Hey, everyone is Andrew Claven with this week's interview with the remarkable social psychologist Lee Jessum, who has done

some incredible, let's say politically incorrect, would be the polite way to say it, studies,

in other words, true studies. You know, I talk a lot on my podcast about the mad scene in Hamlet

because I think it's Shakespeare's prediction of what is going to

happen to human thought after the Reformation. And one of the things that happens in Hamlet,

Hamlet, we don't know whether he's sane and pretending to be mad or mad and pretending to be

mad. But he basically starts to say that everything is perception, that if his mood changes,

the entire world becomes different.

If he's depressed, it becomes ugly, even though it's beautiful.

He says words who are detached from meaning.

When he's asked what he's reading, he says words, words, words.

And he says morality is a matter of opinion.

He says nothing's either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.

And I think one of Shakespeare's points is that people who hold these ideas are not just

insane, but they know that they're being insane. They're pretending to be insane because nobody actually

believes any of these things at all. And so this is, we now live in a world, I mean, because Shakespeare

was right about everything, we now live in a world in which people tell us that none of our perceptions

are reliable. They are being manipulated for the power of the powerful.

They are because we're racist, because we're sexist.

We don't even know what gender we are.

And a lot of Justiceman's work has kind of changed that.

He's chaired three departments at Rutgers, criminal justice, psychology, and anthropology.

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