York City students were absent. So schools had reopened without mitigation measures. Many children would have been scored anyway for these reasons. Teachers would have been at risk. So from May 11, 2020, article in New York, New York City Department of Education has now lost 74 employees to COVID. 30 were teachers. Even after vaccines became available, 15 Miami-Dade educators died from COVID in 10 days. So more educators would have died, none of whom would have been vaccinated in the pandemic's first nine months if no mitigation measures had been taken. So what teachers really have been willing to work in schools with no mitigation methods. And the real world sick teachers couldn't teach anyway. So many principals were begging parents to act as substitute teachers at a headline from Texas September, 2021, at least 45 districts shut down in-person classes due to COVID-19 cases affecting more than 40,000 students. One school in New York City said to notice that though it was open, the kids were just going to hang out in the auditorium. There weren't enough teachers, so the school was nothing more than a daycare center. Many educators would have been out of sec had no mitigation measures been taken. Who would have taught the students? But I suppose some people will listen to this, will think you're seeking to excuse that is abrogation of the right wing. I am not seeking to excuse anything. I said it's a terrible workaround. That's not excusing anything. I'm talking about the extreme hypocrisy of claims about how this is the worst thing that ever happened when it's a fraction of what we do all the time. What about that, Matt? Well, it does remind me of some of the less solubrious type of Twitter discourse where you might find people comparing death counts in various- The Guru lives versus the concentration counts, for example. Yeah. It seems a bit tangential to me, frankly, like precisely how many people died here compared to there, because I don't know. There's all the factors at play, but yeah, so one thing I think which is worth noting is Chomsky remains pretty clear there, right? First of all, he's saying there's not an equivalence. The West has a much higher death toll. So he's saying there isn't an equivalence because it's way smaller in the case of Ukraine conflict. And second, he is clear though that he didn't justify it, right? Like he says, no, I've been clear, but I said it's a war crime, a lesser war crime perhaps, but he is quite clear, right? That he's not saying it's okay. He's just wanting to say no questions, of course. The West is West. Yes, you're right. That's a good summary. I think that's a fair appraisal of what he said, yeah. Yeah, and naturally the interviewer there is highlighting that that response can be seen as minimizing what's occurring. And I don't know, Matt, but there is something about like, has the US in recent decades threatened to nuke a country after annexing a portion of it? Because that does seem to be like, there are differences. You can have legitimate critiques of a whole bunch of the stuff that Western nations have done around the world. And there are plenty of well-documented colonial events and holdovers. But Vladimir Putin's rhetoric about the willingness to use nuclear weapons, the dire threats that will be coming to anyone who dares stand in their rightful reclamation of their territory, it does seem different. Like, I'm always very wary about comparing the magnitude of bad things in just the terms of these raw numbers because it's terribly flattening to do that. So you could compare Ukraine to, say, the Korean War. You go, well, you know, the Korean War had this many hundred thousand casualties. So the US is a bigger criminal than Russia. But that just totally ignores the context and the causes and who is instrumental in invading whom and a whole bunch of things. So look, there's no doubt. So Decoding the Gurus did an episode on Ibram ex-Kendi. So inside of you two, there are two walls, one of them is racist. There can be instances where the measures that are targeted, for instance, that you're saying is Kendi is, you know, policy. It could well be the State and Federal policy has, this is what a lot of people in regional Queensland think, that it disregards people living out here and doesn't value them and so on. They're quite resentful about the fact. It could well be the policy feeds into it as well, but I think primarily actually it's more history. So maybe I was too quick to respond because like, I agree, that's kind of what I mean. Like historical factors, but not necessarily the historical discriminatory factors between groups, it can be a whole bunch of things. That might exacerbate that some groups are favorite overallers, but that they can be just geographical things or so on. But also cultural Chris, I mean, one of the things that is really apparent in the area that I live, is that the local people here, who again, I emphasize are white Australians, they just, they usually, like more than 50% of Australians are first generation immigrants, but people that I'm thinking of like third generation or so. And one of the things you notice about the culture is that they don't value education and they often get married very young. You know, it's kind of like the stereotypes of the American deep south, I suppose, how true they are. But you know, like culture does feed into it and it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with the people. And there can be historical reasons for the cultural, right? But again, your chicken and egging, not you, I mean, in general, the interrelationship of culture and historical circumstances is interact. Yeah, exactly. It's a yin yang type scenario. Yes, and there's a point where actually, I think it's an Ezra Klein interview where Ezra brings that up. I think one question somebody would have is why can it be both aunt? Like why can't there be some differences in cultures or geographies that people come from or whatever it might be. And also that there is racist policy. What makes you certain that it is all one as opposed to some of one and some of the other? Well, I actually do think there's racialized difference. And so obviously geneticists have found that there's a such thing as ethnic ancestry. And of course, each ethnic group has been racialized. Of course, to a large extent, those... Okay, that was Ibarum Candy speaking. Horatia says male invoting caused by COVID lockdowns has given an advantage to Democrats who will never be overcome by the Republicans. Unless a big shift happens, GOP is completely done for. There's absolutely no reason for Republicans cannot be as effective in male invoting as Democrats. The Trump campaign got a record turnout, right? They did a really good job of turning out their voters. Just the Democrats did better. There's no inherent reason going forward that Democrats will do better at securing male invoters than Republicans. Ethnic groups practice different cultures, but at the same time, there's no biological difference. You know, via race, there's no behavioral difference. In other words, across cultures, people love, people lazy. I believe there are five states in America that already have male invoting. They don't have in-person voting. So there's nothing inherently anti-Republican about it. People hate, people laugh, they just do it in different ways. But ultimately, I think more specifically to your point, just because there's difference, cultural and even ethnic, doesn't mean it's better or worse, or doesn't mean it's explaining away racial inequity. Because fundamentally, you never have received benefits. And Ricardo, bro, long time, no talk. How's it going? Pretty good, man, pretty good. I've been meaning to call in for a couple of weeks. You did a show a couple of weeks ago.