SIO229: Means Testing, #metoo, and Bernie Bros

Transcript

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

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 229, I'm Thomas, that's Jamie, how you doing, Jamie?

0:00:36 Jamie: I am, all right, Thomas, how are you?

0:00:37 Thomas: Doing great, can't wait for the debate coming up, we are recording this, you know, few, three, two, three hours before the debate, so, as you're hearing this, that where we are, we're looking forward to it, and we're hoping to get you some amount of debate coverage for that, if not a full episode, we'll see how that goes, today, we've got a bunch of questions pending that I think are are going to be a lot of fun. I'll be honest, millions of questions on Inner Monologue, but also some other ones, little older ones that I think are good still that apply to the Democratic primary and that kind of thing. So lots of good questions we are going to tackle. So what do you think, Jamie? You want to give it a try?

0:01:20 Jamie: Yeah, I'm super excited, let's go for it.

0:01:23 Thomas: Let's go to this question that, now again, Yang has dropped out. So this is related to UBI and I know it's, it's old. I should have, I wish we'd have gotten to it sooner, but you know, it's, we can't do a Q and A every episode. I try to only do it, you know, once a month or something, but I think it still applies because it's about, it's about means testing. It's something that will apply going forward to other policies. And also, you know, this Yang is out, but this won't be the end of UBI. I'm sure we'll see more on UBI going going forward. So I still want to answer this question from Alexis, who emailed and asked, "When you covered Yang's UBI proposal, you guys were pretty much, or sorry, you were pretty outraged at the idea that the 1K a month would also go to the top 1% despite the fact that there might be even more administrative overhead to do the means testing than you'd save. I'm not sure I agree with that."

0:02:10 Thomas: But I think that, I think we said that about the other thing, that there would be more administrative overheard to means test. But anyway, however, when addressing the idea of means testing for university tuition. You guys are on the exact opposite side of pretty much the same argument. Since you basically made all the major points on both sides, can you explain why they apply in one case but not the other? Why is means testing stupid for UBI but not tuition? I have so many thoughts on this. First off, you know, good question. I think prima facie, this is a worthwhile thing. You know, it is true that you and I were pretty mad about how how Yang's UBI would be implemented with regards to it being universal. Whereas when it comes to university tuition, we were on the opposite side.

0:02:55 Thomas: Now, I feel like we kind of distinguished that at the time, but maybe not explicitly. So for me, I think there is easy distinctions to be made. But I don't begrudge anyone asking this question because it does seem like a contradiction at first. So first off, I disagree with the second part of that first sentence that I kind of highlighted. I think there would be more administrative overhead to means test the university thing, but not the UBI. And that's because as Jamie, you know, calculated, punched into her calculator on the U BI, that was an enormous amount of money that would be saved by not giving it to like millionaires. And that was just millionaires, imagine if we, you know, if we only gave it up to, I don't know, 200,000 household income or something, there was a lot of money involved.

0:03:46 Thomas: And I refuse to believe that that means testing cost would be more because we're dealing with something that could be done through your tax return, something where you already have the infrastructure there. You know, there are already plenty of taxes and tax benefits where you exit out of them, you know, with, with your, your income. And I, I've actually being in a two household income in, sorry, two income household in California, um, where the cost of living is high. So therefore, you know, the, the wages are higher and that kind of thing. I actually ran into that. We started getting into that, um, household income limit on like student loan interest. So I wasn't able to expend some amount of that. That infrastructure is already pretty much there. Um, and, uh, when when it comes to university tuition, I think it's kind of the opposite.

0:04:33 Thomas: I think of more universities along the lines of libraries. I don't want to means test the library. I don't want to mean test if we were to make transportation available to everybody, and public transportation, which would be awesome if we could do, if we can make that universal. I wouldn't want it to be means testing people on the way into the subway. That I don't care about. And that would be harder to implement than not. And one final point, sorry, Jamie, this is one that I saw and it's, I had a bunch of stuff preloaded on this. So I apologize for taking the bulk of this one. But, um, I also think that one of the complaints that we had and maybe a central complaint to Yang's UBI is not just the means testing, but there was actually means tested the other way. You know, that like, if you were in the lower tiers, then he wanted to make sure that like your food stamps were taken out of this.

0:05:25 Thomas: And like you had to choose between some of the lower level benefits you'd get and this one K a month, which is the opposite of where we need to be. Uh, and so now I'll, uh, I'll I'll finish my objections and let you go ahead on this.

0:05:37 Jamie: Yeah, so I agree with everything that you said, and particularly the last point. My biggest objection to Yang's UBI, which I agree avec him in spirit, as he likes to say, but that it disproportionately fell on the backs of the people who would need it most. That if you were on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder and needed nutritional assistance or housing assistance or Medicaid assistance, you would have to forego those programs in order to be eligible for this $1,000 a month. And it just seemed to me to be a sort of inversion of burdens than what should be given what this was supposed to accomplish. The people who most need $1.00 a month are the very last people who should be means tested for it or should be at risk of using benefits.

0:06:30 Jamie: And I think this is very different from the university, because I agree with you, I think of universities, I think of education as a public good, in much the same way that you mentioned the library, I think of the fire department. The last thing I want somebody to have to prove before they're able to get an education, or watered, or put their house out while it's on fire, is what their income level is. And I'm especially concerned when this falls on the back of the most vulnerable among us. And I just don't think it's the same thing to say to a millionaire or a billionaire or someone making $200,000, $300,000 $400,000 a year to say, hey, have your accountant send me this information than it is to make have somebody who's making $18,000 year $20,000 per year report to the welfare office to potentially lose their food stamps. I just Don't think these burdens have a parody in the way that it's being suggested in this question. Jen.

0:06:45 Thomas: Right.

0:07:29 Thomas: Totally agree. And the other thing, one last quick thing is I did say at the time, I just really don't even know how many of the 1% are using the public universities. You know, it's gonna be a few, I guess, but like, you know, that that's so little to where that's where I think there's almost no cost savings, uh, in terms of implementing the uh the the means testing there. I just don't, you know, so yeah, okay, so I think we we covered that one. Um, all right, this next one is from Tunde. And all right, I, this one kind of, I'll be honest, this one, this one gets me a little bit. I get frustrated with this kind of thing. But Tunde says, "I've read all the books regarding Ford and Kavanaugh, and I still can't get past the fact that other than her testimony, there's no evidence that the two ever even met."

0:08:16 Thomas: Her best friend claimed to not know who Kavanaugh was and never met him, never saw them together. None of his friends could testify to ever seeing them together. No one else in the town came forward to say they had ever seen them together, but she claimed they were close enough to group to go swimming together. I found her testimony believable, but I can't get past the above fact. Would we still believe her if she came across as a more uncomfortable witness? I don't understand this. Perhaps one with anxiety, other issues affecting communication. Hmm. I'm troubled by a process that favors presentable accusers over others. If Ford was a white female college student in Kavanaugh, black male with no evidence that they actually met, would you still treat this the same way? Um, well, I, I have thoughts, but I, I took the last one first. So do you want to go first on this one?

0:09:05 Jamie: So there's... there's a lot going on there. I'm not sure how many books there are on this or who wrote them.

0:09:15 Thomas: Um. I, they're probably referring to the New York Times one that came out. Um, the New York Times writers, I think they had one that came out recently. I actually read it. I don't know why I said, I think they did have one that came up recently about, uh, that's the only one I can think of though. I dunno if there's another, no,

0:09:31 Jamie: So I'm Not familiar with the book that claims that there's no evidence whatsoever that these two people had ever met before.

0:09:37 Thomas: No. It doesn't, it doesn't claim that.

0:09:39 Jamie: Okay, because that seems like the sort of thing that Dinesh D'Souza would say.

0:09:42 Thomas: Yeah, exactly. No, they're saying they read the book and they still don't see, or, you know, they still didn't know of any evidence that they had met or whatever is what they're seeing.

0:09:50 Jamie: So full Disclosure, I, like many women, have been sexually assaulted in the past, and so I tend to keep these kinds of stories at a healthy distance because they can be sort of re-traumatizing for me. And so I have not read every single thing that's come up about Kavanaugh and Dr. Ford, precisely because it is so upsetting to me to hear how casually women are dismissed and not believed when they make these sorts of accusations, conversations.

My understanding is that Dr. Ford is still getting death threats, and say what you will about her believability in making these reports, you have to at least grant that as a woman who lives in the world and is smart enough to be a doctor, that she is familiar with the fact that it tends to not go well for women when they call out powerful men, or any man really, for for mistreating them. There is invariably blowback. She is still getting death threats at her home because of these accusations. And the thing that blows my mind the most is that people actually think it makes more sense that this woman put herself and her family in danger, disrupted their lives in this way for reasons that are completely made up and not legitimate, before they entertain the possibility that a man might've done a terrible thing.

0:11:24 Thomas: I be this. So you're so right. And just because I did read this book, I just want to add a couple things onto that. All of that. Absolutely. And not only did she do this and put her family at risk, but also in her letter to Feinstein said, I don't want to come forward. I just wanted you to have this information as you're evaluating the nominee and said, I'm just hoping by some miracle, the Republicans will say, you know, okay, let's pick somebody else, you Know, behind closed another Republican, by the way, she never said like, oh, I'm going going to make sure that we get like a communist in there, you know, or something like she just wrote this confidentially, did not want to testify, explicitly told Feinstein and others that she didn't want to justify.

0:12:11 Thomas: She couldn't handle it. And also, by the way, part of the book is that they had to really, honestly, they had almost trick her into testifying. Like, it's not quite that, like, sinister, but they kept saying like, okay, they, they had to really, really push her, be, or, or to go, or to just decide she wasn't going to. Like, it was either, you have to go, like, you can't have it both ways, you know, because of how this process went, because Republicans were not gonna, for a second, we're not going to, um, even consider withdrawing the nomination or opposing the nomination if she didn't testify. So, like, that was like the absolute minimum she had to do for them, you know. And so there was all this effort behind the scenes to get her to do that. It was a very, very difficult decision for her, and she didn't want to do it.

0:13:00 Thomas: So the idea that she did all that as some like super secret plan. And by the way, part of that plan was to tell her husband in what, the nineties that she had been sexually assaulted by this guy. Like, wow, that's an, it's an amazing fourth sight that she has. Isn't that incredible? So I just wanted to say this, um, about this question. It's really, really, it really is hard to talk about because this is so frustrating. Like this is exactly the kind of not believing women that is just so frustrating, you know? And, yeah, I mean, I, I have people I really care about who are victims as well. And like, just this, seeing this kind of, this kind nonchalant, you Know, I and maybe this person doesn't intend any ill will or whatever, but it's, it's this, it'S this kind OF constantly constantly, hyper skepticism toward, you know, women's stories that you wouldn't really apply to anything else.

0:13:52 Thomas: Look, No went to very few. My parents were super strict in high school, so I was able to finagle my way to one party, and it involved a lot of lying that I was later caught at. So I was unable to go to one, part at that party. I couldn't tell you everybody who was there. I can tell you exactly who I interacted with. And I could tell you this, if there was, like, like a friend of a friend there, who I'm sure there was, like, a friend of friend who went to some other school, no, none of that person's friends, or my friends, would have any idea that I met that person once. They would have no idea. You could ask them now or you could ask them then. They'd be like, do those, did they ever meet? I don't know. I have no idea. I don't, if they met, how would I know? It's one party, you know, and maybe they, I can't remember if she said she was familiar with him or knew him enough.

0:14:38 Thomas: Like you can certainly as a, as a high school student, you can have Pre-internet, by the way, pre-Facebook, pre all this stuff, you can have bumped into somebody a couple of times and have nobody 30, 40 years later who's able to say that you met. I mean, that just seems like the most feeble objection to this that I could possibly think of.

0:14:59 Jamie: Right, I've had people come up to me, I've bumped into in a store, that I allegedly went to school with, who are like, "Hi, Jamie, how are you doing? What are you going to, what, with your life now?" And I have to, like, sort of pretend that I remember them when I very clearly don't, because I'm a terrible person and I'm bad at remembering these sorts of things. And so it just, it's just shocking to me that we would sooner believe that this woman completely made this up, put herself through this horrible idea ordeal, is subjected to all sorts of derision and skepticism, that that's more likely to be the case than some rando at a party 30 years ago doesn't remember who else was there while they were drinking. By the way, like, what, right?

0:15:45 Thomas: And I also want to say, when they said none of his friends could testify to ever seeing them together, actually, we don't know that. Um, we, there was that, the asshole friend he had that wrote the book that, like, had, the, his, the nickname for him and all that, it, you know, it's been a long time since this, so I'm blanking on his name, but he wrote the book about it, and about different, you know, times where they were both drunk together, and we don't know that that person couldn't testify to this. It's actually, um, you know, I believe that she was pretty sure he could, but he refused to because they're all protecting this guy.

0:16:17 Jamie: But this this speaks to the general credibility gap that women face compared to when men give testimony. There isn't any man to corroborate it, therefore it must not be true, because the mere fact that this woman says it is true is just insufficient unless it's accompanied by a penis. Give me a break. This pisses me off, I'm sorry, again.

0:16:37 Thomas: And, uh, same. I, yeah. Um, by the way, she did have tremendous anxiety in testifying. I don't know if maybe this emailer couldn't detect that or what. Uh, it's in the book, certainly that she had an incredible amount of anxiety. She had anxiety about the flying too. That was part of it, but she made it, you know, she, she made that sacrifice to, to make it happen.

0:16:59 Jamie: So, I'm gonna make, a I'm so sorry for interrupting, but I want want to interject here and make a recommendation, it's worth looking into the way that people are trying to train emergency responders and police officers in how to better deal with rape victims, because we have not, up till now, dealt meaningfully with how trauma impacts memory, how it impacts reporting the story of what happened to you. And we've taken the fact that there are discrepancies in stories when trauma survivors tell what's happened to them as evidence that there's deceit or there's dishonesty, when in reality, that's a function of how memory works during acute trauma. And so there's been a big push recently to update training for people who have to deal with rape victims, so that the very realities of what it's like to experience this trauma aren't taken as

0:17:01 Thomas: No, No, no, no. All

0:17:51 Jamie: Evidence, that this trauma didn't happen. And that might be something worth looking into.

0:17:57 Thomas: Right. Good recommendation. All right. Well, sort of me too adjacent on this. Um, Rick asks, did you catch that Al Franken was on Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend, the podcast? Haven't listened to it, but do I you think it is him trying to come back into polite society? So Rick's kind of asking about that. And also I think we can broaden that to, to what do you Think, you know, is appropriate there? We, I think we both agreed shouldn't be Senator, but you know commenting on radio, I don't know. How do you feel about any sort of, I dunno, quote unquote comeback in that way?

0:18:32 Jamie: Don't think people should be punished in eternally for finite sins, but where that should end is kind of hard to draw the line. Obviously, you know, if you're going out and you're murdering people and eating their remains, your reentry in society is going to be different than if you steal five bucks from the candy jar. And Al Franken is somewhere in between there. And personally, I think he's a little bit closer to stealing money from the candy jar than he is eating corpses. But I think this is fundamentally a question about whether or not he's made restitution to his victims, and the impact it would have on his victims to see him out making a buck off of his personal fame. And I think that's what really matters. There's something to me meaningfully different between reentering polite society by getting a quote unquote regular job, right?

0:19:24 Jamie: And being a paid guest on big shows jokes like Conan O'Brien's. These are sort of different to me. And so what would be interesting to me would be the extent to which he's tried to make restitution to his victims in the way that speaks to how they need to heal. And if his victims, if the people that he did this to, are saying like, "Yeah, you know what? Al Franken has apologized, he's owned it, he has made restitution in a way that I feel I can go forward with my life, not hampered by pain, not feeling like this is a perpetuation of injustice, that he's thriving while I'm still left to suffer because of the wounds he inflicted," then I'm okay with that. Yeah.

0:20:08 Thomas: Yeah. You know, what's interesting is I, uh, I don't believe that there were any accusers and I went, I went through all this and apologies if I'm, you know, forgetting with time, but I went through all the accusers that I could find for that follow-up that we did. And I don't know, I don't remember anyone who specifically said they didn't want him to be a Senator. Um, even the radio host who was like, you know, she was conservative and she kind of went on like, um, you know, the Fox News shows to like talk about this, even she was like, okay, I accepted his apology and I don't, you know, I'm not asking him to resign. So now I, I still am glad he resigned and I think he should have resigned, but that's kind of interesting. I just thought of it when you said like, you know, depending on restitution of victims, I don't really think any of them pushed for him to resign, but you know that could also be, you know, that's a lot of, that's a lot of pressure and that would take a lot, I think, to as a victim.

0:21:04 Thomas: I'm sorry, I'm just thinking this out in real time. So Jamie, if I say anything stupid, feel free to correct me. But that would be a lot for a victim, I thing, to take on that mindset of like, yes, he did this to me and I want him to step down. And that's like putting it all on you and like opening yourself up for a lot. Don't you think?

0:21:24 Jamie: I agree with that, I'm sort of evaluating more the moral framework of it. I don't think we should set a precedent, right, where we expect victims to hold press conferences saying this person is absolved. I think it's a function of whether or not that person does feel healed, in a way that this person's re-entry doesn't harm. And I think there's something unique at play when you talk about someone like Al Franken, who holds a sort of celebrity status, that this just isn't him going back to his life as an elementary school teacher or something. This is him being on public airwaves and national television, perhaps, in which somebody might accidentally happen across him. I think that matters. I think it also matters, the nature of his offenses.

0:22:11 Jamie: And I don't mean to make light of what he did. But again, he's somewhere between stealing money from the cookie jar and murder and, you know, eating corpses. And I think that matters. And I think those are the different factors that are at play when you want to evaluate how and when somebody should be able to, you know, as the questioner says, like reenter polite society. Yeah,

0:22:33 Thomas: Don't think if it were you, and it's so hard, because oftentimes when you try to do like, well, if that were me, it's like, well, yeah, but also, you know, the kind of person who does this kind of thing, it's hard to say like that could be you, but like, don't you think this is the first thing you would have done, after all this, is, is try to figure out like, okay, can I contact as many of these accusers and apologize personally as I can, you know, maybe, in, or at least see if, like, they're willing to, you know, accept a conversation, but maybe they don't want to talk to me, but like, can I, you know, wouldn't it have been like the first thing you did? I always think about that. And then, and then if he's got time on his hands, I know he really liked being a Senator, and he wanted to be a Senator, and it was heartbroken to no longer be Senator. I get it, but you got time.

0:23:18 Thomas: Now you could have done that and been tried to be a model for, you know, making an apology and restitution for what you did. And, and then maybe who knows if like you did just an amazing job of of that. Maybe people would want to invite you on to podcasts and do stuff like that. I don't know.

0:23:36 Jamie: I think that's, I think that's right. I think part of the responsibility you have, especially when you're in a financial position like Franken's, he is not you know, your average Joe scraping by paycheck to paycheck, who, if he's not able to get an employment opportunity, may not be able to keep a roof over his head, that's just not the reality he lives in, right? And so when he doesn't have that pressing economic pressure, I think that makes it all the more important that he make meaningful restitution a priority. That's my sense, at least, that you don't get to just go around hurting people and then wipe your hands clean, go on with your life, and just ignore the damage that you've left in your wake and let the people you've harmed have to carry that alone while you go off and try to be famous again. Like, that to me seems not right.

0:23:46 Thomas: Yeah. It doesn't have to work.

0:24:30 Thomas: Yeah. All right. Well, shoot. I just looked at the clock and I know you have a hard out later, so try to move on. Um, I, and we're catching up. We're, we're moving more into modern day with our questions. This was one, we made a comment. Uh, I think both of us talked about this, uh, about daycare and how little, I Think I specifically was just flabbergasted by how little the people are making at the daycare, especially the day care that we have our kids at. Despite the fact that we're paying so much for this, it's really, again, I mentioned earlier that we, because we're a two-income household, we hit that income limit for some of these deductions, and then it all goes to child care. It really is insane. It can be very difficult. But anyway, Valerie emailed in about this, and I wanted to read this.

0:25:17 Thomas: Started listening to your show pretty recently, and enjoying it. I'm on the board of my son's daycare, and want to give you a little insight into how little daycare teachers are paid. Our daycare is in Maryland, just outside of DC, where, as I'm sure you know, the cost of living is insane. I'm on the board of my son, oh, sorry. Our teachers make between $11.50 and $19 an hour, depending on years of employment and amount of school pay for training they complete. Since our daycare's non-profit, and we recognize that teachers don't get paid enough, staff receive annual raises, a generous holiday bonus as the budget allows, periodic thank you bonuses, and bonus for completing trainings. Teachers also receive PTO, which is surprisingly not offered at most daycares in the area. The director and assistant director are paid more, but it is much less than public school teacher salary.

0:26:05 Thomas: Tuition is actually reasonable for the area and ranges from $1,000 to $1,550 a month, preschool to infant. For perspective, one school we applied to four years ago cost $1,700 a month for an infant. I can't imagine how much it's gone up since then. Because we are a non-profit, all the budget goes to salaries, rent, insurance, and classrooms. I'm not sure how it would differ at a for-profit daycare. For prospective, school teachers in our country make an average of $65,000 a year, which is also not enough to live on or support a family in our area. I, I'm in a completely different industry, but I made a similar salary when I was single and after rent in a sketchy apartment complex, utilities, car payment, insurance, not a fancy car, and student loan payments, I had about 150 left over each month for groceries.

0:26:51 Thomas: You can't afford decent child care on that salary. Now my husband and I are extremely fortunate that we can afford child care and afford for me to continue working, and my heart breaks for parents who struggle to pay for child care. Quality child care should be free and teachers should be paid more. We've made it work for public schools and public school teachers, and it should be no different for daycare. You couldn't pay me enough to be a teacher of any age group. And I'm so excited. I'm so grateful that there are people who love to work, love that work, despite subpar salaries. They deserve to make more. Rant over Warren 2020. Yeah, that was, again, more of an insight than a question, but I couldn't agree more. It's staggering. Imagine Jamie, imagine thinking like, okay, which job do I want to do take care of other people's babies or teach, you know, 10 year olds, which would you think would be harder? Like for me, obviously it would be the taking care of kids' babies. Like no question.

0:27:47 Jamie: I mean, honestly, both make me want to chew through my own wrist.

0:27:48 Thomas: Uh, exactly. What have you had to pick one? And the idea that, you knows, teachers who already, again, don't make enough are at least making a lot more than these daycare employees. Um, that's, I genuinely, I feel anxiety about this because I, I, you know, we are forced to do daycare. We can't, one of us would have to give up our work and you know we're not going to do that. So um, we have to do daycare and I want to be dropping my, my children off. There's nothing more precious to me than these kids in the entire universe and the idea of dropping them off to a place where people are not making enough or overworked or, you not getting enough benefits or that kind of thing like that genuinely worries me. Like I think about it from time to time.

0:28:37 Thomas: I wish, you know, it's already so expensive. There must be, I don't know what the solution is other than some program, perhaps some government program to help fill the gaps, you Know, and, and I guess comparing it to public school is interesting where it's like, okay, we did this with public school. Why can't we try to extend that a little bit into a childcare? What do you think?

0:28:57 Jamie: Well, Because then how would we economically punish women for having Babies Outside of wedlock if they were just able to go to the workforce easily and not be dependent on the men who got them pregnant?

0:29:01 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Even within wedlock, though, it's still punishing them if they if you say, well, you got to stay home because it's so much cheaper to do that than it is to pay for this daycare.

0:29:16 Jamie: Yeah, so this was actually one of my favorite policies that Elizabeth Warren put out when she advocated universal childcare for every American. I thought this was nothing short of revolutionary and absolutely necessary. And this was one of the reasons that I actually donated money to her campaign because it draws attention to an issue that's often overlooked. At one point, I had both of my children in Montessori schools. And thankfully, my husband had the good sense to die after one of them had at least finished it. And so during that other period of daycare, I just had one child care check to write. And I can't tell you what a difference it made in my like monthly budgeting and just day to day experience of reality to not have to write that check to daycare every month.

0:30:06 Jamie: It's outrageous. And obviously, I'm in New Jersey, things are more expensive here than they are in other parts of the country. But it is absolutely outrageous what a chunk of people's budgets it takes up. I had seen a post on Facebook, someone, it was in a widow's group I had joined, and someone was posting that after rent and child care, before they spent a single dollar on groceries, they were at $3,300 a month. And that's just not tenable for most American families. I think it was something like 44% of whom are making like $18 an hour. Like it just, it just the math doesn't add up and we do need to do something about this.

0:30:49 Thomas: Yeah. We're at at least that with the two kids. With one kid, it was like, OK, and two, it's just like, oh, my God. Yeah. OK, let's try to get to a few more. It's so funny because I thought we had all these inner voice questions and we do, but I, I hadn't realized how many older questions we hadn't gotten to and I'm kind of liking it because it's, these are good questions, here's one now, uh, terribly sorry, Jamie, I'm not trying to rip off the Band-Aid again on this, but this is something that I can't help but reading this question, Chris says, "Hello, Thomas, I plan to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary and for any Democratic candidate in the general. I am center left to very left depending on the issue. I'm a big fan of several leftist podcasts, including Young Turks, Majority Report, Chapo, David Feldman."

0:31:36 Thomas: I don't know that one. I know the other ones, but I've never heard of that one, though. Shows seem to be fine with Sanders accepting and promoting Rogan's intention to vote for him, and I agree with them, but how would some of all these leftists have responded if Rogan had stated he would be voting for Joe Biden or any other Democratic candidate? Their reactions would have been completely different. We know it, and even if they won't admit it, they know it too. I just can't, I know that they would have. Like, we all know this, right? If Joe Rogan come out and endorse Bernie Sanders, or sorry, and just endorsed Joe Biden, there would be an unending ridicule about how, oh, yeah, yeah. He's practically Republican. Rogan is. And this is naturally, of course, the centrist types would stick together. You know, there there would have been unending criticism. I mean, right.

0:32:19 Jamie: Yeah, I think that's right. I think I've been pretty consistent though, that though I personally support Bernie Sanders for president, I recognize that Bernie Sanders supporters are equally liable to different cognitive biases, just like the supporters of every other Candidate. Or just where I sort of push back a little bit is I don't think that this is uniquely applicable to Bernie Sanders supporters. I think people generally are not very good thinkers. We tend to, you know, not be rational, we tend to especially have sort of like first person perspective bias. And very often our first principle and how we evaluate things is how this makes me feel, whether or not this gets me closer to what I want. And rather than does this apply principles of like justice or fairness, fairness equally, would I feel the same way if I were on the opposite side of the debate. And I think people who do that are very, very, very rare. So yeah, do I think people would have Pointed out all of the ways that Joe Rogan is problematic had he endorsed a different candidate? Yeah, of course I do, people are gonna people, yeah.

0:32:34 Thomas: Sure.

0:33:27 Thomas: Yeah, I think. And again, this doesn't apply to you as one of the good ones. I think what maybe if I'm thinking through what makes it feel so much more frustrating at times is the degree of the vitriol. So like, if on one hand, I'm like, I don't really like that, that Rogan support, whatever. And then Rogan supports my candidate, I'm, I kind of like that. There's not that big of a swing between those two things, but sometimes the vitriol, again, it feels really high on some of these things. So the swing would make it just that much more of a gap between when it's my guy versus when it was the other person. It does make it feel like a little disproportionate. But yeah, I shouldn't open that up, wound up again. I just, I couldn't help it. Sorry. I shouldn't have written that.

0:34:12 Jamie: I Think I don't know if maybe we need to do like a separate thing, you know, a separate Bernie bro episode or something. I think there are obviously vitriolic and outlandish Bernie supporters, I think that's also true of all of the other supporters, I Have

0:34:28 Thomas: I don't hold on though. I mean, did you see the stuff about the union? You know, the culinary union, like there, there's a specific group of them that are so much harsher and more, uh, extreme, I feel like, or at least a bit more and, and they're online and they're, if you're in certain environments, it's way more prevalent. And that's my problem.

0:34:29 Jamie: Yeah

0:34:51 Thomas: You I'm on Twitter a lot.

0:34:52 Jamie: So I'm not sure about how reliable that sample size is to tell us anything meaningful about the supporters of a candidate that at this point comprise many millions of Americans. I don't know how much we can meaningfully extrapolate from the online behavior of a couple of hundred people, people to reflect a movement that consists of millions of Americans across racial, religious, sexual orientation, gender and economic lines. It just seems to me to not say very much.

And there's this sense, and I have to be really careful with this because I know I'm sticking my nose in and I'm going to get in trouble for this. So like, I know it's good, I know I'm going to get cancelled and it's fine. But there's something about the way that the Bernie bros are called to task, that reminds me of the ways that when people of a minority do something not great, That that entire community is asked to atone and publicly disown it in a way that when members of a majority community commit bad acts, similar members of that community are not asked to aton.

And so what I think of is, you know, if a Muslim commits a crime, the entire Muslim Muslim community is expected to denounce it, is expected to call it out as though this is somehow representative of that entire community in a way that when a white Christian nationalist commits an act of domestic terrorism, there's never a call on the media for all Christians to denounce this act because we sort of take it as a given that this is an outlier and it doesn't represent the whole. And there seems to be a disparity here with Bernie supporters. You know, no matter how many times you point out that like I'm a great Bernie supporter,

0:36:35 Jamie: Nobody's extra extrapolating from this sample size of one to say I represent all Bernie supporters, and so it's sort of frustrating to see these outliers, these bad actors who seem to be very online, as somehow taken to meaningfully represent the totality of Bernie's support in this way, I

0:36:54 Thomas: Yeah, I think part of it is that it's one thing now when Bernie's, you know, national numbers are, you know, astronomical, as high as they've ever been, higher than they've never been, because he's the main candidate now. It's one thing to say, yeah, look, huge movement of millions. But like, that wasn't always the case. And this behavior was the same. So like, it, I do not think they're, like, I see the comparison you're trying to make. I do not see the causal reason why there would be this bias in in the case of Bernie supporters. Now I understand when it comes to racism and that kind of thing, like there are reasons why people are like, oh, you're a Muslim, you should have to apologize for all, you know, all terrorism, all that kind of things involving racial bias. I don't really, what would be the same thing that's causing that in In the Bernie bro thing other than that this is a large group of people, it's not a couple hundred people, it's A very Large Group of people

0:37:45 Jamie: Think It's Classism To be quite frank and Yeah And I think there's Well

0:37:47 Thomas: Classism I don't Think It, I, I don't even think of these Bernie supporters as being, what, what class do they inhabit that there Would be classism I

0:37:57 Jamie: I think There's a sense There's this, there's someone I had seen had phrased it as, every time you hear someone complain about the Bernie bros, replace Bernie bros with rowdy peasants. And I really think that there's, that's at play here, that there is dismissing these people as Bernie bros and pointing to the most outrageous supporters as somehow being reflective of the movement more broadly. I think is being done as a historical strategy to discredit the movement and to discredite the sort of economic populism that he's been advocating, revocating, as somehow, you know, born of resentment, somehow born of laziness, and therefore illegitimate and not needing to engage seriously with the arguments that he's putting forth.

0:38:43 Thomas: Why wouldn't that have applied to to Warren? Do you really think there's, I

0:38:46 Jamie: Yeah, because I do think that, as I said earlier in the podcast, Elizabeth Warren at the end of the day has described her as a capitalist. She thinks markets ultimately are capable of finding the solution and Bernie doesn't. Bernie does not think at the end of of the day, capitalism can be reformed in a way that's more compassionate. And he does think we need to make a more meaningful and decisive move toward a socialistic government. And I think that's part of it.

0:39:15 Thomas: Mean, I disagree, I, I really think it has to do with the the demographic. You are one of the reasons that you're not the Burnt average Berny bros, you're not the demographic of the core group of Berni bros that was his initial support. Now, now that's expanded, but like back in the early 16 it was a core group of people that were doing this who were really online, and his rhetoric of everything, of him being under attack all the time, and everybody, you know, trying to get him, I think has contributed somewhat to this atmosphere, to this, this kind of support. All

0:39:45 Jamie: Yeah. Yeah, so this might be something worth doing its own episode on, because I think that I understand the nature of cause and effect to be different and in the other direction. And I'm not sure that the sample size is big enough to be representative in the way that it's been used. I

0:40:03 Thomas: Right, well, we'll, we'll leave it there on a disagreement and maybe we'll revisit it. Um, now, we hopefully we can, when, how are you doing for time? When do you need to jump out of here? Okay.

0:40:12 Jamie: Got about 10 or 15 more minutes.

0:40:15 Thomas: We will try to do some inner monologue questions because I finally got to them in the queue, so a lot of these were just kind of, uh, because people were so blown away by this episode, and and the fact that, you know, we Jamie has such a different mental experience than a lot of people. There are plenty of people who are like, "Oh, I'm like Jamie," you know, it's so cool to hear talked about. Or also, we had some people writing in to just say, "They, you know, sure, I have the inner monologue, but I actually don't have the mind's eye, stuff like that." So there's a lot of those here. Here's one from Jack. That's again, it's kind of, I think if I'm interpreting this right, it's kind of turning everything on its head because it's saying, okay, and you and Jamie's last episode, you talked about how she doesn't think in words. Words, well, I guess that would be audible words, right? Because you still, you still think with words, don't you?

0:41:04 Jamie: My thinking is definitely what I would describe languagey, just not with sound.

0:41:06 Thomas: Languaging. Okay, gotcha. "You also said that while you do think in words, you don't typically see stuff in your mind's eye very often. Hmm, trying to think, is that right? Not only do I think in words, it feels like I always have to imagine an image or location for my thoughts to be happening in. If the thoughts don't have any relationship to a physical location, I typically either just imagine the inside of my skull." That's interesting. "Well, I'm thinking, or just a random location I see in everyday life." Huh? And that, so it's like, kind of like, isn't it weird that thought, that these, this person's thoughts need to have like a visual element, you know, in some ways, is that a little, maybe that's a little inefficient. I'm kind of branching off from the question, but yeah, like maybe, maybe it's a little inefficient to have the image involved. Like maybe it's, maybe it's faster to just be able to, to cut out the middleman and just go straight to the concepts or the language-y thoughts that you have. What do you think?

0:42:03 Jamie: Yeah, I'm not sure about that. I guess it's going to depend a lot on how those memories are encoded and which parts of the brain are responsible for retrieval. I think so much of this happens outside of our conscious awareness that it's hard to really get clear about what makes for a more or less efficient system. That's really interesting To me, though, that they need to locate a space. There are certain aspects of my thoughts that have location, like there are certain passages of books I can picture like where they're located, with like on the page, but the idea that all thoughts need to correspond to a geographical location is completely new to me. So

0:42:25 Thomas: Yeah, yeah.

0:42:46 Thomas: Yeah, I don't have that. That might be just Jack and some others, I'm sure.

0:42:53 Thomas: I guess I've already established that I think my mind's eye is maybe a little weaker in some ways, but that's, again, I think that's just color. I don't really know what that's about. It just seems to be color because, again, I think I have a strong mind's-eye when it comes to certain things. Um, but I don't feel like I always need a picture by any means. I think I can definitely just kind of do some thinking without any visual component, but, uh, I definitely go ahead. Sorry.

0:43:17 Jamie: If I said No, I was just going to ask, if I say, like, Olaf to you, can you like Visualize Olaf? Have you seen Olaf Enough Times that you could just Sort Of pull it Interesting

0:43:21 Thomas: Oh, absolutely. 100%. Oh, are you kidding? They also, there's good chance. I am seeing Olaf currently like frozen as being on in my house, even while Phoebe's gone. I'm sure it's on somewhere. Uh, no, yeah, I can definitely picture. Oh yeah. I certainly have the mind's eye in that way. It's just something about color where I don't, that doesn't, the information doesn't retain, like I can make it, I can see for a second, you know, and then it just kind of goes away and I don't. And it's more like the color, so Olaf's carrot nose, I know it's orange, but I can't really see like what shade of orange, I couldn't really tell you, you know, it's like I conceptually know it is orange than that I see the color of it, but I absolutely see Olaf's face. That's weird. I don't know what that's about. All right.

0:44:08 Thomas: One. So here's one that somebody grappling with all this, I think it could be interesting. Ian says, "I am still waiting for this to all be a joke. I, I think Jamie feels the same way. I'm listening to the episode and screaming, you guys are talking about the exact same thing and just describing it differently." Ooh, no, I don't think that's the case. "I started the podcast thinking I was an internal monologue person, by the end of it thinking maybe I didn't have one. Audible means you literally hear the voices like an auditory hallucination. I don't see how that can be possible because everyone would be confused that those voices weren't coming from the room they were in. I have woken from sleep a few times because I swore someone was in the room, said my name, that's as close as I've gotten to auditory. For me, the log, what's, sorry, there might be either a typo or I'm

0:44:08 Jamie: I Don't

0:44:53 Thomas: Not understanding, but it says, "For me, my log is not sounds, just thoughts about sounds." Log, I don't know if that's a typos. Oh, okay. Cool, thanks for catching, figuring that out. "Just thoughts about sounds and music stuck in my head. It's just thoughts about music, like the map is not the territory. I definitely suffer from anxiety and bad thought spirals, but I'm passively observing the thoughts, not hearing them." So yeah, I just want to emphasize that this is definitely not us talking about the same thing and just describing it differently. Like sometimes it starts to feel like that in certain ways, but I mean, Jamie, I think you'd agree that this is very documented, and like there's, there's science on this, and there's ways, there are ways that they're looking at the brain and kind of exploring the differences, right? This is not just a

0:45:00 Jamie: Monologue, internal monologue.

0:45:41 Jamie: That's right. And in fact, in that anthology that we were talking about in that episode, one of the papers, and I can't remember the author's name off the top of my head, but I can look it up and we could post it if somebody wants it, was specifically about how insight or research into the inner monologue was elucidating their understanding of schizophrenia and raising some interesting questions. Because one of the theories that was proposed is that what's at stake with schizophrenia isn't just the hearing of voices, which is how many people describe what their inner monologue is like. It's the failure to properly identify the location as being internally based.

0:45:41 Thomas: Yeah, Okay. Yeah,

0:46:27 Jamie: And so that's one of of the avenues that they're investigating now as to better understand the nature of schizophrenia. Not that schizophrenics are unique in hearing voices, because it turns out the rest of you also hear voices and not hear in the literal sense.

0:46:42 Thomas: But It's We know that it's not, but in the same way, I, I would, I would say it's exactly the same, that, right, uh, as you're sitting there, Jamie, you with your eyes open, you can picture Olaf, right? And you're not confused that Olaf is in the room with you. It's the exact same for the voices. It is different. Like, yes, it is hearing voices in the same way that you're kind of seeing Olaf, but it's still slightly, you know, it's enough different that you, I mean, maybe in an extreme circumstance, if you're looking at a blank wall and you like had an amazing imagination or something, you could picture something that's so vivid that you would think it was there, but I doubt it. I never think I'm hearing somebody who's not there. I mean, it's pretty easy to draw that distinction, I think.

0:46:55 Jamie: Oh, yeah, totally. Correct.

0:47:31 Thomas: So just to clarify to the emailer.

0:47:31 Jamie: That's exactly. Yeah, that's exactly right. So people who have this experience, who claim that they have an experience that is like hearing when they think to themselves, describe it as having something that can be coherently understood as an auditory component, although they are aware that they are not literally hearing anything with their ears, but the experience inside of their head is not dissimilar from what it's like to literally hear a voice.

0:48:02 Thomas: Right. I will say the only thing, and this is I'm guessing unique to me, but there are some songs where when I'm singing them, because there's a vocal harmony that I really, really like, sometimes I genuinely can't tell, like, it sounds like the harmony is happening in real life. Like it's so vivid in my imagination. Um, that's the only time that it's like, it's really, really vivid to me. So certain, certain harmonies in that way, but that's the only thing is that, um, Oh, and actually, okay. I had one. Okay. Jamie, I remembered something I wanted to ask you about.

And sorry, I shouldn't say I remembered. Someone reminded me. I think they tweeted us this. So if there's any questions in the queue about this, I'll just go ahead and ask it and that'll cover that. I wanted to ask you about meditating and if you've tried meditation because I, and I think a lot of people, have the challenge of when meditating, hearing all these thoughts in your head, blah, blah. Just constant internal monologue. Now, do you have the same trouble, but it's just, you're not hearing it or what's, what's meditation like for you? Oh,

0:48:29 Jamie: Yeah, and I can't comprehend that at all.

0:49:09 Jamie: So meditation is definitely not like I am being assaulted by thoughts. For me, Yeah. So when I meditate, it's very calming. It's very quiet for me. And obviously, I think, or at least insofar as it's possible to know if you think, I think I think. And not all of those thoughts are the result of, like, conscious deliberation of "what should I think about now?" "Now I like happy things, so what are some happy thoughts?" And like everyone, I imagine some of my thoughts are sort of decided for me and presented to me by my subconscious. And so meditation is more a process of being aware of what comes up and where my mind kind of goes. And then thinking about what that means and how to understand it and how to make space for it and

0:49:16 Thomas: That sounds nice.

0:50:03 Jamie: To not let it, you know, dominate my experience, particularly if it's something negative. But it's definitely not what it's been described there, where I sit in a quiet space and all of a sudden I'm kind of inundated with a number of thoughts. That sounds dreadful. I'm so sorry guys

0:50:19 Thomas: Yeah. Well, on one hand, on OneHand, it feels like on first blush, like, oh, it must be so much easier for you to meditate. But on the other hand, as we, as, as we've discussed at length, it's not as though you're thinking any less, you know? So maybe, you know, maybe it's similar and that you still have thoughts, but I don't know, or maybe not. I mean, maybe the nature of having an inner monologue makes the thoughts a little more more like distracting or intrusive. I don't know, but, but maybe not. Maybe it'd be exactly the same. I really don't Know. That's funny. It's interesting. Um, one more final question because you got to run, we're going a little long, but along the same lines, this one I think is, I'm, I'm very curious about David asks one question. Thomas didn't ask Jamie was whether she can hear voices of people in her dreams. Is there any dialogue in your dreams? And if so, how do you experience it as someone with an inner monologue? I wasn't even aware that some people don't experience it. Love the show. Yeah, answer we want to know. So

0:50:22 Jamie: Oh, So, that's uh, this is as close as I'm ever going to come to know what it feels like to be a lab rat at. Yeah, so that's interesting. I hadn't actually thought about that before. And so reflecting on dreams is sort of hard because they kind of dissipate as soon as you wake up. And it's hard to really be clear about what you remember from a dream, even really vivid dreams. And I definitely have vivid dreams, and I definitely remember having conversations in dreams, or particularly, particularly arguments in dreams. I don't know, I can't be clear about whether or not my experience in my dreams is one that could be meaningfully described as auditory.

0:52:02 Jamie: I'm actually not sure about how to answer that. I definitely have dreams where conversation is a part of them, but I don't know, I can't say definitively, one way or the other, actually, if my experience of dreaming contains an auditory component. I don't know, that's really gonna freak me out. Yeah.

0:52:13 Thomas: Interesting.

0:52:24 Thomas: You'll have to, uh, you'll have to report back. Let's see if you can. Maybe you can think about it more, like, right after you wake up or something, I don't know, because

0:52:29 Jamie: I'm gonna I'm gonna pay attention to that. Actually, when I wake up tomorrow, to see if I can remember having an auditary component. Yeah.

0:52:36 Thomas: Like, yeah, it wouldn't be impossible that even people without inner monologues would experience maybe different things when they're dreaming, because, you know, our, anyone's dreams are different than just sitting here thinking. There's, it's more immersive to a degree. So it's like, I could see it going either way. Like, maybe you just have no audio ever, or maybe, like, that is the time when you experience, you know, hearing things. That's interesting.

0:52:58 Jamie: So I I had a particularly horrific nightmare last night and. And it's so bad, I refuse to even describe it. But I can still sort of visibly pull up in my mind, like, the nature of the nightmare, because it was so salient. And because it was so saliant, it also reminds me that there was dialogue, like, components to the nightmare. But I can't pull up a memory of the sound.

0:53:24 Thomas: It's like telepathy though.

0:53:26 Jamie: Yeah, but I can't pull up a memory of the sound, the way that I can pull up a visual memory of what about the dream was so frightening. And I don't know if that reflects the fact that my dreams don't have an auditory component, or that I'm just incapable of constituting sound from my own thoughts now after the fact.

0:53:45 Thomas: Yeah. That's the thing. Even if you were able to dream in sound, the fact that you can't sit here and think in sound when that I'd be, how would you be able to, you Know, like, yeah, yeah.

0:53:53 Jamie: I'm not, I don'T how to answer that. I really don't know.

0:53:56 Thomas: Exactly. Oh, super interesting. Okay. Well, uh, there's plenty more. We'll probably have more at a later date, but we are out of time. We've gone long. Thanks so much, Jamie, as always, for coming on and being a lab rat. You can have the piece of cheese or whatever.

0:54:08 Jamie: Oh, I love cheese.

0:54:09 Thomas: Awesome.

0:54:09 Jamie: Excellent.

0:54:10 Thomas: Me too. I was just going to say, like, on one hand, that sounds kind of insulting. On the other hand, I'll gladly take some cheese. Like, I don't go through a maze.

0:54:16 Jamie: Yeah, I just got this like black truffle sheep's cheese and I have no regrets. I've eaten the entire block in two days, it was delicious.

0:54:23 Thomas: All right. Well, thanks for being a Lab Rat. And everybody, thanks for the questions. Sorry that we maybe went a little too long without one. We'll try to keep it more regular. You know, we're trying to find that sweet spot. Uh, and uh, look, we will uh likely be in your feed again very soon because of the debate and uh some other stuff we want to cover, so thank you for listening. Hey, please consider pledging. Um, you know, we we don't push it that that much, but we we have had a a kind of a slow drop off over time, and uh, if if you're considering pledging, please, uh, you know, pull the trigger on that now. Would would be a great time, because we could use your support, and that's at patreon.com/seriouspod. So thanks for listening, everybody, and we'll see you next time.

0:55:15 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, if you'd like to follow Jamie on Twitter, she's at Euthyphro. And follow me at SeriousPod. If you'd like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If you're not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.