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Episode 268: Evo Psych Diet, Retiring Early, Stressed in the Stone Age, Covid Tantrums
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all right well any any news that you guys are i guess you guys are coming out with a well any any new hot blocked episodes that you guys want to talk about or uh any news you guys wanted to discuss yet yeah we do our our focused political bitching mostly on hot block these days we're trying to like have different uh you know different audiences for different offerings right um but yeah we did a show last week which is uh it's still up only for my patreon but it'll be on odyssey here in a couple of days and then we'll do we'll do a new one here um probably this week yeah yeah we feel it i'm feeling the need yeah oh you you and you and president biden that must be why i made that crack it was rattling around the back of my skull that story all right well that's a rumor it's only a rumor but we don't descend into the gutter let's let's let's let's show a little class so nathan yeah we uh we've got some fun questions today uh one of them is about the the diet of our species this human specific species-specific diet uh we've got a question about uh retiring early and whether that sets up any type of complacency and we've got some uh some you know getting stressed out and what people did in the stone age uh and then the rest were just we're going to take them take take a little bit more after that as well so our first question heartbreak was some guy that did a girl wrong yeah well wait what's this podcast coming we're going to leave that one where it's like closer to the holidays because that's when that tends to happen oh jesus all right all right yeah it's fabulous [Applause] when the plane tickets are just cheap enough that you can you know so proud of myself the boys the boys are feeling punchy today watch out people all right let's let's do this thing all right let's go what do we got all right dear doctors my question is about how evolutionary psychologists can interpret the species specific human diet differently dr lyle supports a plant-based starch-heavy diet meanwhile dr jeffrey miller supports a paleo diet heavy in meat and greens it seems clear that the majority of calories were gathered not hunted which lends weight to the plant-based starch-heavy type of diet being the standard human diet and the correct one to follow but how can researchers have such different interpretations of human diet um people can be ignorant and getting outside of their range of knowledge which is what miller has done so the keys it's perfectly understandable i'm sure i've done the same thing in other words i've taken my knowledge a very solid knowledge of evolution and evolutionary psychology and extrapolated into questions where i didn't have a lot of specialized knowledge and i make an educated guess and a lot of those educated guesses are right and some of them are undoubtedly wrong and that's what happens when you're provably wrong yeah it's a monster like obviously blatantly provably wrong just just saying yeah just go ahead that's right that's good so uh here i was trying to get a bunch of credit for being humble and this is what i get this is what i get for that just keep keeping me honest i have a mute button here just in case dr lyle [Laughter] so anyway the bottom line is is that miller doesn't doesn't know as much as we know okay so uh he's a he's a rookie in that space and so he he's doing a cursory look at the situation and to be fair um i know i read i can't remember where i read this i think i read some of his uh machinations on this in the book mate and i remember just rolling my eyeballs um and and understanding how confident he felt and yet how wrong he is so how how do we know that i'm right or we are right and jeffrey miller's wrong well the the way we know is from direct scientific evidence so it's going to turn out that uh he's he's undoubtedly correct in the sense that um that our ancestors ate a lot of meat there's no question that they did the um and the the vegans of the world that stick their heads in the sand and jump up and down and say that isn't true or just being ridiculous it's obviously the case that they did the but what they ate and what would be optimal for the species are two different things and that's because there's a two different uh evolution doesn't try to solve the question of of um what would be you know what would be the optimal thing for you to be eating to extend your life expectancy versus what would be the optimal uh choices for you to be making in order to statistically increase the likelihood of your survival yeah it doesn't care about longevity at all really unless you're you're reproducing that entire time at the same rate that you were when you were younger or long-term health either right yeah yeah no or happiness doesn't give a crap tremendous it would be a tremendous mistake not to be eating uh very you know meat necessary for your survival between the ages of 3 and 60. like if you were to go down at 47 because you were short of calories that would be a disaster it's like wow you left a lot of stuff on the table and so of course the idea is to don't worry about the fact that you could truncate your life by you know five percent of lifespan at the end uh with a diet that is heavy in animal food now the um how do we know that the diet's heavy with animal food is a problem well we actually don't know uh we can't put miller's question to the test very well and or his his hypothesis and the reason why we can't do that is because we don't have people eating significant amounts of meat in their diet that is essentially um organically grown meat that is hunted and is therefore doesn't have a bunch of toxic materials in it and it doesn't have a weird macronutrient you know an amino acid breakdown so we don't have some you know pig eating a bunch of corn that it wouldn't be eating as exclusively as its diet and therefore having a very strange you know fatty acid profile for example so the animals that people are eating are not the animals that you are hunting and eating in the stone age for one thing and then the animal food that is being eaten is not being eaten juxtaposition to organically grown whole natural plant food so if you had a situation which i believe to be the case that if you had organically grown natural animal food that you hunted and you ate that and let's suppose it was 25 percent of calories and you ate that next to 75 percent of the rest of the calories came from organically grown whole natural plant food unprocessed plant food what do i think that diet how does that stack up and my attitude is oh i'll bet it's outstanding i'll bet it's i bet it's coming very close to a whole natural plant foods diet of today so in other words i think the antioxidant load in the 75 plant foods is basically deactivating the oxidative problems associated with eating the animal protein so um i believe that that's true i believe that the evidence is pretty strong that people manage to eat what i consider an atrocious diet and they stagger to 80 for god's sake it's incredible how that these people can survive with what it is that they do miller would say oh these carbs are terrible really well have you ever come to the mcdougall program and watched 40 people who waddle in there way overweight wheezing on five medications with their blood sugar levels uh through the sky and you know and maybe he's listening to joel fuhrman and talking about how potatoes cause you know people to be diabetic and blind or whatever the hell it is that these people think and i watch them eat a very high starch center diet for 10 days and they're well their blood sugar levels crash they will go from very high on four medications to normal in 10 or 12 days okay so that that's a routine finding that takes place so trust me people do really well on these natural carbohydrates i don't think miller knows the difference i don't think that he knows the difference between white bread and brown rice and he's sure as hell yeah go ahead i want to defend him a little bit because i do follow him on twitter and um i think some of his arguments his more uh carnivorous paleo arguments predate his current pair bond because she's vegan um and i think she has introduced him to ethical veganism and the sort of effective altruist argument for reducing animal suffering and so i've seen him tweet things like you know yeah we we were probably meant to in scare quotes from a sort of ancestral perspective eat meat but if you're interested in reducing suffering and acting like a an active moral agent in your own life uh you're better off eating red red meat than eggs and eggs and fish and chicken for example so he makes kind of nuanced points that are intersecting with his current ethics and his current signaling to his partner now wife i believe actually right um so i i think he's walked back some of this some of this extreme stuff and i think now he might be friendlier toward you know he i don't i don't want to put words in his mouth and how he would talk about this but slow carbs over fast carbs or you know he's still very skeptical of processed carbs but i think he's friendlier toward things like potatoes and brown rice right so but he's he still doesn't know so the uh he still doesn't understand also that the animal food if you look at worldwide evidence to look at correlation coefficients it's [ __ ] deadly it's very clear okay it's very clear not only with respect to vascular disease but all kinds of diversified cancer and so he doesn't know this okay so this is an example of like i said a smart person using a logical argument feeling very confident about it because it falls it falls and makes a nice evolutionary and he knows enough about cultural anthropology he knows there's people out there you know he knows there's no vegan community hunter-gatherer community i.e a primitive community in the world no such thing there everybody's got a spear in their hand everybody's fishing so he understands where we came from and we very definitely came from manhunt women gather they come to the together at the end of the day and they trade it out okay this is straight richard wrangham so he he knows all this but he he doesn't actually understand that a whole plant food vegan diet uh dodges every bullet that's associated with the animal food and and is not in any way uh inimical to people's health by virtue of being high carbohydrate so the uh and car all carbohydrates aren't even remotely the same uh in terms of their effects so yeah that's the that's the story and all good and you know one day he'll be better educated than he is now there we go okay maybe two weeks out yeah well actually all he really needs to do there's three books he needs to read he needs to read the the the brilliant trinity of colin campbell and uh if he does he could read any one of them any one of them is an absolute jewel but if he reads all three uh it's done it's like now you're an educated human and there's really nowhere where to go but but you know bow your head and say thank you and now i understand so that's how that works wonderful all right all right yeah i know i know with the uh especially being part of fastingscape i get a lot a lot of calls that people want to do fasting because uh they're on the low carb diet and so fasting was the next logical extension of that and so um yeah it's it's interesting to kind of walk that through the logic of no no carbs are good and good carbs are good and all of a sudden people are happy that they're back on potatoes and rice and veg i bet yeah amazing yeah it's a it is astonishing uh here here now 40 years into this to to to still be running into people that are curious interested and intelligent uh that have been paying attention and remain lost it's it's just it's an astounding thing but hey such is life now dr lyle when when you first got into practice uh was the uh atkins diet which is you know now the the remark debris branded version was that pretty popular when you started to get talk to patients i'm actually quite a bit older than that don't have to admit it i'd already been around a while by the time adkins hit us hate it so uh you know atkins was uh atkins john mcdougall called that he goes oh here comes another one another annoying you know ketogenic sack of [ __ ] and uh he didn't put it that way that's the way i would put it but um but yeah so we were we go back further than that to beverly hills diet scarsdale you know these things that preceded atkins so the the ketogenic trick has been around for a long time and taken uh several different forms atkins was just the the best marketed version okay yeah i wonder if by this point you can see it coming no all right let's talk about something else god all right all right all right dear doctors i'd love to get your take on the fire movement standing for financial independence retire early is it just another example of the enlightenment trap i read a book called your money or your life in my mid-20s and since then i've been saving approximately half of my income i now have enough to frugally retire if i want to but now i don't have a goal to work towards i've always wanted to travel and learn foreign languages so i'm doing that but i now but i know that if i wasn't taking classes every day i'd be bored out of my mind did i just waste the last decade of my life engineering my very own complacency cage that's awesome that's a great question go ahead jenna [Music] yeah i i don't think you necessarily wasted it but you did engineer a complacency cage so now your task is to and sometimes we refer to this as the animal in a zoo problem um and you know this can affect uh anybody who sort of sits in a position of financial security whether it's uh somebody who's worked really hard to get where they are or they've come into a big inheritance or they won the lottery or uh just whatever it is um it it it really robs people of the process in life which confers the greatest amount of happiness which is to come right up against the limits of of what you are easily capable of and push yourself to challenge yourself you're the the main source of um of of good feelings and productivity and happiness and and self-esteem and all of these things that we talk about the main way that you're going to create that for yourself is to demonstrate to yourself that you're capable of doing something uh that you weren't sure you were going to be able to pull off and to impress yourself and the only way you can impress yourself is to is to challenge yourself to to live at the edge of your comfort zone as the cliches have it um and you know those little refrigerator magnets are true life does begin at the edge of your comfort zone and so you've you've put yourself in a situation where for a certain personality um you know because you've been very responsible and you've really set this up nicely for yourself you wouldn't have anything productive to do and you you would sit there and languish like an animal in a zoo and a lot of people do that and it really corrodes happiness and well-being so this is about discovering now that you have this space and latitude you know how do you continue to be of use to the village how do you how do you continue to um produce and and make efforts in a way that reassures you both through your own behavior and through the feedback that you get from other people that you are contributing something valuable and unique to the village economy and we don't know exactly what you do and what that might look like and um and how we could uh you know game that out for you but that's essentially the task you you need the feedback from others and you need the feedback internally from yourself that you know you're not just you know resting on your laurels and and uh collecting interest on your accounts you're you are you're pursuing you're in an active process of improving your life and moving forward wow beautiful yeah animals don't retire people yeah never done okay and uh the i watched my mother who at 88 is obviously um living on past accomplishments which is a thing that other animals can't do and let me tell you something uh she wishes that it were not true um she she's she is haunted by the fact that she does not contribute and it makes her uh every now and then she'll tell me she should just die okay and that's because she it she's got enough awareness in there to calculate and realize you know what i'm costing the village i'm in a net negative situation and um so it doesn't you know obviously i use my personality and my love for to to you know essentially bamboozle her out of that reality okay but the truth is she's got enough sharp and enough honesty to to recognize it from time to time and it it will it will fold in on her from time to time and it's it's not pleasant okay she would uh in fact sometimes because she's you know pretty severe dementia sometimes she will uh think she'll say well you know i i could get a teaching job because i have a lifetime teaching credential and so that that's rattles in her head that that means you could teach for life and so and and she thinks that somehow she could still do it and she ought to be doing it so yeah the animal in a zoo this is not uh we we don't want to be fed and watered and taken care of by other people we want to earn it in an active exchange process in the village not necessarily every day of your life but but you know in a steady stream of evidence of productive capability so you it may be that what you do is you have a home that you bought paid for but you keep it up very well you know what i'm saying so you're uh you may not actually earn something in the village but you're busy you're active you're thinking you're learning you you are keeping yourself competent in some important ways so learning new languages yes you know which the question refers to is we'll we'll do that um and you know practicing them and and joining online communities where you can have conversations new languages push yourself in uncomfortable ways to practice um and then go to those places and practice like that's that it you know we're not this doesn't necessarily have to be an unpleasant process it shouldn't necessarily be an unpleasant process it's just it's it's about um accomplishing and achieving and acquiring skills that you didn't have yesterday that you can then demonstrate and signal to the village whether that's just in principle or you actually do it so you get that feedback or that you imagine you would get that feedback if you were to go show the village yeah you you have to be doing something that your brain can see somewhere down through it that this is increasing your survival reproductive capability so those are those value judgments are are embedded in the adaptive unconscious and so your uh and your if it feels boring and feels useless your brain can't see how it's useful or it knows that you could be doing something else that would be uh feels like it would be a lot more productive so yeah anyway jen i'm like trying to pile a can of beans on top of a really good cake there's no no no need to add anything good carbs talk about that she did a great job it's carbs barbs there you go wow thank you animals don't retire that's that's amazing i think that's going to stick with me a long time a long time so yeah okay thank you dr lyle thank you dr hawk um okay our next question nowadays a lot of people gravitate towards food when they are stressed what did people do in the stone age when they were stressed did they fight did they sleep did they meditate did they go on walks did they talk about it and what about animals what do they do when they feel stressed well i don't know i'll just meander and then jen you correct me the um the uh if you're stressed you're in a situation where you're feeling you're feeling some challenge or possibly uncertainty cognitive dissonance about about your ability to get something done and either ability to do it or do it within a specified length of time uh your your stress over the basically resource allocation decision making etc um whatever it is it's a it's a um it's a stress most of it a whole heck of a lot of it comes from time pressure money pressure um time pressure being being a very predominant issue the uh a feeling of disquiet or discomfort um is it can be one of the most productive things you can do to increase your likelihood of survival is to eat some rich food that is a you'll get short-term feedback from that that tells you that was a pretty good move um that's not going to happen if the food is low calorie density so when people get stressed they don't go to the kitchen and grab themselves some some you know kale out of the refrigerator and start chomping on it that's not what they do okay they they go for something that has high calorie density because that's signaling to the system it's going to give it a dopamine and then subsequent endorphin bath that says that was good that was good we just increased our likelihood of survival yeah so essentially the nervous system is under stress it's scanning around looking for how it can you know what what's the most efficient biological thing for it to do and so you know if it could if it could remove the source of stress easily it would but if it can't if it's complicated and it's energy intensive and it's not certain how it's going to manage it then it's it's scrolling down through a list of options like for example talk to my ex-wife about how to deal with the the note that she and i borrow then we're going to give to the mother-in-law and the interest rate and when it's going to be due and oh my god how am i going to deal with it then i got to talk to my wife about how am i to do that and what what junior's college fund and like you could just feel the stress all kinds of different considerations and now the due date is coming up on it we got to make a decision next week and we're gonna have to sit down and have them been getting along too well with the white wife anyway the last couple weeks and so now it's going to be stressful right in the middle of that it's not a good time and see stress okay so the the organism says okay how could we remove the stress well if we could somehow get rid of this conflict so it turns its mind and it can't figure out how to get rid of the conflict it's already been he's been dealing with this conflict for 13 years it's got it's a complicated mess with personalities and all kinds of situations in it all right now so we've got stress for from whatever reason stress is coming from conflict um and so the the mind is scrolling down through its options and it's looking for what can i where can i spend five minutes of time and energy and muscular effort and get a big bang for it where can i do it what can i what about clipping my toenails well no my toenails aren't too bad okay can i take a shower no i really don't need to shower i mean i don't feel like i need it okay well what about is there's a peanut butter sandwich that i could fix well now you're talking okay so the brain is calculating the biological value of different options and it's running those things in parallel and it's selecting the behavior that has the biggest bang for the back and guess what's always going to have a pretty big bang for the buck is going to be super normal stimuli so that's why people are going to turn to you know smoke a joint have a drink have an ice cream cone you know have a snickers bar have a peanut butter sandwich in other words they're going to do things that are going to cause they're going to be super normal and they're going to cause a dopamine endorphin cascade so that's why and so in the stone age no they probably didn't turn to food because there wasn't any available they would have had to go get some so uh so that's you know that's what i think is going on i don't i don't think that this is super interesting uh from my standpoint and this is uh uh this is the the closest thing to to where uh my observations dovetail any discussion of what we call emotional eating i don't really i mean if you want to call this emotional eating hey fair enough okay but as i pointed out emotional eating is a broader concept of i have underlying issues i've been traumatized i have unfinished business from my childhood you know i'm in a big you know stressful relationship with this that and the other it's like no you know that's not why you're eating the the the crop but you may eat some crap or you may eat rich food behind momentary selection uh under stressful situations where your mind is cycling around looking for the highest biologically efficient option and then turns out it selects some super normal stimuli whether it's a shot of whiskey or a cigarette or uh or some marijuana or you know a cinnamon roll the same concept a very low effort big time dopamine endorphin cascade and super normal that gets in it wedges its way into what would otherwise be a nervous system searching around for the best solution to an array of stressful decision-making so you can see that these things are have a strong tendency to be essentially counterproductive relative to health but they give the brain a little time out uh and that's kind of how i see that so that wouldn't have happened in the stone age because they didn't have super normal things like that uh but it's you know but it's been happening ever since human beings concocted drugs and undoubtedly rich foods for wealthy people and now they're ubiquitous is that all how's that sound jen yeah no i think that's that's exactly that distinction between um you know what constitutes emotional eating is always important to make because you don't no matter how stressed out you are no matter how much childhood trauma you're trying to resolve you're never going to stuff mouthfuls of kale from the fridge like it's just that that is never going i've never seen that happen i've never heard of anyone telling a story like that um i think you also are looking at uh you know when when people kind of run up run against the limits of okay well there's nothing productive to do with my feeling of agitation and stress right now that's where you see individual difference um you know you have some people get really quiet and keep their own counsel and you sit in the corner and and not want to do anything until they have more information you have other people who get very uh they very restless very like i have to do something so i'm gonna go have conversations and do this and figure this i'm gonna go metal i'm gonna go try to these are individual differences that different people have and reaction to exactly the same kind of stressful situation i can see it in my pets i could see it in your pets you know some some pets when they're anxious you know mo gets very trembly and chirps a lot and whines and um and mellie gets very she wants to be close she she wants to cuddle she obviously goes stealing food if she can find it but she even in a state of great stress is not uh not stealing the kale from the refrigerator so um to answer that general question of what did they do in the stone age um is a little overly broad just like it would be to answer you know what do animals do it depends on the species and then within the species it depends on the individual every everybody's different and how they you know what what constitutes stress for them and then if there is no low-hanging supernormal fruit to to consume um then you know how what do you do with that restless energy that looks really different um for different different folks yeah right doctor oh sorry correct hold on a second it's probably even goes further i mean not to not to get fancy or anything but the nature of the stress itself probably causes domain-specific reactions you know so i know when it comes to like paperwork and hassle i'm so avoidant it's unbelievable sure procrastination is always a great of a great anxiety it's gonna go away you know hopefully there's a nuclear war and i'm not gonna have to file whatever that is i was impressed you you sent out your tax documents [Laughter] worth a round of applause all right yeah nathan you had some uh questions well yeah i was just saying the nature of the stress i remember dr lyle when you said like dr hawk i remember when you said uh maybe a year and a half ago last time we had a question on the emotional eating that that uh you know if you go in the super the bar after the super bowl the the people who are cheering for the winning team are still going to be drinking just as much as the team shoot rooting for the losing team first drala i remember you also said that this is the same species that had to deal with normandy uh the the the normandy beach and yet we would consider that extremely stressful and for them they had to do it and so i wonder what the stress looked like in the stone age you know like you could die if you got your infection uh whereas trust me stresses big big stress stone age is full of stress full of a major freaking political political and rus inside villages and between villages and and um you know in other words these are people are vulnerable people freaking die and so um yeah stone age is stressful people so you know if you're if you're find yourself you know chewing a little tobacco at first base you know because it's a little stressful yeah it's no surprise that what's got people's attention is super normal stimuli your you're talking about drugging that brain a little bit that's the that's the biggest reason you see the things that you see well this is why there's such a trope now with um you know oh we uh you know life is just we we're dealing with more trauma now than ever in history and that's why we have these epidemics of autoimmune or we have these epidemics of addiction or whatever it is i mean there's a lot of people who really straight faced say this you know like oh we've never never experienced so much adversity and trauma in in childhood before like are you kidding me it's just it's amazingly willfully ignorant of human history up until very very very recently um and i think there you do have real cultural shifts around just the the norms around discomfort and yes um you know uh suck it up-ness you know like there's there's kind of a standard of behavior that has applied to you know mates bringing up normandy this kind of like well life is life is difficult life is shitty like every you know we we go through terrible experiences and you just kind of handle them you you push through and you you uh you don't talk about them and all the all these kind of norms that have applied to uh human groups and human behavior for since time immemorial so there's there's great uh there it's it's a wonderfully positive thing that some of that has been unwound in the last couple of generations and people can speak more openly about what they've been through and what's going on for them but with that has come this kind of uh denormalization of of life sucking yeah it's like like yeah i mean in general life does yellow shirt yes this is the kind of the the the inflation this sort of diagnostic inflation of something like a traumatic event is just ridiculous if you look over the last several decades where this used to speak to something that was a legitimate you know real physical trauma and now it's oh you know your words are violence or i was in an unsafe space and i i felt like i felt threatened by your ideas and it's just it's it's laughable that this can be compared apples to apples with what people have gone through in the past boy well dr hawkins did you put that gen diagnostic inflation man yeah that's at times that's amazing decade that's what it is yeah it's exactly beautiful absolutely concept creep yeah well over the last last couple of weeks i've i've uh there there's been a few challenges in my life that i just i listened to uh i hear dr dr hockey your words of your dad just handle it and it's helped me through so that's great that was his that was his go-to line not that he always handled it particularly well himself but you know he tries yes of the human condition yeah yes sir all right our final one i was wondering if dr hawk and dr lyle have ever talked about the increase in angry violent outbursts on airplanes and other places that have happened in this age of kovid there have always been angry outbursts but why have they seemed to increase now is it some kind of temper tantrum in reaction to the loss of control due to kovid as my social media appears to be filled with these incidents yeah well let's keep in mind that i think there's like you know i don't know what it is it's some amazing number two or three million commercial error flights a year so if on ten of those or one out of two hundred thousand somebody's finally fed up with this uh ridiculous uh mask rule then i'm hardly surprised given the humans human nature as i know it that that some hundred iq or with limited stress tolerance you know what i mean it finally loses their cool i mean it's not like i don't see this on the basketball court at least once a week so it's something that would be equivalent so uh so anyway yeah i i don't see this as uh particular notable i i'm surprised actually at how little it is uh it's it's it's not a lot not not by this but not by the numbers people yeah i i looked into this at some point because i was wondering how much of it was my sort of perception just because of the the twitter effect and the iphone effect the fact that these things are documented and that they they go viral and people post them and share them um and and that they are recorded when 10 years ago they would not have been recorded um and so some of it is that but it also has truly increased uh specifically over the last year and it's almost all masked mandate stuff yes um and so most of the incidents i think yeah two-thirds or more um were related to to people refusing to put their masks on between bites or these other sort of you know the rules and i think you have an intersection between that and uh really fed up flight attendants who have been working throughout this entire period of time and have just really really had it and they have to do their jobs they're they're bound by these arbitrary rules um and uh and so they may be a little uh a little less patient than they would have been with the same incident a couple of years ago and and so you do see i think it's it's you know it's something between a three and four-fold increase over previous years but it's still the absolute numbers um are still quite small so um yeah i i think this is exactly the kind of thing um i watched uh a documentary recently on um sort of online shaming that was produced by monica lewinsky of all people um and it was was very it was done very well although it came to some problematic conclusions from my perspective as a first amendment absolutist but there there was a moment where they interviewed my old my old friend tristan harris who is the former google employee who's referred to as the sort of the conscience of silicon valley he's he's spoken out a lot against um kind of what social media has done to society and continues to do and he's created a nonprofit to deal with us so there's a short interview with him and he basically said you know what social media is like it's like when you're on a schoolyard playground and there's a couple of kids who are having a conflict but it's no big deal until other kids come around and start saying fight fight fight fight he's like that is twitter twitter twitter is the other kid standing around saying fight fight fight and i think that's what happens with these kind of videos is that the more the more insane it is the more eyeballs it's going to draw the more it gets shared so there is this kind of selection bias on the most extreme incidents when most of them what the airline is recording as an incident you have an increase in incidence because an incident is the flight attendant asks the passenger to put their mask on after they've finished their biscotti and they don't immediately comply um you know they're sort of like there's there's it warrants some kind of escalation within the system that is not necessarily something that someone's going to get their iphone out and record but it still triggers as an incident in the system so you do have this absolute increase but the the extreme stuff is getting way overplayed as far as anybody can you know perceive it gosh i just found out i'm a first amendment absolutist i didn't know there was yeah there's a group of us where our numbers are small yeah it's it's not a very not a very popular position these days because you know words are violence silence is also violent so it's it's a little confusing information is dangerous yeah like free enterprise and milton friedman and the uh and whole natural foods you know a lot of things are misinformation and dangerous what the hell yeah yeah if people are don't don't know what that what it means i mean this first amendment absolutism is is really been the position of the united states supreme court up through the most recent first amendment cases i i.e you have the right to say anything you want in in the u.s as long as it is not a direct threat with imminent harm um so you can't um you including hate speech hate speech is protected speech so you can you can say vile hateful terrible things about individuals or groups of individuals and this is unique to the us you know whether no no other country in the developed world has um the kind of first amendment protections that we historically have uh but you cannot make a credible threat against that person or that group um that that you know would warrant a law enforcement intervention and so you have conceptual creep here as well where well what constitutes a threat um and uh you know is that is is making a threat qualitatively different in the age of social media than it used to be um and so these are the sort of debates that the courts are struggling with now but um i am one of one of the few who remains on the side of you you pretty much have the right to say any terrible horrible thing you want to because i have the right to say whatever i want back to you that's right and if you say something that is uh a demonstrated land true and it harms me i can sue you okay sure that's fine it's all fair and we we go to court you know if it's if it's touchy enough and we hammer it out but yeah i'm just yeah i'm disgusted that anybody would ever feel like we should have anything other than first amendment absolutism now that i know what it is yeah that's count me in jen i'm on that team all right we'll go go to our little protest let it now this is what i also this is kind of one of one one of the things that that uh i mean and you you can see there's some personality differences here and just and god knows what else but um i i don't know very much you correct me if i'm wrong jen i'm sure not understanding this fully but my understanding is that in england the the notion in court is that the it's the job of the the crown or whatever to find the facts and to uh in other words it's not an adversarial type of the system everybody's supposed to be aiming at the truth or whatnot i think isn't that kind of how that works my understanding roughly yes and differing from hours in that hours is adversarial yeah my attitude is let it be adversarial in other words you give it your very best shot okay you make your very very best case from your perspective let them make the very best case from their perspective and let the judge or jury decide and we'll live with it the uh let's not like curtail your ability to make your very best argument and uh that's a that's a little wild west free you know way of looking at things and we're going to just tough it out rather than you know uh essentially tiptoe around something that might be unpleasant to say so anyway that's my position i mean just to to kind of take the the duffle's advocate position that the documentary made and why i found it troublesome was this sort of you know they highlighted several cases of people who p people whose reputation um and uh livelihood had been essentially destroyed by online mobs um right so you know something something again kind of going back to the idea that it's a schoolyard with people yelling fight fight fight that an incident that would not have reached many eyeballs in the past becomes it just appeal it just has that moment you know where it has one day where it's trending um and people get doxed they have their their address gets published they get personally harassed and they do i mean some of the cases that they look at in the documentary after uh experiencing direct personal harassment they do seek remedies in court and they do win and so that's still that part is still working um but the idea is that these companies twitter and facebook and youtube or whatever have some obligation to prevent that from happening because this is a unique phenomenon where never before in history have have people been able to exercise their quote unquote free speech by piling on on these anonymous online mobs and i i'm sensitive to that argument and i i understand the distinction and and what people are saying but i think there is a way to walk that line and and to preserve you know meaningful free speech without descending into the kind of the kind of free expression and censorship law that you get in australia or in the uk where you know you do have these uh i just saw an article today in the uk that online trolls if they there's new legislation targeting sort of online expressions of hate that will be uh defined by literally the department for culture [Laughter] it totally could not be more orwellian so the state is now determining what constitutes offensive speech and and going after people who are engaging in that online especially if it's if it's um anonymous or indecent or offensive or all of these things that the the us supreme court has historically vigorously defended so yeah i uh i don't know where that's going i know there's a lot of demand for that in the us now there's a lot of people who who do feel um bullied and vulnerable and that this kind of thing needs to be that you know they need the state to protect them against the this sort of phenomenon um so i i'm sure that there is an answer i can't tell you exactly what it is but i i can tell you it is not a department of culture the answer might be to handle it i think it's a sophisticated evolution of civil litigation yeah that's what really what it is okay in other words that's in other words if you're going to smear me and say a bunch of stuff that isn't true and destroy my reputation i'm coming after you financially yeah but if it's anonymous if it's an anonymous troll online i think that's the crux of this armies of trolls and you know what that's uh that that gets to be that's an interesting issue for the supreme court and so then do you have the right to sue twitter for allowing those anonymous trolls to write their spleen and great yeah this is all great this is uh in other words we're we're these should these are like interesting legal problems yeah yeah that's why we're supposed to that's why we're supposed to have you know smart people on the court let's hope they can figure it out in the next 10 years you
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