Let's talk about Sarah Silverman. There was a tweet this morning that people called my attention to in which she said — and I want to get the exact words. Sarah, I think she was responding to somebody else's tweet, and she said — so this is comedian Sarah Silverman — she said, "Racists rarely think they're racist, just like cults don't know they're cults, just like groupthink zombies who say stuff like coastal elite, lib, snowflake, feminazi, SJW, etc. don't know they're sheep with an inability for critical thought or original thought, in my opinion."

Now you say to yourself, oh, that's awful. That's awful. Well, let's go to the whiteboard. Here's what I see happening. I see a progression of people's understanding of the reality they live in. And I see it in these phases, roughly speaking. Phase one is where you say my side is all good and the people on the other side are evil or dumb. This is the lowest level of awareness. If you think that your side is doing all the good stuff and the other side is doing all the evil, dumb stuff — you know, at least in terms of American politics. I'm not talking about the Nazis, who were in fact just evil. But in the normal course of ordinary citizens who are not breaking the law, we think our side is good, the other side is evil and dumb. This is the lowest level of awareness.

Sarah, I think Sarah Silverman used to be here, by the way, and maybe only a year ago. Sarah has now moved to this level in which she said my side is good and your side is not evil and dumb. They're deluded. That's, believe it or not, that's legitimate progress. Now I'm saying deluded, and you know the word she used were people don't realize they're being racists. So she's moved from they're dumb and evil to therefore they're sort of hypnotized. They're in an illusion. They're deluded.

Now you could say to yourself, well, that's not true. But that's not my point today. The point is not whether something is true or false. The point is this is a higher level of understanding of the reality that you live in. It's not quite there, but it's a movement in the right direction. The one after this, where you say your side is good and the other people are confused, they're in sort of an illusion, is Yanny and Laurel.

We've been teased with this reality, and it's sort of the reality that I've been trying to explain to you for as long as you've been listening to me. That we are all experiencing our own little movie. My movie isn't the true one. It's just the one I'm experiencing. Your movie isn't the true one. It's just the one you're experiencing. So I don't criticize you for being deluded, evil, or dumb because I know neither of us are seeing reality. We as human beings don't have access to it. We did not evolve to the point where we can see things clearly. We're not even close.

So to imagine that your team has that power but all the people on the other team somehow lacked that capacity that you evolved to have is not a high level of thinking. Well, every bit of science, psychology, you know, the scholarship agrees with what I'm telling you right now. People experience their own reality. That's different from saying there isn't a base reality. I'm just saying that we can't see it. And nobody on either side can see the base reality.

And I would say that there's a slightly, at least the potential for a yet higher level of understanding in which you can learn to spot the triggers. Because if you can learn to spot the triggers, you have at least some chance of knowing which person has departed from reality, the base reality, if there is one. The farthest, and I would say that the way to operate in this reality where nobody knows anything for sure is to use prediction as your best guide. So if your Laurel predicts that other people will also hear Laurel, well, that would be a good prediction and maybe you should stick with that filter on reality. But if you know that some people are going to hear Yanny and some people are going to hear Laurel, I guess that would be a prediction too. And it would be pretty close to what you would actually experience if you predicted that.

So here's my larger point. It's time for the, let's say the right, to take some leadership. You have been following up to this point, and you've been following the people that you criticize the most. You've been following the left, even matching them. You've been doing that hypocrisy thing where you say, oh, why are you criticizing this when you were so bad the other day? Well, first of all, it's almost always true that whoever is criticizing you did not take that specific position you're saying everybody on that other side took. All right, we people are picking and choosing to make it look like the other side, all of them, you know, 100% of them are all hypocrites because there was one person who had this opinion in that group and another person had this opinion. And therefore they're all hypocrites because two different people had different opinions. That's not how it works.

All right, let's skip past the hypocrite stuff. Here's what you say if somebody says, you know, you have bad manners. If somebody says you have bad manners, you should say, first of all, look at what you did. Say, wow, is that bad manners? Why is somebody saying that? And if you did, the best, most strategic, valuable, useful for your benefit is to say, what are you talking about? And then if it looks like you have bad manners, you say, oh, what can I do about that? See if I can fix it. Here's what never helps: you had bad manners yesterday. That never made anything better, right?

So if the moment somebody says you have bad manners and all you do is parrot them back, only you have bad manners yesterday, they're the leader and you're the follower. That would make sense if they were smart or better, you know, more awesome than you. You probably should follow people who know more than you, have let's say an ethical framework that you admire. So sometimes you should follow people. There's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's very helpful. But keep in mind who's the leader and who's the follower in this situation.

If somebody tells you you're bad and you just parrot back the same thing they said — you know, you're bad. Yesterday you were bad or worse. Or somebody says to you you have bad manners and you say, oh yeah, well somebody who has some similar beliefs as you about politics, that other person was bad yesterday. What? How does that move you in the right direction? How is that any kind of leadership?

All right, so I propose that the folks who are Trump supporters, people who are on the right, take some leadership and take advantage of the summer to just be nicer. Stop going after people personally. And even if they go after you, respond with — you know, if you're if you happen to be Christian, maybe there's a Christian way to respond. If somebody criticizes you, how about admitting it if there's something there and say, okay, I was pretty rude there, and back off.

All right, it makes sense to see the people who are out of power per se be a little bit meaner. That's, you know, we wish that were not the case, but the side out of power is going to be a little meaner. That isn't the right. And so if you'd like to take things to another level, just understand where you are on this progression and where you don't want to be. You don't want to be here. Sarah Silverman has already taken it up a notch.

And I saw people turn this around on her. And in fact I did that with my own tweet. So my retweet of her comment was that if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Now that's not an insult about her. That's an insult about how people — and it would apply to anybody. If you're locked into a filter, that's all you're gonna see. So I was directly criticizing her idea that there's one side. They can't see what movie they're in because she's not wrong about that. She's only half right. The reality is that both sides are in their own movie.

So if you see me on Twitter going after somebody personally, let's say their looks, or calling out something they did 20 years ago, you call me out on it. You know, point it out to me. If you see me do that, do a little self-policing here, right? Likewise, you may notice in the coming weeks and months that I might do some friendly reminders to people who would normally be on my side. So if I see you're going after somebody personally, their looks, or if I see you imagining their inner thoughts, I might point it out. But don't take it personally because the point is to try to get the people who can change most easily to get them to change.

The right can change more easily because there's a group that's getting more of what they want, right? It's easy to be nice when you're getting what you want. The left is going to have a hard time, and they're gonna need some leadership. And if you want to provide some leadership, keep in mind we're no longer in the world where the only person who is a leader is the president. We don't live in that world. Social media has made everybody influential in different ways. All right, so you can step it up. You can be nice even when they're not nice to you. And it would take away the biggest club that they have on the left.

You make it safe for the left to be mean. There's a reason this Samantha Bee probably will not get — probably won't lose her job. We don't know yet, but probably won't suffer too much for her comment. And the reason is this: you made it easy for that to happen. Now I think she should keep her job, by the way. That would be my preference. I would hope that you would also hope that. So you should hope that she keeps her job as you hope that Roseanne comes out well.

If you believe that in both cases there was somebody who just was a comedian who went over the line, maybe didn't quite realize the impact of their words. When somebody like Roseanne says — I think she's now saying that she was on Ambien, and at one point she said she thought she didn't know that Valerie Jarrett was anything but white. Now when she says that, does that make sense? Well, yes it does actually. You could take either one of those explanations and that would make sense. You put them together and it definitely makes sense because part of the degraded thought process might have been the Ambien.

So is it a good enough excuse that you thought she was white? Probably not, right? Because she thought she was at least Persian, I believe she thought so. So just the fact that she's got anything in her that would raise the question, it's just bad judgment. So either of those excuses by themselves is kind of weak. You put them together and they're actually pretty good.

But here's the larger point. I'm not going to ask you to read anybody's mind. Don't read Roseanne's mind. But when somebody tells you I did something stupid, I'm really sorry, here's why I did it, and the reason that you hear sounds actually reasonable, just accept it. You don't want to live in a world where somebody who apologizes, shows their work, and does what they can after the fact — you don't want that to be worth nothing. Because once you make it worth nothing, you don't get it anymore. All right, people respond to incentives. So if you take away the power of an apology by not accepting it, not taking people at their word for what they were thinking, you devalue it. And if you want to live in that world, that would be one way to do it.

All right, both apologized. One was punished. Yeah, here's the error. Don't equate those two situations. Do not equate what happened to one and what happened to the other. First of all, as if I've taught you anything, it's that analogies are useless. So you're making an analogy: hey, Samantha Bee had this, Roseanne had this. Analogies never work. The obvious reason in this case is that one was allegedly racism. I don't believe it was, but people believe that, so they act on their belief. And the other one was a woman insulting a woman. Now I didn't make the rules, but the existing rules of our society is you can insult yourself. So a woman could insult a woman. Chris Rock can insult Black people. Roseanne thought she was insulting another white person according to her version of events. It would have been less of a big deal if that had been the case. But that little bit of ambiguity on ethnicity is a big problem.