Ron DeSantis' War on Wokeness with Kmele Foster, Chloé Valdary and David Bernstein (Roundtable EP 01)

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As always, thank you so much for your support. Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today's conversation is a roundtable with several guests instead of my usual one-on-one. My guests today are Camille Foster, co-founder of FreeThink and host of the fifth column podcast, Chloe Valdery, founder of Theory of Enchantment, and David Bernstein, author of the recent book Woke Anti-Semitism. We discuss Ron DeSantis and Chris Rufo's War on Wokeness. We discuss Camille's position on race abolition. We talk about the relationship between Black and Jewish Americans and much more. If you enjoy these larger conversations, let me know and I'll do more of them. So without further ado, Camille Foster, Chloe Valdery, and David Bernstein. Thanks so much, guys, for doing this first roundtable of the Conversations with Coleman podcasts. I could not be happy to be doing it with my good friend Camille Foster, my friend Chloe Valdery, David Bernstein, and Bernstein of Bernstein. Steve Bernstein. I don't know what rule governs how you pronounce it, but anyway, we're here to talk about whatever topics we really want to discuss, but a lot of things we might be excited to discuss are the controversy over DeSantis's rejection of an AP curriculum in African American studies. We may want to talk about issues related to post-racialism, which actually connect to that issue because part of what was rejected by DeSantis was a part of the Florida curriculum which dealt with quote unquote post-racial racism or colorblind racism, the notion that being colorblind is tantamount to racism. That's someplace we might start. We could also just talk about how history should be taught and related issues. So I guess let's just start there. Have you guys been paying attention to this controversy at all? Do you have any reactions to this salient issue right now? I'm certainly paying attention. I'm on the board at fire in addition to my other public commentary on these topics. So I've been following it on a fire, a father lawsuit against the state of Florida on account of the Stop Woke Act, and that is still in progress, and we'll see how things come out. But there are some material concerns about First Amendment issues, particularly when the policy is targeted not so much at the K through 12 area, but at private companies, which want to have DEI programming of their choosing, and also at universities who have been the target of both prior acts and some of the new legislation that's been proposed in the past week or so that would be targeted at DEI. I'm trying to remember the specific words that they use to describe this, the DEI bureaucracy on campuses. I believe Ron described it as going after these DEI bureaucracies and critical race theory and getting them off campus. I think the general problem that I have with all of it is that it is narrowly focused at the K through 12 level and all these other places in prohibiting particular kinds of bad ideas. It's these divisive concepts legislations, they're necessarily going to be kind of sloppy, they're going to confuse people, and that was predicted before pieces of legislation went in, were enacted. And after the fact, I mean, we've got teachers who have drapes over the bookshelves that they have in their classrooms because they're concerned that they might get into trouble. There's been these private recordings of people having conversations about what they can and can't discuss. It was in Texas, I believe that there was a discussion about the right way to talk about the Holocaust and whether or not they needed to teach both sides in order for it to be appropriately fair. And some of this is not so much that the legislation gives one the sense that they need to teach both sides of the Holocaust. It's the general climate of concern and fear that has been animated by this particular approach. And I think there are alternatives if our goal is to actually have classrooms that are focused on critical thinking and teaching folks how to learn on, of course, prohibiting any sort of bigoted language. But giving folks enough room to have complicated discussions at the appropriate age level. And I think you affirmatively pass policies that try to achieve those goals. I think the kind of negative, specifically ideologically motivated targeting of ideas and the prohibition of ideas is just, it's dangerous. It has all sorts of profoundly bad potential implications. And it's hard to even predict what sort of abuses might happen if the governor and other related allies of his are able to get a bit too much control over the way that education happens. You're essentially centralizing a lot of the problems that in this particular case, the status quo before was it's decentralized. There are local school boards that have to get involved. It does require parents to do something. But there are trade-offs. I would probably prefer that. It's a sort of federalist, a traditionally conservative principle there that is eviscerated. Right. It struck me, all of this kind of legislation, this anti-woke legislation strikes me as probably an unwise solution to a real problem, which is that parents are paying tax money to send their kids to school where anywhere between 80 and 90% of the teachers are of one political persuasion, which means the far left ideologues, the people that teach colorblindness is racism and so forth have a space potentially to teach their kid stuff that the media and American parent really finds to be a political dogma rather than historical fact. And then in the era of smartphone, video recordings and cancel culture, I think they fear going to the meeting and saying something and having one word come out wrong and then being the next viral Twitter parent that quote unquote doesn't believe in racism. And so I think people flock to these laws, these poorly written laws that have all the problems that you describe. And it's a very difficult situation because I empathize with not wanting to send your kids somewhere where they're going to... So for example, my friend who's Jewish has a mixed race daughter, she's like nine years old or something, she came home from school once and said, daddy, are you white? And she goes, yeah, daddy's white. And then she goes, does that mean you treat people bad? And it was interesting for two reasons. One, because notice she didn't actually view her father as a race, right? That was not an innate concept in her mind. I don't think it's an innate concept in most children's minds. She had to learn that her father belonged to a quote unquote race. And then after that, she had already at that age from something she learned in school, had an association with whiteness is evil. White people do bad things, which is exactly the kind of association that parents don't want. One of the many associations, parents don't want their kids getting from school. They want their kids to learn how to be competent and do math and know historical facts and so forth. So it's a very difficult issue. How do you actually fix that when a public school institution is totally slanted in one direction? How does one fix that? Well, I would say that it's a little ironic that institutions in Florida are taking up a very arguably critical race theory oriented approach, some of the critiques of critical race theory from Henry Lewis Gates are that you're trying to take a top down approach to stop discrimination. And that doesn't quite work because you're trying to dictate total control over absolute outcomes. And that's impossible. But what's ironic is that in trying to fight that very same way of being the governor of Florida is taking up that way of being. And it's sort of unconscious and it's subtle, but this is what happens when people or, you know, vast organizations get into conflict with each other. They often actually start to imitate each other. They start to take on the patterns and behaviors and the motivations of their opponents totally unknowingly. And so you have this situation where in response to people saying whiteness equals bad, Florida is basically saying all things that we perceive as woke, all things that we define as woke equals bad. So if you create this broad sweeping association and use that to advance political power, we're going to take that same strategy and try to advance political power on our end. But it doesn't work. It creates these fracturing. And the from my perspective, the only possible option is to actually try to create a space where parents and teachers and all people within specific communities get involved in the shaping and making of the curriculum. And there's nothing that can really replace that. And that requires hard work that requires the building of community. Yeah. So when I first heard about the Florida curriculum, I read in the New York Times that Henry Lewis Gates had endorsed it. And I thought, okay, so this is probably a completely solid curriculum. I'm going to be happy with it. And then I found a copy online somewhere. And I started looking through it. And it's not the, it's not the most problematic thing I've ever seen. But there were some parts of it where clearly they were just offering one view on reparations, for example. And now I don't know, I don't support what DeSantis did. When I was watching this all unfold, I was wishing, why did they have to have that legislation that banned those ideas? Why couldn't it be instead demanded that there was an opposing view in each case? And if he had demanded that I would have supported it, the problem is that's not where they're coming from. They want to completely ban all talk of intersectionality and all talk of CRT. And I think that's really wrong and dangerous. I have to say though, I'm not so sure that censorship is worse than indoctrination. I mean, if I had to take my pick, what I want my kids to not learn something like Abraham X. Kendi or what I want him to be indoctrinated in it, I'd rather I think him not learn it than being indoctrinated. And by the way, that's very real for me. I have kids that are seniors in high school. And my son's school district, Montgomery County, Maryland, just went through an anti-racism audit. And the system decided that it's going to teach kids to recognize and resist systems of oppression. And I know what we are, I think we know what that's going to be like, what that's going to, how that curriculum is going to unfold. So for me, I want my kids to be able to learn and be subject to critical thinking. And I think that that's going to be lost if we don't do something. Unfortunately, the DeSantis plan is not the right way to go about it. And there's not enough people I feel right now. There's not enough of a constituency that's arguing for teaching opposing views on these issues. And I think that's one of the big projects. I've always thought going to what you said, Chloe, about bringing people together teachers and parents and like, if you had done a thoughts experiment and you brought sort of maybe five semi-woke educators together, historians, let's say, and five semi-traditionalist educators, and you put them in a room for a week, would they be able to fashion a national narrative that more or less we could all live with? And I think that would be interesting to see and find out. It is interesting. I mean, I suspect we should, I sort of took us in a different direction by talking about a lot of the broad issues. The AP curriculum issue is unique and is worth taking on its own. The specific thing to consider from my standpoint initially was, well, we're talking about an AP class that only certain kids are likely to take. These are 12th graders. This is consistent with a lot of the kind of stuff that they would get if they went to university. I found the curriculum as well. It certainly, there were things that stood out to me about the curriculum. But the issue for me is never necessarily what is being taught, but always how it's being taught. And the pedagogical approach is really important. It is certainly the case that all of the suggested readings were from the same end of the ideological spectrum. But it does seem to me that as you, I think as you were pointing out, you suggested that there is not an attempt to teach kind of the other side of the issue. But more often than not, there's not merely two sides. There's kind of an infinite number of sides. And the art, the delicate art of phenomenal teaching is something that I just don't think can be kind of rotely imposed. I don't think that you can get this top down enforcement from the governor as you were pointing out and ever achieve that. There are no shortcuts. I think the fact that things are widely distributed, that there is an expectation that there will be local control, the teachers and parents are expected to get together and make hard choices about curriculum in the context of the school board meetings and such is appropriate if you can add choice to that dynamic. So more parents have the ability to get out of kind of crummy schools or their local schools. They don't only have one option, I think that would help. But I think it's also imperative to just stress that there are no shortcuts. So in the AP case, this by definition is a curriculum that the whole state is going to adopt in a standardized way, right? So I really may not be available in every school, right? If this school doesn't have AP classes, then it wouldn't be available. Right. So the wisdom of local communities, bargaining and haggling amongst themselves in person at school board meetings and this town coming to a different consensus than this town makes a lot of sense to me. But how does that apply to a curriculum that's by definition standardized across a like a huge state where it's like a lot of different kinds of towns in Florida have to agree on the same curriculum. And Florida basically encompasses the political opinions of the whole country. It might as well be a country unto itself, right? Like Texas in California. That may be the best we can do, but it's a bit depressing to think that we can't fashion a common narrative or a common pedagogical approach to some of these very big problems. I've heard Chris Rufo, who's obviously siding with the Santas and his approach here, say, well, ultimately, aren't we just going to end up with red state and blue state realities? And maybe he's even pushing in that direction. And I found that a bit, a bit depressing. I, you know, I do feel that we haven't tried to fashion or refashion a common narrative. One of my favorite phrases these days is patriotic pluralism. And it's this sort of the idea that the right is very patriotic, but not very pluralistic. And the left is very pluralistic, but not very patriotic. And that we can develop if we work at it a common narrative that I think is really central to who Americans have traditionally been and how we see ourselves and to sort of jump to sort of this very bifurcated reality where everything that's decided at the local level. I wonder what's going to be left of sort of a common national identity if every single city and every school district is really coming at it in their own local flavor. Is the left pluralistic? What does that mean, exactly? Well, I mean, I think that they prize the idea of diversity. Okay. You know, and I understand that those are grand simplifications, but I'm trying to find a language that we can go back to that most people on the right could say, yes, that's true. Pluralism does matter. And I have to think about that. And people on the left can say, yes, patriotism does matter. My Betty White recently died a week, like six months ago. My wife, who loves Golden Girls was relistening to some of the episodes. And there was this, I was just hearing her talk. And she was listening to one of the daughters, lecture of the mom, that America's a really important place. And we all respect each other. And I was listening to this language that seems so quaint. Right. And this was like a progressive show 20 some years ago. And I feel like we have to get some of that back into the conversation. Yeah. It's interesting, though. I mean, we have a lot of the conversation about the schools is the idea. I don't want indoctrination. Let's skip that on the table quickly. Right. But I also feel like it's important not to overstate the scope of the problem. Like, there's a very real sense in which the schools aren't responsible for making us patriotic citizens. They're not responsible for cultivating the culture that is actually going to kind of stitch us together and make us a country. And to the extent things have changed in a way that we can see when we watch old episodes of the Golden Girls, that suggests that this is coming from someplace else, which is, I think another reason to suspect that the project of trying to kind of hive off a certain number of school districts and turn them into red school districts or the activists who insist on creating blue school districts, that that is the wrong project. It seems to me that most of the children who go through those who matriculate through those institutions are likely to be poorly served by those institutions. Because if you're doing this, you're not actually valuing quality education, you're prioritizing ideology, that project is probably going to fail. In general, the right way to think about this might be to say, schools that do this are bad schools in whatever direction. And it might even be an elite institution paid for by parents who are spending $50,000 a year to send their kids to elementary school. But if there is a particular kind of ideological milieu, those kids are going to get that anyways. It's going to happen. The real question is, can we do something to refocus or at least to reset our expectations about what education is supposed to do in the broadest possible sense? I've seen so many controversies where there's this perhaps local scandal that becomes national, where a teacher does something bad in a classroom. And everyone is outraged all of a sudden because the teacher said something disparaging about a race in the classroom. But then I'll go and look on great schools or one of these websites that give you rankings about the school. And the school is abysmal. I mean, they're always uniformly the lowest performing institutions, like plummeting test scores year after year of chronic under performance. And the scandal for you is that there was a bad teacher in the classroom? No, that's just- It's also the elite schools too, right? It's elite high schools as well. Sure. They have great math scores and send every kid to Ivy League. That's true. I think that's true too. And we do see some of this in university. But again, I think from my standpoint, it feels obvious to me that this is part of the cultural milieu. And to the extent it exists in those elite schools, unless Ron DeSantis starts passing laws that are going to prohibit elite schools from teaching it, it's going to stay there. These sweeping, grand ideological battles that are being carried out through the legislature can't actually touch those places. Chris Rufo can't project power into Brooklyn, New York. And when I've talked to him about this, he said he doesn't want to. He doesn't plan to. Perhaps Ron DeSantis would have a different kind of project if you were elected president. And that's something that anyone who plans to vote for him or perhaps for Republicans ought to keep in mind. I think Rufo sees it as a war, essentially. And the goal is just to take as much territory for our side. Which is a huge indictment of him. I mean, it justifies some of the worst fears of his loudest critics. And I'm a critic, but I'm not his loudest critic. His loudest critics say he's a racist, monster, fascist, all sorts of other things. And when he talks that way, it kind of sounds like it. It sounds fascistic. It sounds totalitarian, whether or not he means it that way. When he describes himself as a post liberal, it sounds that way. I think the most charitable version of his argument I could give is that the schools have by and large been captured by that ideology. So it's the point of no return has been reached in a way that makes it more plausible to establish like two left and right wing polls than to try to get that synthesis. Which is if true very sad, but I don't and can't give up on the prospect of finding that middle ground. And the last thing I'll say is I think the media by definition shows us the extremes. And it doesn't make news when a teacher, a great teacher in some town teaches the history of the slave trade in a very balanced and honest way. That will never make the news. It will never make your news feed. And so to one can get a skewed picture of how bad things are, but the goal is to get more and more of the teacher is teaching you the horror of the middle passage right next to the fact that Africans were sold by other Africans. No. And not stolen from their lands as the 1619 projects. Right. 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Like Scott Ockerman, Lauren Lapgeus, Paul Sheer, Jason Manzukas, Cecily Strong and Duncan Trussell. It's completely improvised and it's devilishly funny. There's a new episode every Sunday. Listen and subscribe to mega wherever you get your podcasts. I think that it's it's wild to hear that Russo believes that it's a point of no return because just to be clear, that's my summer years. Yeah, that's fair. I feel like to to believe that though is to sort of give up on the project of democracy itself. It's like I personally think that the purpose of education is at least within the American context is to produce robust citizens who can participate in our democracy and sustain our democracy. And democracy requires a kind of opponent processing, not adversarial processing, but opponent processing whereby you actually come together in a public square and you, you know, iron sharpens iron, you figure out what is required in order to sustain a democracy together by having opposing viewpoints and figuring out sort of the truth between the two. And so it seems to me that to give up on or to believe that that's not possible is just to believe that democracy isn't possible anymore. And that really is quite a fascist perspective, unfortunately. And minimum, it's it's it's rather defeatist. I mean, there are some hills that I would totally be willing to die on and certain certain victories that I'm not willing to attain in a particular way to put this in language that many people would recognize. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul? Like that's, I think that is actually the trade that's on offer here that there are certain fundamental norms and values that we cleave to certain ideals like pluralism that are supposed to be indispensable in our constitutional republic, not democracy. I think the distinction is important because democracy is a mechanism. It's like the the wheel you use to steer the car, although, you know, it's a conventional way we talk about things. Camille hates democracy. I don't hate democracy. But as a mechanism, I don't prize it. Like if you can give me a monarchy that achieves the same ends, I'm perfectly fine with that. Can you do that? I think it's hard. But hey, it's actually really, really hard to do in a democracy as well. So it suggests that the values are actually important for us to understand. And it would be great if we talked about the values a little bit more as opposed to the short hands that make it seem like we're talking about the same things when we're not. Can I just do a quick devil's advocate for sort of the Ron De Santa's Chris Rufo? Do it. Yeah. And it's not where I come from, but I struggle with this. I'm watching what's happening in Canada where critical race ideology and critical social justice are sort of running like wildfire. And there's no opposing political force in Canada. There's absolutely nothing stopping it. And so it's already a more sort of stark ideological reality there than it is in most blue states in the United States. And so while part of my brain says, yes, I mean, I don't want to settle out my liberalism in order to stop wokism. That's not what I'm after. I want there to be a liberal reality when all this is over, whenever that happens to be. But at the same time, I come from the political advocacy world. And I know that in politics, politics doesn't sort of operate by the rules of liberalism. Politics is about who has more strength, who has more political strength. You have to sort of have an opposing political force to be able to neutralize another force. And I'm not saying it's a perfect, it's part, but I, it's hard for me to imagine that we're going to be able to stop sort of this long march through institutions that's been taking place in education and so forth, where this ideology continues to capture places and distort how we teach our kids, if there's no opposing political force. Now, at the end of the day, if that opposing political force wins, we'll, we end up with some kind of synthesis that is liberal in nature. Maybe not. That's a danger. But I'm also worried that if there's no political force, then we will not be able to sort of recapture liberalism either. So I think we have to take that seriously, that us liberal humanists, I can only speak for myself, we're not that strong in numbers. And maybe we need this other force to exist even if we don't like it. So I've heard this argument actually in one of my, in one of the classes I took in college about Malcolm X and sort of like you needed both Malcolm X's wing of the civil rights movement versus King's version of the civil rights movement and order for people to actually see the legitimacy of and really understand the power of King's perspective, because it was sort of contrasted with this more dogmatic perspective. That being said, I think that I agree with you that there needs to be another political force. But the only political force that seems to exist right now would be the equivalent of the Malcolm X wing and not the equivalent of the Kingian wing. And obviously people say that the the means justifies, or the end justifies the means, but for me, like the means and the ends are one. And so it matters how you build that political force. It matters the values that that political force, you know, operates according to. So it's not just enough to have a force. It has, you have to have a force that stands for something and that has a line that it will not cross has lines that it will not cross. Otherwise, it just becomes dogma versus dogma, which is what we see in Florida. Can you end up with a reactionary spiral, though, which is what I actually am most concerned about at the moment? Yeah, like that, if you have, and I'm not saying it started here, but perhaps it did, activist people on the left who are pushing a particular agenda, you have reactionaries on the right who insist we're not going to let this happen. And a similar sort of escalation on the left. I mean, even to try and be a little bit more moderate, or at least a little more even handed in my commentary here, it is certainly the case that when I see representations of the legislation out of Florida and the actions out of Florida, I'll hear descriptions like, they don't want to teach black history. They don't they don't want to talk about slavery and classrooms. These are mischaracterizations, they're misrepresentations. They overlook the material problems that Coleman alluded to that actually exists on these on these campuses. But it also feels like a very predictable response to the tenor of the conversation that's happening now. And it might be, and in fact, I think it is the case that there are certain things that are being done that are totally appropriate at fire, for example, long advocated for getting rid of these these pledges, these expectations that people have to pledge, do these loyalty oaths when they are hired into a DDI statements. Yeah, so that's that's something that fire has long said, we should get rid of those. There should be prohibitions. But fire also says, you have to be exceedingly careful about the way you do this. And they've been anything but cautious. What they been is strident and furious. They're talking openly about going over the walls and taking back the institutions, describing this as a war. That sort of impropriety. That is, I think decorum is actually an essential liberal value as well. Norms matter a great deal. I think the legal protections with respect to free speech are a big deal, but norms with respect to free speech are a big deal too. And they've paid lip service to free speech. And I think that might be the kind of gravest crime here. In many instances, there aren't clear violations of the law. There are disputes with respect to whether or not certain kinds of things are okay. But I think what is inarguable is that they have escalated the culture war. And as a result, yeah, maybe they intimidated the college board to change in their curriculum in a way that some of us like. But it might also be the case that they have animated concern amongst some of the most eager activists. And we have seen similar sorts of legislation come out of places like California that is in the opposite direction. And that matters to me as well. So I think that we have to pursue moderation here. And we have to pursue pluralism. And I think people who care about liberal values and in really meaningfully do, like have to push back against this and say, no, no, no, there has to be a better way. We have to be able to come together and figure these things out and find better models for education. So one of the problems in education around these controversial subjects like race and identity and gender, sometimes it's not what is being taught, but how much of it is being taught, which is a very tricky issue to complain about. So for example, my friend showed me what his son, who's probably six or seven years old was being taught. And the subject of the day was culture. What is culture? This is as a young human, your first introduction to the concept of culture, a lot to talk about. And the first few slides were some generic introductions to what a culture is, how culture can be different, how food can be different in different cultures. Then around page four, it starts talking about black hairstyles, right? And then page five, it continues talking about black hairstyles. And then page 12, it's still talking about black hair. And then page 20, and it got to the point where roughly 80% of the lesson was about black hair. Now, I think as an American, black hair is and it's significance and its uniqueness and all that stuff. That would make a great one page of 20 on an introduction to culture because it's something that American kids will be able to actually see with their eyes and they can connect a subcultural difference in their own country to how people wear their hair differently. And it means this and it evolves over time. Afro's used to be popular and it kind of had this association with black power. But that's a fine example. But for it to be the entire lesson is an extraordinarily narrow teaching of culture when we have this 8 billion people in the world. And I would like a more worldly perspective to be offered. Again, it's tricky though. How do you complain about that without sounding like you're saying, Oh, I just don't want to hear so much about black people, right? And much less, how do you legislate that? You can only have only 15% of the lesson can be, right? That can't be legislate. That's a ridiculous. So how does one even begin to go about addressing that issue? Well, this sounds like a norms issue, not a legislative issue, which is trickier to it. Because it just takes time to cultivate norms. I think we've wanted to do everything legislatively instead of actually asking how do we do the hard work of building community and being in community. And I think that so many of our problems stem from our collective failure to do that. I think legislative victories give you at least a moment to seem like you won. You can stand over the body of your defeated vanquished enemies, thump your chest. But I don't know that you actually win that way. And it's funny you use that example, because I think I probably talked to you about the situation I've had with Leah when she had her first day of school. It was in February, last year actually, at a brand new school. And I walked in and I saw this huge black history month display that was behind that was right there as you come off of the elevator. And there was this book in the center of it, the title of which was Hey, Black Child. And my heart is saying. And my heart sank because some of you perhaps don't know. I don't do race taxonomy at all. I reject it outright, which interestingly, for me, I find more things to hate in American public education with respect to these issues than anyone. Like literally, to the extent you're talking about black history and you're doing it with the smile, I find it like problematic. To the extent you're talking about black hair, I don't even want to page. I think it's all kind of gross to me. There is an implicit endorsement of the race taxonomy. And I want to confront it aggressively. But I'm a radical on these issues. Also think I'm right. All the abolitionists were radicals at one point. So we can talk about this because I know there's a point in this. Actually, I'd love to be being the only racialized white guy here. But I've been fascinated to sort of listen in and participate to a lesser degree on the whole sort of deracialization discussion. And I think probably, I'm guessing maybe I don't want to speak for anybody that we all agree that race is a social construct. But culture is not a social, I mean, culture actually exists. And sometimes I think when we're talking about race, what we really mean is culture. And the question is, how do you talk about culture in a way that doesn't overgeneralize, but actually is at the right conceptual level? Like, how do you disaggregate culture in a way that makes sense? So let me give you an example of this. There have been a lot of Orthodox Jews getting beaten up by racialized black guys. And about one a week in New York, like last year. Now, there are a lot of people who in the Jewish community, where I come from, who want to say, why aren't we talking about the blackness of the perpetrators? Like, isn't that a factor? Shouldn't we be discussing it? And I have to tell you, I'm very torn on that. Because the truth is that only exists in New York. Like, there's nowhere else where there are blacks and Jews living in close proximity. Maybe there's only one New York in that way, but where that's happening. You don't see that anywhere else. And actually, it's not even everywhere in New York. It's in three distinct boroughs in New York City. And so it's a cultural phenomena. It has to be a cultural phenomenon, right? But it's not a black cultural phenomena, right? It's just the issue. Yeah. But in a way, though, it's not also happening from, it's not Asians aren't doing it. But it's still not a black cultural phenomena. Right. It's not 90% of black men doing this. It's not even 20% of black men that are doing this. As you localized it, it's particular neighborhoods. There's a particular culture in those neighborhoods, at least one of many particular cultures in those neighborhoods. And it's producing this bad outcome. We do generalize because it's convenient. And because it makes the world a little bit easier to handle. But those abstractions necessarily obscure our view of what's going on. And I think there's something about dutifully avoiding using the word black when you've decided that you're also going to capitalize black and use it in other contexts. But you won't use it when you're talking about this kind of racially contentious assault. But I think being deliberate and systematically to use a somewhat charged word, avoiding invoking the race taxonomy. Let's talk about these things. This is another matter entirely. I don't think black crime is a useful concept. I actually think it is actively harmful, if not outright destructive. It is a canard in a very meaningful sense. There are particular communities that have to deal with high crime rates. And in those communities, in some cases, it can be like living in a war zone. When you have 100%, 200%, 300% increase in a murder rate, in a neighborhood or a borough, that is a huge deal. To talk about it in terms of black crime, both does this ugly work of essentializing blackness as somehow fundamentally violent and obscuring the very particular unique nature of the crime. And I think in that way, it makes it harder for us to solve the problem. But there's this issue though, which is that it is fundamentally impossible for the state to not abstract. Yeah. No, I expect it to be abstractions. But maps are abstractions. There are more and less useful ways to draw a map and a map that is say one to one and includes all of the details of the things you might encounter in the world is utterly useless. This is a bad abstraction. And I think it has become abundantly clear, given the way that race works. Yes, it's a social construct. It's also an ideological commitment. As an ideological commitment, I think it is exceedingly disruptive and has infected and poisoned our discourse. It makes it hard for us to think clearly about sophisticated problems. We have the illusion of sophistication where we talk about maternal outcomes with respect to race and the magic we're doing something important and sophisticated. I think it's preposterous. I don't think that most of the hard problems are solved with racially coded solutions. Let's take the other half of that hate crime example of in New York, we'd be talking about mostly Orthodox Jews and certain neighborhoods, I think all in Brooklyn. Probably. Brooklyn, I think maybe Queens as well. Maybe one in Queens. And you're talking about specific neighborhoods where lots of Orthodox Jews live and own lots of property usually. And then usually low income Black people living in the same neighborhoods on the same blocks that both groups grow up sort of not understanding and hating the other. And I think Camille, your point is well taken that I grew up 10 miles away from that situation in a town in New Jersey that has maybe 30% Black and almost equally Jewish and there were no such problems. But it wasn't Orthodox Jews and it wasn't quite as many low income Black people and there were cultural differences in both groups that make it impossible to envision a kind of scenario like you're describing. My question is, would you also want to de-racialize or de-ethnize the other half of that? So if I was reporting on such a crime, should I not say it was an Orthodox Jew that got assaulted? Should I just describe them both as people to be symmetrical or should I describe the victim but not the perpetrator? That's why I said I hear what Camille you had to say on that and I sort of resonate to it but there's a part of me that says there's still certain cultural markers that can be relevant and that we can render it impossible to actually solve the problem. And so I think it is germane to the situation that it's an Orthodox Jew. And if you don't talk about that, then we won't actually know who's being targeted by whom. And I don't while I agree completely that the blackness of the perpetrators is not something that you could universalize by any stretch of imagination. I'm also not sure that it's completely irrelevant as well. I mean it still might come from a it's related to a specific cultural milieu. It's not the same as what's happening in opioid infested white areas. It's like, you know, I just heard this crazy statistic that white men my age like in their mid 50s are dying at a higher rate than black men of the same age because of fentanyl basically. And it's and you know, it's you have to I mean there is something about by the way, it's like white old white guys who are taking fentanyl. It's not it's not black guys for whatever reason. I don't know why but it's well it's probably that's probably a side effect of the geography. Is it if you were to if you're talking about where it is that people are subject to the opioid crisis my my understanding is that you would whatever you came up with there the most useful description would be people in these sorts of areas. Right. That be rural rather that be there there would be a former factory towns. And it so happens that the vast majority of people in those towns are white but you will find almost no sociological or opioid similarities between that white guy and a white guy from the suburbs. This is like one of my gripes with the George Floyd moment is that you had you know black people in high up in corporate America claiming sort of claiming some kind of advantage or gain by saying well look what they did to George Floyd. Put me on a corporate board. Yeah. And that's somehow B is a response to A. It's seen as a response to A because they are both happened to B on the same third of the skin color spectrum and B broadly identified with the same subcultural group in America but it seems like that's to Camille's point just like a very a deeply shallow to use a kind of proxy more on understanding of the issue. If you're looking for a funny podcast to add to your rotation check out the God pod. The God pod is this hilarious podcast where God and Jesus are the regular hosts and they have a rotating cast of guests like Moses Mary and more. They are hilarious and irreverent and probably not safe for children but if you like shows like South Park family guy and Rick and Morty you will probably enjoy this. It's really quite a cool concept for a podcast and I highly recommend it. So if you're looking for something light-hearted you can't go wrong adding the God pod to your rotation. It's always super funny. So find the God pod wherever you listen to podcasts. Are you fascinated by the twisted minds that commit criminal acts? I'm Dr. Shiloh and I'm Dr. Scott. We're both forensic psychologists working in Southern California. In each episode of our podcast LA Not So Confidential we dissect the nexus where true crime forensic psychology and entertainment meet. All delivered with our signature gallows humor while examining the actual diagnosis and dishing on the media portrayal of the events. Subscribe to LA Not So Confidential anywhere you go for podcasts. Trust us. We're doctors. The primacy of race in our conversations about these issues is a matter of habit and practice and convenience. People recognize it, resonates with them in a particular way. Even as we're talking about it here and I think you're noticing it as you're describing it there is a bizarre kind of conflation that's happening. What on earth is a white area that has this higher rate of opioid use? The financial district in Manhattan is a white area. It doesn't have this opioid use. That means there's some sort of profound distinction between these two communities. What is it? And what are the things that make communities that struggle with high rates of any sort of drug abuse similar to one another? Is that perhaps more important than race? Do we need an entirely different cultural taxonomy in a way that allows us to talk about these problems that are localized with certain cultural milies and not others? We need another way to talk about them that sort of transcends race and blackness and whiteness. I mean, Coleman's example a moment ago when he talked about was incredibly sophisticated. There are these distinct populations that live there. They are kind of visually easy to distinguish. They rarely come into contact with one another because one of these communities is actually as a matter of their faith and lifestyle cloistered and isolated and very unusual even by the standards of the broader society when you have a dynamic like that and you have a community that is dealing with any number of really challenging social problems and high rates of poverty. This is a bit of a powder keg and I haven't mentioned race once there. And I'm not trying to obscure anything. I'm actually interested in getting to the root of the issue so that we can tangle with it. And if someone casually uses black and white there as descriptors and they could do it in a way that was not so dissimilar from the way that we talk about height and weight and hair texture or something, I suppose I wouldn't care. But we actually don't have a lot of practice doing that. And I think what I am interested in doing is not so much policing word choice, but actually encouraging people to interrogate the ideological commitments that they have signed on to without really knowing it and the implications of continuing to do that without ever making a meaningful effort to try to fix it. Instead, we've literally seen the resurgence of an aggressively essentialist racist paradigm. And I mean racist not as em bigoted, but racialist. It is invested in the race taxonomy and I even see opponents of this movement essentially giving in and using the same sort of language and talking about these issues in the same way, amplifying the problem. And I think it is a horrible dead end. You know, the question is when it comes to personal identity, what does it mean? You know, I'm Jewish, okay? I consider myself part of a Jewish people. I know to a degree that's a construct because my life as a Jew, in America is very different than the life of a Hasidic Jew in Jerusalem and the like or an Ethiopian Jew, you know, living in, you know, the Southern Israel or whatever. But I still maintain the perhaps myth of Jewish peoplehood. And I do think it it enriches me as a person. And I have people who call themselves black American friends who like that and enjoy being that and want to call themselves that. And even though they may on an intellectual level know that once you once you try to scale that into talking about it in the way that we are right now, it becomes problematic or can become problematic. And so the question is how do we sort of not throw away the baby with the bath water there? I mean, tribalism is a real thing. I mean, baby, for you, it's okay to say, look, no one has to say they love being Jewish and they're part of a Jewish people, even if they were born with the two Jewish parents, they can say that's not for me. I'm cool with that. Great. But I think that there's a danger that it comes across when we talk about deracialization, that we're trying to sort of obliterate cultural categories that people actually want to take part in. And I've heard it in your conversations with Glenn and John and others. And I think that there's probably a way out of that. I feel like sometimes we end up in this sort of semantic hell over these questions when the truth is, I mean, tribalism is not going to go away. I'm not going to see being part of a tribe and I want to be part of a tribe. So how do I do that without furthering the racialization conversation? Yeah, so one thing I would say there, and you mentioned this before we start talking today, you said it exactly this way, which is how I think about it. There's a difference between identity and identity politics. I think identity, I don't see as a bad thing, inherently cultural identity, I don't see as a bad thing. And in any sense, I think it's inevitable. But if you love the kind of food that you grew up on and you have an emotional attachment to it, that is because you grew up on it and you may never quite feel the same about any other cooking or any other cuisine, no matter how much you like them, it might not remind you of your grandma's cooking. Right? If you grew up on the music of your culture, of your subculture in your tribe, you may find that you just kind of tend to love it more than every other kind of music. And there is no reason to apologize for that. I think there's a lot of things in that domain can be what give your life meaning. I don't even necessarily fault people that make a choice to only marry someone of their own culture, though that's not a choice that I would ever make. If you find that your preferences have been hardwired in some sense, based on your upbringing, that you just need in order to be happy as a human being, you haven't figured out a way to do that outside of the subculture of your birth. Even that I can't begrudge a person for pursuing their own happiness in that way. But when it comes into the realm of politics, I have a very different attitude because we all have to live together in America. What that has meant for most of our history or let's say much of it is that you're in the effort to figure out how to live together peacefully and how to flourish. At some level, we have to leave our identities at the door in terms of what policies we need to construct in order because we all have to live under the same policies, right? We're not going to have ethnic policies for the most part or at least we've in most ways decided against that. Your identity can't be an argument. The fact that you are you can't be an argument for why this policy should be this way or this other policy should be that way. And your sense of what's right and wrong in the world should not change based on the skin color or ethnicity or culture of people involved. So in my mind, I have a very thick firewall between cuisine and music and even language and all of these things that we are where we are attached to particular things, not universals but particulars and ethics and politics where I do think we always have to be pushing in a universal direction. I think that there's several challenges with some of what has been proposed here. One of the challenges comes from this book that I'm reading called Seeing Like a State by James C. Cook, which I would highly recommend. This is why I asked the question earlier about like how a state can see because a state is fundamentally in the best of worlds interested in allocating resources to different, let's say, communities within its entity. In order to do that, it has to be reductive on some level. And so one of the questions is like, what should the state, how should the state be reductive? If the answer is that it should not see skin color, then the question becomes, well, let's tease out what it should see. And I think that there have been a lot of different answers that have been valid. But then then the norms would have to change in order to actually push the state to be able to see that way. And it obviously would not be enough for us to just have this conversation. The other issue I think that is pertinent is that it is this issue of the fact that human beings have different needs in order to feel fulfilled. And one of those needs is group belonging. So if we lived in a completely de-racialized society, there would still be problems, right? There would still be people clinging to different identities and their identities taking them off into this capacity to be tribal. That is never going to be overcome because it's a part of our capacity as human beings to be susceptible to self-deception. So in my opinion, there is no world in which we automatically get to, let's say, a de-racialized society. And all of a sudden, this politicking thing that we do, where we use identity to gain power, ceases to exist. That's never going to happen. It's built into the fabric of what it means to be human. And so the question becomes, for me, not how do we de-racialize, but how do we actually adopt practices or an ecology of practices such that we can guard ourselves against this self-deception, which becomes a larger project, democracy, constitutional republic, whatever you want to call it, that is the question. Because de-racializing is not going to solve the problem. I 100% agree. I think I said it in the room. I've definitely said it many times. I'm not anti-racist. I'm not. I've jokingly described myself as a race abolitionist, but the truth is I am an individualist. And what I want is to inculcate a value in our broader society that replaces, say, the primacy of race with the primacy of a sense of the dignity of the individual. Your humanity is the fundamental mechanism by which your individual humanity is the mechanism by which you make claims about rights, about justice. And I think adopting that sort of perspective has broad, far-reaching implications. It informs the way that we think and talk about problems. I think it gets us to a place where we can recognize that to the extent people are feeling poverty, they're not feeling black poverty, to the extent that people are feeling joy. They're not feeling white joy, to the extent that they're feeling guilt. It is an Asian guilt. This is, I think that is actually where the problem begins. It is entirely possible for us to respect and have our identities. I don't want to take anything away from anyone. If you love particular kind of music or whatever, you should have it. What I have is a sort of liberty, because nothing is off limits to me. My culture is the broad universe of things that humans have cultivated and created, and I can borrow and take from whatever I want. And it all belongs to me. But there's also a very real sense in which I also belong to very distinct cultures of my choosing, and in some cases, by kind of accident of birth. My family is Jamaican, but they're Jamaican in a particular way. No one is Jamaican in the way that the Tala clan is. In a real sense, no one is Jamaican in the way that Camille is. I think that there is something really important about recognizing that. We, I think, very literally adopted a practice and a habit of talking about people in reductivist, essentialist ways. Even when we invoke these notions of identity, we exist in a universe of different groups at any one point in time. I don't think abandoning a notion of capital B blackness is all that expensive, because in a very real sense, it's a contrivance. Like a dude from Bed-Stuy and a dude from Harlem are different and important respects, even if they kind of look alike. And a dude from the West Coast who lives in Crenshaw is different in a very real sense from both of those guys. But they have something in common. If they were living in Jim Crow America, they would have all faced discrimination, but we don't. That doesn't mean that there aren't collective tribal problems and grievances. And so the question is, how do I think it actually does, because they're individual grievances. But it's still ways. But the history still weighs on the present. It still is present. And so we have to tease out how to come to terms with that. Sorry. Okay. No, it's okay. So I just wrote a book called Woke Antisemitism. And obviously I'm talking about anti-Semitism. Now, in a way that is, you could say that's identity politics. I'm coming forth with a grievance that it's not against the state, it's in society. Well, this is happening, and that's not good for my tribe, and it's not good for society. Now, what I don't do, and to me, this is one of the major delineating factors. I don't claim that my argument is beyond scrutiny. I don't believe because I'm Jewish and I've experienced anti-Semitism, I have some monopoly on wisdom about anti-Semitism. I believe that I have, if you want to hear me out on it, you hear me out on it, and I'll make my arguments. But it's just one data point. And it could easily be that there's other data points that you should listen to or the people's lived experience that you should listen to. So I think that's one thing that separates sort of the brand. Identity politics we're dealing with now, quote unquote, woke identity politics, which is a claim of authority. It's a standpoint claim. It's that my lived experience qualifies me to define this for the rest of society. That's a very, very aggressive claim. It's saying that you don't have standing in the conversation if you're not from that group. And I think that's what's, the problem is not necessarily identity politics or not necessarily having grievances. Groups will have grievances. It's that it's the claim that our grievances should not be questioned that I think is what leads the current discourse astray. I can agree more with that. I mean, I think this is happening not just on the race issue on lots of issues. It's like that there are many people that will say, if you're not a woman, you have no place weighing in on the issue of sexism or on the Me Too mood. You should just shut up. If you are not trans, you have, why are you so interested or concerned in the politics and policies surrounding when and how children transition? This is someone like Jesse Singles constantly getting attacked for a wisest guy that's just quote unquote, this straight white guy, quote unquote, obsessed with trans, right? Where if you were a trans person, no one would question him having written many thousand more articles on the topic. My attitude is like, we're here on earth dealing with certain issues that are sometimes inherently complicated and other issues that maybe are more simple, but aroused extreme emotion and tribalism and therefore have to be dealt with very delicately as a result of not their inherent complexity, but in the outrage that they spark. And anyone who wants to approach that in a good faith way, to me, it does not matter your background. And of course, it never goes the other way. It's never that a poor person should shut up about the rich. It's only that the rich should shut up about the poor. It's never that black people should shut up about white people. It's white people should shut up about black people. It's never that trans don't understand cis. It's only ever that cis don't understand trans never that men, women should shut up about men. It's and the one the unidirectionality of it to coin a word is very suspicious because if it's really true that you can't understand across these boundaries, then it's going to be true in both directions. That principle would have to be symmetrical. And it isn't. And it isn't. One thing I'd say about the assertion about groups experiencing things and having, for example, grievances is the macro micro distinction that I think is happening here. We're saying it's just kind of a collective belief, a collective sentiment. To the extent there is anything called Jewishness, we know that isn't uniformly true that all Jews share this grievance. At best, we're talking about some percentage of them, perhaps even a majority of people who self identify in that way. But the fundamental unit is still the individual person who self describes in that way and then shares in a particular grievance. The fact that the identity itself can be an on ramp to partaking in a grievance in a group way, I think is interesting. And I think it's worth noting. And again, for me, it's about cultivating a kind of cultural sensibility as opposed to a project that's about enforcing a particular ideological perspective that everyone must adopt. I want us to be dispositionally inclined to always going back to respecting the individual. Whilst you are deprived of something or abused as a result of the way that you identify or how other people identify you, your assertion that you deserve dignity and respect that you shouldn't be deprived is on the basis of your humanity. And that is a universal concept. And acknowledging the universality of humanity is an individualist imperative. So that's, I think that is what we're talking about here is entirely possible to be an individualist and to see yourself as Jewish. But Judaism is a thing in a concrete particular sort of way. There's a doctrine and a dogma. Blackness and whiteness don't have that. To the extent there is this kind of an interesting dynamic where Judaism is both racial identity and religious broader identity, I think that that's something that has to be disentangled as well. And I don't know. I mean, there's a broad universe of people who believe themselves Jews, but aren't Jewish, like how you're Jewish, generally. Well, I mean, I'm Jewish according to most any definition that Jews have, but I'm not particularly religious. I might even be considered an agnostic, depending on the day. And and then Jews. Jewish is an ethnicity like Irish. Right. There's a great Jewish thinker named David Hartman, who used to say before Jews, ever got to Mount Sinai, they were slaves in the land of Egypt. So our peoplehood experience precedes our religious experience. And that's very much the case for me. I mean, you don't even hear a lot of God talk. Some people complain about this in the Jewish community. Some rabbis do, but you don't hear a lot of God talk, even in the Orthodox community, maybe more so. But like, you can go to synagogue and of course the rabbi will invoke God. But in outside of that setting among Jews, it's, you know, there's sort of almost a collective agreement. We're not going to talk that way because probably most people are somewhere on the agnosticism spectrum. And so I think that's part of the Jewish experience really is, is that doesn't always elevate those religious views. So I'm not sure how different it is in that sense from from blackness or whiteness or latinowness or whatever else, but it is, but it is complicated by having a religious dogma that sometimes attached to it. I'm Richard Serret. Join me on Strange Planet for in-depth conversations with the world's top paranormal investigators, alien abductees, Bigfoot trackers, monster hunters, time travelers, and more. The handler one day told her this whole thing about how they've been terraforming on Mars and they're building a colony and they're recruiting specific people, specific bloodlines and specific talents and skill sets to go onto the planet. On Richard Serret's Strange Planet, we're redefining reality. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. I think that there's, you know, what you pointed out with with the fact that the relationship is not women can critique men, but men can't critique women. I think that that speaks to the sort of like deification of the victim, real or perceived, which goes back to to Christianity. But just putting that off as a side note, I think I want to offer something as a kind of critique of your individualist take. Please, please. And maybe it's not a critique, maybe it's just something to think of, but like- It's a work in progress. Yeah. Yeah. From some of the things that I've read within cognitive science, specifically the work of John Vervakey, who's a cognitive scientist at the University of Toronto. Around the age of I think like three or four is when we start to develop what we have labeled the ego, which is basically a sense of separation from our fellow humans. But the way that we develop that is actually by internalizing other people's perception of us. I say all that to say, I think it's actually cognitively impossible to be a pure individual, meaning my sense of self has been shaped by my relationships with other people. And so if you scale that up, that is going to have implications when it comes to whether we're talking about grievance within the context of a group, right? It's not as if there's this perhaps unfair take of sort of like effective altruists that I've seen going around where it's like the human being is not simply this atomized, alienated, isolated individual and in fact can only develop in concert with other people. And so I'm curious how you make sense of that. And also, how you make sense of the fact that like, yes, it's true, let's say within the Jewish community of someone experienced anti-Semitism and then tells others about this experience and then they all sort of organized, that is the individual having this particular experience and is able to say, on account of my humanity, I demand, you know, rights. But at the same time, in order to advance political power, one has to organize within a cross group level, right? Presumably. I mean, I don't know of any other situation in which certainly you look at the civil rights movement, for example, you had people in groups organizing for the eradication of Jim Crow, for example. So I'm just curious how you tease that out, especially the first part, if you have to choose one of the two questions too. So there are a couple of parts there. I want to try to keep it all together. Yeah. So the first thing is what exactly? So the fact that there's no such thing as a purely animated, I believe, individual. Yes, man squatting outside of society, etc. Exactly. I don't mean this in a theoretical sense. I mean it literally. To the extent there is anything that we all have in common, it is our individual humanity and no one else can be the person that I am. It is, of course, the case that an individual is shaped by the context they find themselves in, the particular context they find themselves in. But the notion of their being concrete, definite, and a blackness is also kind of as absurd as the notion of there being this concrete, absolute, individual isolated from society. We're not talking about those kinds of things. I think what I'm talking about merely is the absolute truth that we all are self-owners and that that is an idea that is essential to actual organization and functioning of a free society. And it's actually core to a lot of the principles that we're defending when we're doing things like, say, abolishing slavery. The issue there isn't, well, black people shouldn't be in chains. The fundamental issue, as the pin on my shirt says, is I am a man. This was the sanitation workers strike sign from 1965, I believe. But it was also inspired by this medallion that was very popular amongst abolitionists that says, am I not a brother and a man and has this person of an ebony hue kneeling and showing the chains that have been put on their wrists. There is an assertion of dignity, a claim for their actual endowment as a human, the full recognition of their humanity. And it's being made on the basis of their individualism. And I think the abolitionist movement is global in scope. To the extent there were these groups that were participating in the civil rights movement later, it's odd, it's black history month now. We'll talk about the freedom riders and we'll celebrate them. But we know who the three men were who were murdered doing a freedom ride. Two of those men were not self-identifying as black. They would have self-identified as Jewish, would have been broadly recognized. I have a question about that. We're partners in that project. So I'm with you 100% on a word like blackness or whiteness. These are the kinds of words that I'll only ever use in scare quotes, even if I don't actually just stipulate that way. But a descriptor like black or white or Jewish or Irish or Uighur or Korean, I view these as nothing more than descriptors of a particular ethnic group that describes isolated ancestry for a long enough time to cross some unspecified threshold where it's a useful shorthand. And so I view those words as no more meaningful than that. And I guess when I use black and white in an American context, when I use black in an American context, I mean, I generally mean an ethnic group that formed as a result of a section of Africa peeling off and establishing in a new land and then learning to speak the same language, but remaining distinct in many ways. That's blackness? Well, that is why black refers to a particular ethnic group in America, rather than the other definition of it, which could be racial. But I mean, I'm referred to as black. My family is from Jamaica. I'm not a native born black person. I suppose they have the what is it? ADOS, although that would yeah, what is ADOS? African descendant of American slaves? Yeah, American descendants of ADOS. I mean, to the extent there's some ethnicity, I mean, that's more defensible than this blackness, which tends to subsume all manner of people who kind of sort of look alike, which I think that there's a very real sense in which some of these concepts are just like obviously absurd once we actually start to look at them more closely, like Asianness, for example. Yeah, that's totally an absurd one. But blackness is as silly. I know, but especially not quite as so. By the way, I'm Asian American and that my mom is an Iraqi Jew and I am 50.4% according to 23andMe Asian. So my wife who has from Hong Kong, like you're not Asian stuff. But you know, it is, it's an interesting thing. I have a I had a philosophy professor in college who used to say critical reasoning requires two faculties, not one, the faculty to make distinctions for sure, but also the faculty to make good generalizations. Yes. And so what generalizations are germane? What generalizations about ethnicity make sense of which ones don't? Right. You know, I was just listening to this community. And I can't remember he's a he's half black half Korean and he was talking about his Korean mother. And it was hilarious. I mean, he was talking about his mother saying, no, that's that's true. And of course, as soon as I heard that I started making fun of my wife who sounds like who who says, yes, I will say, whatever on my mind, it's because it's true. And you know, and she we both recognize that cultural stereotype is having validity because we see it in ourselves in our own lives. And I think we have and that's why comedy is funny, by the way, comedy is funny because it allows us to air that in a slightly safer way than you might otherwise. And so I don't think we should be too quick to give up that because they'll continue to exist because they're real in a sense, because we've seen them in our own lives. You can't pretend not to see them. But can I can I take a run on something? I don't want you to give anything up. I want to reshuffle the deck. I'm saying that individualism has primacy over all of those things and that perhaps may cause us to scrutinize some of these other things a little bit more. There's a tangible way that when we talk about kind of blackness, even in the way that you just did, it's interesting, Korean and black. I know and I was very conscious of it, which you're actively thinking about. I didn't want to say racialized black. I think I want to activate that interest because I think we have a practiced and robust and of in curiosity about the various ways that race distorts the way that we see the world in ways that are actively harmful. And I think there's perhaps a uniquely American problem. But as George Floyd illustrated, we actually have the ability to export this madness abroad. And by madness, I mean the race monomania where someone black dies in an engagement with law enforcement and the presumption is it's racism straight away. And you have to bend yourself into knots in order to sustain that presumption when five men who are arrested for the crime initially all kind of look like him. It ought to get us to recognize the absurdity of what we've been doing. Instead, we're finding ways to reinforce the ideology that should concern us. I just think this is contextual because if I was living in a different context and for whatever reason, I had a negative association with Korean. Korean is by all intents and purposes also a social concept. If I was in a different, I could imagine a different context where I had a negative connotation with Korean and went into this proposal where it's like, let's, I don't know what you call it, de-contrapy people. But it's like, I bring this up because when you said black and Korean, I just pictured a description and I didn't have all of these other negative connotations associated with it. But I didn't go into policing and all these. I only received it as a description. In the same way that I'm able to receive Korean as a description, there's no reason why we wouldn't be able to receive black as a description either. What I'm suggesting is that there are very obvious and routine ways in which race divides us and obscures the truth and actually makes it hard for us to appreciate what is happening in a context where we care about what's happening. We care, but we can't fix the problem because we can only talk about it in this way. Race and perhaps some other issues have a unique ability to create a distortion field around themselves. And I'm saying that the deliberate effort that's necessary to dislodge that sort of ideology is going to require us to put something else in its place. And I am positing here that individualism as a general notion and, well, yeah, as a generalization ought to be the thing. I agree with that. But it's under appreciate. I just feel like I can't get to the end of a sentence saying such and such who I self-identifies as black and was assaulted by such and such who self-identifies as the clunky verbiage. Oh, I don't think you have to do of it. But you did it so well earlier. I didn't see anything wrong with the way, well, I might have quibbled with some of it. But you were being descriptive, but in general. But those words are nothing. There are not, have no deep content other than to describe the likely ethnicity of the person. You think that blackish Jewishness in the context of talking about hate crime in Brooklyn don't have significance? I mean, I think you not necessarily know, because what if it was just a mugging? It had nothing to do with ethnic hatred, right? I think the deliberate avoidance that was described of using invoking black in those contexts suggests that it has powerful significance. And again, this is a key to that. That imagination is taking place. Yeah, the context. I'm saying in an American context in 2023, it has profound significance because you will see elite media institutions that have a particular worldview systematically avoid using race in particular contexts in another context. Just systematically place it front and center. And it's like 98, 99%. That's substantial. And I think that the ideological heft associated with race in this country is something that is generally undeniable and almost never meaningfully scrutinized in the way that it ought to be. And instead, we have Black History Month and what we're doing is balkanizing history during it. We're celebrating and venerating people's and achievement within the context of these identity cohorts. I mean, maybe one of these years we could spend a year, just or the month, talking about the way that these concepts were created and invented and imposed and the reasons why they were imposed and the detrimental impact that they still have on our ability to engage with each other in meaningful ways. And maybe step back from some of the reification and enthronement and real really sanctification of the race idea. And I should say race ideal that has actually been achieved in recent years. I think it's tangible. It's out there. It's the reason we're so concerned about quote unquote, wokeness, which is just a word I have trouble using now to speak of words that by the way, we just air quotes. I don't know if you want to go there at all, but I just wrote a book called Woken Me. And I think we need to name, we need to name an ideology. There's fascism, names and ideology. And I think wokeness is as good of a name for this phenomena as anything because it actually speaks to sort of the epistemology of the ideology. It says that I'm able to see, because I'm woke, systems of oppression that might be invisible. And so, none of the other terms of people like Helen Puckrose came up with critical social justice was actually DiAngelo, Robin DiAngelo's term, have caught on. And so, we're left trying to figure out a word that we can use to describe this ideology. And I feel like even if we come up with something that's non-offensive for a while, we all agree on it, we start to use it. It won't be long before somebody from the political right comes and takes it over and then turns it into a pejorative. And I just feel like we have to sort of at some point say, listen, we're going to be able to talk about these things. I concur, I suppose my issue is that I wouldn't, the explanation you just gave of what wokeness is, is not one I would have used. I don't know if anyone else would have invoked it as I can see systems of oppression. It would be interesting to sort of poll people neutrally and find out how many people who hate wokeness would define it in that way. I suspect it's like less than 10%. Which actually suggests that what it is is mostly a pejorative. And that many people who hate wokeness can kind of recognize what they hate, but can't really define it. In which case, I'm not word policing, that's not the goal. Sure. It's acknowledging that there is this reactionary spiral that's taking place as a result of the culture war and acknowledging that the notion of race in a bunch of contexts makes it hard for us to talk about things in sophisticated ways. Right. I was arguing with my 21 year old stepdaughter recently about socialism. And I realized- Oh, it's a good idea. It's a good idea. It doesn't end well. And I realized like a few minutes into the conversation that we define socialism completely differently. Yes. I was about government ownership of the means of production. And she's just defining it as sort of social democracy. And so I think all of these words are subject to sort of misuse and obviously evolution to a degree. But I need something that says, the way I would define wokeness is two things. One is that bias and oppression are not just a matter of individual attitudes, but are embedded in the very systems and structures of society. Sort of the postmodern notion that it's in sort of the air we breathe. And second, that only people who have experienced oppression have the authority to define it for the rest of society. Now, what I'm trying to do is describe this ideology that has taken over so many institutions and what are the core elements of it. Right. And if there was a consensus to use something else, I'm all in. But it's, I think what I'm what I'm what I'm keying on is it's nice. The generalization is useful, but at some point you've got to state the problem. I need for detailed indictment. Yes. Because otherwise we get lost. It would be useful. I think what I've discovered and I'm actually very interested in your perspective on this. There's been this odd like IDW heterodox, like sort of cultural thing taking place for a while. And we all are generally regarded as kind of occupying that space. There was a point at which I realized that there were severe, dramatic and profound differences of perspective on things that I thought were kind of ground to truth for that group of people to the extent that constellation of people means anything. And I've always had issues with those labels. And I think what I discovered is that people were generally using a lot of this shorthand routinely. And oftentimes in context where they were just kind of, you know, bemoaning the state of the world and just like having a conversation about how bad things were and how inexorably bad it was likely to get so that pessimism probably didn't help. But I think we lost track of like actually having the meaningful conversation about what our affirmative values are. And I think that's the problem with any sort of categorical denunciation, whether it be racist or woke or white supremacy. At some point those labels become content less. And all it is is the enemy. It's the enemy and it's the us. And in a world where conservatism has become a similarly kind of contentless label, like I don't know what it means relative to what it meant 30 years ago. Like it should, again, dispositionally, let's occasionally restate our values. Let's make sure we're on the same page and do it in a thoughtful way. And I think it's a matter of just, you know, decorum discipline, perhaps. Stoicism. What do you think about when you hear that word? Do you think of a bunch of old stodgy judges with no sense of humor? Do you think of red pill masculinity influencers peddling alpha male advice? Or do you think of the ancient philosophy and school of virtue ethics stoicism with a capital S, which is all about the lifetime commitment to developing a virtuous character? My name is Tanner Campbell. And if you answered yes to any of those options, but the last, I'd love to invite you to listen to a few episodes of my podcast, Practical Stoicism. Stoicism teaches us about the dichotomy of control, the differences between preferred and dispreferred indifference, our human responsibility towards the cosmopolis and to true justice. And it endeavors to help us to become the best, most useful, most appropriate, and most human versions of ourselves. If you'd like to get the real scoop on stoicism and join an audience of hundreds of thousands of practicing stoics who we call precoptons, then check out the Practical Stoicism podcast. You can find it on Apple podcasts, Spotify podcasts, or anywhere else you choose to listen to podcasts. I hope to see you soon. And until then, take care. So yeah, so I mean, if I were to try to summarize how a woke person's values might differ from my own, I would say that I am a pro freedom of speech, pro hearing arguments that may disagree with your own and evaluating them based on reason, logic, evidence, the values that those arguments promote, the consequences of those values, any philosophical paradigm by which you might assess that argument rather than by the identity of the speaker. I mean, those would be, that would be my shortest summary of like, if I were to go back on all the times colloquially in my life, that someone said to me, oh, such and such is so woke. This class, this professor super woke, those would probably be the center of the bullseye of the values that differed between me and that person. And there may be other lots of other differences such as what are our substantive beliefs about like how much racism there is in America or something like that, how racist are the cops, how much sexism is there in your average workplace, all of those disagreements to me strike me as not actually the core, the crux of the issue between people mean or should mean when they talk about wokeness. It's much more as as David, you pointed out about how you know what you know and about whether your identity prevents you from knowing or arguing certain things and participating in certain conversations. So I think that words, we can't really choose words, words evolve like from the bottom up and they catch on because they're so useful in everyday language. And it's no accident that woke caught on so much because it wasn't like woke was not something invented in my opinion. Well, in everyone's opinion, it was not something invented by the right, by its critics, it was co-opted by the right. But yeah, but it emerged like on the in the street, for lack of a better word, I don't mean in the hood, I just mean in real life, people just started using it because it's so well captured in new phenomenon of a certain kind of person. Right. Like I don't, at a certain point, no one used to work out and there used to be no concept of a jock, right? At some point in history, I imagine because people didn't really like going to the gym was not a thing in the 19th century, really. So at some point, this new phenomenon came about and like the word jock must have stuck. I'm sure John McWhorter knows the history of it. And then it becomes a really useful shorthand for a phenomenon and a type of person, which is by definition a stereotype. And that's what woke is. But you know, we were at this conference in the UK with a lot of quote unquote anti-woke Brits and somebody asked this panel, do you, what do you think of the word woke? And every single person on the panel said, oh, I don't use the word woke, it's problematic blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then throughout the conference, the entire time people were talking about woke. Yeah. And you know, I was at the Quellette had a get together in New Orleans. And I was with all these people who are clearly against the word. Yeah. And they and the same thing happened. The editors, I was with Jonathan Kay and others, you know, oh, no, I don't use the word woke, it's this, it's that. And then, of course, the whole conversation was about woken, not woke. So so obviously the word has some traction. There's no debate about that. I think that and I actually subscribe to your, to your definition there. In fact, I think if we talked about it more often, we had developed the habit again, talking about it that way occasionally, we might actually see the various ways in which people who are quote unquote anti woke are frequently engaged in the same sort of fundamentalist, liberal, I was going to say, Rhonda, scientists, practices, practices, like it's the same sort of thing. To tell people to tell people to the extent I am opposed to wokeness, it's for the same reasons I oppose other forms of people imagining that you derived your authority from your status as a member of some group. Right. This is the important thing that I'm actually fighting for and not the thing that I'm fighting against, which I have a a reply guy on Twitter, who any tweet I post about any topic, he will go says the guy that voted for Biden. You're not blocked in here. I don't block. I've never blocked anyone. Is that true? Never. Can we talk about this? We can. I mean, I should probably talk about it with my therapist, which I also don't have, but do you care that this person is replying to your stuff? I mean, you're mentioning it here. So I noticed it. I certainly noticed it. I just don't want to ever give someone the win of knowing of them seeing that I blocked them, but they feel like it's not actually a win. Laughter it. Yeah, but I don't even want them to feel that it's. I block people for two reasons. One, if you're being sort of like openly abusive, like I block you because I don't, I mean, that's just I don't need to engage with that. Two, if you're just being like really, really annoying, I do it. I do it for my own purposes. Like I don't need that sort of distraction. Like it's going to agitate me. It's going to annoy me. It's going to make me upset. I'm going to think about it later. It can continue to show up at my feet. Sometimes even muting those people isn't enough because then they're commenting on the thread and it's changing it in different ways. I mean people, precisely because they can't see that they're muted. Yeah, but I'll block you and don't actually. I'm so crazy that I'd rather I'd rather unload all of the craziness and agitation and annoyance that you just described, then give someone I dislike a win. Yeah, even a perceived win in their warped mind. Yeah. And again, I should probably talk to my therapist about that, but that's my policy. Are there other similar approaches to blocking? I mean, I will block people if they're being just, you know, jackasses. But I can't really do the mute. I mean, I can, but like then I get tempted to like, unmute just to see what they may have said. So it's not as. Yeah, I had this troll named Marion. I won't give her the last name. What's that? Williamson. No, no, no. She's perfect. And she, yes, I mean, she was constant, pretty much daily. Finally, I blocked her just because it became too much in between me. And so mean is sort of a dividing line. But I have this sort of eternal irrational hope that if I start engaging with people on Twitter in a constructive way, that we can actually have constructive arguments. And I think I've been right about it maybe once out of 10 times. You know, sounds about right. And realize that, I mean, just they sort of resort back into this, like, especially if I'm not to use the whole anti woke thing, but I, well, if they, you know, they go, you know, this pervasive snark. And, you know, and I just want to say, well, can't we just go back to that having the conversation and ask them, how you know, you know, you know, the having the public eye on you, which is what Twitter is every commenter knows that they're in a public space and others are going to be reading. And that's when the snark comes out. I don't think all those people are snarky people. I think if you talk to them one on one, most of them, you'd be able to have a very respectful and totally different tenor of conversation with them. But because they're on stage, they bring out the snark. And they hope that they're perceived to be owning you. And that's the goal. And you can't have a conversation like that. I do try to, I try to do the thing as well, engage in constructive ways. I've even tried to and have many, many times in recent months and weeks, I've been quote tweeting something I don't like, but rephrased it so that it's not as pointed. And it's direct. It's stating my perspective. It's clear that I disagree. But it's often buttressed by a question. And I want to try to, in myself, and hopefully it kind of emanates outwards as well, like cultivate a different sort of sensibility and approach to conversations. I don't know that it's one in ten. I feel like though, it might be more recently, more often than not. And it might be a matter of just kind of picking the right targets and actively blocking people who are annoying. But I will also say that I unblock. I actually wish it was timed. I wish that was an option. Like I could just give him a timeout. Yeah. I was talking to an atheist dude the other day and he didn't, he just kept insisting that I was saying that religious and science are equivalent with one another. And I kept saying, I don't believe that. He said, well, no, but you think, literally just said I don't believe that. You're like, go stand in the corner. Daddy is very mad. You have a five minute timeout. Yeah. And he did view the blocking as a victory. He like did his victory lap. But the block is, it's for me, but I think it's also for him. I think you get enough of those. Maybe you don't think this is a victory anymore, but I don't know. I can't care about that part. Yeah. Why would you refrain from? I'm just curious, like, because you're a very Zen person. So like, seems that way. Why would you refrain from blocking someone because you perceive that they will perceive it as a win? Because it's all your perception, ultimately. Right. You can never really know. I mean, don't should be the therapist. This is what I do for a second. I have a different perspective. Someone. Yeah. I got heard you. I've heard you like spit bars, right? That are like withering. So I don't imagine that you're filled with love and compassion. No, no, no, not at all. I think I think I have a lot of anger in me too, you know? So if I feel like I'm being put in competition with someone who's being a dick to me, I don't want to give them any semblance of thinking they won. Because that's like, if you've chosen battle, then that's part of how I'm going to battle you, is like, I'm going to ignore you. And if I'm not going to let you know that you get to me, you know? But there's an interesting analog here between how this shows up for you in a micro level and what Ron DeSantis is doing on a macro level in Florida, right? I mean, human psychology is here all the way down. When we are filled with anger, resentment, all of these things against our enemy, we will do everything we can to stop that enemy from winning or from perceiving that he's winning. And I feel like, you know, I've really cut back on my showing up on Twitter and social media in general, because I think in order to cultivate those types of practices that we're talking about, where we're able to, you know, get in civil discourse and wrestle with ideas and do so in good faith, it requires not being constantly within an ecosystem that incentivizes us to go into that us versus them mentality in the first place, that warlike mentality, like, Twitter is built for that. And that that affects us, like, not just on a, you know, relational level, pure superior, but also can I, I mean, I think blocking someone. So I mean, what is more war, like blocking someone so that they can't communicate with you? That's really what people do in war. They like communication shuts down and then you start fighting, right? You end diplomatic relations, right? So part there is a double edge thing to my blocking. It's part of it is the vein urge to not have them be perceived as a win. But also part of it is like they could send me a message at any time. And I will treat that message in total good faith if their attitude has changed. It's like not a permanent and an enemy situation. I don't view anyone as a permanent enemy. That's fair. My response was less about whether you're blocking or not blocking and more like, if you're going into a space where you're perceiving that this action means that they've won versus they haven't won, that I would like be careful with. So the thing I'm angry about is the inability to actually have the debate. That's what really pisses me off. I grew up around a lot of mostly Jewish guys who we argued all day long. We argued at the Shabbat dinner table. I grew up, I raised my kids where I would just put up an issue for discussion at Shabbat dinner. And I was always the devil's advocate because no matter what position they took. And so I value that. And it pisses me off that I can't do that anymore in a lot of ways and a lot of spaces, including my own community by the way. I mean, Jews have this, there's a phrase that we sometimes use muklok at Lesham Shamayim which is arguments for the sake of heaven. That is a central value in Jewish life. So I want that back. And I'm pissed off that I don't have that back. And so that makes me want to argue with people to see if I can get it back. And then I'm always like, I'm the cycle of being angry because I can't debate anybody anymore in good faith. My kids have changed me. I think I am annoyed by that. I'm also quite heartbroken by it. And heartbroken is probably the right word. And I actually find that I probably have more sympathy for people who are uniquely abusive towards me. Who imagine that the only way I could hold my positions in public is if I was being compensated for doing it all. And I assure you that I would make far more money if I were advocating for all of the opposite things. It's just true. I'm decent at a lot of things. And it's cost me to be Camille Foster in public and to have this particular constellation of views. But you don't get that. And it's actually it's really sad that you can't imagine that it's otherwise. Because I'd be happy to talk to you. And you might even be able to change my mind on some things. I've certainly had my perspective altered by people in recent months and years. And I want to echo Chloe's sentiment and perhaps not for you, Coleman, but for anyone else watching. It is for you, protecting your own peace and not being consumed by enmity and contempt is for you. And the place where I probably still need to do this is the only people I generally have this kind of questionable contempt for are people who are actively, physically doing violence to other people. And even there, I try to marshal some kind of sympathy and people who won't engage. Not like I won't engage in good faith and I won't have a conversation. I'm just throwing and hurling insults at you. But I literally will not have a conversation like that, especially from people who are in positions of authority, who have a lot of cultural cache or currency, I think is unforgivable. So unforgivable kind of cowardice. But is it cowardice or malice? I think it's cowardice. Because if you actually believed in your ideas, you'd be out vanquishing your foes, not trying to ignore them into oblivion. There's though this idea that persuasion isn't really possible. This was in Kendi's book. And I've I think I've heard similar things on Ezra Klein's show that persuasion just doesn't work all that well. That's that's the position is not how do they square that with the many things on which we've changed our perspective, just that people die out and that's what changed. Yeah, so like people die out. Policy has changed via political force. And then people catch up to the policy. That's so ironic because Derrick Bell's, you know, the grandfather of critical race theory wrote a book called Silent Covenants that critiqued the legislative force of Brown versus the Board of Education, which he fought for because it actually undermined integration in some ways. And so it's ironic, especially coming from Kendi who wrote a piece in Atlantic last year saying that like, if you're against critical race theory, then you're against Brown versus the Board of Education. When the grandfather of critical race theory came out against Brown versus Board of Education to advance this particular observation that like, integration has to happen from the ground up. And you can't just have this, you can't just have a sort of from the state down abstracting superimposing order or superimposing integration on societies without that level up emergence normative integration to sustain it. I grew up when busing had just become enforced in Columbus, Ohio. And I went to basically like an all white elementary school. Maybe there was actually one black girl in my fifth grade class. And when the judgment came down, the teacher who was just this total racist started saying, I don't want those kids in my class. And I remember her crying and me not knowing what to do or say. So I remember and then the next year I'm in a junior high school that's integrated. And so I experienced that and I have to say like to me, it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. You know, and I know that maybe the kids who were bused across town, because I wasn't actually in my own school, might have had a different experience. Maybe their communities were disrupted as the critique of integration goes. But it put me in proximity with people that I would not have otherwise been in proximity with. And I think I learned a lot about that. I remember being in in in fifth grade, I believe, and there were a group of young black kids who had come into the school and they were part of the learning behavioral disability kids. And they and I remember sitting at lunch across from a group of them. And not wanting to talk about use the word black to describe the color black, because I thought maybe I would offend them. And of course that quickly dissipated once I'm in, you know, an integrated school, all of a sudden I was, you know, yeah, they're like, you know, either they were, you know, we joked all the time and I learned how to I learned how to interact with people were different than me. And so I do feel like it has had an important played an important role in sight. I don't know quite what yet because, you know, still, you know, I still think you go into cafeterias and integrated schools and black kids are sitting at black tables and white kids are saying a white table. So I don't know like, does that mean that it's impossible or does that mean that it is working? It's just taking a lot longer than we thought. And you hear the other version of that story too, where the integration took place and there was a tremendous amount of friction in a community. And I don't know, I'd imagine that it is different all over the place, which is why the top down solutions to these complicated social problems, localized problems work. Yeah, highly local. Yeah. Yeah. And deeply personal and cultural. All right, guys, we got to get out of here. This has been a great conversation, a great first roundtable. I hope the people, the audience really enjoys it. Before I let you all go, I want to let my audience know how to follow each of you in particular. I mean, that they probably are aware of you, Camille and probably of you, Chloe too as well. But I haven't had you, David, on my podcast yet. I've had the other David Bernstein. I know you do. He's a friend of mine. But we're keenly confused with each other. Yes. I told you about the other. Must admit. That would have made sense too. That would have been a good conversation as well. Anyway, this is not David Bernstein from six months ago on this podcast, did not morph into being you. I just want to be clear. My audience is a different human, different individual, Camille. But yeah, can you plug all your projects so people can follow you before we get out of here? Yeah. I do a podcast called the fifth column at We The Fifth on Twitter and WeTheFifth.com. And I am a partner at Big Think and Free Think where we tell stories about the people and ideas that are changing the world and you can get smarter, faster. Awesome. You can check out my podcast, The Heart Speaks. You can also check out my startup theory of enchantment. We do awesome anti-racism training that's rooted in giving people a cultivation of practices so that they can show a whole secure within themselves and so that they don't project their insecurities onto other people. We just shot something with you. You did? Yeah. Yeah. Timo yesterday. Yeah. Is that right? Yeah. I didn't know that. Just a lot of people that weren't there. Go watch that. I'm David Bernstein, the David Bernstein of the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values. Yeah, I went to the Ohio State University. And I'm a founder of an organ. I've been in the Jewish advocacy world my entire life and I'm a founder of this organization that's meant to push back against this ideology which has found favor and large swaths of the Jewish community and to try to restore open discourse and liberal values into Jewish life and to push back against the variant of anti-semitism that we argue is emerging in this current ideological milieu. You can find me on Twitter at David L. Bernstein B-E-R-N-S-T-E-I-N and I'm the author of Woke Anti-semitism How a Progressive Ideology Arms Jews. You can also find the organization jilv.org. All right, David, Chloe Camille. Thanks so much. Thank you. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of Conversations with Coleman. If you enjoyed it, be sure to follow me on social media and subscribe to my podcast to stay up to date on all my latest content. If you really want to support me, consider becoming a member of Coleman Unfiltered for exclusive access to subscriber-only content. Thanks again for listening and see you next time. If you ever wondered why we call french fries french fries or why something is the greatest thing since sliced bread, there are answers to those questions. Everything Everywhere Daily is a podcast for curious people who want to learn more about the world around them. Every day you'll learn something new about things you never knew you didn't know. Subjects include history, science, geography, mathematics, and culture. If you're a curious person and want to learn more about the world you live in, just subscribe to Everything Everywhere Daily, Wherever You Cast Your Pod. .