 this is my hardest, hardest show ever. I mean, how do I thank someone who's taken me from crayons to perfume? It isn't easy, but I'll try. If you wanted the sky, right, I would write across the sky in letters that would store a thousand feet high, right, to decoding the gurus with love. But now the time has come for closing books, and long last looks must end. And as I leave, I know that I am leaving my best friend. I had a friend indicating the gurus who was taught me right from wrong, weak from strong, from decoding to to good epistemics. I mean, they lifted me reached me when I was vulnerable. They were like a virtual friend to me, right? And like they spiritually reached out to me as I reached out to them back in the dark days of 2021. I mean, there was so much for me to learn from them. What what can I give you blokes in return? Chris Kavanaugh, cognitive anthropologist, associated with Oxford University, Matthew Brown, psychology professor at the prestigious University of Central Queensland, and your fantastic podcast with really strong epistemics, bros. I mean, what can I give you in return? Because if you said 40, I want the moon, I would try to make a start. But I'd rather you let me give me give you my heart. And so to decoding the gurus with love, I was wide awake before 5am, before 2am this morning. My mind was cranking, okay, ways that I could try to decode the gurus. I've done a little bit of that already. And I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not going to overhype this show. I might hit a few singles at best. I'm going to hit a double. So I mean, please don't think of that in sexual terms. Please let's not be sophomoric here. This is a high brow elevated show. Alright, I mean, but how do I thank someone who's taken me from crayons to perfume? I mean, I got to know these guys so well. I mean, I just seen their podcast grow every day. I mean, they take my breath away with their analysis. I mean, suddenly they're in my life. They're part of everything I do. They just got me streaming day and night just trying to keep a hold on your cutting edge insights. And in your podcast, I found my paradise my only chance for happiness. And if I lose you now, I think I would die. You say you'll always be my podcast. We can make it shine. We can take forever just a minute of time. But honestly, you blokes, you've been more than a woman. You've been more than a woman to me. I mean, there are stories old and true of people so in love. And I can see myself let history repeat itself reflecting on how I feel for your show. Thinking about those people, those gurus then I know that in a thousand years I would fair dinkum I'd fall in love with your your podcast again. This is the only way folks that we should fly. This is the only way to go. And if I if I lose you, I know I would die. Oh, you say I'll always be your patreon subscriber. We can make it shine. We can take forever just a minute at a time. Honestly, you blokes you've been more than a woman more than a woman to me. All right, so how on earth do we go about decoding the gurus? So just think about the high level of discipline and the sense of the buff itself, meaning the sense of distance from yourself and your feelings that you have to have to achieve the level of podcasting success that Matt Brown and Chris Kavanaugh have without blowing up their career. I remember listening to a Patreon video where they talked about their biggest fear, their biggest vulnerability for someone writing something to a page negative critical to their to their dean, right? Everyone's accountable to someone in academics by and larger accountable to a dean. I had a good friend who had tenure, right? And I would warn him about the dangerous path he was on that he was saying a lot of reckless things. He didn't say them around me. I'd like to think that I had a pro social influence on him. But when he went off on his own to post on social media, he'd say a lot of reckless things that to most ordinary people would sound disturbing and deranged. And I tried to pull him back. I said, Hey, you can absolutely blow up your life when you post these sort of things. And he said, don't worry about me blow, you know, bro, I got a great life. Don't worry about me. Well, he pushed it too far. And someone apparently said an email to his dean, and he got fired and devastated his life. So everyone's accountable to someone academics usually have have a dean and decoding the gurus, they don't want negative emails about them going to their deans, you know, taking something they've said on a podcast. So they have to maintain a high level of discipline, a high level of reflexivity, meaning you observe your own words and your actions from outside yourself. They have to be, you know, fairly distance from many of their feelings, and, you know, basic emotions, basic attachments, right, that and they have to be able to build a modus operandi, a path forward, you know, a vision for life, a worldview, right, they have to be able to make meaning out of nothing at all, but their own brain, their own rational powers. So me, I made evil, right, 40 convert to orthodox Judaism. All right, I'm just wholehearted experiencing my emotions, I feel love one minute, it's a roller coaster. Then I feel hate, I feel passionate attachment to my country to my people, then I feel disgust and alienation, I feel like we're under threat by, you know, aggressive, assertive out groups who are out playing us. Right, so I'm all over the map, because I don't have the attenuation, the distance, I don't have the ability to make meaning just out of my own head. For me, meaning and order are something that exists outside of myself, and that I can find meaning and order by aligning myself with this greater structure that's in the universe, that's in the community that exists outside of myself. Right, I don't primarily try to conceive and construct meaning just in my own head, meaning is something that I built with you. Right, I mean, everything I do would be nothing if I couldn't bring it to you, to my friends, to my community. Right, meaning is something that I built in my interactions with the people who are closest to me, and to a community, my fellow orthodox Jews, I feel a great tie to Australians, to Americans, right, to fellow writers. Right, I feel like I am a part of a larger structure, a larger order, and I get order and structure and meaning out of aligning myself with things that exist outside myself, while for the fully developed liberal and leftist, right, meaning is something that they construct out of their own buffered identity out of their own power of reason. And they can, they can just build it in here. Right, they don't have to worry about sexual deviance next door. They don't have to worry about being contaminated by, you know, what's going on across the street, or at work, right, they build their own magnificent constructions through the power of their rationality. But as a medieval person, as a trad, as a conservative, as a convert to orthodox Judaism, I'm much more vulnerable to everything that's going on around me because I don't primarily construct meaning from within myself. I seek to align my life with a meaning that is external to me, that belongs to a community, a community that, you know, believes in transcendent values, in a transcendent text, in a God who gave a Torah and gave a distinct way of life, and that by aligning with that distinct transcendent, divine way of life, we, we can then, you know, build structure meaning purpose and, you know, attach ourselves to the Almighty to God. These are all things that exist outside of me rather than inside of me. So yeah, think of this as the making love out of nothing at all podcast. So one thing I've learned from interviewing thousands of people in my life is that everybody is more vulnerable than you might conceive. So in Polish presentations, right, people often look quite strong and invulnerable, but whenever you get to know people up close, you see their flaws, their humanity and their vulnerabilities. Everybody is accountable to someone, somebody who works for himself is accountable to his leading client. So everybody can get in trouble for an ill advised expression. Now, if you're part of a traditional community, right, your, your full hearted expressions, right, will take place usually within the safe space of that community unless what you're saying or doing is a danger to the community, right, you're not going to get into big trouble if you somehow violate social norms. But think about what is considered expertise by the media, by the academy, right, by decoding the gurus, right? What does it take to be an expert? You have to be number one expert at playing the game of being an expert. You have to be hailed by your peers as an expert. That means that you have to get along with your peers. That much of education, right, is learning to play the game of education. So I got to break Betty's stories, right, as a blogger, because I was acting like way outside of the normal rules, right? I was the, the outsider. And so I wasn't accountable to the normal structures. Luke Ford, the outsider. From the fury and intensity with which Luke Ford is reviled in the American porn industry, you would think he's with the FBI or a rabid evangelist crusading against any incursion on family values. Ford, though, is a lowly author who over the past 10 years has made a career of writing and blogging on pornography, and who, on any day, wields an extraordinary influence over the industry unmatched by any news organization. A not a crusader against the industry, says Ford, 40, who blogs at www.lukisback.com after making a name for himself at www.lukford.com. But there is very little filter between me and my readers. All right. So this is an article by Tony Castro, June 6, 2007. And in the course of him interviewing me for this article, he mentioned that the mayor of Los Angeles, Tony Bielorgosa, had not worn his wedding ring in many months. And so while he was interviewing me, I was emailing people I knew around city hall to confirm that this was true. And about, I think before the interview was even finished, I'd put up a blog post saying that the mayor's marriage was kaput, then later as revealed, he'd been carrying on an affair with a Spanish language news reader. And this, this became perhaps the number one story in California in 2007. So this article by Tony Castro, June 6, 2007. There is no glorification or celebration of the industry, just fact based reporting on issues and stories that the industry would just as soon not have made public. Over the years, Ford has broken the stories of four porn actresses and one porn actor who tested positive for HIV, a health scare that temporarily shut down film production in the industry and led to some voluntary safeguards and monthly HIV testing. Luke Ford was way out front with the HIV porn story acknowledged former New York Times business writer Nick Ravo. There have been other stories that Ford has been way out front with as well. The role of the mafia in pornography up until the late 1990s, especially in distribution, and internet credit card scams of some pornography firms. So I graduated as an Alexander Technique teacher in December of 2011. But if I were to be a fully fledged member of the largest, most powerful Alexander Technique teachers association, which will never happen because the controversial things I say. All right, so to be considered an expert in the Alexander Technique, all right, you have to be acclaimed as an expert by your peers, which means getting along with your peers, which means abstaining from criticism of your peers. That's part of pretty much any professional profession. They have very strict rules about to whatever extent you can criticize your own profession. So I would have to give up all sorts of freedom of expression to try to fit into the leading Alexander Technique teaching association. And it's this way with virtually all professions. So if you want to be acclaimed for your expertise, generally speaking, you don't get to do it as a blogger and as an outsider, usually you have to work from within the system. And this requires, generally speaking, the kind of buffered identity that distance from yourself, that self reflexivity, that careful editing of everything you say and do. So it's not reflect ill on your in group, right? This requires a certain attitude and a certain psychic psychological soul based reorganization of yourself away from a traditional conception of self to the modern self, where you're constructing meaning out of your own mind and you're constructing a life based on your own powers of reason. So to succeed in almost all professions and to succeed in the modern world, you have a much easier time if you're a modern rather than a traditionalist or a conservative. It's just the very psychic arrangements that are required for success in the modern world where the left dominates all of our institutions and almost all of the levers of power. It requires a certain psyche, a certain arrangement of the soul, a certain orientation on life, which is not the conservative one is not the traditional one is not the medieval one, is not the godly one in terms of traditional Christianity or Judaism or Islam. So it makes sense that those people who are acclaimed for having expertise, right? It's it's not always because they're so expert in part is because they become so good at playing the game and those who are not inclined to play the game. So I was looking at story in the Los Angeles Times about a good friend of mine in high school and he learned to play the game. He learned to do it very well and he became a major Republican operative. His name's Rob Stussman. So always from the beginning, no, Rob, this is him here. Rob was willing to play the game within the rules of the game. He supported traditional institutions, right? I never saw Rob needlessly alienate anyone. He played by the rules of the game. And so it's not at all surprising that he's been so successful at playing within the rules of the game. Now, Rob was also absolutely appalled by Donald Trump who did not play by the rules of the game. So Rob Stussman was a leading anti-Trump Republican in California. Rob went on to success within the rules of the game, right? He played the expertise game as it is generally laid out. He developed the discipline, the reflexivity. That means the ability to monitor yourself. He developed the self-editing mechanism to not needlessly alienate people. He managed to gain some distance from traditional attachments such as to blood and soil. He has transcended those traditional attachments of blood and soil. He has developed a much more modern, disciplined, distanced self developing through the power of his reason and his ability to reorganize his soul in a disciplined and effective manner. He has managed to play the game very effectively from within, and he had all these qualities in high school. I would not be surprised if Rob Stussman has never lost a friend. Like I've probably lost over a dozen, right? So generally speaking, conservatives, they are much less willing to lose a friend, right? They are much less willing to break ties with the group, right? They are much less willing to say or do things that are going to get them into a great deal of trouble with the people who are most important to them. Now, I've had this crazy delusion that I have some important writer, thinker, and so I've consistently been willing to just follow whatever I believe at the moment to be truth, right? Let's be honest. I'm an intellectual jiggler. I just fall in love with a beautiful new idea every day, but ultimately stay loyal to none. But Chris Mooney wrote a book on the Republican brain and he says, conservatives are less willing to pick a fight with their friends, less likely to issue a corrective when they need to issue one, less motivated to step out of rank and to call out bogus assertions. Because if you do any of these things, you're going to have difficulty rising within the conservative movement, right? So if you're willing to play the game as established by the powers that be, right, you're generally speaking going to be much more successful than rebels such as myself who are just continually rebelling against authority. So both Rob Stussman and I, we had a wonderful journalism teacher at Placer High School, Robert Burge. And when I graduated Placer High School, Robert Burge wrote in my high school yearbook, I've never had anyone else that challenged me as much as you have challenged me. And that's kind of how I've gone on to lead my life, right? Here's Chris Mooney discussing the Republican brain. If our political institutions seem more dysfunctional than ever before, that's probably because they're more polarized than ever before. And we're not just talking about our perpetually bedlocked Congress. Even among voters at large, the broad center seems to be rapidly diminishing. One of the most insidious features of the kind of polarization we're seeing in America now is that it makes it difficult, if not impossible, to relate to people at the other end of the spectrum. They seem irrational, detached from reality, outright crazy. There are two books out now that try to parse this phenomenon. They ask the question, if through evolution we've all inherited the same moral intuitions, then how do we end up so far apart on so many basic political issues? We have the authors of both of those books here with us today. Chris Mooney, who as I mentioned before is the author of The Republican Brain, and joining us now at the table is Jonathan Haidt, Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, and author of The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Are Divided. Thanks for joining us this morning. So this, I think this is in some ways the most important single issue to figure out and discuss, because I have personally evolved in my thinking about polarization in that I used to be very pro-polarization. I used to think that people's concerns about polarization were this bougie establishment, elite concern, and us, the vanguard of righteousness, needed to swash our foes. And I've now realized that to get change on the scale we need, and particularly my sort of preoccupations on climate change, you just can't get it under the current conditions of polarization. You just cannot get it. So the question is, you have to solve that problem first before you solve the bigger problems. Let me start with you, Chris. The book is called The Republican Brain, and it's a really good read. What is the nature of the Republican brain that makes it distinct, or the conservative brain that makes it distinct from the liberal brain? Well, I think it's rooted in personality. Personality is politics, and there's a ton of research showing that the average liberal is much more open to new experiences, new information, trying out new things, and has somewhat of a different cognitive style than the average conservative. And that means tolerating ambiguity on uncertainty change more, and it makes them psychological. Okay, so what type of person are they going to put on TV? Again, it requires a tremendous level of self-editing and self-discipline to even, you know, end up on TV. Someone who says reckless things. Someone who is just wholehearted. All right? Someone who cries about Jesus. Someone who gets passionate about God. Someone who gets passionate about their people or their soil. All right? They're not very likely to show up on TV, except in a presentation where they're made to look absolute idiot. So to be on TV, to be an elite, to be acclaimed as an expert, all right? You generally have to embody much of this modern, you know, buffered, distant self-meaning is created within your own brain. You know, this ability to powerfully self-edit yourself to be highly reflexive, meaning monitoring everything you say and do from the outside and understanding how it affects all the different interest groups, right? That requires a tremendous amount of self-censorship that most of us with a traditional orientation on life are just not able to do. So you have to embody a modern, generally liberal left outlook to move ahead in your profession and to be acclaimed as an expert. And much of getting an education is simply learning to play the game of education and be willing to humble yourself to color within the lines. Now, I got to break many stories as a blogger, such as HIV outbreaks in porn about LA's first mayor, Antonio Vila-Ragosa having an affair, because regular journalists were not incentivized to report these particular stories, all right? The first LA mayor in 100 years, who was Latino, all right? The journalists were not eager to take him down. And journalists found HIV infections in the porn industry, they found it distasteful. And so many establishment journalists absolutely hated me because I caused them headaches. Establishment journalist Amy Klein wrote about me in The New York Times September 5, 2008. Professionally, I was causing her problems. He was always hounding out newspaper to cover scandals in the Jewish community, talking about the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles. As a blogger, he had relaxed standards as to sources. So people with access to ground came to him, voila, he would give them a forum. And then I had to write a new story about it. Well, why did she have to write a new story about it? Because it's not that my sources, you know, went onto something. It's precisely because I was telling the truth. I was telling powerful truths that were making huge waves within various communities. Rabbis were resigning. The porn industry, you know, went to do a state of shock when I was the one who revealed who was the most likely source of an HIV outbreak of dozen or more actresses in 1997, 1998. So it wasn't that I had these relaxed standards is because I was telling the truth. And that's the news media would be writing stories about my work if I hadn't been telling the truth. So I mean, it's every professional desperately wants the approval of his peers. And how do you get it by being highly self editing, right? By being very disciplined, by being very restrained in what you say, right? So every professional in normal, if he's at all normal, right, he has 20 times more of a desire for the approval of his peers than he does to pursue unpopular truths, right? You can can't expect people professionals or unprofessionals to understand something. If their income, their happiness and their social status depends upon not understanding some obvious truth, such as the mayor of Los Angeles no longer has a valid marriage that he's having an affair that there's, you know, HIV outbreaks in the porn industry that the mafia still plays a significant role in the porn industry. All sorts of unpopular truths that I was breaking that had predator rabbis who were giving were essentially given a pass by the powers that be within the the Jewish community. And these were very unappealing stories that the establishment and the establishment media, you know, did not want to touch, logically aligned with the scientific community. It's sort of a natural relationship. And so then when you see a divide over reality and what's true and you see the liberals aligned with the scientists, you should think that's that's normal. That's kind of the way that's because there's there's a there's a kind of personality disposition that is an alchemical mix of nature and nurture, right? That produces in people a way of approaching the world that is prior to their politics, but then ends up essentially forming their politics. Yeah, and their politics probably feeds back into who they are as well, right? So it's sort of it's always in both directions. But partly partly personality is genetic. We know that. Yeah, Jonathan, one place for the two of you. I think there's some points contention between your two. Okay, so yeah, if personality is genetic, right, that means that evolution works on the mind as well. And guess what? Other traits are also a genetic, partly genetic in origin. There are more socially effective personalities. Different groups tend to have different personalities. If you are more open to new experiences than close to new experiences, you will be more socially effective and successful. If you are more intelligent, then average, you will be more successful. If you're more conscientious than average, you will be more successful. If you are more outgoing than introverted, you will be more successful in life. Right? If you are lower in neuroticism, then average, you will be more successful in life. If you are more agreeable than average, you will be more successful in life. So not only did we evolve to have different personalities, we also evolved to have different strengths and different weaknesses, right? The different groups of humanity, right, evolved in very different circumstances. And they evolved through selection pressure that rewarded certain traits and punished other traits. So it would be naive to expect that all of the peoples of the world just have identical gifts. Obviously, evolution has been working on all the different peoples of the world, producing different peoples with very different gifts, including in terms of intelligence, in terms of assertiveness, aggressiveness, in terms of life cycle, whether people tend to live a long life or a shorter life when people start to menstruate, how careful people are, how individualists versus oriented towards social conformity, right? Different patterns of evolution in different parts of the world on different people have produced different groups with different gifts. But the one place that you share, which I think is a profound insight and is drawn from the social psychological research at this point, is that reason is essentially constructed ex-post to come up with reasons to justify things that we already arrived at viscerally and through intuition. And I want to play this clip of Glenn Beck. He's talking about these leaked emails at the right turn to climate eight, which they said completely disproved the consensus of warming, which of course it did not. And he's explaining why this evidence is so important. And he basically makes the argument for this kind of ex-post reasoning explicitly. Here he is. If your gut said, wait a minute, this global warming thing, it sounds like a scam. Well, I think you're seeing it now. We told you this was going on without proof because we listened to our gut. You'd never believe me. But once again, here we are with yet another brand new reality. Okay, that was Glenn Beck speaking. So cut up at 2 a.m. went to work on the garometer. See if I could decode the decoding the guru's garometer. So point number three of decoding the guru's garometer, right? Talking about gurus is that they tend to overwhelmingly be anti establishment, right? It is necessary that the orthodoxy establishment, the mainstream media and the expert consensus are always wrong, at least blinkered and limited and generally incapable of grappling with the real issues. In the rare occasions when they are right, they describe by the gurus as being right for reasons other than they think. So you can call this science hipsterism, right? A guru can seldom agree with the establishment because it is crucial their appeal that they are offering a unique inside a fresh hot take that is not available elsewhere, maybe repressed or taboo, right? The guru's popularity will obviously benefit if this iconic classic view happens to coincide with the prejudices or intuitions or the desires of their followers. Thus gurus are naturally drawn to topics where there is a dramatic split between the expert consensus and public opinion, such as climate change, which pretty much all experts say is real a man made GMOs, which pretty much all experts say are safe vaccinations, which pretty much all experts say are safe lockdowns. Most experts thought that they were in general a good idea. So if a guru is merely agreeing with an expert consensus on a topic such as COVID, then there is less reason to listen to the guru rather than the relevant expert. So the guru is highly motivated to undertake epistemic sabotage to disparage authoritative and institutional sources of knowledge. There is a tradeoff where the more the guru's followers distrust standard sources of knowledge, such as that emanate from universities, the greater the perceived value that the guru provides. So this is at odds with the guru's natural tendency towards self aggrandizement, which often means inflating their limited academic recognition. Gurus will strategically use ambiguity and uncertainty within their criticisms, providing themselves with the means to walk back claims that get proved wrong or attract criticism or enable them to highlight disclaimers. So gurus will often sabotage other sources of wisdom, which you'll see in their frequently fractious relationships with other gurus with whom they may often have alliances of convenience, but they are also strongly incentivized to compete with. Well, if almost all our institutions and almost all the major power brokers in the establishment are dominated by the left, then it makes sense. But none left us to have a knee jerk suspicion of the establishment. So when public discussion follows the rules established by the left, then this public discussion, no matter how elevated, no matter how lofty the terminology, no matter if it is published in the New Yorker or the New York Times or in, you know, a Harvard study, this discussion is a sham. And Stephen Turner noted back in 1989 for Thomas Hobbs and Carl Schmidt, discussion is always an illusion. It is an instrument of authority, not its basis. So we get the news and we get all this discussion that's going on in the news, but who gets to discuss things on prestigious TV channels and radio stations and in prestigious publications is severely limited to substantially exclude traditionalist people. They were traditional ties to God, to blood, to soil, to believing in the nuclear family. All right, these people are much less likely to, you know, have, you know, a free access or have open access or respectful audience in the mainstream media. So by and large, it is the left that decides the real issues. It is the left that decides the boundaries for public discussion in prestigious outlets. And so the left by and large decides on who are the real experts. So it makes some rational sense for those not on the left to rebel. So just read an interesting article in the New Yorker. Oh, come on, mate. So it's about adventures with purpose. It's a group. Every family member in the loop, Isaac told me. Rodney's ex-boyfriend. So remember, there's an enormous audience, there's enormous fame to be gained from playing the true crime crime game. And the more exciting, the more dramatic, the more conspiratorial you make your presentation on true crime, the more you try to make the case that you're being lied to and all sorts of horrible things are being covered up, the bigger your audience, the bigger your poll, the more prestige you get, the more women you get to sleep with, the more money you make. But you are falling into a conspiracy rabbit hole where what you're doing is really bad for you and for other people. But there are a lot of incentives to do the wrong thing. And you see this in right wing talk radio and right wing punditry in general. She was the group of clout chasing. But most people greeted the team members as heroes, lavishing them with hospitality. We couldn't pay for a meal, one of them told me. Law enforcement agencies had devoted nearly 20,000 hours to the search for Rodney. And AWP said that it had found her within an hour of putting a boat into Prosser Reservoir. Lysik liked to say that AWP's job was to locate people underwater, not to determine how or why they'd ended up there. But in interviews, Bishop and Lysik insisted that Rodney's death was suspect. It doesn't add up, Bishop told Fox News Digital. It wreaks a foul play. The team retreated to a cabin on Lake Tahoe where the editors rushed to put together a video. Former AWP team members told me that they fought with Lysik and Bishop over the content. Lysik characterizes it as an open discussion. It would have been better to just be like, here's the facts, we found the missing girl, one of them said. Instead, the video, which was titled, How We Found Kylie Rodney Murder or Accident, Seemed Designed to Stoke Speculation. In it, Bryn discovers Rodney's body in the car's rear cargo compartment, which he calls suspicious. The video also included a lengthy interview with the roadside assistance driver about his interaction with the bizarre couple. Some viewers seized on his description of the young man accompanying the distressed woman, then, with brown hair poking out from under a black giant's cap, the description resembled Rodney's ex-boyfriend. I was like, dang man, this is going to throw those true-crimers into a whole other frenzy, the former team members said of the video. In an interview with a group of true-crime YouTubers the following week, Lysik was coy, suggesting that more information might be released later. There's an entire other theory that it would blow your mind if I even told you. He said, then added that the man the roadside assistance driver had seen was a positive match. The YouTubers received the news as a bombshell. Oh wow, one said. Oh my god. So a lot of audience, a lot of money, a lot of prestige, a lot of sex to be had for hype and for promoting essentially conspiracy theories without factual evidence that end up doing a lot of harm to innocent people. Said another. Lysik's intimations circulated in the true-crime community, where there is a tendency to assume that the official story of a tragic death obscures a more horrific reality. Engagement driven platforms thrive on drama and twists. With those kinds of incentives, it's tempting to see every death as a murder, every murderer as a serial killer, and every investigation as a cover-up. But the Nevada County Sheriff's Office soon told reporters that it had ruled out Rodney's ex-boyfriend as a person of interest. At the time of the party, he appears to have been hours away in Napa Valley. Other search and rescue experts pointed out that it was not strange that Rodney was found in the back of her vehicle. The engine-heavy front end typically sinks first, and a person trapped inside will often clamber to the back to escape rising water. Fisher, the private investigator, tracked down grainy video footage from a wildfire camera overlooking Prosser Reservoir. On August 6, around the time Rodney's phone went dead, it showed a pair of headlights moving erratically toward the reservoir near where Rodney's car was eventually found, then vanishing. In October, the Nevada County Coroner's Office declared that Rodney's death had been an accidental drowning. The official conclusions did not dissuade everyone. Robertson said that the family members continued to receive harassing, humiliating phone calls from people who believed. So this group Adventures with Purpose does a lot of good in that they find, you know, dead bodies, missing vehicles. But by hyping things that are not true, they also wreak havoc, which is very much like a lot of live streamers and pundits. They had a rule in her death. He quit social media, changed his email address, and stopped answering the phone at the family business, a rustic lodge. The family ended up closing the lodge and moving elsewhere. Ryan Upchurch, a comedian and country rapper with more than 3 million YouTube followers, has been a particularly persistent conspiracist insisting variously that Rodney's family had faked her disappearance and that she wasn't even real. On Facebook, AWP acknowledged the official findings. But its murder or accident video is still up on YouTube. It does not mention that Rodney's death has been ruled. So yeah, think of the incentives as someone doing a show like I'm doing right now. All right, the more I can convince you that the experts are wrong, the establishment is wrong, that the official story is wrong, that they're lying to you, and that something much more sinister is going on, the much bigger an audience I can gain, the more money I can make, and the more promiscuous sex I can enjoy. But if I were to do those things, it'd be really bad for me, it'd be bad for my emotional sobriety, and it'd be bad for those who listen to me. Definitely smells like a conspiracy, a recent commenter wrote. Lysik told me that he stands by AWP's handling of the case. I still feel it's foul play, he said. Last February, Lysik's cousin, Christie, was sitting in a doctor's office scrolling through Facebook when she saw a video about a group of divers who had solved a cold case. She clicked on the story and was shocked when Lysik's face appeared. They hadn't spoken in years. I thought this cannot be him. There's no way that can be him, she told me. Christie is a pseudonym. Christie described her family as, you're typical happy outer shell with that deep, dark inner circle that nobody knows anything about because everybody has just been taught to keep it quiet. When Christie was nine or 10, she says, Lysik, who is about six years older, raped her. There was a lot of abuse in her family, she said. But he took it many steps further. As an adult, Christie largely. A lot of people become famous, like this bloke became famous. They wanted fame, but then with fame comes all sorts of embarrassing information. Now he's charged with raping his six-year younger cousin when she was nine, 10 years of age. He had a noble operation in many way adventures with purpose where they would recover bodies and people missing cars, but they'd also hype a lot of their findings to get more traffic, more money, more attention. They wreaked havoc on dozens of innocent people, very much like talk show hosts and pundits and live streamers because of all the incentives are to hype that there's something much more sinister going on under the surface of the official mainstream orthodox story or presentation. This is Chris Mooney here with Jonathan Hyde discussing the Republican brain on the Chris Hayes show. Now, this is highly ridiculable, but what you both are saying is that actually the research and science says we listen to our gut and then we come up with reasons, right, Jonathan? That's right. So what we've seen for a long time now is that the Republicans are better at moral psychology than the Democrats. And, you know, George Lekoff was saying this, Drew Weston was saying this. The left tends to cling to this idea that if you just, you know, if you construct the message vehicle in the right way and put the ideas and the evidence out there, it will go into people's brains and change their minds. And that's just not the way it works. So, you know, Beck and Colbert and many Republican strategists understand you've got to speak to the gut first. But one of the points I want to make is that while I fully agree with Chris, Chris has done a great job surveying the literature. I want to give him a sample of approval. He is not cherry picking. He is representing the current state of thinking about politics and personality. But the one point that I really want to make is that morality binds and blinds. It binds people into teams. And then on those teams, they look for evidence to support what they want. Both sides do it. And the key thing that I want to introduce here is we all do it around our sacred values. So if we go back 20 years, I would have an easier time finding denial of science on the left than on the right. But you can't see it if you're on the left. But in my own field, in psychology, because the left really sacralizes all these issues about race differences, gender differences. Those are so scary that on the left, there's 30 or 40 years of more than a difference, denial of heritability, IQ, innate sex differences. So what Larry Summers ran up against in his comments about women in science. That's right. I would really urge people to just Google Larry Summers, women in science. If people would read the transcript, it is as nuanced and careful as a person can be, especially when talking about a field that's not their own. And so this discussion took place 11 years ago. Jonathan Haidt has moved well to the left and now it doesn't want to talk about the role of genetics in intelligence. And it's bizarre that the left reacted so strongly to it. But it's the same story. It's not bizarre. It's not bizarre, actually. I want to explain why it's not bizarre right after we take a very quick break. Okay. Do you know you have more nerve endings in your gut than you have in your head? You can look it up. Now I know some of you are going to say I did look it up and that's not true. That's because you looked it up in a book. Next time, look it up in your gut. Stephen Colbert giving us a brief gloss of a central thesis here. Let's talk about this point of contention. Because Jonathan, you're saying, look, we all have more, we all sort of morally reason in the same way. We all end up in teams and then we reverse engineer reasons to believe in what our team predisposes to believe, what they believe, and that cuts across left and right. And you're saying, no, actually there's something distinct right now in the nature of the both personality and... Yeah, there are probably different psychological and genetic and cognitive predispositions between different groups, including between different ideological groups. Okay, I did a lot of work this morning on trying to decode decoding the gurus. So think about how we assemble a worldview. It's not just a pursuit of truth. It's also erected on a basis of self-interest. And these interests are not just material interests for money, power, fame, and sex, but they are often deeper, broader, and more subtle. So people will see the abortion issue, for example, is simultaneously a pragmatic issue, a symbolic issue, an emotional issue, an emotional representation of states of what is real states that they find reassuring or threatening. So different people find different things reassuring or threatening. And so the interests in this dispute are in how much they see their own way of life valued. So people with different kinds of lives are differentially threatened or reassured by different beliefs about the status of embryos. Those who are dedicated to a nuclear family and raising children see abortion very differently from people who are leading a sexually promiscuous life. And most people have an interest in a belief in a public policy that validates them and their way of life reassures them about the kind of lives that they have chosen. And so the people who get on TV and who write in the most prestigious journals and those who are academics at our most prestigious institutions, they have a vested interest in abortion being freely available because they have dedicated their lives to the pursuit of their career. And usually family comes in second. They don't generally hold to a traditional perspective life. So all politics, all worldviews have an emotional core. And this emotional core usually revolves around a sense of injury, a sense of justice denied, a sense of right and wrong, a sense of agony. And so different people experience the world differently. And then this leads them into very different ways of life. And so those who determine expertise, those who determine what is true, those who determine social policy, generally speaking are not from a traditional perspective on life. So where do you even get the funding to carry out the science to establish truth, right? Might the way funding science works, such as by peer consensus, distort truth, right? So what are the realities of modern science? You need a lot of money. You need a lot of money to fund a laboratory. That means you need a relationship with funders. There needs to be some sort of alignment between the aims of the scientists and those of the funders. So in the face of intense competition, this work of alignment falls on the scientists to a much greater extent than it does the funders. That means the autonomy to try to do science to establish what is true is limited to what can be achieved with massive funding. So there are all sorts of temptations that arise within these funding relationships, right? There is a temptation to claim impact, to overpromise, to overstate the policy relevance of findings, to sacrifice the pursuit of intellectually promising lines of work to those that can be funded, or those that will be popular, or those that will get you prestige, right? To produce work that is marketable to funders, but scientifically trivial, leave the task of voicing skepticism to other people so that you don't hurt your chances of funding or a prestige. You don't hurt the feelings of your peers to neglect the task of intellectual integration and reflection that don't have impact and don't get funding to just enough to meet the demands of the funders and perhaps not dig deeper or in directions other than what the funders want. So you have all these temptations to do things with to get funding that are inimical to the pursuit of truth, right? Having a bias becomes rewarded and funding and funded, right? If you can get findings that confirm what a funder wants, right? You'll get more funding. You can confirm the results of the powers that be, right? You're going to have more success, more prestige and more funding. So contemporary science is basically following a crowd. Researchers will jump on to an approach or to a topic because it is a good strategy for getting funded and getting kudos from the powers that be. University research officers then facilitate this. So the structure of support for science, all right, provides incentives that overwhelm the pursuit of truth. And so science can't basically police itself, right? You need the marketplace of escalated journalism. You need the legal profession, right? You need government regulation, right? Because science is unable to control itself because it is so incentivized to sell out to whoever will fund them. So you've got the Therano scandal, right? Did the scientists, you know, break the Therano scandal, right? This startup company pitching a supposedly revolutionary blood testing technology. It was not uncovered by the scientific community. It's not uncovered by scientists or academics. It was not uncovered by the Food and Drug Administration. It was uncovered by the investment community and a crusading business journalist at the Wall Street Journal, right? The relationship between the leading Harvard chemist, right? The head of the Harvard Chemistry Department and the Chinese Communist Party was not uncovered by scientists or by Harvard, but by the FBI, right? The poor quality of a tremendous amount of social science studies, right? It's not, you know, usually being exposed by the elite publications or the elite academics or even by peer review, right? It's being exposed by those renegade professors and those with a commitment to science who are willing to risk their reputations to point out, hey, the emperor has no clothes. So decoding the gurus says, our specific focus is the subset of gurus who make liberal use of pseudo-profound BS, referring to speech that is persuasive and creates the appearance of profundity with little regard for truth or reference to relevant expertise. Well, the most prestigious institutions in our country decide in large part what is considered true and what is considered expertise, and these institutions are dominated by the left, right? When those who determine, reward, award, and fund expertise and promote what is true dominantly on the left, does it not make sense for those who are not on the left to harbor suspicion about all this purported truth and expertise? I mean, who decides who gets tenure at a university? Dominantly, it is leftist. Dominantly, you have to meet the approval of your peers, right? The whole point of all professions is to exclude others and to gain benefits by excluding others and to be putative towards amateurs, but also deviance, right? People who fail to get with the new program, right? If I wanted to make it in the Alexander Technique profession, I would, well, it's too late now, but if years ago I wanted to make it, I would have to stop deviating, stop voicing unpopular criticisms. So it was always taken for granted in the academy that appointments to the academy were culturally coded and that merit was secondary. Now that we've got increasing professionalization in the humanities and the social sciences, or at least an attempt at that, right, it's become ever more explicit that to succeed in the academy, you have to get along with the dominant, generally left-wing powers that be. The basic fact of intellectual life, right, Stephen Turner here in 2019, is that it does not pay for itself, right? If I wanted to make a living from what I'm doing now, virtually all the incentives would be to create something that's bad for you, but creates a lot of eyeballs, right? All knowledge regimes of which professionalism is only one need income and they need support that comes from something other than the intellectual work itself, right? If I did a trash show with people screaming abuse at each other like that Saturday night, Jim Goad massacre, I could get 100 times, 1,000 times the viewership that I have now, right? If I wanted to do an intellectually rigorous show, it is not going to pay for itself, right? Academics need funding from public universities, private universities, and from grants, right? Very, very, very few. Only the most exceptional people, those who are public celebrities, frequently by doling out things that sound profound but are actually BS. Any tiny percentage of people can earn a living from lecture fees and for writing for the public or writing textbooks. The academic life is selective and the selection grounds for advancement at each stage are not clear except for degree requirements but they depend on a system and they depend upon peer review and peer review in the academic market rewards conformity, right? The winners in this game are clever and they are conformist so they would deny this and they would point to that minor, very tactical achievements as evidence of their innovative thinking but they can't get to outside the box. They can't be truly innovative or they would upset their peers and they would not get appointed to academic positions. They cannot challenge from within the system, right? The academic system and the professional system have various means of disciplinary enforcement that will make it virtually impossible for a renegade to succeed and then become regarded as a source of truth or expertise, right? Education is largely education to succeed in the current system. Peer review is an affirmation of hierarchy of following the conformist path to succeed in this particular system. Merit is not a matter of debate. It's a matter of counting like how, you know, many prestigious publications are on your side, how many prestigious peers are on your side. So think about the COVID pandemic, right? What's normal for experts in a pandemic, all right? We've had a lot of pandemics and epidemics and so there are normal procedures for dealing with them. So what you generally get is a bureaucratic team with a number of contributors, some of whom are scientists, usually about 200 and they get together in an active social construction. They form a singular message, right? It's selected for its relevance, for its importance and usually selected with an eye towards influencing public behavior to reduce the impact of the disease. Now this is not science. This is not about research results fresh from the laboratory or the field. This is not the product of a long process of sorting out these results through peer review and scientific competition. This is a carefully refined bureaucratic consensus, right? This is a message that is produced through bureaucratic methods and then it is spoken about as science, right? But that's wildly inaccurate, right? These boundary objects carefully constructed for public consumption that contain some knowledge, a great deal of judgment, a great deal of guesswork and a field with uncertainties that are hard to estimate and they have a purpose. They are correlated and brought together and united to a singular message to change people's behavior and to protect the various agencies and experts in the event of being wrong. So agencies, experts and professions want to preserve their trust and they're standing with the public. So disagreement is usually at privately and it is dealt with privately. Bureaucratic infighting is usually kept in the background and definitely those who are more popular and are more powerful and have more funding get a larger say than others even if the others are more true. So there's a good court case after the Hurricane Katrina disaster. There's an obscure engineering researcher at Louisiana State University who criticized the Army Corps of Engineers which was responsible for the levee that failed and flooded much of the city of New Orleans and he criticized the Army Corps of Engineers for its errors. The university was encouraged by its own professors to fire the researcher who was absolutely correct. Case went to court and case was settled without a tryout with a payment to the researcher but the issue is important. The university believed that criticism of the Army Corps of Engineers even though the criticism was absolutely accurate would damage the relationship between the university and the federal government upon which the university depended for research grants even though the Army Corps was not itself a source of funds. The situation with the CDC is parallel. The main source of funds for the Centers for Disease Control is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease which received about six billion dollars in the 2020 budget. The total National Institute of Health budget is over 40 billion. To get funds from these agencies is a matter of scientific life or death of researchers and it's a lot easier to get funds if you fit in with the consensus if you are conformist and if you give the funders what they want. Institutional makeup of the American right that makes it distinctly and extremely hostile of science. So I agree with him that everybody reasons based on emotion and I agree that you can there's experiments when you can get the left to be more biased than the right if you push certain emotional buttons. So I agree with that. No less. I think there's something about the liberal psychology in its affiliation with the scientific community and its willingness to change its views over time such that you might have some liberal biases but over time they're going to more find the truth and I think evolution is a great example. So for instance I'm a liberal. I think you can't understand human beings outside of evolution. All right. So clearly yeah but as a liberal he refuses to accept the obvious truth that evolution has continued over the past 10,000 years that evolution has profoundly affected how our brains work but different groups have evolved you know with different cognitive and emotional and effective structures and he's all down with evolution except for when it that leads to the obvious glaringly obvious fact that different groups of different gifts and different cognitive and emotional structures with different predispositions towards violence or conformity. Right. So he claims he's all down with evolution but effectively he refuses to accept that evolution has continued over the past 10,000 years and that the evolution of different peoples in different parts of the world has produced very distinctive people and sometimes there are very obvious cues about people that are a reasonably useful heuristic for trying to figure out whether someone is likely to be smart or dumb whether someone is likely to be violent or not violent when someone is likely to be conformist or individualist. So yeah big believer in evolution right except for when it goes against his own hero system. Maybe three decades ago I wouldn't have been comfortable feeling that way but I missed all that you know and I'm all for it and the left I think is largely changed on that well you have the right denial of evolution is over 100 years old and it's not just it's not just denial of little things all right these people think that the earth is less than 10,000 years old and they deny everything right but there's also a change over time right so that's the difficult causal story that you have to tell right which is that we see certain certain beliefs get worse over time or certain anti-science postures get worse over time certain kinds of ideological extreme and comment in the chat you can conduct research and not care about peer review but who's going to fund it right science is no longer a matter of the you know the gentleman individual going out and conducting research right science now is about requiring millions and millions of dollars for funding for laboratories right an individual just going out and doing research is highly unlikely to you know achieve any resonance in the world with his findings right we're not in the 19th century anymore this is not the Victorian era where the gentleman scientists can just go out and and do things on his own and have the ability to change the world grow more intense what is the source of of of that because things don't remain static right right so eliot blad has a good shot at me here money crops or science except covert science no covert science is also corrupted i'm not saying that science is useless i'm not saying that universities are useless there are some perverse incentives there are there is reason for some skepticism particularly by people on the right given that these institutions are dominantly controlled by the left at the same time i think that decoding the gurus has some good point that's a reflexive dismissal of institutions establishments academics and expertise i don't think is particularly wise right so we have to do the hard work of trying to figure out when to take expertise and and science seriously and when to employ greater levels of skepticism so i want to fully agree uh with chris that the psychology does predispose liberals more to be receptive to science that my own research has found that conservatives are better at group binding at loyalty and so if you put them in a group versus group conflict yes the right is more prone psychologically to band around and and be you know sort of circle the wagons i just want to read one quote because i think both of us are on the same page here that the psychology doesn't tell you exactly what's going to happen the psychology is just the starting point and you need to look at history so there was recently a study by gordon gosha sociologist finding that basically testing chris's claim and it found yes chris was right that the change over the last 45 years is that the right has gone less and less they've gotten less and less trusting of scientists so that looks really good for chris's idea and that's true but i just want to hear one little nuance on that uh an interview with gosha he said public opinion on science in europe and japan skews differently than in the united states there skepticism about the scientific community usually comes from the left the reason may be that the issues on the scientific forefront in europe such as genetically modified fruit and nuclear power tend to push liberals buttons so there's nothing that human beings can do that would not contain varying elements of corruption all right human beings the floor there'll always be corruption that doesn't mean that you dismiss all human endeavors because there'll always be an element of corruption in them that's interesting well i think but again i think that you can kind of easily wade into a kind of morassic cultural relativism all right this is michelle goldberg who wrote two lengthy articles about me one for salon and one for speak magazine back in 1999 and where everybody's equally irrational and the fact is i mean although obviously you're right and that was true i think in the u.s in the 70s where you had a big kind of back to nature anti empirical strain on the left in the feminist community you know she used to have the most adorable you know betty boo voice when when she interviewed me in 1999 she sounded like the most naive you know 16 17 18 year old but she now sounds much more mature she probably got voice lessons all kinds of communities however i think there's a big difference between being skeptical of nuclear power or skeptical of genetically modified foods although maybe that is slightly less rational than skepticism about nuclear power that's really different than denying an empirical fact like evolution or like the earth is longer than i think that there is but don't you don't think that there's a difference between you don't think that there are rational and kind of empirical reasons to be skeptical or worried about nuclear power to me that's just very different than denying a clear reality the kind of utter safety of nuclear power is not a reality in the way that the age of the earth is a radiation you know it doesn't travel all the way across the Pacific from Fukushima and kill babies on the west coast like that's really a safe statement and but a lot of people on the left might actually be inclined but there's also a huge that nuclear reactors lead to a Fukushima is well that's a different issue but there's also a huge let me just say this there's also a huge institutional component to this right which and that to me is key right we you do not have huge democratic politicians running around in fact they're all they're all pro nuclear power you know all of the all the above we just had a lot of changes right we just had a new permit for for the first nuclear power plant to be built i think in 15 years if i'm not mistaken so so there's a there's a kind of malleability there right so that's uh chris hayes hosting a discussion about 11 years ago let me go back to ronnie gordon's terrific book conservative claims of cultural oppression on the nature and origins of conservophobia so people who are not liberal and not left don't take liberalism and leftism at face value so liberals you know repudiated the bad parts of leftism but they can't repudiate the seeds of that repression which is their sweeping vision of social reform and social unity implemented by the centralized authority of experts so the more left you go the more commitment you have generally speaking to centralized authority of experts and who gets to be an expert one who conforms and plays the game right not necessarily someone of great merit so liberals have you know very different ordering impulses than conservatives so conservatives have a skeptical view of human nature and so they very much want law and order liberals have a much more optimistic view of human nature but it's a human nation nature that has internalized the liberal disengagement from the traditional ties to blood and to soil and to traditional ways of doing things all right someone who has the ability to distance himself from his most immediate emotions so liberals and leftists generally speaking are hostile to the free market right they want the the distant you know buffered self extended to every sphere of life right they make as their target the essential conservatism of the ordinary american they want to you know remove his authentic roots in blood and soil and you know parents would be highly disturbed to know that his common practice among pediatricians right doctors for children these days to tell mom and dad's to leave the room so that the professional can have private chats with the children about controversial topics such as abortion premarital sex masturbation birth control gender transitioning right so the basic presumption on the left is that the experts know best that doctors know best that schools know best that governments know best what's good for you and for your children that parents are too ignorant too traditional you know too stuck in you know high bound folk ways and too incompetent to be left to directly supervise the lives of their own children so on the right is a strong defense for you know parents getting to decide and direct the lives of their own children on the left it's much more of a push to have the schools and to have experts run the lives of our children so we've got the rise of cognitive elites which is a betrayal of america's original self understanding is the promised land of common sense right with the rise of the cognitive elites that undermines the spirit of cognitive egalitarianism which was assumed would keep the common people from being manipulated by intellectual charlatans of every ilk now liberal elites have assumed this role of bullying and educating and refining and disciplining everybody including your children right it's liberals and the elites who have the most allegiance to claims of expertise and professionalism and they increasingly want to manipulate and intimidate ordinary americans into submitting to a left-wing culture so conservatives oppose not just the various specific manifestations of left-wing cultural priorities but the left's general assault on cognitive egalitarianism the ordinary americans general life competence and decision-making capacities which are generally thought to be the psychological bulwark of conservatism that most people have the ability to make competent decisions and they don't need experts running their lives so you've got secularism modernism liberalism leftism operating in the service of this assault on the traditional and conservative conception that most people are competent to decide things for themselves so people who are not leftists tend to celebrate religion and tradition not just for their intrinsic value but as the common man's defense against this sort of rule by experts so on the liberal left they you know increasingly want to educate bully and you know run your family run the most private parts of your life to have you know control over your children right you can call them groomers you can accurately call them groomers not necessarily in the sense that they're out to have sex with your children but they definitely want to groom your kids to grow up to be that disengaged to have a buffered identity to have a distance from traditional emotions about blood, soil, nuclear family, God and traditional ways of looking at life so intellectuals as we currently know them overwhelmingly on the left and their investment is in influence rather than in money right they're not really selfless servants of the public good right they want to make over all of society they want to change the lives of the mass of the people they want to change the lives of your children they want to groom your children to be more modern and secular they want to make everyone conform to the liberal left model of cognitive rearrangements so that people are more buffered and more reflexive and have more of a distance from traditional emotions and loyalties such as the blood, soil and the nuclear family so today's liberals and today's elites and today's leftists do not believe that ordinary people should be left as they are but instead they must be badgered they must be bullied they must be preached at they must be drilled they must have their children removed from their control right they must be organized to abandon their lacks and disordered folkways and traditional attachments but this is why intellectuals dominantly on the left so invested in the fortunes of those they deem to be underprivileged so this badgering takes place through the well-meaning solicitude of the family doctor not just the stern injunctions of the village priest but that does not alter the fundamental nature of this project to remake human nature it is fundamentally a religious impulse that has been transmuted into a left-wing totalizing impulse so this solicitude for your kids is about the latest iteration of this civilizing courtier morality it's a sublimated intellectualized etherealized version of an ambition that when the left has had the ability they've carried out their ambitions much more brutally and openly so chris mooney who was talking here on the his show wrote a book called the republican brain and he offers an intriguing physiological explanation for why conservatives are less well disposed than liberals toward expressive moderation meaning liberals are much more disposed towards careful self censorship and self editing and i want to talk about how we if you guys are right how do we avoid a bleak landscape of will to power nihilism in which no one can persuade anyone of anything and i come to work every day hoping to like you know bring some information to the public and i'm completely bang my head against the wall my life is meaningless they will rescue me from that right after this break morning from new york i'm chris haze here with columbia linguistic professor john Mcwhorter also the new york daily news michelle goldberg was from newsweek and the daily beast jonathan height professor of psychology at the university of virginia an author of the righteous mind why good people are divided and chris mooney author of the republican brain the science of why they deny science and reality we're talking about the ways in which people do their political and ideological reasoning i think is the is the is the common topic here the degree to which there are systematic personality psychological differences between the way liberals and concerns think about the world which they're from the research and the literature appears to be in certain certain personality traits are highly correlative with certain biological or might might be a good way moderately correlated with with certain ideological dispositions and then how those agglomerate into groups and institutions that pursue a political agenda and the key the key locus or the key insight from which both of your works both books spring is the fact that we don't reason in the way that we you know as in the enlightenment mode of i threw out a reason you threw out a reason we wrestle with them i'm persuaded you're persuaded then we come doing great no we have these intuitions those intuitions are formed by all sorts of things personality relationships our cultural embeddedness and then once we use those intuitions to arrive at the things that we are values right and say this is sacred or this is important or i like equality then we we use our reason to come up with reasons to believe the thing that our intuition tells us if that is the landscape what does that do and i'm going to ask a big question that we're probably not going to respond on cable news what does that do the entire enlightenment project because if the fact of the matter is we're all fooling ourselves about this whole thing or i'm okay so the enlightenment project is overwhelming a liberal left project because the enlightenment project calls that people are basically good and that they can reason their way together they can discuss and come to a consensus and they can you know figure out truth through the power of reason alone as a traditionalist right i don't put as much stock in reason i believe that the power of genetics and the power of early imprinting and the power of you know all sorts of forces and incentives around us of which we