Keith Payne (on the psychology behind the political divide)
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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dax Shepard. I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. Hi. I have for...

six and a half years spoke about one of my favorite books called Broken Ladder. And the author of that book is Keith Payne, who is a professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

Very esteemed school. Very. Is it? Yeah, it is. Of public schools, it's like it is one of the best ones. Par excellence. Yeah. Probably with UCLA. Berkeley. Berkeley's public? Yeah. That's the University of California, Berkeley. Oh, okay.

Can you believe it? That one does feel like Stanford, right? Yeah, but I think that's for fakes. Just like University of Arizona State. Hold on a second. You got to lay off of ASU. They don't have a lazy river. We covered this. They're a good school of good people. Back to Keith. He is, in addition to being a professor, he's also an international leader in the psychology of inequality and discrimination. He has a new book out that is tremendous.

It's called Good, Reasonable People, The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide. I hope people will bear with me. I know it's a little bit of my soapbox. So important to me. And I'm so excited that a guy who had written a book completely unrelated to that topic that I absolutely love tackled this topic because I think he did it in such a beautiful way. So check out Good, Reasonable People and enjoy Keith Payne. And check out Salty Sea Dogs. Oh, right.

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It's almost aggressively close to your face. Can I lean back? Okay. Whatever you're most comfortable with. If you want to lean forward, just roll it forward. You flew in from North Carolina. Where there's a hurricane. Yeah, there was a hurricane. It missed our part of the state, but the western part of the state, like Asheville, which is a beautiful, gorgeous town. The mountains just got wild.

demolished a lot of that part of the state. It's terrible. Yeah, I have a friend who lives on the Gulf Coast and he was sending me videos and the house flooded then caught on fire. Oh my God. Holy smokes. Is he okay? He is okay, but their whole life is upside down. That's rough. Nobody who lives in the mountains of North Carolina or a lot of the places that this hurricane went ever thought that they would see a hurricane because when hurricanes come in North Carolina, it's like a couple of days of rain if you're not on the coast.

And so it's getting wild. Yeah. Similarly, I hope to escape a heat wave that's coming by traveling Wednesday. Yeah. You do. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm missing it. Let me start by saying, I hope it got back to you. I was the biggest fan of Broken Ladder. Did that ever get to your door that I talked about it a lot? People told me that you had mentioned my name on the podcast. And that was back before I was familiar with the podcast. I'm embarrassed to say. Oh, then that's fine. And at the time, I was like, oh, okay, that sounds fun. I'm like, let me look into this. And I was like, holy sh...

shit. I didn't realize the podcast was so big and I didn't know you were who you were at the time. And I found out all this stuff since. And so I was so excited when I got the invitation to come on. Oh, good. Because I loved the broken ladder. I loved it. We could do two hours on that. In fact, I would love to do two hours on that. But alas, we're not. We're going to do two hours on your new book. But I would love to chat about a few of the things in there I learned. Well, first of all, what year did you graduate high school? 1993. Same. Oh, yeah. Oh, you guys are the

Same age? Same age. Also, he had sanded down and painted his Monte Carlo by himself or maybe with some help. Your brother did the painting? My brother owned the body shop, so I did most of the unskilled labor and he did the painting. Yeah. And then drove it away to college, drove fast on his way to college. Oh, wow. And then also as you're kind of explaining your ability to click back into

your previous worldview or mindset. I relate to you deeply. I feel like I have a very similar kind of background in a working class. My family's all from Kentucky. You grew up there. As much as I love this broken letter book, which felt so academic, then learning this personal story about you, I thought, oh, likely why it appealed to me so much that we have this. Do you think it's an authentic hillbilly elegy? I

In a sense. Were you triggered by The Hillbillyology? I hated that book. And I was very vocally against it. Even before. Long before. It was political. I felt tricked by the book because the first half, first two thirds, I thought, oh, this is an interesting memoir of his experience. And my experiences were kind of different. But he's just telling his story. And then you get to the last chapter and it's like nothing from that. It's all just like, and here's why conservative policies are the right thing.

And so I felt like it was all a bit of a bait and switch. I like a memoir that doesn't just lead up to his talking points. Right. A knockout punch. Everything you just read was the proof for this theory. I'm going to drop on the end of it. I didn't even think the memoir stuff was real. I'm like, that's not really how it works. I think you've heard these stories, but I don't think you were there for these stories. I don't know. That was my hiccup about it. But Broken Ladder, I just want to talk about a couple of things, Broken Ladder, because they stuck with me so deeply. And I think

They do work their way into your new book in a lot of ways, but tell us about what happens on Airplanes.

If you remember that data, I know it's been a while. Right. But I think that stuff's fascinating. Yeah. So some airplanes have a first class section, some don't. And those that do have a first class section, a lot of them board at the front. So you walk in the front and if you're in coach like me, you walk right past all these people who are already seated in the first class seats. They're having cocktails. Yeah, they're eating their chocolate chip cookies or their champagne. And you walk past these folks and

And they don't even make eye contact, right? You just walk to your coach seat. What can I tell you as someone who's in those seats now, later in life, I'm embarrassed. That's why I don't look at you. I'm sure you imbue from me that I think I'm better than you and don't want to look at you, but I feel ashamed that I am there and you're not. That makes sense. And what's cool about

that as a psychological experiment in real life is that it's literally like a status ladder laid out physically. You walk past the people who are on the highest rungs and then if you're going to coach, you find your place, right? Yeah. And so some planes board at the front like that, but some planes board sort of in the middle. If you're on a plane that's

that you have to walk past the first class to get to the coach seats. Researchers found that incidents of like in-flight troublemaking, violence, tamper outbursts and things like that are much more likely if you're in a kind of plane that boards from the front and you have to walk past and come right up close with that inequality between the coach and the first class compared to if you're on a plane

that boards in the middle. So you don't have to see that. You don't have to have four seconds of feeling less than in route to your seat. Yeah, and it's several times more likely to have a violent incident in the air. It goes further if there's not a class distinction on the plane, then it drops even to its lowest point. Right. But I think the most salient point that you end that example with is that you would be inclined to position that as a story between the haves and the have-nots.

And that, in fact, it's the story of the haves and the have more. People who are flying are already the haves by every metric. Right. An airplane ticket is expensive. Poor people don't fly much. Everybody on that plane can afford several hundred dollars for the cheapest ticket in most cases. And so what it highlights is that it's about a relative difference between, like you said, the haves and the have mores, which is one of the themes running through the book, which is that

A lot of the things we think about and we attribute to an issue of poverty is actually an issue of inequality. And so being in a context like that plane with the first class cabin that you walk past, in which no one is poor, but some people have much more than others, it ends up psychologically triggering a lot of the same thought processes that we associate with poverty.

Yeah, and then even more shocking than that is that abject poverty that we would measure below the poverty line, the results of that in your later life outcomes, your life expectancy, your educational attainment, your incarceration rate, your health, we would think those would be

be really, really adversely affected by poverty. But in fact, people who perceive that they're poor have worse outcomes than people who are abjectly poor, but don't perceive themselves as poor. Right. So there's sort of two things going on. It is the case that being raised poor does predispose you to all these risk factors that you were just talking about. But over and above that, if

If people rate themselves as feeling relatively poor compared to others, then regardless of where they stand in terms of actual monetary income and things like that, it still predisposes you to all of those behavioral risk factors that you were just talking about. Two different things going on simultaneously. They're both happening. Yeah. Okay. Well, let me ask you this. Are your outcomes worse if you feel poor versus you are poor but don't feel poor?

It's hard to make a one-to-one there just because one is measured in dollars and the other one's measured in like scales that people fill out. But the way I would say it is that even if you have few resources, if you feel like you're just as well off as everybody else, that sort of buffers you against a lot of those risks.

Yeah. And where it's like most painful is when people are living in the shadow of these huge gaps. Like there are cities that it's dispersed much more evenly. And then there's really dramatic cities. This would be, I would imagine, one of the top cities for that. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

LA, New York, these big cities that are wealthy are also highly unequal. It's hard intuitively hearing about it just on news stories to separate wealth and poverty from the degree of inequality. You have to do like fancy statistical analyses to separate that in the research literature. But one way to think about it is that the poorer people in LA or New York are

are not much poorer than the poor people are in any little Midwestern small town. But the rich people in cities like that are phenomenally wealthier than the rich people are in Des Moines. Yeah. And so it's the size of that gap, even if it's driven by the extremely rich, that predisposes people to...

health problems, to impulsive behavior, to less psychological well-being. And is it a proximity thing? Because we don't really have suburbs here. And New York City doesn't really have suburbs. We're right on top of one another, everyone. Like Beverly Hills is right next to a place that doesn't have a lot, you know. I think the suburbs mitigate it, though. That's what I'm saying. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Literally where we're at across the street is a dramatically different socioeconomic bracket. It's 13 feet away. Yeah.

And in suburbs, at least you could live in a suburb and never really have to see these extremely wealthy people unless you drove there. This is a question I've always wanted to answer, and I've been trying to figure out how to answer it, but I don't know the answer to it yet. So what you're describing is sort of economic segregation, right? Where the rich people live here and the poor people live there. And on the one hand, we know that segregation, whether it's racial segregation or economic segregation, is associated with a lot of bad stuff. It makes life worse for the poor people who are just surrounded by other poor

people and don't have the opportunity to see people who are doing better. At the same time, what you guys are describing is that in a place where everything's segregated, you don't see the level of inequality. You only see the people who are similar to you. That part of it might buffer against the effects of inequality, but be shittier for the people who are on the poor side of town. Sure. There are societal differences around the world where

If a population of people tends to up-compare or down-compare, that changes radically depending on where you're at in the world. We're a big up-compare society, right? We're always looking and comparing ourselves to people above us. But there are many that would compare themselves to people below and then their kind of mental health benefits from that greatly.

So when I was reading the book, so I agree with you, it's a huge problem. I've experienced it personally. Then the solution for it, my question is, do we think we can augment and change reality to suit everyone? Or do we think we need tools to help us

with this psychological hiccup that if I have an ice cream cone, I'm great as long as the guy next to me doesn't have one. But if someone's eating a banana split next to me, now I'm miserable. Does everyone need a banana split or do we need to figure out how to stop that line of thinking and have tools in place?

Yeah, I think the answer is both. Because if you look across different countries, among rich developed countries, I'm talking about in particular here, because among countries that are very poor, where people are struggling just to have enough to eat and so forth, inequality is not the main concern, right? It's the poverty. Yeah. But if we're talking about Western Europe and the United States and rich developed countries, the countries that are more equal, Norway, Canada, Sweden. Scandinavians. Those countries do a lot better than the United States on all of these outcomes. Yeah.

both longevity and physical health, but also well-being and a longer life and a better life. And it's predicted by the level of inequality. So I do think there's some level of solution that makes sense to talk about on the policy level. The idea, in my opinion, is not to get rid of all inequality, but make it a level where you can actually imagine attaining the next level up, as opposed to where the people who have a lot are just in a completely different universe. Well, and then I would add, too, that they have access to things that

other people don't have access to. So you can't climb the ladder. Right. Part of what's making those more equal societies more equal is not just things like tax policies. It's also universal access to higher education. It makes that pathway something that's reasonably attainable. Right. Did you see Gavin Newsom signed a

a bill for California colleges that there's no more donors or legacy. - Oh, really? - Which is pretty cool. - That's interesting. - And that definitely will have an impact. - In addition to the political stuff, there are psychological tools that we can use to reduce the behavioral or psychological impacts of inequality. We normally go around by default comparing ourselves upward to other people, and that has costs and benefits.

So if you compare upwards to other people who have more than you or are doing better than you, it's actually motivating. We shouldn't downplay that. Yeah. You shouldn't compare yourself to like Jeff Bezos, but you should compare yourself to like somebody in your life or somebody at your work who's similar enough to you, but maybe a little ahead of you that you could take inspiration from that. Yeah, not Jordan, but the dude who scored five points more than you in the game, maybe. Right. But at the same time, it makes us feel bad. It stresses us out. I think it depends.

Depends on what are your goals in that situation. Do you want inspiration to work harder and focus? Or do you want to have some of the stress taken off of you? Because if we compare downward to other people who aren't doing as well, that feels great. But it also is demotivating because we can sort of rest on our laurels. Unfortunately, like all things, there's not a right or wrong. It's got to be some weird percentage you work out in your life that results in happiness, I guess. Most of us don't ever think about that. We just sort of do it by default.

And I think one powerful effect of the research on this and knowing about it is that you can stop yourself and say, wait, what am I doing here in this situation? Why am I comparing myself to that guy? And who should I actually be comparing myself to? And even maybe what are my real goals other than what I'm coveting is just flashy.

OK, so your new book, Good, Reasonable People, The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide. This is really fun because we just had another professor on with a book called Tribal and almost debunking a little bit the very popular tribalism explanation of our political divide, acknowledging where it exists, but also not looking at it as such a negative thing and rounding out our understanding of what we know about that.

us them in group out group thing so that's been kind of helpful and so that's maybe one look at the issue you look at it through a bunch of different lenses and why i'm most excited about this book is i don't really have many causes this is maybe the only one that i constantly am fighting for monica nice fights the most recent month have been around this topic oh great well so

The book, I think you have a similar goal as mine, which is we have got to stop looking at half the country as bad or half the country as racist or half the country as hateful. And by the way, or if you're on the right, half the couple is whining babies and snowflake, you know, whatever stereotype they handed you in your in-group group.

We got to break out of that. And so this book really kind of systematically looks at how we get there. And then a lot of hiccups in thinking that get us there. Yeah. What motivated you? You give a good story about your brother and Facebook. So there was a period of time there when I was...

online a lot on Facebook and Twitter. And I find myself getting into these arguments and some of them are just with random people. But the ones that were really painful were the ones with my own family members. And I talk about this argument with my brother right on the first pages of the book in which he's a Trump supporting conservative Republican. And this

during the Trump administration and he's saying what great things Trump has done for the country. And I'm arguing that, you know, it's so obvious that Trump is just terrible. How can you believe this? We get into this back and forth. I find that so painful. And for a long time, I found it so inescapable. And so that was part of the motivation for writing this book.

is how can you both stand up for the principles you believe in and not just be sort of a wishy-washy, like, nah, everybody's different. There's no right answer. But at the same time, not get into those going for the throat kind of arguments that we get into both with strangers and more importantly to me, the people who you're close to.

You state some of the data that's out there. I forget what percentage, but it's younger people saying across the board they couldn't date anyone outside of their own political party. I think of these great examples like I remember growing up and getting a real bang out of the fact that the raging Cajun was married to, you know, strategist for the Clinton campaigns, married to

Mary Madeline? Mary Madeline, strategist for the Republican campaign. And I thought, that's admirable. That's really cool that those two love each other and they have completely different opinions. And that's like an anthem now. That's insane. The followers of either of those people would feel like it would be a betrayal for them to love and be in a relationship with someone on the opposite side.

Go ahead. I mean, I think up until very recently, I agree. And also, I do agree. If you can make a relationship work with someone who has different values than you, great. But our fight from the other day was about this. And I was saying, I don't think I could...

anyone who was voting for Trump in this election because there's actual values on the table that affect me directly. And I don't see the problem with me saying, I don't think I could partner up with someone who doesn't have my best interests.

Yeah. I'm not saying I have to hate that person or I'm getting in a fight with them, but I don't need to partner with them. You disagreed. Yeah, I did disagree. I do disagree. If I asked you to describe Callie and why you're best friends with her, you would list all these qualities and you wouldn't say, and she's a Democrat.

You know, like I think the core, her character, what you like about her, really, I don't think her political identity would come up. Or if you were asked to describe why you liked any of your friends, I don't know that that political identity would come. It'd be like, they're dependable, they're thoughtful, they listen to me, they're caring, they're loving, they're generous. There'd be all these things. So my objection is this person

very abstract thing of a political identity, the fact that it could nullify all these actual qualities in a person is scary to me. Yeah, it is the most intimate person you will have a relationship with, your partner. So I feel like even a friend, I could have a friendship up until a point with someone who was like, I want, you know, a Muslim ban or abortion. That's a big thing. Or IVF. That affects

So, of course, I'll probably be like, yeah, we can hang out at a party, but I don't know if I'm going to share my deepest, darkest secrets with you. I mean, I think we're allowed to have boundaries up there. Yeah. What do you think? So when you hear that little light debate, by the way, that was very light and respectful. It got a lot more heated in front of our boss last time. That's who we are. I think it's admirable if people can date somebody with deeply different backgrounds.

views. I don't know that I could do it personally. My goal is a little bit more modest. I think we should be able to talk about politics without literally wanting to hurt each other. The broad strokes idea for me is that this is necessary just to keep having a normal democracy where we argue about ideas and we solve it with voting rather than assassination attempts and violence. So I have a

a variety of different political views in my acquaintance circle and definitely in my family. But the ability to just go home for Thanksgiving and be interacting with people as people rather than having these tense political debates or trying to avoid the political stuff is the most important part for me. Well, you talk about this weird flip that also happened where it used to be when you were growing up and me as well, there was this dynamic where a child would go to a parent and

and say, I'm gay, and then kind of wait whether they were going to accept or reject them. And now you have young people publicly on social media talking about having no choice but to reject their parents because of their political point of view. It's just kind of an interesting flip and

very similar through whatever their point of view is, I'm going to reject this person. And that's kind of interesting and feels newer. That might be one of the effects of social media, right? Because older people are more involved in politics. They have more money to donate to candidates, but the young people are the ones driving social media. And so I've talked to a lot of people who are parents who are worried that their kids are going to go on social media and just drag

them. Write them off publicly. Yeah, because it's the kids with the power in terms of those kind of platforms. Yeah, I have that fear. I'm not naive. You have to be different than your parents. I was different than mine. My girls are gonna be different than me. I hope they can accept that. Or I guess I'll probably just fucking join them. I won't lose them over it. Maybe that's the power they have. But yeah, you talk about some warning signs and you list three of them. And one is where democracy unravels into civil war. So one of them is

dehumanizing. You want to talk about dehumanizing a little bit? Right. So if you look back through wars and genocides in history, you see this pattern where either the two sides in wars or if it's just sort of a lopsided genocide situation where the power holders, they tend to talk about the other side in dehumanizing ways. So things like Hutus and Tutsis calling each other cockroaches, Nazis calling Jews rats and vermin.

What that does is it says those people aren't human, so they're not really of moral concern. You treat them like animals. Well, we kill animals when it suits our purposes, right? And so it makes it so much easier to engage in violence if you have convinced everyone that the other side are not fully human. Yeah, outside the circle of moral concern you wrote, and I thought, oh my God, yes, that is so powerful. The second you decide they're not the same thing as you, then the sky is the limit. And we do

it in even less malignant ways in that the Germans were Jerry's or Krauts. Anyone we've been at war with, now we don't do it. But the long history of our wars, we gave everyone a name as well to help the soldiers dehumanize the opponent. Yeah. And we're doing that politically right now. A study came out a

this image that looks like sort of an ascent of man image, where on the left side, it's like a hunched silhouette of an ape. And then each picture in turn stands up a little straighter till on the right side, it's a silhouette of a human standing up. And it asked Democrats and Republicans to rate how fully human Democrats and Republicans were. And the more people identified strongly with one party, the more they rated the other party as basically being apes. Yeah.

And that's just a terrifying study. It is. He has like Planet of the Apes. No one's shedding a tear when you got to fight the apes to maintain law and order. Yeah, that's scary. And then I've seen this in recent times, which is I saw liberals take...

some pleasure when COVID deniers would die or go into the hospital. And I was like, this is a little scary. I don't agree with their opinion. I don't think it's good. The moment we're happy someone died or got tragically ill through their own ignorance,

I don't know if that's where we want to be. And there were people on the right that were happy gays were dying of AIDS. Yeah, it's terrifying. And this is one reason I basically got off social media because at times engaging in these debates, I found myself feeling those kind of emotions. You know, schadenfreude, that something terrible is happening to the other side. I was like,

this context of social media is making me somebody I don't want to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another of these three warning signals would be political differences aligning with racial or religious differences. Yeah, and that's a big part of what's happening right now for the U.S. 50, 60 years ago, being a Democrat or a Republican didn't say much about what race or religion you're likely to be. But

today, if we know just your race, your education level, and what part of the country you grew up in or live in, we can predict with really high rates of accuracy what party you're in. And that's scary too because it's one thing to say, all right, well, my party lost this election. We'll try again the next time. But

If every election is a contest about everything you and your groups hold dear, then everything is an existential crisis. And it's much more motivating to go beyond just politics and get violent. And that's a really scary risk factor that we have right now. Yeah. In the book, you say 90% of black Americans are Democrats. Two thirds of Hispanic Americans are Democrats. 80% of Republicans are white.

Yet only 60% of white people are Republicans. So it's pretty stark how everyone's filing into these political identities. And I think that goes to the heart of the matter of the book, which is that the social identities are the way we're finding our way to politics. And we've always defined us and them differently.

in ways that make sure that I find that I and my people are good and reasonable people, right? That's where the title comes from. It didn't used to be so neatly divided with left and right, Democrat and Republican. So now the ways that we define who's good and who's reasonable lines up perfectly with

left and right almost. And that's the source of why we're not just disagreeing with each other, but we're more and more hating each other. Any member of either of these sides would give all the issues that led them to this side. But if you were an alien hovering above Earth looking at it, and you go, oh yeah, that's all good that those are the issues. But A, the issues have changed nonstop. They're flip-flopping back and forth.

And if there's a 90% chance of your black running up in this party, there's something going on other than the issues. And if there's a 70% chance, if you're a Christian, you're going to end up. That's interesting. But you don't think that does have to do with what's being presented on each platform? Because one group is speaking to...

a religious group, which the other is not so much, and then vice versa with social programs and things like that. I guess it's a chicken or an egg thing. It's like if you're born into this group, you will have these opinions and this identity. You'll just inherit it in a sense. I guess. I see what you're saying. Isn't it interesting, though, that we all feel like we've thought through the issues?

None of us is like, I inherited this issue. We all think that we've reasoned our way to our opinions and we've done our own research. And yet, from the outside, I like that alien perspective you mentioned, you can predict before somebody's born, if you just know what kind of family they're being born into and where they're going to be born, you can predict which arguments they're going to find persuasive. So both are going on, but I think we see it from our own first-person perspective as...

I'm reasoning through the arguments. But we can step back and see it from that alien's perspective because I can tell how you're going to reason through those arguments. Yeah, right. You're going to reason through it, but I'm also going to tell you where your reasoning is going to take you. It's pretty interesting. And then I like this part that we have a universal, again, both sides have a universal tendency to believe that people who are different than us

are irrational or foolish. I hear this all the time. The most generous they could give the other side is to say, well, if they knew what I knew, they would think like I would think. The notion that you could all know the same thing and have a different opinions beyond comprehension. Yeah, and that's why we always tend to think that if I just explain the facts to them, if I just explain the evidence, then they'll come around. And then we're just blown away again and again by the fact that we explained the facts and we explained the evidence and they just won't accept.

And that's because we're so entrenched in our own perspective, not realizing that the reason and evidence are tools that people are using on both sides of the debate to find a position that reassures them that they're good people. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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Yeah, that's what we're going to get into. And you say the fundamental source of our division is our need to flexibly rationalize ideas in order to see ourselves as good people. That is so profound. Will you give the example? Well, let's get into psychological immune system. Define that for us. Yeah, so the psychological immune system is a phrase that psychologists use sometimes to talk about all of the psychological,

maneuvers we use to sort of protect our self-esteem, protect our ego, and basically reassure ourselves that we're good, we're okay, we're valuable people. It's kind of coping or defense mechanisms as older ways of talking about it. Same sort of stuff. And can I just add, what I love about the way it's framed in this is it's not even about being great or being a genius. It's just about being good. Everyone has a pretty baseline desire to believe that they are good.

That's kind of sweet. It's not even that ostentatious. Yeah, I think, you know, some people want to believe they're better than others, but that's a big individual difference. Everybody at some level has this basic desire to think they're good enough. They're just a valuable person. Tell us what happened when you heard the Tara Reid allegations against Joe Biden. Right. So Tara Reid had accused Joe Biden of sexual harassment. Maybe it was even sexual assault. I can't remember now. And that was going on during the election campaign, Biden versus Trump.

I just remember going through this cycle of thoughts as soon as I heard it. My first response, because I was very pro-Biden, was, oh shit, this is terrible. And then my immediate second thought was, eh, she's probably lying anyway. Yeah. And then I thought...

Well, wait a minute. We just went through the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. And I remember arguing to people that you should take women's complaints of sexual abuse very seriously. Even if they can't provide all of the proof, we should still really consider that. So I was arguing both sides of this issue in my own head. And then where my head went next was, all right, well, even if she has a credible claim, Trump has been accused of way worse by way more women. The gymnastics.

I just find myself going back and forth. And this all happened over the course of about two minutes. And by the end of it, I got to a point where I convinced myself that even if the allegations are true, it's not going to change my vote. That's right. And that was kind of the point my brain was always going to take me there one way or the other. And it's kind of hard to realize that.

But all of us, if we are honest, can probably find times when we do that. A thousand percent. And it's coming so quickly as you describe it in the book. Like you're in the kitchen making coffee. You hear that. You go through that whole, I know I'm good and I'm going to vote for this person. So how do I take this very inconvenient piece of information and reduce it in a way that I can hold on to this notion I'm still good and still going to vote for someone that may or may not have done this?

We always assume that people just sort of take in information and then if the information conflicts with their beliefs and the evidence is strong, they'll just change their beliefs. But that's not psychologically realistic. What people do is start with that premise that I'm good and here's what I believe. And then how do I make this new information add up?

to being consistent with that. And there's always a thousand kinds of mental gymnastics that we can use. We can say that, you know, the source of that information is biased. You can say that's not relevant. What about this other thing? And when other people do that, they engage in whataboutism or they move the goalposts or they change the subject. We see them doing it and we notice it's incredibly frustrating. But what we don't realize is that we're probably doing the same thing. I reflect back

on the Monica Lewinsky scandal. And at the time, I remember, and my family was very left, my mother and I were like, someone's sexual life has nothing to do with them running the country. This is such a witch hunt. It has nothing to do with the job we asked this person to do. We don't care what he's doing sexually. Of course, if it was our opponent,

It's a much different analysis. And yeah, I've just caught myself a bunch of different times going like, oh, yeah, I totally if I like the person, I'm probably going to figure out a way why it's a little different or the ultimate good is still worth pursuing. And that may even be the most rational decision. But minimally, I have to grant the other side the same kind of

empathy in that situation. Right. And it doesn't necessarily mean you're going to come to agree, right? You're probably not. But if you are able to bring yourself to the point of having that empathy and understanding that they're doing the same thing you're probably doing, now you're a human talking to another human rather than that person out to destroy my country is spouting all this nonsense. Yeah. Can you tell us the difference between reasons and causes for reasons? If you look up the dictionary definition of a reason...

It says a cause for acting or a justification for why you acted. And I think that ambiguity in the definition is so interesting because we usually think of it as the cause of our actions. Why did you go to the store? I needed some milk. You know, something as simple as that. But whenever we're dealing with complex social identities, the stories we tell to explain why we did something often aren't really clear.

the causes of why we did it. Nobody ever says, I voted for this candidate because this is the racial group and the geography I was born into, which is actually a cause of why they adopted many of their beliefs. Instead, they say, this is a value that's important to me. This is a fact that

And so we point to the reasons to justify why we did something as if they were the cause of our behavior. But in a larger sense, what's more psychologically interesting, if you want to understand what's going on, is why did that person adopt those reasons? And would it be fair to say that for your in-group, you're pretty willing to accept their reason? And then for the out-group, you're quite suspicious of their reasons? Yeah. All you have to do is give me any reason if I am already inclined to...

Believe you. But if you are my outgroup or my opponent, not only am I going to not take your reason at face value, but I'm probably going to say, no, that's not the real reason. You're just rationalizing some other darker motive. Yeah, you give some inane examples like dad goes to the grocery store because he's got to cook dinner. Then there was one about mom and then you would intuit something completely different despite what she told you.

Right. I think the example I said was mom has been working too hard, she says, as she cleans up the shards of dad's broken whiskey glass. Right. So why did she drop the whiskey glass? Maybe it's not just she's tired. So whenever the situations get socially complex, a simple reason is probably not the whole story. So let's say we all get here. We have empathy for a group we don't identify with.

And we get it. It's like, I understand why they're coming from it from that point of view. I come up from this. Then what? So we appreciate that the other person is different from us.

and then we can be civil. That's the goal, right? I guess that's Keith's goal. That's a lot. We shouldn't discount that. Where we are in American politics today is not anywhere close to what you just described, where we can appreciate where both sides are coming from and be civil because that not only allows us to sort out our differences with votes rather than bullets, but also it allows us to have a conversation. And I mean, that's what you guys do here. It's

so important to be able to have a difference and still have a conversation. And we shouldn't discount how important that is. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, because even in my utopian view of this, I'm not asking everyone to sell out what they believe and hold dear to them. What I'm asking is you don't have to align yourself with companies and products to demonstrate your political affiliation. You don't have to be online screaming at people and fighting with people. There doesn't have to be

These riots we see, to me, we already have the roadmap. We already have had dramatically different views and they've played themselves out when people vote as a democracy should. But we haven't necessarily had all the name calling and the otherness and the violence and the hate and the fucked up Thanksgivings and the families breaking apart. We don't need all that wreckage.

as a result of our different opinions. We just got to go vote. I agree, but I guess the part about the brands, do you have a problem with someone who only buys American cars? I don't, but I'd have a problem with anyone that only bought cars from pro-life brands.

These are still identity markers. Like America is an identity marker and so is whether you agree with abortion or not. And so I think you sometimes don't like it came up also in the car where somebody brought up that they have a Tesla. Uh-huh.

Rob, are we allowed to say it? Okay. Rob has a Tesla and he is done with his lease or almost done with his lease and was thinking about getting another car. And you said, are you going to get another Tesla? And he said, well, I don't know the whole Elon thing. I like that car, but that's making it hard for me. And I feel like you didn't like that.

I don't like it. I understand what Rob's saying and I understand what you're saying. You don't want to put money in the pocket of somebody you disagree with who's also quite politically active in funding your opponent. Yeah. I get that. And that's a totally defendable position and it has merit. But if you play out where that all goes, so now every CEO has to declare all of their political. No, they shouldn't. But if they are being very vocal, then why would you ignore it? The

The only reason, so yes, that in the short term is a very, very, again, defendable. I get it. It's a very legitimate point of view. But if you play that out where now every time I see a Tesla on the road, I know that's the opponent. And I know that these four grocery stores have aligned themselves with LGBTQ matters.

and pro-choice. And so that grocery store is for Democrats. And then this chain of grocery stores is for Republicans. You're just further accentuating this huge divide. Now, if we all lived in two different countries, it'd be great, but we don't. We live in one country. I do believe in

Buy American, yes. That is our group that we can be harmonious. We can be at ideological opposite ends of the spectrum as Russia. It's not going to cause any riots or fistfights or gun shootings in this country because of it. So if we all line up, every product now, if every product declares where they're at on the political spectrum, they'll just be endless. It'll really rule out the chance that you can bump into someone, have a nice conversation with them, then later discover they have a different opinion of you. You might as well at that point

Move to a state that they declare is only for Democrats. I don't think it's healthy to go down that road. Yes, it's a great point on the surface, but I think if you play it out, then it's just a million different indicators that you're on the opposite end. I don't see that as very constructive for us as a country.

Keith, sorry, we monopolize that. People have studied this. I think it's really interesting. So we call them identity markers, right? Things that you wear or show off to advertise to the world who you are, which groups you're with. It's really common and pretty deep seated thing that we do. You know, I went to a Catholic school where we had uniforms and people went to such great lengths to wear a Metallica t-shirt underneath the uniform shirt so you could see.

see them advertising what kind of person they really are. And so I hear you that it can add to divisiveness unnecessarily, but I think it's a really strong current to swim against because we really want to show everybody who we are and just as importantly, who we're not. Yeah, I get the urge. I totally do. I had bumper stickers. That's like our easiest way. Yeah. Can you tell us ideology without ideas? And I would love for you to talk about better than average.

I think it's healthy for all of us to have some humility and just say like, either if you're right about your opinion on the left or you're right about it on the right, you still have the same broken brain. There's not two different brains. When we read newspaper articles about what Democrats think and what Republicans think, it's all so focused on issues and sometimes even on values.

But the portrait of the ordinary voter, academics have kind of known about for decades, but it never gets out there into the general press, is that if you actually ask somebody about their opinions on issues and principles, and you look at what they say, they're incredibly inconsistent over time. So if you survey them now and six months later, they'll tell you something completely

different many times. So the correlation between what they say at time one and time two is really low. And if you look at the correlation between what they say on one issue and what they say on another logically related issue, the correlation is also really, really weak. What's like a hard example of that? So you would think somebody who wants to cut taxes would also be in favor of like cutting government benefits. Right. Because how else would you do it? Right.

You would think that somebody who's interested in increasing government support for education might be also interested in increasing government support for helping the poor. But none of those things are very well correlated with each other. Look at people's actual opinions, whether they have the right or left opinion on one issue tells you very little about whether they have the right or left opinion on other issues, even when they're logically related like that.

Right. And so if an ideology is just a coherent set of interconnected principles and ideas, the typical American doesn't really have a political ideology as we normally talk about it. On any given survey, if you were interviewing Republicans, they'll say some Republican sounding things.

And if you're interviewing Democrats, they'll say Democrat-sounding things. But if you ask them six months later, they say a different set of Republican or Democrat-sounding things, as if they're just sort of winging it and telling you whatever talking points they've heard recently for their side. And that seems like a lot of what people are doing. So the political scientist Phil Converse discovered this back in the 60s. And then recently, political scientists thought,

Surely that's different. We're now so polarized. Everybody's got a left or a right position on everything now, right? And so they replicated all these studies and they replicated perfectly in today's environment. So they estimate about 85% of American adults have basically no political ideology. If you define it as an interconnected, coherent set of ideas, something like 15% do. But those are basically people who are academics, journalists,

people who work in politics. We get this idea that people have these coherent ideologies because we usually watch journalists talking to academics or journalists talking to professionals in that realm. And they have coherent ideology. They eat, sleep, and breathe this stuff. The point is that ordinary people are dumb or clueless. It's just that this is not what they spend their time thinking about. For most of us, why would we? And so...

They have this sort of general identity-related pull toward one group or the other, and we tend to sort of say whatever comes to mind. When the survey asks us a question, we answer however will make us look good and look like a reasonable, consistent member of our group.

And so that's related to the better than average effect because we go around not only assuming that we're a good person and everything has to sort of add up to that, but we tend to assume that we're better than average on any trait that we care about. Not every trait. Like if you ask me how good I am at juggling, I would readily admit that I'm terrible. I can't juggle at all. But if you ask me, are you a good friend? Are you a good parent? Are you good at your job? Even though I know about the

above average effect, I kind of want to say I'm better than average. It extends to like driving. If you ask people if they're above average drivers and everyone thinks they're an above average driver. Yeah. Even if you do that survey with people who are hospitalized for a car accident that was their fault.

Isn't that incredible? Yeah, that's good. They're still better than above average. And so how do people then when they prove to not be above average or they get some really undeniable evidence that they're not above average, how do they compute that? There's a hundred different ways, right? It's sort of like getting information that you

don't agree with politically, you can always find some way to discount the evidence. You can find some way to say that's not what's really important here. What's really important is this other dimension on which I do excel. You say I'm bad at this. I'm like, well, can I interest you in this other thing that I'm good at? And so we're very good at being sort of slippery reasoners. And that's good because it actually is psychologically healthy for us. One group that doesn't have this rosy perception of their own self-worth is people who are clinically depressed. And

Most of us, most of the time, are not depressed in part because we're going around reassuring ourselves about how good and adequate we are. Yeah, we wouldn't want half the population to take on the fact that they're below average. In any given domain, half the people are below average. It wouldn't be good for us, for half of the world, to think they're below average at something. Right, and it wouldn't be good for them. Right. So they don't.

Yeah, back to the incongruity of their expressed political identity and what they actually think. I think we have some popular polls right now that really point that out. It's like you have over 70% of America being polled and being against the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and yet you have half the country on the right that will vote differently. Some of my favorite examples of this are

about conspiracy theories. So there's lots of conspiracy theories on the right, and those are the ones I see, given my media consumption. And I had the impression going in that this was a left-right thing, that conservatives are really into these wacky conspiracy theories, but people on the left can't be fooled that way. Because maybe they're too smart or they're too educated. But...

But some recent research looked at this and found that the kinds of theories they believe on the left and right are different. But you can create a fake conspiracy theory in which you just make up something and say Republicans are conspiring with people in the medical industry to take control of your health care and benefit themselves. Do you believe that?

And Democrats will be, yeah, absolutely. And so all you have to do is say, insert enemy group here is conspiring with insert powerful group here to do nefarious thing here. And both sides are very eager to endorse

that kind of conspiracy theory. I think the difference between left and right, to the extent that there is any on those kind of beliefs, is that Republican politicians have figured out how to use that more. And I think people on the Democratic side, in terms of the elites, the leaders, the politicians, have not been as prolific at it. Frankly, if we find somebody who's like a Trump-like character...

On the left, they'll absolutely be able to fool a lot of people on the left. Yeah, they don't tend to be about lizard people on the left, but there's food conspiracies, there's health conspiracies. I hear conspiracies all the time on the left that are more in that realm. But they're just as irrational or imply so many people are keeping secrets and, yeah, nefarious bad actor controlling all these levers.

You did an experiment and I'll forget the details of it, but basically people in the experiment in two different groups earn the same amount of money. But they were told on one side, will you tell us about that experiment? Yeah. So we set up a game in which they are supposed to pick some stocks and we give them a little bit of seed money to invest in these quote unquote stocks. And we do a simulation of the stock market and they can win a little bit of money back if they do well.

And in reality, everybody made the same amount of money. But we told one group that they did better than 89% of all players. And we told the other group that they did worse than 89% of all players. Oh, man. Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah. I just want to remind everyone, they did the same. They did the same. And we asked the people in both groups, like, why do you think you performed as you did? And the people in the winning group basically said, oh, it's my hard work and skill and talent. And the people in the losing group said, this game is rigged.

against me. I was disadvantaged. You need to change your experiment for the following reasons. So different explanations. And then we added a layer to the game in which we kind of had like a taxation and redistribution thing going. So we said, all right, we're going to charge people who are the top performers 10% of their winnings to help

offset the losses of the people in the other groups. What do you think about that? And of course, the people in the group that were going to benefit from that were like, thumbs up. And the people who were getting taxed said, this is a terrible idea because did you see my comment about my hard work and talent? Right? Yeah. So it's so easy to sort of recreate a lot of the differences we see between Republicans and Democrats based on just which group they belong to. In one version of it, we even told people, this is not about

anything you did, we actually randomly assigned your outcomes here. And people in the losing group were like, yeah, I suspected all along. And the people in the winning group basically didn't believe it. They still thought they earned their winnings. Even if you land in the lucky group, you're still above average. You're like, yeah, I got the winning ticket of the lottery. Right. And so people immediately just start spinning stories about

Why am I in this position in light of the fact that I'm a good and reasonable, competent person? If you keep that part in mind, it all makes sense. Because it's the same kind of people. It's not like personality differences. People are just randomly assigned. You flip that group, they're going to behave exactly the same as the other group. If you're below average, it was rigged. And if you're above average, it's a meritocracy. Right. I think so many of the things that we attribute to personality or value differences when it comes to politics have to do with those sort of

contexts that you either are born into or happen into by your life circumstances. I don't buy into this idea that there's like a liberal mind and a conservative mind. I think we're all just sort of doing the best we can to make sense of the world from whatever group positions we ended up in. Yeah. And you point out that there is some reigning theories, right? There's one theory that if you give liberals and conservatives these personality tests, you're going to see that liberals score higher on the open-mindedness personality trait. And

go on down the line. But as you point out, you're looking at, in the best case, if they were choosing out of five, it's like a difference between one. It's like 10%. It doesn't nearly approach the explanation we would need. Right. It's true that Democrats score a little higher on openness to experience, for example, than Republicans do on average. But like you said, out of a five-point scale, it's like one point difference. It's not

these massive differences. It doesn't come anywhere close to explaining why like 90% of black Americans would vote for Democrats and 60% of white Americans would vote for Republicans. You can't explain 90% effects with a 10% difference. Right. And is it really that all of these groups that vote for Democrats are just wildly open to experience? Probably not.

Yeah, I found myself getting defensive about your rejection of that because mine that I hung on to was in either the Molecule Amore or Dopamine Nation. And you do find different dopamine levels in liberals and conservatives, which would explain the willingness for change. But again, that level of dopamine difference is probably in the single percentages of how different their dopamine levels are. Right. There are some real differences in terms of personality and things like you're pointing out in research studies.

If it's statistically different from zero, we go, yay, we found an effect. And we so often don't look at how big the effect is. It's just amazing that with a handful of questions about what social groups you belong to, we can predict like with 90 percent accuracy how you're going to vote. Yeah, there's most certainly some black Americans with lower dopamine levels than a lot of conservatives. So that can't be the smoking gun. Right.

So let's get into some of those things. Tell me about Lincoln's map, this term we all know, kind of Mason-Dixon line, where that originates. Mason-Dixon line was drawn by these astronomers, Mason and Dixon, who were brought over from England to the United States to draw the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland. The Penn family wanted to know where Pennsylvania ended.

And where Maryland began. So they drew this line, but it just happens to also line up with this ancient coastline from the Cretaceous period ended up covering the southeastern portion of the United States. What today is above water, that area was below water about 100 million years ago. And that ocean had a ton of these single-celled organisms called cocoliths or cocolithophores.

And each one had a little shell of calcium. And when they would die, that tiny little microscopic shell would fall to the bottom of the floor. And over millions and millions of years, it covered everything in this calcium that became chalk, a kind of limestone.

And the southeastern portion of the United States became rich with this chalk, as did, like, on the other side of the Atlantic, the White Cliffs of Dover are made of the same stuff. It turns out that chalk is really good for soil conditions for growing cotton. So the combination of the hot climate and that kind of soil meant that the southeastern portion of the United States became rich.

the most profitable place in the world to grow cotton at that time. Cotton is a very labor-intensive crop. So the southern slaveholders were able and willing to exploit the labor of enslaved people to do that work. And so wherever cotton expanded, slavery expanded too throughout the 1700s and 1800s. And so what today we call the Mason-Dixon line just happens to line up with where that chalk stops.

It doesn't really go north of it. Were they observing that, Mason and Dixon? No, it's pure coincidence. We call the Mason-Dixon line the border between the South and the North. It just happens to be the border between where the soil was great for growing cotton and where it wasn't. And that's what set the South and the North on these radically different trajectories around race and around slavery in the 19th century. So Lincoln's map was this map

that Abraham Lincoln used in 1860 based on the 1860 census as he was strategizing for the Civil War that was sort of looming at the time. And what the map showed is each county in the southeast of the United States, each county was shaded a different shade based on the percentage of the population in that county that was enslaved. And the reason he was using that to strategize for the war was that he knew that the

states that were most economically dependent on slavery were going to be the ones who were most likely to secede. And the ones that had slavery but weren't as dependent on it could be persuaded to stay in the Union. And that's basically what happened. So the border states like Missouri and Kentucky, Maryland were persuaded to stay in the Union. The ones below that that had

a higher rate of slavery ended up seceding. And what's interesting is that that didn't only predict the likelihood of secession, but you can predict all sorts of aspects of modern society based on the number of people who were enslaved in that 1860 census. Oh, wow. Like what? Well, you can predict the rate of residential segregation. So places that had more slavery then are more

more racially segregated now. You can predict the level of racial inequality in terms of things like poverty rates or upward economic mobility. You can predict school segregation, differences in health outcomes. All of these sorts of things were set in motion because of the slave society, but

That set up structures like which neighborhoods are the black neighborhoods, which neighborhoods are the white neighborhoods that are still in place today. And you can predict the politics of people today based on that same 1860s census data. And at the same variability within each of the counties.

Yeah, and it's not just some broad north-south difference. Right. Within the south, there's a huge variation, I'd imagine. Yeah. Even county to county, if one county ended up with not much chalk because it was higher elevated and mountainous and ended up not being good for cotton, and the next county over grew a lot of cotton, you can still detect the political differences between those two counties today.

The way that the political differences work is that it's race specific. So Black Americans are highly likely to favor Democrats today and even a little bit more so in counties that have more slavery. And it goes the opposite for white Americans. They're more likely to favor Republicans today if there was more slavery in that county in 1860. Does that...

explain, which has always been a head scratcher to me, North Carolina, in that it has voted liberal in the past and it's in the South. And there's a couple of these that I wouldn't explain away by racial demographic. Like for Georgia to go, that makes sense. You have Atlanta. North Carolina to me was always a little bit like, oh, that's interesting. They're more liberal than the rest of the South. Yeah. Historically, that's been the case. But over the last several election cycles, it's been polarizing more by race. And

It's a 50-50 state. There's a lot going on with North Carolina. I can get into the weeds there if you want. But part of it is that racial dynamic that's happening. Part of it is the effect of gerrymandering. So you have a state that's basically 50-50 Democrat and conservative that has a Republican supermajority in the statehouse. That's all because of gerrymandering rather than the votes of the people. But at the same time, you have parts of the state, the mountainous parts in the

that because their soil and altitude wasn't good for cotton, never had extensive slavery. Places like Asheville have a completely different vibe today that are in the mountains than other places that are lower altitude and closer to the coast. Yeah, wow. Also a lot of universities there that I imagine bring a lot of... What a perfect segue because the next topic is education. Look at that. So education, how do we fold education into this divide?

Well, it didn't used to be the case that education was very predictive of whether you're a Democrat or a Republican. And it's still not very predictive today if you're not white, which is interesting. Oh. So education is predictive mostly for white voters. So if you're white and don't have a college degree, you're very highly likely to favor Republicans. If you're white and you do have a college degree, it's sort of 50-50. There's a lot of variability, but more likely to favor Democrats.

And part of what goes on there with education, it's complicated because we look at this difference between college educated people and people without a college education. And we tend to say, well, that means that going to college makes you liberal. Or once you get smart and educated, you will naturally be liberal. Right. And neither of those really seems to be the case. The biggest driver of that effect is that more liberal families are sending their kids to college compared to more conservative families.

So if you look at how liberal or conservative people are when they show up to college and how liberal or conservative they are when they graduate, there's almost no change. Oh, wow. Interesting. So it's a selection effect or a sorting effect primarily. The exception to that is that there does seem to be some evidence that the experience of being in college changes.

leads to changes around racial attitudes and around understandings of what racism is. That tends to pull toward democratic voting. That would probably be your personal experience, yeah? Oh, for sure. I grew up in a town called Maceo that has 400 people in it. That was outside of a bigger town called Owensboro that has like 50,000. So that was the big city. But I think I hadn't met a black person. 100% white, the population. You grow up in an environment like that. And if

And if you're seeing on the TV news about like racial disparities and poverty or crime or things like that, I think the natural interpretation is me and everybody I grew up with, we don't commit crimes. We're the good people. And so you attribute it so easily to something essentially different about Black people and white people. It took going to college for me

And explicitly learning about the history of slavery and Jim Crow and segregation and all of these things that today we call systemic racism. Oh, I would have thought the effect would have been more just being around those people. Yeah, exposure. Like they say, like the Vietnam War was one of the best things that ever happened for race relations. It was like one of the first times people were forced to live with one another in an integrated army. Yeah, that's part of it, too, because, I mean, going to college was the first time I'd been around a diverse community.

group of people period so it's partially the experience but it's also partially the learning of history stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare

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I want to talk about income now because income also is, this is a big one. Predictive. Well, yeah. And then I think we have some stereotypes about how it works and then maybe you can enlighten us how it actually works. But what are the stereotypes about how income is affecting our politics?

Right. Well, the stereotype is that poor people vote Republican against their economic self-interest and that rich people vote Democrat sometimes against their self-interest too, right? Because if you're a rich person and you vote for Democrats, they might raise your taxes. And we have this trope that working class people vote Republican and professionals vote Democrat. Yeah. It's...

half true, but it's also misleading. Depends on how you define working class. So the way that pollsters define working class is usually do you have a college degree or not? Because you can measure it in a simple question. By that metric, yeah, people with a college degree are more likely to vote Democrat. People without a college degree are more likely to vote Republican. But if you look at income, that's correlated the opposite direction. People who are poorer are more likely to vote Democrat. And people who are richer are more likely to vote Republican.

Oh, that makes sense to me. It makes sense, but it's not what we're told. In recent elections, I feel like everything got so topsy-turvy. I think for so long it was this, right? If you are below the poverty line, it benefits you to vote for a Democrat because there's more help there. Social welfare. But it just

flipped, I feel like, in the past couple elections where people now think that poor people are voting Republican because they're ignorant or whatever, all these problematic stereotypes. I think the left is seeing the person they put on the news that's on the right, and it's the guy with the Go Brandon flag at the truck pole. And then they go, OK, that's the right.

The guy's got no money, yet he's going to vote for this guy who could help him. I think that's what's like infecting our stereotype about it. Does that make any sense? It's also really confusing because people with college degrees do earn more than people without a college degree. And so we conflate the two. It's really hard for us to separate in our heads. If you have a college degree, you're more likely to vote.

Democrat, but if you're wealthy, you're more likely to vote Republican. But people with college degrees tend to be more wealthy. So how do we separate that? Statistically, we can do that. No problem. You just run a regression analysis. But people don't do that in our ordinary intuition. Yeah, you could easily credit the income for what is actually the diploma divide.

Right. Talk about the lottery winners. This is a fun... I told you about this study in which people were randomly assigned in our experiment to be told that they made more or less than other people and it changed their attitudes about meritocracy and stuff. In the lottery studies, this is a way of getting outside the lab and looking at people in real life and...

The cool thing about a lottery is that it's actual random assignment in life. It's literally random choice. So if you look at lottery winners compared to other people who play the lottery but haven't won, people after they've won a lottery, they start voting more conservative. That self-interest in terms of caring about marginal tax rates and stuff like that kicks in pretty immediately.

But if you ask them, is it your self-interest that has led you to care about this stuff? They would probably tell you, no, no, these are the values I've always held. Oh, wow. That less tax equals more job opportunities and overall is better for the economy. You just go out and find an answer that would help you maintain your self-image of being a good person. Right.

It's hard to know if they believe it or not, though, too. That's what scares me because I'm reading this and I go, well, I'm not a unique alien. I'm a human being with all the same biases and hiccups and pitfalls. And as I've made more money, has that affected my opinion on taxes? I still vote liberal, but yeah, I would go, well, what's interesting is this state, which has the highest taxes available,

does not have the best services, does not have the best roads, does not have the best landscaping, does not have fewer people on the street. So I go into a place of, does it work? You know, that's, I guess, probably my own way to be against being taxed at 50% and still feel like a good person. Right. So have you,

you become more sympathetic to like more libertarian ideas over time as you have more money? Or do you think that didn't change? No, in fact, weirdly, I was libertarian when I was broke. And then post 2008 financial meltdown, when I learned about credit default swaps, I was like, oh, no, no, we need a lot of regulation.

I see. Like the system, Adam Smith and laissez-faire, it's too complicated. So no, I went the other direction. But as I get older, there are liberal policies around me in California that I'm totally disenfranchised by. There are a lot of liberal policies that I've seen in action here that I no longer believe in, but it hasn't overridden my higher calling of reproductive rights and inclusion. There's a lot of things. It's complicated. And it's hard to track. Am I getting older or have I gotten wealthier? I don't know. Yeah.

I'm just a human trying to approach being objective about myself. I do think here in LA and New York, probably, it is weird because we do have such a huge wealth disparity and a lot of very wealthy people here. And yet it is a consistent liberal vote over and over and over again. I'm from Georgia. And I think in Georgia, what you're saying adds up to me 100%. The

more money you have there, the more the people I know who have more money vote Republican and people who have less money vote Democratic. And I think that's more indicative of the rest of the country. But how did we get to the point where we were not voting for self-interest? Yeah, it's hard to think about it on an individual level, right? Because over time, we get older and on average, we get richer and we get more educated, too. But

But in the aggregate, if you pull these things apart, they point in opposite directions. More education pulls for more liberal voting, more income pulls for more Republican voting. What you guys were just describing is about the ways that issues come and go. You can have a complex mix of beliefs about political issues and...

And even if you tally up how many of your beliefs are liberal ones and how many of them are conservative ones, that's not really what predicts how you vote. It's more about which social groups do you feel like are your people? Yeah.

And so in the example of California, people might be higher income, but they will be horrified by being a Trump supporter. Right, right. Because it's more cultural and it's more social. Even if they are more libertarian or conservative about tax policy or things like that. Again and again, I come back to how important the social...

social groups are. And those are the things that reassure us that we're a good and reasonable person and a good member of that group. I think that's so accurate and I observe it in others. And I'm probably approaching that point where it's like, there are people that we have liked in the past that are expressively liberal, but everything they're saying is

It's not. They're not going to give up that identity marker despite the fact that all of their opinions really are now conservative. And I'm comfortable saying I'm a centrist now. In a way, that's hopeful, right? The fact that we have issues and principles that overlap so much more than we think we do. So you just explain ways that you're on the left and ways that you're on the right. If you...

talk to a Trump supporter, you could probably find just as many ways that they're in support of issues on the left. And it defies our stereotypes of people being just 100% drunk to Kool-Aid and buy into everything that their side believes. And that's actually a good basis for being able to talk to each other and to stay connected because a lot of the stuff we believe is more in common than the groups we profess to be a part of. My hunch is we're both getting hijacked by...

identity. That's like my deepest real feeling is that I think people on the right are getting hijacked by it. And I think people on the left are getting hijacked by it. You look at these weird polls, like I said, 70 plus percent didn't agree with Roe v. Wade. So that's interesting. Why are we all acting like we're enemies when 70 percent of us agree on that?

Okay, let's get into solutions. The book is fantastic. People should read the book. You really get into rural versus urban country people. Will you tell us water witching really quick before we get into solutions? I want to get into solutions. Right. Water witching. So sometimes it's called witching. Sometimes it's called dousing or divining. It's this folk way of trying to find water where to dig your well using like a forked tree branch, right? So we did this in my family. We had well water. And so every few years it would get stopped up here and have to

have a new well sunk. And so he would go cut a branch out of the tree and witch to find the right place to sink the next well. And I was just captivated by this as a little kid. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. It's magic. Yeah, it was magic. And I wanted him to teach me how to do it. And finally, one time he did. I did it. And as I was

Walking along the yard, holding the two branches of this Y-shaped stick, I felt it starting to pull down toward the ground. And I held on and it twisted so hard that the bark twisted off in my hands. Oh, wow. And I was just blown away by this magic. And my dad had this whole theory about how it works with the electricity in your body resonating with the electricity flowing in the water and all of this stuff.

At the time, I was fully on board. And I remember years later in college, learning that this folk practice is common yet debunked scientifically and all of the reasons that we psychologically fool ourselves into believing that the branch is pulling down when it's actually our own unconscious emotions twisting the branch. And I think it's a great example of

Yeah.

And it was about like me bonding with my dad. And those social experiences are so much more powerful than any kind of fact.

or evidence you can provide. It's a good example of the way that our emotional experiences are pulling us in directions politically in ways that you can't really hope to override just with more facts. Especially Second Amendment, I'd imagine. Yes, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I grew up shooting guns. This is another one, by the way. This is one of these polls that doesn't map like reproductive rights. Yeah.

The vast majority of Americans are in favor of the Second Amendment. Yeah, and the vast majority of Americans want gun control. You shouldn't be able to have an AR-15 or whatever. Yeah, so the public's not conflicted about this. It's the politicians who are using it as a wedge item, right? So I'm...

sort of like the average American, I'm not horrified and terrified by guns because I grew up with them. Right. I think it would be a good idea to not be able to have an automatic weapon and kill many people at a whim. And a lot of people are just emotionally horrified by the idea of even having guns because they've never been around them and they seem like a scary object. A lot of that has more to do with our personal experiences and our emotional reactions than a reasoned policy analysis.

Yeah. Okay, so winging it together is the last chapter. This is kind of a sweet way to think about this. Tell us about winging it together. A big part of the argument in the book is that we don't have these deeply divided ideologies. Most of us don't have much of an ideology at all. We have these social groups that divide us, and we sort of are winging it by just finding something to justify our perspective that makes us seem like a good and reasonable person. And so if we can realize that I'm probably doing that...

And you're also probably doing that. It sets the stage for being able to accept that I'm just a person trying to make sense of the world and you're just a person trying to make sense of the world. And you're trying to be good, actually. Yeah, we're trying to make the world a better place. You have to grant people that. And it's almost impossible to do online. You have to be talking to an individual to be able to do that well, I think. But if you are able to

realize that they're just trying to make sense of the world and be a good person and make the world a better place. But they're starting from different starting assumptions and different groups that they're trying to be a good member of. It's much easier to have a good civil conversation. It really helps if you understand about the psychological immune system and that psychological bottom line that I'm a good person. You can say, well, if this person

is disagreeing with me, what is that doing for them? How is that reassuring them that they're a good person? And how is my position reassuring me that I'm a good person? And then you're two humans trying to do the best you can to both be good, reasonable humans. And if you're in that situation, it's much better than yelling at each other.

having a fight online or having an argument at Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah, and also I'll be stealing Jelani Cobb. Do you know who Jelani Cobb is? He's a Columbia professor. I heard him speak this weekend and he told this incredible story. So this is his story.

I think what can happen when you start there is this example. Jelani is a Brooklynite. He hates the Red Sox, was flying to LA to see the Dodgers play the Red Sox. And obviously he's going there with the hopes that the Dodgers will destroy the Red Sox. And he's sitting next to a guy on the plane

And that guy is also a New Yorker flying to L.A. to see this game. And he assumes that he's hoping that the Red Sox will get slashed. And the guy says, I'm hoping the Red Sox win. And he's immediately can't compute why this New Yorker would be doing that. What a betrayal of being a New Yorker. What kind of guy is this guy? Was he secretly always a Red Sox fan? Yeah.

And he continues to talk to the guy and he discovers that in this guy's rationale, the Yankees had lost to the Red Sox to go play the Dodgers. So if the Dodgers beat the Red Sox, it means the Yankees were the third best team. But if the Red Sox smashed the Dodgers, the Yankees are probably the second best team.

And John, he's like, that makes a ton of sense. I'm not going to be rooting for the Red Sox in this contest. But wow, wouldn't have even thought of this bizarre way you could come to this. And it's pretty defendable. Right. It's not going to be my opinion, but it changes the person to a maniac who's rooting for the Red Sox when he's a New Yorker into notes in a weird way or a different way than his still supporting the Yankees somehow.

And I think so many of our divides are that way. We're assuming the kind of worst case scenario of why they've come to this opinion. They have hate in their heart or they have all these different things. And you might minimally learn that there's a different cause for this thing. And you can still hate the Red Sox. You can still vote the way you want to vote and have all your core values.

Yeah. When you say, why do you believe this? Normally people will hear, why do you believe this policy? And they'll say, well, I think it will be effective for the following reasons. It's a fundamentally different question to say, why do you believe this? And by that, I mean, what does this do for you as a person? How does this relate to you being a good person? Yeah. In that case,

If that person got a chance to explain their reasoning, then it immediately makes sense. In politics, the first layer is not that. The first time you ask somebody, why do you think this? They give you a talking point. They give you a piece of evidence from some study they heard about. And then you start refuting that with some other evidence. None of that's getting at what's actually driving these differences. So I think a better question is to literally ask the person, what difference?

Does that policy have to do with you being a good member of your social groups and asking people to engage about how that connects to them as a person rather than just recite what they heard about some policy? Yeah, they want to give you the factual proof of why this opinion is the only opinion that one could have if they were rational and sane. Not at all what impact it has on their own identity or their sense of why it's a good thing.

Right. And if you give people that opportunity, in my experience, you can ask people personally, why is this something appealing to you as a person? And a lot of times people give you a story about, well, I grew up with guns and I'm comfortable around them. And this is why I think they're actually good for the following reasons. And then they're talking about themselves. It's just much easier to accept that this is a decent person sitting across the table from me, that we just happen to disagree on an issue.

Yeah. I'm so delighted you wrote this book. It's something I think about all the time and it's very disheartening where we're at. And I hope that this book can help people, again, not all come up with the same conclusion or opinion, but not have to scream, shout, punch, kick, shoot at. You know, I don't think that those are the ways forward.

So I hope everyone reads Good, Reasonable People, The Psychology Behind America's Dangerous Divide. Keith, you've done it two for two. Great book. Keep going. Oh, thanks. Well, great meeting you. Thanks for coming. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Unfortunately, they made some mistakes. It was Halloween yesterday. I know, but before we talk about Halloween, which I can't wait to do. Okay. Favorite night of the year. Your favorite. You haven't commented on my new hat.

Well, we were talking about serious stuff. We were really talking about some serious stuff. But I did notice it, and it's very cool. Isn't it cute? Yeah. Good job, Aaron Weekly. It's a Ted Seeger's hat. Did Aaron design it? Greg Davis designed it. Greg Davis is our, like, genius graphic guy for Ted Seeger's. Cool. But Aaron, I think, had the idea and the patch. Whatever. It's cute. I'll tell you who didn't do it. Me. And it arrived, and I was like, wow, they knocked it out of the park. It looks great. Hats are fun. I...

I just scratched myself doing that trick. Oh no. That wasn't even a good trick. I didn't even see it. Oh shit. I wanted to snap my head off really quick for, I thought that was going to look cool for like one second, even while I was doing it. I was like, this isn't going to look that cool. And then I scratched my forehead while I was doing it. Bit gone bad. You know how you can like this with a cowboy hat? Oh. You can reverse. Yeah. Pull it off from behind and do a roll. Yeah, spin. Tuck and roll. You guys don't call a flip a flip, right? It's a tuck? Back tuck, yeah. Back tuck. Yeah. If it's backwards. BT. BT.

Also, if you do three toe touches and into a back flip, you call that a triple toe back. Triple toe back sounds like reverse back. Anything with back sounds weirdly perverse. It does. And I like it. Okay, Halloween was last night. Unfortunately for our listeners, Halloween was a while ago. That's another thing I want to address. Sorry, guys. Halloween was a while ago, but it's... Really fresh in our memory range.

Yeah. It was yesterday to us. We'll be transparent. Also, because by the time you're listening to this, an election will have happened. So the fact that we haven't talked about that is not because, you know, obviously the world – a major event has happened in the world and we can't talk about it yet because – We don't know the results. We just don't know the results. Yeah.

And maybe even while you're thinking about this, you're probably decorating your home with some hints of autumnal color and some turkey decorations. You might even be transitioning into Turkey Day. I know. I hope. I don't know if Alison Roman is going to do her...

Thanksgiving episode again. But last year, that was my entire recipe list for Monsgiving. For Monsgiving. Yeah. Okay, was Allison. Yeah. Well, I could see the challenge for her is like, once you do a Thanksgiving meal, what are you going to all of a sudden do Hawaiian pizza next year? It's kind of a one and done meal, no? She's done it.

a couple times though. And she changes it? Yeah, she adds new things, changes it up. Okay. Some things are classics like the stuffing. She pretty much keeps that standard. Turkey always, yeah? We gotta... Last year she mixed it up. She did turkey legs. Ooh.

Which was great. Dark meat, yeah. Yeah, it was really good. I like a dark meat. I don't know if people remember, but I made a big mistake and I was able to text her. That's my privilege in life. I was able to text her for help. She's pregnant, Allison, which a big congratulations to her. Oh, wonderful. Very, very exciting. Well, maybe she'll incorporate that in. Maybe there'll be more pureed foods for babies. Pureed. Would you want pureed stuffing?

No. No, yeah. Part of it is the texture. What sounds grossest on the menu pureed? The turkey or the stuffing? Oh, turkey. Meat pureed is not good. Can you puree meat? Yeah, you could just blend it. You have to puree it and then they pour it into a form and that's patty. They don't puree it, dude. Well, isn't it liver and stuff? Trigger warning. You know, I heard something horrible when I was in the house the other day.

Your house. You were eating your elk and Kristen came in. She looked in the fridge and she said, did you finish the elk? And I said, oh, no. You're doing this too? She said, did you eat my elk? Now there's his and hers elk in the fridge. Oh, no. Well, I asked with fear, oh, no. Are you doing this too? And she is. Yeah. It's weird you have this position because you did take a bite and you didn't dislike it. I did not dislike the taste, but I really...

I feel it in my body. You do. I feel grossed out by it. You do. But if you think about, and I'm not a non-GMO organic. That's just not my vibe. It's not my bag. Even though I'm not that way, you would agree at least that the Holstein cow is.

It hardly resembles this thing that we started with. I mean, it is like, you know, it's a very refined product of selective breeding. We've kind of created this thing. Yeah, I agree. And elk is like our ancestors were pounding elk. They were. I know. That was a good animal for us to try to bring down. I think you're right. I just don't want to be my ancestors. That's fair.

Yeah, you want indoor plumbing. Yeah. Healthcare. You just reminded me I got to make a dentist appointment. Oh, what's happening? Well, I'm taking it on all sides now from Richard Isaacson to my internist to anyone who finds out I'm not going. Okay. Let's have it. Okay. They finally wore me down. I got to go. The arm cherries?

Oh, they're mad too. Yeah. Not as mad as they were about the toe, understandably. But I got to get down there. Okay. I think that's a good idea. I need, it's time for me to go to mine too. My great dentist, Appa. Oh, no. Yes. We are. It's not payola. I love it. I think it's payola. It's not. Do you have a coupon code for them?

Do you have a URL? I also, I just want to own that. I know it's frustrating to be around me at times because this was last night's declaration I made. And even as I was saying it out loud, I kind of thought they're so sick of this. So,

We generally brush our teeth as a family because you got to kind of oversee them and make sure they're not telling you. So it ends up we all kind of brush our teeth in our bathroom. And so I had brushed my teeth and then and I did a great job not eating a bunch of candy. But I was a little peckish because I was in the car for so long. Yes. So I took a couple of these oat bars with me to bed and Delta saw that.

And she said, post-brush. Yeah, post-brush. And she goes, daddy, you can't eat after you brush your teeth. And to which I responded, and I don't even know if this is true, but I vaguely remember hearing this, that the reason you're brushing your teeth is that over a certain amount of hours, the food on there turns into tartar and then plaque. And what you're really doing when you brush your teeth is interrupting that phase before it can turn into plaque.

Okay. So I said to them that, and really my only commitment is to interrupt that phase every 12 hours. And I'm going to wake up in the morning and brush my teeth before that phase could have happened. And I could look at all their faces and they're like, A, I don't know if this, this doesn't sound right. B, why is this guy, why does he got to do everything so fucking different? Either brush your teeth after the snacks, but guess what? Or just say, I know I'm not supposed to, but I'm doing it. I'm being naughty. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's the truth. Maybe I'll apologize to them. Well, no. It is the truth that I'm being naughty, but it's also true that I believe what I said. Okay. What do we do with that? I don't know. I'm with them. Yeah, of course. And you're subject to a lot of this stuff, you know? Was it the first time you were like, oh.

Oh, I lost them. Oh, I've definitely thought that in the past. I had a moment of recognizing. But then some part of me is like, isn't that the fingerprint of life? Like, you know all the rules and then you kind of cobble together these ones you subscribe to and you don't. And that's just kind of your little, your art piece of your life is like, yeah, I know. And that doesn't make any sense. That's in contradiction to this other thing. I know. We do this. That's it.

That's what you say. Yeah. You don't say, well, I'm actually just interrupting the cycle of plaque. So, because if they went into their bed and ate a bunch of candy, that'd be bad. Yeah, it would be really sugary. Well, then, because I recognized they were like, they didn't know, they don't know what to do with, you know, that whole, with me. And then they all left to sleep elsewhere. Yeah.

And I was laying in bed. I was like, let's get out of here. I didn't have a moment where I was like, am I sure on this thing I just said? Rob, do you want to look it up? Like surely there's sugar sitting on your teeth for eight hours. It's bad. Even if it doesn't go through its whole cycle. By the way, I can already read the comments in my mind. There's going to be some dentists going like, that cycle you're quoting doesn't exist. I got myself open to the idea that I'm wrong. That's great. I don't know about that. Sure.

I think you're wrong. Yeah. Maybe not about that. Like maybe there's something to be said about the plaque, but it's still bacteria is forming. That's why your mouth smells and it's bacteria. Well, so food turns the tart on your teeth in about 24 to 72 hours. Okay. Oh, wow. So I could be brushing my teeth once every three days it sounds like.

But bacteria in your mouth mixed with saliva and food particles to form a soft, sticky film called plaque. This can happen as soon as 20 minutes after eating. 20 minutes. But then how long can you have plaque on your teeth before you get some damage? That's a good search.

We need to have a dentist on. We should have a dentist on. I didn't expect this episode to be so educational. Yeah, we should. Yeah. Speaking of, this is a sad transition, but it is important that I say it. Okay, okay. Because... Do you want... I can give you an answer really quick. Oh, yeah. A plaque can start to become damaging within a few days if left unremoved.

But it builds, though. It hardens into tartar within 24 to 72 hours. Okay, so I'm not completely off base. No. This whole little story I have is rooted in something. Thank God. Okay, but Rob, will you type in why do you have to brush your teeth? Well, come on now. No, that's the— When you wake up in the morning, it's a quarter to one. You want to have a little fun. You brush your teeth.

Did you make that up? You brush your teeth. No, that's a fun song you sing with your babies when they're little. Brushing at night removes food particles, acid, and bacteria that have built up throughout the day. Brushing in the morning removes bacteria that may have built up overnight and causes bad breath. Yeah. Bacteria is... You know that heart disease starts in the mouth. I... Well... Do you know this? I know...

That's a huge statement. Heart disease starts from a lot of different causes. It can start from a lot of different things. What can definitely happen is infections in the mouth can go to the brain. Infections in the mouth can go to the lungs. Bacteria. I just want to say...

I don't eat every night after I brush my teeth. It's a one-off. It's once in a while. But I will tell you, my breath isn't better or my breath's not great in the morning no matter whether I ate a couple bars or not. Yeah. You know, it's not like you brush your teeth at night and then you wake up in the morning and your breath smells great. No. No. It's causing more bacteria. Sure. And then it's harder to get rid of that bacteria the more you do that. Let's say one more thing. Okay. You got to make yourself brush your teeth at night.

You don't have to in the morning. Like for me in the morning, I cannot wait to clean things up. But at night, things are fine in your mouth. Yeah. I'm not like, it's not like come 10 p.m. I'm like, oh God. If I skip brushing teeth, it's because I've skipped everything. I'm just like, I can't move. Yeah. How often do you do that? Because I think it's probably only six times a year.

Where I go, fuck it, we're not brushing our teeth tonight. And you're gonna, but then, and I go, you can handle one night of not brushing your teeth. But then I go, it's gonna be a pattern. I get nervous of my addictive personality. And then like, if I skip once, I'll probably, I'll be dealing with this for six months. But that's not been the case. Okay, that's good. Yeah, I mean, I'm not gonna lie and say I've never done it. I've done it. Sure.

But it's very rare. Especially for you if you're tipsy. I think it's much harder when you're tipsy to be handling all your chores. Yeah, that's true. That's why people that are drunk fuck without condoms more than sober people do. Like a lot of decisions get made. That's true. But I have seen...

Such, I care a lot about my face. I have to, unfortunately, care a lot about my skincare routine. Yes, I have to. You've got your skin. I got my hair, my fitting hair. But because I have to be very, very, very diligent about the skincare routine, I don't really skip the brushing because I'm already in there. Yeah. It's like if I'm already up by the sink, it's not a problem. It's the getting up. I agree. I agree.

And I'm gonna add, and I think I've already talked about the sun here before. So forgive me if I have, but, and thank God Erin really, I have a couple of different people that relate to me. I hate showering so much. Now when I'm in there, I like it, but theoretically I'm like, it's such a waste of time. It's just like this chunk of time where I can't, I don't do anything else productive. I have a real hard time with it. The other thing, a bad habit of mine is when I'm brushing my teeth, 'cause only one hand is required,

It's the only time in my life I'm insistent I can multitask. I'm always like, okay, I'm gonna brush my teeth, but I'm gonna walk into the room and grab my socks and I'm gonna walk over here. I'm gonna do all this stuff. I'm gonna pee while I'm brushing my teeth. I'm so annoyed that I have to spend a minute and a half doing this thing that I ended up trying to do a bunch of things. And inevitably what always happens, I can't learn this lesson enough. I find that I've now taken on something that requires both my hands. And I just have a toothbrush hanging out of my house. It doesn't save me any time. I always somehow ended up needing both hands.

I have noticed this in the movies where people are like brushing their teeth and doing other stuff. And like they have the toothbrush in their mouth and they're doing stuff. And like that's a big trope in movies and television. Yeah. And I can't do it. There's toothpaste everywhere. Everywhere. You ever get toothpaste everywhere? You ever been brushing your teeth and get it everywhere? Yeah.

I'm dying to see. I want to walk into your bathroom and it's just fucking all over your shirt and something's in your hair. Eyebrows are covered in toothpaste. It's not, but it's an effort to not. Do you look like- It's on my face. Yeah, do you look like the woman from Chimp Crazy when she has the numbing cream on her lips? Tanya, yeah, I do. I think if you're brushing your teeth properly, like you're really getting it places. Sure, sure, sure. Maybe you use an excessive amount of toothpaste and you get too much foaming. How much toothpaste are you supposed to use?

I think less than we do as with everything, right? We always use way more than we need to. So my hunch is, you know, more. But I would like you to take a picture tonight of how much paste you put on your teeth. Maybe we'll post that. Okay. Because I know people are dying to know. A pea-sized amount. A pea? I'm going much bigger than a pea for sure. I bet I'm going three to four peas. This is big toothpaste. Oh, big toothpaste is convinces. They're trying to get us. Well, because in the commercial, you grow up watching these great commercials and they do that beautiful thing.

Wavy. Yeah. Perfect minty. Swirl. Do you have one in your mind? Because mine goes to an exact one. Yep. What's yours? It's green and it has that red stripe in it. It's the one that had three colors. Yes. What was that brand? It was like Aquadite or something. Aquafine. Yeah.

You're right. It was aqua something. It was like aqua fresh. Aqua fresh. They have the very best insert shot of toothpaste of all time. And yet I never used aqua fresh in my entire life. That's not a toothpaste I've ever used. I use Arm & Hammer. Love it. Yeah, we don't need to get into that. Of course we do. Yes, I love it. And that one, you can't make a swirl. Rob, can you put things on this TV? Or no, that's got to... Yeah, no, I can. You can? Will you put up the image of the aqua fresh? Yes.

Yep. Like if you can find that classic thing that Monica and I are both thinking of, maybe this is Mandela effect though. Maybe we're going to see it and it's like red. That's another good one. It's on the box. Who is red? Colgate? Remember that used to be red. I think you're thinking of like cinnamon gum.

I don't think I'm thinking of cinnamon gum, but I know one of the toothpastes was red. Anywho, should we get into Halloween while Rob pulls it up? We got to get into Halloween, but I want to share my sad news that was connected to dentistry. Okay. Because on Sync, we talked a lot about dentists.

Okay. And so I do want to share with people, we posted about it, but I know a lot of our listeners listen to this. And so if you missed it, we did decide to bring Sync to a close. These are hard decisions to make, obviously. They're always sad decisions. And I'm really, really proud of that show. As you should be. And I know Liz is as well. But, you know, the real truth is everyone is spread...

So thin. Everyone, her, me, all of us. The team. And it's like at some point you really realize you're at capacity and you have to figure out where to make space for yourself in your life and other endeavors that I don't know about yet. Yeah. You're pretty much, you're either, well, that's okay. So I'm looking for the actual, like a photo of the toothpaste on, um,

A toothbrush. But boy, look at that. That already brings back. Is that even still a, are they still rocking and rolling? I haven't bought aqua fresh in some time. But also the one I'm thinking of is green. It's green with like a red stripe in it. Well, this is harder to find than I thought. I just want to wrap up that. Yeah, yeah, please. That, um. Oh, yes. Yeah, we really. I was, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm not giving it the respect I totally deserve. I was so distracted by toothpaste.

in my audacious claim of last night. Yeah, you're either recording or editing all day, every day. Also, our job specifically, of course, understandably, it's a big job. There's a lot of things to approve. There's a lot of things to do. There's a lot of things that producing requires. And so I just...

Schedules are hard too. Schedules are hard. And I went through this. So of course I had F1 and I absolutely loved it, but you know, it was, it was a little bit more work than I could handle in addition to some other things, which I talked about earlier, about cease and desist letters and whatnot. But still it was, it pushed it over to where it's like, well, now this is pretty much all I do. And I'm,

I'm less good at the primary job because I am not showing up as rested and excited to explore all this stuff. It just, you know, there is some kind of critical mass where... There is a critical mass. And I guess also part of why I want to say that is I want to also remind people and give them permission to like, to take a second and ask yourself if you are at your max capacity and if you can really take some... Because it's very hard. It's really hard to like...

First of all, and anything is very hard. Well, especially something you love. And something you love and something that people love. Yeah, that's the biggest. That's really hard. It feels like you're letting everybody down. I have felt terrible running into F1 fans when they're really disappointed. We have like incredible listeners, incredible. And I do feel sad. I also wasn't going to be able to do it in a way anymore that was servicing those people. And you just have to make hard decisions. It sucks, but it's part of life.

It's part of life. Yeah. So that's that. Tons of love. I always love being on. Yeah. It was a great show. I'm really proud of that show and I'm really proud. I was thinking about this the other day. I think potentially the most proud of Race to 35. Yes. I would imagine so because we hear so often that.

How impactful that was. Yeah. To a lot of women. Yeah. Maybe some men. Well, we did hear a man, a man, a man. We heard a man tell you they were grateful for the perspective because they couldn't have really understood what was going on. Yeah. So yeah, some men too. Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

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Halloween? Halloween. I mean, we got to because now it would be 17 weeks after Halloween if we didn't. I mean, we can sum it up. Yeah. You were, you and Anna were the Olsen twins. We were married. Anna told me last night she was Ashley. She is. Yeah. Because she's an A. Oh, right. And you're an M. Yeah. Yeah.

So we were Mary-Kate and Ashley straight to VHS, the You're Invited video. RSVP. That's what they say. You got it, dude. And when I put on my outfit, which was a t-shirt and short alls and little tennis shoes and a backwards hat. It was a jumper. It was a jump jump. A jumpy. It was a backwards hat. It was a baby's outfit, kind of. I gave myself some bangs with my hair. Uh-huh. And I looked in the mirror and I was like, I...

I look nine. Oh, big time. Yeah, you looked hysterically... I looked so young. Yeah. You looked like a little guy. It made me happy. It was like, God, I can still look nine. I can still play nine. Yeah. In case...

The opportunity arises. Yeah. So online. When is that? And then tonight we're going as Mary-Kate and Ashley, the row era. Oh, nice. Yeah. Nice, nice, nice. It's a dual day thing. Now you. Okay. So we were, and to remind everyone, it's assigned. It's assigned. For you. The girls vote. The girls fell in love with Anchorman this year. So we went as the Channel 4 News team. Oh, I'm going to forget people's name, but I know the actor's name.

Lincoln was Paul Rudd. Yeah. She looked incredible. She really did. Mustache, chest hair, cool leisure leather jacket. And I will say...

The funnest part of Halloween for me last night was I saw the magic of what the Groundlings is, where you put on a wig and a mustache and all of a sudden the character's there. I know. You look at yourself and you know exactly how to move. And Link, it was just on fire. Every photo of her, she is in deep, deep character. Yes. And she's crushing. And then we discovered something else. Have you seen the pictures of Kristen in the photos? No.

Yeah, I think so. I think this is next to impossible. That's a full impersonation of Ron Burgundy just in the face. Can you see that from where you're at? Yeah. Do you need to hold it closer? Yeah, no, I can see it. I don't know if I've ever seen someone do a full impersonation just by moving their face. Yeah. There's no voice or walk. Yeah, it's great. You look at that photo and you go, oh, she's playing. That's Ron Burgundy. For sure. That's clearly Ron Burgundy. I was...

I'm not going to claim I was good at Champkind at all. This is me as Champkind. That's good. Yeah. And you know him. Did you send it? I did. My birthday buddy. Your birthday buddy. Sweet, sweet David Koechner. Yeah, that was a fun costume. I kind of liked it because I could still dance in it. When you were just walking around, it just looked like you were in a suit. Yeah, kind of like a fashion forward suit. When you weren't wearing your hat. Right. That hat was hot.

I had to take the hat off in the car. Yeah. And we had Shake Shack truck, which was awesome. It was great. All the neighbors came and ate hamburgers. Yeah, so cute. Delicious. By the way, I had the gluten-free. I don't generally ever like it. It was phenomenal. I ended up eating two. Did you get in an hamburger?

I did. I did. So delicious. And then the hayride. So why don't you, I was in the car the entire time. Yeah. But I added this year black lights, eight black lights. I added a fog machine. Uh-huh. It was, it was fantastic. Okay, good, good, good. You only took one ride though, yeah? I don't know who was counting. I wasn't counting.

I normally take one ride. Sure. Because I like an excuse to walk. You know this. And it's fun. The neighborhood's gotten more and more and more fun. It's really every year it gets better and better and better. Like this is, I am so like touched and heart filled by the notion that I live, it reminds me of Michigan. Like I live in a neighborhood now where people love Halloween and they put a lot of effort in and they invite people into their homes and everyone's in a great mood. So cool.

God, is it fun. And there's these little pods of people walking through the neighborhood. And they generally get on the hayride in a pod. So I get to see like different groups of friends off the back. It's so sweet. It does feel like maybe the only time that strangers are like amongst each other. We have some new members of the neighborhood and they're going hard. Like they've shown up. Like this is a neighbor that just moved in. This is her first Halloween and she turned her whole house into...

An exhibit. I did go to that party. I didn't go through. Oh, you didn't. So I just went to the end. Oh, I thought you did. Cause when I pulled up, we had our pod on, they all got out there and then cycled through and then got back on. Right. I had our, yeah, I wasn't on the hayride then. So I was just at the party. You were protesting the hayride at that point. I gave Lincoln a lot of praise. I got to throw out there too, that Delta in the picture is incredible. Cause she was playing brick.

Oh, my gosh. And she looked so dumb in every photo. She made herself look, she was just like, like she nailed it. I know. I was the weak link in the family. Everyone really was amazing. And then Rob, Wobby Wob came with his family. Yes, did you have fun, Wobby Wob? Yep, yep. The boys had a blast. Good. They're so cute. I think I knew how tiny Vinny was, but I didn't know how tiny Vinny was. When you guys showed up, Rob, and I looked at Vinny, I thought,

This little person is too tiny for the world. No, he's so cute. He's impossibly cute. He might be the cutest kid I've ever seen in my life. I know. I think so. What was he?

He was a mystery machine. Yeah, mystery machine. Oh, yeah. Your whole crew was... Scooby-Doo. Scooby-Doo. It was really cute. Yeah. So fun. Yeah, Vinny's still the smallest in his preschool. Oh. With just the cutest face on earth. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Beautiful skin. I know. Yeah. These mixed children. I mean, I haven't said this... Enough? Yeah.

I haven't said it enough or out loud really. But when we were in Austin, I'm going to get in trouble for this, but whatever. We were in Austin. I met an amazing armchairie when I was at a sushi. Oh, Rob's Sushi Place, Uchi. This is Uchiba. But I was at the sushi counter and I happened to be sitting next to an armchairie. She introduced herself to me.

And she was so lovely. Uh-huh. And she was gorgeous. Strikingly beautiful. She was beautiful. And I come to find out she's half Indian. Now, did she supply that information or did you inquire? The person who was with her. Okay. Asked me if I was Indian. Okay. And I said, I hesitated and then I said yes. No duh. Okay.

Because, you know, you know what I always and I'm like, this is my, of course, baggage. But what I want to say is, well, my parents are from India. And that is normally what I say. But I've tried to stop saying that because I'm like, just do it. Just whatever. So anyway, I said yes. And she said she is too. Her mom is Indian. Oh, my gosh. And then I got really committed to procreating Indian.

with somebody not of my race. I need a mixed child because they look like that. And they look like Vinny and Calvin. Like, I think it's important I do this for the world. Yeah, yeah. The combo of all this stuff is really nice. You know what a lot of it might be too is currently a missile pilot.

change is there is still a slice of novelty to it. Like, I wonder how much of it is what you're attracted to is you're seeing novelty. You're seeing some mix of these two ethnicities that you have an idea of what those ethnicities look like on their own. Sure. And so it's, it's all, and I would just say that that, that supports the claim that like, what's beautiful is novelty. Yeah. But I, it wasn't like I looked at her and I was like, Hmm,

I can't figure out what's happening. I didn't think anything about that. It was only when the other lady said it that I was like, oh, that's why. So I'm going to take that on for society. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just letting people know. I might do – I might like have a few different kinds. Okay. Okay, great. This is C. Okay. Okay, so you, of course, did your hayride. Did –

Was there anything new? Was there any big moments? Yeah, I will say this. I've already talked and slash bragged about it a lot is the route itself is quite tight. Yeah. I live for this turn into an alley that is almost impossible. Yeah. And that's enough to do. What has always been on the plate is I'm also DJ. So I've got my playlist, but then I've cycled through it once or twice. Then I feel...

I start fretting over, we need some fresh blood in the mix. So now I'm going through my phone and I'm pulling the trailer and I'm going in the alley. And that's always been on the table. So I'm juggling a little too much. Well, now I added in these smoke machines. Now the smoke machines, unfortunately, you can't just turn them on and have them work. At least the ones I got. Okay. So I have to be...

Also hitting a remote control every, the countdown is 200 seconds. So it's like I fire it up. I start driving 200 seconds later, they shut off. Every time it shuts off, I've got to return on the remote. I got to re-put on 200 seconds on the timer. And then I got, so I was, and I have three of them. So I had on the dashboard, I had like, I have my iPhone on the armrest for the tunes and

And I had these three remotes to operate the fog machine. And I got to refill the fog machines with the fluid every, I don't know, 20 minutes. Sure. So I'm hopping out of the car to refill the things. So I had a lot going on. Okay. But I like a lot going on. Yeah. You know? Did it start on fire at one point? It did smell like fire. Yeah, it smelled terrible. One of them, the only one you could turn on and it would run for a really long time, I had two different brands going.

That one, when it ran out of oil, it kept going and I think it kind of like burnt the oil and all of a sudden, and this is a great thing and he deserves a really special shout out. Ryan Hansen came as Ken on Rollerblades.

It was incredible. And so what he did is held onto the back of the trailer and did tricks. And like he was on his blades going on the route. And then what was helpful about that for me is that when anything happened on back, he could quickly roller blade up to the front and tell me what was happening. Oh, that's... Like one time a little person wanted to get off early. Great. Another person, can we get off at the top? Yeah, I'll stop there. Okay. And then one was he rolled up. He was kind of your assistant. He's like, I think the brakes are on fire. I was like, oh boy. Okay. Yeah. So I was like, okay. Yeah.

The trailer doesn't have brakes. Okay. It's not a big enough trailer. I can't imagine Eric's Tesla's brakes are on fire from this very slow seven mile an hour crawl through the neighborhood. So then I got out like, oh God, do we have some kind of electrical fire? Yeah. And it was that one smoke machine. And yeah, it stunk terribly. It did. My apologies to those folks that were on that. I was on that. Oh. I loved it. Home team got the shit right. That's,

Good, that's what you want. You want it to be us. Yeah. And Molly and I were looking at each other like, hmm, there's a smell. Yeah. And then we got off. Once you smelt that smell. Yeah. Yeah. So I lost some customers. This just makes me think really quickly. This is one of the few times.

Or I will be very generous. But in truth, it's not generosity. Do you find that when you cook, let's say you cooked three chicken breasts. Yeah. And you have guests over. I'll always take the shittiest one. Like if I've cooked five steaks and one's a little not done right. Yeah, of course. I take that one. Yes, you have to. Which seems really nice, but really it's my ego. Exactly. It's to show off. Yeah. I don't want anyone to eat a less than perfect steak. Totally. Yeah. So in that same way, I guess, yeah, I guess I'm glad the pod had

Had the stinky smell. Yeah. But it was still, it was fantastic. It was really fun. And it was. I would say it's the best one. That's good. So they're getting better and better. They're getting better. And I have some more. Now I have ideas for next year. Oh, exciting. Yeah. Very exciting. Okay. Let's do some quick facts. Okay. We're way over. Keith. Keith Payne. Great. Oh, God. I like Keith Payne. So great. Yeah. So smart. Yeah.

Great message. We love it. He keeps knocking it out of the park. Yeah. He's a great writer. Yes. Current poverty line. What's the current poverty line? The federal poverty level for 2024 for one person is 15,000. Okay.

For two, $20,000. Well, $20,440. Three people, $25,820. For four people, $30,000. So like a family of four, $31,000 is the poverty line. Yeah, raising and keeping four people alive on $30,000 a year before taxes with rent, I mean, so hard. Although if you're listening in some other country, you're like, are you crazy?

There's lots of countries where- Sure. That's a- Their poverty line is different. Yeah, way, way lower. It's all relative. It's all relative. Like in this country, that's extremely hard. It's almost impossible. You're just going into debt. Yeah. And then you're doing cash, same cash day loan-

shit with a terrible interest rate the whole system set up to disproportionately punish yeah i'm reading a book right now i think i told you i'm reading on audible nate silver's new book you didn't tell me um you know nate silver he does he does he's like a statistician he's always especially around election time he's always front and center he does he does these models uh-huh and um

This book is about risk taking and it talks in there about the lottery is just if you really look at it, it's just kind of a way to make money on money.

Low-income people. If you look at who buys lottery tickets and how much of it that the state keeps of it, it's just kind of, it ends up being a bizarre tax on lower-income people. Wow. Yeah. Because they think the reward is worth the risk. Well, they got to try something, right? Yeah.

And then the state is keeping this huge percent. It's not like it just goes to the winners. Yeah, exactly. So this huge chunk of it comes out. He goes state by state. I mean, at best, I think it's like 30%. In some states, it's like 80% they're keeping of the thing. Yeah. And it's just...

low-income people paying the state. This is so tricky because like, yeah, that sounds awful to me because it just feels like poor people. And like who pays the highest interest rate? Low-income people. Yeah, they're getting, and yeah, so it feels like poor people are getting taken advantage of. And then also I think it depends on what the state does with that lottery money.

Because like in Georgia, it's used towards education. The big sales pitch to every state to get the lottery is that it's going to education. But then there's been a lot of op-eds about how much really gets to education. It hasn't worked out in the way, in many, many cases, that it was promised to work.

out. Because like I did, that was my, the Hope Scholarship in Georgia. The reason I have free tuition is because of the Georgia lottery. Oh, it is? Yeah. Oh, okay. That's great. And that's why they, that's how they have the Hope Scholarship there. You have to, though you have to qualify and in order to qualify, you have to have a certain grade point average. I always bring this up, but it's like so many of these thought processes really end up boiling down to again, kind of content or utilitarian. Cause like you could,

You could look at it just from a content point of view and go like, yeah, if someone wants to buy a lottery ticket, they should be free to buy a lot. They want to buy a lottery ticket and the state should take that money and use it for something good. Great. That on the surface, that's that's very defendable.

But then if you just step back and you're, what are the results of it? Well, the results are that the lowest income people in the state are paying for education. Right. That doesn't like, you look at the results. And also I hate to say this, but like paying for education for people who are doing very well.

Well, or I'm sure that scholarship, the Hope Scholarship, does benefit a ton of low-income people. But disproportionately low-income people aren't going to University of Georgia. Yeah, that's what I mean. Like it's actually probably helped. It gave me free tuition. Yeah. And my parents could have paid. Yeah, so it's just interesting like –

Both arguments are really fair. But at some point you got to like zoom up 30,000 feet and go like, well, at the end of the day, what's happening? Right. Well, poor people are paying for education. Yeah. But then what happens? Like, do you just take away the lottery? Which is like fine with me because I don't play, but I had a lot of people would not like that. I wonder if it should be a...

a tax base we're trying to create. I don't know if that's the place we should be looking for tax revenue. Yeah. To me, that's maybe like the kind of ethical, like they should have a lottery, but 100% of the money should go into the pot to be won by the people who want to play it. Right. I see that. Should the state

Find a different way to fund education. But then it would be privately run. The lottery would be privately run, which might get a little tricky. Sure, sure, sure.

It's all, okay, well, this is a ding, ding, ding because I spoke about Gavin Newsom's bill. So Governor Gavin Newsom today announced that he has signed AB 1780 by Assemblymember Phil Ting of San Francisco to prohibit legacy and donor preferences in the admissions process for private nonprofit institutions. Legacy status and donor preferences have long been excluded from the state's public university admissions processes.

The University of California system eliminated legacy preferences in 1998.

From the state. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. I like that. Okay, so we talked about Keith's town before he went to college. It was like 100% white. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was only around white people. And then I looked up, what are the towns with 100% white population? That's a dangerous search. You're now on a anti-white nationalist. Also, the last fact check, I was looking up the like Deutschland thing. I'm definitely on lists for sure. We've got a single person cell. Exactly.

Exactly. And they're, this'll shock you, they're not white. Yeah. Sometimes those are the most dangerous ones. That great movie with, what's his tush? Cutie Pie from Ken. Ryan Gosling. He played a- White nationalist. He played, yeah, a Nazi who was Jewish. And it's a real story. Oh, God.

I know. I mean, there are. The Believer? The Believer. Oh, I never saw that. It's really good. He's great. He's so great. It says here, this is AI. I'm going to be clear. Forthcoming. There aren't any cities in the United States that are 100% white cities. Cities, yeah. But here are some cities with high percentage of white residents. Can I guess number one? Yeah. Salt Lake City, Utah. No. Oh. No.

My apologies. Columbiana, Ohio. Columbiana? Uh-huh. It's called Columbiana. Not Columbia. Ohio. 99.3%. Okay. Kirtland, Ohio. Okay. 99.3%. All right. Guess what's third? Milford, Michigan. You're close with Milford. Livonia.

Livonia, Papa Bob and Grandma. 96.5%. Except, wait, so we can actually figure out what percentage Sanjay Gupta's family was offsetting that because that's where he's from. Oh my God, that just made me feel very sad. It did? Yeah.

He liked Livonia. That's hard. Yeah. It's hard when the numbers are not like this. Yes. It can be really hard, and he seems to really have enjoyed growing up in Livonia. Okay. I think his mother was like one of the first female engineer at Ford. Yeah. Something cool like that. Knoxville, 90.9. Parksburg, Vienna. Yeah.

West Virginia. There's a Pennsylvania, Altoona, Pennsylvania. Yeah. I guess maybe Salt Lake has Latinos now. I'm kind of shocked Salt Lake's not. When I'm in Salt Lake, I feel like, oh yeah, this is a very white city. Scottsdale, Arizona has 87.9%. That feels right. Hmm.

Your vacation destination with your Indian parents? I went there once. Yeah. You were probably being watched around every turn. Probably was. They were like, everyone you walk by, they're like, okay, I got eyes on the...

The Indian family. They seem to just be arguing amongst themselves. They don't seem to have any plan to attack us. They seem to be pretty engaged in their own dispute. That's about right. Salt Lake City is 65.2% white, 21% Latino or Hispanic. Okay. That's interesting. White cities. Yeah, it is. That's it. That was it. That's it for Keith.

Okay. I love Keith. I really hope he keeps writing books. They keep expanding my mind. Yeah, same. And he was also like, he had such a great demeanor. Very kind of a best boy. Soft demeanor. Yes. Best boy. Oh my God. Best boy was on Connections the other day. I know.

I hadn't played it, but I read it in the comments. Did you play it and see it? I didn't get it. I mean, I got it as the last one. Okay. But it was companies with one letter changed. So Best Buy. It was hard. It was really hard. Oh, I want to go back. I want to look at the other ones. Yeah. I'm so delighted they're archived now. Oh, I love it. Yes. I love it. Archives are where the party's at.

Also, Rob, today on minis, Wabi Sabi was a clue. Ooh, Wabi Wabi Sabi sounds good. All right. Love you. Love you.

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In a quiet suburb, a community is shattered by the death of a beloved wife and mother. But this tragic loss of life quickly turns into something even darker. Her husband had tried to hire a hitman on the dark web to kill her. And she wasn't the only target. Because buried in the depths of the internet is The Kill List, a cache of chilling documents containing names, photos, addresses, and specific instructions for people's murders.

This podcast is the true story of how I ended up in a race against time to warn those who lives were in danger. And it turns out convincing a total stranger someone wants them dead is not easy. Follow Kill List on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen to Kill List and more Exhibit C True Crime shows like Morbid early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus. Check out Exhibit C in the Wondery app for all your true crime listening.