Cenk Uygur

Oh yeah. Miriam wanted me to give Israel, West Bank to Israel. So you have it guys. Now you just occupy the whole thing forever. Okay. Ah, giant war. Oh yeah. I'm going to prove how tough I am. I'm going to nuke Iran. Oh no. What are you doing? What are you doing? Like Trump is a massive risk. He's an enormous amount of risk.

If you were running a company and not a country, would you hire Trump as your CEO? Everyone watching just screamed inside their heads. No. Okay, you would never take that kind of risk with your company. You got an 80% chance the guy's going to blow up the company? No way, no way. And you know it too.

Especially if you're a businessman, you know you're not going to hire that loose cannon to run your company. It's unacceptable risk. But you're not wrong. We talked about it earlier. But as part of that risk, there's a sliver in there that he could accidentally do the right thing.

So why am I center-left and not center-right? It gets to that question. So... you look at the polling, not just here in America, but in almost any country. And it almost always breaks out to two thirds of one third, right? Two thirds of the people say, let's be empathetic. Let's share. Let's be, let's do equality justice. Let's be fair. Right?

One third goes, no, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Okay. That's just the nature of humanity. And so, and usually the same third goes, no change. And the other two thirds go, well, some change, right? So, because if you don't do any change, you're never gonna get to the right answer.

For the wisdom of the crowd to work, for free markets to work, for everything to work, you have to keep changing because the times change and the culture changes and the situation changes, right? So that's why there's amendments in the constitution because you need to be able to change the document from time to time. Be careful with it, right? But you need to allow for an avenue for change.

So now why does the one third keep winning in so many different places? Because they have more money in power. And by the way, if you're more selfish, you're more likely to get more money in power, right? And I wish that weren't the case, but it is. And these are not blanket rules. They're on average. So that third winds up winning in so many circumstances.

But the bottom line is we are a species that requires consent. So I mean, I'm a stone cold atheist. So, uh, so I don't think we're kind of like apes. I think we are apes. Okay. And so, and all the scientists out there are going, well, of course we are. Everyone else is going, that's crazy. Okay. So when you look at it as a species, different species react in different ways.

Snakes have no empathy because it's not in their DNA. They, and that's why we have a sense of what a snake does, right? So for good news is for higher level apes like us, bonobos, chimpanzees, and humans, we all roughly want consent. So a chimpanzee, for example, who has a violent, uh, you know, reputation and they are violent, uh, And unfortunately we're pretty close to them.

Uh, but what people don't know is a leader doesn't win through violence, especially for bonobos. They lead, they win by picking lice off of other chimpanzees by going and doing favors, going to a hunt, getting food and giving it to someone else because what they're gathering is the consent of the governed. And that's how you become the alpha. You don't do it through physical dominance.

You do it through consent. So that's how we're hardwired. That's in our DNA. That two-thirds in the long run will win. And we will have empathy. We will have change. And that's the hope that we're all looking for. Hope has got the numbers, it seems like. Yeah. And in fact, one more thing, Lex. Look at history. Hope and change always win. And so again, conservatives don't catch feelings.

There is a need for conservatives because you have to balance things out. If you just had, even though wonderful two thirds, that still wouldn't be the ideal system. You need a Winston Churchill if you're in the middle of World War II. You need someone to say regulating six inspections of the elevators is too many, right?

So you need that balance and conservatives have a role and it's a really important role. But having said that, they're assigned to losing throughout history because they're fighting on losing ground. A conservative says no change, but the world...

is constantly changing so they're destined to lose that's why the founding fathers won against the british monarchy that's why the civil rights movement won they didn't win overnight it took them a hundred years to get equal rights let alone pass slavery right so we won on women's rights we won on gay rights we keep winning but every snapshot in in time makes it feel like we're losing

There's a bad guy in charge. We aren't living under corporate rule, et cetera. But in the long tide of history, change always wins. So the empathetic, generally speaking, left wing, but again, don't worry about the titles, right? People get obsessed with the labels. The two thirds that's empathetic, that includes a lot of right wingers, right? You win at the end in history every single time.

So we fight forward. We, we, We're tough when we need to be. We need that willpower to win any fight, right? But we're civil and respectful to the other side because they are us. So progressives all the time, we say, look, and this is like the ending of my book, which is we... For conservatives, you have a lot of empathy for inside the wagons.

So, conservatives are great to their family, generally speaking, to their community, to their church, to anyone that's inside the wagons. But they have... they set up electric fences and barbed wire around their wagons. So if you're on the outside, you're the others and you're going to get electrified and it's constant, right? And so I like to think the left wing has wider wagons.

So we view the world as more us and not you. But the good news of that is, if we win, we're not going to do Medicare for only the left, right? We're going to do Medicare for all. You're all going to get universal healthcare. We're going to do higher wages for all. The right wing is not going to be left out. And if we're in Lex, I can tell you a fun story.

It's, it's about my family and, and I'm sure that parts of it are apocryphal from, because it's from like 500 years ago. Um, but, um, Uh, but it gives you a sense of the, the old Mark Twain quote, if it's really Mark Twain's of change happens really gradually. And then all of a sudden, so my mom's last name in Turkish is Yavasha. It means slowly. It's a weird name, even in Turkish.

And so one day we're walking past the mosque in Istanbul when I'm a kid and it says on the mosque Yavasha. We're like, what is this? Okay. So it's a small little mosque. We go inside and my dad starts asking their mom questions. Okay. So he says, why is the mosque named that? And he said, well, you don't know? And he said, because my dad said, my mom, my wife's name is, last name is Yosha.