Forty University have a real live professor so I'm only a professor in my imagination my dad got two PhDs Josh so I massively compensate by fetishizing academia because I never even graduated from UCLA so I didn't even have a BA but my dad got two PhDs and so even though he's gone he's no longer with us I absolutely fetishize academia because I do it almost daily show on YouTube but I want to do something different so I find I often get a more profound understanding what's happening in the world around me by consulting academia and it's so much better and deeper than journalism so my technique is I put it whatever topic I'm interested in into Google Scholar and so I put talk radio into Google Scholar and I found about 40 different academic essays on talk radio but yours was the best written of all of them and your essay talking in particular about the anatomy of Rush Limbaugh's pseudo apology to Sandra Fluke and I just really loved the way you broke it down it was just so clear because most academic writing is abstruse is that fair is it is it relatively rare to encounter like really clear simple academic writing I think that is too true supposedly Albert Einstein said that the person that understands something the best explains that the clearest I've seen people on the internet say no Albert Einstein never said that I don't know but the point is that's kind of my motto I would like to be as clear as I can be so that other people do not have to have a PhD in order to understand what I'm trying to say I think some PhDs use academic jargon to obfuscate a little bit they're not a hundred percent sure so they make up a new word and no one knows what it means and now you can't really say they're right or wrong not all of them do that of course some of them are just so deep into their field that it doesn't occur to them that ordinary people don't talk that way but I think maybe because I also have a background in radio I was taught to try to be as clear as possible as simple as possible and so it means a lot to me that you say that I appreciate that I do think that article might have misled you a little bit because I'm not sure I'm really an expert on talk radio but I did have a good time analyzing some people listing will remember that case from from about 2012 when Rush Limbaugh had to issue an apology to Sandra Fluck and it was a clever apology I don't know if it meets the definition of an ethical apology but I think it was very clever so thanks for reading that article oh it was I mean so much of the I mean so much of the academic discussion of talk radio just seemed absolutely pointless as far as me getting a show out of it I mean this is entirely tangential to the topic and why I led you to this show but I was struck like up until about 1990 or the academic research was essentially talk radio is for losers for people or just have empty lives and they try to fill it through this para social relationship I mean I don't know if you've had any interest in the academic discourse with regard to talk radio and then then it took a 180 degree turn it said well talk radio listeners are more educated more more affluent more politically engaged than the average person so it just took a 180 degree turn circa 1990 it's just kind of curious I don't know if you know anything about that or have any view well my sense you know I did a couple of years in talk radio about 2003 2004 wasn't that good at it I was never gonna be the next big star and so I decided to go an academic route where I would have a steadier job and I wouldn't have to get up at three in the morning but my sense is that yeah talk radio kind of surprised a lot of people kind of came out of nowhere kind of saved the AM radio band for a couple of decades because there was nothing else to put on there as soon as FM music was a thing nobody wanted to listen to AM radio but talking sounds okay on AM radio and so that started to do that and obviously Rush Limbaugh is probably the biggest name in all of that but people started to figure out that you know there were people who wanted some companionship and whether they were in their cars or at home they could get that from listening to somebody talk about things that they were thinking about and calling in and and so all that research about parasocial relationships yeah I mean yes back when I was in radio I occasionally had people come up to me and I was not a big star but people would say hey you know I just can't start my day without listening to your program and that's that's nice little ego trip there it feels good it does matter to people I mean I've also worked in Christian music radio and and some other things and radio stations that do those pledge drives that everybody hates so much the fact that you can get people to call in and give money to a radio station I think is evidence of the emotional connection people make to it so you know they really can't connect with people but I don't know I mean I think talk radio filled a niche I think people who wanted information and were interested in politics especially if they were in the car or maybe they were at a desk they couldn't watch TV even after we had CNN but they could listen to the radio and so they knew what was going on and then they also had some talking points if they were the sort of people that like to argue with their friends so I certainly understand why it would start to appeal to a slightly more educated audience but today I think we just live in a world where media are so fragmented everybody's just trying to find their niche the thing that they do well the thing that there's an audience for and just do it and just talk to one little group of people and and that has pros and cons I guess now I moved to America in 1977 I was 11 years of age I was a little bit socially maladjusted I was socially maladjusted in Australia socially maladjusted in America and so I did form a relationship with the radio there's very intense I got a radio for the first time in my life come coming to the United States and the songs that I would hear on the radio they illuminated everything that I was feeling it was amazing and the the disc jockeys they also seemed to know what I was feeling they picked me up when I needed a pickup they gave me solace when I was feeling down and and I don't know did radio play an important role in your childhood? A little bit yes I grew up in a pretty conservative religious family and my parents were pretty strict about watching television we did get a vcr when I was about 10 years old and we could watch certain movies that were pre-approved and so forth but we didn't watch a lot of tv but I mostly could I was allowed to have a radio in my room and I could kind of listen to that as I wanted to and so the thing that I started listening to was mostly sports radio and for three years my family lived in Puerto Rico my father was in the Coast Guard and we were stationed at a Coast Guard base there and late at night I would listen to arm forces radio that would carry basketball and baseball games from the U.S. and because of the time zone Puerto Rico was in sometimes the games wouldn't even start until 10 p.m. or 11 p.m. and so I would hide under my sheets with my headphones I think my parents knew it was going on it didn't care but I would hide under the sheets until 2 a.m. or something listening to ball games and I loved it yeah so are you a little younger than me I'm 55 yeah I'm 41 ah okay so so when you were 10 that was 30 years ago so 1990 right okay okay so what may my father was a preacher so I grew up except the Adventist my dad did a PhD in Pauline rhetoric and a PhD in apocalyptic I think Daniel 814 what denomination did you grow up in well because we were a military family my early years we kind of moved around different denominations but when I was 9 10 11 we kind of settled into a Presbyterian church and my family still attends a Presbyterian church here in Texas oh interesting and what about rock and roll did you surely your parents had a problem with rock and roll yeah we had a problem with rock and roll when I was young I can't remember exactly how old I was but I had a friend who started listening to not regular rock and roll mind you Christian rock and roll okay but but I thought that meant he was going to go to hell and I tried to save his soul by telling him to stop listening to it and my parents found out about this and they said you know what that's that's not really maybe you've got the wrong idea we have concerns about some of this music but we don't think that this sends people straight to hell and so they kind of realized that I was maybe a little too zealous about some of the rules that I learned growing up and my teenage years were a period I would not say they were a period of rebellion but they were definitely a period of reevaluating some of the things that I heard as a child and saying you know what maybe some of these rules are not necessarily rules from God that everyone has to follow maybe some of these are just personal differences and there's a little bit of room to disagree and so I mean I still consider myself a Christian and I'm glad for my upbringing but I'm definitely not quite as I know it's a pejorative term but I'm going to just say rigid I'm not quite as rigid as probably I was as a youngster and what about rock and roll did that play a role in your life well I went on to work for a couple of radio stations that played contemporary christian music and the christians who don't like rock and roll don't like contemporary christian music and by that I mean Amy Grant Michael W Smith Steven Curtis Chapman jars of clay I've been out of it for so long I don't know who the big bands are today I'm afraid but I worked for those sorts of radio stations and my parents were a little uneasy with it when I started doing that in high school but they didn't tell me not to and I did it through college and for a few years after college and you know I kind of got tired of it to be honest with you but I know there are many people who love it and I think that's great so you never had a stage where you were all up into secular rock and roll music now my knowledge of mainstream music is embarrassingly weak I was playing trivial pursuit with some friends one night and I had to read the question and I read it I said something like who's the lead singer of the band the fugees and everyone laughed at me and I they corrected me and so I'm pretty uncool as far as that goes what's the fugees I've never heard of them well I think that is I think josh demel was dating the lead singer for a while anyway it's I think it's the fugees actually that's how you're supposed to say it but it's totally outside of my wheelhouse so did you have a time when you totally left Christ behind no immersively I did not I mean I say that because I'm I'm glad to be a Christian today I definitely I had a period in high school where I was sort of seeing a girl that my parents didn't know about behind their back and when they found out about that we had a talk you know but that didn't end up you know going terribly far so I don't think I ever really I never really had a time where I didn't consider myself to be a Christian or where I thought that my religion was nonsense or something like that so and maybe that's a little bit unusual for people a lot of people go through ups and downs but I'm kind of low drama I guess yeah and how on earth did you become an academic and at what point in your life did you suddenly get that vision of a life in the academy well I worked in radio before college and through college and after college for a few years my wife is an attorney and so we moved to Oklahoma we met in college in Arkansas we moved to Oklahoma in 2008 and I got a job at a radio station in Tulsa and she was making pretty good money with a law firm there and one morning after our morning show was over the boss came in and he said at 3 p.m. today we're going to flip the switch and this station is going to be a different format and everybody who's part of the old format is laid off and we're having a big 11 a.m. staff meeting to announce the change to all of our salespeople and everybody else and you need to be out of the building by the time that happens and that was a pretty kind and gentle radio firing based on what I've heard other people show up and their key card doesn't work anymore and that's how they discover they don't have a job people get called out in the middle of their airshift and and not allowed back in so it was still startling to me but I kind of knew it could happen at any time and I reflected on my career and I said you know what I like radio it's fun but I am not good enough at it to be one of those big stars who has really good job security and makes a lot of money at it I am good enough to be a journeyman radio disc jockey who moves from town to town and makes $35,000 a year doing radio and I'm not sure that that's fair to ask my wife to move for that and I'm not sure that that's what I want to do for the rest of my life but I do love to talk and if I become a teacher I can force people to listen to me talk right so I had taught a couple of classes as an adjunct instructor while I had been working in radio and I thought teaching was a lot of fun so I went to the Oklahoma State University and got a master's degree and then I went to the University of Oklahoma and got a PhD and that's kind of how it all started and what did you do your PhD thesis in my PhD thesis was a study on corporate apologies for a data breach at the time there were a lot of news stories about companies getting hacked and data breaches and I thought you know one of the things that was already out there in the literature was when you are responsible for a bad thing a crisis or whatever you need to apologize if you're not responsible for it then you can make excuses or you could respond in other ways and I thought you know data breaches are really interesting because whose fault is it obviously it's the hacker's fault the company did not want to get hacked but the public kind of feels like the company had a responsibility to keep people's information safe and so maybe they fell down on the job and so I thought you know different people have different reactions to this maybe I can get a nice range of opinions about this so I did a couple of things I did an experiment where I gave people different versions of different corporate apologies to see which one they like the best and then I did another thing where I asked people to write their own apology that they would like to receive from a company and there was a lot of overlap mostly people I think have they kind of know what an apology is supposed to sound like because everybody is familiar with the concept but there were a couple of interesting things and the biggest one was if a company is apologizing it's not enough to say that they're sorry or they apologize they have to do something tangible and by tangible I mean financial everybody preferred the apology where the company said we are installing new security and we are going to provide you with a year of free credit monitoring that was way better than saying we acknowledge our responsibility and we sincerely regret what happened do you see what I mean so when it's coming from a company the way the company shows its sincerity is with dollars and cents I concluded ah and when did you learn about pseudo apologies and that they are often more effective than genuine apologies well that piece that you found on google scholar about rush limbaugh is where I started to put this together and there was a journal the journal of radio and audio media did a special call which for listeners who might not know sometimes academic journals have special topic issues and there aren't very many professors out there who have a article about that topic ready to go sometimes so it can be easier to get published there and I was like well I used to work in radio I think I could whip something together I can write an article about this you know in a week and so I did and they published it so I was excited because at the time I was still a PhD student that was a pretty big deal for me but I went back and I found the tape and I found the transcript of the apology and I went through it over and over trying to figure out what is it about this apology that doesn't feel right and really what for those that don't remember the situation Sandra Fluck was a Georgetown law student I think she was about 30 years old at the time she testified at a congressional hearing about insurance health insurance about how hard it was for her to get birth control and how important it was to students like her to have birth control and that's why congress should require insurance companies to cover birth control in their insurance plans and Rush Limbaugh started joking about this and saying basically she's saying that the public should pay for her to have sex well what does that make her that makes her a slut right that makes her a whore he said and people reacted very negatively to this obviously a lot of that reaction was sparked by democratic party operatives who had had arranged for Miss Fluck to come and give this testimony but there was also backlash from people on the right like Rick Santorum and others that were you know they were just uncomfortable with Rush Limbaugh using rude language to describe this woman and so a weekend went past and a bunch of advertisers got pressure and started dropping the Rush Limbaugh program and I think it was Monday Rush Limbaugh came back and he issued this apology and the core of what he said was I'm sorry I stooped to their level the left does this kind of thing all the time but we're supposed to be better than that and last week I wasn't better than that I stooped to their level saying crude things trying to make this point and I'm sorry and he went on a much longer than that but you know I thought is it that clever but that's not a good apology because on the one hand you're saying you're sorry but on the other hand you're still hammering away at your political opponents but did it work and the answer appears to be yes people who wanted to support Rush Limbaugh said well hey he apologized let's all move on you know everybody makes mistakes forgive and forget let's move on Democrats were still kind of mad about it but the media was kind of disinterested after that you know they ran some stories about Rush Limbaugh apologizing but ultimately he didn't say anything that would get an FCC fine he didn't say anything that was going to get a lot of stations I think maybe one station dropped him if I remember right but you know he's a cash cow for all these talk radio stations and so ultimately this apology which was definitely not a full genuine apology it worked I thought why did it work I think it worked because there were people on his side and there were people on the other side there were two sides not everybody was in agreement about the rightness or wrongness of what he had done everybody was kind of uncomfortable with the language he chose to use but his listeners the Republicans the people on the right his audience they didn't want the government to mandate health insurance programs cover birth control they didn't want that they weren't with Sandra Fluck so they didn't really I don't think they would have liked it if Rush Limbaugh had said you know what Sandra Fluck was right this was important this was a valid point she was making and I was disrespectful and dismissive and I really am sorry for that and I'm going to try to do better that would have been closer to a genuine apology but I think that would have angered his audience so he found a way through a pseudo apology to thread that needle and say something that sounded like an apology on the surface it didn't satisfy Sandra Fluck or the Democrats but they were never going to be satisfied it did satisfy his base without making his base angry at him for aligning himself with the political opponents and again I'm not talking about the ethics of it I'm just talking about the strategy of it is pretty darn clever yeah I didn't I didn't realize all the the specifics that you went into but I really appreciated how you you broke it down because in a in a competitive situation you don't want to be identifying with the enemy even if you're wrong and they're right exactly that's just how the world works I mean this isn't this isn't church this isn't seminary I mean this isn't like like some some moral abstract in the real world like we we should naturally have a tribe or an in group and in the real world you don't want to go identifying with your in groups enemies if you want to maintain your in group status yeah I mean that's in some ways that's unfortunate but I do think that's sort of the reality of the world we live in yeah I mean it's unfortunate that we're not living in heaven right but for this world I mean anyone who who starts identifying and apologizing to your in groups enemies is is going to lose his in group and he's going to be very lost and alone in the world and I mean some people are made of such stern moral fiber that they can they can go through with that but most people it's a really bad strategic decision he don't want to publicly go against your in group I think an example of that would be the so-called never trump Republicans oh yeah right there are people in that group and this is not necessarily people that I agree with or disagree with but there are people in that group who used to be darlings of the right for example the magazine national review used to be very well respected on the right and I I guess it still is to some extent but it lost a lot of luster when it came out against Donald Trump and there have been people that have left that magazine because they felt like it came back to Donald Trump in the last four or five years and and they're now you know building their own media empire and I you know I don't you know I wish everyone well in their careers but I don't know if it'll work out long-term or not but it's certainly these are people names like Jonah Goldberg or David French that people on the right might know that were pretty popular at least among sort of right-wing intelligentsia back in 2015 and are persona non grata in some quarters now because they chose to go against the tribe now what about someone who's really I assume Presbyterians are something of an in group I mean sure okay so they have an in group identity and then I'm thinking like who would be the biggest enemies of Presbyterians that it would be a really bad decision for a prominent Presbyterian to make a fulsome apology to I mean would it be would it be Methodist would it be something Adventist would it be Catholics who would it Jews who would it be right right well if we're talking about sort of the grubby grubby church politics right I guess the Presbyterians have a pretty long-standing adversarial relationship with the Roman Catholics yeah and of course lots of Protestant Christians perceive a pretty strong adversarial relationship with Muslims yes um I would say if you if if someone said something offensive about the Catholic church or about Islam or something some leader in Presbyterian circles and then they came out and they said I want to apologize I know that we're all God's children we're all going to be together in heaven one day and I shouldn't use language like that that would cause a firestorm because there would be the assumption that no no only certain sets of beliefs get people into heaven right and so there would be the perception that by by saying that oh we're all going to be in heaven together that you've undermined traditional beliefs of the church now if you didn't do that if you simply said it was wrong for me to use that language I still believe what I you know I still believe that we're different I still believe that what you teach is wrong but I'm supposed to love you and I'm supposed to be charitable towards you I don't think that would get that much backlash because repentance is so deeply built into a lot of religious traditions right so I think you can you can apologize but you've got to be loyal to the core beliefs of your group and if you betray those as part of your apology your apology will backfire big time right now has it been like any major soul searching on behalf of protest on behalf of Presbyterians vis-a-vis Catholics because I grew up a seventh-day Adventist and there was just so much visceral loathing hatred of of Catholics it would just it was huge in my upbringing so when seventh-day Adventists go to graduate school in religion they get a talking to that they're in a secular university they they get pulled aside and said okay we know that seventh day Adventists you know hate Catholics but that's not on in this academic situation you can't you can't speak or act that way so has there been any soul searching on behalf of the Protestant Presbyterian denomination that they perhaps went over the top with hatred of Catholics oh yeah well yeah I mean I don't know all of the history but you know the really traditional Presbyterians still follow the Westminster Confession of Faith that was written back in 1646 at the time it was written there was a section in there that said the Catholic Pope was the Antichrist the Church the Presbyterian Church has amended the confession since then and that's gone okay we've taken that out and there's been a few other amendments along the way I do think that and I don't want to act like I'm an expert on all Presbyterianism but I think that in the circles where I have been and where I've seen things I think a lot of different evangelical Christian denominations are realizing that we are not culturally dominant anymore I think back in the 80s Ronald Reagan we thought we were and we thought that it made sense to do things like you know the Southern Baptist boycotted Disney in the 90s and you know people were mad that an episode of NYPD Blue on ABC showed Detective Sipowitz's rear end and thought we should boycott ABC over that like they're Christians in the United States used to feel culturally powerful and it made them aggressive today I think Christians are pretty conscious of the fact that they're not nearly as culturally powerful as they used to be and I think that has provoked a little bit of soul searching and people saying you know what we need to try to show kindness and love to people um in order to win them over not not push them around or bully them because that's clearly not going to work I think I heard something to the effect that the the religion of America is something like niceness that that all the religions have largely given up their their claims to the theological truth and exclusivity with regard to God in exchange for the civic religion of Americanism does that ring true I mean I hear what you're saying and I think that you can find examples of that absolutely when it comes to Presbyterianism there are different pres even among Presbyterians there's more than one flavor okay the Presbyterian Church USA is the biggest Presbyterian denomination it's it's one of what people call the mainline Protestant denominations in the United States um and that's not my denomination I don't want to speak on their behalf but there are other smaller Presbyterian denominations that would at least claim that they're trying to to hold the line on some of their doctrinal beliefs they're trying to say you know no you still have to believe certain things um to be a real Christian and um but but there's pressure there's always pressure um because we do live in a society where we're supposed to be tolerant we're supposed to live and let live and figuring out how to hold certain beliefs that are by their very nature exclusive without being um uncharitable to other people is something that a lot of people you know it's it's challenging oh it's it's impossible but I mean you can finesse it by compromising one way or another well people do of course and then so there's two ways to do it one is to give up certain beliefs in order to be popular or to not seem like a jerk or the other is to accept the fact that some people will see you as a jerk those are your choices yeah yeah uh how you are an associate professor at Texas Christian University how Christian is your university I would describe Texas Christian University as sort of nominally Christian um the university has an affiliation with the Christian church disciples of Christ which is another mainline Protestant denomination pretty big tent but when I was hired here nobody asked me any questions about religion and and I interviewed once for a job at Baylor University which is a Baptist university and they asked me quite a few questions about religion there and I didn't get the job so I don't know what that means but at TCU that didn't come up there are people here who are Christian and part of that is because it's Texas Christian University but part of that is because it's Texas Christian University if you know what I mean we have a lot of students who are Christian but we also have students from many other faiths nobody is required to go there's no chapel requirement like some Christian colleges have and the core curriculum does require people to take a class called religious traditions but people can choose any religion so it could be a class related to Christianity but it could be related to Judaism or Islam or Buddhism or something else and so you know it really students can choose to be involved in in Christian organizations on campus but it doesn't really come from the top now I believe you're an associate professor in the difference between I as I understand between associate professor and full professor is the full professors have tenure if that's accurate what do you have to do to get tenure well so fortunately there's three ranks there's assistant professor associate professor and full professor at least at TCU and in a lot of other universities have a similar scheme so I did get tenure um year and a half ago or so oh congrats so thanks so I mean I have come to believe that tenure doesn't protect you if you do anything that makes the news yes okay but as long as you are doing your job you know then you can hope to have a lifetime sinicure unless of course there are financial exigencies and COVID-19 represented a financial exigency for every university in America so I try not to rest on those laurels but it is nice to have it if you don't get it you gotta leave so assistant professor is normally the first five years and then you can be considered for tenure and you're promoted to associate professor and then the promotion to full professor is um mostly just an increase in salary that comes later on and it's I think it's because they figured out that it's it's terrible to take away all incentives from your employees you have to give them something to keep working for they'll just be terribly lazy I used to do a show every week with a tenured professor and I said to him one day we were like largely doing the show on the weekly Torah portion I mean he was not Jewish but it's just kind of an excuse to talk about anything with it like uh with a with a polite sounding name on it you know this week's Torah portion and then we just go off in many directions and then I said to him hey we should do a show comparing Torah with Mein Kampf okay and I thought it was like a great topic you know compare and contrast in group out group dynamics the the pagan world view versus the the theistic world view anyway he got fired oh no yeah he was tenured and he lost his job in large part because I said to him let's do some shows on Mein Kampf and he he got a little discombobulated he went he took it a little too far to me it was like an academic exercise and right and he said oh wow Adolf's you know got a good point here oh no oh no well I had a professor when I was in grad school who used to work at Tulane and then Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and a bunch of people got laid off and so he ended up at the at Oklahoma State when I was a student there and he said you think tenure is a guarantee it's not a guarantee and so you know there are pros and cons to the tenure system that's not really the point but I I try not to live as if I can do anything I want now I I try I'm trying not to take responsibility because he took it like way beyond what I was thinking of but I introduced him to the book and suggested to him the book that just turned his life upside down and I'm trying to tell myself I'm not responsible like what he did it's like I offered him you know a marijuana cigarette and then he started doing crack so I keep telling myself I'm not responsible but like oh I do feel a little bad and so I make I make a jihad on this show against the zombie by theory of information like I say there's no you know information does not act like a zombie it does not turn you into a zombie like if I get you to read minecraft or I get you to read communist manifesto or anything else no information is going to make you go any direction that you you want to go and it seems like most people believe in the zombie by theory of information for example that youtube videos radicalize people I don't believe that youtube videos take anyone where they don't want to go do you do you have any well there's a long history you know well I shouldn't say long history the study of communication especially media as an academic field is relatively young we mostly steal theories from psychology and sociology and wherever else we can steal them from but it started really in earnest with world war two and with people who felt like Adolf Hitler was incredibly successful with propaganda and there was some videos or some some movies that were made by the US government called why we fight trying to stir up patriotism and support for the war effort and the researchers were trying to make figure out how do we persuade people and at the time they were using phrases like the magic keys of persuasion and and early communication researchers referred to their work as a magic bullet theory or a hypodermic needle theory and the idea was if you could just get the right message in the right medium you could just shoot it into people and it would change them and Yale had some professors doing a lot of research on this and over and over they came back with very disappointing results they could not figure out how to create a message that would persuade everyone and so the pendulum kind of swung first it said oh my goodness communication is magic and if you just blasted at people you will turn them into zombies the pendulum swung back the other direction to more of a limited effects model that said you know what communication doesn't actually do that much and today we're probably somewhere in the middle where we say it depends on the context it depends on the situation it depends on the person there's all these variables communication can be very powerful but it can also be a big dud so I think that's pretty consistent with what you just described yeah it will let you go in a direction like if you if you are just lately even non-consciously frustrated with your life and you want to blow things up you know communication like a book can offer you an opportunity to you know blow things up and to start your life in a new direction but even with hypnosis even when you're under hypnosis you're not going to do anything that you don't want to do you're not going to become a murderer under hypnosis unless you want to become a murderer I think that's right yeah um thinking about something you just said and oh let's go go back to Sandra Fluck you describe her as a private citizen but she volunteered to be a public personality on a highly contentious issue that the state should be funding should force insurance companies to completely fund birth control and she talked publicly I think in a democrat organized hearing about how how important it was that the state would pay for a birth control and how much pain and inconvenience that had caused her so how sure are you that she was still a private citizen she'd been an activist for years this was something that she was you know very dedicated to in a highly incendiary topic so I'm challenging your description of her as a private person I'll take that criticism that's fine I would say that you know I'm not an attorney but based on what I know about libel law you know public figures have a higher burden of proof if someone libels them they have to prove that it was done with actual malice not just negligence I suspect that if Rush Limbaugh had been sued for libel against her that she would have had to prove actual malice she was probably at least a limited purpose public figure in her capacity as a as a witness on Capitol Hill so I will I'll absolutely grant your point there and the only thing I'll say in my defense is that when I was writing that article I wasn't very interested in that because if Rush Limbaugh's strategy for dealing with this controversy had been to say hey she's a public figure she's put herself out there she's in the arena she's got to be willing to take the slings and arrows you know if that had been his his strategy that would have been really central to the argument I wanted to make but it wasn't the argument I wanted to make was that he had a problem because perception apologies are about dealing with perceptual problems when people perceive that you've done something wrong you know you can try to convince them that you didn't do anything wrong but that is a tough row to hoe and so he decided that the best thing to do was this pseudo apology which he did pretty artfully I think and so that's what I was interested in I was mostly just sort of accepting and going with the media portrayals of her just studying the mechanics of apologies make one a better person well you can use that knowledge for good or for bad right you can if you understand how apologies work how to frame them how to what to put in there to make people think you're really sorry you can use that to manipulate people and that's bad you can also use it to genuinely try to rebuild a relationship or genuinely repair your reputation if you're really sorry for what you did so in one sense I guess I would say you know knowing stuff is always better than not knowing stuff so it makes you a more knowledgeable person but as far as a morally better person know I think that knowledge on itself on its own doesn't make you better I think you have to choose to use it the right way yeah yeah so your essays say that apologies quote quote apologies have become a staple of public discourse did this accelerate I mean we doing this more now than 20 years ago 40 years ago 60 years ago and if so when did we change when did they become more of a staple so have become implies that they were not yeah yeah I can't prove what I'm about to suggest this is not something I've studied carefully but this is my speculation if you go back and compare Richard Nixon's resignation speech in 1974 during the Watergate scandal with Bill Clinton's speech during the Monica Lewinsky affair you'll see that Richard Nixon doesn't really offer any apology he does allow for the possibility that maybe some of his judgments were wrong but he says you know whatever I did was for the good of the country and he resigned Bill Clinton 1998 says you know what I did was wrong now he emphasizes the fact you know it was private and people shouldn't be prying into my family's business but it was wrong and you know and later on in December of 1998 in the middle of all the impeachment stuff he made a couple of statements where he talked about how he was sorry and he had done things wrong in words and things wrong in words and deeds and so forth and he survived now Watergate is not exactly the same situation as having an affair a consensual affair with an intern but I think somewhere when it's not very precise I grant you but somewhere between 1974 and 1998 it changed and Bill Clinton proved that it changed he demonstrated that you could survive in the highest political office by admitting you were wrong I think when Richard Nixon was president admitting you were wrong had to come with a resignation and since he had already decided he had to resign there was nothing strategic to gain by offering any kind of apology but Bill Clinton demonstrated was that you could keep your office if you gave the right kind of apology and no doubt there's lots of factors that went into that and some of it was that the Democrats controlled the Congress at the time that Bill Clinton was facing that but but I mean some of some of it was the public willingness to accept moral failings in their leaders so so there's a lot of factors but I think that from that point on people in positions of power were like should I really give this up or should I just offer an apology and if I have a constituency that wants me to stay that is willing to help defend me then an apology plus their activism on my behalf is probably going to let me keep my position so that's that's my guess I can't prove that that's true but that's what I would suggest and what about there's a phenomenon okay so with with rush limbo situation that would not have happened in our likelihood 10 years earlier when before media matters okay media matters started taping talk radio and then highlighting outrageous things that were said so prior to media matters let's just posit perhaps rush limbo this these remarks would have been less likely to hit the news I think that's possible certainly yeah I mean media matters you know I teach classes in public relations and we tell our students journalists and newsrooms all around the country are understaffed and overworked but they still have that news hole to fill if it's a newspaper they have a certain number of inches they need to fill if it's a tv broadcast they have a certain number of minutes to fill and part of what we do in public relations is help them fill it and that's one of the things media matters does right they find salacious tidbits from I guess mostly from the right and then they bring them to media outlets that they think might be interested and they help those journalists fill that news hole and the journalists have an ethical duty to do their own reporting and make sure they're not just taking something from any PR person but sometimes they're busy and sometimes they are sympathetic and sometimes they kind of go with it and and so they're they're receptive to these PR efforts and they run it and it blows up in a way that maybe it wouldn't have otherwise so yeah I think I agree with that and also people were not people were not taping talk talk radio looking to blow people out of the water what rush limbaugh said was kind of almost par for the course with with talk radio but we then had the development of the I guess the left-wing response to talk radio which was to start monitoring so if if there'd be no monitoring by hostile actors then rush would probably have gotten it wouldn't have been a story but we've had the rise of monitoring and so we're taking things out of one particular situation one particular relationship where what he said wasn't necessarily a problem and then putting it on the news where just a person watching here's these rebugs out of context this like oh you know this is socially unacceptable and then the advertisers jump in so just like if you or I had excerpts taken of of things we've said in one particular context and then they were played on the news we'd be looking to apologize right context obviously matters I think the the big problem for rush limbaugh was that people who would like to support him are being asked about his comments now because there's a tape because there are news reports republican members of congress or even ordinary listeners when they see their family you know people are being like did you hear what rush limbaugh said can do you you don't listen to that guy do you what a misogynist what a pig right and this creates a problem for the people that want to support him because they have to answer these complaints and I think that's the biggest reason that he had to address it I think that if if somebody was a rush limbaugh fan and heard him say that they might be like yeah you know that uh come on rush if if they were offended they might be a little offended but they'd get over it pretty quickly it's because now other people are bringing it up that it has to be dealt with yeah life is complicated like that I had a radio talk talk radio host who I particularly venerated during a time in my life is named Dennis Prager and when I broke up with a girlfriend she would call Dennis Prager's office to trash me because she knew that this would hurt me more than anything else that she could do and then when I started becoming an internet personality in 1997 every time I did something there was edgy out of bounds people would would either say to me or to Dennis Prager oh what you know what does Dennis Prager think about this and it it just became absolutely unbearable so I had to just make a clean split because everything I would say that was edgy or would just get reported to Dennis and then Dennis would get questions about it it was no fun for either one so people just even like the biggest idiots they have an uncanny ability to probe and figure out your your weak points absolutely I think that's true yeah so often you have no idea of what what's gonna happen but people just they probe and and they find so I've just been reading this book by moral philosopher John M Doris on the role of character so he essentially calls he's caused his book lack of character personality and moral behavior and so his argument and this is a very widespread argument I think this is the dominant perspective in sociology and maybe in psychology as well that we're different there's no true self like there's no true Luke there's Luke when I'm talking to Josh and then there's Luke when I'm talking to Jaime and there's you know Luke when he's in an office setting and then there's Luke when he's at the bar I mean there's no true self because every situation brings out different parts of me and and so I'm just thinking with regard to apologies one of the elements of an apology is that we want to separate ourselves from something we've said and done that we want to say this isn't our true self so I'm thinking the popular understanding is that we all have a true self and if I may be so broad the academic understanding is we don't have a true self do you have any thoughts well I'm not a trained sociologist or a trained psychologist so I can't speak as an expert I'll speak just as an individual I already told you that you know I am a Christian so I think people have a soul I think we do have a true self that is spiritual that's a that's a personal view that I have I think I'm sure that the experts have a rebuttal to what I would say but I think there's some empirical reason to believe that there is a a mind or a soul in us that is separate from just our physical body I think there's a reason to believe that existence is not purely matter I'm not a materialist and for example I would point to something like the fact that if you give patients in the hospital a big sugar pill and tell them it's a miracle cure they'll feel better right we that's well documented that suggests to me that the mind can do things independent of physical reality even just the fact that human beings across continents and across generations all not all of course there are devoted atheists who are very intelligent but overwhelmingly human beings believe that there is something spiritual that doesn't prove it's true that's not logical proof but to explain that as some sort of you know I'm just not very individually I'm not satisfied that that's just a product of evolution it's not clear to me really what the advantage of that is I'm sure that there are experts who will explain to me but I think there is a true self I think there's a mind or a soul or whatever you want to call it now when it comes to apologies if there is you know a moral soul to people then turning away from wrongdoing being sorry for hurting others has a real moral significance to it but even if there's not then what does that make an apology an apology is a social ritual that sends a signal it signals to people that a person recognizes that they have violated social norms and that they have an intention to uphold those social norms in the future and on that basis that person can go from being rejected or ostracized to being brought back into the fold if you will right so it still serves a purpose it's just it's more of a signaling purpose does that make sense yes yes yes so we we're essentially vowing to uphold social norms in the future and we're we're choosing to ignore that there are situations where every one of us is not going to uphold social norms so I don't know if there are any traits about yourself that you think are true universally in your life because I would argue to you that there are plenty of situations where these traits are not going to be evident okay I think it's I guess the question is does a trait have to be something that's evident in every situation can it be sort of sublimated right can it still be there but be overridden by other things that become more dominant under those circumstances and I'm just making this up as I go along again I'm way out over my skis here but I would say I I would argue again and I I'm sorry I don't I don't mean to turn your program into a Sunday school class goodness but I think that the I think my Christian faith is something that's always part of me I think it is I don't but I must admit I don't always live up to it right so there so you could certainly come back and you could say well aren't there times when you don't act like a Christian yes there certainly are but even in those moments I recognize that the beliefs of my faith are that people fall short and people need to be sorry when they do that they need to repent they need to ask God for mercy and and that's still part of me right so I guess that's the best I can think of to try to suggest that there is something about me that is consistent but it's not consistent in my actions yeah I would I'm trying to argue that it's consistent in my beliefs but if a person is measured just by their actions then of course no one is consistent with their actions all the time right so when you're in a hurry when you've got too much to do and not enough time to do it in or when when I'm in a hurry when anyone's in a hurry they're going to become more cut more short with their speech less empathic much more transactional and the way they relate to other people so in in these situations the the situation is is probably going to have more of an effect on how you behave than anything else about you whether you're a man of faith or an atheist also if you're in an alley fighting for what you feel like is your life with you know someone where it's like it's either him or you that situation I'm sure is probably going to affect you more than anything inherent in you and also when you're in competition like the more competition that you feel in your situation the much more likely you are to be spiteful right when when we feel the pressure of competition we're going to be much more likely to want to lash out at other people and even like take a wound ourselves if we can you know really administer a good a good wound to other people so whatever the situation has just has a profound effect on us in a ways that most people don't think about I know I agree completely context matters situation matters do you think that we have to choose one or the other because I think it's possible to argue that there is a true self but that true self will you know can be buffeted and can you know look different can can make different choices based on the situation I don't think every action or every choice changes who we are but I mean do you think we really do you think that to be logically consistent we have to go all one or all the other no so these ideas are new for me but I've really embraced them because for me I have a problem with idealizing and devaluing people I have had a lifelong habit of taking people I don't know very well such as people on TV or people on the radio and putting them on a pedestal it's like Dennis Prager he is an honest man Dennis Prager here is a courageous man like Dennis Prager here is a clear thinker and and and at the same time like members of my family ah you know they're just so flawed like I just devalued the more people I know well so I've had a lifelong history of this and I'm sure Jordan Peterson has been going through something like this he is a huge hero to thousands of young men who would tell you that Jordan Peterson is courageous Jordan Peterson is clear Jordan Peterson is a true seeker and I just found situationism so helpful because there's nobody who's courageous in all situations like courage is highly situation dependent the person who's courageous in one situation it's going to be absolutely cowardly in another situation the person who tells the truth in one situation is going to be the fount of falsehood in another situation the person who you think is clear in one situation is going to not have a clue in another situation and so when we idealize people or devaluing them is because we're only seeing them through certain situations and so like dating and falling in love and the power of the erotic we fall in love because we only see people in certain situations then when we get married I assume I've never been married when we see them in more situations that that puppy love that that juvenile you know love and lust thing is is completely changed into something that I don't know anything about but I presume it's there because we're seeing someone in more situations and so it's often been falling in love is often being compared to a mental illness and I think it only happens because we see people in certain situations so if someone has my problem of idealizing and devaluing understanding that whoever you think is courageous Luke they're a coward in a different situation whoever you think is a truth teller they're a liar in a different situation whoever you think has this virtue in other situation they have the vice I don't know if anything there you wanted to comment on well I will say a couple of things I think I would be surprised to meet someone who tries to argue that the situation does not matter at all I think it's self-evident what you're saying that the situation does matter that's why parents worry about who their children hang out with right if you hang out with the wrong group of friends you might get into trouble that's why you know if an alcoholic goes through detox they're going to recommend don't go out to the bar your first night out of detox that's not a good situation for you maybe you'll get to the point where you can do that later but don't start there that's not safe for you right people need to understand their limitations they need to understand situations that create risks for them and they need to be smart about that I think that's I mean I think that's consistent with everything that you're saying I think my wife is probably a little rueful after we got married to discover what a loud snorer I was you know so yeah things change to some extent what you hope is that there is still a core of commitments a core of values a core of priorities that you hang on to and when you make a mistake an apology is a way to signal to people that this action and I use the word mistake but sometimes we willfully hurt people sometimes we willfully do what's wrong it's not really a mistake it's a it's a misdeed it's a transgression when we do bad things our apology is designed to try to show people that that's not who we are right I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of the fundamental attribution error yes yes and right and for any listeners that don't know it's just the idea that when other people do bad things we blame it on internal factors they're a bad person but when we do bad things we blame it on external factors you know something happened to me I couldn't help it right that's just human nature it appears to me and if we understand that that we have this tendency it makes us I think more forgiving of other people slower to be offended by them but but it reflects this deep seated human belief that some things come from inside and some things come from outside and situations are outside and they matter a lot but there are some things inside and again that may make me seem like a rube to the top sociologists and psychologists but I cannot shake that that belief that there are certain things inside people so would it bother you if people you regard as fundamentally honest that there are all sorts of situations where they are dishonest well no I mean maybe it would in a specific instance if I felt like it hurt me or if I felt like you know I was trying to defend them and then I was embarrassed because they were exposed as a fraud but I don't want to be too simplistic with this answer because no doubt there are people you know if my father was exposed as some big fraud that would shake me a lot because I have a lot of esteem for my father but most people in the world are not all good or all bad and I would go so far as to say no one is all good or all bad everybody is a mixed bag I think everybody has positive traits and negative traits and proclivities towards good and proclivities towards bad it's why we don't like movies that have two-dimensional characters right they're boring we like movies that have more interesting complex characters because they feel more realistic everybody is complicated but that doesn't mean that there's not some core there I guess that would be my position so the the idea of moral character that has some resonance for you you believe that that reflects something real it does now one of the things that Presbyterians are big on is that people are bad without help you know that's a that's a deep rooted belief in most of Protestant Christianity traditionally anyway is that human beings are fallen we have a propensity to do the wrong thing but we can get God's help to do the right thing and so it's not really shocking to me when people do bad things it kind of that kind of lines up with my perspective I think when people do good things you know that's we're happy about that right we get into rhythms though we get into routines with people we trust them and they've they've done the right thing consistently we expect them and then when they disappoint us that's jarring um but I don't I think I lost track of the question that I was just thinking about situationism versus moral character so the situation says there's no moral character because we're different in different situations so let's just take the the very common dilemma of one's one spouse has left town and one's colleague of the opposite sex whom one has been flirting with invites you over for a good dinner and there's going to be wine and great food and the person who's got his focus on his moral character will say I didn't need to worry I am a person of good moral character nothing's going to happen the situationist says you need to stay out of that situation because whatever you think of your character the situation is going to be incredibly perilous if you put a value on fidelity so that's an example of this where the situationist perspective I think is much more powerful than the moral character perspective all right so when you put it that way I am with the situationist absolutely I think the the moral choice is to not go to that dinner right yeah you if you're going to I might be using the terms incorrectly or imprecisely but the the thing that demonstrates moral character is to know thyself and to realize that everyone can be you know everyone can fall from the moral heights that they you know aspire to everyone is subject to that so don't put yourself in a dangerous situation right if you value your marriage don't do that I still think that that is a choice that reflects some level of moral character but no I don't believe that there are people with such moral character that the situation doesn't matter now one of the weakest forms of apology that I see all the time and it really disgusts me is quote if I offended anyone by doing x I sincerely apologize what do you think about this rhetoric I mean that's one of the examples that the literature uses the academic literature points that out as a pseudo apology or a non-apology if anyone was offended then I apologize part of what's so aggravating about it is that it kind of hints at the idea that the person who was offended might be too sensitive right maybe it's really their problem you're offended that I use the n-word or you're offended that I you know was complimenting it off Hitler or whatever it might be right you're offended by that well if you were offended then I'm sorry it doesn't own the wrongdoing so it's not a real apology a real apology needs to accept responsibility for the wrongdoing and express remorse and either explicitly or implicitly promise not to do it again and sometimes it's also appropriate to include some sort of an offer of reparations let me try to make it up to you sometimes there's no way to repair damage all you can do is say that you're sorry and you won't do it again and you feel terrible about it but you know if I offended you I apologize yeah that's a big old cop out now it feels new to me when did we suddenly start getting offended by people I don't know using the n-word or saying negative about the the transgendered or I mean there seems to be a massive explosion in being offended by things that aren't directly related to use just like if someone says something negative about my group I am now offended this seems new in American history at least we've had a substantial explosion of feeling offended over things that don't directly concern me sure but we probably have things that 50 years ago would have offended people that don't offend us anymore right so probably there would have been a time when lots of people would have been offended if someone said goddamn even if they weren't religious right I'm not a Christian or I'm not Jewish I'm not Muslim I don't care if you talk about God but I'm still offended that you said that because that's a violation of a social norm and you know the the strongest the highest social norm that we have of things that don't constitute actual criminal offenses I think right now is the use of the n-word right that is the that'll get you canceled and so if you if you know that this is a social norm we don't say this word as a society and obviously not every individual in society agrees with that but if if society has said this is our new social norm we don't say that for whatever reason how did we get to that point where that's the thing that you know is the worst thing well it probably has to do with a lot of the research that's been done related to race and the history of slavery and all of that and there's politics tied up and all that too I realize but we have got to the point where that's the really really bad one and if somebody does that they have violated a major social taboo and they have sent a signal that they are different from everybody else who knows better than to use that word so I just put I'm sorry for interrupting you I just put the word offended into google books and gram viewer and basically from 1920 to 1980 the word was hardly ever used comparatively and then there's just been an explosion in feeling offended the use of the word offended from 2000 on so I think we have had a social change as far as taking offense I accept that I agree with that I would say that people um part of it is our communication technology has made it easier for us to let everyone know that we're offended and it's easier for us to find out what somebody we never met said somewhere that we weren't and be offended by that so some of it is social media and all and internet and all that stuff that's part of it um and part of it might also be that as a society we have made a transition from you know sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me to saying words are very powerful words can hurt just as much as sticks and stones well in one sense that's nonsense if I tie you in a chair and I say all right you get to choose for one minute I will beat you with a bat or for one minute I will hurl insults at you what are you going to choose I hope you choose the insults because you might not survive the bat right in one sense sticks and stones are still more dangerous they are direct forms of violence but it isn't quite true what we used to say that words will never hurt me words are powerful to hurt people's feelings and change the way people think about themselves and and words can sting and words can wound but in a metaphorical sense but they do matter and as a society we have recognized that they matter and we have worked hard to try to change the way we refer to different groups of people the way we refer to people that have certain types of disabilities the way we you know the way we describe things we have tried to become more sensitive for the most part I think that is good we should care about other people's feelings but we have also cultivated in our young people I think and they're growing up now we have cultivated this idea that if somebody said something that hurts you then they were bad to say that and my response is well it depends it depends on whether it was true or false and it depends on whether it was needlessly cruel or whether it was just accurate right if somebody if I give a student a grade and I give a student an F and I say this wasn't acceptable work I'm sorry this doesn't get a passing grade this gets an F there are students that might say boy Dr. Bentley is so mean he's I can't believe he would say that to me but I would defend myself and say look I'm just describing what happened that was just true on the other hand if I say to the student I can't believe you're even in college you're an embarrassment you're never going to amount to anything then I deserve probably to get fired for that because that was needlessly cruel I don't have any way to know if the person is going to amount to anything there are lots of people who amount to things without passing one of my classes you know and so that's not acceptable but we have trained people to think that any time my feelings are hurt the speaker must have done wrong so I just put apologize into google books and gram viewer and from essentially 1880 to 1940 quite low use of the word apologize and then it starts creeping up in the 1950s and 1960s into the 1970s and then there's an explosion in the use of the word apologize after year 2000 and I have a theory so prior to 1960 being a victim was considered uncool but actually nobody wanted to be thought of as a victim so for example after world war two there was no initial use of the word Holocaust like if you'd ask someone in 1948 about the Holocaust they would not have a clue what you're talking about and if you'd applied it to world war two they would have thought about the 60 million people who approximately died in world war two then in the 1960s we had an explosion in the power of victimization Jews blacks Latinos homosexuals everybody wanted to be a victim group because being a victim was powerful and so I would posit to you that the reason that we've had an explosion in apologies is that we've had an explosion in the power of conceiving of oneself as being victimized and belonging to a victim group well I'm open to that argument I'm open to that argument I would say I mean we're not really saying whether it's appropriate to be a victim we're not in some of these cases obviously there's real victim hood right genuine victim hood and people who are really victims in some cases there may be people who are trying to jump on a bandwagon that could be so yeah I'm open to that argument I think that but I also I'm not discounting that I also think that information technology contributed to that I'm a big believer in the effects of the internet at suddenly making things everybody's business that weren't everybody's business before and people having opportunities to be offended when they didn't before yeah but um but it'd be hard to think of our current apology culture without or the incentives for thinking of oneself or one's group as a victim you may be right you may be right but I would say I'm just I'm thinking about my childhood in the 80s and the things that people in my Christian subculture were outraged about they were outraged by certain R rated movies they were outraged by certain lyrics in certain songs they were outraged by various things in the media that were scandalous and I don't think they saw themselves as victims at that time I think they saw themselves as the protectors of what was good and decent and certain things crossed a line for them and so it's certainly possible to be outraged and to want an apology without seeing oneself as a victim but I'm very open to your argument that the more people there are that see themselves as a victim the more people there will be that want an apology and especially if the victimhood is sort of nebulous in some cases it doesn't call for you know reparations it doesn't call for paying restitution or something then just a verbal apology or a printed apology might be the an adequate symbolic way to address that perceived victimhood in some cases yeah are is there a growing sense of victimhood among Presbyterians in your lifetime I mean everyone else is on the gravy train I mean you guys why are you on the gravy train I well I'm sure that we are to some extent without realizing it I think that you know the the victimhood mentality again and I don't use that term to suggest that there are no real victims I think there are but I think there are also faux victims and and if I thought I was a victim I would be a faux victim because I'm I've had a good life and people are nice to me and I don't you know but I can still find things in my life to complain about and I have to tell myself well you know what life's not perfect and you got to just deal with it be a be an adult but for people that are are sort of taught to think that life's supposed to be perfect and then they might feel like they are a victim in those cases I'm sure there are Presbyterians who feel victimized by things like the the transgender rights movement and and the LGBT movement as a whole because that's a tough one for sort of very traditional Christians to deal with right it's for a long time Christian doctrine has been unambiguous that sexual relations are supposed to be between a man and a woman marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman sex is supposed to be reserved for marriage and there isn't really room in that sexual ethic to approve of the LGBT lifestyles and I don't want to reduce it to one it's obviously diverse but it's very difficult I think that so I think there are people who say boy you never know you could get fired for for not saying the right thing or not using the person's right pronouns or whatever but my view is that if if someone is a good Presbyterian they're also supposed to believe that God made everybody that God made people in the image of God that everybody has inherent dignity inherent worth and everybody should be treated with love and kindness so I think if we focus on that you know we might get back into a corner where somebody wants to talk about our views about sexual morality and I think people should be honest about their views but I think if a person's life demonstrates that they value every human being and are striving to show them love and respect I think they can sleep well at night not feel too victimized and feel like they're doing what they were supposed to be doing so I'm going to take a risk here and go go into left field I grew up among Protestants some of the Adventism is a type of Protestantism everyone I knew till about age 18 that I knew well was a Protestant and one thing I noticed that there was no veneration of the idea that you can treat outgroups differently than your in-group there was no idea that it was okay to screw over an outgroup I mean it's not that the people I was around were good or you know always good and kind people but there was not this in-group outgroup difference that I've noticed upon converting to Orthodox Judaism and now I see it all over the world I realize that in-group versus out-group distinctions are the dominant way that humanity lives life and I listen to you and I just think that you're so emblematic of Protestants and how vulnerable you are because why on earth would a a group that believes in universalist ethics like even secular Protestants believe you know secular atheists or you know people from Protestant background even they believe in universalist ethics and then I'm just thinking how vulnerable you are to everybody else on earth who believes that you know screw the outsider we have no obligations to the outsider let's just get everything we can for our in-group so in an increasingly diversified America I'm just thinking how vulnerable you are because you're competing in a sense against those who most people don't believe in universal ethics to to my shock most people believe that there are once there's one standard for how you treat your in-group and a considerably more relaxed standard for how you treat your outgroup and I'm just thinking you know mainstream Protestants you're not long for this world because the that really nice ethic you have is going to make you it makes fantastic countries when you dominate like you Protestants have produced you know the highest trust societies generally speaking according to corruption perception indexes but how vulnerable you are to being out competed by those who don't give a damn about outgroups which is the majority of the world's population well I hear what you're saying here's how I'm going to respond to that if what Protestants believe is true then that means that there is that there's God on their side right and and that means that there's hope for them to survive because God could do whatever if what Protestants believe is not true and God's not on their side then I don't really care if they disappear right that's a good response either a true belief system or it's not yeah yeah that's uh that's really good so how did you come to have a subspecialty in public relations did it grow out of your interest in apologies or did your interest in public relations come first and then apology second well to be honest with you it was a pretty pragmatic choice on my part when I did my master's degree I still thought I might do something with radio or broadcasting but when I started my phd at Oklahoma the faculty there had some really top level you know nationally known public relations people and I realized that that's where the growth in academia was at the time journalism is obviously struggling and even broadcasting is struggling a bit with YouTube and everything else and so they're not growing number of jobs in some of those specialties but strategic communication advertising and public relations is still growing partly because it in some ways and this is not a good thing necessarily in some ways it's taking over for those other specialties so I made a pragmatic choice to focus there and I didn't have too much trouble getting a job after my phd was done and it has worked out well now once I started reading about it and learning about it I got interested in it and I saw you know a lot of things that were compelling about it so I'm glad I made the choice but it didn't start from my just deep love of knowledge it started because I wanted a job yeah from from my background in journalists I always just despise publicists as paid liars I mean you say publicist I think paid liar but as I've dealt with so many of them I like some of them became friends like I really really came to like them and so as a journalist I think many journalists we just have an instinctive uh loathing of publicists did you have to overcome any internal prejudices you had against publicists I was never a real journalist I'd never identified myself as a journalist when I was in radio I thought of myself as an entertainer not necessarily a great one but I mean that's what I thought I was doing and so it wasn't that hard for me to make the transition I worked for about five years I was a production director at a little radio station where I was writing radio scripts so I mean I was writing mostly radio copy ads and so I knew a little bit about the advertising business I didn't know as much about the public relations business but I didn't have that transition and I've never worked in public relations you know there's the old adage right those who can do those who can't teach so here I am teaching public relations but I'm I'm pretty academic we have people here at TCU that are you know 20-year veterans of the industry that do a great job teaching pragmatic hands-on kind of stuff a lot of my work is more theoretical the classes I teach are mostly media law classes and so they're not as much about here's how you write a good news release here's how you convince someone to give you an interview it's that's not my real expertise so I've enjoyed it but I probably wouldn't be your go-to if you needed one person to teach you everything about PR I probably would not be the best fit so what have you learned about the social phenomenon of apologizing in the age of Donald Trump because when he rose in the 2015 Republican race for their nomination and when he he said about John McCain well you know my heroes are people who don't get captured it was universally regarded by all the elites journalistic elites and political elites that Donald Trump would have to apologize and when he did not apologize and when he came down that escalator and said we've got immigrants bringing their problems with them they bring drugs they bring crime they're rapists and some I assume are good people and he didn't apologize for that even though all these department stores stopped stocking his brands he was taking this huge financial hit I who has not been excited about a politician it's like whoa this is something entirely new this guy's got balls he's just going to stand up and and say it how he thinks it is and even if he's wrong I am just so impressed by the strength of this guy that he can go up against every right and good person telling him he needs to apologize I mean the Trump the Trumpster was a phenomenon that that kind of went against all the conventional wisdom with regard to offending people and making apologies did you have any interest in this phenomenon sure I mean I will say um at first glance I think someone could say that Donald Trump sort of undermines all of the things I've written about when you need to apologize but here's how I'm going to try to defend my my theorizing in this area what I have said is that if everybody's mad at you you have to apologize if everybody likes what you say you don't have to apologize if some people like you and some people don't like you then you have to figure out which groups are relevant to your success which groups matter in public relations we talk a lot about stakeholder groups okay so if you have relevant important stakeholder groups that are upset with you you probably need to apologize but if the only stakeholder groups that are upset with you are the ones that don't matter and if the relevant stakeholder groups that support you if your base of support is fine with what you're doing then keep doing it that's the strategic path and basically what Donald Trump demonstrated was that he could get elected at least once you know running against Hillary Clinton without having to apologize for any of the stuff he said now the one thing that he did apologize for were the comments he made to Billy Bush on that access Hollywood tape remember that yes he did not admit that he had actually gone up and grabbed anyone inappropriately he said that that was locker room talk and you know he was sorry for using those words but he also took that opportunity to take shots at the Clintons to you know defend himself um but he did sort of say that you know he was sorry for using those I can't remember exactly the language that he used but yeah grab him by the well I mean I can't remember the exact language used in his apology video his youtube video about that that was the closest I remember him ever coming to an apology and I assume that he had internal information that said some of his base was uncomfortable with that and he needed to make some kind of a statement and he did but the comments that you're pointing out I'm sure there were plenty of people who said hey we're tired of mealy mouth politicians here's a straight shooter I mean that's what you heard in 2016 right was you know let's get somebody who's a disruptor somebody who's different get in there fix it shake it up and obviously he followed that strategy for the next four years I don't think he did he ever apologize for anything while he was president I can't remember him now because his brand was I'm a fighter and I'm fighting the left they're attacking me look at all these unfair attacks I never give an inch I always fight and his supporters felt like he was fighting not just for himself but for them so the stakeholders that matter didn't want an apology because that would be a sign of weakness now that wasn't enough to get him over the finish line in 2020 given everything else that happened but I think that he demonstrated that when there's a lot of dissatisfaction with the status quo you can build a base of support even if you're pretty rough around the edges but the theory I I'm going to try to defend myself a little bit here and say the theory holds you only have to apologize if the stakeholders who are relevant to your success are offended ah also there is most people don't have Donald Trump's strength right most people can't handle the blowback even if they've got the the stakeholders on their side most people are not strong enough to to handle that and all sorts of people who think they are strong enough when they they get put into such a stressful situation they just fall so you also have to know yourself well and I don't you know I certainly don't know Donald Trump I would think that people who are inclined to like Donald Trump will say that he showed strength I will say that probably people who don't like Donald Trump would interpret him as just being stubborn or pigheaded or maybe narcissistic or whatever right so you could I guess you could spin that either way but yeah most people are too empathetic they just can't live life with all that hate directed at them justified or unjustified most people would cave I think that's true yeah now as our society becomes more divided right we have we have less in common as compared to say 1980 let alone 1960 1940 then we're in a more divisive age we've got diminished social cohesion and social trust I mean it used to be that you didn't need to lock your doors uh so in a more divisive age we should expect more pseudo apologies because some some people just not going to want to see you know bowing down to some you know our group right my theory would suggest that the more different groups there are that want different things that value different things the harder it's going to be to satisfy the ones that matter with a genuine apology if Rush Limbaugh going back to our initial example there if he had said look Sandra Fluck had a right to talk about birth control I mean it's an important issue in her life and I shouldn't have made fun of her um obviously that's something we ought to debate if he had said something like that his base would have been furious at him I think and so the more fragmented we are theoretically the more strategic it becomes to say something that is sort of wishy washy it sounds kind of like an apology to those that aren't paying too close attention and to the ones that hate you they're not going to be happy with it but they don't matter and to the ones that want to be able to defend you it'll give them a talking point now they can say look he apologized so yes what you're saying is right if my theory holds then the more fragmented we get as a society the more the pseudo apology will be strategically advantageous also just thinking off the top of my head about the rise of the of civil rights which then had all sorts of implications for anyone running a business they then had to start up HR departments you did not have these massive HR departments they become largely staffed by women and you had to be seen as a business doing all these things to proactively pursue diversity and inclusion uh because that would make you purportedly less liable to get sued and so we've essentially had the rise of effectively speech codes in the workplace so I would I would think that that has also fueled the the need for apologies because even if you as as a CEO or even if you just you as an employer employee don't think you did anything wrong now there are government mandates about diversity and inclusion which heavily regulate effectively speech in the workplace so I think that uh just navigating a bureaucracy has has incentivized the apology culture any thoughts well I would say this I think that as a society and I maybe maybe this is I hope I'm not repeating what we've already talked about too much here but I do think as a society we have tried to be more sensitive my wife you know we're talking that she graduated from law school in 2008 okay it wasn't a long time ago but she has had other attorneys scream at her in ways that they would not to a man in my opinion um she you know and and and I've heard stories uh you know the former uh Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor had trouble getting a job with a law firm except as a secretary when she graduated from law school right I happened to know a tiny bit about the legal profession because my wife is in it but you know there have been discrimination in hiring and there have been there's sexual harassment it's not you know it's a real thing it's I don't know if it's as prevalent as some people argue but I guarantee it's more prevalent than others argue it's there are real issues and as a society we've tried to be sensitive to these issues and I don't think that is inherently bad sometimes we go too far in trying to use regulation to fix every little misdeed that people commit but in principle I'm in favor of trying to make sure that people aren't being discriminated against in the workplace and so forth here's the thing though human beings screw up human beings say things that are offensive sometimes on purpose but sometimes as an accident and part of what an apology does just an off the cuff apology oh I'm sorry I bumped someone in the hall oh I'm sorry now that reframes that situation so now hopefully they don't think I'm just a jerk who doesn't care about them hopefully they understand that that was a mistake and I don't go around making a habit of bumping into people in the hall or if I if I tell a joke and someone is offended by it I'm okay wait I'm sorry I didn't I didn't mean to offend you I didn't think about it that way if I'm willing to do that sort of thing that is an amazing social lubricant right that smooths out lots of human interactions if we discover that what we have done offended or hurt someone and if it's not something we feel that need to stand on on principle then just saying oh I'm sorry I didn't realize a lot of times that just makes human life better so I mean I'm I think I'm agreeing with you in part maybe I'm disagreeing with you in some part there but yeah when we're paying attention we have to use some apologies whether these developments are good and bad they've they've definitely fueled more of an apology culture yeah I think that's right I think you're right and then I'm wondering if we've become a less individualist society with the rise of people taking offense on behalf of their group so perhaps in the words of Tom Wolf his last novel back to blood we've become perhaps a more tribal society and therefore more people are taking offense on behalf of their group is that perhaps another contributor to apology culture I'm open to that argument I I think I've I've made something close to this point a couple of times here I think social media is bad for us I'm not saying we should ban it I'm not saying people shouldn't have social media accounts I don't want regulation of it but I think it's mostly bad for us it's like donuts right I love donuts but they're bad for me social media reinforces that tribal instinct like crazy I believe it we follow who we want to follow and if we follow anybody who's not part of our group it's just so that we can go after them when they make a mistake and do something dumb I think the fragmentation of other types of media right you don't have to watch the ABC nightly news or the CBS evening news you can choose to watch MSNBC and hear all of your left-wing beliefs reinforced or you can choose to watch Fox News and have all of your right-wing beliefs reinforced you can find someone to tell you what you already think somewhere on the internet all the time if you don't want to challenge yourself to different ideas you don't have to and so we have made it really easy to isolate from outgroups create your own in group yeah and I think that and I do think we have an instinct to it I think human nature tends towards tribalism and so we have to fight against that actively it's like rowing upstream if you stop rowing you're not going to stand still you're going to go down the stream down the stream is tribalism in my opinion and so yes I think the more tribal we are the more quick we are probably to be offended by something that an outsider does and to demand apologies and for somebody who wants to navigate between different groups that's one of the things public relations is supposed to do be a boundary spanner you know your client may be cloistered in the C-suite and not know what they're saying about him or her on social media not know what they're saying out in the real world part of your job as a PR person is to go out there find out what they think come back to your client and be like people are mad this is why and if you want to be able to build relationships between different groups of people it's inevitable that you're going to screw up you're going to commit faux pas and if you're willing to use apologies then it's probably going to be a little easier to navigate that I'm just thinking like with everything else more intelligent people are going to be better able to navigate apology culture than less intelligent people because being out to see for yourself where you need to apologize that requires empathy and empathy is a function of putting yourself in other people's shoes which is a function of cognitive ability it's abstract thought and there's something that measures abstract thought it's called IQ so not every intelligent person is empathic but the ability to have empathy depends on the ability for abstract thought so along with everything else in our culture it really helps to navigate apology culture to be smarter rather than dumber well I do think empathy is important um and sometimes the way I describe it to students is perspective taking can you take someone else's perspective on a situation if you can do that then you will be more successful you will be able to find common ground you'll be able to reach agreements avoid conflict resolve conflict but if you can only see the world the way you see it you will have more conflict and you will be able to build relationships as well so so that is a key I agree is there anything about the cancel culture phenomenon that you found interesting and relevant to your work well I I would like to write a piece about cancel culture but I haven't yet what I am thinking about what I'm mulling over is sort of the question of when is it important not to apologize because sometimes cancel culture you know the debate about cancel culture people that are generally supportive of this movement don't like the term cancel culture they would say this is accountability culture or something and people who are suspicious of it and troubled by it call it cancel culture well sometimes it probably is necessary to hold people accountable for some of the things that they're saying and doing but I am not a fan of finding something that a baseball player tweeted when he was in high school that was offensive and now that he's been drafted into major league baseball trotting that out and trying to get him to lose his job right I just that's just distasteful to me that just sows division and bad feelings I don't think it helps I would like to live in a world where people are allowed to make mistakes and then apologize and grow and learn and so part of part of what I would like is for businesses to stand up against some of the more frivolous examples of this phenomenon if you've got an employee and they sent a bad tweet and and the twitter mob is coming for them I would like a business because businesses sometimes do things in such a knee jerk way they don't even wait to see if it's hurting their sales they just act because they're frightened and sometimes irrationally so but I think if businesses would say to the employee you see what's going on here do you understand why this was a problem give the employee a chance to apologize tweet out an apology maybe from the businesses account of course there will be haters who will say well the PR department did that yeah maybe the PR department did that but here's the thing we're talking about a human being if they're willing to apologize then I would like the business to not fire them and to say we believe in second chances we believe in giving people a chance to grow and learn from their mistakes and that's all we have to say about this and if the mob keeps trying to get some rando employee fired the business should just say we've said all we're going to say about this I don't know if any business has the courage to do it because they have stakeholders stockholders that they report to I don't know if it would work but I'd love to see it tried now sometimes it really was a bad offense and somebody probably deserves to lose their job and in that case I'm kind of okay with it but I think there are times when you just have to and then so that there's other times when you haven't done anything wrong you just had a political opinion that someone didn't like and in those situations I think it is imperative not to apologize you cannot give up your personal beliefs because someone else has different personal beliefs and you need to say this is what I believe I'm not trying to offend you but I'm not going to apologize for what I believe and I think that if people did that more some of the people who are apparently just really bored on the internet would get tired I mean I've got a four-year-old and a three-year-old and my three-year-old does everything he can sometimes to antagonize and pester my four-year-old and my four-year-old almost always takes the bait and he yells you like stop it stop doing that and I tell him buddy if you would just not react to that he would get bored and give up and sometimes that's how I feel about cancel culture sometimes it shouldn't be apologized to because there's not a legitimate grievance there was a terrific New York Times op-ed about two weeks ago cancel culture works we wouldn't have marriage equality without it by Sasha Eisenberg and the struggle for same-sex marriage equality was new in the people who donated to the anti-same-sex marriage they started getting targeted and boycotted and their names and addresses got put everywhere so this is the first time in in my memory that just people who who donated to a particular option this was even the winning option in California they they got individually targeted their businesses got targeted there were these you know hysterical apologies by by waitresses who had gay rights activists activists you know boycotting and demonstrating outside the restaurant where the waitress worked this this seems like crossing the Rubicon I don't quite recall anything like it in in my lifetime whereby people just donating suddenly became the target of you know massive demonstrations and boycotts and people were absolutely shocked and and taken aback and they were beaten down they were overwhelmingly beaten down by the same-sex marriage advocates is there anything in this phenomenon that you find interesting well the first thing I'll say is I don't know a lot of people who deny that cancel culture works that's not an insight of course it works that's part of the reason that some people are very troubled by it it does lead to people getting fired it does lead to some people not feeling comfortable expressing their personal views it does all of those things and yes there are some views that we would rather not hear as polite society some views that we disagree with strongly but I'm a big believer in the marketplace of ideas when someone says something that I don't agree with I would like to be able to respond and try to explain why I disagree and why I think they're wrong but I don't think the the proper response is to try to silence the people who disagree with you and to the extent that cancel culture might be doing that I'll post to it I certainly think you know the Supreme Court has said and this is controversial and not everybody accepts this but the Supreme Court said back in the 70s that the right to donate to political campaigns was part of the right to free speech because we live in a modern media world where if you're not allowed to spend any money you can't say very much you can't get heard by very many people so you can't stop people from donating or spending money to express their views when people donate to causes they believe in that is a form of political speech according to the Supreme Court I don't think anybody ought to lose their job or feel afraid for their safety because of their political speech as long as they're following all the laws that's my position now if somebody has taken a position you know 15 years ago and they have decided that they don't hold that position anymore in fact they think they were wrong before and they want to come out and say you know what I used to believe one thing but I think I was wrong and I want to apologize to everybody that I hurt with the things I said back then because I believe I was wrong that's an appropriate use of an apology but I don't think apologies you know our constitution doesn't allow police to coerce confessions out of suspects and I don't think that we ought to be doing that for people who aren't under arrest either you shouldn't coerce an apology out of someone because that's probably given by fear it doesn't actually provide any reconciliation and I'm not for it so something I learned from your papers is something called balance theory it was just so I think explicit when I read more about it that even a disagreement puts stress on a friendship like even a disagreement over a pop singer or a sports team creates distress or stress on a relationship is there anything that you can tell us about balance theory? Well Fritz Heider is the Austrian psychologist who developed this balance theory idea and as you said he basically said when you have two people and they're thinking about us a common object let's say it's the new star wars movies if they agree on it then that strengthens their relationship if they disagree on it that creates an imbalance in their relationship wait a minute I thought Bob was a great guy but he really likes the last Jedi what's wrong with Bob right and so depending on how important that issue is it can put real strain on a relationship hopefully people are not abandoning their friends over star wars but certainly things like religion and politics they do divide people because these are important issues and the only way to have a balanced relationship is either to decide okay I agree about this issue okay I agree that the last Jedi was a great movie Bob really likes it I will like it too that's fine or I guess Bob's not such a good guy because Bob loves this terrible movie right those are the options now in a meaningful relationship there are a million of these things that people can have you know common perspectives on so my wife likes crunchy peanut butter I like creamy peanut butter we resolve that by having two jars of peanut butter it's no big deal but if we disagreed strongly about politics or religion that would create a real imbalance in our marriage and so when the reason it's relevant to apologies is because if I hurt you then my action is something that I did obviously I was willing to do it but it hurt you so I like it and you don't like it that automatically creates an imbalance in our relationship and what I have tried to argue in some of my papers is if I apologize it's like telling Bob okay you're right last Jedi was a good movie I am I am changing my position on the object in this case it was my bad action I'm changing my position on it so that our relationship can come back into balance but it's you know it's a pretty simple theory and in my opinion most of the best social scientific theories are very simple they're so simple that after you hear them you're like well obviously you know you don't have to be a genius to come up with that and you probably don't but you have to articulate it in a clear way so that people can use it to extrapolate from that theory you know applications for various different situations in life and that's kind of what I was trying to do by extending that balance theory to talk about how apologies work now you did a paper on the ethnic racial religious and demographic predictors of organ donate organ donor registration status and if I had not even read the paper I did read the paper but I would expect that the core of a country rather than the fringe would be much more likely to donate organs would be much more likely to say to pay taxes honestly would be much more likely to serve on juries would be much more likely to serve in the military that and this is exactly how it breaks down it's the non-catholic Christians who are the core of this country this country was was founded dominantly by by Protestants and so they were the most likely group to be registered donors followed by Catholics and then you keep going out and out now to people who are further estranged from the the white Protestant core of the country so seems to me that you would expect the core of a country to be more patriotic to be more pro-social because this is their country and you would expect people on the margins to be less patriotic and to be less pro-society because they identified less with society so it seems to me before I even read your essay I would think that those who identified most strongly with society would be the most likely to register as donors and those who have more ambivalence about the society would be less likely and this seems to be how how your your study broke broke down that's excuse me yeah so I mean I do think that people who see themselves as pro-social also tend to be more likely to sign up for organ donation that that seems to be true the really interesting thing about that study and this may not be very germane to our conversation but that study was conducted when I was teaching at the University of New Mexico and I did it with several colleagues there and the University of New Mexico and Albuquerque in that area has a lot of Indian reservations and part of what the impetus for that study was was trying to understand how Native American traditions and religions influenced people's willingness to sign up for organ donation and so I would just say this there are people depending on what sort of religious tradition or cultural tradition that they come from there are people who might be quite pro-social but they believe for religious reasons either that their body needs to be buried a certain number of hours after death or that it has to be intact or whatever and so they don't feel free to donate and so I don't necessarily want to say that people in that situation aren't pro-social right I just think that they have other beliefs that are barriers to organ donation but yeah in general I think people this is here's another example of something that is very simple but I think it's true people have a tendency to do things for other people who they perceive to be like them and people that they perceive to be different from them their natural tendency is not to do stuff for them so the more you feel like you're part of America and your organs are going to be used to help other Americans probably it makes sense that you're more willing to sign up for organ donation and the more you you know if you're suspicious of it if you feel like it's going to be used to help people that you don't support or something that you might not do it but there's other reasons that people don't sign up for organ donation I don't think that people who don't sign up are necessarily bad people right right now of course and and yes as a convert to orthodox Judaism I know that Judaism has considerable concerns about organ donation that I believe are considerably stronger than in Christianity so is is there anything I should ask you before we wind up well no I mean I've enjoyed our conversation a lot and thanks for all the good questions and letting me ramble on quite a bit I think in the short term I think apologies are going to continue to be really important I think there is some danger that if people start using them cheaply if apologies turn into get out of jail free cards where people can do really genuinely hurtful things and then get away with it with an apology I think that they could be devalued and especially in public they might not be as as useful if everybody's doing them all the time I think interpersonally they will always matter because it's really easy to tell if someone who's apologizing to you face to face seems genuine and it costs someone quite a lot to give a really genuine interpersonal apology it's very humbling so I think interpersonally apologies are safe I think long term there's a possibility that apologies could be kind of cyclical they might fall out of favor if some of these factors we've been talking about change but I think in the short term they're going to continue to be really interesting and someone who had who figures out how to genuinely say I was wrong I'm sorry could you forgive me that's worth a lot in managing your relationships yes absolutely okay thank you so much professor Joshua Bentley and I providing links in the video description to many of your papers thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me thank you okay take care now right I want to play a little excerpt here from a Yale university course on morality and philosophy the philosophy and the science of human nature from a Yale university this is just a little excerpt here on the well-ordered soul happiness and harmony shoot this says polling closed now polling open did you commit to turning off the internet completely press one did you commit to restricting your internet usage in some way that is you're keeping the internet on but you're promising not to check facebook or play angry birds or go shopping at zappos or whatever other indulgent thing you do on the internet if that's your case press two did you put no restriction on your in-class internet use but you're somebody with a computer if so press three or is this kind of not applicable to you because you're somebody who uses a pencil and paper in class okay now it's supposed to be the case that the timer is counting itself down but no I've got to give you prattle for 28 seconds so here we go so um this is a case I I read through the papers for my section and my sense there and I don't know whether it was a random sample is that about two-thirds of the students committed to totally turning off the internet and about a quarter committed to some kind of restriction and a very small percentage committed to no restriction on internet use okay it should be the case in one second that are slide yes okay so 43 percent of you 43 percent of the students in this room made a pre-commitment in the form of a promise it became a pre-commitment because you wrote it down just thinking it didn't make a pre-commitment but you took an action at a time when you felt yourself to be cool and calm and reasonable and made a decision at that moment that you took to be binding upon yourself in the future and an additional 16 percent of you didn't draw a bright line at the turning off internet completely but attempted to put in place some sort of intermediate restriction now my next question for you is whether you have straight 20 seconds one not even an itty bitty bit not once two just once or twice three I'm well a few times but I'm trying or for yep I've been okay so let's talk a little bit about impression management it's one of the topics that Joshua Bentley brings up in his papers so what the heck is impression management this is from the youtube channel ready set psych if you're on a job interview you might try to come across as more focused conscientious energetic likeable if you're on a first date you might try to come across as way more interesting and outgoing than so professor Bentley was a professor of communications and this lady is a psychologist in real life maybe you enter a room and you happen to notice that everyone is really kind of sad and forlorn for some reason so you decide that it's best to kind of match the mood in the room so to speak why do people do this well they do it because of societal expectations people are not expected to act or display emotions in exactly the same way in every type of situation there are situations where it is expected that we are going to be our best behavior or we're going to act in a certain way or there are going to be certain emotions that are more appropriate to express over others and as naturally social creatures we want other people to like us I know right shocker and by managing our personality in different situations we are increasing the likelihood that we're going to come off in a favorable way and therefore that other people are going to like us and accept us another reason why people do this is because they know that their natural personality is just not going to get them where they want to be take myself I'm a huge introvert and I know from experience that if I just act in my very natural introvert itself I'm not really going to get anywhere in my career because in a lot of jobs you have to be really out there you have to be outgoing you have to be okay go your papa in pretty much any career situation you have to put yourself out there you have to be assertive you have to be well spoken you have to be just maybe a little bit outgoing you have to be bubbly energetic people tend to like that sort of thing so if I was just my natural introverted reserved quiet self well that probably wouldn't get me anywhere especially here on youtube where it's expected that anyone's going to be just kind of bubbly and exciting and outgoing right so people do this because they know that in certain social situations they kind of have to in order to meet the demands of that particular situation but of course there's going to be other situations like if you're with close friends and family or people who know you really well or you can just relax and be yourself and you really don't have to manage any part of your personality who you are naturally just totally fine now I get this particular question all the time is impression management the same thing as being fake okay uh no not quite so being fake just in my impression is when people take impression management to the next level so a healthy level of impression management is important for each and every one of us in our day to day lives being able to get ahead in life and portray ourselves in ways that are societally acceptable being fake is more like when you just don't even like your own personality and you try to put on this total facade and you're not even really being yourself and you're trying too hard and all of these negative things so I don't really think that they're the same thing and I will also say that impression management is not the same as being manipulative there is no deception or exploitation or trying to take advantage of someone involved in impression management you are managing your personality because you want to be better liked by others not because you're desperate to be liked by others but because you're a social creature you're a human being when someone is manipulative they will take advantage of people they will hurt people's feelings they will lie if they have to to get what they want they don't really care it's not about being liked by other people it's about getting your way so manipulation the methods involved and the intent are just very different compared to just regular old everyday impression management if you're just using impression management you're actually trying to come across better to other people so that you can improve your social situations so is impression management a bad thing not really as long as you're using it properly then it's not a bad thing at all it can actually really help you in life it shows that you understand what is appropriate in a specific situation like for example if you're the person at the funeral who just keeps on giggling and smiling that's probably not going to help you if you're the person on the first day to just has no manners is super rude who is yourself but maybe a little too much like maybe you're sharing things that just isn't really appropriate for a first date uh i don't know you might not get a second date so using impression management effectively is a great thing because it shows that you just understand what qualities and behaviors are expected in various situations that you're going to encounter in everyday life it's kind of like having really good social instincts and it shows that you care about how you come across to other people which is not a bad thing you should to some extent care how you come across to other people impression management is also just expected in a lot of different types of situations including like we've talked about job interviews first dates anytime where you're around a lot of strangers they be meeting people for the first time at an event any situation where you have to be very polite because you're meeting someone important there are times where if you cannot use impression management properly you're sinking your own ship people who can use impression management successfully tend to go further in life i mean you think of all the people who are probably using impression management quite a lot there are people like politicians performers actors salespeople anybody who is lucky enough to land their dream job these people are really amazing at using impression management in the right situations they're going to be likeable coming across in a way that they want to to other people not being fake they're still being themselves they're just sort of emphasizing okay so that was i like that those thoughts on impression management one thing that jumped out at me in the josh bentley interview was his very protestant reaction to the idea of tribalism that tribalism is just a bad thing and tribalism certainly does pose many challenges obviously it's someone who converted from Protestantism to Orthodox Judaism i don't view tribalism as inherently bad but if you view the world through the perspective of universal morality and that it's not okay to treat outsiders with lower moral standards than you treat your in-group then then tribalism is absolutely a horror so i've been reading a terrific book called albion's seed it's by david hackett fisher it came out in 1989 so albion seed for british folkways in america so here's just some of my favorite bits from this book so he talks about albion seed let's just give it an overview so he talks about four different groups coming from britain established four different societies so he talks about four main migrations east anglia to massachusetts so the exodus of the english puritans which then influenced the northeastern united states corporate and educational and cultural culture then the south of england moved to virginia so you had the cavaliers and the indentured servants and the gentry influenced the southern united states early plantation culture then you had the north midlands of england to the delaware valley so the friends migration quake is influenced middle atlantic and midwestern united states industrial culture then you had the borderlands to the backcountry so you had the flight from north britain the scotch irish and border english influenced the western united states ranch culture and the southern united states common agrarian culture so here's just a few of my favorite bits from this book albion seed so he talks about folk ways right so in any given culture they will always include speech ways so conventional patterns of written and spoken language pronunciation vocabulary syntax and grammar building ways prevailing forms of vernacular architecture and high architecture family ways the structural function of the household and the family both in ideal and in reality marriage ways ideas of the marriage bond cultural processes of courtship marriage and divorce you've got gender ways customs that regulate social relations between men and women sex ways conventional sexual attitudes and acts and the treatment of sexual deviance you've got child rearing ways so you've got ideas every culture has particular ideas about child nature and customs of raising children you've got naming ways so what are the favorite names for people age ways attitudes towards age the experience of aging and age relationships so some cultures venerate age and other cultures have a like a dismissive attitude towards the old people so in in our culture for example to say something that's history it means that it's academic it's not really important then other cultures venerate history you've got death ways attitudes toward death and rituals around death mortuary customs morning practices every court shares religious ways patterns of religious worship theology architecture patterns of prayer you've got magic ways you've got beliefs concerning the supernatural you've got learning ways attitudes toward literacy and learning and patterns of education you've got food ways what do you eat what's the nutrition like cooking eating feasting and fasting you've got dress ways customs of dress demeanor personal adornment you've got sport ways attitudes toward recreation and leisure both games and forms of organized sport you've got work ways so each culture has its own set of work ethics and work experiences attitudes towards work and then you have time ways attitudes towards the use of time customary methods of keeping time the conventional rhythms of life you've got wealth ways attitudes toward wealth and patterns of its distribution you've got rank ways the rules by which rank is assigned the rules which rank entails the relations between different social ranks you've got social ways so you've got conventional patterns of migration settlement association affiliation you've got order ways so ideas of order ordering institutions forms of disorder and treatment of the disorderly you've got power ways attitudes towards authority and power patterns of political participation and you got freedom ways prevailing ideas on liberty and restraint so every culture in the world has its own distinctive customs in these areas so consider wealth distribution so for marxist the prime mover is the means of production for adam smith that's the market mechanism but what are inherited structures with regard to wealth right so what are children raised with what are the institutions what are the cultural ethics what are the codes of laws so the more advanced the society becomes in material terms the stronger is the determinant power of its folk ways so modern technologies essentially act as amplifiers modern institutions and stabilizers modern elites as organizers of complex culture this book talks about yankee speech as much of its distinctive character to its pronunciation of the letter r so some post-vocalic rs tend to disappear altogether so that harvard becomes harvard with the a pronounces in happen harvard so this speech habit comes from east anglia which means eastern england southern east england and it's can be heard in the english counties of suffoc, norfolk and kent at the same time other rs are added to this pronunciation in the northeast so follow is pronounced follow arse becomes asked and in boston this type of speech was spoken at a speed which made it incomprehensible to others even in the same region and then the puritans had certain patterns of how they dressed they loved sad colors and so the descendants of the puritans still in the boston area they still wear suits of slate gray and other sad sad colors so the brahmin ladies of boston still dress in sad colors and their battered hats appear to have arrived you know in the hold of the mayflower sad colors of the official culture of new england the older universities of massachusetts rhod island new hampshire scholars and athletes do not appear in bright colors so the color of harvard is a dreary off purple called euphemistically crimson brown university's idea of high color is dark brown trimmed with black on ceremonial occasions the president of brown wears a mud colored garment which is approximately the color of used coffee grounds dotmouth prefers a gloomy forest green so even today this region prefers sad colors also in the new england dialect also the australian slang clothes of often being called duds so it's an old english term of contempt for dress so the language of dress in new england was a vocabulary of deprecation and this pejorative attitude still survives in the culture of this region book notes that in most cultures attitudes toward work are closely connected to conceptions of time for a puritan time was heavily invested with sacred meaning and then this is a situation which would have been discussed in orthodox Judaism so there was this bloke ebeniza taylor in massachusetts he fell into a 40 foot well and his rescuers stopped digging on saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath so the jewish system of law goes into what is permissible and what he can and can't do to rescue someone so generally speaking in Judaism a life comes first so you don't stop digging even if it's on the Sabbath to save somebody's life then in new london a courting couple named john louis and sarah Chapman were brought to trial in 1670 merely for sitting together on the lord's day under an apple tree also sexual intercourse was taboo on the lord's day in puritan culture so the rhythms of the day and rhythms of the week were unusually strong in new england but other common rhythms were exceptionally weak so i can't grow up with seven-day adventists they are essentially an offshoot of the puritan so the puritans and the seventh day adventists essentially abolish the calendar of christian feasts and saint's days so the celebration of christmas was forbidden in massachusetts on pain of a five shilling fine and in england the puritan parliament prohibited the observance of christmas easter saint's days and holy days and that was how it was pretty much in my seventh day adventist upbringing then switching over to virginia this is where the british elite moved so the youngest son syndrome became highly important to the culture of virginia the founders of virginia's first families tried to reconstruct from american materials a cultural system from which they'd been excluded at home the great majority of virginia's upper elite came from families in the upper ranks of english society and the book notes the more hierarchical a society becomes the stronger is the cultural dominion of its elite then here's a section that i loved in this book the puritan idea of ordered liberty so think about the declaration of independence we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and have been created by their being given inalienable rights by their creator to life liberty in the pursuit of happiness but the words that are used in the 18th century they didn't mean the same thing to people as these words mean to us today so think about the word liberty right so the public idea the public life of new england was shaped by an idea of liberty which was peculiar to the puritans okay so the noun liberty was used throughout new england in four ways which ring strangely to our ear so liberty was often described as not something belonging to an individual but to an entire community so we think of liberty primarily as an individual thing but for two centuries the founders and leaders of massachusetts wrote of the liberty of new england or the liberty of boston or the liberty of the town there's a communal thing so samuel adams wrote about the liberty of america and he wrote far more about the liberty of america than about the liberty of americans then this idea of collective liberty or public liberty was thought to be consistent with very close restraints upon individuals so massachusetts these individual restrictions were numerous and nobody could live in the colony without the approval of the general court settlers even of the highest rank were sent prisoners to england for expressing diverse and dangerous opinions immediately because the court judged them to be persons unsuitable to inhabit here others were not allowed to move within the colony except by special permission of the general court so the puritans idea of liberty very different than our own ideas of liberty so this idea of collective liberty was expressed in many bizarre obligations which new england towns collectively imposed upon their members so eastam's town meeting order that no single man could marry until he had killed six blackbirds or three crows and every town boy can do england contains such rules general court passed sweeps sweeping statutes which allowed magistrates to suppress almost any act by any means so there's one law threatened that if any man shall exceed the bounds of moderation we shall punish him severely and the definition of exceeding the bounds of moderation was left to the magistrate now new englanders willingly accepted these individual res