#0008 Warren Smith

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Speaker 5 On this episode, we cover the Joe Joe Rogan Experience, episode number 2261, with guest Warren Smith. The No Rogan experience starts now.

Speaker 5 Welcome back to the show. This is the show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.
Joe Rogan is one of the most listened to people on the planet.

Speaker 5 His interviews and opinions influence millions of people, and he's regularly criticized for those views, often by people who don't actually listen to Joe Rogan.

Speaker 5 So we listen, and where needed, we try to correct the record.

Speaker 5 It's a show for anyone who's curious about Joe Rogan, his guests and their claims, as well as for anyone who just wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

Speaker 5 So I'm Michael Marshall, and I'm joined by Cecil Cicarello and today we're going to be covering Joe's January 24th interview with Warren Smith. So far on YouTube alone, this video has 972,000 views.

Speaker 5 So Cecil, how did Joe introduce Warren in the show notes?

Speaker 4 He says Warren is an educator and founder of the Secret Scholars on YouTube.

Speaker 5 Oh, sounds good. Is there anything else we should know about him?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, he's a filmmaker, and he was a media teacher at what sounds like a behavioral disorder school. He went viral for a warm-up exercise he did with a student.

Speaker 4 The student was asking him about the controversy about J.K. Rowling and her bigoted thoughts on trans people.
And he talks to that kid in that video who had probably heard J.K.

Speaker 4 Rowling had said some terrible things about trans people. And he asks for some specifics and the kid really couldn't give him any.

Speaker 4 So they read a couple of tweets and then they deem After reading those two tweets as non-transphobic, therefore they restore the reputation of J.K.

Speaker 4 Rowling through cherry-picking in a four-minute, 49-second video.

Speaker 4 And by the way, it took me 30 seconds to find a tweet where she compares gender-affirming care for adults to conversion therapy for gay people. So it's not hard if you just Google something.

Speaker 4 I will leave a link to that tweet in the show notes.

Speaker 4 Also, he was interviewed by about 50 intellectual dark web podcasts after this with pretty much the same title, Critical Thinking Professor Fired for Teaching Kids How to Think, or some derivative like that.

Speaker 5 Gotcha, gotcha. So essentially, he got famous for dunking on a child's understanding of the world.

Speaker 5 Effectively, that's what we're talking about here.

Speaker 4 You know, I wasn't gonna say, I was gonna explain it a little more, but when you take the real essence of it, absolutely, Marsh.

Speaker 5 Okay, so what did Warren and Joe talk about this episode?

Speaker 4 Well, they talk about critical thinking, film, media, how great Heath Ledger is, trust in the media, crime statistics, bias, how art is a great way to get people people out of poverty along with sports.

Speaker 4 YouTube, they talk about Trump more, and then they talk about how great Heath Ledger is again.

Speaker 4 California wildfires, electric cars, how great and innovative Heath Ledger was, hidden message in Kubrick films, Heath Ledger again, and finally, free speech and authentic conversations.

Speaker 5 Yeah, Heath Ledger appears in this podcast more often than he appears in half of his films. He is a regular in this episode.

Speaker 4 He is a regular in this episode. I feel like him and Lex should get together and have a Heath Ledger versus Genghis Khan base-off to see how often they could randomly bring something up in a podcast.

Speaker 5 Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 5 So before we get to our main event, which is going to be looking at their views on race and crime and all discrimination in that kind of area, first we want to say thanks to our Area 51 all access past patrons.

Speaker 5 So there's Chonkat in Chicago, 11 Gruthius, and Am I a Robot. Capture says no, but maintenance records say yes.
They all subscribed at patreon.com forward slash no Rogan, and you can do that too.

Speaker 5 All patrons get early access to each episode, as well as a special Patreon-only bonus segment each week. And this week we'll be touching on climate change and Elon Musk's definitely not a Nazi salute.

Speaker 5 So you can check it out by going to

Speaker 5 patreon.com forward slash no rogan.

Speaker 5 But for now, it is time for our main event.

Speaker 5 So, first, I want to say a huge thank you to this week's veteran voice of the podcast. That was Colin Sean announcing our main event.

Speaker 5 Remember that you two can be on the show by sending a recording of you giving us your best rendition of It's Time.

Speaker 5 And you can send that to no Roganpod at gmail.com, as well as how you want to be credited on the show.

Speaker 4 So, today we're going to be talking a lot about racism.

Speaker 4 We're going to be working our way through the conversation that they had. We may move some things around just a touch to try to get it a little more clear.

Speaker 4 We're going to be moving things forward and backwards in time chronologically in the show because they touch on this subject multiple times throughout the show.

Speaker 4 The other thing, too, is I did speed up these clips a little bit. I truncated the silence and I sped them up just a touch because definitely Warren's a little bit of a slow talker.

Speaker 4 So I wanted to zoom things up a little bit. So the first clip is Warren discussing racism at Emerson College.

Speaker 3 It was at Emerson. It was, I remember I was taking a class with the dean of the student body, and it was a pedagogy class, the philosophy of teaching, and it was right in the midst of these protests.

Speaker 3 And it was the day of the protests, like 10 people in the class. It's a four-hour class.

Speaker 3 So they're like, we're going to devote the four hours to talk about the problematic racism occurring at Emerson. I was sitting around,

Speaker 3 but the white students were not allowed to speak. We had to concede our space for four hours.
And I just remember, like, what the fuck is going on? Why was that?

Speaker 3 What was the reason given for that? Because it was the moral right thing to do, according to, because we,

Speaker 3 they said to me, I remember he said, I said, what can I, I did say one, I was like, what can I do about this? I would genuinely, I genuinely believed everything.

Speaker 3 I was kind of, I was just starting to question things. I was like, what can I, I feel terrible speaking to the student who had just spoken.

Speaker 3 Like, you genuinely feel every day you wake up and come to class, you feel oppressed?

Speaker 3 That sucks. What can I do? And they didn't have a response.

Speaker 3 And they just said, you can just listen. Just take your time to concede your space and listen.
So that was the reason given. Concede your space.
And then why why did they feel so threatened?

Speaker 3 Did they articulate that?

Speaker 3 There was a Facebook group that was designed to provide that evidence called Emerson, hashtag Emerson So Racist or something.

Speaker 3 And it was like a student, like a teacher said, no, you can't, you got to turn in the work or you're going to fail the class.

Speaker 4 I just, just really quickly before we get into this, Marsh, just listen to the undertones there and how offended they both sound and how they laugh about the idea of having to concede their space and make that real, like understand and realize how much they sort of feel like it's their entitlement to talk about anything at all times.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. Bearing in mind that what they're asking here is, what is your experience of the racism you feel that you're experiencing?

Speaker 5 So the idea that they would have, that they are, that they find it odd that they, in that conversation, would be sitting back and listening.

Speaker 5 Well, I mean, Joe and Warren aren't the ones who are experiencing any racism here. Like they have no experience in this.

Speaker 5 I think it's also interesting that Warren, warren like he puts the the student there on the spot saying well what you feel you come today come to to school every day and you genuinely feel like you're oppressed every single day and i was and he's shocked by that and i think again that's sort of setting an unrealistic standard it's sort of saying well if you aren't feeling constantly oppressed in every moment then your experiences of racism don't count yeah rather than it be that you will experience things every day that are different for you because of your race and you never know when the next one of those is going to happen so maybe it's been a few hours maybe it's been a day or two days since something happened that was to do with your race, but you're always on edge about it if it's something that's happening constantly in your life.

Speaker 5 So, the standard that Warren is setting, the bar that he's setting, is it's got to be all up here of being feeling constantly oppressed every single day, or it doesn't count, is essentially the undertone of what he's saying.

Speaker 5 And that is because he's not listening to what people actually say about the racism that they feel.

Speaker 4 Well, it's really interesting, though, when you say that, but part of me wonders, like, why didn't you listen? Right? Like, clearly, you didn't hear anything they had to say.

Speaker 4 You couldn't even, you couldn't even respond to a single question Joe gives you about what they were experiencing because you didn't bother to listen.

Speaker 4 You play it off as if they didn't have any, like the people who are of color who are talking to you, those people didn't have any examples of how they experienced racism. I don't think you listened.

Speaker 4 I think that's really the problem.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. And we do have examples of the kind of racism that was happening there.
There was an interview that NPR did with the college president, Lee Pelton.

Speaker 5 And Lee Pelton explained that they had two incidents, one in December, one in March leading up to this day where people were discussing the amount of racism.

Speaker 5 The first incident involved seven pollsters that were put up in academic buildings and student residences from a group calling itself America Vanguard, which is a white supremacist group, an anti-Semitic organization that believes in biological and genetic determinism, and that they assert the intellectual

Speaker 5 superiority of what they call the white race. So these pollsters are springing up around the college campus, including where the students are living.
That is a pretty big deal.

Speaker 5 And then in March, the second incident was more than 500 emails were sent to the faculty, student life staff, students, and senior administrators with the subject line, help President Trump stop white genocide.

Speaker 5 So white genocide being the idea that white people are being systematically moved out of power and even outbred by people of color in order to weaken the white race.

Speaker 5 It's a conspiracy theory, a racist conspiracy theory put forward by white supremacists and the idea that changes of racial migration are deliberate to weaken the white race.

Speaker 5 And this is being said to every one of the students as well. So like, these are not nothing.

Speaker 5 It's not just, oh, there was a Facebook group where some people felt that Emerson was racist and it wasn't more than that. These are pretty substantial.

Speaker 5 And as NPR point out when talking to President Lee Pelton in this

Speaker 5 interview, the NPR interviewer says, I guess I have to point out that you were the first African-American president of Emerson, aren't you? To which Pelton responds, I am indeed.

Speaker 5 And so when we think about Emerson, that might have been a reason why they targeted us. Yep.
He said, I also think clearly

Speaker 5 there's been what one author called the kind of rising white consciousness in this country of ours and what others have called the racialization of white people.

Speaker 5 So it sort of feels like there's a lot going on here that Warren is either not telling Joe about because he's withholding it or just, as you say, wasn't listening when he was told white supremacists are targeting this college partly over the race of the president of the college.

Speaker 5 These seem like really significant things.

Speaker 4 I also just want to point out that in his video that he went viral on, the video about his discussion with a student about J.K. Rowling, he wouldn't let that student just say that she was transphobic.

Speaker 4 He made that person go get. examples.
He said, go find examples. Read me some examples.
Tell me exactly what she said. What exactly did you say?

Speaker 4 I don't want to deal with these abstract ideas. I want to hear very definitive exactly what she said.
He wouldn't let that student get away with just saying, I think she's transphobic.

Speaker 4 He made him go find things that he thought was transphobic. Joe does the exact opposite here.

Speaker 4 What happens is, is when asked for specifics, he's like, I don't know, they had a Facebook page. I don't know.
And that is completely accepted. That is, there's no pushback whatsoever.

Speaker 4 So the thing he got famous for, this quote-unquote critical thinking, we'll get into it later on whether or not we think it is as rigorous as he puts it off to be.

Speaker 4 You know, this thing is not the standard that he's being held to on Joe's program.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and not even just that he's being held to by Joe. If this is a standard that Warren values, this is a standard he ought to be holding himself to.

Speaker 5 If that's how he argues with students when he disagrees with students, he should be putting the same level of rigor into his own argument. And he clearly isn't doing that.

Speaker 5 And I think it's good to say, Lo, exactly, what is your evidence here? Exactly, show me some specific evidence. I think that's good.
It does have a slight flaw, as we saw with the J.K.

Speaker 5 Rowling example.

Speaker 5 Whereas if the person who is making this case isn't the best person to have access to the best available evidence to make that point, then you could quite easily dismiss that point on relatively flimsy grounds because maybe this student isn't fully aware of everything that J.K.

Speaker 5 Rowling has ever said about trans people and is going to have a superficial knowledge of that. But it's still far better than accepting just a vague sense of

Speaker 5 what they think the general vibe is. And what Warren is going on here is just vibes.
It's nothing more than that. And Joe's very happy with that.

Speaker 4 And that tells us maybe we should be talking to somebody else about the racism on Emerson campus and not him. He's in the same position as that person who is defending trans people from J.K.
Rowling.

Speaker 4 He doesn't know exactly what's happening. So maybe Joe shouldn't be delving into a topic where many people felt that there was some racist things going on and just hand-waving it away as nothing.

Speaker 4 Another instance of the woke mob going crazy. The next bit here is Joe is having a discussion with Warren, and Warren starts talking about how

Speaker 4 Fried chicken and watermelon isn't racist.

Speaker 4 I don't know how to preface this other than that. So let's just deploy it.

Speaker 3 Why was it articulated that it was so difficult for her, uniquely difficult as a black student? I'm trying to,

Speaker 3 I don't know. Honestly.
Abracadabra. Yeah.
It was just like microaggression. That's the thing about

Speaker 3 these claims, though, is there is no concrete evidence. It's things like microaggression.
Someone made a reference about fried chicken that was, I've heard that one.

Speaker 3 That happened to my mom who's a professor, runs a study abroad program. She said, We're really excited.
This place is, they have really, they were in Italy doing a study abroad program.

Speaker 3 She's like, I know you guys have been missing American food, and this place has fried chicken in it. So, and it's really good here.

Speaker 3 And two of the students she was talking to at that table were black, and they claimed that that was racist. And she was like, what? The fried chicken one is so crazy.
Fried chicken and watermelon.

Speaker 3 Those are the two things that are associated with racism as far as foods, which are universally loved. Like, fried chicken is delicious.
Watermelon is delicious.

Speaker 3 Like, how could that possibly be a negative that certain people like delicious food? Like,

Speaker 3 to this day, it's one of those things. It's so bizarre.

Speaker 3 You could bring up all kinds of different delicious foods, but if you bring up fried chicken, which everybody eats, everybody who eats meat and loves delicious food loves a good fried chicken.

Speaker 3 Have you tried Gus's in town?

Speaker 3 Is that where you get the slabs of meat? No, no, that's Terry Black's. But Gus's fried chicken is in Austin.
Fantastic. Some of the best fried chicken you're ever going to have in your life.

Speaker 3 But if you brought that up to a black friend, they might label you side. Like, what the fuck are you trying to say? Like, I'm not trying to tell you.
Food's good. Good food.

Speaker 3 Like, let's go eat good food.

Speaker 5 This is so ridiculous. It genuinely is.
I mean, first of all, Joe was suggesting right back at the start there,

Speaker 5 what was it that was coming up? Warren says he can't even remember what it was. Again, just complete vagaries.

Speaker 5 This is such an important point that Warren is bringing it up on a show that he thinks is going to be viewed by, well, millions of people, absolutely millions of people.

Speaker 5 And he's just bringing up evidence as examples, things he can't even fully remember. Joe's response is like...

Speaker 5 abra cadabra like the student made it up like you can just magic up grievances out of nowhere that's what they're talking about now again to be clear we're talking at emerson about the campus where white supremacist material was found in dorm rooms and Nazis were recruiting on campus.

Speaker 5 Even if that wasn't this student's specific reasons, it's weird that Warren hasn't mentioned that as anything that was happening at the time, because that's really important context.

Speaker 5 Instead, it's all just vagaries and oh, I can't quite remember what it was that the black students were so unreasonably aggrieved about.

Speaker 4 I would say that Nazis recruiting on campus is a little bigger than a microaggression. That would be my guess.
I don't know.

Speaker 4 I mean, I'm not even, I'm certainly not the target that they're going after in either of these cases, but I would consider that more than a microaggression.

Speaker 4 I also want to say too, you know, Joe thinks that just because you like good food, that's a compliment.

Speaker 4 But racist, there's a racist history behind liking fried chicken and watermelon, being attached to black people.

Speaker 4 The same way that the swastika was something benign, but now has a racist history, so does fried chicken and watermelon.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. And the thing is, obviously, I'm I'm over here in the UK.
I had to look up what the history was.

Speaker 5 I was very aware that they've got a racist history and racist connotations, but those foods in the UK don't really have those kinds of racist associations here.

Speaker 5 Or if they do, I'm not fully aware of it. And listeners are feel free to correct me on that.
But I had to actually look into why. And it's tied in very heavily, obviously, to the American Civil War.

Speaker 5 So, what I discovered from just having a little bit of a look around, since the American Civil War, traditional slave foods like fried chicken,

Speaker 5 watermelon, and chitlings have suffered a strong association with stereotypes of African Americans and blackface minstrelry in particular.

Speaker 5 And when it comes to chickens, it's fried chicken because chickens were the only animals that enslaved people were allowed to raise on their own.

Speaker 5 They were considered like low enough value as to be worth giving to the enslaved people.

Speaker 5 So after, and then after the Civil War, watermelons were grown as a cash crop, which African Americans could grow and sell.

Speaker 5 And so they were sort of tied to self-reliance, liberation, being able to sustain yourself in those kind of ways.

Speaker 5 All of those things are considered considered a threat to former slave owners, the white slave owners.

Speaker 5 And so they were sort of pulled into cultural caricatures that were designed to disparage the former enslaved peoples.

Speaker 5 Also, there's a quote here from I found on Wikipedia.

Speaker 5 The race and folklore professor Claire Schmidt attributes the stereotype both to the popularity of fried chicken in the cuisine of southern United States and to a scene from the film The Birth of a Nation in which a Maudi African-American man is seen eating fried chicken in a legislative hall.

Speaker 5 So The Birth of a nation is KKK white supremacist propaganda. It was a propaganda film designed to encourage lynchings and to continue pushing for racial segregation in really quite violent ways.

Speaker 5 Also, several fried chicken restaurants in the 20th century adopted racist caricatures of black people as mascots. And these might be ones that you're familiar with, Cecil.

Speaker 4 We don't have them over here.

Speaker 4 This is the culinary equivalent of Can I Touch Your Hair. That's basically what this is.

Speaker 4 And so for Joe to miss all that and to, and to also be steeped in the culture over here and recognize how racist that is is just, it's appalling to me.

Speaker 4 It's, it's him hand waving away someone else's lived experience.

Speaker 5 Yeah, he should absolutely know. And for anybody who's unsure, nobody is saying that if you ask your friend to go and get some fried chicken, that's racist.
That's a complete straw man.

Speaker 5 Nobody in the world would say that you can have as many black friends as you like and you can invite them to go to your favorite fried chicken restaurant anytime you like.

Speaker 5 Nobody sees that as a problem. But if you see a black person and your first thought is to talk to them about fried chicken and watermelons, there's a racist reason for that.

Speaker 5 And that's what we're saying here. All right.

Speaker 4 Now they're going to talk about a study. And this person who did this study is Roland Fryer.
And this is a study that comes out of Harvard, which is where this person was.

Speaker 4 And they created a study about

Speaker 4 police shootings. And so we'll let.
Warren explain.

Speaker 3 They conducted a study, a deep dive into police statistics to see racial bias in policing. Right.

Speaker 3 The findings did not match the story that people wanted to be true at Harvard, which caused him to literally go under police protection, like a one-year-old he had at the time, for days.

Speaker 3 Now, I don't know the deep dive beyond that, but that's the.

Speaker 3 Right. Right.
And we should say he's a black gentleman. Right.
Yes. So he says the colleagues told him, don't publish this warning, you'll ruin your career.
Right.

Speaker 3 For releasing findings that contradict popular left-wing narratives on policing. And he said, I'm going to do it anyways.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Surprise, surprise.
Warren doesn't know the details beyond that very sort of tolkinistic surface-level understanding.

Speaker 4 Which is, which is explained. I watched the video, a video that I found of this gentleman talking about his particular survey and things and the study that he did.

Speaker 4 And he explains exactly that in the video. So the only deep understanding he has is he watched the same video I did.
Yeah.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. And so this is the work of Roland Fryer.
Roland Fryer was an

Speaker 5 economics professor at Harvard University. He did publish a paper on racial bias in the police use of force and police shootings.
And it did gain a lot of media attention.

Speaker 5 At one point, it was the top-viewed article on the New York Times website for the time that an article was written about it.

Speaker 5 And in this paper, he claimed there was no evidence of racial bias in police shootings in Houston, Texas, and also that black and Hispanic people were no more likely, and perhaps even less likely to be shot relative to white people.

Speaker 5 So this is why it's going against the left-wing narratives. But the thing is, it wasn't silenced just because it contradicted popular narratives.

Speaker 5 That's not the reason that Harvard tried to say, don't publish this or it will look incredibly bad, or his colleagues were telling him not to publish it. It's because the study was incredibly flawed.

Speaker 5 So Harvard themselves have refuted his study and called his analysis highly flawed with major theoretical and methodological errors, saying he's communicated the results to news media in a way that is misleading.

Speaker 5 So this is why he was warned against it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, and the warning against it that you'll ruin your career probably wasn't about the content of the study so much as the methodology and the way he decided to promote it. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 I mean, there were issues in this.

Speaker 5 So another professor went and reanalyzed the same data and found that black people were more than five times as likely to be shot relative to white people and Latino people were roughly twice as likely to be shot versus white people.

Speaker 5 So completely on the same data, finding completely the opposite thing to Roland Fryer, who obviously found that black people were less likely to be shot to white people.

Speaker 5 Now, the criticisms of this paper are pretty complex and we'll put a link to them in the show notes. But a key thing is that Fryer isn't actually comparing police shootings by race.

Speaker 5 You'd think from how he talked about it, that's what he did. He looked at how many people get shot by the police who are black, how many are white, how many Latino.

Speaker 5 And then, if you're going to do that sensibly, one thing you might look at is what is the racial population makeup of that area.

Speaker 5 And if you find that, you know, 30% of your police shootings involve black suspects or black victims, and only 10% of your local population are black, there's a clear disparity there.

Speaker 5 That would be a sensible way of doing it. That's not what he was doing.

Speaker 5 Instead, he was comparing whether shootings exceeded statistical discrimination.

Speaker 5 Okay, statistical discrimination is the idea that if you want to apply police resources most effectively to say maximize the number of arrests of guilty people who are dealing drugs, say, you might target certain places or even certain populations who you have a reason to suspect are more likely to be dealing drugs.

Speaker 5 We can disagree as to whether they're more likely or not, but that is what statistical discrimination is.

Speaker 5 He used that methodology on police shootings, but it doesn't work for police shootings because you're not trying to maximize the number of people the police shoot.

Speaker 4 Hold on, hold on. That doesn't take into account lots of police officers, Marsh, want to maximize the police shooting.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that is an important, important data set we have to consider. But obviously,

Speaker 5 what the police would argue is that their job is to maximize the number of guilty people that they are arresting or stopping. They're not trying to maximize for how many guilty people they shoot.

Speaker 5 The shooting is when something has gone wrong for whatever reason. Either the suspect hasn't come quietly or there's another factor affecting the situation and therefore something bad happened.

Speaker 5 Even if you agreed with statistical discrimination as a perfectly valid police tactic, and there's a lot of disagreement about that, because that also comes into racial profiling,

Speaker 5 his work actually didn't, it went above and beyond that to say, well, how many people, how many black people would we expect to be killed going through if we were to compare it to statistical discrimination and found that fewer people were essentially being killed than he thought would essentially deserve it.

Speaker 5 The other thing here is that it suffers from the flaw that the police are the ones who decide how likely the suspect was to be shot.

Speaker 5 So essentially, if you're saying you're looking at all your suspects and saying,

Speaker 5 given the behavior of

Speaker 5 the certain crimes involved and the behavior of certain suspects, was it reasonable that they be shot? And then you're saying, of the ones who it was unreasonable to shoot, compare that by race.

Speaker 5 When you are judging who was reasonable to be shot because of their behavior, you're using the police reports for that.

Speaker 5 So, for example, when the police reports would say this suspect was violently resisting arrest, you could say if they are violently resisting arrest, it may not be an unfair use of police force to shoot them.

Speaker 5 But of course, you only get the police report.

Speaker 4 after the shooting.

Speaker 5 You only get it after the officer has already sort of gone to see the suspect. So if you are a police officer who was more biased towards being likely to shoot someone over

Speaker 5 the color of their skin, their race, you might fill in the form to make it more likely that your suspects that you shot were acting violently. You see what I mean?

Speaker 5 So if you imagine this completely hypothetical cop who is incredibly racist,

Speaker 5 when you let them be the one to tell you which of their victims had it coming,

Speaker 5 it's pretty easy to see how a huge bias could creep in. And these are the criticisms of Fryer's police reports.
It's not about you're just saying things that the left-wing narrative won't agree with.

Speaker 5 It's because he's using completely inappropriate metrics on which to determine which shootings were valid and which ones weren't.

Speaker 4 Now he tries to make an analogy. He tries to use an analogy that

Speaker 4 he heard Roland Fryer use, and he tries to bring that back up to Joe here.

Speaker 3 And then he came to the University of Austin and taught a class. It's on YouTube.
And watching that class, to summarize it in a minute, look at it through economics.

Speaker 3 If my job is to approve or disprove loans, I've been able to get that down the best I can. I want to keep the default rate as low as possible.
And I've achieved like a 0.5 default rate.

Speaker 3 Out of anyone who comes in my office, 0.5 after I've done my job defaults. All right.
That's pretty good.

Speaker 3 Someone could come along later and analyze all that and say, wait a minute, you're turning down 60% black people, though, versus white people. His point is you can't look at it through that lens.

Speaker 3 You have to look at it through what is the goal. that's trying, what is the result we're trying to achieve.

Speaker 5 And again, I can see how this might sound incredibly reasonable to somebody.

Speaker 5 You You know, it makes sense that if you are working in the bank, you want to avoid giving money to the people that you deem less likely to repay it. That makes sense.
You don't want defaulting.

Speaker 5 But the question is, how are you making the decision as to who's most likely to default on the loan?

Speaker 5 Well, partly you're going to compare them to people who have already had loans with you and paid them back successfully.

Speaker 5 So do they fit the type of people who defaulted in the past or do they fit the type of people who didn't default in the past?

Speaker 5 So if more of your loans previously were to white people, you've biased your data set in their favor.

Speaker 4 That's a great point. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And now imagine that it's not just the lenders. It's not just the banks who are taking that approach because lots of people are going to be like risk averse.

Speaker 5 Maybe employers, they're going to be risk averse as well.

Speaker 5 If you want to maximize for workers who will fit in best, who'll work really hard, who'll be an asset to your company, well, one of the ways you might do that is say, well, who's been successful for us in the past?

Speaker 5 Who've we hired and it really worked out? And what attributes did they have that we can look for? And maybe they've got the kind of attributes.

Speaker 5 And you're not even talking about their skin color, but you're talking about their educational background, which schools they went to,

Speaker 5 the types of things that they do in their spare time, where in the city they live. All these kinds of things might sort of play in.

Speaker 5 If they live a long way away, then maybe they're not going to be reasonable commuters, that sort of thing. All that will sound reasonable.
It's very reasonable for companies to seem risk averse.

Speaker 5 But you're going to hire people based on your track record.

Speaker 5 And maybe of the people you've hired, the ones that you then promote to managerial positions are the ones that follow your pattern of success for promoting people.

Speaker 5 So maybe you've got a completely race-blind policy, but the last few managers we got, these are the types of people who stood out.

Speaker 5 And, you know, they were the ones who were attending the right kind of get-togethers and making the right kind of networking and fitting it in all the right kind of places.

Speaker 5 So all of these are the people that you're going to be given a salary rise to. And then let's think about landlords and people who are renting out houses because you need to rent.

Speaker 5 You can't buy a house. You couldn't get a loan from the bank.
So now you need to rent. Well, landlords, they want to minimize how many people fail to pay their rent.

Speaker 5 So they'll favor renting based on the people that fit their previous pattern.

Speaker 5 And so in every bit of this machine, you know, in any, in all these worlds, if you don't fit the pattern of who came before you, you're going to find it harder to get a job that will pay well.

Speaker 5 And you maybe therefore find it harder to pay your rent. Maybe you'll miss a few rental payments because your job isn't paying well or you couldn't get that job.
And now your credit's taken hit.

Speaker 5 And now you can't get a bank loan because the bank looks at your credit history and says, you're not the kind of person we can give a bank loan to.

Speaker 5 And you can argue that every single decision that's made along that way is made for the betterment of what that job is. You're turning your cog the right way.
You're not trying to discriminate.

Speaker 5 You're just doing the thing that is risk averse and is aimed at getting the best outcome for your narrow piece of it.

Speaker 5 But this entire machine is unfortunately like biased then, biasing itself against certain types of people.

Speaker 5 And it's way, way easier for you to argue that all these decisions make sense when the machine is working for you and not against you.

Speaker 5 When you're one of the people that is getting those jobs, is more likely to be offered those bank loans.

Speaker 4 Now we're going to continue on with this

Speaker 4 analogy and he's going to talk about how that sort of relates to police stops.

Speaker 3 So in policing, it's to,

Speaker 3 his study showed that 40% of stops, approximately, I think, if we use that as the example, 40% of stops recover contraband, which is pretty crazy, pretty good.

Speaker 3 Across demographics, which means it's being done correctly. And people, this changes how you view so much.
It's kind of difficult to understand at first glance.

Speaker 3 I'm trying to tell me if this makes sense. Okay.
So it's for it's 40% across whatever color the driver is.

Speaker 3 That means we've done correct. We've done it right.
If it was

Speaker 3 60% white drivers were recovering contracts, we should be pulling over his arguments, we should be pulling over more white drivers. But that's assuming they're pulling people over upon race.

Speaker 3 Let's go back to the default rate. You're just coming in after the fact and analyzing the results and looking at it through a racial lens.

Speaker 3 I'm going to judge each case based on a merit, regardless of, because are you going to default or not? And whatever, I'm going to run my analysis, whatever that is.

Speaker 3 So anyone can come in after the fact and say, but there's always going to be a discrepancy. Okay, but you turned down more black people than white.

Speaker 3 So they're, okay, so according to your logic, for every white driver, every black driver I pull over, every Latino, I have to pull over a white driver now, which affects policing itself, as opposed to what's our goal.

Speaker 3 All the police are meeting that morning. Our job is to go out and recover contraband in this neighborhood.
But for every black driver, you got to pull over a white. It's like, that's not how it works.

Speaker 3 Right. So that kind of that boggled my mind when I first heard it.

Speaker 3 I was like looking at it through the lens of what are we trying to achieve and seeing if that achievement is even, then there's nothing like, there's nothing off about it.

Speaker 3 If it's if the contraband being recovered is 40%,

Speaker 3 regardless of the rate of which you're pulling those cars over,

Speaker 3 the success rate is the same.

Speaker 4 Doesn't sound right. Yeah, so I,

Speaker 5 one of the reasons I really wanted to pick apart this conversation was based on hearing this, because this again might sound very reasonable.

Speaker 5 If you're, if your results are good, if you're you've got a target rate of 40% and you're hitting that target rate, then anything you're doing must be good.

Speaker 5 And any analysis that comes along after the fact that puts a racial lens on it, well, that's just like you're looking for problems.

Speaker 5 Now, first of all, I'd point out that if there is a racial bias, you're only going to be able to spot it by analyzing after the fact. So like

Speaker 5 you have to be able to do this in order to spot any potential racial bias. But there's another interesting thing going on here, which is he's missing the base rate essentially.

Speaker 5 So he's saying 40% of all stops result in finding contraband. Okay, so maybe let's accept that number for the time being.

Speaker 5 Does that mean that a policy of stopping more black people than white people is working?

Speaker 5 Well, not unless you can evidence that black people are more likely to be carrying illegal goods than white people.

Speaker 5 But what if, for example, 40% of everybody was carrying contraband in this hypothetical? Yeah. At this point, you could stop 50-50 and you'd find 40% of people.

Speaker 5 You could stop 100% of your stops could be white people. You'd find 40%.
100% could be black people. You'd find 40%.

Speaker 5 So this is the issue here with this entire argument. When you just analyze based on the results and you don't actually think about what is the chances of anybody carrying something here,

Speaker 5 you need to be able to look at this from a racial lens because if they're pulling over more black people, just because they're finding something doesn't mean that the black people are more likely to be carrying something.

Speaker 4 And if we're talking about traffic stops, there is a book called What 20 Million Traffic Stops Tell Us About Policing and Race.

Speaker 4 The book is called Suspect Citizens. And this book basically analyzes 20 million traffic stops in North Carolina.

Speaker 4 Blacks, according to this, and I'll put a link in the show notes: blacks were 63% more likely to be stopped, even though as a whole, they drive 16% less.

Speaker 4 Taking into account less time on the road, blacks were about 95% more likely to be stopped. Blacks were 115% more likely than whites to be searched in a traffic stop.

Speaker 4 And contraband was more likely to be found in searches of white drivers.

Speaker 5 Yeah, which I think makes sense because if you know that you're more likely to get stopped, you're going to be less likely to carry something.

Speaker 4 Why carry it?

Speaker 5 I've never been stopped by the police in those kinds of ways.

Speaker 5 There's another study that we'll put in the short notes from the Public Policy Institute of California called Racial Disparities in Law Enforcement Stops.

Speaker 5 And from that study, white people make up 33% of the California population and 32% of police stops, which is pretty good. That's kind of about right.
That's what you'd expect on average.

Speaker 5 Black people, it says, are 6% of the population, but 16% of the stops. So black people are twice as likely to be stopped for reasonable suspicion.

Speaker 5 That is the cause given, is that the police had reasonable suspicion. But reasonable suspicion is the category that isn't traffic violations, outstanding warrants, parole, or probation.

Speaker 5 So, those other categories are things where you have an objective reason to stop. You ran a red light or you've got an outstanding warrant, those types of things.

Speaker 5 So, when you're stopped for reasonable suspicion, that is police code for we had a hunch. And if you can't back up what that hunch is, we can pretty much guess what that hunch is.

Speaker 5 If black people are twice as likely to be stopped on, I had a hunch than otherwise.

Speaker 5 Black people, again, were found to be less likely to have contraband on them, but they were also found to be twice as likely to be booked into jail as a result of the stop.

Speaker 5 So you're twice as likely to be stopped, but also on any individual stop, you're twice as likely to be sent to prison. And this should really worry Joe and his fans.
It really should.

Speaker 5 I mean, it worries me, but it should particularly worry Joe and his fans because this is a personal freedom issue. Joe, his fans, you know, they care an awful lot about personal freedom.

Speaker 5 They certainly, Joe talks a lot about caring about things like personal freedom.

Speaker 5 There is hard proof here that you are more likely to be stopped by the police and searched and more likely to therefore be arrested if you are black than if you are white.

Speaker 5 That's a personal freedom issue. And maybe they'll say, maybe Joe and his fans will say, there's nothing to fear.
If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear.

Speaker 5 Well, Joe and his fans shouldn't rely on that because

Speaker 5 they're big fans of personal liberty. That shouldn't be a case of like, you have to disclose everything that you like, you know, you have to automatically assume that you can be stopped at all times.

Speaker 5 And also bear in mind, it is the officer's discretion as to what they decide to arrest over and what they decide isn't worth it, is worth overlooking.

Speaker 5 So maybe the way that you are are responding to the police officer is deemed aggressive,

Speaker 5 depending on the police officer's judgment.

Speaker 5 There's not a hard and fast line there about what counts, which is why you're more likely to be arrested if you're black.

Speaker 4 Gosh, Mark, what a great point. And I feel the same way.
I feel like this show so far is starting to become a litany of Joe's.

Speaker 4 moral outrage, but then missing the opportunity of that moral outrage in places where, you know, he could make a difference. He could say something to some of these people.

Speaker 4 You know, I mean, the way Trump talks, Trump was on his show. He could have a conversation with someone like Trump and talk to him about how the disparity that's coming here or the

Speaker 4 difficulty that people are having because their personal freedoms are being stripped away. But he just he just glosses over it and doesn't care.

Speaker 4 And he's literally following right-wing talking points, even though in his show, he often doesn't. He will make these personal freedom stands.
And

Speaker 4 they are in opposition to some of these right-wing talking points. So you're right.
There's another missed opportunity for Joe.

Speaker 5 Yeah, it's when personal freedom is a concern, and it's not a consistent concern.

Speaker 5 It's a concern when it will affect Joe or the people that Joe is talking to.

Speaker 5 But when it affects other people, especially people who Joe might disagree with, especially people he might write off as being woke or DEI or anything like that,

Speaker 5 then he doesn't seem to have as much of an interest in their personal freedom.

Speaker 4 Okay, now we're going to talk, we're going to shift to an anecdote about crime in New York City.

Speaker 3 You know, I was watching these, this left-wing podcasts where they were discussing being gaslit about the problems with violence and crime rising in New York City.

Speaker 3 And that, you know, you're being told that it's not, but if you live day-to-day life, you're like, no, this is real.

Speaker 3 Like, you guys have let in a bunch of Venezuelan gang members and you have a sanctuary city and now it's kind of chaotic.

Speaker 3 And you're seeing like the woman got lit on fire in the subway and like that kind of shit. You're seeing this with

Speaker 3 ever-increasing frequency.

Speaker 3 You're also seeing the way they lie about crime statistics because they'll tell you that crime is down, but what they don't tell you is crime is severely underreported and that people are being released for even violent crimes very quickly, which has direct consequences because then there's no incentive whatsoever to not commit crime if you're going to be right back out on the street.

Speaker 4 I wanted to mention a couple of studies here

Speaker 4 very specifically because I think that

Speaker 4 Joe is misrepresenting this completely.

Speaker 4 First, I'll put links in the Sean O'C studies.

Speaker 4 The number of homicides across the United States declined by 16% in 2024, continuing a recent downward trajectory, according to the latest crime trends report on the Council of Criminal Justice, a nonpartisan think take.

Speaker 4 Despite the recent decline in homicides, crime remains a politically salient issue.

Speaker 4 A majority of Americans, 56%, believe that the national crime has increased or consider it extremely or a very serious problem.

Speaker 4 But concern about crime has lessened over the past year, according to Gallup's annual crime survey. And this is a really important part.

Speaker 4 Perceptions of crime are heavily influenced by political affiliation.

Speaker 4 The survey found that 60% of Democrats believe crime has decreased over the past year, whereas 90% of Republicans think it has increased.

Speaker 4 And that's, this is what we're getting into: Joe's perceptions are mostly Republican. And what Joe sees is mostly the Republican side.

Speaker 4 But when you see this statistic, you're like, okay, well, they declined by 16% last year. So yeah, is there crime? Yeah, does crime exist? Sure.
Do people get, are people's lives impacted by crime?

Speaker 4 Absolutely. But to make it seem like it's this rampant problem and it's continuing to rise is just misrepresenting what we know about crime.

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. And also, I mean, crime absolutely does exist.

Speaker 5 How much of it is tied into Venezuelan gang members in New York, I suspect, is a fraction of the amount of crime that's happening in New York.

Speaker 4 Great point.

Speaker 5 Also, when Joe points out that

Speaker 5 you can't trust the crime statistics because they're being fiddled and that they're not telling that crime is so underreported, what he's saying is the only metrics we have on how bad crime are aren't trustworthy.

Speaker 5 So you have to just trust the anecdote that I've got instead. So trust.

Speaker 5 I don't think the crime statistics are going to be perfect, far from it.

Speaker 5 And I think we should scrutinize them and be skeptical of them, but we shouldn't throw them out in favor of anecdotes of I saw a news story about a woman who got lit on fire in the subway.

Speaker 5 These things are going to skew you towards a far more alarmist view of reality than reality actually has.

Speaker 4 Next,

Speaker 4 there's kind of an offhand comment here that I really wanted to touch on. This is Warren talking about the Papa John CEO.

Speaker 3 So to treat words as the end-all been the end-all be-all is so silly.

Speaker 3 You know, like people say the wrong thing now, and you get it's politically incorrect. Papa John CEO.
Right, right. With no context is gone.

Speaker 3 But it's a larger issue.

Speaker 4 With no context is gone.

Speaker 4 And, you know, it's politically incorrect. Let's not just call it politically incorrect here.
Papa John CEO, he blamed bad marketing on

Speaker 4 NFL players, black NFL players who are kneeling because people were being killed by police officers.

Speaker 4 And they thought as a method of protest during the national anthem, we will kneel as a way to show that we are in solidarity with the people of color in this nation who are oppressed often by police officers.

Speaker 4 And white America lost their shit.

Speaker 4 They thought it was the most disrespectful, awful thing you could possibly do.

Speaker 4 And Papa John's, he recently at that point or within a year year of that point had become sort of the official pizza of the NFL.

Speaker 4 And he was pissed at the NFL because they were bringing this bad, this sort of bad marketing onto him. And so he complained about it.
And when he did, they made him participate in internal training.

Speaker 4 They were like, no, man, you're, what is wrong with you? He complained about it publicly. They said, dude, you've got to do this internal training.

Speaker 4 So then he's role-playing an exercise on a call with these marketing consultants. And this guy is trying to get through this.

Speaker 4 And during the conference call, this is a role play, by the way, during the conference call, he says, Colonel Sanders called blacks and he uses a slur here that I won't use.

Speaker 4 And he says, and Sanders never faced public outcry, end quote. So he used a racial slur on this call.
And after the call, the marketing agency is like, now we're good. We're done.

Speaker 4 We're canceling our contract. And then he resigned as chairman, basically as soon as that incident made it to the to the reporters.
As soon as reporters heard about it, he resigned as chairman.

Speaker 4 So let's not pretend that this was just some, oh, it was just some accidental political, politically incorrect moment.

Speaker 4 This is a guy showing his racist true colors, and then he had to resign because of it. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And I love that Warren paints this as just being out of context.

Speaker 5 But I also love the idea that he sat after saying various things, like you've got the Papa Johns guy sat in a room with marketing consultants whose only job is to get him to not say the N-words on a recording somewhere.

Speaker 5 Like,

Speaker 5 marketing is a fairly fairly cynical profession. I mean, it's going to hit the bottom line if you are using racial slurs.
I imagine if they'd have said to him, you don't have to change your views.

Speaker 5 You just have to stop saying them in our advertising or stop saying them while tied to our brand.

Speaker 5 That's the only goal of the company. And he couldn't even do that.

Speaker 4 He could even do it in a training. Yeah.
So let's not pretend. Let's not make this a big deal like it's, oh, it's, man, that one really slipped past the goalie.
No, it didn't. No, it didn't.

Speaker 4 All right. Now there's a discussion of equity versus equality.

Speaker 3 Which is the argument for equity, right, over equality.

Speaker 3 Yeah, essentially that would be a form of equity, equality of outcome versus equality of opportunity. Right.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I've seen that argument that, like, not everybody starts at the same spot, so you have to raise up people who have started at a different spot, which is to me a band-aid on the real problem.

Speaker 3 The real problem is that we have crime-infested areas that we've done nothing to fix. That's the real problem.

Speaker 3 The real problem is we have parts of our society that have been, you know, because of Jim Crow laws and red line laws, there's a a long history of them being riddled with crime and gangs.

Speaker 3 And it could be fixed. There's been no effort.
There's been no real national effort to take impoverished, gang-ridden, crime-ridden neighborhoods and rehabilitate them.

Speaker 3 The more you do that, if you did that, you would have less losers. If you have less losers, you have a better country.

Speaker 3 And that's including like the Appalachias, like areas of West Virginia that are filled with people that are addicted to pills and committing crime because they're drug addicts.

Speaker 3 They're all poor white people, coal mining people, and those folks. It's everybody.
It's just... crime and poverty.

Speaker 3 And crime and poverty causes people, you imitate your environment, you imitate your atmosphere.

Speaker 3 If you grow up in a crime-ridden, gang-ridden neighborhood, the chances of you getting involved in gang activities and crime are much higher than if you don't grow up in an environment like that.

Speaker 4 Fucking leftist. Ridiculous.
Well, that's it.

Speaker 5 I think he's doing a good job of identifying some of the issues here. You know, Jim Crow laws, red line laws are serious.
He says there's been no effort.

Speaker 5 There's been no real national effort to take impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhoods and rehabilitate them. They have, Joe.

Speaker 4 It's just that you wrote them off as woke and wrote them off as DEI, and now they've been cancelled.

Speaker 5 That's what those things are.

Speaker 5 But when Joe talks about Jim Crow laws and red line laws, these are the kind of things that kept people, kept black people out of the systems for decades, kept them off loans, kept them out of the good jobs.

Speaker 5 The areas in which you live were denied access to amenities through like red lines and Jim Craw laws, meaning that they were more likely to be impoverished.

Speaker 5 Those areas would be denied credit and insurance and healthcare, and it would result in things like food deserts and job deserts, good paying job deserts.

Speaker 5 But okay, those laws have been taken away, but all of that just doesn't get undone overnight. It really doesn't.

Speaker 5 Like, how do you get credit when you've got no credit history because you were previously denied credit? It's not going to be possible.

Speaker 5 How do you get a good job when you can only afford to live in the areas that are further from the good jobs and you don't fit in, you don't fit the profile of people they've hired before?

Speaker 5 And when you can't buy a new place that is closer to your job because you can't get a mortgage, because the bank is just trying to keep its default level below 0.5%, and you're seen as high risk because you've got no credit history.

Speaker 5 So complicated systems with complicated effects don't disappear overnight, even when the laws are taken away. And Joe even says you imitate your environment.

Speaker 5 You know, if you grew up in a crime-ridden neighborhood, the chance of you getting involved in crime are much higher. That is true.

Speaker 5 And that's why there are efforts to try and stop that, Joe, but you keep complaining about them because they're woke and they're DEI and they're all of the things that you think are evil.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that's so true, Marsha. And I, you know, I'm finding myself agreeing with Joe on a lot of the reasons why certain things happen.

Speaker 4 And I also want to, you know, say that one of the major reasons we have crime in this country and crime that continues to be a cycle is we don't have a rehabilitative incarceration system.

Speaker 4 What we have is a vengeance-based system. We don't have, we don't have any way for people to go.
I mean, are there some programs for people to better themselves in prison?

Speaker 4 Yeah, but those most of the time, that stuff isn't available to people, or that there's just not any push to help them better themselves while they're in prison.

Speaker 4 We don't have a good system for incarceration in this country. We have a system that puts people back on the street, they do something else, and then they come back in.
And it's a cycle.

Speaker 4 It's over and over and over again. And we don't ever spend any time trying to think how to break that cycle.

Speaker 4 We just make more prisons and then we sell those prisons to private corporations so they can get taxpayer dollars too.

Speaker 4 So let's not pretend that the entire system needs a re-haul and we need to make sure we get those

Speaker 4 private prison investors out of our incarceration system.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. When you run prisons for a profit, you incentivize prisons to not rehabilitate prisoners because they need more prisoners to keep turning a profit.

Speaker 5 You need your customers to keep coming back. Otherwise, you can't make money.

Speaker 5 But what Joel's actually describing there is a great example of what we'll focus on in our toolbox segment this week, which is the Nirvana fallacy. So that's a bit of a throw-forward.

Speaker 5 We'll come back to that in a moment.

Speaker 4 Okay, so now we're going to talk about two more pieces before we move off of this.

Speaker 4 You know, we talked a little bit about sort of their racial biases and the things that they're seeing when it comes to race, but I want to talk a little bit about trans issues.

Speaker 4 And this is them discussing that. This is the first clip.

Speaker 3 It's like the response that I I got about J.K. Rowling.
It was the ContraPoints YouTuber. Everyone's like, you gotta

Speaker 3 counter ContraPoints. She's the one who's taken down J.K.
Rowling. And the argument essentially is, I'm so done arguing.
I'm not even going to debate this.

Speaker 3 If anyone who believes in transphobia can see that J.K. Rowling is obviously transphobic, it's the same thing.

Speaker 3 If you believe in that definition of transphobia, well, you can find it almost infinite places. Well, the problem with that kind of arguing is that it's a total cop-out.

Speaker 3 Like, if there is any sort of debate, and there clearly is when it comes to trans issues, if there's any sort of debate, you have to be able to discuss things.

Speaker 3 And as soon as you say, if you want to debate, we're done. If you want to have a discussion, we can't.
You don't see it? Well, we're done.

Speaker 3 Well, what you're essentially conceding is you don't have a logical ability to shut this down. Because if you did, you would just do it.

Speaker 3 You would have a rational conversation with that person and you would say clearly, look, this is why this is racist. This is why this is transphobic.
This is why this is sexist.

Speaker 3 Look, whatever the argument is. And you would lay it out.
And as soon as you say, if you don't believe that, then we're done talking.

Speaker 4 I found very easily, and I'll link it in the show notes, a very extensive history of J.K. Rawlings' attacks on trans people.
I'll put it in the show notes. It's a glamour article.
It's very long.

Speaker 4 It has lists all her tweets.

Speaker 4 It lists all the controversy with the former child stars that were in her movies and how they responded and how other people responded, how adult actors and actresses who were in her orbit responded.

Speaker 4 There's plenty of stuff to take a look at. There's no reason to rehash it all, but

Speaker 4 you should, if you want to understand J.K. Rowling's stance, you should look into it.
You should look and see.

Speaker 4 I mentioned one tweet earlier, but there are many tweets that she has and also associations and retweets with people who she is involved with that are very anti-trans.

Speaker 4 So while she isn't saying some of these things directly, she is involved with people who are saying some really horrible anti-trans stuff. And there's also a link in that video or in that

Speaker 4 very specific article to an hour and 55 minute long video by ContraPoints. So if you want to know about all the stuff about J.K.

Speaker 4 Rowling, you could sit down and watch an hour and 40, 55 minute video, or you could put it on FastSpeed and watch it in an hour or however you want to do it.

Speaker 4 But their argument is, I'm not, I'm, I'm done. I'm not arguing about it.
Their argument is very extensive and it's involved in that video. It's not just hand wave it away.

Speaker 4 I don't want to have to have this conversation with you.

Speaker 5 Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And it feels, again, this is another example of Warren and Joe not doing the

Speaker 5 thing we talked about at the start of like pausing to actually listen to what is being said. He's not giving space to listen to what's being said.

Speaker 5 When they mock the idea of giving space, what they're saying is I'm not going to listen, which is fine if you're then going to stay out of the conversation, but you can't say, I'm not going to listen.

Speaker 5 And I'm still going to be in the conversation. So Joe is saying, you know, people will shut things down because they haven't got an argument.

Speaker 5 One of the things to bear in mind is people don't owe you a full education on issues.

Speaker 5 If you've shown that you have tried to find something out for yourself, you've done a good faith attempt to actually try and understand something, you've looked around, you've tried to read things that you disagree with,

Speaker 5 read the perspectives that you don't agree with in order to have a rounder idea of something, and then you're still struggling, people will generally help you at that point because they've shown that you're actually willing to put the work in, to actually try and think about this.

Speaker 5 But the issue is, so many people, and Joe has shown this several times through the episodes we've seen, they expect you to do the work for them first, to come along and say, I don't understand this, tell me everything.

Speaker 5 And they assume that there is no issue until you persuade them otherwise, which is not a good faith position to be in.

Speaker 5 Their assumption is, all of these people are wrong until they persuade me otherwise. And I'm not going to look into my assumption that they're all wrong first.

Speaker 5 And they're only going to have that conversation with you, Joe, if you show that you're willing to listen. that it's actually going to be a conversation.
And that's not what we're seeing with Joe.

Speaker 5 It's not what we're seeing with Warren. Clearly, neither of them have actually, you know, Warren talked about going away and looking at Conch Point's videos.

Speaker 5 He clearly hasn't seen that video because it isn't, as you say, it's not just Conch Point saying, we're done talking. If you don't believe me, we're done talking.
He just hasn't listened.

Speaker 5 He hasn't taken it on board.

Speaker 5 So it's no wonder that some people will refuse to engage in a conversation with him about it because they've demonstrated they don't want to have a conversation about this.

Speaker 5 They just want to, they want to be able to prove themselves right and dismiss anything you say that they disagree with.

Speaker 4 I want to bring up an important piece here that I think is

Speaker 4 a problem with Joe Joe Show and it's a problem with J.K. Rowling.
And I think the problem is, is that the poison's in the dose. I think when people hear about J.K.

Speaker 4 Rowling and they read her tweets and she's not as vitriolic as other people are against trans people, you can find very vitriolic, slur-laden tweets on.

Speaker 4 on Twitter that are way more horrible in many ways than what J.K. Rowling is going to say.
J.K.

Speaker 4 Rowling is going to say some things that are absolutely terrible, but they're not as vitriolic as the other things that other people are saying.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 the poison is in the dose here. And it's the same thing with Joe.
They have, she has 14 million Twitter followers, right? And she's introducing them to concepts

Speaker 4 in a way that is softer than that harsh vitriolic thing. Joe isn't the craziest person out there.

Speaker 4 He doesn't have the craziest ideas out there, but he's got some really insidious ideas that he introduces people to and he introduces it to him on a mass scale that most people cannot reach.

Speaker 4 The same thing with J.K. Rowling.
It's not just her tweets. If she tweets something, it's going to get picked up in a paper.
And it's probably going to be picked up in a lot of right-wing papers.

Speaker 4 And it's probably going to be sent out to a ton of right-wing eyeballs who may not have been paying attention to any trans issues whatsoever.

Speaker 4 And then suddenly this person who they see as sort of an avatar is talking about these things. So this is really insidious stuff that's happening.

Speaker 4 And this is why people have been so vociferously against J.K. Rowling.
It isn't exactly this. I mean, don't get me wrong.
I'm not saying, I'm not trying to forgive her the things she's saying. No, no.

Speaker 4 But I am saying that the things she's saying are not as vitriolic. And that's why a lot of people, when they hear them, they're like, oh, that's not that bad.

Speaker 4 And you're like, no, but look at, think about the, the, how much she's poisoning that entire group of people and how insidious it is.

Speaker 4 And take that into account when you think about how damaging she is. Yeah.

Speaker 5 And it's, it's, it's also a question of scale as well.

Speaker 5 In that, that if you were to go through her Twitter profile over the last, god, five years or more, you'll struggle to find things that aren't about this issue.

Speaker 5 And so, given that there is so much to go through, it's very easy for people to say, well, what about this, where she says something that seems pretty reasonable.

Speaker 5 You can't argue that that's transphobic, but that is not reflective of her general output. And it's impossible to go through everything she said to find the worst things that she said.

Speaker 5 And then, on top of that, it's the sharing of people like Matt Walsh and various other people who've

Speaker 5 said far, far worse things. It's the association on that.
And as you say, the introduction of people into those worlds. That's the stuff that we're really concerned about.

Speaker 4 All right, we're going to wrap this up. This is talking about Joe, of course, has to bring it back to bathroom bills.
So that's where we're going to end with the trans issue.

Speaker 3 It's just neutralizing the debate because they can't have the debate. Well, they can't have the debate because they're not equipped for it.
That's all it is.

Speaker 3 They don't have any weapons, right? And if you're going to go to battle, you have to have some sort of resources. There's nothing there.

Speaker 3 And when there's nothing there, and you just say, I can't, instead of saying, like, like, is there a logical argument that there are men who are manipulating this in order to control women's faces?

Speaker 3 And, like, it used to be that we protected women against men, and

Speaker 3 particularly we protected women against predatory men, right? Like perverts or sex offenders, for example.

Speaker 3 But somewhere along the line with this woke ideology, we completely eliminated the even possibility that a man in a dress that wants to go into the woman's room could be a pervert,

Speaker 3 which to me was the most insane thing. It's like you've just given a hall pass to the grossest members of society that we've always feared.

Speaker 3 We've always feared people that would try to take advantage of women and

Speaker 3 do so in a weird way where you claim to be one, but you have a penis. You're walking around with an erection in a locker room, and anybody who calls it out is transphobic.
Right.

Speaker 3 It got real weird. People would counter and say, Joby.
but like you're, you're, you're taking extreme. You're claiming that trans people are walking around with erections.

Speaker 3 It allows for that capacity. It allows for that to occur.

Speaker 5 This is actually a perfect example of what we were just talking about. We've just, we haven't done many episodes.
We've already discussed this before. We've certainly heard Joe discuss this before.

Speaker 5 This is Joe's go-to example. Joe hasn't invented this as an example.
Lots of people have brought this up. Lots of people have had conversations about this.
There's been a lot of debate.

Speaker 5 There's lots of counter-arguments. Joe has clearly made absolutely no effort to explore what people would would say in response to this.

Speaker 5 But every time a trans person comes up in conversation, this is what he comes up.

Speaker 5 Despite the fact that he's made no effort here, he still expects every trans person and every trans ally to have this specific conversation with him every time.

Speaker 5 And there are counter-arguments to this. So his idea that, well, this is allowing people to go into changing rooms and be perverts and things.

Speaker 5 Well, we could say, well, what about the countries in which these rules are already in place, that trans people can use the bathrooms of the gender they identify as?

Speaker 5 Do we we see a marked rise of people using that as a predicate for people to go in and assault people? And there is no evidence at all that that is what's happening.

Speaker 5 So if Joe really wanted to understand the answer to this really logical question to him, he could say, well, is there any evidence that this is a genuine concern

Speaker 5 where countries already allow for people to use those bathrooms? And he'd see there's no evidence. He hasn't done that because he doesn't want to have an informed conversation about it.

Speaker 5 He wants to stick to his talking points so he can dismiss the thing that he doesn't like.

Speaker 4 I just want to point out: someone who pretends to be a trans person isn't a trans person.

Speaker 4 Let's stop pretending that what we're talking about here, he's making a very specific accusation against trans people.

Speaker 4 Either you're saying all trans people are perverts or have the potential to be perverts, or you're saying there are people who are pretending to be trans people.

Speaker 4 Well, if there are people who are pretending to be trans people, it's not the trans people's problem that there's people pretending to be them.

Speaker 4 It's a male violence problem that you need to address. And

Speaker 4 I just I think that what he's trying to say is, and he won't say, is that all trans people are perverts. That's what I think he wants to say, but he doesn't have the courage to say.

Speaker 5 Yeah, because he clearly doesn't want to, he clearly doesn't believe that all men are perverts. That's not what he's saying.
But like that is the more

Speaker 5 that is the more reasonable conclusion from his line of arguing is that somebody's going to pretend.

Speaker 5 But that would rely on him saying that his audience, any one of those men in the audience, have the potential to do that that themselves as well.

Speaker 5 And obviously, if he said that, people would reject that.

Speaker 3 Wow. So that's the tool bag? And something just fell out of the tool bag?

Speaker 5 So as I already mentioned, we are going to have a skeptical toolbox segment this week, and we're going to talk about the Nirvana fallacy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, so this is

Speaker 4 don't let the perfect be the enemy of of the good, right?

Speaker 5 Yeah, exactly. So the idea of a Nirvana fallacy is that it assumes there is a perfect solution to a problem.
That if there is a problem, there must be a perfect solution out there.

Speaker 5 And therefore, if you can't do the perfect solution, well, it's not worth trying to do anything at all. You know, just because you can't fully fix something, it's never worth trying to improve it.

Speaker 5 And this is obviously not a very good way of looking at things because not all problems are going to have perfect solutions.

Speaker 5 So you might be looking for a perfect solution that doesn't exist and therefore never doing anything.

Speaker 5 Also, sometimes a perfect solution is a completely impossible standard because in most situations, if you solve 99% of the problem, that is going to be objectively better than solving 0% of the problem.

Speaker 5 It's not an all or nothing.

Speaker 5 So for example, someone might argue, well, it's not worth helping the homeless because you won't be able to help everybody. Okay, but what you're missing is you still do help a lot of people.

Speaker 5 So maybe it's worth helping quite a lot of people compared to helping no people.

Speaker 5 So it's just a way of dismissing any attempt to fix a problem because that solution isn't going to be absolutely perfect.

Speaker 4 All right, so let's talk about the first clip here.

Speaker 5 This is solving racism.

Speaker 3 You're never going to stop racism. You're never going to stop ignorant thinking.

Speaker 3 I mean, unless there's some sort of a groundbreaking human-neural interface that completely changes our cognitive function and

Speaker 3 dissolves all boundaries, you're not going to stop people from...

Speaker 3 There's people that don't like people from other cities because they play sports against them. You know, I hate people from Philly.

Speaker 3 There's always going to be people that discriminate against other people because there's always going to be ignorant people. So it's going to be, and it's easier to do that.

Speaker 3 It's easier to decide this person is my enemy.

Speaker 3 These people are on my side. It's easy to be tribal.
It's like, it's much simpler. Yeah.
You don't have to think as much.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 5 So we have here, you can never stop racism. It's not, you can't ever eradicate racism.
So the implied suggestion is it's not really worth trying to improve things.

Speaker 5 Why do these various different measures to prevent black people from having lawns denied? Because you'll never ever stop all of racism. This is Nirvana fallacy.

Speaker 5 Maybe trying to improve things is worth it, even if you'll never get to perfect.

Speaker 5 And I also like how Joe's solution to racism is straight to some magical technological fix, like a human-neural interface.

Speaker 5 It's that rather than having to change his behavior in any way, having to actually make any effort to change his behavior.

Speaker 4 He's got to get hooked up to that machine in the Matrix and they download a non-racist personality into him. That's the only way that you're going to fix it.

Speaker 4 I just want to point out that one of the ways in which to help work on being less racist to be anti-racist is to recognize those biases in yourself.

Speaker 4 And every time you have that feeling that you're being racist or shitty, you just need to confront it and you need to recognize that you have those feelings and you need to think about it.

Speaker 4 And perhaps that is exactly what was happening at Emerson when they made all those people sit down to talk about, hey, you know, we have internal biases, and maybe when you feel one of those biases, you need to realize that that's racist and shitty and we shouldn't be doing that.

Speaker 4 But instead, what happened was dude put up a wall and he didn't want to listen to it. He didn't want to have to hear about any of their

Speaker 4 silly little problems. And now he's on Joe's show and they're both wondering why racism keeps running amok in our country.

Speaker 4 And then they, even when presented with ways in which they could combat it, they refused to do it. So, you know, like this is an this is pretty much exactly what he was talking about earlier.

Speaker 4 And also Joe seems to be saying that racism exists and it's widespread. But when he was talking about Emerson earlier, he kind of hand-waved it away.

Speaker 4 So again, we're seeing a little bit of a cognitive dissonance here on Joe's part. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 5 It's the difference between the abstract and the specific. So you can accept that racism and ignorance and those things, they exist in the abstract.

Speaker 5 But whenever you talk about a specific example, you'll find a reason why that isn't racism. And it's because when you start to look at specific examples, it makes it much harder for you

Speaker 5 to avoid looking at specific examples in your own life and your own thinking. And we will all have instincts that are biased in some ways.

Speaker 5 Sometimes the first thought you will have will not always be the best one. And what makes you a better person is, as you say, working on that to say, well, that instinct isn't good.

Speaker 5 Where did that come from? Maybe I need to think about how I think about things. And over time, you can train yourself to no longer have those kind of biased kind of instincts.

Speaker 5 But we're all going to have some knee-jerk reactions. You're not a racist for having that initial knee-jerk reaction somewhere in your brain at some point in your life.

Speaker 5 You're just a racist if you either act on that or refuse to do anything to try and interrogate why you think that way.

Speaker 4 Next bit. Now, this is a reference to Billy Bob Thornton.
So they're talking about Billy Bob Thornton and the things he's talking about.

Speaker 4 So if you hear he in this, they're referring to Billy Bob Thornton and it's talking about oil.

Speaker 3 Well, that's the other thing about climate change. Like, listen, if you really think that it's oil is the problem with climate change, well, you better change your whole fucking life.

Speaker 3 Because everything in your goddamn life, is that what he says? Everything in your goddamn life is made with oil.

Speaker 3 Everything in your hair, everything in your car, everything in your phone, everything in your fucking life is made with oil.

Speaker 5 Yeah, and if you can't stop using oil in every single part of your life, well, I guess there's no point in trying to do anything at all. Yeah, says Billy Bob Thornton.

Speaker 5 And for starters, I thought actors were all too scared to go against left-wing narratives.

Speaker 5 We do hear that quite a few times elsewhere in the show, that there's this big leftist cabal in Hollywood silencing people, but somehow Billy Bob Thornton escapes it.

Speaker 4 Billy Bob Thornton's got a lot of thoughts on climate change, doesn't he?

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 this is what you were talking about earlier. If you can't change everything, then why even bother?

Speaker 4 Why shouldn't I just create the biggest landfill full of petroleum products, dump my oil out on the ground? Who cares, right? I mean, what's the big deal? The oil's going to get in the system.

Speaker 4 We have to use oil. So let's just neglect any kind of curtailing of that need whatsoever.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And also, if you can't change everything at once, then it's not worth doing it.

Speaker 5 It's not worth divesting from one of those different things, that oil, and sort sort of pick your way through the list. If you can't do everything at once, it's not worth it.

Speaker 5 But just think about applying that logic against positions that Joe and his guests agree with, and you'll see why it's nonsense.

Speaker 5 For example, you could say, well, you'll never stop things being flammable. So why bother putting out the LA fires? Because things are going to burn again.
You can't stop all fires.

Speaker 4 No matter what.

Speaker 5 Or, you know, how about you'll never stop every single person from ever being able to get into America illegally. So why do anything at all about immigration?

Speaker 5 Do you think Joe and his guests would agree with that formation of the thought?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you got to build it. What you have to do is build a wall that people are going to walk around.
That's the key. That's where you need to spend your money.
But you shouldn't spend it.

Speaker 4 Mexico should spend it. Yeah, 100%.

Speaker 4 Okay, so now we're going to talk. This is a great bit where they're talking about, they start, they shift their focus.

Speaker 4 It feels like a lot of the Nirvana fallacy focuses on climate change, and this is no different. This is EV cars versus gas cars.

Speaker 3 So those cars are much heavier than regular cars, much heavier. And there's a problem with guardrails because of that.
So guardrails are designed for a car that's a specific weight.

Speaker 3 And, you know, most cars weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 4,000, 5,000 pounds.

Speaker 3 But when you add batteries, so if you have a car that's filled with enormous amounts of batteries, that car is a lot heavier than a regular car.

Speaker 3 And some of those cars just go right through those guardrails. Wee! Because there's just too much mass.

Speaker 4 You have to do that too when you go through the guardrails.

Speaker 5 Yes, but he's arguing if there's any drawbacks at all to

Speaker 5 electric vehicles, if they're not completely perfect, they're not worth it. Nirvana fallacy.

Speaker 4 Yeah, absolutely. And if there's any drawbacks to guardrails, those aren't worth it either.
So if they can't stop every single car, then you just get rid of the guardrails.

Speaker 4 There's no reason to have them. Absolutely right.

Speaker 5 Also, note here. I think it's going to be interesting.
I did a little bit of digging here. This is one of my little deep dives.

Speaker 4 You did. Did you have, Marsh, did you have an EV expert that you could have called on the phone that you could have talked to this time?

Speaker 5 I didn't, but I did look up the weight specifications of certain models of car in both EV and gas form, internal combustion engine form, to compare them because Joe is talking like there is a massive difference between EV cars and internal combustion engines.

Speaker 5 But electrical vehicles on average tend to be heavier by about 300 kilograms, maybe 400 kilograms compared to petrol cars as transport as calculated by the transport and environment.

Speaker 5 So take, for example, a Vauxhall Corsa, fairly common car. I don't know if you have them in the US.

Speaker 5 That weighs about 1600 kilograms as an internal combustion engine or 1960 kilograms in the electric model. That's about 300 kilograms difference, which is the equivalent of four of me.

Speaker 5 It's like taking four of me out for a ride with you. That's not nothing, but that would not be the most significant weight of the car by some measure.

Speaker 5 And then the other thing to bear in mind is SUVs weigh substantially more than that. They weigh upwards of 2,400 kilograms.
I think I'll give you that in pounds in a bit.

Speaker 5 But that 2,400 kilograms is more than a fully laden Tesla Model 3 performance. So if you have a Tesla Model 3 performance, that's 2,270 kilograms at maximum weight.

Speaker 5 So an SUV on average weighs more than that. So if Jaws issue is with weight, he should be arguing against SUVs before he argues against electric cars.

Speaker 5 A Ford

Speaker 5 Expedition has a curb weight of, let's do it in pounds, 5,793 pounds, which is about 2,600 kilograms. That's before any passengers get into it.

Speaker 5 So if Joe's issue is with vehicle weight, SUV should be a problem. The most popular SUV in America is the Ford F series, which has got a curb weight of 4,500 to 5,500 pounds.

Speaker 5 If you go for the electric model, that's £6,500.

Speaker 5 It adds £1,000 on to a car that already weighed £5,500.

Speaker 5 So I think the issues here are about the size of cars and it's not the electrics is not what's adding the most substantial weight.

Speaker 5 And also, if the guardrails really were were so flimsy, they'd be useless against SUVs.

Speaker 5 They'd also be completely useless against coaches, minibuses, trucks, vans, anything bigger than a standard saloon car. So his arguments here are very clearly biased towards a certain outcome.

Speaker 4 All right. Now we're moving on to talking about problems with wind and solar.

Speaker 3 The bottom line is

Speaker 3 there's problems with all technologies in terms of whether or not they go into a landfill. This is a giant problem with windmills.
Windmills aren't efficient. They're gross looking.

Speaker 3 They pollute the landscape in terms of the way it looks. You just see these fucking windmills everywhere.
And those things have to go into landfill.

Speaker 3 So you have these enormous fiberglass propellers that now have to be buried in the ground. And Billy Vog goes on a good rant about the windmill.
Does he have to go to the throttle? He rips them apart.

Speaker 5 Yeah, they're not effective.

Speaker 3 They're not good enough for what they do to the environment. You know, they kill whales.
That's the other thing. You know, Trump talked about that too.
That these things, when they set these things up

Speaker 3 near the ocean, like the sound is fucking with these whales. Oh, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 It's not good. It's not the way to go.
Maybe solar's better. But, you know, if you have like enormous areas of land that are covered in solar panels, that looks gross too.

Speaker 5 So again, put the Nirvana fallacy in here, just to be clear, there's problems with all technologies, so it's not worth changing which technology we favor.

Speaker 5 Obviously, a ridiculous argument. If there's downsides to all technologies, maybe we compare the problems with one technology against the problems of another.

Speaker 5 Is there a technology out there we could switch to which has fewer problems?

Speaker 5 That's the most important thing. But he's talking about windmills, windmills, okay? Windmills they go into landfills.
Is that a big problem for us?

Speaker 4 We should be asking because they stick out the top.

Speaker 4 You bury them halfway, but then they're stuck out the top and they just keep spinning. There's a problem,

Speaker 4 it's a whole thing.

Speaker 5 Or you have to lie them down like in a grave, and that's that's really inefficient because, like, the top is really long. And yeah, really big.

Speaker 4 Yes, it's too much.

Speaker 5 But like, the questions we should be asking in terms of downsides is: how big a problem is it?

Speaker 5 How big is the landfill problem with windmills compared to, for example, the downsides of oil extraction or coal mining wow and what happens to all the mining and the coal extra the coal mining the oil extraction equipment when that's done with where does that go does that go and the byproducts of those things too right

Speaker 5 all that stuff to worry about and to answer those questions well maybe we need to to understand what the lifespan of a windmill is he said they're not effective well how long does a windmill need to be need a wind turbine need to to last before it gets replaced the average service life of a wind turbine is about 25 to 30 years you need to replace a few bits along the way, but say 25 years before you like to scrap each unit.

Speaker 5 In that time, each wind turbine will produce 6 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year, which is enough to power 1500 homes per year, or double that for offshore wind turbines, which can be even bigger.

Speaker 5 So that I think is pretty useful. That's pretty effective.
Yeah. Given it's not producing ongoing emissions or ongoing byproducts.

Speaker 4 And that's a single turbine. That's not like a wind farm.
That's a single turbine.

Speaker 5 Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, in 25 years' time, that's going to have to go in the landmine, in a landfill.
But like, maybe that's not that big of an issue compared to the benefits here.

Speaker 5 But maybe they're killing whales. Are they killing whales? This is something that Donald Trump actually claimed, and the BBC wrote about it.
So the NOAA, which I think RIP, I think that's now gone.

Speaker 5 I don't think that exists basically.

Speaker 4 They certainly don't have any funding anymore.

Speaker 5 Yeah. Well, I think their website was scrubbed.
I think last time I looked, there was an issue with the website.

Speaker 5 NOAA officials carried out post-mortem examinations on about 90 humpback whales that have been found dead since 2016.

Speaker 5 40% of those deaths were linked to human interaction, but that was mostly whales becoming entangled in fishing nets or being struck by vessels who were traveling through their feeding grounds.

Speaker 5 Some of those vessels, it's worth pointing out, will be carrying oil and gas as well, to be clear.

Speaker 4 So in the remaining cases.

Speaker 4 Or windmill parts.

Speaker 5 Maybe windmill parts.

Speaker 4 Maybe windmill parts. Maybe they were fishing for windmills too with nets.
We have no idea.

Speaker 4 It's possible.

Speaker 5 And in the remaining cases that were

Speaker 5 investigated by NOAA, other factors were listed as possible causes of death, including parasite-caused organ damage or starvation.

Speaker 5 Not listed, windmills, the sound made by windmills, not listed on there. This is untrue, but it's something that Joe heard and it agrees with what he thinks, agrees with what he wants to think.

Speaker 5 So he puts that in.

Speaker 5 And then finally, he comes to, well, solar's better, but you know, it looks gross. Is that the downside of solar? Looks gross compared to what? How do oil refineries look? What about extraction wells?

Speaker 5 What about coal mines? Like, how do those look aesthetically? And how do those compare to solar panels? These are things that we should be taking into account, which Joe will not do, obviously.

Speaker 4 As a kid who grew up near a refinery, so I lived in a poorish town that was near a refinery that would explode about every 10 years or so.

Speaker 4 That refinery looked grotesque. Like it was awful.
It's literally just

Speaker 4 miles and miles and miles of dirty old rusty pipes. And there's just, it's just, it just belches stuff into the air and it's just constant,

Speaker 4 you know, nastiness. And it looks awful.

Speaker 4 And so don't tell me that looks bad, that looks worse than a field a farmer's field which is already boring with windmills get off get out of here it's it's such a it's such a bad argument to say that looks bad in comparison and i don't think solar panels look particularly bad i mean i've got some in my house i love my solar panels they're excellent i get free electricity out of them it's brilliant it's killer all right last clip this is talking about china you could say that's climate change but what The problem with that statement is that the climate has never been static.

Speaker 3 There has never been a moment in human history where the climate was absolutely predictable to the degree every year. It's just not the case.
Climate varies, it has always varied.

Speaker 3 The real question should be: how much of an impact are we having on it, and how much of an impact are we having on pollution? The pollution, the particulate, that's a real issue. It's a real issue.

Speaker 3 And if other countries aren't addressing that, I read something, find out if this is true, that China right now is responsible for more pollutants in the atmosphere, more carbon in the atmosphere than all the other countries combined.

Speaker 3 I wouldn't doubt it at all. I wouldn't doubt that.
They're like majority of the pollutants in the atmosphere are coming from there, and they're not going to change.

Speaker 3 So you switching to an electric car or you stop using a gas stove or you, whatever you're doing, it's not going to have an impact if CO2 is entirely what's going on.

Speaker 3 Even if we got down to climate neutral, that doesn't stop global warming. It doesn't stop a shift in the change that has always gone up and down throughout recorded history.

Speaker 3 When we do ice samples, when they do core samples, and they go back 10, 15, 20,000, 50,000 years, there's always been enormous shifts in the temperature.

Speaker 3 Half of North America was covered in a mile-high sheet of ice up until 12,000 years ago. So miles in some places, more than a mile.

Speaker 3 So there's always been shifts in the climate long before there was any industrial revolution, long before there was any gas-powered cars.

Speaker 5 So yeah, we can't control the entire climate from changing. So therefore, we shouldn't try to do anything about what we're doing to the climate, is his argument here.

Speaker 5 And he's even setting unreasonable standards. You can hear in here.
You know, we can't, the climate was never absolutely predictable to the degree every year. Nobody's expecting it to be.

Speaker 5 But can we compare what the average temperature was roughly 10 years ago, 20 years ago to now and see a rise? And we will see a rise.

Speaker 5 So you don't need to be able to predict in advance to the degree to say that we are rising here. That is really, really clear.

Speaker 5 And he's also saying about how, and bear in mind in the past, America was covered in a mile-high wall of ice. It's like, yeah, Joe, do you want to go back to that?

Speaker 5 Because maybe we should be like paying attention to the way the climate changes because. The climate, as I've said before, Earth will survive.

Speaker 5 It's whether it's habitable for us is the bit that we care about here.

Speaker 4 That's the really important piece. Yeah.
Joe seems to think that, you know, look, if we're all just, we're in a boat in a storm.

Speaker 4 If Joe over here isn't doing doing his part, then let's all just quit and let's drown. Let's all just stop bailing out the boat.
Let's all just, let's all just quit.

Speaker 4 And that's just a stupid thing to think. And it also doesn't recognize international pressure at all.
There's other things that you can do.

Speaker 4 You know, his, the president that he chose seems to be pretty fond of economic pressure. So there's other things you can do to force nations to do things.

Speaker 4 Just because they're not doing it now doesn't mean they won't do it in the future either, if you pressure them to do it.

Speaker 5 Yeah. And also his argument that china's not doing anything so no one else should that also relies on china not doing anything

Speaker 5 once china starts doing something that becomes a problem china is the largest market in the world for solar like by a distance in 2023 china alone added 60 of the world's new solar capacity so they are doing some stuff according to a carbon brief report china's use of coal peaked in 2024.

Speaker 5 Its use of petrol peaked in 2023. It's still got a mile to go.
It's got a long, long way to go. And like, don't get me wrong, I'm not a massive fan of China here.

Speaker 5 Its use of coal was already so high that it's still a huge emitter. But it is factually incorrect to say that China are doing nothing.

Speaker 5 And that it's even worse than that to argue then that's why America should also do nothing and make no effort either.

Speaker 4 Says hello, Brooklyn, you don't smart.

Speaker 3 And I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart. Trust me.

Speaker 4 All right, Marsh,

Speaker 4 we're going to talk about what we liked about this program. So what was something good?

Speaker 5 This was a bit of a struggle for me, but I think there's a point that we sort of touched on where Joe does talk about how people's lives get messed up.

Speaker 5 There's a point we didn't include in the show where he talks about how the things that contribute to what goes wrong in your life include your upbringing and your circumstances and how it's not your fault that that's what's happening.

Speaker 5 He talks about how people can get trapped in poverty by the situation they're in. I think that all is really good, really solid.
He identifies a lot of problems.

Speaker 5 He shows some genuine compassion at those points, But then, and he seems to at least understand that in those situations, those awful things are beyond people's control.

Speaker 5 It's not their fault that they're in those situations. Unfortunately, he doesn't then follow up with what we can actually do about them.

Speaker 5 He sort of writes, write it off as essentially, you know, sucks to be them, but at least he can recognize the issues, which is, which is something.

Speaker 4 Yeah, that is, that is something.

Speaker 4 I also, you know, to be honest, I like the discussion about the power of story and storytelling that they were having. I

Speaker 4 learned about about storytelling while I was in graduate school. I did some trainings in different parts of the country on it.

Speaker 4 I taught a class at university on storytelling and gave several workshops on digital storytelling.

Speaker 4 And the concept of using your own personal stories and relating your own personal stories to people really resonates with me. So I liked their conversation about how important story was.

Speaker 4 So I thought that was a worthwhile listen.

Speaker 5 Also, I also enjoyed Heath Ledger's version of The Joker. So that came up off enough that that's a decent percentage of this conversation.

Speaker 4 I liked him in Night's Tale. So I thought that was, is he in Night's Tale? He was in Nightstale.
Okay, all right, good. Okay.

Speaker 5 Okay, well, that's about it for the show this week.

Speaker 5 Remember, you can access more than half an hour of bonus content every week from as little as a dollar an episode by subscribing at patreon.com forward slash no rogan. That's K-N-O-W-Rogan.

Speaker 5 And meanwhile, you can hear more from Cecil at Cognitive Dissonance and Citation Needed. And you can hear more from me at Skeptics with a K.

Speaker 5 And we'll be back next next week for a little more of the No Rogan experience.

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Speaker 4 If you want to get in touch with us, become a patron, or check out the show notes, go to norogan.com. K-N-O-W-R-O-G-A-N dot com.