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Tribalism is Dumb | Andrew Heaton
142 Plays4 months ago
In this episode, Project Liberal’s Max Marty and Joshua Eakle engage in a thought-provoking conversation with Andrew Heaton, political satirist, podcaster, and author of the new book “Tribalism is Dumb.” They delve into the evolutionary roots of tribalism, its impact on modern politics, and how our innate groupishness shapes societal dynamics. Andrew shares insights from his book, exploring why tribalism has intensified and what we can do to mitigate its negative effects.
Topics Discussed:
- The evolutionary psychology behind tribalism and zero-sum thinking
- How modern society exacerbates or mitigates tribal tendencies
- The role of sports, religion, and community in channeling tribalism
- Dunbar’s number and its implications for social cohesion
- The limitations of the traditional left-right political spectrum
- Cognitive biases, groupthink, and overcoming motivated reasoning
- How to reduce political polarization and foster liberal values
Andrew Heaton brings a unique blend of humor and insight to the complex topic of tribalism, offering listeners a deeper understanding of the forces shaping our political landscape. Don’t miss this engaging discussion that challenges conventional wisdom and provides practical solutions for a more open and free society.
Links:
- Andrew's Book: Tribalism is Dumb https://a.co/d/1XRoo8H
- Andrew's Podcast: The Political Orphanage https://mightyheaton.com/the-political-orphanage
And as always, you can find more of Josh and Max at https://projectliberal.org/
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Transcript
Introductions and Backgrounds
00:00:00
Speaker
Welcome to the latest episode of the Project Liberal podcast. I'm joined today by Joshua Echol, the CEO and founder of Project Liberal. And I'm also joined by Andrew Heaton, our guest who has written an amazing book that we will get into. I am Max Marty. You've probably seen me on a couple of the most latest episodes of the Project Liberal podcast, and you'll be seeing more of me as time goes forward.
00:00:27
Speaker
Andrew is a, well, he's a lot of things. We were just talking about it prior to starting the recording. You do so many things, Andrew. You're a journalist, a comedian, a producer, a podcaster. You worked at the Reason Foundation. You used to work at the Fox network. You had ah a stint in like as a congressional staffer. The political orphanage is what you're mostly doing today, but you also have alienating the audience, which is your sci-fi podcast. um I don't know how you do it.
00:00:56
Speaker
all my introductions from now on because like ah my my friends are just like man you got a fear of commitment you need to pick one thing whereas you max make it sound like i'm i'm very talented and uh and industrious i very much like your take on that uh yeah i i have done all those things um i started out professionally working for the united states congress i worked for a couple of blue dog democrats back in the day before they were confined to zoos And then I went from there, got a master's degree. While I was getting a
Andrew's Creative Journey
00:01:24
Speaker
master's degree, I was doing stand-up comedy and really got into comedy at that time. Moved to New York after my master's and ah got into television, which is how I wound up at Fox Business. I worked on a, I was a writer for a program called The Independence and then for Kennedy and worked there for a while. And ah
00:01:42
Speaker
and then moved on from that to doing my my show, The Political Orphanage, which is a podcast I've been doing for five years now, which is designed for people that do not feel particularly at home on red team or blue team, or at the very least are very tired of the red versus blue dynamic that the country's been sucked into, want to get past that to something better and ah do a sci-fi podcast as well as you know called Alienating the Audience and I actually just moved to Washington, D.C., where I'm i'm coming to you from now, or or Arlington, if we want to split hairs, because I'll be making funny videos with reason on a weekly basis moving forward. ah So
Writing 'Tribalism is Dumb'
00:02:17
Speaker
and do I think a political satirist, I think I can actually call myself a political satirist at this point, because I'm not that good of a pundit, and I'm not funny enough to be a stand-up comedian, but political satirist is right there in the middle. And so that's where I am today. And the author of Tribalism is Dumb, that I think we'll be talking about this evening.
00:02:35
Speaker
How did you, doing all that stuff, how do you still find time to write a book? I mean, George R.R. Martin's doing nothing but writing a book and he hasn't been able to put one out in years. I mean, what that's astounding. Honestly, can i can i can i can I tell you a real trick? This is true. Yeah. um when you're when you're like
00:02:55
Speaker
bottle and save creative projects you're working on, ah because it might be two or three years before you release them. So for example, I go to so to Scotland every summer, and ah I'm there for one to three months. It's a good time. I've got friends over there. And one of the things I always do when I go to Scotland, I've done this the last five years I'm there, is I go to a new place in Scotland, and I write a travel chapter about it. uh... a la bill bryson because i figure eventually bill bryson will die or go to prison when that happens i'm a step up become the bill bryson of scotland but from from an outsider perspective it's going to look like and i don't know where i'll be with this book comes out it could be three years from now could be ten years from now there's a very good chance that it will appear that i'm doing all sorts of stuff in my day-to-day life and indeed i might be and then there'll be this heavily researched book that will come out of nowhere and it will look like i'd just
00:03:47
Speaker
How did you do that? And the answer is that I worked on it piecemeal for 10 years and would would work on it for a couple of weeks and then just forget about it for a year. And I've had lots of projects like that now where like I've had a short story collection and a novel come out in the last two or three years, but they were things that I was working on just intermittently over a long period of time. And this book in particular, Tribalism is Dumb, is exactly that. I've been working on that for about seven years.
00:04:12
Speaker
It wasn't. Thank you very much. i should I should hold up a copy of the book, but I i just moved to the DC area, so it's I've got my author's copy in boxes. ah With Tribalism is Dumb, ah it it was it was a lot of effort, ah but ah you know it it was it was to some extent intermittent over that seven year period. And then you put it all
Podcasting and Creative Efficiency
00:04:31
Speaker
together and you you put a bow around it and put it out into the world.
00:04:34
Speaker
and you're able to to do that so i'm i'm getting better at better bottling stuff the other thing i'll add for podcasters for anybody that's doing content like us if you could figure out how to get credit for stuff that you were already going to do than do it so like with a sci-fi podcast the reason that works is i really like talking sci-fi with my friends and and i was like well if we're gonna do this anyway we might as well record it so it's like for me that's really just my social life anyway that i'm gonna i'm gonna walk around talking about like but Did they mess up Spock or did they get to the core of Spock? that We're going to have those dumb conversations. But I could record it and then just spit it out there. So I'm getting better at overlapping things, I think.
00:05:12
Speaker
I love that idea, and I was gonna say, I would have read your book either way, and now I get to read, and and talk to people about it either way, and now I get to read about it, talk about it, and have other people listen to us talk about it. That's, yeah, overlap, it's a great idea. And probably the book's tax deductible for you now too, so you're welcome. True? I was gonna say, it also seems like incredibly good timing for you to kind of have it all culminated this moment too, because tribalism is at the top of people's minds in a very significant way in this political moment.
00:05:41
Speaker
God, I sure hope so. i think the the Here's how I'm hoping that this book will will be received. I've got a two-part plan for this. I dropped the book a month before the election, ah the logic being exactly as you point out, Josh, that the the peak tribalism would be the month before the election, and that would also presumably be when people are most alarmed by it. ah The upshot to that is that for for people of my disposition that are In some milieu of moderate, a ah liberal, libertarian, something like that, ah we're kind of looking at it going, I don't feel real enthused about this, but I'm very bothered by my neighbor that keeps stealing my yard signs.
00:06:21
Speaker
yeah And I'm very bothered by my aunt that defriended me on Facebook because I didn't agree with her about the Secretary of Agriculture or whatever. ah so So for those folks, the book was like, ah, good, this explains why the election's so bad. I'm hoping that phase two will be now after the election as people are coming down from their political hangover.
00:06:41
Speaker
that they'll that they'll go, oh, this has gotten out of hand. Maybe I went a little bit far. Or alternately, before Christmas, people will send this as a passive-aggressive gift to their dad, ah one of those things. But um it was cut it was ah it was a weird time for me to promote the book, because ah a small portion of the population is very open to talking about tribalism right now. And a much larger percentage of the population had nothing to do with it leading up to the election, because they were in the peak fifths of tribalism.
00:07:10
Speaker
there's ah There's a way that Jonah Goldberg likes to put this, which is whenever he has ah someone on his podcast that's recently written a book, he'll just he knows that it's important for authors to be able to just say, here is exactly what my book is about. So Andrew, can you just tell us in a short, you what is your book about?
00:07:29
Speaker
Yeah, I am fascinated by and irritated by how groupish people have become about politics, how politics feels almost more like a ah religion now than it does just a series of problem solving and policy bundles, which is how I tend to view politics. And so I've spent the last seven years reading sociology and anthropology to understand why are we wired to be like this? what's What's happening that makes us compulsively form groups? What are healthy manifestations? What are unhealthy manifestations like in politics? And what I'm trying to do is figure out
00:08:05
Speaker
Why are we groupish, tribalistic partisan? Why did it get bad? What what changed over the last 20 years because it's worse than when I was a kid? And what can we do about it? And so for folks at home, if you find yourself alarmed or baffled or flummoxed by how people are operating politically, this book is for you. And my promise to you is that if you read the book, you will be a little bit less baffled by the current political landscape that we find ourselves in. I'm not gonna claim that I can get you to Jedi your way into making people believe whatever you believe, or that you can you can Jedi them out of whatever beliefs they have. What I can do is I can tell you why it's gotten so weird, why people act the way they do, and I can make it less confusing for you. And I think that alone will make it easier to operate in. I guess you you start you start a lot of the book in the kind of evil psych space, right, talking about
00:09:02
Speaker
how millions and billions of years of evolution has led to us to to see the world in a particular way. They've programmed us not just physically, but they've also programmed us mentally to perceive of things and act of things in a particular way. um And I think a ah ah cornerstone of that is the zero-sum thinking, right? So um where, and there's actually, in my mind, there's two forms of zero-sum thinking. I'll be curious as to which one you think is more important. But the first form is,
00:09:31
Speaker
Um, zero sum with re with regard to other people taking your stuff, right? So like there's a, there's a set amount of stuff in the world. And if somebody takes more from one group, then that group has less and et cetera, et cetera. The other type of zero sum thinking is zero sum thinking across time that since the world barely changed generation after generation as we were evolving, right? The world only started to change very rapidly in the past few hundred years.
00:09:58
Speaker
then zero
Evolutionary Psychology and Tribalism
00:10:00
Speaker
than the what then your sha your killede children are not necessarily going to be better off unless they go and take someone else's stuff than you were. Which of those two forms of zero sum thinking you know in relation to other groups are in across time? Do you think was more important or are are they both equally important?
00:10:18
Speaker
I think for our purposes talking about tribalism today, the the the macro side of that is more important than the micro side, if that makes sense. I feel like the micro side of, but by which I mean I am rich because Josh is poor, Max is rich because he took money from me, that is extremely pertinent to economics. And it's something that on my podcast, the political orphanage, I kind of am talking about regularly that we don't live in a zero sum world. we We live in a world where we can build wealth, where we can create wealth. You you you and I can both profit from, I pay Josh to build a house and Josh builds a house and I get a house and Josh gets the money. That's great. That's how wealth is made, right? So from an economic standpoint, I think on an individual basis, that's very pertinent. From a sociological or partisan or political science standpoint, I think that the bigger picture is ah what happens there and is is deeply wired into us. And this is something that I kind of struggled with in that I am deeply optimistic about human beings. I am a humanist.
00:11:17
Speaker
I think human beings are underrated. I think if aliens came down, they'd be impressed with us. They'd go, what are you? You're like apes. And we'd go, like yeah, yeah, we're apes. And they'd go, oh, that's great. You've got watches? Oh, that's so cool. like And like what else have you done? We're like, oh, well, we we wait we did Game of Thrones, if you want to see that. ah we've we've We've built these submarines. They'd be like, this is amazing. like Have deer did anything like this? No, deer haven't done anything. They've been jack shit. The deer aren't good at all. like i think I think human beings are great. And i I'll add to that.
00:11:41
Speaker
I think morally speaking, most human beings are operating on a spectrum of benign neutrality to outright altruism. The vast majority of people, I think, are good, decent people that are either leaving you alone or or want to help you. um And what i where I started to get tripped up is looking into the evolutionary history that you bring up, Max, ah where If we're talking, again, economics, like I think of zero sum as like the middle ages, where economic growth was very, very, very low over hundreds and hundreds of years, and all wealth was based in land, and there's a limited amount of land. But when we get even further back into evolutionary psychology, human beings, homo sapiens, the species of which were part, are about 300,000 years old. I was 200,000 years old when I was in high school. Then we found a jawbone in North Africa. We now think we're 300,000 years old.
00:12:31
Speaker
Our immediate antecedents um that that could walk upright, kill things with sticks, ah had fires, had burials like weren't us, but we're pretty close, maybe maybe could talk, I don't know. um They're like maybe 3 million years old if we get into the kind of broader Homo family.
00:12:47
Speaker
And the more I looked into that, the more I'd go, oh, this this has some kind of dark ramifications to it. Because it does sure look like not only were we in a zero-sum world during our formative years as a species, that we were also very likely in a habesian tooth and nail I'm going to die unless I take your food kind of world. Not just you're a peasant and I'm a lord, but you starve to death and I live. And the reason that I say that is I've i've identified at least two different bottleneck moments in the homogeneous history where we were an endangered species. And there might be quite a few more than that. But those are the two that I'm aware of in my in my research.
00:13:25
Speaker
ah One of them was fairly recent. We are Homo sapiens by this time. It's us as a species. There's no hardware differences between us and the people I'm describing. ah But not having the book directly in front of me, I want to say about 70,000 years ago, there was a supervolcano that went off in Indonesia that caused nuclear winter, for lack of a better term.
00:13:44
Speaker
it It limited the amount of sunlight coming in and it lowered the temperatures happening. So there was an incredible ecological collapse that occurred and the human population bottlenecked. And it it dropped down to where the human population was, I want to say like about that of Bixby, Oklahoma for 6,000 years or so. Like it was very, very small. It was scattered because we'd left Africa by that time. So it wasn't just in Africa. but a very, very low amount of time. Then you go further back about, I want to say three million years ago, when our antecedents were Homo heidelbergensis, and again, could kill stuff with sticks, had fires, walked upright. Like, like if you saw us at the back of a bar, as Homo heidelbergensis, you wouldn't notice. You'd have to come up close to notice that we were cavemen.
00:14:27
Speaker
um at At that point there was I think a prolonged drought probably we're not entirely sure but it's probably ecological probably a prolonged drought where it's possible and in fact likely that the homogeneous of which we are part ah was shrunk down to an area about the size of Rhode Island inside of Africa and that the human population dropped to 10,000 people, I want to say. Again, ah apologies. I don't have the book right in front of me. It's in the book, though. You should buy it. Tribalism is dumb. And the human population was endangered. And this was for thousands of years. This was like for 100,000 years. It was a very, very long period of time. And you think about the ramifications of having that little food
00:15:10
Speaker
in that type of an area with that few people it's unlikely that we were living in this nice everybody get along Josh and I can build a house and affluence economy for lack a better term it was probably eat or be eaten and I don't like any of this but but that seems to be where the data is it's corroborated by most of the pre-civilizational sites that we find have lots of war wounds have lots of people that are dying in their 20s or 30s it would appear that there was a prolonged protracted period of human adolescence in which we were a very violent, very bloodthirsty species. And where these two things kind of come together, these two different world views that I've got, where I do think people are genuinely good, is within the tribe.
00:15:55
Speaker
When we're all on a big camping trip for 40 generations, somewhere in Africa together, it's very important to be prosocial with people that you are connected to. In fact, we are very altruistic. We're very altruistic and very reciprocal ah with people that are a part of our clique, whatever that is, our family, our clan, our tribe. The tribes themselves are not. The tribes themselves in a macro sense are proactively seeking out competitors to best and there's an evolutionary reason for that. So like again the people that tend to be of my disposition that folks are mostly good look back into evolutionary psychology and they look at
00:16:34
Speaker
um hunter-gatherers and they go, look, like warfare is probably a development of private property because prior to private property, prior to the agricultural revolution that that allowed for private property to exist, if Josh and I are in different tribes and we we come to the same plain full of big fat bison, I'll just walk away. if if If Josh has more people on his team, as fine we'll walk away, we'll find other bison. Why would we fight about this? Whereas if we own property,
00:17:00
Speaker
Now we're settled and we've got grandpa buried in the back acre and we're not leaving and we're going to fight each other, right? And the the the problem that I have with that is the the aforementioned resource ah issue of there were periods where resources were stretched so thin that you couldn't walk away. And there was a a proactive evolutionary strategy where if I came to good resources, a lot of fish, a lot of berries, a lot of nuts, whatever, it was in my best interest as a tribe, our best interest, to go looking for any other tribes that might have an incursion into our territory and push them out. And this is foundational to my book. I think that tribalism is something that is innate. I do not think it it is a reaction. What I mean by that is that in the same way that
00:17:45
Speaker
You can be hungry before you smell a pie and you can be horny before you see a playboy. We are tribalistic before we encounter an enemy. We we want an enemy. We want to find an enemy. and We want to fight an enemy and ward them off as as a means to protect our resources on a deep evolutionary level before we know who the enemy is. And the positive manifestations of this are all around us, which are competitive sports. The reason that we like competitive sports is we have a deep evolutionary need to form a group and go fight another group. And it's great if you're into football. I don't i don't like i think that this is hardwired into us. We're not going to get away from it. And if you can find a healthy manifestation of that, where you know you go play basketball with other people or you root for the Jets or whatever, that's terrific.
00:18:31
Speaker
But it's coming from that competitive element that we have in us. And we want to go play somebody else. It's not that you want to form a football team and sit around looking at a football. And then another football team comes and goes, we want the football. And then you start playing. today No, you proactively want to go fight the other football team. And this happens in politics as well. It happens in religion as well. when
Community, Loneliness, and Tribalism
00:18:51
Speaker
you start if If you read the book and you kind of digest the thesis to it, you look around, you'll notice it's sort of everywhere. And what I want to do is i don't No one has the ability to inoculate you to tribalism, but I do want people to be aware of it. I want them to be aware of how it affects them, how how it affects our own thinking, so that we can operate in a healthy manner and we can hold back when those impulses are threatening to overwhelm us and go in a negative direction. You mentioned, a you mentioned Andrew, you mentioned sports and our our love affair with sports and in many of these cases. um
00:19:27
Speaker
and and And I think you probably talked about this on your own podcast, but sports stadiums and how much of a boondoggle they are um and and how ridiculous they are economically and everything else. But are you effectively mention making an argument that sports stadiums are hugely undervalued because they are an outlet for our incredible tribal tendencies, and without them we'd pour that tribalism more into politics than we already are. um Or maybe video games, right? Video games, let's get people playing competitive, you know, go play Counter-Strike or whatever, because that's another outlet and it prevents you. Or or is it the opposite? Or is it priming the pump? You know, the more we get
00:20:06
Speaker
The more we do those kinds of things, the more we think of ourselves and our world in those terms, and then they're going to apply that to politics. you know which one is So there's persuaded there's two questions there. ah the The first question of is this a good public investment because it veers away these tribal impulses. I'm i'm just going to put my economist hat on and say no, just because ah I am very, very confident that enough people with enough money like football that they would be able to privately fund a stadium without public intervention. In fact, I believe if anything could be handled by the free the the free market and the private sector, it's sports. there's
00:20:42
Speaker
porn and sports do not need subsidies to exist. They can get along just fine without them. So from a public policy standpoint, I would say no. You could make an argument that if the government's going to spend your money on stupid shit, that stadiums are pretty benign and that that within a spectrum of dumb investments, it's one of the better ones. But i I wouldn't go so far as to say we should build stadiums with public funding as a means to ah be a release valve merely because I don't think we need the public trough to be involved in it at all. I think it will happen very naturally.
00:21:12
Speaker
for that particularly There's other things we could talk about, social safety net and stuff like that, where I would go, yes, I want the government involved. I don't i don't i don't think there's any need for it to be involved in football. um If you want to try to introduce a sport to the United States that doesn't have a market demand, like i don't know lacrosse or ah soccer in certain parts of Oklahoma, then sure, public subsidies might be good. But I think you'll be fine on football.
00:21:31
Speaker
the The other question you have, which I think is a phenomenal question, Max, is do sports and other competitive events prime us to be more tribalistic, or are they release valve for the tribalism that we have? That is a phenomenal question, and I come down on the side of it is a release valve. And the reason that I say that is in the second third of my book, where I talk about how everything got bad, um a big part of what we're going through is that we've had a kind of community collapse in the United States. We're in invoking my Robert Putnam here. If you were to go back to the 50s, 60s, 70s, there was way more intermediate civic institutions or so-called third places, places which are neither work nor government.
00:22:18
Speaker
so church, synagogue, elk's lodge, gardening club, book club, chorus, and anything you you do with other people, right? ah There's been an atrophy in that in the United States. And it is my contention that politics has become the last man standing. And that as people lose places to be a part of something larger, as they lose places to find a healthy tribal membership,
00:22:44
Speaker
like church or like Star Trek conventions, any any place that you have a sense of community and ideally a sense of purpose, as that has gone away, the only thing left is politics. the ah One of the studies that I mentioned in the book that I would love to do more research on and I would love to see more refutation or corroboration thereof is from ah Ryan Streeter in a 2019 study.
00:23:08
Speaker
They did polling, and they found that people who self-identify as very lonely are seven times more likely to identify as politically active. And I think that that is extremely telling, and I will say that it it also corroborates what I've seen. where Now granted, I work in political media, so i'm I'm a different cat, and a lot of the people I interact with are are people in political media. ah But when I remove the political media from this,
00:23:31
Speaker
A lot of folks, I think, are are kind of lonely and they don't have a tribe. or I say this as a ah secular agnostic. I think that a lot of people that would otherwise have been very plugged into their church left and rather than kind of recombobulating their mind, they just turned politics into their church and made that their new religion. So I think that that ah sports and everything else would be a release valve. I think that people would find place and purpose there and that that would be great. i ah
00:24:02
Speaker
Politics has a role in society. Government is important. I do not think it makes a very good catch-all for community and purpose. It certainly doesn't make a good AirSats religion. I would far rather you get into Star Wars or Star Trek than than get into politics as your religion for the very good reason that that politics is necessity excuse me necessarily predicated on defeating somebody.
00:24:26
Speaker
You can really be into Star Trek. You don't have to hate Star Wars fans. You can really be into Star Wars. You don't have to hate Star Trek fans. You can really be into the Jets. You do have to get on other people or want to compete with them. But I i find that sports folks generally have good sportsmanship. But like you're not going to be a vibrant member of the Republican Party if there are no Democrats to fight. You're not going to be a vibrant Democrat if there's no Republican threat there. so I think politics has become this catch-all for people that lack tribe, lack meaning, and anything that builds out other outlets is good in my book. I was actually talking to Max a little bit about this when we were prepping the show, because i am I'm the son of three generations of evangelical pastors, and I was raised at a very religious household. I was homeschooled with a very religious curriculum, and I also kind of had a similar journey. to the oh
00:25:17
Speaker
basically left the church and kind of consider myself more of an agnostic, right, to this to that end. And I found it interesting because I did that around 17 or 18 years old and around that same time in my life, I also got very heavily involved in political activism. And it wasn't until actually, it's like right before I had kids, when I started getting in my 30s, where I realized hang on, like I think I've actually in many ways replaced that urge, that religious urge with, and for for me when i was in when I was involved in the church, it was, um there was a lot of apologetics, so we were about kind of arguing ideas, and so it was really very, very similar, and I i have ah have a theory that people in the libertarian space have a higher proportion of former evangelicals and homeschoolers. Well, interesting. so recent Yeah, I think that's probably true, and I think and I've also noticed this, like like my my journey, Josh, is I i was raised like
00:26:07
Speaker
Tepid Milk Toast Presbyterian. I converted to Eastern Orthodoxy when I was in high school, and I was super into it. like i was I was very, very much into Eastern Orthodoxy in college when everybody else was getting drunk and laid at the OU Texas game. I literally would go to a monastery in Candalia, Texas. I thought at some point I'd probably become a priest eventually, and ah and i've and i've I've left. By the way, it was an amicable amicable parting. I'm still friends with everybody in my parish.
00:26:34
Speaker
Yeah, i don't like i don't i'm I'm not one of those like kick the dust from my feet atheist types. i There are elements of it that I miss. ah But all that makes sense. I'm also told that a bunch of libertarians like became Eastern Orthodox in the last 10 years. And I was like, what? This is weird. Because like i kind of now I just claim to be an independent. But I definitely have libertarian leanings. I i work at Reason. um So I have i have ah tremendous overlap with the libertarian movement. And I'm like, OK, there seems to be some weird like mental pattern that a bunch of us have of like ah libertarianism east and north. I'm not quite sure. But I also think like, and I say this i say this with no prejudice or what do you call it, there's there's no rancor here. I am almost certainly a neurodivergent individual. I'm not entirely sure how that neurodivergence is. I think I'm ankle deep in autism. I'm not entirely sure. I should probably get tested. I am ADHD. I think that there's also a very high amount of autism within the libertarian community.
00:27:31
Speaker
And ah that would seem to lend itself to abstract systemic thinking. And so ah that also lends itself to religion. So you'd see a lot of people that have both both things of like, what is what is the model of how the universe should work? I'm very, very hung up on this. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. I don't i know Max has another topic that he wanted to go to, but but I wanted to stick on that religion conversation a little bit more. ah to To kind of turn that argument on its head and briefly look at it, if we believe that religion is an antidote to political tribalism and some of the worst instincts of this. Would that be kind of a, we're kind of veering into NatCon territory in a way, right? Like we need religion to keep us from
00:28:13
Speaker
um turning on each other. I'm playing devil's advocate here because that's not my perspective. but i know you're's you're You're fine. One of the fun things about writing this book is I get really hung up on economics. That's like the thing that like I'll start fighting people with and I'll like take beta blockers if I'm going out of program and stuff. with with With this book, I welcome people disproving and refuting this book. That's fine. I well i really want people to be aware of tribalism.
00:28:40
Speaker
And ah particularly when it comes to solutions to the current dumpster fire that we find ourselves in, I want to get people thinking about this. And if if they come up with other conclusions that are better, would would be fantastic. That's all fantastic, right? So I welcome your your pushback on this.
00:28:56
Speaker
ah So the the the question as you posed it was, would this not lend itself to the idea that either we should all be religious or um or like aht natcon national conservatives would would be a a cure to this.
00:29:11
Speaker
um possibly, I would worry that with the Natcons, that what we would end up doing is still having a tribal identity based on othering somebody else. that like we we are We are not foreigners, therefore we're Americans. and like i so That probably would help to some extent if if everybody, like it it helped during the Cold War.
00:29:32
Speaker
where, um you know, ah Max is ah a progressive Democrat, and I'm a conservative Republican, but we stand arm in arm looking across the Atlantic to the red menace that looms in the east, whatever, that kind of stuff. But I guess the the main thing I would say, though, is that um Tribalism can manifest in any capacity. its It's so deeply wired in us that I think it's manifesting in politics presently because of the social landscape that we have, but clearly it manifests in horrible other ways. I don't think the Crusades were super theological at root. I think that they were tribalistic, where our team wants to go screw up this other team and take their land, and religion's a pretty good excuse to do it.
00:30:11
Speaker
ah they're like I spent a lot of time in Scotland, and ah Scotland is not nearly as sectarian in terms of conflict as Northern Ireland, the people are more familiar with, but it still has that. Glasgow is divided as Catholic or Protestant, and it's silly. I mean, it's literally silly, because you'll talk to people and you'll go,
00:30:30
Speaker
ah Why do you not like your neighbor? He's like, oh, he roots for the Rangers. You're like, well, why is that bad? Because ah the the Rangers are Protestant. And like, what what are you? Well, I root for like the for the celt Celtics. I out root for the Catholics. like But I thought you were an atheist. ah But i'm ah I'm a Catholic-flavored atheist.
00:30:47
Speaker
What about them? are they ah Do they actually believe in God? Are they atheists too? They're all atheists, but they're Protestant flavored atheists. I'm not a Protestant. It's stupid, right? Tribalism can manifest in any way. like It can happen with race. so like on a On a productive manner, I think these really old ethnic fraternities that exist in the United States are terrific. When I was in Austin, Texas, there's an old German language club that's there. When I was in New York, i in Astoria, I was near the Hellenic Society.
00:31:13
Speaker
Those are great. That's where like you know people that are fresh immigrants to the country would come, and they could feel at home, and they could network, and they could they could have a sense of community. And once once that's gone, I think it's terrific to have a sense of ethnic identity that's not tethered to your national identity. That way, when you meet other people that aren't the same ethnicity, you don't see them as pushing against your civic identity. I think that's all terrific. So that's great. like if if if you If you were saying, we're opening up ah like a black fraternity for adults or whatever, I would think that's terrific. The problem would be,
Social Media and Community Dynamics
00:31:42
Speaker
If you kept going with it and you went, well, now we got to fight the other ethnicities. It's not just that we want to hang out with other Greeks. We want to fight the goddamn Turks that are in America. So I think you you could find an unhealthy manifestation of any particular thing. But at the moment, I think that building up communities in any form outside of politics would be healthy for people.
00:32:02
Speaker
But you would get double points from me if those communities had overlap with groups you didn't know. So if you were going to go religious, I think that that can be a salve towards partisanship because if you are primarily understanding people as a member of your congregation, their political identity will be secondary.
00:32:18
Speaker
where you could go, I'm a libertarian, but the deacon at my church is a Democrat. I primarily know him as a brother in Christ. And so I now have to, in my own internal calculus, make his political identity secondary to how I know him, which I think would be very healthy.
00:32:34
Speaker
Andrew, you're making a point that I find kind of counterintuitive because I imagine that if i'm looking at I'm looking at the tribal, how much more tribalist we've become, especially as it as it relates to politics in the past 10, 20 years, or or so it seems at least. um If I were a Martian looking at this, I would find this a little bit confusing because the internet and social media and all the amazing communications revolution that we've had in the past 10, 20, 30 years, whatever,
00:33:00
Speaker
um has made all of these tribes so much more accessible, right? i you can You can be interested in, in you know, 18th century French poetry or bird watching or whatever whatever, you know, Deep Space Nine, you know, that specific brand of Star Trek and other, you know, guys, exactly. You could be interested in this stuff and you could find your people and you can connect with your people and you can talk to them and you can go in a Discord server for whatever you're interested in.
00:33:29
Speaker
um So it seems to me like if I was, again, this Martian perspective, there's so much more access to so many more, so much more variety in tribes. How is it possible that people aren't finding their particular tribal interest or or niche to be able to fill that desire and that demand? Why are they still, why are they more so now than in the past going to politics for it? That is also a great question. And I think the answer to that is that online tribes are good at supplementing, but do not make a good primary source of your tribal identity, or I should say your community. um and And what I mean by that is, um so my dog Wallace, I don't know if you can see him, he's on my my bed, there you can see him between the chair there. My dog Wallace is over there.
00:34:16
Speaker
um When I'm out of town, I could theoretically ask the dog sitter to put me on the phone and talk to my dog, and we all know what Wallace would do, right? He would smell the phone, it would be very boring, and then he would walk away. he would Wallace would have no idea that I, his master, am somehow communicating with him through this glass square. Now, as human beings, obviously, we we are able to savvy our way through that. I am aware that neither of you gentlemen are in my room right now, but I am aware that I'm talking to both of you.
00:34:45
Speaker
But the part of my brain that I'm engaging to talk to you is my frontal cortex. And I i weirdly get into a lot of neurology in the book as well. um i'm I'm talking to you with my frontal cortex. And that's why we're able to have this fun, abstract conversation where we're able to talk, we're able to connect this way, we're able to connect intellectually, which is all good. And I'm glad that people have the ability to do this.
00:35:03
Speaker
um But the part of your brain that squirts out fun mammal juices like dopamine and serotonin, that part of your brain doesn't know or at least is muted in its capacity to understand that you guys are people and you're not just folks you're not just pixels on a screen. and and the The further you get away from face-to-face interaction, the more loose that mammalian understanding is so like right now i'm I'm feeling pretty jazzed I'm an extrovert I'm talking to you guys I'm having fun but I can also see your facial expressions I can hear your voice um and so I'm more connected to you if we were to do this by email or we were to do this by text message or by discord
00:35:43
Speaker
ah We would be able to stay in contact, but I would not be getting those same juices there. So ah I think that while I'm a big fan of the internet, and I'm glad that we've got Discord, like I just moved to DC, all the people that I'm close to in my life, I'm communicating with via, ah you know, telemedia.
00:36:01
Speaker
um It's all good, but you still need to be interacting with people face to face. The online stuff is supplemental to your needs as a mammal. You need to be able to interact with people regularly. And I think that's part of what's happened. I see that a lot with like much younger people, teenagers, people that are in college, where they they will report higher and higher levels of loneliness And they will retreat to their phones to try to assuage that loneliness. And it's like, right, well, your phone's not going to be able to do it. ah your your Your phone can do it to some extent. It did during COVID when when we were under lockdown and whatnot. But you're you're not going to be able to get all of your needs met through that. And so I think that social media has, to some extent, atrophied the face-to-face communication that we need to do. um It has also ah removed a lot of the ape
00:36:50
Speaker
censorious inner barriers that we benefit from ah We as a species are wired to be very pro-social. We're wired to avoid rocking the boat. we Despite all the crap you see on television, most people don't want to fight with strangers at all.
00:37:05
Speaker
ah most people will go out of their way to avoid creating an awkward situation, even with a room full of strangers they will never see again in their entire life. That's how we're wired, face to face. That same thing doesn't kick in when we're on a message board. In the same way that my dog does not understand that I am talking to my dog through my phone,
00:37:24
Speaker
my The part of my brain that censors me does not kick in when I'm on a message board. and So you have all of this political interaction, or whatever, like like arguing about Star Wars, argue whatever, that that is no longer getting processed through the part of our minds that used to handle that, and that's increased the rank we're happening. And then the final thing I'll add, I think we can actually go much further back than social media, Max, because I think that a lot of the social atrophy that I talked about at length earlier results from television. And I've written on television, and I like television.
00:37:51
Speaker
But um there's, I think, pretty good data that the number one cause of decline in community has been television because it's really easy and it's increasingly high quality and people just stay home and watch TV. And that's like again, it's terrific if you're doing that a little bit.
00:38:09
Speaker
But when when you're watching like eight hours a day, I believe the current stats in the United States are that the average the average person watches eight to 10 hours of TV a day. And that's, again, it's an average, so it's stilted because some people are retired and they're watching it 18 hours a day and some people aren't watching it any. But a lot of people are watching a lot of it. So I think technology has um I don't want to say been bad because I don't want to go back. I'm not Amish, but I think that we're in a transition period and the technology is greatly outpaced where we are culturally. And we're going to have to now adapt to the technology and we'll eventually catch back up with it. But at the moment, we're in this
Human Group Limits and Dunbar's Number
00:38:43
Speaker
kind of painful transition point. So I think at the center of a lot of this, especially when it comes to online organizing, is something that I think believe you touched on in your book related to Dunbar's number, like the amount
00:38:55
Speaker
uh... individuals that you can maintain stable relationships with at some point the human psychology once you get above a specific number just start seeing it as the same, like in other eyes. Can you explain that dynamic a little bit more? I would love to. How you understand that, yeah. I love talking about Dunbar's number. This is my favorite thing of the world to discuss. And I think for people that are unfamiliar with Dunbar's number, Dunbar's number is the most important number to human beings in terms of how human beings operate. This is the Fibonacci sequence of human beings. This is the E equals mc c squared of human beings. When you understand Dunbar's number,
00:39:29
Speaker
everything kind of makes sense about like why governments don't work, why people aren't nice to each other. ah So Robin Dunbar is a British sociologist. He's alive today working in Cambridge. 20, 30 years ago, he wrote a paper where he took the brain pan size of 200 different primates Gibbons and Bonobos and chimps and gorillas 200 or 300 of them took their their brain pan size and he also noted the
00:40:02
Speaker
maximum stable group size of each of those species. So I don't remember the numbers off the top I had, but let's say like chimps can get up to 200 chimps in a group. And then after that, they become unstable. And they either split into a civil war, they run some of the males off, or they fight or something. But it just it's not really stable after 200. And gorillas is less. Gorillas is like, let's say, 70. And gibbons might be 12. And there's there's varying levels. um It's not it' not random.
00:40:29
Speaker
all the primates have different sized groups that they can get up to, and once they get past that, it becomes harder and harder to maintain group cohesion and maintain tranquility in peace. Then, Robin Dunbar took the average brainpan size of Homo sapiens, our species, and used that, plugged into the algorithm,
00:40:48
Speaker
and came up with, or I should back up, he came up with an algorithm based on this massive data that he had where, give me the the brain pan size of the primate, I'll tell you the maximum size of the group. He did that with human beings and the number he came up with was 148. Let's call it 150 to make the math easy. That's Dunbar's number. So 150 is the cellular unit of human beings on an evolutionary level. 150, based on all data that we have, ah appears to be the natural size of a tribe of humans.
00:41:17
Speaker
before it splits and goes in a different direction. So presumably during the three million years that we were homohedal against us, basically before we had ah before we had more kind of second layer social mechanisms that would permit us to scale up and have a king or judges or whatever, 150 is the natural human group size.
00:41:39
Speaker
150 is the amount of people that you can understand as a fellow individual human being one-on-one at any given time. It's kind of like with computer processors. That's the ram of any human. 150 is how many people you can understand as people. It's also the amount of people that you can have relationships with effectively at any time. You can know more than 150 people. There are lots of people who do, but you're going to really struggle to have any kind of meaningful, active relationship with more than 150 people at any given time.
00:42:07
Speaker
And so when you get past that threshold of 150, we still understand that people are humans, but we don't understand it on a visceral level. We understand them as abstractions, as statistics, as theoretical people, as NPCs, for lack of a better term. And ah um at the group level,
00:42:27
Speaker
um We can kind of, I think you could probably have any kind of government you want as long as you have 150 people or less, because at that point, you could all work it out around a campfire. If if Josh is just not working hard to of pick berries and he's sloughing off, we can confront Josh about it. like Josh, the hell are you doing? We're all gonna starve, you know, do your work. ah Max is becoming, he's kind of pushing people around. Well, let's confront him around the campfire. Once you get past 150,
00:42:53
Speaker
you need You need to have mechanisms that allow you to scale up, which we can do. And one of the big mechanisms that we have that allows us to scale up is an enemy. So with all primates, how you bond is basically you spend a lot of time together. You can you can facilitate it with human beings by going through some kind of traumatic event where where where you're solving a problem. But for the most part, you just spend a lot of time together. Like as human beings, like you're in college, what do you do? You sit on bean bags and play Nintendo, get drunk. You just spend a lot of time together. That's how you become friends. That's how ah primates bond. But with homo sapiens, if you've got a ah bunch of strangers that have never met each other before, don't trust each other, don't have any reason to do it, and a tiger comes over the hill
00:43:39
Speaker
immediately we all go into ah honorary tribal brother and sister mode. A tiger comes over the hill, I just hand Josh a gun. I don't know who Josh is. Probably under normal circumstances I wouldn't just hand a stranger a gun. There's a tiger on the hill. Until that threat is dealt with, on faith everybody's a brother.
00:43:59
Speaker
And that happens politically quite a lot because either intuitively or Machiavellian planning wise, political leaders understand that it's really easy to motivate people to come together and solidify when there's an external threat. That's part of the reason that dictators love going to war because now the threat is the external menace and you really need to rally to me. It's why partisan leaders ah want to get you into war mode.
00:44:24
Speaker
They don't want you thinking, well, I like his take on tariffs, and I i like that guy's take on national. They don't want you thinking you like that. They want you thinking as if the other team is an existential threat to you, because then you're going to put on the time and the money and the effort to get my thing done. um So Dunbar's number becomes very, very salient to ah both the failure of scaling within human society, the inability of human beings to go from being deeply beneficial at a parochia level, to being beneficial at an abstract foreign level, and also a lot of the political intrigue that we have. Just to illustrate your point, you know we just came out of an election season. I'm in the Deep South. you know I voted for the candidate I voted for right in the Deep South. I voted Blue.
00:45:10
Speaker
Now i for no west great man ah had a I had a bunch of a bunch of people come in and they took out all the signs from the neighborhood and all like 20 different houses got hit right and then all of a sudden there's this Facebook group which organized between all these people that had their signs stolen and they were all talking to each other and talking about kind of showing up each other's house now they want to get coffee you know and it made me realize I was like you know this wasn't I mean, this was nothing serious, right? There's just some kids probably stealing signs, but it brought all these people together who brought you know lived four or five houses away. ah they're They're like, hey, we're kind of we're getting attacked by these people. Let me help you out. let me help you you you know This is what happened to me. this let's let's keep Let's get dinner next week. And it was something that really kind of pulled that point home for me. Because again, there would have been, under any other circumstances, probably wouldn't have spoken to these people.
00:45:58
Speaker
and it Even at the simplest level, this stuff can scale out. It's very interesting. interesting external External threats are highly, highly motivating to human beings. And they they can be kind of real but benign, as in the the situation that you described. I think that in American politics, we've we've entered a period of kind of apocalyptic rhetoric.
00:46:18
Speaker
um And ah your your mileage may vary on how overstated you think it is with any particular tribe, but ah it it works. um Like, I say this as the the host of the political orphanage, I make a decent living being calm and nuanced and trying to get people to think for themselves rather than think as a team, but man, I would make a lot more money.
00:46:37
Speaker
If I was a fire breathing partisan, if I, if I renamed my show drinking liberal tears with Andrew Heaton or stop the knuckle dragging fascists with Andrew Heaton, either one of those variants, I would probably triple my income in a year, yeah but I would sleep worse. So I won't do it, but, but there's, there's definitely something to it. It was a bit of a, of a hypothetical Andrew. You, you said that Dunbar's number is 150. Is that the right, is that a good number? Like, would you, like, if you could wave a magic wand, would you make it more, would you make it 50 or 500?
00:47:07
Speaker
Or 5,000, right? I'd make it much larger if I could. You'd make it much larger? I would make it much, much larger. A lot of the dysfunction that we have is because we're living in a society that's not designed for us, like to like dragon some Rousseau, which I'm not in the habit of doing. He's right in that a lot of the social constructs that we find ourselves laboring under are not designed for us. There is a mismatch between them.
00:47:33
Speaker
and the The great news is we can scale up way better than chimps and gorillas. If you take 5,000 gorillas and you put them in a theater, they're going to start killing each other. You're going to have a lot of chimp blood, a lot of chimp guts. If you take a bunch of chimps that don't know each other, try to put them on a plane. Not going to work. So like we we we are much more benign, and that's great. And we've come up with scaling mechanisms. We've we've come up with ah we're going um we're going to have judges. We're going to have generals. We're going to have a homeowners association. like we're We're good at it.
00:48:02
Speaker
but those those kind of secondary mechanisms to allow us to scale up on a societal level, they're weak bonds as opposed to strong bonds. They're like like how gravity is a weak bond as opposed to magnets, which are a strong bond. um The strong bond is that visceral, you are a part of my family clan tribe structure. You and I know each other. and ah um There's ways, you again, ways you can get around it. I think ah I'm not talking about the veracity of religion, but from just an anthropological perspective. I think religion has a lot of evolutionary benefits to it. I think that that's why it sent us, is that this is a way to create artificial kinship networks. ah But all that being said, Max, I think any time we can expand the zone of humanity, it's a good thing.
00:48:48
Speaker
Anytime we can be more aware of the humanity and other people, that's a good thing. So if I could expand everybody's ability to understand how many people there are at once, whatever that number would be, it would be positive. Can I can i push back on that just a little bit? So from my um libertarian tendencies, when somebody says, I really deeply care about you and I'm very interested in knowing what's going on in your life and how things are going and um So I look at the number 150 and I think, okay, so you you you care a lot about 150 people. And that may be good because like from a Hayekian perspective, you may not have enough information to care deeply about people much further than that anyway. You just can't, you won't be able to aggregate all the information necessary to care about 5,000 people the way you might want to care about 150 people. And so
00:49:40
Speaker
I kind of like the idea that we use all of these other systems like markets to interact at broader levels rather than like expecting people in other parts. Cause I live in Austin, other parts of Austin to like deeply become interested deeply in what's going on in my life and what I'm doing. Like that, that seems a little bit unpleasant, scary, like no stay away. I'm okay. I'm okay. Interacting with you at a, and not at not a far distance, but like at a medium distance.
00:50:09
Speaker
you know so so Interesting. That's fascinating. It's just sort of the idea that ah increasing the the care and concern for others would part and parcel come with an attendant increase in interference in their lives, something to that effect. Yeah, like a paternalism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. That's never occurred to me before. um i don't I don't think so, because it wouldn't work. If we want to play it the other way, I don't think it works. So ah Rutger Bregman in his book, Humankind, makes a ah compelling case that ah human beings domesticated ourselves, that we we we selected evolutionarily for being cooperative um in ah in a very broad sense, extroverted, wanting to interact with others, being social. And there's a decent argument to be made that the reason that human beings displaced Neanderthals was not because we were faster or even smarter. They had larger brains than us, but because we're all a bunch of
00:51:00
Speaker
touchy-feely plagiarists. And so he he goes through the math at it, and he goes, let's let's say that the rate of genius among Homo neanderthalensis was 1 out of 100. And the rate of genius among Homo sapiens was 1 out of 1,000. But we're way more communicative and prone to plagiarism and prone to interacting. when you crunch And i'm I'm making those numbers up, but he's got it in his book. When you start running the scenarios through, it's much better to have a highly cooperative social species with a handful of geniuses than it is to have a species that is a lot a lot of geniuses that are loners. The amount of time that ah the the the latency problem in good ideas is very high. the The other thing I would add to that is i I think you might be onto something, Max, so I don't want to dismiss this offhand because caring very likely does have some amount of desire to care on your behalf regardless of how you feel about it. So having a paternalism element there
00:52:00
Speaker
I agree. yeah I guess for me, I'm i'm kind of like I'm playing around with the terms here. I am ah very much a socialist, but a voluntary socialist. Like I i like the idea of being a part of a co-op or a commune. I would love to live in a commune at some point. I've gone to Burning Man when I was in the United Kingdom. I went and hung out at a hippie commune here recently. So I like communes. I really like getting together and like, like um I just got a lease here in D.C.
00:52:26
Speaker
If I had more money, I would get like a five bedroom place and go back to having roommates. Roommates were fun. I like all that stuff, right? The the issue for me is the compulsory element, the coercive element, not the communal element. If if you have the ability to opt out, then you're fine. So ah what i would what I would love to do is expand that how many people do I care about element and and we could, I don't know, I don't ah I'll put it another way. I am very much a bleeding heart. i I very much care about people. I donate time and money to charity on a regular basis. But I am not a coercive individual ah or or not compared to the overall electorate. So I think they're orthogonal to one another. I don't think the one comes with the other. I guess the way I respond to that is that I'm OK with that the like I would be OK with a lot of good people caring more about me and me caring more about them. That sounds great.
00:53:16
Speaker
You know, if if you want to care more about me, Andrew, I would i would love to be that to be the case. we can You can be in my 150, I can be in yours. But there's a lot of people out there, for like I'm almost happy that I'm not in their 150, because I don't think they would take no for an answer. and And I guess I'm just more concerned, I'm a little bit more concerned about that than than I guess you are. Sure. Interesting. Well, let's play it the other way. Would it be better to go down to 100 or down to 50?
00:53:43
Speaker
i I feel like maybe the 150 has evolved for how easy it is for us to get information about what's going on with 150 people. right So like the that's how it gets around that Hayekian problem. like You really can know a lot about 150 people. So I guess if we were if that ah if that amount that we could actually know and understand about people sort of changed in in in relation to that Dunbar's number, maybe that would be where We're going down what would but would be OK. Going up would be OK. um As long as we still have a different mechanism to interact at scale, such as the market.
00:54:20
Speaker
Interesting. yeah so So in other words, yeah, 50 might be totally fine. I think we'd be, I'd be okay with 50. I don't know that 150. That's an interesting point, because like, because, you know, 150, I don't, I don't think any of the problems we have right now are because the population of the planet quadrupled from 1950 to now, right? We were like, what, 3 billion in 1950, now we're 8 billion. I don't think that has anything to do with the problems. I do think
In-group vs. Out-group Perceptions
00:54:42
Speaker
scaling is a big issue, but I don't think the overall population was. it We don't seem to have an There doesn't seem to be and an upper ceiling on what we can currently scale. I do think that the scaling issues are towards the bottom, going from like a county to a state or going from like Belgium to North America. ah but But the overall amount, like, yeah, the the market mechanism seems to work very well when you get well past Dunbar's numbers. So perhaps you're right. So how how dare you make me think and possibly agree with you?
00:55:09
Speaker
I still want to know how anyone can have 150 relationships or like keep those up. But I mean, I get the idea. Once you pass that number, it just becomes an abstract. Well, so to drill into it, Dunbar describes it kind of like a target. So the way the way Dunbar says you've got i <unk>re We're getting past the confines of my book, so I'm getting murky on this, but I believe Dunbar says you have like two really, really good friends, like two best friends. You've got five close friends. You've got 15 intimates.
00:55:40
Speaker
And then you've got everybody else, something like that. So it's not that you're best friends with everybody. And and this i this comports with my my my life, where one of your friends gets married and adds kids, and all of a sudden you find yourself not part of their life anymore. It's not that they don't care about you. It's not that they don't like you anymore, but they only have five slots.
00:55:58
Speaker
were the people that are really close to them. and and And even if they had more brain power than that, they only have so much time. And so and unless they want to just do a half an hour phone call with everyone they know in life, which does not seem very pleasant for a wife or a child, ah they have to prioritize that. And um so it's ah the 150, I think, is more manageable when you consider that that most of the people in that camp are kind of like your neighbors.
00:56:22
Speaker
where you know you you know them and you're happy to see them and you can talk to them but they're maybe not like a like a daily interaction that you're putting a lot of social effort to. ah getting back to like what tribalism does to us mentally, how it causes us to think about different groups of people. right You have the the people inside the tribe who you're going to attribute their their ah nuanced and complex people who have a lot of interesting um deep lives, that you're going to see them in a better light than you would see somebody in the outgroup. You're going to
00:56:55
Speaker
um rationalize away problems that you see more in the in-group than you do in the out-group, all this stuff. Can you talk about the relationship between tribalism and the kinds of qualities that become a part of your tribe? So like one is like, for example, you may all start to dress the same, you may all start to talk the same, you may all start to think the same, right? Groupthink and tribalism being ah strongly interlinked. Can you talk a little bit about that?
00:57:23
Speaker
Yeah, let me try to organize my thoughts in three ways. So the the beginning of that is I would highly recommend that people always be cognizant of in-group, out-group interactions. um ah This is something that's pretty well studied and that we've got pretty firm ground on that ah We have an availability bias, which makes us see our group, whatever that is, as individual, nuanced, and almost invariably ragtag. like you talk like Talk to your most partisan Republican friends, talk to your most partisan Democrat friends, and they will have a worldview that sounds like this.
00:58:00
Speaker
ah Our team is composed of very, very different coalitions that are very unique and very individual people. It's a, it's ah a miracle, a minor miracle that we can even get into the same hall together that we can do in an interaction. We're so different and so unique. ah And the other team, my God, my God, my God, they are monolithic.
00:58:21
Speaker
They are mermaidons. Right now, as we're fighting, they're drilling. They're doing drills, and they're going to come over the hill and kill us, because they are ah ruthless and competent, and they are way less individualistic than us. They all get on the same page, and they all line up. And this is this is how Democrats and Republicans both understand each other, and how every group understands the outgroup. The outgroup is always a more monolithic group,
00:58:48
Speaker
And in politics, particularly in America, the out group is always more ruthless and competent than our group is. ah Weirdly at politics, not necessarily at governing, which I find odd. Like Republicans and Democrats do not think the other group's good at governing, but is really good at politics, which is why we have to be ruthless. So that's going on there. In terms of the inside the group, the group forming, um one of the things that i I stumbled onto that I find really interesting over the course of writing the book is a thing called schismogenesis. So if we've not already shaken off some of your listeners with unnecessary $40 words, let me throw schismogenesis at you. Schismogenesis is the phenomenon by which you establish what you think in opposition to what somebody else thinks. So let's say that I just hate Max. I don't like Max. And Max, turns out, loves NASCAR.
00:59:45
Speaker
Fuck NASCAR. I hate NASCAR. And that now becomes a part of my... addict By the way, can I swear? I apologize. I should have asked before I did. So I now now become anti-Nascar. And I see this as rife in our current political landscape. Smarter minds than me. I think maybe it's Scott Lincecomb or Brian Kaplan, I don't know, made the very good observation that About half of Democrats just really don't like markets, and about half of Republicans just really don't like Democrats. I think that explains a significant amount of the political landscape that we're in right now. But but in general, like during COVID, um I have a thought experiment in the book when I talk about schismogenesis of, let's let's say theoretically, at the beginning of COVID, before the lockdowns happened, but right about that time,
01:00:26
Speaker
Donald Trump, then president, had come out in front of Mount Rushmore and there had been red masks on all of the presidents in Mount Rushmore and he said ah conservatives believe in protecting their community and we are at war with COVID and I am a wartime president and we're gonna wear masks because we believe in personal responsibility and we believe in protecting our neighbors and it's these namby-pamby Democrats that are always burning their bras and uh... are uh... are are are wanting to be so expressive that are putting the masks on how would the situation of played out some amount of people would have stuck to whatever position they had in both the republican and democratic party but i think a lot of republicans would have gone out about red masks and camouflage masks and they would have become mass people and i think a bunch of democrats would have written think pieces about how
01:01:16
Speaker
The Republican lockdowns that are ensuing are emblematic of how Republicans are authoritarians and have a fear-based worldview. And ah if you if you look at the data, the science says that we should be focusing on the people that are high priorities and are particularly in danger spots rather than the whole population. You're a bunch of scientific illiterates.
01:01:37
Speaker
Not everybody, but I think a very large amount of people would have completely flipped position if their tribe had done it, and it would have been in opposition to the other tribes. So that's an element that goes on with this in-group, out-group dynamic. Your mileage may vary, but I think it would have been quite high if if that had happened.
01:01:52
Speaker
um and And gosh, let's see. you We're talking about ah tribes developing. I don't know. we We could go at different angles with this. We could go with accents. We could go ah other directions. I forget what the other part of your question was, Max. Apologies. Apparently, my Dunbar's number is two slots for for talking about things and not three as I thought.
01:02:12
Speaker
Yeah, 1.8 and we're just about, you know, maxing it out. No, but um I guess on the on the on the group thinks side of it, like i think of I think of tribalism. I mean, your whole book is literally called tribalism is dumb, right? We're like, we should talk about reasons why tribalism isn't that great. But um one of the things that occurred to me when I was reading this was remembering that knowing things is hard. Like the world is really complex. It's really nuanced. It's not easy to understand.
01:02:41
Speaker
why things happen. like um um yeah Somebody can tell you that you know there's a there's a a billion viruses living on the on the surface of my skin. And you know some of those may be responsible for why millions of people get sick and die and all all this stuff. If you just stare at the world straight, you would never believe any of this stuff. You'd be like, this is crazy talk. right Somebody even tells you the world is round.
01:03:07
Speaker
I know you can't see it. I know if you look, it looks pretty flat, but it's actually round. Or you get in that that that giant piece of metal that's flying through the sky and actually it's safer. It's safer than the one where you're in control and it's going much slower and it's on the ground. Like it's much safer to be up in the air in that metal tin can. All of this stuff is incredibly counterintuitive. So I'm associating tribalism with this kind of group think mentality. But if it weren't for group think,
01:03:37
Speaker
A lot of people just wouldn't have correct thoughts, right? like Because I'm part of a tribe that tells me the world is round and viruses exist and airplanes are safe, I believe all that stuff without having to like do it and verify it myself. In other words, I'm trying to say like groupthink in many ways, which is emblematic, it's one of like the fundamental things of tribalism, is actually kind of important.
01:04:03
Speaker
Right. So like one of the most fundamental pieces of tribalism is really important for us to think in these groups rather than trying to come up with everything ourselves. um Are there other defenses of tribalism that, you know, you didn't maybe mention in here, but that you could, you could think without those, maybe we wouldn't be having this conversation because humanity as a civilization wouldn't exist.
01:04:26
Speaker
Sure. ah So let me push back on the example that you gave. I think that you were describing liberal epistemology and you're describing pluralism more in the scientific method more than you're describing groupthink as being the operative phenomenon in why we think that the world is round, et cetera, et cetera. um Keep in mind that we used to be setting people on fire for saying that the world was round, and that was the exact same phenomenon to groupthink. So I don't think groupthink is a a proactive phenomenon, group think can go poorly, like pushing gays off buildings in Saudi Arabia, or it can go well, where we all agree that it's, it's ah I've not crunched the numbers, but I've heard the same thing, I believe you, safer in a plane. um All of that is true, but I would attribute that more to the the methodology that we've set up as a civilization that allows us to to go in those directions than the group think itself. Overall, I think group think is good for
01:05:26
Speaker
quickly arriving at conclusions, but not not necessarily arriving in a good way. the The reason that we have groupthink wired into us is for speed. The reason we have groupthink wired into us is in that in that prolonged evolutionary adolescence that we had where we're wandering around the Serengeti, killing things with sticks, ah if a tiger pops over the hill and Josh and Max bolt and start running in a different direction,
01:05:51
Speaker
if I go, well, why did they do that? I'm going to see this tiger for myself. Then I walked to the top of the hill and I get eaten by a tiger. I die and I don't pass my genes on. So there there was a ah rapidity to groupthink that was very useful for us when we were in that period of time. I don't think most of the time, you know, again, like you're you're in a crowded theater and it turns out that there's a fire or there's a tiger in the theater, whatever. Yes, sure. In and ah and a life or death bolting situation, that groupthink is useful because it's rapid response, right?
01:06:16
Speaker
But for things like economics, like ah public policy, those are things where deliberation works much better then than groupthink. So i don't I would not attribute to groupthink the the the positive elements there. I think where you you could maybe ah put in some of the positive stuff is that a lot of the scientific literature we've had over the last 20, 30 years, 50 years, has misinterpreted
Managing Tribalism Positively
01:06:39
Speaker
um some of the group think as being much more ah negative than it is, like ah the milligram experiments, the Stanford milligram experiments where, excuse me, not the Stanford ones, the milligram experiments where they were shocked people.
01:06:54
Speaker
yeah yeah that That's typically understood to be that we're we're very authoritarian. ah and And in reality, when you actually read the the literature, ah what they never bring up is that there was sometimes they would have two people in there, like they'd have the the fake scientist and they'd have a fake ah participant. And if the fake participant went, I'm not gonna shock the guy, he's gonna die, then the other guy would go, well, I'm not doing it either. So we we we do seem to have a very strong impulse not to rock the boat, which can be good, because it's ah it's a pro social behavior.
01:07:22
Speaker
um where Where I think that you could make a very good argument in favor of tribalism, Max, is that there are wonderful expressions of community and tribalism, ah ah of being on a team, of organized sports, of organized religion, of ah uh... coming together to do a thing that we we all we all want to come together to take care of this problem that's all wonderful stuff uh... and i i mentioned at the beginning of the book that i i am using tribalism only in the pejorative sense of the word over the course of the book but but tribalism cuts both ways and we we we can't have one without the other that the the the good stuff that the teensy groupish elements of being a part of a society and having close friends and losing yourself into a movement
01:08:04
Speaker
a phenomenon that's bigger than you, those are all wonderful elements of humanity. They're exactly why we're able to have civilization. And they're also why we're able to have the negative tribalism that we have. I don't think you can get rid of either of them. I think they're baked into us. I don't want to get rid of the tribalism because I i don't want to, I don't think you can get rid of human nature. What I do want to do, what I do want to do is funnel that tribalism into healthy manifestations. So in the same way that I think people are naturally pretty horny,
01:08:34
Speaker
human beings are real horny. But I don't think you should have sex while you're flying an airplane. That seems like a bad idea to me. I don't think you should like park your car in the middle of the highway and have sex in the back during rush hour. That's going to be problematic for a variety of reasons. The sex isn't bad. The sex is fine, as long as it's concerning adults. All that jazz, great. Enjoy your throuple. Drop some acid before you do it. That's terrific. But the there are times and places where it is not prudent to do so.
01:09:01
Speaker
or where it can become ah malevolent or problematic. And that's what I want to do with tribalism. I don't want the tribalism to go away. I don't think it can go away. I think it's very much baked into all of us. But in the same way that it's not OK to park your car and have sex on the middle of I-95 during rush hour, there are certain tribalistic manifestations that I want people to go, this is not a healthy thing that I'm doing. This is not a beneficial thing that I'm doing. I would be better to place this energy in football, sports, or whatever, or alternately to scale it back. Maybe he's not maybe now is not the time to be horny. maybe he's not Maybe now is not the time to indulge this behavior. Eating's fine. We've got to eat to eat eat to live. But maybe I shouldn't be eating this third hamburger at this meal. Maybe this is something that I should exercise my prefrontal cortex on and and rein back a little bit in order to make a better decision for myself and for my society. Can can I make one more? I'm going to make one more defensive group thing here.
01:09:56
Speaker
And the example of of of a plane, right you're you're getting onto an airplane, you're getting onto a big 380 or whatever, and it has 200 people on it. Almost none of the people on that airplane actually have ah a decent idea of how that airplane is staying in the air.
01:10:13
Speaker
or or all the mechanisms and all the organizations and all the functions that are like making it safe for it to stay in the air, not just the physics of it, but like the organization business, including you and I, right? We have we have we might have a some inklings about this piece or that piece, but most of it we don't know. And I forget who said this, I think it maybe it was Arnold Kling or one of those, but he said, um you we decide what to believe by deciding who to believe.
01:10:39
Speaker
So when you said, um you know, where this is the the scientific method and the kind of like the the epistemology that we share and how we understand the world, I agree with you. Of course, that's I think that's what a lot of these ideas are rooted in. um But none of us have had the time to go check this stuff, right? So we are all kind of like, okay, that guy over there, this methodology over there, these people over there, they seem to be doing things in the right way, right? So like if if if somebody at the GMU Econ department has a particular paper that they look at, they give me some ideas on, I'm going to be far more likely to believe what they're saying without checking it than what um you know some other economist is going to say without without me checking it, um to the extent that I could even check it because I'm not an economist.
01:11:23
Speaker
So um I think groupthink is incredibly powerful if you happen to choose the right groups and match the right things that they think. Not only that, but many, many of the things that we that affect our lives and that we care about are actually things that are that where the social reality of it matters more than the kind of real reality of it.
01:11:46
Speaker
right So like whether or not everybody around you believes that um and Trump was the right person to be elected, you know and and whether or not you kind of follow that that idea when everybody around you is saying that, whether or not it's true matters a lot less to you personally than whether or not you proclaim it's true or whether or not you act like it's true with everybody around you. like That social reality is going to impact you a lot more. In other words, this is why I'm saying that um um given how complex, how socially motivated and everything of the world around us is, and how difficult it is to understand anything outside of the social sphere, group without groupthink, we would kind of fall apart. Like we just wouldn't be able to process the amount of information, the amount of complexity of the world around us. Sure. um I think I agree with you. I guess what I want people to have is the option to opt out of groupthink or to question it. I think you're right. There's a lot of that of
01:12:46
Speaker
Um, taking on faith, I don't know, for lack of a better, better term of, I don't know, a bunch of smart people said this thing. I'm just going to go with it where everybody else is going. And so I'm going to go with it. Yeah. I think, I think that's probably necessary for society to exist. I think if.
01:12:58
Speaker
If everybody were so skeptical that they had to prove to themselves every single claim every time, no one would do anything other than just reinvent the wheel all the time. So so insofar as you're saying that, I agree with you. ah where Where I would add to it is I do think it would be beneficial to be aware when you're enthralled to groupthink and to be able to potentially push back or opt out of it.
01:13:21
Speaker
ah You're absolutely right that people have what's called motivated reasoning. um the The way we're wired is ah it is far, far more important to us to get along with our tribe than it is to be accurate. we would we would if if ah If I am a member of the Presbyterian Church of Franklin, Tennessee, and that's where my entire social life is, and I begin to become an atheist, my brain is going to go on a very deep level it's more important to me to maintain these social relationships and retain standing within my community than it is for me to be accurate about an abstract concept that doesn't really affect anything. That's and that's how everybody's wired, right?
01:14:01
Speaker
um So yes, I think that you're right and that that this is something that allows people to operate, but i I want people to be aware that it's happening and able to see it when it's happening in them. And and there there are manifestations of it that I don't like that I think are perfectly rational. So, for example, I think part of the reason that we have so much partisan ah media consumption right now is because there's a deluge of media.
01:14:25
Speaker
ah The gatekeepers are dead. The gatekeepers do not have the same authoritative ability that they once possessed to just squelch anything they disagree with which means that there's way more information. There's also just more information in general. I've crunched the numbers on this and the amount of words published every every day is equal about to the amount of words published the year I was born and the entirety of the library of alexandria is replicated in in amounts every like 10 seconds or something it's crazy there's the amount of stuff so like understandably people go look i'm not going to dedicate my life to figuring out if donald trump said x or y every single time he says something i'm not going to like go parse through firsthand documents i'm just going to go with a group i trust that like that there there is a logic to that it's a heuristic
01:15:12
Speaker
calculation that makes sense but what I what I do want people to do is be aware of that I want them to be aware of the motivated reasoning that way when somebody goes hey ah like that that burner on the plane or skip that burner that the propellers broken and I think maybe we should land the plane and everybody else is saying no I don't think we should that you have the ability to entertain that idea if we need to course correct.
01:15:37
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, ive I've lived this so much because, I mean, to to even play Devil's Advocate on Max's max's Devil's Advocate, like I've seen this, especially with older generations, there's so much information. It is impossible for people to parse. As humans, we we find ourselves looking to people we trust or looking to channels we trust. And in this information age where we are completely bombarded and has created some very dangerous outcomes because, I mean, as these trusted institutions have been kind of reduced in influence, there have been these
01:16:13
Speaker
Malicious actors in many cases that have gotten very large platforms that are kind of operating unchallenged um And due to the volume of the information it's impossible to to change it That was that was one of the things I was gonna bring up to you Andrew was you know i' like I've always say and this is when somebody comes to me Especially people in my family that might be older and I have conversations with them. I'm like you just take Go into this with a high degree of skepticism on everything you see but there's some there's something about human nature When you're when you have a preconceived opinion and you're scrolling and scrolling and you see something that validates it, it stretches an itch in your mind and you move on, right? That thing that validated your opinion could be completely false. um And you it it shapes your worldview. And you've already moved on to the next two library of Alexandria, you know, a week later, right? So that's something we've talked about a lot. and that
01:17:06
Speaker
That's to your point. Group thinking cut both ways. but and i'm i'm I'm glad you're doing that because like cognitive bias is a big thing. um Jonathan Haidt talks about this very eloquently in The Righteous Mind. that we need very little information to confirm what we already think. We need tremendous amounts of information to overturn what we think. We just we have a particular bias there where ah I'm a free market guy, I like free markets. ah If I read a thing about like, look, this country instituted free market reforms and it did well, terrific. Or you know what, I'll give another example. I brought up the Ryan Streeter study of ah people that are lonely are more likely to be
01:17:41
Speaker
ah political. Well, that comports with my whole book and my whole theory. So I put it in the book. um And, you know, I stand by it and everything. I read it. It seemed to seem dagger to me. But at the same time, though, if I hadn't liked that, if it had been against my thesis, presumably I would have been more scrutiny of it or I might have gone, well, you need to have way more of these. Like I need to see five of these before we get into it. So those those are all there. I think people should be aware of these, these tricks on on my end.
01:18:07
Speaker
I am worried about that, Josh, now that I'm working for a reason, and just the fact that I'm getting older. I'm going to be twice a week in a a libertarian place, and I'm worried that that's going to create an echo chamber effect in my own psyche. yeah I'm also worried as I'm getting older, particularly given that I work in political media. um Because I am studying politics and political economy all the time, and I have to do it on my show, the political orphanage regularly, I'm worried that I'm going to calcify.
Cognitive Dissonance and Political Frameworks
01:18:32
Speaker
And what I'm trying to do to countermand that is keep exposing myself to people that I disagree with, keeping friends with folks that I disagree with. But also, I'm just I'm trying to develop a sixth sense for cognitive dissonance. When somebody says something that bugs me, because it it addles my my frame or my worldview, I'm trying to become aware like,
01:18:53
Speaker
I think what most people do, including myself, is they experience that cognitive dissonance and it's just a feeling of unease. And we just subconsciously move away from it as quick as we can. We come up with a reason to dismiss the thing that's causing the problem or to not think about it, move on. I'm trying to develop as a skill just the awareness that I'm having cognitive dissonance right now to point it out and then to go into it, just walk into the storm because I've been wrong about a bunch of stuff. yeah I assume I'm wrong about a lot of stuff right now. I'm guessing I'm wrong about a quarter of the stuff that I currently believe. I don't know which part though. That's the problem. So I have to keep stress testing it. And so I applaud you all in drawing attention to this and promulgating cognitive bias and awareness thereof to your listeners.
01:19:35
Speaker
Yeah, so I want to move on to another topic briefly. So this is something I did want to bring up with you mainly because it's something very important to our audience. So I think you referenced in your book Lewis and Lewis Smith of Left and Right. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And so this basically says at the center of one of the reasons why we started this project is we really don't look at the political spectrum in that way. We think it's reductive. Great. Phenomenal. Right.
01:19:59
Speaker
We look at the world in a lot of ways, I think, and our project is kind of a struggle between liberalism and authoritarianism. And there's obviously shades of gray within that. So maybe you could talk a little bit more about your perspective on this before we close. um Because we we're we're convinced that we're we're in the midst of a political realignment in the in the world. And there are two kind of polls. And we see liberalism and authoritarianism as those two polls. But I know you've talked about this a little bit. So I may be tee you up for that before we close this out.
01:20:25
Speaker
Hey, that's great. And you know what? I hadn't even thought about it. But I don't think either of you said left nor right over the course of this interview, if I'm not mistaken, which I applaud. I don't do that either. i've I have been very good about excising that from my vocabulary the last two, three years. ah I think the whole left-right spectrum is profoundly reductive and damaging at this point. um It makes sense if you've got one thing you're talking about, if all we're talking about is guns.
01:20:53
Speaker
that it makes sense to have polls here where one side, broadly, more guns the better. Other sides, broadly, more guns, less guns the better, right? ah The problem is once you have like 15 different categories that you're stacking on top of each other, it makes no sense to try to identify things as left or right. So I host a show called The Political Orphanage. There are ah many different opinions on the show. I just did an exit poll following the election. I had people that listened to the show that voted for Kamala Trump, Chase Oliver, Cornel West, and Jill Stein. Not in equal amounts, but representation for five different, and then then like write-ins and things like that. So a lot of different people. um So I know people in my life who are ah very pro-life and are also in favor of gun control, and I know people the exact opposite, who are pro-choice that are ah emphatically in favor of guns.
01:21:50
Speaker
According to left-right theory, they're both centrists. So if you were to take the most pro-life person you can imagine, and the most pro-choice person you can imagine, and at the same time, they have opposite perspectives on gun control, according to left-right theory, they're both moderates, even though they agree on nothing. They literally agree on nothing. They're they're absolute opposites of each other. But they're they're there in our and our culture, most people, when they're talking about left-right,
01:22:16
Speaker
really mean economics is the primary one so like if you if you you have a lot of libertarians that listen to your show they usually get lumped in with the conservatives because they tend to think that the government is not particularly efficacious in terms of the distribution of resources. So even if they're like, actively banging three different people and different races in the same room, while on LSD, like they're like, like they're very, very socially libertine, they tend to get lumped in that way. um I think all of its nonsense. um One of the things that's brought up in the myth of the left, right spectrum by, ah by Hiram Lewis, and his co author is
01:22:53
Speaker
A better metaphor is that political parties are grocery carts. They're grocery baskets. So is there is there a a thing as conservatism? Yes. Is there a thing as liberalism? Yes. These are these are philosophy that we can get into the you know all of the terminological, taxonomical differences on the difference between a Burkean conservative versus a a you know blood and soil ah Steve Bannon conservative. Sure. ah there are There are isms. There are things. They really do exist. The the problem is trying to take one of these things and turn it into a unified string theory of everything in politics. There is no such unified string theory. It is harmful and it's very easy to to stress test and go, oh yeah, but there's all these exceptions. Like here's here's a really, really good one. Foreign policy. Please tell me what the essence of conservative foreign policy is. What is that? What is the essence of liberal foreign policy? Now,
01:23:48
Speaker
During the Bush years, people would say, well, the the conservative foreign policy is being a war hawk, and liberal foreign policy is is being a peacenick.
01:23:59
Speaker
All right. Well, like FDR, Woodrow Wilson, better example, Woodrow Wilson got us into World War I. Many people, including me, would say that that was an unnecessary thing for the United States to do. So was Woodrow Wilson just, he happened to be super conservative when it came to foreign policy? Like a lot of people would go, yes, he was conservative on foreign policy, but he was liberal. Okay. Well, how about this Donald Trump guy that we just reelected?
01:24:23
Speaker
Now, a lot of the umbrage that people have with Donald Trump's foreign policy position is that he appears to be an isolationist. Now, the same newspapers that were saying that George W. Bush was a super conservative on foreign policy are now saying that Donald Trump is a super conservative on foreign policy. How can how can that be? And the answer is that there is no such thing as a conservative. there there are my My master's degree is in international politics, international relations theory.
01:24:47
Speaker
So I know IR theory. There are IR theories. There's realism. There's muscular liberalism. There's social constructivism. There are definitely isms. They're not correlated with economy. They're orthogonal. You could be um somebody that really wants a big government and wants ah to be America first and wants us to stay over here and spend money on social welfare and education. Or you could be an FDR type. they They're orthogonal. One of the other things that orthogonal is jurisprudential interpretation.
01:25:15
Speaker
um Do you think that we should be strictly, literally interpreting the Constitution as best we can? Or do you think there's some wiggle room? that allows for variability based on um the the people that are currently here. On the one hand, you've got Clarence Thomas that's like, no, if it's not in the Constitution, we're not going to do it. You got to literally interpret it. On the other hand, you have people going, look, ah the Constitution says cruel and unusual punishment. But when they wrote it, you could brand horse thieves in the face. we can't Can't we reinterpret what the definition of cruel and unusual is based on our circumstances? There's two schools with other. They're not correlated. I i should say,
01:25:51
Speaker
They are correlated. There's no causal relationship between them and foreign policy or were ah economics. they are I misspoke. They're definitely correlated right now. But there's no there's no actual ontological connection between these things. It's that one camp has gravitated around one cluster of ideas. The other camp has gravitated around another cluster. And you're absolutely right, Josh. We are living in the midst of a realignment in many, many ways. ah When I was a kid.
01:26:20
Speaker
The Republican Party was the party of Mr. Burns, Dr. Hibbert, and a vampire. And the Democratic Party was the party of Joe Quimby and the guys at the plant. And it was much easier for me to understand. The rich people were the the Republican team, and the blue collar union guys were the Democratic team. And now, it it sures i mean I can tell you the most recent polling, people that identify as working class, 75% of them the most recent poll I saw, 75% of people that identify as working class are conservatives.
01:26:49
Speaker
which is not how it was in the 90s. If you have a master's degree or higher, you are far more likely to identify as a Democrat than you are as a Republican. Even when I worked on the Hill 15 years ago, Republicans still had more college degrees because they were just more old people. ah But that's that's now switched. um So there's all sorts of realignments. And um I think it is It's much, much better to understand that a political party is not some kind of Obi-Wan Kenobi force ghost, or actually Doctor Who would be the better better example here. It's not some like unifying soul that re-manifest through all of human history, and that the the republic there were Republicans in ancient Rome, capital R, GOP Republicans in ancient Rome, and there were liberals, capital L, liberal, no.
01:27:36
Speaker
it's the Isms, sure. there There were authoritarians in Rome, and and there were there were more liberally minded people. There were isms, right? But the the the parties themselves, they're just vehicles for policy, and they change all the time. And people that get sucked into them acculturate to what other the other ones are. So if I'm a fairly non-political person, and I live in Texas, and I'm really into guns, I am going to go with a party that's pro-gun, which is the Republican Party.
01:28:02
Speaker
I may not have a strong opinion on tariffs, and in fact based on all available data I've seen of Republicans the last five years, most Republicans don't have a particularly strong opinion on tariffs. But once the agenda gets set, they go, well, I've joined a tribe and I am now going to absorb these other perspectives that that are there. Same way that the Democrats that I knew 10 years ago thought the tariffs were good because that was they were union people and now they hate Donald Trump. So they're all in favor. I'm talking to my friends that are explaining to me how tariffs work that like 10 years ago had no idea what comparative advantage was. So.
01:28:34
Speaker
I think you guys are very much on the right track. um i I don't think there is a unified field theory of of politics. I am of the opinion that all models are wrong. Some models are useful. But probably the most useful model is the one that you are promulgating, which is a spectrum of authoritarian to liberal. I think that that i don't think it would cover every situation, but it would cover most of them. And it's certainly the one that I use most when I look at politics.
01:28:59
Speaker
love it. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was that was great. I mean, I think that Lewis and Lewis book is also incredibly important. ah Second, only to your own book, of course, in in books that people should be reading. um And of course, if somebody wants higher, higher yours is smart than me yeah I'll give him that but mine's funnier than his.
01:29:20
Speaker
They can read your book, and then they can go to a lot of podcasters to hear Lewis and Lewis talk about the other one. So thank you, Andrew. I know you have to run. Next time you come on, hopefully we can get you on again. We have a lot more contrarian and kind of counterintuitive questions to hit you with. I'd love to come on again, and I will just relentlessly plug my podcast this next time. So bring me on again. We will. I suspect that you've got a very smart audience that would have significant overlap with mine. And so we'd love to come back.
01:29:51
Speaker
Josh, there anything you want to say about the Project Liberal?
Project Liberal and Conclusion
01:29:54
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. So if you're interested in joining a project that is focused on building a cross-partisan coalition against authoritarianism in the pursuit of a free and open society, you can learn more at projectliberal.org. You can become a member of projectliberal dot.org slash member and get access to a variety of perks. um Andrew, where should people go to learn more about you?
01:30:13
Speaker
Well, the main one is the book as we previously discussed. My book is called Tribalism is Dumb. You can get it on ah Amazon or Audible. So if over the course of our discussion you have fallen in love with my dulcet baritone voice, I narrate the book myself and you can get it on Audible. You can also get it in paperback and Kindle form.
01:30:32
Speaker
I would recommend that. I will note that ah despite an excellent, excellent interview done by Max and Josh with with questions that made me think, ah ah that we only covered about half the book, maybe two-thirds of the book. At no point did we get into any of the solutions to what's happening, both in your personal life or on a societal level. So ah while we have covered the book,
01:30:54
Speaker
fairly fully, I promise you there is more in the book that we've not yet discussed. And I i do make the pledge to you that if if you read it, you will be slightly less baffled, perhaps massively less baffled, but at least slightly less baffled by the political landscape you find yourselves in. And once again, the name of that book is Tribalism is Dumb by Andrew Heaton. Thank you, Andrew. We'll make sure to have all those links in the description, by the way. Thank you, everybody. See you on the next one.