How Hate Works

Hate is generally defined as an extreme hostility to something or someone, usually stemming from fear, anger or a sense of injury. But how does it work? Join Josh and Chuck as they dig into the nature of hate.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff you should know
from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. With me is always a
chipper and cheerful Charles W. Chuck Bryant Man, I'm going

(00:24):
ten different directions, buddy. Yeah, I'm a little screwy, are you. Yeah,
we'll focus on this one. Okay, okay, because we're going
on in one direction, and that's hate. I hate to focus. Okay.
You hate broccoli. I do hate broccoli, and you know that.
I also hate peas, like split peas. I remember declaring
um as a child that peas are some of my

(00:46):
most hated enemies. I think a lot of kids don't
like peas because they're mushy. Yeah. Well that's the problem
with all vegetables. Really, they're mushy, they're overcooked if you
cook something. No, I've had pretty nasty broccoli. But broccoli,
it's all that's separate. It's just disgusting in every single way.
But cream spinach, I love that. It's awesome. Yeah, that's

(01:07):
good stuff. You and I shared a cream spinach at
Morton steak. That's recently two ladies. Yeah, it was something
we couldn't even finish. It was so rich. It was
really good, So Chuck, we don't hate cream spinach, I
hate broccoli and um. One of the things I hate
more than anything else is not having an intro, which
I don't because I was looking online and strangely they're

(01:31):
The online world is a repository for hate in a
certain way, as in like, um, neo Nazi punk bands
not huh, this article calls it pop music pop music, yeah, um,
or you know Facebook groups dedicated to hate, like you know,
Holocaust denial and that kind of stuff. Sure, Um, but

(01:54):
this word is so ubiquitous in our culture that there
was nothing there. Like I found a guy um and
dairy and mass who was accused of hate crime. Um,
everybody wants to know why, um, Cleveland fans hate Lebron.
I can answer that. But I mean, like, we throw
this word around like the you know, some reality TV

(02:15):
series was the show you love to hate? Right? Um.
We we use this word a lot. But yeah, I
found a study out of the University of Texas that
that asked people how often they hated and um, nobody
said every day. It's not an everyday thing. So like
we we hate things mc brockley, but we also realized

(02:37):
that there's a real distinction between hating something and experiencing
actual hate. You hit it on the head, and this
is a pretty old distinction, right, Like, like philosophers have
have been aware of this before. I think Aristotle was
pretty sure he hated peas, but he really hated him Lock. Yeah.

(02:58):
He and he's not Webster, so I will read his
definition because he's Aristotle. Uh. He said it was a
dislike for someone based on our negative perception of that
person's nature. That is so intense that whoever feels it
wants to cause real harm to another, Like I really
want to harm you. Yeah, so that's the difference, Like Pete,

(03:18):
like you said, people throw that word around. I hate broccoli,
but you're not gonna go out and try and burn
down broccoli farms. No, I know that's silly. I'm not
gonna go burn down Cubby BROCCOLI's family's broccoli farm. It
was used to fund the James Bond movies. But Josh,
I think, and this is me surmising in my own
personal purview, I think there are kind of two types

(03:40):
of hate, well three types really. Then one type that
you just throw the word around like I hate that show,
I hate broccoli. One that is real hate, which I
think is fear based when you don't know someone personally
or a group personally, where you hate a group of people.
And then there's like the anger retribution based hate, like

(04:01):
someone personally has wronged you so badly that you hate
them and and cause and either want to cause or
which ill upon them. Right, Well, you just brought up
a huge can of worms by using the word anger.
Like there's a real debate over whether hate and anger
are the same thing, right, right, They say they're not.

(04:23):
It depends on who you talk to. But the people
who say they're not say things like UM, hate is
brought on by humiliation or ill treatment or being devalued.
Where anger is brought on when you're when you're treated
UM in a way that you consider unfairly. Right, right,
anger is the result of UM not having any recourse. Right,

(04:48):
frustration perhaps coupled with that right and that that kind
of dances along the border because people who hate, you know,
other groups often are frustrated. Like when we talked about
the fast sism in the fascism podcast Getting Um Getting
groups all riled up against a scapegoat is one of
the tenets of fascism, right, And so these people are

(05:11):
frustrated at their lot in life, their unemployments high because
of the Jews or something like that, Right, But really
they're not. They're they're angry about their job while they
hate the Jews. So the two are really intertwined. But
there's a lot of people think if you look at
them deeply enough, they're not one and the same. Well,
I think a lot of times that kind of hate

(05:31):
is displaced anger and frustration at your own you know. Yeah,
but there is there is also a very um strong
physiological basis to it as well. I mean, it's an
emotion supposedly, although it's not one of the basic emotions.
Anger is Yeah, what are the basic emotions? Anger? Joy,

(05:53):
fear discussed and peckishness. I thought it was joy, pain,
sunshine and rain. No is that Rob bass No? I
can't remember. I could sing it, but I can't remember
sing it. No, no, no, I think it's Rob Basse.
No it was it was a duo. Oh no, no,

(06:14):
I'm thinking of uh, I want money, lots and lots
of money. That was a duo to be rich. Remember
that stupid song? Yeah, kind of. They wrote a song
about being rich. Oh yeah, how great it was, and
that was their only song. So unless they were already
rich than they never were from that song that makes sense. Yeah,
it does just blew my mind, buddy. So do you

(06:37):
hate that song? Uh? I do now because it's in
my head. So, Chuck, what is this um physiological basis
of anger? Well, it's pointed out in the article within
an Iron Maiden song, which I thought was an odd choice.
There's a thin line between love and hate. Yeah, It's
like there's a whole other song called There's a thin

(06:59):
Line between Love and Hate. Well, there's a much more
popular song, I think, the Persuaders, which was It's a
thin line between Love and hate, the old Motown song. Right.
Have you ever heard the Pretender's version of it? No,
it's hands down the greatest version ever. Really is a
thin yea between love and Hey, the Pretenders covered the
Persuaders and yep, all right, I'm telling you all right.

(07:22):
So apparently Iron Maiden actually listen to that song on
YouTube the other day and it's a it's an Iron
Maiden song. Yeah, now I looked it up to make
sure that Iron maidenheading covered the persuaders, and uh no,
Bruce Dickinson came up with his own lyrics, his own version.
He's like, that one's fine. I'm doing this one. That's right.
So the point of all this, Josh, is that there
is a thin line between love and hate as far

(07:42):
as uh the brain goes. Because um, in two thousand
and eight, there was a study at the University College
of London and that's in the UK, and um, they
got seventeen people, not very wide ranging. I had a
lot of problems with this study, but they got seventeen
people who say they hated someone else. Maybe that's why
they maybe have a hard time finding someone who hates

(08:04):
someone else. Maybe not because I don't hate anyone. I
was about to ask you that. Well, we'll get to
the personal stuff in a minute. So this study, what
they did was they found seventeen people who hated someone else,
threw them under the old wonder machine and looked showed
him pictures of the people they hated. Which is so

(08:25):
funny to record the results. I guess they're like, you
need to bring pictures of people you hate. For the study, Yeah,
they could have just said think of the person you hate,
I think, and it would achieve the same goal, I guess.
So anyway, they what they found out was that a
couple of regions in the brain there's like a hate circuit.
They call it there the pudament okay, and the Jerry

(08:46):
laughed at that, and the insular cortex in both fired
up with pictures of people that they hated, right, And
the significance of this is that both of those regions
also fire up when you see picture or think about
someone you love, which is the longest way to say.
It's a thin line between Lemon hates, right, and I

(09:07):
think everybody kind of senses that. It's like um when
passions flaring are it's virtually the same thing. There are
two sides of one coin. In my opinion, if you
truly hate somebody, the real hate to fear is not
one where somebody's like, oh I hate you so much,
you know, because that that can be turned. That means

(09:30):
that they have some sort of emotional connection to you.
The one to be afraid of is the detached, calm,
cool kind of hatred, because that's the one where you
end up dead somewhere like I'm the Green River killer
and I hate prostitutes. Well, that brings up an interesting sidebar, right, Um,

(09:51):
do serial killers hate their victims? No? End of sidebar. Well,
they have long said that serial killers don't experience emotion
on that scale, but they're starting to uh to change
their thinking in certain cases because a lot of serial
killers suffer from antisocial personality disorder, and people who suffer

(10:12):
from that experience a range of emotions. So it's not
always I think it's it's both. You know that not
you can't say every serial killer it's the same. Well,
they've been saying that for a long time. They've been
trying to find the threads that connect them. And I
told you about the sociologist I talked to. He was
just really up in arms that psychology has spent for

(10:32):
decades or so looking at serial killers and investing come
up with his anti personal any social personality disorder. He's like,
of course they have a personality disorder, they're serial killers.
That's a good point. So back to that study though,
about the brain and the difference between love and hate,
and they did see, um, a difference, a key difference
because the areas of the frontal cortex associated with judgment

(10:55):
and critical thinking become less active when you see someone
you love of on the f m R I machine,
But when you saw someone you hate, most of your
frontal cortex cortex cortex is active, remains active. Yeah, so
that's a big difference. But that makes sense as well, Chuck,
because I mean, if you see I know, you don't

(11:15):
hate anybody, so you wouldn't understand this. But when you
see someone you hate, you just like it's a personality,
you just you you you tend to criticize them in
your head, like, oh, you're wearing that sweater today. You
look so fat and stupid in that sweater. I hope
you somehow get did you strangle yourself on that sweater? Yeah?

(11:35):
So the point is that it takes like hatred is
an active thing. It's an active rumination on this. It's
not a knee jerk thing like when you might see
a picture of someone you love. All right, So that's interesting, right,
that's what that study came up with the set of
the seventeen people. Yeah, with the this Yeah, it couldn't
get you know. And the other problem is I'm sure

(11:56):
they were um weird western educated Uh deed something rich
and developed carrel, what the eye stands for? And what
would you just spell weird? It's basically like the idea
that all of these studies that cited are cited. A
lot of them are they're just college kids. So it's

(12:19):
like this really narrow niche of the human population that
they extrapolate onto good point and in this case they
just use seventeen of them. Well, we're here to report
it and then criticize it, and we're done. We did both,
that's right. Uh. What what's the deal with like old hate? Though?
Like don't they have some inclination of like early hate

(12:41):
with Caveman and the like? Well, yeah, because parts of
the you know, the closer to the center or the
brain stem that you get in the brain, the more
ancient that part of the brain is. And if there's
a region like the pew tamin that's associated with a
certain thing e g. Hate, then that means that hate's
been around for a very long time because they are

(13:03):
part of the brain. Uh has been able to carry
out that function for this song or should ostensibly got
you right, but then it's also new with the prefrontal
cortex which is a fairly newer aspect. So maybe we
just hated, but we didn't criticize. We just hated. And
they think possibly that we developed hate as a species

(13:25):
or a capacity to hate as a survival mechanism way
back in hunter gatherer days, where we could feel justified
by say, taking food from another group because we hated them,
which I actually found pretty that's a pretty inspiring idea. Yeah,

(13:45):
that you had to work up hate enough to go
in pillage. I think that's kind of neat because it
makes it seem like we aren't naturally hateful beings, and
I don't think we are. I believe everybody had hate,
and everyone has a vast capacity to hate, but I
don't I wouldn't characterize this as generally hateful. That's good.

(14:09):
I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that that's
true though. Alright, So, uh, it's in the Bible, Josh,
It's an ancient text all over the place. Hate's been
around a long time. M Right. We canna talk about Carthage, Yeah,
because I know you love this. The Carthaginian general, Hannibal Carthaginian,
and you gotta stop that Hannibal pledged to his father, Dad,

(14:34):
I hate Rome, I hate Romans. I don't like the Italians.
I hate them forever, and I will swear retribution because
they have seized our provinces. He said, father, yes, son,
I'm going to kill the Romans. And he did. He
made good on that, invaded Italy and did quite a
bit of damage. Of course, the Romans fired back because
they hate the Carthage. Why can't say that word? They

(14:56):
hated people from Carthage, the Carthagenians, and in one PC
they did some pretty bad things like burning them in
their houses while they screamed. But does that hate, like,
I don't know, And that's a I think that's an
issue that I have um here there with this is
that there? That's kind of a jump to conclusion, Like

(15:20):
is it hate? I don't know. It does hate form
the basis for war or horrible acts in war? Well,
I don't know, because it's it's condemned pretty much in
like the New Testament in the Bible, it's condemned in
the Koran. Uh, let not hatred of the people incite
you not to act equitably, And in uh Medieval and

(15:41):
Renaissance Europe you came up in you but in Italy
they came up with the vendetta, which is uh, very
much retribution for the hatred. There you go, I I
let's see, that's what I'm saying. Like I think, let's
say a Roman soldier comes to your town while you're
away using the the latrine pit that your village has dug,

(16:05):
and they burn your family alive in your house while
you're using the bathroom. And you come back and you
see the Roman legions going away and your family is dead,
burned the crisps. Right. Um. I don't think the Romans
necessarily felt hatred to commit that act, but that act
would incite hatred in the person that it befell. So

(16:29):
I think of vendetta is an excellent example of hatred
because somebody done, you're wrong and you're gonna get back
at them, or they did something to your father or
something you The vendetta is very long lasting from what
I understand. Yeah, and it's not I mean, this is
obviously we're talking about mafia vendetta's and war vendetta's, but

(16:49):
it can happen on a smaller level. You might not
think of it as vendetta though, but if someone done
you really wrong, and you're like, I'm gonna get that
person back by doing this and six months and they
least expected that's a vendetta. But you you don't call
it a vendetta. It's just uh, well in in Italy,
they it's just come up it, sir, Um, I'm gonna

(17:12):
get you suck a bad people do that though. There
was a word for it though in medieval and Renaissance Europe,
in the Messiah, which is Latin for un friendship, it
was a legal term for hating somebody. Okay, so what
we've done is established that hatred is definitely a thing
that's been around a long time. Is that what we've done? Yeah,

(17:34):
and chuck, of course it's still around, um in recent
modern history. There's other examples that we could go into,
like hate groups. Yeah, well, let's talk about the Nazis
real quick, because again we talked about fascism and one
of the tenets of it being, um, I guess, inciting

(17:56):
other group to hate. Yeah, group hate. That's that's where
we are for sure. And a lot of that that
gave a lot of a body of data for people
to study and that they're still studying. But um, one
guy in particular named Martin Oppenheimer, is a sociologist from
Rutgers University. UM. It was basically said, like, look, the

(18:17):
Nazis are proof positive that you can number one, get
an entire group to hate another group, and that you
do this by um identifying and exploiting the group that
you're with their frustrations, say unemployment, joblessness, and then basically saying,
those are the people who are at fault. That's how

(18:39):
you store the pot exactly. That's how you incite hatred,
which is gotta be one of the worst things you
can do. One of the worst non violent acts I
think a person commit is insite hatred, you know. Yeah.
And also I thought what came to mind to me
when I was reading this was some of these same tactics,
like a marginalized people, people who are in a cure,

(19:00):
who are seeking safety somewhere. It's also the kind of
the same thing they do with the cults and the brainwashing.
They're seeking out these same types of people and saying, hey,
you feel marginalized, you feel like you're not loved, you
need a safe haven. But they're not saying go hate
someone else. They're saying, just come and be with our group, well,
our our association of like in group and out group

(19:23):
is like this emotional psychological razor blade that can be
exploited in any number of ways exactly, you know, but
it's always a marginalized people. It seems like yeah, yeah,
or there, But you mean the people who are stirred,
who have hatred stirred up in them. Yeah, or go
join a cult or something like that. Yeah, you mean teenagers?

(19:45):
And uh, well, at Stanford study in two thousand and
ten basically said hey, if you want to um teach
teenagers to hate, here's how you do it. You can't
just overtly say go hate this group, you know, hate Muslims,
hate black people, hate Jewish people, hate gays. You can't
just say that it's not good enough. But if you

(20:08):
tell a story that basically implies this is these are
people you should hate and here's why, right, like um,
homosexuals or Petter asks, and so you know you can't
let them into certain groups, and by the way, you
should hate them because of the story. Right then I

(20:30):
think that I had a problem with that one because
it was like, that's true for everything. If you tell
the story, it's gonna hit home or personally to somebody. Yeah,
you can't say, hey, go love uh Sea Biscuit because
he ran a horse race that was pretty neat. But
if you tell the story of Sea Biscuit all of
a sudden, you're gonna leave that thing going. Man, I'm
getting my butt to the Kentucky Derby next year because

(20:52):
I love me some horse racing. I love Sea Biscuit.
See he saw the movie, right, No, I didn't um
the But the funny thing is is that that whole
that study made the careers of two Stanford researchers so right.
But they do have a point because they point out
in this article, or they don't, but we do. Um.
D W. Griffith's awful um movie awful on content. Birth

(21:16):
of a Nation from nineteen fifteen. It's no Sea Biscuit.
It's no Sea Biscuit, but it did a really good
job of getting people to hate black people in the
United States. Yeah, doesn't it feature like the Well, since
it was nineteen fifteen, it's like the first and everything.
But it's like the first on screen rape uh or
implied rape. There was a rape of a white woman

(21:38):
by like an escaped slave I think by a white
actor in black Face of course at the time, and um,
it was a big, huge movie. It grows ten million
dollars in nineteen fifteen. That's two hundred million. That's two
sixteen million dollars today, is what grows. Yeah. And it
was based on a play, Yeah, it is. This based

(22:00):
on a play in a book called The Klansman. And
d W. Griffith felt so bad about this afterward that
he made a follow up film that you're called Intolerance,
which was a three hour silent film meditation on uh
four parallel stories of man's intolerance throughout history. Oh. I

(22:20):
didn't know he did that. That's good, Yeah, because I
want to like d W. Griffith. Yeah, I mean, he
didn't write Birth of the Nation, so he directed it.
Not like getting him off the hook or anything, but
I think at the time he was just trying to
make a movie that sold lot of tickets and that
was the way to do it. Yeah, that's the way
to do it. And then the Nazi of course, anyone

(22:42):
who saw Inglorious Bastards knows that Gebel's, Joseph Gebel's was
in charge of, you know, the propaganda department with feature films,
and they had one called Judd Seuss. Is it Judd
or you'd probably it'd be you'd seous. So you're the
one who speaks to German. And how did you say
Judd Seuss? I don't know. I was concentrating on the

(23:03):
umlaut part and that's just okay. So yeah, but that
featured a main character, a Jewish main character who was
shunned by a gentile woman and so he raped her,
among other things, and it was required viewing for the Stormtroopers.
They loved it. And then they give him crystal meth.

(23:25):
Really yeah, from what I understand, that will do it. Um.
And that didn't just go out with the Nazis. UM
media has been playing like more and more of a
role UM among I guess hate groups tred as a
as a concept and as a practice, right yeah, because um,

(23:47):
I think in the nineties, Uh, Bosnian Serb TV showed
UM something that's kind of referred to now as like
a basically hate mongering UM series called Genocide that stir
up emotion against the Bosnian Muslims. Right yeah, uh and

(24:07):
and uh, well you know what happened with that in
the Balkan War. Yeah. Alqaed has done similar things on
the web. Obviously, the web is a good place to
to go try and get this thing done these days.
And they have chat rooms, they have terrans. With Facebook's
becoming increasingly um available for people who have UM hate

(24:27):
based ideologies. Um, and Facebook is like, look, we can't
we can't do. I mean, we'll find them and shut
them down and when we when we can, but like
they're all over the place. Yeah, um and then uh
also chuck pop music. Yeah, they called the pop music.

(24:47):
And the reason I know I can't call it pop music,
it's because I've seen some of those specials and I
saw really good when I can't remember on neo Nazis
and they have you know, they have musical groups that
are neo Nazi songs and they just sing about hating
other people and it's you know, it's aggressive music. It's
not it's not pop. There's no sense. No, it's not handsome.

(25:10):
So um chuck. The article begs a pretty um interesting question.
I think um is hate a mental illness, because you know,
don't you have to be slightly mentally ill to burn
down a house with an entire family trapped inside? Or
maybe you're just following orders? Okay, Yeah, excellent. I think

(25:33):
you just hit upon it. Our understanding of hate is incomplete,
because our understanding of the things that we do that
we associate with hate is also incomplete. Are you just
following orders? Are you being whipped up into a mob mentality?
Do you actually hate this other group because you lost

(25:54):
your job? Or is this emotion just being exploited by
someone else, a third party? Um? I I And also
I think our understanding of mental illness isn't refined enough
to say yes, hates the product of a mental illness. Sure,
because they referenced Um Hitler and Osama bin Laden as
two people they suspect might have been mentally ill um

(26:16):
or at least anti social. And they also referenced the
Columbine shooters as one of them suffered from depression and
they had these hate filled rants that they ended up finding.
And was there a link between that depression and hatred? Right?
And I guess the the that begs the question like
did they were they? So? Was Osama bin Laden and

(26:38):
Hitler and Dylan Klebold like so wrapped up in hatred
that they were crazy? Or was um hatred a byproduct
of you know, any mental illness? They may or may
not have had. These are questions we don't know. But
my whole idea that hatred is brought out when you
are um mistreated by someone else is backed up by

(27:03):
a two thousand study of people from Kosovo and those
who have gone through the most trauma and stress hated
the Serbian troops who'd um you know, borne that out
on them more than other people who maybe had pleasant
exchanges with Serbian troops. I guess that makes sense. We
gotta mention hate crimes and hate groups briefly. Hate crime

(27:27):
is obviously a crime carried out against somebody based on
their skin color, their ethnicity, their national origin, their gender, disability,
sexual orientation. Is when you hear a lot about yeah disabilities,
A sad one because it took a while to um
get that into hate crime bills. Oh really yeah interesting,

(27:47):
but the Congress is past legislation now that makes hate
crimes more serious offenses than just like a regular assault.
Well yeah, which is pretty awesome. Yeah, and how it
should be. I remember, um we in the there was
a child safety law that was being passed in two
thousands six, and there was a hate crime language that

(28:08):
was attached to it that made um sexual orientation crimes
hate crimes on a federal level, and there's a big
outrage about it among religious groups. Do you remember that.
I think they were like, wait, we have a First
Amendment freedom to hate gay people as part of our religion.

(28:30):
You know, so you're you're saying that that that in
and of itself is a hate crime. By saying like, no,
these people are wrong, homosexuality is bad, it's wrong, that
kind of thing, um, And that they thought that that
kind of infringed on it, which I don't think it does,
but that was their argument for a while. I don't
think it worked. Interesting. Yeah, uh so I have a

(28:52):
list here first, Josh, and then we have a couple
more little stats um about hate groups since two thousand.
The Southern Pretty Low Center claims that the US hate
groups in the US has grown by more than and
since since two thousand. Yeah, and they had the top
five states with the biggest concentrations of hate groups. And

(29:14):
this one was continued on the next page. And when
I was reading it, I was like, please, Georgia, don't
be on there, Please don't be on there. And it's
not and we will count them down from five to
create suspense Idaho is number five for hate groups. Evidently
Wyoming is number four. You got Arkansas is number three,
Mississippi is number two. Two from the south, and then um,

(29:38):
number one according to the Southern Poverty Law Center is Montana. Yep,
that's you know, Montana. Grab your guns, fellas. Yeah, there's
a lot of Melissias in Montana. Yeah, but there's also
a lot of like super chill cool like fly fish
and uh, microbrew drinking hippies out there. It's an interesting mix.
And I spent time there and I saw both in

(29:59):
this town. That was I could feel the friction even
between those groups, like with an Indian burn. Yeah, Like
I was like I was out in a saloon and
having a good time with some locals, and then a
couple of like cowboys came in that didn't like the
people from l A being in there, and you could,
like definitely sense there's two different types of people in Montana.

(30:21):
There's probably wasn't two, but I'm generalizing. No, there's two.
There's just two. Okay, hate groups and hippies. So um, chuck,
you've got some stance for us. Uh yeah, you dug
this upright on who people hate? Acquaintances friends, family members
twelve percent. That's sad, ex boyfriends and girlfriends twelve percent.

(30:46):
And within the family, it's fathers are hated the most,
at mothers at in laws, and siblings at three percent.
That's kind of sweet. That's surprising to me, though, I
would think siblings would be the highest because they're the
ones that beat the tar out of you most frequently
in most families. All right, so do you hate people?

(31:07):
That's let's finish up with that. Um. I've found that
the best way to hate somebody is to just check
them off. So usual you'll write someone off but not
have that active hatred. I I don't generally like I
will just be like I can't believe you wore that sweater,
you fat pig idiot in my head, But it's usually

(31:29):
because I'm in like a bad mood about something else. Like,
I don't walk around just actively hating people. It's a
waste of time. It's a total waste of time. I
don't I don't think I ever hated anybody at a
situation and an ex girlfriend shacked up with one of
one of my best friends after I moved state and

(31:50):
we were broken up quote unquote, But I also was like,
I'm coming back for you, like, you know, this isn't over.
Were you going to find work? And California on West
in my in my wagon? And they shacked up pretty
quick after I left, and I had like a few
years of like bad dreams and periodic bad dreams. I

(32:11):
wasn't like every day I woke up thinking about it,
but it faded away. But it was never even hate.
It was just like, man, I gotta do that. Really, yeah,
It's just just like that's that sucks. Don't do that, friends.
That's that's one end of the spectrum. The other end
of the spectrum is like people who go and like
kill those people, those two people, well yeah, and that's

(32:32):
like former famous football stars, and that's that. I think
it's all in the wiring. You're wired a certain way,
and I'm not wired to to indulge those kinds of things.
I suspect that all has to do with the amygdala,
you know. All right, Well, if you want to learn
more about the amygdala, you can type that word into
the search bar at how stuff works dot com. You

(32:52):
can also type in the word hate to bring up
the article that we worked off of today. I should
point out to Josh that I made with the dude
years later and uh never made right with a girl.
What does that say. I think it says that you
hated the girl more. I just never felt the need
to drudge that back up with her. But the dude,

(33:15):
I was like, Man, you can't have like an old
friend that you're not friends with anymore, at least I can't.
I don't like that stuff. Yeah, man, I don't like
that hanging over my head. Okay, try to make it right.
That's what I say. You've done. Now I'm done. Sorry anyway,
I think did I even say handy search part? You
totally threw me off? All right, well, handy search bar?
How stuff? First dot com? I said that, Chuck, So

(33:36):
that means it's your turn for listener mail. Yes, Josh,
this is on suicide bombing, and this Nick brings up
a very good point that I think kind of fits
in with this podcast. Hi, guys and Jerry. I think
y'all are very brave for taking on the issue of
suicide bombing. I don't know about brave, but I appreciate it.

(33:57):
I don't want to contribute too much to the delusion
of anils, but I would like to say, you could
have more explicitly underscored something that I believe is key
to understanding suicide bombing and terrorism in general, both our
weapons of the weak and the believer, sort of like
our hate thing. Okay do you agree? Um? Yeah, well,

(34:18):
I mean we've been said it's suicide bomb or cost
about a hundred and fifty bucks exactly. He points out,
if Palestinians, for instance, had access to predator drones and
guided missile systems rather than rocks and slingshots, I don't
think that Palestinians would resort to martyrdom. I would also
point to suicide bombings carried out by the viet Men
during the French occupation of Vietnam, or the example of

(34:41):
Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, both of which movements were
secular in nature. All I want to say is it
seems like suicide bombings is a phenomenon often arising from
situations in which there is a huge asymmetry of power
between an occupying or apartheid resime regime or a native
or a press popular Asian. You guys did mention this,

(35:01):
but I think this dimension is at least as important
to the issue as religion or notions of martyrdom um.
That is sincerely from Nick and I kind of agree Nick,
and Nick is a sharp tack. It's like right on
the money. Yeah, thanks for that one. Wow. Okay, well,
if you think you're a sharp tack, we want to
hear from you, right, Chuck, that's right, send us an

(35:22):
email about anything at all, Anything at all. Two Stuff
podcast at how stuff works dot com. Be sure to
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Join how Stuff Work staff as we explore the most
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(35:46):
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