SIO20: Can We Change Minds?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:28 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode number 20. Nice round number. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Nice, round host. So, today, as I alluded to last week, I want to talk a little bit about what actually changes people's minds, and I want to say that neither me nor Haeley has any psychology background or anything, so this is not coming from experts, and that would be certainly a topic to discuss with an expert at some point. But what I wanted to do today was do a little research to understand that as a layperson and see maybe how that relates to the discussion I had with Dr. Price and how it ought to inform discussions going forward. Forward. So that's my plan for today.

0:01:14 Thomas: But And first I want to talk just briefly about some Trump news, the address to Congress, not going to spend too much time on it, just a couple minutes for a few thoughts on recent events like that. So let's get right over to that.

0:01:34 Thomas: You know, this relationship between Trump and the Republicans is blowing my mind, and what's happening now is actually even more discouraging than I thought it would be. I tweeted, by the way, I tweet at, at SeriousPod, and for more kind of funny, jokey stuff, at T and the B, I don't know, I pretty much am always gonna have those two accounts, because there's no way to consolidate them in a good way, but anyway, follow those if you want.

I tweeted the other day that Trump could literally adopt the Democratic platform, like, issue for issue, like word for word, he could adopt that tomorrow, I believe his supporters would go with it, immediately, and I believe they would still hate liberals and think liberals were trying to ruin the world, even though Trump adopted exactly what liberals are trying to do, I really think that's true, and you know what, we can discuss it another day, the same could be true the other way for some issues, I don't think as many, but never has this become more evident. The reason I tweeted that was what's going on with health care.

It's really blowing my mind that universal health care is now a Republican issue, and it's not a Republican issues that they're like holding over Democrats, like, contrary to these stupid Democrats, we want universal health care, cheap health care for everyone, keep your doctor, keep your plant, like, it's even more promises than Obama was trying to make, and they're, they're talking about it as though this is a Republican innovation.

And what I've learned from all this, again, being a younger guy, I'm 30 years old, I haven't been paying attention to politics that long, really, what I have learned from this is that it is way easier to complain than to get stuff done, so that's something I'm going to be on the lookout during this Trump administration,

0:03:13 Thomas: But I don't think that Democrats are going to fall into that as much as Republicans do, because Republicans, by nature, usually are in favor of cutting things, they just want to stop everything, stop spending, any spending you do, they're criticizing They want to stop it. And that's not going to lend itself to the same trap for Democrats, because what Democrats can do is say, oh, no, we ought to be spending stuff on programs. And then they can just do that. And then that isn't really hypocritical. Supporting healthcare the way he does and promising stuff that he just can't keep. There's no possible way he can keep all these promises. And the quote that everyone's heard by now that really did it, I just, I wanted to jump off a bridge when I heard Trump say, say, oh, who knew that health insurance could be so complicated?

0:04:02 Thomas: Who knew? Literally every single other person but you, Donald Trump. We all knew. That's why Obamacare is not this perfect thing that solved everybody's problems. It's a difficult issue. It is complicated. There are lots of special interests that get in the way. There's problems with trying to get that through Republicans in Congress that cause problems. This idea that you're going to go put some old-fashioned horse sense into it and some elbow grease, and then you're going to come out with a cheaper thing that does more and a lot more, not just a little bit more, a lot more is what he's promising. It's just not going to happen. There's just no possible way. And it's a particular insult that he's now lending himself to the Paul Ryan cause and the Republican cause of flexible spending accounts and health savings accounts, which Those don't give you health care.

0:04:54 Thomas: That's if you have money already. They're a pain in the ass, too. I had an FSA a while ago. It's a total pain. If you already have money, if you already make money, you can set some money aside and then it's not taxed. But that only provides a little bit of a benefit. Those do nothing for someone who just can't afford health care. If you can't affordable health care, you can afford health. Health care.

There's no, oh, well, we'll give you a little bit of a tax break and then surely you can afford health care from a couple of nickels that we give you in tax break. No, it's just not going to work. It's not even close.

So I could go into it more, but you know what, I said I'd only do a few minutes, it's, time's already up, I got a lot of other stuff to get to, so, more in-depth conversation on that later, but that's what made me tweet that, because he's taking on a Democratic issue, something that Republicans were fighting tooth and nail, just fighting as hard as they could in 2008 and 2010, it still, today, they're still talking about death panels.

0:05:48 Thomas: An absurd claim that was false the entire time. Still there, there's a hilarious town hall video that I think, uh, John Oliver had on Last Week Tonight this week, where he, he showed a guy making the death panel claim and saying, like, well, have you read it? It's in there. And everyone's like, no, we've, we've read it's not in there. He said, I don't believe you. It's, that's still happening, and yet Trump's taking it on as though it's some Republican cause, uh, and so it's, it's highly frustrating. And the overall lesson of his budget is, and the overall worry is just that he can't pay for all the things. It's so weird to me that Republicans are supposed to be this conservative, spend less, small government, and everything Trump is doing is just expand, expand, expand, he's going to cut a handful of vital programs that spend a meaningless amount of money and do a lot of good, like the EPA or PBS or something like that.

0:06:46 Thomas: He's going to cut a couple of dimes from there and then try to build a, what, $30 billion wall? Try to add $80 or so billion to defense spending, the last thing we need to do. And then not going to cup Medicare or Medicaid and not going cut any benefits to anybody, but also simultaneously going to offer more coverage to more people in healthcare. Care. It's just, it's, it's ludicrous, it's all spending on stuff that, and a lot of stuff we don't need, except for the health care, I'm cool if we want to spend more on health care, but that's the thing, he's saying we're going to spend less on and just deliver more. Everything else is stuff is spending that is so useless, a wall, in the military, I mean, that, that's just not what we need right now. And final point, he needs 60 votes to get past the sequester on military spending. Spending.

0:07:38 Thomas: And I'm going to say right here and right now, Democrats had better not give him those votes. They really had better. Not. I mean, I know Democrats gave him a few votes on a few appointees. They had really better not given the votes he needs to increase military spending to that degree, because that will really be an insult. I will be incredibly disappointed in the Democratic Party if they do that. So I really, truly hope that doesn't happen.

0:08:14 Thomas: Alright, let's talk about a few studies on changing people's minds. First one up is an interesting one done in 2013 in Israel. And the purpose of this study, what they tried to do was, was do something a little counterintuitive, instead of trying to, and these are all, these studies are kind of aimed at changing people's beliefs, so that's the general goal of these studies that I'm gonna refer to, by the way, I'll put some links in the show notes talking about each one. One.

So this particular study aimed to use a strategy called paradoxical thinking, and what this involves is instead of trying to convince someone their opinion is wrong, they presented people with, like, an extreme version of their opinion, which is kind of weird, so it had to do with the Israel Palestine conflict, that was the issue in question, and what they did was for people who were kind of anti Palestine they showed extreme versions of that argument, of that viewpoint, which was essentially like the Israel-Palestine conflict is actually good for Israel and is actually a key part of the Jewish identity and all this stuff. They presented opinions that really glorified that conflict, and they found that the people who changed their minds were actually the ones who were on the right side of that.

So the people who already believed the conflict was bad, they didn't change their minds, but the people who thought the conflict was good actually changed their minds as a result of seeing this kind of extreme version of the, their viewpoint.

Theory for this is that it might be that the approach, it doesn't threaten people, because the, and so therefore it doesn' allow people to get as defensive, because when you hear someone's point of view from the other side of what you're saying, you get more defensive, but if you hear a point of you that's on your side but is further, I guess, whichever direction,

0:10:08 Thomas: You're not going to have as many defense mechanisms countering what they're saying. So that was the goal and kind of the lesson of this study. I want to also point out, and in fact I should say this from the get-go, nobody changes their mind about anything. The bottom line of all of this is that people do not change their minds very often. Even these studies that are talking about things that were effective in changing their minds, they're very small results, because Because people just don't do it. You know, by and large, it is very, very, very, very, very difficult to get anyone to change their mind on anything. So that doesn't mean we should never try, but it does mean that when I'm talking about these studies, I'm not saying, like, oh, this technique, you know, 80% of people change their minds on the spot.

0:10:58 Thomas: It's going to be a very small number of people. But if we want to set about to change somebody's minds, I think it's useful to have the best methodology available available that science can tell us. So that's kind of the goal here, maybe to reach that marginal one or two people. If we all start trying to argue better and use better techniques, maybe it'll add up to a lot over time. So, how I'd use this particular strategy is to maybe, when I think about debating another Trump supporter, maybe what would be a good use of resources is to find the people Trump has put in his cabinet and find people like Steve Bannon or others that are particularly egregious and maybe highlight their opinions and say, hey, what do you think about this opinion that is obviously going to be a pretty extreme thing if it's coming from Breitbart or Steve Bannen, and just highlight Highlight that extreme side.

0:11:52 Thomas: And maybe I don't think it's good to accuse somebody of endorsing it. Like if I take person Trump supporter A and I say, "Oh, look, you're supporting Trump. Here's what you're endorsing. Check out this extreme thinking." I think that would trigger the defense mechanisms. I think the best thing, there may not be a great way to do this in a one-on-one conversation, because I think by nature, it's always going to feel like I'm challenging the person.

But perhaps there's a way to walk that line and to say, "You know, let's examine this opinion by this person. Tell me your thoughts on this," or something, and do it in a more open way. Maybe there's some potential there. So that might be a technique to try. Next study comes from Cornell, and they studied a website called Change My View, and there's a lot of interesting data here. The first thing that comes to my mind, though, is it's gonna be a little bit skewed because it's specifically a forum designed for people who kind of want to have their minds changed, and that's already got to be a select few. So, and even among these few, even among these few, the percentage of people who change their mind is it so low, it's like like four percent, six percent, depending. I mean, I mean, it's really low.

But it's interesting data because people can rate, like, they they'll present a view, then others can comment, and if someone changes their mind, they can kind of rate them and give them like a Delta score. So that's that's some good data. That's some interesting data to look at, which kinds of comments may be promoted the most change in someone's view. So, definitely interesting and worthwhile.

0:13:27 Thomas: Let's see what it says First thing is obvious, but I think it's still worth mentioning, the more people that try to persuade the original poster, the greater the likelihood of changing their view. Now I know that that would seem obvious, but there are some counter-intuitive conclusions in these studies, so even having an intuitive conclusion drawn is a benefit. So this shows me that I think that it's worthwhile for all of us to raise our voices in opposition to bad ideas, is because the more people doing so, the more likelihood someone's going to change their mind. So that's interesting. This next finding, I'm not sure what to make of it. It says those who wrote back first to the post were more likely to persuade the original poster than those who wrote later. Now, I don't know, this may have to do with the specifics of the forum itself.

0:14:15 Thomas: I don't know if by the time someone writes later, the original poster is not interested anymore, or maybe they've already had their view kind of confirmed. Not sure what conclusion I can draw from that that would apply to our kinds of conversations, but that's okay. This observation is kind of cool. So there's a bit of a bell curve for the amount of response back and forth, so that this means, like, if the original poster and someone who interacted with them went back and fourth, that you can correlate the Delta score along with the number of responses, and it showed that if there's a little bit of back-and-forth, then that that was a good thing. So if someone goes goes back and forth with you once, maybe twice, maybe three times at most, it was a good sign for changing their mind.

0:15:02 Thomas: However, if it's more than four, then there is virtually zero chance of changing the person's mind. So that, I think, is kind of an interesting finding. So it sort of makes me think that if someone is super entrenched in their views, they're more likely to like argue back, "No, no, this, no, no, this." And when you get to that level of argument and that level of resistance, that there's just no chance they're going to change their mind, but you also don't want none, you want you want a little bit of interaction. That's kind of interesting to think about. Now here's something that I think maybe we can apply to our conversations. So, using specific examples and linking to support material helps. Again, this is going to be a little skewed by the fact that these are self-selecting people who went into a forum to have their minds changed.

0:15:49 Thomas: So, I don't know, I'm not sure, but overall it seems like that would help. Even if somebody who is very resistant to sources and will label them as biased or label them as a conspiracy or something, I still think overall it's got to help more than not. And also, this one's interesting, hedging. Using language like it could be the case is actually associated with more persuasive arguments. So even though you would think, oh, it's a weaker statement to say like, well, it could could be the case that this, that actually was found to convince people more. So maybe it could go back to, this is just me speculating, of course, I'm not an expert, but perhaps that goes back to like the defense mechanisms not being triggered as much.

0:16:35 Thomas: If I say, "No, no, Trump is the devil," you know, or something like that, versus saying, "Well, it could be a case that this policy that he adopts," you knows, it's just, it is so hard with Trump because he is the the devil. I think of these things as more useful in maybe less clean cut examples. But because I truly think Trump is an unprecedented person, and it's really hard to use these rules of engagement, like like, again, not to make the Hitler comparison, but if you're arguing like, "Well, perhaps some of Hitler's ideas weren't so good." You know, it's just it's it's like that a little bit for me because of how unprecedented he is and the fact that he worked with the Russians. I'm not going to get into it. But anyway, that's one that I think makes sense when talking about policy, but it would be hard for me to adopt in certain cases because it's just really hard.

0:17:28 Thomas: That's all. I don't know if it'll... I would be worried that in some cases it would make it seem like too close of a call. Like I would not want a scientist going up on a panel and saying, well, you know, it could be the case that the globe is actually warming. Like there's some cases like that where I want, like I said, the globe, just because of globe warming, the planet is actually warm. All globes too. They're all, the globes are warming as well. But anyway, I like, I wouldn't like that to be how they handle it. I think there's Some cases where you, you need to be certain about things, but who knows? I mean, maybe science will tell me I'm wrong about that. I think you would need to do more specific studies, but, but that's something to think about hedging.

0:18:13 Thomas: So I would, I, the conclusion I draw is maybe I'll do that where I can, uh, certainly as much as I can. As much as, I think it's okay. Uh, like I'm not going to say, Oh, maybe treat women as humans. Like maybe that would be a good idea. I'm Not when it's something like that. I mean, I just am not going do that. I think too destructive to present the alternative as like a viable option, but a, but yeah, interesting thing to think about.

Few Thank you. Studies Haeley and I looked at came at the problem of more identifying how hard it is to change people's minds, not so much as a solution to it, but sort of illuminating how bad this is. And there are some really interesting studies done at Stanford, for example, where people would, oh, oh there was a great one where people were presented with two suicide notes. And they were told one is fake, like someone who didn't, someone just wrote it, who didn'd commit suicide and the other is real. And what they did was they actually, they actually had people choose which one was fake, which one is real, and they, they told people, certain people, they told, oh, you got 24 out of 25 and certain other people, They told they got like zero out of 25 and then they had them identify, you know, like what, how they were doing it.

And then And they revealed to these people, oh, we just made that up. You actually didn't get 24 out of 25. You actually, I think they told them that they were either 50-50 or did worse. And what they found was even after being confronted with that information, so even after going through a study, being told, oh you're great at this, being able to identify these real suicide notes, and then later being told we made that to see how you would react to it, But even still, when they were asked how confident they were in their abilities, the groups that were told initially they were good at it still thought they were bad at it.

0:20:11 Thomas: So even though they received new information confirming beyond a shadow of a doubt that they had no reason to think they were good or bad at it, they had basically no evidence at this point, people don't say, "Oh, well, I now have no evidence, so I guess I don't know how good or bad I," no, they they will answer, "No, I'm good at it. I'm great at it. I'm still good," at even though in facing just incontrovertible evidence. And this is really depressing. There were several more studies done, kind of along these lines, that showed very similar results, pretty, pretty universal consensus that people are bad at this, people are bad at rejecting information that is that that goes against what they already believe, you know. Even though it's coming from a pretty uncontroversial place. A really interesting insight from all this for me was when they talked about the fact that humans didn't really evolve to solve problems in the right way.

0:21:07 Thomas: And it's just, this is one major reason why I love the fact that a naturalist worldview just gives you so many more opportunities to find the truth behind things. Because oftentimes people come from this background, and I think this may be a reason that, that, you know, it's only recently that the science on this has gotten better. But people come from this belief that man is a rational animal, and like God would have given us the techniques and the ability to reason and all this. And what we find when we study it is not true. Turns out we're bad at it. I mean, we have, humans have engineered systems that are incredibly good at finding the truth. You know, science and peer review. And there's certainly systems that we can use to fix these things.

0:21:52 Thomas: That's it's not. So if you if you take the viewpoint, the all the way the other side that now there's no way we can know the truth. Humans are terrible knowing the truth, we can't know anything that's that's also wrong, because we found very good ways to work together to be better at detecting truth. But things like politics don't have that. They don't have those systems at all. They're the opposite. They have constant promises and constant ability to deny on any side. I mean, either side can find a way to justify and rationalize and deny. There's no hard consequences oftentimes. So one thing that was interesting that they said was like, this is because we're actually designed to find flaws in others' arguments. And there were studies they did on this too, where they had someone formulate an argument on something and then they they switched this around and said, okay, now critique this argument.

0:22:41 Thomas: And for some people, they gave them their own argument again. Some people were able to figure this out, but of the people who didn't recognize their own agreement, they then went on to criticize and tear apart their own document, even though it was theirs. So initially they thought it was a good argument. They were asked to review their own arguments. They said, "Yep, solid argument." Then when given again and told it was someone else's, they tore it to shreds. And this sort of supports the idea that the way that someone put it in one of these papers that I thought was really fascinating was, we were evolved to work together. We weren't necessarily evolved to individually reach a truth. We were evolved to do kind of the thing that helps us work together, and what helps us work together is to not really question group ideas, you know, to maybe to question an other, as someone we label as another, to question their idea.

0:23:37 Thomas: And actually, they said, we might have evolved to detect when someone is screwing us over more than anything, because we evolved to work reciprocally. And so that might be the reason why we don't see faults in our own arguments. But when someone else presents an argument, we can see all the faults. And that's because we're we're particularly sensitive to when someone is breaking the rules. We call other people out because we've kind of evolved to work together in a system where the only way you keep people accountable is by literally keeping them accountable, by calling them out and calling each other out. And that behavior benefited the species as a whole because they were able to work together more and not be individualistic.

0:24:23 Thomas: So that is really a fascinating way that I saw it put in these articles. Again, these are all in the notes, so you can peruse the articles at your leisure, too. And the original studies are linked in the articles as well. So this is a problem, and the backfire effect is is another problem. It's basically there's an effect where corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question, and I don't know, what I mean, I don't know what the correct answer to that is. It looks like maybe if you try to approach an argument as more of like a partnership, which is something that maybe I could try to do with a Trump supporter a little bit, try to frame it in the words of, you know, let's work together to find the truth on something. Thing. It's it's hard. I think that's hard to do because the sides are so carved out that if a Trump supporter said that to me, well, how would I feel?

0:25:15 Thomas: Well, I would say, OK, we can if you want, but you support Trump. So I'm not really you know, I could see it being very easily resisted, but it may be worth a try because this backfire effect, I mean, if if if true, this backfire effect is highly problematic. It's a big problem for our species to deal with. The fact that confronted with facts makes us dig in to our own misconceptions more. That's a big problem. So what conclusions do I draw about the price debate? Well, I want to give you just a few thoughts I've had in the week since about the price debate. One thing I really do wish I would have asked, and I don't know what this would do really, but I do wish I would have ask this, and some people said this, I wish I were to ask him what could Trump have done to lose prices support?

0:26:05 Thomas: And specifically, here's what I should have should have asked him, I should Should have asked him if it becomes true, if you could become convinced, like if there pretend there's some new data that's incontrovertible that Trump worked with Russia to influence this election, would that change your mind on Trump? I want to really, I should have pinned him down on that because, guys, that's going to happen. It already is pretty much irrefutable based on intelligence reports that I've seen. I read actually this is something I wanted to talk about a later episode. I read the declassified version of the intelligence report. And I think it's a topic I really want to discuss. But it looks very virtually certain that the Trump campaign, maybe not Trump himself, but people in the Trump champagne were working directly with Russian intelligence to hack this election in different ways.

0:26:59 Thomas: Is and I should have asked him, like, if if you, if that were true, what would your reaction be? And I'm gonna ask the next Trump supporter I come across, because it will eventually be, I do believe this will come out, maybe it'll take till 2018, and unfortunately maybe Republicans will never believe it. That's the thing about these things, it just, who knows if they'll ever, if they always, always have some alternate version of the facts where Trump was a poor, uh, victim of a liberal plot to discredit him, and the whole thing was fake. Who knows? But I think it will become mainstream consensus soon. If not, maybe it'll take two years if we have more control in the Senate and the House to do investigations, but I think will become the mainstream consensus that the Trump campaign worked with Russia.

0:27:50 Thomas: And I wanna ask people, I wanna pin people to that. That. I also wish I would have asked Price a little bit more about the sexist recordings that there are of Trump just to get his reaction. I think he would have some way of writing it off, but it would have been nice to at least hear that justification and be informed about it.

And, you know, I've gotta say this, this is something, I actually made this point over on Comedy Shoeshine, which you might know is my comedy podcast with my brother, I love that show, it's my favorite show to do actually because it's funny and we have a good time and we make observations, and I think you should check it out, check out Comedy Shoeshine if you'd like, the people who like it love it to death, and some people don't like it, that's okay, humor is very subjective I think, and if you don't like the show you Don't like the show, but maybe check it out if you haven't, because you might like it a lot.

So, but anyway, I made this point, and I actually think it's a decent one, decent enough to kind of make as a serious point, not just kind of a joke, but this whole idea that business people will have some special insight into fixing the country, because, like, even if you grant that Trump is a successful business person, which I would not grant, but let's say we grant that, yes, he's he's successful, whatever the way he's accumulated his his wealth is by starting with millions of dollars and then buying property, buying real estate.

Real estate is about as close to a no-brainer business decision as there could be in business. I mean, yes, you can make mistakes. You could make a bad deal. Maybe you could buy a property.

0:29:21 Thomas: If you bought a bunch of property before a collapse, sure, there are ways you could go astray. But the biggest barrier in becoming a real estate mogul is not some special insider, or some special genius. It's having money. It's Having Money to Have Been Able to Buy Millions of Dollars of Property to Begin With. If you have $10 million right now and you buy the crap out of a bunch of property, I guarantee you 30 years from now, you'll have a lot more money than that. And what you did didn't take any special insight, really. If you're a single mom or something on just a modest income, there's no amount of elbow grease or ingenuity you can put into becoming a Trump level real estate mogul. It's just not possible for you to do.

0:30:08 Thomas: And even if it were, even if you spent your life scraping together every penny, and you saved up and you invested wisely, and you somehow built up enough wealth to start buying properties and those exploded and you bought more or something, that would be amazing. That would be a cool achievement. It's something everyone should aspire to. I'm not saying it's nothing, but it wouldn't have unlocked for you some sort of macro, macroeconomic insights, which you could use to run this country back on course. The fact is, the U.S. economy, and any economy, is just incredibly complicated. It's so complicated that the people who study it their whole lives disagree on it. And that's a big problem. But building wealth through real estate, when you already started with millions, there's just not that much to it, to be honest with you.

0:30:54 Thomas: It's not nothing, not saying it's nothing. You got to manage things, you got to do a little bit, but like the strategy of save money, buy property, that summarizes the entire strategy. Like that sentence, there's a one sentence strategy for economics. It's absurd. There's all these different rates. There's the lending, there're how much debt your country ought to take on. There're how, where the tax incentives should go. What the best way to get people to do things is, which tax incentives accomplish the things you're trying to accomplish. I mean, there's a billion questions, a billion questions, and simply having bought a bunch of property doesn't equip you to answer those. Also, there's a difference between knowing how to operate well within a set of rules and knowing how best to adjust all those rules to benefit other people.

0:31:43 Thomas: So working within a system to make money for yourself or your company, that's one set of skills and it can be a very, very focused, narrow set of skills. If I'm good at buying stocks of companies that are gonna be successful, say, let's say I'm really good at that. Does that mean I know how to run the economy? No, it's not even close to that. You want people who specifically study the tools and the instruments of macroeconomics that the federal government has at its disposal.

0:32:29 Thomas: You There's no, you know, it's just not how the government works. So I'm sure I've made that point by now or I haven't. Either way, I've spoken enough about it. That said, let's get to your voicemails. Got two weeks worth here, a little longer than usual, but some great stuff here. So thank you so much to everyone who called. Got some great voicemail to play and some commentary on them. Here we go.

0:32:54 Clip: It's time to check the voicemail. And of course, if you'd like to leave a message, that's 916-750-4SIO. That's 9-1-6-7-5-0-4-7 4-6. Let's check out this week's messages. Hey

0:33:15 Voicemail: Thomas, my name is James. I'm calling to recap an earlier message I left for you. I wanted to say right up front that I hugely am Very grateful for the interview that you did with Robert Price. And I wanted to also say that I think that you succeeded where David Smalley very badly failed. You were able to get Dr. Price to expound on his beliefs and feelings and to say some things that were, you know, potentially for him very, very risky to say to a liberal audience. The name of your show is Serious Inquiries Only. Only. And I think that you served the purpose of your show in that interview where you inquired after knowledge rather than being an advocate for a certain point of view. And I hope that your future conversations with Dr.

0:34:11 Voicemail: Price are in the same vein, where you're looking for understanding rather than trying to convert or debate. So I look forward to your future conversation. Thank you.

0:34:29 Voicemail: Hey, Thomas, this is Matt in PA. I just want to thank you for having Mr. Price on. I think think it was a very enlightening conversation. For a while there in the beginning, I was empathetic towards his position. And I could kind of tell without, you know, having to look into it and fact check that a lot of the things he was talking about, you Know, economically speaking, in terms of Trump's policies, probably were based on fallacious information. But I, you know, I can still understand how he was forming his opinion. And then when he said the thing about Ken State, I had a visceral reaction to that, sort of in the way you did after you had looked into the situation again. Ken State was essentially the Ohio National Guard firing on flower people, the types of people that would go to the Woodstock concert, just peaceful college protesters.

0:35:21 Voicemail: And I think it, more than from talking to people who lived through it and lived at the time, more than any other single event, Kent State shattered the illusion that America is the good guy and everyone else is the bad guy, and shattered that black and white moral outlook. And so as soon as he said that, I sort of put the rest of his positions into context where, I mean, there's, in my opinion, there is a stark delineation between people who think the Kent State massacre was justified and people who don't. And honestly, I'd never heard from someone who thought anything other than that that was just an absolutely horrific mistake.

Stake. But anyway, it was enlightening to know what type of people hold these views and are staunch Trump supporters. Thanks. Hey, Thomas, my name's Alex. I'm a huge fan of your show. I wanted to weigh in on something. I've heard a few people call in and talk about blame for the election. And I think that the word blame often conflates three different things. And nobody has said so far what I would like to say. So A, blame can mean what factor, if it had been different, would have given us a different outcome.

And I think that, as you've mentioned, that you can blame any number of 15 different factors, including probably the perception about the regressive left, even though I don't think that really would have anything to do with the Hillary Clinton administration. But I don'T think that's the most interesting question because all of those answers are correct. So the second meaning that blame can have is who are the biggest assholes that we should be angry at for this outcome?

0:37:08 Voicemail: Come? And I think that's actually a pretty easy question too. I would blame all of the bigots Donald Trump pandered to during his campaign, and of course Donald Trump himself for doing it, but I still think blaming the voters also isn't the most useful answer here. So I would like to attempt to answer the question of what lesson can caring people best take from this in order to make sure that we win in 2018 and 2020? And my answer, I'll be curious what you think about it, would be to eliminate the appearance of corruption in the Democratic Party nomination system. So for the sake of argument, I'm not even going to mention Bernie Sanders. Imagine that we had had a fair primary process with no question about the validity of the outcome, perfectly normal debate schedule, didn't seem like anyone was kind of hoping that nobody would hear about the other candidates to make sure that a certain candidate goes through, and Hillary Clinton still wins.

0:38:01 Voicemail: I would propose that in this world, Hillary Clinton is just enough less susceptible to fear-mongering about her legitimacy or about her integrity to tip the balance, and the propaganda machines would have had a much harder time actually convincing a bunch of people that Hillary Clinton would be worse than Donald Trump would be. And you think that's stupid, I think that stupid, but stupid people do get to vote. So if you would like to get people like Hillary Clinton elected over people like Donald Trump, and I certainly would, then I think the best thing you can possibly do is to make sure that you don't show them any kind of systematic favoritism that would make it easy for attacks to appeal to people's anti-establishment sentiments. Departments.

0:38:52 Voicemail: Hi, my name is Gerd Sjöstedt. I'm a delighted listener of yours, originally from Texas, but currently living in Sweden, where I think I've spent most of my adult life at this point. I just finished listening to this week's episode with Dr. Price, and I must say, I found myself wringing my hands of frustration. There's a whole lot of things that I could bring up, but I think we're just going to focus on one thing, and that's this notion of turmoil in Europe that I think Dr. Price mentioned. And I hear this really often now, and I think people are so inured to this terrible news that they stop thinking critically about it. And, I really do think there needs to be some kind of discussion, both in scale and in, like, the relative rates of this type of violence and crime, anytime we talk about it having this kind of sudden increase.

0:39:37 Voicemail: And, as somebody who lives in Stockholm currently, and who's previously the demonna, I can assure you that, and with earnest sincerity, that my life here is pretty damn awesome. I really don't miss Texas at all, except maybe some of the food. Anyway, love the show and look forward to next time. Thanks, bye. This is Lee. I just wanted to say I appreciate you interviewing Dr. Price. I was interested in finding out what he had thought about Trump after a month in office. So here's three questions that I think would be very interesting to ask. The first question is, is what news sites does he use for information? The second one is what fact-checking site does he think is a standard fact that's not left or right? And those two questions could be asked just in an email. It would be interesting as a follow-up.

0:40:50 Voicemail: And the third question is, what does he – this is if you go and talk to him again – What does he think about the scientists and historians who have pretty much universally come out against him? There's an article in Scientific American, and there's a couple of groups of Union of Concerned Scientists and historians come out again. And since Dr. Price respects research and, you know, deep history, both of those, I think, would be interesting to find out what his – thanks so much. Really appreciate your – My name is Neil. I live in Oregon, and I'm a longtime listener and love your shows. But I'm one of those.

0:42:03 Voicemail: Preventing Milo from speaking places was a bad idea, a bad tactic, because the best way to counter him is exactly what Wilcox did on the Bill Maher show, and that is to confront him directly. So if you take away his place to speak, you also take away your ability to confront his ideas with your own. However, we may have a different definition of deplatforming, in that I think of deplplatforming as a person has a venue and you prevent them from speaking at it. I don't consider not inviting somebody deplatforming. They didn't have that platform to begin with. You can't take away something. So, yeah, Breitbart, in effect, my local college hasn't invited him. It is not deplatforming.

0:43:01 Voicemail: I think that's a difference between the word deplatforming and in what context. But that's the way you might want to address it. I love your show.

0:43:28 Thomas: Alright, thank you guys so much for the voicemails. I have to say, I've mentioned it before, but I'm gonna say it again, I got way more than I can use because of the price conversation. A lot of people were, I suppose, moved to call in about that. Thank you so much. I was able to listen to them all, but of course, it would be hours and hours of show of just voicemail, so I couldn't use them all. All. But I would encourage you if you want to be heard, uh, call in at maybe at a time when it's not going to be flooded and, uh. And, and focus on one issue. Keep it short. Keep it like a minute would be best. There's a three minute cap and a lot of people just run into that while they're talking. And it's, it's a little, three minutes is just a little bit too long. So try to keep it to like a minutes.

0:44:14 Thomas: Uh, one particular point and that That will give you a very good chance of being heard on the show. But thank you for calling. So let's get to these voicemails. Lots of interesting stuff to talk about. First up was James. Yeah, I appreciate the comment very much. So if you remember James says that the name of the show is Serious Inquiries Only and he liked that I kind of just inquired after Price's views and didn't debate him too much. But I do have to say, James, that I can't promise I won't try to debate people in the future. This was sort of my first crack at talking to an actual Trump supporter. And so going into it, my specific strategy was actually to get him to just try to talk and calmly question anything I thought I could question. I will point out that I think I pushed back on a lot of stuff. I just didn't get mad, really.

0:45:01 Thomas: And I think a lot of people read that as allowing him to talk. But if you go back, I mean, I did question him on virtually everything. I asked at least one question on most things, sometimes follow-ups. But anyway, I guess I think that people are reacting more to demeanor than actual content. And I think that's interesting. But it seems to have gone over well. So I think I will try to do that more to remain calm and just question things versus, you know, becoming outraged. Because I do think that there's a place for outrage and there's definitely reason to be outraged. But when you're debating a Trump supporter, I don't know how much good it will do.

0:45:50 Thomas: You know, that's sort of what today's show is about. So I can't promise it'll always go that way. But I will say, even if I'm going to debate someone, I firmly believe in at least allowing them to explain their thoughts and not just trying to talk over them and not allowing them to express themselves. So that's important to me either way. Like even if I'm going to hardline debate somebody as much as possible, I still want them to be heard. Otherwise, there's no point. So thank you for that comment. Those are my thoughts on that. Next is Matt in PA. Yes, absolutely, the Kent State Massacre is something that I just cannot believe an informed person would ever support. I can only imagine, I can ONLY hope that Dr. Price has some sort of alternate facts, an alternate history that he's actually using to make that claim because, wow, I...

0:46:41 Thomas: As I said before, I'll say it again, if I ever have a discussion with Price again, it will absolutely begin with a number of questions about that because I... Again, it just caught me off guard. I couldn't believe just truly in retrospect how awful of a comment that was. So that's something that I absolutely would do. That would be the beginning of a conversation because that's a horrible thing to say. And I think likely what we'll find if I ask him, if I were to speculate, I bet you he'll have some alternate version of what went down. I don't think that excuses it because it really is just an awful thing to say. But he'll probably argue that the protesters were violent or something. Who knows? But it's it's terrible. And I will, if we talk again, I will come prepared with the solid facts of what happened in that incident and really try to pin him down on what he's actually claiming there and see if he sticks with it, which I suspect he will because he's stuck with everything.

0:47:36 Thomas: But anyway, that's my thoughts on that. Thanks for the voicemail. Next up is Alex. I want to apologize for Alex. I meant to include this voicemail in an earlier episode. Alex is a patron and hey, if you are a patron, and you want to utilize there's this, I think there's a certain level on patreon.com where you can ensure your comment is heard. Just make sure to coordinate with me because the numbers of people, it's a lot more than it used to be. And it's really hard for me to know without you indicating that your email or your name corresponds to your patron name, etc, etc. So just let me know, as Alex did, and I fully intended to keep his excellent comment in an earlier episode, but I messed up the email. So I want to apologize to Alex for that, but that's why it's a little out of time, like it's little old, but it's entirely my fault and not Alex's.

0:48:28 Thomas: But it's still a good thing to talk about, so I wanted to. So, he was talking about blame for the election, and I agree with how Alex is framing this. There's three things he wanted to talk about. Blame as in a factor that would have changed the election. As he pointed out, and as I've pointed out before, when it's so close, when an election is just fractions of percentages off, really, you can blame any one thing. There's a million variables that you can say, ah, that would've changed the elections. Election. But I agree with Alex that that's not as instructive. So he also framed it a second way, which I also agree with, which is who is actually morally to blame the most. And I think, and maybe I'm rephrasing this a bit more in my words than Alex's, but I would put it that way too.

0:49:15 Thomas: I would say there's a difference between what we can reasonably expect should have been different and who we can morally hold responsible. I absolutely hold Trump morally responsible, Trump voters morally responsible, more than anyone. I don't think they get off scot-free, whereas liberals who didn't vote are more to blame. There's a sense in which I do feel that way, but not morally. I think that morally, I'm still happier with someone who maybe is a liberal and supports liberal causes in other ways, but wasn't able or didn't vote, even though I strongly dislike the fact that people just didn't vote for various reasons. Still, morally, there's nothing worse than actually supporting the bigotry and the hatred and the terrible, basically the entire terrible Breitbart policy platform that is Trump.

0:50:06 Thomas: So I agree with you there. Where I disagree is on your third thing. So Alex's third point of blame was that we need to eliminate the appearance of corruption in the DNC, essentially. And one of the things he brought up was the debate schedule. That's something that I did hear was the DNC kind of favoring Hillary. I have to say that I put this in the category of fact of one of the of the things that would have, maybe it would have changed the election. But to me, this isn't a significant thing, because I think that, and I don't know why you're saying we shouldn't focus on Bernie, because Bernie is the reason for this attitude. If we didn't have a strongly viable second candidate, which we wouldn't have with Bernie, the other candidates were not even close to Bernie and Hillary.

0:50:52 Thomas: So if we didn't have a strong second candidate, I don't think anyone would really have paid attention or cared about this. But what I would argue in contrast to what you're saying, Alex, is first of all, of course, yeah, just like all the other factors we talked about that could have swung at the 1% or whatever, it's not like I'm saying it's a bad thing or an insignificant thing that we should try to, if you're a Democrat like me, if you're someone who supports Democrat causes, that you would want the DNC to be as fair as possible and kind of as neutral as possible, totally agreeing that that's a concern and that's something I would want. However, the way I would counter that as a significant factor is, one, the RNC, for example, wanted nothing to do with Trump. They didn't want him to win. They wanted Jeb Bush to win, probably, or someone of the other.

0:51:39 Thomas: Jeb, I think, had the most establishment support, and that made no difference. And I really don't think that the DNC gave the election, the nomination to Hillary. I just I don't think people are that persuadable by that kind of thing, you know, and maybe it's a few votes here and there. Who knows? Maybe it's tens of thousands. But if you were to try to put a number on how many actual votes you think the DNC was capable of giving to Hillary over Bernie, I just, I can't, I don'T think it's that many. I really don't. You know, I, I think that Bernie had enough visibility to where people saw him. Democrats saw him, it's not like they didn't know who he was.

0:52:27 Thomas: They knew his message. A lot of people, millions of people liked his message, the problem is just that millions of more people, specifically people of color too, went for Hillary, and they just, they didn't, I don't know, for whatever reason, they didn't resonate with Bernie's message, and I don't, I don't think you can just say that they were, you know, brainwashed by the DNC or maybe you wouldn't make that claim. Maybe that's a straw man, but that they weren't heavily influenced and wouldn't have voted the same way regardless of the DNCs favoritism. I just don't see that as a huge thing. And at the end of the day, to use that cliche, at the end of the day, after this was all over, every liberal, every Democrat still had a choice between Hillary Clinton. And by the way, a Hillary Clinton who had taken on a lot of Bernie's talking points as a result of a very close primary, a reasonably close primary.

0:53:19 Thomas: The choice between a more progressive Hillary as a result of the primary and Donald Trump. That was the choice. You still had that choice.

0:53:32 Thomas: If you were a voter who was so turned off by the DNC primary process that you didn't vote or somehow voted Trump instead of Hillary but you would have voted Bernie, I think you're just badly misinformed. And I think you just... severely miscalculated the harm that Trump is going to cause and is causing now, and I think your priorities were completely out of whack, and I think you were wrong. And I think the more productive use of energy and argument is toward showing just how wrong that decision was so that we don't make that again. And I don't think the DNC process will have as big an effect as that does. So that's my opinion.

0:54:17 Thomas: Again, not to say we can't do two things at once. I agree, DNC process should be more transparent, more fair. I think it will be, by the way. I don't think it'll be as big an issue going forward. And so I'm not as worried about that. But interesting comment, thanks for that, and on to the next one. Apologies, next caller, but your name, either it was the phone or it's a name I just have never heard in my life. Sounded like Gersherset or something. I apologize. I just, I never heard of that name and I can't even wrap my mind around what it might have been if a phone messed it up.

0:55:06 Thomas: But at any rate, thank you for the comment. This is the person from Texas living in Sweden. So, by, this is something I'm glad you brought up. I've heard from a number of people about... I sort of granted Price the notion that there's somewhat of an immigration crisis in Europe, and I think there are some concerns, but actually long before this, maybe a few months back, I researched some claims I heard on Sam Harris' show about... there was like some child sex ring that was busted and was happening in some country where it was alleged that people got away with it because their Muslim or because they're refugees or something like that. And I looked into it. I never ended up covering it. It just didn't fit in anywhere. And it was, I kept, I keep thinking I was going to do a more involved show about it, but I, you know, scheduling being what it was.

0:55:56 Thomas: I sort of put it off. I have a lot of things like that, by the way, but that's how it goes. That's the nature of having a show like this. But anyway, I never covered it, but I looked into it. And while, and while it's true that police didn't want to talk about the fact that these were Muslims because they didn't want to create any kind of refugee scare or immigrant scare, that didn't allow them to get away with anything that they wouldn't have otherwise gotten away with. They still were prosecuted. They still weren't arrested. They still, they got away with it for a while, but only because no one reported it. And the people who, and it was actually, there was some police corruption going on too, like people bought off some officers so that people would stay silent, had nothing to do with them being immigrants. And that's sort of what I found when I've looked into a lot of these.

0:56:44 Thomas: It'll just be crimes by immigrants, but they'll be totally prosecuted and arrested and treated like any other crime. There's never not going to be crime. So the question is, is there truly an increase of crime? Like, is there truly a vastly disproportionate amount of crime done by immigrants? And that's an open question. My suspicion is not really.

However, this is something I want to look into more and I can't, there's not enough time to do it right now, but I do, I'm glad you called and I really, I've heard this from a few people that the sort of the Muslim immigrant crisis is overblown. I bet you it is. My initial thought and looking into it is that it is a little overblown and it's something I wanna do in more detail.

But off the top of my head I will say that the number of attacks in a place like France, for example, is troubling, and the reality is, even if statistically you can always say like, well, it's very unlikely any given person is going to die in a terrorist attack, I think as a country there's only so much terrorism you can take and still be level-headed, and I think we've even seen that in our country with the relatively few and far between attacks we have had.

It, there's, terrorism is just, it's highly effective, unfortunately, even though, and it's because people are bad at statistics, but also it's, it's looked at as an attack on the country, it's, it's a real in-group, out-group thing, it's something that I, even if heart disease and car accidents and gun deaths in general are killing way way way more people, I just think it might be a fact about humans that you, you can't, as a country, you can't take very many of these big attacks and still maintain your sanity. I think it's unfortunate, but I think it's true that a few too many, and you could very easily see a far right-wing takeover and reaction to it.

0:58:38 Thomas: Because people just, they don't want to do that. I mean, it doesn't, sure, it's few people, but it's like six degrees of separation with Kevin Bacon or something. It's not that hard for a few attacks to mean you know somebody was there, you know, somebody lost a family member, And it's just such a visceral, fearful reaction you're going to have. So that's a concern for sure. I'm not making any claims as to what the best way to deal with it is now, but that's my initial thoughts on the topic. I want to do something more in depth. I've already talked to Haeley about it. So thank you for that. That's a great future topic, something to look into and investigate with an open mind, by the way, either way. So if anyone has guest recommendations along those lines, uh Please send those emails to Haeley at SeriousPod.com.

0:59:25 Thomas: She handles guest recommendations, H-A-E-L-E Y at SeriosPod. That's a great future topic. Thank you for the call. Next up was Lee. Yeah, interesting notion. There are three questions to ask Price if I talk to him again. I like these. The first one was, what news sources do you get? The second one was, what fact-checking site would you trust? And the final one was, scientists and historians who come out against Trump. I think those are interesting questions to answer. I think worthwhile questions. I would imagine that it's not going to be a very satisfying answer. Answer I mean, I think he'd probably just say, like, well, the internet, I check lots of different sources, and give an answer you can't really follow up on, like, "Oh, I, I have no one source, I have plenty of different sources," something that protects him, but also, uh, doesn't allow me to probe any deeper.

1:00:15 Thomas: And I, that's my guess, but, but it's, it's worth, I would put that in the category of things that I do intend to ask him, even if the answer is not ultimately going to be satisfying. I think the the process is important, and getting maybe getting him to question it, or someone else listening to question it, or just to know where we stand, that's a good thing. As for scientists and historians, I mean, if, if we're talking to someone who's calling Snopes liberal propaganda and who is insisting that the intelligence community, a lot of members of whom were, you know, they're all the way back to Bush and it's not that partisan of a thing, oftentimes, if I'm talking to somebody who thinks that's a liberal scheme to make Trump look bad, even though Trump himself agrees with the conclusions by now, sometimes, he goes back and forth.

1:01:04 Thomas: But anyway, that level of denialism and that level of conspiracy thinking, I just think Price would write that off instantly, the scientists and historians, especially being someone who's in a very minority historian point of view on Jesus mythicism. I mean, a lot of his, if you've listened to him before, a lot of his explanation for Jesus mythicism is based on sort of some conspiratorial level thinking, Thinking like all of the scholars who've ever looked at it kind of being Christian apologists of various sorts, I think he would dismiss that immediately. But the first two I think are definitely worse. And again, there's lots of things that are probably worthwhile challenges and questions to put to a Trump supporter.

1:01:52 Thomas: There is finite time, though, and they do add up. But I want to do this again, if not with Price, with someone else. And I'm enjoying the process of kind of homing in on what the best challenges are, what the best ways to get people to rethink things are. So it's something that I've enjoyed doing. It's somethingthat I enjoy doing kind of along with you and getting your feedback. So thanks for that call. Neil in Oregon. This one, the final one here, and this was about deplatforming. I would say, Neil, that I don't, and you said Wilcox. I think you meant Larry Wilmore, by the way. But I don't think that the difference between taking away a platform and not offering someone a platform to begin with, I don't think that's really that significant. I, I don't, seriously, like that makes almost no difference to me because either way it's, it's taking away a platform.

1:02:44 Thomas: And, and I suppose I'm curious what difference you think that makes, because when CPAC took away Milo's platform, do you view that as not okay, but it would have been okay had they never offered it to him? Because that, I mean, that's just like a scheduling question, that just like making an appointment question to me, that, not really, it doesn't, there's no moral difference in that to me, because you can book someone for something and not know something about them, it's, you know, it pretty easy to miss something in your vetting, something comes to light, and then I would say you have just as much right to disinvite them as you did to not invite them in the first place. To me, no moral difference there. I'm not totally sure if you think there is. Let me know, if you just shoot me an email or another voicemail if you want, clarify your thoughts on that, makes no difference to me.

1:03:34 Thomas: My argument has been, yes, there are definitely lots of people I disagree with where it's worth having them on to discuss it, hash it out, see if you can make some headway. I just don't put Milo in that category. I put Mila in the category of flat earthers or moon landing conspiracy people. Yeah, you can say sunlight's the best disinfectant, let's get all the nut jobs on TV to promote what they're saying and risk turning on more people to their bad ideas. But it's just not true that good ideas always win. I don't actually think that's true because the mass media is a different thing. You're reaching millions of people, and you're allowing these fringe viewpoints to coalesce.

1:04:23 Thomas: You're allowing one person with very fringe views to get access to millions. Yeah, sure, most people probably won't accept what Milo is saying, and most people will see Wilmore's challenge to him and say, "Oh, you know what, Wilmore really was making sense there," but not all of them. And then what, what's going to happen is, as a result, assuming the pedophilia thing never happened with Milo, what would have happened is, sure, lots of people would look at Wilmore and say, like, "Oh, OK, I don't, this Milo, I don't really like him," but not all of them, there would be probably thousands of people who would say, "Oh, what, you know what, he's saying there about, you know, trans people being mentally ill, like, I kind of, kind of agree with that," and now they have found a person to give their support to that they wouldn't have found otherwise. And now that allows Milo, to giving Milo access to millions of people allows him to find the thousands that put him in business, and I just think there's a line, that's, it's not worth it.

1:05:22 Thomas: There's a line of bad ideas. And specifically with Milo, it's the fact that he's more a troll than anything. He doesn't have ideas for the most part. He has a bunch of vacuous claims and then he's a troll. So that's why it's now worth platforming him at all in any way, giving him a platform and keeping once you've given him a form, not taking it away. Either way, to me, making as few platforms as possible for this person is the right thing to do. Just like I would say, don't put a flat earther on Bill Maher. It's just not worth it. There's no value there. Don't put Moonland and Conspiracy Person on there. Don't don't David Duke on your show. Oh, sure. Good ideas can defeat his racism. But at the same time, there's just no value to him being heard by more people because the ideas are not up to that level of, I guess, integrity.

1:06:14 Thomas: They're just not at that level. For me, that's my view on it. So that's why there's no such thing as infinite platforms. There's a finite number of people that you can give your platform to. And I'm just saying Milo is not worth doing that for. All right, that's it for the voicemails. I know that was a little longer of a segment, but I had so much response and I skipped it last week, so I wanted to make sure to do a nice long voicemail segment. It's actually one of my favorite things to do. I love being able to interact with your comments and have the listeners, rather than me just reading your words, having the listeners actually hear you make your points. I loved this segment, so thank you so much to those who contributed, and please keep leaving voicemails. We'll be right back. That being said, it's time to thank my lovely patrons. Thank you new patron Colette, Deborah Smith, Jordan mother fuckin' Franco, Teresa Gant, Sarah Ryan, Abseon, Michael Glyde, Tor Melkevik, and Butch.

1:07:07 Thomas: Thank you, thank you, thank you for being my new patrons. You make the show happen. It really would not happen without you, especially now. If you like what you hear, please go to patreon.com/seriouspod and ensure the continued survival of my little show. I really, really appreciate everyone who does. And that being said, I need to thank my top patrons, my all-time greats. And they are Matt Garrett, Dale, Brian Garefort, Peter Skelton, Steve Sigmund, Adrian Borschoff, Roger Metcalf, Adam Hicks, Matthew Maxson, Andrew Waddington, Zabby, Matthew Staton, John Bodley, Esq, Ian Ryan, Ian Rosano, Jonathan Moyet, Kaylee Reiser, Jesse Sakashita-Fukasumi, Donald J. Trump, Super Genius, Michael Schaffer, Sammy, and Hunter Ashe.

1:07:54 Thomas: Thank you, thank you, thank you, can't thank you enough. You guys are the best, and with that said, thanks for another great week. I love doing it, I love that people are interacting with the show. I hope you're getting something out of it, and I will see you next week for another couple episodes of Serious Inquiries Only.