104 | Changing Your Mind Without Losing Your Values (with Anthony)

Politics used to feel like opinions. Now it can feel like a full-body threat and if you question the script, you risk getting exiled. We sit down with Anthony Rispo, who studied psychology, neuroscience, and political behavior at Columbia University. An expert in how we measure human cognition, emotion, and behavior. We talk about what happens when you leave a political side, stop fitting neatly into a label, and realize you're politically homeless in a culture that demands total certainty.

We go deep into the psychology behind the temperature of the country right now. Binary thinking, hostile attribution bias, cognitive dissonance, and why social media turns disagreement into dehumanization. Anthony shares how old wounds and identity-based hypervigilance can shape how we read the world, and how 2020 pushed many people into anger that didn’t match who they wanted to be. We also talk about maturity as emotional regulation, why parenthood and responsibility narrow your priorities, and what it looks like to protect your home (and heart) by logging off.

From there, we unpack big ideas with real-world stakes: critical theory in higher education, the Overton window shifting under our feet, and how 'sacred values' plus identity fusion can make people feel justified in bullying a small business or screaming labels at someone instead of having a conversation. We also wrestle with the uncomfortable tradeoffs people avoid when they only see victims and villains.

If you’re craving nuance, intellectual humility, and a way to think for yourself again, hit play. Subscribe, share this with a friend who feels stuck in the middle, and leave a review with the mindset shift that helped you lower your own temperature.

You can find Anthony here: https://linktr.ee/anthonyrispo

 and here: https://www.instagram.com/anthonyrispo/

The Myth of Left and Right: https://a.co/d/00A7MDBx

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Transcript

Testing Politics With The Audience

SPEAKER_00 0:31

Well, I have a question for you both. Are you what's your audience like? Like, do they are they all about the stuff you just mentioned? How will the political stuff hit them, do you think?

SPEAKER_03 0:42

Um We're testing the waters. I think that there are probably more people that are where we are right now where they feel politically homeless. We have done an episode about like why we left the left so they're aware of where we are, where we sit. Yeah. And I think the broader conversation, and we've always been about this, is like having nuanced conversations. We've done it in the healing space. And I think that it's important that we carry it over into this space.

SPEAKER_02 1:14

We've been very transparent about where we are at in our lives and in our healing journeys. Part of healing was realizing how black and white our thinking was, even politically.

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Right. I'm I hear that in the notes here about binary thinking and all that stuff. Yep. That's how I felt too at one point.

SPEAKER_02 1:36

Well, and that's how we found you. So yeah, that's kind of where we want to go.

SPEAKER_00 1:42

Finding each other.

SPEAKER_02 1:43

And kind of go into the psychology of it because it's been it's been fascinating to essentially kind of just share our truth, but be exiled by friends and family for just sharing where we're at.

SPEAKER_00 1:57

Let's get into it. Yep.

Meet Anthony And The Pivot

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Okay. Okay. I feel like we already got started, but go ahead. Oh, I know. Welcome everyone to another episode of See You on the Other Side. Leah and I are really, really excited about this interview. It's been an interview we have been wanting to do for a long time just because of where we are at with our lives. Um, but we wanted to welcome Anthony Rispo. Welcome, Anthony, to the See You on the Other Side podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:27

Thank you both for having me. I'm so excited to be here finally.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Finally. Um, so as you guys know, in our new season, we have both been transparent about um our journeys politically and how we have both left the left and now consider ourselves politically homeless. Anthony, I found your Instagram once I kind of started to go away from the left because a lot of the content that you posted and you post now, we really, really resonate with. Um, it's why we are so excited to have you on. Can you share with the audience a little bit about your background and also talk to them about how you were someone who was also on the left and kind of left the party? Left the left, left the left.

From Bernie Leftist To Dissonance

Bullying, Identity, And Hypervigilance

2020 Anger, BLM, And Self-Trust

SPEAKER_00 3:29

Absolutely. Yeah. Yes. Um, it's a lot to so there's a lot to unpack, just generally speaking, on a preface with for your audience who probably already now at this point understands the the dynamics you're talking about, just from their own observations, um, what's going on, and maybe internally questioning things themselves, feeling a bit of at odds, perhaps some listeners with the stuff that's going on, generally speaking. I mean, not just what's happening on the left, but also the overall political landscape, behaviorally, psychologically. Um and so to click on that for myself, I um I think it's a matter of a personal assessment of what my values were, what I cared about fundamentally, and how those things started to feel friction with what was going on outside of me um during the 2020 BLM protests, some riots and um COVID. And so it's this feeling of of dissonance, more generally, that I would say is the modulator or the thing that really did it for me. But before I get into that, who I am and what I um was like even before that, and my general kind of compass in life was that I was always someone who valued a more egalitarian bent uh toward politics, like how you know we're in it for the greater good, our tax money goes to provide X for XYZ, for you know, the end game is really so everyone can get um access to healthcare, education. And doesn't this mean that a society will then thrive? Isn't the end result just advantageous for everyone? And that was my rationale. And to some degree, like those types of things still, I still remain steadfast in very like some of those aspects of um social buy-in, but that not to a its bitter end like I used to. And I can get into that in a minute. But um, so I've always been this kind of left-leaning person generally, and then into my so I should, I should have timestamped it. That was really into my early 20s, starting my early 20s, um, late teens, early 20s. And I even actually like was dealing with uh personal stuff like coming out as gay and um you know, just really getting into the into the world coming into the world as my own self with with this identity that I was afraid of at one point. And I found an acceptance in what I didn't know at the time was the left. And I didn't, you know, I I an assuming late teenager into my 20s who thinks about political theory, who thinks about politics, really. But um, I gravitated toward that naturally, I think a lot of people do when they're sort of at odds with the norm and society, etc. And it was a really nice place for me to feel accepted, validated, reinforced. Um and I naturally bought into a lot of the subscripts and the prescripts and the culture at large. And you march in the gay pride parade, or you you you you identify with the LGBTQ, you know, the acronym, you, you um uh you just accept certain tropes, you accept certain uh social mandates that you have to do. You then it gets to a certain point where people are at odds with you all the time and you always have to be on alert and you identify as a gay man in society. And what does that mean? Well, you when you really tap into that, it means that you know, there's heteronormativity always around you and you you're hyper-vigilant about it. And every time you, you know, interact with a straight male, um, there's always some kind of infraction just looming around you. And and uh, you know, so so this is this is sort of like the bedrock of of my life in my 20s. Now, granted, I'll I'll clarify that I was never the kind of person to entirely buy into it um to the point where um it really identified who I was through and through. It's just something that I almost subscribed to peripherally, but always felt around me. And it was on my radar. It was sort of my salience detector, my like, this is what I'm detecting in the environment all the time, sort of switched on. Um, and then interesting thing for listeners to maybe think about, and and this is a good point of connection that we'll get into, I'm sure, is my past played a very big role in how I experienced that particular moment in my life because I was bullied as a child in my grammar school, and and a little bit after that, uh, I wouldn't say bullied in high school. I wasn't bullied in high school, but I felt at that point at odds with everything because just temperamentally too. I was I was just more timid and shy. But more importantly, for what I'm saying about my 20s, is that I had bullies in my head. I had the caricature and archetype of the bully in my mind, who was, you know, sort of the jockey type of white boy, right? Um, and so that character played in my head. Every time I felt something in the environment around me uh by heteronormative culture, um, that image would flare up and I would literally get quite dysregulated. And there was a time that I'd have nightmares because I started to think about this archetype and caricature more. The more I leaned into this identity culture and my sexuality as a major part of who I am and a valence, sort of valencing my experiencing or making it more present. Um, I started to think about the past a lot more and would have nightmares. Okay. And so I carried that with me. And it wasn't until I made peace with that, and this is a big point of um this is just a big point to make uh going into this uh discussion. It was not until I made peace with the past and accepted that it happened and faced those sort of demons in my head, the caricature and archetype of the toxic male in my head, that I made peace with it when I started to recognize that that that had a control over how I experienced people and judged them. And so I reached a point, so that I made peace with. Okay, fine, that was good. That was a graduate gradual work on my end, psychologically, mentally. But then I I was still sort of on the left, if you will, to um, you know, tear down the system. The capitalism is by default oppressive and exploitative, etc. All these Marxist talking points. Um and that landed me um into the support of Bernie Sanders in 20 for the 2015, 2016 cycle, um, and subsequently his 2020 run, right? I think that's right. Um and I even canvassed for him. Um I supported through and through. I went to the rallies, and I was more what you would call an economic leftist, like exact exactly what I said. Like tear down this system, it's exploitative and horrible, and minimum wage goes up$30 everywhere for everyone, etc. Um, I know I'm going on and on, but there's a whole point. I think this is going to set the stage, hopefully. And I don't want to dictate how you set the stage, but there's a lot to extract from I know. But anyway, so the point is that fast forward 2020, George Floyd, COVID. Um, I started to recognize that the way I was interacting with other people who supported Trump, who voted for Trump, was not indicative or expressive of who I knew that I really was as a human being. I was rude, ruthless at times, um, punitive, even calculated to some degree and how I would exploit these people. Now, not dox them or stuff like that, but like the anger and animus I felt, the level of, okay, so you know, projection or or displacement of anger, like I'd get angry at Trump and then see that anger through and manifest it by displacing it onto someone who supports him. Um and I noticed that per the pivot for me was I had a fight with my brother, an argument rather, when my niece was born, my first niece, uh, around that time. And I just flipped out and I I went kind of berserk and I said, wow, something's up with me. And I gotta check it out, I gotta see what's up because it's not good. It's it's really having a bad effect on my relationships. And then I the real point for me of was when BLM was happening. Uh I was asked if I wanted a sign to put up in front of my house. Now we had children here, young children. It was we were all closed in, it was COVID. Um, and we're on an intersection, it's busy, it's really a red county, actually. Um, and at the time I still was afraid of MAGA, like what they would do, the flags on the trucks and all that stuff. And I was, I believed in BLM at the time, but that started to fracture when I realized that, well, apart from receiving and understanding certain evidence that went against its claims, I recognized that I'm, you know, what am I going to do by putting a sign up in front of the house other than perhaps like perturbing people or like annoying people and possibly even van getting them to vandalize my house with children in it, you know? So I didn't put the sign up. Um, I started to make those little choices that were more connected to my value system personally, individually, and not based on the group. And over time, that became an anti-coagulant for me to really just detach from the identity of the group and to start thinking for myself. And I recognized that I just had left one of the biggest psychotic episodes of my life without being psychotic, really. You know, I don't mean to say that flippantly. But that was a lot, I understand. And I'm sorry I went on for so long. But that's that really is the breadth of and the scope of my life uh and why I changed course.

SPEAKER_03 16:18

That was so much better of a story than I could have anticipated. Like I like that was so eloquent and beautiful in the story behind. I love that. Thank you. What's interesting, I'm I'm gonna, we do have like questions out and we do want to get to them.

SPEAKER_00 16:35

Yeah.

Why Parenthood Rewrites Priorities

SPEAKER_03 16:35

One of the things that I wrote down, Winston Churchill once said, any man who's not a socialist at age 20 has no heart, and any man who is still a socialist at age 30 has no head. I've read that before, and I had a friend one time say something to me about when I considered myself super liberal, super on the left, super angry, super dysregulated. Um, you know, they said, You're just you're not old enough yet. One, you're gonna have, you know, more children and you're gonna get to this point. And I was like, how could you say that?

SPEAKER_01 17:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:08

And then it happened. And I started to value my family a little bit more and value my mental health a little bit more. And it became more about what was important to me and my family and our safety. And I started to notice this shift. But why do you think that happens? Like when you have children, you do settle down, you get older, you have more wisdom. Why does that shift happen psychologically?

Socialism As A Forever Parent

SPEAKER_00 17:39

Yeah, I think your parameters become more defined. Your aperture for um what matters becomes more focused, calibrated, because now you're up against survive, like your survival and you're the survival of someone who's dependent on you. And the the amount of time you have to decide what you need to do in order to make the most advantageous thing happen for your child, your family, just your immediate situation, is so much smaller and so much shorter, rather. And it's not necessarily voluntary. It just is something that hits you and hits everyone who has a responsibility, where there are these parameters that you put up. I mean, I know my sisters, my siblings who have children. I'm a an uncle of nine. Um, and I've watched them become much more calibrated, more focused. Their lens, their orientation toward the goal of keeping their family safe intact has become more defined and less diff. Like you become a less diffuse of person and less just all over the place. And well, hopefully, you know, some people don't, unfortunately. But I think, but I think the nature of it is that, well, you're introduced introduced with this new thing in your life that you have to take care of. And you get older too, and you realize time is just not not is not really on your side, and you start to become much more focused. And without repeating myself too much, you can think of it from a neurodevelopmental perspective too, where when the baby, when an infant is born, they're just um this. So, what I'm gonna say is is kind of interesting because you think about how nature and our experiences rep like resemble each other. Um, you think about, you know, I'm I'll just set the stage a little bit with like you look at the branches on a tree, and then you think about the lungs, right? The the various parts of the lung anatomy, how it looks kind of like the branches on a tree, and then you think about neurons in the brain, and you look at outer space, and they look like the same thing. And so there's so many different things that that uh connect um in nature and in our experiences that that um you know I I think about in this respect, I also I also think that's the case where children are born or babies are born with so many neurons, um, and it's just all over the place. And what's happening in the brain at that time is there's there's pruning of these neurons and synapses, and um the the brain is forming a more focused and refined way of dealing with the world, if you will, making it much more simplified because it's it's just so complex to just to dive into that process. But you have neuronal pruning and differentiation of just different parts of your biology are starting to solidify and and that is what happens as we grow, also psychologically. Like we prune and we we just this works for me, this doesn't work for me, and then we create a model, not voluntarily, but just through experience, we create models of of like the world and how we interact with it automatically. And some things get thrown out, some things stay, and it just becomes more refined and focused. And I think um that's the trajectory of growth and and goal orientation thinking um and behavior for survival. And I think another analogy or another way of thinking about it, and by the way, I'll go back what I was saying about trees and and and lungs, I wasn't trying to be uh flippant or or arbitrary. I was trying to say that just as children, just as babies have this physiology where they're pruning and refining, so do we also, as we get older, um prune and refine and fix our sort of aperture of like what it is we care about and are focused on. So it's just like kind of an interesting connection there, I think. Um and so the other part of it is that um that uh, you know, with socialism, if you think about the idea of it, yeah, I mean, it quote sounds nice. And I'm not even sure it sound even sounds nice anymore. I mean, it it sounds suffocating to me, actually. I guess the outcome or the idea of there being, you know, no uh market system where there's competition and you know, any of that kind of stuff um sounds nice if you feel like you might not make it in the market. I don't know, but um it's interesting because socialism seems to capture a forever maternal or paternalistic um dynamic where you are, I guess you could think of this more clearly in terms of um communism rather, but socialism too, where you're sort of controlled by something at the top. And it's funny to me that a lot of people on the on the quote progressive left, you know, don't like the patriarchy, don't like systems of oppression. But there really is no uh no system that is more oppressive, in my view, than communism or socialism, where you don't have autonomy over your profits or what you do with them or where they go and and how you make it in life. You know, you have pretty much the government, a larger paternalistic body telling you essentially what you can and can't do and where your money will go. And you don't, it doesn't matter if you agree or don't agree. With it, it's for the greater good, right? Back to the whole idea of, well, this is for the greater good, but what does that even mean? When you double-click on that, it means a lot of stuff that you might even not even like. It might mean funding whatever company, BlackRock, which is involved in a web of child pedophilia going down to like maybe even to someone like Epstein. So it's like people don't think about that. They don't think about um the it doesn't matter if it's BlackRock or corporatism, if the it's the government too. The government being a wholesale paternalistic edifice and and project is just as paternalistic, as patriarchal, as controlling and domineering as anything else. And and it's also, though, very settling and um soothing for people who want stability right now, right here in this moment, because they don't have to think about what their output is. They don't have to think about what it means to be a really a functioning, productive member of society per se, necessarily. It's already kind of there for you. It's like a forever mother, a forever father. It's like when the child separates from the the mother, the mother-child separation, and there's a um, you know, a distinction between the two. At some point, the the infant is uh, you know, now kind of gaining some independence and you know, the dependency uh on the mother is becoming much, much um more uh much less of a of a thing. And now they're becoming their own person, and they can start to have their own thoughts into, you know, adolescence, and then, oh, you know, ill, mommy is gross, daddy's annoying into teenage years, you know what I mean? So it's like you start to become your own person. And but the socialistic and communistic kind of um uh mindset is where that particular dynamic where I am mom, mom is me, mom takes care of me all the time, is that's the model of it. And um I I just I think that's a good place to cadence when it comes to as a there's a lot that I just said that I don't I don't know if it it went in circles, but I think that I think that that's probably where I'll stop with that.

SPEAKER_02 25:54

I noticed that a lot of the people who are for socialism are college eduung college educated students.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:09

Who I feel like really don't even understand what that means. Do you think it's a college brainwashing? Do you think it's a I hate saying it, but a victim mindset? Where do you think that comes from? Because oftentimes when I have conversations with people who are for socialism, I wouldn't say that they've lived independently or they're young and they they don't really haven't really lived life yet on their own.

SPEAKER_01 26:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:49

Um so most people who come from a communist country are very grateful to live here and they don't want to go to socialism.

College Ideology And Critical Theory

New York Politics And Waiting To Judge

SPEAKER_00 27:00

Yeah. So is the college mindset is the is the college students' mindset and orientation through life and the way they experience it um a product of or because of perhaps um maybe immaturity um or lack of experience, or is it some maybe something else, brainwashing? Um, I think it depends on okay, so first age, just in terms of developmental, um, a developmental period in in um we're talking adol we're talking not adolescence, we're well, late adolescence into college. Um yeah, I mean, functionally, just purely, they're not psychologically, even uh neurophysiologically at the point where they're making the most thought out uh decisions. They're not really focused on the long term per se. They're focused on right now immediacy. They're just coming out of their home lives and into a new space, and there's a certain new equilibrium they have to figure out for themselves socially in terms of responsibility. So there's like a whole aspect of it that's quite normal. We just give the benefit of the doubt in terms of age and development. But then there's also the the there is the brainwashing part. There's so there's a two other things. There's there's also socioeconomic rank, if whether you go to just, you know, a state, not just, because there this is not meant meant to demean or diminish state schools, but there is a difference in terms of socioeconomic status between state school students and Ivy League students or the you know, Stanfords and the Duke universities, you know, what all those kinds of places. So you have to take into account that also, plus the curricula, you know, plus plus the the various things that they're taught, the ideal ideological landscape at these places. I'll start with first the uh you know, the ideology. Um, a lot of what we would call postmodern or critical theory ideology, which is essentially for your audience, if you haven't talked about it, I don't know, is in a nutshell, and this is not going to do it service, but it's basically saying that everything is to be seen and analyzed through the lens of power differentials. There's everybody at the top who creates the knowledge, who creates information, who um is in government. And there's some truth to this. You know, there's it's not to say that there's not truth to it, but it's they take it to a very bitter end of a dichotomy, uh, kind of going back to the Marxist oppressed oppressor, sort of fixating on this idea that knowledge generates power, and this is meant to control the masses. And again, there's something true about that, but the analysis for these theorists is bitter. It's that you have to be suspect, you have to you have to suspect malintent or that, you know, you're not part of the upper echelons, you're just a sub a subject for them, um, you're their pawn. And anytime there's you know knowledge that's created, uh there's suspicion in it, you have to be very suspect of it and challenge it as a tool for power. Even if, even if there's truth to it, even if it's it's useful to understand, like for instance, the founding of our country, right? We're not talking just, you know, corporations, and we're not talking just, you know, what what are they called? Um, oh my goodness, what are the organizations, the nonprofits, the think tanks? We're not talking um oil companies, we're not talking just even politicians, we're talking everything to the founding of our country is suspect. The Bill of Rights, the scientific method, that's all suspect because white, powerful men came up with it. And so downstream from that, it's just by default tainted and intrinsically sort of toxic. So we have to, we have to just demolish that system of knowledge and come up with something different. And they never talk about what that different what that is. They just want to demolish it, um, and and we gotta do something else. We don't know what that is, but it's something else. And it entails something more like retribution, like um getting the minority to, you know, the minority demographics to um rebel and to create something oppositional. And it's it's not based on a critical process of thinking where you're challenging ideas on for uh, you know, on their own volition, and you're taking maybe elements of the past and putting under a microscope and saying, well, what did that mean at the time? Maybe we can figure out how to refine that or use that in a different way, or even just understand it better and use it as it was stated, like the Bill of Rights, for instance, all these things that are fixtures in our culture, in our society, and in our governance. But no, for a lot of people throughout the decades, throughout the um academic scope, uh, since the uh you know mid-20th century, took Western tradition, law, all these things, and and just demolished it on the face that it was just because it was powerful white men that created it. And so you do have that through line in the education system and higher education in almost all the humanities and even in psychology and in some of the sciences now at this point, where you have to look at everything through the lens of race differentials, power differentials. I remember I sat in a meeting at a lab that I was part of, an autism lab when I was at Columbia, and we had to talk about race in I don't know, in science. It was a very weird discussion because it was just not focused. It was like, what are we here talking about? I can't remember even what the topic was. And somebody said that the scientific method was racist because it was created by white men, very literally. That's what was said. And my jaw nearly dropped. And I said, Can you please explain to me how that is even remotely possible? While someone of color, if you want to even call I I use that term, but it's a black person, a Latino person, a whatever person, Asian people all the time, because they're very represented in STEM, use the scientific method, and you know, their theories, postulations, their hypotheses, you know, are under good care under that scientific method. So how please tell me how. So, yes, to answer the question, it is indeed um a part of it is indeed infrastructural, institutional in the schools, being taught. And this is not just some kind of uncle, whatever crazy conspiracy theorist at a barbecue saying, you libs, you commies in college. No, it's true because the uncle who would say that, I'm 36, and uh, and when I was 16, 17, whatever, I had people who were uncles like that saying that same thing. But those people were around for the hippie movement, if you want to call it that, and there were lots of communists in that movement. It is true that America was inundated with communist proclivities and sentiments and sensibilities in the 60s, 70s, etc. And it made its way into the academy, no question. Now, the extent to which that gets to the student does kind of depend on socioeconomic status and where the student ends up, because those state schools, they're not as ideologically fixated. You know, a lot of the state schools are more focused on getting the student a good education and out into the workforce. And it's not to say you don't find students who go into government, who go into the sciences and become extraordinary scientists or whatever. But Ivy League schools and these more elitist schools, they're producing your journalists, your media people, your lobbyists, your finance people, your at the upper echelons of society who are taking this information that they learn and disseminating it in their business cultures and government culture and legislation, et cetera. So yeah, it it and then the last part of it is that a lot of these people who go to these schools uh come from rich families. These these elitist schools come from rich families. And now they're noticing what's what is being called downward mobility, where their parents are rich or doing well, but they aren't. And so affordability is a buzzword right now, is really hard for them to even fathom capturing. So they're in a precarious situation where they're seeing wealth around them, but they're not experiencing it for themselves. So they have adopted this more Marxist socialist uh cushion to kind of safeguard them from the realities of the stark realities of a true problem, which is an affordability problem. So it's a very complex web of things to think about, but that's in my view, that's the that's a at least a snapshot of the answer.

SPEAKER_02 37:10

What are um your thoughts about what's happening in New York City right now, since that's where you live?

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Oh, with Mom Donnie as the mayor?

unknown 37:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:24

Um I don't know what to say right now. Um I do I oppose his political his just generally his politics through and through. I I don't have much of an answer right now. I know people were really very frustrated with the garbage on the streets after the snow, and I'm not sure that that's a function of Mam Dani per se, as much as it is we had one of a record snowfall that New York City is notorious for kind of waiting to plow the streets um when there's for listeners, so it doesn't sound like I'm spiraling into some random thing. You know, we had a major snowfall um a week ago or so or so, and New York City got clobbered, and cars are buried, and it's you know, garbage is all over the place and out. And people were getting on mom Donnie for you seeing it's sort of like evidence that he's abandoning his real duties as mayor. But but it's it's not clear to me whether or not that's actually the case or that's a good gotcha moment. I think people are often too quick to go there without really gathering enough information. I would venture that there might be something to it, an administration shift or like quirks to work out. But I'm more interested in his just general policies being awful and continuing to focus on those rather than, you know, yeah, okay, you have something happen in the environment, you take it as information and verification of your assumptions. That's fine. You think garbage, you think communist countries, you think bad leadership, you put it all together and boom, okay. But um, I think I don't know enough about what's going on. It's just been a month, really, since he's been in office. And I think I refrain any judgment per for right now, not because I don't want to say anything nasty or whatever, but because I don't have enough on my radar to say, to say enough. But I don't think it's gonna I don't think that he's actually going to make as much of a dent as people think he's gonna make, because I think there are just way too many parameters around him that will obstacles rather, that will over the course of a year, two, three, four, he'll just run out of time. You know, he'll do some damage, but I think he'll just run out of time.

Logging Off To Protect Your Home

SPEAKER_03 39:57

Can I say I appreciate the fact that you do this, you do this often, and I see it in your videos as well, and and even in some of your podcast episodes. Um, I think it is okay to not have a full opinion right away. I think you have you have said before, like, I want to sit with this, I want to take in all the information. I think it's wild to just come out of the gates screaming about something, and then like the next day something else shows up, and you're like, oh wait, I was wrong about that. Like, I should you know probably reel it in. So I think it's a wonderful thing, and I wish more people did that to take a step back, admit they don't have all the information, um, admit that they don't know where things are gonna go, and that's okay. But I think that unknown is very uncomfortable for a lot of people. And especially right now on social media, we were just talking about this before we came on. Like, people are like, if you're not speaking, you're part of the problem. I mean, that this has been happening for years, we know this, but it almost seems so much worse now. And I think Christine and I have like taken a step back from social media because we have realized, I don't know where this question is going, but I'm going somewhere. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:18

It's fine.

SPEAKER_03 41:19

We've realized, you know, we are the heart of our homes. We are the mothers, we both have three children. We both, you know, are in a position where we we are staying home. That wasn't always the case. Um, we were boss babes, we had businesses and, you know, worked ourselves to the ground. But now we're like, my tone sets the tone for the rest of the house. And I need to make sure that I am not dysregulated and angry about things that I cannot control, about things I don't know all the answers to, and about there's something every day. Yeah, and it is okay, and I stand 10 toes down on this to log off and to take care of myself and my family, yeah, because that is what's gonna keep us safe and grounded.

Metacognition And Holding Two Truths

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Absolutely. Absolutely. That's that's maturity, that's definitionally maturity and and sensibility, which you're noticing with the hysterics that you're noticing is emblematic of emotion dysregulation and as a result of, I would say, and I don't have all the answers, but I can definitely say with at least mostly certain most most certainly I can say that people who feel out of control in their own lives especially, they need something to feel in control of and to anchor themselves to. And usually it's really cheap and expedient to do that through a group identity. You outsource your autonomy to a group, and you just exchange the complexity of reason and stepping back and taking a breath and asking, wait a second, to yourself, is this really worth getting dysregulated over? Because a lot of people won't do that. And instead they'll say, you know, this is infuriating. I can't believe this is happening again. They'll cycle again, they'll keep going in circles and reinforcing how crazy it is and how awful it is, and I can't believe it's happening again, and they'll keep repeating the story and over and over. And then they'll get in such a tizzy, they'll get so frustrated and so dysregulated that now they need to go to social media to be heard, to hear others say what they're thinking, confirmation bias. Um, they this is their the way they pacify or soothe themselves when they join a group or go to social media and find that comfort of confirmation, um, reinforcement. And there is no need to think. You don't have to think. It's already processed and packaged for you. It's right there. And that's done. That's it. I, okay, I've my nervous system's calm now. People out there agree with me. I'm not crazy. There's some of that that is important. Like that's a lot of these things are normal, but they're pathological right now, right? They're at, they're completely at the other one end of the distribution where it's like psychologically dysregulated, pathological. Um, you're finding people who are willing to put themselves, their lives on the line by you know, fighting law enforcement over a fabricated notion that law enforcement are now fascists because they're trying to do their job. Now, granted, this is now this is where the thinking and the pausing comes in. It's like we bring ice into if I'm gonna bring ice up because this is a very clear example of what I'm saying. Complexity of thought requires, or it doesn't require, but it it advances. This is a capacity to see two different things, three different things, various things at the same time for their own characteristics, you know, based on their own characteristics and analyzed accordingly in a way where you can hold them together at the same time and not experience dysregulation. That's the opposite of cognitive dissonance. If you have various things going on in your mind challenging a held belief, and you become dysregulated and you cannot face it, that's dissonance. And usually, in order to quell or to regulate oneself, you one will lean into two defenses, will shut down, will double down, and find ways to reinforce their held belief in order to discard the dissonance. But a person who can experience dissonance with the activation of the nervous system, dealing with two or different several things at once in the mind that can contrast each other, is a person who's engaging in something called metacognition, where you're thinking about your thinking. And that requires a higher level of cognition, of regulation, of self-awareness. And that's a key, self-awareness, understanding that you don't have all the answers, like to your point, not needing to answer everything all the time. That's intellectual humility. It's actually a measurable trait in psychology. Um and to be able to incorporate information from the environment and to update your held belief with the new information, which doesn't necessarily mean always changing it and flipping it, but just making it more making it wiser, making it more informed. And here's what that looks like: it looks like being able to say, we do have an immigration problem in this country. And you can then refer to, one can refer to the Biden administration, where he let in millions of people. And then you can then click on that. And what will then drop down from that click is, ah, this is a problem. And this is this is metacognition. No, this is not metacognition. This is really just complex thinking. You're actually indexing, you're actually starting to see, oh, when you allow upwards of 10 million people into the country, you actually strain the system. Oh, you strain the systems that I will, I advocated for, the sort of, you know, social democratic systems that take care of the less fortunate or the vulnerable black and brown people in the urban areas, like, oh, migrants in these areas strain the system. And now people that I said I cared about so much all of a sudden go by the wayside and are not getting what they need. Oh, that's not a good thing, is it? Well, no, it's not a good thing, actually, because not only are you contradicting yourself, but you're also imposing, you know, if you really care about harm reduction, then don't support politicians who impose harm on the people you said you cared about five minutes ago by allowing people who are not even part of this country into a country that, you know, yeah, we grant asylum up to a certain point, but that was a big problem in New York City. It was a dissonant point for people on the left to think about. Like, oh, my ideas of policy and who I vote for, that does have a deleterious negative effect on the people I claim to care about. So there's that you can index and look at that and say, we have a problem, the immigration problem, that's the problem. What oh, what is the effect of that? Like cause and effect. Sorry, I'm getting a little like pissy because it's like this is the part that's missing from the minds of the people who get so ideologically captured, they don't think about the effect, the consequences. So what are the consequences of having this diffuse anything goes system? Well, the consequences might look like, huh, an electorate that votes for Donald Trump, who voted for him on the basis of this issue overwhelmingly. Okay, immigration was a huge thing, okay? It wasn't a secret. And for so many of these people, it was like a shock. And that's the problem. They're not, they're not, they're actually not woke. They're not awake. They're not seeing that. So they, you know, so you have this effect, you have this consequence, you have a what you would call a right leaning, it's not what you would, it's not a formal way of saying it, but it's it's I'm saying is it is technically truly a historical phenomenon and a really a behavioral phenomenon where you have just chaos. Well, then you have order come in and say, nope, that's too much. Like children, they're all over the place. My mother and sister run a daycare, and you have these kids are all over the place, they're crazy. And then, you know, you you both know this. At some point, you just reach a point with like, nope, time for sleep, time for this, time for that. Nope, you can't do that, you can't have that. Order comes in. It's just the reaction. And so that's what we got in return or in response. And now I'm gonna zoom out again into like how you can think about various things at once. Unfortunately, it can get also it can get pathological, where you can agree with ICE's mission of finding the bad people, if you will, and really cracking down at the border and making the country a bit more tight, um, fixing the problem. But then you can also say we don't want to see thousands of people on the street, thousands of officers of federal agents on the street fighting with civilians, even and citizens, even if they're antagonistic. Like we need to start to maybe think about how we can do better. And somebody will say on the other side, and so I'll get somebody on the right saying, yeah, but this is all because of sanctuary cities. It's the it's because they've allowed for this to happen. And that's true. There's a lot of truth to that. But when you're in power, you're Donald Trump and you're in power, and you have Congress, the Senate, the judiciary, like you, you have judges on your side. It is incumbent upon you to at least perceptually, I mean, at the very least, perceptually, do do a bit better. And so we're seeing that. We're seeing that happen now. But the point is, is I can hold constant my belief in border control and national sovereignty and national identity and security while also criticizing how it's being done. That's being able to deal with cognitive dissonance. And then it doesn't, it's no longer dissonant when you update how you think about the thing, and now it becomes your new held belief until something else comes into challenge it and you have to deal with it again.

SPEAKER_02 52:54

Absolutely. Okay, so I promise this is gonna tie into a question. Yeah. Um, I was born in the Marshall Islands. I am a US citizen, but um, I have an adopted son who is also from the Marshall Islands and is not a US citizen. Now, before he came into our lives, I was very liberal 2020. I kind of I I love that you went into your backstory with your childhood and getting bullied because when I was young, I moved to Iowa and moved to a rural town, no diversity.

SPEAKER_01 53:36

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:37

So I've experienced a lot of racism because there was there were just no people of color in that town. So when 2020 happened, it sparked wounds.

SPEAKER_01 53:51

Yeah, of course.

SPEAKER_02 53:52

I reacted to them and it took some healing and some like, okay, I need to back up. I remember in 2016, literally like sobbing that and 2020 sobbing that Trump was gonna get elected. And I had to get to a point where I'm like, okay, like this is affecting you, this is affecting your home life, this is affecting, you know, my relationship. And what are we doing what are you gonna do? And so I decided to take a step back and do some inner work. And with that, I realized things weren't as black and white as I thought. And maybe I wasn't right about everything, and I was having an emotional reaction to things. And just because someone disagreed with me didn't mean that they were bad and evil.

SPEAKER_01 54:40

Right.

Cancel Culture Over A Coffee Shop

SPEAKER_02 54:40

Okay. So now I'm here. This past election, I called out what I disagreed with with the political party. I have never posted anything about Trump or anything like that, but the people who have been pro-immigration, you know, pride themselves on advocating for brown and black voices were the first people to exile me and call me names when I spoke out against a party that I once belonged to and had critiques for it. And uh it's just been an interesting place to be to be kind of exiled by friends and family. Wow. And the people who pride themselves on like advocating for people of color. I don't know even what I would call it if I would call it covert racism or but they're they're the first people to call me a fascist, a Nazi supporter. And I'm like, I'm not even, I don't even consider myself on the right. I just consider myself politically homeless, and that's still not good enough for you. But I'm going somewhere with this. So it's great.

SPEAKER_00 55:58

No, it's a lot of good stuff here.

SPEAKER_02 56:00

I was just telling you this morning, there is a coffee shop in Louisville. And this coffee shop is getting canceled because apparently an ICE officer came in and got a coffee and was heckled. This is not a chain coffee place. This is this is a small business. And this is to me a human being. And this is their this is their livelihood. And so there is all of this social media content about how, you know, we need to leave them bad reviews. This person needs to get canceled, close their business down. And I have taken a step back from social media, but also it's hard because I'm like, this is straight up bullying and harassment because this business owner sent out an email saying to kindly leave politics and religion outside of their business and to be kind to one another. And they are getting canceled because of it.

SPEAKER_01 57:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:02

And so I feel like if I say something and I did say something, I'm walking into this hive.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 57:12

And truly that's what it feels like. But also, it's hard to not say something when you're experiencing just incredible bullying. So I said something, and there were comments that, you know, I was gonna get deported, my family was gonna get deported, I'm a Nazi, I'm this, I'm a fascist, I'm that. Like how do it's in this space, it's so hard because it's, you know, you get exiled if you're Republican, you get exiled if you're mega, you I think sometimes even get exiled if you consider yourself a Christian. You also get exiled if you're independent, if you're political. You're exiled if you're not left enough. Right. You get exiled if you're not left enough. But there also has to be a point where sometimes you speak up and like we are people who want to bridge the gap and find middle ground or commonality with people.

SPEAKER_01 58:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 58:16

But how do you do that where it is so emotionally heightened, it is so extreme, and there is no reasoning with these people. And it's it's been disheartening because there have been people who I've been friends with for decades. And just me speaking out against things I disagreed with with the Democratic Party, it was like, nope, she's bad, she's evil, never gonna talk to her again, and never even going to give her um a conversation or respectful dialogue where it seems like debate is a lost art these days and having diff differences, but learning to find com commonality, it's that doesn't exist anymore because of social media. But I guess what I'm where I'm going with this is how like what do people like us do to try to bridge the gap? Is it pointless? Like how is there like how do we move forward with these people?

SPEAKER_00 59:24

Well, thank you for that. That's actually I that resonates a lot. I mean it expresses so clearly the through line in the politics that we're in today. Not only the politics, but it's gotten into um overall the cultural this the psychology of the culture, and that doesn't even really concern concern itself with politics as a legislative practice, but more as a an identitarian basis. And that's where we are right now. And it's my question actually to start to you is are these individuals the kind of kinds of people who are engaged in politics or are they bystanders? Like what what is the because that'll help me kind of get a better grasp? Are they in really involved? Are they rallying? Are they posting? Are they on social media a lot? They are any people in your lives or or your life who disagree with you but and but they don't go this far and then they're not on social media? Like, is there an effect there? Like, do you do you notice like people who are maybe not plugged in as much, but don't maybe agree with you or not as hostile?

Split Thinking, Algorithms, And 90-9-1

SPEAKER_02 1:00:50

So this is what I will say as somebody who considers themselves politically homeless. I have had more respectful dialogue with people who are consider themselves mega Christian conservatives, right? Who I disagree with on a lot of things, but then I have had, I have not been able to have respectful dialogue with anyone on the left. And most of the people on the left, I would say from my my end are the loudest voices on social media. So it's also been hard to show up on social media because that is now what social media consists of. And again, there is there's they sit here and call me a fascist or a Nazi, but again, there is no dialogue and there is only one side, and it is their side, and that is it. And there's a lot of assumptions and interpretations without you even getting to speak. But I would say they are right now, for me personally, they are the loudest voices on social media.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:05

Yeah. So what's happening in short is something called hostile attribution bias, where the you know, a person will attribute hostility to you, your character, whatever, at face, just face value, just like impose that onto you based on symbolism, based on semantics, based on your the kind of approach that you take. Um, for them, for the people who are captured ideologically like this, like the people you're explaining, because they are, and if they're listening, they should understand that they are captured. Um and is because we I know that because when you can't, going back to the dissonance thing, when you can't experience a person as a complex being, sorry, my pen fell. When you can't can't experience a person as a complex being with many different facets and nodes that connect them, uh that are connected to create them, that is explicitly in uh in terms of psychopathology split thinking. You're you're talking about someone who cannot deal with the gray area. Now, I'm not saying that this is the case for people like this. I'm I I passionately am not saying this. I want to make it clear because I know a psychologist who is trying to make this case, and I very much so disagree with him. But you think of psychopathology, meaning like psychological disorders, on a spectrum, on a scale, you know, like basically it's not one size fits all, it's not just one thing you see in someone, and therefore they're mentally ill. You see various traits and proclivities and temperaments in all and most, many of us that run the gamut when it comes to looking at a psychological disorder, like an emotional disorder, a mood disorder, an anxiety disorder, a psychotic disorder, whatever. You know, it's not that just because a person exhibits more higher levels of anxiety, it means that they are clinically anxious per se, or is has a more depressive mood there, that they have a you know, major depressive disorder per se, or that they fear abandonment, that they're necessarily borderline personality. But what I'm seeing is people who have these particular traits and dispositions at higher levels are coming on the scene with more frequency and much with a much louder megaphone because of social media. And whatever it is that they're dealing with internally, whether it be just being conditioned to be afraid and buying into it all, but there's something about the person that has to kind of be their baseline for them to even, I would say, be so captured and so sure of the thing that they're listening to or hearing to either dysregulate them or affirm their view. Like you have to really be situationally like ready to get really triggered at anything, or it doesn't mean you're mentally ill, but a person who looks at you black and white, like I did too, and you said you did too. So it's not it does again, I I I resent the notion that anybody who does is mentally ill. That's not it. But there is, there are aspects and attributes of certain disorders that we're seeing at large. Um, and one of them is this black and white thinking, this binary thinking, split thinking, where you're either all good or all bad. And you do see that in borderline personality disorder, where there's this emotion dysregulation aspect that drives a person or motivates them to detach from a person and devalue them once they they're, you know, they feel abandoned or challenged or whatever in the relationship or the dynamic. If once that is experienced, you're the bad person. So you kind of can take that as a vignette, as something that happens to us physiologically, psychologically, because it does. I mean, it does you don't have to be a borderline personality in order to have that happen to some degree. But I think that these pathologies are being accentuated and expressed more clearly on social media because they're so finely packaged and manufactured that you do see them in their caricature form. You see social media accounts that again tell you what you want to hear. And that's just very clear, all or nothing. This is all you want to hear. And the nothing that you want to hear, you don't get because the algorithm doesn't serve that. So once you come in contact with that, you're dysregulated. And anytime anybody agrees with that thing that you disagree with, automatically they're suspect, they're bad, you know, guilt by association.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:16

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:16

They attribute they they're it again, host hostile attribution bias. You are challenging the fact that people are standing up for this ice agent or something for buying a coffee. Hope I got that right. Did I get that right? Well then that therefore means you are morally vacant. Why? Because you're defending an ICE agent, really? When you can just step back and say, when they can just step back and say, oh, like you said, this is also a human being. Again, going back to the constellation of complexity, looking at a person from a complex lens. Oh, you're also a human being. You like coffee. You have children, probably, probably not. I mean, I don't know. You go to church or not. I don't know. But you still just want coffee.

unknown 1:08:07

Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:07

That could be separate from the fact that I disagree with what's been going on. And oh, by the way, what's been going on with ice is specific to those ice agents and not every ice agent, right? We're collapsing ice agents into this monolithic category of fascistic gestapos. It's like that's that's split thinking, that's binary thinking. And it's it does come from narrative, from processed narrative, I think, and disseminating that narrative in exped in expedient ways on social media. And it should be noted that there is something called the 90 one uh the 90-9-1 rule. And what it basically says is that and this is something that carries through generally speaking with phenomena in economics and whatever distribution you're looking at, or most distributions. So 75% of of the of United States of the US population is on social media, 75%. 90% of those people are passive users, so they just they don't engage, they don't contribute to social media, they just sort of are on there. Then you have 9% of people who generate some cont they generate some content, they contribute somewhat, and they're somewhat engaged. And then you have 1% of the people who are generating the most content and are very engaged. And so then now when you take 100% of the US population, that 1% figure goes down by quite a bit because now you're adjusting from 75% of the population to 100%. And now you have to adjust, and that 1% becomes less than 1% of people who are creating the most noise and the most content for the 99% of the others to take in.

SPEAKER_03 1:10:24

Well, that's validating. That's that's um good statistics to hear. That feels a lot better than what I thought it was.

The Overton Window And Leaving The Left

SPEAKER_00 1:10:35

Yeah, and it's I'm glad it's also it's I I agree with you, but I also the frightening part for me is how so few people can have such an effect on so on such a large number. Um but I agree. I mean that is that is definitely that's definitely uh what's the word I'm looking for? Um encouraging, I guess I'll say, to know that it's not most people who are frenetic and making all the noise. But the thing is that less than 1%, when you have a passive user who might be higher trait neuroticism, which predicts higher, you know, a higher likelihood of developing an anxiety disorder or a mood disorder or other disorders. When you have someone who is just more emotionally dysregulated, who's on high alert, absorbing and taking in what that less than 1% is giving out, well you have someone who basically says that, oh, you're defending an ice agent getting coffee. Well, you're a miserable vermin scum of the earth, and that's that. So um the Overton window has also shifted in terms of what we accept to be, you know, what we accept in terms of this left-right issue. So people say I left the left. Well the left is an interesting, I mean, this is interesting because I can't, I won't go down a whole spiral or or rabbit hole on this. I could recommend a book, The Myth of the Left and Right, I think is what it's called. And I can't remember the name, the names of the two authors. I think they're brothers, but the last name is Lewis. So maybe in your show notes or something, you could put this there. And it goes down a whole thesis. The thesis is that there really is no such measure of left and right, liberal conservative. There are aspects of their thesis that I disagree with, but by and large, I agree about this idea that what the left agreed on 10 years ago changed 10 years after. And so it's not and same with the right. It's not just about what's going on now, but it's it's about throughout all of this idea of left and right, which really was um the inception was um of this left and right idea came about in the French Revolution when people who were for the uh revolution sat to the left of the National Assembly, and people who were against it sat to the right of the National Assembly. And those were your monarchs and the people who wanted to keep that kind of order, and the people to the left wanted to destroy it, to get rid of it. So that's where we get it from. And there are elements of that that still, I believe, remain intact. I mean, when I think of leftism, I think of people who want to tear down the system, tear down, you know, a more hierarchical structure. I'm sort of going way off, but it there's relevancy because even still, even if that does hold somewhat constant, there are many issues that, as we think of left and right today, have changed over the years. And so the Overton window or this idea of what's acceptable in society has shifted so much to the point where people who consider themselves more left-leaning, more um socially open, um, more sort of live and let live. Yeah, I believe in border control, I believe in a free market economy, but I I believe in gay marriage too, and I believe in these other things. That is where the left was, like, I don't know, a minute ago, like 15 years ago, right? But the window has shifted so much from the infiltration of these really extremist Marxist leftist types, and they are, and they admit it. There's a man running for Congress, Andre um, I can't remember, Easton, Easton District 15 for Congress, I think that is. Um, I hope I'm getting it right. He lit he literally says on his page, we need, we need socialism. Like not literally says we need, but he's like running on socialism. Socialism is there on the front page. There's no apologies about it. That's what they are. They have infiltrated the system during the Bernie Sanders era, who his trope was, you know, we have to get rid of the sexists, the fascists, the, the, the, this, the, that, the isms, the, the misogynists, the xenophobes. He really, really created an earworm into that generation, our generation, to think that that was everywhere all the time and that we needed this revolution, right? I really believe that he had a whole part in it, you know, to indoctrinate a whole group of a whole cohort into thinking that everyone was racist and misogynistic and whatever and whatever, whatever, who liked capitalism. And so the window started to shift. So people who were on the left, this is why Bill Maher says I didn't leave the left, the left left me. That's true. Like if you want to think of it in terms of like, he's not, okay, he's not a far rightist. I'm not a far rightist.

SPEAKER_02 1:15:49

I'm not either.

Gratitude, Order, And Rigidity Research

SPEAKER_00 1:15:50

Right. I am where I feel comfortable in how I've developed as a person emotionally and psychologically. I still I'm gay. I mean, I believe that gay marriage should still stand. I believe that, you know, I there are things that I believe still. And there are certain safety nets that I still believe, like maternal safety nets. I believe that mothers should have more safety nets. Um, I I also believe in the argument that, well, if you're not, if you're not for abortion, then you should probably be for something that advances the well-being of the life of the child after they're born. Like that, I I can maintain that in my brain. It's fine for me. But I'm there and the Overton window shifted to accept that now we, oh, gay rights. Okay, yeah, now let's jet let's gender children, let's transition children. Which, by the way, yesterday, the surgeon um organization, the plastic surgery association said, nope, no surgeries. This was just yesterday, yeah, the third. No surgeries for children until 19. The same day I that I'm gonna do a thing about that. And also, I think it was yesterday, two million dollar lawsuit won in my county um by a a person who was transitioned early in life and they won the lawsuit for malpractice, someone uh on the basis of malpractice. Um, they they didn't do the malpractice, they sued on that basis and they won. This was the first kind first suit of its kind. This happened the same day, I think it was the same day, yesterday, or maybe a day before, I don't remember, of the uh of the plastic surgery association or whatever saying no until 19. So up until a few years ago, that would have been considered, oh my God, how a lawsuit against trans against gender-affirming care, transphobia, bigotry, you know, oh my God, uh the this the plastic surgery association saying no surgery until 19. Oh my god, devastating. No. But that's where we were. And now we're going back to, I think, a different window, a different a different frame where now we're going back to normalcy, where I feel like I was, like for a long time until I wasn't for a bit, but really, you know what I'm saying? So I I don't know if that answers your question about first the hostile attribution toward you for defending someone. And then also just the degree to which a person is willing to be so hostile on the basis of that cultural window being so ideologically captured, because it does come from the top down. You know, people are malleable. People will change how they think based on conformity. So if the top is saying it's unacceptable to transition children at X and X, X and Y period or whatever, their constituency and the people that will conform to them will follow suit. So a lot of it has to do with conformity too, and not necessarily about left and right, as you can probably see over the years, how that's how for yourselves and for myself, how I um am, you know, I am more willing to accept certain things on the right, actually now, um, because I support an administration that is curating those things. And I'll I'll admit that. But I'm also not willing to abandon certain principles that I hold true to my values just, you know, because I'm again going back to the dissonance thing and being able to think with complexity, because I have exercised that muscle of complexity. I'm not, I am not a gold medal winner at it, but I'm aware of it. And so I don't have to adjust in terms of conformity wholesale. That's the point. And I hope and I wish that most more people would do that. Such as yourselves, you've done that, you've done that. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:19:59

Well, I kind of had to get to a point where I took some self-accountability on what I was projecting onto other people.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:05

Yeah. Right. Yeah. I do I want to correct something because I feel like in those posts, you were not necessarily defending the ice agent. You were defending the business that people were trying to destroy because she said, Everybody here is welcome. We want love and kindness here. We leave politics at the door. And so you were defending the fact that like people were trying to destroy her business for saying that.

SPEAKER_00 1:20:33

Right. Because there's nothing to defend the ice agent for per se, because he did because there's really nothing there. There's like not yet. Right. There's it, but it's the it was the owner of the right. You were defending the owner who provided services to the ice agent, which was crazy for God's sake.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:49

Right. Um, but I I wanna I know we're like wrapping up on time, but there was something you said about, you know, the left isn't really the left the way that it used to be. I listened to one of your podcasts with um Aaron. Oh, yeah. Um Left is dead, long live the left. And that was such an interesting episode. I remember like leaving Christine so many voice notes. Like, oh my God, this makes sense. And also connecting dots between like leaving the left. I'm gonna put that in quotations, leaving the left and this healing journey that we've been on, because it seems like it's this idea that, like, okay, yes, we won that, but it could be more. We need more. We need it could be better. And where I'm standing, like, yes, everything could always be better, but I'm also grateful for what I have. And I think this of gratitude and saying, like, you know, gay marriage is legal now. Like, we we we took a win. Let's sit in that for a minute. Like, let's integrate that. Like, we it doesn't have to be like more, more. Right. And I think as long as there is some policy that could be tweaked or improved, they're going to fight for that tweak and improvement. And I just think that, and I think another thing that you said in the podcast was like the right is more about, not you didn't say, um, Aaron said, the right is more about preserving what works and recognizing that like this works right now. Let's let's celebrate that for a minute.

SPEAKER_00 1:22:20

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I just interviewed a psychologist yesterday on my podcast. His name is Luke Conway. He's a professor of psychology at um Citigrove College in Pennsylvania. And he was responsible for coming up with the research for, or the the science, really the investigating left-wing authoritarianism. He uh also did some research recently. We interviewed him uh about this paper that he was an author on. Um, and it talks about rigidity, like cognitive, like who's who's more rigid, the left or the right? Or this, this kind of it's really about like this idea that the right, that conservatives are more rigid. This has been the thesis for decades. So they needed to challenge that. And they brought in several scientists with opposing views to challenge that theory. And what they found was almost negligible effect or findings to show that the right, people who were on the right, the participants, were just a little more by their standard measure of um, their standard, the measure that they used for um rigidity, were just a little bit more rigid. But that of that effect or that outcome really disappeared when they combined these two. So they did one study and another study to replicate. And when they combined the two studies, the the rigidity that you saw on the right almost disappeared. And so what we were talking about was that maybe it's because a normative sort of thing happening where people who are more conservative, your point to Aaron's point, too. Like, you can't, you can't just have change all the time. That would be chaos. Like it is, you know, for the left, a lot of it is just about tearing things down and changing and blah, blah, blah, and all this stuff and and get rid of the patriarchy and get rid of this and that. Just it's like conservatives conserve. They want to keep institutions intact because they at the, you know, in the final analysis, many of them work. You put in the bad actors and they seem like they suck. I mean, vulture capitalism sucks. I mean, monopolies suck. Um, I think Jeffrey Epstein sucks. And hopefully, I won't even say what I hope is happening now to his soul, but like anyway, um, you know, and and these power-hungry people suck, but but at the same time, the structures, conservatives value institutions because they're kind of a constant. They keep things tight. You know, you have um, you know, you have a a uh just your laws order, um, the constitution, you have uh just various structures throughout our our society that work. Um, they can be tweaked, they can be amended, they could be, you know, various, but they work. And so concern so rigidity and that kind of adherence to hierarchy and rule and order is a mechanism to keep things intact, to keep things coherent. And so rigidity functions, it's I get I guess like a theory or hypothesis could go with rigidity functions as a way to keep things um coherent. And so that's probably why they saw that. And I'm just conjecturing. I don't know for sure. He kind of is conjecturing that too. But yeah, it's it's uh what what was the main thing that you even said? I'm sorry, I went down a rabbit hole, but that's I think that kind of tied into what you were saying to some degree, was it? I don't know. I'm sorry.

SPEAKER_03 1:26:01

You asked the question. I feel like it did.

SPEAKER_00 1:26:03

Okay. What what did you uh my apologies? Like in that moment, I blanked out. What did you you led with something though, into that my my little rant there?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:12

You did, didn't you? Me? Yeah. See, we have ADHD. I was like, I thought it was no, I think we were that I had a question. I was just kind of like realizing like this this correlation between the left and always wanting to tweak and change, and then where I am and yes and kind of sitting in in what I've created, and I've worked really hard to to get to the place that I am mentally. And I think my family is like healthy and mentally healthy and my grounded sober and progressing and growing as a human. And you know, that I just I feel like I'm just grateful for where we are and I'm grateful for what we have. And this practice of food seems to be something that I never would have had when I was on that side of thinking. But again, to your point, my life was chaotic. Yeah, I wasn't happy in my marriage. I had a business that I hated and I felt like I couldn't get out of it. So a lot of it was like I'm just in my life. So I'm going to fight and argue and do all of this outside of myself.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:21

Outsourcing your autonomy.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:24

Working on the inside and getting things right within myself and my family. And again, Christine said the same thing. You said the same thing. It just seems to be a pattern. That's all I'm saying.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:35

Inner chaos.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:27:37

Inner chaos seems to be the pattern.

Identity Fusion And Protest Psychology

SPEAKER_02 1:27:39

Add to that, yeah. So again, when I was at my most emotionally dysregulated, and I had that binary thinking, and I was very emotional about things that essentially I could not control. I got into an argument with one of my Marshall's family family members. And I remember being so upset that this family member disagreed with what I believed. Because I'm like, how can you do this? You're you're brown. Like, how how can you think this way? Like you are, you're me. Like I I couldn't wrap my head around it.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:28:22

And having a talk with him was kind of one of the things that woke my eyes up because we come from a third world country where um I still have siblings who live there. And there are many of them who don't even have access to electricity or and running water. And he was saying, Here I am in the United States and I live in a nice house and I'm able to support my family back in the Marshall Islands. Who am I to say that I'm oppressed? And who am I to say that I'm a victim? Yeah. And who am I to stay in this while I get to live this life? And I have family members who don't even have that opportunity. And I was like, wow. Holy shit.

ICE, Sanctuary Cities, And Moral Tradeoffs

SPEAKER_00 1:29:11

That's perspective for you, isn't it? That's perspective for you. Because like uh here in America, a lot of what this leftist temperament is is voyeurism. It's it's just semanti. A lot of it is just this caricature that we place on people that we deem victimized and victims, and and we place onto them that that category. That label and category. But to your point, and what is the experience of many immigrants is this utter shift in gratefulness and this utter shift, this differential between what really was oppression to what feels like, oh my goodness, this is such an opportunity. And so they come here, and then you have people here who are pre-programmed to think you're oppressed by default, just because you're, I don't know, brown from another country, and you're coming into our country as for asylum. You're coming into our country as the as the oppressed. You're coming in as the oppressed. So now you you are stamped with that label. But they don't modulate or think. People don't think, well, you go, you came from oppression and you're coming into opportunity. Now you are autonomous. Now you're advancing yourself. They don't shift their tune. And so people who are from these places, they look at us like, what are you smoking? Because like I'm like to your and it's this perspective shift. Yeah. And honestly, what you're feeling, what you felt um would a lot of progressives hold in terms of their moral orientation as a sort of way of directing how they think about minority groups, is in what psychology research and social psychology calls identity fusion, where you have this sense of oneness with a group, and it's not a differentiated, like I don't view or feel the group as a separate entity apart from me, that I can actually come in and out of. Like I can go to this group, I can go to that group and feel my identity in all of these places. No, it's that this particular group, this mindset, is my identity. There's no distinction. And for a lot of people on the left, it's the ideology that there's the oppressed and the oppressor. And a lot of people on the left view themselves as oppressed. Again, going back to where we all were at one point, most distressed point in our lives, or more distressed than usual, uh, feeling out of control, feeling like nothing's going to work out, at odds with our relationships, emotionally dysregulated. How do I deal with it? A lot of this has to do with like how we deal with our own psychology. And when we don't, going coming full circle, we displace, we we project, we um create problems for other people. We don't think about how we can tend to our own problems and deal with them and hone them in and or reel them in or wield them. And so we identify as the victim. So you could be at an Ivy League campus, white female, and believe that the patriarchy is out to get you, that you have no chance as a female in this country. So you are oppressed, even though your parents make, I don't know, several million dollars a year or whatever. You have a hedge fund, or you're like a gonna be fine. You you you place this label on yourself because of your identity. And now you're no longer an individual young woman at an Ivy League school studying whatever, who's venturing into her career as an autonomous, as an agent who's going to build a business one day, who's going to raise children and or not, or whatever. You're you're looking at yourself walking through life as a victim. And now you identify with the brown, black person, the Gazan person, because they share that identity too. So an identity identity fusion literature shows that white and left-leaning college students from the UK and the US are more likely to fuse with Palestinians based on what's going on. Um that, you know, Israel, the US interfering, let's say, they that's how they believe, um, on the basis of imperialism, like these imperialistic states and uh oppressive countries coming in to dominate and subjugate the the these Palestinians. And so they fight for them, they protest for them because they view them as oppressed under Western imperialism. But in this particular study, when they changed the storyline and they took the Western imperialism part out of it, Western liberal students were not available to emotionally protest for people struggling in other situations in the Middle East, let's say. Um, so it was really the idea that it was the Western imperialist boogeyman that changed how they interacted with conflicts afar, which is why you're seeing now no students who protested for Gaza and Palestine protesting for Iran. Because they don't, their identity is not fused with the people of Iran. They, in fact, viewed our interaction, our interference or our operation to get rid of Iran's nuclear program as American or United States or Western imperialism subjugation. You know, when they said we stand with the people of Iran, we are against what the United States did, little did they know what the United States did was stand up for the oppressed people of Iran. But these people on the left who are fused to this notion that everything is the fault of the U.S. imperialism, um, can't few cannot identify with the people of Iran. They just can't because they don't view them as they view them maybe as oppressed under the regime, but their emotional availability is to people only who they feel are subjugated by US uh powers. Does that and does any of that make sense? I don't know if I tongue-tied it, does it? Absolutely. It's a real effect. It's it's been studied and it's it's quite real. And the the degree to which a person is fused is really dangerous at some point because fusion and with this kind of conviction, it pred it can, it can predict violent behavior. Because when you start to really believe in these things, they become something called sacred values. And then you're getting into the territory of fighting or dying for your cause.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:05

So and that's what we're seeing now, I feel like.

SPEAKER_00 1:36:08

Yeah, I know that was a rabbit hole. And but it was it's it's I think it's important to yes, it is what we're seeing right now with with the protests in Minneapolis. And again, you can disagree with how things are being done. I hold I hold that to be a very valid critique. But what we're seeing done in Minneapolis is that you have a bunch of people who really believe that ICE is our Gestapos who are out to just get rid of brown and black people, and that's that. Period. Nothing to do with fraud, nothing to do with people who are here illegally and um taking advantage of our country without country, you know, none of those kinds of things uh matter. Pedophiles, sex offenders, none of that. It doesn't matter to them because they're not fused. Their identity is not in the American identity of sovereignty, of rule and law and order. It's with the oppressed. And if you're a victim of ICE, no, no matter what, if you're into if ICE interacts with you in any way, you're a victim of ICE. It doesn't matter if you're a sex offender. That's the point I make.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:20

And and that's interesting that you say that. Um, I have a cousin who is, I won't say what she does, but she has been working on deportation cases of people who are Marshallese who are getting deported back to the Marshall Islands.

SPEAKER_00 1:37:35

Oh wow, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:37:37

And so I was asking her about it because she's obviously she knows the truth. And she's like, Christine, you know, these are murderers and child rapists. One case was, you know, there was uh a stepfather who is literally raping his three-year-old stepdaughter. And and and law enforcement got involved, and the mom continued to allow him to stay at the home with the young girl.

SPEAKER_01 1:38:11

Oh my God.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:12

So it's just like, you know, again, when people say, you know, oh, I want to be on the right side of history, I'm like, but where are these people? History's literally unfolding as we speak. So to say like you're on the right side of history, how do you really know that? And also I feel like there's an argument about a lot of people who write history books and have written our history aren't necessarily on the right side of history. So I don't even really know what that means.

SPEAKER_00 1:38:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 1:38:42

But it's interesting to know that information, but again, not be able to have those types of conversations because it doesn't even get to that point to have a conversation like that with people who are so anti-ICE and very um emotionally misregulated right now. So used.

One Mindset Shift To Cool Down

SPEAKER_00 1:39:01

Right. And it's it's disgusting to know that you know, the people who were me too several minutes ago, who were um believe women, who were um against the patriarchy, uh, for women's rights, for are just, you know, a three-year-old girl experiencing that. That is there is a I mean, there is a special place in hell for somebody doing that to a child. And the fact that a person can't see that, and um, because they're so hell-bent on holding true to their belief that everyone who comes into this country is is an oppressed victim by default. And that man is one of that, like and and you know, but then again, it's like we can say um for listeners just to know that you know, we can, and I this is ad nauseum at this point, but it's I think to ride drive the point home, you can also say, well, let's just get those, let's let's focus on getting those people and not really stopping people um based on profiling. But then it gets more complex. It's like, well, if we have such a high number of people in this country, and then you get the wrong address or you get the wrong person, you're really trying to get a sex offender. Ethically, in terms of moral philosophy, I won't go down that right now, but like what actually is best for society to you have someone who's a sex offender and you want to get them, and you get the wrong person once in a while. What's the trade-off? Like, are you gonna, are you, because there's so many people, the probability of there being more pedophiles now in this country and sex traffickers or whatever is quite high because this is a haven for them. It's like, what are you to do in that moment? I mean, it's it's not something that we can answer. I mean, if you want to, both of you is fine, but like I think it's something to toss out to the audience. It's like, how do you reckon with that? How do you deal with the sheer volume and the presence of these people who you can say that most of them are good people, want the right thing, but now you've just the volume is such that the likelihood that you have bad actors is much higher. And what do you do with that information when you're uh you you have cities and towns and states who are sanctuary cities, towns and states that prevent law enforcement work from working with federal agents, muddying up the system and making it much harder for them, then creating more chaos by going out into the streets because they're so backed up and so in, you know, not able to connect um in the in a streamlined way? It it is manufactured chaos from these leaders at the top, the Democratic Party. So it's like, what do you do? You know, at that point you have to think, okay, what did these agencies do they go to these places that they think where these people are and get sometimes the wrong person? What's the moral, what, what really where is really the moral compass? What's the goal? We want to get the right person who does awful things, but we might actually get the wrong person once in a while. And some people will not accept that, but then I have to ask them, so now you inadvertently accept just not doing anything and keeping these vicious, disgusting people in the country who are doing awful things. So what pick, you know, you gotta pick something at some point. And if you want to be a constantly moral person and hold the upper the upper hand morally, hopefully it would be in defense of that three-year-old girl.

unknown 1:42:39

Right. Right.

SPEAKER_00 1:42:40

Just saying. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:42:42

Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so we have one more question. Sure. To end this interview. If you could give our audience one mindset shift to lower the temperature in this country right now, what would it be?

SPEAKER_00 1:43:01

That's a great question. It really is. And I hope the silence that I'm that you're experiencing, well, not now because I'm talking but a second ago, isn't an indication of uh perplexity, but rather my gears are sh are shifting and you can edit some of this out if you want, just so it gets to the point. But um I do need a second to think about that.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:26

One I kind of wanted to add to it.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:28

Yeah, yeah, please.

SPEAKER_02 1:43:30

What also gives you hope, because for a lot of people things just feel so divided right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:43:35

Okay. A mindset shift is and the hope part will come after, is when you notice discomfort in your mind, in your body, when you experience a point of view that rubs against your held belief in the moment in a way that activates you negatively, but you kind of feel like there's something to it, like maybe there's something to it, because not that's not the case all the time, because often people will experience new information and just shut down. But a lot of the time people like us, I think that this happened to all three of us. You'll information will come your way or some experience, and you will feel at odds with it. It will not it will feel incongruent, you'll hate it maybe, but there's something to it. You know there's something to it that's right, but please venture into that light because there that's that's there's probably something there that you really need to hear. And once you really step into that space, you you actually might realize that your held belief was not your own, that it was processed for you. And then what will happen is a chain of events you'll start to unwind and realize that wow, I'm not thinking for myself. So that is that's I think that's a mindset shift. Um at the macro level, it's a broader sense of awareness. At the micro level, it's this series of events that happen when you've met with something that feels at odds and you're uncomfortable, but then you know something's right about it. And then write about it a little bit, journal about it, voice note about it. There's a friend who might feel similarly to that thing that is, you know, that you're starting to think about. Maybe talk to them about it, uh, read a book about it. What gives me hope is that the three of us did that, and that many people there are many people like us who did the same thing. So that gives me hope because it works and it's it's a real it's a real thing. And I think there are waves of this happening. You have the walkaway movement. I don't know if you two are familiar with the walkaway movement where people like us, right? Right. So that gives me hope that it's actually we're here doing having a discussion about it and that it will continue in people moving moving forward who are not there yet, but they're there. And I bet you anything, many people are experiencing the same thing that we experienced.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:30

I'm literally tearing up right now. I love it. I think that like we forget sometimes that just because we're not the loudest in the room doesn't mean um we're not there aren't more of us out there. We're just a little bit quieter.

SPEAKER_00 1:46:46

And um that's right. We're not it's slower.

SPEAKER_03 1:46:49

We're not that 1% of the 99-1 is, you know. Um so to close, I just I want to thank you for being um why am I so emotional right now? Is that felt it's okay?

Where To Find Anthony And Closing

SPEAKER_02 1:47:04

Yeah, like I love it. Yeah, it really felt so healing and thank you so much.

SPEAKER_03 1:47:09

Um yeah, thank you. Uh, I think that um what you're doing on your platform on Instagram is like incredible. Um thank you. Very brave. And I think even your podcasted slab, um, we recommend people um give you a listen, give you a follow. Um, you have a you have very good positive things to say, and you say it with such reverence and light. And there's thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:37

I really oh thank you. Appreciate it. Find you on Instagram as well. Oh gosh, you both are wonderful. You uh yes, I will answer that in a second. We I would I think it would be great to have the both of you on Discourse Lab if you're interested in that.

SPEAKER_01 1:47:52

It would be absolutely play really well right now.

SPEAKER_00 1:47:56

I think it would be so cool. We should do it.

SPEAKER_02 1:47:58

I don't know what we would offer, but uh we would love to.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:01

Yeah, no, I I know that I I'm I'm I think I could speak for Clay, my co-host, who would I think it would be so healing, actually, quite uh kind of a healing episode, frankly. Um but people could follow, could find me on I try to keep it simple. I don't I don't really like X um and I don't really do um TikTok that much. I mean so I'm on I'm on Instagram, it's just at Anthony Rispo. And I'm also on Substack. I know that's more of a niche thing, like it's more kind of geeky, but it's also at Anthony, I think underscore rispo. I don't know. I can give you the information, but mostly Instagram. Yeah, and then Discourse Lab is at uh the underscore discourse lab. Um and I could also, you know, you could uh provide you with that information too, but that's where you can find me for now.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:53

So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 1:48:55

Thank you both. Thank you.

SPEAKER_03 1:48:57

For all of our listeners who stuck with us, you know, the last four and a half years. Um, we appreciate you. Uh you have you're on the other side, hopefully. And we'll continue to see you on the other side because this is a forever journey, forever growing, forever changing, and forever listening to other people's stories. So thank you, Anthony.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:19

We'll thank you both.

SPEAKER_03 1:49:20

We'll we'll keep in touch.

SPEAKER_00 1:49:23

That'd be wonderful. Yes.