Programming Lions

Ep.96 Political Bias In Academia w/ Anthony Rispo

• Matt Morstad • Episode 96

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In this episode, hosts and psychology expert Anthony Rispo explore the intricate reasons behind the political biases and behaviors of the left and the right. Anthony, a psychology graduate from Columbia University with a background in sociology and neuroscience, discusses the impact of academic culture on societal norms, the moral foundations of political ideologies, and the importance of rigorous research. He also delves into personal experiences that shaped his views and offers insights into the challenges of engaging in meaningful dialogue across ideological divides. Join us for an enlightening conversation that peels back the layers of human behavior and political thought.


Instagram: @anthonyrispo


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TIMELINE

00:00 Intro

00:11 Meet Anthony

01:33 Academic Journey

03:30 The Viral Instagram Post

05:24 Research Aspirations

07:17 Politics in Academia

10:47 Personality

17:03 Cultural Hegemony

18:51 Evaluating Research

26:53 Ideological Rigidity

28:26 Handling Difficult Conversations

29:08 Engaging in Open Inquiry

33:35 Personal Journey from Far Left to Center

43:54 Impact of Social Programs

47:51 Summary

Welcome to the Programming Lions podcast. Do you ever wonder why the left and the right think the way that they do behave and have the biases the way that they do? Well, if so, this episode is for you. We've got Anthony Rispo joining us today. He is a recent graduate in psychology from Columbia. He's also well studied in sociology and neuroscience, and we're gonna break all this down, peel back the layers. So let's get into it.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Anthony Rispo, welcome to the Programming Alliance podcast. We're excited to have you on. I was able to connect with you on social media, and we looked at some of your takes and insights on unique things happening and cool perspectives that you had

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Thank you for having me, you guys. It's, it, it was so much fun to to get your message and to come upon your channel and, and to see the work you do and it's, it's so exciting to watch you interact with your sons on these, on these topics. So I'm glad to be here. Yeah,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Thank you. Thank you very much. Well, without further ado, we'll get in, we got a few like kind of, areas and topics queued up. Yeah. So the first question is that I just heard that you graduated from the Columbia as a university, Columbia

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

correct. Yeah. Yeah. Just graduated in

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

prestigious. One max. It's pretty big. This is like, this is like one of the best. This is one of the best schools in the

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

a controversial one at the moment, spotlight for

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

So, mm-hmm. So can you tell us more about your field of study and focus and what are you doing like today? I.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Yeah, absolutely. So, like, as you mentioned, I just graduated from Columbia University with a bachelor's in psychology. So I'm a little older. I'm 35. And usually your, your average college student is much younger. But I came back to school or went back to school to study psychology because I really love the discipline itself just as a, as a whole human behavior the way we think, behave. The way we how we're motivated, you know, how, how we learn, how we remember things. So just the whole spread of psychology and even neuroscience, like what's going on in the brain when we do those things just really was always very interesting to me. So I went back to school to study this pretty late in the game. I'm a professional musician first and foremost. I've been doing that since I was nine. Classical organ. Yeah,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Okay. You organ,

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

yeah, I do.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. Max Max plays. Max plays

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

oh, nice. Electric or acoustic. What do you

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

I do a classical guitar. I wanna get into like the. You know, electric ones like the,

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

but yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

That's awesome. That's great. That's great. Yeah. Yeah. So, like I was saying, I graduated in May. And you asked, what am I doing now? Well, really, I had the, the goal in mind or the vision in mind that I would go into another program. That I would go into a, a PhD program to get my you become Doctor Rispo. But this, this is a very long process and the application process is not the same as, as if you were to apply to a master's little procedural stuff that's a little boring. Long story short, I took a different route and I decided that I would just graduate, but I also kind of, you know, just decided one day to post something on Instagram to post a reel about the state of affairs at Columbia back in April, I think it was. And the video was very simple. It was just that because of the protests that were, that are going on or have been going on for the past almost two years now on campus, that our attendance has dropped and the acceptance rate has increased by about a percent. That was a piece of information that came out in April. All I said was that this, this is a, an issue when it comes to Columbia's reputation. It's about a 30 something second clip. So then for my Instagram page that went viral. I mean, it's, when you look at it, it's actually not viral, but compared to my, you know, whatever I would post prior to that. And so I just kept on going with that and I, and I found that people were interested in what I was saying. And so I, so here I am now, I'm just kind of trying to keep that going and doing more writing and more connecting with other researchers. So, yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

You obviously enjoy research and analysis just based on your perspectives and, and takes on different things that are happening. So I'm curious, like what do you, what do you wanna do? Like what's your end goal or your kind of career aspiration?

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

That's a great question. It's very hard to, to go into a situation thinking you know exactly what you wanna do, and then you come out of it even later in life thinking, oh, that's not it. But the th the, like a, the main theme is still there. So, apart from wanting to do the PhD sort of as a goal at one point that whole thing hasn't really left. I, I really wanna do research or I wanna dive into research more as either a writer or someone who does his own research independently. And so for me, that's really at the heart of it, to look into the scientific literature, psychological literature, the neuroscience literature, and to really sift through the different research programs or the different research questions that various researchers put forth and to understand them. More deeply their methodology, how these researchers sort of surgically remove or surgically look at the world through observation and put together some kind of model of the world to, to show us, well, this is probably what's going on. And the problem with that is that before you do that, you have to have assumptions. As a researcher, you have to think, well, this thing's happening because, likely because of this thing. And if your assumptions are not grounded in former knowledge or other research that's been established, then you're just kind of going based on a whim. And so there's a lot of psychological research that goes in that direction. And for many years it's caused much distortion in the general public. And at one point there was something called a replication crisis in psychology, which means that. You do a study and you can't replicate it. So, so it really defeats the purpose of coming up with something that could generalize. So that's really what I'm interested in, is to really dissect research to understand it fully and to ex explain it to the general public. Yeah,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. That's kind of cool. Okay,

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

yeah,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

so after like, because we've talked to now a lot of people and you've actually seen videos of. Colleges are, and they're typically pretty liberal. Right. And I suspect it would probably be even more liberal in like the psychology and stuff that you're doing. So I'm just wondering like what's your experience with that and how's, how is that like, just like being probably around a lot more liberal people

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. Yeah. So I'm still learning about. This particular dynamic because it's a real, you're putting your finger on something that's real. Academia in general, colleges, universities are, they do lean more liberal especially in psychology and the social sciences, really anything that's studying humanity. And you know, I've not had, personally, I've not had much of a problem with this. But looking at it from a broader perspective, it, it is a problem because it's, it's a cultural issue within the academy. You have researchers that have the incentive to produce, X amount of papers a year based on the grant money that they receive. And they, they have to do it.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Mm-hmm.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Getting into the, into the journals, the academic journals is also a very important for one's status, one's credibility just like, you know, anything else really outside of science. You think about you know, any other career and think about music streaming getting, you know, as many views as you can and gaining credibility. A little bit of a different process. But the same idea, it's all about credibility. And when your incentive is to produce as much as you can and to get published as much as you can given that, the culture leans in one direction, you have to really please that particular narrative. So it isn't the case that, the researchers that I've met or the professors that I've met are necessarily as hostile to toward Republicans or conservatives or middle of the road people per se. But. Their incentive is very self oriented and it creates a, a very ideologically skewed environment where now you're coming in with a different perspective and it's like alien to them. Or maybe it's not quite alien, but it's just something they don't touch because they don't want the reputations to be um, affected. Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

It's almost like a snowball effect, right? Then the more of that happens, then the more of that outcome occurs and the harder it is to maybe get more diverse views. I also like, I don't, I don't know, but I think somebody told me once that. Liberals generally are you know, into social sciences because they're more about people, whereas conservatives are more about building just sort of innately their, the, the way that their brain is structured. So maybe this is like a relation to neuroscience, but it was an interesting thought that somebody shared with me. It made a little bit of sense, but basically their argument was that like liberal ideology type of people will typically drift towards academia and these types of social sciences versus maybe a conservative will more drift more towards being an entrepreneur and starting a business and building some

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

yeah, that's right. And that, that's yes. Be there's, I don't know if you're familiar with the factor V personality construct. It would be open, yeah. Yeah. Ocean openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. These are all different traits that human beings express in one way or another. All five of them, and there are several others that have been put forth. But these are the, the staple, these are the, the ones that have withstood the test of time and statistical rigor. And so it is true that, that those on the left tend to be higher in, in trait openness or open, open openness to experience, which, you know, expresses itself as openness to aesthetics, feelings, emotions, and imagination. And it's correlated with careers such as writing, art, poetry, you know, therapy and, and college teaching particularly in the humanities. And therefore they often excel in careers that involve abstract, creative, and. Conceptually complex work conscientiousness is a different trait. That is, you know, it encompasses industriousness, which that extends to self-discipline and high achievement. And also tends to correlate strongly with conservatism. As it turns out, also you can't, you can't do your job successfully as a firefighter, police officer or construction worker or a member of the military. If you're abstracting and imagining how to approach your job while on the clock, you can't,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Right, right.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

you have to be reliable. You have to have a plan in place. You know, you have to know, you have to know a bunch of things at the ready should something happen on a, a given moment's notice, you know exactly what to do. But I'm simplifying some of this, of course, but that's the gist. And it turns out that academics, you know, academia is too. It tends to be too abstract for, for types like that. Arguably many in the working class too. And those outside of academia generally tend to be those in the working class. They wouldn't want the, you know, luxury of having the time of sitting, you know, to sit back and teasing out pet theories and sociology, you know, or coming up with obscure ideas. They, they've got things that they have to do. And actually for your audience, if they're interested, there's a,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Mm-hmm.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

there's a sociologist by the name of Musa Albi, who's, who teaches at Stony Brook University out in Long Island. And he wrote a book called, we Have Never Been Woke. And the title is a little deceiving. I, it's for a reason. And he's basically not, he's not saying that, you know, wokeness is not real. He is laying out how it evolved and how it evolved in waves. And basically talks about something called symbolic capitalists who are the types of people who end up in academia, in the media, who create knowledge and put it out into the world and who kind of have the luxury of doing this. They're not the highest income earners, but they still position themselves in a place of intellectual authority. And they're the kinds of people who will sit by and talk about what we ought to do for, poor Americans, black Americans, Latino Americans, et cetera. But they themselves don't do the things they claim ought to be done. So, yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Huh? Yeah. Yeah, we see that a lot, a lot of people. Well, it's, it's, it's an interesting dynamic too, because you have your academia, I feel like it sort of steers the path of society in some ways in terms of research and what's right, maybe even morality. I guess like I'm curious of your thoughts of does that run the risk of. A societal shift going in one direction because they are the ones that are steering academia.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

That's a really good question and that's, that is a question that I grapple with all the time. I should just, I should go back and quickly say that. Just because there's an asymmetry in representation in the academy favoring the left it doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't a conservative or moderate base out there that would like to be part of academia. There's a lot of people who are

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

But you know it to the question, does the, is this asymmetry? Does this have, I mean, I'm para paraphrasing what you said. Does this have sort of some kind of effect on how it shapes culture? Is if I'm getting Yeah. Yeah, I think. That's what we've been seeing over the past five or so plus decades that because these humanities based programs are so focused on the human, the human being and, and the human experience, and don't require methodological rigor and empirical basis upon which these claims can be made falsifiable. Like you can actually test them to see if they're true or not that you could just kind of come up with anything as long as you have an iterative process to guide you where you have, well, that theorist said this and this theorist said that, and I'm just gonna put a web of things together and, and, you know, maybe I'm simpl, it sounds like I'm simplifying it, but unfortunately you read some of this stuff. It's that simple. It's not that the humanities are, it's not that it's a simplistic endeavor, it's just that it's easy. To be unfalsifiable in your claims and and to just posture yourself as the, as the, authority of a given topic. So anyway, yeah, I think that what you're saying or asking, I think is what we're, we've been seeing and what we are seeing. The only way I can attack that question or concern is, is actually by looking under the hood and seeing where it really comes from. And I guess if we see where it comes from, we can kind of figure out how to grapple with it better. And I, I can't say that it comes from one spot in particular, but it, there's a few things. So there's a, there was a, a prisoner, a, a communist activist and linguist by the name of Antonio Gramsci. Who lived at the end of the 19th century in Italy. And he was imprisoned by the fascists and he was there for 15 years in prison. And he wrote letters from prison and there's the prison notebook letters from his, his prison cell, really. And he talked about a way in which we deal with the hostility that you see from communists and and fascists. So he, he didn't believe, he, he believed we needed to change we meaning in, you know, human beings generally, but let's just say he believed Italians and broadly speaking people experiencing the fascist regime, the way that they could fix this problem was not through blunt force as the fascist did, or even as the communist did. He said, no, we have to do it through. A cultural infusion. We have to get into the academy, we have to do it through knowledge. And then this became coined the term is cultural hegemony. So you're literally infusing I ideology, the shortcut explanation is you're infusing ideology into knowledge places where knowledge is created and disseminated. And so then over time

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

It takes hold, but it takes time. Right? Like takes a few generations or

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

it does. Yes. Yes. So yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. I am kind of going off of that a little bit. There's a lot of research nowadays, right? So I'm curious how you can tell and how possibly our viewers if a research is like good or if it's false? If it's like telling the truth? If it's not telling the truth? Mm-hmm.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

These are all so important. And the one thing I wanna hit right over the head first is sometimes people will say, well, it was funded by this group or that group. Well, if your data is good, it doesn't matter. That's my view. If your data is, first of all, if your, let me expand on that. If your data is available to the public or to scientists to test and to use and to try to replicate or to tease things out, then I don't care if, you know, king Tut comes from the dead and back from the dead and you know, I don't, I don't care if, I don't care who funds it. It just, if the data's good, let me take it and let me figure out what's up with it. That's what matters. You know? So, that's a little bit of a tangent, but I think that's an

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

So if they're not transparent with the data, that would be one

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

I don't care if you're, that's the thing is like, if we're having so many problems, like if it's, oh, it's NIA, this is the problem with right now we're questioning institutions and authority because we've been led to believe certain things that now we get access to data and we see, oops, that's not really that, that on on target. So I don't care if it has NIH next to it. I want the data. I wanna know if I can get the data. I want to see what you're saying. Great. See your results, but let me see the, the data and let me be able to run it myself. So that's 0.1. But this is very important. So, you know, I guess buckle up. I, so how does, how does a person who doesn't really spend time with research or just general public know if studies are, you could trust them or not? And I'm afraid I don't have, I have a long answer. I'll try to trim it, but I don't have a satisfactory one in that. The, the reason is not because there's no way to separate the wheat from the chaff, you know, but first, empirical research is often held hostage by, like I was saying, institutional gatekeepers, you know, academic journals typically, and I said this before, the incentive you basically there, it's pay walled similar to like news sources these days, you know, in a way this is how they prevent people from engaging with science more critically. And maybe that's a little conspiratorially positioned and I don't, I guess you can take away the conspiracy and just say that's just, that seems to be an effect. I mean, if you pay wall something, you don't have access. And if you don't have access, you don't get to know it. So, but, you know, access to knowledge is what generates conversation. But the other part is, is, is that understanding and knowing how to read empirical papers, which, you know, most people don't. And that doesn't mean we shouldn't be teaching. Students as young as high school or middle school even. I don't know, you know, how to read these papers. It's, you know, the fact is we don't, we don't do it at, at scale, at least. And, and when students do engage with these papers, they're only told to read the abstract and the conclusion or something like that. You know, being told that, you know, they don't need to know all these stats and methods and, well, that's kind of insane to me. I mean, at least if you don't know it, and if you're not a math type you know, we should be engaging with people who do know how to do that. Interacting and collaborating with people who do. So the most important part of a scientific paper is the method section, I would say. Which outlines how the study is set up, you know, and how it's operation, how, you know, variables are operationalized and that that would mean how the researcher defines what their, what they're measuring and how they measure their variables. And I would say though, more so, or not more so, but equal to methods as, like I'd mentioned before, the, the assumptions that proceed experiments or, or studies arguably the assumptions are more important than the methods because, you know, this is what articulates the question of your research, so I'll give you an example if you're willing to hang on for just a moment. This will clarify things. Okay. So for instance, microaggressions and for those listening, you know, microaggressions very loose definition is basically a perceived slight based on, you know, it's like, targeted toward racial minorities. And, and these slights are, are sort of like, the undercurrent is that they're automated by implicit bias, right? So even if you quote, you know, didn't mean to. Say something or to slight someone, whatever that means, you know, it's left to interpretation by the person who feels slighted which is a big problem. You're still kind of in a, in the hot seat because, and you're sort of in a hopeless position because it's, it's what these research will say, well, it's because of your implicit bias that ran away from you and, you know, caused you to be harmful anyway. And, you know, an example of a microaggression would be, you know, if a teacher tells a black student that they did a beautiful job reading, you know, say an excerpt of, of Shakespeare, for instance. And perhaps this teacher is, you know, generally complimentary to students who, who read Shakespeare well. But let's say most, most students actually don't do this. Just a few do. However, it just so happens that the black student this time did, and you could see how this might come across as, you know, overcompensating on the teacher's part. If your worldview is that. White people think black people are stupid. So when a white person compliments a black person, they, you know, they don't mean it. Or they're just saying, wow, you're usually so stupid and I'm so impressed that you're not stupid here in this moment. So that's an example of a microaggression and how, or, or how they unfold the microaggression rather not what a microaggression is per se. So, it's an all out global attack on, if somebody says this kind of thing about a, somebody articulately reading Shakespeare's it's, it's an implied global attack on being a black student in the context of white spaces, which according to the Church of Social Justice, you know, is Yeah, exactly. So, that's, that's a, that's a mouthful. I, and there's a few, few more details, but about how to actually dive into knowing when research like that is not to trust.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

it's hard too because, you know, I feel like so many things are happening fast these days.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

I guess a more distilled and maybe action ready approach could be, you know, to, to know that one paper isn't the whole story. To understand that what the researchers are asking and what they're, what they're assuming, like in the microaggressions case, they have all these assumptions about what it means to be white and how that interacts in these spaces. And you have to, you know, that that's their starting point. They start with a conclusion and use methods and, and. Analysis to validate that conclusion without even testing it. Verso.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

so, so basically knowing what they're assuming and then read the methods method section, if you can stomach through it

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Even when they do, even when you do explain it and you say it's bogus, here's why a lot of, well, it's published, so like

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Oh yeah. That's a, that's a hu Well, it's an appeal to authority fallacy. Absolutely. And then what I, what I usually say is, all right, let's, let's, you know, walk through, the fact that there's really poor follow up on a lot of these studies that there's a selection bias that, you know, you'll have maybe a hundred people in some studies that your pop sample population, a specific population you're looking into is the trans population specific issue and only like, I don't know, 20 of them will participate. There is a study like this, by the way, and, and then they blow up the numbers based on the effects that they see in just those 20 or so people. But the rest of the, the 80 plus people didn't participate, you have no information on. And most of the meta-analyses on these issues are, self-report based. But if somebody's so fixed in their ideology, then the only thing that I feel like I'm able to do at this point, to be honest, is take a meta perspective and, and two. Continue to talk about the way these studies are architected to continue to, you know, connect with people. Like, like you guys build a network and just get louder. I think that people who are not positioned to feel that cognitive dissonance as a invitation to toward curiosity, but rather hostility and volatility are gonna stay there. You're able to know when some, yeah, when someone's inching toward curiosity, when they start to ask things like, this is just my experience, but what about this? And they go into the what about iss? But I find that to be a good place to be with someone because it means that they're not they're not on the, they're not in attack mode per se. They're experiencing a cogni, they're experiencing a cognitive dis cognitive dissonance. There's some wiggle room to work with, and of course, it depends on their personality structure. If you have someone who's high in narcissism or combative or antagonistic, I would say just throw your, you know, surrender and

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Mm-hmm. Yeah,

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Maybe that's not the right approach, but there's only a, there's so much, I don't know what your experience is, particularly talking to people like this, but it can get aggravating, you know?

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

yeah. There's so much you can do. I don't know. What would you

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. What would you, what would you both do? Lu Max?

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

If like we started talking to a narcissist, basically

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Someone who is very difficult to who put it this way? Who?

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

debate or negotiate with, oh, well, I'd probably start off by trying to talk to'em normally, and if that doesn't work, then I'll start matching their energy. Right. Maybe they're starting to get mad at me. I'll start, start getting mad at them, you know?

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

I, I tend.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

No, no, no. Not fighting. Fighting, but yeah. Yeah. And then if it gets too far, I'll probably just be like, you know, I'm not getting anything done useful

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Mm-hmm.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

so I'll still have Vista. You're out.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

You're out, buddy. Yeah, exactly. I mean,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

We do, engage with people on our comments. We, we actually held we're kind of in the summer phase now, but we were holding what we called round table. Debates or discussions with other kids around their age. Yeah. And like we had some liberal leaning kids on an, an anarchist, a communist other conservatives. Yeah. It's crazy. And so we'd bring up topics and it was pretty interesting. Like, I think Mo most of them, we, we tried to vet to make sure that people that came on were in good faith. And I'd say most of them were, but we found most Yeah. Keyword being musk.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

I love this. What you're doing is exemplary of a open inquiry, a Socratic experience talking about all sorts of issues. And you know, anybody who looks at this channel and, you know, who knows that, understands that this is what's happening because etiology on the trend side of things, on the lgbtq plus side of things, on the social justice side of things, it doesn't allow for daylight. You know, it's very rigid. And it's, it's, it's got that how shall I say, almost a kind of a, well, it's authoritarian for sure when there's no daylight that's able to enter there and, and to be open to ideas, to explore and talk about different ideas and to interface with people who have different ideas. You know, really allows the brain to experience a smorgasbord of, of a, you know, appetites and, and capacities and you able to dial back the levers. You know, over time you become used to a little bit of conflict, a little bit of, you know, aggression. You can actually train yourself to be in difficult environments, and it's great that you're, you know, you, you, you boys are and your father is leading you into this, into this world with this skill because my gosh, the people that I go to, you know, I have to say some people that I was in school with you, you can't. It's almost like you can't touch certain issues without them just completely falling apart,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Yeah, losing it. It's very common. It's very common. Like you just keep, like certain topics are off limits. Unless you completely agree with that person on that thing, then you talk

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

You're giving them an intellectual immune

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

guys best friend. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And, and I think, I mean, I think that's a real problem. And of course I mean, of course people that come and look at our channel have strong opinions because of some reel that we put out or whatever. But in general, like our philosophy is we're gonna, you know, expose ourselves to all types of different people. I mean, we've had trans people on our show,

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Wow. Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

anti MAGA people on our show. We've got, you know, people like you on our show that have like a deeper sense of understanding in terms of psychology and sociology. And so like, we're just interested in learning. And of course we develop opinions based on our maybe moral foundation. And then, but we can apply that when we talk to people. And so, yeah, if you're te you know, how to, like if your, if your ideas aren't pressure tested, then are they really good ideas? And so we, we feel like if we can pressure test our ideas and we're just gonna be stronger over time. Oh yeah. But I think in today's age, unfortunately, a lot of people aren't allowing for the pressure testing of their ideas because they're just so tied to an ideology. And you know, this kind of, this goes into a, a question I was gonna ask you about, like, our experience and, and, and if, if this is like too political, you can tell us, but our experience with the left has been fairly, like rough and negative. I've found that, and this isn't equate to like everybody, because I've had productive conversations with people on the left, but by and large it's very much like compliance or like, like they are like it's compliance or.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

or nothing.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

are an idiot. And then it goes, it automatically goes to like, if you don't believe this ad hominem name calling, like whatever it might be. Or, so it even goes to TD yesterday. Just start bringing up Trump for notes or something. Yeah. Or or the, the subject changes from like, something that doesn't involve Trump at all too. Yes. Like Trump, Trump, Trump did this. Yeah. You, you, you voted for a great a rapist So I'm curious like your your experience with conservatives and liberals in terms of their openness to exploring their own ideas and pressure testing them.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

well, nothing's too political by the way. I should just say this is good. There's a few things. So just to get to basics from the personal level, from my own experience, I was very much so on the far left in my twenties. I'm 35 now. Broke out of that after the pandemic. Reasons for that are because of such intense cognitive dissidents. Just to very briefly give you kind of what happened. After George Floyd's death I tried to get family members to put black squares on their Instagram that was not fruitful. And I freaked out there were other things that happened. I mean, especially the trust, the science movement around the vaccines and masks and all that. And then the moralizing of these issues and the vilifying people who didn't get to say goodbye to their loved ones. And I think it also hit hard for me, especially because at the time, and still my, you know, my, well, at the time, my cousin was just starting her career as a nurse at a really busy hospital. Of course, all hospitals were busy at that point, but a particularly busy hospital in the area and. The stories that she would tell us, and she would just go silent often because they were just too hard to tell of people not being able to see their loved ones of, people dying left and right and being around that, if you know what I mean. It just felt off that after this, you know, this was after a while, putting, putting things together that we have this movement of people who are basically not only saying trust the science around masks and vaccines. I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I put, I used masks. I did the, I'm not trying to, you know, save face or anything, I'm just saying that's what it was, you know? But the point being, so it was that. And then it was, you know, the protesters, capitol buildings and I was all on board with like, kind of like shaming them at one point. But then, you know, the. BLM riots and the BLM protests were allowed to happen suddenly. So it was all this, all these double standards, and I started to pick back at like in my twenties of other double standards. And just the co like said, the cognitive dissonance that held belief conflicting with new information was so intense that it, I kind of erupted emotionally. And, and I can't tell you what the turning point was the day per se, but all I knew was at that point was that I was really using a lot of my own, what you call intra psychic tension or internal internalizing anxiety and things like that as motivation to lash out at others. And I just, I decided, I mean, I had a really bad argument with my brother who voted for Trump, and it was, it got bad and I, I thought to myself, is this what I want? You know.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Right.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

and all things being equal. I just I had a, just an evolution from that point. So all that is to say there is a particular way in which left-leaning folks moralize public policy, and it's toward a more egalitarian perspective that would say, for instance, we're all kind of in this together. We all have to do this thing in order to experience

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

The greater good. The greater good, right? Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

And there's, there's a time and a place for that. It makes sense in the, within the, in the scope of human history. Of course. I think we banned together during times of conflict. I saw it during nine 11. But they take it to an extreme for instance, the left has a history of pushing back against institutions and institutionalized religion. That's a bit redundant. Religion is an institution, institutions like religion, I should say. And replaced with a different belief system that is more humanitarian hu humanism really fills that spot and you kind of get rid of the mandates of the church, of the sort of like hierarchical true north that everybody's under, that everybody in a faith tradition, a more conservative situation will adhere to. And my idea is that, and, and this is supported to some degree, through Moral Foundation's Theory by Jonathan Hyde and others that, you know, conservatives tend to focus more on binding principles, which. Concern, safety and loyalty, you know, things like that. And to have cohere around, borders and protection. And it's not really about like what you look like. It's about do you abide by these governing principles that will protect us all? And we're all Americans and we all live under this true north kind of thing. And, and so a lot of the internal tensions that people experience in in that situation will have an outlet. You know, someone breaks the law, there's due process. Someone says something I don't like, oh well, freedom of speech. And we're all protected under that, under that binding principle, right? It's like, I don't have to worry about if you call me something it's fine, because you know what? I can too. And neither of us are gonna be going to jail unless you live in Britain these days. And and, and it's cool dude. You know, it's like whatever. But the left. Has repudiated and rejected so much of those binding principles that coheres, that brings people together under this common thread and replaced it with or replaces it. Usually with a social contract that looks more like social justice, that your tax dollars must go to this program because it saves people, it feeds people. And how could you not wanna pay that? How could you

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

you can't put a price on that. Can't put a price on cancer research. I was having a debate with somebody about that today

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

What was the debate? I'm

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Can't put a price on, you can't put a price on cancer research. I'm like, well, I mean, I can if I don't, unless I have infinite

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Right. But

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

It's kind of crazy. Every I haven't found yet. Yeah. So, but yeah, that's a good point. It's a good point. It's

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

so, so, so basically the way they moralize issues is, is, is much more. Pronounced and there's no outlet when you, I will key, I won't do this. I'm just saying you have a Tesla, I'm going to key your car because you having a Tesla means you support Elon Musk. Elon Musk equals you know, taking away funding. Taking away funding means hurting people. Hurting people means you're not empathetic. Not being empathetic means you're a bad person. And you know what we do to bad people? We punish them. You see how that downward arrow leads straight to the bottom of HE double hockey sticks to vengeance. There is no outlet. All it is is a spiral downward. And, and, and once they get to that spiral downward, they don't know how to build it up.'cause they've been so busy being cynical and hateful towards those who disagree with them. So there's a rigidity the left right now that is, that's very locked in.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

What it makes sense. They, they seem to, they definitely, like, we joke a little bit, I probably, this probably isn't a nice term, but I, I say the left, they operate like a hive mind versus conservatives have wildly different views.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. And I should just caveat, I should say that you know, you, when all is said and done, at the end of the day extremism exists on both ends. You know, I made a video about fascism being an sort of a reaction to communism and the more of a spiral you go down in the, in the socialist sort of, everybody gets everything they want and we're going to, you know, make the rich pay for it. The more of a reaction you're gonna get on the other side. And, and we are seeing that a little bit, so we should be aware of that, you know.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I have a question. We already went over this a little bit, right? But I'm curious, why do you think that the left generally stay in one clump? They don't like, want to expand their views. They don't, they don't break out a line. Yeah. Like, yeah. Conservatives, they just like stay, like they have a lot of different views, right?

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

That's a great question and it's, it's one that I actually actively study. I don't have a lab or I'm not collecting data on it right now at this point in my life, but it's, it's a question that, that I have been thinking about a lot. I've had professors who do this work some friends who are researchers that do some of this work and everybody's scratching their heads, you know, when, when push comes to shove. I mean, the, what we can say right now is going back to that, the way in which people on the left moralize specific issues it's so attached to their concept of being a good person. You know, how could you deny someone food stamps that is just awful? They don't think about, and there's an immediacy and a validity to their, to the immediacy, to their grievance. If you think about. You know, I don't know you boys, I don't know if your, your, your father's talked to you about the Johnson administration af you know, during the civil, civil rights movement he came in after Kennedy was killed. And, you know, you had, prior to the Johnson administration, you had black Americans that were eventually closing the gap when it came to income, wealth inequality, disparities between whites and blacks. And, but they did that through their own volition and on their own accord. And they used capitalism. They used what we had in place to build themselves up. You saw that start to drop a bit in the fifties. And then you had, unfortunately, you know, the, the grievance of the left is at, at its core, is correct when it says that you've had racist and white supremacists, you know, in the Jim Crow era that pushed time back. And that's all very true. And it did push black Americans back. And, but then you had, you know, it's always a pendulum. And then you had Johnson essentially put forth all these programs, that would really help the suffering of people who had the fallout of those, of that regression that happened. But the, the problem was that it was sort of a superficial, overheated way of creating an even playing field. And you, one of the programs would really, would, you know, necesssarily have mothers or women or men of families leave their their family so that the family could be qualified for programs. So it, it's just one example. And, and so,

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

There's a, the, these entitlement programs in general, I think what what you're saying is and we have talked about this a lot, boys, where there's a problem, it's homelessness. Yeah, let's put money towards homelessness. Homelessness gets worse. There's a, there's a problem with you know, inequality of black communities, so let's put money into the pockets of them through incentive programs where we'll give single mothers, you know, money. Oh, single mother problem gets worse. So it's, it's like there's, there's good intentions and I, I give them credit for like big hearts and good intentions, but the results. Of the actions that they do actually have the opposite outcome. And that's like, I'm, I, I try to convince people like, Hey, you know, that's not good.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

And yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Like, and it encourages people to actually do that. Right? Like, like, you said give money to people like don't have children or something. Right. Like single mothers maybe. Yeah. Single mothers.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

yeah. It's an incar.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Well, then just don't have children. Oh, wait, I have three money. What the heck?

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

It, it creates a fracture in the family unit and then that gets stereotyped and that becomes part of the, what people think of when they think of these families. You know, so it is psychological at base. It's, it's sociological. It's, it's something that these, the people on the left don't want to address because it, it hits to your question it hits hard against their moral compass because what they hear when you say we need to crack down on education and we need to be harder. We need to be actually more stringent and more focused on how we teach and how we you know, the materials that we use for students in black and brown communities, in poor communities. We, we, the, the trick is not to lower standards. It's actually to increase them because the results are just look up, you know, in your own time. And for your listeners to Success Academy in New York City is a great case study. I'm not gonna go into it right now, but basically charter school and funded 70% publicly. But the rest privately, I, I think, and. Their only strategy is that they're, they're rigorous, there's no entry exam, and they focus, this is where they actually incorporate some DEI, but then they use hardcore, you know, bare bones structure. And they focus their population as, you know, poor black and brown students. Okay, fine. That's your, that's sort of your population of interest. And, but you know what, their math and reading scores 88 to 90% in terms of proficiency, more so than white suburban kids across the river in New Jersey. So when you say that to someone who feeds into this narrative that you have to just give and give in lower standards, they don't know what to do with that. And then all of a sudden they flip it on you and they, they just can't fathom that you're even saying what you're saying because they're so locked into that ideology and it becomes very difficult at that point. And sometimes people are able to, to shift how they think about things, but. Especially if you're talking to someone who has their, their heels in the sand with this stuff, you only reach a certain point until it's time to just kind of back away and say, you know, I'm gonna advocate for this thing. You can continue to think that way, and I'm just gonna keep pushing the information that actually has results, you know?

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, we'll call, maybe call it a wrap for today. This was super interesting. I feel like we could, we could talk, we could talk to you for hours and probably peel the layers of the onion up back on all kinds of different topics and maybe, we'll, maybe we'll do that again on a specific

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Would love that. Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

I

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

yeah, having your. Methodology and insights on specific topics might be great. Well, one learning experience for us, but also good for our audience and yeah, and just to get a better, deeper understanding. But what I can say is I love what you're doing. We, we follow your channel, and I hope you continue to do this because I don't see anybody like in, in this space giving, what I feel like is fair perspective or analysis as some of these issues. And I love what you're doing and I selfishly hope that this actually turns into maybe your career path as being some kind of influencer where you can help the world unpack all this like, craziness that's going on.

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

Oh, I, I, I, I appreciate that. No, really, I, I, I think that we're tapping into something so thank you for doing what you do and for, you know, you boys. I, hopefully next time you know, if I come, I'd love to come back. As we close out, what's the best way for people to get in touch with you yeah, so for now I think the easiest thing is my Instagram my Instagram is just Anthony Rispo at Anthony Rispo and my Substack link is. Is there on in my, the link section to my Instagram. But yeah, I try to post as much as I can, maybe twice a week or something. So that's where to find me. Yeah.

Anthony_Rispo-Matt-webcam-00h_00m_00s_327ms-StreamYard:

Okay. We'll link that into the description of the show so people can check you out and follow your work thanks again so much for coming on, and we'll look forward to doing a circle back with you on one of these topics. So, best of luck. Thanks so

Anthony_Rispo-Anthony_Rispo-webcam-00h_00m_01s_314ms-StreamYard:

so much for having me, guys. Yeah, thank you. My pleasure.