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Episode 242: Election 2020
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you know the interesting thing that the the news of the week is the united states of america has had its election and we are anxiously awaiting the certified results so dr lyle dr hawk take it away what uh what say you about this uh this in is interesting well this is uh this is this this is why you have a phd in political science from harvard for just times just like this so let's let's hear what jen has to say as you look at this whole thing jen just give us a little feel of your survey of it yeah well yeah doug and i had a good conversation with us this morning for people who are on our membership site on the living wisdom library we actually talked about this on our membership our weekly membership chat um and so uh people may have already kind of heard the points that we'll go over today but i think the main thing that comes out of this whole experience and anyone who's been listening to the podcast for any amount of time knows that they can come to the conclusion on their own that it's uh it's very likely that doug and i voted for different candidates even though we share we share a lot of politics in common because evolutionary psychology kind of it it really drags you into a more libertarian position because it really communicates very effectively through behavioral genetics and just through individual difference the fact that humans are individuals humans have individual preferences they are wired up in very individual ways we obviously have many many things in common but the pursuit of happiness that is so central to our entire premise of democracy is actually a very individual process so as you come to terms with that through ep i think it's really inevitable that it starts to seep into your politics as well because you reach this point where you realize it's actually very tyrannical to impose your idea of the pursuit of your happiness on anyone else in the population at all let alone the other half of the population that doesn't agree with you so i think we have we have that kind of premise in common even though we we sort of drift over to the other sides of the bell curve in terms of our share not share dimensions and the other things that would uh determine what party we're most affiliated with um and you know i i think the the main thing we're obviously nothing is nothing is completely official yet uh although it's it's looking pretty official um i don't i don't know how much of a chance that you know vegas doesn't think there's much of a chance of this turning around so at that at that point i start to think okay we're actually this is really happening um but what we were talking about this morning on the q a is that it's it's this is really uh amazing confirmation of how robust american democratic institutions really are and when i say democratic i say that with a a small d you know small dem small d democratic small l liberal like this this is the machine that the founders designed to be incredibly resilient to even really ridiculous unforeseen challenges and really toxic personalities in our leaders so say what you will about trump but the guy is the guy is not the most presidential of characters to occupy that position um and we like to think that that position is reserved for somebody who is much more presidential in character even though that would be a little bit of a historical mistake to assume that everybody who's been in the white house has had that kind of gravitas they have not um but no one has been under as much surveillance and scrutiny with that sort of bombastic buffoonish sort of personality as trump so for us to get through that with the pressure of all of the media attention all of the all of the social media around it um and now to be in the midst of this very messy contested situation with uh you know a sitting president crying foul like these are these are challenges that lesser democracies would not be able to weather and and we're doing really just fine the process is working just as it should um i you know people uh on all sides of this and on on both sides of the aisle including doug and i both have faith in the courts to do what the courts need to do to the extent that they are summoned to resolve this and um i'm not particularly worried about the outcome either way i i am an institutionalist first and foremost so while i have specific personal political preferences that i would like to see echoed in my president uh who is in that position is much less important than the the upholding and survival of the institutions that preserve the process and that seems to be very healthy and healthier than i would have thought so that's all good news from where i sit with my political scientist hat on totally i couldn't agree more this is uh i i said earlier that i liken this to a uh like if you heard that there was a new steven spielberg movie out and everybody told you it was a great one uh you would be riveted because you know the quality of spielberg and you know that if this is a great spielberg movie this is going to be phenomenal and this is a this is that equivalent in other words that the spielberg is the founding fathers and that those are the that is the collective human genius they gave birth to a phenomenal country uh what makes the country phenomenal isn't you know the rocky mountains and the beaches of florida it's the it's the legal system is what makes it great and at the heart of that legal system it is how do you defend the transmission you know and the and the the selection of power and how do you limit it and so that that took just almost unbelievable ingenuity as far as i'm concerned and negotiation to to come up with the design that that we have and uh and so this is now a moment a spielberg-like moment where it's going to get challenged hard uh uh trump is not somebody that backs off from anything so he he will you can he is he is he is utterly shameless he ha you cannot cow him by embarrassment into anything so if he thinks he's been cheated or if he thinks that there's a way to use any system into his advantage he will uh i don't believe he'll do anything to cross the line i don't think that that's uh in his dna i think what's in his dna is to use every possible advantage that he can and uh and so now we as jen would say you're not going to get challenges like this very often but the whole point of the system is to be able to withstand whatever it is that can be thrown at it and now we're going to get the kitchen sink and so to me it's a spielberg movie we get to sit back and watch the next two months uh watch this unfold and i have no idea you know what i can guess what i think is going to happen but that's meaningless in other words what what i get to do is sit back and watch the american system work under pressure and that's a that's a spectacular thing to observe and i'm looking forward to it as as jen says no matter what happens i'm looking forward to watching the process work we're getting to see uh a historical moment you know it's kind of like watching the the last four minutes of a great super bowl it's like okay now now we're gonna get to find out what happens uh and let's you know the referees are the best we've got in the league we've got instant replay uh we're gonna do everything we can and we're gonna find out what happens and somebody wins and somebody loses and um the and then and then i think everybody lives with it you know maybe not happily but they do i think then that's that's how i think this goes down yeah i mean i i don't how many people i think a big big piece of the current debate at least you know the internet debate is you've got a lot of people who were not old enough to remember the 2000 election didn't that's amazing isn't that amazing i know i used to my opening question when i used to teach poli sci just to kind of get a sense of the room as an icebreaker was what's your first political memory and in the time that i was teaching i sort of watched it go from you know follow the berlin wall up to you know it started to creep north until people started to remember like you know clinton's election and then and then pretty soon it was 9 11 you know they're just getting younger and younger all the time i guess the chicago 1968 democratic convention is not out there anymore oh that's funny so you you you and i were similar ages when we had our first for me it was the berlin wall so that was at the moment or or maybe the iran contra hearings on tv that was a big deal too you know sort of sitting and watching uh ollie north sit there and answer questions so those those were my formative moments but um but yeah i mean i think you're most of these whatever we're into now generation z or whatever it is they didn't they didn't have that experience and i don't think there are a lot of people even democrats who are sitting around nashing their teeth thinking that gore should have been president and that this was all illegitimate and you know the both both terms of w's presidency were a sham and never should have happened and it was all he was just installed by the court that lasted for a couple of years there were definitely people on the left who did feel that way and probably would still if you if you press them they would that's the narrative that they would come up with certainly w's first term um but uh i i don't think anybody really thinks of him as an illegitimate president uh and you know they might not like him and they might not agree with things but that was i mean talk about uh hotly contested crazy you know down to the wire supreme court decision i mean that those were those were crazy times that this seems much more civil and measured compared to that um so for people who just don't have that perspective it's it's like yeah we we've actually been here before yeah fairly recently um and we got through it just fine and it was the you know the look like things were going to go to the other guy that time and this is how it works it just pivots back and forth i mean we were talking in the q a today how a lot of republicans are upset that some of their nominees on the court are not playing out like they were supposed to you know these guys are supposed to be very much in the party's pocket according to the perceptions of a lot of people who vote for their president based on that idea and and really judicial independence is the thing and we want it to be a thing we want those those justices to get in that position and and you know follow follow precedent follow their conscience follow the follow something that is outside of party affiliation that's why they're there that's why these are lifetime appointments so we have these just beautiful i mean this is what checks and balances are all about and nobody has been able to copy us as as well as we came up with it this is just an incredible system yeah all cool all grand we sit back and watch the movie popcorn [Laughter] yeah and also i also spoke about uh this morning i talked about how um that the the feelings that people have and so the feelings that people have are are uh vastly more intense than than is warranted by the actual outcomes the that that isn't unless you were oh i don't know maybe you were some executive in a in a an industry that was looked like it was going to grow largely under trump and now it's going to have its wings clipped or if you're an industry uh that was hoping like crazy that biden would win because you know that industry that you're poised to make a lot of money very few of us have a significant direct relationship or correlation with our outcomes and any political process the um and so i mean the the beauty of it is that that uh at this point the the united states government uh the united states uh certainly federal government actually any uh any uh level of government has surprisingly the variances in how the government can work are almost irrelevant to the individual citizen um the uh that that is it isn't entirely true if you're a developer wanting to build on the coast of oregon and you built you know had a thousand acres up there and you wanted to put a golf course in and now the coastal commission you know is saying no you can't do it even though we told you 10 years ago you could do it you know you've got a political mess on your hands and and your life you know maybe is very significantly influenced by that but but the vast majority of people do not have their lives actually influenced by politics the uh that's because the the decision-making powers of the government and the variances and outcomes of how government the government makes decisions are in relatively narrow ranges largely as a result of a very complex set of checks and balances that it keeps the the decision-making as as jen likes to call it little c conservative in other words not conservative politically but conservative in the fact that it doesn't change quickly the um however your feelings don't follow that and so it can be a little bit confusing um to i think of i i don't know why i have the scene seared in my memory but some some college football team lost a big game like a national game and i they cut to the cheerleaders and they were crying and and i and i remember it was very uh it was very like you could tell it was a big thing and of course it does feel like a big thing but the reason why it feels like such a big thing is because you feel like you're a member of a village that just went to tribal war you know if you're one of those cheerleaders you're about to be one of the spoils of war when the truth is of course i mean that is exactly what's going on so the in the same way that if you're the member of the losing posse or winning posse in a national election you are it's hearkening back to stone age processes where this was a huge issue in your life of leadership shift in a village of 40 or 50 adults and your little coalition if things will go badly between your big guy and the other challenging big guy then that's not so good for you and that that will have actually a potential significant uh change in in your outcomes on on some issues that are very important to you whereas um and you also feel very hyped up and agitated to try to convince everybody that your position is right and the other position is wrong and the reason why you're energized there is because you believe that what it is that they think has significant meaning for outcomes for you that are important now hopefully everybody can run the math there's 150 million voters whether you convince seven people you go out there and yell and scream and go seven for seven and flip seven votes it's not going to have any impact at all but in the stone age village if you flip seven votes it would have enormous impact and so as a result you have within you a feeling of imperative and angst about about whether or not you can convince your friends and relatives uh and you know your stray uncle louie out there who is thinking wrongly and needs to vote for x instead of y that feels important to you and you can feel incensed and frustrated and angry and everything else under the sun and desperate in other words you can have a lot of very intense feelings only because these intense feelings are echoing to stone age processes that were very important as opposed to the current situation where the outcomes are for all intents and purposes irrelevant um i can't i cannot honestly tell you having lived through however many presidents i've lived through as a conscious human my my first consciousness about the presidency would have been with jimmy carter so i would have been about 16 at that time at that point you're old enough to chew gum and walk and be drafted and all kinds of stuff so i can i but when i think about my life experience and what was happening on any kind of day-to-day or month-to-month or year-to-year basis i cannot honestly tell you that my life has been in any way measurably influenced by any of the half a dozen presidents that have that have come since jimmy carter since i was awake the um and i think honestly as i think you used a word gen monitored if you were to monitor your own internal experience and get a graph on it of the last 30 years of your life and try to chart whether or not when president x was in charge you were five percent happier than president why was the charge i think you would it would be absurd there's no way that's true your your future in your life is overwhelmingly dependent upon the esteemed dynamics of your existing situation not washington politics the uh right so so as i tell the uh uh those those those that are feeling you know beaten and panicked about this it's like relax it's no big deal and for those that just won hey enjoy the gloating you know what i mean it's it's uh that's all good it to me it much more resembles the sporting event at this point than it does the life and just as sporting events are mimicking life-and-death issues in a stone age tribal warfare this uh this is mimicking uh that sort of a thing but it's not true and so that so every everybody chill out and enjoy the show and you're about to you're about to watch the genius of the forefathers being tested and i believe that they're going to do brilliantly yeah now truism in in political science too is that you know what's happening at the level of the presidency or even at the level of congress has much much much less to do with your real life outcomes than local politics right so your state legislature and your city council um in your local you know school board all of those and it's this paradox in political science because participation and voting rates are just declined precipitously the closer to home you get so you know people are much more likely to vote for president than they are to vote for their local city council rep when really that's the person you can actually access that's the person you can lobby that's the person who's making decisions about zoning and taxation and all these things that are going to really affect your financial life and and also your all the little decisions about just any any anything running running a business and how you can socialize in town and covet rules and all this kind of stuff that's all local politics that's not that's not in dc so it's really fascinating that we put all of our chips in with this thing that feels like it's this immediate this is the alpha who determines our welfare when really it has almost nothing to do with you and your life moves minutely one or two percentage points from administration to administration um even even under trump i mean i would really ask people who are wailing and nashing their teeth about how terrible trump is and i'm no fan i've i've made it clear that i i think the guy is a contemptible buffoon but i i am amazed by survey data really good robust survey data that i have seen that asks the most important question in presidential electoral politics which is are you better off than you were four years ago and most people this year say yes they are they are in a better position than they were four years ago you ask them is the country better off than it was four years ago they say no so it's an interesting little split result um but the the question that really matters for electoral politics is what how do you perceive your station in life and your financial security and your are you are you moving in a positive direction or not and most people uh according to that data say that they are and that's i mean that's that's after four years of tyranny from from emperor trump so like life just does not move that much it's we're in for the third term of the obama administration and if people are truly honest with themselves life's gonna be pretty much the same uh maybe with a slightly higher tax rate depending how much you're making than it was for the last four years uh this this all of the rhetoric about this being a life and death election the most important election of our lifetime this is every single election you hear these things every single time you know going back i in the early w days i mean i for people who don't remember the the angst around w on the left was just profound um and probably more deservedly so than trump honestly i mean w was he's sort of being softened by history now into more of a statesman compared to trump just be based on trump's more bombastic personality but policy wise uh w was a much more uh you know hawkish uh warmongering you know destructive to environmental rules like he was he was more active or really chaney was sort of behind the scenes but um all of that has just kind of faded in retrospect and now it's like oh why can't we have a president like w again so we have very selective memories about these things it's it's like um you know my friends who are back in alaska are always every time i i talk to them in the wintertime it's it's always the worst winter ever we've never had a winter like this you know it's never been this cold for so long it's never snowed so much it's never been this icy they've they've never been this bad about maintaining the roads and it's just every year we're just this is how we're wired we we have very short little time horizons as humans we we can't look back very accurately and we can't look forward very accurately we're we live in a very small slice of time and reality um and we are prone to exaggerating our circumstances would that be just a side track a little bit yes i heard i hear that story and i'm thinking like does that have more to do with a more a less stable personality or or is that kind of globally around no matter what if we control for personality that's that's how humans are oh well i think what is that the catastrophizing or etcetera over yeah certainly go ahead yeah yeah my really stable friends on both sides they like they're like dr lyle they couldn't care less you know what i mean they're just like yeah okay our guy won or lost or whatever and they're fine but the ones who are less stable they're like oh my god the dictator's coming back if biden wins and then oh my god hitler's coming back if trump went you know what i mean it's just yeah yeah yeah i think the stability is a big big factor in that whole story and a lot of people who are um you know very uh wanting to get a lot of status and attention on social media are also there's a high core correlate with instability who are sort of grandstanding about these things you know i.e this is the most important election of our lifetime i.e this is a matter of life and death for me so yeah i think the future of our country holds in the balance or whatever you know right right i can actually remember i remember four years ago talking to some people that called for help and um they were they were sweet people that were actually really really worried about trump coming into power and they they weren't they weren't being argumentative with the world they were literally in fear so they had they had essentially absorbed the worst case scenario which is exactly what you know that that's an early stone age reaction is what just happened it's bad how bad could it be you know answer could be terrible and and i reassured them listen this is business as usual this is why you've got um an extremely complicated formula in the united states government that essentially makes the president oh if we if we had to look at the variances in policy outcomes and so forth choices i don't know jen has anybody ever done this i like to say that a president is worth 10 senators i don't know what do you well i think it's very much what you were talking about earlier where it matters you know sort of party control of all all the branches so if if you've got you know the same party in the white house that you have in congress then you have a much more quote-unquote effective tyrannical president that is going to you know enforce more of their interests and spend more money yes you know regardless of party affiliation so you get you get these kind of gridlocked presidents who can't really affect very much of their agenda at all which it looks pretty likely that biden will be although biden you know he's got a history i mean he was in the senate for eons yeah and he's got a real deal making kind of history uh with mitch mcconnell in particular among others and so if anyone can wheel and deal and make things happen i you know i expect that he would be able to and this is what we want we want compromisers we want people who you've got to remember this is you may have your preferences and and believe that your way of doing things is the right way to do it and the other guys are totally wrong but you have to co-exist in a country with those people this is half the population this is a tight election this is you you were as unless you want to move to a more homogeneous place where everybody believes the same way that you do and forfeit everything that is great about living in a more ideologically and culturally diverse country this is the trade-off you you have to co-exist with people who fundamentally disagree with what you want to spend money on and how you want to run the railroad and so that is something that is a situation that necessitates compromise and so we want leaders who are essentially in politics we call this the median voter theorem this is you want people kind of coming to the center and finding as much of a compromise around these things as possible and that's going to look like you know the needle moving one or two points we we don't want oscillating revolutions in this country and that the countries do not sustain atmospheres of revolutions followed by coups followed by you know sort of more revolutions that is not the sort of place most of us actually want to live no matter what your t-shirt says when you go to a protest you don't want to burn it all down you don't want to you know start from scratch i saw some interview with some some people at a protest that were like oh the american experiment has failed burn it all down start from scratch like okay this is i'm starting to feel like an old fogey telling the kids to get off my lawn like do you do you know what you're looking at do you know how profound and amazing this experiment is and how how many other people on the globe would would die for it and do die trying to get here and and trying to recreate it in their own countries in their own genuine revolutions like that i i think this all speaks also to something that is kind of uh implied by a lot of what we're talking about which is the fact that you know if this if if uh if a trump election is a traumatic event for you i i would posit that you've led a pretty easy life like you you haven't experienced a lot of real genuine trauma and difficulty in your life if that's kind of the high water mark for the most difficult thing that you've ever gone through is the 2016 election and you're carrying around a bunch of ptsd from it then that that is telling me like you've actually been very very very fortunate in your life so that's just another thing to throw into the mix dr huck thank you consider me uh officially walked off the ledge i mean yeah there you go on the ledge [Laughter] the thing jen was talking about earlier was a uh was a thing that that uh that i had uh i had heard about this and saw the numbers maybe 15 years ago um in a paper showing that when all three branches not not the judicial branch but the the president's uh the senate and the house of representatives when they're all aligned they spend more money and it doesn't make any difference whether or not it's democrat or republican they basically go they go after everything that they want and so they end up spending more of america's money driving it into more debt when um when they when there is check a check on that then you wind up with a more fiscally responsible government and so to me as a libertarian i want a more fiscally responsible government so we now have a divided government which is means the brakes are on things everybody's gonna have to compromise and that's fine i don't like it when every when there's three green lights in a row and they can ramp up a lot of speed that's not that's uh you know it happens but it usually gets checked pretty quickly by a pendulum swinging political process and uh and so this is the the uh i we are i mean jen's not an old fogey but i am at this point and so looking looking back over a half a century when i've been bright enough to look at it and then knowing now enough about the history not not just the history of the world but also the knowing enough about the world the current world situation the um and to know that there's you know brilliant people for example by the by the scads in india that are working for five dollars an hour it's like wait a minute the the world is so far behind uh the united states and western democracies when it comes to standard of living and part of that has to do with that they have not been politically appropriately organized for the last hundred years and so they were not able to go through a capitalization industrialization free market innovation process and as a result they're in poverty even though that they have mega talent that that is a great crime so we get to sit back and look at the american experiment the as jen explained to me the first truly democratic system in history and look at it and look at its at its brilliant outcome and and we enjoy it all of us and so the um yeah so there there's no need for any any catastrophic thinking ever uh really in an american national election it's a it's a it's a beautiful thing uh to uh to watch the process work and for us to be the beneficiaries of an extraordinary system so yeah what a uh you know what a thing to watch around the world as as you know that you i've been places where i know the talent is there and yet the outcomes are are tragic and they're going to remain tragic for another 100 years it's going to take a long time before the world sees the standard of living that looks like the united states yeah my favorite favorite moment to come out of this was you know leftist i i follow my twitter feed is really equally split between um you know it's why when we when we did the q a today my hair is purple because that's my politics you know little red a little blue little just trying to kind of walk the line here um and uh you know as people know i have this like very strong leftist history really was a card-carrying marxist for many years worked for the aclu like really true believer so i have come to this the the hard way like i really um you know it's part of it is just age and wisdom and a lot of it is evolutionary psychology and and just libertarian thinking that has crept into my world view through uh just ingrained now respect and and deference to individual difference in individual freedom like it's i i don't see any more relevant or important value than that and neither did the founders i mean that was what the whole thing was built around they were equally wary of oligarchy and popular democracy like the whole thing is this is this attempt to avoid the excesses of the king and avoid the excesses of the what would become the french revolution the mob yes um and and so like how do you design a system that avoids the worst tendencies of of both sides of the bell curve and they did a damn good job and nobody has done it better and it's incredible that it has held up so robustly to all of the crap that we have thrown at it um and so to see on twitter these uh these people who are just you know the the ready to riot in the streets if if trump had won outright um and and then when he didn't and now and now partying in the streets apparently covet is over now because we have big big dance parties in parks and celebrate um but i saw somebody saying oh hooray we've toppled the dictator and it's like you don't topple a dictator at the ballot box the whole notion that you you were able to volitionally volitionally vote the guy out you know through your franchise like that's the whole that's the opposite of toppling a dictator you you voted out a guy you didn't like and that's what the process is and so yeah people people need to have some perspective and um some gratitude damn it yeah little whippersnappers you got it it's very true yeah so this brings us uh well so i dr hockey you said about the share not share politics and i want to get your take on this as well as dr lyle's take on this sure um do you d are politics these share not share politics are they dynamic like esteem is so you know as you know dr hawk as as you become more uh well let me let's not use your as example but let's say somebody is on one side of the share not chair and then they work really hard they you know get to a particular place they're in a much more stable position will their politics change to be more uh not share versus share if they feel like you know that that they they did it and they don't want to share their efforts of course of course it's not it's not going to happen every single time you're going to have some some people who are not as subject to those changing incentives as other people but i think the the average person as they as they see more and as they accumulate more things that are worth defending including personal wealth and property um they become less russoian and more lockheed i think definitely that is that is a way to think of it they become defensive of what is valuable to them um and and if if they have worked their way up and they have earned something then that is going to shift their politics it's it's equivalent to uh you know we talk all the time about how big five characteristics are dynamic based on the context in the situation so somebody can have x level of conscientiousness but their conscientiousness is going to manifest very differently if they are working in a job with no responsibilities and no accountability versus a job where the stakes are very high and they have a big deadline and they have a boss who's breathing down their necks so whatever the the range of expression for conscientiousness is it's going to express itself based on the broader context of that person's life and that's the same thing with how prone they are in the share not shared dimension if they're very if they're impoverished and they're more interested in in grabbing uh entitlements and you know payouts and you know easy easy living wherever they can get it of course they're going to be you know cancel all student debt now and like you know like redistribute and reparations and everything else like that's that's a very different place to sit than somebody who has spent a few decades clawing their way up some dominance hierarchy establishing something that they want to defend and protect and that they're proud of yeah wonderful dr lyle would say you um let me think about i mean i don't i think that's definitely going to be the case and that's a there's a famous i forgot i forget who said it obviously i remember the first time i heard it was from george will probably 25 years ago the um when he said uh he said you know the well the well-known saying is if you're if you're uh uh 20 years old and you're not a liberal you have no heart and if you're right if you're if you're and if you're 40 years old and you're not conservative you've got no brain and so i remember hearing that when i was 20 being like [ __ ] you buddy like what do you know and at 40 years old right on schedule yeah that we get uh this is i i could remember uh obviously being in a social science phd program uh ev all everyone is liberal this is just how it is so it's liberals and libertarians and a few libertarians but there isn't a single conservative in in that section of the university and i can remember um me being a libertarian i was always you know irritated at the at the left disposition of redistribution of wealth just generally and i had friends of mine that were getting their phds studying quote poverty and how it all ought to be redistributed and so this is you know that's who they when you're in a phd program in psychology that's who your friends are and um so i can i could remember this amusement i i got i got my revenge for my irritation that one of my best friends from grad school called me up bitching at her first paycheck like she got it she got herself a good job and and it was about forty thousand dollars which in 1990 was i don't like sixty eight thousand or seventy thousand now you know it was good good good got a good job i was proud of her and called up can you believe these taxes like i get [Laughter] yeah it was it was it was a moment of beauty when suddenly the the light went on i will also say on on this topic it's really important to note that people and their virtue signaling around these issues do not reflect their actual personal actions necessarily so i can certainly think of a lot of you know leftist professors and uh you know i'm thinking i don't want to throw him under the bus particularly but stephen stephen finger i don't know did i send you this link like moments after the election was called for biden he posted this like cringe-worthy like really cute but also kind of cringe-worthy video of himself and his wife dancing in their living room and of course the guy has zero rhythm you know he's like he's like dancing like you know that the ai program instructed him to dance my my favorite comment on it was this video has more boomer energy than the the atomic bomb it's very very cute but so someone someone maybe not like pinker but other you know very leftist establishment figures will talk themselves blue about how they're in favor of redistribution and and you know oh urban poverty and oh you know racial equity and blah blah blah blah blah and all these things that they they want to signal their allegiance to and their support of but these guys are fully aware that the the needle is only going to move one or two points in the in either direction so they get to talk and signal as much as possible about how virtuous they are and how what big believers they are in redistribution and sharing the wealth they want to share they've worked hard but they want to share it because that's what they that's what they believe in and that's what's really important to them um and then if we actually saw their tax returns of course they're cutting every corner and they're cheating left and right and they're doing everything else that everybody else is doing with any amount of wealth but they can get away with the signal because nothing's really going to their tax bracket is not going to magically double overnight depending on who's in the white house so and they know that they've been in the game long enough that they know that they can they can do this so i think that's a big piece of it where it looks like you've got these intransigent people who their politics never change despite the fact that they're older and wiser and they've accumulated a bunch of wealth and it's like oh wow they're that's a that's a really virtuous person who just really just wants to wants to do the right thing um and and it's really there's some awareness um i'm just thinking in particular some harvard professors what does that mean internal audience tell them i mean does is there is there an inference that can be made from that as far as their actions yeah beliefs or they're in an echo chamber you know so they i think they they justify it to themselves and they don't feel like they're doing anything super out of line and they probably are given a bunch of money to charity and they're you know they're they're on the side of the bell curve that is sharing more relative to the center um but they're not sharing as much as they're broadcasting that they're sharing mm-hmm yeah okay entertaining when you think about a lebron james who uh you know by all accounts that i could see i think i would uh i think i would like him very much as a person i think he's an admirable human i think he works unbelievably hard and he is very passionate his beliefs and his uh he's very much been an activist in the active african american community all of that you know i i can admire the human however if we were to scratch him politically you know we're looking at somebody who would be absolutely in favor of some major redistribution you know that's where where he comes from where he lives however he wouldn't even even out the salaries on the la lakers there's no way [Laughter] like forget it i get 35 million you get 2 million good go scratch okay and so this is i mean this is now what makes america great is the fact that we protect private property very well we have a uh a system that attempts to try to deal with the share not shared dimension as well as we can we wind up being centrist about it so people people can't defend a position theoretically but they can defend it by feel and so robot lebron feels like he shares enough it's reasonable that's that's right it's reasonable and you know what professor writes a nice check to the the planned parenthood and the aclu and it's like it's you know we're redistributing the wealth yeah that's right doing what needs to be done yeah so uh but at the end of the day the what we do is we we protect you know we protect private property we try to essentially have the government be as as modestly interfering as possible to try to to to sort of feel our way to an optimum for how to have 325 million people live with a minimum of conflict and that's what this big mess of a thing called the government is and to me uh as as i've said i mean the alternative where we came from in in in frankly what doesn't seem like a very long time to me when i look at history you go back 10 000 years and it's a bunch of souped-up you know chimpanzees beating each other over the head with clubs in tribal warfare okay i mean that's that's literally what you had the most sophisticated thing on the earth that was created was a hand axe more or less so that's not very long ago and so to to go from there to where we are now uh where we have to squabble and snarl about moving the needle two and two percent one direction or the next uh uh with our government what what a what a magnificent place it is to to be in a time and uh if you're if you're concerned about anything be concerned about your personal situation and your personal efforts and your personal goals about how it is to improve your life rather than worrying about the backdrop or the canvas of which that life is being painted the canvas is just fine and it's not changing hardly at all so your your future is about you and uh keep that in mind when when we have all the exciting noise around you
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