#859 - Ana Kasparian - Why Does Everyone Feel So Politically Homeless?

27:59And so those are difficult questions and how do you proceed in a way where everyone feels like they're respected and that they're safe and protected? And it's a difficult question. I've tried to broach it. It's just really difficult to because, you know, trench gender activism is very intense and very maximalist. So you can't really get into nuance without expecting a lot of backlash. After the last few weeks, can you see the incentives of how people slide from the left to the right? This sort of denial by the purity party. The right is welcoming with open arms, disaffected Democrats. that's please come here.

28:45Yeah, I do actually. So if you're grounded in your values, and I do think I am, you're not going to be seduced by people who are just nice to you, right? Like I actually really respect the fact that the right is welcoming, that they are willing to forgive past transgressions and say, hey, we will take you in with open arms. not everyone on the right, but generally speaking, that is what I noticed. Whereas with the left, there seems to be this weird obsession with exclusivity, purity and purging people who are, you know, heterodox or whatever. And so I've noticed quite a bit of that on the left, but I really do value who I am as a person and I just don't think that I'm going to change my political views entirely based on who's mean to me or who's nice to me.

29:41But I will say this, I don't know if it's a strategy or if it's just who right wingers happen to be, but their willingness to welcome people is honestly how you build power. It really is. And the left just fails to realize that. I don't know why they want to treat politics as if it's like this cutesy little exclusive club, but that's certainly how they treat it. But then there's also this paradox because you look at the current Democratic Party, like Kamala Harris' campaign, for instance, and she's like luring in the who's who of Bush -era Republicans, and I don't like those folks. I don't like Neocons.

30:23I think that, in fact, I became politicized when the Neocons were in charge during the Bush administration. And the idea that I now have to just hold my nose and support Kamala Harris, even as she is talking about the value of having Dick Cheney endorser and campaign with her, it just like grosses me out. So it's like a weird paradox because while I'm being trashed pretty viciously, there's like this insane support for what the Democratic Party is doing and bringing in never Trump Republicans. It's almost like Trump is at the center of everything. It feels, it certainly feels that way, yeah. Yeah.

31:10So it's like if you're an enemy of Trumps, then you are welcome. But if you are someone who believes in a lot of left -wing policies, but your critical in certain ways. Well, you're not pure enough. We're gonna purge you. We're gonna purge you. Where does that degree of purity come from? I have no idea. I think you've tried to think about sort of what this mechanism is. This underlying dynamic. It could be fear, right? Fear of betrayal. I think that, you know, one thing that has really given me some clarity about what drives people is Jonathan Heitzwerk when it comes to moral foundations. I love that book.

31:50I loved Coddling of the American Mind, too. That was an excellent book as well. But what I appreciated about that is I was able to learn about my own inherent biases. And also I was able to learn what moral foundations, the left has that leads to certain behaviors and certain beliefs. So the left tends to score very low on loyalty And so that that was really interesting. I took the test. I don't know how accurate it is, but I scored the absolute highest in loyalty. And so it's just when I see members of the left publicly trashing each other, like prominent figures publicly trashing each other in bad faith specifically, it really discussed me.

32:37It genuinely does. And even as all of these various public figures on the left are trashing me right now, I just, I'm not going to do that on my show. I haven't done that on TYT. I'm not going to do that on TYT because it's just the whole thing grosses me out. It's just not who I am. So I think moral foundations might play a role in the different behaviors that you're seeing on the left and the right. I understand what you mean about this fear and especially the loyalty point that I often think that if you know one of someone's opinions and from it you can accurately predict everything else that they believe even though they might not genuinely believe it, you have this reliable model that kind of project out where Anna, we don't need to worry about Anna, she was on board with X, Y and Z last time.

33:22But if there's a little, if you're this sort of perfect round sphere, we know that if we roll you where you're gonna go, but if you've got a couple of little sort of chinks out of you in a couple of dense and divots, you go, well, hey, and she actually, she didn't quite agree with us so much on that. So she's like an unreliable ally moving forward. I'm not, I'm not so sure that I actually do trust her on this thing. So rather than potentially put your faith in someone who is with you most of the time, but not all of the time, it's easy to just cast you out. But even though you said, you're not, your political allegiance doesn't lie with whoever is nicest to you, you can certainly see the dynamic of how people would feel put off by the left's distaste.

34:01It's all well and good saying, I don't go just where people want me, but it's very hard to stay somewhere where people don't want you. That's 100 % true. Yeah. I do think that the right is winning. I think there's a reason why if you look at voter registration for the first time, there are fewer registered Democrats in America compared to registered Republicans. But that's not because they're registering as Republicans. It's because they're no longer registering as Democrats and just their independent voters. They consider themselves independent voters. That's a problem within the Democratic Party that I think they need to come to terms with and maybe change their behavior, so it stops happening.

34:43That's an exclusionary, less elitist. Exactly. And it's actually been the most shocking to me that they are unwilling to recalibrate in any way. Every single person I know who I'm friends with from the left, this is probably the number one gripe internally. And it's the thing that everybody has to sort of say quietly. I can't actually talk about it fully, because even calling out the fact that there is an elephant in the room is enough of a problem to cause you to be casting that the unreliable ally radar kicks off. One other dynamic that I really wanted to get your take on that I thought is interesting.

35:20We do sometimes see people slide away from the more extreme versions of the left, right? It has been a variety of arcs where people have gone fully from left to right or from left to center or whatever. We've very rarely seen people go in the other direction. Why do you think that is? I don't think that's necessarily true. I don't think it's to the same extent as someone going from left to right. But I mean, there had been people who, you know, claimed that they had been de -radicalized and now they're Democrats, right? I forget the name of this guy's name was David Weissman. I think it might have been, but he was a hardcore Trump supporter.

36:02He was on Twitter and he was tweeting, I guess, negative things. And Chelsea Handler of all people decided to be nice to him. And she de -radicalized him. But that goes back to what we were saying, right? For some people, those dynamics really do mean a lot to them. So if someone is willing to be kind to you, even if they have a different political opinion, and if they're willing to have a conversation with you, well, there is an opportunity for persuasion there. And I wish the left overall realized that, right? These people are not our enemies. I'm talking about voters here. I'm not talking about people in positions of power.

36:40When it comes to ordinary Americans, these people should not be viewed as our enemies because they think differently than us. They should be viewed as our fellow Americans participating in something that we're supposed to value which is our democratic process. So if we stop treating them like they're pariahs and we actually are willing to have good faith conversations with them, there are opportunities for persuasion. Maybe there aren't. Maybe they're not willing to be persuaded. And that's fine. But this idea that we should cut ourselves off from anyone who thinks a little differently from us, that is a losing strategy.

37:15It just is. There's certainly not going to be persuaded if you just castigate them the second that they try and talk to you. Yeah, you can disagree with your own side. But if the other side rejects you too, you go, okay, well, I guess I am politically homeless. I am just sat in the middle now because there isn't anywhere for me to go. It does seem oddly like a kamikaze ideology for the future of a party. If you continue to spiral the purity round and round and shave off the people who don't wholeheartedly take on board the things that you want. And yeah, you mentioned earlier on when you guys, some of your audience had thought that you'd pushed too far on Trump and that that had been sort of disaffacting to them, they felt like it wasn't maybe as objective previously.

38:00Do you think that the audience that you've built now is ready to hear you with an alternative perspective? What's that being like? Yes. This has been, you know, my evolution, if you want to call it that, has not happened overnight. I mean, this has been a slow, painful thing that's been happening for a few years now. And so I think that the audience members who were not interested in this evolution have already left. And they've found, you know, programming that makes them feel comfortable programming that they like. And that's great, you know, that's their right. The people who have stayed behind, some of them are still very critical, but I really respect them.

38:47And it's they're critical. I'm willing to take their criticism because they are willing to hear me out. They are willing to hear what I have to say. They're willing to hear opinions that might differ from theirs. And I have tremendous respect for anyone who has that kind of mindset. So I love my audience. I'm very grateful for the audience we have. And I'm sad that there was a small portion of our audience who decided to leave. But that's their prerogative. And I'm not going to continue to be in some sort of like ideological prison to appease people. I want to find what the reality is. And I'm going to get things wrong still.

39:26But I also want to be honest about when I do get things wrong and I want to correct myself and I want to build the trust that I feel that for a few years, I just didn't deserve. It's a really reasonable, like a shockingly reasonable take. And the fact that that's kind of a radical position, it probably tells us all that we need to know about how the internet works. It's wild. I saw, you know, I kind of watched, uh, disparitedly, I guess, from the sidelines, uh, over the last couple of weeks, the fallout and reaction and re -reaction and so on. Uh, the accusations of you sort of grifting your way toward the right or something in the hopes that a rumble deal is going to come your way.

40:05It seems wild to me that the internet believes the only way that anyone can ever change their mind is if they're grifting. And it seems to me that you're pissing a lot of people off by taking this position. So you're not a very good grifter. Like if this was a grift, I don't understand who you're picking up. It doesn't seem to me to be a pot of gold at the end of it. Well, let me just start off by saying to some extent, I deserve it. And it's because I engaged in that kind of commentary and those types of accusations. So let me just take full ownership of that. I don't know, have you done some ayahuasca or something recently?

40:41What's bloat? This is like, I don't know. You're ascended. I see the truth myself and the matrix. What's going on? I just, I don't, I don't, maybe it's just, I'm aging. I don't know. You get older, you get a little bit wiser. I hope that's what's happening. But there is something a little deeper. So one of my closest friends passed away during COVID, not from COVID, but his name was Michael Brooks, two weeks before he passed away, we were talking and he struggled with depression at the time I did too. And he asked me to work with a woman by the name of Susan who he had been working with for some number of years and she really helped, you know, turn his life around, helped his career.

41:29He had started his own show because of her and he just thought that I could really benefit from talking with her. And she's big into meditation and all and I was not, I thought it was all like woo -woo BS, but I really respected Michael and he bought me a session and I was like, okay fine, I'm going to do this for him. She's changed my life and she has helped me see the humanity and everyone. And I remember, you know, one of the things that he instilled in his viewers was this notion that you should not be vicious to people. You should be vicious to systems of, you know, unfairness, injustice, inequality, but never be vicious to people.

42:09Love people. See, the humanity in people. And I, at the time, agreed with it, but didn't really practice it. And by working with Susan, I finally, really realized what Michael was trying to do. And she was able to instill in me what he had already been practicing. And I think that that's a huge part of it. I'm gonna have a conversation with her for my sub -stack, so people can get to know her and the journey that I went on with her. Because I think it explains a lot of what I've gone through as well, but it's a lot of work that I've done on myself, like really getting to know why it is I behaves in certain ways and what I can do to maybe make the world a better place through the work I do, you know, to some extent.

42:56Yeah, yeah. I don't wanna do harm with the work I'm doing. And I realized to some extent I was doing harm. And so I'm just trying to write my wrongs. It's a type of harm. I very first of all, I really appreciate you saying that. It's not easy to identify when you're making changes, especially in adulthood. It's cool for a young person to change their perspective on things, but when you get to be an adult, you're supposed to be fully formed. Should you not have sorted this out already? Should you not have got your meditation practice and understood your position in the world? But it seems hopeful to me, hoping, juicing to me that somebody who was as politically involved as you could actually come out and be, I'm a real person.

43:38This is not just me, you know, spewing talking points about one thing that you can probably predict in advance if you just see the title of the episode or the title of the topic that we're talking about. It's like, oh, we know where this is gonna go. It's like, oh, this is interesting. Genuinely gives me a new perspective on things. I wonder if there is a business for your meditation teacher friend in detoxing people from their political addictions. I wonder if that's an actual avenue that may need to go down once the Trump era is over. Maybe. I mean, she's amazing.

44:14She's very much on the left. She's not independent. She's not a right -winger. But the thing that's kind of amazing about her is the fact that she sees the humanity and everyone. And we both agree that the only way that this country heals is if we can find ways to bring people together, even if they disagree politically. And so I'm trying really hard to do that. That is the hardest thing on the planet to do at this moment because people like to dig in their heels. And it's not just that they believe in their political views. it's that they attach morality to their political views. Good, bad. Yeah, exactly.

44:54You, I saw another criticism, one of my favorite criticisms was that you shouldn't be complaining about the weaknesses of the left, so close to the election. You basically shouldn't say anything negative about your party at this crucial time, that if you're going to have a revelation, now is inopportune, Anna, can you not just shut the fuck up? Yeah, I'm not a political activist and I'm also not an operative for either a political party. So, I will completely ignore that criticism because it doesn't apply to what I'm trying to do right now. And what I'm trying to do, again, is not activism. I wanted to be a journalist.

45:36When I was young, I pursued that career path. I succeeded to some extent and then forgot about it. And that was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made. So I want to do the news. That is my number one priority and I want to do it well. I want to do it accurately and I want to do it fairly. Yeah, I think this, this overarching dynamic of vote for us because the other side is bad and scary, not because you actually love or really believe in your own side. I mean, there's a bunch of polls that showed this. I think it was about 2012 when things started to cross over. It was largely a protest vote.

46:08It was about not for them as opposed to you a vote for us. And I don't know, in some ways, we can sit here and go, how can it be that we're so tribal and divisive? Could you believe it? And you go, well, what did you expect? Look at the incentives online. Look at the way that the algorithms work. Look at the sort of content that gets pushed to the top of your feed. Look at the rhetoric that is most opportune, most successful. We have a negativity bias. There is more salience psychologically paid to things that are bad than things that are good. Okay, so you just use the bad and put it over there, and then you get to improve your number of clicks.

46:47Had this really great conversation, this guy called Stuart Russell. So for about the last two, maybe three decades or longer, the textbook used in like 80 languages around the world is on artificial intelligence is written by this guy Stuart Russell. So he's the godfather, grandfather of AI. And he wrote a new book called Human Compatible, where he's talking about how algorithms are interacting with humans, always need to remind myself of this. So there's two ways he said that algorithms become effective at serving you content that you will click on. So the first one is to learn your preferences.

47:21I know that if I serve this thing to Anna that she is likely to click on this, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, no, and begin to get better at serving that to you and predicting your preferences. But the other way is to nudge your preferences to make you easier to predict because it's a bi -directional relationship between the two. And what you're not just taking individual users siloed off, what you're doing is it's all users everywhere and learning what other people like you did. And it doesn't know whether it's moving your preferences or you're just getting better at clicking on what it predicts.

47:54But one of the easiest ways to do this, if you're in the middle and you sometimes fall left and sometimes fall right on different topics, one of the easiest ways to make it easy to work out what you're going to believe is to just push you further to one way. So you go, okay, if you're right in the corner, you only have so many directions that you can go, but if you're in the middle, it's actually a little bit more difficult to predict, right? You like 80s jazz and pickleball and cricket and, you know, God knows what else. It's like, no, no, no, let's just make politics their entire life. And then I don't need to predict anything.

48:21And let's actually make one particular brand of politics their entire life. And let's make one particular, you know, length of video, type of video, type of creator, etc. So in some Some ways, I keep asking this question because I think it's fundamentally interested in human nature and fascinated about the dynamics that cause people to behave the way that they do. But it's not that surprising. When you sort of tie together the last 15, 20 years or so of technology, of politics, of culture, of incentives, and our predisposition, what did we expect was going to happen? That's a great point. In addition to that, we used to have community -based clubs and basically opportunities for people in various communities to get together in real life, whether it's going to do recreational things like play tennis with people from your neighborhood in a park.

49:16Those kinds of things I think have fallen by the wayside, certainly during COVID when everyone was forced to be indoors and isolated, people became more atomized. And what that does is it leads to a situation in which individuals are kind of detached from their community, from other individuals, and they're instead getting information about the world around them from technology rather than from real life. And look, I had to be honest, I would never be an eight -hour -a -day streamer. I could never do that because I don't want to be in front of a computer or a camera all day. I like being outside.

49:55I like talking to my neighbors. Not necessarily all my neighbors, but when I walk my dog I love talking to real people and understanding like what makes them tick. What are they stressed out about? I'm couldn't I feel more connected to human beings today than I've ever felt in my life and there's something really magical about that Because people are amazing regardless of what their political beliefs are people are amazing everyone's got a story every one has some sort of struggle. It's just, I don't know, I feel that the fact that so many people are atomized now is really a disservice to themselves, a disservice to our communities, a disservice to this country.

50:36We gotta find ways to get people outdoors. Okay, outdoors and speaking to their neighbors, to their community, just understand what's actually out there rather than having someone else narrate to you What's out there? Mm -hmm. This is the opinion that you should have. This is what the world is like out there. Don't worry about going out there to see it for yourself. You just get, you can live your existence vicariously through me. Exactly, exactly. This is the best, this is the best advert for like Sam Harris is waking up app ever. You know, it's like do the meditation or get the good coach and just the world becomes better or I feel more connected to the people around me.

51:13I've let go of beliefs that I, the ones serving me anymore. Just be open -hearted. I think that's a good first step. Be open -hearted, put your guard down a little bit, and just explore. I mean, I can't imagine having this closed -minded attitude my entire life. There's so much out there that I would miss out on. And so... You would have lived your entire existence imagining catastrophes that never occurred, right? That's so true. That's how you would have lived. I'm going to try and tie two things together that may not work, but bear with me. So do you remember, it was a couple of years ago, and there was a girl filming herself in the gym doing pretty average glute bridge, and there was a guy over the far side, and she sort of narrated over the top that this guy was looking too much, and then I think he came over and offered to help her maybe unload the weights from the barbell that she was struggling with or whatever it might be.

52:07And she put this up with this sort of me to ask kind of a narration that maybe this guy was being a bit creepy. be. And the internet, if you told me before that was going to happen, here's the video, what are the comments like? 5050, I would have said it could be everyone saying that she's crazy for doing it and that this is unfair and the guy glanced over three times in 90 seconds while he was in the video, or the internet could say, yeah, totally correct. I couldn't have predicted it. It turned out that the internet went for the one where this is a little bit over sensitive. This guy did nothing wrong and you're sort of treating him poorly by doing that.

52:40That was really formative or interesting to the way that I see how big inflection point events occur and then people take their cues for how they should behave in future from what happened at that big event. So that one thing that happened, there's been a number of other videos not too dissimilar to that, but think about how many young girls saw that video and then looked at the response and realized, oh, if a guy glances over three times in 90 seconds, I don't need to feel scared. I don't need to feel uncomfortable. So this sort of barometer for where comfort and discomfort sits. It has been reset in some regard.

53:21But kind of like how eventually a million years into the future, there will be so many laws prohibiting so many things because they never get repealed, they only get added that nothing will be legal and everything will be illegal. I kind of think of it like that that you're sort of accumulating these experiences, because in future, that same video could happen or a similar video could happen, and in that one, it's unacceptable, and then the unacceptable level gets reset, and that's where it is, and then it becomes more sensitive, and it becomes more sensitive, very rarely becomes less sensitive in that regard.

53:50So when you're thinking about demonizing the people that are out there, realizing the humanity, et cetera, et cetera, like you very much are in the actions that you take, the things that you post online, the sort of rhetoric that you do, your beliefs about other people, you are encouraging the kind of world that other people need to live in and the one that you're going to live in as well. So basically, I just think seeing the humanity in everybody else allows the volume to come down so that we don't have this hypersensitized future that everybody's got to tread carefully on, that they move through in case that they mess up in one regard or another.

54:26I think that that's mostly correct. I think it's a mistake, by the way, to take the mass reaction to a specific anecdote as a sign of how you should behave, right? And because, look, let's just keep it real. How she felt about that man does not speak for all women. So if I'm at a gym and the exact same thing happened to me, well, I would view it as, oh, he's trying to assist me. And by the way, I mean, yeah, guys are going to look. It's called human nature. It depends. Are they being disrespectful? Are they saying disgusting, dehumanizing things? If that's not happening and they're just simply doing a quick glance, I mean, I'm going to expect it to some extent.

55:17You know what I'm saying? It's going to make it, it might even make me feel good if I took some like time to look nice. But I really, during the Me Too era, the thing that started to bother me, you know, it started off with very serious like sexual assault sexual harassment cases. And then it turned into a season sorry had a bad date and that woman who went on a bad date with him tried to make herself out to be like some victim of sexual assault when she wasn't. And then that kind of started to change my view of that entire Me Too era because then you'd have like women demanding certain consent, like almost like written consent, right?

56:01Or verbal consent. I would, it's, I would, I don't, if a guy asked me, may I kiss you? I would not, I would say no immediately because I would be so turned off for that. Like, anyway, but that's just me. There are other women who feel differently for me. So I just, I hated how that era led to a situation in which one or two women saying something led to like all men thinking all women think this way. There was another story about a man who was trying to help a woman who works in media. I don't remember what her name was. This was several years ago. He was trying to help her with her bag, which she put in an overhead compartment on a plane.

56:47And she flipped out, because she felt that this was a sign of the patriarchy, that a man didn't think that she would be capable of getting her bag herself. And it's like, listen, lady, you speak for yourself. Guy wants to help me get my bag. I am grateful. Man wants to open a door for me. Fantastic. I do that too. I do that for people who are walking right behind me. I'll call the door open. It's not that big of a deal. So one woman having a freak out session online about something is not indicative of what all women want. Yes. I mean, the me to era, I think, and where we're at now, which is this sort of odd nomans land where we've still got a lot of the lingering effects of that.

57:34And I think guys are still very tentative about their interactions with women. There was this phenomenal quote talking about how telling men to not be pushy doesn't work because the guys who need to hear it most won't take any heed and the guys who could do it being a little bit more assertive and forthcoming will take it to heart. That this sort of message when it lands, it doesn't land evenly and it isn't distributed evenly either. So I think, yeah, I really wonder what the future of male, female sort of dynamics, interpersonal dynamics has in store. It doesn't seem particularly good at the moment.

58:12I know that a lot of polls show that women say that they would like to be approached more, but there is also a lot of data that suggests guys are terrified. Like, guys already paid. Hey, before me too, guys were terrified of approaching women just because, right, for evolutionary rejection fear. And then layered on top is what if I end up on the headline of some newspaper, or if this woman shouted to me for trying to help put the bag up, but she's cute, but maybe she's single, but maybe she's not. And you know, like, what do you know? Like, this is just, again, people are going to get things wrong.

58:42And I think that broadening the boundary within which you can get things wrong is probably a good idea. I think that the guardrails have been brought in an awful lot and that you can step outside of them politically, relationally, whatever it is that you're talking about. It's a very small area that's acceptable for you to speak inside of. Yeah, that is so true. And I think the key word is grace. In fact, Susan, the woman I was referring to earlier who I've been doing a lot of work with, when she, I was talking to her about the anxiety, I was feeling about an upcoming debate with a conservative.

59:23And I, she knew what my typical style was at the time, which was far more combative, far more angry. I'm ready to fight kind of attitude. And she's like, what if this time, you try to be, meet his arguments with grace, understanding, don't come at it so aggressively, make your points, but don't go in it looking for a fight, go in it looking to have an exchange. And that was the best advice she gave me because it was a substantive exchange. It was a debate. I definitely made my positions very clear and they were different from his. and I remember the reaction to it from both the left and the right was very positive.

1:00:07Yes, it was. It was very positive and I was really happy to see that and I'm like, this is the way. This is the way because it's not like I will need to see. I think the main lesson from today is that we all need a Susan in our corner. Yes, yes, she's amazing. And so when it comes to the issue of dating or men approaching women, I think we can all maybe meet people with grace. If they make a mistake, don't automatically assume it's coming from a predatory place or a bad place. In some cases, it does. And I think when that happens, it's pretty clear. But if you're a woman, just put yourself in a position of a man who wants to approach you but is terrified, you know, guys are going to make mistakes and it takes balls to approach a woman.

1:00:54It really does to make it clear that you find her attractive and you'd like to date her. I'm so lucky that I'm married right now and that my husband's married right now. Like we don't have to deal with any of it. We talk about this often like dating in today's era seems torturous. Yeah, you've reached a relationship, escape velocity and you're now safe. Anna Kasparin, ladies and gentlemen, Anna, I really appreciate you. I really appreciate the fact that you're prepared to own pretty embarrassing sort of failures in the past. and it's super exciting. I'm a fully paid up fan and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you do next.

1:01:30Where should people go to keep up to date with everything you get in on with? You can go to, I just launched a sub stack where I write about some of the issues that I want to talk about in a more nuanced way. That's over at casparian .substac .com. You can also follow me at TYT that's youtube .com slash the young Turks and all my socials are at Anna Kasperian. Okay. Anna, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you.